The Road to Berlin (41 page)

If First
Panzer
escaped, even though badly mauled, the redesignation of Army Group South as Army Group North Ukraine and Army Group A as Southern Ukraine, effective from 5 April, reflected the damage wrought by Zhukov’s great cleaving blow. But for all the designation, little of the Ukraine remained in German hands. Zhukov’s right flank at Kovel and Vladimir Volynsk rested on Galicia, and to his left Soviet units moved south of Chernovtsy deeper into the Bukovina, with advance guards reaching out to the borders of sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, the doorstep to Czechoslovakia. Marshal Koniev’s centre and right-flank armies had forced the Prut on a broad front and were pressing on Jassy; left-flank formations were now deep in Bessarabia on a line runing from Skulyany on to Orgeyev and Dubossari (north-west of Kishinev). Malinovskii’s 3rd Ukrainian Front had taken Nikolayev on 28 March; after trapping several German and Rumanian divisions at Razdelnaya, where the German Sixth Army was split down the middle, Malinovskii’s centre and left made straight for Odessa. On the evening of 9 April, 8th Guards, 5th Shock and 6th Army prepared to storm the city which was finally liberated on the morning of 10 April. Having freed the principal Black Sea ports—Nikolayev, Odessa and Ochakov—Malinovskii’s mobile columns and assault armies drew up to the lower Dniester on a broad front, positioning themselves for a further drive into Moldavia and an advance deep into Rumania, locking their flanks with 2nd Ukrainian Front in the Dubossari–Grigoriopol area.

The great military earthquake that came boiling out of the seas of mud in the south sent violent shocks through Rumania, of which ‘greater Rumania’ was already being lopped into pieces by Soviet armies. ‘Transnistria’ carved out for the Rumanians between the Dniester and the southern Bug, sagged to the point of collapse, and the Bukovina, Bessarabia and Moldavia were being rapidly penetrated by Russian troops. The Crimea, in which the Rumanians had a last, lingering but by no means insignificant interest, was under major Russian attack by the first week in April, when Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front launched its assault in the north against the Perekop and through the Sivash lagoons, the spreading net of salt lakes and stagnant marshes, a livid, inland ‘sea’. As the roof began to fall in on ‘Greater Rumania’, Marshal Antonescu took himself off on 22 March on a visit to Hitler, a step that General Maitland Wilson (British commander in chief, Middle East, with whom Antonescu had already been in contact over a possible ‘Western response’ to the Soviet advance into Rumania) did not advise. But Antonescu had already left for Berlin, to press for the evacuation or the rescue of Rumanian troops in the Crimea and to seek the concentration of Rumanian forces in Moldavia–Bessarabia, where the last Rumanian
divisions, 4th Army, were being called out to man these lines. At Hitler’s
HQ
it was agreed that north of the line Ploesti–Bucharest the newly designated
Heeresgruppe Süd–Ukraine
should take control, while the German command worked on plans for the military investment of Rumania, Operation
Margarethe
(‘Margarethe’). Hitler had already closed in on Hungary; on 19 March German troops marched into Hungary from Austria, Slovakia and Croatia, meeting no resistance. Premier Kallay fled into the Turkish legation, the enemies of Germany were rounded up and General Szotaj took over the new government. In Bulgaria, communist-led and organized guerrilla activity was growing—the ‘Fatherland Front’—but it remained small and militarily ineffectual, while the Bulgarian government still clung to Germany. But the shackles were being fastened on
Festung Europa
on whose easterly marshes Germany must be defended and kept immune from attack by land.

