1917 AND ALL THAT: THE UNTAUGHT SYLLABUS.
In Their Own Words: A Political History Of The Cold War 1917-1983.
By Brian Mitchell.

Chapters 27-30 of 50.

Chapter 27

NO SECOND FRONT – THE SOVIETS FIGHT ALONE FOR THREE YEARS.
"Arise, vast Land, in awesome might!

For mortal combat gird...

Let storms of indignation rage

And righteous wrath outpour!

This is a sacred war we wage,

A people's sacred war."

(From the Soviet Army song "Sacred War.")

There was to be no "phoney war" for the Soviet people. There was no rapid
capitulation or surrender for the Soviet government or people.

In June 1941, having risen out of their age-long backwardness into the 20th
Century, the entire Soviet people and their Red Army - 200,000,000 people,
immediately became as one and confounded a doubting world as they moved their
entire nation eastward. Thousands of factories with their hundreds of thousands
of tons of plant and machinery, some of it previously thought un-transportable,
were put on thousands of trains and moved eastward beyond the Urals. One Soviet
commentator remarked: "It was as if the earth tilted up and everything human or
mechanical were moved from west to east". The Soviet people tragically had to
destroy with their own hands some of their proudest industrial achievements so
that they would not fall into enemy hands; such as the Dnieper Dam - Lenin's
famous first hydro-electric plant at Zaporozhe. The rest, everything moveable,
was moved to the trans-Volga region, to Western and Eastern Siberia, to
Kazakhstan and Soviet Central Asia, where it was rapidly reassembled and put
into operation immediately, often under great difficulty and near impossible
conditions. Foundation pits had to be cut in Siberian permafrost. In many cases
the machines were put to immediate production work on concrete bases with lights
slung from surrounding pine trees while the factory walls and roofs were built
around them and workers lived in tents outside.

"When the Germans were coming, our village had just about taken in the
harvest... The men were away fighting and there was no one but the women, the
old people and the young ones. The caterpillar tractors had gone to the fighting
lines too. All we had was three old wheeled tractors... But we got all the wheat
out and then it was time to drive the cattle eastwards.

We walked for almost three months. Autumn had set in... Four of our cows had
calved and two women had given birth... The cows had to be milked and while you
stopped to do this, the rest moved on... so you ran after them, milk bucket in
one hand and a rod to hurry the cow along in the other. We tried to give most of
the milk to the wounded in the hospitals we passed along the road. We ourselves
made do with what we had brought from home and a bit of milk. That wasn't much
and we were always hungry."

(Anastasia Yeremenko.) (1)

"On 3rd July the People's Commissar for heavy machine building, N.S. Kazakov,
gave orders that the Krasnii Profintern be evacuated to Krasnoyarsk in East
Siberia.

We began dismantling the equipment next morning...

By the evening of 6th July, the first train was ready for send-off. It consisted
of 34 freight cars...

Our mammoth works was to go up in what was at that time a hemp field...

We managed to find lodgings for the people in the Kirov district of Krasnoyarsk
in schools and community centres... And the local people shared their homes with
the new arrivals...

It took 7,550 freight cars to evacuate the plant."

(Georgii Gogoberidze.) (2)

(1)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

(2)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

The Soviet people moved their entire industry and evacuated 25 million people
eastward beyond the reach of the Nazis and then sacrificed twenty million of
their lives fighting for every inch of Soviet soil.

Behind every stone, every tree and every blade of grass the Nazis were to find a
Russian, a Ukrainian, or a Siberian. He would find a Kazakh or a Tajik with a
machine gun in every window of every house, or a soldier from Azerbaijan or
Kirghizia. A Georgian or an Armenian would be waiting to pounce on him, or a
Byelorussian would be waiting to cut his throat. He would be stabbed from behind
by a Cossak, strangled by a Latvian or bombed by an Uzbek pilot. A sniper from
Turkmenia or Lithuania, lying hidden, would have his gun trained on him; or he
would step on a mine placed by a Moldavian peasant girl or an Estonian partizan.
He would be blown up by a Nentsi Eskimo in a tank or a Soviet Aleutian with a
grenade; or his stay on Soviet soil would be terminated by a booby trap laid by
a Yakut or a Chukchi.

This was not just a war between two armies, two nations, or two peoples; it was
a war of ideologies; a war of US, British and German transnational finance
capital in the shape of Hitler's Fascist armies against a wholly united
socialist peoples; of capital against labour.

"Foreign observers wondered about the secret of the Soviet resistance. But few
could answer the question correctly. To do so they had to know the nature of the
Soviet system, its material potential, and the makeup of the Soviet man.

Two diametrically opposed social systems - fascist imperialism and socialism -
had come to grips, and the question was: Which was the more viable?"

(Soviet historian Prof G. Deborin "Secrets of the Second World War.")

This was class warfare on a continental scale. But not all working classes
realised it. The German working class were fighting for the interests of German
transnational capital; and the British working class were fighting for the
interests of their own capitalist masters. But the Soviet people were not
fighting for any capitalist masters; they were fighting for socialism, in
fighting for themselves they were fighting for the whole world's working class
against capital.

Britain's fate, and consequently that of America, was being decided on the
Soviet front. British policy all through the war was to assist the USSR not
enough that they could defeat Hitler, but just enough to keep them in the war
and keep Hitler occupied in the East and away from Britain until the Western
Allies would be in a position to deliver the final blow. They counted on the
Soviet Union's comparative weakness. But the Soviet Union was not weak. It was
precisely the Soviet Union's strength that was preventing Hitler from invading
Britain.

It was clear that it was Britain and the US that could not have possibly held
out without the Soviet Union in the war:

"I am aware of the realities of this war, and of the fact that we were too weak
to win it without Russian cooperation."

(George Kennan, in a letter to Charles Bohlen, January 1945.) (1)

"Britain and America... had not the strategic genius nor the military resources
to defeat Hitler without the massive support of Communist Russia."

(International Affairs July 1959.)

"We cannot be certain... that Germany's defeat may not be brought about in
principle by Russian action before our own and American war potentiality is
fully developed."

(Foreign Relations of the United States, 1942, Vol.III.)

(1)See:W.W.Rostow "The Division of Europe After World War II: 1946." Universtiy
of Texas Press. 1982.

"The heroic stand of... Soviet peoples saved the United States a war on her own
soil."

(Official US war history "The War Reports.") (1)

"We must ever remember that by the Russians' heroic struggle against the Germans
they probably saved the Allies from a negotiated peace with Germany... and would
have left the world open to another Thirty Years War."

(US Secretary of State Cordell Hull.) (2)

"Military necessity was uppermost in the situation. If Russia gave up, while the
United States was still wavering, the British Empire could hardly hope to hold
out... To Britain this had been an act of self preservation."

(US historian Herbert Feis.) (3)

"The outbreak of war between Germany and Russia was the first ray of hope
Englishmen had seen in this war... Western statesmen considered that the entire
fate of the war depended on the readiness and ability of Russia to stand up to
the German attack."

(US statesman George Kennan.) (4)

"Nothing is more certain than that, when Hitler has finished with Russia, he
will turn upon these Islands."

(News Chronicle, June 26 1941.)

"One thing, and one thing only has saved Tobruk... Russia."

(British Army's chief planner General Kennedy.) (5)

"Russia still gives us time. She holds up the hordes of Hitler more marvellously
than we could have dared to expect."

(Sunday Express, Aug 1941.)

"Where do you think we should have been today had it not been for the Russian
Army? Every German man, gun and aeroplane that could be spared is today in
Russia. Russia has saved this country from the danger of invasion and bombing
for at least eight months."

(General Gough, Feb 22 1942.) (6)

Not known for his pro-Soviet or communist views, even US General Douglas
McArthur stated during the battle for Moscow that:

(1)See:"The War Reports." Philadelphia and New York. 1947.

(2)See:Cordell Hull "Memoirs." New York 1948.

Quoted in:V.Trukhanovsky "British Foreign Policy During World War II." Progress
Publishers. Moscow 1970.

(3)See:Herbert Feis "Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin. The War They Waged and the
Peace They Sought." Princeton University Press. 1957.

(4)See:George Kennan "Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin." Boston 1961.

(5)See:Joseph P. Lash "Roosevelt and Churchill 1939-1941." Andre Deutsch. London
1977.

(6)See:George Bilainkin "Maisky. Ten Years Ambassador." George Allen and Unwin.
London 1944.

"The world situation at the present time indicates that the hopes of
civilisation rest on the worthy banners of the courageous Russian Army. During
my lifetime I have participated in a number of wars... In none have I observed
such effective resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy,
followed by a smashing counterattack which is driving the enemy back to his own
land. The scale and grandeur of this effort marks it as the greatest military
achievement in all history"

(US General Douglas McArthur, at Corregidor, Feb 23 1942.) (1)

"...to the noble manhood of Russia, now at full grips with the murderous enemy,
striking blow for blow and repaying better ones for blows struck at them...
Lately the enemy has not been so ready to come to this island, first, because a
large portion of his air force is engaged against our Russian allies..."

(Winston Churchill, Leeds, May 16 1942.) (2)

"The Russian armies, with the most tremendous sacrifice, are holding the bulk of
the German armies today and a great proportion of their air force... thereby
saving us directly from the danger of attack in this country."

(Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Privy Seal, House of Commons, May 20 1942.)

"I want to express to the Red Army... our profound admiration for... above all
determination to defeat the enemy no matter what the cost in self-sacrifice."

(Roosevelt, Feb 23 1943.) (3)

"No government ever formed among men has been capable of surviving injuries so
grave and so cruel as those inflicted by Hitler on Russia... Russia has not only
recovered from those frightful injuries but has inflicted, as no other force in
the world could have inflicted, mortal damage on the German army machine."

(Winston Churchill, at Quebec, Aug 31 1943.) (4)

"Russia is holding and beating far larger hostile forces than those which face
the Allies in the West."

(Winston Churchill, Houses of Parliament, Oct 1944.)

"We all felt that even if the Soviet armies were driven back to the Ural
mountains Russia would still exert an immense, if she preserved in the war, an
ultimately decisive force."

(Winston Churchill, "The Second World War.")

The Germans could have been defeated in the winter of 1941/42 with a combined
effort by the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. One of the factors effecting
Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union at that time was that Germany was
becoming short of certain war materials:

"The Fuhrer at any rate believes that he can smash the Red Army and Air Force by
midsummer. Then, having seized all the corn, oil and other stocks he can lay his
hands on, he would swiftly turn right about and throw the entire weight of his
land, air and sea forces against this country.

(Daily Mail June 23 1941.)

(1)See:William Manchester "American Caesar. Douglas McArthur, 1880-1964." Dell
Publishing. NY 1979.

See also:D.F. Fleming "The Cold War and its Origins." Doubleday. London 1961.

And:Robert Sherwood "Roosevelt and Hopkins."

(2)See:Pat and Zelda Coates "A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations." Lawrence and
Wishart. London 1944.

(3)Quoted in:G.Deborin "Secrets of the Second World War." Progress Publishers.
Moscow 1971.

(4)See:Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn "The Great Conspiracy - Against Soviet
Russia." Boni and Gaer, NY 1946, and Red Star Press. London 1975.

"The Germans' assault is due to a desperate shortage of oil and grain. If these
can be denied her for four months, or even less, till the Panzers stay in
harbour and the Luftwaffe is ground-bound for lack of oil, and the German
armies, perhaps lie encompassed by snow, then Hitler will have lost his last and
greatest stake. Germany will then be beaten."

(Military Correspondent, News Chronicle June 23 1941.)

Indicating the need for a second front Stalin wrote to Churchill on July 19
1941; Stalin pointed out that even a limited front in Northern France while the
Germans were fully occupied in the East would not only divert Nazis forces from
the USSR but would make it impossible for Hitler to invade Britain:

"It seems to me, furthermore, that the military position of the Soviet Union,
and by the same token that of great Britain, would improve substantially if a
front were established against Hitler in the West (Northern France) and the
North (the Arctic). A front in the North of France, beside diverting Hitler's
forces from the East, would make impossible invasion of Britain by Hitler."

#(Stalin, in a message to Churchill, July 18 1941.) (1)

Churchill continued to reject the idea of a second front with various excuses:

"Anything sensible and effective that we can do to help will be done...

The Chiefs of Staff do not see any way of doing anything on a scale likely to be
of the slightest use to you. The Germans have forty divisions in France alone,
and the whole coast has been fortified with German diligence for more than a
year, and bristles with cannon, wire, pill-boxes, and beach-mines... one mass of
fortifications, with heavy guns... even the whole area is illumunated by
searchlights.

To attempt a landing in force would be to encounter a bloody repulse, and petty
raids would only lead to fiascos doing far more harm than good to both of us."

(Churchill, in his reply to Stalin, July 20 1941.)

Pointing out the grave situation the Soviet people were in, Stalin again wrote
to Churchill on September 3 1941, which was handed to Churchill on September 4
by Soviet Ambassador Maisky:

"Please accept my thanks for the promise to sell to the Soviet Union another 200
fighter aeroplanes...

The relative stabilisation of the front... has been upset in recent weeks by the
arrival of 30-34 fresh German infantry divisions and enormous numbers of tanks
and aircraft at the Eastern Front, and also by the activisation of 20 Finnish
and 26 Romanian divisions. The Germans look on the threat in the West as a
bluff, so they are moving all their forces from the West to the East with
impunity, knowing that there is no second front in the West nor is there likely
to be one. They think it perfectly possible that they will be able to beat off
their enemies one at a time - first the Russians and then the British...

As a result we have lost more than half the Ukraine and, what is more, the enemy
is now at the gates of Leningrad...

This has resulted in a lessening of our defence capacity and has confronted the
Soviet Union with mortal danger."

(Stalin, in a message to Churchill, Sept 3 1941.)

Churchill replied to Maisky with typical British arrogance and insensitivity:

(1) See:Oleg Rzheshevsky "Operation Overlord. From the History of the Second
Front." Novosti. Moscow 1984.

"We never thought our survival was dependent on your action either way. Whatever
happens, and whatever you do, you of all people have no right to make reproaches
to us."

(Churchill, to Soviet Ambassador Maisky, Sept 4 1941.)

And trying to placate Stalin:

"Information at my disposal gives one the impression that the culminating
violence of the German invasion is already over and that winter will give your
heroic armies a breathing space."

(Churchill, in a telegram to Stalin, Sept 4 1941.)

The lack of a second front gave the Nazis even more confidence in the East.

But the Nazis' confidence was soon to suffer the first in a series of defeats on
the Soviet front.

The following series of letters shows the rapid change in German confidence
after the Red Army proved for the first time that the German army was not
invincible when they halted them at Moscow:

"We are now at a distance of 30 kilometers from Moscow and can see some of its
spires. Soon we will have surrounded Moscow and then we'll be billeted in
sumptuous winter quarters and I will send you presents which will make Aunt
Minna green with envy."

(Letter home from a German soldier, Dec 1 1941.) (1)

"When you receive this letter the Russians will be defeated and we will be in
Moscow parading in Red Square. I never dreamed I'd see so many countries. I also
hope to be on hand when our troops parade in England."

(Letter home from a German soldier, Dec 3 1941.) (2)

"My dear wife,

This is hell. The Russians don't want to leave Moscow. They've launched an
offensive. Every hour brings news of terrifying developments. It's so cole my
very soul is freezing. It's death to venture out in the evening. I beg of you -
stop writing about the silks and rubber boots I'm supposed to bring you from
Moscow. Can't you understand I'm dying? I'll die for sure. I feel it."

(Letter home from a German soldier, Dec 6 1941.) (3)

The Western Allies could have launched a second front. Now that the Germans had
suffered their first retreat in the war at Moscow, even a limited operation by
the Western Allies would have forced the Germans to divide their now harder
pressed forces between two fronts. The Germans were fully occupied on the
Eastern front and left Europe comparatively free, giving a good opportunity for
attack. But such ideas were kept from the British public:

"In those first days when the invaders were sweeping towards Moscow, Stalin
wrote that if the West attacked while the Nazis were fully engaged in the East,
the war could be won in 1942. Working on Reynolds News, that letter provided me
with a 'scoop', but the censor killed the story."

(British journalist Gordon Schaffer.)

(1)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

(2)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

(3)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

"Most Secret.

It is impossible to explain to Parliament and the Nation how it is our Middle
East armies had to stand for 4½ months without engaging the enemy while all the
time Russia is being battered to pieces. I have hitherto managed to prevent
public discussion, but at any time it may break out."

(Churchill, in a telegram to Field Marshal Auchinleck, Oct 18 1941.) (1)

Lloyd George MP, who when he was Prime Minister was the sworn enemy of
communism, in a conversation with Eden, Soviet Ambassador Maisky and Soviet
Naval Attache in London Admiral Kharlamov at the Ritz Hotel in London said:

Lloyd George:

"Yes, yes, gentlemen, your idea of opening a second front appears constructive.
It could radically change the course of events."

Eden:

"It is hard to do it right now. We are short of transportation facilities. And
the ferries are so slow."

Lloyd George, to Eden:

"Yes, of course, during the First World War the Channel was certainly narrower
and the ferries were much faster. Perhaps that allowed us to transport one
million soldiers to France."

Eden:

"Don't pay any attention to him. He is old, and it is not easy for him to find
his bearings in the present-day situation."

Kharlamov:

"But Lloyd George, it seems to me, is well aware how wide the Channel is." (2)

Even Lord Beaverbrook wrote that:

"There is today only one military problem - how to help Russia. Yet on that
issue the Chiefs of Staff content themselves with saying that nothing can be
done. They point out the difficulties but make no suggestions for overcoming
them.

It is nonsense to say that we can do nothing for Russia. We can as soon as we
decide to sacrifice long-term projects and a general view of the war which,
though still cherished, became completely obsolete on the day when Russia was
attacked.

Russia's resistance has given us new opportunities. It has probably denuded
Western Europe of German troops and prevented for the time being offensive
action by the Axis in other theatres of possible operations. It has created a
quasi-revolutionary situation in every occupied country and opened 2,000 miles
of coastline to a descent by British forces.

But the Germans can move their divisions with impunity to the East. For the
Continent is still considered by our generals to be out of bounds to British
troops.

...the attack on Russia has brought us a new peril as well as a new opportunity.
If we do not help them now the Russians may collapse. And, freed at last from
anxiety about the East, Hitler will concentrate all his forces against us in the
West."

(Minister of Supply Lord Beaverbrook to Harry Hopkins, Oct 1941.) (3)

But pressure from the Soviets and the British public and forces rank and file
for a second front was continually rejected by the British Government. One of
Churchill's motives was the 'danger' that the Soviets might liberate Eastern
Europe.

Demands for a second front and for a British force alongside the Soviets were
becoming increasingly difficult for the Government to resist:

(1)See:Churchill Papers 20/44.

(2)See:N. Kharlamov "Difficult Mission." Progress Publishers. Moscow 1986.

(3)See:Robert E. Sherwood "Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History." NY. 1950

"It will not be possible in the rising temper of the British people against what
they consider our inactivity to resist such demands indefinitely."

(Churchill, in a telegram to President of the Board of Trade Lyttleton, Oct 25
1941.) (1)

Even US government and military leaders were disappointed at Britain's refusal
of a second front. General Eisenhower's Aide, Captain Butcher wrote in his
diary:

July 10 1942:

"The Chiefs of Staff have been considering a quick thrust across the Channel
during the summer of 1942... the British appear to favour an attack in North
Africa... Ike would prefer to cross the Channel."

July 19:

"Ike finished the basic proposals... for the second front in France by October
this year... these are momentous days."

July 23:

"The proposal for a second front this year has been definitely turned down by
the British. Ike and Clark deeply disappointed. Ike thought that July 22 could
well go down as the 'blackest day in history', particularly if Russia is
defeated."

(General Eisenhower's Aide, Captain Butcher, in his diary, July 1942.) (2)

It is unmistakable that successful efforts could have been conducted to bring
the war to a conclusion in 1942 when the Germans were at their weakest on the
Soviet front; especially after their defeats at Moscow.

"Let no man doubt how very near the Russians came to defeating the Germans last
winter. It was a close thing, so close that with a little more the Germans would
have been defeated. The German army would now be invading Britain if the Russian
army had broken down last autumn. For the future we must work together in the
war and in the peace."

(Lord Beaverbrook, Daily Herald June 22 1942.)

Plenty of praise! But what was Britain doing?

"During the last war, Russia sacrificed her army at Tannenberg to save us and
stop the march on Paris. She lost her army, but achieved her object. Now Russia
is fighting for her life and if the German general headquarters are to be
believed, she needs assistance. What now are we doing to help her? Absolutely
nothing!"

(Lloyd George, Daily Herald Aug 8 1941.)

"There seems to me to be a lack of urgency, almost as if we were spectators
rather than participants. Germany can be smashed in 1943; Britain's effort is
not yet all out."

(Sir Stafford Cripps, Bristol, Feb 8 1942.)

"Everything portends an immense renewal of the German invasion of Russia in the
spring, and there is very little we can do to help."

(Winston Churchill, March 1942.) (3)

From the time the Soviet Union was invaded and taking the brunt of the war there
was tremendous support and admiration for the Red Army, not only among workers,
trade unionists and the armed forces but among the general public.

(1)See:Churchill Papers, 20/44.

(2)In serial form in Sunday Express Feb 3 and March 10 and 24 1946.

(3)Quoted in:V.Trukhanovsky "British Foreign Policy During World War II."
Progress Publishers. Moscow 1970.

"The House has just returned from a Recess, and I am quite certain that honorary
Members have been in touch with their constituents. I challenge any Member of
the house to deny that the first question put to them was, 'What are we doing to
help Russia? Do you know when we are doing something?'... 'When is the war to
begin on the second front'."

(Clement Davies MP, House of Commons, 1941.)

On February 10 1942 the News Chronicle published the results of a Gallup Poll
which asked:

"Would you like to see Great Britain and Russia continuing to work together
after the war?"

86 percent replied: "Yes", 6 percent: "No", and 8 percent: "Don't know".

There was mass popular pressure for a second front. There were mass meetings
throughout the country in May 1942 demanding a second front. 1,400 people came
to a meeting organised by the Daily Express at the London Hippodrome theatre on
May 24 to hear speakers including Lords and MPs. On the same day 50,000 people
came to a meeting organised by the Communist Party in Trafalgar Square. The
pressure for a second front was from the public, the labour movement and the
British armed forces, which was reflected in press and government statements:

"For weeks, millions of workers, massed at 'Aid to Russia' meetings, have
demanded it. [A second front B.M.]"

(Daily Herald June 3 1942.)

"We, the undersigned, 54 British soldiers, urge the speediest creation of a
Second Front on land in the West, so that the United Nations can jointly achieve
the defeat of Hitler in 1942. We know that the men and women in the factories
will not let us down and we, too, are anxious to play our part."

(Reynolds News May 24 1942.)

"We can't give them enough about Russia. The soldiers feel these Russians must
be wizards to stand up like this to the Boche, and their curiosity is
multiplied, of course, by the fact that Russia has been as remote to us as Tibet
all these years."

#(British army officer, in The Times Oct 22 1942.)

One might ask The Times whos fault it is that the USSR is as "remote as Tibet".

"All listen in absolute silence to the announcements about the siege of
Stalingrad and then the wireless is switched off. Nobody wants to hear a word
about anything else."

(News Chronicle Oct 2 1942.)

"Now the day has come when, in almost every quarter of Britain, the cry goes up,
'Attack, attack in support of Russia'. For the passion to set up a Western
fighting front in aid of the Russians is deep in the hearts of our people.

We know the Russians kill more Germans every day than all the allies put
together. We know they destroy more enemy tanks and bring down more enemy planes
than any of us or all of us. Russia is the fighting front. That is the
opportunity, the chance to bring Germans to battle... Russia may win victory in
1942... That is a chance, an opportunity to bring war to an end here and now.
But if the Russians are defeated and driven out of the war, never will such a
chance come to us again."

(Lord Beaverbrook, in a broadcast in New York, April 23 1942.)

The French also were calling for a second front:

"We are given to understand that the majority of the French people in the
Occupied Zone are counting on this possibility, and from the Unoccupied Zone we
receive a great number of letters and expressions of opinion upholding this
view. I believe there is no doubt that in the French mind the feeling exists
that such a move is absolutely necessary and that it must be undertaken at an
early date."

(US Ambassador to the Vichy French Government Admiral Leahy, April 1942.) (1)

But the war was conducted along political, not purely military lines, and was
therefore drawn out unnecessarily. In order to placate the Soviet government and
appease the massive popular pressure for a second front the British government
continued to make deceitful promises and empty excuses:

"Much has been said and urged about a Second Front in Western Europe and I can
assure you that the Government are as keen and anxious for this to materialise
as you are."

(Lord Privy Seal Sir Stafford Cripps, Daily Express May 1942.)

"We are making preparations for a landing on the continent in August or
September 1942... It is impossible to say in advance whether the situation will
be such as to make this operation feasible when the time comes. We can therefore
give no promise in the matter..."

(Churchill, in a Memorandum to Molotov, June 1942.) (2)

This was outright deception; since Britain was planning a diversionary operation
in North Africa.

The considerable forces involved in North African operations in 1942 and in the
Aegean and Balkan operations in 1943 meant that they would not be available for
an invasion of Europe: and so provided Churchill with another excuse against,
and the Germans with no fear of, a second front in 1942 or 1943:

"In the American mind, Round Up [another codename for a European invasion B.M.]
in 1943 is excluded by acceptance of Torch [N.Africa B.M.]. We need not argue
about that."

(British representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee in Washington Sir
John Dill, to Churchill, Aug 1 1942.) (3)

"All the Allied resources were henceforth so tied up in the Mediterranean that
even a cross-Channel operation in 1944 was becoming difficult to mount."

(US historian Trumbull Higgins, in International Affairs, April 1959.) (4)

As a result of talks between the British and the Americans. Eisenhower noted
that:

"Any 1942 operations in the Mediterranean would eliminate the possibility of a
major cross-channel venture in 1943."

(Eisenhower.) (5)

(1)See:Robert E. Sherwood, "Roosevelt and Hopkins." New York 1948.

(2)Winston Churchill "The Second World War." Vol IV.

(3)See:Winston S. Churchill, "The Second World War." Vol. IV

(4)Quoted in:V.Trukhanovsky "British Foreign Policy During World War II."
Progress Publishers. Moscow 1970.

(5)Dwight D.Eisenhower "Crusade in Europe." De Capo Press. NY 1977.

The British even used the weather as an excuse to delay a second front:

"This invasion is to be launched as soon as practicable after weather conditions
in the English Channel become favourable."

(General Ismay, to Stalin, Moscow, Oct 1943.) (1)

As well as the "unsuitable weather" excuse; when the Germans were preparing
their attack on Leningrad Churchill refused Soviet requests for a second front
using the excuse that there were "not enough men and equipment".

"Whether British armies will be strong enough to invade the mainland of Europe
during 1942 must depend on unforseeable events."

(Churchill, to Stalin, Sept 1941.) (2)

But by September 1941 Britain had 2 million idle soldiers in the British Isles,
1.5 million in the Home Guard, 750,000 in the RAF, 500,000 in the Royal Navy,
and in 1941 Britain manufactured 15,000 tanks and armour, 19,000 guns and
mortars, and 20,000 planes.

"How admirable Britain is now equipped in weapons of war for directing such an
attack upon Germany I well know."

(Minister of Supply Lord Beaverbrook, in a broadcast in New York, April 23
1942.)

While decorating four British RAF officers for services in the USSR, the Soviet
Ambassador in London said:

"Now all the Allies put together have the essential implements for victory:
troops, tanks, aircraft, arms. There is no time to wait until the last button is
sewn to the uniform of the last soldier!"

(Soviet Ambassador to London Ivan Maisky, March 25 1942.)

Another excuse for no second front in 1943 was that there were not enough
landing craft. But more landing craft were used in Sicily in 1943 than in
Normandy in 1944; and if they were available for Sicily, then why not for a
second front?. (3)

The Western Allies also used the Goebbels' propaganda claim of an impregnable
"Atlantic Wall" as an excuse not to launch a second front in 1942 and 1943. But
the "Atlantic Wall" was not so impregnable as Goebbels's own propaganda, which
Churchill used to the full, made it up to be:

"Here the Prime Minister was on weak ground; German fortifications along most of
the extended coasts of France were in their commander's own words, in large
measure, a 'Propaganda Wall' conjured up by the nazis to deceive the German
people as well as the Allies."

(US historian Trumbull Higgins.) (4)

"The much publicised Atlantic Wall was more a product of Goebbels's bluff
propaganda than a really unassailable fortification."

(German General Kurt von Tippelskirch.) (5)

(1)Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943.

(2)See:V.Trukhanovsky "British Foreign Policy During World War II." Progress
Publishers. Moscow 1970.

(3)See:John Grigg "1943 - The Victory That Never Was." Eyre Methuen. London
1980.

(4)Trumbull Higgins "Winston Churchill and the Second Front, 1940-1943." NY
1957.

(5)Kurt von Tippelskirch "Geschichte des zweiten Weltkriegs." Athenaum-Verlag.
Bonn 1954.

"Hitler's Europe at that time was not fortified as strongly as Churchill claimed
in his notes to Stalin."

(British Labour leader Michael Foot.) (1)

"Nearly all the German forces - and their crack troops, too - are tied down on
the Eastern Front, while only negligible forces, and the poorest, too, are left
in Europe."

(Stalin, 1942.)

"By the summer of 1942 the German setbacks in the war against Russia began to
have a very negative effect on the Western [German B.M.] army as well. A large
number of troops suitable for use on the Eastern Front was 'combed' out of
second-echelon and reserve units... Combat ready formations were sent to the
East, and the replacements were inferior troops. As soon as these troops became
fit for action they were likewise sent to Russia."

(German Lieutenant General Bodo Zimmermann.) (2)

All through the war, the British government continued to heap its insincere
praise on the Red Army:

"Words fail me to express the admiration which all of us feel at the continued
brilliant successes of your armies against the German invader, but I cannot
resist sending you a further word of gratitude and congratulations on all that
Russia is doing for the common cause."

(Winston Churchill, in a letter to Stalin, Feb 11 1942.)

"We are deeply encouraged by the growing magnitude of your victories in the
South... The results may be very far reaching indeed."

(Churchill, to Stalin, Dec 1942.)

"On the occasion of Red Army day we send the heartiest greetings of the British
Army and Royal Air Force to their gallant Russian comrades who are so
relentlessly attacking and forcing back the German invader. We wish you and the
Red Army and Air Force all possible success in your great task of liberating
your country. Together we shall secure final victory over our common enemy."

#(British Chief of Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, on the 24th anniversary of
the foundation of the Red Army, Feb 23 1942.) (3)

The British had no intention of launching a second front. But to placate public
opinion they agreed to sign a treaty:

"Under present conditions Great Britain is unable to give military aid and
assistance to Stalin in the sense of a Second Front or even in the sense of any
considerable supply of materiel... And in view of the pressure of British public
opinion, Great Britain is forced to conclude this treaty with Stalin as a
political substitute for material military assistance."

(Eden, in a telegram to US Secretary of State Sumner Welles, March 30 1942.) (4)

(1)Michael Foot "Aneurin Bevan. A Biography." London 1962.

(2)See:V.Trukhanovsky "British Foreign Policy During World War II." Progress
Publishers. Moscow 1970.

(3)See:Pat and Zelda Coates "A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations." Lawrence and
Wishart. London 1944.

(4)See:Foreign Relations of the United States, 1942, Vol. III.

The truth is that Churchill had no intention of launching a second front until
the Soviet Union had been thoroughly beaten. British filibustering and
procrastination was even criticised by some US participants in Second Front
negotiations:

"The British were masters in negotiations - particularly were they adept in the
use of phrases or words which were capable of more than one meaning or
interpretation... when matters of the state were involved, our British opposite
numbers had elastic scruples... What I witnessed was the British power of
diplomatic finess in its finest hour, a power that had developed over centuries
of successful international intrigue, cajolery and tacit compulsions."

(US General Albert Wedermeyer.) (1)

On his journey to Moscow to placate Stalin in August 1942 Churchill said:

"I pondered on my mission to this sullen, sinister Bolshevik State I had once
tried so hard to strangle on its birth, and which, until Hitler appeared, I had
regarded as the mortal foe of civilised freedom. What was it my duty to say to
them now? General Wavell... summed it all up in a poem. There were several
verses, and the last line of each was, 'No second front in nineteen forty-two'."

(Winston Churchill, Aug 12 1942.) (2)

On leaving Moscow, Churchill lavished more insincerity on Stalin:

"I take the opportunity of thanking you for your comradely attitude and
hospitality. I am very glad to have visited Moscow, firstly because it was my
duty to express myself, and secondly because I am certain that our contact will
play a useful part in furthering our cause."

(Winston Churchill, on leaving Moscow, Aug 16 1942.) (3)

When Stalin again complained to Churchill about the need for a second front in
1943 Churchill tried to placate him with stories of: "400 bomber raid on Essen"
(March 13), "1050 tons of bombs we've flung on Berlin" (March 28), "348 aircraft
over Essen" (April 6), and promised to send Stalin photos of bombed German
cities.

Stalin wrote:

"The Soviet Government could not have imagined that the British and US
Governments would revise the decision to invade Western Europe which they had
adopted earlier this year... We were not consulted. The preservation of our
confidence in the Allies is being subjected to a severe test."

(Stalin to Churchill, June 24 1943.)

The Soviet people became resolved to the fact that their Western 'allies'
intended that they should fight the war alone.

(1)Albert Wedermeyer "Wedermeyer Reports!" New York 1958.

(2)See:Winston Churchill "The Second World War." London. 1951.

(3)See:Pat and Zelda Coates "A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations." Lawrence and
Wishart. London 1944.



Chapter 28

SOVIET LOSSES DURING THE WAR.
Until one visits the Soviet Union, no one can understand the enormity and the
consequences of World War Two in that country. The Western media hatefully
depicts the USSR as a nation of old women in shawls and headscarves. There are
certainly millions of mothers who still cry for sons and husbands lost in the
war. The economic effects of such human losses are still deeply felt today.
Think of the wealth that 20 million pairs of hands that were lost in the war
could have created since then. The Soviet Union now has a 20 million labour
shortage and millions of war dependants to care for.

How much we owe to the immense sacrifices of the Soviet people during the Second
World War is cruelly and hatefully ignored by a vicious Western media, war
films, and even history textbooks.

In 1914-1917 millions of Russian people lost their lives in a war that was to
decide how European finance capitals would divide up the rest of the world among
themselves. From 1918 to 1921 millions more died as a result of invading
capitalist armies who wanted to 'liberate' them from communism. But the truth is
that the majority of the Soviet people make it quite clear to all those who have
ears to listen that they do not want to be 'liberated' from communism by anyone.

