The Second World War (76 page)

Meanwhile the other three Ukrainian fronts had gone over to the offensive along the whole length of the lower Dnieper, with results which threatened the flanks of Manstein’s Army Group South. The Third and Second Ukrainian Fronts first seized a large bridgehead near Krivoy Rog on Manstein’s southern flank; then, on 3 November, the First Ukrainian Front broke across the Dnieper below the Pripet to recapture Kiev, in the most spectacular reversal of fortunes on the Eastern Front since the encirclement of Stalingrad.

During November the White Russian and Baltic Fronts also moved into action north of the Pripet, advancing from Bryansk to recapture Smolensk – a place of agony for the Red Army in 1941 – and threaten Vitebsk. They were now mobile on Napoleon’s route to Moscow of 1812, but in the opposite direction, and giving Hitler cause to fear for the safety of the Baltic states and the approaches to the 1939 frontier of eastern Poland.

Unseasonably mild weather in December, which left unfrozen the network of waterways and small lakes above the Pripet, temporarily spared the
Ostheer
from the difficulty of defending the Smolensk-Minsk route westward across the upper Dnieper. However, Hitler had announced in Führer Directive No. 51 (3 November) that he imminently expected an Anglo-American invasion in the west and that he could ‘no longer take responsibility for further weakening in the west, in favour of other theatres of war’. Indeed, he had ‘therefore decided to reinforce its defences’; the decision meant that the
Ostheer
could no longer count on reinforcements from the quieter, so-called OKW sectors – France, Italy and Scandinavia – but must fight its battles with the strength it had available and such replacements as the Home Army could find.

‘The vast extent of territory in the east’, Hitler conceded in Führer Directive No. 51, ‘makes it possible for us to lose ground, even on a large scale, without a fatal blow being struck to the nervous system of Germany.’ This admission implied that he might be ready to accept the submissions of his eastern marshals, Manstein foremost among them, that the most profitable way of fighting the Red Army was to employ a strategy of withdrawing from territory before mounting a further attack. The implication was not to be borne out in practice. During the winter of 1943-4 the Red Army came on in even greater strength than before; but Hitler’s reluctance to concede territory proved as fixed as ever – nowhere more so than on the southern front. Hitler not only clung to the hope of retaining the mines at Nikopol and Krivoy Rog but constantly emphasised the danger of allowing the Crimea to become a Soviet air base for attack on the Romanian oilfields and – a particular obsession – argued that its loss would encourage Turkey to enter the war on the Allied side.

Manstein, who had withdrawn his command post to Hitler’s old summer headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, travelled to Rastenburg twice during January to argue the case for withdrawal, but on both occasions it was refused. His Army Group South, moreover, fought stoutly to hold its front together against relentless attacks by the First and Second Ukrainian Fronts, now under Zhukov’s direct command, and at first gave ground less slowly than Kleist’s Army Group A. Assaulted by the Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts on 10 January, Army Group A was nearly encircled in its efforts to retain Nikopol and Krivoy Rog, and after Hitler issued formal permission for a retreat which could be no longer avoided it eventually escaped, at the expense of abandoning most of its artillery and transport. By mid-February, however, Army Group South was also in severe straits; two of its corps were encircled by Vatutin between the Dnieper and Vinnitsa west of Cherkassy and were rescued on 17 February only by concentrating all the available armour to help them break out. This operation by the First and Fourth Panzer Armies, which had previously halted a menacing thrust by Konev’s Second Ukrainian Front towards Uman, caused Manstein’s tanks to be wrongly placed to check a subsequent onset by the First Ukrainian Front south of Pripet. By 1 March the First Ukrainian Front had crossed the 1939 frontier of Poland, was menacing Lvov and was less than 100 miles from the Carpathians, southern Europe’s only mountain barrier against an invasion from the east.

There was a crisis too on the northern front, where Army Group North, now commanded by General Georg von Küchler, was attacked on 15 January. In a whirlwind advance three Soviet fronts, the Leningrad, Volkhov and Second Baltic, had moved to the assault and by 19 January had breached Army Group North’s defences in three places, widened the narrow corridor connecting Leningrad to the rest of Russia and liberated the city after a thousand days of siege; the blockade, which had starved a million Leningraders to death, was formally declared at an end on 26 January, when the city’s entire artillery fired a twenty-four-gun salute. Behind Leningrad, however, ran the only length of the projected ‘East Wall’ which had been brought to a state of completion. During the early stages of the Leningrad offensive Hitler withheld permission for a withdrawal into it, demanding that Küchler, whom he reproached with having the strongest army in the east, should fortify an intermediate position on the Luga river. As it became clear that time and resources lacked, however, on 13 February he was obliged to sanction a retreat to the ‘Panther’ line, as the East Wall along the line from Narva to Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov was denominated. The retreat, like the prospect of abandoning the Crimea, caused him acute political misgivings, since he believed – with reason – that it would encourage Finland to open secret negotiations with the Russians for a separate peace.

