Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  Willkie, said Zaslavsky, was using the phraseology of the "enemy camp"; and then he went off the deep end:

  It is high time it was understood that the question of the Baltic States is an internal Soviet matter which is none of Mr Willkie's business. Anyone interested in such

  questions should take the trouble to become acquainted with the Soviet Constitution and with that democratic plebiscite which took place in these Republics; and let him also remember that we know how to defend our Constitution.

  As for Finland and Poland, not to mention the Balkan countries, the Soviet Union

  will manage to thrash things out with them, without any assistance from Mr Willkie.

  Zaslavsky indeed thought it "most peculiar" and highly suspect that Willkie should dare suggest that a "crisis" among the United Nations might be approaching over this question of Russia's small neighbours.

  Appearing in Pravda a month after Teheran, this strident cry of "Hands off Eastern Europe", with its suggestion of a definite Russian "sphere of influence" was much more indicative of coming disagreements than Willkie's article to which Zaslavsky had so

  violently objected.

  All kinds of little pinpricks continued in the Soviet Press, particularly against the British; thus, in March, Pravda publicised a story of German war prisoners—now re-taken by the Russians—who had allegedly been exchanged for British war prisoners in North Africa

  on the understanding that they would not fight the British again, but were, however, free to go and fight the Russians.

  Above all, there continued to be a chronic irritation over the Polish Problem. The Russian offer to amend the Curzon Line in Poland's favour by giving her Bialystok and a large area around it failed to meet with any favourable response from the Polish London

  Government. This was also held responsible for alleged anti-Russian activities by the Armija Krajowa in Poland who wrote in their clandestine press that there was "nothing to choose between Hitler and Stalin", and who (the Russians alleged) even directly collaborated with the Germans by denouncing to them certain Belorussian underground

  leaders as Communists. It was also reported in the Russian press that General Anders had arrested fifty Polish officers in Teheran for wanting to join the Polish Army in the Soviet Union. Then, in January 1944, the Russians were greatly annoyed by the reservations and innuendos in the British and American press concerning the Soviet methods of

  conducting the investigation into the whole lurid business of the Katyn murders.

  However, with the Second Front in Normandy approaching, the Russian attitude to the

  West grew considerably more cordial, though the Polish Problem still continued to

  poison East-West relations, which became particularly strained at the time of the Warsaw rising in August. But, by October, the atmosphere again changed for the better, and

  Anglo-Soviet relations never seemed as overwhelmingly good as during the Churchill-

  Eden visit to Moscow that month. Even the most sceptical became convinced that, by that time, both Stalin and Churchill thought it expedient to remain on the best of terms, at least so long as the war with Germany was still going on. It was, indeed, not till some weeks after Yalta in February 1945 and very near the end of the war in Europe that the Polish Problem became acute again, only to go from bad to worse once the war was over.

  In 1944, with the end of the war in sight, a great deal of stock-taking began to be done by Stalin and the Party. The reconstruction and population problems in Russia required some long-term decisions; also, the ideological "deviations" and the Russian-nationalist departures from "Leninist purity" during the war—and, indeed, for some time before the war—required some serious adjustments. Finally, the very fact that millions of Russian soldiers were now fighting in "bourgeois" countries in Eastern and Central Europe raised a number of altogether new psychological problems. One of these was to be created by the Russian soldiers' first contact with the department stores of Bucharest.

  Chapter II CLOSE-UP I: UKRAINIAN MICROCOSM

  A "Little Stalingrad" on the Dnieper

  Nikopol with its manganese, Krivoi Rog with its iron ore, and the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine (i.e. the Ukraine west of the Dnieper) —that great colonial domain of Erich

  Koch and that future (if not present) No. 1 granary of the greedy Herrenvolk—it was not easy for Hitler to say goodbye to all these. Without them, Grüne Mappe [Göring's June 1941 "Directives for the Control of Economy in the Occupied Eastern Territories ".] and the rest of his superman blueprints were only fit for the waste-paper basket.

