Slaughter on the Eastern Front E-Book

Anthony Tucker-Jones

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 600

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In the summer of 1941, a collective madness overtook Adolf Hitler and his senior generals. They convinced themselves that they could take on and defeat a superpower in the making – the Soviet Union. Foolishly, they thought in a swift campaign they could smash the Red Army and force Stalin to sue for peace, despite dire warnings that Stalin was amassing a reserve army of more than 1 million men on the Volga. The end result would be such carnage that it would tear the German forces apart. In his major reassessment of the war on the Eastern Front, Anthony Tucker-Jones casts new light on the brutal fighting, including such astounding German defeats as at Stalingrad, Kursk, Minsk and, finally, Berlin. He controversially contends that from the very start intelligence officers on both sides failed to influence their leadership resulting in untold slaughter. He also reveals the shocking blunders by Hitler, Stalin and even Churchill that led to the appalling, needless destruction of Hitler's armed forces as early as the winter of 1941–42. Step by step, Tucker-Jones describes how the German war machine fought to its very last against a relentless enemy, fully aware that defeat was inevitable.

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First published in 2017

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2017

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© Anthony Tucker-Jones, 2017

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CONTENTS

Stalin’s Gathering Armies

Introduction: Collective Madness

1 Enemies of the People

2 Zhukov Pulls No Punches

3 Hitler’s Will-o’-the-Wisp

4 Shameful Intrigue

5 Everything is Normal

6 Provoking War

7 Redbeard and Beyond

8 The Typhoon Falters

9 Operation Blue

10 Disaster on the Don

11 No Champagne or Cognac

12 Zeitzler’s Comeback Plan

13 Prokhorovka Bloodbath

14 Stalin’s D-Day

15 Hitler’s Last Triumph

16 Axis Turncoats

17 Final Stand

18 Madmen in Berlin

19 Hitler Youth

20 Stalin’s Vengeance

21 Slaughter on the Eastern Front

Appendices

1 Glossary of Key Military Operations 1941–45

2 Estimates of Hitler’s Principal European Eastern Front Allies

3 Estimates of Hitler’s Principal Soviet Eastern Front Allies

4 German Losses and Replacements, December 1941–September 1942

5 Stalin’s Reserve Armies, Spring 1942

6 Axis Losses on the Eastern Front 1941–45

7 Red Army and Soviet Allied Forces’ Losses on the Eastern Front 1941–45

8 Red Army Losses by Operation 1941–45

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

STALIN’S GATHERING ARMIES

General Mikhail Ivanovich Kazakov stood on the edge of Tashkent Airfield. It was warm – this time of year temperatures in Uzbekistan reached a stifling 34°C. Out in the sun it did not take long for the standard Red Army issue khaki cotton shirt and single-breasted tunic to become soaked. He dug a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow and then his neck.

Kazakov was not a fan of the Soviet Central Asian Republics. Career wise, the region was a complete backwater – European Russia or Siberia was where most officers wanted to be. Tashkent lacked the opportunities of, say, Moscow, Minsk, Kharkov and Leningrad, or even Vladivostok, for that matter.

Kazakov had found himself ordered to Moscow in early June 1941 to brief the General Staff on the readiness of the Central Asian Military District. He reassured himself it was a routine trip, but in the back of his mind there was a nagging doubt. A few years ago, such an order could mean a brief and often painful interview with Stalin’s dreaded internal security forces, followed by the Gulag or firing squad. Kazakov had heard what had happened to tough Red Army veterans like Konstantin Rokossovsky. He spent three vicious years in the Gulag, where he had been subjected to mock executions and had his ribs broken and his teeth knocked out. Only because Stalin had need of such men had Rokossovsky been released. Kazakov later, very briefly, worked for Rokossovsky and was highly impressed by the man.

He knew war with neighbouring China to the east was highly unlikely. The country had been brought to its knees by decades of violent internal political turmoil. Besides, China was a good trade partner and was distracted by recent Japanese aggression in Manchuria and Mongolia. To the south, Kazakov appreciated that no one in their right mind would tangle with the bloodthirsty tribes of Afghanistan. Its greatest value was as a useful buffer to British colonial interests in India. Only Iran, to the south-west, was of interest to Moscow because of its vast oil reserves and access to the Arabian Sea. The Red Army watched with amusement as the British and Americans squabbled over oil rights in the region.

Kazakov lit up a Machorka cigarette just to calm any last-minute nerves before his flight. He was used to the high nicotine content, which was three times that of regular tobacco. Many officers preferred European cigarettes, but in Tashkent they were not so easy to get hold of. He pondered his trip. It was slightly worrying that he had been at the military’s central headquarters in Moscow earlier in the year and now six months on he had been called back.

His relationship with the military district commander was good, so he was not aware of any problems in the chain of command. In the Red Army, where bullying was institutionalised, it paid to have a good relationship with your immediate superior, otherwise it could make for a very unpleasant working environment and a short-lived career. If anything, Kazakov was slightly envious of his 42-year-old boss, Major General Sergei Trofimenko. He was a veteran of the Russian Civil War and in recent years had been involved in the campaigns in Poland and Finland. After promotion, Trofimenko had arrived to take command of the Central Asian Military District in early 1941.

Across the runway the loadmaster of a DB long-range bomber motioned to Kazakov. This aircraft had proved to be vulnerable to nationalist fighters during the Spanish Civil War and, in many instances, was now relegated to transport duties. He stubbed out his cigarette and straightened his furashka officer’s peaked cap.

Flying north, the pilot picked up the Trans-Siberian Railway as an easy way to navigate to Moscow, and below Kazakov saw trainload after trainload of troops from the Soviet Far East, all heading west. Kazakov was unaware of any large-scale military manoeuvres, so Stalin must be gathering his armies – it seemed war was brewing in Europe. Now he knew why he had been summoned to Moscow.

Meanwhile, in his office in the Central Arbat District of Moscow, General Filipp Golikov, head of Military Intelligence, knew exactly what was going on. He had watched as Adolf Hitler massed three powerful army groups in Prussia, Nazi-occupied western Poland and then Romania. There had also been unending border violations by German spy planes. His credible and well-placed sources all indicated that Hitler was poised to strike between mid-May and mid-June 1941. Golikov had direct access to ‘the Boss’ in the Kremlin and was regularly at his side. When it came to briefing Joseph Stalin, he did not even have to bother going through the General Staff.