Meanwhile Moscow sounded out the Rumanians, initiating contact in Stockholm in January between the Rumanian minister, Nano and the Soviet
chargé;
Russian diplomats were out to learn what, or if, Antonescu could deliver. These dealings flickered on and off, while in Cairo, all in the presence of the Soviet ambassador, talks opened with representatives of the Rumanian opposition, the future ‘Democratic Bloc’. Late in March as Soviet armies crashed into Bessarabia, these talks began to gather momentum. Early in April Molotov publicly asserted Soviet claims to Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina but disclaimed any Soviet intention of either annexing ‘Rumanian territory’ or ‘changing the existing social order’, though policy toward Rumania was apparently a cause of dissent and division between Russian officialdom and the Rumanian Communists, the
émigré
group in the USSR or the ‘External Bureau’ led by Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca. In Rumania, Gheorghiu-Dej and his associates languished in prison. Out of the Stalingrad prison camps, the
émigré
Communists built up the specially indoctrinated pro-communist Rumanian military units, formed into the ‘Tudor Vladimirescu Division’, one tangible achievement. Pauker and Luca strained hard to thwart a Soviet acceptance of any voluntary Rumanian surrender, preferring straight Red Army occupation, in the wake of which would come ready-made communist government and the indoctrinated ex-prisoner divisions to operate as the security arm. The Rumanian ‘problem’ had still some way to run.

The Soviet command could look with real satisfaction on the damage it had inflicted on the
Ostheer’s
southern wing, now visibly crumpled; ten German divisions destroyed, eight disbanded owing to losses, sixty divisions halved in strength and eight left with only a remnant of their men. The two super-soldiers Manstein and Kleist, who had for so long cast immense shadows in the east, suddenly vanished in a Hitlerian storm-cloud of dismissals. Marshal Zhukov had won his protracted encounter with Field-Marshal von Manstein.

Elsewhere the Soviet winter offensive had only partly lived up to expectations; in the nothern theatre, though Leningrad was freed, Soviet armies did not break right into the Baltic states; in the ‘western theatre’, for all the brief, promising
start in late February when Rokossovskii attacked towards Rogachev and took it, the marsh and swamp of the Drut—wet as ever in the persistent thaw—dragged the Soviet advance to a halt. Only in the south, where Soviet war industry pumped in almost 5,000 guns and 4,600 tanks to the three Ukrainian fronts between January and March, were
Stavka
expectations not only fulfilled but surpassed. The German sacrifice at Korsun did not prevent the massed Russian attack. The very obliteration of that salient put Koniev in a position to crash through from the Dnieper to the Dniester in less than a fortnight, which in turn triggered off Zhukov’s great slicing blow to the south.

Even as the German southern wing was being thus divided into one force covering southern Poland, the other pressed back into southern Moldavia and backing on the Danube, Stalin, the
Stavka
and the General Staff with select Front commanders began hammering out the shape of the next phase of Red Army operations. Simultaneously
Generalmajor
Gehlen at
Fremde Heere Ost
also examined Russian operational intentions in a sombre and alarming document,
‘Zusammenfassende Beurteilung der Feindlage vor deutschen Ostfront
…’, a summary of evidence and intelligence data compiled into an estimate dated 30 March. Gehlen, insisting upon a strictly limited circulation for this document, argued that the Russians would press through the Balkans, the
Generalgouvernement
(occupied Poland) and the Baltic states, breaking into
Mitteleuropa
and moving upon the ‘easterly frontier areas of the
Reich’
. The Russians would aim above all else at shattering the remainder of organized German force and could be expected to utilize every fold of geography to assist this. For those who anticipated a ‘pause’, Gehlen pointed to previous experience—dating all the way back to Stalingrad—which amply proved that the Russians could sustain extended offensive operations (not least by extraordinary exploitation of railway networks); for others, Hitler included, who waited weekly for Russian ‘exhaustion’, Gehlen trundled out a sinister set of statistics on the state of Russian reserves. In sum, Gehlen took a very serious view indeed of developments on the Eastern Front now that the southern zone had virtually ceased to exist as a strategic entity. There could be ‘no doubt’ that the Soviet command would aim a very powerful blow through the great gap ripped out between the Dniester and the Pripet, attacking before the German Army could build a defensive front of any kind; any failure to counter this Soviet westerly north-westerly assault on the Lvov–Kovel axis meant jeopardizing the deep southern flank of Army Group Centre from which ‘the gravest consequences’
(krisenhafte Entwicklung)
must ensue.

