The Road to Berlin (76 page)

The most gruelling labour, however, lay with the material preparations for the Soviet attack, and none was more taxing than Tolbukhin’s commitment on the Kitskan bridgehead, into which 37th Army, artillery and armour was being steadily crammed—three rifle corps, a mechanized corps, fifty-one artillery regiments and thirty specialist units. The bridgehead lacked any good road, save for a single track running along the eastern bank of the Dniester; the earth roads could be used by transport only when the weather was fine. Elsewhere in the bridgehead the various units settled down amidst the small lakes and swamps, one company at a time taking up their positions; most of the trenches required embankments
and the armour had to be moved by means of logs lashed to make a kind of planking. The service units installed themselves in the three small villages of Merineshti, Kitskan and Kopanka. The sweat of moving in the machines and the acute discomforts of the bridgehead were real enough when one company would have to skirt a five-mile swamp to keep in touch with the other, but all this was offset by the knowledge that none of the formations need force the Dniester under fire.

Waiting for the inevitable—the Russian military landslide which must fall sooner or later upon all Rumania—the government and the people in Bucharest were feeling the strain by early August. The Communist Party showed signs of stirring, even embarking on plans for a national rising: on 13–14 July a meeting between Communists and army officers resulted in the formation of a Military Revolutionary Committee which discussed plans for a rising in Bucharest, even a turn-about at the front, with the Rumanian troops linking up with the Russians and turning on the German troops. Any rising in Bucharest would mean finding arms for some 2,000 insurgents, the arrest of the German authorities and the existing Rumanian government, and the freeing of all imprisoned ‘anti-Fascists’. The Committee all too soon discovered, however, that the Germans enjoyed great numerical superiority, not least in Bucharest itself, and they therefore set afoot various conspiratorial schemes to increase Rumanian troop strength in the capital and to maintain Rumanian forces in the interior of the country. While this plan grew, Iuliu Maniu showed himself less enthusiastic for the kind of action the Communists presently proposed, street demonstrations and strikes designed to undermine the government. And what the Communists really wanted of Maniu, an undertaking that the army would not shoot in these circumstances, he was unable to provide. Much stranger, however, was the fact that the Soviet command was not informed of plans for an armed rising in Bucharest.

While these contacts between Iuliu Maniu and the Communists flickered on and off, Marshal Antonescu paid what proved to be his last visit to Hitler at Rastenberg where the
Führer’s
train was standing. Antonescu took with him his brother Mihai and General Steflea, the Rumanian chief of staff. In an atmosphere heavy with Hitler’s suspiciousness, expressing itself in his barbed questions about Rumania’s role, Marshal Antonescu faced the
Führer
in a four-hour interview on 5 August. The military talks lasted longer and were conducted by Steflea, but to Hitler’s savage probing Antonescu returned with questions of his own about the German response in the event of the Moldavian Front caving in, about what the
Luftwaffe
might do to hold off the increasingly heavy Allied air attacks, and about how Germany proposed to protect the Black Sea coast, a new preoccupation prompted by the all too recent Turkish rupture of diplomatic relations with Germany. Whatever the satisfactions he sought—and Steflea spelt these out in military terms to the German command—Antonescu did not get them from Hitler. What comfort he drew from all the talk about secret weapons and changing the course of the war was probably minimal, though for the moment Rumania
stayed in the war at Germany’s side. There still remained that other option, one that Marshal Antonescu chose to exercise a little later—the armistice terms already suggested to him from the Soviet side through Mme Kollontai. The Marshal may have reckoned that all was not lost.

Towards the middle of August the German command in Rumania began to take a much more serious view of the whole situation; Col.-Gen. Friessner sent out orders to put all three
Wehrmachtteile
in a greater state of readiness and under full command. Marshal Antonescu may have promised to fight on, but this scarcely settled anything. During the first week in August the Germans detected signs of considerable Soviet reinforcement along the Prut to the north of Jassy, but the General Staff was not inclined to change its view that a major Russian effort in Rumania was unlikely, if only because in July several armies had been withdrawn from the Soviet fronts facing Army Group South Ukraine to fight on the central sector of the front. The general summary of possible developments on 15 August repeated the view that an offensive on a major scale was unlikely in this theatre; any Soviet operation in the Balkans would have a purely limited objective—to prevent the transfer of fresh German forces to the battle-fronts at the centre. But by 18 August the signs of much increased Soviet activity were as unmistakable as they were disturbing. Col.-Gen. Friessner reported to
OKH
that now was the time to order German forces back to the line of the Carpathians, for a major attack against Group Wöhler north-west of Jassy was pending and a supporting attack against Group Dumitrescu must also be expected. It was also at this time that the army group command realized that those mobile formations that Antonescu demanded and Friessner hoped for were never going to materialize. All that Friessner could do was to issue a call to his mixed bag of troops, urging a fight to the finish in which German troops would stand ‘shoulder to shoulder with our tested Rumanian comrades’.

