Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  You have, of course, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man's soul, man's psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade – over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones? How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be… The important thing is that it fights Germans…10

  Stalin adopted the language of oriental despotism: the multiple rape and murder of captured women became nothing more than ‘fun with a woman’; looting was transformed into taking ‘some trifle’. Stalin did not order the Red Army to commit atrocities against the German population, but he did nothing to prevent it. Ordinary soldiers treated atrocity as routine, a cruel perquisite of war. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer in East Prussia in 1945 shortly before his arrest, later recalled without comment the attitude of his comrades: ‘All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced Russian girls, they could have been chased naked round the garden and slapped on the behind…’11 Only when this violence and disorder, generously fuelled by the many German wine cellars liberated from fascism, threatened military discipline did the tide of barbarism ebb.

  Red Army atrocities also owed something to the ferocity of the fighting for the last few hundred miles to Berlin . The Soviet casualty rate had dipped down sharply during 1944, but in the months of conflict on German soil the rate began to rise again. The offensive into East Prussia cost 584,000 casualties; in the battles from October 1944 to April 1945 a total of more than 319,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.12 Officers were under pressure to finish the war quickly and ordered tired and overstretched units to suicidal advances. German soldiers were under a general mandate from the Führer to stand and die. For Soviet soldiers and their families heavy losses so close to final victory were undoubtedly harder to bear. The conquest of Berlin called for the sacrifice of thousands more Red Army soldiers only days away from victory.

  At the beginning of February 1945 Stalin faced a dilemma. The capture of Berlin seemed within the Soviet grasp. Yet there remained islands of powerful German resistance at Königsberg, at Breslau in Silesia, at Poznan and the great Oder fortress at Küstrin on the approaches to Berlin. Zhukov's front reached the Oder on February 2, and the fiery Chuikov, who commanded the 8th Guards Army, the first to arrive and cross the river over treacherously thin ice, wanted to drive on to Berlin without stopping; he argued that the remaining German strongholds could be mopped up later. Whether the forces defending the capital could have coped at that stage with a sustained Soviet thrust is open to question. It was an attractive proposition for Zhukov, who was as eager as anyone to be the conqueror of Hitler's capital, but there were other factors to consider. The Soviet front line was by early February in a vulnerable position. To the north of Zhukov's armies lay a group of German forces in Pomerania. They consisted at first of a scratch SS force made up of office personnel drummed into combat and the dregs of other broken units. During January and February the force was strengthened with a view to mounting a spoiling action against Zhukov's exposed northern flank. Stalin was more than usually anxious about the rallying of forces in Pomerania. The babble of German radio signals caused by the large number of tiny remnants of military units was interpreted by Soviet intelligence as evidence of a much greater strength than actually existed. Further south in Silesia Konev's front had lost contact with Zhukov's, and German forces were rallying here, too. Beyond Konev, the struggles for Hungary and the approaches to Vienna were as fierce as anything in Prussia.

  Stalin bowed to military reality and abandoned an immediate thrust towards Berlin. On February 8 Konev began an offensive in Silesia to encircle Breslau and join up with Zhukov at the Oder. On February 10 Rokossovsky's armies in East Prussia were ordered to clear the Pomeranian threat. Two weeks later they were joined by Zhukov's forces, which to the Germans' surprise turned northward to clear the flank threat instead of advancing on Berlin. Fighting for the fortress of Poznan was not over until the central fort, the citadel, was stormed by Chuikov's men on February 20. At ten o'clock in the evening of February 22 the German garrison surrendered. Of 40,000 men, some 12,000 were fit for fighting. They marched out of the fortress into captivity, some of them shouting the words ‘Hitler kaput' wherever they went in the hope, perhaps, of better treatment by their captors.13 The struggle for the great island fortress of Küstrin also fell to Chuikov. Stalin had been told that Küstrin had fallen in early February. In fact it had not even been encircled. On March 22 the area was finally cut off by Soviet forces, which were then subject to a fierce counter-attack by a hastily gathered German force from Frankfurt an der Oder. These ramshackle divisions of ill-trained and over-age Germans were pushed out by Hitler in a last effort to stem the Soviet tide. On March 27 they attacked almost unprotected across open ground. Eight thousand were killed, sitting ducks for Soviet artillery. On March 29 the Küstrin fortresses were subjected to a gruelling bombardment. Then swarms of Soviet infantry in boats crossed the river to the island. Altogether, a thousand men of the garrison fought their way out to the west. By the afternoon of the 29th the island was in Soviet hands. When Chuikov telephoned Zhukov to report at long last the fall of Küstrin, he was asked: ‘Did you give it to them hot?’ ‘As hot as we could,’ replied Chuikov.14