  At the end of 1943 the Russians had already eaten some distance into Right-Bank

  Ukraine. At the end of September and the beginning of October they had performed one of their most astonishing feats in the war: under cover of night, many thousands of men had forced the mighty barrier of the Dnieper at many points. They had done it s'khodu, that is, "on the march". No sooner had they reached the Dnieper than thousands rowed or paddled across in small craft, on improvised rafts, on a few barrels strung together, or even by clinging on to planks or garden benches. The Germans, who had boasted of their impregnable Ostwall on the right bank of the Dnieper, were taken completely by surprise.

  Their allegedly powerful fortifications along the whole length of the Dnieper had, in fact, not been built, and what fortifications there were had certainly not been manned in time.

  If any serious resistance came from the Germans anywhere, it was dealt with by the

  Russian artillery on the east bank of the river. In one place as many as sixty tanks, with all openings puttied up, actually advanced under water and forded the river. Enough

  Russians crossed the river to form a number of bridgeheads on the other side: Vatutin's troops established several in the neighbourhood of Kiev, and, further south, Konev's set up no fewer than eighteen; and though, in the next few days, seven were lost with very heavy casualties, the remaining eleven merged into one. As soon as the big bridgeheads had been firmly established, the Russians laid pontoons across the river, and German air attacks on these were usually successfully repelled thanks to the powerful concentration of Russian fighters. The Russians also used two brigades of paratroopers to set up the bridgeheads. At the Kremlin banquet during the Foreign Ministers' Conference in

  Moscow in October 1943, General Giffard Martel, head of the British Military Mission, said that no army in the world could have performed the feat of crossing the Dnieper as the Red Army had done.

  On the face of it, it looked like a reckless improvisation, but in reality the whole operation—barrels, garden benches and all—had been carefully planned in advance, and high decorations had been promised to those who particularly distinguished themselves in forcing the Dnieper: over 2,000 were, indeed, decorated afterwards. The Germans'

  "Maginot Line" on the Dnieper proved very largely a piece of bluff, and once the pontoons and ferries were completed, vast quantities of heavy Russian equipment were taken across the river, and, on November 6 the Russians liberated Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. Despite various ups and downs (such as Vatutin's temporary loss of Zhitomir, west of Kiev, later in November) the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts had, by January,

  captured substantial territories on the right bank of the Dnieper, Vatutin's 1st Ukrainian Front [ The former Voronezh Front.] having advanced along a wide front some 125 miles west of the river, and Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front some ninety miles. Still farther south there were Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front and Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front. These four Fronts were to liberate nearly the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine between January and the beginning of May 1944.

  Obviously over-rating their own strength, and under-rating the drive and skill of the Red Army, the Germans were still determined —or at least Hitler was—as late as January

  1944 to clear the Russians out of the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine—to begin with. With that end in view, they clung like grim death to their Korsun-Shevchenko
vo salient on the Dnieper, about fifty miles south of Kiev, and stretching some thirty miles along the west bank of the river. North of this relatively narrow salient were Vatutin's troops [On March 1,1944, General Vatutin was fatally wounded by a band of Ukrainian nationalists and

  Marshal Zhukov took over the command of the 1st Ukrainian Front on the following

  day.];

  south of it Konev's troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front (formerly "Steppe Front"). Hitler's plan was to attack the Russians from this salient both north and south of it, and so to recover the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine for Germany—a plan as unrealistic as so many other Hitler plans during the later stages of the war.

  The Russian command thought differently. Here, it seemed to them, was a golden

  opportunity of inflicting a "second Stalingrad" on the Germans—though admittedly, on a smaller scale.

