Armageddon (50 page)

Among the men of the Red Army, attitudes towards the nation’s leader were complex and various. Many soldiers avowed less respect for him than for Zhukov. “Stalin won the war, but he was responsible for so many deaths,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD was, unsurprisingly, a passionate admirer of his nation’s leader: “He saved the Soviet state. He possessed a very good mind and picked good people. The leaders of England and America did not have to fight the war with a fifth column in their midst. We did. Stalin destroyed our traitors. We were real communists in those days.” Yet for every party zealot like Romanovsky there were scores of men whose families had suffered badly at the hands of Stalin. Nikolai Senkevich, a Red Army doctor, often asked himself: “Is there no one to rid us of this cannibal?” His father, an illiterate Belorussian peasant, had died in the Gulag after being convicted of hoarding flax seed. His brother had served ten years in a labour camp for “political crimes.” Yet Senkevich would never have voiced aloud a harsh thought about Stalin. Corporal Anna Nikyunas said: “We were fighting for our country, not for Stalin.” Major Yury Ryakhovsky’s father told him: “You should obey Stalin not for what he is, but because he is the leader of our nation.” Ryakhovsky himself said: “Stalin seemed like a god to us.”

To the frustration of the Party, however, Christian religion still touched the hearts of many Soviet soldiers. Men and women in imminent danger of death reached out to a deity who promised a hereafter, rather than to a national leader likely to consign them there. “I often prayed to God for deliverance,” said Nikolai Ponomarev, who wore a crucifix through his entire front-line service. Corporal Anatoly Osminov always carried an icon given to him by his mother. He knew that he would have lost his Party membership if a political officer had heard about it, “but many men crossed themselves privately, and prayed for their lives. There was a little bit of religion somewhere in most of us.” Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev’s men liked to recall the Russian proverb: “We all stand together beneath the hand of God.” Seventeen-year-old Yulia Pozdnyakova had never been taught the words of any prayer, but when she found herself being bombed, she invented some.

H
ITLER HAD ALWAYS
opposed the building of fixed fortifications, on the ground that they discouraged the offensive spirit which he demanded from his armies. Yet in the weeks before the Soviets struck on the Vistula some 1.5 million German civilians were belatedly struggling in the snows to drive spades and mattocks into the frozen soil of the Reich from the Rhine to Königsberg, to create anti-tank ditches and trench lines against the Allied flood. In East Prussia alone, 65,000 people of both sexes and all ages and conditions were engaged upon defensive works, almost all of them futile. Hitler fiercely rejected Guderian’s proposal to withdraw the main German forces in Poland from the forward defence zone—the
Hauptkampflinie
—to positions further back—the
Grosskampflinie
—beyond the range of the initial Soviet bombardment. Germany’s warlord lost his temper when this was mooted, “saying that he refused to accept the sacrifice of 12 miles without a fight.” The
Grosskampflinie
was thus established only two miles behind the front, in accordance with the Führer’s wishes, beneath the immediate path of Soviet artillery. This was in absolute contradiction of German military doctrine, and destroyed the prospects of a successful counter-attack even before the battle began.

Worse, Hitler transferred to Hungary two of the fourteen and a half panzer and panzergrenadier divisions available to face the Russians on a 750-mile front from the Baltic through Poland, because of his obsessive anxiety about the Lake Balaton oilfields. “If something happens down there, it’s over,” he told Guderian. “That’s the most dangerous point. We can improvise everywhere else, but not there. I can’t improvise with the fuel. Unfortunately, I can’t hang a generator on a panzer [to power it electrically].” The Russians were delighted by this folly. “A very stupid disposition,” Stalin observed on learning of the German diversion of forces to Hungary. On 1 January 1945, the only major German armoured reserve on the Eastern Front was thrown into Operation Konrad, to relieve Hitler’s forces beleaguered in Budapest. The counter-attack came within sight of the Hungarian capital before it was halted on 13 January. Hitler’s obsession with Hungary caused seven of the eighteen panzer divisions available in the east to be deployed there, while four were in East Prussia, two in Courland and just five faced Zhukov and Konev. In January on the Eastern Front the Germans could deploy only 4,800 tanks against the Red Army’s 14,000, and 1,500 combat aircraft against 15,000.

