The Road to Berlin (47 page)

At 0400 hours on 22 June Marshal Vasilevskii reported to Stalin that Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic and Chernyakhovskii’s 3rd Belorussian Fronts stood ready for action. Marshal Zhukov released the heavy bomber force for use by Vasilevskii against the German defences before the full attack of Vitebsk went in, mounted jointly by Bagramyan and Chernyakhovskii. North-west of Vitebsk—where the massive Soviet attack came as an overwhelming surprise to the German command—Bagramyan up at 1st Baltic Front forward command post watched the weather anxiously. Ahead lay the hummocks and the dark lines of forest, Belorussia’s great expanse of trees, streams and hills. The recent heavy rain, if it continued, would ruin the going for both men and machines. At dawn, however, the sky cleared and at 0500 hours the morning mists began to disperse under the early sun. His fears set at rest on this score, Bagramyan on the stroke of the hour instructed the Front artillery commander, General Khlebnikov, to fire off the opening Soviet barrage, a sixteen-minute preparation. Now Bagramyan fretted over what forward units would find when they reached the German defences—possibly empty positions, the main force pulled back deep into the defensive zone, with only light forces to the front. The first battalions moved out. Committing battalions recommended itself strongly to Bagramyan as a means of saving artillery ammunition, which might only fall on empty trenches, and as a means of avoiding a possible trap; but his confidence was not shared by a number of officers who nursed private fears about this method of ‘developing reconnaissance into battle’. The main attack by 1st Baltic was to be launched along a relatively broad front, a proposal that Marshal Vasilevskii at first rejected only to be won round subsequently by the arguments of the Front command.

Within three hours of the battalions going out, Bagramyan received the kind of battle reports he wanted: the ‘reconnaissance battalions’ of 6th Guards and 43rd Army signalled that they were involved in fierce hand-to-hand fighting as German troops counter-attacked to recover their forward positions. Maj.-Gen. Ruchkin, commander of 2nd Guards Rifle Corps (6th Guards Army), sent in more battalions and during the day pushed some three miles into the German defensive zone. With the coming of night Soviet formation commanders rushed special night-fighting squads into action to ‘hold the Germans by the throat’, though the Front command still suspected German disengagement and withdrawal deeper into the defensive system. Third
Panzer
, however, had expected 1st Baltic to drive almost due west on Polotsk, and the present Soviet attacks were falling
on 9th Army Corps, holding an over-extended front with only minute reserves. From this small beginning grew the crisis that finally engulfed Col.-Gen. Reinhardt’s Third
Panzer
Army.

During the night of 23 June Bagramyan had to decide whether or not to proceed with the full artillery barrage scheduled for the morning or simply to take advantage of the disruption in the German ranks and throw in the main infantry force, relying on ground-attack aircraft for support. At 0400 hours the Front commander issued orders to fire off the barrage against sectors where the German defences remained intact, but the infantry attack would go in mainly with air support. On 23 June German troops saw much evidence of new Soviet tactics. Soviet infantry assaulted the main defence line, opening breaches that they fought to extend in every direction: in the wake of the assault battalions came more infantry with artillery support to clear the area: once the infantry attack had broken through the defences, the big tank formations moved through the gaps, while ground-attack aircraft—in numbers never before seen—pounded German strong-points and gun positions. In this order Bagramyan rolled out his infantry, artillery, aircraft and armour. By mid-morning on 23 June, 23rd Guards Rifle Corps (6th Guards Army), supported by right-flank divisions of Beloborodov’s 43rd Army, took Sirotino at the centre of the Soviet breakthrough sector. Bagramyan ordered up more air support, the Soviet infantry cleared the area about themselves while Butkov’s 1st Tank Corps rolled towards the gap, though the tanks made slow progress along roads and tracks softened with rain. At Shumilino, where German troops put up stiff resistance, General Bazhanov brought up all available
Katyusha
rocket-launchers to smother the defenders with fire. Together 6th Guards and 43rd Army made up to ten miles into the positions held by IX Corps.

