Months before Hitler invaded, Zhukov played the Germans in a war game and won
In January 1941, Georgy Zhukov commanded the invading side in a Soviet staff exercise and, by his own account, attacked along lines strikingly close to the real German assault that came that June. Weeks later Stalin made him chief of the General Staff. The peasant furrier's apprentice went on to take Berlin.
Zhukov was born in 1896 in Strelkovka, about 100 kilometres from Moscow, to a cobbler father and a mother who laboured on farms. After three years of primary school he was apprenticed to his uncle as a furrier in Moscow, studying at night. Conscripted into a dragoon regiment in 1915, he twice won the Cross of St. George. He joined the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution and fought in the Civil War in the cavalry, then worked his way up through cavalry commands and the Frunze Military Academy.
His reputation was made on the Mongolian border in 1939. Commanding Soviet and Mongolian forces against Japan's Kwantung Army at Khalkhin Gol, he launched a combined offensive of armour, artillery and air power on 20 August, encircling his opponents and driving them from the disputed zone within days. It won him the first of four Hero of the Soviet Union titles and exposed weaknesses in Soviet tanks that shaped later designs.
Accounts of the 1941 war games differ; the historian Bobylev describes two exercises and concludes that the side Zhukov led won both, while noting they never tested a surprise first strike. Vasilevsky recalled that publicity about the result fed an illusion that a pre-emptive offensive would be easy. A May 1941 deployment plan later found in Soviet archives has prompted some writers to argue for a planned Soviet first strike, but no evidence shows Stalin approved it, and Zhukov said in 1965 that he did not.
After Germany invaded, Zhukov lost his staff post by arguing with Stalin over defending Kiev, yet he then helped direct the Soviet efforts at Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, becoming a Marshal in 1943. In 1945 his 1st Belorussian Front drove through Poland to Berlin, and he accepted the German surrender. Stalin, wary of his popularity, sidelined him after the war. Restored under Khrushchev as Defence Minister in 1955, he was forced out again in 1957 and died in 1974.
Source: Georgy Zhukov
