DURING the summer of 1942, after a relatively calm winter in Voronezh, Southwestern Front HQ had been constantly on the move, in the state of frenzied activity that is often as ineffectual as complete idleness; no matter what orders HQ commanders issued to their front-line units, the retreat continued.
In the spring of 1942, after receiving reinforcements, they had launched the Kharkov offensive. Gorodnyansky’s army crossed the Donets and, moving through the narrow corridor between Izyum and Balakleya, advanced swiftly in the direction of Protopopovka, Chepel and Lozovaya.
In response, the Germans deployed a large concentration of troops and attacked both flanks of the Soviet army that had advanced so recklessly through the breach in their lines. The gate that Marshal Timoshenko had edged open as he advanced on Kharkov was slammed shut. Gorodnyansky’s army was encircled and destroyed.51 And once again, through dust, smoke and flame, Soviet forces were on the retreat. To the previous year’s list of lost towns and cities were added new names: Valuiki, Kupyansk, Rossosh, Millerovo. To the grief of losing Ukraine was added a new grief: Southwestern Front HQ was now located on the Volga. Any further retreat—and it would be in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
The quartermasters were still assigning the commanders their new billets, but in the operations department telephones were ringing, typewriters were clattering and maps had already been spread out on the table.
Everyone in the department was going about their work as if they had been living in the city for months. Pale from lack of sleep, they hurried around abstractedly, hardly noticing Stalingrad itself. To them it made no difference whether HQ was located in a forest dugout, with amber-coloured resin dripping onto the table from a pine-log ceiling; in a village hut, with a cockroach scuttling across the map and geese following the signals officers indoors as they searched timidly for their mistress; or in a small house in some district town, with rubber plants in the windows and a smell of mothballs and wheat muffins. No matter where they were billeted, the staff officers’ reality was unchanging: a dozen telephone numbers, some signals-corps pilots and motorcyclists, a signals office, a teleprinter, a message despatch point, a radio and—laid out on the table—a map of the war, densely covered with blue and red pencil marks.
During the summer of 1942 the demands on the staff had been greater than ever. Positions were changing from one hour to the next. In a hut that only two days before had seen a meeting of the military soviet, where a staid, pink-cheeked secretary, sitting at a table covered in red felt, had conscientiously minuted decisions never to be put into effect, since German bombers and tank columns took little account of them—in this same hut a battalion commander would be yelling into the receiver, “Comrade One, the enemy is breaking through,” while scouts in camouflage overalls slowly finished their tinned food and urgently reloaded their sub-machine guns.
The speed of the retreat meant that they kept having to change from one 1:100,000 map to another. To Novikov it sometimes felt as if he were a cinema operator furiously, day and night, turning the handle of a portable film projector while a kaleidoscope of images sped past his inflamed eyes. He suggested to his exhausted staff that they should change to 1:1,000,000 maps.
The information on the intelligence-section maps seldom fitted with the information provided by the operations section, while the artillery-HQ maps always provided the most optimistic view of the situation. The air-force data, on the other hand, always provided the most “eastern” view of the front line—and it was their data that Novikov found of most practical use. Air reconnaissance was usually more accurate, quicker to reassess a constantly changing military position.
On the air-force maps, the symbols for Soviet bomber airfields were swiftly replaced by the symbols for front-line fighter and ground-attack airfields, just as the infantry’s symbols for corps and divisional HQs were replaced by those for regimental and company command posts. And only a few days later these same airfields, now bases for German planes, would be marked as targets for Soviet bombers.
Novikov’s daily task of marking in the front line was extremely difficult. Novikov loved precision and he had no doubt that inaccurate information was one of the reasons for the many Soviet defeats. He found it painful to see in front of him the contradictory data received from Army HQ, Front HQ reconnaissance section and Air Force HQ. Often his most accurate source about troop positions would be a commander who had come to HQ on some business of his own and whom he happened to have a word with at breakfast. Correlating these different sources and distinguishing truth from falsehood required enormous mental effort. Deep down, even he himself was surprised by his ability to make sense of a chaos that often seemed beyond understanding.