The Soviet Union was well prepared to face any threat posed by Hitler, or so he thought. Golikov was relatively new in the post and he understood that it was best not to disagree with the Boss. He had replaced Ivan Proskurov, who had been sacked for not sugar-coating the intelligence about Hitler’s intentions. Proskurov had gone the way of his six predecessors and would face a firing squad in four months’ time.

Golikov appreciated that being head of Military Intelligence for someone like Stalin was a poisoned chalice. To survive the rigours of life in the Red Army, you always kept your head down. The Boss, naturally supported by Golikov, had very set views on what was going on. In his mind, Hitler’s build-up was all part of an elaborate plan to force England to the negotiating table. Therefore, it was very clear to Stalin and Golikov that war with Germany was not imminent.

At Wünsdorf, south of Berlin, Colonel Eberhard Kinzel, head of German intelligence-gathering in Eastern Europe, was slightly worried about his conclusions which had been backed by the Luftwaffe’s intrusive reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union. These had confirmed two very important things: firstly, the Red Army seemed to have no strategic reserves east of their old frontier, and this posed the question, where were Stalin’s reserves? Secondly, the Red Air Force was very obligingly lining its aircraft up wingtip to wingtip on its forward airfields. This meant that the Luftwaffe would be able to easily destroy the Red Air Force on the ground and once Hitler’s blitzkrieg had stormed through eastern Poland, the road to Moscow would be wide open.

Kinzel had in recent months made a very thorough study of the Red Army deployed in the border areas, and overall it was in a lamentable state. Everything indicated that a swift victory could be achieved. His superior, General Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff, was very pleased with his work in building up a meticulous picture of Stalin’s defences. However, Kinzel had also studied Stalin’s manpower reserves and industrial strength. Should Hitler attack the Soviet Union, the war would clearly be a race against time, not only against the Russian winter but also Stalin’s mobilising reserve armies.

Rumour of war was rife across the rest of Eastern Europe; there was no hiding it. In Bucharest’s Calea Victoriei Boulevard and Cişmigiu Park people talked of nothing else. Sitting at his desk in a city affectionately known as ‘Little Paris’, Jewish writer Iosif Hechter was anxious about Romania’s relationship with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Better known by his pen name ‘Mihail Sebastian’, the playwright and novelist had connections with the country’s intellectuals who supported the Fascist Iron Guard.

By early June, men were being called up and the Romanian government had ordered everyone to build an air-raid shelter in their yards within the next two weeks. The city had also been subject to a series of blackouts. Writing in his journal almost every day, Hechter fretted about four things: the fate of Europe’s Jews, his creativity, unending money problems and the growing likelihood of war with the Soviet Union. He had little idea of the key role the Romanian military would play in Hitler’s war against Stalin.

On the other side of the world in Tokyo, man about town Richard Sorge was feeling rather pleased with himself. By anyone’s reckoning he was a chancer who got a thrill from taking risks. A Soviet citizen turned Nazi journalist he was actually on Golikov’s payroll. He came from Baku but had grown up and worked in Germany for many years. After a stint in China he had been sent to Japan in the early 1930s. During his time in China he had provided intelligence on Sino-Japanese tensions. Reporting from Shanghai had been particularly exhilarating. In Tokyo he had been very discreet whilst building up his contacts and keeping above suspicion of the Japanese secret police.

He had just come from a meeting with the German military attaché Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Scholl. It had been a very valuable chat; Scholl had his confidence and had been criminally indiscreet. Scholl had informed Sorge that Hitler was poised to attack the Soviet Union on about 20 June 1941. Sorge hastened home to radio Moscow – he would be hailed a hero for saving Mother Russia.

Sorge knew that part of the equation was missing. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union how would Japan react? Would the Japanese attack at the same time? His sources told him that elements of the Japanese military felt the Soviet Union should be punished for interfering in Mongolia. If that were the case it meant a two front war for Stalin. Sorge’s energies would now be directed at confirming Tokyo’s intentions. What Richard Sorge did not know was that Stalin despised him, as he did all spies. Sorge in Stalin’s opinion was little better than a brothel keeper and a peddler of misinformation. When the time came later in the year he would abandon Sorge to the Japanese, torture and the hangman’s noose. Such was the Boss’s gratitude.

INTRODUCTION

COLLECTIVE MADNESS

To people born and raised in Western Europe, the slaughter that occurred on the Eastern Front during 1941–45 is, without doubt, beyond comprehension. The campaigns fought in the west were bloody and brutal affairs, but they pale into insignificance against the simply enormous battles fought in the east and the resulting death toll. In addition, beyond military circles there is little appreciation that so many different nationalities shared in the appalling bloodletting.

In the summer of 1941 a collective madness overtook Adolf Hitler and his senior generals. Contrary to their intelligence, they convinced themselves that they could take on and defeat a superpower in the making – the Soviet Union. Foolishly, they thought they could smash the disorganised Red Army in a swift campaign and force Joseph Stalin to sue for peace. However, even at the start Hitler had insufficient manpower for such an enterprise and he was forced to rely on the inadequate armies of his Axis allies – Finland, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and even Spain. Bulgaria also became involved indirectly, by freeing up German troops in the Balkans.

Hitler indulged in tunnel vision; it was his victorious Wehrmacht that would deliver the decisive knock-out blow against the Red Army while his Axis allies simply held the southern flank. In reality though, the Italians, Hungarians and Romanians were key players in the disaster that unfolded for Hitler’s war effort in the east. Hitler bullied and cajoled the Hungarian and Romanian leadership into joining his anti-Bolshevik crusade against Stalin. Their motives for doing so were based more on mutual distrust of each other than on any great antipathy toward the Soviet Union. They would learn to regret their alliance with the devil.

Crucially, Hitler wilfully ignored the Siberian factor and Stalin’s enormous manpower reserves. By the summer of 1940 there was rumour of war amongst the Soviet military authorities in the cities of Chita, Tashkent, Sverdlovsk and Saratov. This rumour pointed not to the Far East of the sprawling Soviet Union, where there had been open hostilities with Japan, but to the west where Hitler’s aggressive expansion in Europe was a growing cause for concern.

The popular perception is that Stalin was caught completely by surprise by Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union – but this is complete rubbish. In the spring of 1941 Soviet generals in these far-flung outposts were ordered to ship their troops west to form the Reserve Front. This act would help save Moscow from Nazi occupation and stall Hitler’s invasion at a critical moment in the battle. On four occasions, German Intelligence failed to predict the creation of Soviet reserve fronts with catastrophic results: first at Moscow, then Stalingrad, Kursk and finally Minsk.

