The Road to Berlin (30 page)

The
Stavka
had simultaneously issued revised instructions for the conduct of operations at the centre of the front, on the sector running from Vitebsk to Gomel, where a three-sided assault would be launched on Army Group Centre, from the north, the east and the south. During the first week in October the Bryansk Front was wound up, formally disappearing from the Soviet order of battle on 8 October; 50th, 3rd, 63rd and 11th Armies moved under Rokossovskii’s command on the Central Front (shortly redesignated the Belorussian Front), the remaining formations going further north. Rokossovskii’s new offensive, coming from the south, was aimed at Gomel–Bobruisk,
Stavka
instructions requiring him to align his assault armies in the direction of Zhlobin–Bobruisk–Minsk, to capture Minsk itself and then to move on the Minsk–Slutsk–river Sluch line. From the east Sokolovskii with the Western Front would drive on Orsha–Moghilev, both of which had been uncovered by the recapture of Smolensk and Roslavl. In the north Yeremenko on the Kalinin Front (redesignated 1st Baltic) would aim his offensive in the direction of Vitebsk. Yeremenko had already in early October set his attacks in motion, using two left-flank armies (43rd and 49th) to distract attention from his main blow with 3rd and 4th Shock Armies against Third
Panzer
, directed at the junction between Army Groups Centre and North in the Nevel area. This was no great territorial adjustment, but success here was of immense significance in putting the Red Army astride the routes leading to the rear of Army Group North and also for cutting through a vital tendon—
the Dno–Novosokolniki–Nevel railway circuit—whose severance would leave the whole German left wing without its internal connection and flapping all too loosely. Wider success would also put the Red Army along the shortest routes to Poland and East Prussia.

The non-stop Soviet offensive was now running into its fourth month, and into all the autumnal clogging brought by rain and soft, slithery ground. Soviet divisions, outrunning their supply columns and with their bases a hundred miles behind them, were moving into areas specially carved and cut with the demolitions brought on by retreating German troops, meant as more than mere harassment and designed to gouge out the economic vitals of the country as the
Wehrmacht
abandoned it. None of this eased supply and transportation problems. In the north lay the German strongholds, and though Nevel had gone in October, Vitebsk became another fortress. Between Orsha and Vitebsk lay a powerful German line covering the gap between the Dvina and the Dnieper. Down to Rogachev and Zhlobin, nature provided the barriers, with massive swamps and minor rivers by the score, behind them the Berezina and the Drut. Behind these lines improvized by men or established by nature were hard, tough, battle-tested German infantry divisions, veterans of the
Ostfront
and all its nightmares. The
Ostwall
as a great fortified rampart might have been a comforting figment of Hitler’s imagination, but the fixed lines in the north were real enough. To the south lay the one great natural barrier, the Dnieper, less fitted out with fortification, but formidable in its own span. There was, therefore, every reason for a great surge of Russian confidence as in October division after division crossed over, though the battle for the whole ‘Dnieper line’ was to be protracted. For Soviet and German armies alike, the
Schwerpunkt
remained anchored in the southern wing.

