The Second World War (97 page)
Ukraine and the Teheran Conference
SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1943
A
fter the Red Army had recaptured Kharkov on 23 August 1943, the German army faced a crisis in the south. The defensive line along the River Mius was broken, and on 26 August Rokossovsky’s Central Front smashed through on the boundary between Army Group South and Army Group Centre. On 3 September, Kluge and Manstein asked Hitler to appoint a commander-in-chief for the eastern front. Hitler refused and still insisted that the industrial area of the Donbas should be held even if a withdrawal from the Mius was now necessary. Once again Hitler promised reinforcements, but by now Manstein knew that he could not believe him. It was also the day that British troops landed on the mainland of Italy in the south.
Five days later, following a teleprinter signal from Manstein on the scale of the Soviet attack, Hitler flew to Army Group South’s headquarters at Zaporozhye. Manstein’s briefing was so stark that even Hitler felt obliged to authorize a retreat to the River Dnepr. This was his very last visit to the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. On his return to the Wolfsschanze at the end of that ill-fated day, he heard about the Allied landings at Salerno and the imminent capitulation of the Italian army.
After Hitler’s reluctant decision, the German army had to race back to the Dnepr to avoid being cut off. The Red Army, although also weakened by the Battle of Kursk, pushed on at all speed to seize bridgeheads over the river before the Germans had a chance to establish an effective defence. This immense river was supposed to form the basis of a defended line running from Smolensk to Kiev and then on down to the Black Sea. Like most great Russian rivers running from north to south, it had an unusually high western bank which formed a natural rampart.
In their retreat across eastern Ukraine the Germans tried to carry out a ruthless scorched-earth programme, but they did not have time to destroy as much as they had intended.
Landser
s, having stuffed their pockets and packs, almost wept as they watched their own supply dumps going up in flames. Harried by Shturmovik fighter-bombers by day, they pulled back across the Dnepr under cover of night and the early-morning autumn mists.
Stalin promised the award of Hero of the Soviet Union to the first soldier across the river. On improvised rafts made from oil barrels and planks, in
small boats and even by swimming, Red Army soldiers threw themselves at the challenge. In the event, four sub-machine-gunners became Heroes of the Soviet Union, after storming the west bank on 22 September. ‘
There were cases
’, Vasily Grossman wrote in his diary, ‘when soldiers transported regimental field guns on wooden gates, and crossed the Dnepr on groundsheets stuffed with hay.’ Vatutin’s forces seized bridgeheads north and south of Kiev in the third week of September. Soon troops were across at forty different places, but most were too small for launching further attacks inland. One group, whose boat sank, reached a peasant hut. The old woman there welcomed them: ‘
Children, sons
, come in to my place,’ she said. Having helped them warm up and dry their tattered uniforms, she gave them
samogon
, a home-brewed vodka.
In many places, Soviet casualties were heavy. A follow-up group had to deal with the corpses. ‘
We collected those
who were killed or had drowned,’ recalled a member of one squad, ‘and we buried them in trenches, fifty men in each. So many soldiers had died there. The German bank was steep and well fortified while our boys were advancing from an open space.’
In an attempt to increase the bridgehead at Velikii Burin south-east of Kiev, three airborne brigades were parachuted on to the west bank of the river. But Soviet intelligence had failed to identify a German concentration in the area, of two panzer and three infantry divisions. Many of the paratroopers fell on positions occupied by the 19th Panzer Division and were massacred. The most successful bridgehead was Litezh, north of Kiev. A Red Army rifle division managed to slip across the Dnepr in a marshy area the Germans had considered impassable. Seizing the opportunity, Vatutin took a huge risk which paid off. He reinforced the bridgehead with the 5th Guards Tank Corps. Many T-34s were lost in the bogs, but enough got through by driving at full speed.