In 1941 the communist "aggressors" were again attacked by "peace loving"
capital. And another twenty million Soviet people died in a war not of their own
making.

When a fuller and more comprehensive evaluation was conducted some time after
the end of the war, among Soviet losses destroyed by the Nazis in World War Two
were found to be: 1,710 towns and cities, more than 70,000 villages, 32,000
industrial plants and complexes, 10,000 power stations, 1,135 coal mines were
flooded or ruined, 14,000 steam boilers, 1,400 turbines and 11,300 electric
generators were removed to Germany, 7 million horses, 17 million cattle, 20
million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats and 110 million poultry were either
destroyed or taken back to Germany. The Nazis destroyed 65,000 kilometers of
railway track and 4,100 railway stations, 56,000 miles of main highway, 90,000
bridges, 100,000 farms, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, and 43,000 public
libraries with 110 million books, 427 museums and 44,000 theatres. They burned
or demolished 6 million buildings, and 25 million Soviet people lost their
homes.

The Nazis committed the most terrible atrocities on Soviet soil. They would
often herd the entire population of a village into a church or a barn and burn
it down.

It is difficult to find a description of destruction of an average Soviet town
or city in the war that was out of the ordinary, but they all suffered similar
destruction. British historian Alexander Werth's description of Sebastopol is
typical:

"From a distance Sebastopol... looked like a live city, but it was also dead.
Even in the suburbs... there was hardly a house standing. The railway station
was a mountain of rubble and twisted metal; on the last day the Germans were at
Sebastopol they ran an enormous goods train off the line into a ravine, where it
lay smashed... Destruction, destruction everywhere."

(British historian Alexander Werth "Russia at War.")

Nothing was destroyed in the USA. Not one brick even trembled. Not one grain of
sand dislodged. Not one blade of grass was trampled under foot nor did one leaf
even flutter in the breeze of an explosion. The only explosion in the USA as a
result of the war was that of dollars in war profits.

War is a total loss to socialist economies. Nobody profits out of armaments; or
the rebuilding of Soviet cities, homes or industries after a war; while the cost
in human life and labour is immense. Whereas capitalists profit out of every
bullet, boot and biscuit of war and every stone, brick and nail of
reconstruction after a war:

"But this is a seller's market. They want what we've got. Good. Make them pay
the right price for it...

Are there common denominators for winning the war and the peace? If there are,
then, we should deal with both in 1943. What are they?

We will win the war (a) by reducing taxes on corporations, high income brackets,
and increasing taxes on lower incomes; (b) by removing the unions from any
power... (c) by destroying any and all government agencies that stand in the way
of free enterprise."

(Lammot du Pont, Chairman of Du Pont, to the National Association of
Manufacturers, New York, September 1942.) (1)

US War Products Board figures show that between June 1940 and September 1944
$175,000 millions in war contracts was awarded to 18,539 US corporations -
$13,823 millions to General Motors alone.

It has also been remarked that there were over 20,000 more millionaires in the
USA at the end of the war more than there were at the beginning.

The Soviet Union lost a third of its national wealth in World War Two.

Britain lost only 0.8 % and France 1.5%.

By the end of World War Two the US had three-quarters of the world's gold stocks
settled in its banks. The US profited $123,000 millions and came out of World
War Two twice as rich and sole possessor of the nuclear bomb.

The war left the USA the richest and most powerful nation on earth.

British capitalists also profited enormously from the war. The Annual Abstract
of Statistics No.84 reveals that British monopoly profits rose from
£1,368,000,000 in 1938 to £2,190,000,000 by 1941.

"Churchill told the nation that for the immediate future he had nothing to offer
but "blood, toil, tears and sweat". These words were borrowed from Garibaldi's
speech to his comrades after the fall of Rome in 1849. Indeed, the war demanded
sacrifice, but the sacrifice had to be borne by the working people because the
bourgeoisie used its privileged status in the capitalist state to reduce its
burden and to grow rich in the war. The toil and sweat that Churchill demanded
of the working people multiplied the revenues of the British monopolies."

(V. Trukhanovsky "British Foreign Policy During World War II.")

#The USSR lost 20,000,000 dead in World War Two. During the 941 day siege of
Leningrad they lost one million people in one city alone - 600,000 were
civilians. The US lost 385,000 people in the whole of the war - all forces
personnel. Twice as much tonnage of bombs was dropped on Leningrad than was
dropped on the much larger city of London during the whole of the war. The
deaths in Leningrad more than trebled the total number of British people, forces
and civilians, killed in the whole of the war. A quarter of a million Soviet
soldiers were lost in the capture of Berlin. In one Soviet cemetery in Treptow
Park in Berlin lie the bodies of 100,000 Red Army soldiers killed in the last
months of the war in the battle for Berlin. Britain lost 250,000 in the whole of
the war.

For each one of the 1,418 days of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union the
Soviet people lost 14,104 men, women and children. For every American mother who
lost a son in the war, fifty Soviet mothers cried for lost sons. Of all Soviet
children born between 1941 and 1945, half of them lost their fathers in World
War Two.

In less than thirty years, forty million Soviet people - one fifth of their
population - gave their lives defending a system that "oppresses" them.

(1)See:A. Kahn "High Treason. The Plot Against the People." The Hour
Publishers. NY 1950.



Chapter 29

LENINGRAD: "NOBODY IS FORGOTTEN. NOTHING IS FORGOTTEN."
#This inscription is written at Piskaryevskoe - one of Leningrad's many war
cemeteries. The words are from "Requiem", composed by Olga Bergholts:

REQUIEM.

"Here lie the people of Leningrad

Here the townspeople - the men, women, children

Alongside them soldiers - Red Army men.

To their last

They defended you - Leningrad,

Cradle of the Revolution.

We shall not be able to list their noble names here,

So many of them are beneath the eternal protection of the granite.

But know when harkening to these stones

Nobody is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.

The foes were breaking into the town, clothed in armour and steel.

But with the army there arose together

Workers, schoolboys, teachers, militiamen.

And all, as one, said:

Death is rather afraid of us than we are of death.

Not forgotten is the hungry, cruel, dark

Winter of Forty-One / Forty-Two

Nor the ferocity of the bombardments,

Nor the horror of the bombings in Forty-Three

The whole town smashed.

Not one of your lives, Comrades, is forgotten.

Under unbroken fire from the air, the ground and the water

Your daily heroic deeds

You performed worthily and simply,

And together with your fatherland

You all gained the victory.

Thus before your immortal life

On this sad, solemn field

A grateful people eternally dip its banners,

Homeland - mother and Hero City Leningrad."

(Olga Bergholts.)

Olga Bergholts lived through the 941 days of the siege of Leningrad.

200,000 people were killed instantly at Hiroshima. 135,000 were killed over two
nights of the Allied bombing of Dresden. 700 died in one night of the bombing of
Coventry. 385,000 US soldiers died in the whole war.

In Piskaryevskoe's 54 acres of mass graves lie the bodies of 600,000 Leningrad
civilians.

"This was the greatest and longest siege ever endured by a modern city, a time
of trial, suffering and heroism that reached peaks of tragedy and bravery almost
beyond our power to comprehend... And in the West not one person in fifty who
thrilled to the courage of Londoners in the Battle of Britain is cognisant of
that of the Leningraders."

(US reporter Harrison Salisbury, New York Times Book Review, May 10 1962.)

Nearly a million people died in the whole of Leningrad. The great majority of
them starved or froze to death during the 941 day blockade of the city where in
1941 three million were trapped by the Germans.

The famous Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich also insisted on staying in his
city when it was requested that, as a valuable Soviet composer, he be taken to
safety. He remained in Leningrad as a member of the city's fire brigade. It was
here in 1941 that he composed the very beautiful and moving 7th ("Leningrad")
symphony, which portrays Nazi tank and bombing attacks and the heroic suffering
and determination of the people of Leningrad and of their liberation.

Shostakovich wrote in 1942 typifying the Soviet people's attitude to the war:

"The war which we are now conducting against Hitlerism is the war of humanism
against hatred of mankind, culture against barbarism, light against darkness,
justice against falsehood and faithlessness. All these great and high concepts
rule the thoughts of Soviet people, among whom are those who have chosen the
arts as their life work. And they are working hard for the glory of their
country. This work is succeeding. We hear its echoes in the thunder of artillery
music accompanying our fighting battalions. We see its reflections in the land
recaptured from the enemy and returned to our country. And it is this labour,
the labour of the worker, the engineer and the artist, the teacher and the
composer, multiplied by the bravery and the courage of the warrior, that will
bring us final victory... There are not and there cannot be in our country any
citizens aloof from this great struggle. "Everything for the front, everything
for victory", is the slogan for men and women. The self-sacrifice of the
workers, the hardest labour of the collective farmer, the lyricism of the poet,
the creative flight of the composer - all must be consecrated and freely given,
to the last drop, to our sacred aim for which we live and breathe, for our
victory."

(Dmitri Shostakovich, article in "New Masses", Nov 1942.)

The city's suffering and courage was reflected in essays written by Leningrad
school children:

"Until June 22 everybody had work and a good life assured to him. That day we
went on an excursion to the Kirov Islands. A fresh wind was blowing from the
Gulf, bringing with it bits of the song some kids were singing not far away...
And then the enemy began to come nearer and nearer..."

(Essay of Leningrad schoolgirl.) (1)

"June 22! How much that date means to us now!...

As in 1919, so now, the great question arose: "Shall Leningrad remain a Soviet
city or not?" Leningrad was in danger. But its workers had risen like one man
for its defence... A cold and terrible winter was approaching. Together with
their bombs, enemy planes were dropping leaflets. They said they would raze
Leningrad to the ground. They said we would all die of hunger. They thought they
would frighten us, but they filled us with renewed strength... Leningrad did not
let the enemy in through its gates! The city was starving, but it lived and
worked, and kept on sending to the front more of its own sons and daughters.
Though knocking at the knees with hunger, our workers went to work..."

(16 year old Valentina Solovyova, in a school essay written during the siege of
Leningrad.)

Cold and hunger killed the people of Leningrad. They froze to death in
temperatures of minus 40 or 50. In order to survive, they ate leather, wood,
carpenter's glue, the paste for wallpaper - anything that had protein or
hydrocarbons. At the beginning of 1942 about 4,000 people were dying in
Leningrad each day. They collapsed dead in the streets, in food queues, and
while operating machines at their workplaces or defending their city:

(1) See:Alexander Werth "Russia at War 1941-1945." Pan Books. London 1965.

"Comrade Stomach! I am weak and feeble. I have great difficulty dragging my feet
and my face has long ago got out of the habit of smiling... my hunger is
incurable, chronic like rheumatism. But I am fighting not to fall down, for
death tramples quickly upon the fallen. So far I am hanging on... Your obedient
servant, A.Dymov."

"They were weak, of course. Some couldn't even move a hand. Take one man sitting
on the stairs. He had a string bag in his hand. He'd sat down and couldn't get
up again. His fingers were already numb. And once a man can't move, it's all up
with him."

"My son had died at the beginning of the war. And my daughter at the end of
November... my children died, almost within a year of each other, and my husband
was killed by artillery fire at the factory."

"So one daughter had died, and the other one, she was three, was the only one
left at home. What could I do? I'd heat the old fashioned stove, I'd lay the
little girl right on the stove shelf and cover her up, then run off to the
factory. So I kept running back and forth.

I'd rush home, feed her and change her clothes, you see? And run off. She'd be
left alone again. I thought she'd turn into a wild thing. Once I got home,
opened the door, and saw her standing there - a tiny girl entirely on her own in
the flat. Everyone else had died."

