The Road to Berlin (49 page)

Map 8
Operation
Bagration
, June–August 1944

At his headquarters in Obersalzberg, Hitler held high hopes of manning some rear defence line where the Soviet advance would be stemmed as it ran out of steam; on the evening of 28 June Field-Marshal Model assumed command of both Army Group Centre and Army Group North Ukraine, not least to facilitate the transfer of reserves from the concentrations of ‘North Ukraine’ to the centre.
Yet for all the casualties, the Soviet offensive showed no sign of slackening; on the contrary, as Model took over his new command, Soviet movement on the flanks suggested that something much greater than the capture of Minsk was afoot—to the south Rokossovskii pressed his mobile units westwards on Slutsk and in the north, moving through Lepel, more Soviet columns were making for Molodechno. As the outer claws swept on, the inner pincers could be expected to close on Minsk and thus trap Fourth Army.

Advance Soviet units were already within 50 miles of Minsk, north-east and south-east of the city; Fourth Army, fighting its way westwards, was still a good 75 miles from Minsk. With the ‘Minsk meridian’ specified by the operational plan of
Bagration
almost within reach, the
Stavka
on 28 June issued revised directives to all four Fronts: Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front received orders to strike for Polotsk and westwards to Glubokoe; Chernyakhovskii’s 3rd Belorussian Front was to force the Berezina, co-operate with Zakharov’s 2nd Belorussian Front in taking Minsk no later than 7–8 July and advance its right-flank formations to Molodechno; Rokossovskii would also use part of his forces for a drive on Minsk, but his main strength must be committed in the direction of Slonim–Baranovichi, thereby cutting the German line of retreat to the south-west. Zakharov’s orders specified his forcing the Berezina by 30 June/1 July, closing on Minsk no later than 7–8 July and then moving his main force to the western bank of the river Svisloch. The
Stavka
directives set the stage for a two-pronged drive on Minsk, from Borisov in the north-west and from Osipovichi in the south-west—keeping the Soviet line of advance more or less constant with Fourth Army’s steady retreat; by advancing along the Moghilev–Minsk axis, Zakharov would maintain the frontal assault on Fourth Army, pushing it into the trap laid to north and south. Bagramyan’s operations with 1st Baltic Front were intended to secure Chernyakhovskii from the north; by swinging out Chernyakhovskii’s right flank, as well as the left flank of Rokossovskii’s assault force, as far to the west as possible, the German command could neither move up significant reserves nor stabilize the front as a whole.

Lt.-Gen. Oslikovskii’s mobile group (made up of 3rd Cavalry Corps and 3rd Guards Mechanized Corps), following its original orders, pushed through Senno while the lead tanks of 3rd Guards Mechanized reached the Berezina north of lake Palik on 29 June, forced a crossing and pressed on to the west, cutting the Minsk–Vilno railway line. To the south of Oslikovskii, 11th Guards Army and the main force of Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army also bore down towards the Berezina—with Soviet formations and the retreating German Fourth Army all converging on Borisov. Holding off the Russians, a desperate German defence struggled to keep the Berezina bridges open for Fourth Army, the bulk of whose forces still threshed about on the eastern bank of the river in a desperate attempt to move back. Rescuing the Fourth Army meant keeping the Berezina crossing open for a further seventy-two hours, but on 1 July Russian units took Borisov in yet another storming action; two corps of Fourth Army—12th and 27th
Corps—were now wholly marooned to the east of the Berezina, though continuing to fight towards the west. South and south-west of Minsk, Pliev’s mobile units took Slutsk on 30 June, then moved in the next two days to Stolbtsy and Gorodeyia, severing the Minsk–Baranovichi railway line and sealing off the escape route deep to the south-west.

