The Second World War (77 page)

At 4 am on 22 June Bagration opened with a short artillery bombardment, behind which infantry reconnaissance units moved to the attack. Zhukov was anxious that the assault should not waste itself on empty positions. The real offensive developed next day, when heavier infantry waves supported by dense formations of aircraft pressed up to the main German defences, opening the way for the tanks in their rear. They were the vanguard of 166 divisions, supported by 2700 tanks and 1300 assault guns, against which Army Group Centre, on an 800-mile front, could oppose only thirty-seven divisions, weakly supported by armour.

The first German formation to suffer disaster was the Ninth Army, holding the southern sector of the army group’s front. It was threatened with encirclement by the First and Second White Russian Fronts on the second day of the offensive, and when, on 26 June, Hitler gave it permission to fall back east of Minsk to the river Berezina (on which Napoleon’s Grand Army had been savaged in 1812) it was too late. Its neighbour, the Fourth Army, was the next to suffer. Although also granted permission to withdraw on 26 June, it was trapped in a wider encirclement by the First and Third White Russian Fronts and devastated east of Minsk by 29 June. At the end of the first week of Bagration the three German armies which had stood in its immediate path had lost between them nearly 200,000 men and 900 tanks; the Ninth Army and the Third Panzer Army were shadows, each with only three or four operational divisions, and the Fourth Army was in full retreat. Hitler was now confronted with the prospect of a vast gap opening on the Eastern Front, and he was troubled simultaneously by other crises, great and small. The Allied landing in France had secured a foothold, Finland was crumbling, and his favourite general, Dietl, who had saved the situation in northern Norway in 1940, had been killed in an air crash while flying back to secure the German position in the Arctic on 22 June. On 28 June he replaced Field Marshal Ernst von Busch with the general who was emerging as his ‘fireman’, Model, at Army Group Centre, also leaving him Army Group North Ukraine as a source of reserves.

However, not even Model’s firefighting abilities could quell the conflagration which was destroying his army group. By 2 July he concluded that there was no hope of getting the Fourth Army back intact to Minsk, since it was now pinned against the Berezina, which the Second White Russian Front had already crossed at Lepel. He therefore concentrated his efforts on trying to hold open escape routes on each side of the city, but the rapid advance of Soviet armour – Rotmistrov’s Fifth Tank Army made thirty miles in a day down the Minsk-Moscow highway on 2 July – quickly quashed that plan. Minsk fell on 3 July while the Fourth Army stood encircled to the east; 40,000 of its 105,000 troops died trying to break out. After a last attempt to airdrop supplies on 5 July, the survivors began to surrender; the commander of XII Corps offered a formal surrender on 8 July; and by 11 July there was no further resistance in the pocket.

The encirclement of the Fourth Army effectively concluded the Battle of White Russia; the victory was formally celebrated on 17 July, when 57,000 captives were marched through silent crowds in the streets of Moscow to the prison camps. By then the spearheads of the Soviet attacking fronts were already far to the west of the ground where the captives had been made prisoner. On 4 July the Stavka had designated new objectives for each of them, on an arc which ran from Riga in Latvia to Lublin in southern Poland and touched the frontier of East Prussia. For the first time in the war the territory of the Reich itself lay under threat. During the second week of July they drove on; by 10 July Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, was in Soviet hands and the Third White Russian Front had set foot on German soil. On 13 July Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, with 1000 tanks and 3000 artillery pieces, opened its offensive by attacking Lvov, the old Austro-Hungarian bastion of eastern Galicia. A difficult objective, and strongly defended, Lvov fell on 27 July; by then Rokossovsky’s First White Russian Front had swung southward round the edge of the Pripet Marshes to reach out towards it. At the end of the first week in August the two fronts had reached the line of the river Vistula and its tributary, the San, south of Warsaw, while the First Baltic and the other White Russian Fronts had crossed the Niemen and the Bug, the Vistula’s northern tributary, to menace Warsaw from the other flank.

