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| ISBN-13: | 9781574414028 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of North Texas Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Warriors and Scholars
A Modern War Reader
By Peter B. Lane, Ronald E. Marcello
University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2005 University of North Texas PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-402-8
CHAPTER 1
Section I
WORLD WAR II—EUROPE
The first two sections of this work touch upon the war both in Europe and in the Pacific. For the European Theater, two papers address the war from very different perspectives: on the ground and in the air. The first analyzes the epic struggle that began with Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, in June 1941. The second paper is the personal story of a surviving American airman from the "Bloody 100th" Bomb Group stationed in England, one of the initial units engaged in the aerial campaign against targets in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries. These two papers are very different yet are linked by the common word: sacrifice.
Any reader of military history is, indeed, fortunate to have a paper by the distinguished historian Col. David M. Glantz, who reviews the massive conflict in the East between Germany and its allies versus the Soviet Union that only ended with the Nazi surrender on May 8, 1945. His goal is to educate the reader as to the immensity of the struggle and then methodically address some of the myths, issues, and controversies that have emerged over the past sixty years regarding the Eastern Front.
On the ground, the Soviet armies, supported by the united Russian people, met and defeated the Nazi thrust at a tremendous cost in lives and material. The price in lives from all the participants makes this saga, perhaps, the costliest in all of military history. In his paper, Glantz asserts that the Soviet Union suffered over 35 million military and civilian casualties throughout World War II, an immense price to pay for a single nation. "The Great Patriotic War" has left an indelible mark on the Russian nation that colors its current and future policies.
The second author, Maj. John ("Lucky") Luckadoo, truly earned his nickname. This young airman was among the first to arrive in England with the B-17s to begin the strategic bombing of Germany and Nazi-occupied territory. The airpower visionaries were eager to put their ideas to the test of combat. So much had to be learned at such a great cost. The sacrifices of these pioneering aviators did not match the casualties on the ground in the Eastern Front, but their early losses of men and planes were also incredible, and chances for survival were not very high. The strategic bombing campaign represented the efforts by the United States and Great Britain to make airpower a new and decisive element of war. They were determined to relieve some of the pressure on the Soviets and take the war to the heart of the enemy twenty-four hours a day.
Major Luckadoo provides a personal view of the broad strategy of the campaign, and of special value is his perspective as a young airman thrust into a position of great responsibility with minimal training and preparation. These brave American aviators had to overcome the skills of veteran Luftwaffe pilots, adverse weather, heavy antiaircraft fire, and fatigue to deliver their bombs on target. He and others of his generation met the challenge. Luckadoo credits his survival to pure luck. Only four of the original forty members of his flying class who were assigned to the 100th Bomb Group completed a combat tour. His personal testimony and gracious sense of humor provide the reader a unique perspective on aerial combat in Europe in 1943. He surely earned his nickname.
COLONEL DAVID M. GLANTZ, USA (RET.)
FACT AND FANCY: THE SOVIET GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, 1941–1945
Col. David M. Glantz earned degrees in history from Virginia Military Institute (1963) and in modern European history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1965). He is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute (1973), the U.S. Army Institute for Advanced Russian and Eastern European Studies (1975), the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (1972), and the U.S. Army War College (1983). His over thirty years of military service included field artillery assignments with the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) in Europe and the II Field Force artillery in Vietnam and intelligence assignments with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army Europe. During his last eight years of service, he founded and directed the U.S. Army's Foreign (Soviet) Military Studies Office, Combined Arms Command, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Colonel Glantz founded and currently edits the Journal of Slavic Military Studies and is a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of the Russian Federation. Among the numerous books he has authored on Soviet and Russian military affairs are: Soviet Military Intelligence in War (1990); When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1996); Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (1998); Operation Mars: Marshal Zhukov's Greatest Defeat (1999); Kursk 1943: The End of Blitzkrieg (1999); Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia (2001); and The Battle for Leningrad, 1941–1944 (2003). In addition, he has written numerous articles and chapters in journals and books published in Great Britain, Germany, and the Russian Federation.
I am going to address a massive topic, a topic that cannot be adequately addressed within the limited confines for this paper. My goal, however, is to give some sense of the immensity of what the Soviets called for fifty years, and what the Russians still call today, "The Great Patriotic War," a war that, I think, truly justified that. I am going to try to race through that war, identifying some of the salient features that have either been totally overlooked, forgotten, neglected, or, frankly, covered up, because something like 40 percent of that war and the military operations in that war have been consciously covered up for a variety of reasons. I call that section "Forgotten Battles." I am also going to look at a range of issues, debates, and controversies that have arisen from the war, understanding that the number of debates and controversies in so titanic a struggle probably number in the hundreds. I will identify and address in detail perhaps about ten or fifteen.
Suddenly, and without warning, over 3 million Axis forces plunged across the Soviet state's border early in the morning of June 22, 1941, and began Hitler's infamous Operation Barbarossa. Spearheaded by four powerful panzer groups and protected by an impenetrable curtain of air support, the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht advanced from the Soviet Union's western borders to the immediate outskirts of Leningrad, Moscow, and Rostov in the shockingly brief period of less than six months. Faced with this sudden, deep, and relentless German advance, the Red Army and the Soviet state were forced to fight desperately for their very survival. The ensuing struggle went on in a region of some 600,000 square miles and lasted for almost four years before the Red Army triumphantly erected the Soviet flag over the ruins of Hitler's Reich Chancellery in Berlin in late April 1945, just before the formal German surrender in May. The Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War was a war of unprecedented brutality. It was a veritable Kulturkampf, or "cultural struggle," a war to the death between two cultures. As many as 35 million Russian soldiers and civilians, almost 4 million German soldiers, and countless German civilians were casualties. The bulk of Central and Eastern Europe suffered unprecedented destruction.
When this deadly conflict ended on May 8, 1945, the Soviet Union and its Red Army occupied and dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe. Within three years, an "Iron Curtain" that would divide the Continent for over forty years descended upon Europe. More importantly, the searing effect of this terrible war on the Soviet soul endured for generations through today, shaping the development of the postwar Soviet Union and ultimately, I believe, contributing to its demise in 1991. Despite its massive scale, cost, and global impact, it is indeed ironic that, for Westerners and Russians alike, much of the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War remains obscure and imperfectly understood. Worse still, from our standpoint, this obscurity and misunderstanding have perverted history by masking the Red Army's and Soviet state's contributions to Allied victory.
Now, I would like to provide a sense of the immense scale, scope, and impact of the struggle. I will address those points directly. First, relating to scale, I shall address the immensity of the war on the Eastern Front. The combat front—that is, the front along which the forces struggled for almost four years—initially totaled 1,720 miles. These figures are "as the crow flies"; they do not allow for the bends and dips in the front that naturally occurred during the war. Compared to the United States, that scale matches the entire distance from northern Maine to southern Florida. The main Barbarossa front—that is, the front that most of the forces struggled across—extended some 820 miles, equivalent to the distance from New York City to northern Florida. At its maximum extent in 1942, the front extended 1,900 miles, equivalent to the distance from the Saint Lawrence River to southern Florida.
The depth of the German advance was also staggering in its proportions. Hitler's Barbarossa objectives extended over 1,000 miles, equivalent to the distance from the U.S. East Coast to Kansas City, Missouri. The Wehrmacht's maximum advance in 1941 was 760 miles: from New York to Springfield, Illinois. And, if that was not bad enough for the Red Army, the following year the Wehrmacht advanced the equivalent of the distance from the U.S. East Coast to Topeka, Kansas. That, indeed, is an immense area.
As to the scope of this struggle, the numbers of Axis forces that engaged across the Eastern Front exceeded over 3 million—Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians. They faced some 2.5 million Soviet forces in the border military districts. Looking at the figures for the period from June 1941 through April 1945, the majority of German forces fought in the East rather than in the West. Eighty percent of the Wehrmacht fought in the East through 1942. After 1942, the figure declines to around 60 percent through 1945.
Also, consider the tremendous mobilization effort of the Red Army. Beginning with an army of 5.5 million men in 1941, expandable to 10 million, the Soviets lost in the first six months of the war almost the entire 5.5 million-man peacetime army, and yet they fought on. By the war's end, their superiority increased strategically from 2-to-1 to the level of roughly 3.5-to-1.
The human costs, too, are staggering. The official figure used by Russian authorities today is 29 million military casualties, of whom slightly more than 11.2 million were dead or missing and presumed dead. My sources in the archives of the Main Cadre Directorate of the General Staff state that the figure was probably closer to 35 million casualties and 14.7 million dead. That figure is almost beyond comprehension.
Nor was the damage limited to the Red Army itself. The casualties of the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, while significantly lower than those of the Soviets, exceeded 11 million, with 3.9 million dead and over 3 million captured, many of whom never returned. Of the total Wehrmacht casualties of 13 million, 10 million, or 80 percent, were lost in the East. If one walks through any German cemetery today, one will see inscribed on numerous tombstones: "Fallen nach Osten" ("Fell in the East").
The damage extended well beyond Germany. To round out the losses, if one looks at the losses of the other Axis countries, one will see that Romania and Hungary suffered losses greater than the entire U.S. military death toll in the whole war. These are losses of staggering proportion. I will not attempt to discuss the amount of economic dislocation, which is equally staggering in its impact.
One must understand that the Soviet Army in the postwar years, and the Russian Army today—obviously with less tangible results—were wedded to the study of their military history to improve future combat performance. Thus, if one reads the formerly classified studies done by the Voroshilov General Staff Academy, and by the Frunze Academy, one will find remarkably candid analyses of the Red Army's performance in the war. Many of these are available in the West today, and they give us a lot of the fresh source material.
To look at the whole war briefly, basically campaign by campaign, the Soviets have divided it into three major segments for educational and analytical purposes. The first period of war extends from June 22, 1941, to November 18, 1942, the day before the Stalingrad counteroffensive began. This was a period when, as the Soviets view it, the Wehrmacht held the strategic initiative in Russia, and the Red Army was on the defensive. The second period of war opened on November 19, 1942, when the 5th Soviet Tank Army began its counteroffensive against Romanian forces west of Stalingrad, ultimately helping to encircle the entire German 6th Army in the city. The fortunes of war sharply turned in the Soviets' favor. Over the ensuing year of 1943, the Red Army recorded victory after victory, and, we now know, defeat after defeat as well, though those have been neglected. That was a period of transition, a period when the initiative swung inexorably into Soviet hands. In the final period of war, from January 1, 1944, until May 9, 1945, it was clear to the Soviets themselves and to their Allies that there was no question of who held the strategic initiative. It was simply a question of time as to when victory would occur.
The Soviets also divided each of these periods of war into distinct campaigns. A campaign, by the Soviet military's definition, was a seasonal affair, a strategic effort planned by the General Staff of the Stavka, or High Command, as it is called, and by Stalin, who played an active role in all this activity, just as Hitler did on the German side. Looking at the war campaign by campaign, first from the conventional view—that is, the view that predominated in history until now—several issues have been forgotten, or, as I mentioned more candidly, neglected or covered up.
Most Americans know about the first major campaign of the war. This was not a Soviet Red Army campaign; it was a German campaign, a campaign initiated by Hitler's decision to launch Operation Barbarossa. On June 22, 1941, German Army Group North attacked from East Prussia, piercing and demolishing the Soviet defenses and advancing through the Baltic States toward Leningrad. This seemingly seamless advance carried German forces by September 8 to the southern shores of Lake Ladoga and brought the city of Leningrad under a total siege. In October the Germans attempted to envelop and destroy Leningrad from the east by linking up with Finnish forces. This was the famous Tikhvin Offensive, which failed, marking one of the first Soviet victories in the war.
The main attack of Operation Barbarossa, conducted by Army Group Center and two panzer groups, came out of eastern Poland. This attack smashed the Soviet Western Front—a Front is equivalent to a German army group—encircled three Soviet armies in the Minsk area, capturing roughly 600,000 Soviet troops, and drove onward toward Smolensk, precipitating major battles at Smolensk, on the road to Moscow. In the south, Army Group South and its single panzer group advanced toward Kiev. This was a more difficult advance since the preponderance of Soviet Red Army power was stationed in that region in accordance with their prewar defense plans.
In September 1941, realizing that the Wehrmacht faced heavy resistance on the road to Moscow and that Army Group South had achieved less in its march toward Kiev, Hitler issued his infamous order to General Heinz Guderian to turn his panzers southward to deal with the Soviet Southwestern Front defending Kiev. After dealing with the Soviet Southwestern Front, the Wehrmacht encircled four Soviet armies in the Kiev region and another two to the south at Uman', thereby liquidating another million Red Army soldiers. On October 1, 1941, Hitler began Operation Typhoon, the culminating stage of Operation Barbarossa, to seize Moscow. That effort came close to achieving its objective.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Warriors and Scholars by Peter B. Lane, Ronald E. Marcello. Copyright © 2005 University of North Texas Press. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Dr. Alfred F. Hurley, University of North Texas,SECTION I: WORLD WAR II, EUROPE,
SECTION II: WORLD WAR II, PACIFIC,
SECTION III: THE EARLY COLD WAR,
SECTION IV: THE KOREAN WAR,
SECTION V: THE VIETNAM WAR,
SECTION VI: THE LATE COLD WAR,
SECTION VII: TERRORISM,
Index,