A Tale of Two Dictators, Part One
By
S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
February 7, 2004
While Jeff sleeps off a roaring celebration after completing his first
BATTLELINES™ Stalingrad campaign with the
publication
of the Stalingrad campaign Upper Echelon Set,
no one thought to give me so much as a clue about what I should write this
week. All everyone wants to talk about is Jeff, the completion of his game and
his incredible exploding mustard trick (don’t ask). Not that I pay any
attention to their suggestions, in any case, but it is nice to be remembered.
Sniff. The Publisher’s Corner Feathered Friend,
where I explained how we determined our company (Lost Battalion) and
newsletter
(Cher Ami) names, was well received, with all three comments flooding our
company site like so much highly-spiced spam. This encouragement and a lack of
any better idea led me to conclude that Unca Craig should write another history
lesson for you nice cyber-spaced boys and girls out there in web land.
By a frightening coincidence, Mr. Billings’ belated completion of his Stalingrad campaign occurs during the same week as the 61st anniversary of the conclusion of the real Stalingrad campaign. It seems that the German Sixth Army surrendered during the first week of February 1943. WOW! It’s a dramatic story worth the telling that will explain just what the heck the BATTLELINES™ series to date has been all about. It seems that I have found my topic!
Background on the Statlingrad Campaign Operation Barbarossa
On June 22, 1941, so the story goes; Soviet archaeologists near Samarkand opened the tomb of the cruel fourteenth century Tartar conqueror, Tamerlane (1336 - 1405), famed for his limp, bad temper and towers of skulls. The dig defied a curse that opening the tomb would initiate the most terrible war in history. In the event, this put King Tut’s more famous curse in the shade as, hundreds of miles to the northwest, “Operation Barbarossa” started that same Sunday morning, with three million Axis soldiers pouring across the border into the Soviet Union. The German, Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian and Italian troops attacked along the 930 mile border that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, opening what would be known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union and as the Russian Front, the Eastern Front or the Russo-German War to most of the rest of the world.
The National Socialist Party (“Nazis”) under Adolph Hitler (1889 -
1945) had taken control of Germany as recently as 1933. Eight years later,
Hitler, now titled ‘Der Fuhrer’ (‘Leader’), the
political head and supreme warlord of Nazi Germany and conqueror of much of
Western Europe, looked back on an incredible string of victories. Germany had
annexed Austria, dismembered Czechoslovakia, and conquered Poland, France, the
Low Countries, Scandinavia and the Balkans. By golly, it just could be destiny!
These victories had not only been decisive; they had been quick and the losses
had been acceptably small. The new German ‘blitzkrieg’ or
‘lighting war’ operations utilized masses of ‘panzers’
(tanks) and mechanized supporting arms, allied with close air support from the
‘Luftwaffe,’ all controlled by radio. Blitzkrieg attacks are
intended to break through enemy defenses and drive deep into their unprotected
rear areas; this not only kills people and breaks things, it destroys command,
control and logistics, making resistance disjointed and futile.
Josef Stalin (1879 - 1953) had taken control of the Soviet Union in the 1920s,
starting when Vladimir Lenin (1870 -1924) died. Stalin cabled prime successor
Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940) that there was no time for him to return for the
funeral so, not to worry, he might as well remain on vacation on the Black Sea
coast. This gave Stalin the room and time to maneuver, plot, and intrigue,
assassinate and purge until he emerged as the absolute leader a few years
later. After years of mutual threats, the Communist Soviet Union shocked the
world when it allied with Nazi Germany just before the Second World War started
in September 1939. Maybe, they just admired each other’s mustaches. At
any rate, the Soviets clumsily shared in the early spoils of victory by
acquiring half of Poland, conquering Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, grabbing
Bessarabia from Romania and finally seizing part of Finland, after first
suffering embarrassing early defeats in the Finnish snows.
As the technically proficient German army added experience and confidence from its many victories, as well as scores of additional well-trained divisions, the Red Army’s problems against the tough Finns showcased their deficiencies in equipment, training and, especially, leadership. Through the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stalin’s paranoia led him to systematically execute much of the Red Army’s experienced leadership remaining from World War One and the Russian Civil War, among his many other mass liquidations of any conceivable opposition. Stalin insisted on having his own way in everything, even executing his census takers when they reported a reduced population in his ‘Socialist Paradise.’ Beheading the army, political purges, the gulag and episodes of mass starvation in the Ukraine may have cemented his power but the result was a Soviet army that, although huge, was clumsy, inexperienced, unresponsive and cowed but not necessarily loyal. Further, during the first week of the invasion, the ‘Man of Steel’ was too unnerved by the double-cross by his former buddy Hitler (‘We understand each other.’) to issue any coherent orders, leaving the Red Army with no strategic direction. Once he recovered from this blue funk and became his old homicidal self, Stalin imitated Hitler by constantly interfering with his military leaders.
