After the
October Revolution it was decided by
Vladimir Lenin that the old Russian
Army would have to be turned into an instrument of the
Communist Party. The old army was demobilized
and in January 1918 the Soviet government ordered the formation of
the Red Army of Workers and Peasants.
Leon
Trotsky, the Commissar of War, was appointed the head of the Red
Army on 13th March, 1918. The army had to be established quickly as
it was needed to fight the White Army during
the Civil War. Trotsky was forced to
recruit a large number of officers from the old Russian
Army.
He was criticized for this but he argued that it would be impossible
to fight the war without the employment of experienced army officers.
Initially
a volunteer army, losses during the Civil
War forced the Soviet government to introduce conscription
in June, 1918.
Vladimir
Lenin was impressed by Trotsky's achievements and in 1919 remarked
to Maxim Gorky: "Show me another man
who could have practically created a model army in a year and won
respect of the military specialist as well."
At the
end of the Civil War there were over
5,000,000 men in the Red Army. They were demobilized with 600,000
men retained to form a regular army.
When Adolf
Hitler gained power in 1933 the Soviet government decided to increase
the size of the Red Army to combat the dangers of Nazi
Germany. By 1935 the Red Army had grown to 1,300,000 men. The
Soviet Union also had 10,000 tanks and
5,000 front-line planes.
Joseph
Stalin gradually became convinced that the leadership of the Red
Army was planning to oust him from power. In June, 1937, Mikhail
Tukhachevsky and seven other top Red Army
commanders were charged with conspiracy with Germany. All eight were
convicted and executed. All told, 30,000 members of the armed forces
were executed. This included fifty per cent of all army officers.
When the
Red Army was originally established soldiers swore an oath to fight
for international socialism. This was changed in January 1939 and
recruits had to pledge himself "to protect with all his strength
the property of the Army and the People and to cherish unto death
his People, the Soviet homeland and the government of Workers and
Peasants, also to respond at the first call from the government of
Workers and Peasants to defend the homeland, the USSR."
The Red
Army also contained political commissars whose role it was to ensure
loyalty to Joseph Stalin and his government.
Often members of NKVD, the Soviet secret
police, the presence of political commissars created an inefficient
duality of field command.
On the
outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 the
Red Army had an estimated 1,800,000 men in its ranks, of whom one
fourth were stationed in the Far East.
In
November, 1939, the Red Army invaded Finland.
Marshall Carl Mannerheim, Commander-in-Chief
of the Finnish Army, was able to block the Soviet advance at Kemijarvi
and Karelian. It was not until the spring of 1940 that the 7th and
13th armies led by General Kiril Meretsokov,
was able to break through the Finnish defences.
Finland
agreed peace terms on 13th March, 1940. The war cost the Soviets 200,000
men, 700 planes and 1,600 tanks. Joseph
Stalin now
came to the conclusion that the Red Army was not able to fight a major
war and helped to confirm his view that it was vitally important to
avoid a war with Nazi Germany for
as long as possible. The Soviet-Finnish War also convinced Adolf
Hitler that
the German Army would easily beat the
Red Army when the war eventually took place.
After
the war with Finland Stalin rapidly increased
in size of the Red Army. By 1941 it had grown to 3 million men (300
divisions). Most of the men served in unmechanized rifle divisions.
The infantry were supported by horse-drawn artillery and the cavalry.
Over half of the soldiers in the Red Army were stationed in the west
facing the much smaller German forces.
The
Red Army also had two new tank corps. This included the KV
and
Russia's
new "shellproof" tank, the
T-34.
The tank was provided with sloped armour to deflect shells that was
welded instead of riveted. Fitted with a powerful diesel engine, its
main armament was a high-velocity 76mm gun.
On 21st
June, 1941, a German sergeant deserted to the Soviet forces. He informed
them that the German
Army would
attack at dawn the following morning. Joseph
Stalin was reluctant to believe the soldier's story and it was
not until the German attack took place that he finally accepted that
his attempts to avoid war with Germany until 1942 had failed.
The German
forces, made up of three million men and 3,400 tanks, advanced in
three groups. The north group headed for Leningrad, the centre group
for Moscow and the southern forces into the Ukraine. Within six days,
the Germans had captured Minsk. General Demitry
Pavlov, the man responsible for defending Minsk, and two of his
senior generals were recalled to Moscow and were shot for incompetence.
