The Second World War
Page 60
Hitler orders retreat
Manstein, who had withdrawn his command post to Hitler’s old summer headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, travelled to Rastenburg twice during January to argue the case for withdrawal, but on both occasions it was refused. His Army Group South, moreover, fought stoutly to hold its front together against relentless attacks by the First and Second Ukrainian Fronts, now under Zhukov’s direct command, and at first gave ground less slowly than Kleist’s Army Group A. Assaulted by the Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts on 10 January, Army Group A was nearly encircled in its efforts to retain Nikopol and Krivoy Rog, and after Hitler issued formal permission for a retreat which could be no longer avoided it eventually escaped, at the expense of abandoning most of its artillery and transport. By mid-February, however, Army Group South was also in severe straits; two of its corps were encircled by Vatutin between the Dnieper and Vinnitsa west of Cherkassy and were rescued on 17 February only by concentrating all the available armour to help them break out. This operation by the First and Fourth Panzer Armies, which had previously halted a menacing thrust by Konev’s Second Ukrainian Front towards Uman, caused Manstein’s tanks to be wrongly placed to check a subsequent onset by the First Ukrainian Front south of Pripet. By 1 March the First Ukrainian Front had crossed the 1939 frontier of Poland, was menacing Lvov and was less than 100 miles from the Carpathians, southern Europe’s only mountain barrier against an invasion from the east.
There was a crisis too on the northern front, where Army Group North, now commanded by General Georg von Küchler, was attacked on 15 January. In a whirlwind advance three Soviet fronts, the Leningrad, Volkhov and Second Baltic, had moved to the assault and by 19 January had breached Army Group North’s defences in three places, widened the narrow corridor connecting Leningrad to the rest of Russia and liberated the city after a thousand days of siege; the blockade, which had starved a million Leningraders to death, was formally declared at an end on 26 January, when the city’s entire artillery fired a twenty-four-gun salute. Behind Leningrad, however, ran the only length of the projected ‘East Wall’ which had been brought to a state of completion. During the early stages of the Leningrad offensive Hitler withheld permission for a withdrawal into it, demanding that Küchler, whom he reproached with having the strongest army in the east, should fortify an intermediate position on the Luga river. As it became clear that time and resources lacked, however, on 13 February he was obliged to sanction a retreat to the ‘Panther’ line, as the East Wall along the line from Narva to Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov was denominated. The retreat, like the prospect of abandoning the Crimea, caused him acute political misgivings, since he believed – with reason – that it would encourage Finland to open secret negotiations with the Russians for a separate peace.
Hitler’s current difficulties remained military, however, not political. Zeitzler, his chief of staff, fed him with assurances in late February that 18 million Russians of military age had now been eliminated and that Stalin disposed of only 2 million in his manpower reserve; in mid-October Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Foreign Armies East section, had warned, by contrast, that the Red Army would in future ‘surpass Germany in terms of manpower, equipment and the field of propaganda’. Gehlen was right, Zeitzler wrong. The Red Army had now assembled exactly the sort of central armoured reserve which Hitler had allowed OKH to cast away in the cauldron of Kursk and was able to move it about the front as opportunity for breakthrough offered. By mid-February the Stavka had concentrated five of its tank armies opposite Army Group South; the sixth arrived at the end of the month. On 18 February Stalin issued orders for them to attack at the beginning of March: the First Ukrainian Front was to open the offensive on 4 March; the Second and Third were to join it on 5 and 6 March. Between them they outnumbered the Germans opposite by two to one in infantry and more than two to one in armour.
