The Road to Berlin (74 page)

During the course of the evening two dispatches came to Stalin’s hand, both of which he showed to Djilas. The first concerned Dr Subasic, who declared for the benefit of the State Department that ‘pro-Russian traditions’ counted for a great deal among the Yugoslavs, who would never be a party to an ‘anti-Russian policy’, sentiments that simply enraged Stalin, who demanded of his guests why Subasic was ‘scaring the Americans.… Yes, scaring them. But why, why?’ The second message from the Prime Minister announced the imminence of the landing in Normandy, which Stalin took as a cue to mock at the unfulfilled promises of the Allies: ‘What if they meet with some Germans! Maybe there won’t be a
landing, but just promises as usual.’ The sneering had a purpose—to play upon the ‘anti-capitalist prejudices’ of the Yugoslavs—and the hints of perfidy were designed to warn the Yugoslavs against the Western powers, even to frighten them. More Stalin could not do, for, as Milovan Djilas recognized, the Yugoslav revolution had already slipped out of Stalin’s grasp.

Yet the talks with the Yugoslav mission in Moscow perfectly summed up Stalin’s intentions and his frame of mind. He was, in short, prepared to bargain. What Churchill proposed in the summer of 1944 was a partition of Europe, or those parts of Europe upon which Anglo-American and Soviet armies were already encroaching. This Stalin was by all the signs ready to accept, and was determined to adhere to. He was fully deployed to negotiate, with the Rumanians, with the Finns, even with the Germans (his shadow political committee of captured generals gave him at least the outline of an option); in eastern Europe, over which the Red Army loomed large, he was prepared to encourage a nationalistic movement, but he insisted that it be deprived of its strong anti-Russian sentiment, its pre-war hallmark and distinguishing feature. It is probably true that Stalin was in earnest in declaring that the Soviet Union had no immediate interest in the kind of government the Poles or Rumanians intended to set up; the presence of the Red Army, with the
NKVD
in its wake, made this political largesse possible. Stalin gambled nothing and stood to gain a great deal. But he was not prepared to tolerate alarms and disturbances brought about by overt attempts at communist control, if only because he held the bunch of ‘peasant politicians’ with whom he was dealing in such low esteem. Building a formal ‘communist bloc’ in eastern Europe at this time does not seem to have figured in his plans: on the contrary, partition suited him down to the ground, promising as it did the prospect of the uninhibited exploitation of this relatively unscarred region in the interests of Soviet economic recovery, to be followed by a firm Soviet grip on Germany, whose resources would also be available to the Soviet Union. But to ease and speed the Red Army’s advance to the west and south, Stalin was obviously prepared to strike almost any bargain—with the British, even though he mistrusted them deeply; with the petty dictators of south-eastern Europe; with the Germans, through his special ‘Free Germany’ committee (which could well have come in useful if the July plot against Hitler had enjoyed more success). Those who impeded this bargaining, either out of communist principles or national self-respect, inevitably incurred his wrath. Thus, in all these paradoxical policies whose import at first stunned men like Milovan Djilas (and many others), the Communists were urged to ‘compromise’ and the nationalists pressed to be realistic, which amounted to more or less the same thing. In Poland Stalin found a situation that taxed all the resources of this political Byzantinism. Yugoslavia puzzled him, and he may have half-suspected that real control was eluding him. Developments in Rumania, however, provided him with a signal and very serviceable triumph.

*   *   *

The formal order for the attack on Rumania went out from the
Stavka
on 2 August 1944. This terse directive, which came as no surprise to the commands of the two fronts involved—Malinovskii’s 2nd Ukrainian and Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front—alerted a further million Red Army troops for action in one more theatre where a huge cluster of men and machines waited to roll down on south-eastern Europe. The significance of the move however, lay as much with the timing as with the forces committed. This new Soviet offensive must be closely co-ordinated with the massive operations proceeding at the centre and in the northern theatre. Already the five fronts sent rolling forward in June and July in Belorussia and the western Ukraine were at the beginning of August on the Vistula and closing on the East Prussian frontier, having covered 300 miles or more in the previous two weeks. But now the
Stavka
realized that an operational ‘pause’ was inevitable in order to prepare for a massive push along the ‘Warsaw–Berlin axis’. In the light of previous experience, and there was no reason to disregard it at this stage, such ‘pauses’ involving the movement of strategic reserves and the provisioning for a new offensive lasted not less than three months.

