‘This war will be won by industrial production.’
STALIN
In early February 1943 the survivors of the 6th Army crossed the Volga at last, but as prisoners, not conquerors. An estimated 91,000 men were still alive when Paulus surrendered, but the majority were extremely ill. Paulus himself had dysentery, which helps explain his lassitude in the final weeks. Red Army intelligence had grossly underestimated the size of the force trapped in the pocket, and the Russians were astonished at the sheer number of men they had captured. They housed them in prisoner-of-war camps at Beketovka and Krassno-Armiensk, which were swept by epidemics. As many as half the captives died from typhus, spotted fever and dysentery in the next few months – as did a number of Red Army medical staff trying to stop the spread of disease. Fewer than 6,000 men from the 6th Army would survive to return to Germany.
Hitler recognized that the Stalingrad disaster threatened the very foundations of his regime. He insisted that Paulus must fight on, and promoted him to colonel-general, then to field marshal. He refused permission for the 6th Army to surrender. As late as Christmas, there were plans to fly in fresh battalions of infantry in the hope the army could hold out until the spring. These plans were abandoned when the Soviet offensive in late December thrust the front line so much further west. After the last pockets of resistance had been overrun, Hitler summoned the Nazi Gauleiters to Berlin, to prepare them for the news of the fall of Stalingrad. Goebbels’ propaganda machine went into overdrive. He had already been reduced to faking a Christmas broadcast from the 6th Army. The radio message ‘from 6th Army on the Volga’ was recorded in Germany. His ministry also intercepted the last letters from Stalingrad, rightly fearing they would expose the sickening realities of Festung Stalingrad. Three days’ mourning were declared and the radio stations played ‘Götterdämmerung’ and the soldiers’ lament ‘Ich hatt’ ein’ Kamaraden’.
The beginning of 1943 is a convenient moment to pause the narrative and examine how the German and Soviet forces compared in terms of equipment, tactics, operational methods and morale, and the economic base which sustained them – what Marxist military theorists call ‘the correlation of forces’. German accounts of the Eastern Front have left us with an enduring image. Hordes of Russians bludgeon their way west, relying on sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm the Wehrmacht. There is considerable truth in this picture, but it is by no means the whole story.
In sheer quantities of manpower, the Red Army outnumbered the invaders by a good margin in 1941. However, it lost so heavily in the first five months of the war – the Germans took more than three million prisoners by December 1941 – that even its rapid mobilization barely kept pace with the losses. During 1942 the Red Army expanded at an incredible rate, but its casualties in the first half of that year were catastrophic. From mid-1942 it began to develop a significant numerical advantage, one that escalated enormously in late 1943 as Germany deployed more men in the west to resist the Allied liberation of France. Then the great Soviet summer offensive of 1944 tore the heart out of the Ostheer.
German casualties in Russia were far higher than anticipated from the early days of the invasion. The Ostheer expended German manpower faster than it could be replenished by the Wehrmacht’s replacement system, even while winning its famous victories in 1941. The reserve pool was depleted so quickly that emergency measures had to be instituted. Exempt occupations were redefined, which released enough men for another five divisions; some internal security units were transferred from Germany to the front line, and one battalion was detached from each of the 23 divisions still in western Europe at the end of 1941. Rather than reinforce the exhausted units on the front line, the army created new formations, so although the total army strength in Russia increased in terms of numbers of divisions, overall manpower totals declined. In 1941 there were 3.2 million troops in 136 divisions; in 1942 there were 2.7 million men in 179 divisions. By early 1942 the Germans had lost a million men in Russia. It was only by calling up the next classes of conscripts early, substituting slave labourers for German farm workers and other expedients – as well as demanding more divisions from Germany’s allies – that the Ostheer found sufficient strength for the 1942 offensive. Hitler’s lunge to the Caucasus was not only a gamble; he mortgaged the future to pay for it.
Many German divisions lost more than their authorized strength on the Russian front, just as they had on the Western Front in the First World War. The 18th Panzer Division, for example, had a 100 per cent turnover in enlisted men and 173 per cent in officers between June 1941 and the division’s disbandment in October 1943. The famous ‘Großdeutschland’ Division suffered 100 per cent casualties between summer 1942 and its retreat to the Dnepr in September 1944 and lost twice its authorized number of officers in the process.1 The division suffered even heavier losses, nearly 17,000, in the first four months of 1945. Junior officers in the German Army suffered disproportionate casualties from 1941 onwards; so bad that an infantry subaltern’s chances of returning home in one piece from the Russian front compared unfavourably with those of a U-boat crewman or a fighter pilot. Command of companies frequently devolved on non-commissioned officers. Even the NCOs, the backbone of the German Army, were disappearing much faster than they could be replaced. The speed with which units were eaten up in battle on the Russian front has led to claims that the German infantry’s morale was sustained more by Nazi fanaticism and fear of the Russians than by loyalty to their comrades.2 However, both the Allied armies and the Germans suffered even higher rates of attrition in Normandy. Casualties in Russia were severe because they took place over a prolonged period, but there is no reason to suppose that the sources of combat motivation were any different for the Ostheer than for their comrades fighting in North Africa, Italy or France.
Total German Strength on All Fronts (Millions)
| Date | Total | Army | SS | Luftwaffe | Navy |
| 1941 | 7.3 | 5.2 | 0.16 | 1.5 | 0.4 |
| 1942 | 6.7 | 5.75 | 0.19 | 0.19 | 0.57 |
| 1943 | 9.48 | 6.55 | 0.45 | 1.7 | 0.78 |
| 1944 | 9.42 | 6.51 | 0.6 | 1.5 | 0.81 |
| 1945 | 7.83 | 5.3 | 0.83 | 1.0 | 0.7 |
German Army, Air Force and Navy Casualties 1939–45 (Millions)3
| Killed in action | 1.8 | |||
| Killed through other causes | 0.19 | |||
| Wounded | 4.3 | |||
| Missing in action | 1.9 | |||
| Total | 8.19 |
The USSR had more than twice as many men of military age as Germany, although nearly a third of the total Soviet population found itself behind enemy lines by the end of 1941. Mobilization was brutally quick: new divisions were assembled and pushed into the front line in a matter of months. Rifle battalions were filled out with older men, so teenagers served alongside men in their thirties and forties. As the Red Army began to reconquer Soviet territory, all available men were swept into the front-line units as replacements – creating the paradox that in 1944–45, long-serving units were sometimes full of very inexperienced soldiers.
The Red Army could not have managed without the crucial assistance of Soviet women, even if this was deliberately played down after 1945. Two million female personnel served in the armed forces. They provided most of the medical staff, from base hospitals to front-line infantry companies, three-quarters of the gunners in anti-aircraft batteries defending the cities, and many radio operators, including those of the partisan and special forces raiding teams. Some even served as tank crew and snipers. The presence of women in the front-line units inevitably led to sexual relationships, with varying degrees of consent. Many an officer had a female radio operator/medic/typist to share his bed. Wives left at home were often right to fear the worst. It was all theoretically against regulations, but life was short and pleasures all-too-fleeting. Marshal Rokossovsky had a daughter by his mistress, Lieutenant Galina Talanova, a medical officer he met when he commanded the 16th Army in late 1941. She stayed with him throughout the war, and he remained in contact even after he returned to his wife and other children in Moscow in 1945.
