World War: Greatest Battle of All

“Smolensk is a dead city like Pompeii. … En route we saw burning villages and forests aflame, and more farmhouses destroyed. With the exception of one bank and one hotel, Smolensk was completely destroyed, with all houses burned down, streets blown up, railway cars, trams, autobusses wrecked.”

Two Swiss correspondents wrote this collaborative impression (not entirely corroborated by photographs) of Smolensk after visiting the city last week as guests of the German Army. The Germans claimed they had entered Smolensk on July 16. Last week, 29 days later, the Russians admitted they had evacuated it. In that month, in and around that dying city, had been fought the greatest pitched battle of World War II, perhaps of all time.

PU-36. It will take historians years to reconstruct the Battle of Smolensk shot by shot. But it is already possible to reconstruct its general outlines. For the Russian plan of defense was based on a single document—a field manual designated as PU-36, which was drawn up in 1936 by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, then Vice Commissar of Defense. It was his last great service to the Red Army. He was executed in the purge a year later.

PU-36 postulated (long before any other army, except the German, was willing to) an offense powerfully implemented by tanks and planes. To meet this offense, Marshal Tukhachevsky devised a unique defense in depth.

Under the Tukhachevsky system, an Army corps (three divisions), called to defend a given sector, would move up to the enemy on a front only about 20 miles wide—but about 80 miles deep. It would then dispose itself not in lines, but in densely packed islands. Nearest the enemy the islands would be minuscule: just isolated machine-gun nests. Farther back the islands would grow into larger machine-gun clusters, field-gun emplacements, antitank batteries, then larger pools comprising whole battalions and companies, then huge field fortresses (built by sappers in from two to five days) surrounded by smaller islands, finally huge dispositions of reserves.

Each island, each cluster, each pool, each fortress would be circular—so that it could not be attacked from “the rear”—and autonomous—capable of holding out after others were knocked out. The system was calculated to canalize enemy attack into defiles covered by cross fire from several islands at once, and themselves generously cluttered with tank traps, mine fields, barbed-wire entanglements, other obstacles.

Line or No Line? Fortnight ago a Russian communique denied that a Stalin Line “ever existed, or exists.” In the sense of a continuous line, like the Maginot, none existed. But in the Smolensk area, blocking the traditional military highroad to Moscow—between the Dnieper and Dvina Rivers—the Russians had translated PU-36 into concrete and steel terms.

Here the islands were little bunkers, the larger units were fortresses which the Russians call “bins.” Some were visible, to draw attack in their direction—into traps of other bins camouflaged with turf. Some served as huge underground tank hangars. From each bin, “drains” were dug—trenches to give egress to woods. Camouflaged tractors stood ready to haul off artillery in case of retreat. The bigger bins bristled with antiaircraft, the smaller were draped with nets and foliage to hide them from the air. Into this system the Russians crowded something like 60 divisions. The Germans went after them with an estimated 50.

The Battle. German Intelligence had also studied PU-36. Reconnaissance had looked over the Smolensk area. In posthumous tribute to Marshal Tukhachevsky, the German commander in this area, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, decided to abandon the fundamental pattern of Blitzkrieg —cutting as if with a knife through one strategic spot (as at Sedan) and then encircling. Instead he dug in, as if with a gigantic fork, sending five parallel prongs into the defense area. Each pair of prongs had to reduce island after island between them.

Neither side lied when its communiques claimed that the enemy was “cut off.” It was just a question of which would chew the other up. The Germans did—apparently for two chief reasons: 1) the superiority of German aviation, which not only bombed and strafed the Russians mercilessly, but enabled the German command to know what was going on while the Russian command was largely in the dark; 2) the inability of the Reds, who did not see the battle whole, to mount anything bigger than local counterattacks. Except for these two contingencies, Panzer-conscious Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a dead man, might have licked Adolf Hitler.