The Road to Berlin (65 page)

At dawn on 8 September, as prescribed in the
Stavka
directive to Koniev, Soviet guns cracked out over the Carpathians in a two-hour barrage, the prelude to Moskalenko’s attack with 38th Army. The first Soviet infantry attacks met little or no resistance, and encouraged by the progress of the first few hours of fighting Moskalenko decided at noon to commit units of the 1st Czechoslovak Corps. For most of that day the Czechoslovak troops struggled along waterlogged roads, a time-wasting march which kept them well away from the battle on 8 September. By the evening German resistance began to stiffen. Seventeenth Army command pulled reinforcements into the Krosno area, an infantry division moved on from Turka, armour rolled in from the Sandomierz bridgehead and other units were brought up from the interior of Slovakia. Krosno held out stoutly and the breach opened by Soviet troops was just as quickly closed on 9 September, the day on which Grechko’s 1st Guards Army began attacking on the right flank of Petrov’s 4th Ukrainian Front in an operation designed to break the German defences at Sanok.

After two days of fighting at close quarters, Soviet riflemen managed to break into Krosno after penetrating the second German defence zone. But the Soviet advance snagged once again in the main defences covering Dukla, a delay exploited by the German command to bring up more men and armour until their strength—compared with 8 September—had almost doubled, amounting to six infantry and two
Panzer
divisions. Marshal Koniev moved up to Moskalenko’s
HQ
to look into the situation at first hand. What he saw was far from encouraging: the new German reinforcements could frustrate the entire Soviet operation, which must now be conducted without any hope whatsoever of the Slovak troops striking at the German rear and yet had to go ahead against a tight timetable. To provide some reinforcement Koniev had earlier ordered 4th Tank Corps—low in strength, with 59 T-34 tanks and nine SAU-85
SP
guns—into action: some of this armour put in a timely appearance in the storming of Krosno, but something more drastic had to be done. Soviet troops were still a long way from the area held by the Slovak insurgents, and Dukla remained to be cracked. Koniev decided to use a small gap, 2,000 yards or less, opened in the German lines on Moskalenko’s left flank to the east of Dukla, a strip of land lying between the villages of Lysa Gura and Gloitse covered by German machine-guns and mortars. 1st Guards
Cavalry received orders to push into the gap and move across the heights to drop down into the German rear, a risky undertaking which depended upon keeping the narrow ‘corridor’ open.

1st Guards moved off during the night of 12 September, picking its way across the slopes towards the heights. The corps left behind all its heavy equipment and carried only a minimum of ammunition, 300 rounds for the 76mm guns, 420 rounds for the 82mm mortars, 400 hand-grenades, sufficient for only a few hours of fighting. Behind the cavalry Moskalenko sent up the corps artillery as quickly as possible; the gunners manhandled their pieces over the slopes, fought off German machine-gunners covering the access to the roads while the ‘cavalry caravans’ fought their way forward with the limited supplies of ammunition. As the Soviet troops moved forward, the Germans closed in behind; during the night of 15 September the narrow ‘corridor’ was closed off behind 1st Guards Corps, which was now wholly isolated from the main body of 38th Army. From now on ammunition, food and medicines could only be dropped to the Soviet corps by transport aircraft.

Koniev’s gamble had not come off and the Red Army did not break through to rebel-held territory in Slovakia, though the Soviet attacks in the Carpathians drew off German strength and eased some of the pressure on the insurgents in central Slovakia. Czechoslovak troops operating with 38th Army played a prominent part in these first Soviet relief attacks, and by mid-September Czechoslovak pilots and parachute troops joined the battle raging inside Slovakia. The appearance of Czechoslovak forces as such, the parachute troops in particular fighting as a single formation, may have been a comfort to the Slovaks but it precipitated a struggle for control over the entire ‘Czechoslovak armed forces’, including the guerrillas. The
Stavka
authorized the transfer on 13 September of the 1st Czechoslovak Fighter Regiment to Slovakia, a move General Pika had already requested. Marshal Koniev received information at his Front
HQ
that
Tri Duba
airfield could be used and therefore gave his own orders to 2nd Air Army to deploy the Czechoslovak fighter regiment directly to the Slovak front. The fighters arrived at
Tri Duba
on 17 September and during the night of the 18th, flying with a full complement of stores, ammunition, fuel and radio equipment.
Tri Duba
was also the scene of another infusion of Czechoslovak fighting men, 2nd Parachute Brigade (part of 1st Czechoslovak Corps) ordered into Slovakia by the
Stavka
in response to General Pika’s request for these troops. On 13 September, along with the fighter regiment, the
Stavka
released the brigade and assigned the 5th Long-Range Air Transport Corps to lift the men and their equipment into Slovakia.

