Stalin seems to have realised from the very beginning that at the back of the new industry of the Soviet Union must stand a united nation keenly conscious of the immanence of war and prepared to take an active part in it to the last man and last woman. As already has been said, the Russian people have been war-minded ever since the foreign interventions of 1919-1920. This war-mindedness has been sedulously cultivated by the government and through the press, the radio, the party organisation, the Red Army, and the great annual celebrations of November 7 in Red Square. The theme of the official propaganda has been the USSR, a nation of workers and peasants, is encircled by capitalist states. The “capitalists and imperialists”-that is, the whole non-Soviet world-are, by the nature of things, hostile to Soviet society and the Soviet state. Naturally enough, the existing fear of war was enormously increased after the advent of the Nazis, with their revival of German imperialism, their anti-Bolshevik propaganda, their anti-Comintern Pact, and their ascendant military power. By 1938 Hitler had at his command the most formidable army in Europe, which he stated repeatedly was for use in securing Lebensraum at the expense of the Soviet Union. Every reader of Mein Kampf knew that Hitler denounced the leaders of Russia as “common bloodstained criminals... the scum of humanity,” belonging to “a nation which combines a rare mixture of bestial horror with an inconceivable gift of lying.” Strident voices shouted these and similar sentiments over the German radio from 1933 to 1943, with the exception of the brief interval of the Hitler-Stain agreement of 1939-1941.

Myth 2. The Soviet Union was unprepared for the Nazi invasion

Stalin's role in Soviet war doctrine and in modern military history is to be found not in statements of tactical and strategic theories but in his achievements in industrializing the Soviet Union, in training its men, women, and children for industry and modern mechanized war, and in fostering in the population as a whole that psychological preparedness which has been so invaluable in the resistance to the Nazis. Stalin's regime prepared for total war on a scale which few persons in the outside world even remotely suspected or comprehended.

2a. Preparation of the industrial base

That the principal motivating force of the Five Year Plans was the fear of war and defeat is highly probable, if not certain. As far back as 1924 Frunze had pointed out that because of the backwardness of Russian industry as a whole, the primitive character of its automotive industries in particular, the Red Army could not be increased in size or improved in quality and could hardly hope therefore to compete with others on anything like equal terms. Furthermore, the Russian soldier was almost entirely without mechanical training or mechanical sense, which only the large-scale industrialisation of the nation could provide. Voroshilov was even more aware of the technical backwardness of the Red Army; he described the state of the war industry before 1928 as “chaos and disorganisation” and as “the sore spot of our economy,” a potential cause of military defeat. He warned, also, that the railways and other internal communications in Russia were altogether inadequate to the needs of modern war. He wanted the Red Army raised to the efficiency of other armies without any increase in numbers, because quantity in war is no adequate substitute for quality. Hence, in his judgement, the first and principal aim of the First Five Year Plan should be to build those basic industries which were related to the production of war materials and to lay the foundation for the technical education of Soviet manhood. Throughout the period of industrialization, the equipment of the Red Army was given priority over all other demands for manufactured and semi-manufactured goods, raw material priorities, and the allotment of skilled labor. A great many observers of the Russian scene during the years 1928-1938 thought that the scarcity of consumers' goods in the USSR was due to the inefficiency in the administration of industry. As events proved, however, the primary cause was a war economy which sacrificed everything to the interests of the army and military preparedness.

Almost innumerable figures could be used to to show the intensity and extent of industrialization during the years 1928-1941. Perhaps the most graphic single fact is the movement of people from country to town, from agriculture to industry, between 1926 and 1939, the greater part of which came after the initiation of the First Five Year, plan in 1928. In about a decade the industrial population of the Soviet Union increased from about sixteen percent of the total to about forty-six percent-almost threefold. This was made possible by a decline in farming groups from almost seventy-seven percent of the total to less than forty-seven percent. No such drastic shift in the economic centre of gravity of a nation, in so brief a time, is recorded in the whole of the history of mankind, certainly not in modern times.

{…}

It is improbable that any leader in the USSR other than Stalin would have possessed the iron will required to give effect to a planned economy which so thoroughly uprooted humanity. The Russian people made a terrifying investment in their future during those awful years, but, seen in the light of later developments, they undoubtedly saved the revolution and their national independence.

