Armageddon (53 page)

An American officer who did glimpse the Red Army in motion was amazed by the spectacle of this teeming host, mingling the modern and the medieval, drawn from a hundred races and tribes, burdened with equipment and loot, accompanied by horse-drawn carts, civilian vehicles, bicycles, trucks of every shape and size interspersed with tanks and guns: “I’ll never forget those Russian columns and the crap they had. Holy smoke, you wondered how the hell they marched all that distance with that kind of stuff.” A New Zealand doctor liberated from captivity by the Soviet advance watched Zhukov’s men stream across Poland in late January:

What a disorderly rabble they looked. Terrible congestion and utter chaos . . . During my whole eight weeks as a guest of the USSR, I saw absolutely nothing in the way of medical organisation . . . Before leaving a Polish hospital, I was attracted by a commotion outside. I went to the window and saw a stretcher containing a wounded German officer being carried down the steps. As I looked, a young Cossack officer hurried after the stretcher, drew his revolver, and shot the German through the head. It was a ghastly exhibition, but even more nauseating was the sight, some few minutes later, of Polish children stripping the body of clothing as it lay in the street.

Even after the doctor’s recent experiences in the hands of the Nazis, he experienced a surge of pity when he found himself on a train at Odessa halted alongside wagonloads of Germans on their way to Siberia: “it was difficult not to feel sorry for the blighters.”

“There seemed to be little difference between [Russian] treatment of the peoples they were supposed to be liberating and those they were conquering,” wrote Peter Kemp, one of the SOE party mentioned above, who observed the Red Army’s behaviour to the Polish residents of a building commandeered as a corps headquarters.

The soldiers . . . behaved with calculated brutality and contempt. They broke up furniture for firewood, they pilfered every article of value and marked or spoilt what they did not care to take away; they urinated and defecated in every room . . . the hall, the stairs and passages were heaped and spattered with piles of excrement, the walls and floors were splashed with liquor, spittle and vomit—the whole building stank like an untended latrine. It is a pity those communists who declared that they would welcome the Red Army as liberators never saw that particular army at its work of liberation.

Discipline within the Red Army was indeed erratic. Pyotr Mitrofanov, the forty-five-year-old driver of Vasily Kudryashov’s T-34, was supposed to be on watch one night when the lieutenant found him asleep in their tank. Kudryashov lashed out at him: “You traitor! You know you could be shot for this!” Mitrofanov fell trembling on his knees before the officer, pleading for mercy. He was brusquely forgiven. Next day, the driver said: “Comrade commander, will you write a letter to my family for me?” Mitrofanov, like many Red soldiers, was illiterate. Kudryashov shot back, intending humour: “Yes—we can tell them how you were guilty of dereliction of duty!” Mitrofanov turned ashen once more: “No, no, no!” he cried. “Send me to Siberia—tell them anything but that.” The Soviet Army was a maze of contradictions. Sentiment and terror, comradeship and cruelty, devotion to duty and reckless indiscipline marched together in a fashion that could confuse its own men, never mind the rest of the world. Mitrofanov was killed in action three days afterwards.

When millions of very young men were entrusted with weapons, fatal accidents became endemic. For fun, a soldier in Valentin Krulik’s unit of Sixth Guards Tank Army dressed himself one day in a German smock and helmet, then dashed into his section’s bunker waving a Schmeisser and crying “
Hände hoch!
” This was agreed to be extremely funny. But one of his comrades shot the cross-dresser before he was recognized.

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several divisions northward, to secure his flank against the German forces in Pomerania. But, with the collapse of organized resistance in the path of his 1st Belorussian Front, the exultant marshal began to think that he might be able to advance to Berlin “on the run.” This was certainly the fear of German Intelligence, which reported to OKH on 20 January: “From the enemy’s behaviour and reports received, he is aiming to complete operations rapidly and not to permit any pause. We must therefore reckon that, against his usual behaviour pattern, he will continue to press forward without worrying about short-term threats to his flanks.”