Three little-known intelligence officers were partially responsible for the appalling slaughter on the Eastern Front, thanks to their impact on Stalin and Hitler. First, General Filipp Golikov, in charge of Soviet Military Intelligence, on the very eve of war helped convince Stalin that Hitler would not attack in the summer of 1941. Despite warnings from his most experienced senior generals, Stalin felt he knew best. As a result, the Red Army was neither fully mobilised nor fully equipped and the Wehrmacht was able to strike it at the optimum moment. Second, Colonel Eberhard Kinzel, responsible for German intelligence on the Eastern Front, failed to impress upon Hitler the danger posed by Stalin’s Reserve Front and the reserve armies gathering beyond the Volga. The Reserve Front coalesced around Moscow to hold off Operation Typhoon while the reserve armies were mobilising. This meant Hitler had one chance and one chance only to capture Moscow before losing momentum. Kinzel was subsequently sacked for being the bearer of bad tidings.

Likewise, his successor, Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, tried to warn Hitler of the danger gathering on the Volga and the threat this posed to the German Army and its Axis allies at Stalingrad, in the winter of 1942. Hitler refused to listen and would not authorise a tactical withdrawal. Massed Soviet forces cut across the Don and surrounded Stalingrad with ease. Gehlen then tried call off Hitler’s Kursk Offensive in the summer of 1943, warning that it was another trap, but left it too late. The following year he again tried to warn that Army Group Centre was at risk from a third Soviet reserve front, but once again failed to get Hitler to withdraw. As a consequence, Army Group Centre was annihilated before Minsk and the remnants driven all the way back to Warsaw.

What possessed Hitler to believe he could defeat Stalin’s vast army, which had more manpower, and was equipped with more tanks, artillery and aircraft? Hitler’s blitzkrieg had brought Poland, Scandinavia, Western Europe and the Balkans to its knees, and even the combined might of the British and French armies had been unable to stave off defeat. Through a combination of new tactics and daring, Hitler’s generals had run circles around their opponents – quite literally, in many cases. By June 1941 the Wehrmacht stood undefeated and undisputed master of Europe, and Moscow seemed within Hitler’s grasp. Even so, challenging the Red Army still seems a tall order.

Stalin’s purges of his officer corps in the late 1930s and the Red Army’s lamentable performance against Finland during the brief Winter War also convinced Hitler that such a feat was possible. On top of this, the Soviet High Command chose to ignore the mobile warfare possibilities presented by the tank. To them it was a support weapon rather than an armoured fist. They looked to their experiences during the Spanish Civil War and drew the wrong conclusions – despite the recent lessons of Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Europe where the panzer had reigned supreme. The political intrigue of Marshals Voroshilov and Budenny ensured the death of leading tank advocate Tukhachevsky, the Soviet answer to Britain’s Fuller, Germany’s Guderian and France’s Estienne; all of whom were champions of the tank.

Stalin’s collectivisation programmes had wrought untold suffering on the Soviet population. Ukraine, in particular, endured the most appalling famine with a horrific death toll. Stalin violently dragged the Soviet Union into the twentieth century, whether it liked it or not. Collectivisation was enforced at the barrel of a gun and any signs of nationalism within the Soviet Union’s member states was stamped out. As a result, the Soviet Union appeared to be in a state of political and military chaos. To Hitler and his generals there could be only one outcome – if attacked with sufficient force, the mighty Red Army would collapse and Stalin would be ousted by a military coup.

To his cost, Hitler chose to ignore the dire warning provided by an up-and-coming Soviet general, who shaped modern armoured warfare tactics with notable flare just before Hitler’s blitzkrieg was unleashed on Poland. This was where the crucial Siberian factor came in. During the summer of 1939, Georgi Zhukov crushed the Japanese Army on the steppes of Mongolia with such ease that Japan never meddled in Soviet affairs again. It ensured that Stalin was free to fight on just one front rather than two when the time came. When Hitler’s armies reached Moscow, Zhukov was there waiting for them with his wealth of experience and winter-hardened Siberian divisions.

In addition, after the invasion Hitler chose to ignore the anti-Soviet sentiments that were widespread within the Nazi-occupied territories. At grassroots level, collectivisation had fired a hatred of Stalin’s repressive regime. The Baltic States and Ukraine wanted independence and initially welcomed the Nazis as liberators, but Hitler and his despotic cronies chose to ride roughshod over them and treated them as subjugated peoples. The opportunity to raise large armies of nationalist forces from the Baltic States was left too late. Early ‘volunteers’ were consigned to menial support roles within the German military, or became brutal police units who simply alienated the local population even more.

Attempts at raising anti-Stalinist Ukrainian and even Russian forces were simply too little too late. Those units instigated in the name of political change in the Soviet Union suffered predictable fates. Some ended up in the unenviable position of being trapped in the middle, disowned by all. Only the Don and Kuban Cossacks were embraced with any great enthusiasm by the German armed forces. Even then, the powerful Cossack Corps ended up fighting in Italy, far from the Red Army.

The opening stages of Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union were an unexpected and unsurpassed triumph. In June 1941, in a campaign conducted at breathless speed the German and other Axis armies rolled triumphantly across the Baltic States, Byelorussia and Ukraine. The Red Army and Red Air Force were completely smashed and scattered across the Russian Steppes. Desperate to save their necks, the Soviet generals set about blaming each other for the ineptitude that had permitted Hitler to reach the very gates of Moscow.

Then, dramatically, with the onset of the Russian winter Hitler faltered before the Soviet capital and Leningrad. Stalin’s insistence on a premature counter-offensive at Moscow was a dismal failure, but it caused Hitler’s armies, who were ill-equipped to cope with the bitter weather, to pause for breath. Although Moscow was the real centre of gravity, Hitler became needlessly distracted by events on his flanks; the allure of Leningrad, Sevastopol, Stalingrad and Baku became too great. In particular, Stalingrad was where the slowly but surely rejuvenating Red Army was able to prove its new-found mettle. It was a battle that neither Hitler nor Stalin would give up on.

From 1941–42 the losses on the Eastern Front were extremely heavy, but nothing like the subsequent slaughter that occurred with appalling regularity from 1942–45. Thanks to their intelligence, Hitler’s generals knew that the Soviet Union’s massive population would throw a vital lifeline to the battered Red Army on a scale that was impossible for the Wehrmacht. The real question was how quickly the Red Army could recover and if Stalin would survive.

The German intelligence assessment was that with the capture of vital raw materials concentrated in the Caucasus, the Red Army would be starved of resources. Notably, General Georg Thomas, head of the German economic office just before the Eastern Front opened, estimated that Stalin would lose two thirds of his heavy industry, which would make it impossible to re-arm the Red Army. He could not conceive that Stalin’s factories would be shifted, wholesale, east of the Urals and that they would not only resume production of military equipment but also step it up to levels with which Germany could not compete.

The regeneration of the shattered Red Army and Red Air Force was little short of a miracle. Reinhard Gehlen, head of German Intelligence on the Eastern Front, noted that despite staggering Soviet losses at Kiev, Vyazma and Bryansk, by January 1942 the Red Army was still maintaining a front-line strength of 4.5 million men and there were as many Red Army divisions confronting the Wehrmacht as when Hitler first attacked the Soviet Union. General Halder, Chief of the German General Staff, estimated total German losses on the Eastern Front on 28 February 1942 to be 1 million casualties. Whatever the true figure, even by Halder’s reckoning, as of November 1941 Hitler had lost almost a quarter of his forces on the Eastern Front and by February 1942 this had risen to almost a third. This shattered the illusion of a swift victory.

At the same time, Stalin began to release his vice-like grip on the conduct of the war as this had so clearly led to defeat in early 1942. Instead, he finally began to rely on the expert judgement of his deputy, Zhukov. In turning the tide in late 1942, Stalin chose to strike Hitler’s Achilles heel at Stalingrad. First, he routed the ill-equipped Italian, Hungarian and Romanian armies, and then he trapped and crushed an entire German Army between the banks of the Don and Volga, while the Luftwaffe was also dangerously weakened trying to save it. A shudder ran through the ranks of the German armed forces; this was not supposed to happen.

Hitler had deliberately chosen to ignore the warning signs. His efforts to wrest back the initiative received a further deathblow at Kursk, where Stalin sprang another well-concealed trap. Hitler’s depleted armies were now bleeding to death and the slaughter continued in earnest.

When Stalin launched his version of D-Day the following year, he tore the beating heart out of the Wehrmacht and overran Hungary and Romania. From then on it was a fighting retreat for the Germans. Hitler marshalled his dwindling manpower for one last attempt to stop the Red tide in the spring of 1945, but it was to no avail and the Red Army was on its way to Berlin.

Extensive analysis of German intelligence reveals the blunders that led to the shocking and needless destruction of Hitler’s armed forces as early as the winter of 1941–42. The myth is that the regeneration of the Red Army cost Hitler the war, thanks to his defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, but it was ultimately his will-o’-the-wisp strategy and fortress mentality that fatally hamstrung his war effort. In refusing to cede ground, Hitler took away the Wehrmacht’s ability to conduct mobile warfare and fight on the ground of their choosing. Inevitably, the initiative increasingly passed over to the Red Army. Despite this, Hitler’s war machine fought to its very last against a relentless enemy knowing that defeat was inevitable.

1

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

The Red Army did everything it could to win the Second World War, but before the conflict broke out, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did all he could to prevent it from doing so. Representing one of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century, his brutal administration of the Soviet Union during the 1930s caused up to 30 million deaths. His vindictive persecution of the Red Army inadvertently contributed to another 20 million deaths during the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Stalin’s unbridled Terror, or Great Purge, was all encompassing within the Soviet armed forces, making the Red Army’s hard-won victory in Europe in May 1945 even more remarkable.

On the eve of war with Germany there were over 100,000 Red Army officers on active duty, but up to half of these were removed. This was the first time that the officers of a loyal and undefeated army had been so systematically decimated by their own government during peacetime.

Stalin’s paranoia was to cost him dearly. Adolf Hitler concluded that the Wehrmacht had the ability to bring the Soviet Union to its knees in the summer of 1941. This would give his rapidly expanding Third Reich the Lebensraum, or ‘living space’, and raw materials that it required to prosper and from which it could dominate Europe. It was Soviet leader Joseph Stalin himself who convinced Hitler he had the ability to crush the superficially formidable but nonetheless weakened Red Army.

The previous December, Hitler had set out his military plans for the Soviet Union in ‘Directive No. 21: Case Barbarossa’:

The Wehrmacht must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war against England, to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign (‘Case Barbarossa’). […]

The bulk of the Russian Army stationed in western Russia will be destroyed by daring operations led by deeply penetrating armoured spearheads. Russian forces still capable of giving battle will be prevented from withdrawing into the depths of Russia.

The enemy will then be energetically pursued and a line will be reached from which the Russian Air Force can no longer attack German territory. The final objective of the operation is to erect a barrier against Asiatic Russia on the general line Volga–Archangel. The last surviving industrial area of Russia in the Urals can then, if necessary, be eliminated by the Luftwaffe.1

While strong on general intentions, it was at best fuzzy on military and political practicalities. Fundamentally Hitler presupposed that the Soviet Union could be successfully partitioned once the Red Army had been defeated and Stalin had fallen from power. Even in 1940, to imagine that the Asian portion of the Soviet Union would leave European Russia under Nazi rule seemed a massive leap of faith. What convinced Hitler that such an outcome was possible, that the Red Army would never be able to recover sufficiently to claim it back?

Before Stalin’s purges, Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Military Council member and Politburo representative (and future Soviet premier), felt that the Red Army would have been more than a match for Hitler:

There’s no question that we would have repulsed the fascist invasion much more easily if the upper echelons of the Red Army command hadn’t been wiped out. They had been men of considerable expertise and experience. Many of them had graduated from military academies and gone through the Civil War. They were ready to discharge their soldierly duties for the sake of the Homeland, but they never had a chance.2

Meddling political control of the Red Army first appeared to ease in 1934 when dual oversight was ended. The commissars now found their role was purely to provide political advice and education rather than exercise power. This seemed to imply Stalin’s seal of approval of the professionalism and loyalty of the Red Army’s officers. Shortly after, military titles were reinstated.

The five most senior military officials were promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union. These were Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a former Guards officer; Klimet Voroshilov, Commissar of Defence, veteran of the Bolshevik’s 1st Cavalry Army and confidant of Stalin; Alexander Yegorov, chief of staff and another veteran of the 1st Cavalry Army; Semyon Budenny, another cavalryman; and Vasily Blyukher, commander of the Army of Siberia.

