The Road to Berlin (32 page)

Zhukov proposed to smash in the northern wing of Army Group South, and to do Fourth
Panzer
to death. In late November Manstein had momentarily shored up the Fourth’s position (though Hitler undermined its command by precipitate removal of Col.-Gen. Hoth, for three full years a
Panzer
commander on the Eatern Front). The fate of Army Groups South and A depended on holding Fourth
Panzer
together, keeping this ‘lid’ battened down as tightly as possible, but Manstein’s appreciation of 20 November was sombre. Even if the present German counter-blow attained substantial success, this could not of itself
eliminate Soviet forces from their giant assembly areas west of the Dnieper, in which case Army Group dare not contemplate transferring divisions from the northern to the southern wing to fight the battle of the Dnieper bend. And even assuming that both battles—on the northern and southern wings—did result in success for Army Group, nothing in the situation had altered fundamentally; Army Group South, weakened by losses and utterly bereft of reserves, would be still ‘completely at the enemy’s mercy’.

The second battle for the Dnieper bend had just opened. On 14 November Koniev resumed his attack in the direction of Kirovograd and Krivoi Rog, but the mud swallowed up his men and machines. New success, however, was in the offing as Lt.-Gen. K.A. Koroteyev’s 52nd Army (on Koniev’s right flank) forced the Dnieper at Cherkassy; Soviet troops had their foothold by 13 November, though the German Eighth Army managed to get hold of two mobile formations from First and Fourth
Panzer
and clung to Cherkassy until halfway through December. Finally, Galanin’s 4th Guards Army fought its way along the western bank of the Dnieper and linked up with Koroteyev’s 52nd. Koniev worked throughout November and December at enlarging his bridgehead west and south of Kremenchug–Dnepropetrovsk and in the Cherkassy area, stabbing into the German defensive system with short blows. In December came the frosts, which enabled Rotmistrov to move once more, and on 9 December, 5th Guards Tank, operating with the riflemen of Zhadov’s 5th Guards Army, took Znamenka. Rotmistrov’s tank columns prepared to strike for Kirovograd, while at Cherkassy Galanin’s and Koroteyev’s had made contact and sealed off the German ‘hedgehog’. After four days of heavy house-to-house fighting, Cherkassy was in Soviet hands and a new route on the Dnieper opened. The 2nd Ukrainian Front was now emplaced to mount offensive operations of strategic significance. Malinovskii continued to push his bridgehead out to the west of Zaporozhe, while to the south the German Seventeenth Army lay trapped in the Crimea.

The ‘Dnieper line’, now cracked and crumpled, still held by early winter, but the
Stavka
had plans to smash it in completely when four Soviet fronts would crash down in a great avalanche of men and tanks on Army Group South, clearing the western Ukraine completely. Meanwhile the October operations designed to clear Belorussia and to destroy the central group of German armies between Vitebsk and Gomel had produced impressive, though by no means decisive, results. The capture of Nevel had been a major success, shearing the junction between Army Groups North and Centre: Vitebsk now became the focus of Soviet and German attentions. Here strong German fortifications amplified all the hazards of the terrain, the patchwork of small lakes and thick forest to the north of the Dvina and the marshes of the Luchesa in the south. Next in the chain of forts came Orsha. To close off the gap between the Dvina and the Dnieper, German troops had fortified the area between Orsha and Vitebsk, while south of Orsha, towards Rogachev and Zhlobin on the upper reaches of the Dnieper, swamps and numerous river barriers provided abundant natural hazards.
Unfrozen, the little lakes and marshy land could be defended with relative ease. And unfrozen they remained to the north of Vitebsk, for December brought only a glancing frost instead of the normal ‘freeze-up’. Intermittent thaw produced slush, mud and sleet.