(Extracts from "The Book of the Blockade.") (1)

"...coming home and so wanting to eat!... I had some firewood... I took a log...
pine... I chewed and chewed... fragrance of resin gave some sense of
enjoyment... I had to eat something, otherwise death was inevitable from
starvation, and this was even worse than being killed under bombardment. One
dies a terrible death from starvation."

(Yelena Nikitin, 26 Stackek Prospect.)

"There was a young woman with twins living with me... That first winter of the
blockade they were both dying. She too was not long for this world. She looked
weak, lost and alone...

One day she made a decision... I don't even know what to call it - a crime or a
feat of bravery? No, those words are all wrong... Perhaps the right words don't
even exist in any human language. She realised that she would not be able to
save both her sons. So she stopped feeding one of them and he died.

The second pulled through though. I saw him yesterday. He was walking about the
yard. A thin, pale and sad looking boy, but he was alive."

(Leonid Panteleev.) (2)

"In those days there was something in a man's face which told you that he would
die within the next twenty-four hours... I have lived in Leningrad all my life,
and I also have my parents here. They are old people... I had to give them half
my soldier's ration, or they would certainly have died. As a staff officer I was
naturally... getting considerably less than the people at the front: 250 grams a
day... I'd walk every day from my house... to my work... two or three
kilometres. I'd walk for a while, and then sit down for a rest. Many a time I
saw a man suddenly collapse in the snow... on the way back, I would see a vague
human form covered with snow... And during that winter I don't think I ever saw
a person smile. It was frightful. And yet, there was a kind of inner discipline
that made people carry on. A new code of manners was evolved by the hungry
people."

(Leningrad army officer Major Lozak.)

#(1) See:Alyes Adamovich and Daniil Granin "The Book of the Leningrad Blockade."

(2)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

"And yet, somehow - we didn't stop... it would be worse than suicide, and a
little like treason... But still our people worked... they were hungry, terribly
hungry... To this day I cannot quite understand how it was possible to have all
that will-power, that strength of mind. Many of them, hardly able to walk with
hunger, would drag themselves to the factory every day, eight, ten, even twelve
kilometres.

Somehow, people knew when they were going to die... How many workers came into
this office saying: "Chief, I shall be dead today or tomorrow." We would send
them to the factory hospital, but they always died... Many of them died right
here... Many a man would drag himself to the factory, stagger in and die...
Everywhere there were corpses. But some died at home, and died together with the
rest of their family..."

(Director of a Leningrad optics factory, Semyonov.)

During the 941 day siege of Leningrad, many did not manage to escape across the
ice "Road to Life" across the frozen Lake Ladoga. Hundreds of thousands starved
or froze to death, especially in the winter of 1941-1942: November: 11,000:
December: 53,000. In 1941 daily bread rations dropped to an incredible 500
grammes for industrial workers and 250 grammes for dependants. On November 9
1941 Leningrad had only seven days supply of flour and eight days supply of
cereals. On November 20 the people of Leningrad again reduced their bread
rations: 250 grammes a day for industrial workers; 125 grammes for children and
dependants.

On Revolution Day the Nazis dropped leaflets saying:

"Today we shall do the bombing, tomorrow you shall do the burying."

(German leaflets dropped on Leningrad on Revolution Day, Nov 6 1941.)

To help the soldiers hold out was every Leningrader's thought. every Leningrader
was the defender of his city:

"How many hardships we Leningraders have to endure... will never break us.
Neither hunger, nor cold, nor shelling will crush us. We'd sooner die than let
the enemy in here."

(N.Balyashnikov, worker, Kirov Plant, Leningrad, Dec 1941.)

"In August we worked for twenty-five days digging trenches. We were
machine-gunned and many of us were killed, but we carried on, though we weren't
used to this work. And the Germans were stopped by the trenches we had dug."

(A Leningrad schoolgirl.) (1)

During the first winter in Leningrad 600,000 died from hunger and cold. During
the 941 day siege they had no heat, no light. People ill with hunger would go to
the hospital. But what they needed was food, not medicine; and the doctors were
half starved themselves.

"Death would overtake people in all kinds of circumstances; while they were in
the streets, they would fall down and never rise again; or in their houses where
they would fall asleep and never awake; in factories, where they would collapse
while doing a job of work. There was no transport, and the dead body would
usually be put on a hand-sleigh drawn by two or three members of the dead man's
family; often wholly exhausted during the long trek to the cemetery, they would
abandon the body half-way, leaving it to the authorities to deal with it."

(D.N.Pavlov, in "Leningrad During the Blockade.")

(1) See:Alexander Werth "Russia at War 1941-1945." Pan Books. London 1965.

When the spring came, the melting snows revealed thousands of corpses hidden by
snowdrifts at the roadsides, in the alleys, passages and yards.

"The job of disposing of these corpses was truly terrifying; we were afraid of
the effect it might have on the minds of children and very young people."

(Secretary of the Leningrad Komsomol.)

The greatest attention was given to babies and small children. Babies looked
after at kindergartens were laid in warm clothing out in the snow so that they
could get snatches of health-giving sunlight between shellings. Babushkas would
take groups of toddlers for a walk. Covered in layers of warm clothing, they
looked like little balls of fur toddling through the snow hand in hand. One
group of children had just been taken back into a children's hospital when the
Germans dropped oil bombs on it and most of the children in the hospital were
burned alive.

No one who lived through even the worst of the war in Britain could even begin
to imagine the extent of sufferings of the Soviet people in the war.

Perhaps no other city in the war has so many orphans as Leningrad. Children had
better chance of survival because they were naturally given the best attention.
Leningrad public service buildings are full of many floors containing hundreds
of thousands of files of missing persons, missing parents, dead parents,
relatives, and orphans of the blockade. The Leningrad Department of Public
Education houses the files of many thousands of Leningrad's "blockade children"
who were orphaned. The details of the parents invariably state: father Red Army
- missing or dead, mother died of hunger.

"Came the winter of 1941-1942... The number of orphans increased. Many children
came to the district department and glued themselves to the slightly warm
radiators. They were gaunt, dirty, black. Many could not speak but only mumbled.
They all looked alike and resembled little old folk... Only their white teeth
showed them to be children. They had no bread ration cards... A 14-year old boy
was brought to children's home No.27. A woman activist and I held him under his
arms as we led him. His legs didn't bend and he dragged them. When we brought
him to the children's home he couldn't eat. His limbs were already stiff. He was
laid on a table. He died with his eyes open. This is how I remember him: the
eyes pleading for help. He remained unknown...

But what threatens mankind now is so much more terrible. There will be no one to
search for after it, and no one to do the searching."

(Ella Maximova, Archive of the Museum of Leningrad's History.)

The sufferings of Leningrad's children is reflected in an article in The Times
just after the end of the siege:

"A dispatch from Leningrad describes the effort made by the city authorities to
save children from permanent mental injury as a result of the famine... the
imprint of the difficult winter still lay on most of the children's faces and
was evident in their games. Even in group games they played silently with a
serious expression. When the children, most of whom were orphans, arrived at the
kindergartens, their first move was invariably to press themselves close against
the stoves... fought with cries for warm places... sit in silence for hours.
Music irritated them. So did the grown-ups' smiling faces. ...Though the rooms
were warm they would not take off their felt boots, hats and coats, and crept
stealthily into bed in them. It was difficult to wean them from the habit of
sleeping huddled up... It was in their feeding habits that the children were
most affected by their experiences. They divided soup into two courses. First
they drank off the liquid and then ate the rest. They crumbled bread into tiny
bits which they hid in matchboxes. They saved the bread until last, like a
delicacy, taking pleasure in eating a little piece for hours... Many of these
children had seen their parents die from exhaustion, and one of the most
difficult tasks facing teachers was to distract the children's passionate
interest in small objects, such as lockets and rings, that reminded them of
their lost mothers."

(The Times Jan 5 1944.)

British MP D.N.Pritt wrote after the war about the sufferings of Soviet children
and the Soviet Government's work in caring for them and rehabilitating them
after their horrible experiences, and about people in the West who were already
plotting their destruction:

"I Have seen seen some of these children growing up well and happy now. But I
thought of them when in September, 1950, my wife and I visited a War Orphan's
home in Kiev. Here live 120 children, looked after by two doctors, twelve
teachers, and twenty-three other staff. Rs 1,450,000 a year is spent to make
their lives as normal as possible, so that they shall not suffer too much by
comparison with children who have their own parents or have been adopted into
families. Most of them have been in Nazi concentration camps; we saw the camp
numbers tattooed on their arms, the marks of savage beatings on their bodies.
They were happy, frank and friendly, asking us eagerly to arrange for English
schoolchildren to exchange regular correspondence with them - which we have
done... Most of them have seen their parents murdered. Most of them are
fortunate not to have been murdered themselves. And yet some people in the West
think or pretend to think that the Soviet government is planning a new war in
which such tragedies can be repeated and multiplied. And, still worse, some
people advocate a new "preventive war" and seek to rearm the very Germans who
ran these camps - and to release Nazi criminals from prison - in order to repeat
such tragedies."

(D.N.Pritt KC. MP in his book "Russia Is For Peace".)

The city of Leningrad writes diaries that no English or American city could
write:

"I sit and I cry... I'm only 16! Bastards, those who instigated this war."

(From the diary of 16 year old Yuri Ryabinkin.)

Yuri died in Leningrad; he no longer had the strength to walk across the frozen
lake. His mother, barely able to walk herself, managed to walk to safety near a
railway station outside Leningrad, only to lie down herself and die in the snow.

"As I returned home... my heart would miss a beat... I'd go in, find them still
alive... heat some water, get them up, give their faces a wash... we'd drink
some warm water with a small amount of bread. (The size of it is drawn on the
diary page - it measures a square centimeter.) ...Nadenka would say: "Mummy, if
I start dying I'll do it very quietly, so that I don't frighten you." And I'd
shout: "Live, my little snow-maiden!" She was cold as ice all over."

(From the diary of Faina Prusova.)

"Mama!

We come here every day with Papa at 10 o'clock to wait for you.

Slava."

(Scrawled on the ruined house of a Leningrad family.)

Zhenya, eldest daughter, was first of the Savichev family to die. A
draughtswoman, she walked to her factory every day. Several times she would
collapse from exhaustion, people would pick her up, take her to hospital; each
time she would return to her factory. Her youngest sister, Tanya, an 11 year old
schoolgirl, kept a diary in a child's alphabet notebook, each page had a letter
of the Russian alphabet; each page with an initial of a member of her family had
an entry:

Z - "Zhenya died at 12.00pm. Dec 28 1941."

B - "Babushka (Grandmother) died at 3pm Jan 25 1942."

L - "Lyoka died at 5am March 17 1942."

V - "Uncle Vasya died at 2am April 13 1942."

L - "Uncle Lyosha died at 4pm May 10 1942."

M - "Darling Mama died at 7.30am May 13 1942."

The last entry in Tanya Savicheva's diary reads:

"The Savichevs are dead. All dead."

The Savichevs lived at House Nº 13, 2nd row, on Vasilevsky Island in Leningrad.
Tanya's note book was found in a box together with her mother's wedding dress.
Tanya Savicheva was evacuated from Leningrad. Weakened and exhausted from hunger
and from chronic dysentery, she died in 1943.

"NOBODY IS FORGOTTEN. NOTHING IS FORGOTTEN."



Chapter 30

SOVIET RESISTANCE AND NAZI ATROCITIES.
"In a difficult hour ask them, those stern Russian people who put our country
together bit by bit, and they will tell you how to comport yourself, even when
alone among a multitude of enemies."

(Leonid Leonov.)

