The Russians were extremely annoyed by this protest; nevertheless, a few days later, the press published a very full account of a statement by Stettinius showing just how much had been sent to the Soviet Union since the beginning of the war. For one thing, as
Standley had pointed out, it was essential to appease Congress, where much was being made of these charges of Russian ingratitude.
[ In my Diary entry for March 9, 1943, I find the following: "The Russian censorship, after five hours' high-power telephoning, passed the text of the Standley statement. The people at the press department looked furious. Kozhemiako, the chief censor, was white with rage as he put his name to the cable. His mother had died of starvation in
Leningrad... Another Russian remarked tonight: "We've lost millions of people, and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us spam. And has the 'warmhearted'
Congress ever done anything that wasn't in its interests? Don't tell me that Lend-Lease is charity!"]
But this sudden generous acknowledgement of Western aid in the Soviet press in March 1943, though provoked by the Standley incident, had a long-term purpose as well. In a sense, Stalin was already on his way to Teheran with a Big-Three peace at the back of his mind. Apart from the extremely unpleasant "special" problem of Poland which was on the point of blowing up, the Soviet Government was much more "pro-Western"
throughout 1943 than it had ever been. Paradoxically, it was in its official utterances more pro-Western during that year than were the Soviet people as a whole.
Chapter V BEFORE THE SPRING LULL OF 1943— STALIN'S
WARNING—THE GERMANS' "DESERT POLICY"
The great Russian drive in the winter campaign of 1942-3 from Stalingrad to Kharkov
and beyond, and the Germans' forced withdrawal from the Caucasus were not the only
major Russian successes during that period. After all the losses the Germans and their allies had suffered in the south, they were visibly more and more short of trained
manpower. This largely accounts for their decision, in March 1943, to abandon the
Gzhatsk-Viazma-Rzhev springboard, that "dagger pointing at Moscow", to which they had clung so desperately ever since their first setbacks in Russia in the winter of 1941-2.
It will be remembered that although the Russians had driven the Germans back from
Moscow along a wide front, they had failed to dislodge them from their Gzhatsk-Viazma-Rzhev springboard barely 100 miles from the capital.
Throughout the Black Summer of 1942 this remained a potential threat to Moscow; but
the Russians' main concern was less an attack on the capital than a German attempt to hold the "springboard" with the minimum number of men, and to transfer the rest to the south—to Stalingrad and the Caucasus. So, throughout the summer and autumn of 1942
the Russians did their utmost to tie up as many German troops as possible west of
Moscow by constantly attacking and harassing them. Those battles outside Rzhev were
among the most heartbreaking the Russians ever had to fight. They were attacking very strong German positions; Russian losses were much higher than the Germans, and so
bitter was the fighting that very few prisoners were taken.
I visited the Rzhev sector during the rainy autumn of 1942 after the Russians had
recaptured a few villages at fearful cost, but had each time been repelled from the
outskirts of Rzhev. I was struck by the intense bitterness with which the officers and men spoke of their thankless task.
The roads that autumn were like rivers of mud, and countless ambulances had to travel over a "carpet" of felled tree-trunks covering the road, an agonising bone-rattling and wound-tearing experience for the wounded.
That autumn I saw something of the German "desert" policy in a few of the villages recaptured by the Red Army. Thus, in the village of Pogoreloye Gorodishche, a large part of the population had died of hunger; many had been shot; others had been deported as slave labour, and the village had been almost completely destroyed.
Now, in March 1943, fearing to be outflanked by the Russians from the south (and,
eventually, of being trapped in that great "twixt-Moscow-and-Smolensk" encirclement which the Russians had failed to carry through in February 1942) the Germans simply
pulled out of the "Moscow springboard", though with some heavy rearguard actions, notably at Viazma, and destroying as much as time would permit them.
The official Soviet report, published on April 7, 1943, on the effects of the "desert policy" the Germans had systematically carried out in the newly-liberated areas west of Moscow was a harrowing catalogue of mass shootings, murders and hangings, rape, the
killing or starving to death of Russian war prisoners, and the deportation of thousands as slave labour to Germany. Kharkov was almost mild in comparison. The report noted that most of the shootings of civilians had been done by the German army, not by the Gestapo or the SD. The towns were almost totally obliterated—as I could indeed see for myself soon afterwards. At Viazma, out of 5,500 buildings, only fifty-one small houses had
survived; at Gzhatsk, 300 out of 1,600; in the ancient city of Rzhev, 495 out of 5,443. All the famous churches had been destroyed. The population was being deliberately starved.
15,000 people had been deported from these three towns alone. The rural areas were not much better off: in the Sychevka area, 137 villages out of 248 had been burned down by the Germans. The list of war criminals appended to the Report was headed by Col.-Gen.
Model, commander of the German 9th Army and other army leaders who had "personally ordered all this". The report noted that the destruction was "not accidental, but part of a deliberate extermination policy," which was being carried out even more thoroughly in these purely-Russian areas than elsewhere.
It is scarcely surprising that, as the Red Army moved farther and farther west, it became increasingly angry at the sight of all this bestiality and destruction.
The Russians scored two other important military successes at the beginning of 1943: they captured the strategically important Demiansk salient north of Smolensk and, more spectacular, after several days' extremely heavy fighting—with the troops of the
Leningrad Front striking east and those of the Volkhov Front striking west across the German Lake Ladoga salient—the Russians cut a seven-mile-wide gap in the Leningrad
land blockade. It was through this gap, which included the town of Schlüsselburg, that a railway line was built within a few weeks, and so linked Leningrad with the "Mainland".
The trains had to travel through a corridor constantly exposed to German shell-fire, and the journey called for the greatest bravery on the part of the railwaymen. But though frequently shelled, this railway through what came to be known as "the corridor of death"
carried on, and the thought of no longer being entirely cut off by land from the
"mainland" had a very heartening effect on the 600,000 people still living in Leningrad.
The city was, nevertheless, to remain under German shell-fire for another year.
[See Part III.]
All this was satisfactory. Nevertheless, the violent German counter-offensive which
started at the end of February and led to the Russian loss of Kharkov, Belgorod and a large part of the northern Donbas was a disappointing conclusion to the glorious "Winter of Stalingrad".
In his Red Army Day order of February 23 Stalin spoke in glowing terms of the winter offensive, saying that "the mass expulsion of the enemy from the Soviet Union had begun." But he warned the army and the country against excessive optimism—no doubt foreseeing some major setbacks.