A sense of treachery oppressed Hitler at every hand. The common German soldiers remained loyal to him, but his officers, whom he had never trusted as a class, had begun to throw up traitors. The ‘Seydlitz’ group, formed from those who had surrendered at Stalingrad and gone over to the ‘anti-fascist cause’, had been active with radio and leaflet propaganda against Army Group Centre on the eve of Bagration; sixteen of the generals captured in its course were prevailed upon by the Russians to issue an ‘appeal’ on 22 July which alleged that its 350,000 lost soldiers had been ‘sacrificed in a game of chance’. Two days earlier Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had tried to kill him in his own headquarters, as the opening move in a conspiracy designed to replace the National Socialist regime with a government acceptable to the West. In the course of that day Zeitzler disappeared from his post as chief of staff; whether he was dismissed or simply fled has never been clarified. Then on 1 August the Polish Home Army seized the centre of Warsaw.

The motivation for the Polish Home Army’s rising in Warsaw was complex; so too was the explanation for the failure of the Red Army – by 1 August close at hand on the eastern bank of the Vistula – to come to the patriots’ rescue. On 29 July Radio Kosciuszko in the Soviet Union, run by Polish communists under Soviet control, had broadcast an appeal for an uprising and promised that Russian help was close at hand. The Home Army itself was caught in a dilemma: according to Erickson, ‘not to act meant being stigmatised a virtual collaborator with the Nazis or else being written off as the nonenity which Stalin insisted the Polish underground was.’ Stalin had his own satellite Polish army, the People’s Army, currently fighting in Operation Bagration. He also had an alternative Polish government, known in the West as the ‘Lublin Committee’, from the recently captured Polish border city where it had proclaimed itself. On 3 August Stalin met Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the Polish Prime Minister of the government in exile, who had come to Moscow for talks about future relationships with the Soviet regime. Stalin at first professed to be uninformed about the rising, then warned that he could not tolerate disunity between the ‘London’ and the ‘Lublin’ Poles, consistently refused facilities for British-based planes to supply arms to the insurgents, regretted that German counter-attacks near Warsaw made it impossible for the First White Russian Front (nearest to the city) to continue its advance, but finally assured Mikolajczyk, on 9 August, that ‘we shall do everything possible to help’.

By then it was too late. Model had indeed scraped together enough armour to mount a holding attack on 29 July against Rokossovsky’s First White Russian Front near Praga, the Warsaw suburb across the Vistula. Then Himmler, whom Hitler had entrusted with authority to put down the Warsaw rising, brought up troops, including the Dirlewanger brigade of German criminals and the Kaminski brigade of Russian turncoats, both recently formed by the SS for internal security operations judged to demand particular ruthlessness. Within twenty-four hours of the outbreak they opened a reign of terror against the city’s inhabitants – combatant or not – which, through fighting, massacre or area bombardment, would bring death to 200,000 of them before the rising was over.

‘Now set Europe ablaze’ was Winston Churchill’s instruction to Hugh Dalton on appointing him to direct the Special Operations Executive set up at Churchill’s express wish on 22 July 1940, to foment and sponsor resistance to Hitler’s rule of occupied Europe. No event in the history of occupied Europe’s defiance of Hitler more exactly matched Churchill’s expectation of what a ‘setting ablaze’ might mean than the Warsaw uprising of August 1944. It confronted Hitler with an acute internal military crisis; it threw down a challenge to oppressed peoples elsewhere within his empire to do likewise; it endorsed the message Churchill had proclaimed to the English-speaking nations throughout the war – that the defeated were ready to rise against tyranny when the moment offered; and it validated the ‘parallel’ war of subversion and sabotage sponsored by the British and American ‘special’ agencies inside occupied Europe during four years of conventional war against its periphery.

So it appeared on the surface. Historically, however, it must be recognised that for all the bravery and suffering of the Polish Home Army in seven weeks of combat against Hitler’s security troops – 10,000 fighters killed, perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians killed also – the Warsaw rising was not a spontaneous reaction to the brutality of occupation. Nor, by any objective valuation, did it seriously undermine Hitler’s ability to maintain order within Poland at large while continuing to sustain an effective defence against the Red Army, which had halted on the far side of the Vistula at the moment the rising broke out. On the contrary: the rising was precipitated by the Home Army’s calculation that the Germans’ defeat in the Battle of White Russia presented it with a not to be repeated chance of seizing Poland’s capital city for the government in exile before the arrival of the Red Army led to the installation of Stalin’s puppet Polish regime; but its calculation was invalidated by the failure of the Russians to maintain military pressure on the Germans, who, in turn, found the means to fight – and eventually defeat – the insurgents without drawing on their front-line strength.

