Marshall Zhukov 50

Harsh Thakor

Marshall Georgy Zhukov was arguably  the greatest all-round general of World War II, who had his 50th death anniversary this year on 18th June His sheer tenacity, courage and military genius is arguably unparalleled in military history.

 Zhukov’s life was one of rising from rags-to-riches who rose from a peasant lad who rose to become a great general of the Second World War. Zhukov was the Soviet Union’s indispensable commander shaping all the critical turning points of World War II. Zhukov saved Leningrad from capture by the Wehrmacht in September of 1941; led the defence of Moscow in October of 1941; spearheaded the Red Army’s march on Berlin and formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender in the spring of 1945. Zhukov made errors in some campaigns but had few equals when it came coping with complex strategic situations.

Geoffrey Roberts biography Stalin’s General was the first complete critical biography of Zhukov based on independent evidence and engulfing his pre-war life and post-war career. In view of Geoffrey Roberts the Soviet Union was responsible for some of the most epic achievements and most gross misdeeds of modern age. Roberts never backed away from the condemnation of the Soviet system’s terror and repression but persisted that force and terror were not the only factors conveying the truth about his life and the great events in which he took part .Zhukov’s memoirs were highly factual, sounding more like a historian than a memoirist.

Zhukov was born on December 2, 1896, in the peasant village of Strelkovka, Kaluga Province, in Central European Russia. Between the ages of 7 and 10, he received three years of primary education at his local parish school before serving as an apprentice to a Moscow cobbler to train for that trade.

In 1915, Zhukov enrolled into a Tsarist cavalry regiment where he acquired the skill of using large mounted formations on Russia’s flat steppes. Operating as a spy behind enemy lines, Zhukov captured a German officer before receiving a concussion to the head from an enemy mine, and was awarded his second St. George’s Cross. In 1918, he decided to join the newly formed Soviet Red Guards and met Stalin during the Russian Civil War while fighting at Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad and Volgograd). Fighting alongside the Reds, Stalin and Zhukov both played a determining role in the ultimate defeat of, right-wing White forces.

Stalin’s purge of the officer corps paved way for younger men like Zhukov and the rest of the Soviet World War II-era marshals to rise to the top ahead of their time. In June 1939, Zhukov became commander of the 1st Soviet Mongolian Army that defeated the Japanese Kwantung Army the following August.

 Zhukov’s partnership with Stalin was a turning point to Soviet success in defeating Hitler and the Nazis. Zhukov’s generalship shaped the outcome of all the great battles of the Soviet-German war — Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. In his memoirs, Zhukov praises Stalin for having saved Moscow: “By his strict exactingness Stalin achieved, one can say, the near impossible.”

On the eve of the battle for Stalingrad, Stalin appointed Zhukov his Deputy Supreme Commander. Zhukov’s mission was to save Stalingrad and to prepare counter-actions to halt the enemy offensive.

 He firmly believed in Stalin and his leadership but when the dictator attacked him after the war he confronted him. He expressed his loyalty but denied any wrong-doing with dignity. The same thing happened when he was dismissed by Khrushchev, except that he held Stalin’s successor in far lesser esteem. Zhukov was close to Stalin but he was also an independent figure in the Soviet high command that tried to get the dictator to do the right thing during the war but was often overruled.

“For me personally, the word of the party was always law,” Zhukov reflected.

Zhukov was outstanding in both attacking and counter-attacking roles in war games the Soviets held in January 1941. When the Germans attacked in June 1941 plans to counter-attack were chalked with devastating results as the Soviet forces’ advances shattered their morale. During the war the Red Army’s doctrine crystallised and Zhukov tended to favour encirclement operations like the one at Stalingrad in November 1942. Stalin expressed doubt over such operations because of the number of times the Germans escaped encirclement and preferred to advance steadily across a broad front and to occupy and hold territory.

When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 Zhukov ordered a series of counter-offensives but these actions exposed Soviet troops to encirclement and compounded the disaster of an invasion that inflicted on the Red Army one of the greatest defeats of any army in history. By the end of 1941 the Red Army had lost four million soldiers and had been pushed back to the gates of Leningrad and Moscow.

Zhukov relinquished post as Chief of the General Staff at the end of July 1941 and was given command of a reserve army of about 50 divisions, tasked to mount a major counter-offensive in the Smolensk region. At Yelnya in August 1941 Zhukov launched the Red Army’s first successful large-scale counter-offensive against the Germans, recapturing a big tract of territory and blocking Hitler’s path to Moscow.

