104

[introduction.]

The war that the German Nazis started against the Soviet Union was the fiercest offensive of the forces of world imperialism against socialism, the heaviest trial the Soviet state ever went through. In that war the future of the USSR, the future of world civilisation, progress and democracy was at stake.

War Against the USSR.
Plans and Aims

p None of the other theatres of the Second World War (North Africa, Italy, Western Europe, the Pacific Ocean) ever saw such continuous, uninterrupted and intensive military operations as the Soviet-German front. It is this front that tied down up to 70 per cent of Nazi Germany’s divisions. Out of every four soldiers of the Hitler Wehrmacht an average of three were engaged in the fighting on the Eastern front and only one on the Western. A total of 507 Nazi divisions were destroyed, routed or taken prisoner. The Soviet troops also destroyed most of the enemy materiel: 167,000 cannon, 48,000 tanks and assault guns, about 77, 000 aircraft. The allies of Nazi Germany lost no less than 100 divisions on the Eastern front. The armies of the United States, Britain and other members of the anti-Hitler coalition put out of action 176 divisions, or under one-third of the total of routed divisions of Nazi Germany and her allies. German casualties on the Soviet-German front constituted more than 73 per cent of its total losses in the Second World War. Here too the entire military strategy of Nazi Germany foundered and its military machine broke down.

p The monstrous crimes committed by the Hitlerites on the territory of the USSR have no match in history. The fascist hordes razed to the ground tens of thousands of Soviet cities, towns and villages. They killed and tortured men, women, 105 children and old folk. The cruelty to which the Nazis subjected the population of other countries they occupied was surpassed many times over on Soviet territory. All these crimes were recorded and authenticated in documentary form by the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation into the Savagery of the Fascist German Invaders and their Accomplices, and were all brought to the knowledge of the world.

p The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union took a toll of more than 20 million people killed and cost our country about 30 per cent of its national wealth.

p What were the reasons for such a vast struggle, unprecedented in scope and ferocity, and what were the reasons for Nazi brutality, unequalled anywhere in human history? To answer this question one must, in the first place, bear in mind that the war waged by Nazi Germany and its allies against the USSR was no ordinary war in the conventional sense of the term. The Soviet Union was the main stumbling block to German imperialist domination of the world. At the same time German nazism, as the main striking force of international reaction, wanted this war against the USSR not only to capture its territory, but also to destroy the Soviet social and state system. In other words, German nazism also pursued its class goals in that war. Therein lies the difference between the war that Germany waged against the USSR and the wars which it fought against capitalist countries. Class hatred for the world’s first socialist country, the predatory instinct and the vicious essence of fascism were fused in Germany’s policy, strategy and methods of warfare.

p According to Nazi plans, the Soviet Union was to be carved and liquidated as a state. Its territory was to be divided into four Reichskommissariats, or German provinces. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and a number of other cities were to be blown up, flooded, wiped off the face of the earth. "This is a war of extermination... In the East, harshness today means lenience in the future,” said Hitler at a meeting of his military council on March 30, 1941.  [105•1  The Nazi 106 leaders demanded that not only Soviet armymen be killed, but also the civilian population of the USSR. Their aim was the physical extermination of most of the Soviet people, as proponents of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht were issued with leaflets which read: "Kill every Russian, every Soviet male or female you see. Don’t stop just because it is an old man or woman, a girl or a boy. Kill! By doing so you will survive, ensure yourself a secure future and make yourself famous for ages to come.”

p The initial stages in the planning of aggression against the Soviet Union go back to the mid-1980s, a long time before the Second World War. The war against Poland and the campaign in Northern and Western Europe temporarily relegated the Eastern plans of the German General Staff to the background, although it never lost sight of the continuing preparations for war against the USSR. The Nazi leaders stepped up the tempo of these preparations after the fall of France when they thought they had ensured a stable rear for the future war and had sufficient resources for its prosecution.

p On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive No. 21, codenamed Barbarossa, which set forth the general idea and the initial instructions on the course of war against the USSR. The Barbarossa Plan was based on Blitzkrieg strategy. According to this plan, the Soviet Union was to be defeated within 8-10 weeks, even before the end of the war against Britain. The main strategic targets were Leningrad, Moscow, the central industrial legion and the Donets coal fields. A special place in this plan was assigned to the seizure of Moscow, which was’ supposed to conclude the campaign.

p To prosecute this war the Nazis set up an aggressive military coalition based on the triple alliance formed in 1940 between Germany, Italy and Japan. Also drawn into these aggressive plans were Romania, Finland and Hungary. The Nazis were aided by the reactionary ruling elite in Bulgaria and by the puppet regimes in Slovakia and Croatia, and also benefited from cooperation they received from Spain, the Vichy regime in France, from Portugal and Turkey. The Nazis made intensive use of the 107 economic and manpower resources of the countries they had seized and occupied: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia and Greece. The economies of the neutral countries of Europe were, to all intents and purposes, geared to the expansionist interests of Germany. This means that Nazi Germany rallied the resources of almost all European countries for the realisation of its Barbarossa Plan-both its direct allies and the Nazi-occupied, dependent and neutral countries with a combined population of over 300 million.  [107•1 

p Hitler and other Nazi leaders were so sure of the plan’s success that in the spring of 1941, with the attack on the Soviet Union only a few weeks away, they proceeded to develop in great detail their further aggressive designs for world domination. In special trains that served as mobile headquarters (called the Asie and the Amerika) Nazi army strategists mapped out the directions of global attack by their armies. An entry made in the office diary of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) on February 17, 1941, contained Hitler’s demand that "the successful conclusion of the Eastern campaign should be followed up by the capture of Afghanistan and an advance on India.” Acting upon these instructions the OKW proceeded to develop long-range operations. The Nazis intended to carry out these operations late in the autumn of 1941, and In the winter of 1941-1942. The substance of these operations was set forth in draft Directive No. 32 "Preparations for the Post-Barbarossa Period" which was circulated in the army, air force and navy on June 11, 1941.