There was a last-minute impediment. Vatutin, commanding the First Ukrainian Front, fell into an ambush mounted by Ukrainian separatist partisans – combatants in a shadow war between Russians, Germans and Poles for local dominance over the Pripet borderlands which the onset of the Red Army was now making irrelevant – and was mortally wounded on 29 February. He was a grave loss to the Soviet high command; but his place was immediately taken by Zhukov, who, as at Stalingrad, exercised direct control of the coming offensive. It opened with one of the devastating bombardments which had become the signature of the Red Army’s operational methods ever since the enormous wartime expansion of the artillery. The First Ukrainian Front quickly opened a gap between the flanks of the First and Fourth Panzer Armies and rolled forward; the Fourth Panzer Army was encircled at Kamenets near Lake Ilmen and forced to break out. The Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts made even faster progress against the weaker forces of Army Group A. By 15 April they had broken and crossed all three of the river lines on which the Germans might have hoped to stand, the Bug, the Dniester and the Prut, had retaken Odessa and had left the Seventeenth Army isolated in the Crimea to their rear. On 8 April moreover, Tolbukhin’s Fourth Ukrainian Front suddenly enlarged its bridgehead on the Crimean Kerch peninsula, rolled forward, and surrounded the survivors of the Seventeenth Army in a small pocket around Sevastopol, exactly as the French and British had done to the Russians in 1854 – and Rundstedt to the Red Army in 1941. The Russian defenders of Sevastopol had held out heroically in the eight-month siege from November 1941 to July 1942. In early May 1944 Hitler conceded that he could not sustain the city’s defence and it was evacuated in four nights between 4 and 8 May; over 30,000 German soldiers were nevertheless abandoned within the perimeter and made captive when the Russians liberated the city on 9 May.
The spring offensive on the southern front had been a triumph for the Red Army. Between March and mid-April it had advanced 165 miles, overrun three potential defensive positions, recovered, if in gravely devastated condition, some of the most productive territory in the Soviet Union, deprived Hitler of his cherished strategic outpost and inflicted irreparable damage on Army Groups A, South and Centre. The Seventeenth Army, the garrison of the Crimea, had disappeared altogether, with the loss of over 100,000 German and allied Romanian troops.
The débâcle in the south had already prompted Hitler to impose a cosmetic change on the Ostheer there. On 30 March he had summoned Manstein and Kleist to Rastenburg, told them that what the southern front needed was ‘a new name, a new slogan and a commander expert in defensive strategy’ and announced that they were relieved. Manstein was to be replaced by Model, the general who had stabilised the Leningrad front on the ‘Panther Line’, and Kleist by General Ferdinand Schörner, an even more fanatical devotee of the Nazi regime and a consummate promoter of his own reputation. Thus at a stroke the two great Panzer breakthrough experts were removed, to be replaced by men whose capacity was for the ruthless subjection of their soldiers to orders and slavish obedience to the Führer’s authority. Zeitzler, also a disciplinarian, retained enough integrity to offer his own resignation at the news. Hitler refused it, with the warning, ‘A general cannot resign’.
In a wholly empty gesture, Hitler also ordered a few days later that Army Groups South and A were to be renamed North and South Ukraine respectively, in token of his stated determination to recapture that territory, of which none now remained in his possession. However, not only did he lack the means to mount any offensive or even to find the reserves to shore up a defensive battle; in the spring of 1944 he was faced with the threat of seaborne invasion in France and the reality of an Allied breakthrough in Italy. In the east it was Stalin who retained the strategic initiative and who, on the heels of his Ukrainian triumph, was planning a further offensive which would clear the Ostheer from the soil of Russia once and for all.
During May Stalin commissioned two of his senior staff officers, S. M. Shtemenko, General Staff chief of operations, and Timoshenko, representing the Stavka, to examine each sector of the Soviet front – 2000 miles long between the Baltic and Black Seas – and repor
t on possibilities. Their analysis was as follows: to persist in the advance towards the Carpathians, despite the political advantages of heightening the threat to Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and ultimately Yugoslavia, was dangerous because it would lengthen the flank presented to Army Group Centre. To advance from Leningrad down the Baltic coast would menace East Prussia but not the German heartland, and would also risk a counterstroke by Army Group Centre. By elimination, therefore, the desirable strategy was to wipe out Army Group Centre itself, which still occupied the most important sector of historically Russian territory and also guarded the route to Warsaw, on the high road to Berlin. To do so would require organisational changes, notably the reinforcement and division of the White Russian and Baltic Fronts which opposed it. However, given the Red Army’s new-found ability to concentrate strength rapidly on an altered axis, such a redeployment was feasible.