Far from demonstrating what an earlier uprising in a series of similar insurrections might have contributed to the defeat of Hitler, therefore, Warsaw stood as an awful warning of how dangerous it was, even at that late stage of the war, for any of his subject peoples to take up arms against him on territory which remained under the Wehrmacht’s control. If Warsaw were not sufficient proof, the point was reinforced by the experience of the Maquis in southern France in June and of the Slovaks in July. In France, on D-Day itself, the Maquis of the Grenoble region set up the standard of revolt on the plateau of Vercors, from which it began to raid German troops using the Rhône valley route; by July there were several thousand Maquisards at Vercors, most of them fugitives from the forced labour programme. Army Group G, which was being troubled by pinprick attacks all over its area of responsibility, then decided to make an example of this isolated and vulnerable resistance base, cordoned the plateau, landed SS troops by glider on the summit and between 18 and 23 July brutally killed everyone they found there. On a small scale it anticipated the action German security troops were simultaneously taking against the Slovak rebels in eastern Czechoslovakia. Elements of the satellite Slovak army rose against the occupation forces in the expectation of imminent Russian intervention, but were not rescued and were put to the sword. Hitler had to deal with no further uprising – except the carefully timed outbreak of insurrection in Paris during the week of its liberation – while his armies still stood on conquered territory.

What made the Vercors massacre all the more dispiriting for those committed to Churchill’s policy of ‘setting Europe ablaze’ was that the resistance had been supported and supplied by the Special Operations Executive; one of SOE’s liaison teams (codenamed ‘Jedburghs’) had been parachuted to the support of the Vercors Maquisards, who on 14 July had received a drop of 1000 loads of weapons and ammunition flown to the plateau by the USAAF. This supply had availed them not at all. Although led by a French regular officer, the resistance fighters wholly lacked the experience and training to engage professional troops – who were in any case indoctrinated to put down resistance with pitiless brutality.

Warsaw, Slovakia and Vercors, coming so late in the course of the Second World War, were key events in the history of Hitler’s Europe against which all other resistance and subversion to his rule between 1939 and 1945 must be set in the balance. (The partisan wars behind German lines in Russia and Yugoslavia are exceptions and require separate consideration.) If the three uprisings typify in their outcome the unintended effect of the programme of subversion, sabotage and resistance which Churchill, later abetted by Roosevelt, and the European governments in exile so ardently supported after June 1940, the programme must be adjudged a costly and misguided failure. All failed at the price of very great suffering to the brave patriots involved but at trifling cost to the German forces that put them down; as a result, all the lesser and preliminary activities of the resistance forces which they crowned must be seen, by any objective reckoning, as irrelevant and pointless acts of bravado. If that is a fair verdict on European resistance and the Allied efforts to plan and support it, what is the explanation for its failure?

At the root of Churchill’s misapprehension of what resistance could achieve against ideological tyranny, a misapprehension shared by hundreds of intelligent and energetic men and women among his fellow countrymen, was a total misunderstanding of the role of public opinion in the politics of conquest. Britain’s history is suffused both by conquest and by resistance to it. In Churchill’s own lifetime the boundaries of the British Empire had been greatly extended by military force, in South, West and East Africa, in the Middle East, in Arabia and in south-east Asia. However, the tide of British imperialism had always been tempered by extraneous factors: the continuing influence of anti-imperialism, domestic and foreign, and the British empire-builders’ own ethos of equity and trusteeship. Confronted by rebellion and atrocity in India during the Great Mutiny of 1857-8, the mid-Victorians reacted with a ruthlessness from which Hitler’s security forces could have learned little. Their successors were raised in a more equitable philosophy of empire. ‘Eventual self-rule’ became the principle on which colonial governments were founded in Africa in the late-Victorian and post-Edwardian era; ‘trusteeship’ was the concept on which Britain administered the African and Arabian mandates granted by the League of Nations; ‘self-rule as soon as possible’ informed the regime which Britain imposed on the Afrikaner republics in the wake of the Boer War; and the same spirit transfused British rule in India in the years after the First World War.