Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  On the next day Stalin replied that it was "very important to make use of our superiority in artillery and aircraft", for which clear weather was essential—and the weather prospects were bad—but "in view of the position of our allies on the Western Front, Headquarters of the [Soviet] Supreme Command has decided to complete the

  preparations at a forced pace and, disregarding the weather, to launch wide-scale

  offensive operations against the Germans all along the Central Front not later than the second half of January."

  On January 9, Churchill replied with overwhelming gratitude:

  "I am most grateful to you for your thrilling message. I have sent it over to General Eisenhower for his eyes only. May all good fortune rest upon your noble venture.

  The news you give me will be a great encouragement to General Eisenhower

  because... German reinforcements will have to be split."

  The Russian offensive was duly launched on the 12th—even earlier than Stalin had

  promised: five days later, Churchill cabled to Stalin thanking him "from the bottom of his heart" and congratulating him on "the immense assault you have launched upon the Eastern Front."

  Later, in February, in an Order of the Day, Stalin claimed that the Russian offensive had undoubtedly saved the situation in the West: "The first consequence of our winter offensive was to thwart the German winter offensive in the West, which aimed at the

  seizure of Belgium and Alsace, and enable the armies of our allies, in their turn, to launch an offensive against the Germans."

  Churchill, while quoting some of this correspondence, gives it rather less dramatic

  significance. He describes it, nevertheless, as "a good example of the speed at which business could be done at the summit of the alliance." Also, "it was a fine deed of the Russians and their chief to hasten this vast offensive, no doubt at heavy cost in life.

  Eisenhower was very pleased indeed."

  [Churchill, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 244. On the other hand, Chester Wilmot, in describing the military events in the West in December 1944-January 1945 in The Struggle for Europe greatly minimises the effect of the Russian offensive on the situation on the Western Front.]

  On January 14, two days after Konev's thrust from the Sandomierz bridgehead, the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov (Chief of Staff, General Malinin) struck out

  from their two bridgeheads south of Warsaw, and from another one to the north. After surrounding Warsaw, the two groups entered the Polish capital (or rather, its ruins) on the 17th. Units of the Polish Army took part in this operation.

  The timing of the Russian offensive on the middle Vistula appears to have come as a

  surprise to the German High Command. True, an eventual Russian thrust in the "Warsaw-Berlin direction" was to be expected, and the Germans had built seven defence lines between the Vistula and the Oder. But in January they expected that, before attacking here, the Russians would try to destroy the thirty German divisions trapped in Courland and also strike their heaviest blow in Hungary. The concentration of German forces along the middle Vistula was therefore not as great as it might have been. The enormous

  superiority the Russians achieved in this "sector of the main blow" may be gauged from the following figures quoted by the Soviet History.

  The 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts had 163 divisions, 32,143 guns and

  mortars, 6,460 tanks and mobile guns and 4,772 aircraft. The total effectives were 2,200,000 men. Thus we had in the Warsaw-Berlin direction [at the beginning of the offensive] 5.5 times more men than the enemy, 7.8 times more guns, 5.7 times more tanks, and 17.6 times more planes.

  [IVOVSS, vol. V, p. 57. This great superiority was, of course, far from being maintained throughout the subsequent fighting; with the Germans throwing in reserves, there was to be some extremely bitter fighting in many areas for the next four months, e.g. on the Oder, at Königsberg, etc.]

  Further north, the troops of Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front also struck out.

  By the 18th the whole picture was clear: Konev was overrunning southern Poland on his way to Silesia; Zhukov, central Poland towards the heart of Germany; Rokossovsky,

  northern Poland on the way to Danzig. Meantime in the south, General Petrov (4th

  Ukrainian Front) was advancing in the Carpathians and, in the north, Cherniakhovsky

  (3rd Belorussian Front) was breaking deep into East Prussia.

  A few dates and place names should suffice to illustrate the success of this offensive: January 18 Rokossovsky captured the fortress of Modlin. Konev captured Piotrkow.

