Certainly it was not for want of the necessary strength. At the
start of the June offensive the five Soviet "fronts" concerned had deployed forty-one armoured brigades—a force
equivalent at the very least to twenty full-size Panzer divisions,
or more than three times the German tank strength. In numbers of
artillery and infantry their superiority was of the order of six and
four times that of the Germans. Furthermore, if the Red Army's
communications had been stretched, it is equally true that the
Germans' losses in their precipitate retreat had been very much the
heavier. If the
Stavka
had allowed its central "fronts"
to draw reinforcement from the Baltic and the Ukraine, it should have
been able to deploy an even greater superiority on the Vistula by the
middle of September, a moment when the whole German position in the
West was crumbling and every reserve was being packed into the
Siegfried Line.
On a comparative basis of strength, then, the Russians could have
ended the war in 1944. No documents will reveal the background of
their failure to do so—if only because it is highly unlikely
that orders defining the long-term Soviet objectives were ever
committed to paper. But it is hard to avoid the impression that
purely military considerations, which weighed with the Western Allies
until the very end, had already forfeited priority in Stalin's mind.
War, the Russian dictator must have reflected, is not only "diplomacy
carried on by other means," it offers on occasion a very
acceptable substitute for normal diplomatic procedure, being, to an
all-powerful nation, both faster in operation and more generous in
yield.
The "second front," which had been so essential an
adjunct to Soviet policy while it promised to weaken the West and
relieve the pressure on the Red Army, was now an impedi-ment to the
advance of communism in Europe. Stalin was determined to secure the
Balkans for himself, and to push the Russian "frontier" as
far to the west as possible. A direct march on Berlin before the
Balkans had been overrun might mean that the war would be ended with
a large area of Europe still under nominal German occupation. The
governments of Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria had all been in touch
with Western agencies in 1944; in Yugoslavia the spectre of
Mikhailovitch still haunted Tito. A sudden collapse of German
resistance could be followed by a number of bourgeois "centre"
administrations that could appeal to the Allies for diplomatic
support at least until "free elections" had been held—and
Stalin was realist enough to know that the Communist parties were so
closely identified with Russia as to make the outcome of these
elections, in countries which had lived for centuries in dread of
Russia, a foregone conclusion.
Still more serious from the Soviet point of view was the
likelihood of a last-minute switch by the German High Command.
Stalin could not believe that once they saw their homeland to be in
immediate peril of Russian occupation the German generals would not
pack their Eastern defences at the price of "letting in the
West." This in turn might mean that the Russians would have to
rely after the war on treaties to hold the Germans down, rather than
on military force, and that a complete sealing off of the
recalcitrant Poles would be impossible.
No Western statesman could match Stalin's icy realism, and
Roosevelt's "charm," which had so astonished and gratified
the Russian at Teheran, had been partially offset by the disagreeable sound of the British plan for landing in Istria and
striking north to Vienna. In 1944, Stalin could hardly have foreseen
Yalta and the American attitude that ". . . if I give him
everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return,
noblesse oblige
, he won't try to annex anything and will work
for a world of democracy and peace."
[For one who had spent a lifetime in American politics, Roosevelt's attitudes in diplomacy are well-nigh incomprehensible. It is
exemplified by his note to Churchill "... I think I can handle
Stalin personally ... he hates the guts of all your top people. He
thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so."
(Churchill,
History of the Second World War
, IV, 171.)]
Thus it was to the Balkans that the centre of gravity of the
Eastern front shifted in the autumn of 1944. A fresh "front"
was formed by the
Stavka
(the 4th Ukrainian) and allocated
eighteen divisions under General Petrov. Petrov's task was to advance
into Hungary across the Carpathians and at the same time to maintain
contact between Koniev and the two "fronts" charged with
the occupation of the Balkans, those of Malinovsky and Tolbukhin.
