Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (32 page)

During the spring months, Mark Healy records, the Red Army laid tens of thousands of mines across the entire salient, all of them soon to be hidden by the growing summer wheat. “The density of the minefields, particularly between the strongpoints, was remarkably high, with antitank mines averaging 2,400 per mile and antipersonnel mines 2,700 per mile.” The Soviet defensive minefield belts, carefully laid by the invaluable sapper units, were, one scholar notes, between 16 and 25 miles deep. They thus completely blocked the prospect of lightning armored strikes.
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When and where the static mines did not disrupt the panzer thrusts, the Red Army’s antitank weaponry did so. The Russians, like the British, traditionally placed enormous reliance upon field artillery, the “gunners”: that is, upon a combination of mortars/howitzers, regular heavy field guns, and screaming Katyushas (multiple-warhead rockets loaded and launched on a Red Army truck) to beat off enemy attacks, assault enemy lines, and blow the enemy to pieces before the tanks and infantry had even started moving. At Kursk, the Red Army deployed more than 20,000 guns and mortars, a number far larger than the Wehrmacht possessed at this stage in the war. The 85 mm dual-purpose guns were especially effective, because the Red Army had at last learned to group them into very large clusters and to site the individual weapons
in ditches, in concrete buildings, and in thousands of prefabricated and even portable concrete pillboxes. Almost all of this weaponry, offensive and defensive, had actually been around in embryonic form in 1941. But, like the early T-34 tanks, they had always been scattered—“in driblets,” to use John Erickson’s favorite term—and there were never enough of them to stabilize that wide, collapsing front.

In addition, however, two weapons were specifically designed to disable enemy tanks. The first was a primitive yet effective antitank rifle (the Degtyaryov PTRD-41) that a simple infantry platoon could use to blow off a panzer’s track or any other exposed part, including the driver. Although a crude weapon compared with later American bazookas and German
Panzerfausts,
it was effective because the Soviets employed more of them by far than any other army, and expected their platoons to get right in close to the German tanks. The Red Army often won the Ostfeldzug by still being primitive in many ways (thus the early T-34s, while easily knocked out of action by superior German armor, could be cannibalized for spare parts) and also by being willing to expend more of its troops than anybody else. To the Stavka, losing half a platoon in order to cripple two panzers was worth it.
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The second was the much more powerful antitank gun, at first a long-barreled 45 mm weapon with a mixed record of success—fast-moving panzer columns blew many of them away—followed by the much more powerful 57 mm ZiS-2. Production of the latter, which was designed by V. G. Grabin and built at the vast Artillery Factory No. 92 in Gorki, was begun in 1941, inexplicably halted through 1942, then resumed in earnest when the Red Army witnessed the sheer defensive strength of the new Panther and Tiger tanks and realized that their own 45 mm guns were not powerful enough. The 57 mm guns slid off the production line from June 1943 onward, only a short while before the July 5 German offensive against Kursk. Once again, one is struck by how late in the day the tide turned in this and in other campaigns, as improved weaponry finally reached the battlefronts. About this particular clash, John Keegan suggests that “Kursk may be regarded as the first battle in which the anti-tank gun … actually performed the role intended for it—to deflect and if possible destroy attacking enemy tanks without recourse to supporting armor.”
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Kathy Barbier’s description of how the Red Army put the pieces together before the Kursk onslaughts cannot be bettered. By July 1943, she explains,

The point, again, was that neither the antitank rifles nor the PaK bazookas—nor, for that matter, the silent mines—needed to do anything more than disable an oncoming tank. If its caterpillar tread was damaged, the behemoth was immobilized, its capacity for attack destroyed. Additionally, as we have noted, the Wehrmacht was not very effective in bringing up its repair teams, and even at this stage in the war it did not appear to grasp that smart logistics are the foundations of victory.

That strategic polemicist Fuller, despite all his enthusiasm for rapid, long-range military strikes, often remarked that while the panzer’s purpose was inherently offensive, the infantry’s role was inherently defensive. The problem was that Fuller and his ilk assumed that a swift armored blow would always work, and thus the offensive would prevail. But that simply could not happen through the
eight
successive lines around Kursk, nor the many lines around El Alamein when Rommel launched his assault. And behind those lines were groups of enemy tanks waiting to counterattack when the assaulting panzers had lost half or more of their initial strength.

