A World at Arms (131 page)

As for the Hungarians, their first serious effort to leave the war led the Germans to occupy the country and change its government. The
German leadership had long been suspicious of the Hungarians; they believed that Budapest had not been sufficiently eager to send its best troops to assist the 1942 campaign in the East; and Hitler himself had retained doubts about the steadfastness and loyalty of the Hungarians ever since their government had funked at war in 1938 when he had hoped to enlist them in a joint attack on Czechoslovakia. They were, in his eyes, the least reliable of Germany’s allies. It is worth recalling that in July 1941, when at the height of his euphoria over an assumed victory in the East he had discussed the project of murdering all of Europe’s Jews, he had predicted that, as the countries of the continent were urged to give up their Jews, the Hungarians would be the last to yield to German pressure.
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This prediction had proved to be correct.
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In spite of endless efforts, including heated personal interventions with Hungarian Regent Horthy by Hitler and von Ribbentrop, the government in Budapest had failed the acid test of loyalty to the Third Reich at a time when the vast majority of Jews in German-controlled Europe had already been murdered. If Germany could no longer conquer its enemies, at least it could occupy its allies to keep them from defecting. In the case of Italy, the Germans had struck late but on the whole effectively, aided, as already discussed, by the complete incompetence of the Italians. The Germans now arranged a repeat performance in Hungary under the code–name “Margarethe.”

For some time plans and preparations had been made in German headquarters to take over in Hungary, utilizing, as in Italy, troops allegedly on their way through the country to fight Germany’s enemies, not its own allies. As the situation on the Eastern Front changed drastically with Zhukov’s offensive in March coming closer and closer to the border of Hungary, the urgency for action increased just as the means for the operation decreased. Hitler decided to try to keep the Hungarian army on the German side rather than turning it into a source of slave labor like the Italian one. Horthy was summoned to meet Hitler and browbeaten into accepting a German occupation as well as appointing a new government agreeable to Berlin. By the time he returned to Budapest, German units were in control of much of the country; he was himself surrounded by Nazi soldiers; and the new government he was obliged to install was headed by the former Hungarian Minister in Berlin, Döme Sztojay, a man acceptable to Hitler. Hungarian units were now called on to assist the remnants of German divisions fleeing from
Romania before the advancing Red Army in clearing the passes of the Carpathians. Incidentally, they could thereby imagine themselves to be protecting their country not only from the Soviet Union but also from having to return territory to Romania. The first serious attempt of Hungary to leave the war had been effectively crushed.
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The coup in Hungary was not the only step Germany took in the face of its disastrous defeat at the hands of the Red Army in the Ukraine in the early months of 1944. A second step was a new tactic: the designation of essentially arbitrarily selected places as “fortresses,” which were to be held to the bitter end by an especially appointed fortress commander who was expected to inspire his troops to hold out until they and he were killed. The intended purpose of this charming innovation was to force the Red Army to devote such large forces to dealing with isolated German garrisons that the advance columns of Soviet tanks would be weakened, bereft of supplies, and eventually halted. The isolated “fortresses” could serve as beacons for German stragglers from units broken up by Soviet offensives and would then be able to hold out all the better until they were eventually relieved–in theory by again advancing German forces, in reality by imprisonment or death.
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The third step Hitler took involved the command of the two Army Groups defeated by the Soviet offensive. On March 28, von Manstein and von Kleist were both given high decorations and relieved of their commands. Their successors were the two highest ranking dedicated National Socialists among the Eastern Front commanders, Model for Army Group South and Schörner for Army Group A. Their Army Groups may have shot more German soldiers after rigged courts martial than they had before, but the new commanders would prove just as incapable of halting the Red Army as their predecessors. Changing the names of the Army Groups from South to North Ukraine and from A to South Ukraine pointed to Hitler’s hopes and ambitions but also did nothing to enhance German military strength.
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Ironically, the appointment of the cautious Model would prove of enormous help to the success of the great Soviet deception operation for their 1944 summer offensive because it was
his
Army Group that the pretended Soviet offensive was to strike and which hence drew to itself, with Hitler’s enthusiastic support, practically all German reserves.

