Guest post: In the war in the East, there were no excuses
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on 14 million people.
The war in the East was terrible, likely the worst three years of human conduct that ever has or ever will be enacted; the horrors that the Germans and Soviets committed upon one another and the millions of civilians across the battlespace are unimaginable even to historians who’ve documented them.
The Red Army was particularly brutal to women in the territories it clawed piece by piece from the Wehrmacht, during the three years it took to reconquer the territories lost to Operations Barbarossa and Blue. The German authorities estimate that at least two million East German women were raped, not a few of them to death, and eyewitnesses in the siege of East Prussia claim that no woman between eight and eighty was spared. Estimates for the reconquered Eastern European countries are harder to come by, but there are also plenty of anecdotal accounts that tell us the Red Army’s conduct in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland was at best a difference of degree, and not of kind. Given the much larger populations of Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian women, it is likely that the German share of such brutality was at most half of the whole, if not less.
Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945 goes into this aspect of the Red Army’s conduct during their victorious encirclement of Berlin. He has also written a forward to the English translation of A Woman in Berlin, which was published out of the diary of an anonymous woman who experienced the conquest first-hand. I am currently picking my way through the original version, and I have not yet gotten to the truly harrowing parts yet, but I will steel myself for them.
This brutality is in some sense understandable, though by no means excusable. The Germans launched a genocidal war in order to enslave and work to death every non-German between the Vistula and Volga rivers, and they prosecuted this war in contravention of every law of warfare ever established on the theory that their victims were at once subhumans barely capable of cultivating their lands and a dire ideological threat to the German way of life. The only real reason Germans did not employ chemical weapons on the battlefield, aside from the bitter experience they had gained in the First World War over the stalemate quality of such tactics, is because much of their capacity for producing such chemicals was dedicated to the Holocaust.
And make no mistake, if the Germans had defeated the Soviet Union and finished murdering the Jews and Roma and Soviet POWs, they would have kept the camps humming along for the Slavs in their conquered lands, in an attempt to replace the entire population with ethnic Germans (at least those themselves not deemed worthy of extermination). I personally believe that the enterprise would have collapsed in on itself even in this worst-case scenario, that the literal and social people-eating machines the Nazis developed would wind up eating the Nazis and millions of Germans besides before the society fell to civil war and anarchy, but I am grateful that these musings of mine were not tested by history.
In any case, in the face of such barbarism — not really seen since before the Bronze Age — the Soviets made great and terrible sacrifices simply to survive. Essentially every man between the ages of fourteen and sixty who could walk and hold a gun was pressed into military service, while almost all the women were set to work in military industries. And, of all those called, between a third and 40 percent would not survive to see the end of the fighting. Indeed, Germans took between two and three Soviet lives for each German life lost, but the Soviets did not stop until they had pushed the Germans from Moscow and Stalingrad all the way back to the Elbe. In order to do this, the Soviets had to endure privations, brutalities, and terrors that are quite simply unimaginable to any of us.
Americans often like to boast that they “won” WWII, that they “beat” the Nazis…and they aren’t exactly wrong, but they are usually misidentifying America’s role in winning the war in Europe. It is true that America invaded North Africa and Italy and France, and engaged in fierce combat at many points of the war on their own path to the Elbe, but for all that, less than two hundred thousand American lives were sacrificed in Europe, essentially every one of them a soldier. By comparison, the Soviet Union (including the countries it had occupied which became a part of the so-called Bloodlands) sacrificed approximately 27 million people, civilians and soldiers, in order to beat back and defeat the Germans.
But the Soviets were only able to accomplish this titanic loss of life, and the victory in the face of it, because the Americans supplied them with a vast amount of food and civilian supplies; indeed, Operation Lend-Lease sent more materiel to the Soviet Union than to the rest of the Allies combined, though this fact has been all but forgotten. The Soviets even made sure to stamp-over the American livery with Soviet emblems, so that their own troops wouldn’t realise that so much of their food had come from the United States. As it happens, a great deal of these supplies came up through the Volga, which had the benefit of never freezing over and not being threatened by German U-boats, unlike the Arctic port of Arkhangelsk; it is likely that Hitler set his sights on Stalingrad at least in part to cut this supply line, which might well have forced the Soviets to capitulate.
So imagine life as a young Soviet grunt. You’ve been indoctrinated your entire life into a cult of personality and into an ideology that places the existence of the state above your own, and gives you all the positive and negative incentives in the world to at least pretend to trust the word of those speaking on behalf of the leader of your country. Your country has been invaded by millions of maniacs that are actually intent on killing you and everyone you love, and geopolitical forces far beyond your understanding have turned your entire army into what is essentially the vanguard of the powers allied against your enemy — regardless of your position, you and everyone you know is in principle a front-line soldier. Half of the men you have fought with have died, and the only way that you have survived is to let almost everything human within you die, to become more pitiless and ruthless than your enemy and your comrades both.
