World War: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Bringing Back An Army

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Adolf Hitler, with the audacity of a boxer who tells his opponent the exact moment when he plans to put in the knock-out punch, announced last week that his supreme push was coming.

Then it came.

It was apparently a monster drive at the two flanks of Moscow. It had its beginnings at points about 200 miles southwest and northwest of the capital. It developed slowly, beginning with heavy bombings of communications (see map), continuing with the usual mechanized thrusts and infantry attacks.

It was a gigantic operation. It was designed to split the three fronts once and for all. If it succeeded, the job of beating Russia would then be much like the job of beating three smaller countries. One would be the land of Leningrad, where a great pool of Russian defense had already been dammed up. The second would be the country of Muscovy, where a second great mass would be isolated. The third would be the Ukraine and the Caucasus, where the rest of Russia’s hope would be boxed. Three little armies would be far easier to crush, one by one, than one big one. Adolf Hitler would once again have accomplished his old, old strategy: Divide & Ruin.

Scheme for Schisms. Hitler struck first and squarely at the center. He achieved victories great enough to force the Russians to withdraw part of their strength from the two flanks. He then drove a wedge northeastward, which cut off Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov and his forces in Leningrad. That accomplished the split between north and center.

Paving the way for the division between center and south was a harder assignment. It was accomplished by a series of maneuvers which made up the Ukraine campaign. That the maneuvers were not thwarted was due to the apparent inability of a very brave but not very wise man, Marshal Semion Budenny, Commander of the Ukraine Front, to see what was coming.

Myth. In the eyes of most Russians, Semion Budenny is something superhuman. They say that in the Revolution he and his horsemen struck like lightning, that ever since he has been a fine thunderbolt of a man. His was the revolutionary cry which swept southwestern Russia: “Proletarians, to horse!” Such speed did he command that sometimes (the legend goes) he personally fought in half a dozen sectors at once. With five men, the peasants say, he routed an army under Denikin. His praise, it is said, made men warm in winter; he could kill with no other ammunition than unprintable words.

He became the hero of novels, the theme of poems. Some people thought he looked a little like Peter the Great, victor at Poltava (which Semion Budenny lost fortnight ago). One of the largest coal trusts in Russia was named for him. A city in the Caucasus, a town in the Ukraine, factories, collective farms changed their names to Budenny. The grey peaked cloth hat which used to be part of the Red Army uniform is called Budennovka. Among men who knew horses he became the incarnation of horsemanship, something approaching the upper half of a Centaur. Red cavalrymen sing:

Through the cornfields rumbling tanks go,

Biplanes loop the loop on high;

Of Budenny’s fast tachanka*

Sing the flyers in the sky. . . .

Eh, tachanka—Rostovchanka

You’re a beauty and our pride.

With the mounted troops, tachanka,

On four wheels you swiftly ride.

Man. Actually Semion Budenny is a man. He has lots of brawn on his fine body, but he also has more than his share of bone between his ears. He always was, and probably still is, a great fighter. But he is not a strategist. He is still a cavalry noncom of incredible dash and dumbness.

Physically, the Budenny specimen is still, at 58, superb. He rides like a trooper, fences without guards, can snuff out a candle with a revolver bullet at 40 paces. He has a voice like the roar of a breaking ice-jam. Manly to excess, he is a born leader in the medieval sense of the term.

But fame and the years have mellowed him to the verge of softness. Instead of studying hard after the Revolution, to make up for his ignorance of military science, he was satisfied with an honorary degree from the Frunze Military Academy. He lolled about in pleasures: the Bolshoi Theater, festivals, plays, the opera and ballet. Instead of studying tanks he initiated a campaign to breed better horses for the Red Army, and spent his happiest afternoons at the races at the Moscow Hippodrome. He became a dandy with only half his heart in soldiering. Many an old soldier is summed up in hismustache, and Budenny says of his magnificent eight-incher: “One end of it is directed against the enemies of my country and the other is for the ladies.”

Bluster. He won many skirmishes in the Revolution because he had neither fear nor prudence. When he completed a mission he would come with a delighted grin to his commander and say: “Whom do I strike next?” But he had no understanding of anything beyond action. “Comrade,” Lenin once asked him, “Suppose you were asked what you were fighting for, what would you say?” Budenny answered: “Comrade, I would say that Lenin knows.”

He never comprehended strategy. During the fight against Poland in 1920, Tukhachevsky’s forces were at the gates of Warsaw. Budenny was ordered to strike at Warsaw from the southeast, to be in on a well-timed kill. Recklessly Budenny disobeyed orders, turned aside to attack Lwow. When he finally did wheel toward Warsaw it was too late. Under Maxime Weygand and Josef Pilsudski the Poles smashed Tukhachevsky’s force and then, separately, Budenny’s. It later turned out that Budenny, with no understanding whatsoever of the whole plan, had “wanted to take Lwów before Tukhachevsky could take Warsaw.”

Of defensive maneuver Budenny instinctively knows only one thing, and that instinct has been his one guide in the battle of the Ukraine. During the Revolution, Trotsky once scolded him for not sending in a written report about a battle.

“But I won it,” Budenny protested.

“How am I to know that?” asked Trotsky.

“I brought my army back. Whenever I go out to battle and fail to bring my army back, you will know that I lost.”

Blunders. Marshal Budenny’s troops fought in the Ukraine with glorious disdain of death. But while an army is as brave as its privates, it is only as good as its generals. Marshal Budenny succeeded last month in bringing part of his army back from the Ukraine campaign. He fought gallantly, as always. But he let himself be confused by the dilemma with which Adolf Hitler always likes to confront his enemies: whether to hold important geography or sacrifice it to keep important forces intact. In any case, bringing his own army out was scarcely enough: his army was only a part of Russia’s Army—and if that was to be brought back, he must keep close touch with the forces on his right flank.

> His first misjudgment was at the time of the first German breakthrough in the Ukraine, at Uman on Aug. 8. That break came near Budenny’s center. When he saw it coming, he should have tried to withdraw his entire left (Bessarabian) wing. He gave the order after the breakthrough, after the Germans had already swung to the rear of the left wing. Some survivors Budenny extricated. The rest made their way into Odessa, where they were still besieged last week.

> Next, after the Germans had dashed into the rich Dnieper industrial area, Budenny reformed his left wing and rushed all available reinforcements to it—notwithstanding the fact that a drive on Kiev, on his right, seemed the obvious next move (because of the German necessity of eliminating the Russian salient into German lines there). With his troops mistakenly weighted to the left, Budenny allowed a crossing of the magnificent barrier of the upper Dnieper, which exposed Kiev to encirclement.

> He failed to withdraw his huge army from Kiev until it had been enveloped on both flanks.

> Last week, after the disaster of Kiev, he was drawn into his worst, perhaps his final, blunder. Such of his army as he was still bringing back he concentrated on the defense of the important coal-bearing Donets Basin (see map, p. 21). He was drawn into this error by the apparent need of defending the Basin, and, if it fell, of dropping back to defend Caucasian oil. Perhaps sentimental reasons had something to do with his decision, for he was born in the Donets region.

But Semion Budenny should have realized that it was no use to defend coal and oil and sentiment if he let the enemy cut the lines of communications which carried those commodities to the rest of Russia. After the fall of Kiev, he should have made his way north, to re-establish contact with the central forces of Marshal Timoshenko. Then, although the important geography would be lost, at least the important forces would be intact. Instead he pulled his army south, and fell to futile (but, as always, gallant and dashing) counter-attacks southwestward, to relieve if possible the beleaguered Crimea.

All this had laid bare the stretch between the forces of skillful Marshal Semion Timoshenko around Moscow and those of not-so-skilled Marshal Semion Budenny in the Ukraine. But dangerous though this was, it did not mean that Hitler’s “gigantic operation” would be either easy or necessarily final. Russia still had lots of men, lots of miles, lots of tachankas, lots of courage of the Budenny stamp.

*A tachanka is a horse-drawn peasant cart mounting a machine gun.