With the
execution of Pavlov and his generals, Joseph
Stalin made it clear that he would punish severely any commander
whom he believed had let down the Soviet Union. In future, Soviet
commanders thought twice about surrendering or retreating. Another
factor in this was the way that the German Army massacred the people
of Minsk. Terrified of both Stalin and Hitler, the Soviet people had
no option but to fight until they were killed.
Joseph
Stalin appointed himself Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army on
20th July, 1941. A new Conscription
Act was passed on 31st August 1941. The age of military conscription
was lowered to eighteen for youths without secondary education and
nineteen for those who had been educated above that level.
The first
few months of the war was disastrous for the Soviet
Union. The German northern forces surrounded Leningrad while the
centre group made steady progress towards Moscow. German forces had
also made deep inroads into the Ukraine. Kiev was under siege and
Stalin's Chief of Staff, Georgi Zhukov,
suggested that the troops defending the capital of the Ukraine should
be withdrawn, thus enabling them to take up strong defensive positions
further east. Stalin insisted that the troops stayed and by the time
Kiev was taken, the casualties were extremely high. It was the most
comprehensive defeat experienced by the Red Army in its history. However,
the determined resistance put up at Kiev, had considerably delayed
the attack on Moscow.
It was
now September and winter was fast approaching. As German troops moved
deeper into the Soviet Union, supply lines became longer. Joseph
Stalin gave instructions that when forced to withdraw, the Red
Army should destroy anything that could be of use to the enemy.
The scorched earth policy and the formation
of guerrilla units behind the German front lines, created severe problems
for the German war machine which was trying to keep her three million
soldiers supplied with the necessary food and ammunition.
By October,
1941, German troops were only fifteen miles outside Moscow. Orders
were given for a mass evacuation of the city. In two weeks, two million
people left Moscow and headed east. Stalin rallied morale by staying
in Moscow. In a bomb-proof air raid shelter positioned under the Kremlin,
Stalin, as Supreme Commander-in-Chief, directed the Soviet war effort.
All major decisions made by his front-line commanders had to be cleared
with Stalin first.
In November,
1941, the German
Army launched
a new offensive on Moscow. The Soviet army held out and the Germans
were brought to a halt. Stalin called for a counter-attack. His commanders
had doubts about this policy but Stalin insisted and on 4th December
the Red Army attacked. The Germans, demoralized by its recent lack
of success, was taken by surprise and started to retreat. By January,
the Germans had been pushed back 200 miles.
Stalin's
military strategy was basically fairly simple. He believed it was
vitally important to attack the enemy as often as possible. He was
particularly keen to use new, fresh troops for these offensives. Stalin
argued that countries in western Europe had been beaten by their own
fear of German superiority. His main objective in using new troops
in this way was to convince them that the German forces were not invincible.
By pushing the German Army back at Moscow, Stalin proved to the Soviet
troops that Blizkrieg could be counteracted;
it also provided an important example to all troops throughout the
world fighting the German war-machine.
Helped
by aid from the United States and Britain,
the Soviet Union was able to build up the
Red Army. The large tank corps were replaced by independent tank brigades
of about 90 tanks. In late 1942 the Red Army created tank corps that
contained one motorized infantry and two tank brigades. These new
units were used to exploit gaps created by massed infantry attacks.
In
July 1943 a Red Army attack using 3,000 tanks defeated the German
Army at
Kursk. This was followed by steady Soviet advances along the Eastern
Front. The pace of success was increased when the Allies landed in
Normandy in June 1944.
In
1945 the Red Army moved into Germany. Afraid of being captured by
the Soviets and being paraded around the streets in a cage, Adolf
Hitler commits suicide and on 2nd May, the Commander of German
troops in Berlin surrendered.
At
its peak an estimated 12.5 million men and women fought in the Red
Army. It is unknown how many were killed but after the peace was signed
the government claimed that over 20 million Soviet citizens died during
the Second World War.
