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The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945)
COL David M. Glantz
Foreign Military Studies Office,
Fort Leavenworth, KS.
Introduction
To laymen in the West, the German-Soviet War was a somewhat obscure, mysterious, and brutal four year struggle between Europe's most bitter political enemies and largest and most formidable armies . The two contending armies fought over vast expanses, and the sheer size, physical complexity, and seasonal meteorological severity of the theater accorded the war a seamless nature of slow advances and retreats and months of stagnant combat punctuated dramatically by four major battles, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. The paucity of detailed information on the war was reinforced by the natural American (and Western) penchant to view it as merely a backdrop for more dramatic and significant battles in western theaters, such as El Alamein, Salerno, Anzio, Normandy, and the Bulge.
This altogether unbalanced layman's view of the war is explicable given that histories of the conflict have been based largely on German sources and these sources routinely tended to describe warfare against a faceless and formless enemy, an enemy whose sole attributes were its army's immense size and its limitlessness supply of expendable human resources. Therefore, only truly sensational events stand out from the pale mosaic of four years of combat.
Even those more interested in and better acquainted with the details of the German-Soviet War share these common public mis-perceptions. They may know more about the major battles and perhaps have heard a little about several others (von Manstein's Khar'kov counterstroke, the Cherkassy Pocket, Kamenets-Podolsk, the collapse of Army Group Center, and Soviet perfidy at the gates of Warsaw). The use of these terms themselves evidence a German-based education. More important, laymen and interested readers alike lack the detailed knowledge and understanding necessary to fit the German-Soviet War into larger context and to understand its regional and global consequences and importance.
Who then is at fault for this unbalanced view? Western historians who wrote on the war from only the German perspective deserve part of the blame. But they would argue, correctly, that they did so because they used the only sources available. Blame can also be ascribed to the natural influences of ethnocentrism, which conditions a people to appreciate only what they have experienced. These tendencies, however, only partially explain the unbalanced Western perception of the war. Perhaps the greatest factor contributing to our unbalanced view of the war is the collective failure of Soviet historiography to present Western (and Soviet) readers and scholars with a credible account of the course of war. Ideology, political motivation, and shibboleths born of the Cold War have often combined to inhibit the work and warp the perceptions of many Soviet historians.
While many detailed Soviet works on the war display sound scholarship and are accurate, unfortunately the most general and most accessible to Western readers tended to be the most biased, the most highly politicized, and the least accurate. Even the soundest works have been vetted ideologically, and the authors have been forced to write their accounts with the narrowest of focuses. These realities undercut the credibility of these works (fairly or unfairly), permitted German historiography and interpretation to prevail, and, coincidentally, damaged the credibility of those few Western writers who incorporated Soviet historical materials into their accounts of the war. These stark historiographical realities also explain why, today, sensational, unfair, and wildly inaccurate accounts of aspects of the war so attract the Western reading public.
This bleak general description of the state of German-Soviet War historiography, while essentially correct, must, of course, be qualified somewhat. Soviet historiography has not been universally bad, Western works have always existed which challenge the German view, and these works are now growing in number and their credibility is improving in the eyes of Western readers.
In general, Western appreciation of the Soviet view has been inhibited by three fundamental barriers to understanding: an ignorance of the scope of Soviet writing on the subject, an inability to obtain and read what Soviet historians have written (the language barrier), and an unwillingness to accept what those historians have written. Western historiography has slowly overcome the first two barriers to understanding by publishing accounts using the best of Soviet sources. In so doing, they have lifted the veil on Soviet historiography and candidly and credibly displayed both its vast scope and its strengths and weaknesses. To overcome the third barrier, however, that of credibility, requires that the weaknesses of Soviet historiography now be overcome. In short, the blinders and restrictions that inhibited the work of Soviet military historians must be explained and removed before they, or their Western counterparts, can achieve the credibility they deserve and, even more important, before the Soviet role in the war can achieve the stature which it deserves.
Among the most important steps that can be undertaken to restore the reputation of Soviet historiography and convey an accurate appreciation of the war to Western readers is to explain and then fill in the gaps existing in the history of the war. This paper identifies some (but not all) of those gaps.
[...]
A Sample of Neglected Operations
Soviet Counterattacks and Counterstrokes During Operation Barbarossa (July-September 1941)
Historians and general readers alike have been fascinated with the sudden, deep, and relentless advance of German forces during Operation Barbarossa. Spearheaded by four powerful German panzer groups, the German advance from the Soviet Union's western borders to the approaches of Leningrad, Moscow, and Rostov has been portrayed as a series of successive offensive lunges culminating in the final November 1941 thrust on Moscow itself. While historians have identified the various stages of the advance and have argued about the sequencing, timing, and objectives of each stage, they have tended to accord it a seamless nature, whose various phases exist, but do not warrant excessive study in their own right. These primarily Western historians argue that German confusion over their ultimate objectives, the vast scale of Russian terrain, the terrors of a Russian winter, and weak German logistics ultimately produced German failure. They recount in some detail the complex Border Battles, the Minsk encirclement, the battles around Smolensk, the German September southward turn and subsequent Kiev encirclement, the German October victories around Viaz'ma and Briansk, and the final failed drive on Moscow. Often they openly lament German confusion and the failure to secure Moscow.
