Kill, by Ilya Ehrenburg, June 24, 1942...If you have not killed a German today, your day has been wasted.... CD
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Great. I am laughing. I mean, why hold back Ilya, tell us how you really feel. (I am sure the Russians were feeling pretty fucking desparate)
All during the winter `41-42, the Germans were pinned down along a front running from a few miles north of Murmansk down to just outside of Rostov. (How long is this? More than 1500 miles?) The Germans were literally at the end of the city trolly lines for Leningrad. The Russians had already lost more than a million soldiers killed or captured in the first six to eight months of the war. The Germans had encircled something like ten Russian armies (mainly around Kiev) to reach this stage and had hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners.
In the winter and spring the Russians staged several large break-out offensives in the northern and center sections trying to free Leningrad and Moscow from threat of encirclement. While Russians lost these offensives, the Germans only barely won them.
In March `42, Hitler decided on a plan for a summer offensive on the southern front moving further east to the Don and Volga with a flank cover at Stalingrad while the main forces were to move south from Rostov with several eastern branches following and then crossing the Don and then due south toward the Caucasus to capture an oil pipeline that connected Rostov to Makhachkala on the Caspian Sea and of course the oil fields. Meanwhile he decided to leave the center and north sections fixed in place. Why, is the central question of the war? Carell explains it was for the oil. (I really needed maps to make sense of this.)
``Every one of Hitler's idees fixes played its fatal part in the war against Russia---but most decisive of all was his obsession with oil. It dominated the campaign in the East from the start, and in the summer of 1942 it was this obsession that led Hitler to take decisions and make demands on the Southern Front which eventually decided the campaign of 1942 and hence the course of the war....'' (537p, v1 Carell)
In June `42 Sevastopol which had survived as a pocket fortress of Russian forces was under heavy German assault and fell in early July.
Meanwhile in May the begining German summer offensive called Operation Blue was about to start. The Russians got a break. A German major and his pilot crash landed near the Russian lines in the Kharkov region. The German officer had maps and an outline of the order of battle for Operation Blue. But the map and outline only covered the northern sector start from Kharkov to the Oskol river.
The consequence of this find was that Marshall Timoshenko could launch a massive offensive against the German positions near Kharkov before the Germans had a chance to start their offensive south. Timoshenko drove through the Germans lines heading west, but was cut off by flanking German units north and south in a pincer and surrounded. Timoshenko tried to fight clear to head back east and lost almost a quarter million soldiers to capture. (The scale of these battles is just enormous...)
Sometime after April `42 Hitler assumed direct command of the army. He started stripping the center front to re-inforce the southern front to prepare for Operation Blue. By August he had moved his military HQ to the Ukraine near Vinnitsa (I think).
The earlier translation (August `41) dates from the first German offensive the year before while the Russian armies were collasping before the onslaught. It sounds like the first realization of what they were in for:
``I now address the Jews of America as a Russian writer and as a Jewish writer. There is no ocean behind which you can hide. Listen to the voices of the guns around Gomel! Listen to the screams of Russian and Jewish women tortured to death in Berdichev! You will not cover your ears or close your eyes. Into your nights, still full of light, will come images of the bestiality of the Hitlerites. Your sweet dreams will be disturbed by the voices of a Leah in Ukraine, a Rachel in Minsk, a Sara in Belostoksk -- they are crying for their murdered children. Jews, the animals have you in their sights. They mark us so as not to miss us! Let this mark be an honor! We will not forgive the indifferent. We curse those who wash their hands. I am addressing your conscience. Help everyone who fights the cruel enemy! To the defense of England! To the defense of Soviet Russia! Here it is evening, 8 o'clock, it's dark. In the (CD -- "zastenka" -- dunno this word) in occupied Belarus the Germans are torturing people...''
>From the maps I see Berdichev (German Group South) is west of Kiev, so
Kiev hadn't fallen yet. Minsk (Group Center) was probably about to go,
on the way to Smolensk. I recognize these names from Tolstoy's
W&P. And it's impossible to hear the name Kiev without thinking about
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Segovia's version of `The
Old Castle' with its Arabic, or its exotic Eastern sound.
I just got through watching a empty video documentary shot about two years ago in Iraq . 21 Days on the Empire's Edge (don't bother renting it). You see men kissing, boys holding hands, red tea, cigarettes, pieta bread, kabobs, open markets, men arguing, old women in black, Japanese cars falling apart like mine---utterly alien worlds to the US. And US soldiers, very tight lipped, except one guy going off on capitalism and oil, almost left sounding, except... We are supposed to pretend this isn't a clash of civilizations but I don't honestly believe that.
We wonder now how these pleas from Erhenburg fell on deaf ears in the West more than fifty years ago. I suspect it was exactly because they were Eastern and the East was some how mixed up with Russians and Jews, something like Gypies or Mexicans in the American mind---shady characters.
I was also interested to find out that part of the German strategy for Operation Blue was to cut off Iraq and Iran which were used by the US as entry points for military aid to the Russians. They also started Platium Fox in `42, an operation in the far north to cut off Murmansk but it failed.
CG