Stalin and Beria were the only two at the meeting who knew exactly how much more difficult it would be. The Soviet intelligence source within Hitler’s entourage had ceased communications. Beria had privately briefed Stalin that the same explosion probably killed the source as well as Hitler. The source’s information had been invaluable, even decisive on many occasions. Had he known about Ultra, he would have called the source his one-man Ultra, able to relay Hitler’s orders to Moscow even before they reached his own commanders. And now the dependable duo was gone—Hitler with his foolishness, and the source with the ever timely news of it.
Stalin was now concerned with tallying up the pieces on the board. The Soviet Union must not lose any more pieces after the Anglo-American perfidy had removed the Second Front. The biggest piece was Lend-Lease. He had to restrain Beria from killing any more British and American aid officers, at least until victory was assured. He had come a long way as a military strategist and leader since June 22, 1941, the day of the German invasion, when he’d had a nervous breakdown. The Soviet peoples had unfortunately paid a horrific price for his instruction. By mid-1944 he knew that the Soviet Union had little need of combat equipment and ammunition from the West. Soviet factories had been rebuilt in areas safe from the Germans and were now in full war production, an achievement of quality and volume historic by any standards. But every last Soviet resource was funneled into producing the sharp end of the Red Army’s needs. The soft but vital sustaining logistics of war were beyond Soviet resources. Already much of the population outside the armed forces and vital industries was seriously malnourished. That part of the war effort poured across the seas from the United States and Britain.
When it became clear in 1942 that the Red Army desperately needed to restore the authority of rank to its officer corps and downplay the corrosive power of the commissars, old czarist shoulder boards of rank were reintroduced. The Soviets surprised the British by requesting a million meters of gold braid for the new rank insignia. And now it was common for the canned food the Red Army soldier opened to contain beef that had grazed in Texas or pork raised in Iowa. The Americans dedicated the complete production run of the Studebaker corporation to supply the Red Army with the mobility to carry on high-speed armored warfare across vast fronts and at great depths. Monthly truck deliveries were averaging 11,500 vehicles, enough to equip nine infantry or two tank armies. Twelve thousand trucks had been required for the immediate needs of the armies taking part in Bagration. Soviet formations were being equipped on a scale undreamed of before the war. Fronts possessed truck brigades of 1,275 vehicles; armies had 1,200 in all, including a 348-truck transport regiment. The new mighty tank armies were even more lavishly provided with 5,340 vehicles.
6
These fleets of remarkable and reliable vehicles often ran on British oil pumped up through the great Middle Eastern oil fields. American radios and signals equipment linked the fronts and tank armies with a speed and efficiency that the prewar Red Army had thought only a theoretical possibility. Often as not, the Soviet infantry trudged forward on American and British leather boots and were clothed in American and British cloth. That the useful idiots in these Allied governments had bargained to continue Lend-Lease was the fruition of a long-term investment Stalin had made in subverting left-leaning elites in both countries. He had to play that hand carefully—there were even more dividends to be reaped.
He puffed on his pipe again and let the silence penetrate the moment.
“I shall remind you of what I said to you all in December 1941 when the fascists were at the gates of Moscow. The Germans are only a temporary enemy. The main enemy, the
glavnyy vrag
, is the United States. When Lenin declared war on the capitalist world before he died, he clearly recognized the centrality of the imperialist circles of the United States as the great bastion of the enemies of socialism. That is even more true today.”
He knew he had their attention. But then, he always had their attention. The inattentive ones did not last long. But he had also confused them. Good. It would prepare them for the political-strategic lesson he was about to deliver.
“The cowardly armistice that the West has made will, indeed, make the immediate victory of the Red Army more difficult, much more difficult, to attain. But, comrades, once achieved, the victory will be all the greater—the victory of which Lenin dreamed—the final victory of socialism over capitalism will come with surprising speed.”
He was on his feet now, slamming his fist on the great wooden table.
“It will be the Soviet Union alone,
alone
, which will conquer Germany, all of Germany, and make it a faithful subordinate of the socialist camp. The rest of Europe will fall to us like rotten fruit. When the war ends, Soviet power will be planted from Norway to Gibraltar to Crete!”
7
Rommel’s Junkers transport was more of a sieve than an aircraft when it belly-landed on the muddy field. His Luftwaffe escort had been jumped by a flock of Stalin’s Red Falcons as they approached the front. The Yak-3s were aggressive and outnumbered the Focke-Wulfs three-to-one. One after another had sought out the Ju-52, clawing past the Focke-Wulfs and sending streams of shells into the transport, burning out one motor, killing the pilot and wounding his copilot who barely got it on the ground without crashing.
