Armageddon (51 page)
On 14 January, forty-eight hours behind Konev, Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front launched the principal thrust of the offensive, breaking out of its two small bridgeheads west of the Vistula. On the first day, his men advanced twelve miles into the positions of the German Ninth Army. By the night of the 15th the Russians had reached the Pilica river, which they were eager to secure before the enemy could stabilize a line behind it. Infantry crossed the ice, but it proved too thin for vehicles. Engineers fortunately discovered a ford, and blew holes in the ice to open a path. Six tanks and two assault guns were abandoned in the river after their engines flooded, but two dozen Soviet tanks reached the western bank. By nightfall on 15 January, Soviet bridgeheads west of the Vistula were linking up across a front of 300 miles. Zhukov’s leading tanks and infantry had advanced sixty miles from their start lines. Hitler’s Army Group A was reduced to ruin.
The Germans mounted repeated counter-attacks with tanks, assault guns and infantry. All failed. It is impossible not to contrast the manner in which the Russians brushed aside German spoiling operations with the checks to which the Americans and British submitted in similar circumstances. The Germans considered the Western allies absurdly nervous about their flanks. Again and again on the Western Front, local counter-attacks caused assaults to be broken off. Russian aggressiveness was indeed sometimes punished by the encirclement of their spearheads, but Russian forces became accustomed to this predicament and were relatively untroubled by it. Men spoke with pride of having survived two, three, four encirclements. Sooner or later, either the isolated troops broke back to re-establish contact with the Soviet main positions or a relieving force fought its way through to join the spearhead. In the early days of the Vistula offensive, poor weather restricted Russian air support. But the entire operation demonstrated the Soviets’ mastery of the setpiece attack; their dash in exploiting success and their resolve in dismissing counter-attacks.
Alexandr Sergeev, one of Zhukov’s gunner officers, found the mood of the Red Army at this time quite different from that which he had known in the years of struggle for the motherland and the long winter lull in Poland. “In the trenches, we all knew each other intimately. We were together for a long time. Now, people seemed to come and go so quickly. We once got a new battery commander whom I never even met, because he was killed so quickly. His replacement was shot by a sniper a few hours after he arrived. I lost ten replacement gunners in a single morning. At this stage of the war, some of them were very poorly trained.” Yet Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko, fighting further north with 2nd Ukrainian Front, said: “Morale was very high.”
As early as 15 January, OKH’s war diary acknowledged: “The Russians have achieved their breakthrough. It is to be feared that within two days they will have reached the Upper Silesian border. The forces of Army Group A are hopelessly inadequate . . . the divisions moved from the west by the Führer on the 13th will not arrive before the 19th, which will be too late.” Army Group A reported: “The battle in the Vistula salient continues at undiminished intensity, and threatens a major crisis . . . 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions are no longer coherent forces, having lost all their tanks . . . Our available forces have been gravely weakened. We are conducting piecemeal withdrawals to more secure positions. These movements are still in progress, and details are not available.” Details were unnecessary. The overarching reality was that the remains of Hitler’s armies on the Vistula were retreating in disarray. On the 15th, Hitler belatedly ordered two divisions of the crack Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps south from East Prussia to prop up the sagging front in Poland. Guderian was aghast, since it was plain that a big Russian offensive was looming in that sector too. These reinforcements never reached their intended destination in front of 1st Ukrainian Front, but became entangled in the Polish shambles created by Zhukov. The Grossdeutschland detrained near Lodz on 18 January, amid a mass of fleeing ethnic German civilians. Its tanks covered the withdrawal of Ninth Army, and then themselves joined the retreat across the vast white, flat plain where the only landmarks were blackened vehicles and buildings. Guderian fumed at the absence of Sixth SS Panzer Army in Hungary. He had wanted the Ardennes formations for a strategic counter-stroke in Poland. Hitler refused to commit further forces against Zhukov. He merely replaced the Wehrmacht’s commander on the Polish Front, Josef Harpe, with the brutish Nazi Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner.