For the war potential of the Soviet Union is built upon its geographic position, its resources, and the quantity and quality of its manpower. But its resources would be of no military value unless converted by modern industry into the instruments of war, and its manpower would be ineffective without the mechanical aptitudes which only an industrialized country can transmit to its youth, the raw material of the armed forces.

{…}

The Fire Year Plans involved other objectives of importance to the Soviet military effort. A vast reservoir of skilled and semi-skilled labor was created, partly by industrial conscription; war industries were dispersed and thereby rendered less vulnerable to an invading army; ghost factories were brought into being and whole new cities sprang east of the capital and even beyond the Urals; plans were laid for the eastward migration of industrial plants in wartime; the largest possible measure of self sufficiency was sought. Out of the expanded national income, an increasingly large proportion went to expenditures for the armed forces. All of this and more was achieved at enormous sacrifice to the population as a whole, for not even in Nazi Germany was the butter of civilians so completely converted into guns for the army. The test of any policy is, of course, its ultimate results. Only the Russians themselves can say whether their survival as a nation was worth the price they paid over the years 1928-1941.

2b. Preparation of the population

Stalin was able to make “military preparedness, the art of warfare, and the science of war the every day occupation of Russia's workers, peasants, students, and civil servants.” A quasi official organisation-Osoaviakhim-formed by the merger in 1927 of Oso (for defense) with Aviakhim (aviation and chemistry)-was the principal agency through which the mobilisation of the civil population was effected. Osoaviakhim was founded on the principal that, as the entire population must take part in the coming war, the entire population must be actively and adequately prepared for it. It helped make the nation mechanically minded for the era of mechanized warfare and defense minded for the tasks of active resistance to the enemy. It had a membership of about eleven millions in 1931, and the goal for the following year was almost twice that number. It taught courses in technical warfare, in marksmanship (including sniping), various phases of military aviation, gas warfare, air raid defense, meteorology, gliding and parachuting, military communication and administration, and almost every other subject which could conceivably be related to the war effort-all of this for civilians. To cite specific achievements, literally hundreds of thousands of Russians were instructed to handle firearms and hundreds of thousands more more were taught to drive motor cars and trucks. In short “a general knowledge of warfare was provided to the whole population, and specialized knowledge was made available to substantial numbers of Soviet citizens through organized instruction and training.” Nothing quite like Osoaviakhim exists outside of the USSR. To it must be assigned a large share of the credit for the heroic resistance of the entire population of the Soviet Union to the German invasion. Without it, it is difficult to believe that the bright pages of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Sevastopol could have been written or that mobilisation and defense against air raids could have preceded so efficiently and smoothly.

It would be impossible to pay adequate tribute to the magnificent contribution which women have made to the total defense of the USSR. By the statute of August 8, 1928, they were accepted as volunteers in the armed forces and were subject to conscription for specialized duties. Although their greatest service has been in non-combat work, they have served in the ranks of the army on the same basis as men in several branches of the service. And as about sixty percent of all the physicians and surgeons in Russia are women, their contribution to the medical corps has been indispensable. In no country of the world have women done so much, so soon, and so efficiently for the cause of national security. From the very beginning the Soviet concept of total war has recognized no barriers of sex. The enlistment of women in war activities was in accordance with the Marxist ideal of the nation-in-arms and the Marxist belief that the army must be inseparable from the whole people.

2c. Preparation of the Red Army

Radical changes were being effected in the Red Army. In March, 1934, as soon as the first material results of the Five Year Plan permitted, the number of troops in the standing army was increased from 560,000 to 940,000. The following year there was a further increase to 1,300,000. In 1935, also, the Far Eastern Army was made an autonomous and self-sufficient force. By January, 1936, seventy-seven percent of the Red Army were in the regular forces and only twenty-three percent in the militia-reversing the ratio of 1924. In March, 1939, the Red Army was put entirely on a regular basis. “The territorial system, as the foundation of our armed forces,” Voroshilov told the Party Congress, “came into contradiction with the requirements of the defense of the state, as soon as the principal imperialist countries began to increase their armies in size and to place them on a war footing even in peacetime.” While expansion and changes in organisation were going forward, the Red Army was being completely re-equipped and again re-equipped, as the dividends of industrialization became available; to all intents and purposes it became an entirely new army. The Red Air Force was being built up at a rapid pace and, despite the gloomy comments of some foreign critics, was becoming a formidable weapon. Enormous reserves of munitions, ordnance and materiel were accumulated

