Counter Offensive in Free Fall

反撃の開始

On 5 January, the over-confident Supremo gathered Zhukov and the generals to hear the plan for a massive offensive from Leningrad to the Black Sea to capitalize on the German defeat before Moscow.
… Zhukov criticized the offensive, saying the army needed more men and tanks. Voznesensky was against it too, saying he could not supply the necessary tanks. Stalin insisted on the offensive, at which Malenkov and Beria attacked Voznesensky for ‘always finding insuperable and unforeseen’ objections. ‘On that,’ said Stalin, ‘we’ll conclude the meeting.’… (p. 359)

悲惨な結果に終わる「アマチュア軍人」たちの反撃

As Molotov set off for [London and Washington in May 1942], Stalin was launching a wave of counter-attacks along the entire front. He quite reasonably presumed that Hitler would again attack Moscow but the Führer actually planned a powerful summer offensive to seize the grain of the Ukraine and, more importantly the oil of the Caucasus. But Stalin’s real fault lay in his raging over-confidence: he lacked the resources for this vast enterprise which, instead of capitalizing on his Moscow victory, handed Hitler the constellation of stunning victories that led to the ultimate crisis of Stalingrad.
He certainly did not help matters by granting draconian powers to his crew of military amateurs. Apart from Stalin himself, no one contributed more to these defeats than the brave, indefatigable and blood-thirsty Mekhlis, now at the height of his power….
He started the year with a visit to the Volkhov Front which had been ordered to relieve the Siege of Leningrad. It was in no shape to launch an offensive which predictably ended in disaster. Mekhlis arrived to investigate, arrest and shoot the culprits…. (pp. 362-363)

That March, Stalin ordered an assault from Kerch towards the centre of the Crimea to relieve the besieged Sebastopol. Mekhlis… took over the command of these 250,000 men, terrorizing their general, [D.T.] Kozlov, and ignoring the front commander, Budyonny. In this sensitive and complicated battle, Stalin had exchanged an inept and corrupt drunkard (Kulik) with an inept and incorruptible maniac….
On 2 March, Mekhlis launched his ‘big music’ in a fiasco that proved to be the insane apogee of terror applied to military science. He banned the digging of trenches ‘so that the offensive spirit of the soldiers would not be undermined’….
On 7 May, Manstein’s counter-attack drove Mekhlis off the Crimea altogether, capturing an awesome bag of 176,000 men, 400 planes and 347 tanks….
On 28 May, a haggard Mekhlis was waiting in Stalin’s anteroom… Then, Stalin emerged from his office.
‘Hello Comrade Stalin, may I report…’ said Mekhlis.
‘Go to hell!’ snarled Stalin, slamming the door…. (pp. 364-365)

… the worst was befalling the South-Western Front where Timoshenko and Khrushchev were launching their offensive from a Soviet salient to retake Kharkov, oblivious of Hitler’s imminent attack….
On 12 May, Timoshenko and Khrushchev, both uneducated, crude and energetic, successfully attacked and pushed back the Germans. If Stalin was delighted, Hitler could not believe his luck. Five days later, his Panzers smashed through Timoshenko’s flanks, enveloping Soviet forces in steel pincers that the Russians were no longer advancing but simply burrowing deeper into a trap… By the 18th, 250,000 men were almost encircled when Timoshenko and Khrushchev finally realized their plight.
Around midnight, Timoshenko… persuaded Khrushchev to beg the Supremo to cancel the offensive. At Kuntsevo, Stalin asked Malenkov to answer the phone…
…‘[Stalin] says the advance on Kharkov should be called off…”
The trap snapped shut on a quarter of a million men and 1,200 tanks. The next day, Stalin called off the offensive but it was too late. The exhilarated Germans pushed on towards the Volga and the Caucasus: the road to Stalingrad was open.
Khrushchev thought [he and Timoshenko] were spared because Mikoyan and Malenkov had witnessed his call to Kuntsevo but it was perhaps simpler: life and death was Stalin’s prerogative, and he liked Khrushchev and Timoshenko. Either way, this was Khrushchev’s greatest crisis until, as Stalin’s successor, he blundered into the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years later. (pp. 365-367)

ヒトラーのソ連南北分断作戦

On 19 June, a Luftwaffe aircraft crashed beyond German lines, containing a briefcase bearing the plans for Hitler’s summer offensive to exploit the Kharkov disaster and push towards Stalingrad and the North Caucasus. But Stalin decided that the information was either incomplete or a plant. A week later, the Germans attacked exactly as the plans warned, smashing a hole between the Briansk and South-Western Fronts, heading towards Voronezh and Stalingrad. But it was the oilfields that Hitler really coveted. When he flew in to headquarters at Poltava, he told Field Marshal von Bock: ‘If we don’t take Maikop and Grozny, then I must put an end to the war.’
… Once again, Timoshenko’s front was in free fall….
Dizzy with over-confidence, Hitler divided his forces into two: one to push across the Don to Stalingrad while the other headed southwards towards those Caucasian oilfields. When Rostov-on-Don fell, Stalin drafted another savage order: ‘Not One Step Backwards’, decreeing that ‘panic-mongers and cowards must liquidated on the spot’ and ‘blocking units’ must be formed behind the lined to kill waverers. None the less, Hitler’s southern Army Group A broke into the Caucasus. On 4 and 5 August, Stalin, Beria and Molotov spent most of the nights in the office as the Germans took Voroshilovsk (Stravropol), racing towards Grozny and Ordzhonikidze (Vladikavkaz), in the Caucasus and, on the Volga, approached Stalingrad. Von Paulus’s Sixth Army was poised to took the city and split Russia in two. (pp. 367-368)

On 12 August… Winston Churchill arrived in Moscow to tell Stalin that there would be no Second Front soon, a mission he compared to ‘carrying a lump of ice to the North Pole’. (p. 368)