Simultaneously with the change in the German command on the southern part of the Eastern Front came the confirmation in his position of General Lindemann, who had been acting as commander of Army Group North.
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In that portion of the front there had also been a major Soviet victory in the winter. The Red Army had built up its forces in the Oranienbaum pocket as well as on other sectors of Army Group
North’s front and hoped that a massive offensive could completely free Leningrad and drive the Germans out of the northern Soviet territory they still held. Though the tight siege of Leningrad had been broken earlier, the city was still under constant artillery bombardment and a drastic change at this point would be a signal for all of Scandinavia. The Germans had done some serious contingency planning here, unlike elsewhere on the Eastern Front, and were preparing a defensive line which took advantage of the Narva river and the lakes along the Estonian-Soviet border. Although transfers of German divisions to the endangered southern portions of the front and the withdrawal of the Spanish Blue Division dramatically weakened the German front, the order to withdraw to what was called the “Panther” position was not given.
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This was due in part to erroneous intelligence of the German 18th Army which led its commander to prefer remaining in place, and in part to the concern in headquarters about the likely repercussions on Finland of a withdrawal on this sector of the front. The result was that the weakened front–which included a number of the air force field divisions–crumbled quickly under the Soviet offensive .

On January 14 the Red Army launched a major attack from the Oranienbaum pocket and south from Leningrad itself, followed soon after by an attack near Novgorod. Here was a far more ambitious project than the prior relief attempts. Neither replacing Army Group Commander Kuechler temporarily with Model and subsequently having Lindemann take over when Model was sent south made much difference. The Germans fought skillfully and fiercely, while the Soviet leadership was not as sure as in the south, but the German army was forced to retreat to the Panther position. The units which arrived there by the end of March had been badly battered in the interim while the Red Army had won another major victory; Leningrad was really and truly freed. Furthermore, although an early spring thaw halted the Red Army as much as the Germans at the Panther line, the Russians had already bounced the Narva river line in their advance and held a small but significant foothold across that river.
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It appears likely that the temporary holding of the northern end of the main front at Narva had helped decide the Finns to reject the Soviet terms in April 1944. But the fact remains that at the northern as on the southern ends of the great front in the East the Red Army had driven back the Germans, inflicting heavy losses in men and materiel. At both ends of the main front, the Russians were now essentially back at their pre-1939 borders. There was a major German bulge eastwards only at the center; in the south the Red Army stood at the gates of Hungary and Romania; in the north they could strike at Finland or into the Baltic
States or both. The initiative was with them, and as observers anticipated the summer of 1944 on the Eastern Front, the question now was where the Red Army would strike, not what the Germans might do. The whole initiative had passed to the Soviet Union.

Since March 1944, the Soviet general staff had been working on plans for the summer offensive. If the Finns did not leave the war on their own, they would certainly be driven out of it by a massive attack for which preparations were already under way. The big question was where to strike on the main front? The result of prior failure to drive the Army Group Center out of its Belorussian positions, combined with the great winter successes of the Red Army in the south and north, suggested the possibility of an attack on what was now an eastern bulge; this project simultaneously offered the possibility of deceiving the Germans by making it look as if the attacks were to come in the regions of prior success, especially the northern Ukraine. With Stalin personally canvassing the possibilities and opting for this approach, the stage was beginning to be set for one of World War II’s most dramatic battles.

The Soviet plans provided for a massive buildup of forces on the central sector with the old Western Front split into the Second and Third Belorussian Fronts on April 24. This was not a mere name change like the German one of a month earlier. Here was a portion of a carefully calculated buildup in which, however, reinforcements were for the most part fed into existing units and additional units were transferred from the reserve and from other segments of the front in the last weeks before the attack, and under unusually careful provisions for secrecy. At the same time, steps were taken to give the impression of a major offensive against the Army Group North Ukraine with a secondary thrust into the Baltic States. Perhaps most important was the insistence in this offensive plan on concentration on one major objective within reach at one time and on putting all the needed resources into it.