Soviet propaganda loudspeakers blared music towards the German lines night after night of early January, to drown the engine noise of thousands of tanks and guns moving towards their start lines on the east bank, or preparing their breakout from the western beachhead already established at Sandomierz. Some of the men who occupied listening posts beyond the Russian lines, watching the Germans, lay prone all day in the snow. Only when darkness fell could they rise to relieve themselves, to force some movement back into paralysed limbs. Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko, one of the Red Army’s superbly skilled patrol leaders, spent Russian New Year’s Eve, 7 January, crawling for hours across the ice of a frozen river to reach German positions on the far bank. As always ahead of an attack, the Red Army needed prisoners. His patrol stormed a house where they had identified a German machine-gun post, killed three and captured three of the enemy, and returned across the ice before dawn. In the early days of January, such operations were repeated a thousand times along the entire front from East Prussia to Yugoslavia.

Until the very eve of Stalin’s assault, Hitler’s fawning military courtiers Keitel and Jodl continued to feed their Führer’s belief that the Soviet threat was a bluff. There were scant grounds for such a delusion. A steady stream of reports from prisoners and deserters—how strange it seems that Red Army soldiers were still deserting to the Wehrmacht in these last months—confirmed the scale of Russian preparations. “A deserter from 118th Guards Army at Baranov says the Soviet attack will start in three days, aims to reach the German border in a single bound, and will mask Cracow,” observed a Wehrmacht situation report sent to Berlin on 9 January. A prisoner from 13th Guards Division likewise declared that the attack would start in three days, and that the River Nida was his unit’s first objective. Another PoW from 370th Guards Division said his formation had been given the cheering reassurance that its assault would be preceded by a penal battalion’s “fighting reconnaissance.” Soviet mine-clearing, bridge-building and reinforcement on a huge scale were reported to OKH.

The deluge of foreign equipment which had descended upon the Red Army caused some difficulties for those obliged to use it, especially American radios. Yulia Pozdnyakova, a signaller, puzzled desperately over the English-language instruction manuals for the sets she was expected to operate, together with the English labelling on their controls and dials. To confuse matters further, she was attached to a Polish formation of the Red Army, most of whose men spoke little Russian. She was horrified at being ordered to wear a Polish uniform. Her own family were descended from old Russian nobility, and indeed her grandparents had fled from the Bolsheviks, never to be seen again. Her father died in 1930. She lived with her mother and stepfather until they were arrested for “political crimes” in 1940. She and her two sisters found themselves alone in Moscow.

When the war came, though she was only fifteen she enlisted in the Red Army, claiming to be two years older. She discovered a companionship in its ranks which had been entirely missing from her lonely childhood at home. “I always felt an orphan, but you cannot be entirely lonely when you are eating every day from the same soup pot as a lot of other people.” The soldiers called her “the kindergarten kid.” She had a good musical ear, a sense of tone and timing which proved invaluable in learning Morse transmission. Yet the campaign was always an experience of discomfort, fear and bewilderment for a girl of seventeen. “We weren’t living proper lives. We were simply surviving, and doing a job that had to be done.” Corporal Ponomarev said: “In January 1945 we could see the end in sight, which seemed wonderful.” He himself had been a soldier since 1940, fighting from Moscow westwards with all three Baltic Fronts at different times, twice wounded. Now, he yearned to finish the business and go home to Omsk to fulfil his ambition to become a doctor.

Though the Red Army was incomparably better supplied in 1944 than it had been earlier in the war, shortages remained endemic. Lieutenant Valentin Krulik’s unit found itself without lubricants for its weapons, and tried to substitute sunflower oil. This was not a success. All its tommy-guns jammed. The favoured Guards divisions were generally well provided, but lesser Soviet formations still relied heavily upon scavenging for equipment, vehicles and above all food. Early in 1945, units were given advance warning that they would be required to carry out the harvest on German territory when summer came, to reduce the requirement for bringing flour from Russia. As far as possible, the Red Army lived off the land, in the manner of European armies centuries earlier.