Novikov had had to report to the chief of staff frequently. He had also been summoned to meetings of the military soviet and he had a clear and complete grasp of the details of the Soviet retreat, something most people understood only partially and through guesswork. He knew the intelligence map of the German front; he knew the precise positions of the flatirons that symbolized the German army groups. He knew the names of the generals and field marshals who commanded these army groups: Busch, Leeb, Rundstedt, Kluge, Bock, List. These alien names were now linked to the names of cities he loved: Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Rostov.
The elite divisions of the army groups commanded by Bock and List had moved onto the offensive.
The Southwestern Front had been torn open, and two German mobile armies—the 4th Panzer and the 6th Army—were heading towards the Don, widening the breach in the Soviet front line as they advanced. Out of the dust and smoke a new name came to the fore—that of Colonel General Paulus, commander of the 6th Army.
All over the map were small black numbers representing German tank divisions: the 9th, 11th, 3rd, 23rd, 22nd and 24th. During the previous summer the 9th and 11th divisions had been deployed on the Minsk and Smolensk axes; evidently they had been moved south to take part in the Stalingrad offensive.
Sometimes it seemed that all this was simply a continuation of the summer offensive with which the war had begun; the German divisions moving across the map still bore the same numbers. In reality, however, these were entirely new divisions, manned by soldiers from the reserves called up to replace the dead and the wounded.
Meanwhile Richthofen’s 4th Air Fleet was doing its work: massive air raids, terror on the roads, attacks against columns of vehicles and even against men on foot or on horseback.
And all this continual movement of vast armies, the bitter fighting, the repeated relocations of HQs, airstrips, maintenance and supply dumps, the abandoned fortified points, the sudden breakthroughs by German mobile units, this fire that had blazed across the steppe from Belgorod and Oskol as far as the Don—day after day every detail of this grim picture had been clearly presented on the map for which Novikov was responsible.
There was one question that perplexed Novikov: Why was this current German offensive so very different from that of the summer before? Even in the din and chaos of the first day of the war he had felt able, if more through intuition than logic, to grasp the Germans’ overall strategy; it had been possible to understand a great deal simply from the flight paths of their planes. And Novikov’s reflections during the winter had, he believed, deepened his understanding. Studying the map, he had seen what care the Germans had always taken not to expose their flanks. The left flank of Rundstedt’s Army Group South had been covered by Bock, who was advancing on Moscow with their greatest concentration of forces; Bock’s left flank had been covered by Leeb, who was advancing on Leningrad; and Leeb’s left flank had been covered by the waters of the Baltic.
This year the Germans had adopted a very different strategy, advancing as swiftly as they could to the south-east, leaving their left flank exposed to the entire mass of Soviet Russia. This was hard to understand.
Why was it only in the south that the Germans had launched an offensive? Was this a sign of weakness? Or of strength? Or was it some kind of bluff?
These were questions Novikov was unable to answer. He needed to know more than can be read from an operations map.
Novikov had not yet realized that the Germans were simply no longer strong enough to advance simultaneously across the entire front; they had achieved their breakthrough in the south-east only at the price of enforced inaction on the Moscow and Leningrad axes. Nor could he know that even this one and only possible offensive had been launched without the necessary reserves. Several months later, when the fighting in Stalingrad reached its greatest intensity, the German High Command would find itself unable to transfer any forces at all from the Moscow and Leningrad axes; the Soviet armies in the centre and north-west posed too great a threat.
•
Novikov dreamed of something other than staff work. It was as a front-line commander, he believed, that he would be able to make best use of the experience he had accumulated in the course of a year of intensive thought and careful analysis of military operations that he himself had helped plan.
He had filed a memorandum to the chief of staff and handed in a written application to his section head, asking to be released from his work at the Front HQ. His application had been rejected, and he knew nothing about the fate of his memorandum.
Had it been read by the general in command of the Front?
This was a question of great importance to Novikov; he felt he had put all the strength of his mind and soul into his memorandum. In it he had outlined a plan for a defence in depth at three different levels: regimental, divisional and corps.
