The Luftwaffe, meanwhile, had continued to annihilate Red Army aviation. By the end of the second day of fighting, it had increased its score to two thousand aircraft destroyed. The Soviet Union could build fresh aircraft and train new pilots, but that immediate ‘infanticide’ of aircrew crushed morale for a long time. ‘Our pilots feel that they are corpses already when they take off,’ a squadron officer admitted to a commissar fifteen months later at the height of the battle of Stalingrad. ‘This is where the losses come from.’
In the south, where Soviet forces were strongest, the German advance was much less rapid. General Kirponos had managed to establish a defence in depth, rather than line his armies along the frontier. But although his divisions inflicted quite heavy casualties on the Germans, their own losses were infinitely greater. Kirponos rushed his tank formations into battle before they could deploy effectively. On the second day, 23 June, General Ewald von Kleist’s First Panzer Group came up against Soviet divisions equipped with the monster KV tank, and for the very first time, German crews saw the T-34 tank, the best general-purpose tank developed in the Second World War.
The reduction of the southern front between the Pripet Marshes and the Carpathian mountains took much longer than expected. Field Marshal von Reichenau’s Sixth Army found itself continually harassed by Russian forces cut off in the wooded swampland to its left. Reichenau wanted prisoners executed as partisans, whether or not they still wore uniform. Red Army units also shot their German captives, especially Luftwaffe pilots who had baled out. There were few opportunities for sending them to the rear, and they did not want them to be saved by the enemy advance.
In Lvov, the capital of Galicia, the NKVD slaughtered political prisoners to prevent their release by the Germans. Its savagery was no doubt increased by the atmosphere of suspicion and chaos in the city, with drunkenness and looting. Lvov was subjected not only to aerial bombing, but also to sabotage by German-organized groups of Ukrainian nationalists. The mood of violent fear had been fuelled just before the invasion by jibes from the non-Russian population: ‘The Germans are coming to get you.’
Hitler’s conviction that the Soviet Union was a ‘rotten structure’ that would come ‘crashing down’ was shared by many foreign observers and intelligence services. Stalin’s purge of the Red Army, which had begun in 1937, was fuelled by an inimitable mixture of paranoia, sadistic megalomania and a vindictiveness for old slights dating back to the Russian civil war and the Russo-Polish War.
Altogether, 36,671 officers were executed, imprisoned or dismissed, and out of the 706 officers of the rank of brigade commander and above, only 303 remained untouched. Cases against arrested officers were usually grotesque inventions. Colonel Κ. K. Rokossovsky, later the commander who delivered the coup de grâce at Stalingrad, faced evidence purportedly provided by a man who had died nearly twenty years before.
The most prominent victim was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the leading advocate of mobile warfare. His arrest and execution also represented the deliberate destruction of the Red Army’s operational thinking, which had encroached dangerously upon Stalin’s preserve of strategy. Former imperial army officers under Tukhachevsky had been developing a sophisticated theory of ‘Operational Art’ based on ‘the study of the relationship between mass firepower and mobility’. By 1941, this was a treasonous heresy, which explained why few Red Army generals had dared to mass their tanks effectively against the German threat. Even though most of the purged officers were reinstated, the psychological effect had been devastating.
Two and a half years after the purge began, the Red Army presented a disastrous spectacle in the Winter War against Finland. Marshal Voroshilov, Stalin’s old crony from the 1st Cavalry Army, displayed an astonishing lack of imagination. The Finns outmanoeuvred their opponents time after time. Their machine-gunners scythed down the massed Soviet infantry struggling forward through the snowfields. Only after deploying five times as many men as their opponents, and huge concentrations of artillery, did the Red Army begin to prevail. Hitler had observed this lamentable performance with excitement.
Japanese military intelligence took rather a different view. It was about the only foreign service which did not underestimate the Red Army at this time. A series of border skirmishes on the Manchurian frontier, which culminated in the battle at Khalkin-Gol in August 1939, had shown what an aggressive young commander, in this case the forty-three-year-old General Georgy Zhukov, could achieve. In January 1941, Stalin was persuaded to promote Zhukov to Chief of the General Staff. He was therefore right at the centre when, on the day after the invasion, Stalin set up a supreme general-staff headquarters, under its old tsarist name of Stavka. The Great Leader then appointed himself Commissar of Defence and Supreme Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces.
In the first days of Barbarossa, German generals saw little to change their low opinion of Soviet commanders, especially on the central part of the front. General Heinz Guderian, like most of his colleagues, was struck by the readiness of Red Army commanders to waste the lives of their men in prodigious quantities. He also noted in a memorandum that they were severely hampered by the ‘political demands of the state leadership’, and suffered a ‘basic fear of responsibility’. This combined with bad coordination meant that ‘orders to carry out necessary measures, counter-measures in particular, are issued too late’. Soviet tank forces were ‘insufficiently trained, and lacked intelligence and initiative during the offensive’. All of this was true, but Guderian and his colleagues underestimated the desire within the Red Army to learn from its mistakes.
The process of reform was not, of course, easy or rapid. Stalin and his placemen, especially senior commissars, refused to acknowledge that their political interference and obsessive blindness had caused such disasters. Front and army commanders had been hamstrung by the Kremlin’s militarily illogical instructions. To make matters worse, the ‘dual command’ system of commissars approving orders was reinstituted on 16 July. The political controllers of the Red Army tried to escape their responsibility by accusing front-line commanders and their staff officers of treason, sabotage or cowardice.
General Pavlov, the commander of the central part of the front, and the general yelling down the telephone that those at the top knew better what was going on, was not saved by having followed orders. Accused of treason, he became the most prominent victim to be executed in this second round of the Red Army purges. The paralysing atmosphere in headquarters can be imagined. A sapper expert in mines, who arrived at a command centre accompanied by NKVD border guards because they knew the area, was greeted by expressions of terror. A general babbled pathetically: ‘I was with the troops, and I did everything—I am not guilty of anything.’ Only then did the sapper officer realize that, on seeing the green tabs of his escort, these staff officers had thought that he had come to arrest them.
During this hysteria of deflected blame, the groundwork for reorganization began. Zhukov’s Stavka directive of 15 July 1941 set down ‘a number of conclusions’ following ‘the experience of three weeks of war against German fascism’. His main argument was that the Red Army had suffered from bad communications and overlarge, sluggish formations, which simply presented a ‘vulnerable target for air attack’. Large armies with several corps ‘made it difficult to organize command and control during a battle, especially because so many of our officers are young and inexperienced’. (Even if the purges were not mentioned, their shadow was impossible to forget.) ‘The Stavka’, he wrote, ‘therefore believes it is necessary to prepare to change to a system of small armies consisting of a maximum of five or six divisions.’ This step, when eventually introduced, greatly improved the rapidity of response, largely by cutting out the corps level of command between division and army.