On the very anniversary of Barbarossa Soviet reconnaissance battalions moved into the German front in force, seizing German patrols and hunting out German artillery positions in order to gain the intelligence necessary to target the main Soviet thrusts effectively. The full-scale attack finally took place on June 23, starting at the north of the German salient and rolling slowly southward over the next two days. Despite the evidence that there would be some kind of attack, the German defenders were unprepared for the scale and ferocity of what struck them. The usual artillery barrage, which might have alerted them to what was coming, was reduced in favour of a general attack, with infantry, tanks and artillery rolling forward together under cover of darkness. The first wave was made up of special plough tanks, which carved a way through the minefields. They were followed by infantry supported by self-propelled artillery and more tanks. The way ahead was lit with flares and searchlights were used to dazzle German defenders. The German defence crumbled away, leaving room for the following mechanized forces to exploit the gap and push on to the next objective.45 This time Soviet commanders were under orders to leave pockets of German resistance where they were and to press forward before the line consolidated, precisely the tactics used with such alarming success by the German army between 1939 and 1941.
The terrain was in the defenders' favour. The ground was alternately marshy and hilly, with wide river systems unsuited to rapid troop movement. Nevertheless Soviet forces made lighter work of the problems posed by topography than did the Allied forces enmeshed at the same time in the Normandy bocage. When Rokossovsky's 1st Belorussian Front launched its part of the rolling offensive on June 24, his tanks and guns appeared out of the swamps at the northern edge of the Pripet Marshes, to the alarm of the German defenders. Undetected by the enemy, Soviet engineers had prepared the ground with wooden causeways. Down the makeshift roads poured Soviet armour, making gains of twenty-five miles in a day.46 Whole German army units were threatened with encirclement; they fought back, in a state of mounting disorganization, battered by a remorseless air bombardment and uncertain where the enemy would appear next. This was sweet revenge for the Red Army; three years before it had been their turn.
In a little over a week Bagration had proved to be an astonishing success. A few makeshift units around Minsk were all that remained of the German front. On July 3 the Belorussian capital was seized, but Soviet forces were already past the city, pressing on at all costs to prevent the German front from digging in to form a stronger line of defence. From Hitler's headquarters came frantic calls to stand fast no matter what, or to hold defensive positions long since overrun. On June 29 Field Marshal Model was given command of Army Group Centre to try to stop the avalanche, but he could see no sensible alternative to withdrawal (though he could not say so openly to Hitler). Within two weeks a hole 250 miles wide and almost 100 miles deep had been gouged out of the German front. For the first time, large numbers of prisoners were taken, more than 300,000 around Minsk, and an additional 100,000 over the next few weeks. Stalin must have gained a special satisfaction from the fact that while the Red Army had swept everything before it in two weeks, the Western Allies remained mired in a narrow bridgehead.
So swift was Soviet success that it proved necessary to stop to think about where to move next. On July 8 Stalin called his staff together. Zhukov and Antonov arrived to find Stalin ‘in good humour’; during the conference ‘his gaiety increased’.47 This was an altogether unfamiliar Supreme Commander. Although it was two o'clock in the afternoon, Stalin asked them to share his breakfast. The three men discussed Soviet strategy. Stalin insisted that the Red Army could finish the job by itself but welcomed the second front as a way to end the war sooner. Then he asked Zhukov if his forces could liberate eastern Poland and reach the Vistula River in the current offensive. Zhukov said he could do it with ease. Poised at the southern end of the Soviet offensive were a further 1 million men, 2,000 tanks and 3,350 aircraft. Stalin ordered him to unleash them towards Warsaw and the gateway to Berlin.48
On July 13 the fourth of the five offensives was begun with a drive on the Polish city of Lvov. In this case poor initial reconnaissance of German strong points, together with atrocious rainy weather, made for slow progress. On July 18 a second assault was launched against Lublin. This had much greater success, and within a week German forces were again in disorder. Lublin was seized on July 23, Brest-Litovsk, where in March 1918 the notorious capitulation to the Germans had been signed by Trotsky, fell on July 26. The drive on Lvov, spearheaded by General Rybalko's 6th Guards Tank Corps, was renewed on July 16. A narrow corridor was carved through the German line, and Rybalko took the risk of pushing through the 3rd Guards Tank Army in single file and under continuous fire in order to move rapidly behind German lines and encircle the force in front of Lodz. While other tank forces held the corridor open, a daring sweep completed the encirclement of eight German divisions around Brody. By July 22 the pocket was conquered, and Soviet tank forces moved to surround Lvov itself. On July 27 the city fell as German forces retreated to the Vistula; the whole front line in southern Poland had been destroyed by Soviet mobile operations in ten days.