To the north, Smolensk itself was finally taken after hard fighting at the end of the month. The Rzhev Offensive, which had begun the push west on this part of the front, left complete devastation in its wake. The Australian correspondent Godfrey Blunden was taken round. ‘
Some peasant families
of old men, women and children had returned and were camping in wigwams. In several places they had hung out their washing on lines between trees as if it were normal to have a washing day in this desecrated no-man’s land. There is some lesson in human persistence in the way these people come back to their old homes, but one could not help wondering how they would survive the coming winter.’ He was shaken to discover that ‘a little wizened old woman’ whom he met was in fact ‘a girl of thirteen’.
In the south, General F. I. Tolbukhin’s Southern Front cut off the Seventeenth Army in the Crimea, which had by then evacuated the Kuban bridgehead in the Caucasus. Rokossovsky’s Central Front had punched a
large salient due west of Kursk, and in October was approaching Gomel on the edge of Belorussia. For Stalin, and of course for Vatutin, the true prize was the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. By the end of October, Vatutin had infiltrated, night by night, Lieutenant General P. S. Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army and the 38th Army into the Litezh bridgehead. Brilliant camouflage, deception operations elsewhere and a lack of Luftwaffe air reconnaissance led the Germans to overlook this particular threat. When the two armies burst out of the bridgehead they were able to encircle Kiev, which fell on 6 November, the day before the celebrations in Moscow of the anniversary of the Revolution. Stalin was exultant. Vatutin wasted no time in pushing forward other armies to seize Zhitomir and Korosten. Despite the mud of the autumn
rasputitsa
, his armies soon created a salient 150 kilometres deep and 300 kilometres wide.
As they advanced, they encountered desolation and a peasantry mute from suffering. ‘
Old men, when they
hear Russian,’ Vasily Grossman recorded, ‘run to meet the troops and weep silently, unable to mutter a word. Old peasant women say: “We thought we would sing and laugh when we saw our army, but there’s so much grief in our hearts, that tears are falling.”’ They recounted their disgust at the way German soldiers walked around naked, even in front of women and young girls, and ‘their gluttony, their ability to eat twenty eggs in one go, or a kilo of honey’. Grossman met a young boy, barefoot and in rags. He asked where his father was. ‘Killed,’ he answered. ‘And your mother?’ ‘She died.’ ‘Have you got brothers or sisters?’ ‘A sister. They took her to Germany.’ ‘Have you any relatives?’ ‘No, they were all burned in a partisan village.’
There were, however, Ukrainians who did not welcome the return of Soviet rule. Many had collaborated with the Germans, forming their militias or even serving as soldiers or concentration camp guards. And the Ukrainian nationalists in the UPA (Ukrainska povstanska armiia), who had turned against the Germans, were now ready to fight a guerrilla campaign against the Red Army. Their most famous victim would be General Vatutin himself, killed in an ambush.
Grossman’s worst nightmares were exceeded by the reality of what he discovered. The capture of Kiev confirmed reports of the massacre at Babi Yar. The Germans had tried to conceal the crime by burning and removing bodies, but there were too many for them. After the initial massacre in September 1941, the site had continued to be used for executions of other Jews, Roma and Communists. It was estimated that by the autumn of 1943 almost 100,000 people had been killed there.
Grossman found the statistics of the great void numbing. Lacking the names of individuals, he tried to give a human face to this previously unimaginable crime. ‘
This was the murder
of a great and ancient
professional experience,’ he wrote, ‘passed from one generation to another in thousands of families of craftsmen and members of the intelligentsia. This was the murder of everyday traditions that grandfathers passed to their grandchildren, this was the murder of memories, of a mournful song, folk poetry, of life, happy and bitter, this was the destruction of hearths and cemeteries, this was the death of a nation which had been living side by side with Ukrainians over hundreds of years.’ He recounted the fate of a much loved Jewish doctor called Feldman, who had been saved from execution in 1941 when a crowd of Ukrainian peasant women pleaded with the German commandant. ‘Feldman continued to live in Brovary and treat the local peasants. He was executed in the spring of this year. Khristya Chunyak sobbed and finally burst into tears as she described to me how the old man was forced to dig his own grave. He had to die alone. There were no other Jews alive in the spring of 1943.’