  The similarities between the two operations were, indeed, striking enough. It was a case of encircling the German forces by the Russian northern (Vatutin) and southern (Konev) pincers joining somewhere west of the "bag", and of preventing the Germans outside it from breaking through to their encircled comrades. In this case, the rôle of Manstein was played by the German 8th Army under General Hube; the most important difference

  between the Stalingrad and the Korsun situation was that the Germans trapped at Korsun did try to break out, with the result that the Russians had to fight on "two fronts", as it were, on either side of the circle they had made round the "Korsun" Germans.

  On February 3rd the great news was announced that, after three days' heavy fighting the troops of the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, one striking south-east from Belaya Tserkov, the other, striking north-west from Kirovograd, had effected their junction near

  Zvenigorodka, and had thus cut off the large German "Korsun" salient. The German divisions had been encircled, and the sixteen-day battle to liquidate them began. On February 9, Gorodishche, inside the Korsun "bag", was captured; on the 14th, Korsun itself was taken, and although that day the German forces, trying to break through the ring from outside, made some slight advance, on the 15th their further attempts to break through were already "successfully repelled". On the 18th, the Germans were wiped out in the whole Korsun "ring". The Russians claimed 55,000 German dead and 18,000

  prisoners, 500 tanks, over 300 planes and much else.

  It was in February and the beginning of March that all the four Ukrainian Fronts came into violent motion. After liquidating the Germans in the Korsun Salient, Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front swept all the way into northern Rumania within a few weeks; north of it, General Zhukov's 1st Ukrainian Front, meeting with much suffer resistance (it was

  getting nearer Germany than any other) still advanced along a wide front as far as the Carpathians and almost as far as Lwow, capturing Rovno, Erich Koch's Ukrainian

  "capital" in the process. To the south of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, Malinov-sky's 3rd Ukrainian Front pushed on, in a spectacular sweep, to Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa,

  which they captured at the beginning of April; and Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front, after finally dislodging the Germans in February from the Nikopol bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper, undertook its spectacular reconquest of the Crimea.

  While Zhukov was crashing ahead in the northern Ukraine and Malinovsky along the

  Black Sea coast, on March 5 Konev launched his great offensive against the German 8th Army under General Hube—the "Manstein" who had failed to rescue the Germans trapped at Korsun. After a week's heavy fighting in incredibly difficult conditions (an early thaw had set in) Konev captured the town of Uman, Hube's principal base; after which the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front drove on to the Bug and beyond, not to stop until they had invaded Rumania the last week in March. They had covered a distance of over 250 miles in less than a month.

  It was soon after the liquidation of the Korsun "bag" and on the day after Konev's capture of Uman that I had the good fortune of being the only Western foreign correspondent

  authorised to visit the 2nd Ukrainian Front, where I spent one of the most illuminating weeks of all my war years in the Soviet Union. My principal companion was Major

  Kampov, an officer of General Konev's [He was to be promoted to the rank of Marshal

  later in 1944.] staff, who was to remain a life-long friend, and who was to become

  famous after the war as the novelist "Boris Polevoi".

  On March 12 I was flown in an army plane from Moscow across the Dnieper and over

  Cherkassy to a place called Rotmistrovka which had been, until February, in the northern part of the Korsun salient. On the following day I was to fly in a tiny U-2 plane to Uman, which had just been recaptured by Konev's troops.

  It was at Rotmistrovka that I first met Major Kampov. He looked pale and physically—-

  though not mentally—tired; his uniform was grubby, and the mud was splashed right up his army boots. For three years he had been at it; in the grim autumn of 1941 he had broken out of an encirclement in the Kalinin Province after losing most of his men; he had taken part under Konev in the heartbreaking Rzhev offensive in 1942; but now he

  had eight months of continuous victories behind him. He was slim, dark, and had grey laughing eyes with a quietly humorous expression. Maxim Gorki, in his youth, must have looked a little like him (except that one of his eyes was half closed as a result of shell-shock).

  "You couldn't have come at a better moment," he said, "do you know what happened today? Our troops have already crossed the Bug." This was great news. The Bug, on the way to Odessa and Rumania, was said to be one of the most heavily fortified German

  lines. (In practice, as I later learned, it was nothing of the kind, since before reaching the Bug the Germans had lost all their heavy equipment).

  The "Mud Offensive" was in full swing. It was one of the most extraordinary things that had happened; it was contrary to all rules of warfare. Barely three weeks after the

  liquidation of the German troops trapped at Korsun, Konev had struck out at a time when the Germans had least expected it. So deep and impassable was the Ukrainian mud.

  During that week in the Ukraine I was to hear—and, indeed see— a great deal of the

  "Little Stalingrad" of Korsun. Since then I have read both Russian and German accounts of the operation, and whereas, by and large, the Russian and German versions of what happened at Stalingrad coincide, there are some major differences in the two versions on Korsun.

  According to the official Russian History, the German troops still in the bag after a fortnight's heavy fighting, and after the failure of the Germans to break through from outside, made a final bid to break out of the encirclement on the night of February 16-17.

  Despite a violent blizzard, they were heavily attacked, first by artillery and mortar fire and by "light bomber planes", and then by machine-gun fire, and Russian tanks and cavalry.

  Only a small group of enemy tanks and armoured cars, carrying the generals and

  senior officers, succeeded, thanks to the blizzard, in breaking out of the

  encirclement in the Lisyanka area, leaving their troops to their fate. Before that, they had succeeded in evacuating 2,000 to 3,000 officers and soldiers by air. The whole operation ended in the liquidation of ten enemy divisions and one brigade.

  55,000 Nazi officers and soldiers were killed or wounded, and 18,000 taken prisoner.

  The enemy also lost all his equipment, all of which had a highly demoralising effect on other units of the German Army in the Ukraine.

  [IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 68.]

  German writers, on the other hand, have tried to minimise the disaster. According to Manstein [Op. cit., p. 585. There is also a detailed account of this battle in

  Mellenthin's Panzer Battles.] only six divisions and one brigade were encircled, totalling 54,000 men—a figure which the Russians challenge on the strength of German army

  documents captured at the time. Other German historians, such a
s Philippi and Heim,

  while (as usual) putting the whole blame on Hitler for trying to hang on to the "utterly useless" Korsun salient at all, claim that when the 50,000 encircled troops still left there attempted their desperate breakthrough on February 17, 30,000 got out, and some 20,000

  "were lost", besides the entire equipment of all the divisions that had been encircled.

  [The big margin between the German admission of a loss of 20,000 men and the Russian claim of 80,000 German dead, wounded or prisoners, is perhaps due to the Germans

  referring only to the " final" breakthrough attempt without taking account of the extremely heavy fighting that had gone on for a fortnight for the liquidation of the "bag".

  When the casualties the Germans suffered during this period are added to the 20,000 men lost on February 17, the Russian figure of 80,000 becomes much less improbable.]

  What is certain is that the breakthrough of February 17—unsuccessful according to the Russians, partly successful according to the Germans—was very costly for the Germans.

  In view of the conflicting post-war versions, it may be interesting to quote Major

  Kampov's very dramatic eye-witness account given me at the time.

  After describing how the Vatutin and Konev troops had formed their ring round the

  salient on February 3, Kampov said:

  "Having broken through with our tanks and guns and mobile infantry, we now had to face both ways in the 'ring'—and, for a time, this was very hard. We were shelled from both sides, and we had to attack unceasingly to widen our 'ring'—which, at first, was often only some two miles wide. Of course, we suffered very heavy losses. Even so, after six days, we had managed to widen the ring to nearly twenty miles at its narrowest point.

  "At the beginning of the encirclement the area of the 'bag' was almost 240 square miles, and for a long time we had to fight not only the troops inside, but also those outside—and these amounted to no fewer than eight Panzer divisions.

  [Seven, according to Philippi and Heim.]