The seminarian-turned-staff-officer who designed Uranus
Stalin asked about his family. Vasilevsky admitted he had cut ties with his father — a priest — in 1924, fearing he'd be branded an enemy of the people. Stalin, surprised, said: "Re-establish relations at once, and help your parents."
A seminarian who became Chief of the Soviet General Staff. With Zhukov he co-designed Operation Uranus and oversaw planning for the major offensives of the war's later years. One of the rare men who disagreed with Stalin and lived to old age.
Career Timeline
- 1937–41General Staff operations; rapid rise into purge-emptied posts
- 1942–45Chief of the General Staff; co-designs Uranus
- 1945.8C-in-C Far East: the Manchurian campaign
- 1949–53Minister of the Armed Forces
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionRed Army soldier
- 1939.11–1940.03The Winter WarSignatory of the peace treaty for the Soviet UnionThen a major-general heading the General Staff Operations Directorate, he signed the Moscow Peace Treaty of 12 March 1940 as a Soviet plenipotentiary alongside Molotov and Zhdanov.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarChief of the General StaffAs Chief of the General Staff he planned the major strategic offensives, including Operations Uranus and Bagration.
- 1945.02–08The Yalta and Potsdam ConferencesCommander-in-Chief of Soviet Forces in the Far EastExecuted the Yalta promise: on 9 August 1945 he commanded the 1.5-million-man Manchurian Strategic Offensive. When Stalin ordered the attack moved up 48 hours after Hiroshima, it was Vasilevsky who relayed the directive to three fronts.
- 1945.08The Soviet Entry into the War against JapanCommander-in-Chief of Soviet forces for the Manchurian OperationStalin told him in summer 1944 that he would command the Far Eastern Front. On June 28, 1945, Stalin issued three attack-preparation directives to fronts under his command. On August 3, he reported he could attack by August 5 if needed.
- 1950–1953The Korean WarOverseeing the military assistanceAs chief of staff and defence minister he oversaw weapons supply and the dispatch of advisers.
November 1942, the Planner of Operation Uranus
Aleksandr Vasilevsky was born into a priest's family in Novaya Golchikha on the upper Volga and was studying at a seminary when the First World War broke out; an accelerated officers' course carried him to the rank of staff captain. In the Red Army his talent showed less in field command than in staff work, and he caught the eye of Chief of the General Staff Shaposhnikov, growing into a mainstay of the General Staff's operations directorate. Because of his origins as a priest's son he long broke off contact with his father; his memoirs record that it was Stalin himself who later urged him to resume relations, and father and son were reconciled.
Appointed Chief of the General Staff in June 1942, Vasilevsky reported to Stalin that autumn, together with Zhukov, the concept for a counteroffensive at Stalingrad. While the attritional battle inside the city pinned the German Sixth Army, the plan called for breaking through the weakly held Romanian sectors on both flanks and closing a vast encirclement: Operation Uranus. For two months men and materiel were concentrated in secrecy, and Vasilevsky coordinated the preparations on the spot as the Stavka representative.
The counteroffensive opened on 19 November 1942, and within four days the pincers closed at Kalach, trapping some 330,000 men of the Sixth Army. Vasilevsky went on coordinating the great operations at Kursk, in the Crimea and in Belorussia as Stavka representative at the front. Moving between the General Staff's desks and frontline command posts, he was called the quietest of the planners of the Soviet victory.
9 August 1945, the Manchurian Strategic Offensive
In February 1945, when the commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front, Chernyakhovsky, was killed in action, Vasilevsky took over the front and in April reduced the fortress of Königsberg. After the German surrender his next assignment lay on the other side of the globe. As commander-in-chief of the war against Japan that the Soviet Union had promised at Yalta, he directed the largest strategic redeployment in history, moving forces from Europe to the Far East. Relying on the single Trans-Siberian railway, hundreds of thousands of troops and their equipment covered nine thousand kilometres in three months.
At midnight on 9 August 1945, one and a half million men in three fronts struck the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria simultaneously from three directions. The tank forces of the Transbaikal Front crossed the Greater Khingan range and the fringe of the Gobi, terrain judged impassable, and drove deep into the Kwantung Army's rear. It was the most complete realization of the deep operations theory the Red Army had developed through the whole war, and within some ten days the Kwantung Army lost the capacity for organized resistance.
The Manchurian operation is judged one of the factors that hastened Japan's decision to surrender, and it became a textbook of mobile warfare long studied by American strategists. Vasilevsky received his second title of Hero of the Soviet Union for the operation, served after the war as Chief of the General Staff and Minister of Defence, and on his death in 1977 was buried in the Kremlin Wall.