The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941-1944

A Critical Historiographical Analysis

Leonid D. Grenkevich, David M. Glantz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136318580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Partisans and terrorists have dominated military history during the second half of the 20th century. Leonid Grenkevich offers an account of the shadowy partisan struggle that accompanied the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War (1941-1945).

PART I

CAUSES OF THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE ON TEMPORARILY OCCUPIED SOVIET TERRITORY, 1941-44

Causes of the Partisan Struggle on Temporarily Occupied Soviet Territory, 1941-44

Long before 1941 Hitler had dreamed about marching to the east and defeating the Bolshevik State. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler menacingly declared:

And so we National Socialists take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement toward the south and west of Europe and turn our gaze toward the lands of the East … When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here … This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination will also be the end of Russia as a state.¹

When developing its plan ‘Barbarossa’ to crush the Soviet Union within the period of a couple of months, in June 1941 the Nazi High Command concentrated substantial military forces along an extensive front extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. During the first stage of the ambitious operation, the German plan envisioned the destruction of the bulk of the Red Army in the region west of the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers and the prevention of a Soviet withdrawal to the rear. The plan then called for German forces to seize Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and the Donbas (Donets Basin) region and reach the line Astrakhan’, Volga River, and Arkhangel'sk. To fulfil this plan, the Germans concentrated 190 combat divisions, including 19 tank and 14 motorised divisions, along the Soviet border and supported this massive force with four Air Fleets and the Finnish and Romanian Air Forces. All told, Germany and its allied satellite states committed 5.5 million soldiers, 47,000 field artillery pieces and mortars, 4,300 tanks, and about 5,000 combat aircraft to take part in the initial assault against the USSR.²

Of course, the initial Nazi attack, which began upon receipt of the coded signal ‘Dortmund’, signalling the commencement of Operation ‘Barbarossa’, was very difficult for the Red Army to withstand. Worse still, largely because of Stalin's policies, the Soviet High Command was not prepared to contend effectively with so harsh and heavy a blow. On the first day of ‘Barbarossa’, General Franz Haider, the chief of the German Army General Staff, noted in his famous diary that the Soviets were ‘tactically surprised along the entire front’. Hundreds of Soviet planes were caught by surprise and destroyed on their airfields.

Although Soviet resistance in many sectors of the long German-Soviet front was intense, nevertheless, the general situation for the Soviet Union was extremely grave. The German exploitation of surprise and the concentration of German forces, such that they achieved five- to ten-fold numerical superiority in some key front sectors, enabled the Germans to win early and dramatic victories.

Josef Stalin was shocked and could not believe the terrible losses the Red Army was suffering. In his memoirs, which were published in Ogonek magazine in 1989, Nikita Khrushchev described the Soviet dictator's behaviour when he heard the first grave news of the Nazi assault. Stalin met with his fellow members of the Politburo of the Communist Party Central Committee and is said to have uttered the following words, ’The war has started, and it is developing catastrophically. Lenin has left us a proletarian state, and we are about to lose it. I renounce the leadership.’³ He then left the Kremlin and spent about a week in solitude at his country house. That is why the radio address to the Soviet people officially announcing the fact of the German invasion was delivered by V. M. Molotov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs.⁴ When Politburo members Molotov, Beria, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov subsequently came to Stalin's country house to attempt to persuade him to resume the leadership of the state, the owner looked, as Khrushchev vividly described, very scared, as if his former colleagues had come to arrest him.⁵

At the beginning of the Soviet-German War, no government in the world believed that the Soviet Union could withstand such a heavy Nazi blow. British intelligence estimated that the USSR would be capable of rendering resistance for no more than 10 days.⁶ US President Franklin Roosevelt's military advisers were equally pessimistic about Soviet prospects for survival. They concluded that the Germans would completely defeat and occupy Russia within a month at the minimum and within three months at the maximum.⁷ The fact that the highest levels of the US Armed Forces did not believe that the Soviet Union could fight effectively against Nazi Germany and its satellites also adversely influenced the US Congress regarding the issue of providing assistance to the Soviets through Lend-Lease.⁸ Especially tragic in this regard was the July 1941 declaration by George C. Marshall, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Red Army would likely be crushed.⁹

Only the diary of Fascist Italy's Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, the son-in-law of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, contains strange words expressing doubts over the likelihood of easy and early German victory. At 0300 hours on the morning of 22 June 1941, the German Ambassador in Rome, von Bismarck, delivered to Foreign Minister Ciano Hitler's long message about his decision to attack the Soviet Union. Ciano immediately telephoned Mussolini, who was resting at his summer home at Riccione. As soon as the Duce had rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he ordered an immediate declaration of war on the USSR, although he knew that the Germans would receive a bloody nose. Reflecting his doubts, Mussolini said to his son-in-law, ‘I hope for only one thing, that in this war in the East, the Germans lose a lot of feathers.’¹⁰

One of the few encouraging events to occur in the initial days of war was British Prime Minister Churchill's declaration of support for the Soviet Union, which he uttered on 23 June. Churchill stated that, although, ‘No one has been a more consistent opponent to Communism than I have been for the last twenty-five years’, nevertheless, ‘Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.’¹¹ These words were a virtual declaration of friendship in the fight against Hitler.

