In 1943 and 1944 the Volga Germans were joined by a stream of other nationalities from the areas bordering the Black Sea and the Caucasus: the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Balkars, Kalmyks and Meskhetians. Some had indeed collaborated with the invaders and done so willingly. The rest were found guilty by association. Beria encouraged Stalin to act and was instructed to proceed with their collective punishment. The operation in Chechnya was carried out with military precision. In February 1944 NKVD troops entered the tiny republic as if on a military exercise. On the evening of February 22, the annual Red Army Day, the population was assembled in the village squares to celebrate. The crowds were suddenly surrounded by NKVD troops and the deportation orders read out to them. Scuffles broke out as unarmed Chechens fought to escape. Some were shot down. The rest were ordered to pack at once, no more than a hundred pounds of baggage per family. Heavy snowfalls and frost hampered the operation, but within twenty-four hours most of the Chechen population was loaded into trucks and trains, destined for Siberia. In one township those left behind were gunned down, buried in pits and covered with sand. It says much for the invincibility of the national spirit that the Chechens retained their identity in exile and rebuilt their national homeland when they were finally allowed to return home after 1956.27
In all over one and a half million men, women and children were uprooted from their homes. It has been estimated that as many as 530,000 died from the bleak conditions of the journey and the inhospitable new homelands, though the figures recently made available from the NKVD archives give a death total of 231,000, more than one-quarter of those deported between 1943 and 1949.28 Their possessions were looted by NKVD troops. Attempts to escape from exile were punished with twenty-five years in the camps. The local NKVD commanders of the exiled communities became petty monarchs over their new kingdoms; their subjects were restricted in everything they did: their choice of jobs, their education, their movements. They even had to petition the commander for permission to marry. The Crimean Tatars were singled out for the harshest treatment, as some of them were still fighting alongside the German army when the Crimea was liberated. Estimates of the number of victims vary. Of the 400,000 claimed by Tatar leaders to have been deported, almost half were said to have died within eighteen months.29 Beria reported that 191,000 were deported, of whom 52,000, or 27 per cent, had died by 1949. When the round-up in the Crimea was over, Beria wrote to Stalin asking for medals for NKVD troops ‘who have distinguished themselves' in the war against the ‘traitors to the fatherland’; 413 were awarded.30
The other war, against the real enemy, was still to be won. During the winter months the liberation of Kiev was followed by almost continuous campaigning to clear the southern front of German troops. In January Konev organized the seizure of the last element of the Dnepr line, which Hitler wanted to hold at all costs. The German salient was subjected to a sophisticated Soviet assault, which demonstrated how, even in harsh winter conditions, the newly learned art of mobile warfare could be deployed to deadly effect. By a brief deception, Konev succeeded in blinding the German defenders to his intentions. A limited attack on the south part of the salient masked the movement north, in complete secrecy, of the larger part of his forces. On January 24 his forces struck suddenly and ferociously. The German front was pushed back three miles, and the 5th Guards Tank Army moved through the Soviet infantry to exploit the breach and open the way to the German rear. Two days later another tank army on the north-west part of the salient cut through to join the 5th Guards and encircle the German forces in what became known as the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket. Leaving a thin outer cover to preserve the encirclement, Konev's troops, in bitter weather, cut into the pocket, reducing it step by step. Four Panzer divisions were mobilized to rescue the trapped Germans; they succeeded against an inexperienced tank army in breaking into the outer ring, but the concentration of air power (orchestrated at Stalin's insistence by the commander-in-chief of the Soviet air force himself) and the supply of fresh reserves blocked the relief column.
