The Road to Berlin (42 page)

At this juncture, Stalin, the
Stavka
, the State Defence Committee
(GKO)
and the General Staff were still involved in the preliminaries to planning the summer campaign of 1944, a campaign intended to inflict decisive defeat on the remaining German armies lodged on Soviet soil. The damage inflicted by Soviet forces in the ‘southern theatre’ had been both unexpected and immense: the winter campaign by Soviet reckoning had inflicted almost a million casualties on the German and
German-allied armies, the brunt of the losses being borne by German formations (unlike the Stalingrad débâcle). One German army vanished at Stalingrad; in 1943–4 no less than four—the Sixth, Eighth, Sixteenth and Eighteenth—were bludgeoned into military wreckage and a fifth army, the Seventeenth in the Crimea, was near annihilation. Two army groups, North and South, had been splintered, three
Panzer
armies had been severely mauled, leaving only one (Third
Panzer
with Army Group Centre) relatively unscathed. At the end of 1943 the German order of battle in the east paraded thirteen armies, four of them
Panzer
armies; now only ten showed up on German strength, with only one full
Panzer
army in being and one undergoing refitting in Galicia. ‘Satellite armies’ made a sudden reappearance, first a Hungarian army and then two German-Rumanian armies. The defence of what was left of the ‘southern theatre’ posed well-nigh unmanageable problems for the German command since the unity of the area was irreparably shattered. The deep Russian penetration into the Bukovina isolated Galicia from the ‘Rumanian zone’ and communications between them could be maintained only by the roundabout route through Hungary. Hungarian divisions now in Galicia passed under General Model’s command. Rumanian divisions with German stiffening or under German command for the moment held on to western Moldavia, but in Transylvania Hungarian and Rumanian troops eyed each other in mutual hostility in territory bitterly disputed between them.

The Soviet–German front still ran its 2,000 miles from north to south, forming two huge bulges: north of the Pripet marshes Army Group Centre anchored in Belorussia and based on Minsk jutted into the Soviet lines, while south of Pripet Soviet armies protruded deep into the German southern flank. Here in the south the Red Army massed up to forty per cent of its infantry armies and eighty per cent of its tank strength, with only one-third of its total fighting complement lodged on the ‘central sector’ north of the Pripet marshes. The present limit of the Soviet advance brought the front in the north-west to east of Narva, east of lake Peipus and Pskov; in the west, the line ran from east of Vitebsk, Orsha, Moghilev on to west of Mozyr; in the south-west Soviet armies drew up west of Kovel, Lutsk and Tarnopol; in the south-east, west of Suchavi, north of Jassy and along the line of the Dniester to the Black Sea. For the moment, and with only a reluctant assent from Stalin, Soviet armies were turning to the defensive, first in the north-west and the west, then in the south, though Stalin delayed instructions to the south-western and south-eastern commands as long as possible. By this time the final offensive operation of the winter campaign was launched against the German Seventeenth Army in the Crimea, long shut off from the main body of German troops. Reduction of the German redoubt in the Crimea fell to Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front, entrenched in its bridgeheads on the Sivash and at Perekop, while away to the eastern tip of the Crimea troops of the Independent Coastal Army had landed on the Kerch peninsula.

Together with Marshal Vasilevskii, Tolbukhin and Biryuzov (commander and chief of staff of 4th Ukrainian Army) had been summoned by Stalin in March
to attend a special briefing in Moscow on the proposed Crimean operations. Standing before a relief map of the Crimea which showed all known details of German deployment and defences, Stalin listened to an exposition of the attack plans involving the 4th Ukrainian Front, the Independent Coastal Army, the Azov Flotilla and the Black Sea Fleet. Tolbukhin proposed to attack across the Perekop isthmus and through the Sivash lagoons, using G. F. Zakharov’s 2nd Guard and Kreizer’s 51st Army; the main attack would come across the Sivash, bringing Soviet troops into the rear of the forces in the Perekop, followed by a drive on Simferopol and Sevastopol. At the other end of the Crimea, on the Kerch peninsula, men of the Coastal Army under General Yeremenko had established another bridgehead; Yeremenko now planned to drive into the interior, take Kerch, destroy the enemy garrisons, block the escape route through Ak-Monai and prevent any transfer of German troops north to counter Tolbukhin’s push. For air support, Tolbukhin had Khryukin’s 8th Air Army; Yeremenko, Vershinin’s 4th. Marshal Vasilevskii remained
Stavka
‘representative’ with 4th Ukrainian Front, and to supervize Yeremenko’s operations Stalin sent Marshal Voroshilov, his post at the Central Partisan Staff now wound up. The old war-horse gradually came snorting back.