During the course of the day, Soviet air reconnaisance reported a large column of German vehicles moving from the south-west towards the western Dvina. Bagramyan’s staff assumed that German troops meant to hold the Dvina line, and if they held it in strength 1st Baltic’s offensive could come to a dangerous halt. The main mobile striking force, Butkov’s tanks, were still struggling along the soaked roads and only late in the day closed on Shumilino. Bagramyan decided to make a dash for the Dvina with infantry—once the infantry armies got across the river, the tanks could follow. General Chistyakov (6th Guards) and General Beloborodov (43rd Army) received urgent orders to advance with all speed, to be astride the Dvina on the morning of 24 June and to take personal responsibility for moving up bridging equipment and boats as speedily as possible. Throughout the night Soviet engineers and infantrymen dragged pontoons back on to the wet roads from which they so frequently slipped, lorries took each other in tow and road movement officers
(dorozhno-komendantskie chasti)
sorted out the multiple traffic jams. At noon on 24 June General Chistyakov reported to Front
HQ
that the first Soviet units were over the western Dvina, making a hazardous crossing on improvized rafts, planks and any boat to hand; by the evening the pontoons finally arrived so that a start could be made ferrying over
artillery and tanks. But without waiting for his heavy weapons General Beloborodov rushed two corps (1st and 60th) over the western Dvina, sending 60th Corps in the direction of Gnezdilovichi and straight into the rear of the German forces at Vitebsk.

There was need for a speedy crossing of the western Dvina. Marshal Vasilevskii, co-ordinating the operations of 1st Baltic and 3rd Belorussian Fronts, had telephoned to ask Bagramyan for a precise situation report, in particular the location of Beloborodov’s corps. Bagramyan’s last information was that two corps belonging to 43rd Army were on the western Dvina north-west of Beshenkovicha: General Beloborodov himself had gone up to 60th Corps to supervise the river crossing. Marshal Vasilevskii, rarely given to dramatization, stressed that it was vital to get Beloborodov’s right-flank divisions over the river at top speed—‘the whole course of the Vitebsk encirclement operation literally depends on this’. The reason for Marshal Vasilevskii’s excitement was that the other arm of the pincer moving from the south-west, General Lyudnikov’s 39th Army from Chernyakhovskii’s 3rd Belorussian Front, had already closed in on Gnezdilovichi. Marshal Vasilevskii continued: ‘We have information that the Fascist command has twice sought Hitler’s permission to withdraw from the Vitebsk “bag” … but it is not Hitler, but us, who must decide the fate of this concentration of troops. In any case we mustn’t let go of the Fascists. That depends on rapid operations on the part of comrade Beloborodov.’

Not long after this talk with Vasilevskii, Bagramyan made contact with Beloborodov himself. Revising his orders, the Front commander appointed noon on 25 June as the time limit for 43rd Army’s link-up with 39th Army. Since Beloborodov could not now wait for all his artillery to be moved over the western Dvina, Bagramyan promised him full air support instead. Beloborodov was soon to need it. Striking on with 60th Corps, he was only about ten miles from units of 39th Army which were then to the south of Gnezdilovichi; on the evening of 24 June he promised Bagramyan that he would ‘close the ring’ at noon the following day. During the night of 24–25 June, as 60th Corps drove down from the north-west, German units tried hard to hold the Soviet advance; on the morning of 25 June the 246th German Infantry Division launched a full-scale attack to press 60th Corps right back, an enterprise smashed from the air when Bagramyan ordered 3rd Air Army commander to send in a complete division of
shturmovik
ground-attack planes to support Beleborodov.

On 24 June Third
Panzer
faced a highly critical situation. Bagramyan’s assault armies closed on Vitebsk from the north-west, Beloborodov in the lead. The day before Chernyakhovskii had opened 3rd Belorussian Front offensive, attacking in force, and on the first day Lyudnikov’s 39th Army, with Krylov’s 5th, had broken into the German defences to a depth of some five miles across a 25-mile front. To the north-west of Vitebsk, Third
Panzer’s
IX Corps had been badly hammered: to the south-west Lyudnikov was now pushing 6th Corps over the river Luchessa and striking on to the north-west. On 25 June Krylov’s 5th took
Bogushevsk by storm, cutting the Vitebsk–Orsha railway line and biting deeper into 6th Corps on Third
Panzer’s
right flank: the same day Chernyakhovskii ordered Lt.-Gen. Oslikovskii with his ‘cavalry-mechanized group’ to push as far and as fast as possible to the west of Bogushevsk.