  January 19 Konev captured Cracow, almost intact.

  January 20 Cherniakhovsky captured Tilsitt in East Prussia.

  January 21 Cherniakhovsky captured Gumbinnen, and Rokossovsky Tannenberg, also in

  East Prussia.

  January 23 Zhukov captured Bygdoszcz (Bromberg) and Konev broke into Silesia and

  reached the Oder along a forty-mile front.

  January 24-26 Zhukov captured Kalisz, "on the way to Breslau". Rokossovsky broke through to the Bay of Danzig, thus almost isolating the German forces in East Prussia; Konev broke into the Polish Dombrowski coal basin.

  January 29 Zhukov crossed the 1938 frontier into Germany, south-west of Poznan.

  Poznan, and its large German garrison, was encircled and, two days later, Zhukov

  penetrated into the province of Brandenburg, on his way to Frankfurt-on-the-Oder.

  That was the setting in which Hitler was "celebrating" the 12th anniversary of his accession to power—with the Russians inside the province of Brandenburg! One last

  obstacle, the Oder, and then— finis.

  There was panic in Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing along all

  roads to Berlin and beyond, in twenty-five or thirty degrees of frost. Many died by the roadside, and thousands were suffering from frostbite when they reached Berlin. If they were not, as a rule, strafed from the air, it was because among this torrent of refugees, with their lorries, horse-carts, hand-carts, babies and animals, there were also many non-Germans—war prisoners and slaves of all nationalities, who were being forcibly

  evacuated—away from the front, away from the Russians. Hospitals in Berlin were

  packed, the military barracks were almost empty, and the life of the capital was made an endless misery by massive air-raids from the West, the most devastating of which

  precisely coincided with this influx of refugees from the East. The most fearful were the thousand-bomber night raids at the beginning of February, which set miles and miles of the city ablaze.

  Before abandoning Tannenberg, the Germans blew up the immense Tannenberg war

  memorial and took to Berlin the remains of Hindenburg and his wife. "We shall put it up again when East Prussia is liberated", the radio announcer said dismally. But Ditt-mar, the "radio general", was saying: "The position on the Eastern Front is incredibly grave", and they were interrupting the programmes with announcements of Terrorbomber, here, there and everywhere.

  On January 30 Hitler himself spoke, lugubriously, like a voice from the grave. It was the last time his people were going to hear him speak. "By sparing my life on July 20, the Almighty has shown that He wishes me to continue as your Führer." No word of comfort, still less of apology came from him. Only: "German workers, work! German soldiers, fight! German women, be as fanatical as ever! No nation can do more." He then started prophesying how Europe, with Germany as her spearhead {an der Spitze), would yet defeat the hordes that England had called up from the steppes of central Asia.

  Meanwhile, thousands of refugees were chasing along the Autobahnen and other roads to Berlin, where nobody wanted them. Berliners, aided by the police and the SS, were

  driving them farther away—where to? 150,000 of those who had not fled to Berlin, fled to "impregnable" Königsberg, only to be trapped there, until the German garrison hacked a path through the Russian lines and they
could flee to Danzig along the icy wastes of the lagoon and the strip of snow-covered dunes. But, before very long, Danzig itself was going to be cut off by the Russians.

  The Russian offensive across Poland and deep into Germany was spectacular. The

  Germans retreated to the Oder, but leaving behind various garrisons for delaying actions.

  The largest delaying force was that progressively isolated in an ever-shrinking area of East Prussia; but there were also garrisons at Poznan, Torun and, later, at Schneidemühl and Breslau. A handful were still resisting desperately in the castle of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg. In their retreat through Poland the Germans destroyed what they could— railway bridges above all—but they had no time to destroy Lodz or Cracow, or

  the great sources of wealth that Silesia represented to the new Polish State.