Now imagine that the personality whose cult you’ve been pulled into has decreed that every civilian in occupied territory who is not a partisan or has not died fighting the enemy is a collaborator and a traitor, someone responsible for all of the suffering and death you have had to endure and inflict just to keep breathing. It becomes not simply a right, but something like a duty to punish them, to take your pleasures where you can before you, too, meet your end. Imagine that your superiors look the other way, or slap you and your fellow soldiers on the wrist — or, if you cross too many lines, they shoot you cleanly in the head and hand your rifle to the next man in line behind you, just as you were handed the rifle of the man who fell in front of you.
…as I said, this does not excuse such brutal conduct, but in the war in the East, there were no excuses. There was only horror, and blood.
I would recommend Soviet Storm on Youtube, which is 18 episodes about the terrible war in the east – possibly the most terrible war in its cruelty and casualties that there has ever been. This was made for Russian television but it does talk about the idiocy of Stalin in murdering about half the officers in the army and his belief that Hitler would stick to their treaty – also the mistakes that the USSR made and then managed to recover from. Stalin was a better all over commander than Hitler and gave his generals more of a free hand. It’s about the military side rather than the civilian, and that was horrific enough with the casualties in the millions.
KBPlayer,
Indeed, Stalin’s Great Purge wiped out many experienced military officers, and his initial disbelief that Hitler had betrayed him cost many precious days to the Soviets defending the newly-occupied Polish territory that Stalin had marched into scantly two years prior. This led to many commanders waffling, caught between the harsh reality of German tanks and planes in front of them, and politically-correct intelligence officers behind them, and it could well account for why the opening six months of the war went so disastrously for the Soviet Union.
Yet, by the end, Hitler was ranting and raving in his bunker that his longstanding generals had betrayed him, and he should have executed them all in a Great Purge of his own. Funny how that worked out.
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This piece largely calls to mind Soviet atrocities upon Eastern Europe and Germany, but I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the film Come and See, which dramatises the Nazi occupation of Belarus as seen from a Belarusian youth’s point of view. I have not had the displeasure of seeing it yet, but I have seen and read of it, and it is on my list to deepen my own understanding of the German prosecution of the war and occupation.
Russia defeated the Germans by smothering them in blood. Relentless attrition that Germany couldn’t match. I recall that the great Marshall Zhukhov’s tactic for clearing minefields was just to push his armor through. Casualties would be high but in the end keeping the pressure on the enemy was more important. Sounds cold blooded today but then not so much. When the Western allies were trying to breakout from Normandy, the Germans took ~450,000 casualties in the east as the Soviets crushed their entire front.
Your statements about Lend Lease are simply wrong. The Black Sea was not reachable for most of the war, so the Volga was irrelevant. Until October 1944, the Germans controlled Aegean air space, cutting off any hope of Allied shipping into the northeast Mediterranean. It was operational only between June and December 1941, accounting for a tiny fraction of deliveries. The Persian route did not become operational until October 1942, after Stalingrad had been attacked. Most of the food delivered actually came in from the Pacific Route, delivered exclusively in Soviet ships.
But the fundamental error is claiming the limelight for the US. While Lend Lease may have been critical in late 1941 and into 1942, it was less than 5% of total Soviet war materiel and supplies.
My son was interested in this history. He relates that the Russians had more men than guns. So they would send out two men with one gun. When one man was killed, the other would take the gun and go on.
Naif,
Forgive me for being that guy, and perhaps diminishing the moral thrust of my remarks with a point-by-point examination of your comment that goes into far too much military detail and counterfactual speculation. But your comment misses the mark, in that most of your points either correct claims I did not make or are themselves mistaken.
This has gotten away from me a bit, so I will tl;dr it here: with all due respect, you are wrong, though I am empathetic to the reasons why you believe what you do. The next several paragraphs are an examination of why those beliefs are incorrect.
Firstly, you will note I did not mention the Black Sea or the Aegean, so your points here are simply a red herring. You will further note that, as a matter of geography, the Volga does not empty into either of these bodies, but rather into the Caspian Sea. You should also note that, in August 1941, as the Wehrmacht was pushing between ten and twenty kilometres a day directly toward Moscow and had already taken hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers captive since its invasion began at the end of June, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom invaded Iran.
They invaded not in spite of the thoroughgoing disaster that was Barbarossa, but directly because of it, to secure what you correctly identify as the Persian Corridor that would ferry supplies both to the British forces in the Middle East and to the Soviets. The invasion itself took about a month, and the logistical situation was sorted by early 1942.
