The Soviet Infantryman on the Eastern Front

Introduction

It is ironic that the capitalist countries of the Western world should owe such a debt to the Communist Red Army, doubly so because just over 20 years earlier the Allies—the United States, British Empire, French and others—supported the White Russians against the Reds. Never was the saying the enemy of my enemy is my friend more taken up than by both Western Allies and the Soviet Union in 1941 after the start of Operation Barbarossa. It may have been based on distrust, but the Lend-Lease program put in place by the United States and Great Britain was of substantial help to the Soviet Union—a country that had aided and abetted Germany to evade the military consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, had joined it in the dismemberment of Poland and had provided the Nazis with essential war materials.

Of course, supporting the Soviet Union helped the Western Allies: the sacrifice on the Eastern Front bled the Wehrmacht dry and left them ill-equipped to cope with the invasion of France when it happened. While the British and Americans played a massive part in the war against Germany—particularly at sea and in the air—there’s no doubting where the major land battles took place as the table of German manpower on the Eastern Front shows. Between Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of Italy the bulk of German forces were in the east and thereafter the preponderance continued as they attempted to stem the Soviet advance—an advance that knocked Germany’s allies out of the war, one by one. This is not to belittle the Western Allies’ involvement which diverted not only men but, perhaps more importantly, the majority of the Luftwaffe’s fighters to protect Germany from the strategic bombing campaign. The need to defend the Atlantic Wall also took much-needed raw materials—concrete and rebar for the bunkers; machine guns, mortars, antitank guns and artillery weapons for the defenses; and, of course, panzers for the mobile reserve. And then there was the flow of Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviets: 12 percent of its armored vehicles, 15 percent of its combat aircraft, 25 percent of its foodstuffs, and around 50 percent of its trucks and jeeps.

Eastern Front Manpower

Somewhere in the Persian corridor, a U.S. Army truck convoy carries Lend-Lease supplies for Russia in 1943. LoC

The Soviet Union lost large tracts of land in the German offensive and this had a major effect on both available manpower and also on food production—from the start Red Army infantrymen complained of lack of food. Kumanev and Ryzhov quote First Deputy Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, chairman of the State Planning Committee, Nikolay Voznesenskiy, from his book The War Economy of the USSR during World War II: On the Soviet territory, under occupation, 7 million of 11.6 million horses that were in these areas before the occupation were exterminated or stolen by invaders; 17 million heads of cattle from the total number of 31 million were exterminated; 20 million pigs of the total 23.6 million; 27 million sheep and goats of the total number of 43 million. Crop production was reduced from 150,414,000 hectares in 1941 to 67,289,000 hectares in 1942. As the Germans closed on the Caucasus and Stalingrad, the Soviet Purchasing Commission in the United States requested more canned meat, fats, and oils, and by December 1942 food was given priority over other products. Most food came as concentrates and powders, necessary due to the length of the supply routes.

Also vital were metals—aluminum, cast iron, and various steels: over half of Soviet rails came from the United States, freeing Soviet industry to make tanks. Weapons were in short supply after the losses in 1941 and lack of metals increased manufacturing difficulties. While the importance of Lend-Lease shouldn’t be over-emphasized—it accounted for only 5 percent of Soviet GDP between 1941 and 1945 and 80 percent of it was received after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk when the Red Army was on top—the speed of Soviet success was helped significantly by the Allied contributions. It included 58 percent of the USSR’s aviation fuel, 93 percent of its railway equipment, 50 percent of its TNT (1942–44), and 16 percent of its overall explosives.

Food supplied by Lend-Lease 1941–45

The Red Army had succumbed in summer 1941—as had the armies of Eastern Europe in 1940—to the might of the best-equipped, best-led, and best-motivated army of the time. Indeed, few forces in history were as capable as the Wehrmacht in that period. It had been honed by Blitzkrieg, its personnel and arsenal swelled by annexation and conquest. There were cracks: lack of strategic air forces, logistical issues, and the problems of the overlapping jurisdictions and power struggles of the Nazi elite, but these problems wouldn’t become obvious until the opposition applied enough pressure to expose the failings—and it was in the east that this pressure was exerted.

It wasn’t the Western Allies that stopped Hitler’s all-conquering armies: it was the Soviet armed forces, and at the forefront the Red Army infantry. It was the Soviets—assisted by the terrain, the distances, and the weather—who cobbled together a defensive line and then provided the weight behind a winter counteroffensive that saved Moscow and Leningrad and stopped the Germans in their tracks. It was the Soviets who occupied 80 percent of the German Wehrmacht in 1942 and caused a German manpower and equipment crisis. It was the Soviets who ground out the victories at Stalingrad and Kursk that forced the Germans first onto the defensive and then into a retreat from which there would be no recovery.

The Red Army accomplished this while sustaining fearful losses as the table shows. It’s also worth remembering that between 1941 and 1945, more than half the Soviet POWs (possibly as many as 3.3 of 5.7 million) taken by the Germans died in captivity. Additional to these massive casualty figures are the civilian deaths—as high as 20 million—not just from the fighting but from the executions and genocidal activities of the German extermination teams. The Soviets paid a heavy price for their victory, and it is unsurprising that their immediate postwar aims were to ensure Germany would not be able to fight again, and that a buffer of client states was put in place to protect their borders from any other western incursions.

The Theater of War

After 1922 the Bolshevik victors of the civil war took final control of the Russian Empire of the Tsars, which they transformed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its huge area—8.6 million square miles spread over some 6,000 miles from west to east and 4,500 from north to south—represented about a sixth of the world’s overall land mass. A quarter of this was European—up to the Ural Mountains—where most of the industry and population were. In 1940, there were about 194 million Soviet citizens divided among 11 Soviet Socialist Republics (Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, and Kazakhstan) and 19 major nationalities—each with its own language. After June 1940 also to be included were the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (which also became Soviet socialist republics)—occupied by the Soviet Union as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that had also secured the eastern half of Poland following the 1939 invasion.