However, Stalin’s new-found seal of approval was to be very short-lived. When Stalin’s Terror was unleashed in 1937 almost the entire Red Army High Command were accused of being part of a German military-political conspiracy. Approximately 90 per cent of the general officers and 80 per cent of the colonels disappeared; three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union and thirteen out of fifteen senior generals were eliminated, as were seventy-five of the eighty members of the Supreme Military Council and eleven Vice Commissars of Defence. Regional commands and more junior officers were not spared either.

Command and control of the ten Soviet military districts, tasked with defending the Soviet Union’s borders, was decimated. Out of eighty-five corps commanders, fifty-seven were gone within a year, and of 406 brigade commanders, 220 were dead by the close of 1938. Some 40,000 senior and medium-grade officers were removed from post and executed, imprisoned or sent to the labour camps of the Gulag. As a result, Hitler was completely duped into believing that the Wehrmacht could crush the decapitated Red Army and so he greenlighted Operation Barbarossa.

But, what first drove Stalin to emaciate his armed forces to such an extent that Hitler felt confident enough to attack his well-armed neighbour? By 1929, in the wake of the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Stalin was firmly in control of the Soviet Union and had no intention of relinquishing it, regardless of the cost. Within two years, fearing the influence of his exiled arch-rival Leon Trotsky (the number two figure, after Lenin, during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution), he turned his attentions to the Red Army, making changes amongst the senior appointments. This was one of Stalin’s initial minor bloodless purges of the armed forces. Those involved could count themselves extremely lucky, for they were simply removed from post and in many cases simply dismissed. Relatively painlessly, Stalin promoted his own cronies. As a dress rehearsal of things to come this minor purge, conducted in 1929–30, saw just 4.7 per cent of the military membership expelled from the Communist Party; again, in 1933–34, 6.7 per cent of the military membership was excluded or demoted.

Stalin launched his first ‘five-year plan’ in 1928. Its goal was to industrialise an agricultural system that largely remained rooted in the Middle Ages. The Red Army was also to be modernised; particularly in terms of equipment and mechanisation. The second ‘five-year plan’, launched in 1932, saw Stalin turn his attention on the hapless wealthy peasants, for he wished to collectivise their farms which meant appropriating their land. The Soviet Union had some 25 million peasant farmers who worked their own land. The richest numbered some 2 million, to whom Stalin ruthlessly attached the name ‘kulak’ (‘usurer’ or crooked rural trader). There were 18 million middle peasants and some 5 million who were semi-destitute.

Stalin ordered that the kulaks be liquidated as a class, accusing them of being enemies of the state. The tragedy was that many of them were former loyal Red Army veterans who had returned to claim their land after fighting in the Civil War. In response to Stalin’s mass appropriation of their property, the kulaks slaughtered their own livestock rather than let the state take it and, in some cases, resisted. Red Army morale plummeted and in many units there was mass desertion by peasant soldiers, who hastened home to their villages, with or without rifles, to wreak vengeance on the executives of the collectives. By 1936 it has been estimated that 7 million people died in the collectivisation famine and forced deportations.

At the same time, new military vehicles began to roll out of Soviet factories at a rate previously unknown, and by the end of the year the Red Army had approximately as many tanks as France, which was at the time the pre-eminent European military power – by 1935 the Red Army had a fleet of 10,000 tanks.

Stalin, however, soon began to fear that a revived and enhanced Red Army would pose a threat to his power base. In addition, the Red Army had been divided by the wanton persecution of the kulaks. Stalin’s following actions were to have ramifications that even his warped mind could not have conceived.

First, he moved to stamp out potential political opposition in the key city of Leningrad. When Sergei Kirov, an old Stalin supporter, was assassinated (allegedly on Stalin’s orders) this unleashed a gradual purge which was to gather momentum until it became the all-encompassing Great Purge. This was to affect every element of Soviet society, including the Red Army. Stalin’s instrument of terror and destruction was to be the Peoples’ Commissariat of Internal Affairs – the dreaded NKVD – which came into being in 1934 as the forerunner of the KGB.

That year, on a December afternoon, Kirov (Leningrad Party leader for whom the ballet was named) was shot dead. It appeared the assassin acted on his own, but thirteen accomplices were killed along with him. Then, in the spring of 1935 thousands of Leningrad Party members, tainted by association with Kirov, were deported to the Gulag.

In Moscow, Stalin’s supporters moved quickly, the Central Committee of the Communist Party had 70 per cent of its 200 members liquidated. A few faced kangaroo courts, the rest just vanished from their homes. A show trial was conducted in 1937 where seventeen politicians were accused of conspiring with Leon Trotsky, the Germans and the Japanese.

No previous persecutions had ever reached the scale of Stalin’s. He made Ivan the Terrible’s reign of terror look tame. Under Stalin, state-authorised executions reached up to 1,000 a day. Between 1936 and 1938 approximately 500,000–1 million people were executed, with a further 8 million imprisoned.

Colonel General Andrei Trofimovich Stuchenko, who attended the prestigious MV Frunze Academy (the Soviet Union’s second highest military school) in 1936, recalled:

It was a terrifying time. People began to fear one another. Anything might serve as grounds for arrest: national origin, failure on the job, or even an incorrect interpretation of some word. It was particularly dangerous to be suspected of having connections with ‘enemies of the people’. […]

The arbitrariness and violations of socialist legality which were spawned by Stalin’s personality cult caused us to lose many experienced military comrades. The critical shortage of commanders began to be felt by the troops.3

Once Stalin’s political enemies were exterminated, the Yezhovshchina (as the Great Terror became known – named after NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov) fell firmly upon the Red Army with a vengeance in 1937. Ironically, the year before, the US Military Attaché in Moscow had observed that the loyalty of the Red Army to the government appeared beyond doubt.

Stalin had already murdered Defence Commissar Mikhail Frunze in 1925 (he was forced to undergo a gall stone operation despite a weak heart), in order to replace him with Kliment Voroshilov. The latter was a political general rather than a professional soldier. The initial step in tightening Stalin’s grip was the reintroduction of Communist Party political deputies (military commissars) into units of divisional size or larger.

Author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army veteran and guest of the Gulag who became the Soviet Union’s leading dissident, wrote with gallows humour of the strain these purges put on the Gulag’s metaphorical sewage system:

Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one nor the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting.

Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930 … which drove a mere fifteen million peasants … into the permafrost.