{…}

Discipline was tightened and compulsory salutes were restored. Every opportunity was given younger officers to earn promotion. As a result of the poor showing made by the Red Army in the early phases of the war with Finland, Marshall Timoshenko was charged with the responsibility of bringing the armed forces to a higher state of efficiency. This he succeeded in accomplishing by the strictest enforcement of the foregoing and other reforms, so that by the time the Germans launched their attack on the USSR in June, 1941, the Red Army had acquired a high degree of effectiveness

Myth 3. The purges damaged the Red Army’s ability to resist the Nazi invasion

One of the striking features of the Russo-German war has been the high quality of the staff work in the Red Army. This has been the more remarkable because it had been freely prophesied by persons outside of the Soviet Union that the great purge of 1937, which removed Marshal Tukhachevsky and others from the rolls, would disrupt the high command. Such might have been the case had it not been that the progress of the Five Year Plans, the mobilization of the whole population for war, and the drastic changes made in the composition of the Red Army gathered increasing momentum after 1937 and offset any consequences, psychological or otherwise, of the purge. Furthermore, the new chief of staff Shaposhnikov assured a certain continuity of policy and strategy

Myth 4. The Red army retreated in disarray in the face of the Nazi onslaught

Before the German successes in Poland, the Red Army had evolved a fairly coherent military strategy. As has been seen, it was a predominantly offensive strategy which had been outlined by Tukhachevsky, although both he and Shaposhnikov had visualised the possibility that a European war would become so vast in scale and of such a degree of intensity that it would become a war of attrition in which Russia might have to resort to the defensive for a time. A doctrine for such a contingency had therefore been worked out with some care and had been incorporated into the new Field Service Regulations of 1936. It was based upon the concept of defense in depth. Resistance to an invader was not to be based upon fortifications and position but was to be elastic and founded upon manoeuvre. Modern weapons, especially the tank, it was pointed out, could be used by an army on the strategic defensive as well as by an army on the attack. In fact, the Regulations of 1936 placed great emphasis upon the importance-indeed the imperative necessity-of close integration of all arms in both offensive and defensive operations. This applied especially to aviation; and although the Red Air Force was coordinate with the army, it had not developed the theory of independent air power as advocated by Douhet and others, but was closer to the Luftwaffe's role of cooperation with ground troops.

The German campaign in France in the spring of 1940, which was not that different from the campaign of 1939 in Poland, provided the Red Army with a blueprint of the attack against them which was to come a year later. The Germans, the Russians reasoned, would depend upon surprise and speed, aerial assault upon communications and services of supply, mobile warfare aimed at encirclement and annihilation-the most gigantic Cannae in all history. Hitler was determined to try what Falkenhayn, Seeckt, Leeb and other had always thought could not be done-to deliver a knock-out blow to Russia within a relatively brief time. The Russians were reasonably sure that unlike the Low Countries they could not be overrun and that unlike Poland they could not be paralysed by by aerial assault. But they knew that they had a prodigious task on their hands of meeting an invasion of such tremendous scale and intensity. It is doubtful, however, that they could have imagined even vaguely the purgatory through which they were to pass before, in the summer of 1943, they could seize the initiative.

What the Russians had to do was fairly obvious. They had to keep the Red Army intact, “in being,” at all costs. They had to avoid encirclement as far as possible; such units as could not escape were to resist to the last. They must trade space for time-that is to say, they must bring about protracted war by compelling the Germans to punch deep into Soviet territory without obtaining a decision. But the territory which the Wehrmacht acquired must be made virtually useless by wholesale devastation and rendered insecure by incessant guerilla warfare. The resulting warfare of attrition and extended lines sooner or later would give the Red Army the great opportunity for which it had been trained and indoctrinated ever since the civil war-the opportunity to destroy the enemy by an offensive. “according to the {new} Soviet concept, blitzkrieg came at the end of the war, not at the beginning.”

In evolving a strategy of retreat for 1941 the Red Army was completely unaffected by the defeatism of Weygand and Petain, but rather was adopting the policy of active defense which ha been ably advanced by Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb of Hitler's Army. The facts of geography and the force of historic tradition must have been almost equally persuasive. Space and cold and rain and mud have always stood in the way of the would-be conqueror of Russia-natural barriers perhaps even more formidable under the conditions of mechanised war, than rivers or mountain ranges. When the storm broke over the Soviet Union in June, 1941, the minds of people everywhere travelled back to 1812, the name of Napoleon was on the lips of millions.