Hitler’s current difficulties remained military, however, not political. Zeitzler, his chief of staff, fed him with assurances in late February that 18 million Russians of military age had now been eliminated and that Stalin disposed of only 2 million in his manpower reserve; in mid-October Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Foreign Armies East section, had warned, by contrast, that the Red Army would in future ‘surpass Germany in terms of manpower, equipment and the field of propaganda’. Gehlen was right, Zeitzler wrong. The Red Army had now assembled exactly the sort of central armoured reserve which Hitler had allowed OKH to cast away in the cauldron of Kursk and was able to move it about the front as opportunity for breakthrough offered. By mid-February the Stavka had concentrated five of its tank armies opposite Army Group South; the sixth arrived at the end of the month. On 18 February Stalin issued orders for them to attack at the beginning of March: the First Ukrainian Front was to open the offensive on 4 March; the Second and Third were to join it on 5 and 6 March. Between them they outnumbered the Germans opposite by two to one in infantry and more than two to one in armour.

There was a last-minute impediment. Vatutin, commanding the First Ukrainian Front, fell into an ambush mounted by Ukrainian separatist partisans – combatants in a shadow war between Russians, Germans and Poles for local dominance over the Pripet borderlands which the onset of the Red Army was now making irrelevant – and was mortally wounded on 29 February. He was a grave loss to the Soviet high command; but his place was immediately taken by Zhukov, who, as at Stalingrad, exercised direct control of the coming offensive. It opened with one of the devastating bombardments which had become the signature of the Red Army’s operational methods ever since the enormous wartime expansion of the artillery. The First Ukrainian Front quickly opened a gap between the flanks of the First and Fourth Panzer Armies and rolled forward; the Fourth Panzer Army was encircled at Kamenets near Lake Ilmen and forced to break out. The Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts made even faster progress against the weaker forces of Army Group A. By 15 April they had broken and crossed all three of the river lines on which the Germans might have hoped to stand, the Bug, the Dniester and the Prut, had retaken Odessa and had left the Seventeenth Army isolated in the Crimea to their rear. On 8 April moreover, Tolbukhin’s Fourth Ukrainian Front suddenly enlarged its bridgehead on the Crimean Kerch peninsula, rolled forward, and surrounded the survivors of the Seventeenth Army in a small pocket around Sevastopol, exactly as the French and British had done to the Russians in 1854 – and Rundstedt to the Red Army in 1941. The Russian defenders of Sevastopol had held out heroically in the eight-month siege from November 1941 to July 1942. In early May 1944 Hitler conceded that he could not sustain the city’s defence and it was evacuated in four nights between 4 and 8 May; over 30,000 German soldiers were nevertheless abandoned within the perimeter and made captive when the Russians liberated the city on 9 May.

The spring offensive on the southern front had been a triumph for the Red Army. Between March and mid-April it had advanced 165 miles, overrun three potential defensive positions, recovered, if in gravely devastated condition, some of the most productive territory in the Soviet Union, deprived Hitler of his cherished strategic outpost and inflicted irreparable damage on Army Groups A, South and Centre. The Seventeenth Army, the garrison of the Crimea, had disappeared altogether, with the loss of over 100,000 German and allied Romanian troops.

The débâcle in the south had already prompted Hitler to impose a cosmetic change on the
Ostheer
there. On 30 March he had summoned Manstein and Kleist to Rastenburg, told them that what the southern front needed was ‘a new name, a new slogan and a commander expert in defensive strategy’ and announced that they were relieved. Manstein was to be replaced by Model, the general who had stabilised the Leningrad front on the ‘Panther Line’, and Kleist by General Ferdinand Schörner, an even more fanatical devotee of the Nazi regime and a consummate promoter of his own reputation. Thus at a stroke the two great Panzer breakthrough experts were removed, to be replaced by men whose capacity was for the ruthless subjection of their soldiers to orders and slavish obedience to the Führer’s authority. Zeitzler, also a disciplinarian, retained enough integrity to offer his own resignation at the news. Hitler refused it, with the warning, ‘A general cannot resign’.