In mid-February, in fierce blizzards, the surviving troops in the pocket were flushed out by an incendiary attack that burned down the township sheltering them. The German commander, General Stemmermann, ordered his men to breakout, marching in two columns across the bare, snowy landscape. Unaware of what lay in wait, they set out to try to reach the relief force. As they moved forward into open terrain without a sign of the enemy, they relaxed. Some shouted out, others fired their automatic weapons. Suddenly, as from nowhere, Konev released his forces in a terrifying finale. The German columns were caught in the open with no heavy weapons. Soviet artillery blasted them and tanks crushed them beneath their tracks while a Cossack cavalry unit hunted down the German soldiers, slaughtering them with their sabres as their ancestors had done in generations of service to the Russian crown. ‘It was a kind of carnage,’ recalled one eyewitness, ‘that nothing could stop till it was over.’ Survivors tried to scramble clear, but of the 30,000 who had set off across the snow, 20,000 were dead, including Stemmermann, who had refused an earlier Soviet offer for him to surrender, and 8,000 were taken prisoner. Stalin was reported to be delighted with the massacre; Konev was promoted to marshal, but the hero of the initial encirclement, Nikolai Vatutin, blamed by Stalin for the time it took to reduce the pocket, received no acknowledgement. He died a few weeks later from wounds received in an ambush by Ukrainian separatists on February 28.31
By May 1944 most of the Ukraine and the Crimea had been liberated in a series of heavy, concentrated blows by the six major tank armies, led by Zhukov and Konev. The Red Army now stood on the Romanian frontier in the south and threatened to break through the Carpathian mountains towards Hungary. Further north, Leningrad was at last freed from its ordeal, despite a clumsily executed operation in which Soviet commanders, after years of trench warfare, failed entirely to grasp the new tactics of armoured penetration and exploitation that had served so well at Kursk and beyond. On February 26 Leningrad was formally declared liberated. The main obstacle still facing Soviet forces in 1944 was the large concentration of Axis forces in Belorussia. The German Army Group Centre withstood the winter offensives and inflicted heavy casualties. It was here that the Soviet leadership decided to unleash the largest operation yet undertaken by the revamped Red Army.
The military campaigns on the eastern front in the last year of the war were larger than any of the earlier operations. This was thanks largely to a very great increase in the size of the Red Army and air force. By the end of 1943 the large German losses, the growing threat from bombing (which forced the Germans to divert two-thirds of their fighter force, one-third of their artillery and 20 per cent of all ammunition to the defence of the Reich), and the likelihood of an invasion of Western Europe combined to produce a steady decline in the forces available to stop the Soviet army.32 The 3.1 million Axis soldiers in the east faced almost 6.4 million of the enemy; the 3,000 German aircraft were vastly outnumbered by the 13,400 they opposed; their 2,300 tanks could not match the 5,800 Soviet machines. During 1944 the gap continued to widen. At the Stavka Stalin's commanders knew that they enjoyed a decisive advantage. The object was to make that advantage tell against an enemy skilled in active defence, with battlefield weapons of the highest quality, and whose troops and commanders were now fired by the same fatalistic defiance the Red Army had shown in defence of its own country. Soviet commanders wanted to finish the war as swiftly as possible and to do so with less prodigal use of men and equipment. Stalin, for his part, was motivated by more than the desire to bring his enemy down. Poised to begin the march into Eastern Europe, he was aware that the Soviet Union would soon be in a position to reconstitute the German ‘New Order’ in the Soviet image.
In March 1944 the Soviet General Staff and the State Defence Committee began a thorough assessment of the whole front to establish where the next blow should be struck. Even Stalin had come to accept that ‘general offensives’ did not work, even with a clear numerical advan
tage. The General Staff view was that offensives should be mounted one after another against attainable objectives. This allowed forces to be concentrated and kept the Germans guessing about the main locus of attack. By May the decision was made to mount an assault on Field Marshal Ernst von Busch's Army Group Centre, which was the only significant force still on Soviet territory.33 It was stretched out around Minsk in a giant salient whose shape earned it the nickname Belorussian Balcony. The German army expected the main assault in the south, from the Ukraine, where most of the Soviet armoured forces were concentrated. The success of the attack on Belorussia depended, as so often on the eastern front, on persuading the enemy that the main attack was to come somewhere else.