General Jänecke, commanding 150,000 mixed German–Rumanian forces (the bulk of the German Seventeenth Army brought off from Taman), rested considerable confidence in the fortifications behind which his eleven divisions manned the lines covering Perekop, the defences against Kerch, the Ak-Monai positions, and finally Sevastopol itself, where Soviet troops had held out against massive German attacks for almost a year. Mad and cruel though Hitler’s decision was to immure his men in the Crimea, the winter waned and still no Russian attack materialized; the Sivash lagoons had not frozen and now they appeared to present a formidable barrier. The Perekop fortifications had a full complement of pill-boxes, anti-tank ditches and ‘the Turkish Wall’, itself a good defence line. In 1920 Red troops under Frunze had stormed Perekop and its fortifications held by the ‘Black Baron’, Wrangel, operations studied by the German command and utilized to base its present defences on the high ground not much beyond Ishun. German gunners with their batteries covered these ‘impregnable’ defences, though along the Sivash the Rumanian divisions took themselves off to the relative comfort of the hard, high ground, leaving only detachments to screen the salt-flats and the marshes. To stiffen a wilting morale, the German command paraded much of its strength, especially in artillery, and placarded its determination ‘to bar the Crimea to the Bolsheviks’. But the stillness, rent only by occasional artillery exchanges (when Soviet reconnaissance planes carefully registered German gun positions), served merely to thicken the atmosphere of suspended doom.

On the morning of 8 April, beginning at 0800 hours, Soviet guns to the north along the Perekop isthmus opened fire in 2nd Guards area, where the infantry went into the attack under cover of smoke-screens. Soviet shells exploding in so constricted a space blew defensive positions to pieces, and two and a half
hours later the guns in 51st Army opened fire, this time on the Sivash sector. Zakharov’s Guardsmen pushed into Armyansk, while Kreizer’s infantrymen and gunners manoeuvred their guns and light tanks on pontoons, the men working in biting salt water where no horse would go, through the small but treacherous Sivash ‘sea’. On 9 April Yeremenko attacked from his bridgehead on the Kerch peninsula, fighting to capture Kerch itself, while Kreizer’s men dragged their rafted guns and lorries to the southern end of the ruined Chongar bridge and went ashore in some strength, ready to strike out of the Sivash and into the rear of the Perekop defences. General Jänecke had already ordered his units out of Kerch and on to the Ak-Monai line: when Kreizer on 11-12 April burst out of the Sivash bog, Jänecke had no option but to pull his divisions out of Ishun. Two ‘impregnable’ lines were already breached or turned—Ishun and Ak-Monaiskii. When 4th Ukrainian crossed the Sivash and took Tomashevka, Biryuzov reported this to Vasilevskii and added to his signal: ‘Permit me, in the name of the Front command, to present you, Alexander Mikhailovich [Vasilevskii] with the keys of the Crimea.’

Biryuzov did not exaggerate. Kreizer’s 51st, with 19th Tank Corps in the lead, slashed through the Rumanians and on to Simferopol, from which Jänecke had hoped to launch a counter-blow. On his way Kreizer smashed up the three German divisions pulling back from Ishun. Yeremenko had meanwhile burst through the ‘bottleneck’ at Ak-Monai, cutting off two German divisions which now turned south along the coast road running from Sudak to Yalta. In less than a week, Soviet troops had rolled up the main defence lines, dispersed the Rumanians and hammered the German garrison; it remained now to subdue Sevastopol, to fight it out amidst the base’s forts and trenches, for there was no chance of rushing the defences.

General Jänecke planned to hold the northern face of Sevastopol to keep Soviet guns out of range of the docks and wharfs, from which German ships were moving all spare equipment and even lifting off Rumanian troops. A smaller German force (two divisions) took up positions to the east and south-east, holding the formidable
Sapun-Gory
(Sapun Heights), a long exposed ridge dropping down into a valley, the same valley where the Light Brigade had charged the Russian guns ninety years before (the ‘valley of death’). Here, along the south-eastern axis, Tolbukhin proposed to make his main thrust with 51st Army and units of the Coastal Army that passed under 4th Ukrainian Front command. Towards the end of April, more and more Russian artillery as well as air reinforcements moved up; Zakharov’s 2nd Guards prepared to attack from the north across the Mackenzie Heights, but Tolbukhin shifted his main weight on to the left flank, against the Sapun Heights, and planned to use 19th Tank Corps in a sweep from the south into the German rear. Marshal Vasilevskii approved these plans and early in May preparations were almost complete. The
Stavka
demanded rapid action and immediate results; what had taken the Germans 250 days in 1941–42—the reduction of Sevastopol—must now be done in a few hours.