Konstantin
Rotov, Krokodil (1945)
(1)
George
Seldes wrote
about Red Army in his book You Can't Print
That! (1929)
Food
clothing and propaganda have made the army loyal. Trotsky's personality
and his knowledge of military strategy were an important factor for
years. Although he has spent most of his life as a red agitator and
writer, he has always been a student of military strategy, has written
a book on Napoleon's manoeuvres and has been given credit for building
the keenest morale and using the keenest military strategy in the
numerous campaigns in which Russia defeated her enemies in the civil
wars.
(2)
Leopold Trepper, the head of the Red
Orchestra, kept Joseph Stalin and
the Red Army informed of the planned German
invasion of the Soviet Union. He wrote about this in his autobiography,
The Great Game (1977)
On December
18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation
Barbarossa. The first sentence of the plan was explicit: "The
German armed forces must be ready before the end of the war against
Great Britain to defeat the Soviet Union by means of Blitzkrieg."
Richard
Sorge warned the Centre immediately; he forwarded them a copy of the
directive. Week after week, the heads of Red Army Intelligence received
updates on the Wehrmacht's preparations. At the beginning of 1941,
Schulze-Boysen sent the Centre precise information on the operation
being planned; massive bombardments of Leningrad, Kiev, and Vyborg;
the number of divisions involved.
In February,
I sent a detailed dispatch giving the exact number of divisions withdrawn
from France and Belgium, and sent to the east. In May, through the
Soviet military attaché in Vichy, General Susloparov, I sent
the proposed plan of attack, and indicated the original date, May
15, then the revised date, and the final date. On May 12, Sorge warned
Moscow that 150 German divisions were massed along the frontier.
The Soviet
intelligence services were not the only ones in possession of this
information. On March 11, 1941, Roosevelt gave the Russian ambassador
the plans gathered by American agents for Operation Barbarossa. On
the 10th June the English released similar information. Soviet agents
working in the frontier zone in Poland and Rumania gave detailed reports
on the concentration of troops.
He who
closes his eyes sees nothing, even in the full light of day. This
was the case with Stalin and his entourage. The generalissimo preferred
to trust his political instinct rather than the secret reports piled
up on his desk. Convinced that he had signed an eternal pact of friendship
with Germany, he sucked on the pipe of peace. He had buried his tomahawk
and he was not ready to dig it up.
(3)
Joachim von Ribbentrop,
letter to Staatssekretaer Weizsaecker (29th April, 1941)
I can summarize
my opinion on a German-Russian conflict in one sentence: if every
burned out Russian city was worth as much to us as a sunk English
battleship, then I would be in favour of a German-Russian war in this
summer; I think though that we can win over Russia only militarily
but that we should lose economically. One can find it enticing to
give the Communist system its death blow and perhaps say too that
it lies in the logic of things to let the European-Asiatic continent
now march forth against Anglo-Saxondom and its allies. But only one
thing is decisive: whether this undertaking would hasten the fall
of England.
That we
will advance militarily up to Moscow and beyond victoriously, I believe
is unquestionable. But I thoroughly doubt that we could make use of
what was won against the well known passive resistance of the Slavs.
A German
attack on Russia would only give a lift to English morale. It would
be evaluated there as German doubt of the success of our war against
England. We would in this fashion not only admit that the war would
still last a long time, but we could in this way actually lengthen
instead of shorten it.
(4)
Joseph Stalin, radio speech (June, 1941)
The Red
Army, the Red Navy, and all citizens of the Soviet Union must defend
every inch of Soviet soil, must fight to the last drop of blood for
our towns and villages, must display the daring, initiative and mental
alertness characteristic of our people.
In case
of forced retreat of Red Army units, all rolling stock must be evacuated,
the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway truck,
not a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel. Collective farmers
must drive off all their cattle and turn over their grain to the safe
keeping of the state authorities, for transportation to the rear.
lf valuable property that cannot be withdrawn, must be destroyed without
fail.
In areas
occupied by the enemy, partisan units, mounted and on foot, must be
formed; sabotage groups must be organized to combat enemy units, to
foment partisan warfare everywhere, blow up bridges and roads, damage
telephone and telegraph lines, set fire to forests, stores and transport.
In occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy
and all his accomplices. They must be hounded and annihilated at every
step, and all their measures frustrated.