This was a week of disasters for the German high command. On July 25 the Western Allies at last broke out of the Normandy beach-head, and American forces, like the Soviet, began to sweep aside weakened German armies. That same day the first units of the Red Army reached the banks of the Vistula, the giant waterway across Poland, which cuts Warsaw literally in two. Within days small bridgeheads were established across the Vistula at Magnuszew and Pulawy. Both bridgeheads were subjected to fierce German counter-attack. The commander at Magnuszew was General Chuikov, the hero of the Stalingrad siege. Not one to be pushed backward, he held fast to his tiny bridgehead, reduced at one point to a dozen men and guns. Stalin now ordered Soviet forces to converge on Warsaw and cut off what was left of Army Group Centre. But the Soviet attack, which had covered hundreds of miles in four weeks, began to slacken. Heavy wear and tear on tanks and men left the Soviet vanguard
Caption
Map 9 Operation Bagration, June–August 1944
vulnerable to counter-attack. In late July the German army mounted a desperate spoiling action: heavily reinforced Panzer units, including the Hermann Goering Division and the SS Viking Division, held the Soviet advance and so severely damaged the leading tank corps that 2nd Tank Army, far from reaching Warsaw, was forced to withdraw and refit. The limits of Bagration were finally reached east of the Polish capital.
The Polish capital was no stranger to war. In September 1939 the German air force flattened large parts of it in an effort to force Polish capitulation. In April 1943 the surviving population of the Warsaw Ghetto rose in revolt, only to be destroyed by 2,000 troops of the Waffen-SS in a savage act of reprisal which reduced the area to rubble and left over 20,000 men, women and children dead. The 49,000 who survived were sent to the camps, some for a quick death from gassing, some for a slow death in the labour colonies. In August 1944, with the Red Army in full pursuit of an apparently beaten enemy, fighting broke out in Warsaw again. The Polish resistance, organized as the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), launched a rising in the capital on August 1 in an attempt to liberate it before the Soviet armies arrived.
The revolt was led by General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski and 20,000 poorly armed patriots. At five o'clock in the afternoon of August 1 the signal went out to the fighters of the Home Army. Germans found themselves all at once under a hail of fire from doorways, windows and balconies. Home-made bombs and mines exploded around the city. Parts of the German garrison were overwhelmed and large parts of central Warsaw were seized, but the rebels failed to capture the railway stations or any of the bridges over the Vistula. Lacking artillery, tanks or even adequate quantities of hand weapons and ammunition, they were worn down in two months of fighting against German troops under orders to raze the city and exterminate its people. Some 225,000 civilians died, in the largest single atrocity of the
war. The German troops went on a rampage. They were led by the same Bach-Zalewski who had commanded the Einsatzgruppen in 1941 and run the brutal anti-partisan war behind the front. Hospitals were burned down with staff and patients imprisoned inside; gas was used to flush out Poles fleeing through the sewers; women and children were murdered in their thousands. On October 2, to save his city further suffering, Bor-Komorowski surrendered. His men went into captivity and Warsaw's remaining population was deported to German camps. Stone by stone, street by street, the ancient city was utterly demolished.49
It has long been conventional in the West to hold Stalin and the Red Army responsible, indirectly, for the horrors that befell Warsaw . Churchill in his memoirs berated his former ally for lack of ‘considerations of honour, humanity, decent commonplace good faith’, characteristics with which Stalin was indeed poorly supplied.50 It is said that the Polish Home Army expected help from the Soviet Union. Instead the Red Army sat on the Vistula and watched the destruction of the city in front of them. Churchill was only one of many who assumed that Stalin did this in order to let the German army liquidate Polish nationalists instead of having to do so himself. In this sense the agony of Warsaw could be regarded either as the final flourish of the Nazi-Soviet Pact or as the first battleground of the Cold War.
