Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [124]
The Russians too were relatively weak in 1942, but as the German graph slid downward, theirs went up. At the start of the spring campaign they were even short of rifles and small arms for their infantry, but they gained day by day. Part of this gain, though only a part, come from the West. In 1942 and 1943 the British, Americans, and Canadians turned out more than 10,000 tanks which were sent to Russia. Most of them were not up to Russian standards, ironically, and they were generally employed on quiet sectors, with the exception of some British infantry-support tanks heavy enough for Russian needs.
Rather better results were achieved with western aircraft. A total of just over 14,000 American aircraft was sent to Russia, nearly 10,000 of them fighter planes. The largest single type was the P-39 Airacobra, one of the less successful in the American inventory, which had already been rejected by the British as unsuitable for combat. The Russians liked them and used them extensively as ground support and attack aircraft. The British added another 4,000 planes, mostly Hurricanes and Spitfires. These figures impressed western observers more than they did Russians. The American aircraft industry produced about 300,000 planes during the war; Russian industry built 142,000. The Russians felt that 10 percent of their needs, and only 5 percent of American production, was not a great deal.
The greatest contribution of the Western Allies, however, was in trucks—more than 385,000 of them—clothing, rations, raw materials, signal equipment, and all kinds of items which enabled the Russian war industry to concentrate on producing its own guns and tanks. It was American trucks and half-tracks that really motorized the Red Army. Not until 1943 did these items reach Russia in large proportions, but they were a major addition to Russia’s war effort. If the Russians did not appear as grateful as the British and Americans thought perhaps they should be, the Soviet response was brutally simple: we are doing the fighting. It was November of 1942 before the first American troops were in action against the Germans in even divisional strength. At that time the Russians had more than four million men facing the German armies.
That was far more Russians than there were Germans about. The Axis had in midsummer of 1942 just over three million men in Russia; more than half a million of them were from the satellite countries: fifty-one divisions of Rumanians, Hungarians, Slovakians, and Italians. There was a Spanish division as well; though Franco remained determinedly neutral in Hitler’s war, he did allow the dispatch of an all-volunteer division to join the fight against communism. Few of them came home to Spain again.
The Russians needed to be stronger because, though they were improving, they were still far less sophisticated than even a weakened German war machine. Their staff work was not as good, their troops were poorly trained, forced to learn as they went along—if they survived to do so—and the Reds still employed tactics that were wasteful of manpower. More than any other army, except possibly the Chinese, they were willing to trade lives for time and space. Yet as their communications techniques developed and as their planning staffs gained confidence, they became increasingly adept. Once again, as Russian matériel—human and otherwise—got better, and German matériel got worse, the two lines on the graph neared and finally crossed. The place where they ultimately met each other was at Stalingrad.
Hitler’s plans for 1942 were grandiose indeed, when viewed on a map. He decided by a four-stage operation to clear the great bend of the Don River, close in on Stalingrad on the Volga, and then drive down into the Caucasus where he would seize the Russian oil fields and bring the Russian war machine squeaking to a halt. The weakness in these plans was that they made the oil fields the primary objective and reduced the Red Army, which had to be pushed out of