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PART ONE
STALIN RESURGENT
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1
TRAINING AT SARATOV
The racket was deafening. There was the sound of hammering, drilling and riveting. Every now and then there was the clang of metal upon metal. The harsh electric lights were supplemented by the flash of welders. The elaborate girders holding up the enormous roof disappeared skyward, creating an industrial cathedral. Outside the factory building the trains rattled along the sidings day and night carrying tanks. The workers likewise toiled day and night, they were cold and hungry, but grumbling did no good. To complain was unpatriotic and subversive. Some worked for the love of the Motherland, others simply because they had to.
Whenever any Red Star or Party cameramen turned up it was all smiles and hearty waves. No one really wanted to see just how grim the conditions were in the defence factories relocated to the Urals. As well as the noise, they were cold and dirty. Much of the workforce were older men, women and youngsters. The men of fighting age had been conscripted. They had to endure sixteen-hour shifts with meagre rations to keep them going.
Each tank had up to a dozen workers bustling around it. They were dressed in overalls and caps. Subassembly took place in the other buildings until the tank hull and suspension had been complete. The body was then brought into the main production hall and lowered into the line by a gantry for the men to work on. The gantry was then used to swing the completed turret over the hull ready for installation. Once in place the twin circular turret access hatches were flung open for ease of access into the interior. Upright these made it look as if the tank had ears similar to those of a very famous American cartoon mouse.
Often young, apprehensive-looking tank crews would arrive at the factories to collect their new steeds. The T-34 tank was so durable you could drive it straight to the front, though the preferred method of transport was by train. The men had come from the tank training schools or were from decimated front-line units that were being rebuilt. The factory workers were amazed at what these young men did with their tanks, but there was no hiding the fact that they always needed more. The T-34 was a good tank but the Red Army’s losses seemed unending.
Seventy-three-year-old Yevgeny Paton smiled at the sight of the production line, it had not always been such a hive of efficient activity. When he first arrived in Nizhny Tagil it had been chaos. Moving the T-34 tank factory from Kharkov along with his staff from his Electric Welding Institute in Kiev had not been easy. Similarly, moving elements of the Kharkov and Leningrad tank plants to Chelyabinsk had equally been a giant logistical headache.1 Other tanks plants had been set up at Gorkyy, near Moscow, and at Stalingrad. After the loss of the latter to the Nazis, production had been moved to Sverdlovsk. In the early days machinery and workers had gone missing, trains had been rerouted or requisitioned. Nonetheless, saving the Red Army’s tank factories had been nothing short of a miracle and ultimately nothing had stopped the mass migration eastwards. Chief tank designer Alexander Morozov, also from Kharkov, had played a part in this.
Morozov was grateful for what Paton had done for the Soviet Union’s defence industries. They were now locked in a production war with Nazi Germany, which to win meant they had to produce everything faster and in greater quantities than the invaders. The armed forces needed aircraft, ammunition, artillery and tanks, as well as rifles and uniforms, in phenomenal quantities. Slowly but surely the Red Army’s losses in men and equipment were being made good.
Just before the war Paton had gone to see Nikita Khrushchev to show him the fruits of his research. Khrushchev had seized upon his welding technology immediately and urged Stalin to implement it in factories and building sites. He also saw that it had a military application. ‘Tell me, comrade Paton,’ said Khrushchev, ‘do you think your technique would work on tank steel?’2 Paton thought it possible and was packed off to the Kharkov tank factory to work with Alexei Yepishev, who was the Ukrainian Communist Party representative there. Yevgeny had been made a commissioner to the Council of the People’s Commissar’s despite not being a member of the Communist Party.
The results of Yevgeny’s work were soon apparent with the smooth welding finish on the turret of the first two versions of the T-34 tank, which was made from rolled plate armour. Some turrets though were also cast from moulds. The tank looked streamlined and modern, a worthy successor to the thousands of inadequate tanks the Nazis had destroyed on the road to Moscow.
When Hitler invaded, Khrushchev recalled, Paton ‘moved with our armour works to the Urals when we had to evacuate our industry from Kharkov early in the war’.3 In the summer of 1943 the Red Army needed yet more tanks and Yevgeny helped ensure that happened. ‘Thanks to the improvements he introduced in our tank production,’ said Khrushchev, ‘tanks started coming off our assembly lines like pancakes off a griddle.’4
The new tanks were shipped as battle replacements to the front-line units and to the Saratov Tank School. Many of the other tank training schools had been overrun during the invasion. Despite the ever-growing number of Soviet-built armour, some units found themselves equipped with American- and British-supplied tanks. Morozov was now working on a new T-34 armed with a bigger gun, but it would not be ready until the end of the year.
Summer was coming and you did not need to be a rocket scientist to forecast a big battle was imminent. The season was always campaigning time. It did not matter if the Red Army or the Wehrmacht started it, there would be fighting one way or another. That meant more tanks than ever were needed as the Red Army stockpiled its equipment ready for some big push.
