The Road to Berlin (100 page)

As the pounding of East Prussia proceeded, Marshal Zhukov was pushing his right flank at top speed towards the middle Oder with the cognizance of Stalin, who nonetheless warned him to keep a wary eye open to the north. Bogdanov’s tanks were already over the Netze, crossing the German frontier at noon on 26 January and under orders to reach the Oder by 30 January; Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army forced both the ‘Netze line’ and the ‘Obra line’ at speed and also received orders to make for the Oder in the region of Frankfurt. Zhukov pressed at the same time to bring Chuikov’s 8th Guards in strength across to the northern side of the Netze and the Warte, leaving a blockading force at Poznan—yet another
Festung
, one held by over 60,000 men manning the well-prepared and well-stocked armoured forts. The main body of the forces of 1st Belorussian Front passed the frontier of the
Reich
on 29 January. While right-flank armies stabbed into western Pomerania and advanced against dwindling resistance as far as Arnswalde and Deutsch-Krone, at the centre Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army and Bogdanov’s tanks forced their way to the Oder. Colonel Yesipenko’s battle group from the 89th Rifle Division (5th Shock)—a forward unit made up of rifle
troops, heavy tanks, an anti-tank regiment and a mortar regiment—made the first assault crossing of the Oder on the morning of 31 January, capturing a bridgehead in the area of Kienitz, Neuendorf and Refeld; the surprise assault on Kienitz caught German soldiers walking the streets as if nothing had happened, and trains were running on the Kienitz–Berlin line.

Bogdanov’s tank army, with Colonel Vainrub’s 219th Tank Brigade from 1st Mechanized Corps in the lead, reached the Oder at 10 am on the morning of 31 January. The next day 1st Mechanized drew up in strength and fighting went on in the eastern approaches to Küstrin. At three o’clock in the afternoon of 1 February, 20th Guards Mechanized Brigade from 8th Guards Mechanized Corps (1st Guards Tank Army) also reached the Oder; 40th Guards Tank Brigade spurted along for the last fifteen miles, drawing up to the Oder late in the evening. 1st Guards Tank Brigade had meanwhile crossed the Kunnersdorf battlefield, where Russian troops long years before had defeated Frederick
II
of Prussia, and closed on the Oder. Frankfurt seemed only ‘a hop, skip and a jump’ away, but 1st Brigade had run out of fuel and was almost without ammunition, so in Kunnersdorf it stayed. Meanwhile Colonel A.Kh. Babadzhanyan with 11th Guards Tank Corps (1st Guards Tank Army) made its initial crossing of the Oder on 2 February, the same day as Chuikov’s 4th Guards Corps started its own assault, crossing to seize a bridgehead on the western bank and gain control of Kietz in the southern suburbs of Küstrin. Treacherously thin ice, the lack of any proper bridging equipment and the sudden arrival of the
Luftwaffe
all severely inhibited this first ambitious attempt to cross. The arrival of
AA
guns on 3 February kept the German fighter-bombers at bay, but the lack of heavy bridging meant that neither guns nor tanks could be ferried across the Oder.

During this last week in January five of Marshal Koniev’s armies were either astride or across the Oder, though the lack of firm ice caused by the swift-flowing current made it difficult to transfer large bodies of men and equipment. Lelyushenko’s 4th Tank Army had reached Göben north of Steinau on 22 January; improvised and hazardous crossings brought men and tanks to the western bank, with Göben being cleared completely on 25 January and Steinau captured on 30 January, the day that V.N. Gordov’s 3rd Guards Army took up its own positions on the Oder and thus secured Lelyushenko’s right flank. D.N. Gusev’s 21st Army had reached Oppeln and the Oder on 23 January, followed in short order by the 13th, 52nd and 5th Guards Armies. A week of furious labour and strenuous fighting brought Koniev’s armies two large bridgeheads, the first to the north in the region of Steinau, between Breslau and Glogau, the second further to the south at Brieg, between Breslau and Oppeln.