The drive on Vitebsk was only one of Chernyakhovskii’s Front assignments; the second involved a full-scale attack on Orsha itself. A huge battle had begun to unroll along the northern sector of Army Group Centre, but for the first twenty-four hours the drive towards Orsha was stalled: the attack mounted by 11th Guards Army and 31st Army failed to make much progress, largely because the preliminary bombardment fell on open ground, missing the German gun positions and leaving the German defences largely intact. The blame for this belonged to 5th Artillery Breakthrough Corps; their violation of camouflage discipline had long given the game away to the Germans, who methodically plotted the Soviet artillery deployment.

The delay with the second of Chernyakhovskii’s attacks now opened a gap between the ‘southern group’, whose progress was rapid. To plug the breach, Marshal Vasilevskii proposed to use Marshal Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army, committing it along the ‘Bogushevsk axis’ with Krylov’s 5th Army, a somewhat unwelcome surprise for the tank marshal, who had expected to operate with Lt.-Gen. Galitskii’s 11th Guards: fortunately, in a quiet moment, Marshal Rotmistrov had gone over Krylov’s plans and operational area, so that he was not wholly unfamiliar with 5th Army’s commitments. Rotmistrov had already received orders from Chernyakhovskii to close on 11th Guards Army, but his latest instructions stipulated that the tank army must be ready for action with Krylov’s 5th by noon on 25 June. On the morning of 25 June Rotmistrov’s tanks were concentrating to the west of Liozno, with the bulk of 1st Air Army—four corps and two divisions under the command of Lt.-Gen. Ushakov—assigned to special support operations, a powerful armoured fist ready to drive deep into the German lines and with ground-attack aircraft available to blast a path for the tanks.

Crashing through woods or fighting over streams and rivulets, the Soviet ‘pincers’ closed on Vitebsk during the afternoon of 25 June, trapping four divisions of LIII Corps (Third
Panzer):
5th Guards Rifle Corps from 39th Army—3rd Belorussian Front—linked up as planned with 60th Corps from Beloborodov’s 43rd Army. Flank units of 39th Army began fighting their way into Vitebsk itself, Soviet machine-gunners worked their way into the rubble of the suburbs even as Hitler demanded that the town must be held ‘at all costs’—a sentence of death passed on the 206th German Infantry Division. Reluctantly Hitler had given permission for LIII Corps to fight its way out to the south-west, but this decision came far too late, for 39th Army had already cut the main escape route for the corps at Ostrovno. In Vitebsk itself, where Soviet and German troops fought it out for possession of suburbs and squares, what the Soviet command wanted was possession of the main bridge over the western Dvina; as 43rd Army
crashed into Vitebsk from the north, on the night of 25 June a squad of Soviet sappers under the command of Sergeant Blokhin worked their way to the bridge and killed the guard, whereupon the sergeant swung himself across to dismantle the demolition charges. The next morning Soviet armour and artillery rolled on to the west across the main bridge. Twenty-four hours later the German garrison surrendered to a Soviet ultimatum, leaving 20,000 dead in the shattered town: the commanding general and chief of staff of LIII Corps were taken prisoner. One force of 8,000 German troops did find a way out of Vitebsk, only to be surrounded once more and then wiped out almost to a man.

By the time the Soviet pincers had closed on Vitebsk—25June—the whole massive Soviet offensive against Army Group Centre was fully and finally joined, a savage, relentless battle rolling across an enormous front. As Third
Panzer
was being dragged down in the north, Zakharov opened his attack on Fourth Army on 23 June and one day later, on the morning of 24 June, Rokossovskii launched a shattering attack against Ninth Army. If there was any moment of decision outweighing all others in the battle for Belorussia, it came on the morning of 24 June. Once Rokossovskii unleashed his armies against General Jordan’s Ninth Army, there could be no further doubt that the whole of the German army group was under sustained and fierce attack. That morning, in the Minsk
HQ
of the army group, Field-Marshal von Busch (Army Group commander) and General Zeitzler (Chief of the General Staff) held a hurried and remarkably inconclusive conference, most of which turned on the subject of Vitebsk alone: Busch suggested pulling Third
Panzer
back to the Tiger Line and asked for reinforcements, but he drew back from discussing the whole situation building up round his army group. Zeitzler was presumably pleased not to have too drastic a list of proposals to present to the
Führer
, but on his return from the Minsk meeting, when he reported to Hitler, Zeitzler failed to get any agreement for a withdrawal by Third
Panzer
. All Hitler authorized was the movement of two
Panzer
divisions by way of reinforcement. From this point forward, Army Group Centre was caught in an impossible situation and progressively drenched with Russian fire, denied any degree of flexibility yet bereft of any effective reinforcement.