A World at Arms (137 page)

New defensive lines in the center existed mainly in the imagination of Model and Hitler. The Red Army commanders, who could not know of these theoretical halt lines, simply drove on into the open or into the fleeing Germans. A project to push into the advancing Soviet forces from the north–a sort of Eastern Front precursor of the Mortain offensive in the West–never got started because Army Group North lacked the needed’ Panzer divisions, and the Red Army drove into Lithuania and eastern Poland. Just as the Western Allies had hoped that an active Eastern Front would prevent the Germans from switching troops from the East to drive the invasion back into the sea, so the successful establishment of a bridgehead in Normandy, signaled by the liberation of Cherbourg in the first days of the Soviet summer offensive, made it impossible for the Germans to transfer troops from the West; simultaneously the advance in central Italy after the liberation of Rome prevented them from shifting divisions from the south. By mid-July, the Red Army had advanced more than 200 miles on the Central front and had to pause for bringing up supplies and repairs on the road and railway system. But there would be no respite for the Germans.

Before the extension of the offensive to the north and south can be discussed, something must be said about the symptoms of disintegration which were beginning to appear in the German army during the summer of 1944, both after the Soviet breakthroughs of late June in the East and the American rupture of the Normandy front at the end of July.
There were clear signs of panic in the rear areas on both fronts, with those who had been stationed there in the prior years of occupation rushing back by any means at hand now that the possibility of being engulfed in the fighting suddenly loomed before them. Among the units at the front, most fought very hard at first, and some continued with desperate resistance even after the front had been pierced, but there were now mass surrenders alongside instances of garrisons fighting to the bitter end. On both major fronts, very large numbers of German soldiers surrendered; this was an especially novel development on the Eastern Front. On July 17, the Red Army arranged a mass march of over 57,000 prisoners through the streets of Moscow; the Japanese ambassador reported to his government on the fact that hundreds of thousands of Muscovites watched calmly as the soldiers, robust and full of life, were paraded by them.
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Unlike the Red Army soldiers captured three years earlier in the same general area, the vast majority of whom had been shot or starved to death by the end of 1941, most of these men would eventually return to Germany–even if later than their comrades captured in France.

Hitler came to attribute the disaster of Army Group Center and the large-scale surrenders on both fronts to treason among the military, especially after the coup attempt of July 20, but the roots of defeat lay elsewhere. The fear of another Stalingrad hung over German soldiers in the East; they had lost heavily in the battles of the preceding years; to the ordinary soldier the prospects looked grimmer and grimmer; to the officers, the sacrifice of their men in holding on to some obscure French or Russian town for a few more days looked ever more dubious as a sound operation of war. While Army Group and army commander–sin–chief might still hope for glory, promotion, and their monthly bribes from Hitler as long as the war lasted, the subordinate division and corps commanders could see less and less sense in fighting on, once cut off. The German military machine still had lots of fight in it, but there were now omens of disaster which could not be obliterated either by enthusiasm and hope on the one hand or fear of the enemy or one’s own judicial terror machine on the other. The new army Chief-of-Staff, appointed as a result of the July 20 explosion, General Guderian, could vent his resentment on commanders like von Kluge who had crossed him in prior years, and he could call on all officers to listen to lectures on National Socialist ideology, but beyond that he hardly made a major difference.

The destruction of Army Group Center and the liberation of the still occupied parts of Belorussia had immediate repercussions for the northern segment of the front as the Red Army drove into the open gap
between Army Group North and the remnants of Model’s forces. As early as July 9 Model proposed to Hitler that efforts to restore contact between the two Army Groups by offensives from both were not feasible and that Army Group North, which might easily be cut off by a Soviet thrust to the Baltic Sea, be pulled back to the river Dvina. In rejecting this concept then and later, Hitler referred to the critical objections of Admiral Dönitz, the Commander-in-Chief of the navy, which needed control of the Baltic to train U-Boat crews,
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a subject which recurs repeatedly in controlling German strategy in the Baltic area in 1944 and 1945. When the subject was raised again in the following weeks, Hitler also stressed Germany’s need for steel from Sweden, nickel from Finland, and oil from Estonian oil shale. But the Red Army was not impressed by all this, continued to roll forward, and drove to the Baltic just west of Riga. In the most desperate fighting, the Germans reopened a corridor along the coast to Army Group North; but because the Soviet offensive had driven the Germans out of their best defensive line from the Gulf of Finland south, utilizing the large Peipus and Pskov lakes, even the fanaticism of the new Army Group commander Schörner, sent in exchange for General Johannes Friessner from the 20th Mountain Army in the far north on July 23, could not hold Estonia forever. At the end of August the front in the north quieted down temporarily as the Red Army regrouped, but there were clearly great dangers ahead for the exposed northern flank which the Soviet Union could exploit when the next offensive was launched.
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In mid-July, as the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw on the Central front, the First Belorussian Front of Rokossovski and Konev’s First Ukrainian Front smashed into Model’s Army Group North Ukraine. By this time, a number of the divisions which Model had amassed earlier had been written off by being sent to reinforce the crumbling front of Army Group Center. The withdrawals Hitler had allowed Model to make before the new Soviet offensive did not provide much relief. In a series of massive attacks, of which the first was moved up to July 13 as Model was pulling back to the new line, the Red Army spearheads, now much more carefully concentrated than earlier, broke the German front and sent the 4th Panzer Army, 17th Army, and 1st Panzer Army-or rather what was left of them–reeling back. In six weeks of battle the First Ukrainian Front, part of it reorganized as the Fourth Ukrainian Front in the meantime (with the staff from the Crimea where it was no longer needed), drove the Germans back to the Carpathian mountains.

In the same period, the First Belorussian Front and the bulk of First Ukrainian Front pushed across several rivers, closed to the Vistula in some places and jumped it to form bridgeheads on the west bank at
Magnuszew, Pulawy, and Baranov. With Galicia now under Soviet control, the Red Army stood practically on the border of Hungary
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and Slovakia at about the same time as it had reached the German border of East Prussia on the northern flank of the great offensive. The Soviet victory over Army Group South Ukraine included an encirclement of a corps of about 30,000 men of whom only 5000 escaped; the Soviet leadership at the army and the newly reintroduced corps level had learned much about offensive warfare in the age of armor and now applied this effectively to the Germans. The fact that by this time the Red Air Force controlled the skies over most of the front helped; and Soviet artillery could compensate by very heavy firing for the fact that, after their earlier great losses, the Russians now had to be very careful with their infantry in the assault.

In its push into Poland, the Red Army reached two places of special significance in late July. They came to Majdanek, the easternmost and first of the larger death camps established by the Germans. The labor and extermination camp was the only one in the immediate vicinity of a large city, Lublin, and had served for years as a central site for forced labor and mass killing of Jews and of other people primarily from Poland and the Soviet Union. Over 300,000 had been murdered there; it was liberated by the Red Army before the Germans could destroy the crematoria, gas chambers, barracks, and other traces of what would become the major monuments to the penetration of German culture into Eastern Europe. Here pictures could first be taken and circulated around the world of huge piles of shoes, enormous quantities of human hair, and grinding machines for crushing bones into fertilizer.
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The nearby city of Lublin, taken by the Red Army on July 23–24, came to be known as the seat of a Soviet sponsored government for Poland, a group generally referred to as the “Lublin Poles” to distinguish them from the government-in-exile in London. This new government had been announced by Moscow on July 22 and was placed in nominal command of the Communist underground and partisan movements organized under Soviet auspices, while the new Polish army under General Berling was under the direct control of the Red Army Fronts to which it was assigned.

The establishment of a Soviet puppet regime had been preceded by months of internal preparations and over a year of dispute, sometimes in public, sometimes quietly, with the Western Allies, who recognized the Polish government-in-exile which had fought the Germans continually since September, 1939. The whole time since the Soviet government had broken relations with the Polish government in the spring of 1943 there had been various efforts, especially by the British, to get relations
reestablished, but without success. The nominal stumbling block was the eastern part of Poland, occupied by the Soviet Union under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Stalin indicated a willingness to accept minor modifications in this border in favor of Poland but expected agreement on it, or on the Curzon Line prepared as a possible border after World War I. Churchill urged the Polish government to accept the new border, especially because Poland was to be enlarged westward and northward at the expense of Germany and because the Red Army was certain to occupy Poland in its advance westwards.
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The Polish government-in-exile was itself frequently divided internally, but practically none of its members was prepared to agree to the territorial demands of the Soviet Union. The other Soviet demand, voiced increasingly stridently by Stalin and Molotov, was for a major change in the personnel of the Polish Cabinet; and while the Prime Minister, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, was willing to make some changes, there were limits to what he would concede. The issues were complicated in 1944 by two further factors. This was an election year in the United States, and President Roosevelt was hesitant to take steps which would alienate the Polish American voters, and hence to be as explicit about the inability of the United States to assist the Polish government in the face of the Soviet advance into Poland as the facts warranted.
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The other and more important element was the functioning of the Polish underground army, the Armia Krajowa, or AK, inside Poland as the Red Army advanced into the portions of German-occupied Poland where it was active. There were all sorts of problems and frictions, but the major pattern was that the advancing Soviet units utilized the assistance of the AK, especially their local knowledge, until an area was firmly under Red Army control and then arrested and either shot or deported them.

These issues all came to a head in late July 1944 as the Red Army approached Warsaw and soon after crossed the Vistula fifty miles south of the city, and the Germans tried to call up thousands of Polish men in Warsaw for forced labor on the defenses, even as Mikolajczyk flew to Moscow to confer with Stalin. Expecting to overrun the Polish capital quickly, Soviet radio on July 29 called on the public in the city to rise against the Germans as the thunder of artillery could be heard from the nearby front. The British government had made it clear to the Poles
that they could neither fly in the Polish Parachute Brigade nor carry out extensive air operations at enormous distance from British bases and right in front of the Red Army. Given permission to act when ready by Mikolajczyk, the Polish commander in the city on July 31 ordered an uprising for the next day. He and his men could sit it out and be condemned as useless or pro-German-the latter a favorite term of condemnation applied to them by the Soviet government–or take a chance on either winning control of the city at least temporarily or going down to defeat.

The Warsaw commander of the AK, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, decided that it was better to take a chance than to stand aside, and it is clear that the bulk of his associates agreed. What is not so clear is why this reversal from previous AK strategy was made with very little preparation. In prior years, the plan had always been to stage an uprising against the departing Germans in the
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areas, and accordingly weapons had been moved by the AK out of Warsaw into the countryside. Now that an uprising was to be staged in the capital, there was a terrible shortage of weapons. When the rising took place as ordered on August 1, the insurgents were unable to seize either the whole city or many key locations, and, as the Germans rallied their forces, the AK was relatively quickly confined to segments of the capita1.
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No one has explained why the Polish underground learned nothing from the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto the year before; for those who have studied the 1944 uprising, as for the civilians in the rest of Warsaw at the time, that event might as well have taken place on another planet.

The next two months saw something like a repeat performance of the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact against Poland. The Red Army had slowed down on the approaches to Warsaw; now it halted short of the Vistula–pushing to the river only after the insurgents had been driven away from the opposite bank–and placed its emphasis on expanding bridgeheads over the river south of Warsaw and obtaining bridgeheads across the Narev river to the north.
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For weeks, the Soviet Union refused either to send aid itself or to facilitate the sending of aid by the British and American air forces. The latter did send some supplies by air drops from Britain and Italy, but these operations were very costly, strongly objected to by the air force commanders, and in any case more effective for morale than supply purposes since a high proportion of the material sent fell into German hands.
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