Proper staff work and a cool assessment of the day's intelligence would have allowed the Germans to establish two things.
First, that the attack was under the direction of Rokossovski, not
Zhukov; second, that it was not a broaden-ing of the westward
advance into Pomerania, but a thrust on a northerly axis, designed to
isolate the German forces in East Prussia. But during this critical
day of 27th January the SS officers who held the majority of key
positions on the army group staff were bumping along the road between
Dirschau and the Ordensburg Croessinsee in haste and confusion.
Their situation was not such as to encourage reflection and
analysis. The result was that during the night, when Himmler was told
of the depth of the Russian advance, he had ordered that the whole
position, the line running north to south from Thorn to Marienwerder,
be evacuated.
This meant that the strong northern anchor, the position on the
lower Vistula, was given up in the face of an imaginary threat. For
in fact the Russian advance was not moving against the front of Army
Group Vistula, but parallel to it. Had it not been for Himmler's
precipitate retreat, the Russian corridor to the Baltic would have
been so confined that the extrication of the bulk of the divisions in
East Prussia might have been achieved, and with it the possibility of
roughly handling the Russian spearhead which had probed so deeply. As
it was, the German front had once again been fragmented, and Army
Group Vistula was forced back into a position which saddled it with
the responsibility for the northern flank as well as the vital
centre.
The plight of the National Leader's command was worsened by a
simultaneous reverse which had occurred at the southern extremity of
the army group boundary. Here the area between the Oder and Warthe
rivers was protected by a line of permanent fortifications, many of
which dated back to the late twenties, when they had been constructed by the
Arbeitskommando
as a protection against
Poland, during the period before the repudiation of the Versailles
restrictions. The emplacements were well laid out and stoutly built,
but the majority of their guns had been stripped and moved to the
Atlantic Wall in 1943. During November and December four "regiments"
of
Volkssturm
had been drafted into the position, where they
occupied themselves with clearing fields of fire, and some
mine-laying. The fighting value of this garrison, even if the
position had been properly armed, was highly doubtful. The majority
consisted of invalids and old men, with little training or discipline. They were responsible not to the Wehrmacht but to Party
officials who themselves were without military experience and not
conspicuous for their personal courage.
Nonetheless, on a situation map, or as a ration-strength figure,
the position and its garrison looked reassuringly solid, and in those
critical last days of January both Army Group Vistula and Army Group
Centre came to rely on the "Warthe position," the one
hanging its southern, the other its northern flank upon the "line"
there. While Poznan, some thirty miles due east, was holding out, it
was reasonable to assume that the Russian wave would be broken
against the city and would not land with its full force against the
un-steady
Volkssturm
. However, by the 27th it was plain that
Zhukov's columns were bypassing the city and that their
communications, running on the frozen ground, were hardly affected.
On 28th January the Russians gained their first bridgehead over the
upper Oder at Lubin, and it was plain that a full-strength assault
would fall upon the "Warthe position" within forty-eight
hours.
Into this position an SS corps, the 5th (in reality a heterogeneous collection of anti-Partisan units lately arrived from
Yugoslavia), was drafted. But before it had time to consolidate, its
commander, Gruppenführer Walter Krueger, was surprised while on
reconnaissance, and in his car a complete map of the position was
found. The Russian attack swept through the
Volkssturm
position by daybreak, and during the afternoon of the 30th the Soviet
tanks had passed through both Schwiebus and Züllichau.
The effect of this new collapse was that Army Group Vistula again
had both flanks "in the air," while Schörner was
compelled to draw in his own left. The gap between the two army
groups was reopened, and there was little to stand between the
advancing columns of Zhukov and Koniev, now approaching in tandem,
and the east bank of the Oder along its whole length between Küstrin
and Glogau. Some idea of the German disorder can be gauged from the
fact that at Oels airfield the Russians captured 150 aircraft in
serviceable condition, including 119 four-engine F-W Kondors—the
entire strength of the "U-boat support group" which was
being husbanded for a renewed offensive in the Atlantic.
