What about maps folks? Any reasonable explanation?Cheshire Cat wrote:Soviet soldiers and officers were preparing for a victorious march on Berlin, but the war against Germany in 1941 didn’t run according to plan. As a result, when Soviet commanders were captured, the Germans found quite interesting maps and curious orders in their bags. Thousands of soldiers had Russian-German and Russian-Romanian phrase books. Many simply did not think of the necessity to get rid of this compromising evidence.
The commander of the 5th Battery of the 14th Howitzer Regiment of the 14th Tank Division of the 7th Mechanized Corps, Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili, son of Stalin, was no exception. He was taken prisoner, but at first he was not recognized. The senior lieutenant was betrayed by his subordinates. Stalin’s son was searched and questioned. A letter was found in his pockets, from a certain junior lieutenant in the reserves named Victor: “I am at the training camps, I would like to be home by fall, but the planned walk to Berlin might hinder this.” The letter is dated June 11, 1941. The contents of this letter were reported to Hitler personally; he mentioned it on May 18,1942. (Piker, Hitler’s Table Talks, 303)
In June 1941, German intelligence officers showed the letter to Yakov Dzhugashvili and asked him to clarify the statement about the “planned walk to Berlin”.
The questioning protocol recorded Stalin’s son’s reaction. He read the letter and quietly muttered: “Damn it!”
During questioning, Stalin’s son was asked why the Soviet artillery, which had the best cannon and howitzers in the world, and in incredible numbers, fired so poorly. Stalin’s son answered: “The maps let the Red Army down, because the war, contrary to expectations, unfolded to the east of the state border.”
Stalin’s son told the truth. In 1941, the Red Army fought without maps. There simply weren’t any. But the artillery couldn’t fire without maps. Direct aiming and firing was just a small fraction of the work done by artillery in war. Most of the time artillery fired beyond the horizon.
“It turned out that in Soviet Russia a map-making industry was created that surpassed everything that had ever been done before in its size, organization, volume, and quality of work,” concluded the Germans about Soviet topographic services (Petermanns geographischen Mitteilungen (Germany, 1943), vols. 9, 10)
How do we reconcile the best map-making industry in the world with the complete absence of maps?
General A.I. Lossev explained: “Storages of topographic maps, located unreasonably close to the border, were either seized by the enemy, or destroyed by the enemy during the first bomb raids. As a result, the troops lost 100 million maps.”
This is a modern-day evaluation, and the numbers are lowered. Lieutenant General M.K. Kudryavtsev, who under Stalin was director of the topographic services of the Red Army, said that during the first days of the war, and only in the Baltic, Western, and Kiev military districts, the Soviet troops destroyed during retreat over two hundred railcars of their own topographic maps.
The smallest cargo railcar in the Soviet Union in 1941 could carry twenty tons. Even if we supposed that the smallest cars were used to store the maps, four thousand tons of maps were destroyed in the three districts. Kudryavtsev said that, on average, every railcar contained 1,033,000 maps. Two hundred cars equaled 200 million maps.
Which of the two generals is right? They both are. One talked about what the Germans troops destroyed, 100 million, and the other added that the Soviets themselves destroyed 200 million maps, so they would not go to the enemy.
If the Soviet army planned to defend Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad, it needed maps of those regions. There was no reason to transport these maps to the state border.
At the border, the army needed maps of border regions. And, if there was a plan to advance, the army needed maps of the territories that lay ahead. If the Soviet Union planned to take over large territories, it needed the corresponding number of maps, to supply a multimillion-strong army. The Red Army did not save its maps in the border regions, because they were useless for defending the country. In 1941, the plans for the “liberation” of Europe crumbled, and the value of the maps that were kept in railcars on the border became zero. Millions of Russian-German and Russian-Romanian phrase books were burned along with the maps.
The Soviet population was expecting a war, but it didn’t anticipate a German invasion. Therefore, once the Germans attacked, everyone was shocked. Major General of the KGB O.D. Gotsiridze remembered: “Before July 3, when Stalin made a public appearance, it was completely unclear as to what were to do. Everyone thought that the war would be quick and on foreign soil.”
“The complete demoralization among our troops occurred because…the people had planned to fight on the enemy’s territory, and our military commanders were dreaming of a blitzkrieg no less than the Germans were. But everything turned out not quite so happily…..The sudden need for defense turned into a total retreat on all fronts for the troops and the people” (A.B. Zubov, Continent, no 84 (1995))
200 million of maps, covering territories to the west, south and north (till Berlin, Sofia, and Helsinki and so on) were destroyed in the railcars.
But there were another 100 million kept in divisions. In total 300 million maps were destroyed. Some captured by the Germans. They were 4 color military maps (mostly 1:25000).
Maps in the railcars just were waiting their time, considering high secrecy of the offensive preparations. And would have been given to troops, approximately, within few weeks time. All those maps were absolutely useless in defense. No maps – no defence.
During the war Soviet Union produced 700 million maps.
By the way, maps used by the Nazis were mostly produced during the spring of 1941.
http://www.echo.msk.ru/programs/victory/575359-echo/