Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ also had his ribs broken and endured a number of mock executions.¹⁶ Despite all this, Rokossovsky never signed a confession; nor did he denounce any of his erstwhile colleagues. Unlike so many of his compatriots who perished in Beria’s indefatigable ‘meat grinder’, Rokossovsky escaped with his life. He would soon be a pivotal figure in the fate of his home town of Warsaw, for it was he who would lead the Soviets to the gates of the city, and who would watch from across the Vistula River as the Germans crushed the desperate uprising in the summer of 1944.

      Rokossovsky’s argument with Stalin proved that the Red Army of 1944 was a completely different entity from that of 1941. Officers with talent were finally being promoted rather than being sent to the gulag, the ideology of an officer corps was brought back, and officers were given a certain amount of freedom from the NKVD. Propaganda abandoned dull, Communist rhetoric in favour of rousing talk of the Great Patriotic War and the fight for Mother Russia. Three years earlier Rokossovsky would have been shot for standing up to Stalin; now he was allowed to argue with the dictator face to face – and win.

      Other things had changed too. The Soviets were producing more, and better, weapons than the Germans. By the time of the summer offensive they had introduced a new model of the T-34 tank, now with an 85mm gun; the SU-100, an update of the SU-85 anti-aircraft gun with lethal long-range 100mm barrel; and the Josef Stalin II tank, armed with a heavy 122mm artillery gun, that could wreak havoc on its German equivalents. Huge stockpiles of food, supplies and ammunition, and fleets of trucks, were brought to the front.¹⁷ Massive quantities of Lend-Lease matériel from the United States were of enormous importance: American Jeeps whizzed around Byelorussia, and Studebaker US6 trucks were used to launch Katyusha rockets; at the same time Russian soldiers feasted on Hershey’s chocolate and wieners stamped ‘Oscar Meyer – Chicago’.

      Stalin approved the final plan of attack against Army Group Centre in Byelorussia on 31 May 1944. The operation, he declared, was to be called ‘Bagration’, after the Georgian general whose heroic resistance at the Battle of Borodino was instrumental in reducing Napoleon’s Grande Armée to such a crippled force that it could never mount an offensive against Russia again. General Pyotr Bagration himself had been killed at Borodino, but the name was a prescient choice. Operation ‘Bagration’ of 1944 would also change history, and when it was over the Germans in turn would be so weakened that they could not mount another significant offensive in the rest of the Second World War. It was the single greatest defeat ever suffered by the Wehrmacht, and in losses of men and matériel far exceeded those at Stalingrad. The Soviets would achieve blistering success, and would race westward at such speed that it surprised even Stavka and Stalin himself. At the same time, Stalin would launch the Lwów–Sandomierz offensive, drawing German reserves to the south to fight phantom armies. The summer of 1944 saw the loss of a million German soldiers on the Eastern Front. It was the success of Bagration and the Lwów–Stanisławów–Sandomierz operations that would lead to the Polish Home Army’s ill-fated decision to begin the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August.

      One of the reasons Stalin favoured a full-scale attack on Byelorussia was the element of surprise. His commander Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had long enjoyed duck-shooting in the swamps near Parichi, understood that the Germans had dismissed the possibility of a Russian attack in the area, believing that the marshes were impassable. For Zhukov the landscape was ‘crucial in shaping the course of the attack’. The front held by Army Group Centre was 1,000 kilometres long, with the ancient and beautiful cities of Mogilew, Orsha and Vitebsk strung along it like pearls on a necklace. The southern sector ran through the Pripyat marshes, an enormous 100,000-square-kilometre wetland, a maze of ‘swamps and bogs, mud and mosquitoes, impassable for armoured vehicles without special knowledge and equipment’. The rivers Dnieper, Prut, Berezina, Svisloch and Ptich were also natural obstacles. The Germans, Zhukov said, believed that ‘the wooded and boggy terrain would not allow us to move to Byelorussia’. He added wryly, ‘the enemy miscalculated’.¹⁸

      The next phase of the plan suited Stalin’s devious nature perfectly. Having chosen his target, he set about deceiving the Germans with ‘maskirovka’ – a particularly clever and all-encompassing form of camouflage, misinformation and deception. All troops and equipment were to be moved up to the Byelorussian front in utter secrecy, while at the same time an entire mock front was to be created in Ukraine to fool the Germans into believing that Stalin intended to attack to the south. The plan succeeded brilliantly.