But even at this time, as the Russians poured into the neck of
land between the Oder and the Warthe, their salient was assuming a
classic pattern of vulnerability—comparable only to that of the
Germans who had filled the bend of the Don in their lunge toward
Stalingrad. The question was, had the defenders the strength, had the
attackers the
hubris
, to allow an inverted historical
coincidence to set its stamp upon the battlefield?
Guderian saw clearly what must be done. He sensed the Russians'
exhaustion, even in their moment of victory. He could see how far
they had come, how many islands of resistance remained in their
wake. He knew better than any-one the life of a caterpillar track,
the stage at which tank crews reach utter exhaustion, the safety
point below which the level of supplies cannot drop.
As we watch this man, a superb technician struggling with wornout
machinery and malicious individuals, it is impossible not to feel
sympathy for him. He knew that if the counterstroke was to be
effective time was of the essence.
Yet he was to suffer one disappointment after another in his
efforts to bring this about. First, there had been the appointment
of Himmler to command the army group he had selected for the task,
thus minimising his own opportunity to exercise personal direction of
the battle. Then, at the conference of 27th January, a new blow fell.
Hitler told Guderian that he had decided to send the 6th Panzer Army
(whose first elements would be arriving from the West the following
day) to relieve Budapest instead of committing it on the Oder. There
was no discussion of the subject. That evening Hitler was far away on
the wings of fantasy and had ear only for the chief of the Army
Personnel Office, General Burgdorf.
Burgdorf was one of that disagreeable race of courtiers who thrive
by their assiduous cultivation of the mood and taste of the tyrant—to
the exclusion of any objective performance of their nominal duties.
On that evening he had been regaling the Führer with the
measures adopted by Frederick the Great to deal with
"insubordination," and had collected details of some of the
sentences. These delighted Hitler, who declared, "And people are
always imagining that I am brutal! It would be desirable [and there
cannot have been many among his audience who heard this with satisfaction] if all the prominent men in Germany were to be informed of
these sentences."
While he was in this kind of mood Hitler was unap-proachable on
matters of concrete fact. And Guderian turned for support, for the
second time in as many weeks, to the civil side of the
administration. In Speer, the Chief of the General Staff, he found
someone both more convinced and more fearless in expression than
Ribbentrop. Speer drafted a report, which was based solely on
economic premises and thus avoided any taint of criticising by
implication the Führer's military genius. The report opened with
the flat assertion, "The war is lost." When Guderian handed
it to Hitler, "as a document of extraordinary importance, submitted at the urgent request of the Minister of Armaments,"
Hitler glanced at the opening sentence, then took it over to his
safe, where he locked it away without a word. Some days later, having
received no reply, Speer asked to see Hitler alone after the evening
conference. Hitler refused, complaining, "All he wants is to
tell me again that the war is lost and that I should bring it to an
end." Speer thereupon handed a copy of his memorandum to one
of the SS adjutants, who brought it across to Hitler. Without looking
at it Hitler said to the adjutant, "Put it in my safe." He
then turned to Guderian and said, with one of those rare glints of
humanity that occasionally illumine this titanic and devilish figure,
"Now you can understand why it is that I refuse to see anyone
alone any more. Any man who asks to talk to me alone always does so
because he has something unpleasant to say to me. I can't bear that."
Hitler's inertia at this stage of the battle was particularly
unfortunate since the evidence shows that it was during the first ten
days of February that the Russians were at their most vulnerable.
Zhukov's follow-up of the Warthe. breakthrough was weak numerically
and reached the Oder more because of a total collapse of the defence
than from its own power. On paper he was disposing of four
independent armoured brigades, but the real strength cannot have
amounted to more than two—about six hundred tanks, of which the
majority were probably in urgent need of service and attention.
[Zhukov was leading with the 5th Assault Army (Berzarin) and
reinforcing with Bogdanov's 2nd Guards Armoured Army, which had now
been disengaged from East Prussia and brought across the lower
Vistula, though not, it can be assumed, in any strength at this
stage. His infantry component (the 47th Army) was still around
Poznan.]