  In many of the conquered towns of Germany there was a babel of tongues—French war-

  prisoners who had worked on the land ("It was we Frenchmen who ran the agriculture of East Prussia in the last two years," some of them later claimed); British prisoners, many of them survivors of Dunkirk and almost old residents; American newcomers—G.I.'s

  captured at Bastognes a few weeks before, who had gone into Germany from one end,

  and were now coming out at the other; Dutch workers, Belgian workers, French workers, Polish slaves, Russian slaves, Italians—not much better than slaves either —it was rather crazy, jolly and chaotic.

  Later, in March, I was to see many British, American, French and other ex-war prisoners who were being sent home by sea via Odessa. The first days of their liberation had been pretty rough-and-tumble, and each had some tragic, or comic, story to tell. A kind of real international solidarity had developed among them, and if things sometimes went wrong, as they were bound to do, it couldn't be helped. The Russian armies had plenty of other things to worry about but, by and large, the repatriation through Odessa was done as well as could be expected in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

  [Some had even arrived in Odessa with their "wives", mostly Ukrainian girls who had been deported to Germany. I saw six English lads with Ukrainian "wives"—they all claimed to have gone through some sort of religious marriage ceremony in Germany—

  and all six couples lived happily together in Odessa in a schoolroom. There was a seventh couple—a London lad with a German girl from East Prussia, a plucky young thing who,

  he claimed, had saved both his life and that of a Russian officer, who had thereupon given them his blessing. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian girls—rather raw village specimens they were—were not allowed to go to England with their Tommy husbands, and the poor

  plucky German girl was informed by the British repatriation authorities that her

  "husband" already had a wife in London.]

  *

  Despite the spectacular Russian advance through January and February, and great

  superiority in both men and every kind of equipment, the Germans were not cracking up yet. Ehrenburg's daily outbursts of gloating, mostly on the subject of "see-how-they-run", did not strictly correspond to the facts. I remember a Russian major saying to me: "In some places their resistance reminds me of Sebastopol; those German soldiers can be

  quite heroic at times." And a professional soldier wrote in Red Star in February: How fierce the battles are in the Poznan area may be judged from this episode: in one of the suburbs of Poznan some five hundred German soldiers and officers were

  cut off from the rest. Having entrenched themselves in a number of stone buildings, they continued to resist our advancing troops till they were nearly all destroyed.

  Only the last fifty Germans, who realised the uselessness of further resistance,

  surrendered.

  The Germans were certainly not easily surrendering to the Russians; their chief hope, except when trapped or left behind for delaying actions, was to get beyond the Oder. By the end of January the German losses since the beginning of the offensive were put by the Russians at 552 planes, 2,995 tanks, 15,000 guns and mortars, 26,000 machine guns,

  34,000 motor vehicles, 295,000 dead—but only 86,000 prisoners; and even this figure

  may have been an exaggeration. Throughout February, the Russian advance went on

  relentlessly. Every night the German radio played light music— what else were they to do? And then a male voice would say dismally that here was the report from the Fiihrer's headquarters: "After heroic resistance, Elbing has fallen... The enemy has broken into Posen and Schneidemühl... The Bolsheviks are suffering enormous losses. They lost

  7,500 tanks in the last month. But the V-bombing of London continues... " Then there would be atrocity stories about such-and-such little girls and somebody's 87-year-old grandmother having been raped. Next, another military march and again: Terror-bomber, Terrorbomber over such-and-such cities. Finally the same old baritone would then sing his little song: "Geht zu Bett und geht zu Ruh, geht dem neuen Morgen zu", ["Go to bed and go to sleep, until the morning comes".] or the Fräulein would wind up reassuringly, and yet rather conscious, one felt, of the silliness of the remark: "Good night, and sleep really well."

  The Russian press published many lurid accounts of Berlin, especially after the immense fire raid of February 4. But so far the big land offensive in the West had not yet started, and the Russians tried to push on as fast as they could.

  On February 1 Rokossovsky took Torun by storm, after a six-days' siege.