p According to this project the Wehrmacht was to carry its war of conquest, after the defeat of the Soviet armed forces, to the British colonies and some independent countries in the Mediterranean, Africa, the Middle East. It was also to invade the British Isles and launch military operations against America. Hitler’s strategists thought that in the autumn of 1941 they would move their troops to start the conquest of Iran, Iraq, Egypt, the Suez Canal zone, and later of India 108 where they would join the Japanese armed forces. The Nazi leaders hoped that by annexing Spain and Portugal the German Reich would easily capture Gibraltar, cut Britain off from her raw material resources and lay siege to the Isles. The draft directive and other documents show that after the defeat of the USSR and the solution of the "British problem" the Nazis intended, in alliance with Japan, to seize the American continent. Invasion of Canada and the United States was planned by landing large sea-borne contingents on the eastern coast of North America from bases in Greenland, Iceland and the Azores and in Brazil, and on the western coast from the Aleutian and Hawaiian islands. The deadly menace spread over all mankind. The aggressors were convinced that the "lightning march" on the USSR would give them the key to world conquest.

p The German strategists were making predictions that the Soviet Union would fall almost immediately. Nazi General Giinther Blumentritt wrote in a report prepared for a meeting of the Army High Command on May 9, 1941: "The history of all wars in which the Russians took part shows that the Russian soldier is tough, indifferent to weather, undemanding, does not fear either blood or losses. This is why all the battles from King Frederick the Great down to the World War were soaked in blood. In spite of all these qualities of its troops the Russian empire never scored any victories. At present we have a vast numerical superiority.... Our troops have more field experience than the Russians.... We will face some hard fighting for about 8-14 days. Then success will not be long in coming, and we shall win.”  [108•1  Apart from a poor knowledge of history (for example, in 1759 at Kundersdorf Russian troops routed the army of Frederick the Great, whose hat, lost on the battlefield, is now on exhibit at a museum in Leningrad), the general demonstrated the kind of adventurism that was an underlying feature of military planning in Nazi Germany.

p Typically, many Western political and military leaders in those days underestimated the strength of the Soviet 109 Union, and grossly overestimated Germany’s own possibilities. When the Nazi command moved its troops against the Soviet Union, they predicted quick success for the Wehrmacht which had shortly before routed the AngloFrench coalition. The prevailing view in Britain was that the Germans would seize Russia in six to twelve weeks. U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in a letter to Roosevelt, June 23, 1941 that it would take Germany three months at the most to defeat the Soviet Union. But the Soviet people and their armed forces refuted all these predictions. After a long and arduous struggle they turned the tide of the war, threw back the enemy, and foiled the fascist plans for world domination.

The reactionary analysts of the events on the Soviet- German front are clearly inclined to denigrate their significance for the outcome of the Second World War, and to give a distorted picture of Soviet policy, strategy and military art. This applies first and before all to the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, which reversed the fortunes of the Second World War.

The Battle of Moscow

p The summer and autumn of 1941 were particularly difficult, as three Nazi army groups-North, Centre and Southwedged deep into Soviet territory, laid siege to Leningrad, went as far north as the Soviet Arctic, and moved in the direction of Moscow, the Donbass coal fields, and the Crimea.

p In the course of the strategic defence operations the Soviet troops held out against the pressure of the advancing enemy and themselves delivered powerful counter-strikes. Suffice it to say that in the first three weeks of the war the German troops were advancing some 20-30 km a day, whereas in the middle of July their speed dropped to 3.5-8 km a day, and later to even less. In September the enemy was halted outside Leningrad, and in November outside Rostov. Fighting fiercely for every inch of their land the Soviet troops acquitted themselves with courage and heroism. The stubborn defence of Brest and Kiev, Odessa and Sevastopol, Smolensk and Tula were the harbingers of 110 the early collapse of the Blitzkrieg against the USSR. The enemy lost 758,000 troops and more than 5,000 aircraft between June and November 1941.

p In the autumn of 1941, the fiercest fighting was in the Moscow sector of the front.

p The battle of Moscow (September 30, 1941-April 20, . 1942) has gone down in history as the beginning of the turning of the tide in the struggle against the Nazi onslaught.

p Altogether on both sides, more than 2.8 million troops, about 2,000 tanks, more than 1,500 aircraft, 21,000 guns and mortars were engaged in the fighting.  [110•1  Sustaining tremendous losses the leading units of Army Group Centre reached the approaches to the Soviet capital at the end of November 1941. Here they were halted and put to rout.

p On December 5, 1941, the Soviet troops launched a counteroffensive in the course of which they struck a crushing blow at Army Group Centre. As a result, 38 Nazi divisions were routed. The greatest losses were inflicted upon the enemy armoured units, which had been assigned the key role in the seizure of the Soviet capital.

p By the end of April 1942, the casualties of the land forces of the Wehrmacht on the Soviet-German front exceeded 1,500,000, including 716,000 men of Army Group Centre. This is almost five times as great as the Nazi losses in Poland, in Northwestern and Western Europe and in the Balkans. Other German losses on the Eastern front were about 4,000 tanks and assault guns, more than 7,000 aircraft. To offset its depleted strength the Hitler command had to transfer 60 divisions and 21 brigades to the East. The Soviet troops liberated from the invaders more than 11,000 inhabited centres, among them such large cities as Kalinin and Kaluga. The enemy was pushed back 100-250 km away from Moscow.

p The rout of the Nazi forces by the Red Army exploded the myth of the Wehrmacht’s invincibility, and signified the utter collapse of the plans for a lightning war against the USSR. The victory at Moscow showed that the Soviet Union would 111 eventually win the war, in spite of some of the initial reverses.

p Progressive and freedom-loving people on all continents saluted the Soviet Army’s victory at Moscow, which demonstrated to the whole world the stability of the Soviet socialist state and the fighting efficiency of its armed forces. The peoples of the Nazi-occupied countries were now looking to the Soviet Union as a force capable of saving the world from fascist enslavement. The progressive Italian political leader Roberto Battaglia pointed out that "the first military success of the Soviet Union ended the long period of indecision and bewilderment" on both sides of the Atlantic.  [111•1  Fernand Grenier, a member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, recalled that on the New Year’s Eve of 1942 he and his friends picked up a radio broadcast from Moscow. "Kalinin’s speech breathed confidence and vigour.... When at the end of the broadcast we heard the chimes of the Kremlin clock, tears welled up to our eyes. At that great hour Moscow was truly the hope and the heart of the world.”  [111•2  The victory at Moscow helped rally the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and brought about a steady increase in its military might.

