Armageddon (52 page)

Soldiers of 1st Polish Army are known to be particularly ruthless towards Germans. There are many places where they do not take captured German officers and soldiers to the assembly points, but simply shoot them on the road. For instance, [in one place] 80 German officers and men were captured, but only two were brought to the PoW assembly point. The rest were shot. The regimental commander interrogated the two, then released them to the Deputy Chief of Reconnaissance, who shot these men also. The deputy political officer of 4th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Urbanovich, shot nine prisoners who had voluntarily deserted to our side, in the presence of a divisional intelligence officer.

The NKVD’s objections to such practises were practical rather than moral, but the killing of prisoners had plainly attained epidemic proportions if it provoked a protest to Moscow.

Yelena Kogan was an interpreter who spoke fluent German and was often charged with interrogations:

For everyone else, a German was simply an enemy with whom it was impossible to have any human contact. But I could talk to them. I saw in their eyes their awful uncertainty about their own fate, as they wondered if they would be shot. The younger Germans were professional warriors. But the older ones had families, civilian jobs, some experience of the world. I tried to find a common denominator among the fascists, and I usually failed. It seemed to me that they were simply victims of their country’s madness. I only met one real fascist in the whole war—in the spring of 1942, a German navigator who bailed out when his Heinkel was hit while he was bombing us. I asked him: “Didn’t it bother you to bomb defenceless women?” He shrugged: “It was fun.”

By January 1945 the Soviet Air Force, which had begun the war with pitifully primitive aircraft, had become a formidable ground-support arm, equipped with machines as good as anything its enemies possessed. As the Luftwaffe’s squadrons declined steeply in both quantity and quality, those of Russia had improved dramatically. Pilot training was never of the same standard as that available to British and American aircrew, who flew for a year or longer before being committed to combat. Alexandr Markov, a boyish-looking twenty-one-year-old from the Caucusus, spent three and a half years in pilot training among 800 other air cadets at Grozny, because there were no aircraft available for them to fly. After an eternity of boredom and frustration—“we wanted to go out and conquer Germany, but all we were able to do was study the theory of flight”—he won a place in flying school by getting into the school band. His commanding officer was captivated by the fashion in which Markov played the balalaika. But, even in 1944, they were expected to train on old aircraft, which constantly failed them. “Sometimes, there were three funerals in a week.” Forty-seven per cent of all wartime Soviet aircraft losses were the consequence of technical failure rather than pilot error or enemy action. They learned next to nothing about fighter tactics, because they were forbidden even to loop: “We were just taught to make figures in the sky.” Markov qualified in May 1944, with 100 hours’ dual and solo experience. When he was finally sent to a squadron, he was expected to learn to fight in the air over the German lines.

The Soviet Union devoted little effort to strategic bombing. Its air force was a branch of the army, overwhelmingly committed to tactical operations. Russian units never received the sort of “cab-rank” close support from fighter-bombers that was available to the Western allies, because they lacked sophisticated ground–air radio links. But in 1944–45, the Soviets possessed overwhelming air superiority over the battlefield, protecting their advancing armies from the sort of devastation they had suffered from the Luftwaffe between 1941 and 1943. Most Russian bomber operations were carried out by daylight formations of Ilyushin-2s and American-built Bostons, attacking with heavy fighter escort. “I was testing my own skills to the limit,” said Alexandr Markov of his days as an escort pilot. “Right to the end, the Germans had some pretty good fliers. We were sometimes flying four missions a day, each one from half an hour to two hours. Nobody asked whether we could take it. The tired pilots were simply the ones most likely to die.” Unlike British and American pilots who were rested after a “tour,” Russian aircrew flew until they died, or won the war. On the ground, their planes were serviced almost entirely by women. The girls did everything for them—bombing up and arming the aircraft, manning communications, washing their clothes. One Soviet night-bomber wing was entirely crewed by women, twenty-three of whom became Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Markov fell in love with his unit’s meteorological officer, twenty-six-year-old Lydia Fyodorovna. She was married, but her husband serving on the Leningrad Front wrote suggesting that the couple should part: “He had found someone else, of course.” Markov married Lydia after the war. At their airfield behind the Polish front, the pilots partied every night. Yet in most respects their war was more austere than that of their British and American counterparts. No one painted names or cartoons on their planes, any more than they did on Rus-sian tanks. They had enough to eat, and almost unlimited supplies of alcohol. But there were few creature comforts, and no leave. There was only the war, and the comradeship of the unit.

