The Road to Berlin (14 page)

In terms of the map, the Germans had regained the Donets–Mius line by March 1943 but the situation had undergone a major, if not a profound transformation. Five armies, four German-allied and one the formidable Sixth, had been swept clean off the German order-of-battle map. The wound was very deep. As Kazakov, Rybalko, Kharitonov, Popov and Kuznetsov finally fought their way through the German attacks in late March, the front stabilized itself on the Donets and the Mius, over which Soviet troops held a few bridgeheads and, in Golikov’s area, the southern face of what finally became the Kursk salient. Here the armies were held fast in the mud of the spring thaw.

‘The real struggle is only beginning.…’: with this cautionary phrase Stalin in his 23 February Red Army Day order introduced a note of reservation into otherwise effusive praise for the Soviet winter offensive, which—on Stalin’s tally—had inflicted almost a million casualties on German and German-allied troops and brought staggering losses in equipment. The Red Army was now a cadre formation, its troops skilled and experienced in battle, its commanders masters of ‘modern operating art’. The
Wehrmacht
, torn by the terrible battles of the Eastern Front, had lost much of its pristine 1941 quality, though it was by no means finished. Much as the enemy had been battered, however, his grip on
Soviet territory would have to be prised open, for the German armies would not relinquish their gains without a struggle.

Nevertheless, with Soviet armies striking westwards and penetrating for more than 150 miles, the ‘mass expulsion of the enemy’—
izgnanie vraga
—had now definitely begun. From the rear, Soviet factories were now pumping equipment and ammunition to the field armies in vast quantities. But of Allied aid—or Allied achievement in the Western Desert and North Africa—there was not a word. On the contrary, Stalin threw out the blunt statement that the Soviet Union alone carried the weight of the war-waging. Not all of this was the mere flush of victory at Stalingrad. In December 1942 Stalin had again returned to the question of the Second Front, which he now pressed to be opened in ‘the spring of 1943’. The decisions of the Casablanca conference, communicated to Stalin on 26 January 1943, certainly did not come within his specification of a ‘second front in Europe’, which meant unambiguously a full-scale sea-borne invasion launched across the Channel against northern France. All that Stalin got in this 26 January signal by way of commitment was that powerful forces, already being assembled, would ‘re-enter the continent of Europe as soon as practicable’. In his own message of 30 January to the British Prime Minister and the American President, Stalin now asked for information on ‘the concrete operations planned and of their timing’, announcing at the same time that the Soviet armed forces would ‘finish our winter campaign, circumstances permitting, in the first half of February’—though orders had just gone out for a massive activation of the Soviet offensive as from the middle of the month. On 9 February, Winston Churchill sent Stalin an answer about ‘the concrete operations’—eastern Tunisia, Sicily, further operations in the eastern Mediterranean and preparations ‘for a cross-Channel operation in August’. Stalin’s reply a week later (16 February), though smoothly phrased, had a ring of reproof and a sting of complaint about it—‘for some reason’ Anglo-American operations in Tunisia were ‘suspended’ at the end of December, since when twenty-seven German divisions (five of them armoured) had been moved on to the Eastern Front; ‘in other words, instead of the Soviet Union being aided … what we get is relief for Hitler, who, because of the slackening in Anglo-American operations in Tunisia, was able to move additional troops against the Russians.’ And that signal Stalin could end with a flourish, with the announcement of a considerable Russian triumph: ‘This morning our troops have taken Kharkov.’

For all of Stalin’s disclaimers about continuing the offensive, five Soviet fronts—the North-Western, Kalinin, Western, Bryansk and Central—were about to embark on a huge new round of operations, for which the directives were being prepared and orders issued even as Stalin phrased his message. The objectives were hugely ambitious in what was essentially a repetition of the 1942 offensive pattern: the destruction of Second
Panzer
Army in the Orel area; the encirclement of Army Group Centre; the destruction of German troops at Demyansk; and the introduction of a powerful mobile force into the rear of Army Group North.
While the Voronezh Front struck south-westwards to Kursk and Kharkov and the Bryansk Front towards Orel, the gap between the flanks of the two fronts would be sealed by the deployment of the Central Front under Rokossovskii, who immediately after the German capitulation at Stalingrad had flown to Moscow to receive instructions about the movement and operations of the new front. The Central Front, organized on the basis of the old Don Front, would include the 21st, 65th Army and 16th Air Army (Don Front formations) plus 70th Army and 2nd Tank Army from the
Stavka
reserve. Lt.-Gen. A.G. Rodin’s 2nd Tank Army was brand new; established by
Stavka
orders of 15 January 1943, it comprised two tank corps (16th under Maj.-Gen. Pavelkin and 11th under Maj.-Gen. Lazarev) with supporting units. Rokossovskii’s troops were to be ready to attack on 15 February, to carry out their deep outflanking operations against Second
Panzer
in the direction of Gomel–Smolensk; but the ten days or so allotted for moving up all the formations proved to be woefully inadequate, with only one road and one railway line in service. The shortage of lorries and horses meant that Soviet infantrymen carried their heavy machine-guns, anti-tank weapons and even mortars on their own backs, while more often than not ammunition was shifted from village to village by the porterage of the local civilians. Guns and men went their separate ways; tractors and gun-tows were separated from the guns, and in the Stalingrad area more than 150 supply or rear service units waited for trains which came only slowly, and which could move only as far as Shchigry in the Front area. Rodin’s 2nd Tank had a 150-mile approach march ahead of it before reaching its deployment area at Fatezh; to keep control over the movement of the columns driving on through snow drifts and blizzards, Rodin organized an aerial watch with the small U-2 planes and directed the progress of his tanks in this fashion himself. By the evening of 12 February the lead tanks were moving out to the Front area, but not until 24 February were 65th Army, 2nd Tank Army and 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps fully concentrated; 21st and 70th Armies were even then still on the move.

Reiter’s Bryansk Front had already jumped off on 12 February with 13th and 48th Armies, left-wing formations seeking to outflank Orel from the south and south-east. After twelve days of difficult fighting, these two armies had penetrated some fifteen miles to reach the line Novosil–Maloarkhangelsk–Rozhdestvennoe, thereby turning the offensive front in a northerly direction, by which time also Bagramyan’s 16th Army from the Western Front under the command of Col.-Gen. Sokolovskii had already begun its attacks from the north. This northerly attack in the Orel–Bryansk operation by Bagramyan’s units made precious little progress after breaking through the first German defence line; all too soon 16th Army, having advanced some seven miles, was brought to a halt when it bumped into two German divisions. The blame for this outcome Bagramyan subsequently laid squarely at the door of Sokolovskii himself who had failed to provide the requisite forces for the operation. Reiter’s Bryansk Front striking from the south had so far managed only fifteen miles and had already come up against the
German reinforcements brought down from Vyazma and Rzhev to Orel; by Soviet calculation, some seven German divisions had been newly deployed to the south of Orel.

At this juncture Rokossovskii with elements of his Central Front was making ready to attack, deploying as fast as possible to the north of Kursk. The original timetable had called for Rokossovskii to take the offensive on 15 February; that had now been revised to 25 February. The original plan had assumed that the Central Front would drive for Smolensk through Bryansk and then, in co-operation with the Western and Kalinin Fronts, destroy the bulk of an encircled Army Group Centre. On Stalin’s instructions, the Bryansk Front was now relieved of the assignment to take Bryansk (which devolved on the Central Front): Reiter was to concentrate on freeing Orel and destroying the flank formations of Second
Panzer
. On the morning of 26 February Rokossovskii’s 65th and 2nd Tank Armies, together with a ‘cavalry-rifle group’ (under Maj.-Gen. V.V. Kryukov and consisting basically of 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps), attacked in the direction of Bryansk. Rodin’s tank army—reinforced with three rifle divisions and a rifle brigade—was to break the German defences on the river Svap, push armoured units into the breach between the ‘central’ and the ‘Orel’ German forces and then go for Pochep–Unech (south-west of Bryansk) to encircle German troops at Orel in co-operation with Western Front forces coming from the north. Batov’s 65th, with its six divisions, would attack to the right. Neighbour to Batov was the newly formed 70th Army under Maj.-Gen. Tarasov, a young and inexperienced officer whose new army had been formed largely out of former frontier guards. This army had been having a hard time before it reached the line, for it lacked ammunition and food supplies. The men in its regiments had gone hungry for some time now, and Tarasov came over to Batov’s
HQ
to ask 65th to help out as best it could. Tarasov received orders to attack at 0800 hours on 26 February. Rokossovskii also had some bad news for Batov: owing to the German counter-stroke to the south, 21st Army had been diverted and would not now follow Batov in the attack. To bolster up the Voronezh and South-Western Fronts, a large part of the Central Front air force was similarly ordered south. As Rokossovskii remarked, ‘they are flinging “the Don boys” about all over the place’.