Soviet successes since Kursk had been on an impressive scale, not only in the forward sweep but in cracking the structure of the German Eastern Front, that great dispersal of German forces which Stalin had claimed in October was the very essence of his ‘war-shortening’ strategy. Whatever the guise in which he presented it, Stalin’s strategy was basically an admixture of attrition and offensiveness, much of the latter ill-judged and even reckless, though just for once—in the critical period before the battle for Kursk—Stalin had been prevailed upon to exercise restraint, patience and confidence in his own troops. That decision had now begun to make a handsome pay-off and Stalin was gaining ground diplomatically, militarily and politically. There was to be a ‘Big Three’ conference, the preparation for which had been set in train in Moscow; in military and political terms he now held the initiative in the struggle on the Eastern Front. With the ‘Free German movement’ he held a valuable bargaining card. The
Bund Deutscher Offiziere
, the
BDO
, had from the outset refused to be identified with the seditious propaganda—particularly the incitement to German soldiers to desert—which emanated from the
NKD
, but early in September the generals Seydlitz, Lattmann and Korfes had been persuaded by General Melnikov, an
emissary of the Soviet government and an officer of the
NKVD
, that in the event of a collapse of the
Ostfront
owing to the
Wehrmacht
intervening against Hitler, then the Soviet government would ‘guarantee’ Germany its 1938 frontiers, the continued existence of the
Wehrmacht
and no ‘Bolshevization’ of Germany. This, coupled with the
NKD’s
agreement not to subvert German soldiers in the field, swung the German generals into the
BDO
, and finally into a ‘merger’ of the
BDO
and the
NKD
. In the late summer Stalin may have overestimated the effect of the disaster at Kursk on Germany, but with his captive soldier ‘committees’ he did at least have a faint ‘shadow’ German authority representing ‘the army’ and ‘the people’, at least in name, a propaganda pincer to nip the native army and the nation as he chose, and a possible counter-weight to any Anglo-American ‘deal’ with Hitler—an ‘anti-Bolshevik Germany’ against which Stalin could respond with his own ‘pro-Bolshevik Germany’.

The ominous implications for Nazi Germany, not merely in the field but across the whole military–political board, were underlined by General Gehlen, himself chief of
Fremde Heere Ost
, in a chilling chart, the extrapolation of which he submitted in mid-October under the toneless title of
Bisherige Entwicklung der deutsch-sowjetrussischen Kräfteverhältnisse seit Kriegsbeginn und seine mögliche Weiterentwicklung bis Ende 1943
, a comparative survey of Soviet and German strength and performance in great detail, hung with maps and charts. From these data, from the
Gesamtbild
, General Gehlen drew only the most sombre conclusion: ‘… so in the future will the Soviet-Russian enemy surpass Germany in terms of manpower, equipment and in the field of propaganda’ (T-78/R466, 64403145: 17.10.43). To think, or to hope, that the Russians would now lie back was the gravest self-deception; the Soviet Union would surely—‘
mit Sicherheif
—unleash a powerful winter offensive. Gehlen was not guessing and indeed he was proved right. Plans were afoot for that massive winter attack which would bring the Soviet armies to the line from which they would be able to launch the truly decisive blows. Equally, as Gehlen predicted, the Red Army swelled with men and machines: 78 reformed rifle divisions (from what had been hitherto brigades), 126 rifle corps, an array of 5 tank armies, 24 tank corps, 13 mechanized corps, 80 independent tank brigades, 106 tank regiments and 43 regiments of self-propelled guns, 6 artillery corps, 26 artillery divisions, 7
Katyusha
rocker-launcher divisions, plus a score of artillery brigades.

Within twelve months of unleashing the counter-offensive at Stalingrad, the situation had taken a profound turn in favour of the Russians. Stalingrad itself brought premonitions of disaster to the Germans, but the killing-ground at Kursk, the miles of fire that consumed the
Panzer
divisions and burned out the infantry, brought the full reality of vast destruction. After the frenzied mechanized jousting on the battlefields in the salient at Kursk, the
Ostheer
, fearfully mangled at the hands of the Red Army, now began to wither. The last offensive and the last victories of the German Army in Russia had come and gone forever.

4

The Drive to the Western Frontiers: October 1943–March 1944

The autumn of 1943 once more brought low-hung cloud, fogbanks and rain to the battlefields. By day the sun, if it appeared, shone pale and fitful and at night autumnal frosts crackled on the surface of the mud and the ooze. Winter was only weeks away, but for the Red Army the coming winter was to prove very different from the two previous winter campaigns, fought much further east amidst the frost, ice and snow. Since storming the ice-bound Don and Donets, Soviet troops had moved many hundreds of miles to the west where conditions were markedly different; only in the north, on the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts, could there be any parallel with the past. In the south-west winter conditions were very fickle, with the lower Dnieper and the southern Bug freezing over at different times and for different periods; at the centre of the Soviet–German front winter also assumed a milder form. The Soviet command did take these climatic vagaries and fluctuations into its general calculations, but it could scarcely foresee that not only would the winter of 1943–4 prove to be different but would also turn out to be enormously capricious.

At the end of October, what Manstein calls ‘the decisive struggle’ for the Dnieper line was already well advanced, as the Red Army piled on the pressure in four sectors: the Zaporozhe bridgehead, the two Dnieper sectors and the bridgehead to the north of Kiev (the left flank of Fourth
Panzer)
. To hold this Dnieper Front, all 440 miles of it, Manstein mustered thirty-seven infantry and seventeen
Panzer/Panzergrenadier
divisions, the bulk of them mauled and mangled; the hopes of safety behind the high western bank of the Dnieper were to prove both temporary and illusory. For the moment the main Soviet effort appeared to be directed in the Dnieper bend itself, where Koniev’s 2nd Ukrainian and Malinovskii’s 3rd Ukrainian Fronts, facing in turn First
Panzer
and Eighth Army, were hacking out a giant emplacement on the western bank from Cherkassy to Zaporozhe, a bridgehead fifty miles deep and over two hundred miles in length. General Koniev’s left wing had pushed itself into a relatively shallow but extended bridgehead south of Kremenchug, four armies (5th Guards, 37th, 7th Guards and 57th) in all, behind which followed Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army, newly released from
Stavka
reserve. On 7 October Koniev submitted his attack
plans to the
Stavka:
he proposed to strike from his bridgehead with his main attack directed at Pyatikhatka–Krivoi Rog, after which he suggested a drive on Apostolovo in order to cut off the German escape route for units holding Dnepropetrovsk against Malinovskii. The
Stavka
duly approved.

For his main attack Koniev intended to use his four bridgehead armies, with 37th and 5th Guards opening the German defences whereupon Rotmistrov’s tanks would go in. Zhadov’s 5th Guards Army had a fifty-mile march ahead of it to redeploy, Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army (the bulk of it still refitting at Poltava on 10 October) a 100-mile approach march. With his Guards armour and infantry finally in position, Koniev attacked on the morning of 15 October out of the bridgehead. That afternoon Rotmistrov’s tanks were introduced and manoeuvred through the autumn mud. Within three days Soviet units had taken Derievka and on 19 October Pyatikhatka, another important rail junction. Four days later Rotmistrov’s lead tanks were on the outskirts of Krivoi Rog, with another tank force driving on Mitrofanovka (fifteen miles to the east of Kirovograd). With riflemen riding atop their tanks, 18th Tank Corps (5th Guards Tank Army) broke into Krivoi Rog on the morning of 24 October, but 11th
Panzer
Division managed to hold up 37th Army advancing to support 18th Corps. That evening, running short of ammunition, 18th Corps tanks began pulling back, having both to find and to fight their way through unfamiliar streets increasingly engulfed in darkness.

Though momentarily checked at Krivoi Rog, Koniev’s attack threatened the left flank of the German units holding Dnepropetrovsk. This was Malinovskii’s target. In the first half of the month Malinovskii’s 3rd Ukrainian Front had been engaged in the reduction of the heavily fortified German bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnieper, Zaporozhe—which Hitler insisted must be held at all costs and which the
Stavka
demanded categorically must be swept away. The first attempt to rush the defences of Zaporozhe failed. Malinovskii resolved to lay his hand on a sledgehammer, Lt.-Gen. V.I. Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army (the old 62nd, the defenders of Stalingrad), a formation drawn into
Stavka
reserve from 3rd Ukrainian strength. Contacting Stalin, because Stalin’s permission was required, Malinovskii found inordinately difficult, but having asked for 8th Guards he got it, at the price of giving his word to Stalin that Zaporozhe would be taken ‘in two days’. Three infantry armies—8th and 3rd Guards and 12th Armies—and two armoured corps (1st Guards Mechanized and 23rd Tank), with 270 tanks and 17th Air Army in support, would storm Zaporozhe. Malinovskii’s decision to attack at night brought a deal of misgiving from his Military Soviet, but Chuikov strongly supported the Front commander.