  The cleaning-up of the Soviet front took much longer than Soviet leaders might have wanted, but it was an indication that Chuikov's idea of a rush for Berlin in early February might well have produced a messy ending rather than a clean punch. It was not until the end of the first week of March that Zhukov was summoned to Stalin to begin the planning for the Berlin operation. He found the Supreme Commander in a sombre mood, and uncharacteristically reflective. In his memoirs Zhukov recalled Stalin's words to him: ‘What a terrible war. How many lives of our people it has carried away. There are probably very few families of us left who haven't lost someone near to them…’15 It was one of the few occasions on which Stalin let down his guard. Zhukov recalled that he seemed close to exhaustion, ‘utterly overworked’. When they ate together, Stalin did not fall upon his food, as was his habit, but sat silently for a long time without eating. Eventually he sent Zhukov away with orders to begin at last the detailed planning for the Berlin operation. Zhukov sat with Antonov until deep into the night, putting the finishing touches to a plan which had been worked out in general the November before. On March 8 it was presented to Stalin, who approved it. Over the next three weeks the logistical services brought up the last trainloads of ammunition, fuel and food. The troops were redeployed to the Berlin axis as soon as the mopping-up operations were over. On April 1 Stalin summoned Zhukov and General Konev, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, to a conference in Moscow, where the detailed operational plans were presented and approved and the date for the operation fixed for April 16. Both Soviet fronts had only two weeks to complete the preparations for what Stalin hoped would be a showpiece campaign in front of his allies, who by then were no more than eighty miles from Berlin themselves.

  The operational plan was straightforward. Zhukov was to attack from the bridgeheads on the Oder with a frontal assault on the city over the Seelöw Heights; further to the north was a wide flanking operation, designed to bring Soviet forces around Berlin to attack it from the west. Konev's task was to drive his front towards Leipzig and Dresden, with his northern flank, next door to Zhukov, deployed north-westward towards the southern outskirts of Berlin to complete its encirclement. There was a good deal of rivalry between the two commanders for the privilege of delivering Berlin to Stalin. Their recollections of the meeting of April 1 were very different. Zhukov recalled that Stalin, looking at the two operational plans, told Konev that he should move into Berlin itself from the south if Zhukov got bogged down. Konev remem
bered no such instruction, though he did remember that when Stalin drew the demarcation line between his front and Zhukov's, he suddenly paused, erased the section to the south of the German capital and deliberately left the line unfinished. Konev took this as an invitation to join in the attack on Berlin if circumstances permitted, which he later did, to Zhukov's intense irritation. Another version of the story had Stalin announce to both commanders, ‘Whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin,’ but neither Zhukov nor Konev recalled his saying it.16

  Whatever the truth, the two men lost no time. Konev admitted that he had ‘a passionate desire' to seize Berlin. The two commanders arrived at Moscow's Central Airfield on the morning of April 3, and flew off only two minutes apart through a thick spring fog, which failed to lift throughout the journey.17 There then followed a little under two weeks of frantic preparation to meet the deadline of April 16. In all, twenty-nine Soviet armies had to reposition themselves, some moving more than two hundred miles over rail networks swamped with the demands for shells, bombs, fuel and fodder. The task of seizing Berlin was different from the campaigns that brought the Red Army across the Ukraine and Poland. Berlin was the largest city in Germany, 320 square miles of urban and suburban territory. Before the war it housed four million people; by 1945 the number was only half that, as the population fled from Allied bombing. Its geography made fighting potentially as difficult as Stalingrad. The area was criss-crossed with rivers and canals and surrounded by fortified strong points. Pressed into the defence of the capital were approximately one million men, of whom about three-quarters were regular front-line forces. They were supported by 1,519 tanks, 9,303 artillery pieces and small numbers of aircraft. Many of the defenders were young conscripts of fifteen or sixteen, or old men of the Volkssturm, a volunteer militia set up to defend the Reich. They crouched behind a network of rough fortifications – barricades of vehicles and furniture – or hid in the network of bunkers and pillboxes built as the Soviet threat came nearer. In their midst, in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery, was their Führer, Adolf Hitler, who wanted his people to share the final death agonies rather than surrender.

  Facing the German defenders was a solid wall of weaponry. Zhukov's front alone had almost 14,600 guns, with 7,147,000 shells in store, supported by seventy-seven divisions (reduced to about 4,000 men each), 3,155 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 1,531 rocket launchers. Over 2 million combat troops and 7,500 combat aircraft were assigned to the Berlin operation.18 Zhukov planned to push his units forward in a night attack, dazzling the defenders with a force of 143 searchlights. In front of him lay the Seelow Heights, rising to 200 feet above the Oder banks, with German guns that could fire across his whole field of advance. Zhukov was sufficiently worried by this threat to change the original plan to use his tank armies for a flanking attack; instead he concentrated his tank force for a direct assault on the Heights, behind Chuikov's 8th Guards. Stalin approved the change without demur.19 On paper Konev had a more difficult task than Zhukov. His men were exhausted from the long struggle for Silesia. They had been fighting heavily since mid-January. Their point of departure was the east bank of the Neisse river. They had to cross to the higher and heavily-defended west bank across a wide stretch of water. Konev relied on a careful reconnaissance of enemy firing points so that they could be neutralized by very precise artillery fire when the attack began.

  During the two weeks of preparation Stalin was faced by pressures from all sides. Rumour and counter-rumour circulated about the intentions of the Western Allies, only partly stilled by a direct message from General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the west, that his main axis was to the German south and north, leaving Berlin for the Red Army.20 The Polish issue became deadlocked over interpretation of the Yalta agreements on the composition of the Polish Government. On April 5 the Soviet Union revoked its non-aggression pact with Japan. On April 12 Roosevelt died. The response of the Soviet leadership seems to have been genuine grief and shock, not least at the loss of a man whom Stalin trusted a great deal more than he trusted Churchill. The Vice-President, Harry S Truman, a newcomer arriving at a very sensitive stage of the war's finale, was suspected of having anti-Soviet feelings. Expressions of sympathy and goodwill were extended by a ‘deeply distressed' Stalin to the American ambassador on the following day, but it was difficult to disguise the sense that Roosevelt's death symbolized the passage from fruitful collaboration to damaging distrust.21

  Berlin beckoned ever more powerfully. To his allies Stalin pretended that Berlin no longer held any strategic importance. He had no intention of revealing his immediate plans as disarmingly as had Eisenhower. By April 14 millions of men and thousands of guns and tanks were packed into a wide semicircle around the German capital. German troops manned the outer layer of eight defence fields between the Oder and the government quarter around the Tiergarten in central Berlin . The tension had a particular quality, like the tension Soviet troops had felt over three years before outside Moscow. Zhukov's forces were more exposed than usual, for there was little greenery, and the flooded, sandy soil made it impossible to dig deep trenches or foxholes. German searchlights and flares, hunting for Soviet positions, lit up the ground at night. By the final night Chuikov was in a state of high nervous tension, unable to sleep. ‘When you are awaiting great events,’ he later wrote, ‘time drags very slowly.’22

  Just before dawn Zhukov arrived at Chuikov's headquarters. At five o'clock precisely he gave the order to fire. The roar of thousands of guns was soon followed by the roar of bombs and bombers. Even without the searchlights, the view in front of Zhukov became like daylight. After half an hour, with no response from the German forward positions, Zhukov ordered a halt to the barrage and the first units moved forward. The result was chaotic. Zhukov's golden touch had deserted him. The 143 searchlights were duly switched on, but because of the dense smoke and dust the lights revealed little and their reflections dazzled advancing Soviet infantrymen. So concentrated was the bombardment that the ground was impassably churned up. The vehicles and guns were soon stuck on the narrow routes out of the bridgehead, piling up one behind the other. Worse still, the German forward defensive line had been abandoned, following information from a Soviet soldier captured near Küstrin on April 15. The German commander, General Gotthard Henrici, pulled his men back to the second defensive line, so that many of the bombs and shells fell on empty trenches and shelters. For Chuikov and the unfortunate Zhukov the battle soon became utterly obscured by a pall of thick dust that drifted over the command post when the wind suddenly altered direction.23

  If they had been able to see the battle it would hardly have cheered them. The attack faltered at the edge of a canal after just a mile. Armoured vehicles could not negotiate the steep sides of the Heights. By midday part of the front had not moved at all, and much of it was stuck at the foot of the Heights under constant bombardment. Zhukov then made one of his few errors, and a most conspicuous one. Ignoring the hard experience in using tank armies, which had taught that they should not be deployed until they could penetrate freely and break into the enemy rear, Zhukov ordered his two tank armies to move forward to speed up the conquest of the Heights. The problem was compounded, as Chuikov warned his commander it would be. The tanks blocked the roads already crowded with vehicles and men; when they reached the sandy, marshy ground they were forced to move at a snail's pace. As men and armour crowded into an area too small to support them all, the enemy was able to exact a heavy toll of both. Zhukov, so used to reporting rapid movement and instant success, had to telephone Stalin to tell him that the breakthrough he so coveted had failed. He was treated brusquely. Stalin told him that Konev had been more successful that day and that he would be ordered after all to move his tank armies northward to try to take Berlin from the south. Zhukov heard nothing more from Stalin for three days.24

  Zhukov needed swift success, but progress on the second day was sluggish, with more high losses. The rear areas were combed for replace
ments. Liberated prisoners of war were drafted, along with Russian labourers who in many cases had little or no military training. Soviet soldiers, like German, were taken from younger age groups as the Soviet Union scraped the bottom of the manpower barrel. Rising casualty rates reflected the poor quality of soldiers available. By the end of the second day the Seelöw Heights were stormed, but most of the defenders withdrew to the third line of defence, which had not been properly reconnoitred before the battle. On the third day Chuikov was obliged to breach this line, under heavy fire and an occasional counter-attack, with the two tank armies still bunched uncomfortably behind him. By April 20 the forward units at last reached the eastern suburbs of Berlin and, using small assault groups, began to push the defenders back block by block. The same day long-range artillery came within firing distance of the centre of Berlin. Zhukov's front began to recover its momentum. The northern flank now opened up the weak German defences in front of the city and swept around the capital to reach the Elbe river beyond it. Though the German forces in Berlin defended with fatalistic courage a city beyond saving, those spread out to the west of the capital, squeezed between enemy armies, were swiftly reduced to a feeble fighting force. In the capital itself Chuikov's men began to push towards its centre.

  Zhukov pressed his commanders to drive on. Once again he ordered his tank army to follow the infantry, this time into the city streets,

  Caption

  Map 11 The Assault on Berlin

  where mobile warfare was almost impossible and where the German anti-tank Panzerfaust gun exacted a heavy toll of Soviet armour. To cope with the threat, it was found that thin sheets of tin or iron set at an angle, or piles of sandbags, could be attached to the tanks to deflect the full impact of the new weapon. These devices gave a simple, crude but effective protection. Tanks were difficult to manoeuvre across the canals and rivers. They relied on the engineers, who, under heavy fire, threw pontoon bridges across each water obstacle. By April 24 Chuikov's forces had crossed the Spree and the Dahme rivers and were closing in on the central zones of the city. At six o'clock the following morning units approached the Schonefeld Airfield, only to find that there were Soviet forces already in occupation. They were units of General Rybalko's 3rd Tank Army, attached to Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front. When Chuikov reported the discovery to Zhukov there was consternation. Zhukov had asked his generals to keep a close eye on Konev's progress, but he seems to have had no idea that they had moved so far, so fast. When Zhukov himself confronted Rybalko only 300 yards from the Reichstag building he shouted, ‘Why have you appeared here?’25 The two fronts were now fighting side by side in southern Berlin; the race for Berlin took on a fresh meaning.