Page 128 - The Chief Culprit

About the Brilliant Military Leader Tukhachevski y 89

Let us assume that Tukhachevski decided to keep 1.8 to 3.6 million soldiers in the tank
troops alone. Where would they have been trained? Practically everyone who finds himself in
tank forces needs special preparations. ese soldiers would have needed to learn how to be
radio operators, repairmen, gunners, scouts, and commanders. Would everyone have had to
go through training divisions? How many training divisions would have been needed?
And what would have been done about officers? Tukhachevski’s proposal was to pro-
duce the tanks immediately. Even if they had been produced, how many officers would
have been needed to staff at least one hundred new tank divisions? e USSR could have
opened new military academies. During peacetime, an officer was trained for three years.
Tanks would have been arriving from the plants, as Tukhachevski planned, in 1928, but the
officers would not have graduated until 1931, and they all would have been young and in-
experienced, while what was needed at the time was commanders for battalions, regiments,
divisions, and corps.
Where would the officers have lived? Even now Russia is incapable of building housing
for all her officers. Back then, where would the officers have lived—in tents? Where would
they have found enough tents?
Where were the tanks to be stored? During wartime it is easy: tanks loaded on railway
trains travel from the factories directly to the front and go into action, and the life of a tank
in the war is short: very soon it has to go into repair or is melted down, and new tanks take
its place. Tanks do not need to be stored. ey do not accumulate: while tanks are unloaded
from one train, the tanks from the previous one are already burning in battle.
But here is the situation: in peacetime, a stream of steel monsters suddenly flows in
from the production plants. What are we to do with them? Keep them in the open fields, in
the cold and the snow?
In addition, the armed forces of that time could not consist of just tank corps and tank
armies. For every tank and motorized division there needed to be a minimum of three to four
rifle divisions. Consequently, there would have to be from 847 to 3,000 rifle divisions. At that
time, Germany had twelve divisions, in total.
Some think that the army’s strength is in its numbers. Tukhachevski was from that
breed of strategists who wanted to fight with numbers. But, as we can see, even with numbers
he had some difficulties. He never understood the meaning of numbers. He never learned to
work with them.
Tukhachevski was incapable of working out the simplest calculation of the consequenc-
es of his actions and proposals. We have to marvel at Stalin’s patience—how could such a
strategist have been kept in high government positions?
If 50,000 to 100,000 tanks are produced in one year, one should simultaneously pro-
duce about as many airplanes, because without air force support the tanks become coffins.
Fifty to one hundred thousand airplanes? In one year? Where would they have been built? At
what factories? Or, perhaps we would not have produced the planes right away, just put out
all the tanks and left them without air support? is would have been a crime; it would have
been treason. For such actions one should be executed.
So, what kind of army did Tukhachevski want to form? Or did he plan to just have
tanks without airplanes or artillery?
Tukhachevski demanded: we need to produce tanks! Here, many questions arise, and
quite an important one among them is: What kinds of tanks?