Zhukov’s next operation rescued Leningrad from imminent capture by the Germans in September 1941. In December Zhukov launched a counter-offensive in front of Moscow driving the Germans back 100 miles and ending Hitler’s dream of conquering the Soviet Union in a single Blitzkrieg campaign. In summer 1942 Hitler tried again to inflict a devastating defeat on the USSR by seizing the Soviet oilfields at Baku on the other side of the Caucasus. It was this southern campaign that led to the siege at Stalingrad later that year. On the eve of the battle for Stalingrad, Stalin appointed Zhukov his Deputy Supreme Commander. Zhukov’s mission was to save Stalingrad and to prepare counter-actions to halt the enemy offensive.

In November 1942 Zhukov unleashed a multi-pronged counter-offensive at Stalingrad. Operation Uranus broke the back of the Hungarian, Italian and Romanian armies defending the Germans’ flanks, encircled 300,000 German troops in Stalingrad and threatened to cut off Wehrmacht forces heading south to Baku. When the battle was over the Germans and their Axis allies had lost 50 divisions and suffered a million and half casualties. The Germans were able to withdraw their other troops from the south but, by early 1943, were back in the very area to where they had launched their war for oil in June 1942.

Zhukov also played a central role in the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 when hundreds of German and Soviet tanks clashed in open war-fare, inflicting a mortal blow on Germany with the loss of Hitler’s Panzer reserves. Kursk paved the way for the German retreat all the way back to Berlin. Incidentally Kursk is again in the news because of Ukrainian incursion into the region and Putin is on trial. Russians don’t find a second Zhukov to save them! Nor is there any Red Army.

Triggering the Soviet strategic offensive of 1943–1945, in November 1943 he rode into Kiev with the Soviet forces that had just re-captured the Ukrainian capital. A few months later Zhukov administered Operation Bagration which liberated Belorussia from Nazi occupation. Bagration took the Red Army into Poland and to the outskirts of Warsaw. Zhukov captured Warsaw in January 1945 after the Soviets launched an operation that advanced the Red Army from the Vistula to the Oder – the two great rivers bisecting eastern Poland and eastern Germany respectively.

.Zhukov aimed to seize the German capital in February 1945 but was forced to divert forces to confront enemy dangers on his northern flank. In April it was Zhukov’s troops who triggered the capture of Hitler’s last installation, albeit at the cost of 80,000 Soviet soldiers’ lives. It was Zhukov who formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender on the Soviet behalf on 9 May 1945.

In the victory parade in Red Square in June 1945 Zhukov delivered the victory speech and then stood alongside Stalin as 200 captured Nazi banners were piled against the Kremlin wall.

Zhukov was startled to be sacked as commander-in-chief of Soviet ground forces and dispatched to a provincial military command in Odessa.

Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, Khrushchev became Zhukov’s political patron and took the leading role in eliminating NKVD Secret Police Chief Lavrenti P. Beria. Zhukov promoted Khrushchev’s dominance, only to be demoted once again by him and sent into a renewed exile. Zhukov had been accused by Khrushchev of creating “a cult of personality” and being a “Bonapartist” (one seeking to become a political general).

At the 20th Party Congress in 1956 Stalin’s war leadership was targeted by Khrushchev in the so-called Secret Speech, with Zhukov falling out with Khrushchev. A particular target was the Soviets’ failure to be fully prepared for the German attack in June 1941. Khrushchevites argued that Zhukov shared with Stalin the responsibility for the military disaster when the Red Army lost millions of men, and the Wehrmacht pushed forward to Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov. Zhukov rebuked that allegation stating that Soviet defences were as prepared as they could be in the given circumstances.

In unpublished drafts of his memoirs Zhukov was less defensive and expressed more readiness to admit mistakes.

In October 1964 Khrushchev was toppled, and the following day May Marshal Zhukov was resurrected once more standing atop the red marble mausoleum of Lenin’s Tomb during the 20th VE-Day celebrations. He felt Khrushchev’s betrayal of him in 1957 was greater than Stalin’s in 1946. A gradual rehabilitation occurred under Brezhnev, and after a battle with the censors, his memoirs were published.

Marshal Georgi Zhukov died on June 18, 1974, at age 77, with his ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow. Wrote his friend Marshal Vasilevsky, “One can only envy a man who so closely identified his life with that of the people.”

[Harsh Thakor is freelance journalist.Thanks for information from Geoffrey Roberts’ “Stalin’s General” and ‘Warfare History network’ by Blaine Taylor]

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Vol 57, No. 22, Nov 24 - 30, 2024