The Road to Berlin (114 page)

If Zhukov demanded masses of blinding searing lights on the battlefield, Koniev chose the dark and the concealment of dense smokescreens to cloak his assault crossing of the Neisse: all formation commanders (and 2nd Air Army commander) received this instruction in Koniev’s operational directive No. 00211, issued on 8 April. Zhukov opted for only thirty minutes of artillery preparation; Koniev planned a lengthy barrage lasting 145 minutes. At least Zhukov was across the Oder at Küstrin—though the bridges and crossings suffered continuous shelling and bombing, even the hazard of floating mines—while Koniev had to force the Neisse from its eastern bank, flat and sloping as opposed to the steep western side. The Neisse was fast and formidable, forcing on Koniev an assault crossing on an enormous scale all under the German guns located in concrete forts and strong-points.

Across an arc of 235 miles the three Soviet fronts committed to the Berlin attack piled up massive stocks of ammunition, deployed hundreds of units and sited thousands of guns. Zhukov’s divisions fought a losing battle against the weather and the terrain when it came to concealment: the sodden ground, oozing water from the spring floods and local springs, made it impossible to dig in properly and effective camouflage was ruined by the bare trees as yet without leaf. Ammunition by the thousands of tons—seven million shells finally—came up by rail, with the tracks now replaced by broad Russian gauge and the wagons bypassing intermediate dumps to unload near the front-line positions. Tanks and
SP
guns were shifted by rail on flat-cars, covered by great bundles of hay and bulging sacks, while units moved by night as a rule, halting by day and moving at once under what camouflage they could devise; the guns moved into the spiky forests, a giant array growing day by day and stepped in ranks by calibre, an artificial forest in its own right dominated by the massive 203mm guns draped in their camouflage nets. The searchlights came in from the Front Searchlight Company and from 5th Air Defence
(PVO)
Corps, the lights sited in intervals of 200 yards from each other and at varying distances from the front line, anything from four hundred to almost a thousand yards: the girl crews did not arrive in the forward positions until 15 April, cheered on their way by a deal of front-line humour. The Germans also used searchlights, which poked and prodded from the Seelow Heights into the valley where Soviet assault units steadily piled up; when the lights went out, German aircraft dropped flares to continue the illumination. Under strict orders Soviet guns did not fire and the units in the bridgehead froze or squirmed flat as the lights swept over them.

As the guns massed in incredible numbers—8,983 on Zhukov’s main attack axis, 7,733 mustered by Koniev on his attack line—the engineer troops also crowded the bridgeheads and assault positions. Rokossovskii and Koniev faced assault crossings of the Oder and the Neisse, while Zhukov’s men in the Küstrin bridgehead would have to deal with strong German fortifications and fixed defences. The
Stavka
rushed up all the reinforcement it could muster, in all 485 battalions of combat engineers and bridge-building (pontoon) troops, of which
360 battalions were to be used directly in the breakthrough operations. On Zhukov’s Front, bridge-building over the Oder went on ceaselessly and under heavy fire, with thirteen pontoon bridge and twenty-seven engineer battalions working like demons to keep the damaged bridges and crossings open; twenty-five bridges went into position, linking the Küstrin bridgehead to the eastern bank of the Oder, thus emplacing two bridges for each mile and a half of front in the actual assault area, plus three ferries. Then, on 10 April, the Dnieper River Flotilla sailed into this flurry of river activity, the gunboats of the 1st and 2nd Brigade taking up positions on the Oder near Küstrin; the 3rd Brigade received orders to prevent the destruction of the power installations at Fürstenberg.

Koniev planned to bring his infantry and light guns over the Neisse in the first assault, followed by tanks and
SP
guns, but both tank army commanders were warned not to use their river-crossing equipment on the Neisse and to hold it back for the Spree. Each rifle regiment took delivery of a couple of light assault bridges, divisions had two three-ton bridges and corps a sixteen-ton pontoon bridge: armies would deploy their own thirty-ton and sixty-ton bridges. Elsewhere Koniev’s engineers laboured on, preparing 136 bridges, digging out 14,700 bunkers and armoured command posts, and setting up 11,780 gun-pits. Five Motor-Transport Regiments put 3,000 lorries to work shifting fuel and ammunition, as well as redeploying troops; 15,000 Lend-Lease lorries crisscrossed the Front area delivering more food and above all, ammunition.