After it there was a wave of 1944 to 1946 … when they dumped whole nations down the sewer pipes, not to mention millions and millions of others who (because of us!) had been prisoners of war, or carried off to Germany and subsequently repatriated.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archipelago [Gulag] people of position …4

One of the Yezhovshchina’s first senior military victims was General Gamarnik, head of the army’s Main Political Administration (MPA). Marshal Blyukher visited him on 31 May 1937, informing him of the spreading arrests throughout the army. That afternoon, when the NKVD came, Gamarnik either committed suicide or was killed resisting arrest.

With the head of the MPA out of the way, the NKVD had free rein. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior generals were arrested without fuss and taken to the dreaded Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Amongst them were the commanders of the Soviet Union’s key western military districts (Leningrad, Byelorussia, Kiev and Volga) and the Moscow garrison. In one fell swoop Stalin compromised the whole of the western Soviet Union’s defences. Tukhachevsky’s real crime was in being everything that Stalin was not – educated, talented and very able. Also, he hated Generals Voroshilov and Budenny, which won him no friends at Stalin’s Red Court.

Tukhachevsky has been described as Stalin’s most gifted general. A former tsarist cadet, he was energetic and incisive and at 27 had commanded Soviet forces fighting against Poland. At 28, he destroyed the Kronstadt uprising with Trotsky, and at just 31 he became chief of staff. Already viewed as a rival, he had initially been removed by Stalin in 1928 and posted to the provinces. Tukhachevsky may not have known it but he was on borrowed time.

Stalin wanted Tukhachevsky arrested for treason as early as 1930, but his forward thinking with the Red Army had ensured that he remained Deputy Defence Commissar. It was another six years before he slid from power. In May 1936, following a heated row with Stalin’s favourite, Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky found himself sacked and sent to the Volga Military District. He was almost immediately arrested and sent back to Moscow. This was at a time when the first generals were being arrested and they were only too willing to implicate him if it meant saving their own necks.

Incriminatingly, Tukhachevsky was close friends with members of the German General Staff; he had been captured during the First World War and had since visited Germany six times. He made impassioned pleas to Stalin and Voroshilov, but to no avail, and under torture eventually ‘confessed’ to being a German agent. His blood-splattered confession bore testimony to the methods used to gain it. Stalin claimed, at a meeting of the Soviet High Command, that Tukhachevsky had been recruited in a honey trap involving a German female spy.

The growing numbers pouring into the Gulag from all walks of life meant that bureaucratic niceties were soon dispensed with. According to Solzhenitsyn:

Before 1938 some kind of formal documentation was required as a preliminary to torture, as well as specified permission for each case to be under investigation … then in the years 1937–1938 … interrogators were allowed to use violence and torture on an unlimited basis … in 1939 such indiscriminate authorisation was withdrawn and once again written permission was required.5

It may have been that Stalin feared, or indeed knew of, a genuine plot amongst the ranks of the Red Army to oust him. Nonetheless, it is equally possible that the following show trial was because of Hitler’s attempts to feed Stalin’s paranoia and deliberately weaken the Red Army. The marshals’ and generals’ arrests came after an allegedly secret German document fell into the hands of President Benes of Czechoslovakia, who passed it to Stalin. The German Gestapo and the NKVD are suspected of faking this incriminating evidence. It was passed to Benes via a White Russian émigré, General Nikolai Skoblin, in Paris, who had links with the Gestapo and NKVD. He was to vanish from Paris in September 1937, conveniently tying up any loose ends.

On 11 June 1937, the entire Red Army command, including the chief of the General Staff, the deputy defence commissars, military district commanders, all four army commanders, naval flag officers and four of the Marshals of the Soviet Union, attended the show trial of their comrades. Only Voroshilov was conspicuously missing, although he had branded the accused ‘scoundrels and degenerates’. To try the eight accused were eight judges (including two marshals); perversely, five of them were destined to die as well. Apart from Military Jurist of the Army First Class V. Ulrikh (who had considerable experience of show trials), none of them had any legal training. Understandably the judges themselves were uneasy about the whole proceeding. Marshal Blyukher even claimed he was ill and excused himself.

In contrast, Marshal Semyon Budenny, commander of the Moscow Military District, swaggered in full of bravado – even taking time to pose for the cameras. Budenny, a Civil War cavalry veteran who had served with Stalin on the South-Western Front, proceeded to denounce Tukhachevsky’s progressive thinking. He referred to the accused as ‘scum’ and argued the creation of tank corps was a deliberate attempt to wreck the Red Army. Tukhachevsky was understandably flabbergasted. However, Budenny’s self-seeking grandstanding did not stop him later falling under the suspicion of the NKVD.

Chief of the General Staff General Boris Mikhailovitch Shaposhnikov was aghast as General Ion Yakir, former commander of the Kiev Military District, stoutly denied the accusations of being a traitor. Shaposhnikov held the key post of commandant of the Frunze Military Academy (the Soviet equivalent of Sandhurst or Westpoint) from 1932 to 1937. He was then elevated to chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, a position he held until 1940 and again during 1941–42.

Yakir demanded of his colleagues, ‘Look me in the eyes! Can you really not understand that this is all lies?’ Fellow accused, General Primakov, former deputy commander of the Leningrad Military District, realising this was the work of Stalin and that all was lost, replied, ‘Give it up, Ion. Don’t you see who we are dealing with here?’

It was claimed that all eight were working for German Intelligence and undermining the Red Army, a charge that would have been better levelled at Stalin himself. Strangely, the folder containing the Benes document was never produced as evidence. None of the unfortunate generals pleaded guilty; in the typed trial report, all the ‘no’ responses were changed in ink to ‘yes’, apart from Tukhachevsky, who resolutely refused to co-operate. All eight were shot and their bodies were taken to a building site at Khodynka, thrown in a ditch and covered in quicklime and soil. It was a shocking demonstration of Stalin’s absolute power over the Red Army. In the coming months, it was to be repeated again and again.

This show trial opened the floodgates and former tsarist officers and Red Army veterans of the Civil War shared the fate of the eight generals. Lubyanka, Butyrka and Lefortovo in Moscow, and Kresty and Shlaperny prisons in Leningrad began to fill up with the ‘enemies of the people’.

For the arrests, the NKVD operated in pairs, while three constituted a tribunal. Arrest, sentencing and transportation took just three months, on average, and sentences were either death or a minimum of ten years in the Gulag prison labour system. Nothing could save the accused. Many, thinking that it was some sort of mistake, phoned Voroshilov, but he was Stalin’s protégé and their calls for help fell on deaf ears or he would instruct them to remain where they were until someone could come and ‘explain’. Voroshilov, far from trying to safeguard the Red Army High Command, personally ordered the arrest of 300 fellow officers – by his own account, 40,000 were arrested and 100,000 new, inexperienced officers promoted.