Throughout November and December, the 1st Baltic, 2nd Baltic and Western Fronts fought their wet, wintry actions for Vitebsk, outflanking the town from the north-west and making a direct approach from the east—a hard, slogging operation which finally gave the Russians Gorodok to the north, but left Bagramyan to push into the swampland in the Dvina bend. Sokolovskii’s Western Front, while approaching Vitebsk from the south, attacked simultaneously in the Orsha–Moghilev direction. Rokossovskii’s Belorussian Front was aimed at Gomel–Bobruisk, with Minsk as its main objective; Rokossovskii’s left-flank armies had already forced the Dnieper south of Loev in mid-October, making a drive to outflank Gomel quite feasible. After little more than a month, on 26 November, Gomel fell after being approached on three sides and Soviet troops cleared the town in a fierce burst of street fighting. In late November Rokossovskii’s right flank was on the Dnieper all the way from Novy Bykhov to Gadilovich; the left-flank armies had already crossed the Berezina. To hold the Zhlobin–Rogachev–Bobruisk ‘triangle’, the German command moved up five infantry divisions. Having pressed Army Group Centre back from the river Sozh, Rokossovskii’s operations halted on a line running from Petukhovka in the north, through Novy Bykhov, on to the east of Zhlobin and Mozyr. Bagramyan, Sokolovskii and Rokossovskii each suffered from the abnormal weather, which kept swamps soft and streams wet and dangerous. Part of eastern Belorussia had been freed, Vitebsk was threatened but by no means subdued; but by the end of 1943 the ‘Smolensk gate’, the highway pressed out by nature between Orsha and Vitebsk leading to the west, had still not been lifted off its hinges.

At the end of the first week in December 1943 the General Staff completed the final schedules and attack timetables
(Plan operatsii)
for the winter offensive proper, designed to unroll ‘without pause’ in the wake of the autumnal battles waged in thick, clogging mud and under dismal skies laden with rain or mist. Front commands had already received specific directives or were submitting their final operational proposals. The forthcoming strategic offensive, the winter campaign proper, envisaged four main actions: the destruction of German forces in the Leningrad area, in Belorussia, in the western Ukraine and in the Crimea. The main Soviet striking forces would gather on the outer flanks, in the Leningrad area (aimed at Army Group North) and in the western Ukraine (facing Army Groups South and A). The main attack would be mounted in the south-western theatre in order to recover the substantial industrial resources and raw materials still in German hands, as well as to bring Soviet troops most speedily to the 1941 frontiers of the Soviet Union.

By Soviet calculation the
Wehrmacht
at this time deployed more than sixty per cent of its total strength, and more than fifty per cent of all its armour, on
the Eastern Front: 236 divisions, including 25
Panzer
and 18 motorized divisions, 4,906,000 men (706,000 of them from Germany’s allies), 5,400 tanks and assault guns, over 54,000 guns and mortars, supported by 3,000 aircraft. The Soviet Union fielded a gigantic army at this juncture: 5,568,000 men served with the field armies (419,000 in reserve), 480 divisions (19 in
Stavka
reserve) with an average strength fluctuating between 6,000 and 7,000 men, 35 armoured and mechanized corps (12 in reserve), 46 tank brigades (4 in reserve), 80 artillery and mortar divisions (4 in reserve), 5,628 tanks (271 in reserve) and 8,818 aircraft (312 in reserve). Four types of army made up this enormous force: the infantry army
(‘all-arms’–obshchevoiskovyi)
, the Guard armies (‘all-arms’ and armoured), the shock armies for assault operations and the tank army: infantry and Guards infantry armies comprised usually three to four corps with an artillery brigade, anti-tank, mortar and
AA
regiments; the Guards army incorporated somewhat heavier firepower; the
udarniya armiya
, the ‘shock armies’, included tough and experienced units with heavy artillery support to crack open fixed defences; the tank army combined two tank corps with a mechanized corps. At the end of 1943 the Red Army fielded some sixty ‘all-arms’ armies, five shock armies and five tank armies (increased to six when the
Stavka
on 20 January 1944 raised the 6th Tank Army from 5th Guards Tank and 5th Mechanized Corps and put it under the command of Lt.-Gen. Kravchenko).

Three rifle regiments made up a rifle division; between two and four rifle divisions, a rifle corps. The basic tactical unity in the armoured forces was the tank brigade, with a shade over 1,000 men and three tank battalions, twenty-one tanks to a battalion. The tank corps consisted of three tank brigades, the mechanized corps of three mechanized brigades (this brigade consisting of three motorized rifle battalions with tank, artillery and mortar support) and a tank brigade. It was in artillery, however, that the Red Army showed its enormous power. The artillery reorganization in 1941 under Voronov probably did more than anything else to save the Red Army from total annihilation: the trend towards greater concentration of artillery continued throughout 1942, so that by 1943 divisional artillery had shrunk to a mere score of guns and a dozen howitzers. The Artillery Reserve of the High Command went on forming its own artillery regiments, divisions and corps, deploying them at will and by design for particular operations; the artillery division usually numbered some 200 guns and howitzers, with an additional 100 heavy mortars.

