Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (27 page)

Rokossovsky’s military career began in 1914 when he was conscripted into the Tsarist army at the outbreak of the Great War. Perhaps through
tales of his grandfather and great-grandfather, who had both served with the Polish lancers, he chose to join the cavalry, and was drafted into the 5th Regiment of Kargopolski Dragoons. He served with distinction on the Eastern Front, winning the St George’s Cross, and stayed with his regiment until it disintegrated in the revolutionary summer of 1917. At that point Konstanty, now twenty-one, made the decision to stick with a group of radical friends and to join the infant Red Army. From then on, as a professional soldier with three years’ experience of active service, his prospects were extremely good. Much decorated during the Russian Civil War, he changed his patronymic to the more Russian-sounding ‘Konstantinovich’, obtained his membership card of the Bolshevik Party, and threw himself into the mill of campaigns and commands. In 1924–25, alongside Georgii Zhukov, he attended the Finishing School of the Red Army’s General Staff. He belonged to the elite of the Red Cavalry, reaching the rank of major general by 1935. He earlier had a spell in China as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-Shek, and in 1936–37 spent a year in Spain as an adviser to the Republican Army fighting Franco. Rokossovsky had missed the Red Army’s western campaign of 1920 because he was serving elsewhere. He missed the campaign of 1939 because he was a prisoner in the Gulag.

Stalin’s purges defy comprehension by people who demand rational explanations. They were
not
undertaken simply to weed out opponents or unreliable elements. They were often directed against his most loyal servants, against Communists who had welcomed the earlier purges of Trotskyists and old Bolsheviks, or like Rokossovsky, who had never uttered a word of dissent. Yet they proceeded on a scale and with a ferocity unparalleled in European history. In the 1930s, Stalin ordered the deaths of more human beings than Hitler would kill in the whole of his career. And he didn’t stop in 1939. He did it from motives of pure terror, to render the very idea of independent thought unthinkable. In the Red Army purge after 1937, he had 36,671 staff officers shot outright. At a time when a European war was brewing, he left a mere 303 out of 706 men in the top ranks untouched. In this light, it is surprising that Rokossovsky, who had twice been abroad, was merely sent to a concentration camp. It is even more surprising that he survived three winters in the camps when the average prisoner could only survive one. His resentment may only be imagined. At his ‘trial’ he was condemned on the evidence of a man who had died twenty years earlier.

Rokossovsky’s war memoirs begin in the spring of 1940 when he was
sunning himself on the beach at Sochi. He could not say openly why he was there. But many informed Russian readers would have correctly guessed that he was benefiting from the usual post-Gulag rehabilitation course. He waited for a posting as he recovered in the company of his Siberian wife, Julia Petrovna, and their daughter. He was to need every ounce of strength he could garner. For in the next four years, he was to receive one top operational command after another – against Operation Barbarossa, before Moscow, at Stalingrad, at Kursk, and in 1944 at the head of the conclusive Soviet drive to the West.

Rokossovsky is known to have talked in public about his years in the Gulag only once, about thirty years later when on exercises in the far north of Siberia: he reportedly ordered his command plane to circle low over the frozen tundra before uttering delphically: ‘No traces left.’ Nor was the experience unusual. Stalin routinely arrested the wives and relatives of his closest colleagues in order to ensure their good behaviour. The inner culture of Stalinism is all but impossible for Westerners to comprehend. But it helps to explain why the Red Army’s leaders, in their heroic attempts to save the Soviet Union, were so contemptuous of the human cost. For they, like many others, were walking along the knife-edge between celebrity and extinction.
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During Operation Barbarossa, Rokossovsky commanded a tank brigade near the front line at Novograd Volhinsk. According to one report, his initial orders had been to attack, but when attacked himself, he conducted a skilful fighting retreat, earning himself four commendations for the Order of the Red Banner. He was then placed in command of the penal brigades made up of convicts from the Gulag, who were used for clearing minefields. One of his soldiers tried to talk to him in Polish.
‘Tutaj, nie ma panów,’
he replied, ‘There are no “squires” here . . . Make your report in Russian!’
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During the desperate Battle for Moscow in the last months of 1941, Rokossovsky was rewarded for his earlier performances by a sector command at Volokhamsk. When his troops reoccupied the town in December, after retreating to the very gates of the capital, they found the square filled with corpses swinging from gallows.