You are simply incorrect that the Volga was not an active supply corridor by the time Case Blue was initiated, much less by the time the Nazis reached Stalingrad. On the contrary, American supplies were being shipped overland through the Caucasus to the Southern Front’s supply depots and up the river to Stalingrad and Moscow via the Volga as soon as the American military logistics command took up positions in Iran. The cited Wikipedia article confirms that, of the 17.5 million “long tons” of supplies the United States provided to the Soviet Union, nearly 8 million of these came through Persia.
I will concede that Case Blue interrupted the use of the Volga up to Stalingrad until Operation Uranus succeeded in encircling the Sixth Army, which did not wind up in Soviet defeat — at least partially because the supplies that would have been shipped to Moscow and Stalingrad were delivered far earlier in the Volga route or were diverted to the land route over the Caucasus.
Your point about Russian ships ferrying supplies across the Pacific from the United States and Canada is technically correct, but it misses the extremely relevant point that the Empire of Japan — whose home islands are situated precisely astride the sea routes between Vladivostok and Los Angeles or Vancouver — was actively at war with North America, whereas it was not at war with the Soviet Union. Thus any Allied tonnage would need to be delivered under extremely heavy guard, and would have taken massive losses in any case, at the expense of the Battle of the Atlantic and at the very real risk of drawing the Soviet Union into the war with Japan. Regardless of the ultimate outcome for Japan, that eventuality was far too risky for the Soviet Union’s strategic position against Germany, not to mention the security of Lend-Lease to Britain and the Russian Arctic.
I will also concede that I was a bit fast and loose with the term “materiel”, and though I emphasised food and civilian goods along with mentioning Soviet military industry, I could have been clearer. You are correct at least in spirit that the Americans supplied a comparatively small (if not precisely inconsequential) amount of offensive weapons and military equipment to the Soviet war effort, and they delivered far more weapons (especially planes) to Great Britain. What military equipment was delivered was considered extremely unreliable by the Soviets, because they lacked both the mechanical expertise and the spare parts to properly maintain American models; contrast this with Britain, where America supplied massive pools of spare parts and enough mechanics to train the British in how to maintain their equipment, no doubt helped by their common language.
Thus it was simply more efficient for the Soviets to make their own weapons and trucks and planes while the Americans fed them. And the Americans fed the Soviet Union from the start of Barbarossa to the end of the war. American food, clothing, and domestic supplies freed up a crucial portion of the Soviet workforce from the burdens of agriculture and light industry so that Soviet citizens could produce enough tanks and planes and trucks and conscripts of their own to drown the Nazis in steel and blood (as Pliny notes).
Of particular note is that, once Lend-Lease and the charitable civilian aid through the newly-established UN Rehabilitation and Relief Administration both ended and Soviet troops demobilized, a famine broke out in the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1948 in which about a million people starved to death.
So several things are true at once. Namely, the United States delivered more food and non-military equipment to the Soviet Union than they did to the rest of the Allies; this contribution summed up to between five and ten percent of total Soviet supplies, depending on the year and method of accounting, as noted in the Wikipedia article on the 1946 famine. Since the Soviets supplied the vast majority of their own armaments as noted above, this five-to-ten-percent was concentrated almost exclusively among agricultural and light-industrial products, which makes the American contribution a far higher proportion of these kinds of supplies. This concomitantly freed Soviet men from having to farm, or work in canaries or fisheries or dairies or silverware factories, and let them produce and consume all those tanks and planes and guns.
Notably, more Allied supplies were delivered year over year until they levelled off in 1945, when it was clear the Soviets would win. Yet the Soviets relied *more* heavily upon Lend-Lease and private foreign aid during the war’s closing than during those first two disastrous years, not less. This is because 1944-1945 was by far the bloodiest of the war, with more Soviet and German military casualties in the war’s last hundred days than in Barbarossa and Blue put together. The Soviets simply did not have the men to fight and to farm, to operate all of the light industry and military factories required to supply their bellies and their barrels. Thus, if the Allied contribution was crucial in 1941 and 1942, it only became more crucial in 1943 and 1944, and remained crucial in 1945.
What follows is some speculation about the progress of the war if the Allies did not provide these supplies, informed by the above analysis and much more background knowledge of the strategic situation over the course of the war, the full elaboration of which would make this interminable comment even longer.
Without Allied supplies, it is likely that the Soviet Union loses Stalingrad as they did in our time, that Leningrad falls rather than barely hanging on as it did in our time with supplies from Arkhangelsk, and that the Nazis re-assault Moscow in late 1942 or early 1943. If Moscow and Leningrad and Stalingrad all fall, and there are no Lend-Lease supplies coming in, there is simply no way the Soviet Union does not sue for peace.