Rokossovskii’s offensive unrolled very successfully at first on the left, where Colonel Sankovskii’s brigade penetrated the German defences. First the motorized infantry and cavalry, and finally the bulk of Rodin’s 2nd Tank Army passed through this gap and raced ahead for some thirty miles. Rodin and Kryukov had exploited one unreinforced German sector, but within a few days German resistance stiffened visibly as fresh units moved in; on 7 March 2nd Tank received orders to shift the axis of its advance with right-flank units to the north-east, in the direction of Karachev (south-west of Bryansk), at a time when the tanks were beginning to run out of ammunition and fuel as well as to need overhaul badly. Within forty-eight hours, Rodin’s tanks were heavily engaged with two German divisions, 45th and 72nd Infantry. Kryukov with his mobile group
pressed on north-westwards, reaching the river Desna in the Novgorod–Severskii area by 10 March, a deep penetration of 60 miles, making a considerable Soviet salient. But what the Soviet command hoped for did not happen; German units did not pull back from Orel. On the contrary, strong German forces, up to six divisions on Soviet reckoning, now assailed Kryukov’s force.

Elsewhere the situation had deteriorated in an ugly fashion.
Stavka
instructions to Rokossovskii now envisaged the Central Front attacking Orel in co-operation with left flank of the Bryansk Front (once Rokossovskii had made it plain that his front could not carry out the vast advance implied in its original orders), but the formation assigned to the new Orel attack—21st Army—was now hurriedly switched to Oboyan and put under the command of the Voronezh Front. On 12 March the
Stavka
, in an effort to centralize the control of operations in the Orel–Bryansk area, compressed the Bryansk Front, subordinating most of its formations to Rokossovskii except for 61st Army which went to the Western Front. It was, however, all too late. Under heavy attack, Kryukov and Sankovskii’s brigade, struck from north and south, were forced to pull back to the river Sev, where Kryukov himself moved to the eastern bank with the last of the Soviet rearguards. Kryukov lamented his running out of fuel, ammunition and forage; Sankovskii was angry at the dispersal of his brigade, scattering in battalions over a broad front. The military soviet of 2nd Tank Army investigated the reasons for the withdrawal from the Desna—‘voluntary retirement’ by Kryukov and Sankovskii. Since the latter were operationally subordinated to Batov at 65th, the matter had to be investigated by commission representing the Front Military Soviet and the court of inquiry was duly held, its findings being that the withdrawal was unavoidable. This Rokossovskii supported and wrote on the report: ‘Conclusions agreed. No basis for turning matter over to field tribunal’. By 21 March the Central Front had turned over to the defensive along its entire front running from Mtsensk through Novosil and on to Bryantsevo, Sevsk and Rylsk—the northern face of the ‘Kursk salient’.

Late in February Gehlen completed a major intelligence survey of the Eastern Front—
Beurteilung der Feindabsichten vor der deutschen Ostfront im Grossen
(Fremde Heere Ost:
II
a)—which set present Russian objectives as the destruction of 17th Army (the Kuban), First
Panzer
and
Armee-Abteilung Hollidt
(the Donbas), as well as the winning of operational freedom south of lake Ladoga. The development of a major offensive against Army Group Centre was certainly part of Russian intentions, but there was now no hope of a general breakthrough on both German wings. Already the attempt to splinter the German centre had failed to produce any decisive breakthrough, though the persistent attacks in the Orel–Bryansk area, in addition to holding Second
Panzer
from any co-ordinated action with Fourth
Panzer
, had also forced the German command to bring down reinforcement from the Vyazma–Rzhev
place d’armes
, that dagger which had hitherto been pointed straight at the heart of the Soviet Union. Sixteen German divisions were shipped out of Vyazma–Rzhev for Orel and Kharkov. On 27 February to forestall
the danger of being outflanked from the south and to minimize the risk of encirclement, the German Ninth Army received orders to pull out westwards, pursued now by troops of the Kalinin and Western Fronts. On 3 March Soviet troops took Rzhev, and found it torn to shreds by battle and by ruthless German demolitions; in their wake, German troops left a horrible debris of destruction, mass killing and slave-labour deportation. Villages were burned to the ground, buildings blown up, rail tracks systematically ripped away with special rail-wrecking equipment. For three weeks Soviet troops traversed the oozing mud, through devastated zones and over obstacles that had been piled wherever possible to impede the advance; on 12 March, Vyazma, one more ghastly ruin, was liberated. Ten days later the line ‘stabilized’ at Ribshevo (thirty miles north of Smolensk)—Safonovo (twenty miles east of Yartsevo)—Milyatino (thirty miles south-west of Yukhnov). The front had sprung fifty miles westwards in the direction of Smolensk and was now shortened by well over a hundred miles, which enabled the Soviet command to take two armies and a mechanized corps into immediate reserve as well as using spare divisions to build up second echelons on the Western and Kalinin Fronts.