p What a great response the victory at Moscow aroused all over the world can be judged from some impressions voiced at the time by state and military leaders in different countries. In a London radio broadcast on February 15, 1942, Winston Churchill said: "In those days Germany seemed to be tearing the Russian armies to pieces and striding on with growing momentum to Leningrad, to Moscow, to Rostov.... How do matters stand now?... The Russian armies are in the field.... They are advancing victoriously.... More than that: for the first time they have broken the Hitler legend. Instead of the easy victories and abundant booty ... he has found in Russia so far only disaster, failure, the shame of unspeakable crimes, the slaughter or 112 loss of vast numbers of German soldiers....”  [112•1 

p In a message to Stalin received in Moscow on December 16, 1941, President Roosevelt wrote: "I want to tell you once more about the genuine enthusiasm throughout the United States for the success of your armies in the defense of your great nation.”  [112•2 

p In a penetrating speech made over the London radio on January 20, 1942, General de Gaulle said: "The French people salute with enthusiasm the successes of the Russian people and their growing strength. For these successes are bringing France closer and closer to her desired goal: liberty and revenge.... To our common misfortune, the FrancoRussian alliance has over the centuries too often been plagued by obstacles and obstructions born of intrigue or incomprehension. Nevertheless, the need for such an alliance becomes increasingly clear at every turn of history.”  [112•3 

The unprecedented heroism and staunchness of the Soviet soldiers and the whole Soviet nation, also the superb military skill of Soviet commanders were given their due by many outstanding personalities. For example, General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of the U.S. Armed Forces in the Pacific, wrote in February 1942: "During my lifetime I have participated in a number of wars and have witnessed others, as well as studying in great detail the campaigns of outstanding leaders of the past. In none have I observed such effective resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counter-attack which is driving the enemy back to his own land. The scale and grandeur of the effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.”  [112•4 

113

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p The Battle of Moscow still engages the attention of Western historians, especially in recent years.

p We shall start with some of the more objective evaluations.

p Professor Alfred W. Turney (USA) writes that the stamina and courage of the Soviet troops foiled the elaborate plans that the Germans had worked out before the war for a lightning thrust to Moscow. He refers to the actions of the Soviet troops from the middle of October 1941 as forceful and daring. "The ferocity with which the Russians fought, even when hopelessly encircled, caused surprise, even consternation, at the German Armed Forces High Command.”  [113•1 

p Most of the Western historians cannot fully ignore the implications of the defeat of the Nazi armies at Moscow. However, in their works this event of world-wide significance is often lost like a needle in a haystack. Moreover, bourgeois authors often concentrate on the plans of the Hitler High Command, on the proposals of German generals made in the high echelons of the Nazi military hierarchy, also on the operations and battles as they were fought by the German armed forces, while, at the same time pushing the operations of the Soviet Army far into the background.

p Many of them claim that the allied actions in North Africa and at sea in 1941-1942 had a greater impact on the course of the Second World War than the Battle of Moscow or the fighting on the Soviet-German front in general. In their analysis of the events of the winter of 1941-1942, bourgeois historians laid special emphasis on the entry of the United States into the Second World War. The attack on U.S. bases in the Pacific "brought the full potential of the United States into the European War”, wrote H. Wallin.  [113•2  Another American historian, Trumbull Higgins, writes that the Pearl Harbor attack left Hitler in a state of indecision.  [113•3  Such assertions have been made with the express purpose of 114 denigrating the heroic efforts of the Soviet people to repulse the Nazi onslaught in 1941, of belittling the significance of the Red Army victory at Moscow, and of justifying the strategy of the British and American leaders who already at that time regarded a defeat of the USSR in the war as a foregone conclusion and who entertained ill-based hopes that Germany would be brought to her knees by massive bombing raids, an economic blockade and limited offensive action.  [114•1 

p The entry of the United States into the war was, of course, an act of great importance. But it was the Red Army that held out against the enemy and foiled the Nazi plans by assuming the counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-1942 and thereby ensured the groundwork for turning the tide of the Second World War. Beginning with June 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fighting, for it had to deal with the overwhelming mass of the troops of Nazi Germany, the pivot of the aggressive fascist bloc.

p The reasons for the failure of Hitler’s plans for a Blitzkrieg against the USSR, the defeat of the Nazi troops at Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942 are simplified by most Western authors to, first, Hitler’s political and military mistakes, second, unfavourable climatic conditions and the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, and, third, the assistance that the Soviet Union received from its allies in the war. These Western historians seem to have nothing to say about the military skill and heroism of the Soviet Army, the selfless determination of the entire Soviet nation to drive back the enemy at all costs.

p The thesis that Hitler and nobody else was personally responsible for the defeat at Moscow is the most common in bourgeois historiography. It has been put forward by the Nazi ex-generals who, in the days of the war, served their Fiihrer with zeal and lauded his “genius”, and even by some of the more “liberal” bourgeois historians including Turney who wrote: "Having made the strategic decision to attack and 115 destroy the Soviet Union, Hitler then proceeded to make a series of fatal errors in its implementation.”  [115•1 

p These historians virtually keep silent about the fact that Hitler’s plan of carrying the war to Russia was adventuristic to its very core, based as it was on the naive assumption that the Soviet Union was "a colossus with feet of clay”. However the fascist ring-leaders clearly underestimated the stability of the social and state system of the USSR, the might of the Soviet armed forces.

p Turney writes that "in an effort to solve the dilemma, Hitler made his second fatal error... He halted the headlong advance to Moscow and directed the German forces to encircle and destroy huge concentrations of Russian forces in the Ukraine”  [115•2 . Trevor Dupuy echoes this view, saying that "most crucial of all was his [Hitler’s] failure to concentrate his forces on Moscow in the summer of 1941 ".  [115•3 

p These authors deliberately ignore the fact that the strategic plans of the Wehrmacht were foiled by the Red Army which had exhausted the enemy forces and threatened them with encirclement and ultimate destruction. Marshal Zhukov pointed out that if the Germans had not halted their advance on Moscow and had not diverted some of their forces to the Ukraine, the position of Army Group Centre would have been even worse. "For the GHQ Supreme Command reserves which in September were committed to fill the operative breaches in the southwestern sector of the front and in November to defend the near approaches to Moscow, could have been used for striking at the flanks and rear of the Army Group Centre as it advanced on Moscow.”  [115•4 

p Whereas Hitler’s political and military miscalculations, according to many Western historians, were responsible for the defeat of Nazi strategy in the Battle of Moscow, the military failure was purely the result of the rigours 116 of the Russian winter which frustrated the operations of the Nazi troops. "The German forces could not overcome the handicaps of nature, the breakdown of their supply system, and the dogged resistance of the Russian defenders,” writes Turney.  [116•1  He is echoed by Leonard Cooper who insists that Hitler’s advance was checked by impassable roads.  [116•2  About every Western publication for the mass reader features photographs of German tanks and vehicles stalled in mud. The wording of the captions under these pictures runs approximately like this: "The Russian winter slowed down the Nazi advance, the rains played havoc with the roads. People, horses and vehicles bogged down in the mire. The German Blitzkrieg was stopped.”

