Rommel cast his chief of staff a dubious look and then turned to von Treskow, the man with the ‘Ostfront’ chief of staff experience. ‘Anything we are missing?’ He was tense, this was not his field.
Von Treskow was as exhausted as the rest of them, but managed a smile. Feldmarschall, the Russians also only cook with water. We seem to be doing fine.’
10:30 pm October 10th
HQ of the Home Army
Warsaw
Although the paraffin lamp on the table only partly illuminated the cellar, General Bor was enjoying life a little more these days. Even the firebrand Okulicki had mellowed. It probably came with making compromises. And with living them day after day. There was no question that both men still hated the mere presence of German troops on Polish soil. Both wanted nothing more than to throw them out. However they were also the only two men taken into the confidence of the German high command. Two weeks before both had received the first inkling from the German liaison officer that the Wehrmacht was planning an offensive. The presentation that had been given to them had harped on the objective to securing Polish ground and pushing the Red Army back to the 1939 border. Afterward however the German officer had admitted that of course these objectives would also keep the Red Army away from the soil of the Reich.
Somehow neither of the two had actually believed it. Okulicki had even voiced the fear that this was a German trap designed to catch them out and arrest them for passing secrets to the enemy.
Neither man had mentioned a thing for fear of giving the Germans the excuse. Other troubles associated with the re-establishment of a Polish administration in parts of Poland alongside a German military presence had occupied their time. The Home Army was busy morphing back into a conventional military force. The scattered planes of the Kosciuszko Squadron and a few other Poles in British uniforms that had made it to Warsaw were still not militarily significant but they were being used to bolster morale. The fighting as Okulicki reminded them was not over yet. Now able to operate openly, he charged from unit to unit like a man possessed, making decisions, supervising training. Then the German offensive had indeed begun.
Bor sat across the table from his fire-eating chief of staff and both men just smiled. No Polish troops had been asked to serve as cannon fodder. Instead Warsaw had been stripped of another Wehrmacht battalion which had headed east. Only the Police unit at the railway yard remained as well as the strongpoint guarding the bridges at both ends. Theoretically the Home Army was in control of the Polish capital. The telephone exchange, the hospitals, the power plant – all were in Polish hands.
‘And you know what is really funny about it all?’ Bor grinned at the white-haired officer. I got a phone call from Berlin. It was their foreign minister, the chap with the impossibly high forehead. He told me that in principle they have no problem with us putting the bastard Hans Frank and anyone else whom we can prove ordered major crimes, on trial.
‘I hope you behaved in a civilized manner and thanked him for the offer.’ Even the hard-bitten soldier was smiling. Under Hitler the Germans had generally behaved abysmally against their old adversaries. If this new lot sought to buy favour with some senior sacrificial lambs, who were they to object?
6am, October 12th
East of Kaunas
The two hundred Fallschirmjaeger who slipped through the forest had not slept properly since their unit had descended on Kaunas. After ripping the railways apart and cutting down a few surprised MVD units and transport columns, they had made their way westwards. The Panzers had come as planned but they had been pushed southwards by rallying Russian units. Unable to break through to their own lines as the bulk of the Kaunas Fallschirmjaeger Group had done, they had begun to move to move westwards, but had almost instantly run into Russian forces. To make matters worse they were now being pushed eastwards. The previous evening they had been followed by Russian infantry, though not very vigorously, now in the night they had broken contact and made their escape. The leader, a stocky major who now sported a limp from a shrapnel cut planned to head southweast hoping to eventually make it back to the German lines. He did not know that temporarily the Russian lines around Kaunas had held. Dawn crept through the pines and birches as they took their first rest for six hours. The major posted lookouts and then sank into a death-like slumber as did most of his men.
Two hours later one of the lookouts spotted a small Soviet column approaching on the road that they had used to navigate through the forest. Mindful that his commander and the rest of the team needed sleep, the lookout, a 26 year old Fallschirmjaeger NCO who had seen action in Crete, let them pass.
