The Nazis- a Warning From History by Laurence Rees

Author:Laurence Rees [Rees, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780563493334
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

7

THE TIDE TURNS

1942 WAS A year of transformation on the Eastern Front. At the start of it the Red Army was grappling with the Germans at the gates of Moscow. By the end of it the mighty German 6th Army was on its knees at Stalingrad.

It is easy, then, to characterize this as the year when the Soviets made the Germans pay for the arrogance of the original Barbarossa plan; to see this 12-month period as the time when a combination of the vast reserves of population from that the Red Army could draw, military aid from Britain and the USA, and the tanks and artillery from Soviet factories that had been dismantled in the face of the German advance and reconstructed far behind the front line, resulted in an inevitable change of fortune for Stalin and the Soviet Union. In short, it is easy to regard 1942 as the year when, day by inexorable day, the inevitability of a Soviet victory became obvious to the world.

But to judge that year in such a way would be a mistake. Instead, what the history of 1942 demonstrates is that, despite all the foreign help, all the manpower at their disposal, all the output of their factories, the Soviet Union could still have lost the war against the Germans. Both Stalin and the Red Army had to change the way they conducted the fight – and in the process, they had to learn from the enemy.

The Red Army performed badly in the first months of 1942 after the Battle of Moscow, and Stalin was the man most responsible. On 5 January he announced to the Stavka (the Soviet High Command) a plan almost as overambitious and contemptuous of the enemy as Hitler’s original Barbarossa plan had been. Instead of concentrating the resources of the Red Army on one point of attack, Stalin proposed that they should advance on all fronts. In the north they would push to relieve Leningrad, in front of Moscow they would attack Army Group Centre, and in the south they would confront the Germans in the Ukraine and the Crimea. In 1941 Stalin had demonstrated his military incompetence when it came to defence; now, at the start of 1942, he was showing his weakness as a commander in attack. Zhukov spotted the plan’s flaws and said so. Nikolai Voznesensky, the economist, pointed out the grave logistical problems that would result from such an overarching campaign, but was ridiculed as a man who ‘only ever mentioned problems’. Against such protests the Soviet offensive began.

Not surprisingly, the Red Army made little progress as it attempted simultaneously to take on the Germans on all fronts, but at least there were no disastrous defeats. However, all that was to change when Stalin ordered a new offensive in the south, around the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, to begin in May 1942. The General Staff view was that the Red Army should be much less ambitious and consolidate its position around Moscow. But Stalin wanted action.

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