If the Soviet Union capitulates, the peace agreement will shear the Soviet Union of virtually all of its territory west of the Urals, and leave an Asian rump state — still geographically the largest territory in the world, but with hardly any industry or population that had not been forcefully transferred from Europe during the initial stages of the war. This weakened rump state would also be in grave danger of falling under Japanese attack, which would wrest Vladivostok along with vast swathes of eastern territory from this diminished Union, potentially up to Irkutsk.
Even if Germany subsequently falls to the Western Allies, they will have had years of industrial-grade genocide in the conquered lands, and the West would not allow the Soviet Union to simply waltz back across the Urals and back into the eastern reaches of Siberia to reclaim the liberated territory once the Germans and Japanese were defeated without Soviet assistance.
The renewed assault on Moscow might well not succeed, preventing the above course of events. But in order to blunt it, the Soviet Union would probably need to exhaust its manpower. That means no extra reserves for Operation Uranus, which puts the liberation of Stalingrad and the retaking of the Donbas into serious doubt; even if they manage that, the Soviets will then have no manpower for Operation Bagration in 1944.
Without Bagration, the war does not end in 1945. Without Bagration, the Nazis have enough resources to throw the Allies out of Normandy, if indeed D-Day takes place at all — Overlord and Bagration were planned in tandem, with Bagration setting off two weeks after D-Day to catch the Germans off-guard in the middle of redeploying assets to the west. If the Soviets are not in the strategic position start Bagration, it is well within the realm of possibility that D-Day is postponed or simply not considered. Without D-Day, Stalin does not get the second front he demands, and his chances of suing for peace grow by the month as the war drags on with no end in sight.
Without Allied supplies and considering all of the above, the drought of 1946 still happens, except this time far more than a million Soviets die because they are still at war, and the Bloodlands keep bleeding until the Americans drop nuclear weapons on Munich and Frankfurt and Berlin — if indeed the Germans have not developed nuclear weapons by then and turned London and Glasgow and Moscow into festering irradiated sores.
If and when Germany finally capitulates, it will have been conquered entirely by the Western powers after the tactical deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe, while the Soviet Union is at best locked in a stalemate somewhere between Minsk and Moscow and at worst has been knocked out of the war entirely sometime between 1943 and 1947. In any case, it will certainly not have won, and the rump Soviet state that remained would have been a fourth-rate power in Siberia rather than the master of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
The truth is that the conquest of Germany was a true allied effort, and without the blood spilt by the Soviets along with the American supplies which enabled all of that blood to be spilt in the first place, the war would have a very different — and much worse — outcome for the whole world. I understand why Americans and their apologists like to think they beat the Nazis in a shooting war, and I understand why Soviets and their apologists like to emphasise the undeniably-crucial Soviet military contributions that actually defeated the German Army in the field. I understand why this leads to both parties ignoring and downplaying the effect of American aid to the Soviet war effort.
But both of these things are true — the Soviet Union beat the Germans in the field, while America kept the Soviet Union from collapsing by providing it with millions of tonnes of food. There is no lack of honour for either side in acknowledging this reality. Indeed, it would be better for America to revise its understanding of the war in Europe, to take a more humble place as the party that supported the Soviet Union’s military victory; it would also be better for Russians to acknowledge this support, without which their country as they know it would not exist.
The Allies won, and they won together, every one of them. It would be better for all of us to keep that in mind.
Ophelia, I have written a perhaps-too-long reply to Naif, which seems to have somehow gotten lost. It showed up for me initially, but disappeared on a refresh of my browser; yet, when I attempt to post it again, the blogging platform identifies the duplicate and refuses to post it again. Have you any clue about what shenanigans might be afoot?
Naif, to very very briefly sum up said reply: I believe you are mistaken in every respect, as I spent more than two thousand words exploring (which might indeed have broken something), though I can understand why you believe what you do. I believe the world would be a better place if the incentives for discounting American aid to the Soviets had not fed into Cold War machismo on both sides.
(Ahh, I see now, I have likely run into a spam filter because of the number of links employed. In that case, Ophelia, I leave it to you to approve my first blocked comment and delete my botched attempts at posting them in pieces, if you judge it worth the effort. In the worst case, I will eventually post my reply to my own blog as an essay in its own right.)
Done. Yes, it will be because of the links. I could tweak that but then spam might get through, so I don’t.
Thank you. I wouldn’t change the policy if I were you, but I will try to remember it in the future, if I remain myself.
It would have been a bit of a tragedy (although we live in tragic times!) if that comment had been lost!