Armageddon (25 page)

Yet, if the Red Army at last possessed hitting power and command skills as great as those of any combatant, its infantry and armoured assaults relied upon the sacrifice of lives rather than upon tactical ingenuity or even common prudence. To this day, Russian casualty figures are a source of perverse pride to many veterans. “Of course the Red Army was reckless with the lives of our men,” said Vladimir Gormin of 3rd Ukrainian Front. “Nobody knew how many died, and who cared, anyway? It was typical that there was always some grand operation on the great revolutionary holidays—1 May, 7 November, 23 February. Men died, simply so that a few generals could collect another medal.” By contrast with the Western armies, the Soviets adopted a cavalier attitude to the threat of encirclement. “The Shock Armies pushed on regardless of what was happening on their flanks,” said a Russian officer. “They got cut off by the Germans, sometimes for weeks, sometimes running out of fuel, food, ammunition. But they were expected to break out again.”

Lieutenant Tony Saurma, who fought the Red Army as a Tiger troop commander with the famous Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division from 1942 to the end, admired the stoicism of the Russian soldier. His unit often fought opposite the Soviet “Red Flag” Guards Division. Each side collected the other’s cap badges. But Saurma qualified his respect by saying: “The Russians didn’t think much. They were usually being driven by their officers.” The Germans feared the Soviet Stalin tank, but thought little of Soviet tank gunnery. In battle, Saurma sought to keep moving constantly. “It’s much harder to hit a running hare,” he told his own tank commanders. Like every German soldier, he was awed by the spectacle of the Red Army in attack. T-34s would approach six, twelve abreast. The Germans would knock out four or five, but there were always more. “You couldn’t believe the way they kept coming—their infantry simply charging our tanks, running and shouting, even when the bodies were piled up in front of our positions. Sometimes our infantry seemed paralysed by the spectacle. One thought: ‘How can we ever stop such people?’ ” Rolf-Helmut Schröder, a Wehrmacht officer who became a post-war Bundeswehr general, said: “The Russians were not good soldiers. But they had very good generals, and they had mass.”

The Nazis acknowledged an unwilling but profound respect for the Russians as adversaries which they never extended to the Americans and British. Deriding the Western allies’ lack of spirit, Hitler said at one of his military conferences: “The Russian—that pig—has managed it. If someone starts to whine among us, I can only say: take the Russian in his situation in Leningrad.” General Heinz Guderian, the Army Chief of Staff, agreed that the Russians were “brilliantly” led. Hitler marvelled: “The way they have survived this crisis [Leningrad]!” Göring interjected: “They let a million die of starvation.” Guderian said: “They lead very energetically, very quickly, and very decisively. It is a lot.” Stalin returned the respect of his adversary, once describing Hitler to Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins as “a very able man.”

The fastidiousness of the Americans and British about the lives of their men was admirable in humanitarian terms, and reflected the fact that the Western allies possessed strategic choices about where and when to confront the Germans. Delaying D-Day until June 1944 represented a prudent, even self-indulgent decision, of a kind that was denied to the Russians. They were forced to maintain an unbroken struggle from June 1941 to the end, because their armies were continuously in the presence of the enemy. It was necessary for somebody, somewhere, to pay a heavy price to break down the mass of the Wehrmacht. Who can imagine the democracies, in any circumstances, bearing a loss akin to that of the 900,000 citizens of Leningrad who starved to death to sustain its defence? Even if Britain had been invaded, the inhabitants of its cities would have chosen surrender rather than eat each other. American and British leaders and generals required a degree of consent from their soldiers and their peoples. It would be wrong to underrate the degree of consent even in Stalin’s Russia, the real patriotic passion that impelled most of its people to resist the Germans. In decisive contrast to the Russians’ military collapse before the 1917 Revolution, the national spirit of the Red Army grew with every day of war. But it would be foolish also to deny the compulsion which underpinned the Soviet war effort, reinforced by draconian and usually mortal sanctions against those who faltered.