Stalin, understandably proud of the Soviet Union’s great military achievements that year, finally agreed to a Big Three meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill. In late November 1943, they would come together in Teheran, which like most of Iran was still occupied by Soviet and British troops, to secure the oilfields and the overland supply route to the Caucasus. Stalin had chosen the Iranian capital so that he could stay in direct touch with the Stavka.
To prepare for the Teheran conference, there would first be a meeting in October of foreign ministers in Moscow. The agenda in the Spiridonovka Palace was enormous. British concerns ranged from the Polish question to post-war international relations, the treatment of enemy states, a European Advisory Commission on Germany, trials of war criminals, and arrangements for France, Yugoslavia and Iran. Cordell Hull, the American secretary of state, emphasized Roosevelt’s wish for a successor to the discredited League of Nations. This was a sensitive issue for Molotov and Litvinov, the deputy commissar for foreign affairs, following the Soviet Union’s expulsion because of its invasion of Finland in 1939. Roosevelt’s project of the United Nations, which would come into being at the end of the war, would have the victor nations at its core to give it greater strength.
The Soviet side insisted that the British and Americans put detailed proposals on the table which could then be dealt with at Teheran. They were giving nothing away about their own position, and insisted on only one item: ‘
measures to shorten
the war against Germany and its allies in Europe’. That is to say, they intended to extract a precise date for the invasion of France. They also raised the question of bringing Turkey into the war on the Allied side and suggested putting pressure on neutral Sweden to allow the establishment of Allied air bases on its soil. Overall, the
conference was deemed by both sides to have gone well.
The greatest success in Moscow, according to the Australian Godfrey Blunden, came in the form of a ‘
little wooden box
with two eye pieces’. It was ‘in all respects similar to peep-show boxes you used to see at a funfair, except that instead of dancing girls there was a series of startling stereoscopic pictures of bombed Germany’. This brainchild of Air Chief Marshal Harris fascinated and impressed Red Army generals in Moscow with its three-dimensional images of urban destruction.
Blunden heard all this from Harris himself when he went to see him at Bomber Command headquarters. Harris showed him the large photograph albums he had had specially bound in RAF blue leather to impress visitors. Each series of aerial photographs on the same scale was covered by a sheet of tracing paper showing the outline of the industrial and residential areas. The first in the book marked the destruction of Coventry. Harris then turned the pages one by one showing the German cities. At one point, Blunden exclaimed at the extent of the damage: ‘There must be at least six Coventrys there.’
‘No, you are wrong,’ Harris replied with satisfaction. ‘There are ten.’ When they reached another town where the damage was not so widespread, Harris remarked: ‘Needs another good raid and that will finish it off.’
‘These photographs’, Blunden wrote, ‘show very graphically indeed how area bombing as first practised by Germans has developed into a weapon of immense power. The damage done to Coventry three years ago–which led Germans to coin the word “Coventrate” meaning to obliterate a city–is now almost insignificant beside this vaster damage done to German cities.’
The Americans at this time were also trying to promote Nationalist China’s membership of what should become a ‘Big Four’ alliance. Roosevelt, knowing Chiang Kai-shek’s ambitions in this direction, hoped that this would help to keep the Nationalists in the war despite their disappointment over the shortage of supplies for their armies. Chiang played the same game with the United States as he had played earlier with the Soviet Union: he used subtle threats of a separate peace with Japan to obtain more support. Although a card of deliberate weakness, Chiang’s gambit still had some effect since Chinese forces were, at least in theory, tying down more than a million Japanese troops on the mainland. Yet Roosevelt was also looking towards a post-war world in which he saw China’s inclusion as vital in the leadership of the United Nations. It was an idea which Churchill and his entourage certainly did not encourage. The Soviets were even more reluctant after Chiang’s pressure to expel them from Sinkiang province, but an
agreement in principle was reached at the Moscow conference.
Chiang had changed his position in one important way. He now wanted American support to ensure that the Soviet Union did not secure areas of northern China if it entered the war against Japan. Having done everything he could earlier to persuade Roosevelt to push Stalin into a declaration of war, Chiang now wanted to see Japan defeated without Soviet help. He feared, with justification, that Soviet involvement would boost the power and armament of the Chinese Communists.