The offensive aimed through Warsaw on Berlin, the ‘direct thrust’, also remained dependent on destroying powerful German forces in the north-western and the south-western theatres, in the Baltic states and in south-eastern Europe. In committing all three Baltic fronts to action when the Belorussian fronts and Koniev’s Ukrainian Front were deep in their own major offensive operations, the
Stavka
aimed successive blows at three of the four German army groups (North, Centre and North Ukraine). Now it was the turn of Army Group South Ukraine to come under the hammer. For the past three months the two fronts of the south-western theatre, 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian (presently threatening Moldavia and Rumania), had remained on the defensive after fighting off the joint German–Rumanian attacks mounted round Jassy in May, operations designed in part to reassure the Rumanians about German support in the field. The brunt of these attacks fell on the Soviet 52nd Army, but the
Stavka
permitted neither the army commander nor the Front commander (Malinovskii) to commit any reinforcement, hoping thereby to convince the German command that 2nd Ukrainian Front was already weakened by the transfer of troops to other Soviet fronts. After the opening of the Soviet offensive in Belorussia, the ‘balance of forces’ operated increasingly in the Red Army’s favour. To bolster up Army Group Centre, Army Group South Ukraine was forced to hand over a dozen divisions (six of them armoured) and after Koniev’s attack on Army Group North Ukraine there was little this force could do to help its southern neighbour, whose position was made much worse once Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front fought its way to the foothills of the Carpathians and drove to the south-west of Lvov. Conversely, the creation of the new Soviet front (Petrov’s 4th Ukrainian) could only benefit the two more southerly fronts (2nd and 3rd Ukrainian). No less than fifteen German divisions were tied up in the Carpathians facing Koniev’s left flank and Petrov’s 4th Ukrainian Front, and with a restless Slovakia in the rear of these
German troops, the country was stirred out of its acquiescence in fascist rule by plans for a national rising and by the growing presence of the Soviet-led partisans.

Without a shot being fired in any new Soviet offensive, the German armies in Rumania were facing catastrophe. The unfortunate formations of Col.-Gen. Friessner’s Army Group South Ukraine were sandwiched between the Russians eager to attack them and the Rumanians no less eager to betray them, abandoning them to their enemies. Friessner’s command comprised two main groups: ‘Group Wöhler’, with the German Eighth Army, the Rumanian 4th Army and the 17th German Corps, fourteen Rumanian divisions and seven German divisions, two-thirds of which were concentrated in the stretch of land between the Siret and the Prut; and ‘Group Dumitrescu’, including the German Sixth Army and the Rumanian 3rd Army, which held a line running from the Prut to the coast of the Black Sea with twenty-four divisions (seven of them Rumanian). Friessner’s combined German–Rumanian strength amounted to something over 600,000 men with 400 tanks and 800 aircraft, a not unimpressive total after the battering these forces had taken in the winter and early spring. But the strength lay largely on paper. German divisions on a number of sectors were ‘connected’ by Rumanian units, a dangerous piece of ‘corsetting’, and now the position was made much worse by the withdrawal of the
Panzer
divisions which went north to help Model in his struggle with Koniev. Once the
Panzer
divisions and the motorized infantry moved north, the Eighth Army was left with only one armoured division (20th
Panzer)
and a couple of mobile formations to fight off massive Russian tank strength.

To his twenty-four regular German divisions, Friessner could add the police units,
SS
troops, air defence troops and a force of special naval infantry guarding Black Sea port installations, in all about 57,000 men. Two of the three Rumanian armies (3rd and 4th) formed part of the order of battle of Army Group South Ukraine, but an additional army—the 1st—with four infantry divisions remained at the disposal of the Rumanian command who put it to singular use, guarding the revised frontier line with Hungary set as a result of the Vienna Award of 1940 which ceded northern Transylvania to Hungary. Though the Hungarians held the Carpathian passes leading into Transylvania, the Rumanians guarded those providing access from southern Transylvania into Wallachia, an arrangement that seemed ideal to the Germans in 1940 when they acted as the diplomatic brokers of the Vienna Award but which in the late summer of 1944 finally produced quite disastrous consequences. Other Rumanian units were also scattered about the country, with a special force maintained in the capital (where all Rumanian troops came under the military commandant of Bucharest): on the lines facing the Russians, Rumanian units were interlaced with the German troops of the Eighth Army, as they were in Bessarabia where the Sixth Army held positions between the Prut and the Dniester.