p This version was first circulated by Nazi propaganda. Back in December 1941, the German High Command issued a statement to the effect that the winter conditions had compelled the Germans to pass from mobile warfare to position warfare, and to reduce the frontline. The OKW Directive No. 39 of December 8, 1941, read: "The premature advent of a cold winter on the Eastern front and the ensuing problems of supplies have made it imperative to cancel all major offensive operations and to assume the defensive."  [116•3  After the war these arguments were taken up by bourgeois historians. Almost none of them fails to mention the “fatal” factors such as "mud, cold winter, bad roads, and the vast Russian expanses" which led to the defeat of the Nazi armies outside Moscow.

p According to American and West German historians, the Russian "General Winter" put the Nazi forces at Moscow to rout. The editors of The Encyclopedia Americana believe that "possibly, had the cold not set in, the German armies would 117 have battled their way through the mass of men...” to Moscow.  [117•1 

p Soviet historians have in many of their works proved wrong the assertions that the climatic conditions were the main reason for the defeat of the Nazi armies at Moscow. The point is that the rainy season in the autumn of 1941 was rather short and gave way to winter weather early in November. In the Moscow region the average temperature in November and December stood at minus 6-14°C.  [117•2  The bourgeois historians who studied the Battle of Moscow are undoubtedly familiar with the entry in the diary of Franz Haider, Chief of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht’s land forces, made in August 1941: "The general situation makes it increasingly clear that we have underestimated the power of this colossus^-Russia. This contention applies to all (he economic and organisational aspects, to the means of communication and especially to the purely military possibilities of the Russians.”  [117•3  However, such conclusions which disclose the true reasons for the failure of the Nazi offensive on Moscow have not made their way into most of the works of the Western authors.

p “No, it was not the rain and snow that stopped the Nazi troops at Moscow. The more than a million-strong elite Nazi force was crushed by the iron will, courage and heroism of the Soviet troops who were there to defend their people, their capital, their country,” wrote Marshal Zhukov.  [117•4 

p In trying to explain the reasons for the collapse of the Blitzkrieg against the USSR some bourgeois historians overemphasise the significance of Anglo-American aid to the Soviet Union in that period. One analysis of the situation on the Soviet-German front says that the Allied support in 1941 "contributed ... to the ability of the Soviet military forces in general to continue their resistance. Lacking Allied support ... the Soviet economy might have been unable to supply adequate material to sustain the Soviet forces in 118 the field".  [118•1  Sumner Welles puts it even blunter, saying that U.S. military equipment "helped greatly to make possible the victory at Moscow".  [118•2 

p Let us recall in this connection that in 1941 the Allied delivery of supplies was less than limited. Britain and the United States delivered to the USSR 750 aircraft, 501 tanks and some other weapons. This assistance could not have possibly matched the needs of the Soviet-German front, also because all this materiel arrived in Soviet ports in incomplete sets, and much of it damaged. Stalin wrote to Winston Churchill on November 8, 1941: "...The tanks, guns and aircraft are badly packed, some parts of the guns come in different ships and the aircraft are so badly crated that we get them in a damaged state.”  [118•3 

p In the opinion of the British historians J.R.M. Butler and J.MA. Gwyer, Britain and the United States did not wish "to see valuable war-material, which could be put to immediate use elsewhere, lost in the chaos of a collapsing Russian front".  [118•4  The Allies’ wait-and-see position clearly showed that they did not believe the Soviet Union was strong enough to hold out against the enemy and win.

In spite of all these doubts, the Red Army, at the cost of tremendous losses, halted the advancing enemy, routing its main striking force and rolling it back from Moscow to the west.

The Battle of Stalingrad

p The victory of the Soviet armed forces at Stalingrad holds a place in the history of the Second World War. 119 Profound in its conception and realisation, sweeping in scope and far-reaching in its military and political consequences, the battle on the Volga is a glorious page not only in the annals of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, but also in the history of the world. In a speech marking the opening of the memorial complex in Volgograd on October 15, 1967 Leonid Brezhnev said: "The crack Nazi troops were not only milled in this battle. The Nazi drive for the offensive petered out here and their morale was broken. The fascist bloc began disintegrating.... The strength of those who would not bend their heads to the Nazis redoubled. ‘Stalingrad’ became the watchword of resistance, the watchword of victory.”  [119•1 

p The Battle of Stalingrad continued for six and a half months (from July 17, 1942, until February 2, 1943). The combat operations took up an area of about 100,000 square km, with the frontline varying at different times from 400 km to 850 km. Taking part in the fighting on both sides were more than two million men, over 2,000 tanks, and over 2,500 aircraft, about 26,000 guns and mortars.  [119•2  The enemy, who had sought to cut off the Volga as a line of supply and troop movement and capture the Caucasus, suffered a crushing defeat.

p In the course of the defensive operation, in the area between the Don and the Volga, and also in Stalingrad itself, the Wehrmacht forces were worn out and then routed in a brilliant encirclement operation, with the Soviet and German sides being of approximately equal strength. After demolishing the 330,000-strong Nazi army at Stalingrad, the Soviet army launched an offensive in several sectors of the front. The Battle of Stalingrad fully revealed the heroism and supreme courage of the Soviet soldiers, the military skill and organisational talents of the Soviet army command. "Stalingrad spelled the decline 120 for the Nazi army. After the Stalingrad holocaust, as is known, the Germans could never recover,”  [120•1  read the Government Report on the 26th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

p The Battle of Stalingrad was of tremendous international and military significance. It was a historic landmark on the Soviet Union’s road to victory over Nazi Germany, the decisive strategic factor behind the sweeping changes in the political and strategic situation in favour of the anti-Hitler coalition.

p A high evaluation of the victory of the Soviet troops in the Battle of Stalingrad was given by President Roosevelt in an honorary scroll to the city of Stalingrad. It reads: "In the name of the people of the United States of America, I present this scroll to the City of Stalingrad to commemorate our admiration for its gallant defenders whose courage, fortitude, and devotion during the siege of September 13, 1942 to January 31, 1943 will inspire forever the hearts of all free people. Their glorious victory stemmed the tide of invasion and marked the turning point in the war of the Allied Nations against the forces of aggression.”

