The Road to Berlin (63 page)

Meanwhile the Soviet-trained partisans went into action. During the night of 26 July 1944 the first group of eleven men, equipped with weapons and two radio-transmitters, dropped by parachute into Slovakia in the Ruzomberok area. P.A. Velichko, a captain in the Red Army, commanded this detachment, which worked feverishly to set up base areas into which many more partisans were dropped during August, to be followed by partisan units coming over the land frontier. Soviet aircraft carried out supply-dropping flights, delivering arms,
ammunition and additional equipment. These early flights used aircraft from the Ukrainian Partisan Staff, but regular supply-dropping missions required the services of a regular unit, an assignment handed to Colonel Yuzeyev’s 208th Night Bomber Division attached to the 2nd Air Army (1st Ukrainian Front). The Soviet guerrillas speedily flung out a wide net of bases and inter-linked subunits, making contact with communist and non-communist sympathizers, enlisting Czechs, Slovaks and foreigners (French prisoners-of-war finally formed a partisan detachment of their own), though the Soviet command built up its main base in the Kantorska valley near Sklabina and put it under a Soviet officer, Red Army lieutenant Vysotskii.

At the end of July the
Stavka
decided to create a new Front command. Following Marshal Koniev’s recommendation, the 4th Ukrainian Front was formed from Koniev’s left flank, out of which 1st Guards and 18th Army were withdrawn to form the first strength of the new front, the air support coming from 8th Air Army presently in
Stavka
reserve. The commander of 4th Ukrainian Front, Petrov, received a preliminary directive to prepare an offensive operation, designed to seize the eastern Carpathians and drive on in the direction of Uzhorod–Mukachevo in order to debouch on to the Hungarian plains. The Front command accordingly set about preparing its own plans, proposing to use 1st Guards and 38th Army to seize the Carpathian passes before attacking Uzhorod and Mukachevo, plans that received
Stavka
approval and full authorization to prepare an offensive operation for the period 25–30 August. The
Stavka
meanwhile moved up 3rd Corps (Mountain Troops), artillery and engineer units to reinforce 4th Ukrainian Front. Marshal Koniev’s left-flank formations had also reached the foothills of the Carpathians, with Moskalenko’s 38th Army fighting throughout August for possession of tactical footholds in the approaches to the Carpathians, each day bringing losses and the steady wearing down of the rifle divisions that were already badly in need of rest and reinforcement. Though the axis for 4th Ukrainian Front operations had been selected early in August and preparations went ahead to organize the Uzhorod–Mukachevo operations, designed principally to assist 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts operating in Rumania and Hungary, events late in August in Rumania suddenly facilitated Soviet movements, thus throwing the plans for 4th Ukrainian Front into the melting pot. Petrov at 4th Ukrainian Front
HQ
received orders from the
Stavka
to put his present plans aside and not to embark on any offensive operations without the express authorization of the
Stavka
.

Events in Slovakia were already impinging on Soviet plans shortly after the first week in August. Inside the Slovak Defence Ministry three colonels of the Slovak Army—Golian, Vesel and Ferencik—worked out detailed military plans for a rising, an operation that greatly interested the London-based Czechoslovak officers and politicians, already preoccupied with the question of how to raise an indigenous army and install a command inside liberated territory, particularly ‘liberated Slovakia’. While the Czechoslovak government in London explored
means of ‘expanding’ the Slovak Army into a force of four divisions and thus creating an indigenous Czechoslovak army (with units in Bohemia and Moravia to be armed if arms could be found), Lt.-Col. Golian as chief of staff of the Slovak Army attended his first meeting with the Slovak National Council in Bratislava on 27 April. Two months later, at the end of June, the Council set up its own ‘Military Centre’ with Golian as chief.

