Armageddon - Max Hastings [87]
Lieutenant Tony Saurma, who fought the Red Army as a Tiger troop commander with the famous Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division from 1942 to the end, admired the stoicism of the Russian soldier. His unit often fought opposite the Soviet “Red Flag” Guards Division. Each side collected the other’s cap badges. But Saurma qualified his respect by saying: “The Russians didn’t think much. They were usually being driven by their officers.” The Germans feared the Soviet Stalin tank, but thought little of Soviet tank gunnery. In battle, Saurma sought to keep moving constantly. “It’s much harder to hit a running hare,” he told his own tank commanders. Like every German soldier, he was awed by the spectacle of the Red Army in attack. T-34s would approach six, twelve abreast. The Germans would knock out four or five, but there were always more. “You couldn’t believe the way they kept coming—their infantry simply charging our tanks, running and shouting, even when the bodies were piled up in front of our positions. Sometimes our infantry seemed paralysed by the spectacle. One thought: ‘How can we ever stop such people?’ ” Rolf-Helmut Schröder, a Wehrmacht officer who became a post-war Bundeswehr general, said: “The Russians were not good soldiers. But they had very good generals, and they had mass.”
The Nazis acknowledged an unwilling but profound respect for the Russians as adversaries which they never extended to the Americans and British. Deriding the Western allies’ lack of spirit, Hitler said at one of his military conferences: “The Russian—that pig—has managed it. If someone starts to whine among us, I can only say: take the Russian in his situation in Leningrad.” General Heinz Guderian, the Army Chief of Staff, agreed that the Russians were “brilliantly” led. Hitler marvelled: “The way they have survived this crisis [Leningrad]!” Göring interjected: “They let a million die of starvation.” Guderian said: “They lead very energetically, very quickly, and very decisively. It is a lot.” Stalin returned the respect of his adversary, once describing Hitler to Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins as “a very able man.”
The fastidiousness of the Americans and British about the lives of their men was admirable in humanitarian terms, and reflected the fact that the Western allies possessed strategic choices about where and when to confront the Germans. Delaying D-Day until June 1944 represented a prudent, even self-indulgent decision, of a kind that was denied to the Russians. They were forced to maintain an unbroken struggle from June 1941 to the end, because their armies were continuously in the presence of the enemy. It was necessary for somebody, somewhere, to pay a heavy price to break down the mass of the Wehrmacht. Who can imagine the democracies, in any circumstances, bearing a loss akin to that of the 900,000 citizens of Leningrad who starved to death to sustain its defence? Even if Britain had been invaded, the inhabitants of its cities would have chosen surrender rather than eat each other. American and British leaders and generals required a degree of consent from their soldiers and their peoples. It would be wrong to underrate the degree of consent even in Stalin’s Russia, the real patriotic passion that impelled most of its people to resist the Germans. In decisive contrast to the Russians’ military collapse before the 1917 Revolution, the national spirit of the Red Army grew with every day of war. But it would be foolish also to deny the compulsion which underpinned the Soviet war effort, reinforced by draconian and usually mortal sanctions against those who faltered.
In the autumn of 1944, Stalin’s armies faced the Germans on fronts totalling almost 2,000 miles—though now shortening fast—and embracing the soil of eight foreign countries. For both sides, it was a stupendous undertaking to maintain supplies of men, food, weapons and ammunition to the millions doing the fighting. In 1944, the Soviet supply system delivered the equivalent of 1,164,000 railway wagon-loads of supplies to the fronts, of which