The Second World War (82 page)

Hitler had meanwhile also quashed another attempt at defection among his eastern satellites. Slovakia, ruled since October 1939, in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment, by Joseph Tiso, a signatory of the Tripartite Pact and a co-belligerent in the war against Russia, had been seething with internal discord since the spring. While the ‘London’ Czechs, legitimately the government in exile, looked to a post-war settlement to restore them to power, the dissident Slovaks, through the underground Czechoslovak Communist Party, were in contact with Moscow, which sponsored a small army in exile stationed on Russian territory. Part of the Slovak army of Monsignor Tiso’s puppet state remained under German control on the Eastern Front; the rest, stationed at home, fell increasingly under patriot influence. A pro-Soviet partisan movement was also active in eastern Slovakia, towards which Operation Bagration had drawn the Fourth Ukrainian Front at the beginning of August. At the end of August the pro-Soviet partisans precipitated action. Liaising directly with the Red Army and bypassing both the London Czechs and the dissidents’ ‘Slovak National Council’, on 25 August they initiated a national uprising, in which they were joined by the home-based Slovak army, and looked for support to the Russians beyond the Carpathians. Their response was far more positive than it had been to the Polish Home Army in Warsaw. They at once sent liaison officers and initiated an offensive by the First and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts to come to the insurgents’ rescue. They also airlifted parts of the Czech army in exile from Russia into Slovakia and embodied the rest in the Ukrainian fronts fighting to cross the Slovak passes through the Carpathians. However, pressure from without and within was not strong enough to overcome the response Hitler organised to preserve his position in Slovakia. Two German corps, XXIV Panzer and XI, were sent to man the Carpathian position, including the key Dukla Pass. At the end of September the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army, assisted by the I Czechoslovak (exile) Corps, was still battering against the pass, and it did not fall until 6 October. Meanwhile the security troops which were so experienced in anti-partisan operations in the eastern theatre were being earmarked for commitment. Two SS divisions formed from ethnic minorities, the 18th
Horst Wessel
(racial German) and the 14th Galizian (Ukrainian), were concentrated for a counter-offensive, together with five German army divisions; by 18 October the Dirlewanger and Kaminski brigades had also been brought down from Warsaw to turn their murderous talents against the Slovaks. Between 18 and 20 October ‘free Slovakia’ was assaulted at eleven points and by the end of the month the insurrection was extinct. The Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army and the I Czechoslovak Corps (commanded by General Ludwik Svoboda, whom the Russians would install as Dubcúek’s successor after the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968) suffered 80,000 casualties in the effort to come to the insurgents’ rescue; almost all the insurgents who did not escape into the hills died in combat or in concentration camps.

In the extreme south of his Balkan theatre, Hitler was to prove less successful at shoring up a defence than in Hungary and Slovakia. The occupation of Greece had been crumbling since the capitulation of the Italians in September 1943, when at least 12,000 of their weapons had fallen into the hands of the resistance. The Greek partisans had been fighting bravely and doggedly against the occupiers, as their forefathers had done in the war to liberate their homeland from the Turks 120 years earlier. Many of the British liaison officers whom SOE infiltrated into the Greek islands and mainland were touched by a Byronic afterglow, seeing themselves as successors to the philhellenes who had fought at the patriots’ side in the War of Liberation in the 1820s. However, German reprisals against the villages near which the resistance attacks took place were ferocious; at the Nuremberg trial a prosecution lawyer was to testify that ‘in Greece there are a thousand Lidices [Lidice was the Czech village obliterated after the assassination of Heydrich], their names unknown and their inhabitants forgotten.’ Therefore much SOE effort was devoted to restraining rather than encouraging the partisans; but the British liaison officers had not been able to check violence between the right and left wings of the resistance movement, which, as in Yugoslavia, obeyed different authorities – ELAS the Greek Communist Party, EDES the Greek government in exile in Cairo. The Germans restored and maintained order after the surrender of the Italians – whom they treated with almost as much brutality as any partisans they caught – but, as their Balkan position began to collapse, they evacuated the Greek islands (except for Crete and Rhodes) from 12 September and then on 12 October the whole of Greece. As they left and the British began to arrive, the first round of a civil war between ELAS and EDES broke out; it was to be quelled, at a tragic cost in British lives, by the intervention of the 2nd Parachute Brigade and other formations against ELAS at Christmas.

