The Road to Berlin (91 page)

Prescribing the particular assignments of the fronts proved to be both complicated and taxing, since the offensive along the western axis brought the General Staff face to face with the problem of East Prussia with its well-organized defence system. The threat of a German thrust from East Prussia against the right flank of Marshal Zhukov’s armies striking along the Berlin axis could only be neutralized by the Red Army itself driving into East Prussia and sealing it off from contact with the remainder of the front. To accomplish this, two Soviet fronts would be needed, one for an attack on Königsberg from the east and a second for isolating German forces in East Prussia from Army Group A defending the Berlin axis. The deep outflanking of East Prussia from the south and south-west would at the same time secure the flank of the Soviet armies deployed along the Warsaw–Poznan–Berlin approach. The 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts were promptly
assigned to the East Prussian operation. For the ‘main task’, the offensive designed to breach the German strategic front followed by a rapid drive to the west, the two fronts on the Vistula—1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian—were selected, subject to massive armoured reinforcement, especially tank armies and independent tank corps.

At the beginning of November 1944 the General Staff plan was ready, the Front assignments delineated, the direction of their thrusts fixed, together with Front boundaries and the depth of their immediate objectives set, followed by their subsequent assignments. The General Staff plan submitted that within forty-five days the German war machine could be smashed by offensive operations reaching a depth of 375–440 miles, a two-stage operation but with no ‘operational pause’ between phases. The first stage would occupy fifteen days, the second thirty. The rate of advance was deliberately not fixed too high, for heavy German resistance was expected, particularly in these ‘closing battles’. The prospect of such resistance stamped itself on the particular Front assignments: Chernyakhovskii’s 3rd Belorussian, facing the defences of East Prussia, was assigned immediate objectives to a depth of 100–120 miles. The 1st Belorussian Front was to attack in the general direction of Poznan, the 1st Ukrainian Front to reach the Oder north-west of Glogau, Breslau and Ratibor; the immediate objective for 1st Belorussian Front became the breaking of enemy defences in two separate areas in a simultaneous attack, moving to the Lodz line once the German forces in the Warsaw–Radom area were eliminated, advancing after this stage in the direction of Poznan to a line running through Bromberg–Poznan and enlarging the attack to the south until 1st Belorussian linked up with 1st Ukrainian Front. With 1st Ukrainian Front disposing of massive strength, any southerly ‘extension’ of 1st Belorussian Front commitments seemed on the face of it unlikely; the greater probability was that 2nd Belorussian Front battering its way into East Prussia might need help and in this event Zhukov would have to move part of his forces to the north.

From the outset the final campaign directed against the
Reich
was conceived as a two-stage operation, with the ‘old’ axis—the southern-flank offensive aimed at Budapest—taking the brunt in the very first instance: the General Staff planners counted on using the brief breathing space to move up Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front (that entity which seemed for so long to have disappeared from the Soviet order of battle) into the region between the Tisza and the Danube, bringing the bulk of its forces to the south of Kecskemet. With 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts so closed up, it should be possible so to increase the rate of advance that within twenty or twenty-five days Soviet armies would reach a line running from Banska Bystrica through Komarno and on to Nagykanizsa (west of Budapest), and within one month after that push on to the outskirts of Vienna. The General Staff calculated that the threat of the destruction of the vital southern flank must impel the German command to move troops from the central sector to defend it, thereby easing the task of the fronts attacking to the north of the Carpathians.
Nor did the General Staff planners entertain any doubts about the possibility of Soviet armies on the lower reaches of the Vistula being able to reach Bromberg and capture Poznan, thus bringing them out on a line running from Breslau to Pardbitse on the Elbe and further south closing on Vienna, advancing the Soviet front from its October disposition anything from 75 to 220 miles. Once on this line, the second stage would open and lead to the final capitulation of the
Reich
.

At the beginning of November Stalin summoned Marshal Zhukov and General Antonov for a discussion of the proposed operational plans. Already Stalin had to be persuaded of the futility of prolonging further offensive operations, agreeing with obvious reluctance to countermand the existing directives. Zhukov came out unequivocally against a frontal attack across the Vistula and again, with the same reluctance, Stalin finally agreed. Yet on the question of reinforcing the assault on East Prussia—where, in Zhukov’s opinion, the
Stavka
had blundered not so many weeks earlier—Stalin seemed unwilling to face facts by strengthening the 2nd Belorussian Front with an additional army to undertake this offensive, though the obvious solution was to take that reinforcement from the Baltic fronts due to go over to the defensive.

A few days later, on 7 November and during the October Revolution holiday, Marshals Tolbukhin, Rokossovskii and Koniev together with General Chernyakhovskii worked over the plans in the General Staff, a secret and select assembly since the
Stavka
did not propose this time to hold a general conference of commanders such as was convened on the eve of the Belorussian offensive, Operation
Bagration
. Each front worked out its own requirements and then submitted requests for reinforcements and supplies to the General Staff. Though no major modification to the main operational plan emerged in these preliminary discussions, the
Stavka
did not give it formal approval until late in November. Stalin let it be known that ‘D-day’ would be somewhere between 15 and 20 January 1945, but for the moment Front planning went ahead without the
Stavka
issuing formal directives or even without the main plan being authorized in the usual fashion. The crucial decision, however, emerged with some rapidity—the nomination of the commander of the troops assigned to capture Berlin. The man nominated was Zhukov, Stalin’s deputy, an appointment made official on 16 November when Zhukov took command of the 1st Belorussian Front and Rokossovskii assumed command of the 2nd Belorussian Front from G.F. Zakharov: both Zhukov and Rokossovskii received the news personally from Stalin, who passed it to them by telephone.

