Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (12 page)

Arnhold now focused on the islands in the middle of the Vistula as launchpads for his mine attacks. The islets were already occupied, not by the Red Army, but by geese. The officer likened them to the geese of the Roman Capitol which had alerted the garrison when the Gauls tried to storm it: neither side had succeeded in occupying the islands because of the deafening cackle of the geese, which immediately prompted a hail of artillery fire. One island, 400 yards long, was finally cleared of the birds, but that barely made the task of Arnhold’s pioneers any easier. To reach it they had to wade for more than 100 yards through the Vistula with the water up to their chests. In the river, the salt plugs on the mines dissolved and the metal detonating arms were freed, sticking out like antennae. The weapons were now live – and would explode with the slightest of shocks. Two nights running, four men volunteered to take the mines out to the island. And two nights running, the mines drifted towards the bank and detonated prematurely. But on the third night, the mines struck the nearest bridge and destroyed it. “Utterly exhausted, but with a beaming smile, the men came back to our island,” Paul Arnhold recalled. “They had probably been swimming against the current for fifteen to twenty minutes.” Night after night these ‘kamikaze swimmers’, as they became known, struck out into the Vistula and released their mines. Some hit the bridges, some did not. Arnhold recommended four of his men for the Iron Cross, but LVI Panzer Corps’ commander
General der Infanterie
Johannes Block dismissed the request. “Tossing a couple of mines into the water,” he told the
Oberst
, was “not an heroic act.” Arnhold suggested his general watch this ‘tossing’ in person. A brave man, Block did just that, wading into the Vistula then cowering under artillery fire on the island. He watched the swimmers set off with the mines. “If the men do not handle them as carefully as raw eggs, then they’ll explode – and they’ll go up with them,” Arnhold pointed out. Twenty minutes later four explosions shook the Vistula valley as the closest underwater bridge was destroyed. That same evening, Johannes Block returned and pinned Iron Crosses on these kamikaze swimmers.

The days of these mine attacks were numbered, however. First the Russians subjected the island to such a pounding from their artillery there could be no thought of launching mines. Then they stretched wires across the Vistula upstream of the bridges, causing the mines to detonate prematurely. The build-up in the Puławy bridgehead continued unimpeded.
³

Fifty miles upstream, so too did the massing of Soviet forces at Baranow. On clear days, Hans Jürgen Hartmann could look down the Vistula valley and see a road lined with trees stretching to the horizon. Day and night Russian guns, tanks and endless supply columns rolled along it. The direction was always the same: to the west. “No one disturbs them, no artillery, no aircraft,” Hartmann fumed. “The sight of these masses, even for brief glimpses, is depressing enough.” The junior officer contrasted Russian preparations with his own company’s. His men raided the ruins of nearby homes for anything they could get to shore up their positions: boards, joists, nails, spades and axes, plus a little extra to decorate their foxholes. At night the men dug fresh trenches, but to what end Hans Jürgen Hartmann did not know. “It must be an intoxicating pleasure marking this tangle of scrawled lines on large charts in beautiful colour,” he observed in his diary. “Red in front of the main defensive line, green for the second line, brown for the third, purple for the fourth, on top of that the hundreds of cleverly-placed communication trenches, the ditches to it, the dummy positions, the switch positions, this completely idiotic network where only rats and mice cower, which not one German soldier will ever occupy – because there aren’t any.”
⁴