All the judges were executed, except for Budenny, Shaposhnikov and Ulrikh. Budenny even called Stalin to inform him that he had just warned off the NKVD with machine guns protecting his house. Stalin claimed he had no better idea than Budenny what the NKVD were up to and he was concerned they might come for him next. Budenny somehow survived to fight the Germans.

As a junior officer, Marshal Sergei Biriuzov had similar experiences to General Stuchenko:

I recalled with a shudder the years of 1937–38. During that dismal period, I studied at the MV Frunze Academy. […] After graduation I was appointed to the 30th Irkutsk Red Banner Division [as chief of staff]. There, an even more stupefying picture unfolded before me.6

The military in the Soviet Far East remained untouched until May 1938 when the deputy head of the NKVD arrived. Even Marshal Blyukher, Commander of the Far East, who had sat on the initial tribunals, disappeared in 1938. The 100,000-strong Soviet Kolkhoz Corps was disbanded and the Japanese, underestimating the effect of the purge, were prompted to probe Soviet border defences during 1938 and 1939.

Even those sent to serve in the Spanish Civil War were not immune. Soviet Consul Antonov-Ovseyenko was liquidated in 1939, and General Jan Berzin, former head of Military Intelligence, also fell prey to the Terror. The other services were not spared either. In fact, the navy lost more senior officers than the Red Army. Admiral Orlov, commander-in-chief of the navy, was shot, as was Admiral Muklevich. Four of the five fleet commanders were also executed.

Very few escaped the rolling tide of denunciation and destruction. Amongst them was General Andrei Vedenin. Although accused of being a tsarist sympathiser and buying unhealthy horses for the military, he survived to become commandant at – of all places – the Kremlin. Similarly, Laventi Beria told General Meretskov, who had been forced to confess that he was a British agent by the NKVD, that his claims were nonsense. He was released, given a general’s uniform and sent off to the front.

Other survivors were equally brutalised. Solzhenitsyn recalled:

They say that Konstantin Rokossovsky, the future marshal, was twice taken into the forest at night for a supposed execution. The firing squad levelled rifles at him, and then they dropped them, and he was taken back to prison. And this was also making use of ‘the supreme measure’ as an interrogator’s trick. But it was all right; nothing happened; and he is alive and healthy and doesn’t even cherish a grudge about it.7

Such forgiving attitudes in the face of appalling physical and mental brutality are hard to fathom. One would expect that Rokossovsky and colleagues who suffered similar experiences would have wanted the Red Tsar and his court dead as soon as possible. Rokossovsky and his comrades not only endured mock executions but also countless brutal beatings. Yet the Russian officers’ love for the ‘Motherland’ overrode any hatred they may have felt for Stalin or the Soviet system. Rather than turning on Stalin, they would readily spill their blood for him. Such loyalty is testimony to the culture of brutality prevalent in the Red Army at the time.

With the Second World War imminent, the timing of Stalin’s purge could not have been worse. Prior to the Terror the Red Army was at its strongest and most efficient – all this work was undone in one fell swoop. The removal of the able Tukhachevsky and his colleagues was a disaster. The General Staff was left completely disorganised, with its members constantly looking over their shoulders to see who was next.

Making up for the level of damage wrought by Stalin’s purge before Hitler attacked was impossible. While Voroshilov was incompetent, Stalin bore equal blame for also allowing the Red Army’s manpower to treble while officer training only doubled. Efforts to make good the purges were clearly insufficient. In the spring of 1940, over 30 per cent of Red Army platoon and company commanders had not attended the prescribed five-month course for junior lieutenants. By the summer of the following year, over 90 per cent of Soviet officers had not received higher military education and almost 40 per cent had not completed intermediate training. On top of this, 75 per cent of all officers had only held their posts for under a year, casting doubt on their competency. The reality was that no one knew what they were doing.

The Red Army’s desperate need for experienced officers inevitably began to result in the release of some of those consigned to the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn observed:

The reverse wave of 1939 was an unheard of incident in the history of the Organs [state security, or NKVD], a blot on their record! But, in fact, this reverse wave was not large; it included about one to two per cent of those who had been arrested but not yet convicted, who had not yet been sent away to far off places and had not yet perished. It was not large, but was put to effective use.8

General Ernst Köstring, the German Military Attaché in Moscow in 1940, was predicting it would take the Red Army four years to recover from Stalin’s purges. Prior to Barbarossa, the German General Staff produced A Brief Review of the Soviet Armed Forces, which provided an assessment of the Soviet officer corps. It concluded:

At the present time, many positions must be considered vacant as a result of the many arrests. There are attempts to make up for the lack of officers by reducing the period of officer training and by promoting veteran sergeants to junior lieutenants … The actual strength of the Air Force is about 30 per cent less than the authorised establishment … Following the execution of Tukhachevsky and a number of generals in the summer of 1937, just a few military leaders have remained. Everything indicates, at this juncture, the middle and senior command personnel represent the weakest element.9

During the second half of the 1930s Soviet cinemas had screened a rousing documentary film called The Fight for Kiev. Foreign military delegations were invited to watch impressive large-scale Red Army manoeuvres being filmed in Byelorussia and Ukraine. Undoubtedly, the German General Staff could draw conclusions from the exercises and the documentary about how Soviet military thinking was developing. ‘We ourselves failed essentially to utilise our rich experience,’ said Marshal Biriuzov, ‘although we were the first to work out the principles of conducting large-scale combat operations under modern conditions of mechanised war.’10

Not surprisingly, the veterans of the 1st Cavalry Army got themselves into positions of power. This was, after all, Stalin’s favourite Civil War formation. Despite his purge, an old boys’ network of Civil War veterans survived to ensure that the Red Army still retained a few relatively competent commanders, amongst whom were General Semyon Mikhailovich Budenny, Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko and Georgi Zhukov.

Budenny was an old-school cavalryman through and through, with a deep-rooted scepticism of tanks, and was not considered very bright by some. His main contribution to the Red Army seems to have been his ridiculously large moustache and a comical looking Civil War era cloth helmet, named after him. Nonetheless, from 1937–39 he held the key post of Commander of the Moscow Military District, followed by the First Deputy People’s Commissar of Defence, and during the German invasion commanded the South-Western Front.