While his front-line troops struggled manfully to complete the preparations for the mammoth attack on Berlin involving over 190 Soviet divisions, Stalin battled in dour style with his two partners within the Big Three to secure all his political gains: wariness was necessary, for as he told Zhukov at the end of March, President Roosevelt would not violate the Yalta agreement, ‘but as for that Churchill—
vot Cherchill
—he can get up to anything’. Over Poland truculence turned to trickery. At the end of March, under cover of a specific safe-conduct, fifteen leading Polish political and military figures travelled to Pruszkow near Warsaw for consultations with Marshal Zhukov. Two groups made this journey, the first on 27 March and the second following a day later. None ever returned. In any event it would have been difficult to talk with Marshal Zhukov, who was already on his way to Moscow to confer with Stalin on the Berlin offensive. The Poles, it is true, did follow him but under
NKVD
guard. This spoliation of the opposition in Poland was also accompanied by yet another manoeuvre, an attempt on the part of one Jagodzinski as an ‘unofficial’ representative of the Lublin Committee to negotiate a direct settlement with Professor Grabski, the former Speaker of the Polish Parliament in London. Jagodzinski dismissed the ‘Moscow Commission’ as unimportant, he scorned all the business of ‘intermediaries’ and proposed that Professor Grabski, Mikolajczyk and three others join ‘his’ government. Forget the Moscow Commission, Jagodzinski counselled; it was ‘only window dressing. Stalin will decide all.’ Mikolajczyk was also subject to these same blandishments by yet another ‘Lublin Pole’.

Such news dismayed the Prime Minister, who was not inclined to accept a Foreign Office appreciation that Stalin’s aims were limited. Nor was he inclined to acquiesce in Soviet control of eastern Europe. His letter of 27 March to President Roosevelt spelled out this growing anxiety, with a plea for ‘the strongest appeal to Stalin about Poland’. But Stalin was also nursing his own grievances and responded to the President’s message of 25 March about the ‘Berne negotiations’ with a growling signal on 29 March, complaining about the movement of German divisions to the Soviet–German front from Italy and hinting that ‘some other, more far-reaching aims affecting the destiny of Germany’ must have been involved in a German move to ‘open the front’ to Allied armies in Italy. On 1 April, the day on which Stalin was finalizing the military arrangements to guarantee his portion of Germany and Berlin to boot, the President and the Prime Minister launched two lengthy messages to Moscow, both letters conveying obvious misgivings particularly over Poland. A further message from the President also responded to Stalin’s views, expressed on 29 March, about the ‘Berne negotiations’: no negotiation had taken place, the President repeated, and German troop movements from Italy—with two divisions sent to the Eastern Front—took place well before this contact was made.

Stalin had already fired his shot about the erroneous intelligence supplied about Sixth
Panzer
. Now he sent direct contradiction to the President in a letter on 3 April: there were indeed negotiations at Berne—‘Apparently you are not fully informed’—all ending in an agreement to open the front to Anglo–American troops and allow German forces to move east. In return, the British and Americans will ease the armistice terms for Germany. Such was the information from Stalin’s ‘military colleagues’ and, he added, ‘I think that my colleagues are not very far from the truth.’ The Germans on the Western front have practically ceased the war against Britain and America; they fight on only against Russia. Stung and angered, a physically weakened President left it to General Marshall to send a reply on 5 April: rebutting the charges, the message ended with undisguised bitterness, castigating Stalin’s informers ‘whoever they are’ for ‘vile misrepresentations’ of the President himself and his subordinates—his trusted subordinates. The Prime Minister also sent a message in similar vein.