At Stalingrad, in 1942-43, Rokossovsky took control of the Don Front to the north of the besieged city, and masterminded the encirclement of the German Sixth Army. It was he who at 4 p.m. on 2 February 1943 penned the final report to Stalin, announcing that ‘military operations in the city and district of Stalingrad have ceased’. Next day Rokossovsky
became world-famous.
Pravda
published a full, front-page photograph of him interrogating the captured German Field Marshal, von Paulus. The only blemish in the picture was the face of the military commissar, Gen. Telegin, which for no apparent reason had been blacked out by the censor.
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The Battle of the Kursk Salient, in July 1943, has been described as the largest armoured battle in world history. Some 6,000 tanks, and a similar number of aircraft, mauled and blasted each other for eighteen days on the open steppe south of Moscow. The Red Army lost 600,000 men. But the T-34s saw off the German Tigers. Never again would the Wehrmacht be capable of mounting a major offensive. Rokossovsky commanded the central sector of the salient, at the heart of the cauldron.

After Kursk, the Red Army started to roll westward in a huge unstoppable tide. Rokossovsky took charge of the Central Front, pivot of the wings advancing to north and south. He broke into northern Ukraine near Glukhov and captured the ruins of Chernigov on 21 September. In October, he crossed the Dnieper, a mightily symbolic line.

Early in 1944, the Soviet Central Front was renamed the First Byelorussian Front and was designated the area of maximum concentration. Rokossovsky remained in command, and built up a crushing superiority of 2:1 in men, 3:1 in guns, more than 4:1 in tanks, and 4.5:1 in warplanes. He would be helped by a partisan force of nearly 150,000. Even so, his task was formidable. Army Group Centre had turned Byelorussia into a desert zone. Villages had been burned, crops ploughed under, towns dynamited and booby-trapped, the surviving population driven into the woods and marshes. Centres like Vitebsk and Bobruisk had been declared ‘fortresses’ to be defended to the last man. The principal city, Minsk, contained 4,000 delayed action bombs. Only 19 of its 332 factories remained intact.

Nonetheless, when Operation Bagration was unleashed on 23 June, it was shattering. 100,000 German troops were quickly surrounded east of Minsk. Over half of them were marched off to Moscow to be paraded through Red Square. And the Soviet colossus kept rolling on at 10–15km (6 to 10 miles) per day. Twenty-five, or possibly twenty-eight, German divisions were annihilated. In the words of the Official Journal of the German high command, ‘the rout of Army Group Centre . . . was a greater catastrophe than Stalingrad.’
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On 18 July, Rokossovsky’s men crossed the River Bug. On the 28th, they captured the fort at Brest-Litovsk where Barbarossa had begun three years earlier. Soviet territory had been cleared. On the 29th, Rokossovsky was nominated a Marshal of the Soviet Union.
That same day, his Sixty-Ninth Army raced to the Vistula and crossed to the western bank.

In spring 1944, during the Soviet build-up in Byelorussia, Rokossovsky’s Front was strengthened by the arrival of Gen. Berling’s 1st (Polish) Army. It was the second Polish Army to be formed in the USSR during the war, and was the military arm of the so-called Union of Polish Patriots, a political organization formed with Stalin’s blessing in Moscow the previous year. Its predecessor, the army of Gen. Anders, had succeeded in extracting itself from Soviet control and had departed for the Middle East to fight for the Allied cause under British command.
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Berling’s army, which numbered some 104,000 men when it joined Rokossovsky on 29 April 1944, was a substantial and growing force. Like the Anders Army before it, it drew on the huge pool of deportees, refugees, and POWs from Poland who found themselves in the Soviet Union, and who were now eager to fight their way home. But it was kept on the tightest of political leads. It was staffed entirely by Soviet-trained officers, and subject to the surveillance of Soviet-trained political commissars. ‘43,000 members of the Polish Communist forces had been transferred straight from Gulag camps’, hence ‘their feelings towards the Soviet Union were unlikely to be entirely fraternal.’
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Nonetheless, it attracted more recruits than it lost in the fighting, and it grew as it marched. It now consisted of five infantry divisions, a tank brigade, four artillery brigades, and an air wing. There can be no doubt that its spirits rose with every step that it took towards home.