  On February 6, Konev forced the Oder along a wide front in Silesia and isolated Breslau.

  By February 9, Königsberg was almost entirely encircled, and a German prisoner was

  reported as saying:

  There is not much enthusiasm amongst the troops who have been ordered to defend

  Königsberg to the last. All are tired, and the soldiers are silently watching the panic among the civilians; it has a depressing effect on soldiers and officers alike. The city is full of gloomy rumours. All the schools, theatres and railway stations are packed with wounded. The civilians have been told that they must get out of Königsberg as best they can.

  On February 10 Rokossovsky took Elbing, and on the 14th Zhukov took Schneidemiihl,

  after several days' street-fighting. On February 23, after a month's siege, Zhukov took Poznan and its citadel, the last German stronghold there. General Chuikov, of Stalingrad fame, and a specialist in street-fighting took a leading part in the fighting there. 23,000

  prisoners were taken. That was the day on which the Allies launched their offensive in the west.

  A few days before, one of Russia's most brilliant young soldiers, General

  Cherniakhovsky was fatally wounded outside Königsberg. Marshal Vassilevsky took

  over the command of the 3rd Belorussian Front.

  During March, the war in the East became somewhat less spectacular than in January and February. Everywhere the Germans were resisting fiercely. Vassilevsky was battering at Königsberg which, reduced to a heap of rubble, was not going to fall until April 9.

  Zhukov's and Rokossovsky's troops were closing in on Danzig from different directions.

  By the middle of March Danzig was completely isolated, except by sea; on March 28

  Gdynia was taken, with its harbour wrecked, but its modern Polish-built town—called

  "Gothenhafen" during the German rule—more or less intact. Not so Danzig, which fell on March 30, after several days' fierce street-fighting. The beautiful medieval city had been reduced by then to a smoking ruin, but the Polish flag was solemnly hoisted on what was henceforth to be known as Gdansk. Ten thousand German prisoners were taken, but

  many more than that were dead. Many civilians in and around Danzig committed suicide, so great was the fear of falling into Russian hands. I was later to see a German Army leaflet printed during the last days of the defence of Danzig; it was full of last-ditch resistance slogans and stories of Russian atrocities, and it promised a mighty German counter-offensive. Signifi
cantly, there was no mention of Hitler in it.

  It was, more or less, the same at Königsberg. When it fell, 84,000 prisoners were claimed there, and 42,000 German dead, though the Russians also had lost many thousands of

  men. A few thousand half-demented civilians were still living among the ruins, among them many Russian war prisoners and deportees. Except for some minor mopping-up

  operations still to be done, East Prussia had vanished from the map by the middle of April. The country was to become partly Russian, partly Polish. Most of the Russian

  troops in East Prussia could now be moved to the Oder where, with the bridgeheads the Russians already held on its west bank, the stage was now set for the final onslaught on Berlin. Meanwhile, after the fall of Danzig, Rokossovsky was pushing along the Baltic towards Stettin.

  For a time, during that first half of April, attention shifted to the south. Even before the fall of Budapest in February, the "Democratic Government" of Hungary at Debrecen asked for an Armistice, and this was signed in Moscow on January 20 by Göngös, Weres and Balogh on behalf of Hungary and by Voroshilov on behalf of the three Allied

  Powers. As Red Star wrote on the following day:

  Hungary was Hitler's last satellite in Europe, and the most stubborn of all. Not until the Red Army had occupied a large part of Hungary did the Horthy Government

  feel obliged to break with Germany... But the Germans organised a coup d'état in Budapest and Salasi, a ruffian with a criminal past, and head of the Crossed Arrows

  [A Hungarian Nazi organisation.] , became head of the new puppet government... His aim was simply to defend Austria's frontiers with the help of Hungarian

  "volunteers". But even Hitler, in his New Year message, had to admit that the partnership was coming to an end.

  The Hungarian Democratic Government at Debrecen decided then to declare war

  on Germany and sued for an Armistice... The terms are generous, especially when