On the evening of 19 August Marshal Timoshenko, Marshal of Aviation Khudaykov, General Malinovskii and the ‘operations staff’ of 2nd Ukrainian Front moved to the forward command post situated on Height 195: at first the evening was still but later the quiet was broken by a German bombing attack on the heights. On the 3rd Ukrainian Front Tolbukhin called together all arms commanders and supply officers, questioning them once again on their state of readiness and ordering them to get some rest, after seeing that their men were resting properly. Once darkness came, the Front ‘operational group’ set off for the forward command post, located in the Kitskan bridgehead. Biryuzov checked the command posts and looked up General Tolstikov, the aviation corps commander, who reported that his ‘rippers’—special aircraft used to cut telephone lines—were already flying out over the German lines. The late evening was full of the usual noises, machine-gun bursts and isolated shots, and was lit by the flares over the enemy lines. In the Front command post General Tolbukhin was asleep, ‘snoring in heroic style’. The guns of 3rd Ukrainian Front were set to fire at
0800 hours, those on Malinovskii’s at 0600 hours on the morning of 20 August, the day of the great offensive.

On the first day of the offensive Malinovskii’s assault armies fought their way to some depth into the German defences north-west of Jassy: Trofimenko’s 27th Army and Koroteyev’s 52nd, supported by Soviet ground-attack planes, drove ten miles into the enemy positions along a fifteen-mile front. Here, as on Tolbukhin’s front, the initial artillery barrage wreaked great havoc, smashing in the defensive system and inflicting heavy casualties on the defenders. At noon Malinovskii loosed Kravchenko’s tanks into the breach and the armour pushed on to the third line of defences. The German command, at first unaware of the weight of the Russian attack, tried to localize the penetration, but the mass of Russian infantry and armour proved too much. At the end of the first day the Soviet command was reckoning on the destruction of five enemy divisions and 3,000 prisoners. The Rumanian divisions stationed along Eighth Army’s front began to crumble almost at once and nothing the German officers might do could raise their fighting spirit. The Rumanian army commander, General Abramescu, had pleaded with Antonescu to pull the 4th Army back to enable it to make some defence of Moldavia and to defend the line of the Prut: this would also secure passage for the Rumanian divisions in Bessarabia. Abramescu pleaded on 20 August to be allowed to retire to the ‘Trajan line’, but this was summarily rejected and the Rumanian troops finally perished singly or in groups amidst the fury of Malinovskii’s first attack.

The next day, 21 August, Trofimenko’s 27th Army pushed on deeper into Eighth Army’s positions, with orders to clear the Mara heights and open up a path for 6th Tank Army: Koroteyev’s 52nd Army received orders to go for Jassy itself and then to advance in the direction of Husi. To the right of his front, Malinovskii broadened his offensive by committing Shumilov’s 7th Guards Army and the ‘cavalry-mechanized group’ in a supporting attack to clear the flank. By this time Group Wöhler was in a precarious position: the Rumanian positions between Jassy and Targul Frumos had been completely smashed in, and Soviet troops were thrusting down the valley of the Prut preceded by the remnants of the Rumanian divisions in full retreat. Kravchenko’s tanks were now more than fifty miles to the south, German positions at Jassy had been outflanked from the west and east, while Koroteyev’s troops had already turned east and were making for the town of Husi on the way to the link-up with 3rd Ukrainian Front.