Soviet Army Front Line Strength 1941–45 (Millions)
| Jun | Nov | Dec | Nov | Jan | Jun | Jan |
| 1941 | 1941 | 1941 | 1942 | 1944 | 1944 | 1945 |
| 4.7 | 2.3 | 4.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.5 | 6.0 |
Soviet Army Losses 1941–45 (Millions)
| Killed in action | 6.8 | |||
| Died in German captivity | 2.7 | |||
| Wounded | 15 | |||
| Sick | 3 | |||
| Total | 27.5 |
The Red Army’s greatest quantitative advantage lay in its vastly superior numbers of tanks, aircraft and (above all) artillery. This was not because the USSR enjoyed greater economic resources, but because its war economy was far better managed than Germany’s. Despite conquering so much of Europe, the Nazi regime signally failed to exploit this industrial windfall for military production. In 1943 Germany produced about four times as much steel and three times as much coal as the USSR – after all, in 1941 it had conquered the Donbas where more than half of Russian coal was mined. Nevertheless, the Russians built 33 per cent more tanks, 50 per cent more aircraft and vastly more heavy artillery pieces. The ratio tilted sharply in favour of the Soviets during 1943–44, despite the managerial genius of 36-year-old Albert Speer, who trebled German war production in three years.
Germany’s most serious economic weakness was its lack of oil resources. As early as 1941 the Luftwaffe was using its reserve fuel stocks to sustain current operations, but the fuel shortages that were to dog both army and air force towards the end of the war played little part in the critical campaigns of 1942–43.
Like an army, an industrial workforce fights on its stomach. German agriculture was sustained by the use of slaves, predominantly Polish and Russian/Ukranian teenagers and children. On Soviet farms, the ceaseless manpower demands of the front and the factories left women, children and the elderly to wrest a living from the unforgiving climate. Even a high proportion of the draught animals were taken by the army, so women had to haul the ploughs themselves. Their unsung efforts meant Russia had just about enough to eat. The daily ration for industrial and rural workers in the USSR was a quarter of the German ration, and a fifth of the British.4
Germany had been preparing for war throughout the 1930s, and the German victories in 1940 brought the industrial resources of most of western Europe under their control. By the time Hitler attacked Russia, half the German industrial workforce was working on military orders – a greater devotion to military production than that achieved by the USA in the Second World War. By every indicator of economic strength, Germany should have outproduced its opponents, enabling the Wehrmacht to face not just the Red Army but the western Allies’ invasion of France with every confidence. Had German industry been as well organized as the German Army, the Allies would not have enjoyed such crushing superiority by 1944. Yet until 1943, even the much smaller British economy was outbuilding Germany in aircraft and warships, and closely matching its production of guns and tanks. By squandering its economic advantages in the first half of the war, the Nazi regime lost the battle on the factory floor. Competing and overlapping bureaucracies, inconsistent procurement policies and not a little corruption among the Nazi elite deprived German soldiers of the weapons and equipment they so desperately needed.
German and Soviet Production Figures (Millions of Tons)
| 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | |
| Coal | |||||
| Germany | 246 | 258 | 269 | 281 | – |
| USSR | 151 | 75 | 93 | 121 | 149 |
| Steel | |||||
| Germany | 31 | 32 | 35 | 35 | – |
| USSR | 18 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 12 |
| Oil | |||||
| Germany | 6 | 7 | – | – | – |
| USSR | 33 | 22 | 18 | 18 | 19 |
Germany used air power to devastating effect against Poland in 1939, and against Britain and France in May 1940. Indeed, it was only in the air that Germany had any superiority; in numbers of men, tanks and guns it was outnumbered. All the more astonishing then that German aircraft production remained virtually static between the outbreak of war and 1941. Throughout the Battle of Britain, the British built more aircraft than the Germans. German bureaucrats displayed no sense of urgency once the French aircraft industry fell into German hands. Capable of manufacturing 5,000 aircraft per year, even using its relatively labour-intensive methods, French factories produced a mere 2,500 aircraft for Germany in four years of occupation – equivalent to just 10 per cent of its potential output. The post-war reputation of German efficiency is confounded by the incompetence with which Nazi agencies managed their conquered territories. A giant slice of Soviet industry was captured by the Germans, but achieved only 10 per cent of its pre-1941 productivity under German rule. Agricultural yields in German-occupied Russia were so low – just 50 per cent of pre-1941 levels – that not enough food was produced to feed both the population and the German Army. So the civilians starved. For all Hitler’s talk of exploiting the east, Germany received more from Russia during the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact than it did after seizing most of European Russia. At its greatest extent, German-occupied Russia comprised about 850,000 square miles and 65 million souls, yet occupied France yielded seven times as much in terms of food and minerals.
Meanwhile, the Soviet aircraft industry was stepping up production. French manufacturer Louis Breguet had visited the Soviet factories in 1936, noting that ‘With ten times as many personnel employed as the French, the Soviet industry is producing 20 times as many aircraft.’ And the Germans knew it – a delegation of Luftwaffe officers was taken around Russian factories in April 1941. Their report, according to Field Marshal Milch, was suppressed by Göring.
Aircraft Production 1939–45 (Thousands)5
| 1939 | 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | |
| Germany | 8 | 10 | 12 | 15 | 25 | 40 | 7 |
| USSR | 10 | 11 | 16 | 25 | 35 | 40 | 21 |
| Britain | 8 | 15 | 20 | 24 | 26 | 26 | 12 |
| USA | 6 | 13 | 26 | 48 | 86 | 96 | 50 |
Totals by Type for the Luftwaffe
| Messerschmitt Bf-109 | 33,000 | |
| Focke-Wulf Fw 190 | 6,600 | |
| Heinkel He-111 | 7,300 | |
| Junkers Ju-88 | 14,700 | |
| Junkers Ju-188 | 1,100 | |
| Dornier Do-17/217 | 3,000 | |
| Heinkel He-177 | 1,100 |
The production figures conceal a second weakness of the German air arm. Under the blasé incompetence of Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe failed to develop a new generation of aircraft to replace the 1930s designs with which it won its early triumphs. Great time and effort were expended on disastrous projects like the Messerschmitt Me-210 twin-engine fighter, several manufacturers amassing fortunes but not actually delivering any new aircraft. Although some designs like the Junkers Ju-88 twin-engine bomber proved remarkably versatile, incremental improvements in veteran machines like the Messerschmitt Bf-109 were not enough to match the completely new fighters of the Allied air forces.6 Corruption, ineptitude and the confusion of rival agencies competing for Hitler’s favour left German pilots flying inferior aircraft, and the German Army without air cover.
Once the Allied heavy bomber offensive against Germany gathered pace in 1943, with the first daylight raids by the Americans supplementing RAF Bomber Command’s nocturnal onslaught, German production priorities changed. German bomber production dwindled as every effort was made to build more fighters. Anti-aircraft batteries were concentrated around Germany’s industrial cities, tens of thousands of guns and millions of rounds of ammunition that would otherwise have been on the front lines.7 The current Russian school history of the Second World War presents the western Allies’ strategic bombing campaign as a key factor in reducing German strength on the Eastern Front. The threat of an invasion of France drew most German bombers to the west at the end of the 1943, and to Italy where further amphibious assaults tempted Hitler to counter-attack.
