Antony Beevor - Stalingrad

The vast majority of the population in the hinterland of the Soviet Union knew nothing of the disaster which had befallen their country. As befitted a day of rest, the centre of Moscow was empty. Admiral Kuznetsov, the chief of naval staff, reflected on the peaceful scene in his car on the way to the Kremlin. The population of the capital ‘still did not know that a fire was blazing on the frontiers and that our advance units were engaged in heavy fighting’.

Finally, at midday on 22 June, Molotov’s voice, not Stalin’s, emerged from the wireless. ‘Today at four o’clock in the morning, German troops attacked our country without making any claims on the Soviet Union and without any declaration of war.’ His statement gave little detail. ‘Our cause is just,’ he concluded woodenly. ‘The enemy will be beaten. We will be victorious.’

Molotov’s choice of words was uninspired and his delivery awkward, but this announcement created a powerful reaction throughout the Soviet Union. The city of Stalingrad on the Volga may have been far from the fighting, but this did not diminish the effect. ‘It was as if a bomb had fallen out of the sky, it was such a shock,’ remembered a young female student. She promptly volunteered as a nurse. Her friends, especially Komsomol (Communist Youth) members, began collections for the war effort.

Reservists did not wait for mobilization orders. They reported at once. Within half an hour of Molotov’s speech, the reservist Viktor Goncharov set out from home for the centre, accompanied by his old father, whom he assumed was coming to see him off. His wife, working out at the Stalingrad tram park, could not get back to say goodbye. He had no idea that his father, an eighty-one-year-old Cossack who had ‘fought in four wars’, was planning to come along to volunteer. But old Goncharov was furious when the staff at the centre rejected him.

In Stalingrad Technical University, near the huge Stalingrad tractor factory, students put up a large map on the wall, ready to mark with flags the advance of the Red Army into Germany. ‘We thought’, said one, ‘that with a huge, decisive blow we’d smash the enemy.’ Countless newsreels of tank production and aviation achievements had convinced them of the Soviet Union’s immense industrial and military strength.

The images had proved doubly impressive in a country which, until recently, had been technologically backward. In addition, the domestic omnipotence of the Stalinist system made it appear unshakeable to those inside it. ‘Propaganda fell on a well prepared soil,’ acknowledged another of the Stalingrad students. ‘We all had this powerful image of the Soviet state and therefore of the country’s invincibility.’ None of them imagined the fate that awaited the Soviet Union, even less the one in store for the model city of Stalingrad, with its engineering plants, municipal parks and tall white apartment blocks looking across the great Volga.

During that night of 21 June, the diplomats in Berlin and Moscow could only guess at what was happening along the frontier that separated them. Never had foreign ministries been so redundant. Some 3,050,000 German troops, with other pro-Axis armies bringing the total to four million men, awaited the invasion of the Soviet Union from Finland to the Black Sea. ‘The world will hold its breath!’ Hitler had declared at a planning session several months before. The ultimate objective was ‘to establish a defence line against Asiatic Russia from a line running from the Volga river to Archangel’. The last industrial area left to Russia in the Urals could then be destroyed by the Luftwaffe.

It was the shortest night of the year. Wireless silence was maintained for the many hundreds of thousands of troops hidden in the birch and fir forests of East Prussia and occupied Poland. Artillery regiments which had arrived in the eastern frontier regions weeks before, ostensibly to prepare for manoeuvres, were well prepared. In East Prussia, the gun teams, wearing old clothes borrowed from local civilians, had brought forward reserves of shells on farm carts and camouflaged them next to pre-selected fire positions. Most soldiers believed the stories that this exercise was all part of a huge diversion to cover preparations for the invasion of Britain.

At nightfall, when orders were issued, the German Army was left in no doubt. The guns were stripped of their camouflage, or hauled out from hiding places in barns. They were then hitched to teams of horses, to half-tracks or to artillery tractors, with masked headlights, and towed out to their fire positions. Forward observation officers went ahead with the infantry to within a few hundred yards of the frontier posts occupied by the Soviet border guards.

Some officers in second-wave divisions toasted the coming operation with vintage Champagne and Cognac brought from occupied France. A few glanced again through the memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, to whom Napoleon had said on the eve of his invasion in 1812: ‘ Avant deux mois, la Russie me demandera la paix. ’ Some, trying to imagine what lay ahead, leafed through copies of the phrase book which Dekanozov’s embassy had sent to Moscow with so little effect. A number read the Bible.

Soldiers had built fires in their camouflaged encampments to keep away the mosquitoes. Accordion players struck up sentimental songs. While a few sang, others stayed with their thoughts. Many dreaded crossing the frontier into the unknown land of which they had heard only terrible things. Officers had warned them that if they slept in Russian houses, they would be bitten by insects and catch diseases. Many laughed, however, at comrades who wanted to cut all their hair off as a precaution against lice. In any case, most of them believed their officers when they said that there would be no need to worry about winter quarters. In the 24th Panzer Division, for example, Captain von Rosenbach-Lepinski is said to have told his motorcycle reconnaissance battalion: ‘The war with Russia will last only four weeks.’

Such confidence was, in many ways, understandable. Even foreign intelligence services expected the Red Army to collapse. The Wehrmacht had assembled the largest invasion force ever seen, with 3,350 tanks, around 7,000 field guns and over 2,000 aircraft. The German Army had improved its level of motor transport with French army vehicles; for example, 70 per cent of the trucks in the 305th Infantry Division, another division to perish at Stalingrad the following year, came from France. Yet the Wehrmacht, although famed for its Blitzkrieg, also depended on over 600,000 horses to tow guns, ambulances and ration wagons. With the vast majority of the infantry divisions on their feet, the overall speed of advance was unlikely to be much faster than that of the Grande Armée in 1812.

Many officers had mixed sensations. ‘Our optimism was tremendous after the rather easy victories in Poland, in France and in the Balkans,’ recounted the commander of the first panzer company to reach the Volga at Stalingrad fourteen months later. But, as one of those who had just read Caulaincourt, he had ‘bad feelings about the enormous space of Russia’. It also seemed rather late in the year ‘to start such an ambitious campaign’. Operation Barbarossa had been planned to begin on 15 May. The delay of over five weeks, often blamed entirely on Hitler’s Balkan campaign, was in fact influenced by many other factors, including the exceptionally heavy spring rains, the inability of the Luftwaffe to prepare forward airfields in time, and the allocation of motor transport to divisions.

That evening, regimental officers were told of certain ‘special orders’ affecting the conflict ahead. They included ‘collective measures of force against villages’ in areas of partisan activity and the ‘Commissar Order’. Soviet political officers, Jews and partisans were to be handed over to the SS or the Secret Field Police. Most staff officers, and certainly all intelligence officers, were told of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch’s order of 28 April, laying down ground rules for relations between army commanders and the SS Sonderkommando and security police operating in their rear areas. Their ‘special tasks’ would form part of ‘the final encounter between two opposing political systems’. Finally, a ‘Jurisdiction Order’ deprived Russian civilians of any right of appeal, and effectively exonerated soldiers from crimes committed against them, whether murder, rape or looting. The order signed by Field Marshal Keitel on 13 May justified this on the grounds ‘that the downfall of 1918, the German people’s period of suffering which followed and the struggle against National Socialism — with the many blood sacrifices endured by the movement — can be traced to Bolshevik influence. No German should forget this.’