Operation Bagration
During April the ‘western’ theatre of operations was reorganised. The two White Russian and Baltic Fronts each became three. New generals were appointed, and senior commanders – Vasilevsky and Zhukov – were nominated to supervisory roles. Tank reinforcements and artillery reserves were concentrated on the White Russian fronts. Diversionary moves were co-ordinated at the extreme southern and northern ends of the whole theatre of operations – the latter not merely diversionary, since a subsidiary component of the summer offensive was intended to be a surprise attack designed to drive Finland out of the war. Finally, the First Ukrainian Front, south of the Pripet, commanded by the experienced Konev, was filled out with tank armies drawn from the other Ukrainian fronts to mount a long-range encircling manoeuvre round the Pripet Marshes into the flank of Model’s Army Group North and eventually against that of Army Group Centre itself. The operation was to be the most ambitious the Red Army had ever staged. All it lacked was a name; on 20 May, when Stalin received the detailed plan from the General Staff, he announced that it would be called Bagration, after the general mortally wounded at Borodino on the route between White Russia and Moscow during Napoleon’s invasion of 1812.
The attack on Finland by the Leningrad Front began on 9 June and, though mounted only with marginal force, soon consumed the tiny Finnish army’s reserves. On 28 July the Finnish President asked leave to transfer his office to the national leader, Marshal Mannerheim, who at once began negotiations for a separate peace. His approaches were to be answered at the end of August.
Meanwhile Stalin had set a date for the opening of Bagration. At Tehran the previous November he had assured Churchill and Roosevelt that the operation would be timed to coincide with D-Day. The date he chose was 22 June, the third anniversary of Hitler’s unprovoked and surprise attack on the Soviet Union. In the three preceding nights the Russian partisan groups based in Army Group Centre’s rear area busied themselves laying demolition charges on the rail lines which supplied its logistic needs; over 40,000 charges were exploded on 19, 20 and 21 June. Both OKH and OKW nevertheless discounted the possibility that these attacks supplied evidence of an offensive in preparation. Since early May the Eastern Front had been quiet, and Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East section insisted that such signs as there were indicated the preparation of a new offensive against Army Group North Ukraine; it was what Gehlen called ‘the Balkans solution’, precisely what the Stavka had rejected. The Luftwaffe, through its own intelligence service and reconnaissance flights, took a contrary view; it had established that 4500 Soviet aircraft were concentrated against Army Group Centre. Warning of this, which came to Hitler on 17 June, alarmed him and prompted him to order IV Air Corps, his last intact air striking force in the east, to undertake spoiling attacks. However, the Russian concentration was too large for any attack to be effective, and it was now too late to move ground forces to stand behind Army Group Centre’s front.
At 4 am on 22 June Bagration opened with a short artillery bombardment, behind which infantry reconnaissance units moved to the attack. Zhukov was anxious that the assault should not waste itself on empty positions. The real offensive developed next day, when heavier infantry waves supported by dense formations of aircraft pressed up to the main German defences, opening the way for the tanks in their rear. They were the vanguard of 166 divisions, supported by 2700 tanks and 1300 assault guns, against which Army Group Centre, on an 800-mile front, could oppose only thirty-seven divisions, weakly supported by armour.
The first German formation to suffer disaster was the Ninth Army, holding the southern sector of the army group’s front. It was threatened with encirclement by the First and Second White Russian Fronts on the second day of the offensive, and when, on 26 June, Hitler gave it permission to fall back east of Minsk to the river Berezina (on which Napoleon’s Grand Army had been savaged in 1812) it was too late. Its neighbour, the Fourth Army, was the next to suffer. Although also granted permission to withdraw on 26 June, it was trapped in a wider encirclement by the First and Third White Russian Fronts and devastated east of Minsk by 29 June. At the end of the first week of Bagration the three German armies which had stood in its immediate path had lost between them nearly 200,000 men and 900 tanks; the Ninth Army and the Third Panzer Army were shadows, each with only three or four operational divisions, and the Fourth Army was in full retreat. Hitler was now confronted with the prospect of a vast gap opening on the Eastern Front, and he was troubled simultaneously by other crises, great and small. The Allied landing in France had secured a foothold, Finland was crumbling, and his favourite general, Dietl, who had saved the situation in northern Norway in 1940, had been killed in an air crash while flying back to secure the German position in the Arctic on 22 June. On 28 June he replaced Field Marshal Ernst von Busch with the general who was emerging as his ‘fireman’, Model, at Army Group Centre, also leaving him Army Group North Ukraine as a source of reserves.