(5)
Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky, Memoirs
(1974)
Stalin
was unjustifiably self-confident, headstrong, unwilling to listen
to others; he overestimated his own knowledge and ability to guide
the conduct of the war directly. He relied very little on the General
Staff and made no adequate use of the skills and experience of its
personnel. Often for no reason at all, he would make hasty changes
in the top military leadership. Stalin quite rightly insisted that
the military must abandon outdated strategic concepts, but he was
unfortunately rather slow to do this himself. He tended to favour
head-on confrontations.
(6)
General Walter Warlimont, order issued
to German Army about the occupation of the Soviet
Union (12th May, 1941)
1. Political officials and leaders are to be liquidated.
2. Insofar
as they are captured by the troops, an officer with authority to impose
disciplinary punishment decides whether the given individual must
be liquidated. For such ax decision the fact suffices that he is a
political official.
3. Political
leaders in the troops (Red Army) are not recognized as prisoners of
war and are to be liquidated at the latest in the prisoner-of-war
transit camps.
(7)
Alfred Jodl, order issued to the German
Army (23rd July, 1941)
In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East the forces
available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient
only if al resistance is punished not by legal prosecution of the
guilty but by the spreading of such terror by the occupying power
as is appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the
population. The competent commanders must find the means of keeping
order not by demanding more security forces but by applying suitable
Draconian methods.
(8)
Order from the German Army Supreme Command (16th June 1941)
General provisions on the treatment of Soviet POWs. Bolshevism is
a deadly enemy of National Socialist Germany. For the first time the
German soldier is facing an enemy, who has not just received military
training, but is indoctrinated in the spirit of Bolshevism. Struggle
against National Socialism is in his flesh and blood. He wages this
struggle using all means: sabotage, subversive propaganda, arson,
murder. Therefore the Bolshevik soldier has lost the privilege to
be treated as a genuine soldier according to the Geneva Convention.
(1) The
faintest manifestations of protest or disobedience should be met with
ruthless reprisals.
(2) Weapons
should be used ruthlessly to suppress resistance.
(3) The
escaping POWs should be shot at without warning and with the determination
to hit the target.
(9)
Major Shabalin, a member of the Red Army,
kept a diary of the fighting with the German
Army in 1941. He was killed on 20th October and his diary
was translated by the Germans for military analysis.
9th September, 1941: The situation with the personnel is very bad,
practically the whole army consists of men, whose homes have been
captured by the Germans. They want to go home. The passivity at the
front, immobility in the trenches demoralise the soldiers. There are
some cases of drinking among the officers and political Commissars.
Sometimes people do not come back from reconnaissance missions.
14th October,
1941: The enemy has encircled us. Incessant gunfire. Cannon, mortar
and submachine gun exchanges. Danger and fear all day long. And this
is not to mention the swamp, the forest, and the problem of passing
the night. I have not slept since the
15th October,
1941: Terrifying! I wander around, dead bodies, was horrors and permanent
bombardment everywhere. I am hungry and had no sleep again. Took a
bottle of alcohol. Went to the forest for reconnaissance. Our total
destruction is obvious. The army is beaten, its supply train is destroyed,
am writing sitting in a forest by a bonfire. In the morning lost all
my Cheka (KGB) officers, and now I am alone among strangers. The army
has disintegrated.
16th October,
1941: I spent the night in the forest, had no bread for three days.
There are a lot of soldiers in the forest, but no officers. Throughout
the night and the morning the Germans were firing at the forest from
all kind of weapons. At about 7 a.m. we got up and marched north.
The gunfire continues. During a halt I managed to wash my face and
hands.
19th October,
1941: All night long we were marching through the rain across marshlands.
Pitch dark. I was wet to the bone, my right foot has swollen; very
difficult to walk.
(10)
Statement issued by the Soviet government (3rd February, 1943)
Our forces have now fully completed the liquidation of the German
fascist troops encircled in the area of Stalingrad. Today the forces
of the Don front broke the resistance of the enemy encircled north
of Stalingrad and compelled them to capitulate.
The last
centre of enemy resistance in the Stalingrad area has thus been crushed.
Today, February 2, 1943, the historic battle before Stalingrad has
been concluded by the final victory of our forces.
During
the past two days the number of prisoners taken by the Soviet forces
was increased by 45,000 bringing the total in the Stalingrad area
from January 10 to February 2 up to 91,000 officers and men.