The reason there weren’t any German soldiers was simple: 1944 had broken the back of the German Army on the Eastern Front. At the dawn of the year it held the Ukraine and the shores of the Crimea, it was camped outside Leningrad. A relentless series of offensives drove the Wehrmacht from the ‘cradle of the revolution’, from ‘Russia’s breadbasket’. The bloodletting reached its climax in Byelorussia, in Galicia, in eastern Poland, in Romania over three summer months. Between July and September, the German Army lost nearly 6,000 dead
every day
on the Eastern Front, more than half a million men in all. By the time the front on the Vistula stabilised, the Fourth Panzer Army was holding the front at Baranow with just three or four men every 300 feet. It was short of a dozen battalion commanders, 121 company and 140 platoon leaders. The typical infantry division had begun the war 17,000 men strong, supported by four dozen artillery pieces, more than 600 vehicles, 900 carts (and nearly 5,000 horses to pull them). By 1944, the average division was reduced to 12,000 men, thirty-nine guns, 1,300 carts yet only 3,200 horses.
⁵
Rear services, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine were combed out for men, as was the rest of the Reich – the railways, the postal service, the civil service, schools and universities, public utilities – under ‘total war’ measures introduced in the summer of 1944. The Nazi apparatus had no scruples about calling up the 1928 year group – boys aged sixteen, as
Reichsführer
SS Heinrich Himmler told senior officers: “A nation has to be willing and we must be willing, if necessary, to send fifteen-year-olds to the front to save the nation. I know that it caused many to shake their heads. These gentlemen didn’t think logically. It is better for the young to die and the nation to be saved than the young to be spared and an entire nation of eighty or ninety million go under.”
⁶
Boys, men, former sailors, airmen, it was still not enough. As 1944 drew to a close, the German Army was short of at least 600,000 men. In the East, the Red Army outnumbered it almost three to one.
⁷

Inferiority in men was compounded by inferiority in material. That year the Wehrmacht lost just short of four million rifles and more than a quarter of a million machine-guns. The battles of 1944 had cost it some 6,000 Panzer IVs and Vs (Panthers) – by far the most numerous models – as well as more than 850 of the pre-eminent German tank, the Tiger. Despite the efforts of the Reich’s armament industry, which had produced 18,000 panzers and
Sturmgeschütze
– self-propelled guns – in 1944, the armies in the East could muster a little over 1,600 panzers as 1945 opened, and a good third of these were out of action. Beyond the shortage of armour there was a shortage of fuel: the loss of the Romanian oil fields, the sustained Allied bombing campaign against synthetic oil plants and the Reich’s rail network severely restricted the movement of the panzers. As 1944 faded, it was not the panzer, not the Panther, not the Tiger, which was the German Army’s weapon of choice, but the
Panzerfaust
. This small, simple anti-tank weapon had become, one SS general believed, “the principal weapon of our entire conduct of the war”.
⁸
This from an army which had given the world Blitzkrieg.

If the German Army had abandoned Blitzkrieg – by necessity rather than desire – the Red Army had embraced and adapted it. In the summer of 1944, Russian tanks had demonstrated that they too could slice through defences, lunge far into the enemy’s rear and trap hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The methods of the summer of 1944 would be refined for the winter offensive: a lightning artillery barrage, a foray by reconnaissance parties to probe the German defences, then a bombardment of unparalleled intensity, followed by the painstaking clearance of mines by the pioneers and engineers. Only then could the armour be unleashed – more than 3,500 tanks and self-propelled artillery were poised to strike at Baranow alone. Once let off the leash, they were not to stop until they had crossed the Oder.

Like the Wehrmacht, the Red Army was never the mechanised, armoured behemoth the propaganda image might project. There were, to be sure, some 100 tank brigades as 1945 began. But there were nearly
500
infantry – or rifle – divisions, and 100 artillery divisions. Outside the armoured brigades, the horse was as common a method of transport as the truck. Infantry marched into battle, or rode on tanks. The Mosin, a sturdy if unspectacular rifle, was their trusted weapon, the DP their standard-issue light machine-gun with its trademark ‘pan’ magazines which were exhausted after just forty-seven rounds. The men lived on a diet of porridge for breakfast, cabbage soup or broth, a bit of bread, tinned meat or tinned fish for their main meal. They received 100 grammes of vodka every day and a double ration on holidays such as May 1 or November 7. But in such a vast, disparate nation, there never was an archetypal ‘Ivan’ or
frontovik
– front-line warrior. There were educated men, and there were men whose vocabulary stretched to barely 2,000 words. There were idealistic warriors – one in four Red Army soldiers was a member of the Communist Party – and there were men who clung to their religious beliefs, however much the Party tried to eliminate God. There were men from the industrial heartlands who generally fought better than peasants, but then peasants from northern Russia were more fearsome warriors than those from the south of the country. The Red Army, like the nation for which it fought, was a melting pot of peoples. Nazi propaganda talked repeatedly of the ‘Mongol storm’ or ‘Asiatic hordes’, but Slavs – Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians – were by far the most numerous of the Soviet Union’s many nationalities represented in the ranks. There were, of course, Mongols. There were Siberians. There were Georgians. There were Kalmycks. There were Uzbeks and Tajiks (they didn’t like the cold). Uzbeks did not get on with Ukrainians and Russians, while Ukrainians were frequently treated with suspicion.