On Zhukov's left Koniev, who had travelled less far and had been
less severely resisted, was in greater strength. He was rapidly
breasting the upper Oder along its whole length with the tanks of
Rybalko's 3rd Guards Armoured Army, and his infantry (Koroteyev's
52nd Army) was in close support. Even here, though, the speed of
Soviet reaction had suffered. For the Russians had been unable to
close the trap on the 1st Panzer and 17th Army. Both of these
formations had been cut off from Harpe in the Ka-towice area, but
managed to shoot their way south and slip across the Carpathians in
the last days of January. And Rybalko had not been able to
eliminate all the German bridgeheads on the east bank of the Oder.
Breslau was to remain a thorn in Koniev's side, just as Glogau was in
Zhukov's.
[Glogau was to hold out until 17th April, Breslau until 6th May.
The Soviet Official History claims that the escape of the 1st Panzer
was intentional, as "to have liquidated them in this mining area
would have risked serious damage to the welfare and economy of our
Polish ally." But considerations of this kind had not affected
the Soviet commanders when fighting in their own territory—as
for example, the Donetz basin—and it is unlikely that they
would have paid much heed to them on foreign soil had they disposed
of the means and ability to destroy the enemy on the spot.]
As early as 23rd January, Koniev had ordered Rybalko to probe only
with light forces along the axis Liegnitz-Bunzlau and to swing the
mass of his armour back in the southeasterly direction to clear the
German forces that were believed to be grouped along the left bank of
the Oder. The same preoccupation with the flanks is evident from the
orders to Rokossovski and Chernyakovski to clear East Prussia. No
fewer than five infantry armies were allotted to this task, which was
coordinated by Vasilievski in his capacity as the personal
representative of the
Stavka
, while Zhukov and Koniev had only
four infantry armies between them. Ease of communication was a
factor, for it was simpler to direct the slow-moving infantry
northward than due west across the devastated territory of Poland and
Pomerania. But equally there can be little doubt that these
dispositions were the result of a policy conceived by the
Stavka
before the opening of the offensive and to which it continued to hold
in spite of the experience and, presumably, the recommendations of
the forward commanders.
The same caution which had prompted Stalin to keep a ten-or
twenty-division reserve under his own hand even in the darkest days
now led him to tread more warily than he need in his last approach on
a cornered foe. Three factors probably contributed to this. First,
the very tenacity of Ger-man resistance at the extremities of the
front, in Courland and Hungary, suggested a sinister master plan far
more credible than the lunatic and desperate irrationality which was
the truth. (There must have been many in the
Stavka
who
recalled their own satisfaction in the autumn of 1942, when the
Germans began to thin their line before the armies of Golikov and
Vatutin at Voronezh.) Second, the Soviet armies had twice been caught
and suffered local defeats when overextended. They had been roughly
handled by Hossbach in East Prussia in October of the previous year,
and still more seriously defeated by Manstein's counteroffensive in
February 1943, when the Germans had recaptured Kharkov.
[See Ch. 16.]
Both setbacks could be directly traced to overconfidence and
outrunning of supplies, and both played a part out of all proportion
to their strategic significance in generating an "inferiority
complex" which led the
Stavka
to overestimate German
capacity right up until the end of the war. Third, there was the
political element in the Russians' calculation. If they were to
suffer even a light re-buff—to be compelled, for example, to
fall back onto Polish soil again—they believed that their
influence at the peace table would be seriously diminished. The
Western Allies had not yet begun their own offensive. If the Russians
could consolidate on the Oder, less than forty miles from Berlin,
they could afford to wait until their rivals had crossed the Rhine
before making a final effort. The strength shown by the Germans in
their Ardennes offensive had surprised the
Stavka
less than it
had SHAEF, and confirmed them in their view that henceforth the
Eastern and Western fronts must apply concerted pressure.