German Operational Bombers 1943–458
| Oct 43 | Dec 43 | Feb 44 | Jun 44 | Oct 44 | Dec 44 | |
| Norway | 16 | 15 | 15 | 17 | – | 73 |
| E. Front | 358 | 238 | 138 | 326 | 97 | 79 |
| W. Europe | 459 | 695 | 429 | 184 | 123 | 7 |
| Italy | 285 | – | 189 | – | – | – |
The Luftwaffe did make a few raids on Soviet industrial targets in 1943, but this was a local initiative by Luftflotte 6. A series of night attacks were made in June 1943 against the tank and engine plants at Gorky, the synthetic rubber factory at Yaroslavl and several petrol refineries. To put these operations into context, a total of 168 Heinkel He-111s took off to attack Gorky on 3 June 1943: 149 aircraft attacked and dropped 234 tons of bombs. Eight days later RAF Bomber Command attacked Düsseldorf with 693 bombers, delivering 1,968 tons of bombs in 45 minutes.
Senior Luftwaffe officers discussed transferring most of their bomber strength to strategic missions on the Eastern Front, but their deliberations became irrelevant as the front line was shunted westwards that summer, leaving most Russian industrial centres beyond the range of German bombers. In any case, the Luftwaffe was being overwhelmed by the army’s incessant demands for intervention on the front line. The German Army had come to depend on tactical air power as a substitute for heavy artillery, and as a primary element in its anti-tank defences. The escalating requirement for close air support missions that had been such a marked feature of the 1941 Blitzkrieg had never stabilized. As one veteran Luftwaffe commander put it, ‘Even during quiet spells, the army command insisted on the constant commitment of air power against enemy targets within the battle areas in order to conceal their own weaknesses in point of numbers and weapons.’9
As ground attack became the Luftwaffe’s primary mission, aircraft and weapons were modified accordingly. It was not just the German Army that experimented with new equipment during the battle of Kursk. The Luftwaffe introduced the Henschel Hs-129 twin-engine anti-tank aircraft, armed with 30mm guns. The Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber also sprouted cannon. A 37mm gun pod was added under each wing to create a formidable ‘tank buster’, in which Hitler’s favourite airman, Colonel Rüdel, would destroy more than 500 tanks. Attempts were even made to fit a Pak 40 75mm anti-tank gun to a Ju-88.
Although these flying anti-tank guns looked spectacular, the standard aerial anti-tank weapon was the SD-4-H1, a 9lb bomblet, of which 78 were carried inside a 1,100lb bomb case. The Germans had learned that 550lb or heavier bombs needed to score a direct hit to knock out a tank. This was difficult to achieve, but a ‘shotgun’ blast of hollow-charge bomblets, each powerful enough to blow through the thin top armour, produced much better results. They were delivered primarily by Ju-87 Stukas, provided the skies were clear; if the cloud base was under 1,500 feet, the Stukas could not attack: they needed that minimum altitude to pull out of their vertical dive.
In 1943 the Luftwaffe had a total strength of 6,000 aircraft, of which about half were on the Russian front. Its intervention on the battlefield was enormously important, sometimes providing relatively minor operations with extremely powerful support, as with the attack on the Soviet bridgehead south of Novorossisk in April. This involved just three German divisions, but their objective was precision-bombed by no fewer than 511 Ju-87 Stukas on 17 April and by 296 Stukas two days later. Air support was vital at the battle of Kursk, and even in the ensuing defensive battles that lasted into 1944, the Luftwaffe succeeded in making 1,000 sorties a day above critical sectors of the front.
Soviet factories built staggering numbers of aircraft and the Red Air Force lost them in equally dizzying amounts. Production figures for the war by type were:
Fighters and Fighter Bombers
| Yak 1 | 8,700 | ||||
| Yak 7 | 6,400 | ||||
| Yak 9 | 14,600 | ||||
| Yak 3 | 4,100 | ||||
| La-5 | 9,900 | ||||
| La-7 | 5,800 |
Bombers
| Pe-2 | 10,600 | ||||
| Il-2 | 36,000 | ||||
| Il-4 | 6,800 | ||||
| Pe-8 | 93 |
The Pe-8 was Russia’s four-engined heavy bomber. Like the Luftwaffe, the Red Air Force abandoned any thought of strategic bombing, and the fact that it built so many Il-2 ground attack planes shows where priorities lay. Soviet losses were on a scale unmatched by any other wartime air force:
| 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | |
| Total strength | 29,900 | 33,000 | 55,000 | 68,100 | 58,300 |
| Combat losses | 10,300 | 7,800 | 11,200 | 9,700 | 4,100 |
| Non combat losses | 7,600 | 4,300 | 11,300 | 15,100 | 6,900 |
The proportion of non-combat losses is worth noting. The Red Air Force lost nearly 25 per cent of its total strength in accidents in 1941. Non-combat losses still accounted for 20 per cent two years later in 1943, slightly more than it lost in action. In 1944 61 per cent of the 12,700 Russian fighters lost were as a result of accident, not combat, rising to 62 per cent in 1945, in both cases a far greater number than were lost in battle. Manufacturing standards and pilot training were sacrificed in the determination to get as many aircraft into the sky as possible.
British and American aid was also important in the air. The following totals of aircraft were supplied for the war:
Aircraft Supplied
| Supermarine Spitfire | 2,800 | ||||
| Hawker Hurricane | 1,300 | ||||
| Bell Airacobra | 4,700 | ||||
| Curtiss P-40 | 2,100 | ||||
| A20 Boston | 3,000 | ||||
| B-25 Mitchell | 900 |
The German Panzer formations had achieved their great victory of 1940 by concentrating almost their entire strength on a narrow front in northern France. Divided among three army groups for the invasion of Russia, and with subsequent diversions of strength to North Africa, Italy and France, Germany’s armoured forces would never achieve such a concentration of strength again. Between July 1942 and March 1943, the Ostheer’s monthly strength returns show an average of about 2,500 tanks in Russia, of which some 1,500 were operational at any one time. During the same period, a total of 2,426 replacement tanks were shipped from Germany, 1,031 of them in the first three months of 1943 when the SS Panzer Corps was transferred from France for the Kharkov battle (see Chapter Seven).
German industry produced just enough tanks to replace the losses in Russia, but the Soviet tank forces increased rapidly as the relocated tank factories worked around the clock. In January 1943 German tank strength in the east peaked at 2,80310 of which 1,475 were operational. The Germans also had 500 Sturmgeschütz assault guns. They faced a total of 8,500 Russian tanks and assault guns in five ‘tank armies’, backed by another 400 in Stavka reserve, and 4,300 in training commands and non-operational formations.11 Assault guns and tank destroyers accounted for about a third of German armoured vehicle production from 1941 to 1945, but only about a sixth of Russian production.