The other side of these preparations was the complete and successful hoodwinking of the Germans. As so often before and later, German army intelligence had lots of accurate minor details while getting the big picture completely wrong. A major Soviet offensive against Army Group North Ukraine was anticipated. All reinforcements and much new equipment was sent to this Army Group, which had the additional advantage of now being under the command of Hitler’s favorite, Model. Army Group Center, on the other hand, lost most of its reserve formations to its southern neighbor and had to put all of its strength up front, an arrangement which fitted perfectly into the plans of the Red Army which wanted to crush the Germans facing them in place, not drive them through the forests and swamps of Belorussia. Whatever the signs
beginning to come in at the front, both German military headquarters and the Army Group Center commander Field Marshal Busch himself were certain there would be no major offensive against the Army Group until the day it started; Busch himself was away and would have to fly back to his crumbling command.
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The great offensive to destroy Army Group Center and rip open the road to Warsaw was also to be supported by a massive partisan operation in the German rear. The movement had grown substantially in the area still occupied by the Germans with the Belorussian terrain especially suitable for guerillas. The partisans by late 1943 in fact controlled large areas in the rear, drafted men into their ranks, and made it obvious to the rural population that the power of the Soviet state would soon be coming back in full force. In the spring of 1944 the German army launched a series of major anti-partisan operations and inflicted considerable casualties, but by this time there were so many partisans that their military effectiveness from the Soviet point of view was not substantially affected. They were to make thousands of line cuts in the railways in the days and nights just before the Soviet offensivestarted; their activities helped to paralyze the German transportation system in the critical early days of the Red Army offensive somewhat the way the Allied bombing of the transportation system in France held up the German reaction to the Allied landing in Normandy.

PRELIMINARIES IN THE WEST

In early April, the British and Americans had notified the Soviet Union that the invasion would begin on or about May 31, with the weather determining the exact date. There is no evidence that the precise dates were in any way coordinated; the Soviet Union and the Western Allies both moved at the earliest time that each felt it could, with both having to make some last-minute changes in the timetable. On details in such fields as intelligence between the Soviet Union on the one hand and Britain and the United States on the other, cooperation was very poor.
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At a time when there were all sorts of political problems between the Allies, only the broad thrust of strategy, not the details of operations, could be coordinated.

The Western Allies had decided to utilize the Italian campaign to help prepare for the invasion in the West in three ways. They would bind German forces in that theater and thus keep them away from both the Eastern Front and the invasion area. Secondly, the liberation of central Italy would provide them with air bases from which the remaining unreachable portions of German-occupied Europe were within the range
of their bombers. Finally, experienced divisions from the Italian theater were to provide the needed push for the landing on the south coast of France which would support the invasion of northern France and provide additional port facilities for the Allies once fully ashore.

The campaign in Italy itself proved very arduous, as shown in
Chapter 11
. While the Germans failed in their repeated efforts to drive the Allied divisions landed at Anzio into the sea,
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the Allies themselves, in spite of repeated efforts, failed to break the German line across the peninsula. The renewed frontal assault in the period February 15, to March 23, 1944, did not push through to the Liri valley, the route north.
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Shifting forces from the east coast to the west, the Allies struck again after major preparations on May 11, a date determined with reference both to steps in Italy and the forthcoming invasion in the West. Over a period of several days, the Allied forces battered their way into the German lines, broke through and headed north after joining up with the troops in the Anzio beachhead.
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As the Allies advanced under General Mark Clark’s command, they most unwisely raced for Rome rather than trying to cut off the retreating Germans.
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On June 4 Rome was liberated (and there is no evidence that the Allies heeded the Pope’s plea to refrain from sending Black soldiers into the eternal city); in the following months the British, American, French and Polish troops pushed on, slowly driving the Germans out of central Italy.
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