Thanks for the post.
Joanna
Chuck Grimes wrote:
>``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
>
>-----------
>
>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
>
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