Labouring under the most arduous conditions, the Soviet industrial workforce – half of which was female by 1942 – forged a mighty weapon that would strike the fatal blow against Nazi Germany: the tank armies. In the critical year of 1943, during which the Russian Army still faced the overwhelming majority of the German forces, the Russians lost four tanks for every one German tank destroyed, but the factories more than made up for those losses.
When Hitler invaded Russia the German Army’s main battle tank was the Panzer III of which 5,500 were built until production ceased in 1943. A total of 6,800 Panzer IVs were built, and a further 6,000 Panzer V Panthers. These formed the main body of the Panzer divisions, although the 1,400 Panzer VI Tigers had an impact out of proportion to their numbers.
Total German Tank Strength (All Fronts) 1943–4512
| Jan 43 | Jul 43 | Jan 44 | Jul 44 | Jan 45 | |
| PzII | 1,000 | 200 | 400 | 450 | n/a |
| PzIII | 2,950 | 1,300 | 900 | 800 | 510 |
| PzIV | 1,100 | 1,400 | 1,700 | 2,400 | 1,800 |
| PzV Panther | 0 | 450 | 1,200 | 2,250 | 2,150 |
| PzVI Tiger | 60 | 260 | 410 | 670 | 280 |
| PzVI Tiger II | 0 | 0 | 0 | 60 | 190 |
German Tank Losses (All Fronts)
| 1943 | 1944 | ||||
| PzIII | 2,633 | 220 | |||
| PzIV | 2,396 | 3,103 | |||
| PzV Panther | 493 | 2,803 | |||
| PzVI Tiger I | 291 | 788 |
Total Armoured Vehicle Production
| 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | |
| Soviet | 2,794 | 6,590 | 24,446 | 24,089 | 28,963 | 15,419 |
| German | 2,200 | 5,200 | 9,200 | 17,300 | 22,100 | 4,400 |
Soviet production after 1941 concentrated on just four types of armoured vehicle: the KV-1 heavy tank, the T-34 medium tank and the T-60 and T-70 light tanks. The latter were accepted as an unsatisfactory expedient, used to fill out the tank battalions in 1942–43. In that period most tank battalions used a mixture of T-34s and T-60s, with the light tanks making up a third of the unit’s total strength. T-34 production figures dwarfed those of any other wartime tank except the American M4 Sherman. They were:
Total T-34 Production
| 1942 | 12,600 | ||||
| 1943 | 15,700 | ||||
| 1944 | 3,700 |
From 1944 production switched to the T-34/85, of which 11,000 were completed in that year, with another 18,300 in 1945. Production totals for the light tanks were 4,500 T-60s in 1943; 4,900 T-70s in 1944 and 3,300 in 1945, mostly completed as SU-76 assault guns. Russian factories built 19,000 self-propelled guns from 1942 to 1945. An additional 1,200 or so self-propelled guns were created by fitting 76mm guns onto captured German tank chassis, mainly Panzer IIIs and StuG IIIs.
If the enormous disparity between Soviet and German production was bad enough in 1942 (a ratio of more than 2.5:1), it is important to note that the situation never really improved. The figures cited above – and usually given as ‘tank’ production in most reference books – actually include all manner of self-propelled guns, ammunition carriers, self-propelled anti-aircraft guns and other specialist vehicles. The totals for tank, self-propelled gun and assault gun production alone are far lower:
German Late-war Tank Production13
| 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | |||
| 11,667 | 13,109 | 1,836 |
The Panzer divisions were hopelessly outnumbered. Nevertheless, they and the German anti-tank gun batteries exacted a very high price, destroying nearly 2,000 Soviet tanks per month in the first half of the war, and more than 1,000 a month in 1944.
Russian Tank Losses
| 1941 | 1943 | 1944 | |||
| 22,600 | 22,400 | 16,900 |
Of these, about 66 per cent were destroyed in action: the rest were lost to mechanical breakdown. Soviet figures reveal that of tanks knocked out in battle, 10 per cent could be repaired by the unit, 15 per cent could be repaired at Russian factories, and 75 per cent were beyond repair, generally with their crews killed or wounded.
A tank – and in most cases its crew – had a life expectancy of about six months between leaving the factory and destruction in battle. German memoirs often describe the tactical ineptitude of Russian tank units, mostly traceable to hasty training and inexperience. Russian tanks tended to move slowly and cautiously. Drivers preferred to travel along the crests of hills, where they were easily spotted and knocked out, rather than using a covered approach. The T-34 had a significant speed advantage over almost all enemy main battle tanks, but Russian crews rarely exploited this, and did not move between firing positions fast enough. Slow, ponderous formations of T-34s often suffered grievous losses, blundering into ambushes or, by poor choice of approach, exposing themselves to long-range fire by 88mm guns that could penetrate their armour from a mile or more.
The Russians subordinated almost every aspect of weapons design to the dictates of mass production. They standardized wherever possible, and concentrated on two main types of tank (the T-34 and KV-1), a handful of artillery pieces, one principal rifle and one primary sub-machine-gun. The latter typifies the Soviet approach: the PPSh-41 looks ugly and feels poorly balanced when you pick it up, and its accuracy is unexceptional. On the other hand, the inside of its barrel is beautifully chromed so it is not corroded by mercury-primed ammunition that will function at -50ºC. It is strong enough to batter down doors or enemy soldiers without damaging the weapon, and it keeps firing in snow, sand, grit or mud. As for accuracy, as one German veteran commented, in close-quarter battle ‘one should shoot first and aim later’.
The T-34 tank was crudely finished too; its turrets were rough-cast. It had wide tracks to reduce their ground pressure and give better grip on snow or muddy surfaces. Its cross-country performance was superior to the Panzer III or IV. There was no turret floor, and the loader’s life was a hazardous one as he (or she) scrambled around for ammunition, ducking to avoid the breech of the 76mm gun. In this respect, the T-34 is arguably more of an assault gun than a main battle tank, and its armour protection, while superior to that of the German Panzer III, was soon trumped by the next generation of German anti-tank weapons. Its tracks were not rubber-clad: this, and its unmuffled diesel, made it one of the loudest tanks ever to rumble into action – in its own way a formidable psychological weapon, like the Stuka dive-bomber’s siren. It had one disadvantage, in that the engine needed about 30 minutes to warm up, giving audible warning to the Germans that the T-34 was on its way. It also had a strange feature, possibly installed to satisfy some ideologue’s belief in the superiority of Communist Man on the offensive: the T-34’s gas pedal is set so that the driver puts his foot to the floor to stop, and eases up the pedal to accelerate. If the driver is incapacitated and lets his foot off the pedal while the machine is in gear, the tank trundles off at top speed – hence the numerous reports of T-34s crashing into each other, and sometimes their opponents. The occasional collision with a German tank might have been a suicide-ramming of the sort claimed by Soviet propagandists, but most were the result of installing one of the most important parts of any vehicle backwards.