On February
2 our troops captured Lieutenant General Streicher, Commander of the
11th German Army Corps, who was in command of the group of forces
encircled north of Stalingrad, and his Chief of Staff, Colonel Helmuth
Rostuck.
During
the general offensive against the encircled enemy troops between January
10 to February 2, according to incomplete data, booty captured by
our forces totalled 750 aircraft, 1,550 tanks, 6,700 guns, 1,462 mortars,
6, 135 machine-guns, 90,000 rifles, 61,102 lorries, 7,369 motor-cycles,
480 tractors, 320 radio transmitters, three armoured trains, 56 railway
engines, 1,125 railway trucks, 235 arms and ammunition dumps, and
a large quantity of other war material. Other booty is being counted.
(11)
The Manchester Guardian
(4th September, 1943)
The great Russian advances continued yesterday on all fronts, particularly
in the Donets, where 150 places have fallen to the Red Army. Stalino
is now menaced. In all some 400 more towns, villages, and railway
stations have been captured.
A Moscow
telegram received early today says the German retreat in some sectors
of the Donets is becoming a rout, and large enemy forces are now facing
a threat of envelopment.
The rapidity
of the advance in the Donets area is shown by the fact that although
the capture of Lisichansk was only announced on Thursday the Russians
are now able to report the capture of the railway junction at Kamishevankha,
fifteen miles south of Lisichansk on the way to the big German base
of Stalino. Numerous other advances towards the heart of the industrial
Donets are also reported. The Germans are blowing up all the buildings
they can as they retreat.
The threat
to the important railway junction of Konotop is rapidly growing. On
the front the 100 inhabited places captured include the big town of
Bielopole.
(12)
General Paul von Kleist was interviewed
by Basil Liddell Hart about the Red
Army in his book The Other Side of the Hill (1948)
The men were first-rate fighters from the start, and we owed our
success simply to superior training. They became first-rate soldiers
with experience. They fought most toughly, had amazing endurance,
and could carry on without most of the things other armies regarded
as necessities. The Staff were quick to learn from their early defeats,
and soon became highly efficient.
Their equipment
was very good even in 1941, especially the tanks. Their artillery
was excellent, and also most of the infantry weapons - their rifles
were more modem than ours, and had a more rapid rate of fire. Their
T.34 tank was the finest in the world.
(13)
General Gerd von Rundstedt argued that
the standard of the Red Army generals improved during the Second
World War.
None were any good in 1941. Of Budenny, who commanded the armies
facing me, a captured Russian officer aptly remarked - 'He is a man
with a very large moustache, but a very small brain.' But in later
years there is no doubt of the improvement in their generalship. Zhukov
was very good. It is interesting to recall that he first studied strategy
in Germany under General von Seeckt - this was about 1921-23.
(14)
Guenther Blumentritt first fought
against the Russian Army during the First World
War.
In 1914-18, as a lieutenant, I fought for the first two years
against the Russians, after a brief contact with the
French and Belgians at Namur in August, 1914. In our very first attack
on the Russian front, we quickly realized that here we were meeting
essentially different soldiers from the French and Belgian - hardly
visible, entrenched with consummate skill, and resolute! We suffered
considerable losses.
In those
days it was the Russian Imperial Army. Hard, but good-natured on the
whole, they had the habit of setting fire on military principle to
towns and villages, in East Prussia when they were forced to withdraw,
just as
they always did thereafter in their own country. When the red glow
from the burning villages lit up the horizon at
evening, we knew that the Russians were leaving. Curiously, the population
did not seem to complain. That was the Russian way, and had been so
for centuries.
When I
referred to the bulk of the Russian Army good-natured, I am speaking
of their European troops. The much harder Asiatic troops, the Siberian
corps, were cruel in their behaviour. So, also, were the Cossacks.
Eastern Germany had plenty to suffer on this score in 1914.
Even in
1914-18 the greater hardness of war conditions in the East had its
effect on our own troops. Men preferred to be sent to the Western
rather than the Eastern front. In the West it was a war of material
and mass artillery -Verdun, the Somme, and so on. These factors were
paramount, and very gruelling to endure, but at least we were dealing
with Western adversaries. In the East there was not so much shell-fire,
but the fighting was more dogged, as the human type was much harder.