Schörner’s first report to OKH was a catalogue of woes: “Thousands of soldiers are fleeing in the region of Litzmanstadt [Lodz], especially support, police and administrative units. Numerous vehicles—even armoured ones—are being abandoned. Measures to halt this tide have so far proved fruitless . . . I must demand urgent assistance to restore order in the rear areas. The enemy’s breakthrough can be checked only by rounding up every man in uniform who is running away.”
The famous General Walther Nehring of XXIV Panzer Corps performed one of the most notable feats of the Polish campaign. He withdrew his forces in a series of night marches punctuated by fierce local battles with Russian troops. Nehring’s men encountered terrible scenes, where Russian columns had smashed through columns of trekking refugees, leaving roads strewn for miles with shattered humanity and vehicles. When they reached the Pilica river, they found a single small bridge which they reinforced with tree trunks, to carry trucks and light armour. Finally, they drove two tanks into the water under the bridge, to reinforce it for the passage of Panzer IVs. Many vehicles were lost when they ran out of fuel, but on 22 January the vanguard of Nehring’s force reached the comparative safety of the Warthe river, after covering 150 miles in eleven days. Other units trickled in during the days that followed. Coolness, luck and exceptionally shrewd map-reading by their commander had enabled them to sidestep the main Russian forces. Nehring’s units were finally able to cross the Oder westwards at Glogau.
The Russians were now advancing up to forty miles a day, exceeding the most optimistic estimates of the Stavka. Yet in the exhilaration of such a dash, with the enemy fleeing in disarray, death came upon many men unexpectedly. Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov was driving at full speed down a long, empty Polish road in a tank column behind his company commander, Victor Prasolov. For hours they had not heard or seen gunfire, nor any sign of the enemy. Kudryashov was leaning on his turret hatch, smoking. Prasolov was sitting on top of his T-34, singing exuberantly, though no one including himself could hear his words above the roar of the engines. The column emerged from a forest into open fields on both sides of the road. A German tank concealed behind a haystack a thousand yards away fired a single shot which struck Prasolov’s tank. A shrapnel splinter neatly severed the commander’s head. Kudryashov, behind him, stared in horror as it bounced among the shell fragments on the road.
Captain Abram Skuratovsky, a signals officer, finished supervising the laying of telephone lines fifteen miles behind the front one morning and prepared to drive back to corps headquarters. A group of pretty girl soldiers begged a lift. The unit’s deputy political officer said peremptorily: “I’ll take the girls—you take the men and lead the way.” Their little column of vehicles had just set off when the Luftwaffe made one of its rare appearances. Four German aircraft strafed the column. Skuratovsky and most of his men sprang out of their trucks and ran hard for the fields. A bomb scored a direct hit on the commissar’s staff car. The planes disappeared. Badly shaken, Skuratovsky stood smoking a cigarette and contemplating the dreadful wreckage on the road. Suddenly the divisional commander drove up, and sprang out. “Fuck you!” he shouted. “Is this your idea of being an officer? Don’t just stand there looking at wreckage—get the road cleared!” The signallers dragged out the bodies of the political officer, his driver and the six girls, dug a common grave for them, and pushed the remains of the vehicles into the ditch. Then the survivors drove soberly towards corps headquarters.
A bizarre little episode of this period concerned a Soviet general named Mikahylov. A man in his forties, he possessed a much younger wife. Returning unexpectedly to Moscow, he found her with a young captain and a newborn baby. He was overcome with despair. “
O blad! Generals na kapitana zamyenila!
” he said drunkenly one night, back with his division, “What a whore! She prefers a captain to a general!” A few days later, Mikahylov personally led a suicidal assault on the German lines. He was badly wounded, but survived to become a Hero of the Soviet Union. “If we could have made good use of all the futile heroic deeds we witnessed, we could have won five wars,” Major Yury Ryakhovsky mused sardonically.