From his truck, Ivan Borzov did not see the camouflaged sentry. His mind was in turmoil, for the first time in months they were retreating again and on a broad front.
11am, October 12th
Whitehall
London
Churchill presided over the War cabinet meeting due to ill health. His cold was playing up again. He was uncomfortable. For the first time the war cabinet was not united. Many of the men around the table could almost scent the end of the conflict, the return to normal politics. It was something most of them preferred to their current existence. The split in today’s meeting was likely to be down party lines.
The meeting began with an update on the German offensive from Alanbrooke.
“The Germans appear to have caught the Russians by surprise. A force of somewhere between 10 – 15 divisions, at least 6 of them armoured have broken through the Russian front line on a broad front in northeastern Poland and in Lithuania. That is a breadth of almost 150 miles. Apart from surprise, the German success appears to have been due to massive use of parachute units over key railway points and a display of focussed air power we had no longer considered them capable of. The Russians forces just recently retook these areas and had more or less outrun their own supply lines. The Germans seem about to take the key rail junction of Kaunas in Lithuania.
Interestingly enough they have also retaken a third of Polish territory conquered so far by the Red Army. They claim, they’ll hand these over to Polish control as soon as practical. They have privately signalled us that their ambitions are limited to the old Russian-Polish border and the protection of the borders of Hungary and their Baltic allies. However we cannot in the light of their success be sure that this will remain the case. I must point out however that they have temporarily at least retaken about a third of the territory they lost since late July.”
‘It seems we underestimated Jerry. How much ground have they actually taken and do we have any idea of how bad a knock the Russians took.’
‘We estimate that they have pushed the front east as much as 45 miles in some places. They did this in just two days and they are still on the move. How bad they have hurt the Red Army is anyone’s guess. If our glorious allies were not telling us much before, they are certainly not telling us much now.’
‘What do we do if they stabilize their front?”
Four hours later they still had no clear answer to that question but the transcript of the meeting would read like a dissertation on global geo-politics. The one item that was not recorded was informal feedback that had been received from a meeting in Stockholm.
8pm October 12th
Rommel’s HQ
Rastenburg, East Prussia
Things were still going well. The 1st SS Panzer battlegroup comprising 1st and 2nd SS Panzer plus infantry had overwhelmed the 11th Guards Army of General Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Byelorussian Front, roughed up 31st Army to its south and reached the outskirts of Kaunas. Here it made contact with the surviving paratroopers, and without pausing veered northward towards the small railway junction of Ukmerge on the Wilna-Riga highway and railway line. Headed by Panzer Meyer’s Leibstandarte, they were expected to take the town of Ionava, halfway there, during the night. The infantry units of second battlegroup comprising PanzerLehr, the remnants of the parachute divisions and some motorised infantry were battling their way into Kaunas while
the Panzers were bypassing the city on its south side and headed eastward towards Vilnius. The next obstacle was street fighting with remnants of 31`st Army desperate to deny them a bridgehead across the River Njemen on the way to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
To the south the two battlegroups heading for Bialystock had had less success, 4th Panzer Corps comprising the 9th and 10th SS Panzer had run headfirst into a brigade-size Soviet tank force and lost more than 35 Tigers before overrunning the Soviet armour. The battlegroup comprising 11th and 21st Panzer, had had less opposition and had reached the outskirts of Bialystock. There it was running into stubborn resistance from units of Marshall Rokossovsky’s 1st Byelorussian Front.
Dawn, October 13th
Off the Latvian Coast
Baltic See
It was an assembly of Kriegsmarine ships on a scale that had not been seen before in war and it was steaming towards Leningrad in a deliberately provocative show of force. The Kriegsmarine command had creamed blue murder when the proposal had been put forward by the Army that the Navy play its part in harassing the Soviets, but to no avail. At the risk of having even more of the precious vessels scrapped to supplement tank production, they mustered all available ships for a last decisive battle.