Open steppe grants the attacker great freedom of manoeuvre, allowing him to concentrate his forces and make lightning strikes. While the defender is regrouping, while he brings up reinforcements along roads parallel to the front line, the attacker can break through, seize important junctions and sever communication lines. Defensive fortifications, however impregnable, become mere islands amid a vast flood. Heraclitus said, “Everything flows, everything changes.” The Germans had rephrased this: “We can go around everything, we can flow around everything.” Anti-tank ditches had proved worthless. Mobility could be resisted only by means of mobility.
Novikov had set out careful plans for the defence of steppe regions, taking into full account details specific to warfare in areas with a complex network of small roads and tracks that, during dry summers, are easily negotiable. He had included in his considerations the speeds of various kinds of motorized weaponry and other vehicles, the speeds of fighters, bombers and ground-attack aircraft, comparing all these with the speeds of corresponding enemy vehicles and aircraft.
Even during a strategic retreat, a mobile defence offered enormous potential. It was not simply a matter of being able to bring about a swift concentration of forces in the axes of a German offensive. Novikov also envisaged swift deployments that would make it possible to achieve sudden breakthroughs at points where they were least expected. Flanking counter-attacks could impede an advancing enemy and prevent him from carrying out encirclements. Soviet forces could even break through to the rear of an advancing enemy, sever his communications and carry out encirclements themselves.
There were moments when Novikov felt that his analysis of steppe warfare was extraordinarily clear and important. His heart would tremble with joy and excitement.
Novikov, however, was not the only commander to be elaborating plans of this nature. And he did not yet know about some of the regiments already being formed in the deep rear. Ultra-mobile anti-tank regiments were preparing to go into battle on the distant approaches to Stalingrad. Whole regiments and divisions had been equipped with the latest anti-tank guns. High-speed trucks made it possible to deploy these regiments anywhere in the vast arena of the steppe. At the first reports of a German tank breakthrough, these anti-tank regiments could deliver crushing blows, striking swiftly and decisively.
Novikov did not and could not know that his dream of an ultra-mobile defence was already being realized. Still less could he know that such a defence would turn out to be the precursor to infantry fighting of unprecedented violence on the outskirts of Stalingrad, on the cliffs of the Volga and in the streets and factories of the city itself. Nor, of course, could he know that this very street fighting, this dogged defence of the city streets by Soviet foot soldiers, would in turn be the precursor to a swift and decisive Soviet offensive.
Novikov now had a firm grasp of many things that, before the war, he had understood only theoretically. He knew about infantry and tank operations under cover of darkness, about the interaction of infantry, artillery, tanks and aircraft, about cavalry raids and operational planning. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of heavy and light artillery, of heavy and light mortars. He understood Yaks, LaGGs and Ilyushins,52 heavy bombers, light bombers and dive-bombers. But what interested him most were tanks; he believed he knew all there was to know about every possible kind of tank operation: daytime and night-time, in forest, steppe and populated areas, in ambush and in attack, and in response to a breach of a defensive line.
For all his excitement about the advantages of ultra-mobility, Novikov was well aware of the extraordinary tenacity with which Soviet forces had stood their ground in Sevastopol and Leningrad; he knew what a vast number of German lives had been lost, week after week and month after month, in struggles for a single small patch of land, for a single hilltop, bunker or trench.
Novikov longed to correlate and make overall sense of the countless engagements that had taken place over the whole of the Soviet– German front. There had been battles in open country and in marshy forests, on the vast Don steppes and in the tiny Hanko peninsula.53 On plains and steppes the Germans had made rapid advances of thousands of kilometres; in marshes and forests, and amid the rocks of Karelia, there had been times when the front line had moved only tens of metres in the course of a year.
Novikov’s mind was constantly at work. Nevertheless, the war as a whole remained too vast, too complex for him to take in; his experience, after all, was only that of a single individual.
This, however, only made him still more determined to arrive at a broader and deeper understanding. He knew that the sole true judge of formulas and theories was the flow of reality.