Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [8]
Finally, at midday on 22 June, Molotov’s voice, not Stalin’s, emerged from the wireless. ‘Today at four o’clock in the morning, German troops attacked our country without making any claims on the Soviet Union and without any declaration of war.’ His statement gave little detail. ‘Our cause is just,’ he concluded woodenly. ‘The enemy will be beaten. We will be victorious.’
Molotov’s choice of words was uninspired and his delivery awkward, but this announcement created a powerful reaction throughout the Soviet Union. The city of Stalingrad on the Volga may have been far from the fighting, but this did not diminish the effect. ‘It was as if a bomb had fallen out of the sky, it was such a shock,’ remembered a young female student. She promptly volunteered as a nurse. Her friends, especially Komsomol (Communist Youth) members, began collections for the war effort.
Reservists did not wait for mobilization orders. They reported at once. Within half an hour of Molotov’s speech, the reservist Viktor Goncharov set out from home for the centre, accompanied by his old father, whom he assumed was coming to see him off. His wife, working out at the Stalingrad tram park, could not get back to say goodbye. He had no idea that his father, an eighty-one-year-old Cossack who had ‘fought in four wars’, was planning to come along to volunteer. But old Goncharov was furious when the staff at the centre rejected him.
In Stalingrad Technical University, near the huge Stalingrad tractor factory, students put up a large map on the wall, ready to mark with flags the advance of the Red Army into Germany. ‘We thought’, said one, ‘that with a huge, decisive blow we’d smash the enemy.’ Countless newsreels of tank production and aviation achievements had convinced them of the Soviet Union’s immense industrial and military strength.
The images had proved doubly impressive in a country which, until recently, had been technologically backward. In addition, the domestic omnipotence of the Stalinist system made it appear unshakeable to those inside it. ‘Propaganda fell on a well prepared soil,’ acknowledged another of the Stalingrad students. ‘We all had this powerful image of the Soviet state and therefore of the country’s invincibility.’ None of them imagined the fate that awaited the Soviet Union, even less the one in store for the model city of Stalingrad, with its engineering plants, municipal parks and tall white apartment blocks looking across the great Volga.
2
‘Nothing is Impossible for the German Soldier!’
During that night of 21 June, the diplomats in Berlin and Moscow could only guess at what was happening along the frontier that separated them. Never had foreign ministries been so redundant. Some 3,050,000 German troops, with other pro-Axis armies bringing the total to four million men, awaited the invasion of the Soviet Union from Finland to the Black Sea. ‘The world will hold its breath!’ Hitler had declared at a planning session several months before. The ultimate objective was ‘to establish a defence line against Asiatic Russia from a line running from the Volga river to Archangel’. The last industrial area left to Russia in the Urals could then be destroyed by the Luftwaffe.
It was the shortest night of the year. Wireless silence was maintained for the many hundreds of thousands of troops hidden in the birch and fir forests of East Prussia and occupied Poland. Artillery regiments which had arrived in the eastern frontier regions weeks before, ostensibly to prepare for manoeuvres, were well prepared. In East Prussia, the gun teams, wearing old clothes borrowed from local civilians, had brought forward reserves of shells on farm carts and camouflaged them next to pre-selected fire