History of the Second World War (98 page)

By contrast, the Germans now benefited through having fallen back on the network of communications radiating from Lwow, while their forces had become more concentrated with the retreat into Galicia. The following week, the week before Easter, the Germans launched a stronger counter-stroke than they had been able to deliver for a long time. It had a double aim — to paralyse the Russian advance, and to release the eighteen under-strength divisions of the 1st Panzer Army which had been trapped east of the Dniester between the horns of Zhukov and Koniev. This large force had then tried to find a way out to the west past Skala and Buczacz towards Lwow.

The German counterstroke was made along both banks of the Dniester. On the right it cut deeply into the ‘Tartar’ wedge, recapturing the junction of Delatyn on the railway from Kolomyja to the Pass. On the left it recaptured Buczacz, and opened a path through which the divisions isolated near Skala were able to withdraw. After their extrication the front in southern Poland, between the Pripet Marshes and the Carpathian Mountains, was stabilised along a line well to the east of Lwow. It remained static from April to July.

Koniev’s thrust across the Prat — which formed Rumania’s frontier — had also been checked just beyond the river. It did not succeed in penetrating into Jassy, which lies only ten miles west of the Prut, though a little farther north it reached the Sereth. Koniev, however, had a more important aim for the moment. His left wing had now wheeled southward down the Dniester against the rear of the enemy forces near the Black Sea — which were largely composed of Rumanian divisions. This flank move of Koniev’s was closely combined with Malinovsky’s more direct advance from Nikolayev westward on Odessa.

The combined threat presented a very awkward problem for Schorner, who had relieved Kleist in command of the former Army Group A (now Army Group South Ukraine’) and for Model, who had replaced Manstein as commander of ‘Army Group North Ukraine’ (formerly Army Group Don and, later, Army Group South). Schorner’s difficulties were increased by the poor state and paucity of the communications in his rear, for since the Russian drive to the Carpathians he was separated from the armies in Poland, and dependent on the circuitous lines running back through the Balkans and Hungary.

At the same time the Allied heavy bombers from Italy launched a series of blows at the main railway bottlenecks, beginning with attacks on Budapest, Bucharest, and Ploesti, in the first week of April. This rearward menace developed rather late for immediate effect, but it paid a deferred dividend.

On April 5 Malinovsky’s troops reached the junction of Razdelnaya, closing the only unbroken rail route out of Odessa. On the 10th they occupied that great port itself. But most of the enemy forces had slipped away. They only fell back a short distance — to the line of the lower Dniester, whence the front now curved back to Jassy. For Kornev’s southward thrust had been checked in the area of Kishinev.

In the first week of May, Koniev launched a heavy attack west of Jassy, down both banks of the Sereth, employing the new Josef Stalin tanks. With their aid the Russians achieved a breakthrough, but Schorner had a fairly strong panzer reserve close at hand, under Manteuffel. This succeeded in curbing the exploitation of the breakthrough, by well-judged defensive tactics, based on the natural advantages of the riposte and the skilful use of mobility to offset an advantage in armour and armament. A big tank battle, in which some five hundred tanks were engaged, ended in a Russian repulse and the renewed stabilisation of the front.

That success became the Germans’ undoing three months later. For it encouraged Hitler to insist on maintaining the ground they held, not only near Jassy but in the southern part of Bessarabia, between the Pruth and the Dniester. It meant that the forces were kept in an exposed position a long way to the east of the Carpathian mountain-barrier and the Galatz Gap. During the interval their rear was crumbling, under pressure of the Rumanian people’s desire for peace.

April also saw the liberation of the Crimea. Its occupying forces, half German and half Rumanian, had been gradually reduced by evacuation across the sea, but the attacker’s problem was still a difficult one, since no large numbers were required to maintain a formidable barrier at the two narrow approaches. The capture of the Crimea called for a strong and carefully mounted attack. That was Hitler’s justification for clinging to it so long after the incoming Russian tide had swept beyond it on the mainland, and in this case he had better ground than elsewhere for sacrificing a detachment, since it produced a large subtraction from the Russians’ total in a critical period.