Although improved by the substitution of an 85mm gun for its 76mm weapon, the T-34/85 was still greatly inferior to the famous German Panzer V, or Panther. Introduced in 1943, the Panther had a superb ballistic shape, a high-velocity 75mm gun, a powerful engine and, by 1945, even infrared sights. The first examples were flung into battle at Kursk, before troop trials could be conducted, and the Panther proved superior in tank-on-tank engagements, knocking out T-34s at more than 3,000 yards. Unfortunately, fuel pump failures and motor breakdowns – there had not been time to run the engines in – put about a third of them out of action after just a few days’ fighting. The Panther was a magnificent design, with frontal armour superior to that of the Tiger, and sufficient to stop even the 122mm round fired by the IS-2. Its Maybach HL 230 engine, developing 700 horse-power, gave it greater mobility than the Panzer IV, and it cost half as much as a Tiger tank. The Panther became the main battle tank of the German Army in 1944–45, with nearly 6,000 produced by the end of the war. However, the production rate of a few hundred per month was dwarfed by the output of the Russian factories: T-34s were coming out of Tankograd (Chelyabinsk) at a rate of nearly 2,000 a month.
In April and May 1944, production of the famous Panzer VI, the Tiger tank, peaked at 100 vehicles per month. With its 88mm gun, thick armour, and wide tracks for good cross-country performance, the Tiger trumped any other tank on the battlefield, but it had a desperately short range, which led some infantrymen to prefer to be supported by the more common Sturmgeschütz, which did not disappear to refuel just when it was needed most. The Tiger was also too heavy for German Army bridging equipment and permanent bridges tended to collapse under its weight, further reducing its operational effectiveness. Just 1,354 were manufactured in total, which represents less than 5 per cent of German tank output in the war. It was the tendency of Russian (and British and American) troops to identify every Axis tank they saw as a Tiger that helped build the legend. It was big, it looked the part, and its 88mm gun could penetrate the frontal armour of a T-34 or a Sherman at up to a mile.
To compensate for its lack of armour, the German Army improvised an incredible variety of tank destroyers, which were issued to the anti-tank battalions of Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions. Obsolete French and Czech tanks formed the basis for many conversions. The turret was removed and a more powerful anti-tank gun substituted in an open mounting with limited traverse. German tank chassis were used too, some to create formidable tank killers with enclosed fighting compartments, low silhouettes and powerful guns. Production totals of the main types were as follows:
| Type | Total |
| Panzerjäger I (47mm gun on Panzer I chassis) | 132 |
| Marder II (75mm gun on Panzer II) | 1,217 |
| Marder III (75mm gun on Skoda THNP-S/Panzer 38(t)) | 799 |
| Hetzer (full conversion of Panzer 38(t) with enclosed fighting compartment) | 2,500 |
| Nashorn (88mm gun on Panzer IV chassis in open compartment) | 473 |
| Panzerjäger Tiger (P) Elefant (88mm Pak 43 on Porsche Tiger chassis) | 90 |
| JagdPanzer IV (75mm gun on Panzer IV chassis in enclosed compartment) | 1,000 |
| Jagdpanther (88mm gun on Panther chassis in enclosed compartment) | 382 |
| Jagdtiger (128mm gun on Tiger II chassis) | 77 |
The Germans also developed a bewildering variety of self-propelled guns, mounting field guns and howitzers on just about every type of tracked vehicle they had captured from the French in 1940. The introduction of so many types of vehicle, all in small quantities, made their logistic difficulties even worse, but it was a case of improvise or die. Some were used only for indirect fire, but others, like the Brummbär, were designed for direct support of the infantry. Production totals for the main types were as follows:
| Type | Total |
| Schwere Infanterie Geschütz 33 (150mm howitzer on Panzer I chassis) | 370 |
| Wespe (105mm howitzer on Panzer II chassis) | 700 |
| Hummel (150mm howitzer on Panzer IV chassis) | 750 |
| Brummbär (150mm howitzer on Panzer IV in enclosed compartment) | 313 |
| Sturmtiger (380mm rocket projector on Tiger I chassis) | 10 |
Often used in a similar role, and as a substitute tank, the Germans also came to rely on the Sturmgeschütz assault gun. Almost as many of these were built as all the other conversions combined. Pre-war plans called for each infantry division to receive a six-gun battery of assault guns which mounted a short 75mm gun on the hull of a Panzer III, but there were only three or four such batteries ready for the 1940 campaign. By 1941 there were eight 28-gun battalions and a number of independent nine-gun batteries in service. A total of 642 Sturmgeschütz IIIs (with 75mm L/24) built between 1940 and 1942 were still in service in July 1942 when production switched to a new version with the 75mm L/48, offering much greater anti-tank capability. The short-barrelled StuG III disappeared during 1943, but assault gun battalions with the 75mm L/48 were widely employed, one or two being attached at corps level. Favoured divisions – especially the SS Panzer and Panzergrenadier formations – had integral Sturmgeschütz battalions. Production totals were as follows:
| Type | Dates | Total | |
| StuG III (75mm L/24) | 1940–42 | 822 | |
| StuG III (75mm L/48) | 1942 | 699 | |
| StuG III (75mm L/48) | 1943–44 | 3,000 | |
| StuG IV (105mm L/28) | 1943 | 300 | |
| StuG IV (105mm L/28) | 1944 | 900 |
In 1943 Germany built 2,663 StuG IIIs and they seemed to have lasted longer at the front. Between September 1943 and May 1944 the Ostheer had more operational StuGs than tanks: average tank strength was 433 vehicles, and average assault gun strength was 661. Why the Sturmgeschütz provided so high a proportion of the armoured forces is not clear, but it was more mechanically reliable, having no turret to go wrong, and German doctrine called for the StuGs to operate only with close infantry support.
The Russians appreciated the value of self-propelled anti-tank guns too, introducing three dual-purpose assault gun/tank destroyer vehicles in the summer of 1942. The SU-76 combined a 76mm gun in an open mounting on a T-60 or T-70 light tank chassis, while the SU-122 was a 122mm howitzer on a T-34 chassis. The self-propelled gun regiments created late that year had four four-gun batteries of SU-76s and two batteries of SU-122s, also with four guns each. In early 1943 the regiments were reorganized and consisted of either 21 Su-76s or 16 SU-122s. The first SU-152 (152mm guns on a KV-1 chassis) regiment was ready for the battle of Kursk that July. Some SU-122s carried 122mm guns rather than howitzers. The SU-85 and SU-100 carried 85mm and 100mm anti-tank guns respectively and were intended to counter the new German heavy tanks. Production totals were as follows:
| Type | Total | |||
| SU-76 | 14,000 | |||
| SU-85/100/122 | 4,000 | |||
| SU-122/152 | 5,000 |
By mid-1944 each Russian tank and mechanized corps had one light, one medium and one heavy self-propelled gun regiment, and there were many independent SP gun regiments, 241 of them by 1945. Light regiments had five batteries, each of four SU-76s; medium regiments had four batteries, each of four SU-85/100/122s; and heavy regiments had five batteries, each of two SU-122/152s.