Its enemies, however, were in a far worse case. On 11 January, an OKW report on the condition of Germany’s forces acknowledged that morale was low in many units. On all fronts, there were serious shortages of clothing, machine-guns, motor tyres, trucks. Army Group E revealed that it had been forced to destroy much of its own artillery because it lacked means to move the guns; “the men’s ability to march is handicapped by the number of worn-out boots.” Fifteenth Army reported shortages even of mess-kits and horses. All units lacked men, and especially trained NCOs. Army Group Centre said that many replacements were inadequately trained in the use of weapons, and physically unfit. Klaus Salzer, an eighteen-year-old paratrooper, wrote home describing how a local farmer had invited him and some comrades for a great Christmas dinner—the last of his young life, as it happened—with chicken and pork and roast potatoes: “When you haven’t had a lot of food for ages and that sort of feast is put in front of you, it’s hard not to stuff yourself,” he told his parents. “A lot of us were horribly ill next day as a result.”

After an acrimonious argument about the deployment of reserves, Hitler surprised Guderian by becoming suddenly calm and declaring emolliently that he respected his Chief of Staff’s anxiety to strengthen the line in Poland. Guderian said bluntly: “The Eastern Front is a house of cards. If it is broken at one point, all the rest will collapse.” On 12 January, British Naval Intelligence sent a dispatch to London from Stockholm, detailing the latest information from agents about the mood inside Germany. Civilian morale had improved a little, said the report. There was optimism about the coming of the new jet fighters. There was no expectation of a new Allied push in the west before early summer, but a Russian offensive in south and central Poland was anticipated at any moment: “Germans who had hitherto held some hope of making terms with the Russians no longer count upon this possibility.” This was a prudent concession to reality. The Soviet Union indeed possessed no interest in negotiation with any faction inside Germany. Vengeance, the destruction of Hitler and the spoils of victory were the objectives of the vast armies which Stalin now unleashed. He professed to the Western allies that he had advanced the timing of his onslaught in order to ease their difficulties in the Bulge battle. In reality, the essential schedule of the offensive had been determined back in November. Churchill expressed Allied gratitude anyway. “May all good fortune rest upon your noble venture,” he cabled to Stalin. “. . . German reinforcements will have to be split between our flaming fronts.”

The Soviet offensive began with an assault by Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, from the western bridgehead across the Vistula some 120 miles south of Warsaw. The cold was even more brutal than on the Western Front in the Ardennes. Fog and intermittent blizzards cut visibility. At key points, 300 artillery pieces were allocated to a single kilometre of front. The bombardment began at 0435 on 12 January, directed against the positions of Fourth Panzer Army. The frozen ground was torn open in a thousand places. Houses crumbled to rubble. Bunkers collapsed on their occupants. The survivors lay stunned and traumatized by the cacophony unleashed by the Soviets. The assault began at 0500, with Soviet “forward battalions”—penal units—probing the German front, bypassing strongpoints and advancing up to half a mile beyond the outpost line. This was a mere reconnaissance, however, before a new barrage began at 1000, pouring fire upon the defences to a depth of six miles. This phase lasted almost two hours. The Germans estimated that the bombardment cost them 60 per cent of their own artillery and 25 per cent of their men, together with the destruction of Fourth Panzer Army’s headquarters.

The main Russian infantry attack began late in the morning, and by 1700 hours had advanced some twelve miles across the snowclad landscape. The Germans paid an immediate and heavy price for Hitler’s insistence that much of the German armoured reserve was deployed in the forward zone, within easy reach of the Russian guns. One Tiger unit was destroyed while refuelling. The commander of 17th Panzer Division was wounded and captured. On the second day, Soviet spearheads penetrated fifteen to twenty-five miles on a forty-mile frontage. LXVIII Panzer Corps ceased to exist, and German infantry fell back as best they could, covered by the surviving tanks of 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions. LXII Corps found itself being outflanked, and retreated on foot with the loss of all its heavy equipment.

“We now had to pay for our tardiness in retiring from the great salient which in any case was bound to be lost in the end,” wrote von Manteuffel, lamenting the belated transfer of his formations from the Ardennes to the Vistula Front; “. . . our troops were more tired even than we had expected, and were no longer capable, either physically or mentally, of coping with a tough, well-equipped and well-fed enemy. Replacements received in January were inadequate both in quality and quantity, being mostly older men or of a low medical category, and ill-trained as well.”