Unabashed, Stalin would have none of this. ‘The Russian point of view’—that other allies should be invited to surrender talks—is ‘the only correct one’; the Germans could easily withdraw 15–20 divisions from the east to aid their western front, but this does not happen. They fight furiously in the east for ‘an obscure station’, about as much use to them as a poultice to a dead man, but they surrender Mannheim and Kassel without a shot … ‘strange and unaccountable behaviour’. As for Stalin’s informers he pointed again to the information on Sixth
Panzer
: they may have been late with the news, but they were right. To the Prime Minister he was offhandedly brusque: no one was trying to ‘blacken’
(‘chernit’)
anyone, certainly neither he (Stalin) nor Molotov was casting slurs, for the matter boiled down to ‘the duties and rights of an ally’. As for those rights
Stalin referred to them in his communication of 7 April to the President and the Prime Minister, answering their complaints about the handling of the Polish question. Certainly, ‘the Polish question has indeed reached an impasse’, Stalin agreed somewhat grimly, but only because the Western ambassadors were departing ‘from the instructions of the Crimea conference’ and introducing ‘new elements’: they have ignored the Provisional Government, they demand that an ‘unlimited number’ of persons from Poland and London be invited by each member of the Moscow Commission for consultations rather than the five from Poland and three from London, and they ignore the ‘Crimea decision’ that only those Poles willing to accept the Yalta agreement (in particular, the Curzon line demarcation) and anxious to implement ‘friendly relations’ with the Soviet Union should be invited for consultation. Given the presence of Poles committed to ‘friendly relations’ with the Soviet Union, the provisional government could be enlarged with the understanding that it formed the ‘core of the future Polish Government of National Unity’, with a restriction on the numbers invited for consultation and a ratio of old to new ministers in this future government based on the Yugoslav model.

At the beginning of April, in one momentous week, Stalin sieved the whole of his strategy through his fingers. Showing the strain of war, Stalin seemed a prey to conflicting pressures and contradictory emotions—the vengeful mood which filled the Russian mind at large; the rights of Russia and the honour due to her, the freedom to secure Russia’s security interests in eastern Europe born of massive military presence and power, a gnawing suspiciousness that the British would clamp a
cordon sanitaire
once again round the Soviet Union, and paranoia about secret deals which would deprive Russia of the spoils of Germany and sabotage Russia’s claim to power and prestige in a morass of intrigue and dingy dealing. Stalin was right about Yalta and the Polish question: the British and Americans were now pinned on the ambiguities they had encouraged, but Yalta could not be renegotiated, certainly not when Stalin insisted on a legalistic and strict interpretation of what had been agreed. In view of the grip fastened by the Red Army and the
NKVD
on Poland, Stalin could even afford a certain insouciance in disputing the Prime Minister’s charge about too much secrecy in Poland—‘Actually there is no secrecy at all’, he wrote on 7 April.

Having drawn up his armies for a mighty assault on Berlin, sucking in at least two and a half million Soviet fighting men for a grand if gruesome finale by way of chastisement to the strutting
Herrenvolk
—the butchers of the common folk of Russia when they were not acting out the part of supercilious slavers—Stalin set about discharging his remaining obligations under the Yalta agreement. He sent orders to begin strengthening the command staffs in the Trans-Baikal and Far Eastern military districts, as well as the Far Eastern Coastal group; Soviet armies in the European theatre should shortly begin their move to the Far East. The former Karelian Front had already been disbanded, and at the end of March Meretskov found himself on the way to Yaroslavl where his staff was assembled ready for fresh orders. Ahead of Meretskov, the ‘wily man’ in whom Stalin
reposed an unwavering confidence, went 670 T-34 tanks and some of the latest equipment to stiffen the Far Eastern armies.

On 5 April, implementing Paragraph 3, the Soviet government served notice of its denunciation of the Non-Aggression Pact with Japan, signed in April 1941. It had run for four years, short of eight days.

In the middle of March Marshal Vasilevskii, in immediate command of the 3rd Belorussian Front and with Bagramyan’s ‘Samland Group’ (formerly 1st Baltic Front) directly subordinated to him, gathered his battered forces for the final attack on Königsberg, though a necessary and costly prelude proved to be the reduction of the German bridgehead to the south and south-west, a defensive system with Heiligenbeil at its centre and manned resolutely by the German Fourth Army. By Soviet reckoning nineteen German divisions were deployed in this bridgehead, with only eleven in Samland and Königsberg itself, but Vasilevskii envisaged three stages to the Königsberg operation—the destruction of the Heiligenbeil defensive force, a powerful attack on Königsberg itself and finally the elimination of German forces in Samland. To split the Heiligenbeil defence Vasilevskii proposed to mount two attacks from the east and the south-east, realizing full well that this would inevitably delay the final assault but unable to see any other way to solve what had become a formidable problem.