Zhukov becomes Deputy Supreme Commander

In the last days of August 1942 Joseph Stalin appointed General of the Army Georgy Zhukov Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the USSR and First Deputy People’s Commissar for Defence – in other words, his own deputy in both roles. The resolution of the State Defence Committee on the appointment as Deputy Supreme Commander is dated 26 August; the appointment as First Deputy People’s Commissar, 27 August. A few days later Zhukov flew to the Volga, where the Germans had just broken through to Stalingrad.

It is often said that “Marshal Georgy Zhukov” was then appointed commander of the defence of Stalingrad. Both parts of that statement need correcting. Zhukov was still a General of the Army; he became a Marshal of the Soviet Union only in January 1943. Nor did he take command of the city’s defence. As a representative of the Stavka, his task was to coordinate the operations of the fronts at Stalingrad and, above all, to organise an offensive that would relieve the city from the north. The fronts remained under the command of Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko, and the city itself was defended by the 62nd Army.

The city on the Volga in flames

On 23 August the tanks of the German XIV Panzer Corps broke out of the bridgehead on the Don, crossed the steppe and reached the Volga north of Stalingrad, near Rynok. That day and night Wolfram von Richthofen’s aircraft bombed the city, reducing much of its wooden housing to rubble and setting the oil tanks by the river ablaze. In the days that followed the Luftwaffe returned over Stalingrad almost without pause, attacking the Volga crossings, the factories and the residential districts. On 25 August a state of siege was declared in the city.

The German corridor from the Don to the Volga cut off the 62nd Army and the units defending the city from the troops north of Stalingrad. Behind the defenders lay a river a kilometre wide, across which everything had to be brought: ammunition, reinforcements and food. It seemed that the city, which Hitler had made the main objective of the offensive in July, would fall within days. After several weeks of fighting in the great bend of the Don, General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army stood at the gates of the city.

Summoned to Moscow

Zhukov was then commanding the Western Front, which since 30 July had been waging a costly offensive against the German 9th Army near Rzhev and Sychyovka. The front had advanced 30–40 kilometres, but at the price of enormous losses and without a decisive result. According to Zhukov’s memoirs, the telephone call from Moscow reached him at the front’s command post on 27 August. He reported to the Kremlin that same day. Stalin told him that the State Defence Committee had decided to appoint him Deputy Supreme Commander and to send him to the Stalingrad area, where the situation was very difficult. Colonel General Ivan Konev took over the Western Front from him.

The appointment was something exceptional. Since the autumn of 1941 Zhukov had been, in Stalin’s eyes, the commander for rescuing hopeless situations. In September 1941 he had stabilised the defence of Leningrad, from October he had directed the defence of Moscow and the December counter-offensive, and in the winter he had led the counter-offensive at Rzhev and Vyazma. Now Stalin, who during the first year of the war had frequently changed commanders and trusted few, gave him the position of second man in the state’s military hierarchy. No one else held the title of Deputy Supreme Commander during the war.

The offensive from the north

The plan Stalin presented to Zhukov was simple. Three armies had been concentrated north of the German corridor: General Kirill Moskalenko’s 1st Guards Army, General Dmitry Kozlov’s 24th Army and General Rodion Malinovsky’s 66th Army. They were to strike south near Kotluban station, cut the corridor and link up with the 62nd Army in the city.

On 29 August Zhukov flew to Kamyshin on the Volga, and from there to the headquarters of the Stalingrad Front. Already on the spot were the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who as Stavka representative had been assisting the command of the defence since mid-August, and a member of the State Defence Committee, Georgy Malenkov. Zhukov quickly realised that the armies earmarked for the offensive were not ready: the divisions were only just assembling after their marches, ammunition and fuel were short, and the artillery had not had time to take up its positions.

Who commanded at Stalingrad

The command structure he found was tangled. When the defensive sector had stretched to some 800 kilometres, the South-Eastern Front had been carved out of the southern wing of the Stalingrad Front on 7 August. From 13 August both fronts were under a single commander, Colonel General Yeremenko, and Nikita Khrushchev was a member of the military council. After the Germans broke through to the Volga, the 62nd Army was transferred to the South-Eastern Front on 30 August. It had been commanded since 3 August by Lieutenant General Anton Lopatin. At the beginning of September, when he concluded that the army could not hold its existing lines, he was removed. His chief of staff, General Nikolai Krylov, stood in for him briefly, and on 12 September (formally from 10 September, according to some lists) command passed to Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, who was to defend Stalingrad throughout the autumn and winter.

Zhukov thus replaced no one in this chain. His authority stood above it: as Deputy Supreme Commander he could issue instructions to front and army commanders, demand reinforcements from Moscow and report directly to Stalin. But it was he who bore responsibility for whether the blow from the north succeeded.

The first attacks at Kotluban

It did not. On 30 August Moskalenko was ordered to attack on 2 September, but that proved impossible. The 1st Guards Army moved off on 3 September, and two days later the 24th and 66th Armies joined in. On that same 3 September Stalin, alarmed by reports that the Germans were already in the suburbs of Stalingrad, telegraphed Zhukov to attack at once, since delay “is tantamount to a crime”. The Soviet divisions went into the attack across open steppe, under artillery fire and incessant Luftwaffe air raids, against German divisions that had had time to dig in on the high ground. They advanced a few kilometres and lost thousands of men. According to Zhukov’s memoirs, on 10 September he reported to Stalin that breaking through the corridor was impossible with the forces available. Even so, the attacks continued until 13 September, and in the weeks that followed they were renewed several more times in the same area.

The attacks at Kotluban did not relieve the city, but they were not entirely in vain: they forced Paulus to keep on his northern flank a large part of his forces, including armoured units, which might otherwise have taken part in the assault on Stalingrad.

Place in the war

According to Zhukov’s memoirs, in mid-September he and Vasilevsky, summoned to the Kremlin, told Stalin that “another solution” had to be found, and that conversation marked the start of planning for a counter-offensive that would strike not at the German offensive itself but at its weak flanks, held by Romanian troops. Historians, among them the American scholar David Glantz, point out that this version contains a good deal of later tidying-up of events: the plan matured gradually through September and October, with the participation of the General Staff and the front commanders, and in the autumn Zhukov was also preparing a second great blow at Rzhev. In the event, on 19 November 1942 Operation Uranus was launched, and within four days it had encircled Paulus’s 6th Army. The offensive at Rzhev, by contrast – Operation Mars, which Zhukov directed in person from 25 November – ended in a bloody failure.

The August appointment settled Zhukov’s role for the rest of the war. As Deputy Supreme Commander he remained until the end of the war Stalin’s chief “fireman”, sent wherever the fate of a campaign hung in the balance, and in January 1943, after the blockade of Leningrad had been broken, he became the first commander of this war to be promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union. In Stalingrad itself, a battle had begun on 23 August that was to last until February 1943 and become the turning point of the war in the east.