On 2 July Model knew that there was now no hope of bringing surviving units of Fourth Army back in strength to Minsk. Minsk itself was directly threatened by Soviet columns to north and south, and the Berezina, against whose eastern bank Fourth Army was pinned, had been crossed in strength by Soviet forces to the west of Lepel. Virtually ignoring the situation at Minsk itself, Model threw his remaining strength into holding open escape routes to the north-west and south-west of the Belorussian capital. Chernyakhovskii—his eyes fixed on Vilno—swung his main force in the direction of Molodechno (north-west of Minsk), assigning the assault on Minsk itself to Glagolev’s 31st Army and one corps of Rotmistrov’s 5th Tank: Burdeinyi’s 2nd Guards Tank Corps would also drive for Minsk and simultaneously cover the left flank. At dawn on 2 July Rotmistrov launched his tanks along the Minsk highway, making up to thirty miles and breaking into the north-eastern outskirts during the night: Burdeinyi’s corps started the same day, guided over rough country by partisans and making good speed in the absence of enemy resistance. To the south-west Panov’s 1st Guards tanks were within a dozen miles of Minsk on 2 July, having pushed through Pukhovichi; two tank brigades (15th and 16th) followed a battery of
SP
guns and a small infantry force, with 3rd Army and its supporting 9th Tank Corps also closing on Minsk. On 3 July, four hours after tanks from 3rd Belorussian Front rushed the city from the north, north-west and north-east, Panov’s tanks and infantry were in the south-eastern suburbs. Minsk, its factories dynamited and its installations wrecked, stood mostly in ruins; throughout most of Belorussia Soviet troops advanced through burned villages and broken towns, the livestock gone and the population fearfully thinned. More than once Red Army units came upon trains loaded with children consigned to deportation to the
Reich
.

With the capture of Minsk, the Soviet encirclement locked round Fourth Army, trapping 105,000 men split into two bodies, one to the south-west and the other to the east of Volma. Almost on the site where in June 1941 the
Wehrmacht
had carried out a great encirclement of Soviet armies, a mass of German soldiers now awaited annihilation or capture in the great forests east of Minsk: more than 40,000 of them died either in attempting to break out of the ring or in fighting off the Russian reduction of the encirclement area. Save for air-dropping supplies—and the last attempt was made south of Minsk on 5 July—Army Group Centre could do nothing. Three days later the acting commander of 12th Corps ordered a general surrender, since lack of ammunition and fuel ruled out further organized resistance. The rounding up of the remnants of four German corps, a dwindling mass of hungry, hunted men with their wounded untended, lasted until 11 July: the mopping up fell to 49th Army of Zakharov’s
2nd Belorussian Front, Rokossovskii’s units having peeled off to drive on south-westwards.

On 4 July, when the battle for Belorussia was decided—the Red Army having torn a 250-mile gap in the German front and Army Group Centre left with eight scattered divisions—the
Stavka
set new target lines for the four fronts. The way ahead for the Red Army lay into Poland and Lithuania. Using two armies, 6th Guards and 4th Shock Army, Bagramyan had just taken Polotsk, another of Hitler’s phantom fortresses from which he planned to lunge with Army Group North—a two-division attack to restore a situation which the power of more than a hundred Soviet divisons had produced: Model and Lindemann (Army Group North commander) managed to scotch this senseless plan. The
Stavka
meanwhile aimed Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front at Kaunas; Chernyakhovskii’s 3rd Belorussian at Vilno and Lida, thence the western bank of the Niemen; Zakharov’s 2nd Belorussian at the Molchad and Niemen river lines and thence to Bialystok; and Rokossovskii’s right-flank armies at Baranovichi–Brest, across the line running from Slonim to Pinsk and finally to the western Bug. The Soviet pursuit, as it unrolled along the axes specified by the
Stavka
, made an average speed of ten to fifteen miles per day. Baranovichi fell on 8 July, Vilno—already encircled—on 13 July, while Bagramyan with five armies advanced on a broad front towards Lithuania and eastern Latvia.

By mid-July Rokossovskii’s right flank armies had passed the line running from Svisloch to Pruzany and west of Pinsk—a highly significant meridian, for now Rokossovskii could bring his powerful left-flank armies into action, 1st Belorussian Front being no longer cut into two widely separated entities by the vast Polesian swampland which lay well to the rear at this stage of the advance. The
Stavka
had already authorized the attack plan for the left-flank armies on 7 July; as the right-flank armies moved down on Brest from the north-east, the left prepared to attack towards Lublin in Poland and to sweep past Brest from the south. Rokossovskii’s left hook disposed of great power—nine infantry armies (including 1st Polish Army), one tank army (the 2nd), two tank, one mechanized and one cavalry corps, two air armies: 70th, 47th, 8th Guards and 96th Armies formed the first echelon. Shortly after dawn on the morning of 17 July, preceded by a barrage of 170,000 shells fired off by Soviet guns, the lead armies of the left flank lashed out westwards from Kovel in a double drive on Siedlce and Lublin. Six days later Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army, supported by 2nd Tank Army, broke into Lublin and then turned north-westwards towards Deblin on the Vistula—and Warsaw.