BREACHING THE ODER

A
T THE END
of January, the Russians seized bridgeheads across the upper Oder, upstream and downstream from Breslau. The Germans first learned of their coming when Russian tank gunfire sank a steamer proceeding blithely downriver from the city. Breslau was designated by Hitler as a fortress, and doggedly held by the Germans for many weeks to come. But Konev’s southern offensive had now achieved its principal purposes. It had opened a path into the heart of Germany across the last great river barrier. The loss of Upper Silesia caused Albert Speer to dispatch a memorandum to Hitler, copied to Guderian, in which the armaments minister asserted that without Silesia’s factories Germany’s war was lost.

Meanwhile, further north, General Vasily Chuikov had seized Lodz against negligible resistance on 19 January. Soviet and Polish flags burgeoned across the city. The Russians had enveloped Warsaw. Its garrison, such as it was, fled without resistance. The occupiers found that the Germans had systematically razed every landmark: St. John’s Cathedral, the Royal Palace, the National Library, the Opera House. There was no military purpose behind the devastation. It reflected only Hitler’s nihilism. Captain Abram Skuratovsky, a Soviet signals officer and also a Jew, wandered among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Like many Russians who had already seen so much horror and destruction, he felt regret, but no sense of shock. For Skuratovsky, this was “just another bloody page in the history of the war.” Beria’s men were already arresting Polish Jews. As early as December 1944, the NKVD chief had reported to Stalin the arrest of a group who had established an organization in Lublin, with the intention of sending a delegation to the planned Polish Jewish Congress in the United States. Beria declared that he had evidence the Lublin Jewish leader was a British agent.

The Soviets estimated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Warsaw’s buildings had been destroyed. Most of the population, expelled by the Germans, scavenged like animals in the surrounding countryside across a radius of ten or fifteen miles. “In order to re-establish order in Warsaw,” Beria’s local commander reported to him on 22 January, “we have formed an executive group composed of members of the Department of Public Security and NKVD, with orders to locate and arrest members of Army Krajowa and other underground political parties. 2nd NKVD Frontier Guards Regiment has been moved to Warsaw to implement these measures.” In Poznan, the NKVD reported that a third of the housing and half the city’s industry had been destroyed, and that more than half the pre-war population of 250,000 had fled. The Germans blew all the bridges before they retired. The speed of the Soviet seizure of Lodz took the Nazi leadership and local population by surprise, though “all members of the city’s administration have fled to Germany.” No demolitions had been conducted, and 450,000 residents remained from the pre-war population of 700,000. Of these, almost half were Poles, about 100,000 Ukrainians, Russians and Belorussians, together with some 50,000 Germans. The Russians immediately embarked upon the massive task of shipping each racial group in its tens of thousands to the homelands which Moscow deemed most suitable for them.

Even as the Red Army was storming towards the Oder, its relentless rear-area campaign continued, to clear Soviet-occupied territory of “hostile elements.” These operations required the deployment of thousands of NKVD troops. A report to Stalin from Beria in January described one action in which the 256th Escort Regiment was sent to liquidate a 200-strong partisan band; 104 were killed and 25 captured, including their leader. In another action, eighty-seven were killed and twenty-three captured. Among the dead were five Germans. A further Wehrmacht straggler was taken prisoner. An armoured train was dispatched to deal with another such group, which included draft-evaders as well as “bandits.” In a further action, seven “bandits” and 252 draft-evaders were captured. Some of these, said Beria, were wearing SS uniform. A captured Wehrmacht officer proved to be a White Russian who had left his country in 1918 and who admitted that he had been serving as an intelligence officer for Vlassov’s Cossacks.* 
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The validity of Beria’s claims is, of course, highly doubtful. But his reports provide a vivid picture of the bloody chaos which persisted for many months within the territories reconquered by the Red Army.

