The Second World War (113 page)
Hitler, in his world of illusion, convinced himself that the V-1 flying bombs which he had just started to launch against London would bring Britain to its knees, and that the new jet fighters would soon destroy the Allied air forces. Rommel, who knew that this was fantasy, urged him to bring the war to an end. Hitler retorted that the Allies would not negotiate, and for once he was right. After this brief visit, Hitler returned to the Berghof. Five days later, the German army on the eastern front suffered its greatest defeat in the whole war.
JUNE–AUGUST 1944
W
hile the OKH and Führer headquarters discounted the likelihood of an attack in Belorussia, apprehension grew in front-line units of Army Group Centre. On 20 June 1944, the atmosphere was heightened by the ‘
heat of high-summer days
with distant thunder’, and a crescendo of partisan attacks to their rear. Ten days before, a German intercept station had picked up a Soviet signal ordering an increase in activity behind the Fourth Army. The Germans had accordingly launched a major anti-partisan drive, Operation Kormoran. It included their notorious Kaminski Brigade, whose conspicuous cruelty against civilians seemed medieval and whose raging indiscipline was an affront to traditional German officers.
Moscow’s instructions to the large partisan bands in the forests and marshes of Belorussia were specific. They were first to attack railway communications, then harass Wehrmacht forces once the offensive began. This would include seizing bridges, cutting off supply routes by cutting down forest trees and dropping them across roads, and mounting attacks to delay reinforcements from reaching the front.
At dawn on 20 June, the 25th Panzergrenadier Division was subjected to an hour’s bombardment and a brief assault. Everything went quiet again. It was either a probing attack or an attempt to unsettle them. Führer headquarters did not believe that the Soviet summer offensive would be aimed at Army Group Centre. They expected an offensive north of Leningrad against the Finns, and another massive onslaught south of the Pripet Marshes into southern Poland and the Balkans.
Hitler believed that Stalin’s strategy was to strike at the Axis allies–the Finns, the Hungarians, the Romanians and the Bulgarians–to force them out of the war, like the Italians. His suspicions appeared confirmed when first the Leningrad Front and then the Karelian Front attacked. Stalin, now confident enough to choose pragmatism over revenge, did not intend to crush Finland entirely. That would divert too many forces needed elsewhere. He simply wanted to bring the Finns to heel and take back the land he had seized off them in 1940. As he had hoped, these operations in the north took Hitler’s eyes off Belorussia.
The Red Army successfully employed
maskirovka
deception measures suggesting a major build-up in Ukraine, when in fact it was secretly
transferring tank and other armies north. Its task was made easier by the virtual disappearance of the Luftwaffe. The Allied strategic bombing offensive, and now the invasion of Normandy, had reduced Luftwaffe support to German armies on the eastern front to a disastrous level. Soviet air supremacy prevented almost all German reconnaissance flights, so Army Group Centre headquarters in Minsk received little indication of the huge concentration of forces that was building up. Altogether the Stavka had assembled some fifteen armies, totalling 1,670,000 men, with nearly 6,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, more than 30,000 guns and heavy mortars, including Katyusha batteries. They were supported by more than 7,500 aircraft.
Army Group Centre had become a poor relation. Some sectors were so thinly manned that sentries had to remain on six-hour shifts each night. They and their officers had no idea of the furious work being carried out behind Soviet lines. Forest tracks were being widened for the large armoured vehicles, corduroy roads to take tanks were laid through marshes, pontoons were brought forward, fording points were given solid bottoms, and underwater bridges were constructed just beneath the surface of rivers.
This great redeployment of forces delayed the launch of the offensive by three days. On 22 June, the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the 1st Baltic and the 3rd Belorussian Fronts carried out their reconnaissance in force. Operation Bagration itself, which Stalin himself had named after the Georgian princely hero of 1812, began in earnest the next day.