When Soviet armies shattered Army Group Centre, they achieved their greatest single military success on the Eastern Front. For the German army in the east it was a catastrophe of unbelievable proportions, greater than that of Stalingrad, obliterating between twenty-five and twenty-eight divisions, 350,000 men in all. On 17 July 57,000 German prisoners of war—with captured generals at their head—were marched in a great column through the streets of Moscow lined
with Russian crowds: for the most part, the Russians masked their anger with silence, apart from jeering boys and saddened women. This chilling and unique display was prompted on the Russian side by the desire to ridicule German assertions that nothing ‘unplanned’ had happened in Belorussia and to underline to the Allies that the Belorussian victory had been hard-fought. Russians resented suggestions that German troops had been transferred from Belorussia westwards to fight off the invading Allied armies: the parade of prisoners was in part designed to stifle ‘nonsensical talk’ of this kind. The main battle-front, and here Soviet comentators quoted directly from German cries of anguish, lay in the east where battles of ‘apocalyptic’ dimensions raged.

After 9 July, in order to bring his ‘personal touch’ closer to the Eastern Front, Hitler moved his headquarters into East Prussia, and it was here on 20 July that the abortive attempt was made on his life. The ‘bomb-plot’ did much to confirm Russian feelings that the
Reich
was beginning to disintegrate, though too speedy a crack-up at this juncture—with the Red Army about to burst into Germany itself—might not have served Stalin’s best interests, or even those of the Soviet Union. Yet the Soviet press did not scoff or minimize the importance of the ‘bomb plot’:
Freies Deutschland
, the
NKD
newspaper and mouthpiece of the ‘Free German movement’, took an equally positive line and called for ‘common action’ with the much unloved German generals to dispose of Hitler. The ‘bomb plot’, and the great German defeat in Belorussia, gave a fresh impetus to the activities of ‘Free Germany’, though it proved to be short-lived. Two days after the attempt on Hitler’s life, sixteen of the generals recently captured issued an ‘appeal’—authenticated by Lt.-Gen. Bambler, commanding officer of the 12th Infantry Divison—calling for a continuation of the struggle against Hitler, for Germans ‘to use force against force, to resist Hitler, not to fulfil his orders, to finish Hitler’s regime and the war with it … Do not wait until Hitler ruins you.’ In the wake of the savagery inflicted on the German officer corps after 20 July on Hitler’s orders, Field-Marshal Paulus, for long unwilling to form any association with the
Bund Deutscher Offiziere
, finally dropped his resistance and came out with his own personal summons to deal with Hitler and expressed his agreement with the programme advanced by the ‘Free Germany’ movement.

Before the Soviet offensive opened in Belorussia, and at a time when ‘Free Germany’ had accomplished very little to win over German troops in the field—at Korsun, Seydlitz and his companions, shunted down to the Soviet ‘ring’ to persuade the trapped divisions to surrender, failed dismally for all their loudspeaker broadcasts, leaflets and personal appeals—the
NKD
and the
BDO
were at each other’s throats over their respective roles. Seydlitz objected to being merely a propaganda mouthpiece to subvert German soldiers: Lattmann, however, seized upon this, and Lattmann won. A few, a very few, German prisoners were trained to work behind the German lines, or else were hand-picked to form the nucleus of military units attached to the Red Army: small groups of ex-prisoners wearing Red Army uniforms made their appearance in the Ukraine that summer. Inside
the German lines rumours flew fairly thick about the ‘Seydlitz army’ and there was talk of the ‘German government’ set up in Moscow, but the ‘army’ was virtually a phantom and the ‘government’ exercised no pull on German troops still fighting. Inevitably the role of the ‘Free Germany’ movement dwindled and its importance waned, though for the moment it flourished amidst the vast wreckage of the Belorussian defeat. How disastrous this defeat was, those who had just suffered it—sixteen of the chastened generals so recently captured—set out in their ‘appeal’:

… the destruction of 30 divisions, in other words almost the whole of the Army Group [Centre]: the whole of the Fourth Army, the bulk of Ninth Army and the Third Panzer Army. In these unequal battles 21 generals, including ourselves, were taken prisoner and more than 10 others killed. Reasons for this renewed defeat: a wrong interpretation of the enemy’s strategic possibilities and intentions; our flank positions threatened ever since the winter; lack of reserves and Luftwaffe support. To put it briefly, Army Group Centre was sacrificed in a game of chance. [Lt.-Gen. Bambler, Cdr. 12th Infantry Div., pamphlet, 22 July 1944.]