Under the guidance of the Kremlin and under the leadership of brilliant young generals who won recognition in the inexorable tests of combat, the Red Army preceded to carry out its long-range war plan. Active defense as conducted by the Soviet forces meant, in the words of the Soviet analyst Professor Minz, “fighting for every inch of territory, holding on to every village and town for as long as possible to gain time, bleeding the enemy as much as possible, inflicting the greatest possible losses upon him, wearing down his forces and launching frequent and impetuous counter attacks.” Marshal Timoshenko's chief of staff, General Sokolovsky, described these tactics by the picturesque and illuminating term “blitzgrinding.” Active defense required and encircled unit, large or small, to continue to give unrelenting battle to the invader-what the Germans, in frustration, called “senseless resistance.” It also included carefully organised guerrillas warfare, of which the Russians have been past masters throughout their history-a type of warfare to which modern armies are particularly susceptible because of the complex character of their weapons, equipment, communications, and supply. It meant devoted and courageous sacrifice by tents of millions of people in every walk of life. The USSR in fact has come nearer the goal of the nation-in-arms than any other nation in history.

One of the stupidest myths about operation Barbarossa is that the Nazis were on the brink of victory, that if Hitler had just reached Moscow the Nazis would have won; or that if Stalin had “fled” Moscow the Nazis would have won. Dumb dumb dumb, any non idiotic observer could have seen that 1) the soviet counter-attack would have occurred regardless of whether the Nazis had taken Moscow. 2) the Wehrmacht was so strung out by this point that they had no chance of taking Moscow in the first place, especially considering the later demonstration of city warfare at Stalingrad; and 3) Kutuzov retreated (n.b. retreated) from Moscow, taking every single scrap of food and supplies, burning the rest, and for good measure took the entire population of 270,000 with him leaving Napoleon with an empty, useless city, which Russian guerillas then burn to the ground once Napoleon had entered, and then then went on to drive Napoleon all the way to Elba. Anyway, point is that if the Nazis had captured Moscow they still would have lost.


Myth 5. The Red Army was a monolithic entity bound by dogma which stifled innovation and prevented adaptation to the Nazi invasion

Of great value in the tactical execution of the strategic defensive was the emphasis which the Field Service Regulations of 1936 put upon the individual soldier and the junior officer. “All sensible initiative of subordinates must be encouraged through all possible means,” said the Regulations, “and must be exploited by the commander in the general interest of battle. Sensible initiative is based upon an understanding of the commander's intentions.” The problem, then, was to relate the purposes of high command to the company commander and his men. Stalin himself understood the difficulty, although he suggested no definitive solution: “We leaders see things, events, people, from one angle only, so to speak from above. Therefore our horizon is more or less limited. The masses, on the other hand, see things, events, people from another angle, that is to say from below, and their horizon also is limited to a certain extent. To find a right solution of problems we must combine these experiences. Only then will management be correct.” It was undoubtedly a keen appreciation of the importance in individual initiative that led to so high a standard of competence of the Red soldier and hence to such a great effectiveness in the defensive operations of 1941-1943

It was fortunate of the USSR that, despite almost idolatrous worship of the offensive, it had made adequate preparations for defense and, particularly defense in depth. For the German conquest of Poland in 1939 and the collapse of France the next spring required a complete re-examination of all former military doctrine. A characteristic of Soviet attitude in domestic affairs had been adaptability, a willingness to change the party line, and an absorbing interest in attempting the new and untried. This flexibility, easily applied to the military sphere, has stood Stalin in good stead. Readiness, indeed eagerness, to alter existing plans in the face of new conditions has been an outstanding virtue of the Red Army and its personnel during the stresses and strain of 1941 and 1942. Even the junior officers seem to have understood the necessity of constant adaptability to the unprecedented problems which arose in meeting the German assault.

6. Bonus Question. Stalin should have attacked Germany in 1939

are u a fukkin idiot?