On 24 January, Beria reported that 110,000 people had now been returned from the occupied territories to Russia, including 16,000 children. Of these, 53,610 had been sent home; 7,068 drafted for military service; 43,000 dispatched to NKVD camps for “further screening”; 194 “collaborators and betrayers of the motherland” had already been identified. Stalin ordered that all liberated Red Army officers about whose behaviour there was the smallest doubt should be sent to penal battalions. “One had to be very vigilant at Front HQ,” said Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD. “There were so many kind of nationalists, and Whites who were urging men to desert, and assuring them of good treatment from the Germans.” He added gravely: “We would never convict innocent people. We looked into every case.” It was acute awareness of the significance of the Soviet tide for the people of eastern Europe, above all the Poles, that caused Churchill to send to a friend a greeting for this “New, disgusting year.” How perverse it seemed that, amid Stalin’s smashing victories, Jock Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, should observe: “The prospect of the end of the war and the problems it will bring with it are depressing the PM.” Churchill said to Colville: “Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be bolshevised; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.”

Roosevelt raised the Polish issue half-heartedly at the Yalta conference of the leaders of the Grand Alliance in February 1945, reminding Stalin that the United States possessed seven million inhabitants of Polish stock. As an elected national leader, the president had to consider their concerns. Stalin dismissed this assertion with a shrug: of those seven million Poles, only 7,000 voted, he said. A British junior minister, H. G. Strauss, resigned from Churchill’s government over Yalta, observing that he found it “impossible to approve of the treatment of the Polish people by the Crimean conference.” When New Zealand’s prime minister remonstrated about the abandonment of the Poles to Stalin, Churchill answered: “Great Britain and the British Commonwealth are very much weaker militarily than Soviet Russia, and have no means, short of another general war, of enforcing their point of view. Nor can we ignore the position of the United States. We cannot go further in helping Poland than the United States is willing or can be persuaded to go. We have therefore to do the best we can.” Poland’s doom was sealed—to be passed with the acquiescence of the democracies from the bloody hands of one tyrant into those of another.

When Hitler heard that Warsaw had fallen, he ordered the arrest and interrogation by the SS of three senior staff officers at OKH who were deemed to have connived in this act of weakness. As a gesture of solidarity, Guderian insisted on sharing his subordinates’ ordeal. In the midst of one of the climactic battles of the Third Reich, its senior commanders were obliged to devote hours to this black farce. Guderian was then grudgingly permitted to return to his duties. OKH’s chief of operations was dispatched to a concentration camp. Another of the three staff officers was shot.

“Germany’s leadership faces its greatest challenge of the war,” acknowledged a Berlin radio broadcast on 22 January. “Retreats and disengagements are no longer possible, because our armies are now disputing territory of vital importance to German war industry . . . The utmost effort is required from every man and woman. The German people will respond willingly to the call, because they know that our leader has never failed to restore the situation, however grave the difficulties.” On the same day, Bradley’s aide Colonel Hansen wrote in his diary: “It is incredible to view the advance of the Russian front and realise how the East has suddenly become the cynosure of American and allied attention.” After many months when commanders in the west had scarcely considered events in the east, now as they pored over their maps and perceived the Soviet line of battle drawing so close to Berlin, the movements of the Red Army began to cast a long shadow over the operations of the Anglo-Americans.

For the Western allies, the frustrations of communicating with the Russians about practical military problems, such as bomb lines, remained as great as ever. To the end, Stalin rejected all demands for liaison officers to be attached to Soviet field headquarters, just as Russian officers were attached to SHAEF. He insisted that contacts should be conducted exclusively through Moscow. In addition to refusing to refuel Allied aircraft seeking to aid the Poles, the Russians denied requests that RAF and USAAF planes crippled on bomber operations should be allowed to land at Soviet forward airfields. A British SOE mission parachuted to the Army Krajowa, led by a full colonel, was detained, disarmed, interrogated, humiliated, imprisoned and finally shipped to Moscow. The Russians were seriously tempted to shoot its members, as they had already shot some SOE personnel in Hungary. It was two months before the British embassy in Moscow could gain exit visas for the SOE group. Allied commanders, conscious of the huge volume of vehicles, equipment and supplies delivered to the Soviet Union, were increasingly exasperated by Russian recalcitrance. Yet from Stalin’s viewpoint his policy was perfectly rational. The consequences would be gratuitously embarrassing if Allied liaison officers witnessed at first hand the conduct of the Red Army in eastern Europe, and reported it to Washington and London.