At the center of the fleet pushing the hazy waters to the west of Latvia’s Riga Bay the Tirpitz, Germany’s last battleship, was making an cruising speed of 22 knots supporting her were the heavy cruisers Admiral Hipper, Prinz Eugen and Admiral Scheer, the two remaining light cruisers of the Kriegsmarine, twelve of its remaining 18 destroyers and half a dozen smaller support vessels, towing a dozen S-Boats. Among them were four fast transport laden with supplies. The fleet was screened by a steady coverage of Arado 196 spotter planes flying about 10-15 kilometers ahead of the force. Their mission was simple, to resupply the garrisons left behind on the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa (Dago and Osel to the Germans) at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga and for the next few days they were to create havoc among Soviet units anywhere near the reach of the big guns. If the Soviet surface fleet chose to venture out for an engagement, there was confidence that the greater experience of the German crews and the narrow waters would give them the advantage.
Afternoon, October 13th
Northeastern Poland
After three days of V-1 and jetfighter raids combined with the aftershocks of the airborne assaults, the Soviet supply system crumbled. Four more V-2 had found Minsk on the morning of the second day of Wintererwachen and sent the remnants of the MVD into a complete panic. Hunting for saboteurs got in the way of officers desperate to push through supply trains. With no empty trains returning from the front the system began grid locking. By the evening of the first Red Army units at the front ran out of ammunition. By the morning of the 14th, with the Tigers still crawling eastward larger Soviet formations were forced to yield for lack of firepower. It was left to the Soviet infantry to deal with the Panzers while the Minsk rail yards turned into a transport mess. By evening there were more than 30 trains stuffed with supplies stuck on the east side of town and effectively going nowhere in a hurry. That night a wing of German night fighters opportunistically pounced on the rail yards, damaging the already tenuous signals systems badly.
3:20 pm 13th October
The White House
Washington D.C.
Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair behind his desk, while the senator from Ohio droned on. He had already given the swarthy, balding man thirty minutes. They had swapped stories, jokes and Roosevelt had listened to a special political request connected with the upcoming election. In his own fashion he had agreed which meant that he had nodded and made pleasant sounds to the man’s face with no witnesses present. That left him open to change his mind later if the matter came up formally in the House or Senate Committee. This had always been his way, avoiding arguments and hurt feelings. He had always preferred to please whomever he was talking to, winning them over through seeming agreement. The feeling of winning people over, of charming them into agreeing with him was a feeling he cherish more than most. Being liked had always been very important to him and he had generally managed to delegate ugly chores such as disappointing people or dismissing them to others. Except recently when there just had not been a way around some very free and frank discussions with Churchill. But even there he knew that no matter what they had said , it was what they had not said that mattered. They had both left so much ground uncovered, too much space between key positions. Eleanor had once told Winston that when the President is saying ‘yes, yes’ is did not necessarily mean that Roosevelt was in agreement, it merely indicated that he was still listening. Though it had been good advice, Churchill had on many occasions forgotten it.
Things were going to be difficult between them. The tension that came from the knowledge that the alliance was being strained and this could endanger the United Nations project was giving him physical pain. It pained him as much as the knowledge that there was division even within his administration of whether to deal with Japan first now that Hitler was gone.
The door to the Oval Office opened and Grace Tully, one of the secretaries slipped in carrying another stack of papers which required his attention but which she and the President knew would only be dealt with in passing by the man who preferred to juggle the issues in his mind, rather than commit too much to paper. Grace Tully’s appearance also marked the end of the interview and the senator bade his farewell. Smiles all round.
He waved a tired hand, “They can wait Grace” let’s go. It was rare that he let her push the wheelchair but he was just too tired. It was almost happy hour and Roosevelt tried very hard to maintain his precious ritual born in his gubernatorial days in Albany when for an hour over cocktails the world of politics was forgotten and everyone could just gossip. Happy hour usually happened in the second-floor study of the White House, a room crammed with the Presidents maritime memorabilia. The purpose of happy hour was for the President to unwind and for him to chatter and experiment with new and often rather strange cocktails. That’s what the President wanted to do now. He never even gave the stack of papers on his desk a second glance. Among them was the first assessment of the German offensive.
