IceBreakChron III: PREPARING THE WAR

[JasonPratt]

1935: "Strategic Deployment Issues", a paper apparently delivered at the Frunze Military Academy of the Workers and Peasants' Red Army (otherwise unsourced by Suvorov), explains that "in modern parlance a 'covering army' embodies the prevailing strategic operations concept of dynamic sudden invasion. The current defense term 'covering army' thus clearly serves, if anything, to cloak an 'invasion army' designed for sudden offensive."

The instructors are trying to teach Soviet commanders that while they may be assigned to "covering armies" which have a defensive sounding name for political diplomatic marketing purposes, they should realize and understand that these armies are intended for surprise invasions on a sudden offensive.

[JasonPratt]

1935: the General Staff of the Red Army is created.

This is more than a little confusing, as Suvorov states elsewhere that Tukhachevsky was already the Chief of Staff for the General Staff in 1927! (Succeeded by Shaposhnikov. Perhaps Suvorov is referring to a prior General Staff that was not of the Red Army, but of the Politburo or Kremlin or something like that?)

Its first Commander will be Marshal A.I. Egorov; succeeded by the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by Marshal Boris M. Shaposhnikov (developer of Soviet mobilization doctrine). Next will be Army General K. A. Meretskov, and then after he is promoted in early 1941, G.K. Zhukov.

[JasonPratt]

February 2, 1935, from a Pravda article, The People's Commissar of Heavy Industry, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, "Our plants, our mines, our factories are now equipped with such outstanding technology that no other country has... Where did we get it from? We bought from the Americans, from the Germans, from the French, from the British, the most advanced technological achievements and then outfitted our enterprises. [...] They themselves still have their plants and mines equipped with nineteenth and early twentieth-century equipment."

Stalin has paid for this by stripping Russia of its natural resources, most dangerously its food which must regrow every year. But American engineers travel to the Soviet Union to design factories, and to mount, set, and test the imported cranes, tools, and equipment; while Stalin's slaves dig pits, pour concrete roads, and erect walls.

Americans have designed and built the most powerful industrial enterprise in the world, the Ural Railroad Car Factory (Uralvagonzavod), in the city of Nizhny Tagil. This will remain the largest enterprise in the world (confirmed by the Guiness Book of World Records) for sixty years. It can, of course, switch at any moment from producing railroad wagons, to producing tanks. During four years of war, it will produce thirty-five thousand T-34 tanks along with other weapons.

The Chelyabinsk tractor factory has been built in the Urals according to American designs and with American equipment, also of course able to switch at a moment's notice into mass producing tanks. During the war this will earn the nickname Tankograd! It not only builds T-34 tanks, but also the heavy IS and KV classes.

A third gigantic factory, Uralmash, is built not far away in Sverdlovsk; smaller but still among the top ten engineering factories in the world.

A city of metallurgists, Magnitogorsk, is built, as well as a huge plant, mainly for the output of steel armor.

One mustn't forget the soon-to-be-famous Stalingrad tractor factory, also of course built to switch to tank production immediately with no delays.

A network of steel casting factories must also be built to supply these world giants; but they are not the only such factories. Automobile, motor, aviation, and artillery factories are also being erected. The most powerful aviation factory in the world is built in the Far East, and with it the support city Komsomolsk-na-Amure -- both according to American designs, and furnished with the most modern American equipment.

Are these for improving the lives of Soviet workers, indirectly from their production, or directly by working in them? No; the most ordinary pots and pans, rubber boots, plates, the simplest furniture, cheapest clothing, nails, matches -- all become scarce. Huge lines form outside the stores. Stalin has been paying for his mega-industrialization with the living standard of his people.

But it could be worse: they could be in his gulags.

[JasonPratt]

Did Stalin at least reward his own genius designers? Yes, often! -- by accusing and imprisoning entire groups of them for espionage (while he himself paid well in gold for industrial espionage elsewhere).

Among the prominent aviation, tank, and artillery designers sent to prison with their teams, are S.O. Korolev (future inventor of Sputnik), N.N. Polikarpov; A.N. Tupolev; R.L. Bartini; V.M. Myasishev; V.M Ptlyakov, and thousands of others.

