It was no time for talking around a bubbling samovar.
It was Summer and the burning sun beat down upon the Soviet Union, biggest land in the world.
“Vnimaniquie” said a cold ominous voice three times through hundreds of thousands of tiny loudspeakers stuck onto buildings, houses, newspaper kiosks of the cities and on poles and in houses in countless villages across this long land.
Every Russian wherever he was, stopped. Vnimaniquie means attention and he gave it.
“Citizens of the Soviet Union” said another voice, the unmistakable voice of V. M. Molotov, and actually this land of nearly 200,000,000 stood still.
“The Soviet Government and its head, Comrade Stalin, have authorized me to make the following statement,” Molotov paused for a perceptible moment and millions of hearts beat faster.
“At 4 a.m. today, without any claims having been presented to the Soviet Union, without any declaration of war, the German troops attacked our borders at many points.”
Here it was then. War for a young Soviet Union and another war for the old Russia whose broad plains have for many generations run with the warm, fresh blood of its sons fighting off the invaders coming from west, east, north and south.
A woman sighed the universal sigh of a sorrow-stricken woman in some lonely village. Another cried softly in a tiny apartment in crowded Moscow. It was the old story again. Another invader. Another war. Another time when men must march off from home never to return. And this time it was perhaps the most terrible, most ruthless foe of all. A foe whose armies had smashed through the French, British, Dutch, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Poles and Greeks. A foe with the most modern army in the world. A foe who fought with new, horrible weapons in the skies.
German tanks were rattling down hot, dusty roads of the west; from cloudless blue skies German bombers were dumping tons of death and destruction on Russian cities. Endless waves of green-clad infantrymen were methodically marching eastward.
As Summer faded into Autumn and the Nazi juggernaut rumbled on, unstoppable, unbeatable, unrelenting, Hitler, in personal command, was well inside the Soviet Union and on October 2, he launched his first offensive on Moscow. On they came during the long dark days of November and the holy of holy Soviet days, November 7, anniversary of the communist revolution. The German army still rolled on towards Moscow and in some corners of this country now covered by a deep blanket of glittering snow there was black despair. Hadn’t the German army beaten everyone it had come up against and hadn’t the military minds of the Western World predicted a quick knockout of the young clumsy commissar-ridden Red Army? And didn’t things generally seem in a terrible state, indeed, Tovarich? Yes, they did, but those reckoning in this fashion reckoned without Joseph Stalin, without the spirit of the Russian people.
On November 7, Stalin and men around him kicked a hole in the form book of the militarists, including Hitler. Braving a bitter gale and cutting snow they mounted the blood red tomb of their beloved Lenin and with audacious courage held and reviewed the parade of their Red Army in Red Square.
It was a terrific psychological boost but what was even more important was what Stalin said to his people.
I was standing in the open square in the old city of Yaroslavl beside its ancient colored cathedral. I, like the Germans, was trying to get to Moscow but for obviously different reasons. I shall never forget that afternoon in the snow storm, and Stalin’s voice. There was something magnificent in that cold, impersonal, dull, factual, almost biblical sounding voice. It didn’t tug at the heartstrings and it didn’t play upon emotions, nor dwell upon flights of oratory, but carefully and with almost mathematical exactness, it discussed war and appraised it. Confidence! Confidence was all-apparent as the domes on the old cathedral.
“The enemy is not so strong as some frightened little intellectuals imagine,” said this voice of the Russian leader coming out to his people through the driving snow and in the shrieking wailing wind. “The devil is not so terrible as he is painted.”
Standing in the midst of a large group of muffled, sombre Russians I could see them stiffen. They turned and looked at one another. They said yes to one another. They said yes, that Tovarich Stalin was right. They nodded and cursed the Germans in their beards and in that Yaroslavl square there were many bearded. Then they cursed them some more and shuffled off home. But the Germans came on and on.
On November 16, Hitler launched his second hard drive on the Soviet capital. The vast Red Army had not yet halted the Germans and military experts from all ends of the world were predicting the worst. The dark days of November grew darker and victory was apparent nowhere.
All foreigners in Moscow had been moved to Kuibyshev. Hundreds of factories had gone east. The Russians, with the Germans coming down upon them, had taken the body of father Lenin to Siberia. During that first week in December the armored German patrols got to the outskirts of little Khemkie, a place on the Volga Canal, 5 miles from Moscow.