The main attack on the Crimea was launched by Tolbukhin on April 8, after a preliminary attack designed to make the Germans disclose their battery positions. The frontal assault on the defences of the Perekop Isthmus was assisted by crossing the Sivash Lagoon on its flank, and getting astride its rear. As soon as this manoeuvre had unlocked the northern gate of the Crimea, Eremenko’s troops attacked from their foothold on the eastern tip at Kerch. By the 17th these converging sweeps had reached the outskirts of Sevastopol, and taken 37,000 prisoners. The size of this bag was largely due to the German mistake, following Hitler’s rigid principle, of trying to make a stand on a line south of the Perekop Isthmus, instead of falling back immediately to Sevastopol. This enabled Tolbukhin to bring up his tanks, make a breach in an improvised defence line that was much too wide for the forces available, and overrun a large part of these before they could get back to Sevastopol.

The Russians paused to bring up heavy artillery before tackling this fortress — where the defending forces were now insufficient to fill the defences to a reasonable density. Yet Hitler still insisted that Sevastopol must be held at all costs. The assault opened on the night of May 6, and quickly made a decisive breach on the south-east approaches, between Inkerman and Balaclava. On the 9th, Hitler belatedly reversed his order and promised ships to evacuate the garrison. On the 10th the garrison abandoned Sevastopol and fell back into the Khersonese peninsula, where nearly 30,000 surrendered on the 13th, after only a few handfuls had got away by sea. Most of the prisoners were Germans. Before the offensive opened, the German Command had chosen to evacuate the Rumanians by sea, and rely on their own troops. That policy might have prolonged the defence but for the fatal rigidity of the defensive plan.

On the other flank of the Eastern Front the Russians had also gained ground during the opening months of 1944, though not in equal measure to that in the south. At the start of the year the Germans had still closely enveloped Leningrad, Their front extended past the city to a point about sixty miles to the east, and then turned south along the Volkhov River to Lake Ilmen; on either side of that great lake they held the bastion-towns of Novgorod and Staraya Russa. In mid-January the Russians launched their long expected offensive to break the enemy’s grip on Leningrad. Striking from the coast just west of the city, Govorov’s forces drove a wedge into the left flank of the German salient, while Meretskov’s drove a deeper one into its right flank near Novgorod. The initial penetrations produced the familiar illusion that the German forces were ‘trapped’, but they achieved an orderly withdrawal, by stages, to the baseline of the salient. The exaggerated anticipations tended to obscure the definite advantages which the Russians had gained by freeing Leningrad, reopening the railway from there to Moscow, and isolating Finland.

At the end of the withdrawal the Germans stood on a line running from the Gulf of Finland near Narva to Pskov. The straightening and shortening of the front much improved the Germans’ situation for the moment, and all the more so because the practical reduction of the defensive front was much greater than its map-measure. For three-quarters of the 120 miles stretch between the coast and the new bastion-town of Pskov was filled by the two vast lakes of Peipus and Pskov. At the end of February a sudden stroke by Govorov captured a bridgehead over the Narva River, between the sea and Lake Peipus, but he was then blocked. South of the lakes, too, the Russian advance was held up when it reached Pskov, 120 miles behind Staraya Russa. That was a disappointment to the Red Army, which had hoped to celebrate its 26th birthday by recapturing the city where it was born in battle, against the Germans, on February 23, 1918.

The military results of this whiter offensive in the north were less important than the political repercussions. Shaken by its sense of isolation, the Finnish Government entered into negotiations for an armistice in the middle of February. In view of the circumstances the Russian conditions were notably moderate — being based on a return to the 1940 basis and frontiers — but the Finns were apprehensive that they might be extended in practice, and asked for more explicit safeguards than the Russians were willing to insert. The Finns also protested that they were not capable of fulfilling the demand that they should disarm German forces in the North of Finland, and were fearful of allowing the Russian forces to march in for the purpose. But although the discussions were broken off in March, it was clearly no more than a postponed decision. Moreover, the Finnish lead in these open negotiations for peace encouraged Germany’s other satellites to begin similar approaches in a more covert way. Such a move on the Rumanians’ part was stimulated by Stalin’s statement that he favoured the idea of restoring Transylvania to Rumania.

