A World at Arms (130 page)

^p
It was in the naval fighting of the New Georgia campaign that John F. Kennedy’s “PT 109” was sunk by the Japanese.

^q
It is surely worth noting as a sign of inter-Allied confidence that the Americans provided the British with the full details of their planned operations in the Pacific, including the date of the scheduled landing on Tarawa. See J.S.M. Washington (Dill) to COS, FM D 41 of 20 October 1943, in CAB 120/412.

^r
The communiques from the Southwest Pacific Headquarters were notorious not only for their inaccuracy but also for their quite unnecessary slighting of the Australian role in the theater.

12

THE ASSAULT ON GERMANY FROM ALL SIDES

PRELIMINARIES IN THE EAST

In the months after the October 1943 set-backs west of Kiev, the Red Army quickly recovered and launched a new set of offensives. In the south, the winter of 1943–44 was more varied and mild than usual, but the mud caused by the periodic thaws did not hamper the movements of Soviet forces as much as it hindered the Germans. Soviet tanks were equipped with substantially wider treads and were therefore able to move more easily, and, in addition, the Red Army was by this time equipped with thousands of American trucks far more likely to keep going than the German ones. The greatly increased gasoline consumption characteristic of vehicles churning their way through the deep mud imposed a more serious burden on the oil–short Germans than on the Soviets. Furthermore, the Red Army had commandeered far more “panje carts,” high wheeled wooden wagons drawn by a single horse, which could often move–and carry equipment and supplies–when all other modes of transport failed. The major factors enabling the Red Army to maintain its offensive pressure, however, were the continued growth in Soviet military production, the greater experience and self-confidence of its military commanders, and the increasing disparity in the size of its forces as compared to the German units facing them.

The Russians were also aided by two aspects of Hitler’s control of the German military effort. With an invasion in the West anticipated by the Germans, the basic strategy of the Third Reich, as already described in
Chapter 11
, looked to a successful defeat of that invasion before troops and equipment could be turned to the East. As codified in Hitler’s general directive Number 51 for the conduct of the war of November 3, 1943, this strategy required that for the time being the Eastern Front would have to take care of itself while Germany concentrated her newly mobilized men and manufactured weapons on defending Western Europe against Allied assault.
¹
Minor deviations from this policy were
required by crises on the Eastern Front in the spring of 1944, but on the whole this policy was adhered to because, as the directive put it: “In the East the size of the [German-controlled] space is such as to allow if worst came to worst even large losses of space without deadly danger to German survival,”
²
while this was not the case in the West.

If this sense of strategic priorities for 1944 meant that Germany would concentrate on building up her forces in the west and south, Hitler was by no means as willing to trade space for time in the East as the quotation might suggest. On the contrary, the economic importance of the Ukraine, both in terms of mineral and industrial resources and as a rich agricultural region, made him especially reluctant to agree to withdrawals urged on him by the commanders on the spot who were often supported by the Chief of the Army General Staff. In rejecting such advice, or following it slowly, Hitler not only acted out of regard for the economic importance of the area but also the fact that shortening the lines freed Russian as well as German units, often meant that heavy equipment and supply dumps could not be evacuated, and was likely to add to the strength of the Red Army, which promptly conscripted any men in the area given up who had escaped being evacuated by the Germans. In their memoirs the German generals, therefore, usually attributed their defeats during the period of retreat to Hitler’s insistence on holding ground they believed should have been given up sooner, but the real difference between many of them and Hitler lay elsewhere.

Earlier in 1943 Hitler had agreed to the evacuation of the Demyansk and Rzhev front bulges to gain reserves for operations elsewhere on the Eastern Front, but these other operations had failed in the face of determined and effective Soviet resistance. Later, in September-October 1944, Hitler would agree to two very large withdrawals, one in southwest France and the other in the southern Balkans. Although in some of the other instances when withdrawals were recommended, an excellent case could be made for the earlier retreats urged by the military leaders on the spot, the real difference, it seems to me, lay in quite a different sphere.

Although they would not admit it openly–even to themselves–many of Germany’s military leaders were by late 1943, early 1944, becoming convinced that they were losing the war and would be defeated; they preferred that the defeat come about in the least messy way possible. Hitler, on the other hand, still wanted and hoped to win, if not the whole war, at least a major part of it, and saw the need for Germany to hold as much of the occupied territories as possible as a basis for victory or at least an advantageous or partial peace. When given unpleasant advice by those military advisors he trusted, like Admiral Dönitz or General
Model, he was quite prepared to accept it; he sensed–correctly it should be noted–their devotion not only to him personally but to his vision of ultimate German victory. If he distrusted the advice of others, it was because he sensed–equally correctly I believe–a difference not only on tactics but in basic orientation. In the meantime he retained some of them, relieved others, occasionally followed their advice, and continued his program of massively bribing them all regularly in the hope that this would assure their loyalty.