p A detailed examination of the Battle of Stalingrad was given in two chapters of Earl Ziemke’s book Stalingrad to Berlin. This historian on the Pentagon staff puts his own evaluation on this battle. "Possessing some strategic attributes in its own right, Stalingrad became, in part by accident in part by design, the focal point of one of the decisive battles of World War II,"  [120•2  he writes.

p Ziemke takes great pains to belittle the role of the Soviet army and Soviet military art in the battle on the Volga. He says bluntly that the victory at Stalingrad "resulted more from Hitler’s errors than from Soviet military skill".  [120•3  At the same time he bends some heavily 121 doctored facts trying to prove that the Soviet troops had numerical superiority at the time of the counter-offensive. According to Ziemke, the one million-strong Soviet army was confronted by half this number of Germans and their allies on the battlefield.  [121•1  However, this is nothing but an attempt to use official Western statistics drawn from the fabrications of Kurt Zeitzler and other Nazi generals which have long since been exposed as false in the Soviet and world literature on the military history of those days. It is well known that the total correlation of forces at Stalingrad was roughly equal: 1,015,300 troops on the Soviet side and 1,011,500 on the Nazi side.  [121•2  As for the main directions of attack, the Soviet command succeeded in gaining superiority over the enemy by skilfully manoeuvring its manpower and materiel.

p In the Western literature on the subject the Battle of Stalingrad is often compared with other battles in world military history. The most frequent comparison is that with the battle of Verdun. Cornelius Ryan, for example, believes that "the epic battle of Stalingrad was Germany’s World War II Verdun".  [121•3  Significant in this respect is the line of reasoning taken by the British historian B. Pitt. "Stalingrad has been compared to Verdun in intensity and significance-and there is much to support the comparison; but in one vital matter it was different. The French in 1917 accepted Falkenhayn’s challenge and exchanged soldier’s life for soldier’s life, feeding an endless stream of reinforcements into that cramped arena on the Meusse until both sides fell back sickened by the slaughter and bled almost white....

p “At Stalingrad during that crucial winter of 1942-1943, the Red Army leaders showed an appreciation of military reality and ability to learn from the past which should act as a model for all.... They reinforced the defenders 122 inside along lines dictated by the minimum necessary instead of the maximum possible and used the power and strength thus preserved to launch the great encirclement which eventually throttled Paulus’s 6th Army.

p “Thus Stalingrad is the name of a great victory, won at reasonable cost; Verdun is just the name of a battle which devoured lives with the appetite of Moloch, and left both sides weaker and poorer.”  [122•1 

p Many military historians in the United States use the term "The Stalingrad in the West" which they apply to the encirclement of the 7th and 5th Panzer armies (about 20 divisions) between Falaise and Martin in August 1944.  [122•2  True, the fighting there was heavy. The Western Allies penetrated deep into the German positions, forcing the bleeding enemy to retreat beyond the Seine. However, the combined Allied force (about 37 divisions), which besides had clear superiority in the air, encircled, what was only the disjointed units of eight infantry and two armoured divisions totalling about 45,000 men. The Nazis succeeded in taking the most battleworthy armoured and infantry divisions out of the Falaise Gap. This partially successful encirclement plan had some weak points (as, for instance, not enough forces were detailed for creating the outer and inner fronts of encirclement) which were aggravated by disarray in the joint U.S.-British command and its indecision in the final stages of tht operation, as well as other circumstances.

p American history books give prominence to the idea that Germany’s fate was settled by "Stalingrad in the East and Bastogne, in the West"  [122•3 . This comparison does not stand up to criticism. In Bastogne the German troops encircled the 101st airborne division and a part of the 10th armoured division of the U.S. armed forces. A week later the Nazi ring around these forces was broken. This event in the Ardennes which raised great concern in the 123 U.S. Army command occurred in the concluding stages of the Second World War when the defeat of Nazi Germany was only a few months away.

p Now for the Western attempts to “explain” the rout of the Nazi armies at Stalingrad by talk about Hitler’s "fatal decisions”. By putting the blame for the defeat squarely on Hitler the authors of these books not only virtually absolve the Nazi General Staff, but also manage to get the idea across that Germany’s defeat was somehow accidental, and that military revanche was still possible.

p Here are two examples. The earlier mentioned American military historian Trevor Dupuy writes: "Hitler insisted that they [German generals] must not retreat one step from Stalingrad. While the German generals tried to persuade him to change his orders, the Russians brought in tremendous ground and air reinforcements....”  [123•1  Another American historian, Matthew Gallagher, known for his anti-Soviet sentiment, contends that "the German generals were aware of the threat to their flanks ... but Hitler, fearing the consequences to his prestige, refused to permit withdrawal".  [123•2 

p It is hard to believe that these and other historians sharing their views are not familiar with the article “Stalingrad” written by former Chief of the General Staff of the Nazi land forces, Colonel General Kurt Zeitzler, at the request of the U. S. Defense Department. In this article, which together with others formed a book entitled The Fatal Decisions, Zeitzler says that Hitler wanted to seize Stalingrad at all costs, and later ordered to keep under German control the part of the city which had already been occupied. He also says that Keitel and Jodl supported this plan.  [123•3 

p The book Enemy at the Gates by the American historian 124 William Craig merits a closer examination as a fundamental study of the Battle of Stalingrad.  [124•1  It largely reflects the views prevalent in the United States on the events on the Soviet-German front, and its author poses as an impartial and dispassionate interpreter of history.

p He avoids a repetition of the odious attempts to lump together the battle of Stalingrad with the battles for El Alamein or Tarawa Atoll in the Pacific, as is done by Hanson Baldwin and some other Western historians. At the same time he does not give the Battle of Stalingrad the place it deserves in the Second World War.

p On closer examination the reader can see that Craig gives very perfunctory treatment to the military operations at Stalingrad, has confused different episodes of the battle, and ranks and names of military commanders. According to him, the Kazakhs live on the Volga, and Novosibirsk is a city in the Urals,  [124•2  etc. The author does not go to the trouble of examining the rich historical material he uses in his book. He obviously had other intentions and another mission to fulfill.

