Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  [This is the Russian figure; the Germans speak of " 140 rifle divisions, plus forty-three panzer and mechanised formations {Verbände)" (Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 247).]

  The campaign, starting along a 450-mile front (which was to extend later to over 600

  miles) was conducted by four fronts:

  1st Baltic Front under General Bagramian,

  3rd Belorussian Front under General Cherniakhovsky,

  1st Belorussian Front under General Rokossovsky,

  2nd Belorussian Front under General Zakharov.

  The first two were under the general command of Marshal Vassilevsky and the last two under that of Marshal Zhukov.

  The Russians made no secret of the fact that this was, in a sense, their revenge for 1941

  and that it was they who now had enormous superiority over the Germans, with 166

  divisions (including reserves) in Belorussia, 31,000 guns and mortars, 5,200 tanks and self-propelled guns, and at least 6,000 planes. Their superiority over the Germans was: 2

  to 1 in men; 2.9 to 1 in guns and mortars; 4.3 to 1 in tanks; and 4.5 to 1 in planes.

  [IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 164. German sources put the Russian superiority even higher.]

  This looked, indeed, like 1941 the other way round! In the breakthrough areas, the

  density of artillery was often as much as 320 guns per mile. For several weeks enormous reserves of ammunition, petrol and food had been accumulated behind the Russian lines; 100 train-loads had been arriving daily for the four Fronts, besides large quantities brought by lorries (chiefly American). A large fleet of motor ambulances was in

  readiness, as well as hospital accommodation of 294,000 beds for the wounded.

  [Ibid., p. 166.]

  A fleet of 12,000 lorries was in readiness to transport 25,000 tons of ammunition, petrol, etc., to the advancing troops in a single journey. It was—with the possible exception of Kursk—the most thoroughly prepared of all the Russian operations, with everything

  worked out down to its finest detail, and nothing left to improvisation, as had been the case in the past, even at Stalingrad, chiefly because of serious shortages in equipment and motor transport.

  One characteristic of the Belorussian campaign was the very important part played by the partisan formations behind the German lines. Despite some particularly savage German punitive expeditions against the Belorussian partisans in January-February 1944, and again in April, with massacres of entire villages (for example, the village of Baiki in the Brest province where 130 houses had been burned down and 957 people massacred on

  January 22, 1944), the partisans of Belorussia still constituted an appreciable armed force of 143,000 men on the eve of the offensive. There was close coordination between the Red Army Command and the partisans who succeeded between June 20 and 23, in

  putting practically all the Belorussian railways out of action—precisely what the Red Army needed to paralyse the movement of German supplies and troops.

  From the very start, the Russian offensive was tremendously successful. Between June 23

  and 28 the four Russian Fronts broke through the German lines in six places, and

  encircled large German forces at Vitebsk and Bobruisk. Tens of thousands of Germans

  were killed and some 20,000 taken prisoner in these two encirclements alone. After the Germans' loss of the Vitebsk-Orsha-Mogilev-Bobruisk line, Hitler sent a frantic order to hold the Berezina line. But in this the Germans failed completely. Striking out from north-east and south-east, the Russians entered Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, on July 3, and in the process encircled large German forces in a vast "bag" east of Minsk—a total of about 100,000 men, the majority of whom surrendered. Some 40,000 were killed or

  wounded, but 57,000 Germans, with several generals and dozens of officers at their head were marched in July 17 through the streets of Moscow. The purpose of this unusual

  procedure was to disprove both the German claims of a "planned withdrawal from

  Belorussia", and suggestions in the British and American press that if the Russian campaign in Belorussia was a "walkover", it was because large numbers of German troops had been moved to fight the Western Allies in France.

  That parade of 57,000 Germans through Moscow was a memorable sight. Particularly

  striking was the attitude of the Russian crowds lining the streets. Youngsters booed and whistled, and even threw things at the Germans, only to be immediately restrained by the adults; men looked on grimly and in silence; but many women, especially elderly women, were full of commiseration (some even had tears in their eyes) as they looked at these bedraggled "Fritzes".