Everything seemed to hinge upon whether Zhukov could seize a bridgehead across the Oder in the Berlin region before the Germans regrouped. Through the last days of January, the Russian advance towards the river slowed, as it met new German lines of resistance. None amounted to much, but each imposed delay and some casualties. On 30 January, on the northern flank men of Fifth Shock Army reached the Oder. Next morning an officer and a few men walked across the frozen river and took possession without opposition of the small town of Kienitz. The local stationmaster nervously approached the Russian officer and demanded: “Are you going to allow the Berlin train to leave?” The Russian expressed ironic regret: “The passenger service to Berlin will undergo a brief interruption—let us say until the end of the war.” Although the Germans rushed forces to Kienitz, Zhukov’s men were able to reinforce their foothold west of the river. On the night of 2 February, the Soviet 301st Rifle Division crossed the Oder ice under heavy German fire, to strengthen the bridgehead. The Germans still held ground eastwards at Frankfurt and Küstrin. But elsewhere the Russians had secured vital ground on the western bank. Here was the final prize in an operation which had overrun a large part of Hitler’s remaining territory in three weeks. On 2 February, the Stavka formally declared 1st Belorussian Front’s Vistula–Oder operation concluded.

Zhukov’s dash to the Oder inspired the Germans to a last Herculean effort. The Wehrmacht’s difficulties now far exceeded those of September 1944, when new defences were forged in the west after the Anglo-American rush across France. Men, weapons, aircraft, fuel were drastically diminished. Yet German reaction was effective enough to crush Zhukov’s hopes, briefly shared by Stalin’s Stavka, of a dash for Berlin. On 19 February, the artillery commander of 1st Belorussian Front was told to prepare for an immediate attack on Hitler’s capital. But these orders were almost immediately countermanded in the face of intelligence reports of large-scale German movements on the northern flank: “The Front commander took the decision to liquidate enemy forces in Pomerania before starting the Berlin attack.” In reality, of course, the decision was Stalin’s. The Russians felt obliged to delay their final assault by almost two months, vastly increasing the price they paid for Hitler’s capital. In February, with the Russians within sixty miles, the city lay almost undefended. By April, when the climactic encounter took place, hundreds of thousands of men had been summoned from every corner of the shrunken Reich to fight its last battle.

We shall never know how the Russians would have fared in February had their spearheads pressed on. Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad, now commanded Eighth Guards Army, which had advanced 200 miles in fourteen days. He vociferously asserted until the day of his death that Hitler’s capital could have been seized in February. His Soviet peers strongly disagreed. First and Second Guards Tank Armies could almost certainly have got to Berlin. But even the Soviets, often so bold about exposing their flanks, feared that after driving a deep salient into the enemy’s line it was too dangerous to go further, leaving large German armies behind their front both north and south, in Pomerania and Hungary. To Stalin’s Stavka it seemed reckless to risk disaster, having achieved overwhelming success. Zhukov’s and Konev’s men were tired. They faced problems of supply immensely more challenging than those of the Anglo-Americans in France in September. Distances were greater, roads worse and transport limited. The Anglo-Americans were still far away, and seemed to pose no threat of pre-empting Stalin’s triumph in Berlin. It was decided to defer the final assault until the Soviet armies north and southwards had caught up; the enemy had been further battered; and reserves of men, guns and ammunition could be brought forward.

As always, the Germans seized the respite. They threw themselves into rendering the Oder line defensible. In the last days of January aircraft bombs, power saws, demolition charges were employed in attempts to breach the frozen river. Then God took a hand. On the night of 1 February, it began to rain. In the days that followed, a premature blush of spring brought a thaw. The snows melted—and so did the Oder ice. Hitler had been given a moat. More than that, and as always when seasonal thaws came, the roads of eastern Europe deteriorated dramatically. The task of providing daily supply for Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies became dauntingly harder, when every ton had to be trucked 300 miles or more through chronic mud from the nearest railheads.

The Germans rushed 88mm flak guns from all over the Reich to reinforce the anti-tank defences beyond Berlin. Almost the entire remaining strength of the Luftwaffe was thrown into the eastern battle. The Germans were able to mount some damaging air attacks on Soviet positions. By St. Valentine’s Day, fourteen German divisions were deployed against Zhukov’s front. In February, while just sixty-seven new and repaired tanks were sent to the west, 1,675 were shipped east. German counter-attacks on Soviet positions west of the Oder failed. The Russians slowly but steadily enlarged their bridgeheads. The outcome of the impending struggle for Berlin was hardly in doubt. But each day of respite granted to the Germans would increase the price the Soviets must pay for final victory.