The USSR has the longest list of Nazi atrocities and destruction. No other
nation, not even the whole of Europe, East and West, has such a long history of
Nazi atrocities, devastation of peoples, cities and towns; the list goes on and
on. I have merely singled out just a tiny fraction of examples.

A people fighting for themselves and what they have built up for themselves
display far more heroism in defending their gains than an army fighting for the
gains of capitalist rulers.

The battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the war. So close was the
enemy that in the height of this battle, in the winter of 1942/1943, workers
were driving unpainted tanks straight from the production lines into the battle.

Stalingrad became the most ruined city in the Soviet Union.

One famous house in Stalingrad, called Sergeant Pavlov's house, cost the Germans
more lives than the taking of Paris. Very little of Stalingrad was left
standing. The city was almost totally destroyed and its population decimated:

"The civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad were compelled to leave the ruins of
their homes and, on the orders of the (German) Sixth Army, to move off
Westwards. It was a tragic march... Thousands collapsed, exhausted, by the
roadside; starving and frozen, there they died. There was no one to help them."

(German war correspondent.) (1)

While the bulk of the German forces were tied down at Stalingrad, British forces
were able to take the German and Italian armies at El Alemein.

But Leningrad and Stalingrad are not the only examples of Nazi destruction and
heroic Soviet resistance. So many Soviet cities and towns and villages were
ruined or destroyed by the Nazis there is not room even to list their names
here, let alone describe each one of them - Minsk, Smolensk, Lvov, Odessa,
Rostov, Kherson, Zaporozhe, Voronezh, Orel, Kharkov, Kiev - are only a tiny few
of the examples. But the list is endless. Just one example was Sevastopol:

"From reports of survivors it is now possible to relate some of the events of
Sevastopol's last days when, after tenaciously fighting against overwhelming
odds for 8 months, the garrison was forced to abandon the ruined city. Yet even
then a rearguard of marines, cavalrymen, pilots, pioneers, women and youths
fought stubbornly to cover the embarkation of the main forces, the bulk of the
remaining civil population, and the wounded... When it was seen that the
heaviest losses were not deterring the enemy from pressing forward... the
defenders were told in plainest terms what lay ahead. Gathering round him his
marines... the political commander spoke these words: "Now we have to die. We
have to die for those who will one day return to Sevastopol; we have to die for
those who will one day build another Dnieper Dam. We have to die for those who
will go on fighting at sea."... The men removed their caps and stood silent for
a short time and then swore an oath to conquer or to die. They returned to their
guns wearing under their Red Army blouses their striped sailor's jerseys "for
luck" and twisted round their forage caps hat-bands bearing the names of their
ships... They fought till the last shell had been fired and then blew up
themselves and their guns. No white flag ever flew at Sevastopol... Amid the
rubble of the city, among its fallen monuments and ruined quays, Russian
resistance reached a climax, and time was saved and an example was created for
the enemies of Germany fighting all over the world. Nothing was left."

(The Times, in a despatch from its Special Correspondent, July 25 1942.)

(1) See:Alan Sillitoe "The Road to Volgograd." Pan. And W.H. Allen. London 1966.

"It will remain one of the puzzles of the war why, in 1941-42, despite
overwhelming German and Rumanian superiority in tanks and aircraft, and a
substantial superiority in men, Sebastopol succeeded in holding out for 250 days
and why, in 1944, the Russians captured it within four days."

(British historian Alexander Werth "Russia at War.")

"I shall die, but never surrender! Farewell my country. July 24, 1941."

(Inscription written on a wall at Brest Fortress by a wounded Soviet soldier.)

The Brest Fortress in Byelorussia held out against the Nazis for almost a month,
- longer than Denmark, Holland and Belgium. The Moonsund Islands in Estonia held
for six weeks, - as long as the whole of France. Sevastopol held out for over 8
months, during which the Germans lost 300,000 troops, - more than they lost in
the whole of Europe, North Africa and the Atlantic when the British were
conducting the phoney war in the 22 months from September 1 1939 to June 22
1941. That is: one Soviet city cost the Nazis more troops than they lost in the
entire phoney war with Britain and France before the USSR was attacked.

The first three months of Hitler's war against the Soviet Union cost the Germans
more dead - over 500,000 - than the taking of the whole of Western Europe in the
first two years of the war - less than 300,000.

Individual acts of Soviet heroism would fill many a book. Typical of the most
well known ones which were carried out on more than one occasion are the Soviet
soldier who, helping his comrades to put a pill box out of action at a crucial
time, wounded, placed his body against the firing aperture and died there. On
more than one occasion Soviet airmen would ram German planes or road transport
convoys when out of ammunition. Having failed to extinguish an incendiary bomb
which had hit the headquarters of the Soviet General Staff under Moscow's
Kirovskaya metro station, Private A.V.Teterin placed his body over it and put it
out. He died of his burns. There was a story of an old peasant woman who
poisoned German officers who had entered her house. The suspicious Germans made
her eat the food first. Not wanting to appear suspect, she ate the poisoned food
herself and, knowing that she would die more quickly than the Germans, she went
and hid in a cupboard to die. When the partizans came to the house, her husband
told them: "Quiet there, hold your tongues, there's a lioness here. Dead, but
she defended her den to the last."

A note was found on a dead Soviet soldier defending the Minsk Highway:

"We were twelve, ordered to block the enemy, especially tanks. And we held them.
Now there are just three - Kolya, Volodya and I, Alexander. But the enemy keeps
coming. We've lost Volodya, of Moscow. The enemy still keeps coming. Nineteen
enemy tanks are aflame. But there are just two of us. We shall stand firm to our
dying breath, unless reinforcements come to relieve us.. Now I am alone, wounded
in head and arm. The burning tanks are twenty three. Maybe I'll die. Maybe
someone will find this note and remember us. I am Russian, from the town of
Frunze. An orphan. Good-bye, friends. Yours, Alexander Vinogradov. 22.2 1942."

(Note found on a dead Soviet soldier on the Minsk Highway in 1942.)

"I remember we were trying to take a little hill that was to give us control
over a locality... Three times we attacked and each time we were thrown back.
The enemy opened up drumfire. I was sent on a scouting mission. That was when I
witnessed the following incident. A Soviet soldier was walking erect towards the
hill. He was wounded, alone, without weapons. The Germans watched him closely.
When he was about 30 meters from them, the soldier took out a harmonica and
started playing a lovely Russian melody on it. The Nazis started to clamber out
of cover and soon they had practically surrounded the man. The last thing I saw
was a grenade explosion and the Germans being thrown in different directions.
The soldier had blown himself up together with the enemy."

(Sergeant Ivan Sakhov, Gorky.) (1)

Nazi atrocities on Soviet soil far exceeded that on any other territory. The
German fascists had a special policy for the Soviet Union:

"We are obliged to depopulate as part of our mission of preserving the German
population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation... If I can
send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest
pity for the spilling of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to
remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin."

(Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial papers.)

"Kill every Russian, every Soviet citizen, do not stop, even if stands before
you an old man or woman, girl or boy. Kill them all and by doing so you will
save yourself from death, ensure the future of your family and win glory for
centuries to come."

(Wehrmacht command instructions of June 6 1941.)

"It will be a war of extermination... Unless we look at it that way, we may
defeat the enemy, but the Communist danger will reappear 30 years hence. We do
not make war to preserve an adversary... In the East cruelty is a boon.

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly
fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have
to be conducted with unprecedented unmerciful and unrelenting harshness...
German soldiers guilty of breaking international law... will be excused."

(Adolf Hitler addressing his Generals, March 30 1941.)

"Therefore you should carry out with dignity the cruellest and most merciless
assignments the state might charge you with."

(From German army manual "The Twelve Commandments Governing the Behaviour of
Germans in the East and Their Treatment of Russians." June 1 1941.)

"The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated... The German soldier comes
as a bearer of a racial concept...

The food situation at home makes it essential that the troops should be fed off
the land, and the largest possible stocks should be placed at the disposal of
the homeland. In enemy cities, a large part of the population will have to go
hungry. Nothing, out of a misguided sense of humanity, may be given to
prisoners-of-war or the population unless they are in the service of the German
Wehrmacht."

(Nazi Field Marshal von Manstein, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial papers.)

The Nazis' biggest targets were always the Communists.

"The "Moscow Advance Commando"... was used for the liquidation of people... the
safeguarding of documents in Russia was not undertaken for economic or cultural
reasons, but with the intention of obtaining lists of communist functionaries,
who would themselves have become candidated for "Liquidation"."

(From Nuremberg War Crimes Trials Documents.) (2)

(1)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

(2)See:The Brown Book. War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany. Verlag Zeit im
Bild. Dresden.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost 3 million members in the war. But 5
million more joined the party during the war to take their places.

Millions of Soviet people formed partizan units behind enemy lines on Soviet
territory, many of these partizans were members of the Communist youth - the
Komsomol. The communist youth also had many fine heroes and suffered many
losses:

One heroine every Soviet citizen knows about is Komsomol girl Zoya
Kosmodemyanskaya who was defiant to her Nazi executioners till her death:

"You can hang me but I am not alone. There are 200 million of us and you can't
hang us all."

(18 year old Komsomol girl Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya to her Nazi executioners, Nov
29 1941.)

Zoya was an 18 year old Moscow schoolgirl. She was a member of the Komsomol and
a famous guerrilla fighter, a partizanka, who destroyed a German munitions depot
during the height of the battle of Moscow. She was tortured by the Nazis. She
betrayed no one. The Nazis hung Zoya at Petrishchevo before the whole village
and mutilated her body. As she was about to be hung she shouted:

"Soviet people - fight against the invaders."

(Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.)

The brave Zoya became known all over the world. Chinese poet Ai Tsing, wrote
about her. Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet wrote a poem about her while in jail.
Soviet partizans were written about by Argentinian poet Raul Gonzalez Tunon and
Chilean poets Abraham Jesus Brito and Pablo Neruda. In 1942 Indian poet Shashi
Mohan Bakaya wrote:

"Beware, fascists,

You've killed Zoya,

But millions of Zoyas

Will rise again to the struggle."

(Indian poet Shashi Mohan Bakaya, 1942.)

Many other Komsomols and partizans captured by the Germans were brutally
murdered - Liza Chaikina, Shura Chekalin, and hundreds of thousands more.

The story of the Soviet partizans, like those of their Yugoslavian, French and
other comrades, can never be fully told, since all members of some groups were
wiped out by the Germans or died of cold, hunger, illness or their wounds. Many
were badly wounded; but that did not deter them:

"When the war started a group of girls at our factory, including myself,
enlisted. We wre assigned to a partizan unit...

I was wounded in a battle... Both my legs and my hipbone were shattered. But I
managed to crawl to the forest where I lay semi-conscious on the snow all night.
In the morning I was found by some partizans and they made me as comfortable as
possible in a dugout. When I was evacuated to Moscow both my legs had to be
amputated. I was only 20 years old at the time and my life was just beginning.

As soon as I was discharged from hospital I went back to my factory. It wasn't
at all easy to stand a shift with my artificial limbs, but the thought that it
was no easier where the fighting was kept me going."

(Katerina Yelina.) (1)

(1)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

The partizans grew from 1941 when they had only a few rifles and grenades and
starved much of the time, to 1943 when they had more sophisticated weapons
including mortars, anti-tank guns and heavy artillery, were well organised, well
supplied, and their operations were coordinated with the Red Army. By 1943 there
were 360,000 armed partizans in Byelorussia alone. The partizans attacked enemy
lines of communication, command and control centres, destroyed supplies and
disrupted transport. During the "rail war" coordinated simultaneous operations
on one night alone in 1943 blew up the railways in 5,800 places around Orel to
coincide with a Red Army offensive. In the same area they blew up over 17,000
rails between July and September. Partizans put two thirds of the Byelorussian
railways out of action in August, sometimes for weeks at a time. The partizan
armies tied up large numbers of German army units. The partizan war drew off
large German forces from the main battle-front. During the summer and autumn of
1942 as many as 23 German divisions were kept in the rear against the partizan
forces. The Germans had also drafted in 30,000 Hungarian troops just for
fighting the partizans.