The Stavka plan was first to surround Vitebsk on the north side of Army Group Centre’s bulging front, and Bobruisk on the southern side, then thrust in diagonally from both these points to surround Minsk in the middle. On the northern flank, Marshal I. Kh. Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front and the young Colonel General I. D. Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front attacked rapidly to surround the Vitebsk salient before the Germans could react. They even decided to dispense with an artillery bombardment, unless it was deemed essential on a particular sector. Their tank spearheads were supported by waves of Shturmovik fighter-bombers. The Third Panzer Army was taken totally by surprise. Vitebsk lay in the middle of a vulnerable bulge, whose central part was defended by two weak Luftwaffe field divisions. The hapless corps commander had been ordered to hold Vitebsk as a fortress position, although he utterly lacked the forces to accomplish the task.
In the centre, from Orsha to Mogilev, the Tsar’s headquarters in the First World War, General der Infanterie Kurt von Tippelskirch’s Fourth Army was also taken by surprise. ‘
We really had a black day
,’ an Unteroffizier with the 25th Panzergrenadier Division wrote home, ‘one which I
will not forget in a hurry. The Russians began with their heaviest possible bombardment. It carried on for about three hours. With all their strength they tried to break through. The force was inexorable. I really had to run for it to avoid falling into their hands. Their tanks were advancing with red flags.’ Only the 25th Panzergrenadiers and the 78th Sturm Division with assault guns fought back furiously east of Orsha.
The following day Tippelskirch asked for permission to pull back to the northern Dnepr, but this was rejected by Führer headquarters. With several divisions shattered and his men exhausted, Tippelskirch decided to disobey the insane orders to hold on, parroted by the subservient army group commander Generalfeldmarschall Ernst Busch in Minsk. Commanders realized that the only way to save their formations was to falsify situation reports and war diary entries to justify withdrawals.
The German 12th Infantry Division in front of Orsha pulled back just in time. When a major asked a pioneer officer why he was in such a hurry to blow a bridge after his battalion had crossed, the man handed him his binoculars and pointed across the river. Turning round, the major spotted a column of T-34 tanks, already within range. Orsha and Mogilev on the Dnepr were both cut off and taken in three days. Several hundred wounded had to be left behind. The German general ordered to hold Mogilev to the end was close to a nervous breakdown.
Behind Soviet lines, the greatest problem was presented by the huge traffic jams of military vehicles. A broken-down tank could not be circumvented easily because of the marshes and forests either side of the roads. The chaos at times was such that ‘
the traffic controller
at a crossroads might be a full colonel’, a Red Army officer later recalled. He also pointed out how fortunate the Soviet forces were that there was so little sign of the Luftwaffe, since all those vehicles stuck nose to tail would have provided an easy target.
On the southern flank, Marshal Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front launched its assault with a massive preliminary bombardment which began at 04.00 hours. Explosions sent up fountains of earth. The ground was cratered and ploughed over a huge area. Trees came crashing down and German soldiers, instinctively adopting the foetal position in their bunkers, quivered as the ground vibrated as in an earthquake.
Rokossovsky’s northern pincer broke through between Tippelskirch’s Fourth Army and the Ninth Army responsible for the Bobruisk sector. General der Infanterie Hans Jordan, the commander of the Ninth Army, brought in his reserve, the 20th Panzer Division. But as the counter-attack began that night, 20th Panzer was ordered to pull back and move south of Bobruisk. The penetration of the other pincer led by the 1st Guards Tank Corps had proved to be far more dangerous. It threatened to encircle
the town and cut off the left flank of Ninth Army as well. Rokossovsky’s surprise approach, through the edge of the Pripet Marshes, had a success similar to that of the Germans emerging from the Ardennes in 1940.