The truth is far more complicated than this. The Warsaw rising was instigated not to help out the Soviet advance but to forestall it. Polish nationalists did not want Warsaw liberated by the Red Army but wanted to do so themselves, as a symbol of the liberation struggle and the future independence of Poland. This ambition was all the more urgent because only days before, on July 21, a Communist-backed Polish Committee for National Liberation was set up with Stalin's blessing. At Lublin on July 22 the Committee was declared to be the new Provisional Government; four days later a pact of friendship was signed, with the Soviet Union recognizing the new Government.51 All of this was at least technically within the terms agreed at Teheran, where Churchill and Roosevelt had half-heartedly acquiesced to Stalin's request to keep the frontiers of 1941 and his share of Poland as divided in the German-Soviet pact. What Polish nationalists and the Western Allies could not tolerate was the almost certain fact that any new Polish state born of German defeat would be dominated by the Soviet Union. The Polish Government-in-exile in London, led by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, urged the Home Army to launch a pre-emptive nationalist insurrection and remained unalterably opposed to any idea that the Soviet Union should keep the territory seized in 1939.52
The real issue was not political – there was nothing new about the hostility between Soviet leaders and Polish nationalists – but military. Could the Red Army have captured Warsaw in August 1944 and saved its population from further German barbarities? The answer now seems unambiguously negative. Soviet forces did not sit and play while Warsaw burned. The city was beyond their grasp. In the first days of August the most advanced Soviet units were engaged in bitter fighting on the approaches to the city; the small bridgeheads over the Vistula were subject to a fierce German onslaught. To the north both sides desperately contested the crossing of the Bug and Narew rivers, which might have opened up another avenue to the Polish capital. This was hardly inactivity, though it could little benefit the Poles. Stalin was completely, and no doubt correctly, dismissive of the military potential of the Polish army. ‘What kind of army is it?’ he asked Mikolajczyk, who was visiting Moscow in early August, ‘without artillery, tanks, air force? In modern war this is nothing….’53 Soviet commanders knew that this was not like Kiev or Minsk; their forces were tired and short of arms, and the Germans had made the defence of the Warsaw district a priority. Late in August 1944 General Rokossovsky, whose troops were tied down on the Warsaw front, told a British war correspondent that ‘the rising would have made sense only if we were on the point of entering Warsaw. That point had not been reached at any stage… We were pushed back….’54 When Zhukov was sent to the Warsaw front in early September to report to Stalin on the confused situation there, he concluded on military grounds that the Vistula could not yet be crossed in force. German war memoirs, which are less suspect as a source, confirm that the Red Army was prevented from helping Warsaw by the sudden stiffening of the German defence.55
Some effort was made to help the insurgents. Churchill and Roosevelt were shocked by Stalin's attitude to the rising; they began to drop arms and supplies from heavy bombers, but the quantities were tiny. On August 4 two aircraft managed to reach Warsaw; on August 8 only four. The accuracy of high-altitude parachute drops was negligible, and it is likely that most of the material fell into German hands. This was Stalin's reason for not dropping supplies.56 There was little military realism behind the Western plan. It is out of the question that Allied air drops could have sustained Polish resistance in Warsaw for long; they were gestures prompted by humanity certainly, but by politics as well. When Stalin finally relented in September and began to drop supplies into the surviving pockets of resistance in Warsaw, he was almost certainly motivated by politics alone. No doubt he did welcome the destruction of anti-Soviet Polish nationalism, which was certain by this stage. But even his Polish Communist allies wanted some kind of gesture towards the fate of their future capital, and by early September the military situation had altered. The Polish 1st Army under General Berling joined the front line opposite Warsaw on August 20. On September 10 the attack was renewed; this time the Praga, the eastern suburb of Warsaw on the Soviet side of the Vistula, was captured. Air shipments by low-level parachute drops began. The Polish 1st Army then launched its own attack across the Vistula into Warsaw itself, but after heavy losses was forced on September 23 to retreat back across the river. Even at this late stage the Polish Home Army distrusted their pro-Communist compatriots so profoundly that they refused to co-ordinate their operations with the new attacking force.57 A week later they surrendered, victims not so much of cynical Stalinist calculation but of their own nationalist fervour: love of their country and hatred of the two great powers at either shoulder which had conspired to crush it.