Thus the record suggests that the practical problems facing the Wehrmacht by this stage in the war on the Eastern Front included (1) running out of ammunition and fuel, (2) those insidious minefields,
and (3) the effective Red Army antitank platoons. The geographic problem was that there were no longer any weak places that would permit a Guderian-like exploitation. It was therefore no wonder that the official war diaries of the German armies that struck both from the north and from the south of the Kursk salient in July 1943 kept reporting that they were trying a change of direction or a switch to another flank, always in the hope of finding a weak spot. There were none.

Finally, from mid-1943 onward, all those Russian weapons systems had one further advantage: the mobility brought about by the continual stream of Studebaker trucks and the ubiquitous jeeps. Mutual Cold War chauvinisms later produced a silly debate about how much or how little American Lend-Lease aid actually “helped” the USSR during the war, and it is quite true that the majority of Red Army vehicles (58 percent of its 665,000 trucks by war’s end) was produced in the country itself. Yet it is also true that the American trucks and jeeps were significantly more robust and reliable, that the frontline Soviet commanders insisted on having them, and that they were exclusively used to carry guns and ammunition for combat units, while the Russian trucks were employed to bring up follow-on supplies and carry back the wounded. (A nice symbiosis is observable here: American trucks, brought over in British naval convoys, helped Zhukov’s frontline mobility.) By 1944, ironically, a completely motorized Russian antitank regiment could probably move around faster than a tank regiment itself. No other army managed that.
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The Red Army’s successful defense at Kursk and then its steady advance westward over the next year were helped by three other advantages it held over the Wehrmacht: bridge-building capacities, deception techniques, and the assistance of a vast network of partisans. The first two of these offer fine examples of midlevel organizations providing solutions to acute military problems. How, for example, did one get three, four, or five Soviet armies and their heavy equipment across big rivers in the steady reconquest of Eurasia after the summer of 1943? The next chapter will examine the story of the Anglo-American efforts, often at first unsuccessful, to cross great stretches of water and land on an enemy-held shoreline. But this was also a massive logistical challenge for any Soviet army group (consisting as it did of tanks, self-propelled guns, heavy artillery, Katyusha rocket launchers, trucks, headquarters
equipment, and all the rest) because of the physical obstacles posed by the extremely wide and reed-bed-surrounded rivers so familiar in the history of Russia—the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Vistula.

This was a logistical problem that the Russians, because of their geography and their history, had had to deal with over the centuries—in 1799, for example, the great General Alexander Suvorov took an entire army to the Alps, obviously crossing a large number of rivers in between. While pontoon construction does not occupy a high place in the planning documents about Soviet rearmament plans in the 1930s, the fact was that by January 1, 1942, as the battle for Moscow was drawing to its close, the Red Army already possessed 82 engineer battalions and a further 46 separate pontoon bridge battalions, which turned out to be of great importance three years later in advancing upon Berlin. By January 1944, the Red Army had no fewer than 184 engineer battalions and 68 pontoon bridge battalions.
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One has the sense that the Soviet system accorded much more importance to engineers in general than did the German high command.

