On 10 January 1942, Red Army units received a letter critiquing past operations and looking ahead to upcoming ones. The tone and style of the letter suggest that much of it was written by Stalin. It was generally critical of the way in which German defenses had been breached during the December counteroffensive. The widely dispersed actions by the Red Army, which was stretched thin along the entire front, were characterized as incorrect. “The offensive can achieve the necessary effect,” it read, “only if we create a force capable of overwhelming the enemy in one sector of the front.” A second major failing was the poor use of artillery. “We often throw the infantry into an offensive against the enemy’s defensive line without artillery, without any artillery support, and then complain that the infantry is not advancing against a well-defended and dug-in enemy.… This is an offense, not an offensive—an offense against the Motherland, against the troops forced to endure senseless casualties.”83 The Supreme Command demanded regular artillery support for attacking units, not just during the preparatory stages of an offensive. Here too the main emphasis was on concentrating artillery where the thrust of the attack would be focused.
These were sensible and important observations on the perils of frontal attacks, which entail large casualties, and the need to concentrate forces and maneuver skillfully. But in planning the winter campaign of 1942, Stalin ignored his own warnings and insisted on attacking on all fronts at once. He wanted the swift, victorious conclusion to the war that he had promised during his 7 November 1941 address. This idea was also expressed in secret documents. Stalin’s basic assumption, apparently based on the intelligence reports he was receiving, was that Germany had used up its reserves. In his 6 November 1941 speech he claimed that the Germans had lost 4.5 million men during four months of war, and the subsequent reports he received tended to support these fantastic numbers. For example, German casualties as of 1 March 1942 were estimated at 6.5 million.84 These figures, five or six times higher than the actual ones, were probably the result of the usual Soviet system of distortion, in which the vozhd was told what he wanted to hear.
The plan for the summer campaign, approved in March 1942, provided for a shift to strategic defense and a buildup of reserves for the next offensive. Stalin wound up issuing orders that conflicted with this decision and led to the staging of offensive operations in multiple sectors. “After reviewing the plan of action adopted for the summer of 1942, I must say that its weakest aspect is the decision to conduct defensive and offensive actions at the same time,” Marshal Vasilevsky wrote several decades later.85 This opinion also prevails in scholarly literature on the subject.
During the summer of 1942, offensives were planned for Crimea, the Central Direction, and around Kharkov and Leningrad. Stalin was heavily involved in the planning of these operations. In matters of staffing, where he was, as usual, worried about selecting leaders capable of acting decisively, his personnel choices again reveal his shortcomings as supreme commander. He sent Lev Mekhlis, the head of the Red Army’s Main Political Directorate, to represent Moscow in Crimea. Mekhlis, who had served as Stalin’s secretary, was fanatically loyal to the vozhd, energetic, decisive, and ruthless, but he was completely ignorant of military science.
Voroshilov was assigned to the Volkhovsky Front, outside Leningrad, despite having been earlier dismissed from the Leningrad Front for incompetence. His special relationship with the vozhd allowed him to turn down this assignment, infuriating Stalin. On 1 April 1942 the Politburo adopted a decision, dictated by Stalin, subjecting Voroshilov to savage criticism. The disclosure of his reason for turning down this command was obviously meant to embarrass him. The former defense commissar was quoted as saying that “The Volkhovsky Front is a difficult front” and that he did not want to fail at the job. The Politburo resolved to “(1) Recognize that Com. Voroshilov did not prove himself in the work assigned him at the front. (2) Send Com. Voroshilov to perform military work away from the front lines.”86 This was an empty gesture: Voroshilov was not banished from Stalin’s inner circle. Nevertheless, the resolution, which became known to a wide circle of top officials, may have been a warning to others.
The Southwestern Command was not a particular source of Stalin’s complaints. Aware of his inclinations, the front commander, Timoshenko, and military council member, Khrushchev, proposed an offensive to retake Kharkov. After confronting objections from the General Staff, Stalin decided to maneuver. He approved the Ukrainian operation but pronounced it an internal matter for the front’s commanders. This decision did not change anything, but it relieved Stalin of some responsibility for how it turned out.
The poorly conceived plans for the offensive led to more heavy losses and damaged the overall strategic situation. The first disturbing sign was defeat in Crimea. The German counteroffensive, launched on 8 May 1942, crushed Soviet troops in twelve days and sealed the fate of the Crimean city of Sevastopol, which had been under siege for eight months. Large-scale heroism was not enough to prevent catastrophe. The city fell in July after the Germans brought in significant forces from other fronts. According to the Sovnarkom’s chief of administration, Chadaev, Mekhlis tried to make his excuses to Stalin in person, waiting outside the vozhd’s office. Chadaev described what happened when Stalin appeared in the doorway: “Mekhlis jumped up from his seat: ‘Hello, Comrade Stalin! Permit me to report.’ Stalin paused for a moment, looked Mekhlis up and down, and with a voice filled with emotion pronounced: ‘Damn you!’ He then headed straight into his office and slammed the door. Mekhlis slowly lowered his arms to his sides and turned toward the window in distress.”87
The following day, 4 June 1942, Stalin signed a Supreme Command directive to the military councils of all fronts and armies on the reasons for defeat in Crimea. The style of the directive, which pointed out that the Crimean forces had been crushed despite having a significant numerical advantage, suggested he had a hand in composing it. The commanders in Crimea, including Mekhlis, were accused of incompetence and inability, removed from their positions, and stripped of their rank.88 Nevertheless, Mekhlis did not fall out of favor with Stalin and continued to be given important posts. Zhukov later speculated that Stalin was relatively lenient in punishing those who had directed the Crimean catastrophe “because he was aware of his own personal responsibility for it.”89
The effort to retake the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov was also planned with Stalin’s full support. The attack began on 12 May and at first seemed to promise success. A few days in, however, everything changed. The Germans, who were thought to be focused on capturing Moscow, were in fact planning a decisive offensive in the south. Timoshenko’s poorly conceived plans for Kharkov only made their task easier. Despite warnings that the huge Soviet force now risked encirclement, Stalin refused to halt the attack on Kharkov in order to deal with this threat. By the time he decided to suspend the offensive, it was too late.90 According to General Staff statistics, 277,000 Red Army troops were lost—killed, wounded, or captured—in the Second Battle of Kharkov.91 The Germans had again been handed a strategic advantage. Hitler’s forces were now able to move quickly toward the Caucasus and the Volga.