The river Prut bisected the whole 350-mile front into two ‘sectors’, the northern one running from Cornesti to Husi held by the German Eighth Army and the
Rumanian 4th Army (‘Group Wöhler’, with General Wöhler in command of the Eighth Army). To cover the vital ‘Focsani–Galatz gap’ which led to Ploesti and Bucharest, Wöhler deployed the pick of Eighth Army in the valley of the river Siret and emplaced three Rumanian divisions between Targul Frumos and a German force just north of Jassy itself. On the southern sector, a 200-mile stretch running from Cornesti to the Black Sea, the German Sixth Army operated with the Rumanian 4th, ‘Group Dumitrescu’ (Dumitrescu commanding the Rumanian 4th Army): here German attention was concentrated on the ‘Kishinev bastion’, with German divisions holding sectors of some two miles, though the flanks were weak, especially the right flank and reserves marginal (two divisions at the disposal of the group commander). The Dniester, however, protected Kishinev—which screened the Focsani gap from the north-east—to the east, and in the area between Cornesti and the river Reut, German troops found excellent defensive positions in the hilly, wooded country west of Kishinev. Though Soviet troops had two small bridgeheads on the western bank of the Dniester, at Grigoriopol (east of Kishinev) and near Bendery (opposite the Russian town of Tiraspol), both seemed to be effectively compressed. The ‘Tiraspol bridgehead’ was established in swamp ground and overlooked by German-dominated high ground not far from Bendery itself. The defence of the Dniester line was entrusted to a Rumanian force under the general supervision of Sixth Army. With this deployment, the stage was set for a smaller but no less savage repetition of history: the Sixth Army had gone to its doom at Stalingrad similarly trussed with Rumanian divisions, except that now it was the Dniester rather than the Don.

Though both Soviet Front commanders were convinced of the feasibility of driving into the Kishinev salient, the
Stavka
could give absolutely no indication of when the offensive could take place, mentioning only that it would have to be the subject of special authorization. During the preparation of the great Belorussian attack, both fronts were ordered on to the defensive and instructed to assign a number of powerful formations—2nd and 5th Guards Tank Army, 5th Guards Army, artillery and aviation (2nd Ukrainian Front), plus 8th Guards Army (3rd Ukrainian Front)—to
Stavka
reserve. While the great battles roared across Belorussia and in the Baltic states, the South-Western Front remained absolutely quiet, with only diplomatic stirrings to ruffle the calm in Rumania, and even these seemed almost wholly inconclusive. Not until late on the evening of 15 July did General Antonov, deputy chief of the General Staff, telephone the two Front commands with instructions to start planning and preparing the ‘Jassy–Kishinev operation’ designed to accomplish the final destruction of Army Group South Ukraine.

For Malinovskii at 2nd Ukrainian Front, the choice of the direction of the ‘main blow’, though undoubtedly of critical importance, was less complex than with Tolbukhin to the south. Malinovskii and his chief of staff, Col.-Gen. M.V. Zakharov, planned the main attack in the direction of Vaslui–Focsani, proposing to break through north-west of Jassy, then striking in the direction of Jassy–
Vaslui–Felciu. Although the valley of the Siret offered the most direct route to the Focsani gap, its lack of width would inevitably inhibit Soviet armoured movement and the terrain itself would enable German troops to carry out a fighting withdrawal: for this reason, Malinovskii’s staff chose to attack north-west of Jassy, between the German troops and the Rumanian forces strung out to Targul Frumos, while a second thrust would move down the valley of the Prut, at the junction of a German–Rumanian force on the left flank of the Sixth Army. The first objective of 2nd Ukrainian Front was to gain the line Bacau–Vaslui–Felciu; a junction with the troops of 3rd Ukrainian Front would thus encircle the ‘Jassy–Kishinev enemy concentration’ and the encirclement line would prevent them making for Barlad–Focsani and freedom. The next objective was Focsani—the ‘gap’ leading to Ploesti and Bucharest—with the right flank of the 2nd Ukrainian Front secured by a force operating in the direction of the Carpathians.