Zhukov had served as a squadron commander under Budenny in the 1st Cavalry Army, and more importantly, Zhukov’s brigade commander had been Timoshenko. Just under two decades later Timoshenko, by then a marshal and People’s Commissar for Defence, ensured that Zhukov gained the post of his principal assistant, chief of the General Staff in January 1941 at the age of 44. Neither Budenny nor Timoshenko would show the flare or survival instincts exhibited by Zhukov before or during the war.

Prior to his appointment as Timoshenko’s deputy, Zhukov, future hero of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin, was deputy commander of the Byelorussian Military District. He prudently kept himself away from Soviet politics and escaped Stalin’s purges. Zhukov had been appointed commander of the 3rd Cavalry Corps in 1937, but shortly after was offered the 6th Cossack Corps. Zhukov discovered this formation to be in a much better state, and found it contained an old command of his, the Don Cossack Division, as well the 6th Chongar and 29th Cavalry Divisions.

However, Zhukov was not a conservative cavalryman – far from it – he was, in fact, very progressive. During this time, Zhukov recalled, ‘It was clear that the future largely belonged to armour and mechanised units. Hence we gave undivided attention to questions of cavalry–armour co-operation, and the organisation of anti-tank defences in combat and in executing manoeuvres.’11 While commanding the 3rd and then the 6th Corps, Zhukov co-operated closely with the 21st Detached Tank Brigade under M.I. Potapov and the 3rd Detached Tank Brigade under V.V. Novikov. Both commanders were, in Zhukov’s own words, ‘former mates of mine’.12

At the end of 1938 Zhukov was offered the Byelorussian post, commanding the cavalry and tank units which were to comprise up to five cavalry divisions, up to four detached tank brigades and other supporting units. Saying goodbye to the Cossack Corps, Zhukov travelled to Smolensk and during May 1939 conducted exercises near Minsk, little realising that this would soon be the scene of bitter battles with Hitler’s marauding panzers.

Other notable commanders who served with the 1st Cavalry Army included Grigory Kulik, Semyon Krivoshein, Kirill Meretskov and Klimet Voroshilov. The prominence of these cavalrymen ensured that at the start of the war with Germany the Red Army had thirteen cavalry divisions (four of which were mountain cavalry). By the end of 1941 there were forty-one (although these were only of brigade strength) being used as mounted infantry. Even with the revitalisation of the Red Army’s mechanised corps, by 1943 there were still twenty-seven cavalry divisions. This cavalry-orientated legacy of the Russian Civil War simply refused to fade away.

There was another, simpler reason for the continued dominance of the Red Army by the cavalry. Alexander Werth, a reporter for The Sunday Times, enjoyed a grandstand view from Moscow and was remarkably able to travel around the country unhindered. Born in St Petersburg and a fluent Russian speaker, he was given unparalleled access to the Red Army:

Undoubtedly it is the largest cavalry force in the world, but most Russian generals will tell you that they would prefer an armoured division to a cavalry division, and that their relatively wide use of cavalry resulted primarily from inadequate tank and armoured car production.13

Ironically, it has been argued that Stalin’s purge of the Red Army, although damaging, also served to prune out much dead wood. While Stalin spared his Civil War cronies such as Budenny, Kulik and Voroshilov, they proved to be far from progressive; it was the surviving younger generation of generals such as Zhukov, Vasilevskiy, Rokossovsky, Meretskov, Voronov, Malinovsky, Tolbukhin and Rotmistrov who would eventually surpass Hitler’s commanders.

Although Stalin undoubtedly liquidated several very talented and potentially promising generals, it would be wrong to argue that even with them the Red Army could have withstood the Nazi blitzkrieg any better than the other intact European armies that had been crushed so easily. Popular mythology has it that Stalin decapitated the Red Amy and this contributed to its catastrophic defeat, however, his purge’s greater crime was to encourage Hitler to attack in the first place. The reality is that with or without the purge Hitler would have still attacked the Soviet Union.

2

ZHUKOV PULLS NO PUNCHES

In the second half of 1939 Hitler and his High Command watched with great interest as the Red Army fought three brief and very different border wars. In the summer, it was involved in what seemed an inconsequential border squabble with the Japanese. Then in September, sixteen days after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, it rolled into eastern Poland under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Polish opposition to the Red Army was negligible, which was just as well, as its conduct proved to be the complete opposite to the Wehrmacht’s highly efficient blitzkrieg. Then in the winter, the outnumbered Finnish Army ran circles around the Red Army after it became trapped in Finland’s dense forests.

Ironically, the Soviet–Japanese War could not have come at a better time for Zhukov and the Red Army. Zhukov would gain invaluable experience conducting armoured warfare. He would also become familiar with the forces of the Transbaikal Military District guarding the Chinese Manchuria–Manchukuo border. This district had come into being in the mid-1930s as a precautionary measure in response to the Japanese invasion of China. It also helped create a useful reserve for the Red Army.

The main Japanese force in occupied Manchuria, known as Manchukuo, was the Kwantung Army. Japan coveted the Soviet port of Vladivostok, but to keep the Red Army at bay it needed to sever the Trans-Siberian Railway. As a precautionary measure, the Red Army occupied Changkufeng Hill near the mouth of the Tyumen River on the eastern border, south-west of Vladivostok. Throughout the summer of 1938, the Japanese probed Soviet defences with a series of border incidents near Vladivostok at Lake Khasan. The Soviet response was poor, revealing the true extent of Stalin’s purge. On 11 July 1938 fighting broke out when the Japanese tried to remove Soviet troops from Changkufeng. However, they had fortified the area and remained in possession of the hill following an armistice on 10 August 1938.

The Imperial Japanese Army risked losing face after the formal ceasefire at Khasan. However, Japanese Emperor Hirohito agreed to the General Staff’s plan to act much further west, against Mongolia. Stalin’s purges had left the Red Army in disarray and with war brewing with Finland, which would tie up resources and severely stretch its capabilities, and tensions growing over Poland, Stalin looked around for someone he could trust, who would swiftly put an end to Japanese adventurism. He picked Corps Commander Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov.

Zhukov was ordered to see the People’s Commissar of Defence, Marshal Voroshilov in Moscow on 2 June 1939. Voroshilov told him:

Japanese troops have made a surprise attack and crossed into friendly Mongolia which the Soviet government is committed to defend from external aggression by the Treaty of 12 March 1936. Here is a map of the invasion area showing the situation as of 30 May.1