Maginot of the East, May 1945
As the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, neither Hitler nor Stalin had ever seriously expected an alliance between the two to be long-lasting. Both dictators went into the pact hoping to buy time from the other, Hitler to defeat France and Stalin to push the Japanese out of Asia. As soon as a new border was drawn through the centre of Poland, Stalin ordered the Red Army to begin construction of a new defensive line along the border with Germany, which later became known as the Molotov Line.
Work on the Molotov Line progressed well until early 1942, when the defences could be described as “mostly complete”. By this time however, the line was looking more and more redundant as the German Army had bogged down in France, and was becoming almost completely dependant on imported raw materials, nearly all from the USSR, in order to maintain its war efforts. Stalin was well aware that even simply cutting off the German trade would be enough to destroy the German economy within a short time, and any war with the USSR would very quickly turn against an increasingly powerless Germany, even in the unlikely event that France was forced out of the war. Apparently serving no purpose, work on the Molotov Line was abandoned.
Germany’s collapse in the wake of Hitler’s assassination triggered a new interest in the Molotov Line. In the event that the Allies were defeated by the Red Army, Stalin hoped to use the border established by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as his western frontier, with communist states being established in any states the Red Army held at that time (possibly allowing for the restoration of a Nazi regime under Halder, Goring, or another leader who Stalin believed loyal). If the Allies did manage to push the Red Army out of Germany and Poland, as Patton had done by early 1945, then the Molotov Line would prove useful as a set of defences to hold the Allies themselves out of the USSR. Work crews returned to the Molotov Line in May 1944, and in the following eight months the original line was completed, while an extension behind the Siret River in Bessarabia was added to the project (which was approximately half way to completion by the time the Italians were facing it).
The completed Molotov Line was a formidable obstacle. Manned by 3,000,000 men, the line included no fewer than 5000 concrete bunkers, containing anything from a lowly machine gun to a massive 152mm gun emplacement built to destroy even the mightiest of Allied tanks. Behind the line were thousands of pieces of artillery, and anti-air guns to defend the frontier from aerial bombardment, all well connected to the Soviet railroad network. A substantial armour reserve, including ten thousand tanks of various sizes, and the bulk of the VVS lay ready to smash any breakthrough of the line. Intelligence reported very little about the Molotov Line’s existence, and it was only when Patton’s first attempted crossing of the Bug was thrown back with heavy casualties that the Allies truly began working out how to crack a fortification effort possibly stronger than even the Maginot Line, which had held off every German attack attempted over the five years that the two had been fighting.
Seeking A Replacement, May 1945
Truman had long been committed to the idea that Stalin would need to be overthrown or killed before any peace with the USSR could be acceptable, an idea that Churchill had been advocating since the Invasion of Poland. Once the military situation was such that plans for a potential post-war world could begin to be constructed, it was still assumed that the Communist Party would retain control of Russia after the war, with most Allied leaders believing that a more moderate communist, such as Anastas Mikoyan or Nikolai Bulganin, would be the most acceptable leader, although Roosevelt maintained that if Stalin was prepared to pull back to his pre-war borders and allow the restoration of democracy in Finland, Poland, Turkey and Romania, then that would be acceptable.
Roosevelt had passed away in early February, never finding out the true scale of the atrocities that Stalin had carried out. Truman, as part of a visit to Paris to meet with Daladier, Mussolini and Churchill, had seen Buchenwald first-hand, and it was by now well-known that the worst camps were further east. No-one among the Allies even dared consider a world in which Stalin was allowed to continue ruling any longer, and as Patton decided that he would take the US Army into Moscow, it was decided to get rid of the Communist Party for good.
With most known Russian anti-communists within the USSR either dead or imprisoned in a gulag, any potential future Russian leader would have to come from Allied-held territory. During the Paris Conference in early May 1945, the idea of re-establishing the White movement, broken in the wake of the Russian Civil War, was raised as a potential solution. While many notable White leaders, generals and other notable figures had died during the 1920s and 30s, Alexander Kerensky, the most notable of all anti-Soviet leaders (although he never joined the White movement itself), was still alive and well in New York, where he spent much of his time writing papers on Russian history.
Kerensky, who had no desire to return to government after his failed term as leader in Russia during 1917, was unwilling to lead the New White Coalition, but was persuaded by Truman to give his official support for the movement in the hope of establishing legitimacy. The leadership position was eventually taken by Vasily Maklakov, who had led a liberal democratic party during the Tsar’s reign, and had since been living in France. Maklakov was able to take advantage of his less famous reputation, untainted by controversy the way Kerensky was, to unite the various groups of White emigrants under the New White Coalition Movement, and many people whose families had fled from Russia after Lenin took control volunteered to join the New White Army. Among them was Boris Shteifon, a Russian veteran of World War I and Wrangel’s campaigns in the Civil War, who had fought with the Chetniks in opposition to the Axis after 1941 and would soon be made the commanding General of the New White Army, and Maklakov’s right-hand man.
Breaking the Molotov Line, June 1945
The delay caused by the Molotov Line gave Patton’s logistics columns time to catch up to the armies that were extending further and further east. The Red Army, despite all the losses it had suffered in Poland and Romania, was far from beaten, and to deal a decisive blow the Allies desperately needed the respite. But Patton knew only one direction, and that was forward. No matter how well defended the Molotov Line was, Patton was sure his men could smash straight through it and begin a march on Moscow. But the Molotov Line would not be so easily smashed through, and after one bloody assault Truman ordered Patton to halt.
Instead of bloody frontal assaults, Supreme Allied Commander General Eisenhower decided to use the Allies’ incredible air supremacy, hard won by the battles fought in accordance with the Oil Plan, to smash the Molotov Line from above. A series of ‘bunker buster’ bombs, the most well known being the five ton ‘Tallboy’, had been developed through the war’s middle years for use against massive industrial targets, only for Germany to collapse before any were needed. Now the bombs would be used against the Molotov Line’s bunkers and heavy emplacements, hoping to destroy them with underground explosions.
Operation Moonscape began on June 22nd as nearly 10,000 bombers took off all across the front line. In an attempt to both confuse and overwhelm the defenders, some bombers were aimed at industrial cities such as Minsk, Kiev and Leningrad. Others were sent to bomb airfields, grounding the Soviet fighters and especially their formidable jets. Of the bombers sent to destroy the Molotov Line, only some carried bunker busters. Others carried incendiaries while yet more dropped regular high explosives. Even escort fighters, especially the heavily armed P-47s, attacked the Soviet concentrations on the ground, launching rockets at Soviet armour and anti-air guns. The bombardment lasted ten days, interrupted at times as the VVS attempted to destroy any aircraft they could. But against an onslaught representative of the USA’s immense industrial capabilities, the Molotov Line, and many of its defenders, were left reeling.
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