Britain provided the USSR with military aid, at a fearful cost in sailors’ lives. The relief effort began on 1 August 1941 when HMS Abdiel delivered mines to the Soviet Northern Fleet. The Royal Navy escorted convoys of Allied merchant ships through the Norwegian and Barents seas to Murmansk and Archangel. The arrival of German surface units, from destroyers to heavy units like Admiral Scheer, Scharnhorst and eventually Bismarck’s sister ship Tirpitz, as well as a substantial number of U-boats, led to a new naval war in the world’s most dangerous waters. These convoy battles are a story in themselves.14 Some British leaders like Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke doubted their value, believing the sacrifice of men and matériel was unjustified from Britain’s point of view. It was certainly unappreciated by the Communist regime at the time. Soviet leaders took their cue from Stalin and kept up a steady stream of ungrateful invective. They criticized the rate of delivery, which reached 4,000 tanks in 1942 from Britain and America, equivalent to 16 per cent of Soviet production for that year. The Russians affected not to understand the fearsome difficulties of fighting a convoy through the Arctic in the teeth of Luftwaffe air attack, U-boat assaults and occasional sorties by German battleships. Obstructionism and official indifference in the Arctic ports was accompanied by complete paranoia about contacts between British seamen and Russian civilians. Liaisons of any sort were discouraged, and when love did flourish in this very cold climate, the Russian government’s response was invariably to arrest the women involved.
Between 1941 and 1945 Britain and America supplied the following totals of weapons and equipment. Three-quarters of British aid was shipped across the Arctic Ocean, whereas most US aid was dispatched via Iran or the Pacific. Britain supplied 5,218 tanks,15 7,411 aircraft, 4,932 anti-tank guns, 473 million rounds of ammunition, 4,338 radio sets, 1,803 radar sets, ten destroyers and one battleship. The USA supplied 7,537 tanks, 14,795 aircraft, 51,503 jeeps, 375,883 trucks, 1,981 railroad locomotives, 11,155 railroad wagons, 2.6 million tons of gasoline, 3.7 million tyres, and 345,735 tons of high explosive. The latter may have been the most important, filling the millions of shells that the formidable Red artillery used to pound German defensive positions to oblivion during 1943–45.
Stalin and his commanders knew they were being ungenerous. Perhaps it stuck in the throat to accept aid from the very Allied powers (and in the person of Winston Churchill, the very same leader) that had landed military forces at the same ports – Murmansk and Vladivostock – in 1919 to crush the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. The great tank armies with which the Red Army broke the back of the Wehrmacht in 1944 depended on American trucks to carry their supplies of fuel and ammunition. Their artillery and supporting weapons, as well as accompanying infantry, also relied on US trucks for their mobility. By 1944 between two-thirds and three-quarters of the Red Army truck fleet was made in the USA.
Allied tanks were quickly introduced to Russian armoured units. The first British tanks were in action as early as January 1942. However, since half the Allied tanks supplied to the Red Army arrived in 1944–45, the critical battles of 1942–43 were fought almost entirely with Soviet vehicles. Those tanks that did arrive were distributed widely: in the summer of 1943, a quarter of all Russian tank brigades had some Allied tanks on their strength. British tanks had narrow tracks, unsuitable for snow or mud, but were prized for their excellent engines, which outlasted those of Soviet tanks, making them ideal for training. Soviet tanks were not built to last; they were usually destroyed in battle before their engines gave out. However, low standards of production and maintenance led to heavy losses from mechanical breakdown, especially during 1941–42.
For the sake of simplicity, the Soviets asked the British to supply only Valentine tanks from 1942, and the production line was kept open solely for the Red Army – all 1,388 Valentines built in Canada were shipped to Russia. The total number of British tanks supplied to the Red Army was thus 3,900 Valentines, 1,100 Matildas and 300 Churchills. American tanks were disliked by Russian tank crews because of their petrol engines and horrific tendency to catch fire and incinerate the crew.16 Just as British tank crew dubbed the American M4s the ‘Ronson’ – after the cigarette lighter advertised to ‘light every time’ – so Russians christened the M3 Lee tank the ‘coffin for seven comrades’. America supplied 1,400 M3 Lees and 4,100 M4 Shermans, fitting the latter with diesel engines at the Russians’ insistence, since diesel fuel does not explode like petrol.
The addition of several hundred thousand American trucks gave the Red Army’s armoured forces new strategic mobility. At the same time, the Wehrmacht found itself relying more and more on draught animals. It may be one of the most prosaic and unglamorous determinants of the conflict, but one of Germany’s critical weaknesses during the Second World War was its inability to make as many trucks as its enemies. Although production increased steeply during the war, it did not match that of British factories. In its first year of war, the United States built 620,000 trucks compared to Germany’s 58,000: a 10:1 advantage that would prove General Sherman’s point about the folly of declaring war on a nation of mechanics.
As time went on, Germany’s tanks, trucks and self-propelled guns were concentrated in a few elite units which spearheaded every offensive or rushed to block each Soviet attack. Meanwhile, the rest of the German Army underwent a demoralizing process of ‘de-modernization’, fighting an increasingly well-equipped enemy with much the same weapons as their fathers had on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. German infantry divisions had more automatic weapons than their First World War equivalents, but fewer field guns. From 1942 many divisions were reorganized with six battalions rather than nine, but although their firepower was augmented with extra machine-guns and mortars, especially captured Russian 120mm weapons, Germany was unable to substitute technology for manpower. German artillery relied on experienced forward observers and well-trained crews to deliver ‘time-on-target’ concentrations of fire that partially compensated for their numerical inferiority. Against comparatively inexperienced Soviet artillery units, this worked well, certainly until mid-1944, but in time the Russians learned their profession. Meanwhile Germany failed to solve its production problems and German tactical air power had become no more than a memory.
Even the Panzer divisions were not immune to this process, and their experience was arguably the more traumatic as heavy losses in their tank regiments left some of them little more than motorized infantry brigades with a dozen or so tanks in support. Only a few weeks after the invasion of Russia the 18th Panzer Division had just 12 operational tanks left. By November 1941 Panzergruppe Guderian had no more than 150 tanks out of the 1,150 it had employed since 22 June. Many Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions endured a horrific cycle of attrition that saw them reconstituted after near-annihilation, only to be overwhelmed again. One of the most telling images of ‘de-modernization’ shows an SS armoured column in action in the streets of Budapest in 1945. At a time the Russian tank armies were filled out with IS-2 heavy tanks and T-34/85s, even the SS are reduced to driving into action in ex-Italian L6 light tanks – obsolete death traps.
The SS evolved into a state within a state. Starting as simply one of the armed wings of the Nazi Party, it grew into an army, industrial conglomerate, internal security agency, eugenics breeding system, and, above all, perpetrator of the Holocaust. Its military role on the Eastern Front became crucial, with the SS armoured divisions ‘Leibstandarte’, ‘Das Reich’, ‘Totenkopf’ and ‘Wiking’ playing the leading role in both Von Manstein’s counter-attack at Kharkov and the last great German offensive at Kursk. The political clout of the SS ensured these divisions secured the lion’s share of new equipment, and their authorized strengths were larger than those of their Wehrmacht equivalents.
The SS more than trebled in size from 1942 to 1944, but of the 450,000 SS men serving in 1943, only a small proportion were in the well-known Panzergrenadier formations. Only one new SS division (9th ‘Hohenstaufen’) was formed in 1942, and that did not see active service until early 1944, when it was committed to Poland.17 The combat record of the elite SS Panzer formations was excellent by any standards; however, there was a widespread conviction within the German Army that these ideological shock troops suffered excessive casualties through foolhardy displays of National Socialist ardour. Worse, the diversion of so many troops to ‘ethnic cleansing’ was especially perverse in the face of Germany’s manpower crisis. By 1943 there were more men serving in the Einsatzgruppen than were lost with the 6th Army at Stalingrad. Towards the end of the war, only 50 per cent of the enlisted SS personnel were German; 25 per cent were ethnic Germans from conquered Europe and the rest were foreign volunteers.