In the autumn of 1944, Stalin’s armies faced the Germans on fronts totalling almost 2,000 miles—though now shortening fast—and embracing the soil of eight foreign countries. For both sides, it was a stupendous undertaking to maintain supplies of men, food, weapons and ammunition to the millions doing the fighting. In 1944, the Soviet supply system delivered the equivalent of 1,164,000 railway wagon-loads of supplies to the fronts, of which ammunition alone accounted for 118,000. Stalin’s armed forces consumed four million tons of fuel in 1944. Russia’s factories in the last year of war produced almost 30,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, together with 40,000 aircraft. The Red Army had travelled an immeasurable distance since June 1941, from the days when men were expected to arm themselves by seizing the rifles of the dead on the battlefield, Soviet airmen fought in biplanes and there were no tank radios. Private Vitold Kubashevsky of 3rd Belorussian Front remembered fighting through the campaigns of 1942 wearing
lapti
—boots made for his unit by local peasants out of birch-bark—and patched or washed clothing stripped from dead or wounded men.

American supplies made a critical contribution. It was often suggested in Washington and London that the Soviets were ungrateful. Stalin might have given the contemptuous response he once gave to Zinoviev, who made the same charge: “Gratitude? Gratitude is a dog’s disease!” Russians observed that America’s contribution to the war cost mere money. Russia was paying for her victories with blood, torrents of blood. Woven into the entire Soviet vision of the Second World War from 1941 to the present day, transcending any issue of mere ideology or propaganda, has been the conviction that the Western allies were content to wage war against the Nazis at their leisure, husbanding the lives of their peoples with bourgeois parsimony. Churchill observed, with justice, that Britain entered the war in 1939 as a matter of principle, and fought alone for almost two years, while Russia was content to play vulture on the carcasses of Hitler’s kills until Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It was impossible to dispute, however, that Stalin’s people were overwhelmingly responsible for destroying Hitler’s armies.

The remains of Germany’s Army Group Centre now stood on the Vistula less than 400 miles from Berlin. Marshals Rokossovsky and Zhukov held several bridgeheads westwards across the river, which repeated German counter-attacks had failed to dislodge. On the great Polish plain, the River Oder was the only major natural obstacle which remained between Stalin’s armies and Hitler’s capital. Yet the price of the Russians’ huge summer advances was that months of labour became necessary, to rearm and resupply Stalin’s armies before they could strike anew. Their difficulties in the autumn of 1944 mirrored those of the Americans and British on a larger scale and over much greater distances. The Russians customarily required three months after a big offensive on a given front before they were ready to hurl themselves forward once more. From Poland southwards to the Czech border, between September and the turn of the year there were no significant advances. Men on both sides dug, patrolled, rested as best they could, and harassed each other’s positions. Germans and Soviets alike recognized that this was a mere respite before a new and even more terrible battle.

Yet, even while the central front lay quiescent through the autumn months, bitter fighting continued in the Baltic states. The German Army Group North still possessed some powerful formations and commanders. Nine hundred thousand Soviet troops together with 1,328 tanks and self-propelled guns were deployed on a battlefront that sometimes extended to 750 miles. Advancing Soviet forces which broke through a German line repeatedly found the enemy retreating to new prepared positions a few miles back. The Wehrmacht’s appetite for counter-attack seldom faltered. Between 14 September and 24 November 1944, Stalin’s three Baltic Fronts suffered 103,946, 73,735 and 55,488 casualties respectively. The Leningrad Front added a further 28,776. The Germans were pushed back into Baltic enclaves at Courland and Memel, but the Russians failed to achieve the absolute destruction of the enemy’s forces which they had sought. Any rational commander would have pulled back German forces from the Baltic states to East Prussia and Poland, to provide desperately needed reinforcements for the defence of the German homeland. But Hitler, obsessive in his rejection of retreat, insisted that he must maintain a foothold on the Baltic coastline, as a testing centre for the new generation of U-boats. Through October and November, the Wehrmacht did so at dreadful cost.