However, not even Model’s firefighting abilities could quell the conflagration which was destroying his army group. By 2 July he concluded that there was no hope of getting the Fourth Army back intact to Minsk, since it was now pinned against the Berezina, which the Second White Russian Front had already crossed at Lepel. He therefore concentrated his efforts on trying to hold open escape routes on each side of the city, but the rapid advance of Soviet armour – Rotmistrov’s Fifth Tank Army made thirty miles in a day down the Minsk-Moscow highway on 2 July – quickly quashed that plan. Minsk fell on 3 July while the Fourth Army stood encircled to the east; 40,000 of its 105,000 troops died trying to break out. After a last attempt to airdrop supplies on 5 July, the survivors began to surrender; the commander of XII Corps offered a formal surrender on 8 July; and by 11 July there was no further resistance in the pocket.
The encirclement of the Fourth Army effectively concluded the Battle of White Russia; the victory was formally celebrated on 17 July, when 57,000 captives were marched through silent crowds in the streets of Moscow to the prison camps. By then the spearheads of the Soviet attacking fronts were already far to the west of the ground where the captives had been made prisoner. On 4 July the Stavka had designated new objectives for each of them, on an arc which ran from Riga in Latvia to Lublin in southern Poland and touched the frontier of East Prussia. For the first time in the war the territory of the Reich itself lay under threat. During the second week of July they drove on; by 10 July Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, was in Soviet hands and the Third White Russian Front had set foot on German soil. On 13 July Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, with 1000 tanks and 3000 artillery pieces, opened its offensive by attacking Lvov, the old Austro-Hungarian bastion of eastern Galicia. A difficult objective, and strongly defended, Lvov fell on 27 July; by then Rokossovsky’s First White Russian Front had swung southward round the edge of the Pripet Marshes to reach out towards it. At the end of the first week in August the two fronts had reached the line of the river Vistula and its tributary, the San, south of Warsaw, while the First Baltic and the other White Russian Fronts had crossed the Niemen and the Bug, the Vistula’s northern tributary, to men
ace Warsaw from the other flank.
A sense of treachery oppressed Hitler at every hand. The common German soldiers remained loyal to him, but his officers, whom he had never trusted as a class, had begun to throw up traitors. The ‘Seydlitz’ group, formed from those who had surrendered at Stalingrad and gone over to the ‘anti-fascist cause’, had been active with radio and leaflet propaganda against Army Group Centre on the eve of Bagration; sixteen of the generals captured in its course were prevailed upon by the Russians to issue an ‘appeal’ on 22 July which alleged that its 350,000 lost soldiers had been ‘sacrificed in a game of chance’. Two days earlier Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had tried to kill him in his own headquarters, as the opening move in a conspiracy designed to replace the National Socialist regime with a government acceptable to the West. In the course of that day Zeitzler disappeared from his post as chief of staff; whether he was dismissed or simply fled has never been clarified. Then on 1 August the Polish Home Army seized the centre of Warsaw.
The motivation for the Polish Home Army’s rising in Warsaw was complex; so too was the explanation for the failure of the Red Army – by 1 August close at hand on the eastern bank of the Vistula – to come to the patriots’ rescue. On 29 July Radio Kosciuszko in the Soviet Union, run by Polish communists under Soviet control, had broadcast an appeal for an uprising and promised that Russian help was close at hand. The Home Army itself was caught in a dilemma: according to Erickson, ‘not to act meant being stigmatised a virtual collaborator with the Nazis or else being written off as the nonenity which Stalin insisted the Polish underground was.’ Stalin had his own satellite Polish army, the People’s Army, currently fighting in Operation Bagration. He also had an alternative Polish government, known in the West as the ‘Lublin Committee’, from the recently captured Polish border city where it had proclaimed itself. On 3 August Stalin met Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the Polish Prime Minister of the government in exile, who had come to Moscow for talks about future relationships with the Soviet regime. Stalin at first professed to be uninformed about the rising, then warned that he could not tolerate disunity between the ‘London’ and the ‘Lublin’ Poles, consistently refused facilities for British-based planes to supply arms to the insurgents, regretted that German counter-attacks near Warsaw made it impossible for the First White Russian Front (nearest to the city) to continue its advance, but finally assured Mikolajczyk, on 9 August, that ‘we shall do everything possible to help’.