Stalin's General (33 page)

Stalin was undoubtedly hostile to the uprising, which was anticommunist and anti-Soviet in its inspiration, and directed as much against him as against Hitler. But there is no evidence he saw the AK as much of a threat. He had every confidence that when the Red Army captured Warsaw he would be able to deal with the anticommunist Poles. This confidence was shared by his Front commanders. “Do you think that we would not have taken Warsaw if we had been able to do it?” Rokossovsky rhetorically asked journalist Alexander Werth in an
off-the-record interview at the end of August 1944. “The whole idea that we are in any sense afraid of the AK is too idiotically absurd.”
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Stalin's refusal to aid the insurgents also aroused suspicion that he was happy to see the Germans crush them. At first he had been inclined to give some help, even though he thought the uprising ill-judged militarily and doomed to failure. But his attitude changed when the western press began to publish reports that the AK's action had been coordinated with the Red Army, which having encouraged an uprising was now refusing aid to the insurgents. When the British and Americans approached Stalin with a request for Soviet landing and refueling facilities for their planes dropping supplies to the insurgents, he refused. On August 16 he wrote to Churchill explaining why:

On August 20 Churchill and Roosevelt jointly appealed to Stalin to drop supplies to Warsaw, if only to propitiate world opinion. Stalin replied on August 22:

But by September, with their attack on Warsaw delayed, the Soviets began to worry more about the public relations aspects of the affair. On September 9 the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs sent a memorandum to the British embassy in Moscow proposing to establish an independent commission to investigate who was responsible for launching the Warsaw uprising and why it had not been coordinated with the Soviet High Command. The memo also announced that the Soviets would now cooperate with British and American supply drops. In mid-September the Soviets also began to step up their own airdrops to Warsaw—a move that coincided with renewed Red Army efforts to take the city. Indeed, Soviet airdrops of supplies to the insurgents were broadly equivalent to those of the British and included 156 mortars, 505 antitank guns, 2,667 submachine guns and rifles, three million cartridges, 42,000 hand grenades, 500 kilos of medicine, and 113 tons of food.
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By the time the uprising failed in early October the AK had incurred about 20,000 fatalities and many thousands more wounded, while the civilian population, caught in the crossfire, suffered somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 dead. To cap the whole horrific affair the Germans demolished the Warsaw city center and deported the surviving population to concentration camps. After the war the issue of who was to blame for the catastrophe was the subject of prolonged and often virulent controversy. Was it the AK for launching a premature uprising? Was it Stalin for holding back the Red Army? Was it the British and Americans for failing to do all they could for the insurgents or for encouraging a lost cause?
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Because of the controversy both Rokossovsky and Shtemenko devoted entire chapters of their memoirs to demonstrating that the Red Army had done all it could to capture Warsaw and to aid the insurgents. In his memoirs Zhukov said much the same thing, but devoted little space to the details of events.
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In truth, Zhukov regarded the capture of Warsaw a sideshow compared to the more strategically important goal of an invasion of Germany. He was disappointed by Stalin's rejection of his proposal for a large-scale offensive into East Prussia, which he saw as a missed opportunity to take advantage of the Germans' disarray and weakness following the stupendous success
of Bagration—an error of judgment he thought would cost the Red Army dearly when it invaded Germany in 1945.
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Another reason for his retrospective lack of interest in the Warsaw uprising was that at the end of August he was given a new mission. Stalin had decided to declare war on Bulgaria. The country was not at war with the USSR but it had aided Nazi Germany in various ways. The 3rd Ukrainian Front was tasked with the invasion of Bulgaria and Zhukov was sent to supervise the operation. In command of the 3rd Ukrainian was Marshal Tolbukhin, a former classmate of Zhukov's from the Frunze Military Academy. On September 4 Zhukov and Tolbukhin submitted to Stavka an invasion plan that was approved by Stalin the next day. The plan called for an attack by three armies (twenty-seven infantry divisions) and two mechanized corps. On September 5 the USSR declared war on Bulgaria. A couple of days later the 3rd Ukrainian invaded. It was not much of a war. The Red Army was welcomed as a liberator by most of the population, including by the Bulgarian army, and on September 9 the pro-German government was overthrown by a communist-led coup in Sofia. The new Bulgarian government promptly declared war on Germany.
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By the middle of September Zhukov was back in Poland coordinating the 1st and 2nd Belorussian Fronts but not until the end of October was he formally relieved of his responsibility for the 3rd Ukrainian Front.
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According to Stalin's appointments diary the dictator did not meet Zhukov at all during September and October 1944. However, they did meet on November 2 and this was the first of a series of meetings
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leading to a portentous decision: on November 12 Zhukov was appointed commander of the 1st Belorussian Front.
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By this time planning had begun for the Red Army's next strategic operation—the invasion of Germany. The 1st Belorussian's role in the invasion would be to advance in the center from Warsaw to Berlin. To Zhukov's north would be the 2nd Belorussian Front, commanded by Rokossovsky, while to the south there was Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front. Rokossovsky was not happy with his transfer from the 1st to the 2nd Belorussian Front even though Stalin assured him that his was not a secondary task. “If you and Konev don't advance,” Stalin told him, “neither will Zhukov.”
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Zhukov was convinced that Rokossovsky blamed him for his removal from the command of the 1st Belorussian and wrote in his memoirs: “It seems to me that after this conversation [between Rokossovsky and Stalin] Konstantin Konstantinovich and I did not have the warm friendly relations we had had over many years. It seems that he thought … I had asked to head the 1st Belorussian Front. If that is so, he was profoundly mistaken.”
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There is no reason to doubt Zhukov's word on this matter. The decision was Stalin's and he had decided that the honor and glory of leading the Soviet storm on Germany belonged to his deputy supreme commander.