The logistical problem was worked out by the design bureaus of the People’s Commissariat of Defense (NKO)—though we still lack many details of who these designers were because of the unavailability of the archives—in the emergency created by the launch of Operation Barbarossa. At first they couldn’t do much, for it was difficult to design and build pontoon bridges when the invader was crashing through Minsk, Kiev, Smolensk, and on to Moscow. Yet by the spring of 1942 the NKO was sending forward its first kits, fairly primitive all-wooden ferries (rafts, really) that could transport troops and light equipment across a river, and which could be strung together to form the underpinnings of an improvised and very rapidly made bridge, then dismantled to be used elsewhere. These “pontoon-bridge parks” relied upon simple, sturdy, and mass-produced equipment; for that reason, the factories never built the equivalent of the American LCTs (landing craft, tanks). Yet by September 1942 the first of the new-model TMP pontoon bridges were reaching the front, just in time for Stalingrad. Their professional assembly crews needed only three to five hours to erect across the Volga—which was a mile wide at points—a bridge with a total load capacity of 80 tons. This was a remarkable feat.
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At the same time, another group of NKO designers and production teams was working on specialized equipment to be used in one of the Red Army’s most favored tactics—
maskirovka,
or deception ploys. The idea was as old as fighting itself—Scipio, Frederick, Napoleon, and Sherman all used deception techniques, and the Western Allies were to do the same, very successfully, before and during the D-Day landings. The Stavka regarded deception as an essential part in Russia’s advance westward, for two obvious reasons: first, they shared the universal respect for the German army’s capacity to react swiftly and fiercely to an assault on any front, and second, attacking across a wide and swift-flowing river was about as precarious an undertaking as landing across coral reefs, because of vulnerability to enemy fire from the shore. It was important to strike where the enemy wasn’t, or where he was only holding a weak line. The NKO therefore threw itself into the production of an inventory of goods, from camouflage netting and artificial terrain-masking materials to mock-up and dummy tanks, artillery, and other large weapons. False trenches, fake airfields, and promising-looking tank parks were also constructed. These were all handled in the field by special
maskirovka
companies assigned to each Red Army front for the twin task of hiding where the army was strong and falsely pointing to locations from which an attack would not be made.
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The successful deployment of these new techniques was immensely assisted by the rapid growth of Soviet partisan groups within the German-held territories from about mid-1942 onward. Here the folly of the cruel Nazi treatment of the Ukrainians and other ethnic groups within Stalin’s loathed empire came back to haunt the German high command. The harsher their reaction to partisan activities (mass shootings, hangings from trees, the burning of churches), the more they drove the people—men, women, and children—into resistance. Apparently the difficulties they encountered with their repressions in Crete, Greece, and Yugoslavia conveyed no lessons to the Wehrmacht. Thus from Brittany to Belarus, from Norway to Rhodes, the German armed forces faced the double task of handling the assaults of the Grand Alliance and responding to sporadic attacks from within their conquered lands. The Soviet special-operations coordinators, like their British equivalents, worked assiduously to supply the partisans with small arms, dynamite, radios, and explosives experts. As soon as the Kursk
battle began, an estimated 100,000 guerrillas began sabotage and sniping. During June 1943, partisan groups destroyed 298 locomotives, 1,222 railroad carriages, and 44 bridges in the area directly behind Army Group Center—a worrying sign to Manstein and the other generals as they prepared for the assault upon Kursk. A year later, just before the Red Army’s next big push (Operation Bagration, to be described later), Belarusian guerrillas were detonating tens of thousands of charges against German rail lines and bridges, and waiting for the order to attack straggling German army platoons after the big knockout blows were delivered. Still, while the partisans could assist the Red Army, they were not themselves capable of turning the tide on the Eastern Front. As one scholar has noted, their greatest impact occurred when the main Soviet armies were already heading toward Berlin.
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The partisans also supplied lots of information about German troop movements. It was, admittedly, often difficult to make much sense of this, because by 1943–44 reports were coming in from dozens if not hundreds of guerrilla groups, and the Stavka faced a problem very like the one that had confronted American planners before Pearl Harbor—too much “noise.” The Soviet high command’s intelligence challenge was that it needed specific data: exact times, exact numbers, exact line of first attack, exact route of the
Kesselschlacht
move, and so on. Pretty well everyone—the Lucy Spy Ring in Switzerland, British Enigma decrypts, Die Rote Kapelle, members of the Cambridge Five, captured prisoners—was reporting in an urgent way that a large German offensive would come in June or July 1943, but what did that tell Zhukov that he didn’t know already? The Stavka had already issued three separate alerts in the month of May alone. By early July, the suspense at the front was barely tolerable. Then, at 2:00 a.m. on July 5, a forward Russian platoon captured a German engineer clearing minefields. Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovski at once decided to begin massive spoiling fire (the contrast with the forced inactivity on June 21–22, 1941, is striking). The struggle for the salient was now on. But what role intelligence played in it still seems unclear, and the debate among scholars over Kursk and Russian intelligence continues unabated.
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