The Road to Berlin (44 page)

Almost at once the General Staff discovered a flaw in its plan. German strength, fixed at forty-two divisions, was turning out in the light of fresh reports to be appreciably higher; though 2nd Baltic Front had the task of holding Army Group North, thereby eliminating the danger of a German attack in the Soviet flank, this Soviet Front appeared to be much too weak to restrain Army Group North, which might turn to help its neighbour on the right. But the attention of Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevskii was directed to ensuring one principal objective, the destruction of a ‘significant’ element of German fighting strength during the actual breakthrough operation in the German forward defences, which were heavily manned. Zhukov and Vasilevskii therefore proposed to concentrate a mass of artillery and aircraft with the Front commands, in particular ‘artillery breakthrough divisions’ with heavy-calibre guns. The need to pin down and to wipe out German troops in the tactical defensive zone, to wreak the greatest possible havoc here, arose from the supposed difficulties of ‘encirclement’ operations: only Vitebsk raised no problem, for there Soviet troops already held this German strong-point in a vice. Analysis of past Soviet experience, at Stalingrad and in other operations, confirmed that the actual encirclement and subsequent destruction of enemy troops on a major scale demanded no small amount of time; in Belorussia, the German command could use time to bring up reserves and could rely on the terrain, with its bogs and thick woods, to hinder any Soviet attempt to build a firm encirclement front. The problem for the Soviet command therefore involved not only smashing German divisions as they stood in their defensive positions but also preventing surviving units from fleeing to the abundant protection provided by the Belorussian swamp and forest.

Far away in the west ‘D-Day’ was fast approaching, though the Soviet high command had learned through the American and British Missions of several postponements in the date of the cross-Channel attack. To finalize Soviet preparations for Operation
Bagration
, Stalin summoned top Soviet commanders to a massive
battle conference which lasted for two days, 22 and 23 May. General Antonov headed the General Staff party. Front commanders Rokossovskii and Bagramyan joined the two
Stavka
‘co-ordinators’, Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevskii; Col.-Gen. Chernyakhovskii had also been summoned, but illness prevented his attending. The members of the Military Soviets of 1st Belorussian, 3rd Belorussian and 1st Baltic Fronts sat in with Novikov (air force commander), Voronov and Yakovlev (artillery), Khrulev (rear services), Peresypkin (signals) and Vorob’ev (engineers). Petrov had not as yet been relieved of his command, but he received no orders to attend the conference since his Front, 2nd Belorussian, had not been assigned a major attack role.

The conference opened with a presentation of the General Staff plan for
Bagration
, and in the subsequent discussion the main operational task was defined as the encirclement and destruction of the main force of Army Group Centre east of Minsk (although the General Staff disliked the term ‘encirclement’ for these operations). This raised at once the question of the rate of advance required both by infantry and mobile formations; here the General Staff formally supported Chernyakhovskii’s 3rd Belorussian Front acquiring a tank army, and 5th Guards Tank Army was assigned to this Front command. The General Staff had also miscalculated over securing the right flank from possible attack by Army Group North. Here General Bagramyan, commander of 1st Baltic Front, proposed that, rather than commit all his Front armies to the main attack, he should operate to guarantee full security against interference by Army Group North. Bagramyan’s suggestion was taken up and adopted, so that now 1st Baltic Front, instead of striking on to the east of Minsk after taking Vitebsk, would attack westwards to outflank Polotsk from the south and seal off Army Group North from German troops fighting at the centre. As additional security, 2nd Baltic Front would mount its own limited operations in the north. The southern flank presented no such comparable problem and did not require substantial forces to secure it.

The real row came over Rokossovskii’s operational plan for 1st Belorussian Front. As far back as March, Rokossovskii, on learning from Stalin about possible offensive operations aimed at Bobruisk and Brest, asked that Soviet forces operating on ‘the Kovel axis’ (the old 2nd Belorussian Front) be brought under his own command, thereby extending his front by 300 miles with its flank armies scattered across the Polesian marshes. On 2 April the
Stavka
approved Rokossovskii’s proposal: 1st Belorussian acquired 61st, 70th and 47th Armies from the defunct 2nd Belorussian Front and in turn handed over 10th and 50th Armies to the Western Front (itself soon to be wound up). At the same time Rokossovskii and his chief of staff General Malinin had worked out plans for the destruction of German forces in the Minsk–Baranovichi–Slonim–Brest–Kovel–Bobruisk area, to bring Soviet forces to the Minsk–Slonim–Brest line and thereby cut German road and rail links to a depth of 150 miles or more, thus paralysing the German defence on ‘the western axis’. Rokossovskii envisaged a two-stage operation, the first lasting no more than twelve days, mounted by the four armies on the left
flank and designed to destroy the German defences with a southerly attack. By seizing bridgeheads on the eastern bank of the western Bug from Brest to Vladimir–Volynsk, the way would be open to turn the whole right flank of Army Group Centre; the left-flank armies would move from Brest into the rear of the German armies, while the right flank simultaneously launched a second offensive, this time towards Bobruisk–Minsk, the whole operation taking thirty days and requiring a couple of tank armies to accomplish the full manoeuvre.