The first Soviet transport planes dropped twelve Czechoslovak paratroopers with two radio sets on 17 September, an advance party sent into
Tri Duba
to prepare the landings and unloadings at the airfield. Not for ten days did the first units land and then only companies showed up. The main body of the brigade—700 men and 104 tons of equipment—flew in during the first week in October, deploying at once to the west and south-west in the area of Banska
Stiavnica. For more than five weeks Soviet aircraft continued to fly in elements of the Czechoslovak brigade, landing 1,855 men, transporting 360 tons of supplies, and flying out 784 wounded partisans and soldiers. The Soviet air-lift ceased on 25 October, but well before that the flights had been at the mercy of unfavourable weather conditions with the autumn bringing mists and high, driving winds.

The mixture of partisans and regular troops, the entangling of lines running to London and to Moscow, and the military pressures of the revolt itself intensified the struggle for control of these miniature armies. As the first German rush into Slovakia was held, the rebel front contracted and the revolt was confined largely to central Slovakia, where the defence system was quickly reorganized; the two ‘defence areas’ were replaced by six ‘tactical groups’ affording greater flexibility and easier collaboration with the partisan units, but this still did not solve the problem of the regular military forces and the partisans fighting under what amounted to separate commands. In an effort to centralize partisan activities, the Slovak National Council on 16 September established its own ‘Main Staff for Slovak Partisans’, whereupon the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party ‘requested’ the Ukrainian Staff of the Partisan Movement to fly in specialist Soviet officers. For quite some time Soviet transport planes continued to bring in Soviet partisan commanders and political officers, swelling an already considerable force, but the dispatch at the end of September of Colonel A.N. Asmolov from the Ukrainian Staff with Rudolf Slansky as his deputy (along with Jan Sverma, who was subsequently killed in Slovakia) marked a much more significant change, for it put the Slovak partisan movement under overt Soviet command. Towards the end of the month American and British liaison missions working through Marshal Koniev’s Front command arrived at the headquarters of 1st Czechoslovak Army in Banska Bystrica; under the command of Major Sehmer and Lieutenant Green, the men of these two missions along with their two officers were shot out of hand by the Germans upon being captured, in spite of their being in regulation uniform.

Early in October the situation in Slovakia seemed to take a turn for the better in what proved to be a brief and heady interlude before the full storm broke over Slovakia. Moskalenko’s 38th Army fought its way to the summit of the Carpathians late in September and was forcing the approaches to the Dukla pass. At the very end of the month, in the mists and heavy autumn rains, Soviet and Czechoslovak troops attacked and after five days of fierce fighting 1st Czechoslovak Corps took the pass in the celebrated action of 6 October. More units of the 2nd Parachute Brigade were coming into Slovakia from their Soviet bases, while from London General Viest came to take over the 1st Czechoslovak Army installing himself at his post in Banska Bystrica, the prelude to a determined attempt to bring all the Czechoslovak military units fighting in and for ‘Free Slovakia’ under a single command responsible to the London government. The Czechoslovak government had already instructed its ambassador in the Soviet Union to sound out the Soviet attitude over Czechoslovak discussions with the British and Americans
about supplying arms to Slovakia, since the ‘transportation of weapons from the Soviet Union is being delayed by bad weather conditions’. Ambassador Fierlinger replied that the Soviet attitude was wary in the extreme, but he supposed that ‘if the British and Americans bring in only arms to Slovakia, then Moscow should not raise any objection …’. His own view, however, was that the Czechoslovak government should formally request the Soviet government to send ‘an experienced Soviet general’ to Slovakia, to act as ‘Red Army supreme commander’; thus armed with the requisite authority, this commander could ‘co-ordinate the operations of all forces … particularly those of the military units and the partisans’. Masaryk returned a plain negative to this proposal; the Soviet–Czechoslovak agreement stipulated that for those military units raised in the Soviet Union there should be a Czechoslovak commander, even if the units were operationally subordinated to the Russians; whereas the forces raised in Slovakia were not covered in any way by this agreement and there was consequently no need to seek the services of ‘a Russian general’. Czechoslovak efforts to unify all their forces by seeking to bring 1st Czechoslovak Corps—which was now on Czechoslovak territory—into the framework of the 1st Czechoslovak Army under Viest and Golian led inevitably to strained relations, which became more embittered as the rebel state crashed in ruins once the Germans determined upon its complete destruction.