Power politics among the Nazi leaders led to further profligate use of German manpower. Rather than transfer some personnel to the army as was suggested at the end of 1942, Göring insisted on following Himmler’s example in having an army of his own. He formed 20 Luftwaffe ‘field divisions’, which were raised and trained in considerable haste and confusion before being dispatched to the Russian front. Consisting of two regiments of three battalions, with a total authorized strength of 9,800, they were poorly trained and required a steady infusion of officers and NCOs from the regular army to keep them operational. Again, German Army officers were appalled at how these divisions sustained unnecessary losses because their bravery was not allied to tactical proficiency.
In the summer of 1942 Himmler appointed his adjutant SS-Gruppenführer Knoblauch as chief of the Reichsführer-SS command staff, with special responsibility for countering the Soviet partisans. The army’s nine security divisions, formed of six or seven battalions of old soldiers and equipped with obsolete weapons, were clearly inadequate to police the occupied territories. Although the combined strength of these units, the Einsatzgruppen and the Ordnungspolizei (regular police), exceeded 100,000 men by the end of 1941, they had more than 850,000 square miles to control. In August 1942 the term ‘partisan’ was replaced by ‘bandit’ in SS documents, signalling an even more brutal phase in an already ghastly campaign of terror and counter-terror. Mass killings of civilians in retaliation for attacks on the German forces – 100 hostages shot for the death of one German – were supplemented by indiscriminate slaughters. Many anti-partisan operations led to high body counts with disproportionately few weapons captures; for example, 6,000 ‘partisans’ reported killed and 480 weapons recovered. German losses might be less than half-a-dozen; sometimes there were none. These were outright massacres, without regard to the age or sex of the victims. Children as young as ten were regularly tortured and shot as spies. Scenes of hideous brutality by German soldiers, regular army as well as SS, were documented in nauseating detail on their personal cameras. Atrocities were photographed out of pride, not as protest. Army headquarters had to repeat orders to stop men sending their photos home.
The Russian Revolution and the Civil War had seen some hideous acts of cruelty by Russians against so-called ‘class enemies’ of their own nationality and other ethnic groups. The Jewish population of Kiev had endured a terrible pogrom at the hands of the White Army.18 So the peoples of the occupied territories were not slow to respond to German atrocities, and they began executing captured Germans in the most revolting ways imaginable. During 1942 the partisans began to conscript people into their ranks, and sometimes resorted to terror tactics against the population too, forcing men to join them by holding their families hostage. At the same time the Germans began to round up able-bodied men and women for forced labour in the Reich. Under this chilling policy, children under 15 years of age had to be abandoned and left to starve when villages were evacuated. This simply stampeded more people into the forests, swelling the ranks of the guerrilla bands that grew to more than 100,000 strong by the end of the year. As in 1941, the open spaces of the Ukraine were least affected by partisan action, while about half the guerrillas were established in the trackless forests of Belorussia.
Elements within the German Army and SS favoured the recruitment of local troops to counter the partisan threat. Hitler was adamantly opposed to the idea of Russians wearing German uniforms, but other national groups, like the Cossacks, were acceptable to him. Nevertheless, more than a million Russians did serve in the German Army. The service troops that made up to 10 to 20 per cent of divisional strengths were supplemented by an eventual total of 176 Osttruppen battalions – 150,000 men by mid-1943. Some 180,000 men were recruited into the UNS (Popular Self-Defence Corps) in the Ukraine for security operations. Many Osttruppen units were transferred to France and Italy on Hitler’s orders, stimulating the desertion that their removal from Russia was supposed to prevent. The UNS and Russian auxiliary police units retreated westwards from 1943 as the Germans were driven back, many of their personnel being absorbed into the SS. Himmler’s farcical obsession with pure ‘Aryan stock’ diminished as the future looked bleaker. Initially unable to admit he was recruiting Russians – a people he had publicly labelled ‘racial inferiors’ – he called many of his Russian units ‘Ukranian’ and suddenly became very supportive of the idea of a discrete Ukranian identity.
Perhaps the most notorious Russian unit that fought alongside the Germans was the so-called Kaminski brigade, or ‘RONA’ (Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Narodnaya Armiya: Russian Peoples’ Liberation Army). This began as a locally raised militia in the small town of Lokot, south of Bryansk, at the end of 1941. After Soviet partisans assassinated its leader, the town mayor, command fell to one of his deputies, 38-year-old Bronislav Kaminski, an engineer born in St Petersburg to a Polish father and German mother. He had fought in the Red Army during the Civil War but had been arrested in 1937 and sent to the gulag for five years, probably just because his parents were foreign. He had only just been released and returned to his home in Lokot when the war broke out. Hardened by his time in the labour camps, and understandably anti-Communist, he set himself up as a warlord. Kaminski recruited more men and scavenged for abandoned Red Army weapons. His men fought the Soviet partisans and kept road and rail routes open for the Germans. Several German officers were attached for liaison purposes, but his force remained all-Russian. Kaminski’s men took part in a major anti-partisan sweep in June 1942 in the forests north of Bryansk. The size of the operation testifies to the scale of the partisan threat in this sector, involving as it did a tank regiment from 5th Panzer Division, elements of two German regular infantry divisions and one Hungarian division, a total strength of more than 6,000 men. Kaminski’s unit was divided among the German battalions, to act as local guides, translators and interrogators. The body count tells its own story: 2,600 partisans were killed, 498 captured and 12,000 civilians seized for slave labour; the German battle group lost 58 killed and 130 wounded.
Kaminski expanded his fiefdom, re-opening churches and schools and supporting private industry. He pressed the Germans to make his rule official. They did not, but were happy for him to exercise considerable independence provided he kept the partisans away from the road and rail net. Kaminski tried to create a Russian National Socialist Party, which attracted little interest. He renamed his followers the ‘Russian Peoples’ Liberation Army’. The sort of men who joined him can be easily imagined from TV footage of the Balkan militias in the 1990s. The partisans attempted to subvert some of his men and no doubt managed to place double-agents in Kaminski’s little empire, just as Tito’s guerrillas infiltrated locally raised pro-German units in Yugoslavia. Kaminski’s discipline problems accelerated in the summer of 1943, once it was plain that Germany was losing the war. Nevertheless, Kaminski’s forces took part in a succession of anti-partisan operations in 1943, again divided among battalions provided by German and Hungarian infantry divisions with some Panzer and Panzergrenadier support.
