How Long For Russia?

(See Cover)

A German crouched behind a tree peering across at the Russians. He was in uniform, but he had no gun. He was talking excitedly into a field telephone, but he was not communicating with headquarters.

He was one of Herr Dr. Goebbels' propaganda boys, selling the home folks another war.

His voice was elated, but it was also as genteel as if he were describing the tennis matches at the Red-White Club in Berlin. "It is a fine summer morning," he said, "and the action here is wonderful."

He told how the German machine had swept into action at 3:05 a.m., the planes going forward to wake the enemy to death, then the pioneers creeping forward to do little engineering tricks, then the full German mechanized weight, noisy, swift, flaming, reaching out to crush and sear the great unknown weight across the way.

At this moment the unit he was covering somewhere along the 3,000-mile front was about to storm a section of Russian defenses--tank traps, blockhouses, a barracks. The announcer said: "The Russian fire is not enough to hold up our infantry. [Chatter of machine guns; bombs falling.] Light machine guns are now going forward. The bunker over there still answers. It is not made of concrete, but of logs. The Russians are coming forward now [staccato of rifles] but naturally they are stopped. Again we see our infantry going ahead. . . . The bunker is ours. Apparently the first Russian prisoners are in our hands. . . ."

The voice became more excited. "I can see the German soldiers within the barracks.

"IT'S TAKEN!"

What Chances? Thus, with every detail worked out, even to the designation of the trees behind which broadcasters should crouch, the veteran German Army took on its hugest job. Though bigger potential armies (10,000,000 Russians, 9,000,000 Germans) had never fought on a bigger potential front, the weathered Germans began fighting Russia just as they had opened against all the other opponents, with apparent calm, with obvious savvy.

They opened with blows which had become familiar even to the civilians of the world. The airmen executed "rolling attacks" on Russian concentrations, materiel dumps, communications. Other bombers Blitzed cities (see map, p. 24). The tricks and the gadgets were all used: fog screens, pontoons, tanks, parachutes, flares, flamethrowers, motorcycles, tommy guns. Pioneers exploded casemates with experienced precision. Engineers built bridges where they were needed. Infantry advanced fluidly.

The initial success was familiar: Ten miles here & there the first day, minor break-throughs at many points on the second. The initial taciturnity of the High Command rang true: "Operations are proceeding satisfactorily and according to plan." The initial preposterousness of such German "unofficial sources" as D.N.B. was the same as ever: it was claimed that 1,200 Russian planes were destroyed in the first two days.

But in spite of having seen all these signs before, every German soldier must have known as he went into battle that nothing is certain about war save uncertainty.

Whether the Battle of Russia would turn out to be also the most important battle in man's books was out of the German soldiers' hands. That depended on the performance of the Russians.

How long would the Russians last? Almost no one except the Russians was convinced that they could trounce the Germans. But if the Russians could put up a long and bitter fight on their own soil, if they could make Hitler pay far more than he thought he was going to have to pay, especially if they could prolong the war into one more winter, then they might give the Battle of Russia a glory commensurate with its size.

What were the chances of their doing this? The Russian chances of holding out indefinitely were conditioned by timing; by geography; by the quantity and quality of the opposing armies; by the quality of the opposing leaders. On these grounds their chances were not too bright.

Death Before the Deadline. The crisis came at a time chosen by Adolf Hitler. He apparently recognized that U.S. entry into the war would make the struggle a long one. He recognized, after the assault on Crete, that the invasion of an island which was defended by airplanes as well as Navy and ground forces would not be easy; he might have to choke Britain by attrition. He recognized that he would need food, fuel and factories of a large part of Russia. He further recognized that his pact with Joseph Stalin was not worth a ruble. For a long war he had to be sure of Russian supplies. If Stalin could not be bluffed into letting Germans take charge of Russia's economy, Germans would have to take it by force.

The clash, therefore, was bound to come. The Russians evidently knew it too. They took steps to prepare. They reformed their Army, redesigned their equipment on the basis of the latest lessons of the war. According to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germans in Belgrade found a report to the former Government of Yugoslavia from its military attache in Moscow, dated Feb. 17, 1940:

"According to information received from Soviet sources, armaments for the Air Force, tank corps and artillery in accordance with the experiences of the present war are in full progress and will, in the main, have been completed by August 1941."

Adolf Hitler decided to catch Russia before the deadline. As soon as his armored divisions had finished their work in Yugoslavia and Greece, he swung them around in a sharp arc, let them pause for amazingly swift refitting and reorganization in Austria and Bohemia, then sheered them into eastern Poland alongside divisions already there. He concentrated infantry divisions from France and Germany in Poland and East Prussia. He built eight strategic roads and many air-dromes in Slovakia. He seized Lemnos and Samothrace, Aegean islands at the mouth of the Dardanelles which served to bottle the Russian Black Sea Fleet. He won Turkey to benevolent neutrality. He persuaded Finland and Rumania, where he had kept large pools of troops for months, to prepare to get back lands taken by Russia.