Little is known about Berling’s relations with Rokossovsky, though the two men had much in common. They were exact contemporaries; they were both professional soldiers; and both had survived Stalin’s purges by a whisker. Sigismund Berling, born 1896 near Cracow, had served in the Polish legions of the Austrian army when Rokossovsky was serving in the Tsarist army. He had joined the Polish army when Rokossovsky joined the Red Army, and had been cast into the Lubyanka Jail when Rokossovsky was lingering in the Gulag. A lieutenant colonel, he spent some months at the prison camp of Starobielsk among comrades who were later to be massacred. He belonged to the very small group of Polish officers whom Stalin kept alive, and he was the only senior member of that group to be persuaded to serve in the Soviet ranks. In the eyes of others, who
stayed with Anders and eventually left the USSR, he was, to put it mildly, a turncoat.

Berling’s motives were undoubtedly mixed. They seem to have included vanity, opportunism, strategic realism, fear for his skin, and resentment against his former superiors. He had left his pre-war regiment at his own request, having been reprimanded for an inappropriate romance. More to the point, there was a long tradition among people of Berling’s generation which held that a war between Germany and Russia rendered a neutral stance impossible. One could work with the Russians, they thought, without sharing every Russian aim. At the time of his interrogation in the Lubyanka, Berling would not have known about the Katyn massacres. But according to various sources, including his widow, he was present at the critical meeting with Beria in October 1940, when, in response to a query about the missing officers, Beria made the chilling comment: ‘We made a mistake.’
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At all events, once Berling had agreed to cooperate, the road to fame and favour was opened. Just as Rokossovsky was sent from the Gulag to the beach at Sochi, Berling was sent from the Lubyanka to the ‘Villa of Delights’ at Malakhovka near Moscow. From then on, re-education and rehabilitation beckoned. Berling briefly made an appearance with the independent Anders Army – no doubt as a Soviet informer – but deserted after an altercation with one of his seniors.
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He re-emerged in 1943–44 as commander of the Ko
ciuszko Division, commander of the Polish Corps, and in March 1944 commander of the 1st Army. In the month when he was taking up position for the offensive in Byelorussia, Anders was covering himself in glory at the storming of Monte Cassino.

A possible clue to Berling’s feelings may be gleaned from his own account of his parting with Anders in August 1942 on the shores of the Caspian Sea. He had been sent by his NKVD controllers to report for duty with his Polish superiors and to monitor their evacuation to the Middle East. He was already accompanied by the woman who would become his third wife, and he felt that his departing compatriots, by leaving Russia, were losing all chances of eventually returning home. He thought that they were even more misguided than the men of Napoleon’s Polish Legions, who were sent to crush the slave revolt in San Domingo and were never seen again.

Shortly before moving to the Byelorussian Front, however, Berling and his corps were obliged to perform a highly symbolic duty. They were
taken to the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, recently recaptured from the Germans, and shown the mass graves of the Polish officers murdered there. Berling knew perfectly well that the victims had disappeared in 1940, more than a year before the German Occupation of the district. Even so, since a Soviet Commission had recently pronounced the massacres to be a Nazi crime, he was obliged to make a speech confirming what he knew to be untrue. ‘Our inexorable foe, the German,’ he began, ‘seeks to destroy our whole nation . . .’
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Berling, like Rokossovsky, knew that Stalin’s political games were every bit as deadly as the war in which they were now engaged.