Stalin’s Secret Generals are now in action

Camp News, Volume 4, Issue 158, 22 January 1943, Page 2

Stalin’s Secret Generals are now in action

(From the “Daily Mirror,” London.)

All reports from Moscow emphasise the gravity of the situation in Russia, where the. mightiest battles that history , has ever seen are being fought. Von Bock’s forces are pushing on towards the Caucasus, and the Russians who oppose them are commanded by Stalin’s “Big Six” group of Generals. Few of their names are known outside Russia; two of them are men in their late fifties. The other four are young men. Only now can the stories of the Soviet military Big Six be revealed. Tall, slim and not unlike Timoshenko in appearance is LieutenantGeneral Pavel Kurochkin. He was a baker’s boy, and used to get up at four in the morning to help knead and bake the bread, before trundling it around to cottage doors in his father’s cart. Then, anxious to do something with engines, he became a railway labourer, cleaned locomotives, and later got a semi-skilled job in the Krassny engineering works helping to build tractors. In his spare time he did military training, and showed himself to be a useful sort of chap with mechanised forces, knowing a ■ few things worth knowing about tractors, tanks and caterpillar diesels of all sorts. Now he’s a Lieutenant-General under Timoshenko, and is taking a big part in the Caucasian fighting. Even younger than 42-year-old Kurochkin is Lieutenant-General Pavel Rychagov. These two men with the same Christian name are in adjacent commandsbut Rychagov is equivalent in rank to an R.A.F. Air Marshal, and is one of the leading commanders of the Red Air Force. He is stumpy, grim-looking sort of chap, with a Napoleonic expression. Timoshenko and a few others fought in Tsarist days, but as Rychagov is in his early thirties, he is almost entirely a Soviet production! Pavel is a brilliant fighter pilot, and has devised his own methods for beating Nazi tanks by his Stormovik divebombers— now the Stukas and Messerchmitts in Russia try to copy the aerobatics thought out and then tested by Pavel Rychagov!

Older than these two Pavels is grimlooking General Zhukov, No. 3 of the Big Six, who is still in charge of' the Moscow area. He took over the Moscow .front when Timoshenko went South, held it in its darkest days and drove the Nazis back. It was Zhukov who gave the order that turned the German tide—and perhaps the tide of history. The man who executed the order and sprang the biggest surprise on the Germans was Zhukov’s team-mate, Major-General Byelov. They are still working together. Byelov is a Cossock, a farmer’s son, an expert horseman. On that night when 70,000 mounted Cossacks took the: sleeping Nazi panzers by surprise, Byelov proved that z he was a good General. No. 5 of the Big Six is Marshal Budenny. He was a Cossack villager, and it was he who organised the historic 250-mile raid into the Tsarist Russians’ rear at Tsaritsin. Stalin gave him charge of the Ukraine front where Hitler attacked. This front broke, as Stalin knew it would. Budenny saved the bulk of his armies—as Stalin knew he would! And now? Nothing has been heard of Budenny for months. But he is very much in the thick of the fighting. And No. 6? That place is reserved for Boris Shaposhnikov, a 58-year-old Tartar from the Ural mountains. He was a Tsarist, a colonel in the last war. J If that surprises you, remember —Shaposhnikov, like every other i Russian, has only, one loyalty to — Russia. Stalin accepted that loyalty, and made him his principal military adviser and Chief of Staff. ■ .. Boris is a cold, unemotional man who ha sno interests outside military affairs. His hobby is writing military primers which, are reckoned to be the world’s models in their subjects. It has never been officially stated, but I believe it to be a fact that Shaposhnikov and Wavell met in the Caucasus in September to co-ordinate plans for the join defence of the oil. As Britain’s 10th Army now stands ready in Iran—a short distance from Boris Shaposhnikov’s comm and — it is more than probable that No. 6 on the list will have the job of co-operat-ing with British forces.