``Probably his leaflet for Soviet children that was dropped over occupied territory, his essay "Jews" written for Red Star (the Soviet, and now Russian equivalent of Stars & Stripes), the essay "Stalingrad,"..'' Chris Doss
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I would like to read any of these, if you feel like translating. Stalingrad or the kids letter would be good.
While I was reading Carell, and looking at his maps I was very surprised to see Stalingrad was a long thin city running north and south along the Volga river front. So the Russian front line was in the factory and warehouse section right next to the water. Their staging area was across the river and they had to re-enforce and re-supply their front at night on rafts. Meanwhile the whole weight of the German advance was stalled in front of the factories and warehouse district that had been reduced to rubble. They were afraid to leave this point without taking and holding the western bank of the river. If the Germans left just a light force there, the whole southern drive into the Caucasus could be cut off by the Stalingrad flank----which is exactly why the Russians were so intent on keeping the pressure up no matter what.
Some of the factories were still functioning and the weapons and ammunition were made and distributed immediately to the surrounding buildings and neighborhoods.
The other interesting thing I learned was that the political commissar for Stalingrad was Nikita Krushchev. The way the Russian military was set up was to have all the general officers of a particular front sector report to and carry out plans with their central civilian authority under the regional commissar. The commissars in turn formed the committee for war planning and answered directly to Stalin and the party central committee---or whatever it was called at the time.
This seems like a strange set-up until you realize they were managing millions of soldiers, hundreds of thousands of officers along a vast front line and there were too many generals and armies to ever form a central command structure without something like this commissar system for centralized communication and planning. (Leonid Breshnev was one of the other commissars under Kruschev.)
We make a big deal out of the planning and coordination of D-Day at Normandy. Sure it was a big deal, but the Russians were running vast battle plans covering thousands of miles that were many times larger.
I suspect that the US military, near the close of the war realized just how vast the Russian military system was, how much coordination, planning, men and material went into their battles with the Germans, and they were in serious awe---to the point of generating an irrational threat. About the only way to stop the Russians was nuclear weapons---and there were not enough to do the job. I think it was this realization by US military planners that had a lot to do with setting up the cold war immediately following the German defeat.
Thinking back on all the ideological bullshit generated when I was a kid about the commie menace was just that, propagandistic bullshit for public consumption. The real threat was merely that the Russian military was bigger and more capable of taking the rest of Europe if they had wanted to---and the US was very much less capable of holding or defending western Europe if it was forced to.
When I think about Kennedy meeting Krushchev in Vienna right after he was elected (last year of high school, first year college), now I realize that Kennedy must have known he was about to go head to head with the guy who managed the battle for Stalingrad and was lead commissar for the southern front. That must have been pretty scary, since commanding a torpedo boat in the Pacific with a crew of 12 was pretty weak shit by comparison.
CG