In a wholly empty gesture, Hitler also ordered a few days later that Army Groups South and A were to be renamed North and South Ukraine respectively, in token of his stated determination to recapture that territory, of which none now remained in his possession. However, not only did he lack the means to mount any offensive or even to find the reserves to shore up a defensive battle; in the spring of 1944 he was faced with the threat of seaborne invasion in France and the reality of an Allied breakthrough in Italy. In the east it was Stalin who retained the strategic initiative and who, on the heels of his Ukrainian triumph, was planning a further offensive which would clear the
Ostheer
from the soil of Russia once and for all.

During May Stalin commissioned two of his senior staff officers, S. M. Shtemenko, General Staff chief of operations, and Timoshenko, representing the Stavka, to examine each sector of the Soviet front – 2000 miles long between the Baltic and Black Seas – and report on possibilities. Their analysis was as follows: to persist in the advance towards the Carpathians, despite the political advantages of heightening the threat to Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and ultimately Yugoslavia, was dangerous because it would lengthen the flank presented to Army Group Centre. To advance from Leningrad down the Baltic coast would menace East Prussia but not the German heartland, and would also risk a counterstroke by Army Group Centre. By elimination, therefore, the desirable strategy was to wipe out Army Group Centre itself, which still occupied the most important sector of historically Russian territory and also guarded the route to Warsaw, on the high road to Berlin. To do so would require organisational changes, notably the reinforcement and division of the White Russian and Baltic Fronts which opposed it. However, given the Red Army’s new-found ability to concentrate strength rapidly on an altered axis, such a redeployment was feasible.

During April the ‘western’ theatre of operations was reorganised. The two White Russian and Baltic Fronts each became three. New generals were appointed, and senior commanders – Vasilevsky and Zhukov – were nominated to supervisory roles. Tank reinforcements and artillery reserves were concentrated on the White Russian fronts. Diversionary moves were co-ordinated at the extreme southern and northern ends of the whole theatre of operations – the latter not merely diversionary, since a subsidiary component of the summer offensive was intended to be a surprise attack designed to drive Finland out of the war. Finally, the First Ukrainian Front, south of the Pripet, commanded by the experienced Konev, was filled out with tank armies drawn from the other Ukrainian fronts to mount a long-range encircling manoeuvre round the Pripet Marshes into the flank of Model’s Army Group North and eventually against that of Army Group Centre itself. The operation was to be the most ambitious the Red Army had ever staged. All it lacked was a name; on 20 May, when Stalin received the detailed plan from the General Staff, he announced that it would be called Bagration, after the general mortally wounded at Borodino on the route between White Russia and Moscow during Napoleon’s invasion of 1812.

The attack on Finland by the Leningrad Front began on 9 June and, though mounted only with marginal force, soon consumed the tiny Finnish army’s reserves. On 28 July the Finnish President asked leave to transfer his office to the national leader, Marshal Mannerheim, who at once began negotiations for a separate peace. His approaches were to be answered at the end of August.

Meanwhile Stalin had set a date for the opening of Bagration. At Tehran the previous November he had assured Churchill and Roosevelt that the operation would be timed to coincide with D-Day. The date he chose was 22 June, the third anniversary of Hitler’s unprovoked and surprise attack on the Soviet Union. In the three preceding nights the Russian partisan groups based in Army Group Centre’s rear area busied themselves laying demolition charges on the rail lines which supplied its logistic needs; over 40,000 charges were exploded on 19, 20 and 21 June. Both OKH and OKW nevertheless discounted the possibility that these attacks supplied evidence of an offensive in preparation. Since early May the Eastern Front had been quiet, and Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East section insisted that such signs as there were indicated the preparation of a new offensive against Army Group North Ukraine; it was what Gehlen called ‘the Balkans solution’, precisely what the Stavka had rejected. The Luftwaffe, through its own intelligence service and reconnaissance flights, took a contrary view; it had established that 4500 Soviet aircraft were concentrated against Army Group Centre. Warning of this, which came to Hitler on 17 June, alarmed him and prompted him to order IV Air Corps, his last intact air striking force in the east, to undertake spoiling attacks. However, the Russian concentration was too large for any attack to be effective, and it was now too late to move ground forces to stand behind Army Group Centre’s front.