Col.-Gen. Kurochkin’s 2nd Belorussian Front had already tried to develop an offensive in the direction of Kovel. The German garrison at Kovel had been encircled, but German tank attacks drove in a corridor to free the trapped men; Kovel remained in German hands and Soviet troops fell back to the outskirts of the town. On 5 April the 2nd Belorussian Front was disbanded. Marshal
Zhukov meanwhile proposed a deep outflanking move on Lvov in an operational plan he submitted to Stalin at the end of March: Zhukov envisaged the final destruction of German forces in the Kamenets–Podolskii area, the full investment of the Chernovitsy region, to be followed by an offensive against Lvov, bringing his right flank to Vladimir–Volynsk, the centre to Lvov and the left flank to Drogobych. Marshal Zhukov selected Peremysl as his terminal point, but the outflanking move on Lvov remained his prime thought. Lack of forces prevented the immediate implementation of this plan, but other factors also intruded, not least that Stalin had only just embarked on his great appraisal of the strategic situation. Front commanders received instructions to present their views on future operational commitments, whereupon Stalin conducted his long-distance telephonic interrogations, poking, probing and piling question on question, concentrating on Rokossovskii’s Belorussian Front. The General Staff carried out a systematic survey of every Soviet front, beginning with Karelia in the north. While
Stavka
coordinators closeted themselves with Front Military Soviets, the General Staff put its first proposal in mid–April to the
Stavka
—a temporary turn to the defensive. Stalin refused to consider the idea at first:
‘produmaem eshche’
(‘Let’s think this over’), which meant mulling over his own ideas for further Front offensives. On 16 April, however, Stalin permitted the north-western and western ‘theatres’ to go on to the defensive; all other fronts would also consolidate, but no commander was to ‘rush on to the defensive’. All orders for the defensive must be read as ‘preparatory moves for an offensive’ and to make sure of no immediate slackening Stalin delayed the formal
Stavka
directive to the southern fronts until early May, though authorizing the requisite orders for the north and west between 17 and 19 April.

At the end of April, the General Staff completed the master plan for the summer offensive, the full scope of which was known only to Stalin and five Soviet officers—the Deputy Supreme Commander (Zhukov), the Chief of the General Staff (Vasilevskii) and his deputy (Antonov), the Chief of the Operations Section (Shtemenko) and his deputy. The new
Plan operatsii
embodied the main features of what was designed as the Red Army’s decisive campaign—to feint on the flanks in the north-west and the south, with the massive core of the offensive aimed at the centre, in Belorussia, to wipe out the last great concentration of German strength, Army Group Centre, and thus blast a path into Germany itself.

5

Breaking the Back of the
Wehrmacht
: April–August 1944

General Antonov, deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff, received Anglo-American notification of 31 May (with a small margin on either side to allow for weather conditions) as the date for
Overlord
, the cross-Channel attack, at the end of the first week in April 1944. The information reached him direct from Maj.-Gen. Deane and Lt.-Gen. Burrows, heads of the American and British Military Missions in Moscow, who feared that the Russians might be so overstretched by their successes in the southern theatre that they would not be able to regroup in time to launch their offensive promised to synchronize with
Overlord
. It was wiser, therefore, to give the Soviet command as much warning time as possible. In the middle of the month the Prime Minister and the President sent their own signal to Stalin, intimating that the Channel invasion would be launched ‘around “R” date,’ which the British and American officers had already communicated to the Soviet General Staff, a signal that went out amidst growing Anglo–Soviet strain over the Polish question. At the end of March, Stalin turned on the Prime Minister with another denunciation of the Polish
émigré
government in London, coupled with a protest at the methods of ‘intimidation and defamation’ and a repudiation of the ‘gratuitous insult’ to the Soviet Union in suggesting Soviet–Polish hostility. Nor was it entirely fortuitous that Stalin linked his attack on the ‘London Poles’ with a lunge in the direction of the ‘Yugoslav
émigré
Government’, ‘which is akin to it [the London Polish government]’, and even more pointedly stressing the similarity between ‘certain generals’ of the Polish government in exile and the Serb General Mihajlovic, the latter a declared and discovered collaborator with the Germans.