p The defeat of the Nazi armies at Stalingrad and the successes of the Soviet armies are, according to Craig, the result of Hitler’s mistakes. In his review of the Battle of Stalingrad he tries to convince his readers that Voronezh remained in Soviet hands solely because of the Fiihrer’s oversight. "Originally Hitler planned to bypass Voronezh.... But when German armor easily [sic] penetrated the outskirts and commanders radioed for permission to seize the rest of the city, Hitler vacillated, leaving the decision to Army Group B’s commander, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock.”  [124•3 

p The fierce fighting at Voronezh in the summer of 1942 tells a different story. It was the heroic resistance of the Soviet army units and formations, and the timely and masterly operations carried out by the Soviet military 125 command that frustrated the Nazi plans to capture Voronezh. The mobile formations of the German army which, on July 6, succeeded in capturing a vantage ground on the left bank of the Don and in capturing a part of the city, came up against the well-organised and stubborn resistance of the Soviet troops. On that same day the Bryansk Front delivered a counter-strike south of Yelets, as the result of which the fascist command was forced to turn north the 24th Panzer corps and three infantry divisions which had been moving into the Voronezh area. The Nazi striking force which was supposed to capture Voronezh thus lost much of its strength and failed to accomplish its mission.  [125•1 

p Craig insists that the Paulus group could have been saved, had it not been for the arbitrary orders of Hitler who had forbidden the encircled German troops to break through towards the advancing forces of Field Marshal Manstein.  [125•2  In his words, the offensive of the Don Front, which was to relieve the encircled troops, proceeded as planned: "Surprisingly, the Russian resistance was negligible.... The worst problem facing the Germans was the ice that covered the roads and prevented the Panzers from getting ample traction.”  [125•3 

p The actual picture of the offensive which the Nazis launched on December 12, 1942, from Kotelnikovo to Stalingrad was quite different. The enemy, with all his superior strength, sustained tremendous losses at the hands of the Soviet soldiers -who offered dogged resistance and fought to the death. Field Marshal Manstein writes in his memoirs about the beginning of the offensive of the Don Front under his command: "The enemy went far beyond the defensive action, launching counter-attacks in order to either regain the area captured by our two Panzer divisions or encircle some of their units.”  [125•4 

126

p In Craig’s opinion, the most important contributing factor behind the victory of the Soviet Army at Stalingrad was the leak of top secret information from the German command. He refers to the activity of Sandor RadO, Rudolf Rossler, and other anti-fascists doing intelligence work against the Nazis.  [126•1 

p But such a version of events, propounded not only by Craig, but by many other Western historians, was refuted by Sandor Rad6 himself: "As an intelligence man, I would be the last person to deny the importance of intelligence work of those who collected the precious information in the enemy rear. But to credit our victory to intelligence work would be turning the whole thing upside down. Such attempts of the bourgeois falsifiers are ridiculous, to say the least.... The outcome of the war was in the final analysis decided on the battlefield. Victory favoured the army which had greater economic potential and manpower resources, was better armed and trained, and had superior moral strength.”  [126•2 

p Much space in Craig’s book is taken up by the "moral aspects of the war in the East”. He divides the facts into those that could be and those that could not be used for anti-Soviet propaganda. He selects for his narrative all the facts in the first group and discards all the rest, as can be judged from his lengthy descriptions of the life of Nazi soldiers, officers and generals taken prisoner at Stalingrad.

p The Morning Star, the newspaper of the British Communists, wrote in this connection: "But one is left wondering how reliable can be the latter-day evidence of some of William Craig’s [West] German interviewees, a surprising number of whom seem to recall only the more humane of their own or their comrades’ deeds and only the harshness of their captors.”  [126•3 

p It would be well to recall here that the victory at 127 Stalingrad was achieved in a.situation which was very difficult for the Soviet Union, which was being threatened by the handpicked Kwantung Army in the Far East and by a large contingent of Turkish troops in the south poised as they were for attack. Between the two of them, Japan and Turkey tied up a considerable portion of the Soviet armed forces, thereby limiting their possibilities in the struggle against the Nazi invaders, which was growing in scope and ferocity.

p The breach by the leaders of the United States and Britain of the Allied commitment to open a second front in 1942 exacerbated the already difficult situation in the Soviet Union. This enabled Germany to funnel its forces and material resources to the Soviet-German front, not only to make good its losses, but to actually increase the number of troops operating against Soviet armies.

p And yet, many Western authors still try to make it seem that the Soviet Army would not have been able to win without Anglo-American military support.

p Ronald Seth, a contributor to Der Zweite Weltkrieg, writes, for example, that the shortage of manpower reserve which prevented the German command from achieving its objectives in the East in 1942 came from the inability to use vast armies tied up in the West against the possibility of Anglo-American troops landing.  [127•1  The American historian James Stokesbury insists that the Russians specially put off their counter-offensive at Stalingrad until November 1942 waiting for "the Allied invasion of French North Africa, rightly seen as tying down the German reserves in Western Europe".  [127•2  Craig, for his part, tries to attribute a still greater role to the imminent Anglo-American invasion of France. He writes that at the time when the Battle of Stalingrad was already in progress, the German command transferred the 128 Grossdeutschland Panzer Division from the Soviet-German front to France.  [128•1 

p The arguments used by Seth, Stokesbury and Craig have failed to find their confirmation in fact. In the first place, shortly before the start of the Battle of Stalingrad the Nazis had a total of 530,000 troops in Western Europe, as against 2,997,000 on the SovietGerman front, the ratio being one to six. In the West the Germans had one air fleet and in the East four air fleets.  [128•2  In addition to that, a considerable part of the German forces in the West were made up of battle-weary formations, or what was left of them, which had been moved over there from the Soviet-German front for rest and reactivation.

p Second, in the days and months of the Battle of Stalingrad the Nazis were busy shifting more troops to the Eastern front, primarily from the West. In the period between November 1942 and April 1943, the Hitler command moved 35 new divisions from France and other countries of Western Europe to make good the heavy losses on the Soviet-German front.  [128•3  Craig’s contention that the Nazi military command moved the Grossdeutschland Division over to the West was a lie out of the whole cloth. The Haider diary confirms that this division was operating on the Soviet-German front.  [128•4  The Grossdeutschland Division was brought to the Soviet-German front in May 1942 and stayed there to the end of the war.  [128•5 

p With the beginning of the counter-offensive at Stalingrad in November 1942,. which developed into an all-out offensive that lasted through the better part of March 1943, more than 100 enemy divisions were put to rout. Altogether, the Nazis lost about 1,700,000 officers and 129

1/2 7—682

men (killed, wounded, missing in action, taken prisoner), 24,000 guns, more than 3,500 tanks and 4,300 aircraft.  [129•1  These losses greatly undermined the military strength of Nazi Germany. The Battle of Stalingrad was a major contribution to the turning of the tide in the Great Patriotic War and indeed in the whole of the Second World War.