The Axis blitzkrieg into the Soviet Union advanced rapidly and, for most of the rest of 1941, it was springtime for Hitler and Germany. Army Group North raced through the Baltic states and reached the outskirts of Leningrad (modern Petersburg). Army Group South captured Kiev and Odessa, bypassed the Crimea, overran most of the Ukraine and reached Rostov. Army Group Center, the most powerful force, took the delightfully named Minsk, Pinsk and Smolensk and its leading armored wedges reached the suburbs of Moscow. Besides these impressive gains and victories, there were a noteworthy series of flashy secondary operations dictated by Hitler that caused huge Soviet losses but, also, unnecessary wastage on the Axis forces. His fellow dictator Stalin, informally known as the ‘Boss,’ repeatedly ordered unnecessary attacks and refused to allow necessary withdrawals, which greatly increased the Red Army’s butcher’s bill. Many Soviet soldiers had family members or friends murdered or imprisoned during Stalin’s purges and were only too happy to surrender during the early weeks of the invasion, when the invaders were often greeted as liberators. Right to the very end of the war the German army would be supported by hundreds of thousands of ‘Hiwis,’ Soviet citizens who supported and accompanied the German divisions in the east.
Soviet losses in men and material were enormous but their replacements were on a corresponding scale. If the new soldiers were no better trained than those who had been lost, they were better equipped and better led by more experienced officers and noncoms, and faced a German war machine that had lost some of its vaunted ‘edge.’ After an initial scramble to evacuate their factories to the east, Soviet industry went on to produce prodigious quantities of basic, but effective, weapons and munitions. Further, although a comparative trickle in 1942, ‘Lend-Lease’ from the United States and Great Britain would become a flood by 1943, providing many thousands of tanks, aircraft and other useful weapons and hundreds of thousands of trucks for lovable ‘Uncle Joe’ and the Red Army.
Axis casualties were lighter but also heavy and harder to replace. Whenever the Germans initiated a maximum effort, as in June 1941, their practice was to incorporate most of their training cadres to gain additional experienced manpower. This caused little disruption during the short campaigns early in the war but the losses in the east were aggravated by the length of the campaign, which led to a lack of trained replacements and, later, the need to withdraw many experts to resume large-scale training. Second, the Nazis apparently believed their own propaganda about the German army being ‘stabbed in the back’ by the civilians to end World War One and bent every effort to supply both ‘guns and butter;’ to provide for the army in the field while still keeping the home folks happy with consumer goods. Third, the Nazis wanted German women to stay at home to breed the next generation of German soldiers and made little use of female factory workers, essentially forcing half their population to take no real part in the war, except as bombing targets.
After advancing hundreds of miles into the Soviet homeland, the German vehicles were worn out and broken down, their lines of communication were stretched to the limit over primitive roads and unusable rail lines, thousands of otherwise uninjured soldiers suffered from frostbite and the replacements of trained men and vehicles were totally inadequate. The Fuhrer had pushed his armies to the limits of their strength and stamina and their foremost spearheads were weak and vulnerable.
Persisting in their hopes of an early victory, the Germans had forwarded little winter clothing to the front and this had a significant effect on the campaign. The Soviet’s great ally, ‘General Winter,’ closed its icy grip on the front in early December, just as the Red Army launched a massive counteroffensive spearheaded by fresh troops railed in from the wilds of Siberia. Ace Soviet spy Richard Sorge had revealed that the Japanese were going to attack into the Pacific Ocean, making most of these Soviet troops in the Far East superfluous there and available for redeployment. Pushed back all along the front, the German army seemed to be on the verge of disintegration when Hitler issued an order for all units to hold where they were. Air supply kept surrounded Axis troops supplied through the winter and primitive Soviet logistics arrangements and clumsy tactics made their attacks less and less effective as snow blanketed the battlefields. Like his opposing dictator had done during the advance on Moscow in November and early December, Comrade Stalin gambled in a futile attempt to win it all in one campaign and pushed his troops to the limits of exhaustion and beyond.
By spring, a front line that had been 930 miles long at the start of ‘Barbarossa’ was over 2,000 miles long and both opposing armies were seriously mauled. Interestingly, Hitler took full credit in claiming that his ‘hold’ orders saved the German army and, in the future, increased his interference with his military chiefs while Stalin, who, to be sure, still interfered on occasion, learned a lesson and came to defer more to the trained professional soldiers in his ‘Stavka’ (’Supreme Headquarters’).