On the fair, fine morning of 5 May Zakharov’s Guards, attacking in the north along the Mackenzie Heights, opened the Soviet assault on Sevastopol, where General Almedingen had taken Jänecke’s place, though he left more or less undisturbed the earlier plans to fight to the north where most of the mobile artillery was deployed. In the face of heavy German fire, 2nd Guards fought its way up the Heights, extensive minefields slowing the advance. After two days of bloody combat, Tolbukhin unleashed his main attack from the east against Sapun Heights with 51st Army and the Coastal Army. Moving by night, Kreizer’s 51st had crossed the Bakchisarai mountains and now lay in front of the northern slope of Sapun Heights; the Coastal Army to the south had taken Balaklava and waited to storm the southern end of Sapun. By dawn on 7 May Colonel Pavlov’s 12th Assault Engineer Brigade had cleared a passage for Colonel Rodionov’s 77th Rifle Division (51st Army); 11th Guards Rifle Corps (Coastal Army) was assigned to attack the southern sector. Tolbukhin and Vasilevskii installed themselves at forward
HQ
in Balaklava. Up with 51st Army, Biryuzov watched the opening barrage supported by dive-bombers cover the heights almost completely in smoke and dust. Kreizer’s men were astride the ridge by mid-morning and a sapper from 12th Assault Brigade hoisted a Red banner. In the afternoon both Soviet armies, 51st and the Coastal, had fought up the western slopes and battled to break into the Inkerman valley. Once there, the route to Sevastopol lay open.

Within hours German troops had begun falling back in the northern sector, towards the ferries or the Inkerman bridge; 2nd Guards launched assault boats into the bay. From Sapun Heights Russian infantrymen pushed their way into the outskirts of Sevastopol and on to the main station, 10th Rifle Corps (51st Army) in the lead, and engaged in heavy street fighting. Tanks from 19th Corps swept along the coast from the south, on to the Kherson spit, to what Soviet intelligence identified as the German ‘disaster line’, the final point of German resistance. On the evening of 9 May Sevastopol had fallen entirely to Soviet troops; on 10 May Tolbukhin reported this to Stalin, who, even before Tolbukhin had finished speaking, demanded the complete clearance of the Crimea within the next twenty-four hours. Soviet dive-bombers, fighter-bombers and artillery relentlessly harried German troops fleeing by boat out of Sevastopol. Squadron after squadron bombed the last remaining airfield in German hands near Kherson. The remnants of the German Seventeenth Army withdrew into the Kherson spit, the long finger of land with the lighthouse at its point where in a last flicker of resistance German troops tried holding off the Coastal Army with
AA
guns depressed and firing over open sights. But the end had come. Soviet guns ranged freely over the trapped regiments, Soviet aircraft jumped boats and rafts making for the open sea, Soviet warships and motor-gunboats patrolled the coastline intercepting and sinking rescue ships. The long lines of dead bobbed in the water, inshore and out to sea, while the living shuddered under the final Russian bombardment. By noon on 12 May, 25,000 German troops surrendered at Kherson. Soviet estimates of total German losses—the virtual annihilation of
Seventeenth Army—reached 110,000 killed, wounded and captured. The revenge for 1942 had been both massive and swift.

While Tolbukhin’s troops had been slicing through the Crimea, the Soviet high command had finally committed itself to a main strategic plan for operations in the summer. Previous offensive plans had fallen short in co-ordinating several fronts, in not providing proper aim and direction to Soviet operations. Since March the General Staff had been working on an exhaustive analysis of the Soviet–German front, inspecting each Soviet strategic unity in turn. Chief of Operations Shtemenko and Marshal Timoshenko, the latter acting for the
Stavka
, carried out a detailed inspection of the situation in the north-west, 1st and 2nd Baltic Fronts in particular; the ‘main blow’ could not be lauched here, nor further north, for though an offensive could lead to knocking Finland out of the war, this hardly meant mortal danger for Germany. On the ‘western axis’, the situation looked rather different. North of the Pripet marshes, in the Belorussian bulge, German forces covered the route to Warsaw and could mount a flank blow at Soviet armies aimed at East Prussia, as well as menacing the flank and rear of Soviet fronts on the ‘south-west axis’, seriously complicating a Soviet drive on Lvov and a thrust into Hungary. South of the Pripet marshes Soviet armies had struck deep along the ‘Lublin axis’, but their strength had suffered through unbroken commitment to offensive operations; to mount a ‘main blow’ here must involve extensive regrouping and reinforcement from interior reserves. North of the marshes lay Army. Group Centre, whose divisions tied down considerable Soviet strength; Moscow still lay within range of German bombers on their Belorussian airfields. The destruction of Army Group Centre seemed, therefore, both the logical and the desirable strategic objective to pursue. But was it feasible? Already Soviet armies on the ‘western axis’ had tried and failed too often, with grim losses, to pull down the Belorussian ‘balcony’ about Army Group Centre’s head.