The singular innovation of the Berlin operation lay not in the reshuffle of the commanders but in Stalin assuming the role of ‘co-ordinator’ for all four fronts involved. With Zhukov emplaced as the senior field commander in charge of the operations, and with Stalin acting as his own
Stavka
‘co-ordinator’, it was Marshal Vasilevskii who was rudely displaced, leaving him only 1st and 2nd Baltic Fronts to occupy his considerable talents: in effect, the chief of the General Staff (a position Vasilevskii still held) was marooned in a military backwater. (That
he was rescued from it owed nothing to Stalin but was due to a twist of fate which killed General Chernyakhovskii, 3rd Belorussian Front commander.)

Even with the general acceptance of the operational plan, much remained to be done in the way of specifying Front assignments, above all the operations of 1st Belorussian Front. The original General Staff plan envisaged 1st Belorussian Front attacking from the Magnuszew and Pulawy bridgeheads, breaking through the German defences at great speed, a concept that required adjustments to the attack assignments for Zhukov’s left-hand neighbour, Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. Here the General Staff proposed that Koniev’s Front should not take ‘the shortest route into Germany’ but should rather shift its attack a little to the north, in the direction of Kalisz, since taking the shortest route meant crashing into the Upper Silesian industrial region—ideally fitted for defence with its massive structures and installations. Further ahead lay German Silesia, also a formidable defensive obstacle. After discussing the problem with Marshal Koniev himself and submitting it to the
Stavka
, the General Staff substituted a plan to outflank Silesia from the north and north-east. This variant brought the double advantage of preserving Silesian industry from destruction and introducing Koniev’s troops into the rear of German forces covering Poznan. Stalin himself impressed on Koniev the need to spare the factories of Silesia.

Zhukov arrived at
Stavka
on 27 November to discuss his own operations. The latest intelligence assessments confirmed that any Soviet thrust due west would be met by heavy German resistance on well-defended lines. To guarantee speedy success with the breakthrough operation and the subsequent westerly drive, Zhukov proposed that his armies strike first for Lodz and then shift their attack towards Poznan. Stalin agreed, this time without demur, and the revised attack assignments for 1st Belorussian Front were duly affixed to the master plan. Once this decision was accepted, the need to adjust Koniev’s attack to the north disappeared and Breslau rather than Kalisz became the prime target for the 1st Ukrainian Front. At the end of November the General Staff had completed the full plot of the forthcoming offensive. Apart from some minor changes, the plan remained unaltered. Though formal
Stavka
directives had not yet been issued, the normal pre-offensive preparations went ahead, with a significant build-up in reserves and the stockpiling of supplies, especially ammunition. Even the simplest military tally suggested the scale of the storm about to break over the eastern front: Soviet strength in the field climbed to over six and a half million men, supported by more than 100,000 guns and mortars, 13,000 tanks and
SP
guns, over 15,000 aircraft—fifty-five ‘all-arms’ armies, six tank armies and thirteen air armies, no less than 500 rifle divisions being prepared for the final apocalyptic battle.

On 20 November, when the Soviet attack plan for a massive eruption into Germany was largely complete, Hitler left the barely finished towers of the
Wolfsschanze
for his ‘western’ headquarters at Ziegenberg. The move from East Prussia was dictated by the imminence of the German attack in the west, the
‘Ardennes offensive’ designed to ‘eliminate the danger in the West’. With that accomplished, there was ‘every possibility of holding out and sticking it through’—so Hitler informed his officers when explaining his decision to go over to the offensive in the west. To win time and to frustrate the hope among his enemies of winning total victory, Hitler intended first to strike in the west and still to have time to move armies to the east to beat back the Soviet offensive directed at ‘Fortress Germany’. Devastating though the military impact of the Ardennes offensive proved to be in the beginning, it worked the one effect that Hitler refused to countenance as reality, triggering the very Soviet offensive which at the end of 1944 he dismissed angrily as a mere figment of the imagination of the officers in
Fremde Heere Ost
. Nor was the
Reich’s
new martinet Himmler any more persuaded by the facts and the figures, scoffing at the whole idea of a Soviet attack to Guderian’s face in a rush of condescension and conceit—’… I don’t really believe that the Russians will attack at all. It’s all an enormous bluff.…’

7

The Assault on the
Reich:
January–March 1945

Shortly before dawn on the morning of 16 December 1944, with their final deployment concealed by the prevailing fog and snow showers, twenty-five divisions from three German armies swept into the attack along a seventy-mile front in the Ardennes held only by a handful of American divisions. The ‘Battle of the Bulge’, which lasted well into January 1945, opened with this thunderbolt blow and enjoyed considerable success in the beginning. Aimed at Antwerp, with the object of splitting the Allied armies and destroying four of them in the northern sector, the
Panzer
divisions struck out for the river Meuse. In the north Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth
Panzer
Army struggled to reach the roads it so desperately needed, though
Kampfgruppe Peiper
managed to break out, butchering soldiers, prisoners and civilians in its path. At the centre, south of Saint-Vith, two corps of Manteuffel’s Fifth
Panzer
Army burst through the thin screen of Americans, crashed into Luxemburg and raced for the Meuse using the route running through the Belgian town of Bastogne. Having surrounded Bastogne the German tanks continued their drive for the Meuse, only to be caught on 23 December by the Allied air forces when the skies suddenly cleared.