Rokossovskii’s grand design fell through, because the
Stavka
ruled out any possibility of moving a tank army into the Kovel area, but the General Staff Operations Section took over the suggested lines of advance for its own
Bagration
plan. Five weeks later, on 11 May, Rokossovskii submitted a second plan for 1st Belorussian Front operations, proposing this time the elimination of German troops at Zhlobin, followed by an offensive in the direction of Bobruisk–Osipovichi–Minsk. The striking feature of this revised plan was the double attack on Bobruisk, one attack aimed along the northern bank of the Berezina, the second along the southern bank, with a supporting attack in the direction of Parichi–Slutsk–Baranovichi. This plan passed into the overall operational planning without any undue comment, but suddenly at Stalin’s war council it became the centre of fierce argument. Stalin himself objected to the double attack on Bobruisk, seeking instead one single ‘main blow’. Rokossovskii refused to consider only one attack. During the course of the argument, Stalin twice sent Rokossovskii into a neighbouring room ‘to think it over’, and on the second occasion Molotov and Malenkov followed Rokossovskii into his immediate exile. Both urged Rokossovskii to fall in with Stalin’s suggestion—‘Do you know who you are arguing with?’, they asked. Rokossovskii stuck to his guns and intimated that, if the
Stavka
insisted on a single attack, he would ask to be relieved of his Front command. After the third presentation of his ‘report’, Rokossovskii convinced Stalin, who announced that he liked generals who knew their job and their own mind—there would be a double attack on Bobruisk.

Operation
Bagration
emerged in its final form from the
Stavka
conference: the destruction of Army Group Centre would open with simultaneous blows on the German flanks to flatten them in the areas of Vitebsk and Bobruisk, as well as wiping out German troops at Moghilev. The road to Minsk would then be open, and west of Minsk Soviet troops could sever the German escape route, entrap Army Group Centre and proceed to destroy it piecemeal by air attack, by ground attack launched from three fronts and by partisan operations. Though the 2nd Belorussian Front had not been assigned a primary attack role, it was to pin down as much German strength as possible to prevent its use against 1st and 3rd Belorussian Fronts. The one commander absent through illness, Chernyakhovskii of 3rd Belorussian, arrived in Moscow on 25 May and on being briefed by Zhukov and Vasilevskii on
Bagration
submitted his Front operational plans. Both marshals approved, but that same evening, during the
Stavka
examination, Chernyakhovskii received instructions to plan an additional attack,
one directed along the Orsha–Minsk highway as well as the operation aimed at Bogushevsk; by way of compensation, Chernyakhovskii learned that 5th Guards Tank Army had been definitely assigned to his Front, plus one artillery breakthrough division. Throughout the night Chernyakhovskii, his chief of staff (V.E. Makarov) and Lt.-Gen. V.F. Mernov (General Staff officer responsible for this ‘axis’ and an old military schoolmate of Chernyakhovskii’s from their days in the Kiev Artillery School) worked out a new Front plan. Early on 26 May Chernyakhovskii and Shtemenko (General Staff Operations) submitted the plans to the
Stavka
and that evening travelled out to Stalin’s ‘out-of-town’
dacha
on the Dmitrovsk highway. Here Stalin inspected the plan and approved it without further ado. But the last word on 5th Guards Tank Army had by no means been said, and Stalin played a very personal hand here.