As 1944 ended, they stood more than six million strong – despite the terrible toll four years of war had taken. The past twelve months alone had demanded more than six million casualties, a quarter of them dead. Two in every five tanks or self-propelled guns – nearly 24,000 in all – had been lost, plus more than 43,000 artillery pieces and mortars. Yet Soviet industry had made good all these losses, while the ranks of the Red Army stood 500,000 men stronger at the end of the year than it had at the beginning.
⁹

Human losses had in fact proved more difficult to replace than equipment. Three out of four tank men never returned from the war – not entirely surprising as the T34, the outstanding Soviet tank of the war, “quickly went up in flames – very badly”, one surgeon recalled.
¹⁰
Other arms fared no better: after three months’ fighting one mortar company commander observed that all of his men had either been killed or wounded,
¹¹
while one pioneer leader told his troops: “A pioneer platoon commander only lasts two months.”
¹²
By 1945, instead of their requisite 9,000 to 11,000 men, many infantry divisions were barely half that strength. A rifle company commander recalled that the ranks of his division, 213th Rifle, were never more than sixty per cent filled, while he never led more than thirty-seven men in his company; the paper strength was seventy-six.

Not even the enlistment of some 800,000 women could plug the gaps in the Red Army’s ranks. They served in every arm of the Soviet armed forces. They served at the front. As pilots. As tank crew. As infantry. As snipers. As anti-aircraft gunners. As machine gunners. As medics. They served behind the lines. As cooks. As laundrywomen. The men struggled to adjust to the sudden appearance of women in a male-dominated world. After rifle training, driver Tamara Davidovich picked violets, then wrapped them around her bayonet. Back at camp her instructor called her forward. “A soldier has to be a soldier, not a flower picker,” he berated Davidovich, sentencing her to extra duties.
¹³
A group of female snipers pitched up at the front only to be told they were being kept in the rear. “No, we’re snipers,” they protested. “Send us where we belong.” They were despatched to a regiment where a colonel explained to them they were soldiers first, women second. “Pay attention, girls, you’ve come here to fight, so fight and don’t do anything else. Here there are boisterous men and no women. Damn it, how can I explain it to you? It’s war, girls …”
¹⁴
Others, such as nurse Maria Boshok, did not find it hard to banish all feminine thoughts from her mind. “I told myself that that I didn’t want to hear any words of affection in this hell,” she recalled. “How can you think about pleasure there? About luck? I did not want to associate love with it.” At school Boshok had enjoyed herself. In war she never smiled. “When I saw a young women doing her eyelashes or putting on lipstick, I was angry. I was firmly against it.”
¹⁵

If womanly thoughts could be suppressed, feelings of compassion and horror could not. Tamara Davidovich and her comrades were ordered to collect the dead from the battlefield – “all very young chaps, barely adults”. But it was only when they saw the corpse of a girl that they fell silent. “We were silent all the way to the mass grave.”
¹⁶
Maria Boshok went to war as a nineteen-year-old nurse. After six months, friends thought she had aged a decade. It was, she observed, understandable, having spent “every day in fear, in terror”, surrounded by “people dying constantly. Dying every day, every hour. In fact, apparently, every minute. There were not enough sheets to cover them up.” The dying always stared upwards, never to the side, never at the nurses, always upwards “as if they were looking to heaven.”
¹⁷

It wasn’t only the foe who dealt these
frontoviki
death. More than 150,000 Red Army men were shot for desertion, for cowardice, for self-wounding. Behind the front,
zagraditelnye otriady
– blocking detachments – were set up with orders to shoot any man who panicked or retreated without orders. Lesser infractions might result in a spell of hard labour in the gulag, or worse still, the
shtraf
battalions. The ranks of these
shtraf
– penalty – units were filled with men who had shown cowardice in the face of the enemy, or indiscipline. Joining them were “criminals, bandits, thieves, demoted officers, soldiers who had failed to fulfil orders”.
¹⁸
They were given the most dangerous missions in battle – attacking the unassailable, clearing minefields, storming over open ground – where they would “atone for their crimes with their blood”.