Bagration did not lead to the liberation of Warsaw, for it had not been part of the original plan. In all other respects the operation was a resounding success. Belorussia was liberated, as was eastern Poland. In August the last of the five offensives was unleashed in the southern sector of the front, at the point where German and Romanian forces had been poised to absorb the Soviet punch in June. Now Axis forces were much weakened by the effort to reinforce the fighting further north, as Zhukov's plan had intended. Soviet forces were larger than the armies they attacked, but the two months of fighting to the north had drained their reserves also. Some of the men were poorly trained, recruited hastily from the very areas the Soviet army had liberated only a few months before. Here too, the remodelled Red Army relied on tanks, guns and aircraft rather than on raw manpower.
The blow struck in the south once again exceeded expections. Between August 20 and August 29 Army Group South collapsed entirely. Over 400,000 prisoners were captured, including most of the German 6th Army, which had been reconstituted after Stalingrad, only to fall to another annihilating encirclement on the banks of the Siret river, in northern Romania. On August 23 the pro-German Romanian Government fell, and Romania switched sides. Some Romanian army units were back in action only weeks later, fighting at the side of the Red Army. By September 2 the Ploesti oil fields, Germany's last major source of crude oil, were in Soviet hands, and Bucharest had fallen. The Red Army swept on through Bulgaria and into Yugoslavia; by early October it was poised on the boundaries of Hungary for a drive on Budapest. The Hungarian capital was laid under siege by December, and after bruising armoured battles, which sucked much of the German army's remaining tank services into the Hungarian bloodbath, Budapest fell on February 14.
The Soviet drive into the Balkans had a firm foundation in Soviet military planning in the summer of 1944, but its real impact was political. Stalin found himself in a little over a year transformed from a leader who had c
ontrol of only two-thirds of his own country to the master of large parts of Eastern Europe. Soviet leaders were determined to use German defeat to create a political structure in Eastern Europe that would give them the security they had failed to get from the pre-war system. In effect that meant Soviet domination in place of German. What that amounted to in practice was already in evidence from the treatment of eastern Poland and western Belorussia between 1939 and 1941. Stalin told the Yugoslav Communist, Milovan Djilas, that the nature of the conflict required that this be so: ‘This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’58 Soviet leaders expected their Western Allies to do the same.
There was certainly one sense in which Stalin's analysis was correct. Britain and the United States did not want the countries liberated in Europe to become Communist. They wished them to remain as far as possible within the Western camp and the world market. For much of the war Roosevelt genuinely believed that there existed some prospect of an American-Soviet axis in the post-war world, by which they would co-operate to preserve the peace. Churchill had a more cynical view. He knew that the Soviet Union could hardly be expelled militarily from Eastern Europe, having defeated what had been only a few years before the most effective armed force in the world. He was much more prepared for horse-trading. Stalin had no real liking for Churchill – he told Djilas in the summer of 1944 that he had not forgotten who the English and Churchill were: ‘They find nothing sweeter than to trick their allies… Churchill is the kind who, if you don't watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket.’59 When Churchill arranged to visit Moscow in October 1944 to discuss the future of Europe, Stalin found him more realistic than Roosevelt.
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