On Koniev’s left flank, which was committed to the capture of the Silesian industrial region, ‘everything turned out exactly as planned’. Gusev’s 21st Army, rather than persisting with its outflanking movement to the north-west, received orders to launch a frontal attack on the German garrisons, while one corps of Rybalko’s tank army was to make for Ratibor. Wryly accepting the need for yet
another turn, Rybalko re-routed his armour and watched his tanks move off, many festooned with silk netting captured in some textile mill as camouflage against the snowy ground. Gusev took Gleiwitz first and then advanced along a west-to-east axis, closing on Hindenburg before taking Beuten and Katowice. On their southerly encircling drive, 59th and 60th Armies, accompanied on their extreme left by 38th Army from 4th Ukrainian Front covering difficult terrain in the direction of the river Skawa, moved towards Rybnik, which they reached on 27 January. In this drive Kurochkin’s riflemen stumbled on the gigantic death camp at Auschwitz (Oswiecim) with all its hideously perverted industrial processes of mass extermination—the rail unloading ramps and assembly points, the gas-chambers and crematoria, the giant’s staircase of piled suitcases and the ghastly mountain of a full seven tons of women’s hair, bulging bales of suits and dresses, plus the grotesque pyramids of dentures and spectacles removed from those consigned to the death-chambers.

By 29 January the Silesian industrial region was cleared. German units falling back to the south-west towards the Oder were caught—as Koniev planned they should be—by Rybalko’s tanks and Kurochkin’s riflemen. Only one-third, 30,000 out of 100,000 men, escaped the Silesian trap. Now Marshal Koniev began shifting the main weight of his assault to the right flank in order to invest the Oder line; the area north of Breslau offered a much more favourable deployment area and was in any event much nearer to Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, as well as being closer to Berlin itself. Both Pukhov’s 13th Army and Gordov’s 3rd Guards Army had to battle their way to the Oder against stiff opposition from XXIV
Panzer
Corps and XLII Corps, battered though these formations were. German troops failed to eliminate the Soviet bridgehead at Steinau, but Koniev for his part failed to encircle enemy units squeezed southwards by 1st Belorussian Front and intent on escaping across the Oder. The German bridgehead at Glogau on the eastern bank survived yet awhile, though Gordov and Lelyushenko managed a limited encirclement at Leszno, eliminating about 15,000 German troops. Tattered though the German divisions had become, Koniev’s assault armies were also severely worn down; Lelyushenko had outpaced his supply and was running short of fuel and ammunition, with air-drops scarcely making up for the shortfall. But the bridgehead at Steinau held and, in spite of furious German resistance at Brieg, a large consolidated bridgehead fifty miles long and fifteen deep was built up south of Breslau. Breslau itself, however, set about manning its elderly forts and improvised anti-tank defences, transforming itself into a fortress of astonishing resilience and extraordinary tenacity.

As their armies drew up to and massed along the river Oder, both Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Koniev fixed their gaze on one compelling and commanding target—Berlin. Only forty-eight miles separated the capital of the
Reich
from the Küstrin Bridgehead at the tip of Zhukov’s massive salient driven into the eastern reaches of Germany. The capture of Berlin now loomed increasingly large in the minds of the Soviet military commanders, persuaded that one final all-out,
high-speed attack was feasible in view of the present pace and scope of the Soviet offensive. That view was also shared at the centre: as Soviet armies drew up to the Mlawa–Lodz–Czestochowa–Cracow line, the Soviet General Staff on 19 January formally plotted the capture of Berlin on its working operations map as Zhukov’s next assignment with 1st Belorussian Front. The final decision to go for Berlin would not be taken, however, without consulting the two Front commanders themselves.

Marshal Zhukov evidently decided on 26 January to go flat out for Berlin; that same day he submitted his plans for a non-stop offensive aiming at the capture of Berlin. Zhukov’s plan involved reaching the Berlinchen (Barlinek)–Landsberg–Grätz line, concentrating his Front forces, replenishing ammunition stocks and bringing his armour into a full state of readiness, moving 3rd Shock Army and 1st Polish Army into the first echelon of the Front and, on the morning of 1 or 2 February, opening a non-stop offensive to force the Oder off the march and then strike along ‘the Berlin axis’; 2nd Guards and 1st Guards Tank Army would converge on Berlin from the north-west and north-east respectively. Hot on the heels of Marshal Zhukov’s plan came that of Marshal Koniev: the first phase of his operations, timed for 5 or 6 February, envisaged eliminating German forces at Breslau by an attack launched from the two large bridgeheads north and south of the city, followed by an advance to the river Elbe which was to be reached by 25–26 February. Koniev’s right-flank armies would then co-operate with Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front in the capture of Berlin, while left-flank armies advanced in the direction of Dresden, relying for support in this operation on 4th Ukrainian Front. At this juncture these plans clearly coincided with Stalin’s own view of the situation, for they were approved without demur and without delay, Zhukov’s on 27 January, Koniev’s on 29 January. Both Fronts, 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian, were apparently free to strike out for Berlin.