Nature's Pincers. Between the Arctic and the Black Sea lie 3,000 miles of Russian border (see map, p. 24)--as long as the U.S.-Canadian border. The long miles bulge in a great convex arc--incipient giant pincers against Russia. It was to push these pincers as far as possible from Moscow and the industrial area of European Russia that the U.S.S.R. had grabbed buffer areas every time Germany had pushed over a nation on the Soviet border.

The German opening attack struck at every sector of the arc. Only as the attack developed could the main drives be singled out with assurance.

In the far north, the Finnish Front was at first relatively quiet. The tired Finns, though they mobilized, had no stomach for more war. But Germany had for some time been gathering a big troop pool in Norway. This moved up over the top into Finland, maybe directly into Russia.

From East Prussia strong German forces drove north into Lithuania. The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) afforded a particularly tempting target. Russia seized them in June 1940--as the Germans did after the Red revolt in 1917. The people remain disaffected, and Adolf Hitler made the most of their feelings.

Revolt against the Russians was reported breaking out in Estonia; the Germans set up a puppet Government for Lithuania. If the Germans could quickly sew up the Baltic littoral, they would not only have developed the northern arm of the master pincers; they would also have deprived Russia of bases for her large fleet of submarines, which might prove embarrassing to the German flow of ore from Sweden.

But the area Adolf Hitler has been most interested in ever since he dictated Mein Kampf is the Ukraine (see p. 27). Into the Ukraine many fingers of attack dug forward. As the basis of this attack, and also as the southern jaw of the master pincers, German troops, supported by Rumanians, cut into Bessarabia, the area which Russia grabbed from Rumania in June 1940. Main Russian defenses were behind the Dnieper; Bessarabia looked as easy to take as the Baltic States.

The Russian defensive remained to be developed. Remembering how they beat Napoleon--and perhaps Chiang Kai-shek's defense of China--the Russians have the option of using the size of their country as a weapon to wear down the enemy. On the first day mass flights of Russian bombers attacked East Prussia. But Red withdrawal would eventually be necessary, because the position held by the Russians was dangerous; in the initial phases geography was on the side of the Germans.

Lessons of Finland. Crusty old Paul von Hindenburg once said: "Any general who fights against the Russians can be perfectly sure of one thing: he will be outnumbered." The Germans are outnumbered in this battle. First reports indicated that the Russians had about 175 divisions on the front, to about 130 German divisions--perhaps 3,000,000 Russians against perhaps 2,000,000 Germans.

Numbers of men do not win mechanized battles. But even mechanically, the best units of the Russian Army are heavier than Germany's. The Russians have a childlike, Oriental faith in the unanswerable power of machinery, and they have equipped their divisions to the ears. Each infantry division has an unusually high percentage of tanks--one battalion. Estimates of Red tank totals run from 6,000 to 20,000 (compared with perhaps 15,000 German tanks). The Russians have a few vast 100-ton "land battleships" which look better in the Red Square than in action, but they also have about 1,500 medium tanks (20-30 tons) with the heaviest armament of any tanks their size--three cannon, four machine guns. The total number of planes in an air force is meaningless, but it is possible that Russia has the edge in numbers, although Russian planes are slow.

On the record, the German Army looks good; not one of its missions has gone sour. The Russian Army, which has fought only Finland and the Japanese on a minor scale, looks bad. It is not, however, quite as bad as it looks.

In Finland, Russia's best divisions fought hard and courageously on the hardest testing ground they could possibly have chosen. In the beginning they managed very badly, but towards the end much better. They were resilient. They improvised--used armored sleighs, field guns on skis, three-storied dugouts, dummy encampments to decoy bombers.

The Russian Army--and especially its Commander in Chief Marshal Semion Timoshenko--observed well the lessons of Finland. The biggest lesson was that no army can function when officers advise rather than command, beg rather than order. Marshal Timoshenko applied that lesson by banishing political commissars from the Army, restoring the rank of General, empowering officers to force obedience even if the pistol was the only way, obliging common soldiers to swallow their comradely pride and salute their superiors.

Another important lesson of Finland was that quantity is not enough. The pitiful 44th Division which lay on a road before Suomussalmi, equipped as thoroughly as any mechanized division in the world, heavy as steel could make it, was shot to pieces because, like a supine knight in armor, it was too ponderous to get up and go. Accordingly, when the vast military maneuvers began last year, Semion Timoshenko addressed his officers (see cut, p. 23) with these words:

"We intend to check up on the fitness of our small units. ... If each such particle attains real efficiency and imbues genuine military culture in all of our larger units, our troops, should they be called upon to fight, will carry on their operations without sustaining heavy losses."