I'll leave with this final quote from Meade:-

Stalin is a titan in his own right. It took a heart of oak, nerves of steel, and veins of ice to assume the responsibilities which were involved in the Great Retreat. The stature of Marshal Stalin may be measured by the fact that his decisions were military decisions, not decisions of prestige for himself and his regime. There must have been doubts in many minds as to whether any dictatorship could stand up under the long series of blows which threatened to pulverize the Soviet Union during 1941 and 1942. But not once did Stalin, unlike Hitler, distort the fundamental truths of the situation or subordinate the goal of ultimate military victory to the momentary demands of popular morale. There is something awe-inspiring in Stalin's broadcast to his people of July 3, 1941, exhorting them to scorch the earth and to fight as a nation of guerillas. It was magnificent, it was terrifying-and it was war.

“In case of a forced retreat of Red Army units,” he said, “all rolling stock must be evacuated; to the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel.

“collective farmers must drive off their cattle and turn over their grain to the safekeeping of State authorities for transportation to the rear. All valuable property including non-ferrous metals, grain and fuel which cannot be withdrawn, must without fail be destroyed.

“In areas occupied by the enemy, guerilla units, mounted and on foot, must be formed, diversionist groups must be organised to combat enemy troops, to foment guerilla warfare everywhere, to blow up bridges, roads, damage telephone and telegraph lines and to set fire to forests, stores and transports.

“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.”

Edited by drwhat (April 19, 2017 11:27:11)

Time alone will tell whether Stalin will be judged in the future as more Russian than Peter the Great or more Communist than Lenin. But there are straws in the wind by which the student of politics may chart his course. And chart a course every statesman must, for the existence of Russian military power of the present magnitude is an entirely new factor in European and world politics. Russia has all the elements of fundamental strength, all the essential factors of the ear potential. She has a vast territorial domain, superabundant natural resources, a vital and growing population, an industrialized society, and a dynamic political system. Other nations may wane, but the USSR and USA will emerge from the present struggle in overwhelming strength. It is even probable that before the twentieth century has run its course, the Soviet Union will be the most powerful nation in the world. How she uses her vast power is portentous for the future of all mankind The Moscow and Tehran conferences have given us reason to hope that Russian power may be a stabilizing influence in peace, as it has been a determining influence in war

makes a nice change from reading “Putin: the neo-Soviet Hitler” or whatever passes for military-strategic writings these days

The Russians, April 1945 – Martha Gellhorn

One Russian guard stood at the pontoon bridge on our side of the Elbe. He was small and shaggy and bright-eyed. He waved to us to stop and came over to the jeep and spoke Russian very fast, smiling all the time. Then he shook hands and said, ’Amerikanski?’ He shook hands again and we saluted each other. A silence followed, during which we all smiled. I tried German, French, Spanish and English, in that order. We wanted to cross the Elbe to the Russian side and pay a visit to our allies. None of these languages worked. The Russians speak Russian. The GI driver then made a few remarks in Russian, which I found dazzling. 'You got to talk a little bit of everything to get around these days,’ he said. The Russian guard had listened and digested our request and he now answered. The operative word in his answer was: nyet. It is the only word in Russian I know, but you hear it a lot, and afterwards there is no use arguing.

So we drove back to the CP of a Russian officer, who perhaps controlled that bridge. Here we had another brilliant and enjoyable conversation, filled with handshakes, laughter and good will; the operative word again was nyet. It was suggested that I go to a building in Torgau, a little way farther back from the river, where I would find more of my compatriots who were waiting for one thing or another. This was a square gray German house, outside of which were parked various jeeps and staff cars belonging to various American and English officers who were waiting to cross the Elbe on business. The situation seemed to be permanently snafu. The atmosphere was one of baffled but cordial resignation. Officers stood in the street and speculated on Russian time, which was either one or two hours earlier or later than ours. They asked themselves whether the Russian General who was due today (they thought), but who had actually arrived and departed yesterday, would possibly come tomorrow and if so at whose hour, ours or theirs. They said that it was pointless to try to telephone across the river because the telephone, which was located in the first Russian office I had visited, was in a purely experimental stage and anyhow you never got an answer to anything by telephone, if in the first place the telephone worked and you happened to reach anyone at the other end. They said, this is the way it is, chum, and you may as well get used to waiting because wait is what you do. You could cross the Elbe to the Russian side only if accompanied by a Russian officer who had come to get you to take you to a specific place for a specific purpose. There was no nonsense about walking across a few hundred yards of pontoon bridge and fraternizing with our allies.