  I remember one old woman murmuring, "just like our poor boys ... tozhe pognali na voinu (also driven into the war)".

  The Russian soldiers fighting in Belorussia did not, on the whole, feel quite so charitable towards the Germans. Everywhere the retreating Germans had tried to destroy as much as they possibly could. At Zhlobin, the Russians saw a trench with 2,500 corpses of newly-murdered civilians, and it is estimated that well over a million people had been murdered in Belorussia during the German occupation— among them the entire Jewish population

  and many hundreds of thousands of partisans and their "accomplices", including women and children.

  Most of Belorussia, and the country east of it between Smolensk and Viazma, had been turned into a "desert zone". In the spring of 1944, anticipating a probable withdrawal from Belorussia, the Germans had ordered that the winter crops be ploughed under, and had tried to prevent spring sowing. They even devised special rollers to destroy the crops.

  Practically all the cities were in ruins. It is true that with nearly sixty percent of the rural areas more or less under partisan control (and even jurisdiction, complete with Soviet administrative and party organs) these orders could not be put into effect in many places.

  General Tippelskirch, Commander of the 4th German Army which took part in the

  Belorussia retreat, later referred to "a vast wooded and marshy area from the Dnieper nearly all the way to Minsk which was controlled by large partisan formations, and was never in three years, either cleaned up, still less occupied by German troops."

  [K. Tippelskirch. Istoriya vtoroi mirovoi voiny. [Russ. ed.] p. 445.]

  Nevertheless, the Germans succeeded in turning most of Belorussia into a "desert zone".

  In the villages (according to Russian figures) over a million houses were destroyed; and when I travelled through Belorussia, shortly after the German rout, there was extremely little livestock to be seen.

  Here (as distinct from the Ukraine) a large number of young people had evaded

  deportation by joining the partisans; but even so, 380,000 had been deported from

  Belorussia to Germany. The destruction in the cities was appalling: nearly all factories and public buildings had been destroyed, and at Minsk the majority of all other houses had been burned down, too. If the large Government House and some other public

  buildings and nineteen out of 332 industrial enterprises had survived, it was only because they had been rapidly de-mined as soon as the Russian troops had entered the city. In Minsk alone 4,000 delayed-action bombs, mines and boobytraps had to be unprimed. The Red Army was full of admiration for those engineers "who never made more than one mistake."

  The "bagging" of 100,000 Germans east of Minsk meant that the Red Army had torn a 250-mile gap in the German front, and that the road was now almost clear into Poland and Lithuania.

  On July 4, even before the final liquidation of the Minsk "bag", the Soviet Supreme Command set new targets for the four fronts fighting in Belorussia: they were to advance, within a very short time into eastern Latvia, Lithuania, and on to Vilno, Kaunas, Grodno and Brest-Litovsk, and to force the Niémen in several places, with a subsequent advance to the East Prussian border and (farther south) into Poland.

  The Red Army continued to advance at great speed, covering between ten and fifteen


  miles a day; on July 8 Baranovichi was taken; on July 13 Vilno fell to the troops of Cherniakhovsky, on July 18, Rokossovsky's troops crossed into Poland, and on July 23, captured Lublin—an event of far-reaching political consequences. On July 28 they

  captured Brest-Litovsk, and the whole of Belorussia was cleared of the Germans.

  According to the Germans themselves, the Russian offensive in Belorussia was the

  gravest defeat ever inflicted on the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Between twenty-

  five and twenty-eight German divisions were destroyed, a loss of at least 350,000 men. In the words of the Official Journal of the OKW the rout of Army Group Mitte (in Belorussia) was "a greater catastrophe than Stalingrad."

  [ Kriegstagebuch des OKW, IV-I, pp. 13-14.]

  This figure of twenty-five divisions or 350,000 men lost occurs in other German post-war accounts. Thus, Guderian speaks of the "destruction of Army Groupe Mitte" and of "the total loss of some twenty-five divisions." The events, he says, were "so shattering" that

  "Hitler moved his headquarters in mid-July from Obersalzberg to East Prussia."