The Battle of Kursk

p At midnight, August 5, 1943, Moscow gave an artillery salute in honour of the heroes of Orel and Belgorod for their outstanding victory in the Battle of Kursk. That was the first victory salute fired since the start of the war. Twelve salvoes from 124 guns announced to the Soviet people and the world that Nazi Germany had suffered yet another shattering defeat, which pushed her to the brink of disaster.

p The Battle of Kursk (July 5-August 23, 1943) involved huge forces and materiel on both sides: more than four million troops, more than 69,000 guns and mortars, more than 13,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, and about 12,000 aircraft.  [129•2  After the defeat at Stalingrad, that was the. last attempt on the part of the Nazi command to mount a major offensive on the Soviet-German front in order to gain strategic initiative and reverse the course of events in its favour.

p The Soviet Supreme Command, knowing from intelligence reports that the enemy was preparing an offensive, decided on deliberate defence. In the series of battles that ensued, the powerful enemy groups concentrated in this sector of the front were exhausted, and subsequently rolled back in a sweeping counter-attack. The Battle of Kursk, which was also known as the biggest battle of tanks in the Second World War, cost the Wehrmacht 30 crack divisions, including seven Panzer divisions. The Nazis lost more than 500,000 officers and men, 1,500 130 tanks, 3,700 aircraft and 3,000 artillery pieces.  [130•1  The advancing Soviet army liberated Orel, Kharkov, and many other towns and villages, thus creating favourable conditions for the liberation of the part of the Ukraine east of the River Dnieper.

p Hardly any major works about this battle were written in the West before the sixties. Though in wartime its great significance was recognised in the Western literature. "The great Soviet offensive which started rolling on the Kursk-Orel front in the summer of 1943, did not stop until the following spring when the Nazi invaders were driven completely out of southern Russia,” reads A Brief History of World War II.  [130•2 

p Since then bourgeois authors have been taking great pains to keep silent about or belittle the victories of the Soviet army at Kursk and its effect on the outcome of the Second World War as a whole.

p One of their favourite versions is about the so-called limited objectives of the offensive undertaken by the fascist Wehrmacht in the Kursk Salient (Operation Citadel). The section in Earl Ziemke’s book about this operation is called "A Limited Offensive".  [130•3  The same evaluation of the objectives of the German offensive was given by Trevor Dupuy and many other American historians.  [130•4  A similar point of view has gained ground in most publications of the West German historians. Ernst Klink believes that in planning Operation Citadel the Hitler strategists sought not to regain their strategic initiative but to strengthen their own defences.  [130•5  Since these aims were limited, they continue, the failure of the offensive cannot be regarded as a factor of strategic importance.

p But this conclusion is at variance with the facts. The 131 preparations for Operation Citadel, and the forces concentrated for its realisation go to show that by launching an offensive at Kursk the Nazis hoped to achieve farreaching goals. This, in effect, was their desperate attempt to defeat the main forces of the Soviet army, to regain their strategic initiative, to preserve the fascist bloc of countries and turn the tide of the war in their favour.

p Operation Order No. 6 of the Wehrmacht High Command (signed by Hitler) on preparations for an all-out offensive at Kursk reads: "Every commander, every rank-and-file soldier must grasp the full importance of this offensive. Our victory at Kursk must serve as a torch for the whole world.”  [131•1  In this order the German High Command demanded that the best formations, the best armaments, the best commanders and the largest service of supply and ammunition be used in the offensive in the Kursk Salient. The former chief of staff of the 48th Panzer Corps of the Wehrmacht, F.W. von Mellenthin writes that "no attack could have been better prepared than this one".  [131•2 

p The Nazi command concentrated immediately outside Kursk 50 crack divisions, including 14 Panzer divisions (about 70 per cent of the armour on the Soviet-German front), and two motorised divisions. Altogether the German forces there included more than 900,000 men, about 10,000 guns and mortars, 2,700 tanks and self-propelled guns and more than 2,000 aircraft.  [131•3  The Nazi leaders dispatched to Kursk almost all the Panther and Tiger tanks and the heavily plated Ferdinand self-propelled guns manufactured in Germany by the beginning of July 1943. This large concentration of force could not possibly have been made for "a limited offensive”. On the contrary, the Hitler command had mounted a far-flung strategic operation which, however, was frustrated by the masterly and heroic actions of the Soviet army.

132

p An insidious method of falsifying the history of the Battle of Kursk is the assertion that it was the AngloAmerican landing in Sicily, and not the victory of the Soviet Army, that forced the Hitler command to halt Operation Citadel.

p This is what “official” historians in the United States write in The Encyclopedia Americana. They admit that "the situation north of Orel was precarious”, but then try to convince the reader that Hitler’s "greatest source of worry was Sicily, where American and British troops had landed on July 10”.  [132•1 

p The Allied landing in Sicily worsened Germany’s strategic positions, but could not have markedly affected the course of the fighting near Kursk. On July 10, Hitler gave the go-ahead for the operation. The next day the Nazi troops made fresh efforts to achieve a breakthrough at Kursk. They changed the direction of their main strikes and committed new Panzer formations, but with no success. On July 12, the forces of the Western and the Bryansk Fronts launched an offensive in the Orel sector, and the Voronezh Front launched a counter-attack near the village of Prokhorovka and against the left flank of the Nazi strike force which tried to break through to Kursk from the south.

p This radically changed the situation in the Kursk-Orel Salient, putting the Germans in a critical position. Under the mighty blows of the Soviet forces, Army Group Centre abandoned its earlier plans for offensive operations and assumed the defensive. On July 13 Hitler summoned the conference. The critical position of the German troops in the Salient compelled Hitler to go over to defensive, but he was dissuaded by Field Marshal Manstein, commander of Army Group South. Army Group Centre was allowed to assume the defensive, while Manstein was to continue the offensive. As for the final decision to halt Operation Citadel and to assume the defensive along the entire frontline between Kharkov and Orel, it was adopted by 133 the Wehrmacht High Command only on July 19, 1948, when the Orel group of Nazi armies faced the danger of encirclement.  [133•1 

p In spite of the Allied troop landing in Sicily, the Soviet-German front continued to tie up and demolish the main forces of the Nazi war machine. Suffice it to say that more than 70 per cent of the German field forces was in the East, which enabled the Allies to effect a comparatively easy landing in Sicily. What is more, the Soviet army offensive foiled the Nazi plan to move some of the German divisions over to Italy.

