It was March 1945. As the Red Army closed in on Berlin, Marshal Zhukov put in a call to his friend, Nikita Khrushchev, then the Soviet commissar in Kiev.“Soon,” he told Khrushchev, “I’ll have that slimy beast Adolf Hitler (Number l) locked in a cage. And when I send him back to Moscow, I’ll ship him by way of Kiev.”
Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker. There is not a doubt in the world, however, that the Führer would have been exhibited like a freak in a sideshow if Zhukov had taken him alive.
Zhukov is recognized here as the tough-minded commander of the Red Army during World War II. It is difficult to say whether Joseph Stalin (Number 4) really ever trusted anybody, but if he did trust one man, it was Marshal Zhukov. During the war, Stalin listened to him, confided in him, and sometimes even changed his mind on the basis of what Zhukov told him. After the war was another story.
Distinguished Service in World War II
Zhukov was born in 1896 in Strelkovka, Russia. He was a cavalry officer for the czar in World War I. Following the Russian Revolution, he joined the Red Army and the Communist Party. He escaped with his life during the Red Army Purge Trials of 1937–1938. In 1939, Zhukov distinguished himself in an undeclared border war with the Japanese over Outer Mongolia. The following year, Zhukov took part in war games as the leader of an “enemy” force. His force won, proving that Moscow would be vulnerable in the event of war.
In June 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Stalin soon found that Zhukov could be relied on to take on virtually any military problem and do what was necessary to solve it. Zhukov began on the Russian central front, defending Moscow. Then he was sent to Stalingrad, where he turned the tables on the Nazi armies and forced the Germans to surrender. He was involved in the battle for Kursk, where the Red Army fought and won the greatest tank battle in the history of warfare. He went into Lenin-grad and bolstered the defenses of that city. Finally, Zhukov planned and carried out the final assault on Berlin. The city fell to the Red Army, and what was left of Hitler was found in the ruins. The war was over.
A Cold-Blooded Mind-Set
When Dwight D. Eisenhower (Number 7) met Zhukov, the two men swapped sto-ries about military tactics, especially how tank commanders deal with the problem of mine fields.
Zhukov told Eisenhower:There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong points of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out channels through which our vehicles can go.
Eisenhower was stunned by the coldbloodedness of the approach. Americans, he knew, would never tolerate that kind of deliberate sacrifice of men. Zhukov never blinked an eye at doing what he thought was needed to defeat the Nazis.
Some historians have called Zhukov “Stalin’s trouble-shooter.” He was that and more. Cold, calculating, and sometimes cruel, Stalin’s deputy supreme commander beat Hitler at his own game.
After the war, Stalin’s paranoia overtook him. Zhukov was assigned insignificant military posts and stripped of any real power. Once Stalin was dead, Zhukov was brought back to Moscow, and he took part in rounding up the leaders of NKVD, the dreaded secret police. When Khrushchev came to power, Zhukov was named minister of defense.
As various Soviet leaders came and went, Zhukov would periodically find himself in and out of favor. When he died in 1974, however, he was honored with burial in the Kremlin wall.
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