Sober assessment was less unfavourable to Stalin’s chances. The pre-war analysis, shared in Berlin and Moscow, held that the Germans needed to attack by early summer if they were to conquer. The actual military campaign validated this analysis. The Wehrmacht, after massive advances into the western borderlands of the USSR, was halted outside Leningrad and Moscow; it had failed to overrun the Russian heartland, oil-rich Baku and the Volga transport routes. The USSR retained adequate human and material resources to go on resisting the aggressor. The Wehrmacht operated in bleaker conditions than Hitler had anticipated. The last months of 1941 were bitterly cold. German lines of communication and supply were overstretched: Hitler had not got far enough to have final success but had gone too far to maintain his armed forces in a decent condition. Germany’s military equipment, moreover, had not been built to specifications for the rigours of the Russian winter. The odds began to turn in the USSR’s favour despite the enduring impact of Stalin’s miscalculations about Operation Barbarossa.
Stalin had gained his second wind even though the immediate situation was deeply discouraging. The Wehrmacht prowled like a panther outside Moscow and Leningrad. Supplies of food in the unoccupied parts of the USSR had fallen by a half as a result of German control of Ukraine. The Don Basin too had been seized, and with it had vanished three quarters of the country’s access to coal, iron and steel. Other metal deposits lay in the territories held by Germany; these included copper, manganese and aluminium. Potential conscripts to the Red Army were reduced by the speed and depth of the Wehrmacht’s advance. In the Soviet-held territories, moreover, there was much chaos. Millions of refugees streamed into central Russia. Trains reached Moscow from the west with wagons piled high with the machinery of factories that had been evacuated.
The Supreme Commander reverted to instinct. Attack, he insisted to his exhausted generals, was preferable to defence. Even Stalin acknowledged that this was impossible near Moscow and Leningrad. But he thought his maps indicated German weakness in the Don Basin. Generals and commissars warned him that logistics and geography were unpropitious; but they got nowhere. Stalin argued — or rather he assumed and did not care about what others argued against him — that almost any action was better than passivity. In April 1942, as the snow gave way to mud, Stalin overrode Stavka and compelled its military specialists to organise an offensive in eastern Ukraine with the objective of seizing Kharkov. This would be the first serious Soviet counter-attack. It was planned with egregious indiscretion and German intelligence agencies had prior knowledge. The Wehrmacht had made its arrangements and was waiting; it also knew in advance about Stalin’s plan to retake the Crimea. A strategic trap was sprung. Despite the objections from his advisers, Stalin insisted on the offensives and the Red Army drove its tanks straight into the jaws of defeat.
Hitler had dealt a juddering blow to the Soviet armed forces, and Kharkov stayed in the hands of the enemy. Hitler continued to think in grandiose terms. The war was going well for German forces in north Africa and it was not unreasonable to suppose that the Wehrmacht, coming from the south and the north, would soon overrun the entire Middle East and take possession of its oil. The Japanese, Hitler’s allies, were moving fast down the western rim of the Pacific Ocean. No country could hold out against Japan; the European imperial powers — Britain, France and Holland — were being worsted in the Asian struggle. Hitler confidently chose Stalingrad (formerly known as Tsaritsyn) as his next target.
Stalin ordered the city to be held at all costs. There is much unwarranted commentary that both he and Hitler exaggerated Stalingrad’s strategic significance. Stalin had been based there for some months in 1918 and his propagandists had treated the Tsaritsyn campaign as crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. Hitler, it is said, was drawn to attacking Stalingrad because the city bore Stalin’s name. Sentiment and symbolism may well have contributed to the German determination to take Stalingrad and the Soviet will to resist. But the primary reason for Hitler’s decision was strategic. Stalingrad lay in an area vital for the logistics of the USSR’s war effort. German control over the mid-Volga region would cut the USSR off from its oil supplies in Baku and Grozny. Its possession would also permit the Germans to break across the Volga to south-eastern Russia and dangerously reduce Moscow’s access to grain and potatoes. The alternative would have been to concentrate on the capture of Moscow so as to dominate the centre of transport and administration for the entire USSR. But Hitler’s decision was sound even if it was not the sole option available to him.
Germany and its allies started the Stalingrad campaign on 28 June 1942. Quickly they reached and took Voronezh. Then Rostov fell. Stalingrad seemed doomed and a confident Hitler split the attacking forces so as to seize the oil of the north and south Caucasus. The reports to Moscow made painful reading for Stavka. Panic gripped the inhabitants of Russia’s south. To prevent any repetition of the kind of panic which had disrupted the capital in July 1941, Stalin issued Order No. 227, ‘Not a Step Backward!’, on 28 July 1942. Its terms, read out to troops in the field but withheld from the Soviet media, demanded obedience on pain of severe punishment. Retreat, unless it had clear sanction from the Kremlin, was to be treated as treason. Soviet-held territory was to be defended at all costs. ‘Panickers’ and ‘cowards’ were to expect summary treatment: they would either be shot on the spot or transferred to the so-called penal battalions (where they stood little chance of survival). Order No. 227 had been edited and signed by Stalin. No serving soldier was left in doubt of his determination to compel the Red Army to fight without giving an inch.
Yet when Stalin refused to send reinforcements to Stalingrad, he was not relying on Order No. 227. He was fearful about diverting his reserves from Moscow and Leningrad. German commander Friedrich Paulus’s forces moved unrelentingly on Stalingrad. Stalin turned again to Zhukov. Implicitly he recognised that he had been making misjudgements in Ukraine and southern Russia which at last he called upon his most dynamic officer to rectify. As a reward for his achievements Zhukov was made Deputy Supreme Commander. After a swift visit to the front, Zhukov stood out for a changed set of military dispositions. In particular he called for the dispatch of reserves to Stalingrad. This plan was agreed in September 1942, and Zhukov and the new Chief of Staff Alexander Vasilevski worked out the details with Stalin. Gradually the Supreme Commander was learning how to work with fellow Stavka members. The plan for a wide counter-offensive — Operation Uranus — was elaborated. Reserves were assembled and the defenders of Stalingrad, cut off by the Germans, were ordered to hold out for the duration. Whole districts of the city were reduced to rubble by the constant bombing raids of the Luftwaffe. Vasili Chuikov was appointed the new Soviet commander, but Hitler believed that Paulus would soon have possession of Stalingrad.
Zhukov and Vasilevski conferred with Stalin and other commanders at each stage of their planning. This was the outcome of Stalin’s growing respect for their professional expertise. Zhukov reported to Stalin on his direct observations near the front. When he made recommendations about operational defects, he had to put up with Stalin expatiating on contemporary warfare.4 Yet generally Stalin behaved himself. He proposed that Operation Uranus should be postponed if preparations were not fully in place.5 This was not a Stalin seen earlier in the war.