"The guerilla war became a veritable plague, which also affected the morale of
the men at the front."

(General Heinz Guderian, in "Bilanz des zweiten Weltkrieges.")

"The greater the space that the soldiers seized, the more of a hell that space
became for them."

(West German military specialist Werner Picht, in "Bilanz des zweiten
Weltkrieges.")

The Germans never became masters on Soviet territory. The partizans had a
saying: "Peasant lands, partizan forests, German roads and Soviet government."

A Soviet poet was asked by the Briansk partizans to write a song about them that
could be sung slowly and softly. Partizans cannot light fires or sing loudly for
fear of being seen or heard. They have to move and work secretly and silently.
The poet wrote:

"The Briansk Forest murmered grimly

As the blue mist settled down

The pines all round strained to hear

The tread,

The tread of partizans

Going into battle.

(Soviet poet Antolii Sofronov.)

By the summer of 1943 more than 200,000 square kilometres, an area the size of
Britain, Belgium and Denmark combined, was under partizan control.

From 1941 to 1943 the Soviet partizans far outnumbered the British army in
Europe. They accounted for over 500,000 Germans, including 47 generals and
Hitler's High Commissioner Wilhelm Kube whos Byelorussian 'girl friend' put a
time bomb under his bed. Over 300 Nazis were killed by Soviet woman sniper
Ludmilla Pavlichenko.

Another role the partizans took on was the dealing with those wretched few
traitors who collaborated with the Nazis. These met the same fate as partizans
caught by the Germans – they were shot or hung – for Zoya, for Liza, for Shura,
for...

The partizan movement was also internationalist in character. Soviet partizans
accepted people of other nations into their ranks. Even early in the war, German
soldiers who saw the wrong of the war deserted and joined the Soviet partizans;
thus fighting for the Soviet Union and their own homeland. Partizan units of
other nationalities were formed on Soviet territory, some growing into large
formations.

Escaped Soviet prisoners of war formed partizan units or fought with the
resistance movements in all occupied European countries. They became national
heros and have memorials to them in France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Denmark,
Norway, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Austria, and in Germany
itself. Any Soviet soldier who escaped joined the local partizans. In France
there were over thirty Soviet partizan units totalling about 1,500 men
operating. As many as another thousand were members of the French resistance.
Their attitude and methods gained the respect of those in the countries in which
they fought, and their character and solidarity influenced the growing socialist
movements in those countries. Soviet soldiers made hundreds of thousands of
sacrifices on the soil of foreign lands which they directly of indirectly
liberated:

"The blood of Soviet partizans that fell on French soil is the purest and most
enduring cement that has joined the French and Russian peoples in friendship for
all time."

(French Resistance leader G. Laroche.)

"Friend, be vigilant over the earth in which I am lying.

Slain on the field of battle, I ask for this as my due:

When my son was born, that was the day of my dying.

Giving my life for him, I also gave it for you."

(Inscribed in the Red Army Hall of the Mausoleum on Vitkov Hill in Prague,
Czechoslovakia.)

On Soviet territory the Nazis murdered anyone caught supporting the partizans or
suspected of 'partizan sympathies'. Villages caught or even suspected of
supporting the partizans were burned to the ground or their populations, mostly
old people, women and children - since the young men were all in the Red Army,
were savagely murdered - 200 in Vesniny, 372 in Rasseta, 469 in Dolina. When
partizan armies returned to their base in northern Byelorussia in March 1943
they found thousands of corpses everywhere. A German expedition into this
partizan controlled area had burned down 158 villages, murdered all women and
children and old people and took the able bodied men away for slave labour.

"The atrocities committed against both captured partizans and allegedly
pro-partizan peasants and their families must rank among the worst atrocities
committed by the Germans and their stooges."

(British historian Alexander Werth "Russia at War.")

On seeing what the Nazis were doing, thousands more Soviet people fled into the
forests to join the partizans.

In Kiev 1 million people were reduced to 10,000 by the German fascists. 250,000
of them, mainly Jews, were thrown over a cliff into a ravine at Babi Yar. In
Krasny Luch in the Donetsk coalfield the Nazis threw 2,000 people alive down a
worked out coalshaft. 2,000 acacia trees are now planted there. How many British
or US towns have 2,000 such acacia trees? France's Oradour and Czechoslovakia's
Lidice were repeated thousands of times on Soviet soil. In Byelorussia the Nazis
burned the 149 inhabitants of the village of Khatyn in a barn on March 22 1943.
186 other Byelorussian villages suffered the same fate - their inhabitants
exterminated and the villages burned to the ground. On the site of the village
of Khatyn now stands 186 cottage chimneys, each one has a bell which constantly,
solemnly, rings out the mourning of those 186 villages. There were 66
concentration camps in Byelorussia alone. 2,600,000 Byelorussians, a quarter of
Byelorussia's population, were killed by the Nazis.

The Nazis' routine was similar in every Soviet village:

"O.U. Kobrin23 September 1942

Battalion fighting position Mokrany. The action begins with the surrounding of
the settlements, which is completed in the early hours of the morning. At dawn
the inhabitants are collected... After selection of absolutely reliable
families... 119 men, women and children are shot. After that the cattle,
implements and grain are safeguarded."

(From the war diary of the 3rd battalion of police regiment 15.) (1)

(1)See:The Brown Book. War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany. Verlag Zeit im
Bild. Dresden.

The Nazis razed the village of Pisk, near Kiev, to the ground and threw the
babies into the fire. 247 were killed in the village of Podvysokoye; the older
children taken to Germany for forced labour. Before the war the city of Vitebsk
had a population of 170,000. At the end of the war only 118 remained alive. At
Uman half the Jews had escaped to the East; but the 5,000 who stayed were herded
into a barn in which all openings were boarded up and completely sealed; they
took two days to die of suffocation. At Klooga near Tallinn 2,000 Jews were shot
and burned on a fire they themselves were forced to build and light. At Klooga a
German SD man said to a child: "My little one, don't cry like this; death will
soon come." The retreating Germans in 1943 and 1944 destroyed and murdered with
indiscriminate ferocity. Pursuing Soviet soldiers came across a trench at
Zhlobin filled with 2,500 fresh corpses.

"After a long battle for Davydovo, a village in the Moscow region, our company
was given permission to clean up. It was almost morning and we started looking
for a well. We knocked on the very first door. An old man who had been
frightened by the night battle pointed to the other end of the village... The
well was there, undamaged. But when we glanced inside our blood ran cold. The
well was full of the corpses of children, from tiny infants to some about five
years old."

(Igor Butoma.) (1)

"I'll never forget that day in Byelorussia... The enemy put up desperate
resistance but we pushed them into a pocket... That was when a farmwoman came
running to our forward line. Tears streaming down her face, she said: "Sons,
come and see what those monsters have done!" We went.

In the village, by a house that had served the Nazis as a field hospital, she
showed us a pit that had been covered with soil. That soil still breathed and
moved. We shovelled it away and the sight of what was underneath filled us with
horror. The pit was full of the bodies of little boys and girls aged between ten
and twelve years. We learned that the Nazi butchers had used them to give blood
transfusions to their wounded officers and then had thrown them into the pit. I
sincerely wish no one ever feels what we did at that moment. The sobbing woman
also told us that the retreating Nazis had taken another 200 children along with
them..."

(Boris Shugayev, Minsk.) (2)

Another Nazi atrocity, one that Western media and even recent British television
documentary programs either directly accuses the Soviets for or they leave it in
the balance as 'unsolved', is the massacre of 11,000 Polish officers in a forest
in Katyn near Smolensk. But it has long been conclusively proved, as a later
chapter will show, that the Nazis committed this crime and Goebbels used it in a
propaganda war after the Nazis were militarily defeated at Stalingrad.

Almost 4 million Soviet people died in Nazi concentration camps on Soviet
territory alone. Others were either deliberately starved or massacred after
being put to work for the Reich.

"How the Russians fare... does not interest me in the least... whether the other
peoples live in prosperity or perish from hunger, that interests me only in so
far as we need them as slave for our culture, otherwise I am not concerned with
it. Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion when they build a tank
trench interests me only to the extent that I want to have the tank trench made
for Germmany... Most of you will know what it is like when 100 corpses are
heaped together, when five hundred corpses are piled up or a thousand. To have
gone through that – and with the exception of human weaknesses – to have
remained decent, that made us hard. This is a page of the glory of our history
that has never been written."

(Himmler, in a speech at Posen (Poznan), Oct 4 1943.)

(1)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

(2)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

"Russian women can be put, without hesitation, to performing men's work, as in
any case any considerations or safety regulations with regard to work times or
conditions are out of place."

(Archives of the Nationally Owned Film Factory in Wolfen, under IG-Farben.)

"The supply plan provided for a small quantity of meat per week. But only meat
unfit for human consumption could be used for this purpose; this was either meat
from tubercular horses or otherwise contaminated meat... Typhus was also widely
spread among these workers... vermine plagued the inmates of these camps. As a
result of the filthy conditions in these camps almost all the workers from the
East had skin deseases. The inadequate nourishment caused cases of oedema,
nephritis..."

(From Nuremberg War Crimes Trials Documents.)

Three million Soviet people were taken to Germany, where their treatment was
much worse than that of any other nationality. Early in 1942 Rozenberg wrote to
Keitel complaining that out of 3,600,000 Soviet prisoners only a few hundred
thousand were fit for work. Others went to the gas chambers in camps such as
Treblinka:

"The naked people (men one time, women another time, children the next) were
driven or forced... into these dark concrete boxes - about five yards square -
and then, with 200 or 250 people packed into each box... the process of gassing
began. First some hot air was pumped in from the ceiling and then the pretty
pale-blue crystals of Cyclon were showered down on the people, and in the hot
wet air they rapidly evaporated. In anything from two to ten minutes everybody
was dead... 'Nearly two thousand people could be disposed of here
simultaneously,' one of the guides said."

(British historian Alexander Werth "Russia at War.")

Most of them ended their lives in the concentration camps.

Many were used for horrible experiments:

"Received the order of 150 women. Despite their emaciated condition, they were
found satisfactory... The tests were made. All subjects died. We shall contact
you shortly on the subject of a new load."

(From an IG-Farben memo on 150 women bought by IG-Farben for $70 each from
Osweicim (Auschwitz).) (1)

(1) See:A. Kahn "High Treason. The Plot Against the People." The Hour
Publishers. NY 1950.

Few survived.

One such survivor of Auschwitz, Zinaida Lishakova, wrote an open letter to Rolf
Mengele, the son of Josef Mengele - the "butcher of Auschwitz", when the Western
media said that he had died:

"Mr Mengele, you have just disclosed in the press the post war life of your
father Josef Mengele. You are grieving that during all these years he lived in
miserable conditions. I doubt the truthfulness of your words. I am also not sure
that your father has died. But I want to tell you only one of about 400,000
stories in which your father is involved. I am doing this not because I want to
accuse you. You are a lawyer, and you know better than I do that children do not
bear responsibility for the actions of their parents.

Nevertheless, I want you to listen to me.

You were born in 1944. A year before this I, Zinaida Lishakova, was sent to the
Auschwitz concentration camp... Seeing me, your father... said in German: "this
little mouse looks strong"...

