The Road to Berlin (176 page)

Yeremenko, A.I.,
Gody vozmezdiya
, ch. 14, Prague operations, pp. 566–76: German strength in Czechoslovakia (62 divisions), Prague rising, 4th Ukrainian Front driving on Prague from the east, organization of Front mobile group (rifle division with a tank brigade, also a rifle battalion with 10 aircraft), also mobile groups set up in 38th, 60th and 1st Guards Army, Front mobile group concentrated at Opava, first assignment to capture Olomouc, capture of General Trukhin from Vlasov Army, Yeremenko confirms his identity since Trukhin a lecturer with him at General Staff Academy in 1938 (p. 572), signal from Moscow on Reims capitulation, some German commanders reject ultimatum, 60th and 38th Army continue drive to the west, new boundary lines between 1st and 4th Ukrainian Fronts set by
Stavka
during night of 10 May.

Zavizion, G.T. and Kornyushin, P.A.,
I na Tikhom Okeane
… (6th Guards Tank Army), ch. VII, ‘Na Pragu’, pp. 185–96: Prague operation, capture of Brno 26 April, at opening of Prague operation 6th Guards Tank had only
151 tanks and
SP
guns
(9th Guards Mech. Corps had only
21 tanks), Stavka
plan to launch two powerful blows on both flanks of Army Group Centre and then close on Prague with concentric attacks to encircle enemy forces east of Prague cutting off German escape routes to the west and south-west, offensive of 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts timed for 7 May, at 0530 hrs 6th Guards Tank committed into breach of enemy defences cleared by 7th Guards Army, 1300 hrs 9 May lead elements 5th Guards Tank Corps in Prague from the south-east and linked up with 3rd Guards Tank Army/1st Ukrainian Front, 9th Guards Mech. Corps also approached from the south, 7th Guards and 53rd Army following in wake of 6th Guards Tank, junction with 3rd and 4th Guards Tank armies completed encirclement of main body of Army Group Centre, escape route to the Americans severed, lead elements of 9th Guards Mech. Corps made contact with American forces 40km south-west of Prague.

Polish materials

Gać, Stanislaw,
Udzial 2 Armii Wojska Polskiego w operacji praskiej
(Warsaw: MON 1962), 176 pp. (2nd Polish Army: Prague operation).

Vlasov/Vlasov movement: KONR

‘Die Aktion des Generals Wlassow’, see Teil B., ‘Die Behandlung des russischen Problems während der Zeit des ns. Regimes in Deutschland.’ (Manuscript), ch. OX: 1 ROA Division on the Oder front, Vlasov’s plans and intentions, the Schörner–Bunyachenko confrontation, the final days, pp. 278–83.

Steenberg, Sven,
Vlasov
, ch. V, ‘Too Little and Too Late’: Vlasov on the Oder front 8 April, journey to Prague 16 April Vlasov–Klecanda meeting, Bunyachenko’s march south, Schörner–Bunyachenko confrontation, pp. 183–94; ch. VI, ‘Marching toward Doom’: Vlasov troops and Czech rising in Prague, Vlasov reaches American forward post, Vlasov in Soviet hands, pp. 195–211.

Strik–Strikfeldt, Wilfried,
Against Stalin and Hitler
(trans. David Footman), ch. 19, ‘Last Meeting with Vlasov’, plans for approach to the Americans (and British), Strik–Strikfeldt to have Vlasovite identity card as ‘Colonel Verevkin’, pp. 222–30; ch. 20, ‘The End’: the Mannheim camp, conversation with captured senior German officers on Russia, Russian campaign and the Vlasov movement, arrest of General Vlasov on Czechoslovak soil, pp. 231–45.

Tolstoy, Nikolai,
Victims of Yalta
. See ch. 12, ‘The End of General Vlasov’, pp. 278–303: the most detailed study of the final circumstances of Vlasov and the
KONR
, the strange affair of the ‘handover’ and a note on a 1973 article in the USSR on Vlasov’s trial.

Bibliography

NOTE ON SOURCES AND MATERIALS RELATING TO THE SOVIET–GERMAN WAR (1941–45)

To assemble any account of the Soviet-German war, or the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in its Soviet guise, involves nothing less than scaling a mighty mountain of material, not least the formidable escarpments of captured German military documents (GMD) and the massive outcrop of Soviet publication amounting to more than 15,000 volumes to date. Such circumstances must perforce make any claim to comprehensive identification and listing pretentious, even absurd, though by the same token some method must be devised and implemented to account for the diversity and internal complexity of these materials. To this end I have divided the material into four sections, beginning with
Soviet sources
, followed by
German Military Documents, East European
items and
non-Soviet works
, all of which is intended to comprehend the bulk of sources and materials utilized in the preparation of the present work as well as its predecessor,
The Road to Stalingrad
.

The ordering and classification of Soviet materials has proved to be no simple undertaking. Sheer bulk apart, the several revisions of the wartime history of the Soviet Union—prompted by political exigency—necessitate some form of differentiation, a matter to which I have attended in the first instance by listing the several Soviet
bibliographies
of publications related to the war (including wartime materials themselves). Wartime censorship and the need for morale-boosting propaganda (designed for internal and external consumption) all too obviously impregnated this wartime output, but in which embattled nation was this not so? Nevertheless, it is quite impossible to discount the wartime issues of the newspaper
Krasnaya Zvezda
, those essential communiqués from the important collection
Soobshcheniya Sovetskogo Informatsionnovo byuro (Sovinformbyuro)
, with almost 3,000 pages to it, and also
Soviet War News
(published by the press department of the Soviet Embassy in London); one of the best compilations of the most pertinent wartime military monographs and patriotic brochures—representing names such as Talenskii, Zamyatin, Fokin, Sidorov and Tarle—is to be found in Maj.-Gen. A. Grylev’s article, ‘Sovetskaya voennaya istoriografiya v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i poslevoennyi period’
(Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal
, 1968 (1), pp. 90–100). Just what could be accomplished by skilful exploitation of these contemporary sources was shown in that excellent two-volume study, one which even today retains considerable value,
The Russian Campaigns of 1941–1943/1944–1945
by W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, published by Penguin Books in 1944–6. There is also much to be derived from Marshal Stalin’s Orders of the Day
(Prikazy Verkhovnovo Glavnokomanduyushchevo)
,
wartime drum-rolls recently brought back to sight and sound in the 1975 Soviet reproduction.

Clearly, the Party must have its place and I have combined this with the Soviet version of ‘official histories’ of the war, technically a misnomer but easily recognizable in that form, principally the earlier six-volume history and the current publication on the history of the Second World War, now completed in twelve volumes. Campaign histories, operational narratives and formation/unit histories are self-explanatory, but ‘memoirs’ pose something of a problem due to their highly variegated nature: while
Voennye Memuary
form a distinct series, I have followed that admirable Soviet handbook
0 voine, o tovarishchakh, o sebe
(Voenidzat 1977) as to what constitutes ‘voennomemuarnaya literatura’ and which books should be included under the rubric of a ‘memoir’. The difficulty is compounded by the expansion of that series ‘Vtoraya mirovaya voina v issledovaniyakh, vospominaniyakh, dokumentakh’, supervised and published by the Academy of Sciences, not least as a corrective to the more exuberant ‘subjectivism’ of the authors published in
Voennye Memuary
. Additionally, it is necessary to take account of yet another category, the ‘Istoriko-memuarnyi ocherk’, a combination of documentary research with personal reminiscences and memoir material, hence my subdivision into memoirs in a personalized form,
Voennye Memuary
(selected for their historical relevance) and, finally, memoirs in a collective context with collective contributions.

Within all this literature
Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal
enjoys a very singular place, that major journal which resumed publication in 1959 and is now in the twenty-third year of its resuscitated existence. The memoir material in this journal is of prime importance, often being a more technical (and reliable) version of what subsequently appeared in
Voennye Memuary;
the documentary evidence adduced is also of commanding importance, a significant example being the wide spread of Marshal Vasilevskii’s contributions suffused with command papers, transcripts and signals. Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasilevskii is a much underestimated soldier, a figure who flits about Soviet historiography but a commander inured to the battlefield yet deft in his handling of the whole Soviet war machine. For that reason alone—illuminating the role of Marshal Vasilevskii—
Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal
must command the attention of every historian, but there is the additional dimension of quite stringent analysis of Soviet operational decisions, operational performance and command systems—a feature which became more pronounced in the mid-1970s as the treatment of wartime experience was integrated more fully into contemporary military research, particularly what is presently labelled ‘command and control’. For that reason, as well as others, the military statistics provided by this journal also enjoy singular relevance.

Mention of Soviet ‘military statistics’ brings us to the
massif
of the captured German Military Documents. I should say at once that in terms of ‘raw data’ (order of battle, strengths, dispositions, weapons performance, assessments of intentions) derived from contemporary sources, the German and Soviet materials do not differ appreciably. What has been constructed in retrospect is another matter, but I have tried here to assemble out of the many thousands of pages of German documents a collection which can represent the ‘comparability’ of Soviet and German sources—hence (i) the main command decisions and related papers at Army Group/Army level, the
Chefsachen
and operational planning papers, (ii) that invaluable agglomeration of intelligence material amassed by
Fremde Heere Ost
, perhaps best described as ‘assessments and evaluations’, and (iii) ‘collected papers’ comprising the multiple collections of studies, compilations, analyses, statistical data, map folders, interrogations and captured mail—both yielding masses of information—and so into the manic, horrifying records of the
Reich
Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, coupled with the even more chilling files of the
Reichführer SS
which retail the unrestrained horrors of
Bandenkrieg
, the battle with the Soviet partisans and the sinister business with General Vlasov. These same ‘collections’ also provide a wealth of information related to technical intelligence, ranging from the study of the logistic support for Soviet tank troops to the narrow but revealing data from
OHK/General der Eisenbahntruppen
, the railway troops (material which can be duly compared with the Soviet analysis of railway operations presented by G.A. Kumanev in
Na sluzhbe fronta i tyla
, Nauka 1976). From this and other material it is possible to assemble what I might best call a ‘sub-archive’ of original Soviet documents, papers and orders captured by German units—a prime example is furnished by the
FHO
(IIb) file (T-78/R488) on the conduct of Soviet troops on German territory, with original Soviet orders and instructions as well as PW interrogation and details on Soviet procedures, including the organization of Soviet
strafbats
, the punishment battalions.