Simply create the best bomber, or tank, or cannon, or engine, or submarine in the world, and they can go free! Fail, and they will go to the Dal'stroy gold mines, where inmates do not live too long. (For modern context, these are the gold mines where Bernie Sanders will sit around shirtless in a solidarity workers' meeting and break into song about how great it is that workers could come together to make such a place. That song will be "This Land is Your Land.")

Imprisoned engineers do not need to be paid millions for their work (not that they were being paid much to begin with); they do not need vacations; they do not even need good apartments, much less houses! They do need better food, but only relative to other inmates in the Soviet Union.

In return, they are highly motivated to create the best weapons in the world on short deadlines! -- and each of them has the best American, British, German, and other designs in each required field, whether bought or spied.

[JasonPratt]

April 7, 1935, Stalin enacts a law making children 12 and older subject to the death penalty, formalizing the millions of Russian (not even counting neighboring nations') children he has slain so far whether directly or indirectly by various means (including starvation).

But he has a specifically practical reason for doing this: Soviet mega-industrialization requires millions of teenagers mobilized into labor reserves, basically slave labor for the factories, under military oversight. Defection from duty under military oversight earns a court-martial with a death sentence; and now this applies to teenagers.

(Suvorov suggests elsewhere that this starts in 1940 instead.)

[JasonPratt]

1935: sometime this year, Stalin delivers his first of two pre-war speeches to graduates of military academies. The theme of this speech is that "cadres determine everything", simply meaning that for great feats a nation needs good teams, led by good commanders. Once you have those, all problems can be solved.

As Stalin famously quips at another time, death also solves all problems: no man, no problem! Stalin is secretly planning the complete extermination of almost all the Communist hierarchy: state, party, technical, scientific, cultural, and all other leaders. Even the Soviet military which has been more or less immune from such purges (aside from the pre-GRU, for which such purges are something like regular foreplay!) will not be entirely spared this time. (More on that qualification later.)

Almost everyone listening to Stalin's military academy speech will land in a torture chamber, a prison, and/or an execution hole within two years.

[JasonPratt]

Speaking of military academy personnel landing in jail within two years, let's get that party started early!

July 2, 1935, Corps Commander G. Gay, head of the military history department at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, is arrested. The 3rd Cavalry Corps under his command had been the main assault and maneuver force in the battle near Waraw, fought by Tukhachevsky in 1920.

At this time, the Soviet Union does not have military history other than the Revolutionary Civil War, aside from brief and superficial reviews and forewords about anything preceding. The Civil War however is taught, and learned, meticulously.

Gay is arrested on the charge that he was not teaching military history "correctly", but he has been teaching only the prescribed and required three volume history -- prepared, and edited, by that shining and triumphant hero of the Civil War: the butcher of blood, Tukhachevsky!

In other words, Gay is arrested for being an ally of Tukhachevsky.

[JasonPratt]

Well, that was a grim foreboding of future events... let's consider something a lot more awesome! And portentous in its own way...

August 1935: upon orders from the Commissar of Defense of the USSR, Voroshilov, seven of the light and 'obsolete' T-37As, first produced two years ago in 1933, start out from Leningrad. They are roughly comparable to the Nazi Panzer Ia, which entered production last year, perhaps a little worse in some capabilities -- except that the Panzer Ia still cannot, and never will be able to float.  :D

So, seriously, what does it mean that these tanks can float?

This 'obsolete' (cough) tank squad travels several tens of kilometers on caterpillar tracks; then sails along the river Luga through otherwise impenetrable weeds; then on to the river Shelon and Lake Ilmen. There, these 'obsolete' competitors to the PzIa find a storm on the lake. They cross the lake anyway, 55 kilometers, in 8 hours and 15 minutes. Next they come to the river Volkhov, the Novoladozhsky Canal, and the treacherous, ferocious river Neva.

Not one tank is lost on the way: all seven reach the finish line by the Petropavlov fortress in eleven days, crossing seven hundred kilometers -- including six hundred kilometers by floating on the water.

Not one tank lost; not one accident; not one breakdown. Try that, Panzer Ia! Try that, literally every tank in history afterward! Down to the publication of "Chief Culprit", this 1935 record has never been successfully repeated by anyone. No one has even come close to repeating it. No one has come distantly close (so to speak) to repeating it.