For all the forthrightness of these decisions, a certain confusion began to prevail both within the Front commands and at the centre. There were unmistakable signs that the
Stavka
was no longer entirely abreast of the pace and extent of the Soviet advance: Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front had speedily outstripped its
Stavka
directives, while Zhukov’s Front was almost five days ahead of schedule when it reached the Kutno–Lodz line, yet no great thought seems to have been given to re-examining rates of advance and possible objectives. As they outran
Stavka
directives, so also were Soviet armies overreaching themselves in terms of supplies of fuel and ammunition; in the onward armoured rush, Soviet tank crews would fill up from one or two vehicles, leave them stranded and press on with the remainder of the battalion or company, but this could not solve the problem of ammunition. At the same time Marshal Zhukov was looking with growing anxiety at his northern flank—and yet again at his southern flank, where he depended on Marshal Koniev. On 31 January he sent an urgent signal to Stalin stressing that the frontage of 1st Belorussian Front had now reached 500 kilometres, that Rokossovskii’s left flank was lagging appreciably behind the right
flank of 1st Belorussian Front—Rokossovskii
must
push his 70th Army forward—and Marshal Koniev should gain the Oder line as speedily as possible. Marshal Zhukov received no reply to this urgent signal, and thus was faced with the dilemma of buttressing his outstretched right flank and at the same time concentrating all his armies for the advance on Berlin. Meanwhile the General Staff was trying to resolve an impossible military conundrum, in which Stalin had designated Marshal Zhukov alone as ‘the victor of Berlin’, yet Marshal Koniev was to participate in the operation. The General Staff simply closed its eyes to this problem for the moment and took solace in the fact that Berlin was still some way off.

Confusion and contradiction now began to creep into Soviet orders at all levels. Zhukov had already pointed out the danger on his right flank but received no hint of any response from the
Stavka
and, more important, no indication that reinforcement would be forthcoming. He was trying to pull all his armies into one main striking force directed against Berlin, yet he had to make provision to defend his right flank, ‘a huge and almost unprotected gap’ opening wider with each day between 1st Belorussian and 2nd Belorussian Front; it proved impossible, for example, to regroup 47th Army with the main striking force. On 1 February, 8th Guards and 5th Shock Armies had reached and crossed the Oder, taking small bridgeheads near the fortress of Küstrin; 69th Army had also reached the Oder, but German troops still held a bridgehead of their own near Frankfurt. For his immediate purposes Zhukov could count on four rifle armies and two tank armies drawn up along ‘the Berlin axis’, but two of the rifle armies—8th Guards and 69th—had detached part of their forces to deal with the fortress of Poznan, while Berzarin’s 5th Shock was besieging Küstrin with elements of that army. On the embattled right flank the 1st Polish, 3rd Shock and 61st Armies were forced to leave more divisions to reduce the ‘fortress’ of Schneidermühl and other strong-points.

Losses and shortages further denuded Zhukov’s assault forces. Chuikov could only commit fifty per cent of 8th Guards for the proposed attack on Berlin (the other half of his army was presently held back at Poznan); battle losses had made heavy inroads into Chuikov’s strength, with regiments down to two battalions and the companies reduced to an average strength of 22–45 men. Ammunition was becoming alarmingly scarce and Chuikov had fallen back on using captured German guns with captured ammunition. Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army and the 33rd and 69th Armies also reported growing shortages of ammunition and depleted ranks. Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Army mustered 737 tanks and
SP
guns at the time of breaking through to the Oder, of which 567 were in working order with 750–1,000 miles on the clock and 180–200 engine-hours piled up. All Soviet formations were calling for increased air support, but poor weather and the difficulties in moving up Soviet squadrons kept the Soviet air force out of the battle; heavy snow and rain turned grass airfields into quagmires, making
take-off and landing impossible. A great clamour went up from all sides for
AA
guns in order to provide some kind of air defence.

Faced with growing German resistance on the Oder, with the appearance of German reinforcements along ‘the Berlin axis’ and with growing German strength in East Pomerania—directed against the right flank of 1st Belorussian Front and the left of 2nd Belorussian—Marshal Zhukov, caught up in the ambiguity and imprecision of the
Stavka’s
stance, followed one set of orders by instructing his armies to dig in and honoured the other by issuing a provisional attack order for the Berlin operation. Zhukov specifically ordered 5th Shock Army to hold on, at the same time issuing a general brief—
orientirovka
—covering the proposed attack on Berlin to the military soviets of all armies, to all arms commanders and to the chief of Front logistics. Divided into two main sections, this operational document described German dispositions and detailed Soviet tasks: