Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [87]
“Although this Russian soldier is a resourceful animal he does not exist as an individual for he is a conditioned and controlled animal. All the thinking is done for him from above. He is never asked or expected to make a decision on his own.
“The top commanders of the Red Army are excellent soldiers of sound military judgment.
“However, the captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and those in the middle ‘field rank’ can think only as far as the staff over them orders. These ‘field’ rank commanders carry out their orders to the fraction of a letter. They carry them out on fear of liquidation from their own superiors or the political commissars. There have been thousands of individual instances where a field commander has failed to exploit a sudden breakthrough because he simply will not assume personal responsibility.
“Most Russian tactics are based on using masses of men to overwhelm the enemy. They have good armor, equal for the most part to the German armor, but their tank tactics are crude. If the Germans knock out a dozen Russian tanks, they face another dozen.
“Their legendary artillery is also based on using mammoth numbers to saturate the target.
“In bedrock, the formula is waves and waves of men in a frontal assault. This is the bread and butter power play of the Red Army. Many a time the German would stack up Russian attackers like cord wood but they came on endlessly. The Russian Staff thinks little of expending regiments or entire divisions to spearhead a drive or clear a field of land mines. Human fodder, the disregard of the individual, makes the Red Army go.
“Interviews with German prisoners state how demoralizing a Russian assault can be. Even if the attack is beaten back, the memory of it becomes unforgettable.
“This ruthless use of the human as soldier is paralleled by the ruthless use of the Russian civilian population. The Soviet commanders will never hesitate to use a village, a town, or a city as a defensive position. As they retreat they will destroy the crops, machinery, homes in order to deny these to the Germans, but at the same time deny their own citizens the means to exist. Many’s the time the Red Army has pulled back leaving such deliberate destruction that the civilian population has no alternative but to starve to death. Thousands of towns were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and millions more were moved to the interior of Russia as slave labor for suspicion of collaboration with the Germans.
“Russian defensive stubbornness is legend. The Russian will not be moved from a fixed position unless overwhelmed by the enemy. However, once a position is overrun, the Russian does not retreat in an orderly manner, he plunges back. The Russian has thousands of miles of land in which to fall back.
“Leningrad, even more than Stalingrad, is the prime example of Russian defense and ruthless disregard of a civilian population. Hitler shied away from a frontal assault on Leningrad and the bloody street fighting which would have to follow. Instead, he ordered a siege with the aid of Finnish troops in order to starve the city into submission. In the first six months an estimated half-million Russians died of cold and hunger. For the balance of the thirty-month siege, another half million met death. Yet, at no time did Leningrad intend to quit, and as the siege wore on, the city actually became stronger and stronger until they broke out.
“A line of credit must go to the women fighters who appear in every phase of the service including infantry, air corps, and tank corps.
“As the war progressed, the Red Army became