The Soviet T-37A will be produced until next year, 1936. Five years later, in 1941, these unique tanks will be obliterated from the Soviet historical statistics of tanks ready to fight upon the front line of Barbarossa.

[JasonPratt]

Of course, there is little use for light armored amphibious tanks armed only with machine guns in a defensive war deep landward in the Soviet Union; there is nowhere to sail to, and they will only be murdered like little Panzer I's -- especially if caught by surprise by even their little Panzer II Nazi cousins.

If the little amphibious tanks are following their big Soviet brothers in an invasion, however, then the heavy tanks which punch open holes in the enemy lines, and the medium tanks and racecar tanks which blast through the line deep into the enemy backfield, also don't need the slow little tank with only bulletproof armor and a machine gun.

Not until they reach a water obstacle.

If two, three, five, ten such little tanks could keep on keeping on across the river during the night, and with a sudden attack from the rear disrupt the enemy, then the speedy autobahn tanks can race across to help and perhaps not be blow sky high by the totally reasonable detonation charges which any defender will have put on his bridges; followed by the medium tanks, and where possible by the heavy tanks.

But if the enemy blows the bridge pre-emptively, or if the attack goes where there are no bridges, then the little tanks that could, can cross the water with the amphibious infantry, and secure a bridgehead on the other side. After all, these tanks don't have to submerge themselves to cross (though plenty of other Soviet tanks can go as far as 1 km under water, at 1 m/s -- a standard design requirement eventually): they can float, which means they can lay down suppressing fire!

Upon the other shore, the exhausted amphibious infantry lack heavy weapons or much ammunition. In their first, most frightening minutes on shore, the presence of even one of a tank equivalent to a Panzer I would be far more valuable and important than ten more powerful tanks forced to remain, even providing their own covering fire, on their own side of the river: as wonderful as their own covering fire might be, they can provide no shelter for the amphibious infantry, whereas the little tank that could, might.

So, by 1936, next year, when their production ceases, how many T-37A tanks will Stalin have produced? The Soviet Union will flatly keep this secret for fifty years, but upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union old records will start coming to light. The current tally accounted for (by the publication of "Chief Culprit"), produced in four years from 1933 to 1936?

Two thousand six hundred and twenty-seven little lake-storm-worthy floating machine-gun tanks (per Karpenko, "Review of National Armor-tank Technology, 1905-1995", 1996, p.194)

They had no use except in the situation described, and a tank's operational life in peacetime is ten to twenty years, so five years after they cease production they would mostly still be operational. We can only make guesses about this now, because the Soviet government will simply erase their statistics off the record after the summer of 1941, but by itself, in its own numbers, it will match about 73% of Nazi tank strength on the day of Barbarossa.

The point of course is not that the Soviet Union will still have around 2600 tanks comparable to the Panzer I. The point is that they will still have that many fully amphibious tanks -- ready to use somewhere other than in defending against a Nazi invasion.

Or rather, they'll have significantly more fully amphibious tanks than that! (More on this later.)

[JasonPratt]

November 31, 1935: Stalin hasn't been focusing much on fighter production, but that doesn't mean competition among his aircraft designers hasn't been fierce (to keep from having a holiday counting trees at a very cool lumberjack facility somewhere).

Today, pilot Vladimir Kokkinaki sets an altitude world record in designer Nikolay Polikarpov's I-15 fighter, of 14,575 meters: 47,818 feet or 9.06 miles.


End of 1935: no future Allied or Axis power can still compete with the Soviet BT-28 tank models in armor, weaponry, and horsepower.

[JasonPratt]

The Shadows of Death
-------------------------

Did I use this subtitle already? Well it applies much better to 1936 anyway, so there!  :P

Lots to cover in 1936, or lots of detail anyway for the topics. Let's get started with the usual thing: Soviet fighter and bomber airfleet training manuals continue to focus teaching one massive ground strike instead of dogfighting.

This will be particularly relevant this year.  ^-^


Before we get to why, let me set up another particular relevance this year...

January 1936, Marshal of the Soviet Union Tukhachevsky (appointed at age 42 back in 1935), visits Britain, France, and Germany, on unknown or unclear business.