Thus the stabilisation of the Eastern Front which the Germans achieved in May brought only a superficial improvement of their situation. The attrition of their strength had gone so far that they could benefit little by gaining time, whereas the Russians needed time to mount their next great offensive effort, and negotiators needed time for the completion of their peace efforts. Only an autocrat can change sides overnight. Meanwhile the pressure for peace, as well as the strain upon the enemy’s communications, was increased by the progressive extension of Allied bombing attacks in the Balkans. On June 2 the development of a shuttle-service was inaugurated when American Flying Fortresses landed at newly prepared bases in Russian territory to refuel and re-munition before delivering a second blow on their way back to their own Mediterranean bases. A similar shuttle-service between air bases in England and Russia began on the 21st, the American bombers being escorted the whole way by long-range fighters.

On June 10 the earlier Russian air pressure on the hesitant Finns was reinforced by a land drive through the Karelian isthmus — between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. After breaking through successive positions, Marshal Govorov’s forces captured Viipuri on the 20th, thus gaining the outlet from the isthmus. Thereupon the Finns offered to accept the Russian terms for an armistice which they had earlier rejected. But Stalin now demanded a symbolical act of capitulation, and at this the Finns baulked. In the meantime Ribbentrop hurried to Helsinki, where he played on the Finns’ fears while promising them German reinforcements. His mission was helped by the fact that the Russian advance lost impetus as it stretched farther and entered the lakeland belt behind the 1940 frontier. So the Russo-Finnish war had a further extension, though in a quiescent form. The immediate outcome was that the American Government now broke off relations with Finland, which it had so long maintained, while the Germans continued and increased their commitment there, at a moment when their own front was in desperate need of reserves.

The Russians had reason to be content with this small profit. Their own summer offensive against the Germans was launched on June 23 — by which time the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy was well established. This, together with the Allied advance beyond Rome, ensured that the Germans were hard-pressed everywhere before the Russians struck. The Russians however profited most of all from Hitler’s continued insistence on rigid, instead of elastic, defence.

While Russian preparations were manifest along the whole front between the Carpathians and the Baltic, attention was focused on the sector south of the Pripet Marshes. For here the Russians were already deep into Poland, and it was natural to expect a renewal of their spring drive, which had carried them close to Lwow and momentarily into Kovel. Three months’ pause had enabled Zhukov to repair the rail communications behind his vast bulge.

The Russians chose, however, to open their offensive from the most backward ‘echelon’ of their front — as the German Command had done in 1942. They struck in White Russia, north of the Pripet Marshes — where the enemy still had a large foothold on their soil.

Their choice was well-calculated. As the northern sector was the least advanced, the Russian communications there were best developed to provide initial momentum for the attack. As this sector had proved so tough in 1943 the German Command would be unlikely to reinforce it at the expense of the more vital, and obviously precarious, position between Kovel and the Carpathians. Although the main stretch of the northerly sector had withstood all attacks during the previous autumn and winter, the Russians had succeeded in driving two wedges into its flanks, near Vitebsk and Zhlobin respectively. These promised them a valuable leverage for a renewed effort. Moreover, once they could get the enemy on the run, a wider leverage on his rear could be developed from their own southern bulge, near Kovel. For here they lay at the western end of the marshland belt that divided the German armies.

Prior to the offensive, the stretch between the Baltic and the Pripet Marshes was reorganised and reinforced. It now held seven handy-sized army groups, or ‘fronts’. Govorov’s ‘Leningrad front’ was on the right, and next the ‘3rd Baltic front’ under Maslennikov and the ‘2nd Baltic front’ under Eremenko. These were inactive for the moment. The four which carried out the offensive were, from north to south, the ‘1st Baltic’ under Bagramyan, who had earlier driven in the wedge north of Vitebsk; the ‘3rd White Russian’ under Chernyakhovsky, who at thirty-six was the youngest of all the higher commanders; the ‘2nd White Russian’, under Zakharov; and the ‘1st White Russian’, under Rokossovsky, who had driven in the wedge near Zhlobin. These four groups comprised some 166 divisions.