Konev took Cracow on 19 January, before the Germans had time to demolish it. Next day, the first Russian troops crossed the German border east of Breslau, pushing for the city. On the southern flank in Upper Silesia, the German Seventeenth Army possessed only seven feeble divisions, 100,000 men, to hold a front of seventy miles in an industrial region which contained the most important mines and factories left in Hitler’s empire. Konev had been ordered by Stalin to do his utmost to secure the area intact. The marshal launched his forces upon a grand envelopment, while simultaneously pressing the Germans frontally. Schörner recognized that Upper Silesia was untenable. He ordered a wholesale retreat. The field-marshal telephoned Hitler and told him: “If we don’t pull out, we’ll lose the whole army . . . We’re going back to the Oder.” Hitler stunned his staff by acceding without protest. He knew that if Schörner, most blindly loyal of his commanders, said that the line could not be held, he must be believed. By 29 January, the Russians had overrun all of Upper Silesia. They had also taken Auschwitz.
Red Army signaller Yulia Pozdnyakova was one of those sent to help the doctors coping with the 7,600 survivors of the largest death camp in Hitler’s empire. The ovens had been cold for ten days, but the stench of death lingered, though at first the girl did not recognize this for what it was. She gazed upon the great heaps of children’s shoes, the hoards of human hair, the mass of files and paperwork in the camp offices, and was perplexed that the Germans had left behind such a gigantic collection of documentation and evidence about their unspeakable actions there, not least 348,820 men’s suits and 836,255 women’s coats and dresses. As she sorted through clothing and papers, “I felt somehow guilty that I was touching all these things. The ghosts of the dead were all around us. It was very hard to sleep at night. For weeks afterwards, I could not stand the smell of fried meat.” Each night when they returned to their billets, they heated water and scrubbed themselves desperately, seeking to wash from their bodies the taint of genocide.
It is curious that, though Konev was told what his men had found at Auschwitz, he did not trouble to visit the camp for himself. The marshal said after the war that his duties on the battlefield did not permit him to “abandon myself to my own emotion.” It seems more plausible to suppose that any Rus-sian who had lived through the mass murders of Stalin was incapable of excessive sentiment in the face of those perpetrated by Hitler. Moscow made no public announcement about Auschwitz, or about what had been found there, until after the war ended.
On 14 January, Guderian ordered the mobilization of the Volkssturm along the entire length of the Eastern Front. The military value of this measure was negligible. It was quickly found necessary to mingle the VS with regular army units in forward positions. “Used in isolation [the Volkssturm] possesses only limited military value and can be quickly destroyed,” Hitler himself acknowledged in a general order of 27 January. The consequences of the VS mobilization were disastrous for German industrial production, emptying whole factories of their workforces, provoking a flood of complaints on this score from regional gauleiters, and driving another nail into the coffin of Speer’s armament production. Keitel reminded all commands that the Volkssturm should be deployed only when there was an immediate local threat. But he continued to urge the virtues of Germany’s citizen defenders: “The VS consists of men of all ages engaged in the defence of the Reich, many of whom have suffered severely from the terror-bombing, and most of whom have long experience of important war work. They have been mobilized to assist the defence of the Reich in its most dangerous hour.” In justice to the Nazis, they committed the Volkssturm in exactly the circumstances for which the British trained and prepared their own Home Guard, “Dad’s Army,” in the event of a German invasion in 1940. The Volkssturm’s military value proved small, not least because few weapons were available for its units. In the battle for Germany, some teenagers fought with frightening courage. But most of the Volkssturm’s old men wanted no part of the struggle, and drifted home as soon as they dared.
Even as the front collapsed before the Russian onslaught, however, some Germans impressed the Red Army by the tenacity of their resistance. A Pole quoted a Wehrmacht prisoner saying: “A terrible end is better than terror without end.” A report to Beria from 1st Belorussian Front declared: “There are still a lot of Germans fanatically confident of Germany’s victory.” The same document complained that resistance was being encouraged by the promiscuity with which some Soviet units were slaughtering German prisoners: