Page 169 - The Chief Culprit

130 y e Chief Culprit

one minister was in charge of the production of weapons and ammunition, not two. e
Soviet Union, in peacetime, had created a separate ministry to take care exclusively of the
production of ammunition. Stalin’s Ammunition Narkomat began to function immediately
and fully.
Right from the start there was a problem to be solved: where to locate all the new facto-
ries that would be producing shells, gunpowder, cartridges, and so on. e issue of finding lo-
cations for the new ammunition industry entailed the issue of the character of the next war.
If Stalin had planned to carry out a sacred defensive war, if he planned to hold down
his borders, the new ammunition factories should have been built behind the Volga River.
ere they would have been fully secure—the enemy tanks and airplanes could not reach so
far inland. If Stalin was not sure of his strength, if, as we have been told, Stalin was afraid
of Hitler and had reservations about the Red Army’s ability to hold the borders, if there had
been a belief that it might be forced to retreat—in that case the new factories should have
been built not behind the Volga but even farther inland, in the Ural Mountains, where there
are raw materials, a sufficient industry and energy base, and where the factories would have
been completely secure. Let the enemy take huge territories, but our industrial base would
remain whole—then Hitler would have a taste of what a wounded bear is like.
But neither the first nor the second option was even briefly discussed; there was no
need for them. e Red Army had no plans to retreat, just as it had no plans of holding down
the borders of its country. According to Stalin’s plans, the Red Army had to advance forward
into a war-devastated and weakened Europe. If the Red Army crossed the borders and ad-
vanced, the ammunition factories along with all the other ones (tank, artillery, etc.) would
be left behind farther and farther in the rear. Let us imagine that the Red Army needs to be
supplied with a small quantity of ammunition, for example 100,000 tons, or 200,000 tons.
How could they be transported from the Urals to the western borders? A standard military
train could carry nine hundred tons. Imagine how many trains would be needed, how many
railroad cars, how many locomotives. Estimate how many workdays would be spent by all
the railroad personnel, how much coal would be burned, how many train guards would be
needed for how many days.
Aside from all this, it is important to remember that shells were not the only things that
would have to be transported along the railroad lines. e railroads during war are crowded
with troops, repair crews, hospitals, cisterns, and so on. In other words, if we prepare an at-
tack, the transfer of hundreds of thousands of tons of ammunition and all other equipment
has to be done in secret, and secrecy is best achieved by shortening the distance to be covered
during the transfer. In an ideal situation, all factories would be located right at the borders.
en the trains would need to travel only a couple of hours, not days across the entire country.
In that case, the demand for transportation decreases, and one train can be reused for several
trips. is frees up the internal railroad lines for other military needs. So, it was decided to
build the new ammunition factories closer to the borders, as close as the metal-forging bases
permitted, and not behind the Volga or in the Urals. e locations chosen were Zaporozhie,
Dnyepropetrovsk, Dnyeprodzerzhinsk, Kharkov, Krivoy Rog, and Leningrad.
e ammunition factories put out more and more production, while the voracious
Ammunition Narkomat consumed the nation’s metal resources, including copper, nickel,
chromium, lead, tin, and mercury. e more nonferrous metals went to producing ammuni-
tion, the less there was left for all the other areas of industry. e question arose as to how
long this could be expected to last.