Night fighting, hand-to-hand fighting, fighting in the forests, were
particularly fostered by the Russians. In that war there was a saying
current among German soldiers: 'In the East the gallant Army is fighting;
in the West the Fire Brigade is standing by.'
The Red Army of 1941-45 was far harder than the Tsar's Army, for they
were fighting fanatically for an idea. That increased their doggedness,
and in turn made our own troops hard, for in the East the maxim held
good-
'You or I'. Discipline in the Red Army was far more rigorous than
in the Tsar's Army. These are examples of
the sort of order that we used to intercept - and they were blindly
obeyed.
Wherever
Russians have appeared in the history of war, the fight was hard,
ruthless, and involved heavy losses. Where the Russian makes a stand
or defends himself, he is hard to defeat, and it costs a lot of bloodshed.
As a child of nature he works with the simplest expedients. As all
have to obey blindly, and the Slav-Asiatic character only understands
the absolute, disobedience is non-existent. The Russians commanders
can make incredible demands on their men in every way and there is
no murmuring, no complaint.
(14)
General Hasso Manteuffel was impressed
by the standard of the Red Army in the Second World
War.
The advance of a Russian Army is something that Westerners can't imagine.
Behind the tank spearheads rolls on a vast horde, largely mounted
on horses. The soldier carries a sack on his back, with dry crusts
of bread and raw vegetables collected on the march from the fields
and villages. The horses eat the straw from the house roofs - they
get very little else. The Russians are accustomed to carry on for
as long as three weeks in this primitive way, when advancing. You
can't stop them, like an ordinary army, by cutting their communications,
for you rarely find any supply columns to strike.
(16)
In 1943 Lieutenant-General Rokoossovsky of the Red Army wrote about
the German invasion of the Soviet Union during
the Second World War.
The Germans avoid woods, fearing guerillas and knowing how difficult
it is to use tanks there. In the villages they generally select brick
houses or houses with brick foundations as firing posts. Not infrequently
German soldiers dressed in women's clothing move from the houses to
the trenches, reckoning that Soviet artillery will not notice this
ruse.
Bayonet
charges are dreaded by the Germans and they always avoid them. In
counter-attacking, they shoot without even taking aim.
Engagements
with enemy tank units have led us to the conclusion that German tank
crews are afraid of the anti-tank grenades extensively used by Soviet
infantry.
(17)
Vsevolod Vishnevsky was a Soviet journalist who reported on the battle
for Tallinn during the invasion of the Soviet
Union in 1941.
The battles
were extremely hard fought. On one of the sectors of the front the
Nazis launched a "psychological attack". It was done at
dusk. After strong artillery preparations the alcohol-primed soldiers
rose to their full height and rushed into the attack, firing from
their automatic weapons.
They advanced
in waves, hoping to paralyze the defenders' will to resist. Well aimed
machine-gun fire, however, mowed down the Nazis in hundreds. Encircled
by five times superior enemy forces the Red Army fought the unequal
battle with iron tenacity. In the approaches to Tallinn the Nazis
were counter-attacked by Soviet marines. Under the latter's onslaught
the enemy was hurled back from the city for several miles. On the
highways hundreds of Germans met their end on the barbed wire entanglements.
Shelling
from the Soviet warships threw whole German columns into the air.
Anti-aircraft fire and attacks by planes were very intensive. In one
raid alone the Germans lost entire groups of planes. Nazi airmen picked
up in the water spoke with a nervous shudder of the Soviet A.A. barrage.
Although
cut off, the marines continued to hold the position for days. The
population of the city took an active part in the fighting. The metal
workers of Tallinn, the textile workers of Keila, fishermen from Muhumaa
Island, peasants of Volost Ravila, left their homes and participated
in the defence.
Members
of the People's Volunteer Force fought side by side with Red Army
men. Esthonian girls were not behind the men in courage and bravery.
A 17-year- old nurse, Nina, brought a wounded soldier off the battlefield
on her back under a hail of bullets. The Germans opened a deliberate
fire on the nurse and wounded her. Bleeding profusely, she nevertheless
brought the Red Army man safely to the first-aid post, where she attended
to him before attending to her own wounds.
Thousands
of working people, Esthonians and Russians, built barricades under
artillery fire. Motor drivers delivered ammunition and provisions
and picked up wounded under direct fire.