Apart from the different nationalities and languages, the great geographical distances made control of the Soviet Union difficult, but there was a further significant division: religion. The Russian Empire had been staunchly Russian Orthodox. The Communist state promoted atheism—a problem for the Eastern Orthodox Christians and many Muslims whose places of worship were closed, and religious leaders persecuted. The other significant faith, Judaism, also saw its share of discrimination, although Lenin and the Soviet state were both against antisemitism. Indeed, large numbers of Jews fought for the Red Army and while many report strong elements of antisemitism, that tended to be a postwar issue and most Jews were accepted by their fellow soldiers without qualms.

The Russian winter is seen as one of the main factors in halting the German advance towards Moscow in 1941. This evocative watercolor was painted by Obergefreiter Fritz Brauner of Flakregiment 101, XXXXVII. Panzerkorps. Note the distinctive harness for the horse-drawn sled that proved to be the best transport system in the snow. The panje horses—related to the Polish konik, 12–13 hands high at the withers and weighing about 800lb—were used extensively by both sides. RCT

The terrain and weather of European Russia are both notable for their extremes, as identified by U.S. Army Pamphlet 20-290:

Any attack from the west must hurdle [great] obstacles, and, at the same time, overcome the military resistance of the Soviets. In all that great expanse, only one major river, the Pripyat, flows from west to east and appears to provide access to the interior. But, of all the freaks of nature, just that river and its tributaries form such a maze of swamps that the watershed of the Pripyat constitutes an obstacle rather than a gateway to the interior of the USSR. Practically all other streams and rivers of the Soviet Union flow from north to south, though a few flow in the opposite direction. An attacker approaching from the west thus faces one natural obstacle after the other. As one proceeds toward the east, those obstacles become more and more formidable. The Dniestr, the Bug, the Neman, and the Dvina conform reasonably well to the usual concept of natural obstacles in the form of watercourses, although they are the very rivers that are peculiarly treacherous. The watersheds of the Dnepr, the Don, and the Volga constitute barriers of extreme difficulty. Moreover, the tributary streams of those watersheds combine with the main rivers to form what amounts to a perfect defense system. A look at the tributaries of the Dniestr on a 1:300,000 map, for example, shows that no military architect could have laid them out to any better advantage. …

Red Army Wartime Casualties

A mounted gun crew moving to a new position. Mud affected both sides: in autumn 1941 it delayed the German offensive at a crucial moment and allowed the Soviets to build up the Moscow defenses. In 1942, as the snows melted to mud, so the Soviet counteroffensive faltered. RIA Novosti archive, image #90027/ Lander/WikiCommons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Then there are the Russian forests, most of which merge with the swamplands. Northern European Russia is a woodland interspersed with swamps; the central part of European Russia abounds in forests; the southern part of European Russia is practically devoid of woods. As a matter of fact, European Russia is the only region of the Continent that has arid steppes and sand flats of typical desert character.

Northern European Russia proper, that is to say the swampy woodland north and northeast of the Valdai Hills, is not suitable for mobile warfare, particularly not for large armored formations. The crucial blows of an offensive, therefore, have to fall in central and southern European Russia. In central European Russia lies the Smolensk–Moscow Ridge, a low glacial moraine whose western extension is known to the Germans as the Orsha Corridor (Landbrücke von Orscha). This is the watershed between the Black and Caspian Seas in the south, and the Baltic and White Seas in the north. Here are the sources of the Dnepr, the Dvina, the Lovat, and the Volga. Access to this ridge is of paramount importance for any conduct of military operations in the western part of European Russia. But the western approaches to the Orsha Corridor are protected by a wide belt of swamps and forests which extends from the Pripyat Marshes past Velikiye Luki and up to Leningrad. After breaking through this belt, an attacker still faces the watersheds of the Don and the Volga. Even if he has reached the Volga, an enemy coming from the west will find himself only in the outer ramparts of the Soviet domain; before him lie the Ural Mountains, and beyond them, Siberia.

As well as the rivers and associated swamps, the Soviet Union in 1941 was crossed by few metalled roads. Twice a year, just before winter and again in spring, rains and thaw bring on the rasputitsa, the bottomless mud that stops motor transport dead. At these times boats are better than cars or carts. The Germans hadn’t done their research and, as Pamphlet 20-290 intimated:

The field forces were taken completely by surprise by the first muddy season in the late fall of 1941 and encountered, in the fullest sense of the word, bottomless difficulties. Military operations that had been planned or had actually gotten under way became delayed or were foiled altogether. On the highway between Smolensk and Vyazma in late October 1941, for example, 6,000 supply trucks piled up, most of them loaded with ammunition, rations, and fuel for the forces advancing on Moscow. Not that the pile-up was caused by a failure to promptly replace demolished bridges with close-by emergency bridges; it was simply a case of the short approach roads to the emergency bridges disappearing time and again into the mud.

The German Army, dependent on horse-drawn transport, ground to a halt, giving time that helped the Soviets prepare their defenses around Moscow. In their turn, when it came for the Soviets to attack and push the Germans west, the rivers that had created such potential obstacles in 1942 proved easier to assault because of the reduction in German manpower and firepower. The Soviet infantry proved adept at fighting in forest and swamp and the Germans were less able to utilize the terrain in their defense.

Fording rivers and lakes became second nature to the Red Army. Here sappers