Page 308 - The Chief Culprit

e War Has Begun y 253

Before the war, the Soviet command prepared neither for defense nor for counterat-
tacks. e Soviet Union planned a different kind of war. Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky reported
that during the last year before the war the officers and generals of the General Staff and the
staffs of the military districts and fleets worked fifteen to seventeen hours a day without holi-
days or vacations. Marshals Bagramian and Sokolovsky; Generals Shtemenko, Kurassov, and
Malandin; and many others have confirmed that information. General Anissov and General
Smorodinov reportedly worked twenty hours a day.
In February 1941, General G. K. Zhukov became the Chief of General Staff of the Red
Army. From that time, the General Staff in essence began to operate on a wartime regime.
Zhukov himself worked very hard, and did not allow anyone else to relax. e veterans of
the General Staff remembered Zhukov’s reign as the most frightening period in history, more
frightening than the Great Purges. At that time, the General Staff and the other staffs were
working with inhuman intensity. en the Germans invaded. Every commander, starting
with regiment level and higher, had in his safe a so-called “Red Packet,” which contained the
plans for war. e commanders opened their “Red Packets,” but they did not find in them
anything useful for defense. “Of course we had detailed plans and orders about what was to
be done on day “M”. . . everything was written to the minute and in great detail. . . . All these
plans existed. But, unfortunately, they did not say anything about what was to be done if the
enemy suddenly went into attack.”
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Something else is unclear. If the Red Army entered the war without any plans, then
Stalin, upon finding out about this, should have shot the chief of general staff and all those
who participated in developing the plans. is did not happen. On the contrary, those
who participated in developing Soviet plans—Vassilevsky, Sokolovsky, Vatutin, Malandin,
Bagramian, Shtemenko, and Kurassov—began the war as major generals or even lieutenant
colonels, and ended it as marshals or at least with the four stars of army generals. During the
war, they all proved to be truly great strategists. ey were all devoted, even pedantic, staff
officers, who could not imagine life without a plan. If Soviet staffs worked very hard and de-
veloped war plans before the war, but those were not defense or counteroffensive plans, what
kinds of plans could they be?
e Soviet Black Sea fleet had the following military objective before the war: “active
military actions against enemy ships and transports near the Bosporus and on the passageways
to the enemy’s bases, as well as cooperation with land troops during their movement along
the Black Sea coast.” Admiral S. Gorshkov remembered that the Baltic and Northern fleets,
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as well as the Black Sea fleet, had purely defensive objectives, but they were to be achieved
through aggressive methods. e actions of the Soviet fleet during the first minutes, hours,
and days of the war showed with sufficient clarity that they had plans, but these were not
plans for defense. On June 22, 1941, Soviet submarines from the Black Sea fleet immediately
sailed into the sea toward the shores of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. On that same day, the
submarines of the Baltic fleet sailed toward the shores of Germany with the objective of “sink-
ing all enemy ships and vessels according to the rules of unrestricted submarine warfare.” e
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order made no exceptions, not even for medical vessels sailing under the Red Cross flag.
Starting on June 22, the Black Sea naval air force conducted open military actions in
the interests of the Danube military flotilla with the objectives of opening the way for it to
advance upward along the river. On June 25 and 26, the Black Sea fleet’s cruisers appeared
in the vicinity of the Romanian port of Constanta and carried out an intensive artillery raid