Golian quickly took up the question of the status of the Slovak Army. In mid-June, in his report to London, he stated categorically that ‘we do not wish to go over to the Russians … above all we wish to take part in the liberation of the Czech lands’. This required that talks start at once with the Russians about the status of the Slovak Army as a possible ‘co-belligerent’ to prevent it being taken prisoner and disarmed. At the end of the month Golian submitted his operational plan (the second part of which arrived between 4 and 7 July); his plans envisaged the use of the field army (two divisions) in a joint operation with the Red Army to free the Carpathian passes, the Rear Army with its garrison troops being committed to holding central Slovakia, and the rising as a whole to be triggered off at a signal from the Russians. The Czechoslovak Defence Ministry in London at once asked Golian how he saw the Slovak Army’s relations with the Red Army, to which Golian made a very specific reply on 4 August: on receipt of the pre-arranged signal, Soviet troops could pass through the Slovak lines and expect the co-operation of Slovak officers, for which reason it was vital that Soviet forces should come in strength, otherwise Slovakia would be occupied by the Hungarians. Equally, the Russians must know of the Slovak plans, they must be made aware of the need to cross the frontier in strength and the rendezvous for liaison officers must be fixed. Under these conditions Golian thought that the whole of Slovakia could be in Soviet hands practically overnight.

During the first week in August a considerable amount of information on Slovakia flowed into Moscow from a variety of sources, from Koniev’s Front
HQ
, from the Ukrainian Partisan Staff, from the two representatives of the Slovak National Council (Karol Smidke and Colonel Ferencik, who were flown to the Soviet Union) and from General Heliodor Pika, the head of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in the Soviet Union. General Pika dealt with the details of possible co-operation between Slovak and Soviet troops. On 8 August he sent the Soviet high command a letter suggesting this co-ordinated role for Slovak troops and two days later followed it up with a memorandum entitled ‘On the situation of the divisions in eastern Slovakia’, the main point of which concerned Slovak–Soviet co-operation in the area of the Dukla pass, a key part of the terrain. What the secret minutes of the Czechoslovak Military Mission show then is a break in the contact between Pika and the Soviet command lasting for more than two weeks (from 10 to 28 August), but neither these minutes nor other available records explain why this connection with the Soviet command was not firmly and formally established. It is also far from clear just what was proposed in the way of ‘co-operation’ to the Soviet command. Colonel Golian was reportedly
informed by the Czechoslovak Defence Ministry in London (responding to the Colonel’s signal of 4 August) that his plan could not be submitted to the Russians as it stood, since it ruled out any significant operational role for Slovak troops. As for suggesting, as Golian had, ‘a large Soviet force’ for Slovakia, the London message rejected this idea completely on the grounds that the Soviet command needed all its men for ‘more important strategic axes’.

Soviet–Czechoslovak arrangements at the governmental level seemed, therefore, to be conspicuously lacking in conciseness and commitment. But there were other channels. On 6 August Karol Smidke and Colonel Ferencik arrived in Moscow after being flown out of Slovakia as representatives of the Slovak National Council. Both men possessed detailed information about the proposed rising and reported presumably in the requisite detail both to the Czechoslovak Communist Party and to officers of the Soviet military command. For two days the Slovak delegates talked at length with Maj.-Gen. Slavin of the Soviet General Staff, who reported to General Antonov, who in turn submitted this material to Stalin on 10 August. Though a Communist, Smidke was also a Slovak nationalist, as were a number of his colleagues in the Party, including Dr G. Husak; such ‘opportunism’ and deviationist ways led to Slovak Communists embracing the so-called ‘London concept’ of the struggle for the liberation of Slovakia, a transgression that inevitably brought the wrath of Moscow upon their heads. Viewed from Moscow, Slovakia presented the spectacle of a strategic area presently devoid of German troops but ruled by a reactionary government, with a nationalistic population liberally sprinkled with ‘opportunistic’ non-Communist elements looking to the Benes government in London, and with even the communist leadership leaning in the direction of the ‘London concept’—the label attached to the idea of delaying any rising until the Red Army was on Slovakia’s doorstep, effecting a
coup
rather than pursuing a ‘revolutionary struggle’ and then consolidating a ‘bourgeois’ state system. To allow the proponents of the ‘London concept’ to triumph without any challenge would have been foolish and pointless political benevolence. Once a Soviet-controlled partisan movement was entrenched on Slovak territory there was an instrument in being to ‘activate’ the struggle, to place the leadership of this fight firmly in the hands of the ‘progressives’ and to pre-empt the bourgeois nationalists by precipitating revolt.

In the course of the talks with the Foreign Bureau of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (which avoided any direct contact with the Soviet government, a useful precaution aimed at warding off the protests of the Czechoslovak government in London who could be told that these were simply ‘Party proceedings’), Smidke and his communist colleagues worked out the terms of a ‘directive’ covering the planned rebellion in Slovakia. In the event of a German occupation, the Slovak people along with the Slovak Army would fight the invaders, occupy or liberate as much territory as possible, set up a ‘provisional national authority’ and fight guerrilla actions until final liberation came with the entry of the Red Army. The second contingency envisaged by this document centred on Soviet
troops entering the country first, in which event there would also be a national rising, the setting up of ‘organs of revolutionary power’ and a drive to expel the Germans and the Hungarians, to be followed by the participation of Slovak troops in the final liberation of all Czechoslovakia.