On the eve of the 1943–4 winter campaign, the
Stavka
, mindful of earlier disasters, set about amassing considerable reserves, taking into
Stavka
reserve’ five infantry armies, two tank armies and nine armoured corps. These formations (save for the 20th and 70th Armies, which existed only as
HQ
administrations) were already earmarked for use on the flanks both north and south, a decision that took little account of the difficulties facing Soviet troops at the centre—the ‘western theatre’—and which in no way affected the process of setting the targets
for the central fronts (1st Baltic, the Western and the Belorussian), with the result that ends and means here remained dangerously lopsided.

Stalin intended the main Soviet blow to fall in the south-west, in the ‘southern theatre’, running from the Pripet to the Black Sea. This southern drive involved four fronts—1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Ukrainian—and was to unfold in two stages, the first to crush enemy opposition on the Dnieper and bring Soviet troops to the line of the southern Bug, the second to shatter the German strategic grouping throughout the south by destroying the individual German armies and moving the Red Army to a line running from Rovno to Moghilev Podolskii and the Dniester. In effect, the German Army Group South was to be crushed between the Dnieper and the Dniester, while Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front and the Independent Coastal Army received orders to prepare themselves for the recapture of the Crimea.

The second great drive was also to be on an outer flank, in the north-west, where the Leningrad, Volkhov and 2nd Baltic Fronts must destroy Army Group North and in the process free Leningrad completely, clearing the Leningrad and Kalinin
oblasts
, after which Soviet troops must push on to a line running through Pskov–Narva–Balka and the river Velikaya, thus positioning themselves for an advance into the Baltic republics. At the centre, the operation tasks needed little additional definition; the Western and 1st Baltic Fronts received orders to destroy German forces in the Orsha–Vitebsk area, to be followed by an advance on Polotsk–Moghilev–Lepel. Rokossovskii’s first target on the Belorussian Front was Bobruisk and his terminal point Minsk, those two names that had figured in
Stavka
directives dating back some time.

These Soviet plans accorded a special place to partisan operations, which were to be integrated as far as possible with those of the regular formations in the field. An important change in the direction of partisan activities was in the offing, for on 13 January 1944 the General Staff of the Partisan Movement was wound up on orders from the State Defence Committee. The Central Committee of the various Soviet republics, the
oblast
committees and individual partisan staffs, now assumed direction of the partisan movement, bringing Soviet power back into the partisan areas. Moscow’s long reach was now no longer necessary or desirable: control had to be exercised from closer range. Front Military Soviets assumed responsibility for supplying arms to partisan units; Front commands worked out integration through the partisan staffs. There was a massive movement up to the front. In Belorussia, the Belorussian Party Central Committee moved the Belorussian Partisan Staff from Moscow to newly liberated Gomel; in the north-west the Leningrad and Kalinin
obkoms
(the Party’s
oblast
committees) directed the partisan movement at close range, as did the Crimean
obkom
in the Crimea.

Stalin had set his sights on success in the south where the fruits of victory would be both substantial and immediate—the complete restoration of the Ukrainian political unit to Soviet possession, the restitution of the metallurgical resources of Krivoi Rog and Kerch, the manganese of Nikopol, the grain lands,
the Black Sea ports and the enormous population. The bulk of the Red Army’s present striking power was going to the outer flanks, with the Ukrainian Fronts receiving the lion’s share. Though the
Stavka
had assigned the ‘western theatre’ an enormous task, nothing less than a westerly advance of up to one hundred miles to reach the line running from Polotsk through Minsk and to the river Ptich would have to be accomplished without reinforcement. (Over the next three months 1st Baltic, Western and the Belorussian Fronts received only nineteen per cent of the available infantry reinforcements, twenty-five percent of the artillery and four percent of the reserve armour.) On the eve of the winter offensive in the south, the Red Army mustered 169 rifle and 9 cavalry divisions (divisional strength wavering at this time between 2,600 and 6,500 men), slightly more than 2,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 2,360 aircraft for operations in the western Ukraine. Soviet intelligence set the strength of Army Groups South and A at 103 divisions and 2 brigades, with 93 divisions (18
Panzer
and 4 motorized)—2,200 tanks and 1,460 aircraft—in the western Ukraine itself. Almost half of the entire German strength on the Eastern Front lay on the southern wing, which also disposed of just under three-quarters of all German armoured forces in the east.