Hitler still refused to allow retreat, so on 26 June Generalfeldmarschall Busch flew to Berchtesgaden to report to him at the Berghof. He was accompanied by Jordan, whom Hitler wanted to interrogate on his use of the 20th Panzer Division. But, while they were away from their headquarters, almost all of the Ninth Army was surrounded. The next day, both Busch and Jordan were dismissed. Hitler immediately resorted to General-feldmarschall Model. Yet, even with this disaster and the threat to Minsk, the OKW still had no inkling of the scale of Soviet ambitions.
Model, one of the few generals able to stand up to Hitler with success, was able to make the necessary withdrawals to the line of the River Berezina in front of Minsk. Hitler had also released the 5th Panzer Division to take up position north-east of Minsk at Borisov. It arrived on 28 June, but soon found itself attacked by Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft. Reinforced with a battalion of Tiger tanks and odd SS units, the division took up position either side of the Orsha–Borisov–Minsk road. Officers and men alike had little idea of the general situation, although they had heard a rumour that the Red Army had crossed the Berezina some way to the north.
During that night, advance elements of the 5th Guards Tank Army clashed with the division’s panzergrenadiers. A battalion of Panther tanks arrived to strengthen the German line, but to the north Chernyakhovsky’s troops had broken through between the Third Panzer Army and the Fourth Army. A chaotic withdrawal began under constant attack from Shturmoviks and Soviet artillery fire. Terrified German transport troops drove at full speed to reach the last remaining bridge over the Berezina, cutting in on each other to get across before it was hit by the enemy. The site of Napoleon’s crossing in the terrible retreat of 1812 was just to the north of Borisov.
Vitebsk was already on fire when German troops of LIII Corps pulled out in a vain attempt to break out through the encirclement to rejoin the Third Panzer Army. The stores and fuel dumps blazed, belching black smoke. Nearly 30,000 men were lost, either killed or taken prisoner. The disaster also shook the faith of many, both in the Führer and in the direction of the war. ‘
The Ivans broke through
this morning’, an Unteroffizier of the 206th Infantry Division wrote home. ‘A short pause allows me to write a letter. Our orders are to disengage from the enemy. My dear ones, the situation is very desperate. I no longer believe in anybody, if it looks as it does here.’
In the south, Rokossovsky’s armies had encircled almost all the Ninth
Army and the town of Bobruisk, which they captured. ‘
When we entered Bobruisk
,’ wrote Vasily Grossman with the 120th Guards Rifle Division, which he had known from Stalingrad, ‘some buildings in it were ablaze and others lay in ruins. To Bobruisk led the road of revenge! With difficulty, our car finds its way between scorched and distorted German tanks and self-propelled guns. Men are walking over German corpses. Corpses, hundreds and hundreds of them, pave the road, lie in the ditches, under the pines, in the green barley. In some places, vehicles have to drive over the corpses, so densely they lie upon the ground. People are busy all the time, burying them, but there are so many that this work cannot be done in a day. The day is exhaustingly hot and still, and people walk and drive pressing handkerchiefs to their noses. A cauldron of death was boiling here–a ruthless, terrible revenge over those who hadn’t surrendered their arms and broken out to the west.’
Once the Germans had been beaten, civilians emerged.
‘Our people whom we’ve liberated
tell us their stories and cry (it’s mostly elderly people who cry),’ a young Red Army soldier wrote home. ‘And young people are in such a great mood that they laugh all the time, their mouth is never shut. They laugh and talk.’
For the Germans, the retreat was disastrous. Vehicles of every sort had to be abandoned because they had run out of fuel. Even before the attack, each one had been restricted to ten to fifteen litres per day. General Spaatz’s strategy of bombing oil installations was certainly helping the Red Army on the eastern front as well as the Allies in Normandy. The German wounded lucky enough to be evacuated suffered dreadfully on the back of horse-drawn carts, rattling, shaking and lurching. Many died from loss of blood before they reached the dressing stations. Because first aid had been so drastically reduced at the front with the loss of medics, a serious wound now meant almost certain death. Those that could be brought back from the front line were taken to military hospitals in Minsk, but Minsk was now the main Soviet objective.