Tolbukhin’s success during these first hours of the offensive was equally striking. Sharokhin’s 37th Army, supported by heavy artillery and air strikes, along with Shlemin’s 46th, broke through the defences along a front of twenty-five miles by the evening of 20 August. Though German resistance on the heights south of Bendery scarcely slackened, the Rumanians covering Causani collapsed completely
and by the evening this road junction was in Russian hands enabling the mobile forces to strike in several directions. The German command still thought this a ‘supporting attack’, deceived as it was by Tolbukhin’s demonstrative concentration north of Kishinev and further confused by Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army preparations for an attack from this area. Within twenty-four hours Rumanian resistance was almost at end, the reserves of Group Dumitrescu wholly expended. With Sharokhin and Shlemin’s divisions already more than twenty miles deep into the enemy defensive zone, the Front command ordered 4th Guards Mechanized Corps to move up into Sharokhin’s zone and 7th Mechanized into Shlemin’s. Tolbukhin’s three armies—37th, 46th and 57th—had broken right across the Dniester in a number of places, though Gagen’s 57th Army faced continuing German resistance, prompted by fear for the flank and rear of the Sixth Army.

While Tolbukhin began pushing in his mobile formations, Malinovskii feared that Kravchenko’s tanks might remain tangled up with Koroteyev’s infantrymen fighting in the hilly area around the Mara height. At noon on 21 August the Front commander categorically ordered Kravchenko to break off all action with the infantry and to speed up his drive to the south. Kravchenko took the hint and turned all his forces south; Koroteyev continued to fight his way eastwards. On the evening of 21 August the
Stavka
sent out a revised directive to both Front commands, emphasizing that their task remained the rapid conclusion of the encirclement of the ‘Kishinev group’, to which end the main forces must be committed and should not be dispersed on ‘other tasks’—‘you have all the means for the successful accomplishment of your orders and you must carry out this assignment.’ General Antonov telephoned Biryuzov at Tolbukhin’s headquarters to give him verbally the substance of the new directive and also the latest news of Malinovskii’s movements.

In the region of Jassy, German and Rumanian forces faced a hopeless situation: though the German positions in the valley of the Siret still held, Soviet columns were pushing past the troops holding Jassy on two sides. On 22 August Kravchenko’s tanks were closing in on Vaslui and making for Husi after striking down the road in the valley of the Barlad. The only way of escape for the Germans was to make for the Siret and somehow to link up with what was left of the Eighth Army, but many men were trapped by Russian units as they tried to break away or else were put to even faster flight. The mobile forces from 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were now closing on the Prut: Jassy was abandoned and the Sixth Army given orders to fall back, but it would only find the Russians already south of the line upon which the Germans proposed to retire. From east and west Soviet pincers fastened on the river Prut: while Malinovskii’s armour sliced into Group Wöhler, Tolbukhin’s two mechanized corps burst into the rear of three corps of the Sixth Army causing so much disruption that the commander of Group Dumitrescu lost contact with them. Withdrawal would not save the Germans now, since they had to cover fifty miles at least to the Prut and Soviet armour was only twenty miles away from the river.

Bakhtin’s special group meanwhile set out to seize the estuary. Once the naval infantry captured bridgeheads for the Red Army riflemen, the troops were ferried ashore or towed to their positions in small boats; the Danube Flotilla put more than 8,000 men ashore together with heavy equipment including tanks and artillery. At Akkerman the Rumanians showed no fight and only one of the two German divisions stayed to resist with any force. Once the town was taken, Bakhtin’s columns struck out south-west, while the left-flank and centre divisions of 46th Army began to sweep round the Rumanians to the north and north-west, breaking through to the river Kogilnik and into the rear of the main body of the 3rd Rumanian Army. While the encirclement of this Rumanian Army to the south-west was almost complete, the German Sixth Army began to disintegrate at alarming speed and the German command tried desperate measures to save what it could of the army. Hastily assembled units set up defences at Leuseni, Leovo and Felcui on the Prut, in order to secure the crossings. But already the two encirclement arms of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts—the inner encirclement—were not far from closing; on the western bank of the Prut the Germans tried to hold off 52nd Army and the 18th Tank Corps, both under orders from Malinovskii to take Husi with all speed and at any cost. Tolbukhin had broken right across Sixth Army area from Bendery, on the Dniester, to Leovo, on the Prut, and was now starting an attack on Kishinev itself from the north. The tanks from 6th Tank Army also continued to drive south, on to Tecuci and eventually to the ‘Focsani gap’, thus sealing off the entire German escape route.