AFTER THE BATTLE OF MOSCOW, ZHUKOV IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS ROLE IN
the capture of Berlin in April 1945. It was Zhukov's troops who fought their way into the city center where, on April 30, they famously planted the Soviet flag on top of the ruined German parliamentary building, the Reichstag. By this time Hitler was dead, having committed suicide in his bunker that afternoon. Two days later the German defenders of Berlin surrendered and on May 9 Zhukov had the honor of accepting Germany's unconditional surrender on Stalin's behalf. Victory came at a high price. During the assault on Berlin the Red Army suffered 300,000 casualties, including nearly 80,000 dead.

Stalin and Stavka began to plan the invasion of Germany in autumn 1944 with an eye to capturing Berlin by the end of February 1945 after an operation of no more than forty-five days. A pause would then follow before the resumption of large-scale offensive operations in the summer designed to finish off the Nazi regime. In other words, the Soviets expected the war to follow the same pattern as in the previous three years: winter offensive, spring pause, summer campaigning. It should be noted that the Soviets did not equate the fall of Berlin with the end of the war. They fully expected the Germans to fight on for a few more months, including in Hitler's much vaunted Bavarian stronghold—the birthplace of the Nazi movement and where it was widely expected to make its last stand. The struggle for Berlin only
became the last great battle of the Soviet-German war because of various military and political contingencies, not least Stalin's determination that the Red Army capture the German capital before the British and Americans. Zhukov—Stalin's deputy, the savior of Leningrad and Moscow, the victor of Stalingrad and Kursk, and the liberator of Poland, Belorussia, and the Ukraine—was always destined to play a significant role in the conquest of Germany and the capture of Berlin. But no one anticipated the dramatic finale of the Soviet-German war that would cement Zhukov's reputation as one of the greatest generals in history.

In early November 1944 Zhukov participated in several long discussions with Stalin, Vasilevsky, Antonov, and Shtemenko about winter operations.
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The main idea to emerge was that in early 1945 the Red Army would stage a multi-Front strategic operation to take it from the Vistula to the Oder—the two great rivers that bisected eastern Poland and eastern Germany, respectively—and then on to Berlin. The two main Fronts involved in what became known as the Vistula-Oder operation would be Zhukov's 1st Belorussian and Konev's 1st Ukrainian. Between them Zhukov and Konev had 163 divisions with a total of 2.2 million troops, 32,000 guns and mortars, 6,460 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 4,800 aircraft. Relative to the Germans, Konev and Zhukov had 5.5 times more manpower, 7.8 times more artillery, 5.7 times more armor, and 17.6 times more aircraft.
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In addition, they had the flanking support of the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts in the north and the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts in the south.

Zhukov's mandate was to capture Warsaw, advance to Poznan, and then take Berlin. Konev was to head for Breslau and the important industrial area of Silesia, which Stalin was keen to capture for economic as well as strategic reasons.
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The task of Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front was to strike out across northern Poland toward Danzig. In charge of the 3rd Belorussian was I. D. Chernyakhovsky—the only Jewish general to command a Front during the Great Patriotic War—who was to destroy the strong German forces in East Prussia, capture Königsberg, and link up with Rokossovsky's forces in a joint advance along the Baltic coastal lands. However, in February 1945 Chernyakhovsky was killed in action and his place was taken by
Vasilevsky, hitherto Stavka coordinator of the 1st and 2nd Baltic Fronts. That Vasilevsky did not have a central role in the invasion of Germany from the outset was not a sign of Stalin's disfavor but of his plan for Vasilevsky to command an attack on the Japanese in Manchuria later that year. Although the Soviet Union remained neutral in the Pacific War Stalin was pledged to enter the war against Japan soon after the defeat of Germany. In return the Soviets would regain the territory and military bases in China they had lost as a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.