Soviet sources cover the period in greater detail, properly underscoring the importance of these combat phases in the ultimate outcome of battle on the approaches to Moscow. Soviet historians highlight the confused ferocity of the Border Battles, the importance of the Battle of Smolensk, and the Herculean efforts of the Stavka to assemble, amass, and commit to combat those strategic reserves which, at the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Rostov, ultimately thwart the German Barbarossa offensive. In the context of their accounts, however, Soviet historians have mentioned, but not elaborated upon to a sufficient degree, the intense Soviet efforts to counter the German advance before it reached unprecedented depths. Specifically, they have not covered in adequate detail the apparently concerted series of counterstokes and counterattacks that periodically punctuated (and in the process perhaps wore down) the German advance.
In short, there are a series of Soviet counteractions, which occurred in clusters during July, August, and September 1941, which deserve further study and elaboration. At a minimum, these include the following:
July 1941:
-- Western Front operations toward Lepel' (6-11 July)
-- Northwestern Front operations at Stolb'tsy (14-18 July)
- -Western Front Counterstokes (planned or carried) out along the Dnepr (13
-17 July), to include:
- 22d Army (at Gorodok)
- 19th Army (at Vitebsk)
- 20th Army (around Orsha)
- 13th Army (around Staryi Bykov)
- 21st Army (toward Bobruisk)
- 16th and 4th Army remnants (to Gorki)
-- Southwestern Front operations toward Dubno (1-2 July)
-- Southwestern Front operations toward Novgorod-Volynskii (10-14 July)
Soviet historians have written in varying detail on each of these operations, but much of that detail is at the lower operational and tactical levels. For example excellent accounts exist on the exploits of 63d and 67th Rifle Corps near Rogachev, and accounts of the Bobruisk operation are fairly clear, as are the experiences of 5th and 7th Mechanized Corps at Lepel' (see map 1).4 One wonders if the factual detail here is in response to the detailed, if somewhat sensational, German accounts of the Bobruisk offensive as related in Guderian's memoirs and other German-based sources, under the rubric of the "Timoshenko counteroffensive." The same feature is apparent from operations in the north along the Leningrad axis. In his memoirs, von Manstein mentions heated actions around Stolb'tsy and Staraia Russa (see maps 2 and 3). Subsequently, Soviet sources mention the action, only in less detail than their German counterparts. Likewise, German popular accounts focus on the heavy combat around Smolensk, and Soviet accounts have responded with considerable detail, in particular, about the fate of Group Kachalov, which Guderian's panzer corps destroyed (see maps 4 and 5).5 Unfortunately, Soviet accounts are less revealing about the operations and fate of the other Soviet operational groups which struggled around Smolensk.
A. I. Eremenko's memoirs do provide considerable detail about the Roslavl'-Novozybkov operation, but again in apparent response to materials in Guderian's memoirs. There are, however, a dearth of other sources on this operation and on the El'nia operation further north. Finally, the excellent recent work by A. V. Vladimirsky, Na kievskom napravlenii [On the Kiev axis], finally casts light on the intense efforts of the Southwestern Front to halt the German drive on the approaches to Kiev.6 It remains, however, the only detailed source to do so.
Thus, there are many historical gaps to fill related to action during these critical phases of Operation Barbarossa. More detail is required on each of the operations. mentioned above. Even more important, the strategic intent, nature, and import of these operations must be revealed. In the recent work entitled Nezavershchaemie operatsii pervom periode voiny [uncompleted operations of the first period of war], A. A. Volkov carefully describes the offensive mind-set of Red Army commanders inherited from the prewar years which governed much of their 1941 planning and operations. He implies that the failed offensives of that period were largely prompted by this mind-set, but that requisite strategic appreciation and operational and tactical skills were lacking to carry out that tradition.7 Further, in their 1976 article on restoration of the strategic front, B. Panov and N. Naumov wrote that, in late June and July 1941, the Stavka faced the complex and daunting task of "restoring the strategic defensive front from Polotsk to Poles'e," and that the mission of forces designated to do so was "to prevent an enemy penetration to Moscow, while destroying him with powerful counterstrokes by ground forces and aviation." Therefore, the preeminent question is to what extent were these counteractions interrelated and driven by Stavka orders? And if that guidance existed, to what extent did these counteractions contribute to subsequent Soviet failures or the ultimate defeat of Barbarossa?