      It is difficult to imagine the scale of the subterfuge. The movement of a staggering 1.7 million men in and around Byelorussia had to be done in utter secrecy. This monumental task was undertaken with deadly seriousness. No information was to be permitted to leak to the Germans. Correspondence, telephone conversations and telegraph messages were strictly forbidden. Front-line soldiers were not to know that they were going on the attack, but were told that they were holding ‘defensive positions’; General Sergei Shtemenko ordered that ‘front, army, and divisional newspapers published material only on defence matters. All talks to the troops were about maintaining a firm hold on present positions.’¹⁹ The troops were carried in by train, but were often dropped a hundred kilometres to the east of their assembly points; in many places the move to the front line was ordered only two days before the attack began. There were to be no unauthorized people in the area, and the transport of troops and equipment was kept from the sight of the general public as much as possible: 50,000 supply vehicles moved at night in strict blackout conditions, and the construction of roads and pontoon bridges was done only after dark and under cover. Vehicles could not use headlights, but instead followed daubs of fluorescent paint on the tailgates of those in front; white posts were put by the sides of roads as night markers. No artillery fire was permitted. Tank crews being moved to the front were forbidden to wear their black uniforms lest they be spotted by German spies; officers had to dress as private soldiers, and even bathing in the open was forbidden. The enemy, as Rokossovsky put it, was permitted to see ‘only what we wanted him to see’.²⁰

      All the while, the fronts were being secretly supplied under the noses of the Germans with immense quantities of matériel and equipment: nearly 400,000 tonnes of ammunition, 300,000 tonnes of fuel and lubricants, and 500,000 tonnes of foodstuffs and fodder were moved in. Five combined armies, two armoured armies, one air army and the 1st Polish Army were brought, up as were five independent armour, two mechanized and four cavalry corps out of the Supreme Command reserve, as well as dozens of independent regiments and brigades of all fighting arms. Eleven air corps were moved to new bases, and tanks equipped with heavy rollers were brought in to break through the minefields. As Zhukov put it, ‘All these movements had to be done with great caution to prevent the enemy’s detection of the preparations for the offensive. This was especially important since our intelligence reports showed that the German High Command expected us to make the first blow of the summer campaign in the Ukraine, not Byelorussia.’²¹

      While the real offensive was being prepared in top-secret conditions, the Soviets worked equally hard to convince Hitler that the main summer offensive would be staged against Model’s Army Group North Ukraine. As Byelorussia went ‘quiet’, the Ukrainian theatre was abuzz with manufactured noise and movement. Soviet air activity increased dramatically. German reconnaissance flights were allowed to pass over the lines and photograph the ‘armies’ that were gathering – armies which actually consisted of rubber tanks and mock gun emplacements. In a strange take on the Potemkin Village, only 10 per cent of the arms in the entire region were genuine. Heavy radio traffic was faked, and increased rail usage simulated. Small teams of men were sent out into the forests at night; when German planes flew over they shone torches into the sky, before moving forward ten kilometres and repeating the performance, to convince the Germans that the forests were crawling with troops. Major V. Vilensky was not the only one ordered to move his division back and forth to make it look as if ten divisions had been brought up. ‘We’d move out at night, come back in the morning, sleep the whole day, and then repeat it all over again.’²²

      Hitler was completely taken in by the deception, but so too were General Kurt Zeitzler, chief of staff at OKH (the German Supreme Command), and СКАЧАТЬ