Timoshenko closed with a summation. “In terms of the strategic art, the experience of the war in Europe has perhaps brought nothing new,” he asserted. “But in the sphere of the operational arts, in the sphere of frontline and army operations, there have been immense changes.” He singled out the value of tank armies and motorized divisions coordinated with aviation, noting that whereas offensives in the First World War had been stymied by defense in depth and the employment of reserves, “German tank divisions in 1939–1940 forestalled calling up these reserves.” The Germans just “pushed forward,” having “rightly taken into account that the force and success of the contemporary offensive consists in its great speed and uninterruptedness.” He contrasted the German experience in just bypassing the Maginot Line with the Soviet Winter War, wherein a bypass proved impossible, and accentuated being expert at both wars of maneuver and of heavy concentration, in order to achieve that early breakthrough. He also noted that German success had depended upon preparation, laying railroads, building roads, readying aerodromes, and using agents on enemy territory to sow panic. In conclusion, he said that “the decisive effect of air power is achieved not via long-range raids in an enemy’s rear but coordination with infantry in the field of battle, in the location of divisions, the army.”27
As Timoshenko knew well, however, the Red Army’s existing organization, officer skill set, and rank-and-file training did not correspond to this incisive blueprint. How much, if anything, the absent Stalin absorbed of the revelatory discussions of the new German way of war and its implications for Soviet military doctrine remains uncertain. Timoshenko had submitted a draft of his summation to the despot, who inserted several lines: “One organizes defense in order to prepare an offensive.” “Defense is especially advantageous only when it is understood as a means to organize an offensive.”28
SEEKING CLARIFICATION
Also on December 28, Sorge in Tokyo drafted a radio message, the first of many he would send warning of possible war. He had developed a close relationship with the German military attaché Colonel Alfred Kretschmer and was able to meet the many high-level military visitors from Berlin on assignment to Japan. “Every new person arriving in Japan from Germany talks about how the Germans have around 80 divisions on the eastern border, including Romania, with the aim of exerting pressure on the policy of the USSR,” his message stated. “In the event that the USSR starts to actively oppose the interests of Germany, as happened in the Baltics, the Germans could occupy territory on a line Kharkov, Moscow, Leningrad. The Germans do not want to do this, but are assembling the means, should they be compelled to do so by the behavior of the USSR.” But Sorge added that “the Germans know well that the USSR cannot risk this, because, after the Finnish war debacle, Moscow needs at least twenty years to become a modern army on a par with Germany’s.”29
Sorge’s dispatch was characteristic of the mountains of chatter that Stalin would receive. But the December 29 intelligence out of Berlin on the existence of Operation Barbarossa was different. It had been written by Skornyakov (“Meteor”), who worked under the cover of the aviation aide to the Soviet military attaché. “Meteor,” in turn, had gotten the information from Captain Nikolai Zaitsev (“Bine”), the intelligence operative in the Soviet trade mission. “Bine,” in freezing weather, drove around and took public transportation for up to five hours (to ensure he was not being followed by German counterintelligence) to meet with the German journalist Ilse Stöbe (“Alta”), who ran the field agents in Soviet military intelligence’s network in Berlin, including her source for this revelation, Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”). The latter, returning from Warsaw, now worked in the German foreign ministry. Filipp Golikov, the head of Soviet military intelligence, forwarded the information to Stalin, as well as to Molotov, defense commissar Timoshenko, and chief of staff Meretskov (collectively known as List No. 1), writing that “from highly informed military circles, it has become known that Hitler issued an order to prepare a war against the USSR and that the war will be declared in March of the coming year.”