Evening, October 13th
The Kremlin
He could not remember being nervous enough to sweat before entering his master’s study. But today Beria was. His pince-nez almost slipped off his nose as he headed down the poorly-lit corridor. The guard at the door to Stalin’s study usually opened to the door so that he could enter without breaking his stride. Today the feared MVD chief felt fear himself and paused. He took a deep breath and stepped through the door. The German offensive had caught them all napping, none of his dwindling German assets had given any indication of this. Stalin would exact punishment. Even his British spies, who occasionally picked up things had been silent.
The study was as always poorly lit, sparse light filtered through the curtains in the fading Moscow afternoon. It silhouetted the brooding shape of the Soviet dictator whose foul mood hung like a poison fog in the room. Beria managed to a toneless ‘Good afternoon Comrade General Secretary,’ more formal than he would have liked. He took his place in one of the chairs facing Stalin’s desk. In the other Molotov sat like a sphinx, his features as always immobile. Beria searched the foreign ministers face for a flicker of emotion; if Vladimir Molotov’s heart could feel fear, he had not communicated that to his face. But then Molotov seemed to be a professional at hiding his emotions, ever since Stalin had temporarily arrested his wife during the time of the purges.
For endless minutes the two men sat while Stalin stood at the window his back to them. In his hand the dictator held a sheet containing the technical specifications (many of them estimates) of the new German jet fighter the Messerschmidt 262. Stalin had always taken an inordinate interest in the technical details of aircraft, especially fighter design and the numbers on the sheet made for grim reading. Until recently Soviet intelligence had believed that the Me 262 wo
uld not see active service before December 1944. Here it was operational and in at least squadron strength. When he finally turned around and shuffled towards the desk, Beria sensed something other than anger, it was confusion, or no could it be fear. Was Stalin afraid? Surely not!
But his instincts were confirmed when the dictator refused to look them in the eye. Instead Stalin just stared at the papers on his desk. “So did we underestimate the capitalists?” Molotov just sat there as if made of stone but Beria’s nervousness got the better of him.
‘I am not sure I understand the question Comrade General Secretary.’
‘This new offensive against our forces. The Germans must be supported by the British at least if not the Americans as well. They do not have the resources for such action. They are advancing across a front of nearly two hundred kilometres. They are internally divided; on the brink of civil war and yet Zhukov tells me that they have cut through our forces like a knife through butter with the use of new weapons whose capabilities we cannot match ‘
‘Is that the assessment of STAVKA, Comrade General Secretary?’ Molotov asked
.‘STAVKA’ Stalin almost spat. ‘For weeks they have been telling me how we can afford to consolidate because the enemy is divided. They celebrated when the Finns asked for peace; gloated when we swept into Bulgaria and Romania. They were busy preparing for the next offensive in Poland and in Yugoslavia. Comrade Antonov was so busy consolidating in Poland that he did not see this coming.’
Beria was on solid ground here with knowledge that Molotov did not have. ‘Our agents in Britain gave no indication of a change in British policy. In fact their reports suggested that the Churchill clique was at present more likely to continue hostilities against the Germans.’
Stalin looked up and stared at Beria with empty eyes. ‘Well, Zhukov is convinced they got it wrong. In just two days we have lost nearly 45 000 men. Two guard divisions, three tank brigades, large bits of three infantry divisions major supply formations and over 400 planes, most of them destroyed on the ground by some new weapon the Germans are using. They seem to have deployed some long-range weapons, artillery or something like that with which they reached all the way to Minsk. They sent sabotage teams into our most important harbours, they must have had help to reach places like Sevastopol. They also gave Kusnetsov a bloody nose, no matter what he says.’
The Valkyrie Option Page 49