The Soviet summer offensive in this sense closely resembled the vast amphibious Operation Overlord, which American and British Empire forces were preparing in the west. The invasion of northern France, scheduled for May or early June, was critically dependent on success in shielding from German eyes the exact location of the main invasion force and the intended landing site. It says little for the German intelligence network that both operations, east and west, managed to achieve complete surprise. On the Soviet side the plan of concealment was given the topmost priority. Only five people knew of the operation as a whole – Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Antonov, Shtemenko and one of the deputy operations chiefs. Any correspondence between them by letter, telephone or telegraph was forbidden. Reports from the front were handled by no more than two or three people, who reported in person. No one else was told anything more than he needed to know for his particular part of the plan. No definite date was set until shortly before the last stages of preparation.34
The deception extended right along the Soviet front line. In May commanders were ordered to go ostentatiously over to the defensive to give the impression that the Red Army was digging in and consolidating, after almost nine months of continuous activity. Major radio stations were closed down all along the front, and a cloak of complete radio silence was imposed. An entire dummy force was set up further to the south, like the phantom force set up in southern England opposite the Pas de Calais, to give the impression that the southern flank was the one under threat. The fake force was given added credibility by the stationing of anti-aircraft artillery to ‘protect’ the dummy tank and gun parks, and by flying regular fighter patrols overhead. In the north, on the Baltic front, a second dummy force was constructed. German intelligence swallowed the deception. Air reconnaissance was difficult, given Soviet air superiority – except in those areas which the Soviet commanders wanted the Germans to see. The network of native spies and informers, on which German intelligence had relied in the past, dried up as the Red Army moved closer. In the late spring, just weeks before the Soviet attack, the German head of military intelligence in the east told Army Group Centre to expect ‘a calm summer’.35
This intelligence ranks as one of the worst blunders of the war. The German commanders expected their enemy to take the easy route, to the south, and retained their persistent belief that Soviet forces were not capable of mounting large and complex operations against experienced German troops in entrenched positions. The success of the Soviet deception plan rested not only on the competence with which it was mounted, but on the willingness of the enemy to be duped. By the time the attack on Army Group Centre began, Soviet intelligence knew that the deception had worked. German forces were stronger in the south and in the far north; the centre had a tough outer shell, but inside it was hollow.
The Soviet plan for the summer was to have five separate offensives unfolding in sequence. The first offensive was to be in the north, a limited assault on the Soviet-Finnish border to break the Finns' resistance and to lure German reinforcements to the Baltic states. The second and third offensives were to be launched by the Western Front (which was divided and renamed the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts) against the main German concentrations around Minsk. This was the core of the main operation; it was designed to allow a further exploitation towards the Baltic coast and East Prussia if the German front collapsed. The fourth offensive was then to be undertaken by Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front towards the Polish cities of Lvov and Lublin to try to cut off the retreating forces of Army Group Centre. The final offensive, to be commenced only when the central objectives had been gained, was in the far south, against Romania and the Ploesti oil fields.36
The planning was designed to avoid unnecessary risks; each stage of the offensive was intended to create conditions to make possible its successor. The key was the assault on Minsk. The two fronts primed to attack the main German concentrations were unobtrusively reinforced with men and stores. So secret was the coming campaign that the units were not told where they were going or why. Trains heading for the front were cordoned off when they stopped en route and the men allowed off only in small groups under constant watch. Train engineers were not told where they were heading, only the number of the train they were to drive.37 As the plan unfolded it became clear that the two main fronts were too weak for the task they had been set. With no single tank army, they lacked the mobile striking power needed for a rapid breakthrough. In the last days of May they were given Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army, which had played a dramatic part at Kursk. On May 20, Stalin hosted a final top-level meeting in the Kremlin, in which the whole enterprise was placed under critical scrutiny. The start date was set between June 15 and 20. The operation lacked a name. Stalin was asked for his view, and he selected the name ‘Bagration’, a hero of the war against Napoleon in 1812 and a fellow Georgian.38
German forces were faced in May 1944 with the prospect of countering two offensives, one in the west, one in the east. For neither of them did they have any clear view of the size of the forces they would be fighting, where they would come or when. In the Soviet Union the constant disappointments about the second front had produced a widespread cynicism about Western intentions. The tone was set by Stalin himself, who on the very eve of Overlord still doubted Western resolve: ‘What if they meet up with some Germans! Maybe there won't be a landing then, but just promises as usual.’39 Second-front jokes were widespread in Moscow. ‘What is an Old Believer?’ asks one Russian. ‘A person who still believes the second front will open,’ replies another.40 The second front did open. On the morning of June 6 the Western Allies invaded the beaches of Normandy; by the evening they had secured a narrow bridgehead on the coast. That night Moscow's restaurants were crowded with celebrants. On June 7, Pravda carried news of the operation across four columns, with a picture of General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander in the West. But after that the news died away. Newspapers carried small, matter-of-fact reports on ‘Military activity in Western Europe’. The tone of the press was, according to a British journalist posted in Moscow, carping and condescending.’41 The general view was that the Normandy campaign was being waged with insufficient vigour; Western success was widely attributed to the fact that most German divisions were still deployed on the Eastern Front.
This point at least was true. In the east Germany and her allies had some two hundred and twenty-eight divisions, compared with fifty-eight divisions in the west, only fifteen of which were in the area of the Normandy battle in its initial stages. More manpower and anti-aircraft artillery were deployed against bombing in the Reich than were available in France. The German army was well aware of the greater threat. There was no major movement of manpower westward to cope with the invasion of France. The Allied bridgehead in Normandy was contained, though not eliminated, with the troops already there. The first attack in the east followed a few days later. The initial assault was a feint, part of the plan of deception to confirm German suspicions that the main attacks would come in the north and south, not against Army Group Centre. On June 10 the campaign began against the Finns. Soviet forces had learned from the mistakes of the Winter War. This time they prepared the ground with sufficient thoroughness that they were able to achieve their limited goal with a third of the casualties suffered in 1939. Further so
uth Zhukov and Vasilevsky, assigned to co-ordinate the main attacks, supervised the final preparations. Troops were trained and retrained. It was found that the exercises lacked conviction when they were played out with dummy bullets. Zhukov ordered them to use live ammunition. Almost a million tons of supplies and 300,000 tons of oil were ordered from the rear.42 Delays in the movement of tank reinforcements pushed the date for Bagration back to June 22, the third anniversary of the launch of Barbarossa.
In the event the start of the new campaign was less coherent than might have been expected from the months of secret preparation. The ‘mighty avalanche’, as Shtemenko called it, began with the usual trickle of stones and ice.43 Nevertheless, the destruction of Army Group Centre showed how effectively the lessons of the first two years of warfare had been learned. It was perhaps the best example of Soviet operational art at work during the war. The campaign bore a strong resemblance to the ‘deep operations’ of massed aircraft and armour first outlined by Tukhachevsky in the early 1930s. First of all, on the night of June 19 partisan units began a systematic assault on the German communications web, knocking out a thousand transport targets and crippling the German system of supply and redeployment. This was followed by air attacks of furious intensity. On the eve of the anniversary, June 21, Soviet bombers launched co-ordinated air strikes against the German rear areas. The German 6th Air Fleet could muster, according to one German account, only forty operational fighters.
Some of the bombing strikes were carried out by women pilots flying at night in biplanes with open cockpits. Despite some resistance from male aviators, by 1944 women were introduced in larger numbers to actual combat. The 46th Guards Women's Night Light-Bomber Regiment was run entirely by women, from armourers to pilots and mechanics. Twenty-three of its members became Heroes of the Soviet Union. Other women served in the army; by 1945 there were 246,000 women in uniform at the front. Few concessions were made. The 1st Belorussian Front boasted a chief gynaecologist, but sanitary and medical amenities for women at the front were rudimentary or non-existent.44 Male comrades and officers expected women to bear the same hardships that they did, while the women themselves often volunteered for more hazardous work to prove themselves to the men.
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