  [Guderian, op. cit., p. 336. Philippi and Heim speak of twenty-eight divisions and

  350,000 men.]

  The routing of Army Group Mitte in Belorussia had created highly favourable conditions for other Russian army groups to come into action. On July 13 the 1st Ukrainian Front under Konev started its Lwow-Sandomierz operation; in the north, the 3rd Baltic Front liberated Pskov on July 18 and broke into southern Estonia; the 2nd Baltic Front broke into southern Latvia, while the 1st Baltic Front under Bagramian, after capturing Yelgava (Mitau) broke through on July 31 to the Gulf of Riga at Tukkum, thus cutting off the whole of the German Army Group Nord in Estonia and Latvia from the rest of the German forces. However, three weeks later, the Germans succeeded in hacking out a

  twenty-mile corridor south of the Gulf of Riga and thus partly restoring land

  communication between Army Group Nord and western Lithuania and East Prussia.

  Although, in Belorussia and eastern Lithuania the Russians had scored one of the greatest victories of the war—and one from which the Germans could never recover—their

  further progress from about July 25 to the end of August was much slower for a number of obvious reasons: long-drawn-out communications, fatigue among the troops, and the throwing in of heavy German reserves against the Russian attempt to advance both

  beyond the Niémen into East Prussia, and along the Narew and upper and middle Vistula into central Poland. By the end of August, when most of the operations between Yelgava in Latvia, and Jozefow, a hundred miles south of Warsaw, came to a standstill by order of the Soviet Supreme Command, the front ran about half-way across Lithuania, then a short distance from the eastern border of East Prussia, and then, roughly, along the Narew and Vistula into central Poland.

  *

  By this time Poland had become the scene of the most dramatic military and political events. On July 23, the left flank of Rokos-sovsky's 1st Belorussian Front, including the 1st Polish Army, had already liberated the ancient Polish city of Lublin. On July 31, the blunted spearhead of the right flank of the same 1st Belorussian Front reached "the outskirts of Praga" across the Vistula opposite Warsaw; on August 1, the Warsaw Uprising of the Armija Krajowa under General Bor-Komarowski began.

  Chapter VIII WHAT HAPPENED AT WARSAW?

  It was shortly before the beginning of the Warsaw tragedy that events of far-reaching political importance took place in the Russian-liberated parts of Poland.

  As we have seen, Lublin was liberated by the Russians on July 23, and two days later the Soviet Foreign Office published a statement on the attitude of the Soviet Union to

  Poland; simultaneously a Manifesto was published, dated July 22 and signed at Chelm (a frontier town inside Poland), announcing the formation of the Polish National Liberation Committee, before long to be known as the "Lublin Committee".

  The Russian statement said that the Red Army, together with the Polish Army fighting on the Soviet Front, had begun the liberation of Polish territory. The Soviet troops, it continued, had only one object: to smash the enemy and to help the Polish people reestablish an independent, strong, and democratic Poland. Since Poland was a sovereign state, the Soviet Government had decided not to establish any administration of its own on Polish soil, but had decided to make an agreement with the Polish Committee of

  National Liberation concerning the relations between the Soviet High Command and the Polish administration. The statement added that the Soviet Government did not wish to acquire any part of Polish territory or to bring about any changes in the social order of Poland, and that the presence of the Red Army in Poland was simply necessitated by

  military requirements.

  The Rada Narodowa (the "underground parliament"), in a document dated "Warsaw (sic), July 21", issued a decree, which was published in Chelm on the following day, in the first issue of the "official" paper, Rzeczpospolita, ordering the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation.

  The principal members of the Committee were:

  President and Chief of the Foreign Affairs Department: E. B. Osöbka-Morawski.

  Deputy-President and Head of the Department for Agriculture and Agrarian

  Reform: Andrzei Witos.

  Deputy President: Wanda Wassilewska.

  Head of National Defence Department: Col.-Gen. M. Rola-Zymierski.

  His Deputy: Lt.-Gen. Berling.