Army Group E, the German command in Greece and Albania, had a single hope of salvation, which was to find its way through the Ibar and Morava valleys to link up with Army Group F in Yugoslavia. The sudden onset of the Third Ukrainian Front, now supported by the Bulgarian Army, forced it to fight a desperate rearguard action. Meanwhile Army Group F was confronted by a Soviet assault on its eastern flank aimed at the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. The Third Ukrainian Front had crossed the Yugoslav border on 6 September, prompting Tito to fly to Moscow from a British airfield on the Adriatic island of Vis to discuss the terms on which the Red Army would operate on Yugoslav territory. In a remarkable exercise in negotiation from weakness, Tito persuaded Stalin by 28 September to agree to lend troops from the Third Ukrainian Front for a joint assault on Belgrade but to withdraw them, leaving civil administration in Tito’s hands, once the operational task was complete. The battle for Belgrade opened on 14 October and ended on 20 October; 15,000 German soldiers were killed and 9000 taken prisoner in the defence of the city. Tito paraded his Partisans through the streets as victors on 22 October; of his ‘Belgrade battalion’, which had fought the three-year partisan war, only two of its original members were still in the ranks.

The rest of Yugoslavia now lay open to an extension of the Soviet offensive; Army Group E, which had incorporated F, was holding an indefensible north-south flank which ran from the outskirts of Belgrade to the Albanian frontier. However, in mid-October Stalin had agreed with Churchill in Moscow a strange division of ‘spheres of influence’ in the Balkans which gave Britain a 50 per cent share in Yugoslavia. An odd streak of legalism in Soviet diplomacy lent this agreement force; but Stalin also had other fish to fry. Hitler’s successful coup against Horthy in Budapest had destroyed the chance of making a quick advance, by a negotiated armistice, into the Hungarian plain. The approach to Vienna, up the Danube valley, would now have to be fought for; the force it would require meant that the Red Army could not afford to dissipate its strength in the mountains of central Yugoslavia, where conditions would put even the battered formations of Army Groups E and F on equal terms. On 18 October, therefore, the Stavka had ordered Tolbukhin to halt the Third Ukrainian Front west of Belgrade and turn its formations back to the Danube to take part in the coming battle of Hungary.

Hungary, however, had now been reinforced and parts of the Hungarian army (First and Second Armies) hijacked to fight on the German side. On 19 October Army Group South counter-attacked, and when Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front began its assault on 29 October, at Stalin’s express orders ‘to take Budapest as quickly as possible’, it found twelve German divisions in its path. The Russian advance reached the eastern suburbs on 4 November but was then halted; when the assault was resumed on 11 November a sixteen-day battle ensued which left much of the city in ruins but still in German hands. By then the German front line, though withdrawn 100 miles since mid-October, rested from west to east on the strong defences of the river Drava, Lake Balaton and the flanks of the Carpathians. Vienna, the prize which Stalin sought, remained secure 150 miles away along the Danube.

The campaign in Hungary thereafter took on a logic of its own and proceeded quite separately from the Red Army’s preparations on the far side of the Carpathians for the final advance into Germany. On 5 October Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front began an offensive designed to encircle Budapest from the north-west, while Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front made a feint to the south of the city between Lake Balaton and the Danube. By 31 January the Third Ukrainian Front was within seven miles of the city centre and emissaries were sent forward to offer terms for a capitulation. The city was completely surrounded, the suffering of its inhabitants was intense, and the situation of the German and Hungarian defenders appeared hopeless. Hitler, however, had decided upon a Stalingrad-style Panzer rescue. He had dismissed the commander of the Sixth Army, Maximilian Fretter-Pico, on the Budapest front, to replace him with Hermann Balck, another ‘standfast’ general of the Model type, and in late December had brought IV Panzer Corps from Army Group Centre to stage a counter-attack in concert with III Panzer Corps, which was already on the scene. The attack by IV SS Panzer began on 18 January 1945 and during the next three weeks IV and III Panzer Corps fought savagely, switching from one axis to another by road and rail, in an awful warning to Malinovsky and Tolbukhin of what damage experienced German tank soldiers could still inflict on Soviet formations operating on stereotyped and predictable fixed lines of advance. By 24 January IV Panzer Corps had driven to within fifteen miles of the German perimeter in Budapest, and the defenders could have broken out to safety had that been Hitler’s wish. As during Manstein’s winter thrust to Stalingrad in December 1942, however, he wanted the city to be recaptured, not evacuated. This vain hope collapsed when IV Panzer Corps, after three weeks of frantic operations, ran out of steam.