This appears to be the trigger for Stalin to convince his inner circle to act at last against the butcher of blood. More on this later...

[JasonPratt]

We'll get back to the blood of the butcher later. First, let's talk about aircraft!


January 1936: the Soviet Union has produced enough heavy bombers to form the world's first aviation army.

Suvorov is unclear about whether this means an organizational container for multiple heavy bomber corps, or whether this includes other aircraft (which greatly outnumber the heavy bombers, of course.) Suvorov's direct implication is that by the end of 1936, if not already (or by March), the Soviet Union will be the first nation to have one thousand heavy bombers in operation. ("A fleet of a thousand heavy bombers is a strategist's dream, and this dream materialized first in the Soviet Union.")

Generals and politicians of all nations are disputing the doctrine of the Italian air power theorist General Giulio Douhet, a strong proponent of strategic bombing (who in 1910 theorized that heavy bomber aviation would play a decisive role in the next world war); but Stalin isn't disputing it. He just focuses more doctrinally on that one massive ground strike and close air support. But neither is Stalin resting on his heavy-bomber laurels...

[JasonPratt]

March 1936: the Soviet Union adds a second aviation army to its roster! A third will be added "a little later" (per Suvorov).

Plans are in place for rearming the first three aviation armies, currently using converted TB-1s and TB-3s, to add some of the newest bombers, and additionally deploying another three more air armies in the Byelorussia, Kiev, and Leningrad Military Districts (per Shumikhin, "Soviet Military Aviation", 1973, p.168) What newest bomber...?

Tupolev himself is working on the Maxim Gorky, an eight-engine bomber, one of which was produced as a show piece to fly over parades. Thirty-seven people died when it was rammed by a small escort plane (apparently on purpose, for which a theory arose that the pilot thought Stalin was on board.)

Pavel Sukhoy proposed a one-motor, long-distance bomber, the DB-1 ("dal'nyi bombardirovshik" literally long-distance bomber) with an incredibly wide wingspan, which when built by Tupolev's crew (and under a different designation, ANT-36), starting in 1933, made several trips across the North Pole to America, breaking some other long-distance records along the way. It could carry ten 10 to 20 kilograms of bombs internally, and ten aircraft were produced for a regiment (plus another eight for testing), but the Soviet Aviation service rejected it eventually and withdrew all models by 1937.

Sergei Kozlov has proposed the twelve-motor "Ghigant", which could lift several dozen tons of bombs, although eventually it was shunted into airmobile research for airlifting the heavy equipment of rifle divisions.

Bolkhovitinov redesigned the TB-3 itself as the DB-A, which in test models broke four world records and which, of course, could be produced on the same factory lines as the prior TB-3 without changing equipment, disrupting current workflow, or retraining engineers and fabricators, nor even retraining pilots, technicians, or ground engineers.

But then, a true, new miracle of aircraft design appears...!

[JasonPratt]

In 1936, the Soviet Union develops the high-speed, high-altitude heavy bomber known as the TB-7, later renamed the Pe-8 (after the tragic death of its creator Vladmir Petliakov). Eventual Soviet Air Force Major General V. Shumikhin's evaluation (from "Soviet Military Aviation", p.218), "At altitudes above 10,000 meters the TB-7 could not be reached by the majority of existing fighters at that time, and the ceiling of 12,000 metres made it untouchable even by anti-aircraft artillery."

So, some European fighters could reach 10Km at the time, but as Air Force Major General P. Stefanovsky reports from his time as a test pilot for the bomber (in his memoir "Three Hundred Unknowns", 1968, p.83), "The multi-ton ship surpass all the best European fighters of its time, in its flight capabilities at an altitude of ten kilometers." So some fighters could get there, but couldn't do much than just 'be there'.

Airplane designer Viktor Shavrov, in his "History of Aircraft Design in the USSR, 1939-1950", 1988, p.162, will write of it, "A remarkable airplane. It was on the TB-7 that the first five-ton bombs were lifted, earlier than in the United States or in England."

Professor L. Kerber (deputy to legendary aircraft designer Tupolev, who would take over much of Petliakov's posthumous work to create famous bombers still in service in the 21st century), in "TU: Man and Airplane", 1973, p.143, describes it: "This machine had a strong defense system consisting of 20-mm cannons and 12.7-mm heavy machine guns. Bombs of the largest caliber could fit in the large compartment," at a time when Germany's best level bombers had to mount any 1800kg bombs outside on the airframe. (Or rather, that time will come later; they can't do that yet in 1936!) In an earlier article for "Trail in the Sky", 1971, p.202, he describes it as "a record-setting plane... No, we have every reason to assert that the TB-7 was more powerful than the American flying fortress B-17."

The TB-7 would be unreachable by the Germans for all practical purposes, until 1940 when the Luftwaffe started receiving mass deliveries of the Bf-109 E-3. Even then, Western historian John V. R. Taylor will report, in "Combat Aircraft of the World", p.1969, p.592, "At heights of 26,250 to 29,500 feet its speed surpassed the speed of German Me-109 [i.e. the Bf-109] and He-112 fighters."

Even after that, into 1942, the TB-7 will still be so superior to German airpower, that when Stalin sends Molotov to Britain and the United States as his personal envoy to talk grand strategy, the Western powers will naturally expect Molotov to travel by Siberia and through the Arctic Circle, avoiding Nazi held Europe from Norway to North Africa. But instead, Molotov will fly straight non-stop over occupied western Russia and across Nazi domination of Europe to Great Britain; thence to the United States in another non-stop hop; and back again the same way. Later, after Soviets capture Nazi records, designers will be curious about whether the Nazis knew how Molotov was traveling and his route, and will discover that the converted passenger-bomber had not even been tracked. Simply put, the German anti-aircraft defenses not only could not take down the TB-7, they could not even detect its presence in their territory!

Captain E. Pussep (later Colonel) will pilot Molotov on that trip in 1942, along with other cargo over Germany many times; and will boast in Gallay's "Third Dimension" (1973, p.330): "The anti-aircraft guns reach at such altitudes with hardly any aim, if at all. A fighter plane at such height can act only like a sleepy fly. Who can do anything to me?"

The TB-7 is able to defeat the low-oxygen performance problem of high altitudes by installing a fifth engine to work as its supercharger. Turbochargers (using spare exhaust gasses to run compressors for providing the oxygen at proper densities for engine operation) had been successfully used before in record-setting airplanes; but doing so had damaged the engines, due to the corrosive exhaust gasses passing over engine components at over one thousand degrees Celsius while outside temperatures might be sixty degrees below freezing. Vladmir Petliakov discovered a solution: bring oxygen along in tanks and have an internal fifth engine supply it to the other engines! (Naturally this was kept as a military secret.)

Vaclav Nemecek will report, in "The History of Soviet Aircraft from 1918", 1986, p.134, "This machine had an incredibly long life. In the fifties, one could still encounter [some of] these planes on polar routes, where they were used for transporting cargo."

[JasonPratt]

Thus in 1936, Stalin possesses an unstoppable heavy bomber, the finest in the world, not to be surpassed in the whole World War to come.

All Stalin has to do is build one thousand such bombers; invite delegates of all nations to a testing area out in the steppes; glass a hill upon his command with at least one thousand tons of bombs (one kiloton, the measure of a nuclear age); and then observe offhandedly that anyone who invades him will suffer this fate; and by the way, whoever wishes to surrender to Stalin's control as Soviet republics can do so now and save time later. The end, period.

Stalin needs no precision: he is dropping the equivalent of a proto-nuke every day on his target -- until next year when he can drop two small nukes as his bomber capacity increases.

Are you trying to produce enough aircraft to stop a thousand-bomber raid at that height? Your factory goes away tomorrow.

You wish to hit our airbases first? Too bad: no one else has strategic aviation, and won't by November 1940 either! Nor will they after 1940, because the moment Stalin realizes they are setting up a factory, he zergs it with a bomber rush, declaring checkmate before the chess match even begins!

Stalin does not even need one thousand TB-7 bombers to drop a thousand tons of bombs on any target; several hundred bombers will suffice; the other several hundred are, of course, ready at any time to go drop their own one thousand tons on the same day. Ten days of that equals twenty kilotons, equal to the Hiroshima bomb.

And now, gentlemen, let us drink to eternal peace under Soviet global rulership over all property and means of production!