It was quite agreeable in the sun, and the street was interesting. Two Russian girl soldiers passed, and a Russian nurse wearing a pistol competently on her hip. A Russian soldier in a blue overall, with blue eyes to match, wandered up and said ’Amerikanski?’ and shook everyone’s hand and was treated to a flood of GI jokes, to all of which he responded with smiles and the word ’Russki.’ Then he said, ’Na,’ with a little sigh, and shook hands all around again and went about his business. The morning wore on and obviously nothing was going to happen, so we drove through the Russian part of Torgau and across a bridge guarded by MPs, and went to the American Battalion Headquarters for lunch. There we found a very large jolly soiled Russian colonel and his interpreter, doing their best to cope with a plate of K rations. They were no more enthusiastic about K rations than we are, which proves them to be men of taste, but they did like the coffee. No one was looking very spick-and-span in Battalion Headquarters, since combat troops are too hurried and occupied to look spick-and-span and also there is usually no water in newly liberated towns. However, the Russians all looked as if they hadn’t had time for a bath since Stalingrad.

The colonel was delightful and had a handshake like the death squeeze of a grizzly bear, and through his interpreter he said he would take me across the Elbe tonight, as he was going back to his Division Headquarters, and he would call for me at five-thirty. After a certain amount of discussion we agreed on whose five-thirty that would be, his or ours, and everyone was happy. At five-thirty he had not come and runners went out to search for him. At six-thirty I went back to the Russian part of Torgau and tracked him down.

He insisted that I come and eat with them; they were having a little snack. The little snack was a dream, consisting of hard-boiled eggs and three kinds of sausage and pickles and butter and honey and various wines, and I decided that the Russians had a more sensible approach to rationing than we have. It is old fashioned but effective and saves a lot of trouble; you live off the land and any land can beat K rations. We began to talk about crossing the Elbe. It appeared that the Colonel had not understood my request; no, it would be impossible to go unless the General gave his permission. Then could he telephone to the General? What, now? Yes, now.

'Time is money,’ said the interpreter.

'You are in such a hurry,’ said the Colonel. ’We will talk this all over later.’

'You do not understand,’ I said, ’I am a wage slave. I work for a bunch of capitalist ogres in New York who drive me night and day and give me no rest. I will be severely punished if I hang around here eating with you citizens, when it is my duty to my country to cross the Elbe and salute our gallant allies.’

They thought this was fine, but still nothing happened.

'Go on and call the General,’ I said, trying the wheedle angle. ’What difference will it make to the General if one insignificant female correspondent pays him a visit?’

'Hokay,’ said the Colonel, that being the one American word he knew. He went out to telephone the General, and more time passed.

There was another colonel and the interpreter, and between mouthfuls of hard-boiled eggs we had a splendid talk We discussed the Germans and were in perfect agreement all along the line. We discussed the American Army and were in perfect agreement all along the line. I was told of the wonders of Russia, which I have never seen, and l was urged to visit the Crimea in the summer, since it is of surpassing beauty. I said I would. I was asked what I thought about the Russian Army. I said I would give anything to see it but in the meantime I thought it was wonderful, the whole world thought it was wonderful. We had a few toasts. We toasted ’Treemann’ for quite a while before I realized we were toasting the President; the way they said it, I imagined it was some crisp Russian term meaning bottoms up. Then the Colonel came back. The operative word again was nyet. I do not think he had telephoned the General, but it was nyet anyhow.

The conversation had been purely gay and they are very gay, but all of a sudden it got serious. We were talking about their medals. They do not wear ribbons, they wear the entire medal, officers and men alike, and the medals are worn on both sides of the chest and look terrific. There are handsome enamel decorations for killing Germans-I believe each decoration equals fifty dead Germans but I am not sure of this-and there are medals for individual heroism and for battles.

Out of the blue, the interpreter said, ’I am a Polish Jew. My father was shot by the Germans. Three months later my mother was put to death in a gas chamber. They came for my wife and she was still bandaged from an operation, she could not even stand up straight. They took her away to work and there was the child, four months old, left behind. They killed the child by striking it across the head with a pistol, but my wife did not know this. She got a little letter to me, that was more than four years ago, and said, ”Do not wait for me, I will never come back, take the child and find him a mother and make a new life." She did not know the child was dead.’ He brought from his pocket a Russian newspaper with pictures in it, such as you have all seen by now. These were taken at Lemburg and showed the horribly familiar but never endurable piles of dead and the mass hangings and the mutilated bodies of those who had been tortured. ’Lemberg was my home,’ said the interpreter. ’When the Germans come crying to me, asking for this or asking for that, I show them these pictures and I say to them, ”Look first and then cry!’"