The fighting
raged on the outskirts of the city and in the city itself, but the
electric power station continued to work, and newspapers continued
to appear. After a long siege the enemy brought up fresh forces and
finally broke into the town.
For four
days in succession heavy artillery pounded away at the port and the
roadstead, putting up a curtain fire in an attempt to prevent evacuation.
The heroic defence nevertheless made it possible to evacuate a large
proportion of the population.
(18)
Milovan
Djilas,
Conversations With Stalin (1962)
Koniev was one of Stalin's
new wartime commanders. His promotion had been less rapid than Rokossovsky's,
whose career was much more sudden and stormy. He joined the Red Army
just after the revolution as a young worker, and gradually rose through
the ranks and through the army schools. But he, too, made his career
in battle, which was typical of the Red Army under Stalin's leadership
in the Second World War.
Taciturn as usual, Koniev
explained to me in a few words the course of the campaign at Korsun-Shevchenkovsky,
which
had just been completed and which was compared in the Soviet Union
with the one at Stalingrad. He described, some what gleefully, Germany's
latest catastrophe: some eighty, or even a hundred, thousand Germans
had refused to surrender and had been forced into a narrow space,
then tanks smashed their heavy equipment and machine-gun posts while
the Cossack cavalry finally finished them off. 'We let the Cossacks
cut them up for as long as they wished. They even hacked off the hands
of those who raised them to surrender!' the Marshal said wjith a smile.
I must admit that at that
moment I also rejoiced over the fate that had befallen the Germans.
In my country too Nazism had, in the name of a 'master race', waged
war without any of the humane considerations that had previously been
shown. And yet I had another feeling at the time-horror that it should
be so, that it could not be otherwise.
(19)
Ann Stringer, United Press (26th April,
1945)
The Elbe River is swarming with Russian soldiers, stripped to their
shorts. They are swimming over to greet us. The Germans blew all the
bridges across the Elbe, but there is a small fleet of shaky boats
and canoes. I decided to cross the river in one of them and visit
the Russians.
As the Russians on the eastern bank saw us coming in our canoe they
rushed down to the river bank through the tall, wet grass and began
yelling greetings. They helped us drag the canoe up on the bank, and
then they all stood rigidly at attention for a moment. One by one
they stepped forward, saluted, shook hands and stepped back into line.
Then Lt.
Grigori Otenchuku, a veteran of Stalingrad, stepped forward to make
a formal speech in behalf of the Russians.
"A few months ago German soldiers were nearly in Stalingrad,"
he said. "Now Russian soldiers are in Berlin and Russian soldiers
are here - all the way across Germany - with their American Allies."
Our party
consisted of Lt. Myril Mayer of Wood River and Lt. Raymond Worth of
Galveston. The Russian soldiers insisted that we meet the commander
of their regiment, so we started off. I noticed that almost all of
our escort wore at least one brilliantly colored medal on their greenish
tunics.
We were
introduced to the commander, a quiet, stocky man with jet black hair.
We gave the Russians our autographs. They gave us theirs. The commander
invited us to lunch. He said I was the first American woman he and
his troops had ever seen, and he seated me in the place of honor on
his right at the luncheon.
(20)
Catherine Coyne, Boston Herald
(27th April, 1945)
Americans and Russians in their historic long-awaited link-up in their
joint war against Germany provided the world with a hilarious preview
of VE-Day in a sunny meadow on the bank of the Elbe river here this
afternoon.
There was
a ceremony, of course. Maj.-Gen. E.R Reinhardt, commanding general
of the 69th Infantry Division, one of whose second lieutenants made
the first contact unofficially and accidentally late yesterday afternoon,
crossed the Elbe in a rowboat to meet a major general of the 58th
Guards Division of the Red Army.
They shook
hands, posed for thousands of pictures in the center of a screaming,
shoving mob of official professional and amateur cameramen, then feasted
in a German barracks on captured German eggs, black bread with cheese
and tumblers of champagne and eau de vivre, an inferior cognac
bottled for the Wehrmacht.
Primarily,
however, it was a day for the little man of the armies - for the GI
and the junior officer-and each made it a merry one, forgetting war
while toasting the United States and Russia, swapping insignia and
watches, snapping pictures and trying out one another's weapons amid
noise, danger and laughter reminiscent of the Fourth of July at home.
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