In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill liked to think that he was partly responsible for this frenzied Soviet military build-up. Captain Jerry Roberts, a decoder at Bletchley Park, recalled Soviet scepticism: ‘At first, they ignored British intelligence, but we managed to find ways to send very detailed reports to the Russians … Eventually the Russians put pressure on their factories to deliver as many tanks as possible to the Kursk area. The Russians were able to deliver huge numbers of tanks …’5
Paton was a hero of the Soviet Union; at home though he had a dark secret that had worried him for a long time. It put him and his family in very grave danger. He was fairly certain that the state knew about it, but to date had chosen not to act. Yevgeny was thankful that he had escaped Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s. Hundreds if not thousands of engineers and designers had been consigned to the Gulag. Some had been released, others never heard of again. He was conscious now that his prominent profile with the war effort inevitably put the spotlight on him. He was anxious his past might catch up with him should he be denounced. His father had been a Tsarist consul at the time of the 1917 Revolution and Yevgeny had a Tsarist upbringing. This made him and his kin potential enemies of the people.
He decided if he could join the Communist Party it might at least afford him some protection. Paton resolved to put pen to paper and write to the Central Committee, saying:
I believe I have recently made a significant contribution to the wartime defense of our country by helping in the production of tanks. Therefore I feel I have earned the moral right to address myself to the Party with a request that I be accepted into its ranks. I enclose an application for Party membership, and I ask the Central Committee for its endorsement.6
Paton felt that the letter on its own might not be enough, he needed help from a well-placed sponsor. Travelling to Moscow, he sought out Khrushchev and requested to see him. As luck would have it Stalin had summoned Khrushchev to the capital. Khrushchev willingly took Yevgeny’s letter to Stalin. The issue could have gone one of two ways. Luckily for Yevgeny, Stalin issued a special decree allowing him to join the party immediately, waiving the normal two-year trial period. He was safe for the foreseeable future.
Even using Yegeny’s welding technique, by 1943 production of the T-34 tank was deemed too slow and Morozov had been tasked the previous year with looking at ways of not only speeding up production but also improving the turret armour. The solution was a hexagonal cast turret that resulted in the Model 1943 T-34, although it had gone into production the previous year. Thanks to its turret hatches the Germans had dubbed it Mickey Mouse because it looked just like the cartoon character’s ears.
Despite the enormous efforts made by the Soviet Union’s industries in the wake of Hitler’s invasion, even by early 1943 they were still struggling. In March that year, Deputy Supreme Commander Marshal Georgi Zhukov took part in a meeting ‘to discuss fuel supplies for metal production and electricity generation and for the aircraft and tank works’. He was alarmed to find ‘Their reports clearly revealed the grave situation that still persisted in industry’.7
Alexander Werth with The Sunday Times in Moscow observed:
Soviet armaments production did not reach a satisfactory level until the autumn of 1942. The evacuation of hundreds of plants from west to east in the autumn and winter of 1941 had resulted in an almost catastrophic drop in arms production, which largely accounted for the disappointing results in the Russian Moscow counter offensive in the winter of 1941–42 and the disasters of the summer of 1942.8
Monthly tank production was to average 2,000 in 1943, slightly less than the previous year. However, the production of light tanks was almost stopped in 1943, while at the beginning of 1942 it accounted for more than half the total. In 1943 Soviet weapons factories churned out 16,000 heavy and medium tanks, 3,500 light tanks and 4,000 mobile guns. This was eight and a half times more than in 1940 and almost four times more than in 1941. It was a remarkable feat.
In contrast, supplies from America were not as forthcoming as Stalin might have wished. Zhukov’s meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin showed ‘There were hold-ups in the aid under lend-lease from the USA.’9 Stalin and his advisors did not like to admit it but British and American raw materials were playing an important role in helping rebuild their weapons factories and their armies. ‘We received steel and aluminium from which we made guns, airplanes, and so on,’ admitted Khrushchev. ‘Our own industry was shattered and partly abandoned to the enemy.’10
This and other aid ironically caused great resentment in Moscow. ‘The fact remains that the Allied raw materials enormously helped the Soviet war industries,’ wrote Werth. However, he also noted, ‘But this still does not dispose of the profound emotional problem created by the simple fact that the British and Americans were losing much fewer people.’11 This sense of bitterness was to result in an almighty row with the Allies in the early part of that year. It was ill-timed in light of Stalin’s developing plans for the summer.
The Red Army had endured a tough year during 1942. It suffered a severe defeat at Kharkov in May 1942 and, although it scored a remarkable victory at Stalingrad, it needed to recuperate. Replacement soldiers had to be increasingly drawn from the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Infantry training instructor Lieutenant Evgeni Bessonov found that the quality of the replacements was often poor:
Most of the soldiers were 18 years old in 1943. They were not strong physically, mostly small and frail youngsters, so I tried to adjust the training programme to meet their physical and health capacity. Day and night we trained them for future battles.12
Language was also a problem. Amongst the recruits Bessonov received were middle-aged Azeri soldiers, some 30–35 years old. They required a translator as they could not understand orders given in Russian. However, Bessonov had no complaints about them as they proved to be tough fighters.
In particular, the Red Army needed to replenish its battered armoured units ready for the summer of 1943. Sensibly, tank training regiments were established at the main T-34 factories at Chelyabinsk, Nizhniy Tagil and Sverdlovsk. This was intended to greatly speed up getting combat replacements to the front. Nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Vasiliy Pavlovich Bryukhov received his initial tanker training at Kurgan and was commissioned in April 1943. The following month he joined his first crew at Chelyabinsk and was assigned to the 2nd Tank Corps just before Kursk. Bryukhov was lucky as Senior Sergeant Petr Kirichenko, deployed to the 159th Tank Brigade, was promoted after just a month of training.
Typically, if they survived, tank company commanders ranged from 22 to 27 years old, while platoon leaders averaged 19 to 21. The junior officers were normally recruited for their political loyalt...