’Let us go out and walk,’ said the Colonel. ’We must not be sad. We hate war and we would like to go home, for it is many years since we have been home, but we will kill Germans as long as they ask for it. Meanwhile it is a nice night, so we will go walking.’

Torgau in the evening was a picturesque place. From one building came the lovely sad sound of Russian singing, low and slow and mourning; from another building, a young man leaned out of a window and played a very fast bright tune on a harmonica. Rare-looking types wandered around the street; there is the greatest possible variety in the faces and uniforms of the Russian soldiery. There were blonds and Mongols and fierce looking characters with nineteenth-century moustaches and children of about sixteen, and it felt like a vast encampment of a nomad people, where everyone is eating around camp fires, singing, playing cards and getting ready to roll into blankets and sleep. We heard a few stray shots and met a few stray drunks and no one paid the slightest attention. We passed a couple of burning houses which looked very pretty and a yard where a wealth of Torgau bicycles had been collected and stacked-and tomorrow no doubt more of the Russian Army would be mobile.

I said it was all charming, but how about getting across the Elbe? In two weeks, the Colonel said, I am sure it will be arranged. If there was anything I was sure of, it was that I wouldn’t be waiting around Torgau for two weeks. It is a political question, said the interpreter, you are capitalists and we are Communists. I told them heatedly that I did not consider it any of my business whether they were Mormons, cannibals or balletomanes, the pointbeing that we were allies and naturally we were interested in «ch other and each other’s armies No one, said I crossly, minded where they went; their correspondents moved freely with our Army and everyone was delighted to see them. If, on the other hand, they behaved in this suspicious and unfriendly manner, it would make everyone angry and it would be their own fault. We were eager to understand them and none of us in these parts was interested in polities. It would be nice if they acted more open-hearted for a change. They agreed to this but said that in their Army nothing was done without permission; the permission had not been granted as yet. All right, I said, but unless we can all circulate freely amongst each other there will be no trust and no confidence, and that will be terrible.

’It will be arranged in time, you will see,’ said the Colonel.

’Time is money,’ the interpreter remarked, knowingly.

In the morning the pontoon bridge was the center of interest. The day before, to the amazement of the GIs, some Russian soldiers had appeared and washed the boats which supported the wooden treadway. Today more Russians appeared, with pots of green paint, and painted the boats. Small fir trees were stuck up along the treadway and it was the prettiest bridge you could hope to see. Now in the early sun-light, a procession of thin, quiet displaced persons appeared; these were the Russians who had been taken into slavery by the Germans, and they were crossing the Elbe to go home. The Elbe is not very wide and the banks are soft green grass, but as soon as anyone crossed that bridge and disappeared up the opposite bank he might as well have gone to Tibet, because it was forbidden, unimaginable territory.

For a little while there was relative calm and we sat on a stone wall and watched the river and smoked and talked about nothing. Gradually the Russian Army began to cross the bridge to our side of the river. The Army came in like a tide; it had no special shape, there were no orders given. It came and flowed over the stone quay and up on the roads behind us like water rising, like ants, like locusts. It was not so much an army as a whole world on the move. Knowing nothing of the formation of the Russian Army (and never being told by the Russians), one does not know whether this was a regiment or a division or six regiments or six divisions for that matter, but it came on and on and on, inchoate, formless and astonishing, and it was very noisy and slightly mad and it knew exactly what it was doing.

First came men, hordes of them, wearing tunies, greatcoats, baggy khaki-ish clothing, and carrying a light sort of tommy gun, pistols, grenades and generally assorted munitions. They did not seem to march and they did not seem to be numerically divided into groups; they were simply a mass. They looked tired and rather indifferent and definitely experienced. Then some trucks bumped over the bridge-God knows what sort of trucks, or where manufactured. Quantities of men rode on these, also women. These women were uniformed like the men, and equally armed, and were young, absolutely square in build, and tough as prize-fighters. We were told that the women were wonderful snipers and that they served as MPs. At this point a woman soldier arrived at the near end of the bridge, carrying two flags like semaphore flags, and took up her position. She was an MP, and with her flags and an air of authority she proceeded to handle this startling traffic.