For all the momentary brightening of the scene early in October, with Czechoslovak troops at last fighting on their own soil, the portents were grim enough. Heinrich Himmler arrived in Bratislava at the end of September and took Höffle, the
SS
commander in Slovakia, to the special conference in Vienna that met during the first week in October, at which the German plans to crush Slovakia were laid. There were pressing reasons for this drastic action. The Soviet penetration of the Dukla pass gave the Russians access to Slovakia and the possibility of an eventual link-up with the rebel army, which, if suitably reinforced, could push on to the west, or even more likely could move north-westwards into Bohemia–Moravia or south-westwards into Hungary, the source of immediate German concern as the Hungarians set about negotiating their own surrender to the Allies. ‘Free Slovakia’ must be eliminated at top speed, and the task was assigned to a force of seven German divisions, 40,000–45,000 men with artillery, armour and aircraft at their disposal. The Sźalasi
coup
in Hungary in mid-October greatly facilitated this operation, for German troops could attack from Hungarian territory and Slovakia lost the valuable asset of a quiet southern frontier. After 18 October German troops closed in on Slovakia from all sides, striking from eleven points on the perimeter. Among the new arrivals in Slovakia was the Dirlewanger Brigade, fresh from the butchery of Warsaw and eager for further ‘anti-partisan’ operations: the
Horst Wessel Panzer
Grenadier
SS
Division moved from reserve to the south for a strike towards Telgart, Banska Bystrica, Zvolenska Slatina and Zvolen, while to the north a
Waffen SS
division took over the
Kampfgruppe
Schäffer.

These fresh German troops struck into rebel territory between 18 and 20 October, leaving everywhere a trail of burning villages, mass graves or cowed civilians awaiting transportation to the concentration camps. Only on the northern slopes of the Low Tatras could the partisans and soldiers hold up German armour; elsewhere the
SS
slashed their way through the insurgent positions. From the north-west 14th
Waffen SS
cut its way to Brezno;
SS Horst Wessel
attacked from the south towards Tisovec; German tanks moved from Kremnica and Turciansky Sv. Martin towards Banska Bystrica, upon which other German units were converging. Brezno fell on 25 October, Zvolen two days later and Banska Bystrica, the governmental seat of ‘Free Slovakia’, on 27 October. Under this flail of converging attacks the Slovak National Council evacuated Banska Bystrica and fell back on Donovaly at the edge of the main range of the Low Tatras. Once German tanks appeared at
Tri Duba
airfield, the Czechoslovak Fighter Regiment lost its only base and was forced to fly back behind the Soviet lines. German aircraft then concentrated on the roads to the south of Banska Bystrica, finding a mass of targets in the jam of soldiers and civilians breaking out to the mountains.

In this final bloody round with its massacre and confusion, General Viest, mocked by the Communists as a ‘drawing room general’ (though he met his death in a concentration camp), made one last attempt to salvage the remnants of an army in what was left of ‘Free Slovakia’. Viest issued his last order on 29 October; though anxious to preserve his army, Soviet officers insisted on breaking up the 1st Czechoslovak Army into guerrilla units in order to carry on the fight in the mountains. This issue of the control of the fighting forces in Slovakia both at this time and later provided each side, communist and anti-communist, with a great deal of ammunition to fire at one another. The Communists charged that ‘bourgeois elements’, including the ‘deviationists’ among the Slovak communists who were infected with nationalism, worked in the interests of the
émigré
Czechoslovak government to free Slovakia without Soviet help and were hoping to use the 1st Czechoslovak Army, plus the 1st Czechoslovak Corps raised in the Soviet Union, as the core of a new, bourgeois-type army. The counter-charges aimed at Soviet leadership and policies indicted the ‘prohibition’ on the supply of arms to the Slovak insurgents from the Western powers, the ‘sabotage’ of the transfer of the Czechoslovak Parachute Brigade to Slovakia, and the deliberate exploitation of the rift between the army and the partisans in Slovakia.