Between them these two commanders had thirty-eight full-strength
divisions against a nominal Ger-man strength of twenty-five. In
fact, the German units were all down to under ten thousand men, and
the five strongest divisions (including two Panzer), which Schörner
had been holding in reserve, had been taken north on Guderian's or-ders, following his appointment on 20th July; on the 29th Schörner
himself had been ordered to Courland by Hitler' to take command of
the German forces—the rump of the old Army Group North—which
were threatened with isolation by Govorov and Chernyakovski.
Colonel General Friessner, who arrived to take Schörner's
place, found himself bequeathed with the same sort of classically
vulnerable deployment that was a recurring feature of the German
dispositions in the southern theatre. Ironically, even the army
numbers were the same, for the "resurrected" 6th Army,
supported by three infantry divisions of the 8th, was dug into the
right bank of the Dniester, covering Jassy and Kishinev, with those
two Rumanian armies of ill omen, the 3rd and 4th, on its flanks.
The Germans had had nearly four months in which to prepare their
positions, but they did not have the numbers to cover the whole
length of the Dniester, and the Red Army, too, had had ample time,
not only to accumulate supplies and refurbish its armour, but to seek
out the vulnerable sectors which had been entrusted to the Rumanians.
At this stage in the war the satellites had lost interest in
everything except working their passage with the Allies and getting
the German Army out of their country in the shortest time and with
the least damage. King Michael of Rumania had been in touch both with
the CIA and with the Russian Legation in Turkey, and made
preparations for a
coup d'état
which was to be followed
by the "internment" of the troops of his erstwhile ally: he
awaited only the signal, which was to be the passage of the Dniester
by Tolbukhin.
On 20th August the two "fronts" of Malinovsky and Tolbukhin fell on the submissive Rumanian divisions opposite them and
within hours were driving across the open, undamaged fields of
Bessarabia. The majority of the Rumanians simply laid down their arms
and melted into the countryside. Others hitched on to the advancing
columns (which included the heavily indoctrinated Tudor Vladimerescu
Division, made up of former prisoners of war, whose approach was a
warning to King Michael of the kind of tiger he was riding) and were
soon exchanging shots with the Germans. Within forty-eight hours the
bulk of the 6th Army had been surrounded, and the few remnants which
had been able to escape were heading at breakneck speed from the Iron
Gates and the Hungarian frontier. Antonescu had been placed under ar-rest, and with him General Hansen, chief of the German military
mission.
The whole German position in Southern Europe was now on the point
of disintegration. And the task of repairing it was made practically
impossible by the crippling shortage of troops. There were only four
divisions left in the whole of Rumania south of the Transylvania
Alps, and one of them, the 5th Anti-Aircraft, had very little
transport and was tied down at Ploesti by the zeal of local Rumanian
forces that were attempting to "intern" it. Even if greater
strength had been available, its deployment would have been impeded
by the fact that the OKH command net, which had hitherto exercised
absolute sovereignty over the Eastern front, had been pushed back so
far that it overlapped the province of OKW and Army Group F, under
Weichs, which was responsible for Yugoslavia and Thrace.
To send additional troops into the Balkan whirlpool was clearly
hopeless, but OKW made one brief reflex attempt to evoke the formula
of 1941, when the
coup
of another young king, the Yugoslav
Peter, had upset the German timetable and so aroused the wrath of
the Führer. On 24th and 25th August the Luftwaffe attacked
Bucharest, and three battalions of the Brandenburg Division were
flown in from Vienna to cow the populace. But the Luftwaffe could no
longer mount the terror strikes of the old days. A few Heinkels
dropped their loads at random, some were caught by prowling Russian
fighters, others, landing short at Rumanian airfields, were shot up
and their crews made prisoners. The Brandenburgers found themselves
facing the whole of Mana-gorov's 53rd Army, advancing at the rate of
thirty miles a day. They commandeered what transport they could lay
their hands on and set off south to the Bulgarian frontier.
Here the elderly Weichs was attempting to disarm the Bulgarian
Army, whose "general behaviour made their reliability suspect."