Within the perimeter, meanwhile, the Russians had brought up dense concentrations of 152-mm guns and 203-mm howitzers to reduce the German positions block by block in Pest, the northern half of the city. Its garrison began to surrender
en masse
on 15 January, when they were trapped with their backs to the Danube. In Buda, Pest’s twin city on the south bank, resistance held up fiercely until 5 February, when Malinovsky ordered a final assault. For a week the Germans stuck it out, taking to the sewers to frustrate the Russian advance, but by 13 February they had no more room for manoeuvre and were overwhelmed. The Stavka claimed to have killed 50,000 German and Hungarian soldiers and taken 138,000 prisoners since 27 October; it is known that only 785 Germans and some 1000 Hungarians escaped from Budapest. The Red Army’s own undisclosed losses in killed and wounded may have equalled those of the enemy.

There was to be one more battle fought in Hungary, at Lake Balaton, from which Hitler drew his last supplies of non-synthetic oil. By the time it opened on 15 February, however, a far greater battle was in preparation for the ultimate objective of the war itself: Berlin. Since early February Zhukov’s First White Russian and Konev’s First Ukrainian Fronts had been poised astride the river Oder, ready to launch themselves into the climactic offensive as soon as the Stavka defined the attack plan and made available the requisite forces. On 15 January Hitler had left the western headquarters in the Eifel mountains (
Amt
500) from which he had overseen the Ardennes offensive to return to the Reich Chancellery. For all his talk of secret weapons that were still to bring victory, he sensed the approach of the final struggle and was resolved to be present on the field in person.

Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia, from which he had directed most of the war, was now in Russian hands. The Red Army’s offensive north of the Carpathians had begun on 15 September 1944 when the three Baltic and the Leningrad Fronts had opened an attack on Schörner’s Army Group North, designed to cut it off in the Baltic states from contact with Army Group Centre and its lines of communication into Germany through East Prussia. Schörner commanded some thirty divisions, disposed in well-fortified terrain, but lacked mobile forces with which to counter-attack. Though his army group was able to slow the Russian advance, therefore, it was not able to disrupt it and on 13 October, after an eight-day battle, Riga fell to Bagramyan’s First Baltic Front. This breakthrough to the coast completed the encirclement of Army Group North (shortly to be renamed Courland) in the ‘Courland pocket’, where it would linger in pointless isolation until the end of the war; six separate battles were fought by the Red Army against it. Finland’s defection in September allowed Schörner (before he was removed to command Army Group Centre in January) to improve its position by abandoning Estonia and concentrating his forces in Latvia. Its four dependent divisions in the port of Memel, between East Prussia and Lithuania, were also surrounded in October and held out until January 1945.

The Baltic front’s clearance of the approaches to East Prussia (which a unit of the Third White Russian Front had actually entered on 17 August) now laid it open to major assault. Plans for the great offensive had been laid by the Stavka in early November and allotted the greater effort to the two fronts which lay most directly astride the route to Berlin, Konev’s First Ukrainian and the First White Russian, command of which Stalin conferred directly on Zhukov, in testimony of his proven strategic achievements. Each front now greatly exceeded any German army group in strength. Between them they controlled 163 rifle divisions, 32,000 guns, 6500 tanks and 4700 aircraft, or one-third of all current Soviet infantry strength and half the Red Army’s tanks. Together they outnumbered the German formations opposite, Army Groups Centre and A, over twofold in infantry, nearly fourfold in armour, sevenfold in artillery and sixfold in airpower. For the first time in the war the Red Army had achieved both the human and material superiority that thitherto the Wehrmacht had only faced in the west. Army Groups Centre and A, now commanded by new generals, Hans Reinhardt and Josef Harpe, disposed between them of seventy-one divisions, 1800 tanks and 800 aircraft; all their formations were under strength, and their defensive capabilities depended greatly on the ‘fortresses’ which the Prussian and Silesian border towns – Königsberg, Insterburg, Folburg, Stettin, Küstrin, Breslau – had now been so designated by Hitler.