Every Russian with a spark of honesty acknowledged respect for the enemy’s fighting power. “I was not surprised the Germans fought to the end,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “They did what we would have done. They were the only fighters in Europe who deserved our respect.” “They were wonderful soldiers,” said Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko, a Cossack. “The Hungarians, Rumanians, were nothing to the Germans. The German nation has a marvellous discipline, and they were very well trained. Russian history has always been entwined with that of Germany. Russians are good soldiers, but our culture is different. We had to teach ourselves how to fight—our training was poor. When we advanced, we often found ourselves outrunning our supplies. The Germans were better organized.” Yet none of this diminished his hatred for Hitler’s nation. “A soldier who hates the enemy is a good soldier,” said Timoshenko. Most of his schoolfriends were killed in the years of war—the rollcall of death was endless. Many of his old schoolteachers were slaughtered by the Germans during their occupation of his home district around Kuban. Like a host of Soviet soldiers, he entered the last phase of the war with the sense of a long, bloody score to pay off.

Through the autumn of 1944, the Soviets made dramatic advances in southern Europe. While the Western allies were closing up to the German frontier, in the east throughout September the 1st and 4th Ukrainian Fronts drove west, deep into Hungary, “a land so flat that you could have played golf on it,” as Lieutenant Valentin Krulik of Sixth Guards Tank Army observed laconically. Bitter fighting persisted through November and December, with the Germans in Budapest encircled and cut off by the end of the year. Most of the Hungarian population fled before the Red Army. One report to Stalin at the end of November described how when Soviet forces entered Kethemet, a town once occupied by 87,000 people, only 7,000 remained. The NKVD claimed that Hungarians fired on Soviet troops when they were obliged to withdraw during a local German counter-attack: “a Hungarian fascist shot a Soviet lieutenant with a hunting rifle.”

Such allegations were, of course, employed to justify savage retribution when Soviet forces secured an area. And as news of the Red Army’s ruthlessness spread, so the great migration before the Soviet advance increased in scale and desperation. “[Russian] soldiers’ conduct in this enemy country was influenced by the press, and by [political officers’] talks invoking hatred, and calling for revenge and retribution,” wrote Gabriel Temkin, an interpreter with 78th Rifle Division of Twenty-seventh Army. “The simplest way to avenge was to prevail over the enemy’s women, to satisfy a sexual need, while simultaneously retaliating for actual or perceived wrongs.”

While the qualitative superiority of the German Army to its opponents should be acknowledged by every student of the Second World War, it would be mistaken to imagine the Wehrmacht fighting with skill and imagination on all occasions. The gun in Tony Saurma’s Tiger of the Grossdeutschland once jammed in action, because his loader was drunk. Especially in the last months of the war, many German after-action reports contain cries of anguish about command follies and poor performance by untrained soldiers with inadequate support. A characteristic account from
Kampfgruppe Oelmer,
about an action at Tapiostentmarton on 11 November 1944, paints a sorry picture of incompetence. Oelmer violently protested orders from 13th Panzer Division to conduct a night attack with his Tiger battalion:

1. The wood was heavily occupied by the enemy . . . it was not possible, even in daylight, to push through it with Tigers without very strong infantry close support. 2. The terrain was very marshy, and it was impossible to leave the roads, especially at night. 3. Tigers on roads cannot even traverse their guns because of the trees, and if one tank was knocked out, it would become impossible for others to pass it. 4. Tigers cannot drive around at night five kilometres in front of our own main battle line on ground impassable for armour. 5. Last night’s forced march reduced the unit’s strength to six fully operational tanks, and one conditionally operational.

Despite heavy rain and pitch-black conditions, 13th Panzer insisted that the attack should go ahead. One Tiger soon threw a track, and two others became bogged down. A Russian anti-tank gun disposed of another, killing its crew. The remainder were soon immobilized by the terrain. “Working with this division was extremely disagreeable,” observed the German tank commander angrily. “Absolutely no attention was paid to the tactical principles for employing Tigers. When a vehicle carrying forward supplies broke down and a request was made for the loan of another for a few hours, the division’s senior staff officer refused, saying: ‘it’s your problem to get your own fuel forward! I’m not here to lug fuel for you!’ ” In the east as in the west, therefore, immense frustrations and setbacks dogged the operations of the German Army in the last year of the war. Not every German commander was a von Manstein, not every soldier a young Waffen SS fanatic. Yet the achievement of the Wehrmacht in resisting the Red Army against overwhelming odds, and amid such follies as that described above, remained remarkable.