The May conference set 15-20 June as the probable date for opening Operation
Bagration
. The General Staff on 21 May had set in train the first measures to regroup (that day Tolbukhin received a personal secret telegram prescribing the movement of the Crimean armies), but pulling armour and infantry from the interior districts and sliding out armies from the flanks was a gigantically complicated task. The railways worked furiously, overloaded and stretched to the limit. Front staffs received categorical instructions to maintain the strictest security of movement: all trains must be guarded, all de-training to be carefully controlled and done only under orders. Moving Rotmistrov’s 5th Tank presented special difficulties. The Front command wanted to see it withdrawn in stages, but the General Staff considered this merely weakened the formation; 5th Tank’s orders specified that two corps (Vovchenko’s and Kirichenko’s) must move out fully manned and with no less than 300 tanks. For some time reinforcements had been moving discreetly into the central area and the four fronts: 1st Tank Corps to 1st Baltic Front, 11th Guards Army and 2nd Guards Tank Corps to 3rd Belorussian, 81st Rifle Corps to 2nd Belorussian, 28th Army, 9th and 1st Guards Tank Corps, 1st Mechanized and 4th Guards Cavalry Corps to the right flank of 1st Belorussian Front, 8th Guards and 2nd Tank Army destined for the left flank, with 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps. Many of these formations were first pulled back into reserve, like Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army withdrawn from the Dniester bridgehead of 3rd Ukrainian Front, then assigned to the central sector, though several weeks elapsed until they moved into position. For the moment, the
Stavka
assigned 51st Army and 2nd Guards (moving from the Crimea) to its special reserve. Marshal Novikov, air force commander-in-chief moved up dense masses of aircraft, no less than eleven aviation corps and five aviation divisions.

Although
Bagration
occupied pride of place as the hammer-blow aimed at Army Group Centre, the
Stavka
and the General Staff laboured simultaneously on the attack plans involving the outer flanks, with the offensive to knock Finland out of the war high on the list of operational priorities, involving the Leningrad and Karelian Fronts with a combined strength of forty-one rifle divisions, almost half a million men, 10,000 guns and over 800 tanks. During the month of
May Govorov on the Leningrad Front prepared an attack on Vyborg, to drive north of Leningrad across the Karelian isthmus; Meretskov on the Karelian Front planned an attack to seize Petrozavodsk. Govorov proposed to use Gusev’s 21st Army for his main attack, a force of nine rifle divisons reinforced with tanks, to drive straight through the Finnish defences, along the Vyborg highway and the coastal railway all in a matter of ten days. To smash its way through, the Leningrad Front disposed of half the available artillery to fight across the old, bloody battlegrounds of the 1939–40 ‘Winter War’.

The decision for an all-out attack on Finland came speedily on the heels of the breakdown of the first sustained Soviet–Finnish peace probe. Towards the end of 1943 Mme Kollontai at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm let the news seep out that the Russians would not be averse to talking to a Finnish delegation. This produced a cautious response from the Finns and a furious reaction from Germany now bent on a binding Finnish pledge not to sign a separate peace. Washington at the beginning of 1944 urged the Finns to talk terms, but when in February Paasikivi talked to Mme Kollontai he heard how chilling Russian ‘terms’ might be—the 1940 frontiers and the elimination of German troops in Finland. Late in March a two-man Finnish delegation, Paasikivi and Enckell, went to Moscow to test the truth of these terms, only to return on 1 April with the stunning news that they were, in fact, even harsher—the 1940 frontiers as a matter of principle, the internment or expulsion of German troops and the payment of a war indemity of $600 million spread over five years. On 18 April the Finnish parliament rejected this ‘peace offer’. In Germany General Heinrich, Chief of Staff, suffered some rough handling from Keitel and Jodl because the Finns had even dared to go to Moscow, but no German sound and fury could alter the basic Finnish conviction that catastrophe was looming in the east and Finland was on the edge of this terrible whirlpool.

The Russians now applied the lessons of 1940 with enormous energy and a menacing heartlessness. The war in the north had been savage and was to be brought to a savage end. To break through the Karelian isthmus and on to Vyborg, the Soviet command massed thousands upon thousands of guns and almost 1,000
Katyusha
rocket-launchers, 536 bombers and ground-attack aircraft and almost 500 tanks; the Baltic Fleet added 175 guns (most of them 130mm and upwards) trained on the Finnish defences. The Baltic Fleet also lifted the main body of 21st Army from Oranienbaum across the gulf of Finland to the Karelian isthmus. The final operational plan committed two fronts (Leningrad and Karelian) to a double attack, the right wing of the Leningrad Front on the Karelian isthmus, and two armies of the left wing of the Karelian Front operating in southern Karelia, 7th Army fighting between lakes Onega and Ladoga and 32nd Army attacking north of lake Onega, supported by nineteen partisan detachments under orders to blow up enemy dumps and rail links. The
Stavka
set 10 June as the date for Govorov’s attack with the Leningrad Front, with Meretskov’s Karelian Front starting its own operations a few days later.