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front in Poland, the bitter struggle between the “London Poles” and the communists continued unabated. On the night of 19 February, men of Army Krajowa stormed the communist-run prison in Lublin, killed two guards and released eleven AK prisoners, along with twelve guards who also defected. Seven of the prisoners had been awaiting execution for “political crimes.” On 2 March, the commanding officer of 28th Regiment of the 9th Polish Division of the Red Army persuaded 380 of his men to desert on their way to the front. Most set off for their homes, to which they were pursued by NKVD detachments. On 7 March, a junior officer at the Polish army tank school at Holm, a secret member of Army Krajowa named Kunin, persuaded seventy cadets to quit with their weapons, and to join the anti-Soviet struggle. In the days that followed, the deserters were ruthlessly hunted down by the NKVD. Most were killed or captured. So alarmed was the NKVD by the political threat that a draconian order was issued to remove all personal radio sets from members of Polish units of the Red Army, to prevent them from listening to broadcasts from London. This ban was soon afterwards extended to make possession of radios illegal even among Polish civilians. The Russians had now “liberated” almost all Poland. Yet the plight of most of its citizens was, if possible, worse than their lot under the Nazis. Beria received permission from Stalin drastically to reinforce the NKVD’s forces in Poland.

While Zhukov paused at the Oder, further south Konev renewed his own massive operation to clear south-east Germany. First, his men closed upon the ancient city of Breslau, Silesia’s capital. At 0600 on 8 February, at first moving sluggishly through the quagmire created by the thaw, the Russians advanced from their bridgeheads on the upper Oder. Against slight resistance from the remains of Fourth Panzer Army, the attackers gained almost forty miles on the first day. By 15 February, 35,000 troops and 80,000 civilians in Breslau were encircled by Konev’s armies. The Germans of Seventeenth Army attempted a counter-attack which met some of the Breslau fortress troops on 14 February, but were then driven back by overwhelming Russian forces. The only consequence of the German effort was to impose a delay on Konev, during which he was able to rest and resupply his men. Like Zhukov his great rival, the marshal had cherished his own hopes of reaching Berlin in a single bound. He, too, was now obliged to acknowledge that this was unrealistic.

Nehring’s XXIV Panzer Corps launched an ambitious counter-attack in the south on the night of 1 March, which surprised the Russians and inflicted substantial casualties before it ran its course—Konev lost 162 tanks to the Germans’ ten. Goebbels joined Schörner for a parade in the recaptured town of Lauban on 8 March, at which the field-marshal, a devout Nazi, flattered the propaganda minister outrageously. Next day, amid snow showers, a new German counter-attack began at Streigau, forty miles eastwards. This recaptured the town. Revelations of atrocities committed by the Russians during their brief occupation may have done something to stiffen the determination of Schörner’s soldiers. The Russians did not make an impressive military showing during these operations. They had grown over-confident, allowed themselves to be taken by surprise, and retired in disarray.

German Intelligence was still making extraordinary efforts to gather information from behind the Russian front. Four Ukrainians were parachuted from a Ju-88 on the night of 27 February, led by a former Red Army sergeant, carrying a radio and 206,000 roubles. They were immediately captured. On the night of 4 March, troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front met a twenty-two-man German patrol nine miles beyond the Oder. After a protracted firefight in which thirteen Germans and five Russians were killed, the survivors were found to be members of Abwehr Group 306, guided by three Red Army defectors. It seems remarkable that even the legendary Reinhard Gehlen, chief of German Intelligence for the Eastern Front, still considered operations of this kind practicable or worthwhile, though as late as New Year’s Day 1945 a U-boat landed two German spies on the Maine coast, to conduct ill-defined intelligence operations against the United States.

German counter-attacks seemed irrelevant. It was meaningless to expend lives and irreplaceable equipment to recapture small fragments of lost Reich territory, which were doomed to be lost again within a matter of days. Army Group Balck reported miserably from Hungary on 5 February: “Amid all the stresses and strains, no improvement in morale or performance is visible. The numerical superiority of the enemy, combined with the knowledge that fighting is now taking place on German soil, has proved very demoralizing to the men. Their only nourishment is a slice of bread and some horsemeat. Movement of any kind is hampered by men’s physical weakness.” The staff officer cataloguing these dismal realities concluded in wonder: “In spite of all this, and six weeks’ unfulfilled promises of relief, the men still fight tenaciously and obey orders.” Yet for how long?