  There were fifteen other appointments, among them that of S. Radkiewicz, the notorious head of security, and five whose names were not disclosed, since they were still in

  German-occupied territory.

  The Committee's "Manifesto" stated that it had been nominated by the Krajowa Rada Narodowa, "a body comprising representatives of the Peasant Party and other democratic elements inside Poland", and "recognised by Poles abroad—in the first place by the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR and by the Polish Army formed in the Soviet

  Union." It denounced the London emigre government as a "usurper" government that had adopted the "fascist" constitution of 1935. The National Committee, on the other hand, recognised the "democratic" constitution of 1921 until the Constituent Assembly met and decided otherwise.

  The Manifesto emphasised the new era of Slav unity; it said that the frontiers between Poland and the Soviet Union would be settled on an "ethnical" basis and by mutual agreement, and that, in the west, Poland would regain her old territories in Silesia, along the Oder, and in Pomerania. East Prussia would also be included in Poland. The 400

  years of fruitless enmity between the Slav peoples were now at an end, and the Polish and Soviet flags would wave in the wind side by side as the victorious troops marched into Berlin...

  The Manifesto then enumerated the various items of the reconstruction programme, and stressed the need for a general land reform. On nationalisation it was cautious; it said that the Polish State would take over large enterprises now run by the German State and

  German capitalists, and, "as economic relations were being regulated, property would be returned to its owners." All this was still exceedingly vague.

  The Manifesto said that comradeship-in-arms would strengthen Poland's friendship with Great Britain and the USA, and that Poland would strive to maintain her traditional bonds of friendship and alliance with France.

  The personnel of the National Committee was a rather mixed bunch; Dr Drobner—head

  of the Department for Labour and Health—for instance, was a right-wing Socialist; Witos was (like Mikolajczyk) a veteran leader of the Popular Peasant Party (he was soon to be eliminated); but the key positions were obviously held by men of the PPR (the

  Communist Party)—to which Bierut, the President of the Krajowa Rada Narodowa, at that time also belonged. Osöbka-Morawski was made President of the Committee—not

  perhaps because he was an outstanding personality, but because he was one of the fe
w Socialists available. This was freely admitted (much later, it is true) by many of the PPR

  men.

  On July 23 a number of decrees were issued by the Rada Narodowa—one establishing a High Command of the Polish Army, another placing the Union of Polish Patriots under

  the authority of the National Committee, and so on.

  We now come to one of the most controversial episodes of the war in the East—the

  tragedy of the Warsaw Rising of August-September 1944. The "London-Polish" version of what happened is too familiar to need recalling in detail. Bôr-Komarowski, the leader of the uprising, has told his story of "Russian treachery"; so has Stanislas Mikolajczyk in his Rape of Poland [ See his Chapter VI called "Betrayal".] Mikolajczyk's book in particular, keeps on referring to General Rokossovsky's headquarters as "only a few miles" outside Warsaw, and to the Red Army as being "in the suburbs of Warsaw from which it wouldn't budge." The fact that Warsaw and the Red Army were separated by a wide river, the Vistula, is only very incidentally referred to. His implication is that the Vistula was no serious obstacle and that, if they had wanted to, the Russians could easily have captured Warsaw, and so saved the city from destruction, and also saved many of the 300,000 Poles who were to perish in the two-months' fighting-cum-massacre inside the city. If the Russians did not capture Warsaw, it was not, according to Mikolajczyk, because they could not do it, but for purely political reasons: it did not suit them to have the Polish capital "liberated" by a popular rising, directed by Bör-Komarowski and other

  "agents" of the London Government. Both Bor-Komarowski and Mikolajczyk make the most of the following facts: (1) a Moscow broadcast at the end of July specifically calling on the people of Warsaw to rise against the Germans; (2) the Russian refusal to allow planes from the west that had dropped supplies on Warsaw to land on Russian airfields, and (3) the lack of proper Russian support for the gallant attempt of the Polish troops under General Berling to force the Vistula in the immediate neighbourhood of Warsaw, and the disciplinary action taken against Berling for failing to hold the bridgehead, or rather, for making the attempt at all.