But while these various parties talked, Smidke and Ferencik in Moscow, Golian in his exchanges with London, Pika with the Soviet command, the situation in Slovakia blew up in their faces, precipitating an impromptu rising for which the Slovak Army was far from prepared. Acting under orders from the central Ukrainian Partisan Staff and ignoring the Slovak National Council, the Soviet-led guerrillas intensified their own operations early in August and tightened their grip on central Slovakia and the middle reaches of eastern Slovakia. The Slovak government took fright and appealed to Berlin for German help and German troops. On 12 August Golian informed London that a major anti-partisan operation was in the offing. He asked for the curtailing of these partisan activities, which could only bring German intervention and must mean the premature crushing of Slovak ‘resistance’. The reply from London could scarcely have encouraged Colonel Golian. It was, the London signal affirmed, technically impossible to restrain the partisans since there was no direct communication with their command—but more important, it would be political madness for the Czechoslovak government in exile to call for a cessation of partisan operations on Czechoslovak soil when throughout all Europe calls were going out for nations to take up arms. The only solution London offered was that the Slovak military command should itself make contact with the partisans and should support partisan operations.

Twelve days later, on 24 August, Golian again reported that a German–Hungarian occupation of the country seemed to be imminent. This Axis military occupation had been fixed as the signal for the Slovaks to take up arms and fight. But the problem now looked much more complex. Should the Slovaks offer resistance on a purely local scale to the German–Hungarian troops, or would it be more effective for the Slovak Army to break through and go over to the Russians? In four days Golian received a reply to his questions: military resistance on any major scale was impossible, but London could not advise on the particular course to follow from the options presented by Golian. To break through to the Russians seemed on the face of it the best course; but if this promised no success, then there was nothing for it but to organize local resistance, to concentrate the bulk of the available forces in central Slovakia, to reinforce rear units and to fight alongside the partisans. The Czechoslovak Defence Minister in London promised nevertheless to inform the Soviet supreme command about the critical turn of events in Slovakia.

The partisans in Slovakia, however, moved first. After 25 August guerrilla actions intensified and the insurgents were already in control of one town, Turciansky Sv. Martin. During the next two days Slovak garrisons defected to the partisans in other towns, but it took the murder of the head of the German military mission in Rumania, passing through Slovakia on his way to Berlin, to trigger
off the final explosion. Captain Velichko’s partisans halted the German military train at Turciansky Sv. Martin, which lay no great distance from the main partisan base at Sklabina. The German general along with his staff was taken from the train; they were lodged in a local military barracks and then shot the following day, 27 August. Enraged at these killings and incensed with the Slovak government for its failure to maintain order, Hitler ordered the 357th German Infantry Division along with some supporting units—a force of some 20,000 men—to move immediately into Slovakia to put down the disorder. On 29 August German reinforcements entered Slovakia from Moravia and the first fighting with the Slovaks broke out at Zilina, Cadca, Povazska Bystrica and Trencin. The partisan units pressed on with their own attacks, closed in on Banska Bystrica and seized the radio station.

The ‘military centre’ run by Slovak officers sent out its own call sign for a military revolt—‘Commence transfer’—to all army units earmarked for operations against the Germans. The ‘Free Slovak Radio Station’ broadcast an appeal to the nation at large, calling on the Slovaks to resist the German invasion. The Slovak National Council proceeded to proclaim a ‘Czechoslovak Republic’ and announced the establishment of six provisional ministries. For the defence of the new state the Council authorized the establishment of two ‘defence areas’, each with an independent headquarters, to operate under the general command of the ‘1st Czechoslovak Army’: ‘Defence Area 1’ was centred on Banska Bystrica and disposed of three infantry regiments with artillery to defend the Zvolen–Banska Bystrica–Brezno area; ‘Defence Area 2’ had its own headquarters at Liptovy Sv. Mikulas and covered the area from Spiska Nova Ves-Kezmarok westwards to the Vah valley down to Dolny Kubin and Ruzomberok.