Arguments over appropriate tactics for the Germans in the face of Soviet offensives marked the winter of 1943–44. From the Soviet side, the aim was obvious: a series of hammer blows was designed to force the Germans (together with what satellite troops still fought alongside them) out of the bulk of the Soviet territory they still occupied in the north and south. Most of the economically valuable land still held was in the south and it was here that the Red Army concentrated the bulk of its offensive forces. Beginning in the last week of December and continuing through January, Vatutin’s First Ukrainian Front drove the Germans (4th Panzer and 1st Panzer) out of the area west of Kiev where they had earlier won their last tactical victory.
³
In the process the Red Army freed such important cities as Zhitomir, Berdichev and Kirovograd. Furthermore, they cut off and surrounded two corps in an encirclement at Korsun-Shevchenkovsky, a pocket which the Germans referred to by the name of Cherkassy, a nearby city also liberated by the Red Army. Because on this occasion, unlike Stalingrad, the advancing Soviet units were unable to drive back the German front a substantial distance away from their ring, the Germans succeeded in driving a relief column close to the pocket; and again unlike Stalingrad, when that column came close, the encircled units moved to break out. As a result, of some fifty to seventy thousand men in the pocket, possibly as many as a third of those trapped were able to escape but without any of their equipment. However hard the desperate Germans fought, the whole experience showed two things clearly. The initiative was now wholly with the Red Army, and the shock of the Stalingrad experience had made a deep impression on the thinking and the conduct of the German army.
⁴

While Manstein’s Army Group South was being battered and driven back in the northern Ukraine, Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist’s Army Group A was receiving its share of attention farther south, though a few weeks later. Here the Germans still held the major industrial area around Krivoi Rog in the Dnepr bend area and the manganese mines at Nikopol together with a substantial protecting bridgehead south of the great river. A series of massive offensives by the Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts drove the Germans out of both areas with heavy casualties in January and
February of 1944; neither the talents of the Army Group commander nor the ruthless fanaticism of General Ferdinand Schörner, one of Hitler’s favorites, could contain the well equipped and carefully led Red Army units.
⁵
As they advanced, the latter did on this sector of the front what they had done at the Dnepr and would do over and over again thereafter: bounce the next river barrier, in this case the Ingulets, on the run, establishing bridgeheads
before
the Germans could establish a firm line on the river banks.
^a

The collapse of German military power in the Dnepr bend area and the loss of the Nikopol bridgehead raised once more the problem of the German and Romanian forces cut off in the Crimea in the fall of 1943 and now more isolated than ever. Marshal Antonescu urged Hitler immediately after the fall of Nikopol on February 8, 1944 (as he had in the preceding October), to evacuate Axis troops from the Crimea now that all hope of regaining contact with them was lost.
⁶
Only the seven Romanian divisions stationed there could secure the defense of Romania itself from the obviously imminent Soviet invasion. Hitler refused, ostensibly because of concern for repercussions on the policy of Turkey and the danger of air raids against the Romanian oil fields, perhaps in reality more because he still hoped that after a stabilization on the Eastern Front and a defeat of the invasion in the West he could reconquer the Ukraine and thereby reestablish land contact with the Crimea. There was also concern over the Soviet Black Sea fleet regaining the great base at Sevastopol.

When Antonescu visited Hitler’s headquarters at the end of February, the Germans were primarily interested in checking whether he was about to leave the war and whether or not to have Romania join Germany in occupying Hungary, which was indeed considering an exit from the conflict far more seriously than Romania.
⁷
Hitler decided not to have the Romanians participate in his planned action against Hungary because he hoped to keep Hungary fighting on the side of Germany; promising to return to the Romanians the piece of that country which the Axis had awarded to Hungary in 1940 was guaranteed to prevent that. But neither would he agree to an early evacuation of the Crimea. The five German and seven Romanian divisions were to remain there.

A Soviet offensive struck from the north across the Perekop land bridge into the Crimea and from a bridgehead the Russians had earlier secured nearby, while a companion attack came from the east, where they had held a small bridgehead since November 1, 1943, across the Kerch Straits. The two Red Army operations hit the Axis forces on
April 8–9, 1944. By mid-May the 120,000 men formally organized as the 17th German Army had been crushed. Only a small proportion was evacuated; there was no long siege as in 1941–42. The Soviet victory and Axis defeat in the Crimea was one of the most complete, if least known, of the war.
⁸

A major Soviet victory which had made it foolish for the Germans to try to hold on to the Crimea–and most difficult first to supply and then to evacuate its isolated garrison–had been the massive spring offensive on the southern front. Designed to crush the whole German front from the Prijpet Marshes to the Black Sea, it had freed the important ports of Nikolaev and Odessa from German and Romanian occupation. With Vatutin wounded, Zhukov took over the command of First Ukrainian Front; in a major offensive striking south from the Rovno area, the armored units of First Ukrainian Front staged a Blitzkrieg of their own. In a four–week period of March 1944, they clobbered the German 4th and 1st Panzer Armies, drove to the Carpathian Mountains, and outflanked the various possible German defense lines in the southern Ukraine.

An equally effective if less daring frontal assault by Konev’s Second Ukrainian Front demolished most of the German 8th Army while the Third Ukrainian Front of Malinovsky battered the reconstituted 6th Army at the southern end of the front. Although in this process the speedy Soviet advance captured important German supply centers, the Soviet hope of catching the 1st Panzer Army in an encirclement was not realized, in part because of the re–transfer of an SS armored corps from the forces assigned to deal with an invasion in the West. The Red Army’s advances in March 1944 were, nevertheless, dramatic. It was obvious that its commanders knew how to maneuver and control vast forces on the move. Prospective German defensive lines to be based on the Bug and Dnestr rivers were bounced in the advance, and the next one, on the Pruth river, outflanked from the north. The Germans and Romanians had been driven out of the main portions of the Ukraine, and the Red Army stood at the entrance to Romania and Hungary.
⁹

Neither Romania nor Hungary was in any strong position to defend itself. The Romanian army had, to all intents and purposes, bled to death at Stalingrad and in the Crimea-the collapse of the Romanian forces on the latter battlefield came right after the Soviet offensive, which freed Nikolaev and Odessa, had removed all realistic hope of their relief. The Romanians were, as discussed in
Chapter 13
, already trying to find a way out of the war; the Germans were in effect giving them every incentive to quit while making it as difficult as possible for them.