In autumn 1943 Kaminski had to abandon his little empire as the front line moved inexorably west. Together with an estimated 10,000 men and 40,000 camp followers, he retreated into Belorussia, where his militia continued to serve alongside German units against the partisans there. In July 1944 the brigade was incorporated into the SS as Waffen-Sturm-Brigade RONA and Kaminski was appointed Brigadeführer. Gottlob Berger, head of the SS main leadership office and a close ally of Himmler, planned to use Kaminski’s troops as the basis for a Russian SS division, 29 Waffen-Grenadier Division der SS. Together with the equally unsavoury Dirlewanger Brigade, a unit of violent criminals led by a convicted paedophile, Kaminski’s militia undertook further anti-partisan operations during 1944. These missions were characterized by heavy loss of life among the civilian population and relatively few weapons captures. In August Himmler created an SS-Kampfgruppe commanded by SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinfarth that included a 1,700-strong detachment from Kaminski’s followers, the Dirlewanger Brigade and various SS police and paramilitary units.
It is often said that Kaminski’s behaviour scandalized even the SS, as they crushed the Warsaw Rising with acts of cruelty so abominable that even the Nazis noticed. The Russian SS men certainly spent much of their time looting abandoned buildings and raping hospital patients – possibly including two German servicewomen. However, the senior SS commander in Warsaw, Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski, withdrew Kaminski’s rabble from the fighting, not for raping, murdering and stealing, but because their combat record was one of diabolic incompetence. And in any case, Himmler had decided to concentrate all his renegade Russians into former Soviet general Andrei Vlasov’s hands. Kaminski was summoned to a conference at Bach-Zelewski’s headquarters in Lodz, where he was shot by the SS. His followers were told he had died in a partisan ambush and were incorporated into Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army (ROA) later in the year.
That the German forces could recruit more than a million Russians to their colours despite all the atrocities and the deportations suggests that the Nazi racial policies brought about their own defeat. Many senior figures – even Goebbels, by 1943 – came to believe that had the Germans behaved with even a modicum of humanity, a great many Russians would not just have accepted German rule but actively fought alongside the German Army against the Communist regime. Of course, by the time Goebbels came around to this view, it was too late. Soviet citizens knew exactly what kind of rule they could expect if Germany won the war. And after two years of being encouraged to commit all manner of cruelties on ‘Bolshevik sub-humans’, casual brutality had become so ingrained in the Ostheer that units transferred to other fronts would sometimes lapse into old habits – as massacres of Allied prisoners in the Normandy campaign and the Battle of the Bulge demonstrated.
By mid-1943, when the Partisan War was at its height, approximately 250,000 partisans were in the field, with perhaps 500,000 men (army, SS, police and security units) ranged against them. On the eve of the battle of Kursk, and again as the great summer offensive of 1944 began, the partisans launched concerted attacks against rail communications. This exacerbated German logistical difficulties and tied down even more personnel guarding the trains, bridges, water-towers and other facilities. After 1945 it was claimed that the partisans killed tens of thousands of German soldiers, and played a decisive part in the Soviet victory, but OKH sources record only about 15,000 casualties attributable to the guerrillas. Compared to the enormous body-counts racked up on some counter-guerrilla sweeps in Belorussia, this ironically reinforces the impression that such operations were as much concerned with ‘ethnic cleansing’ as the pursuit of military objectives.
Given the suspicion with which Stalin’s secret police regarded anyone who had been the wrong side of the lines during the war, millions of Soviet citizens had a keen personal interest in exaggerating their own contribution to the war. There are obvious parallels with the exponential rise of resistance groups in France after June 1944. In fact, the partisans did not play a decisive role, although they did divert large numbers of second-grade troops to security operations, and certainly undermined German efforts at several critical points. Some areas of northern and central Russia effectively remained in Soviet control despite being behind the German lines. Luftwaffe maps showed in red those areas over which it was dangerous to fly and suicidal to land. As an eventual Soviet victory looked likely, so these areas expanded. Yet the Baltic States remained free of partisan activity, as did all of the Crimea except the mountains along its southern shores. The steppes of the Ukraine gave little cover for guerrilla bands, and attempts to initiate partisan action there were defeated. Although powerful guerrilla bands were formed in the Ukraine, they were fighting for independence and vigorously resisted the Soviet Army in 1944 – they even killed Marshal Vatutin – and they carried on the fight well into the 1950s.
The defeat of the German 1942 offensive revealed the limitations of Blitzkrieg. It did not have universal application. The substitution of air power for artillery, and the mechanization of a dozen divisions had enabled Germany to beat France. But the events of 1940 were as much the consequence of French political and military errors as anything else. The German Army staked everything on another rapid victory in 1941, and, when this failed, tried a second Blitzkrieg in 1942, this time aimed at economic as much as political objectives. Enormous distances were covered in both campaigns, but the German Army could not effect a truly strategic breakthrough. Its great battles of encirclement were not, proportionately, as significant as the complete rupture of the Allied front achieved in 1940. The ratio of ‘force to space’ was simply inadequate. Having failed to deliver a knock-out blow, the German Army found itself embroiled in a Materialschlacht very like that of 1914–18; but rather worse. In the First World War Russia sent soldiers into battle without rifles, hoping they would pick up weapons discarded by casualties. This time, Russia was outproducing Germany.
Accustomed to short, victorious wars, German soldiers were neither physically nor psychologically prepared for this return to trench warfare. They were used to living in centrally heated barrack blocks, not squalid holes in the ground.
Despite the heavy emphasis on marching, hiking and field exercises, there had been entirely too much stress laid upon nearly a ‘peacetime’ type of garrison life which bore little resemblance to the stark and foreboding realities of life on the Eastern Front ... In Russia, German troops were required to live for long periods of time in the open, in all kinds of weather, often in vermin-infested bunkers or redoubts where clothing changes could seldom be made ... The German soldier and airman, resting on an impressive string of victories, was soon provided with a number of startling surprises in Russia, almost all of them bad.19
The battlefield performance of the Red Army improved by fits and starts, not least because Stalin ordered operations beyond its abilities in both 1941 and 1942. The great strengths of the Soviet military were concealed at first by a combination of over-ambitious offensives that produced sharp defeats, and the enduring legacy of the purges: inexperienced officers and a culture of fear that discouraged initiative. Yet the operational philosophy of the Red Army was far more realistic than that of OKH. From mid-1942 it matched its resources to the scale of the front. It emphasized artillery firepower, integrating aerial bombing with the artillery fire-plan, primarily in counter-battery work, attacking German gun positions and employing its tank formations to exploit to great depth. As soon as Soviet factories had provided the tools, the Red Army put its pre-war theories into practice. The result was the 1944 offensive, Operation Bagration, in which the Soviet Army attacked and destroyed the main body of the German Army, effectively winning the Second World War before the Allied divisions landed in Normandy had managed to break out from the beaches. However, the improvements in Soviet military performance were at army and army group level; the tactical performance of most Soviet battalions, brigades and divisions remained lamentable, primarily because high losses meant high turnover in personnel. Few men lived long enough to gain experience, and those who did were usually promoted.
Eighteen months earlier, as the fight for Stalingrad ended and the Soviets tried to bounce the German Army out of Kharkov, Zaporezhe and the Dnepr crossings, the ultimate triumph of the Russian Army lay in the future. At the beginning of 1943, the overwhelming majority of the German Army was still concentrated in Russia, and as the Soviet South-Western Front was about to discover, it was still, man-for-man, battalion-for-battalion, the most deadly military instrument in the world.