p Some Western historians hold that the Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk was the result of "accidental circumstances”. Thomas Weyr says, for example, that the Nazi plan of an offensive towards Kursk "was a good one and, had Hitler carried it out as soon as the spring thaws were over, might well have succeeded".  [133•2  According to some other American historians, the German operation was hampered by a violent rain storm on July 5 which made the entire terrain on the southern side of the Kursk Salient completely impassable for the tanks, and the poor weather on July 8 prevented the use of the aircraft.  [133•3 

p Earlier on we mentioned some of the inept references to the weather as the reason for the Nazi military reverses. The actual reason is different; the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad, which shook their entire war machine, removed all possibility of the German troops’ launching an all-out offensive in the Kursk Salient in the spring of 1943. After the encirclement of the Paulus group had been completed, the Soviet command moved to the Kursk area large army contingents from the Volga.

p But bourgeois historians are powerless to hush up the irrefutable fact that the Nazi troops used a number of 134 rigid patterns for planning their operations and carrying them out, whereas the Soviet command kept looking for new, original solutions. One of these was their decision to deliberately assume the defensive in a situation in which the Soviet armed forces had overwhelming superiority over the enemy.

p Martin Caidin, who is more objective than others in his assessment of the Battle of Kursk, singles out two principal factors which, in his view, were behind the Soviet victory: first, a brilliantly executed plan of deliberately going over to the defensive, followed by a counter-attack; and second, the fighting ability and stamina of Soviet soldiers.  [134•1  He argues with those who keep silent about the special place this battle held in the war, and calls it "the greatest single land-and-air combat engagement in military history".  [134•2  Martin Caidin sets at length the arguments of the Soviet historians who expose the Western falsifiers of history, and comes to the conclusion that their arguments have "points of validity ... especially in ... reference to histories that purport to cover the entire Second World War”, that "...much of the story on the Russian front failed to reach the writers, the editors, and the publishers who were responsible for historical volumes”. Examining the episodes of the Battle of Kursk he writes: "The divisions on the eastern front in July 1943, then represented .approximately 75 percent of the total strength of the German army, which le,nds hard credence to the insistence of the Russians that they were carrying the brunt of th^ Jand war against the common enemy.”  [134•3 

p Caidin has studied the plans of the Wehrmacht’s offensive in the Orel-Kursk section of the front and the plans of the campaign in the summer of 1943, and comes to the conclusion that the Nazi strategists were out to achieve wide-ranging objectives. Operation Citadel was 135 to be followed by a new sweeping offensive on Moscow. If they achieved all these goals on the Eastern front, the Nazis then planned to occupy Sweden and then move their troops against the Anglo-American forces, should they attempt to invade Italy. With all this in mind Caidin concludes that "it was not only the tide of the Russian fortunes that would be decided at Kursk. It was the war itself’.  [135•1 

p This American author provides some interesting figures on the Soviet and German forces fielded at the time the Nazis began their offensive. In his view the two sides were approximately equal in the number of tanks and aircraft. The Hitler armies had 3,200 tanks and assault guns and 2,500 aircraft. This means, he continues, that "the Wehrmacht had been badly mauled in two years of fighting with the Russians, but there remained a tremendous cutting edge of German steel for the offensive against the Kursk salient.... Hitler had come to believe, along with many of his generals, that the German army stood an excellent chance of achieving its main objective at Kursk-to cut off the Russian forces in the salient...".  [135•2 

p Caidin gives much credit for the victory at Kursk to Soviet military thinking which made it possible to see through the enemy designs and to work out an effective plan of action in the 1943 summer campaign. He specifically mentions Marshal Zhukov, Marshal Rokossovsky and General of the Army Vatutin. "We too have our ranks of military greats. General George Patton springs to mind. There is Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery and General Douglas MacArthur.... How many students, to whom World War II is now musty history, recognize at once the name of Georgi Zhukov? ... the man .. who will stand above all others as the master of the art of mass warfare in the twentieth centurv.”  [135•3  Analysing the progress reports of the Front Commanders-Rokossovsky and 136 Vatutin-about a possible course of action by the enemy, Caidin writes that "both Rokossovsky and Vatutin had formulated a brilliant assessment of the capabilities of the enemy facing them”.  [136•1 

p Notable in the sense of historical authenticity and in the light of numerous fabrications of Western Sovietologists about the so-called "technical backwardness" of the USSR are the high evaluations that the author of the Tigers Are Burning puts on Soviet weapons: the T-34 and KV-1 tanks, IL-2 fighter-bomber, 76 mm gun, etc. He refers to the T-34 tank as "the finest tank in the world.... It owed its existence to men who could envisage a mid-century battlefield more clearly than anyone in the West."  [136•2 

p The course of the Kursk battle itself and the subsequent offensive of the Soviet army are given much less space in Caidin’s book. He writes that, in spite of the massive use of some new and unexpected methods of warfare the Nazi troops failed to achieve a strategic success and got bogged down in the mighty system of Soviet defences.

p He points out the successes scored by Soviet tanks and air force, the effectiveness of the massive attacks carried out by IL-2 fighter-bombers. He attaches special significance to the artillery strike at the Nazi troops poised for attack and says that as a result of that strike the German infantry was cut off from the tanks and the tanks themselves were caught in devastating crossfire, and that effective methods of fighting were found to deal with the Tigers and Ferdinands. Caidin made numerous references to the heroism of the Soviet soldiers and their combat skill.

p The book is not, however, free from certain defects and bears some typical marks of Western writing about the Second World War. Caidin, too, repeats the old story about Hitler’s sole and personal responsibility for the debacle in the Kursk Salient. He follows in the footsteps of other bourgeois historians claiming that there could have been another outcome of the Battle of Kursk: "There is every chance that 137 the battle of Kursk might well have produced different results without the sudden artillery attack.”  [137•1  Linking the outcome of the battle to certain accidental factors he concludes that the Wehrmacht lost this battle because its Tigers had no machine guns.  [137•2 

p Summing up the results of the Battle of Kursk, Caidin describes it as "a debacle, a disaster of unspeakable proportion" and writes that the Soviet offensive broke the back of more than a hundred Nazi divisions. Clearly ip disagreement with Hitler’s generals who survived the war and are still denying this fact, he says with a touch of sarcasm: "They will describe the brilliant reargard actions of their troops, but they find it difficult to admit that this was brilliance in defeat and not in victory.... The important end result of Kursk is this: When the last shots had echoed off into the hills, it was the Russian army that had gathered to itself the impetus of the war, and it was the Russian army that dictated when and where that war would be fought.”  [137•3 

The strategic triangle-Moscow-Stalingrad- Kurskreversed the course of the fighting on the Soviet-German front and that of the Second World War as a whole.