A beginning of Russian improvement, therefore, had been made. Maneuvers are not as good training as wars. It is doubtful whether determination could give Russians as keen military instincts as Prussians. Experience and innate skill were probably also on the side of the Germans.

Up to the Marshal. If all these military factors favored the Germans, there was only one thing left which might save the Russians--genius of generalship. The Germans have some pretty seasoned generals. To beat them was the staggering task of Marshal Timoshenko.

Tough, stone-bald, peasant-born Marshal Semion Konstantinovich Timoshenko is about as young a marshal as a great nation ever had. That is his advantage, for while not all young generals are geniuses, most of history's generals with genius have been younger men. It is many generations since Russia has produced a great general and perhaps one is due.

For 22 of his 46 years Timoshenko has known Joseph Stalin. He has risen in his old friend's favor by military ability and by avoiding those political disaffections that have led so many other Soviet officers to the cork-lined execution chambers of the GPU. More than once he has been moved into the post of a doomed officer just before or after the cork-lined walls muffled the sound of the firing squad.

Born in the village of Furmanka, Bessarabia, near Russia's Rumanian border, Marshal Timoshenko worked as a farm hand for wealthy landlords, first fought against the Germans as an Imperial draftee in 1915. He learned to operate American-made machine guns, but his Tsarist service ended when he was court-martialed and jailed for beating up an officer. Released after the Revolution, he rose to be a Red cavalry commander. Though the Marshal has recently been engaged in stamping out democratic procedures once favored by the Red Army, he got his own early promotions in the democratic manner--he was elected platoon and later squadron commander of a Black Sea cavalry detachment.

Young Timoshenko fought the White Russians and foreign intervention troops on many fronts, was wounded five times, in 1919 helped defend Tsaritsyn (now Stalingrad) where he met Comrade Stalin, who was in command. In 1920 Timoshenko took part in the Red offensive on Warsaw which was repulsed by the Poles under famed Marshal Josef Pilsudski.

Following the Russian-Polish war, Timoshenko spent several years at Russian schools of war in special classes for soldiers who, like himself, were experienced but had never studied military science. In the early '30s he traveled abroad, studying "capitalistic" armies, and when Joseph Stalin began to purge the Soviet command, Timoshenko rose rapidly.

In 1935-37 he was Assistant Commander of the Kiev Military Area under General lona Emmanuilovich Yakir, who was shortly to be executed. In 1937 Timoshenko became Commander of the North Caucasus Military Area, succeeding General N. D. Kashirin, who was shortly to be executed. Later in the year Timoshenko became Commander of the Kharkov Military Area, succeeding General L. Dubovoy, who already had been executed. In 1938 General Timoshenko returned to the Kiev Area as full commander. While in this post, in the autumn of 1939, he directed the Red Army's occupation of eastern Poland.

In the winter of 1939, when Russia's ill-trained and ill-equipped troops were led to a freezing massacre in the snows of Finland, the campaign was finally saved by the use of better troops following the shrewd tactics of Generals Grigory Kulik, Boris M. Shaposhnikov and Semion Timoshenko. General Timoshenko was widely credited with the chief part in the salvage.

One night in the following May at Moscow's Bolshoi Opera House, a lusty Soviet audience loudly celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of the greatly lyrical "Russian weeper"--Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. To the cheers of the crowd, in a box there appeared Joseph Stalin, Premier Viacheslav Molotov, Marshal Kliment E. Voroshilov, and a new figure in the Stalin entourage--General Semion Konstantinovich Timoshenko.

That day the General's name had not yet appeared in the Soviet Encyclopedia. But that day, together with Generals Kulik and Shaposhnikov of the Finnish victory, he was made a Marshal of the Red Army. And while Marshal Voroshilov was kicked upstairs to the office of Assistant Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Marshal Timoshenko succeeded him as People's Commissar for Defense.

Since that time Marshal Timoshenko has behaved like both an illustrious military leader and a People's Commissar. For, while he has designed for himself and his comrade marshals a special gold and platinum star studded with diamonds, he has also visited in full regimentals his native village of Furmanka, where he embraced his brother Efrem, whom he had not seen since 1914, kissed many of his old friends, and joined in an all-night carousal in his honor.

Fortnight ago it was rumored that Marshal Timoshenko was the leader of a Kremlin clique who dared to oppose Joseph Stalin by opposing the appeasement of Adolf Hitler. If so, the Marshal has obviously had his way. Last May Day he declared: "The present international situation is pregnant with all kinds of surprises. . . . [Russia is ready] to offer an annihilating rebuff to any encroachment by imperialists." Last week, the Greatest Imperialist of them all having sprung a major encroachment, it was up to Marshal Timoshenko to produce Russia's rebuff.

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