It is a fact that many Red Army units displayed bravery and resourcefulness during the initial days of fighting against the Nazis. Nonetheless, within the first three weeks of the Nazi assault, the Wehrmacht forced the Red Army to abandon Latvia, Lithuania, part of Estonia, almost the whole of Belorussia and Moldavia, and the greater part of the Ukraine. German armies penetrated 450–500 kilometres into the depths of Russia along the north-western axis, 450–600 kilometres along the western axis, and 300–350 kilometres along the south-western axis.¹² As a result, during the summer and autumn of 1941, the Germans seized an area of 1.5 million square kilometres of Soviet territory where 74.5 million people had lived before the war.¹³

By the autumn the Soviet Union was in great peril. The Germans deprived the country of its iron and steel resources in the south and seized the valuable Donbas coalfields. Worse still, most of the large number of industrial plants that had been evacuated to the east were not yet in operation. The Soviet Union's total industrial output in the second half of 1941 was down to less than one half the pre-war level. The German advance severely disrupted Soviet transport, and what transport remained was operating under terrific strain. All of these grim realities made it extremely difficult to supply the struggling Armed Forces with adequate arms and munitions.¹⁴

At the beginning of July 1941, Franz Haider, the German General Staff chief, expressed his faith in early German victory in his diary. On 14 July Hitler was confident enough to issue a directive recommending that Wehrmacht strength be cut ‘considerably in the near future.’ In addition, since Germany was still at war with Great Britain, which the US was tacitly supporting, he ordered armaments production to concentrate on naval ships and Luftwaffe aircraft.¹⁵ In fact, by the end of the summer of 1941, Hitler was convinced that the Soviet Union was finished. Consequently, at the end of September, he instructed the German High Command to take necessary measures to disband 40 infantry divisions so that this additional manpower would be available for use in German industry.¹⁶

In this very parlous situation at the beginning of the war, the Soviet political and military leadership did all in its power to promote resistance to the advancing German forces. Quite naturally, their thoughts turned to partisan actions. Partisans, they believed, could be used not only to harass the enemy but also to inflict losses on him.

A factor very conducive to unleashing partisan warfare in the enemy rear was the nature of the occupied territory itself. The vast area occupied by the Germans during the first months of the war from Kiev northward to the Baltic Sea was ideal terrain for conducting partisan operations; the Soviets exploited it to the full. This region of the former Soviet Union is low and marshy, and most of it is covered with extensive forests or numerous groves of trees. The forests and groves provided concealment for the partisans and hidden bases from which they could conduct lightning raids. The swampy ground prevented the Germans from sending heavy motorised equipment, such as armoured vehicles, tanks, and heavy artillery, in pursuit of the partisans. Moreover, during the winter months the partisan fighters possessed another advantage over the Germans. Accustomed to the Russian climate, they were far better prepared to endure the bitter cold than their German opponents, and they were able to carry out their hit-and-run attacks no matter how harsh the weather conditions became.

Thus, despite the generally unfavourable situation the Soviets faced at the beginning of the German offensive, the rich experience in guerrilla warfare that they had acquired during the Russian Civil War conditioned Soviet forces to organise and conduct large-scale partisan war. Although critical of various aspects of the Soviet partisan movement during the war, the German author, Otto Heilbrunn, accurately and correctly described the situation at the Soviet-German front regarding partisan warfare. He wrote:

The outstanding patriotic guerrilla movement of World War II was, of course, that of Soviet Russia. Nowhere were conditions for its inception more favourable. There was in Russia a lawful government, resident in the country, and with all the might of State and Party behind it; there was an unbeaten Army, a large reservoir of manpower in the occupied areas from which partisans could be raised; much of occupied Russia was excellent guerrilla territory – the forests, the swamps and the mountains; and from the vast unoccupied areas the partisans could be reinforced and supplied … Finally, the Soviets had had fair experience of guerrilla fighting in the days of the Civil War.¹⁷

NOTES

1. A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 654.

2. IVMV, tom 4, p. 21.

3. Ogonek, No. 13 (July 1989), p. 18.

4. Pravda, 23 June 1941.

5. Ogonek, No. 13 (July 1989), p. 18.

6. A. J. P. Taylor, The Second World War: An Illustrated History (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 98.

7. Ibid., p. 99.

8. R. Jones, The Roads to Russia: United States Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), p. 34.

9. J. Curtiss, ‘Russian History in the United States: Vistas and Perspective’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1970, pp. 26, 27.

10. G. Ciano, The Ciano Diaries, 1939-1943, ed. Hugh Wilson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946), pp. 369, 372.

11. As quoted in D. Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 338.

12. Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1941-1945: Kratkaia istoriia [The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945: A Short History] (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1965), pp. 64, 68.

13. IVMV, tom 4, p. 129.

14. Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina Sovetskogo Soiuza 1941-1945[The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945] (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1984), p. 88.

15. W. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 853.

16. Ibid.

17. O. Heilbrunn, Partisan Warfare (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 17.

1

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Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• CASS SERIES ON SOVIET (RUSSIAN) MILITARY EXPERIENCE
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• Map of the Partisan Movement in German-occupied territories
• Introduction
• PART I: CAUSES OF THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE ON TEMPORARILY OCCUPIED SOVIET TERRITORY, 1941 - 44
• PART ll: COMBAT ACTIVITIES OF THE SOVIET PARTISAN
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index