A pack train now rumbled across the bridge. It consisted of beat-up carts and wagons and strong but shabby horses, and the drivers handled the horses with a competence that was inspiring and rather like the chariot races in Ben Hur. The pack train carried everything, bedding and clothing and pots and pans and ammunition and also women, because Russian women can go to war with their men, and it seems a reasonable idea. These were no glamour girls; they were peasants and they looked as if no hardship would be too much for them, no roads too long, no winter too cruel, no danger too great.

After the pack train, something like the first locomotive appeared. It was short and had a huge smokestack and it towed two huge wooden cars. The Gls on the wall above the river broke into applause, saying, ’Here comes the motorized stuff! Men on bicycles pedalled across the bridge and more men on foot and then some trucks carrying pontoons. The noise was a splendid Slavic roar mixed with the clang of ron wheels on cobbles and occasional shouts which may have been orders or curses. There was no visible plan to this exodus and you felt you were watching a marvellously realistic movie about the Russian armies during the war against Napoleon It was entirely unlike anything we had ever seen before and it would be impossible to describe the feeling of power that came from this chaos of men and material. We sat on our wall and thought how bitterly the Germans must have regretted attacking the Russians. We thought anyone would be extremely silly to bother these people; for in these great shapeless numbers they were as overwhelming and terrible as a flow of lava.

By a miracle this welter of humanity vanished from Torgau. no one knows how, and proceeded to infiltrate inland to take up the Russian line along the Mulde River, some fifty miles west. 1 have no idm how this was done; it happened. It is to be noted that many of the men wore the medal of the Battle of Stalingrad, and the whole lot had certainly fought their way wast for some three thousand miles, and probably pretty largely on their own feet.

It was lunchtime and the exodus stopped temporarily. The show’s over,’ said a GI sitting next to me. Then, summing up the whole matter, he said with awe, 'My God.’ We walked back to the bridge which leads to the American side of Torgau. Two Gls were guarding the bridge, and a Russian soldier, aged about eighteen, stood across the street apparently guarding it also. Three Russian soldiers were leaning over the stone railing in the middle of the bridge and suddenly there was a loud explosion and a fountain of water coming up from the stream below.

That’s nothing,’ one of the American guards said. 'Ihey're just throwing hand grenades in the water. They’ re crazy about that. 1 don't know what it does to them, but if you see one anywhere near a bridge he’s pretty sure to throw a hand grenade in the water.'

The Russian guard now crossed the street and said in a voice of wonder, ‘Amerikanski?’ to which the GIs replied in a tone of equal wonder, 'Russki?’ We all shook hands.

’You can’t turn around for Russians shaking hands,’ the short GI said. ’Now this ice, for instance, he’s been on this bridge all morning and this is the fourth time he comes over and says “Amerikanski” and gives us the handshaking treatment.’

'It’s to show we’re allies,’ the tall GI explained.

'Sure,’ said the short one, ’that’s okay by me. I only ask myself how many more times today this joe is going through this routine.’

’Look at the ambulance, will you?’ said the tall one. We turned and saw something like a furniture van, painted green and with small red cross on its side. It had stopped farther down the street and a band of wounded crawled, limped or hopped out. They had been packed in on a nest of quilts and mattresses and they disappeared into a house which may have been an aid station.

'That’s the first ambulance I seen,’ the tall one said. 'Seems like if you can walk you go right along in their Army. You see more guys with bandages on their heads. Don’t seem to bother them none.’

’I used to think we were rugged,’ the other CI said, ’until I saw these Russkis. Boy, they’re really rugged, I mean.’

’They’re crazy,’ the tall one said flatly.

’What’s the matter?’ I asked. ’Don’t you like them?’

’Sure, I like them. They seem like pretty good guys. They’re crazy, that’ s all.’

‘I guess they’ ll push us back to the Rhine pretty soon,’ the short one said. ’They certainly shoved a lot of men over this morning.’

’Suits me,’ his colleague answered. ’I hope they push us back quick. I hope they take all of Germany. They’ll know how to handle it, brother. They really know. Suits me. What I want is to go home.’