By the morning, wounds opened on our skin... began disintegrating... After the
sixth 'bath', my wounds skinned over. I became one of your father's favourite
patients. ...demonstrated my body before various commissions. My skin became
grey, ugly, dead.

...I would like to forget him, but, alas, I shall never be able to do so.

...he dissected them alive... My God, I can still hear them scream.
...hunchbacks and twins on whom your father conducted his horrible experiments.

I managed to survive. I returned home. My twenty-eight relatives perished during
the war. When my mother saw my body, she fainted. She was paralysed and lay
motionless for 21 years, each day cursing your father. Before she died she said
to me: "there is no God in heaven if this man is still alive and unpunished."

I am still alive. I have no family. I have no children. My skin has remained the
same as it was made by your father Josef Mengele, a butcher of the Auschwitz
prison camp.

If you read my letter, I ask you to remember that my story is only one of the
400,000 stories of people murdered or maimed by your father.

Zinaida Lishakova, Shumilino, Vitebsk Region, Byelorussian SSR."

Zinaida Lishakova's strength and endurance afforded the survival of Mengele's
"little mouse". She was marked by Mengele as "Especially durable experimental
material number 25." Zinaida still lives in Shumilino. Her camp number is
tattoed on her forearm; but it is not the only or most conspicuous reminder of
her Nazi torturers. Denied the pleasure of dressing up or having a family, she
has not bought herself a dress for 44 years now. Her skin is described as like
the bark of a dead tree. Every year on April 11, which is marked as the day of
liberation for camp survivors, she goes to Poland and lays flowers at the
Auschwitz furnaces which took her sister and her friends:

"We mark this day... The ashes of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Treblinka are a
reminder of the brutality of war. We are few, but as long as we live, we will
cry out against the horrors of war."

(Zinaida Lishakova.)

Among the treasured Soviet property destroyed by the Nazis were the museum homes
of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy and many others, including original manuscripts, and
those of Pushkin and Gorky. When the Red Army returned they found their works
torn up, burnt and destroyed in gardens and yards. Tolstoy lived in the house in
Yasnaya Polyana for 60 years. He wrote "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina"
there. The Red Army and local peasants put out the fires and started immediate
restoration. The museum was re-opened May 24 1942; but it took many years to
fully restore. Leningrad's beautiful historic buildings containing some of the
world's most rare and priceless art treasures, including the Tsarina's Summer
Palace at Petrodvorets near Leningrad with its gold domes and gold statues, were
destroyed by the Nazis. Restoration of the damage is still going on today.

First man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin describes events in his
village - Klushino: multiply his story many thousands of times and you have an
idea of some of the enormity of Soviet suffering in the war:

"Germans entered our village... They began searching the houses, looking for
partizans, and under cover of their search they looted the houses...

Our family was turned out and our house was occupied by German soldiers. We had
to build a dug-out to live in. It was terrible at night with the fascist planes
headed for Moscow whining overhead...

...the Soviet offensive developed... the SS seized our Valentin and Zoya [Yuri
Gagarin's brother and sister B.M.] and, together with other young men and women
from the village, marched them off in a column westwards, to Germany...

A great misfortune had overtaken us... the whole village was drowned in tears,
for the fascists had taken people into slavery from every family."

(First man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in his autobiography "Road
to the Stars.")

"Mr. President, come to the Soviet Union and look into the eyes of the mothers
and wives whos sons and husbands perished on battlefields for the freedom of
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania. Tears have not dried in their eyes
yet."

(Letter from a Soviet worker to President Reagan.)

Selling flowers outside Leningrad's Piskaryevskoe cemetery today you can see
Mother Courage - old and beautiful like no other mother. On her face you can see
the years - 1941 - 1942 - 1943 - all the seventy years of her life are written
in those three frozen, hungry years on her face, a face that still hasn't lost
that life-giving warmth and security every Soviet mother has.

Every Soviet woman, every Soviet mother, every wife and every sister, was also a
hero in the war. Mothers, wives, sisters - all waited for loved ones. Soviet
women waited like no other women waited in the war. For four long years they
waited. When no news came, they waited still. Living every day, largely under
German occupation, fighting against the Germans themselves, as partizans, or
working in war industries or on the land; they waited.

"We were working in the field that day... practically all the work in the fields
was done by our womenfolk.

We saw Naskida, the one-armed postman, coming as we sat resting under an oak. As
usual, we all started rummaging in his bag... But Naskida was holding something
in his hand and when we asked him what it was, he said abruptly that those
papers were none of our business. At the same time he gave Daro a long attentive
look.

Daro was the mother of four sons, three of whom had already been killed in the
war. And now there were no letters from Vakhtang, the youngest. Daro sat there
crying as she usually did when she saw the postman in those days. Naskida
apparently could take no more. He got up and in his eyes there was a certain
something besides compassion and understanding.

Today, 40 years later, I know what it was... At his funeral recently we learned
that hidden away in his home were dozens of letters notifying local families
that their men had been killed in action. Daro's son, Vakhtang, was among them.
For years Naskida had been carrying about the sad tidings buried deep in his
heart, so that many a mother could go on waiting and hoping."

(Chodar Yenukidze.) (1)

(1)See:Carey Schofield (Ed) "Russia at War 1941-45." Stanley Paul. London 1987.

Every Soviet woman held in her heart the waiting for their men, and she knew by
heart Simonov's poem "Wait for Me":

WAIT FOR ME.

"Wait for me, and I'll return, only wait very hard.

Wait, when you are filled with sorrow as you watch the yellow rain;

Wait, when the winds sweep the snowdrifts,

Wait in the sweltering heat,

Wait when others have stopped waiting, forgetting their yesterdays.

Wait even when from afar, no letters come to you,

Wait even when others are tired of waiting...

Wait even when my mother and son think I am no more,

And when friends sit around the fire, drinking to my memory,

Wait, and do not hurry to drink to my memory too;

Wait, for I'll return, defying every death.

And let those who did not wait say that I was lucky;

They will never understand that in the midst of death,

You, with your waiting, saved me.

Only you and I will know how I survived:

It's because you waited, as no one else did."

(Konstantin Simonov, USSR, 1941.)

The courage of Soviet women sustained each Soviet soldier, even when he was only
a few steps away from death:

"In our dug-out a log fire's aflame...

Weeping resin, it splutters and sighs,

The accordion's tender refrain

Sings of you and your smile and your eyes.

We are now many light years apart

And divided by snow covered steppes

Though the road to your side is hard.

To death's door it's an easy four steps."

(Written in a dug-out in Stalingrad by Soviet poet Alexei Surkov.)

At each lull in the fighting, it was time to bury the dead, and reflect on last
farewells:

#FAREWELL.

"Do not call me father, do not seek me.

Do not call me, do not wish me back.

We're on a route uncharted, fire and blood erase our track.

On we fly on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords.

All of us in battle fallen, not to be brought back by words.

Will there be a rendesvous? I know not.

I only know we still must fight.

We are sand-grains in infinity, never to meet, never more see life.

Farewell then my son.

Farewell my conscience, my youth and my solace, my one and my only.

And let this farewell be the end of a story of solitude vast

than which none is more lonely;

In which you remain barred for ever and ever from light and from air

with your death-pangs untold;

Untold, and unsoothed, not to be resurrected,

For ever and ever an eighteen year old.

Farewell then.

No trains ever come from those regions, unscheduled or scheduled,

No airoplanes fly there.

Farewell then my son. For no miracles happen,

As in this world, dreams do not come true.

Farewell.

I will dream of you still as a baby;

Treading the earth with little strong toes.

The earth where already so many lie buried.

This song to my son then, has come to its close."

#("Son." USSR 1942)

For all their suffering at the hands of the Nazis it is important to understand
the Soviet people's socialist attitude to the German civilian people, for whom
they had respect:

"Soviet people cursed the Nazi invaders... But we will say once again this did
not refer to the German nation as a whole, the nation which produced Goethe,
Beethoven and Kant. The SS, the Gestapo and the death camp butchers did not
represent the German nation, but disgraced it, and Soviet people, with rare
exceptions, understood this."

(Soviet historian Ernst Henri.)

"The experience of history indicates that Hitlers come and go, but the German
people and the German State remain."

(Stalin, Feb 23 1942.)

But such atrocities as the Soviet people suffered can have the affect of burning
the reason out of the hearts of even the most dignified human beings. The Soviet
people's attitude to the Nazis, reflected by Soviet poets at the time, was
unequivocal:

"...One can bear anything: the plague, and hunger and death. But one cannot bear
the Germans. One cannot bear these fish-eyed oafs contemptuously snorting at
everything Russian... We cannot live as long as these grey-green slugs are
alive. Today there are no books; today there are no stars in the sky; today
there is only one thought: Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the
earth. Then we can go to sleep. Then we can think again of life, and books, and
girls, and happiness... We shall kill them all. But we must do it quickly; or
they will desecrate the whole of Russia and torture to death millions more
people."

"We are remembering everything. Now we know. The Germans are not human. Now the
word 'German' has become the most terrible swear-word. Let us not speak. Let us
not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill the German, the German will
kill you. He will carry away your family, and torture them in his damned
Germany... If you have killed one German, kill another."

(Ilya Ehrenburg.)

"If your home is dear to you where your Russian mother nursed you;

If your mother is dear to you, and you cannot bear the thought of the German
slapping her wrinkled face;

If you do not want the German to tear down and trample on your father's picture,
with the Crosses he earned in the last war;

If you do not want your old teacher to be hanged outside the old school-house;

If you do not want her, whom for so long you did not dare even kiss, to be
stretched out naked on the floor, so that amid hatred, cries and tears, three
German curs should take what belongs to your manly love;

If you do not want to give away all that which you call your Country,

Then kill a German, kill a German every time you see one."

(Konstantin Simonov.)



School and college history, economics and business studies teaching and books do
not contain any of this information.



All the material and information I have presented here is readily available to
historians, writers, journalists, teachers, educators and syllabus publishers.
Although I have spent many hundreds of hours gathering it all together, I did
not have to look very far to find any of it.



When as a trainee history lecturer, it was suggested I take the class on a trip
to the Tower of London and then set them an essay on what life was like for a
soldier in King Charles’ Army centuries ago. Very useful knowledge that! A
sociology of the past perhaps? But certainly not history in its most important
sense; unless history is to mean anything old or ‘interesting’ that you can do
in evening classes, like antiques, flower arranging or basket weaving. When
instead I taught real history, learning from the past in order to change the
future, the collective life-experience of humanity, I was got rid of. The head
of the history department complained that the students had remarked that I made
them think; which the head of history had probably never done in a lifetime of
teaching. I ended up washing and cleaning and emptying human surgical waste in a
hospital.



Unless teachers learn to be brave and intellectually honest (difficult when they
have a mortgage and bills to pay), future historical, social and economic
education and popular ‘knowledge’ will also not refer to the US or British
history and continuing complicity in global plunder, exploitation, domination
and control, wars of aggrandisement and acquisition, causing the deaths and
devastation of the homes and lands of millions of people – the thousands of
children under the age of two who will die tonight through simple lack of food,
clean water, medicine and education – the untold millions of unnecessary deaths
among the overwhelming majority of humanity on this incredibly rich and abundant
and ultimately sustainable earth.



From Brian Mitchell. Evolution.



Responses and criticisms welcomed. Reply to my personal e-mail if you prefer. My
replies to criticisms will be posted.








"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our
minds." (Bob Marley, Redemption song.)

"The most remarkable thing about the world is that you can understand it."
(Einstein.)

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go
into the other room and read a book." (Groucho Marx.)

"To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as night the day, that thou
canst not be false to any man." (Shakespeare. Hamlet.)

"And if we were all capable of unity to make our blows stronger and infallible
and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the
struggling people – how great and close would the future be." (Che Guevara.)



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