At the beginning of August, in the teeth of Guderian's bit-ter
protests, OKW had sent a substantial quantity of armour —eighty-eight
PzKw IV's and fifty assault guns—to the Bulgarians, in the
belief that they were the most reliable of the Balkan allies because
of their hatred of the Greeks and their fear of the Turks (whose
entry into the war on the Allied side was now regarded as
inevitable). But Colonel von Jungenfeldt, in charge of training the
Bulgarians, had been reporting directly to Guderian in his capacity
of Inspector General, and not to Weichs or OKW. Jungenfeldt's opinion
of the situation had been so gloomy that Guderian had ordered the
return of the equipment to Belgrade, where it was to be issued to the
4th SS, itself practically the only mobile unit left in the Balkans
and one which, having spent the previous six months burning down
Yugoslav villages, was in a relatively fresh condition. However,
Jodl (who has a record of disastrous uniformity whenever he
interferes in the East) had heard of the order, and countermanded it
at the last minute. It was not until the 25th that Weichs, on his own
initiative, began to take "certain precautionary measures."
By now, though, things were moving too fast for corrective
action by individual commanders. On 25th August, Michael's new
government had declared war on Germany, and units of the Rumanian
Army were attached to Malinovsky and Petrov, to guide them over the
Carpathian foothills. Two days later the Bulgarians began to evacuate
Thrace and Weichs was asked formally to leave the country. On the
strength of the "good faith" thus displayed, Bulgarian
plenipotentiaries began frantic negotiations with the British (with
whom they had been at war since the Greek campaign of 1941) in Cairo,
in the hope of getting some sort of settlement recognised before
the Russians (against whom they had taken the precaution of never
declaring war) were in possession of their country. But time was
running with Stalin. Tolbukhin's armour crossed the Bulgarian
frontier on 5th September, to the accompaniment of a formal
declaration of war, and the following day the Black Sea fleet
disembarked Russian marines at Varna and Burgas. On 9th September a
"patriotic front" government, heavily loaded with Communists, was formed and straightway opened negotiations with Moscow,
declaring an armistice forty-eight hours later, on the 11th.
There now began for Weichs's army group a long and tortured
retreat northward. The railways were barred to them, and
Jungenfeldt's precious armour was left behind—many of the tanks
still resting on their flatcars at the Sofia goods siding. Along
dusty side roads, winding through endless ravines in the arid
mountains of Serbia and Montenegro, constantly harassed by
guerillas, the retreating Germans struggled homeward.
The retreat was a terrible affair. The roads would be mined
sometimes in the passes, for twenty or thirty kilometres at a
stretch, and after the first week we had lost most of our vehicles.
Many of the men had worn out their shoes, and discarded everything
except their rifles. At night we had to mount half the company on
guard for the partisans would allow us no rest. Every village that we
passed through bore testimony to the unbelievable ferocity of this
partisan warfare . . .
Meanwhile Tolbukhin's forces had diverged, and his right wing was
swinging northwest, parallel with the Danube in a race to join forces
with Tito at Belgrade and cut Weichs's bedraggled column in half.
Capturing Turnu Severin on 9th September, they were delayed by the
4th SS, which took its stand forty miles south of the Yugoslav
capital in the isthmus of land between the Danube and the
Transylvanian Alps. But three days later the Russians were across the
mountains farther north and descended into the valley of the Maros,
capturing Temesvâr on 19th September and Arad two days later.
The whole of Hungary was now open to the Russian advance.
At the end of August, Guderian, cast by Hitler in the role of
diplomat, had travelled to Budapest with a letter for Admiral
Horthy and instructions to discuss matters with him "as one
soldier to another" and to "form an impression of his
[Horthy's] attitude." Formal courtesies were maintained
throughout the meeting, but Horthy had given the game away the moment
they were left alone, for drawing up his chair, the old Admiral had
told Guderian, "Look, my friend, in politics you must always
have several irons in the fire . . ." The two men continued
their discussion for several hours, but from that opening sentence,
as Guderian wrote in his diary, "I knew enough."