Then the miracle happened in the dark sleeping forests of Russia. The forests where miracles have been happening for generations.
The Russian army personally directed by Stalin, with the able assistance of that nimble, barrel-chested cavalry man, Georgi Zhukov, son of a Moscow peasant, not only halted but turned on the “unstoppable” Nazi horde and hurled it from the capital.
The Battle of Stalingrad had all the drama of a great moment in history but for me I shall always think that the Battle of Moscow—with Stalin at the helm in his long grey-brown coat moving through the forests—saved Russia and perhaps the world.
Hitler reeled back down the old Smolensk road, just as Napoleon had done, and his army was cold and tattered and his tanks were frozen. But most important of all, the Russian had beaten the German at his own game and in the hearts of many a German soldier doubt and defeat gnawed for the first time. Gone was the Nazi myth of invincibility, as the shattered evidence lay scattered over the frozen Russian lands and in the dark forests.
Hard, discouraging days followed for the Red Army but from then on it learned, improved, grew strong and more adept, until the scene shifted to Stalingrad where once again the Russian was pinned back against a vital objective. This time it was the Volga, the lifeline of the Soviet Union, and the Wehrmacht was hammering at it from across the quiet Don.
As the German armies slugged across the Don, the late President Roosevelt sent his personal emissary, white-mustached, ramrod-backed Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Hurley to have a look at the Russian front and try to explain, if he could, why there wasn’t any second front, so badly needed, so clamored for by the Soviets.
Hurley was the only foreigner who sat in on that big chunk of history for the young Red Army. Gen. Nikolai Vatutin took him personally across the frozen territory behind the German lines and let him watch the climax of the greatest encirclement in military maneuvers—the encirclement of the Sixth German Army at Stalingrad.
Characteristically, Hurley sensed the situation and the drama of it.
“May I”, he asked in his best Oklahoma drawl, “salute these soldiers in my own peculiar way.”
“Please,” answered the slightly surprised Vatutin.
Hurley strode up to these tough, guard units, lifted his broad right hand to his mouth and let out a blood curdling Indian war whoop, rich in decibels, that echoed and reached across the Don steppe.
Returning to Moscow, Hurley told a few of us what he had seen.
“Boys,” he said, “the balloon has gone up. Hitler is whipped.”
Presumably he told the same thing to the late President. And in the few days that followed, the Red Army started its push that carried it from the Volga to Stalingrad, that push for which the Russians later gave the General praise. American trucks, and American food in many cases helped it. Spam even had its place.
When the United States established its shuttle-bombing bases in the Ukraine, preceding the Normandy landings, a Russian girl—one of those employed by the United States at Poltava—stood over a sizzling dish of it in an army mess.
“My God,” gasped a bomber pilot just in from an Italian base, “they got this damn spam in Russia too.”
Eager to get along with her new American employers, the girl hung on every word.
A little later a Red Army general entered with American General Ira Eaker.
“Damn spam” said the girl in her best English, “have some.”
This Russian story would be incomplete without mentioning the acumen of Stalin in picking the men for his army.
His selection of Marshal Zhukov probably was his happiest move. But almost the same could be said of a man that is little known in foreign countries, artillery Marshall Nikolai Nikolaievich Voronov, who not only commands the Red Army artillery but looks like a cannon if ever a man did.
Others personally picked by Stalin who helped so greatly in the war were Konstantin Rokossovsky, Ivan Konev, F. I. Tolbukhin, A. M. Vassilievsky, Rodio S. Malinovsky, L. A. Govorov, I. K. Bagramian, I. E. Patrov, I. D. Cherniakshovsky, Nicolai Vatutin and A. I. Yeremenko—an Armenian, a Siberian, a Jew, three Ukranians, a Pole, and the rest great Russians—all young, all hand picked for their jobs. Two of them, Cherniakovsky and Vatutin lost their lives under fire.
★★★
Eddy Gilmore, a native of Selma, Ala., joined the AP in Washington in 1935… transferred to foreign service in 1941… went to England with the late Wendell Willkie… after a year in the London blitz he went to Moscow to cover the eastern front… he still is in the land of the Soviets, as AP’s Moscow bureau chief.