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Rommel stumbled out followed by Gehlen, his intelligence chief, and the other survivors. They had landed near a Panzer company retreating west. A Kubelwagen sped over to the plane. A rumpled captain, Knight’s Cross at his throat, jumped out of the car as it stopped by the survivors. A hard veteran at twenty-five, the captain thought he had seen everything in three years on the Eastern Front. But he had to admit he had never seen the leader of the Third Reich, or whatever they were calling Germany in the last week, fall out of a shot-up aircraft. He barely had time to salute before Rommel jumped into his jeep, ordered Gehlen to follow, and said. “Hauptmann, where are the closest Russians?”
The story would shoot across the fluid front in hours. Rommel had escaped death by an eyelash, and his only thought was to find some Russians to thrash. The fact that he arrived at the 20th Panzer Division and led its pitiful remnant into a counterattack that savaged the Russian tank corps spearheading the pursuit quickly became a legend that grew with the retelling. The truth was more modest. Both the Panzer division and the tank corps were shells of themselves and exhausted, but the magic of Rommel’s name worked wonders with the German troops. He seemed to be everywhere among the retreating columns, showing himself and turning them east. Goebbels might have been dead, but his propaganda machine was still working, and picked up the story of the victory at Baronovichi. In these hands it became another miracle. The Desert Fox had brought his magic with him to the Eastern Front.
If Field Marshal Walther Model, commander of the remnants of Army Group Center, had any complaint with the head of state interfering with his conduct of the retreat, he kept it to himself. After all, he had worked with Hitler, who only caused him trouble. If Rommel wanted to play division commander, he would not object, especially when it helped. Their meeting went surprisingly well. Rommel showed a good grasp of the situation and concurred with Model’s overall handling of the retreat and then outlined his plans for the immediate future. Within those plans, Model had a free hand. “Trade space for time. Save as many men and as much equipment as you can. The decisive battle will be fought on the Vistula-Narew line. But you must buy me the time to prepare for it and mass a Panzer reserve.” Then he was gone.
Zhukov did not allow himself to become elated when signal intercepts reported that Rommel had been shot down approaching the front. First reports were usually wrong, and he had more important things at hand, such as bullying his flagging armored forces forward. He was a much feared man, and with good reason. He was completely ruthless. Rumors had it that he had personally shot more than one general who failed. Only recently, disgusted with the failure of an attempted river crossing, Zhukov had ordered the corps and division commanders involved sent to penal battalions. His staff had intervened to save the corps commander. The former division commander was allowed to redeem himself by leading a suicide attack. Generals physically feared him, but the troops seemed to have a great confidence and affection for him. Though he spent their lives like a spendthrift, he had a reputation for fair treatment of the lower ranks. Anyone who shoots generals usually looks good to privates.
Zhukov did allow himself some guarded optimism, though. Operation Bagration had destroyed or wrecked four German armies. Stalin would be pleased with the 50,000 POWs who were destined to be marched through Red Square. His job now was to guarantee the destruction of the remnants. With luck the Red Army would crush them and throw itself over the Vistula and Narew Rivers before his forces completely outran their logistics. Then a few months’ rest and the offensive would resume, across the flat, tilled Polish plain, as its right brushed the Baltic through East Prussia and its left the Carpathian Mountains. The blow would fall upon broken German forces and sweep them aside as the Red Army made its lunge across the Oder to Berlin itself. And after Berlin there was the Rhine, and beyond the Rhine …
The railroad control officer was a retread from the 1914-18 war. Strangely enough, he had been working the same Rhine River railroad bridge control point in late November and December 1918. The troop trains then had been full of German troops returning to the Fatherland. This time there was a difference. This time they were the victors, not the defeated.
The officer, like millions of other Germans, had been euphoric over the victory in the West. The news of Hitler’s death had followed and stunned the nation. But the armistice in the West followed so quickly that it submerged Hitler’s sudden disappearance from the stage in a wave of euphoria. Since Stalingrad and the disaster in Tunisia, the news had been getting worse. A sense of doom had formed in the minds of the German people, growing daily as the propaganda could no longer explain away the constant retreats and the rain of death from the sky increased. The destruction of Hamburg in its firestorm from hell stunned the elites, although everything possible had been done to hide the extent of the disaster from the public. Now the skies were clear again, and he, as a railroad control officer, found his job infinitely easier. No more constant interruptions of the schedule by damaged and destroyed track and rolling stock. It was almost like peacetime.
The army had moved quickly and almost instinctively to shed the obnoxious attributes of National Socialism. The up and coming “National Socialist” politicals quickly found themselves transferred to the more dangerous assignments, where their previous and enthusiastic support of Hitler’s “hold or die” orders took on new meaning. Himmler’s death left the SS without a head. One of Rommel’s first acts was to abolish its national establishment and subordinate its fighting arm directly into the army. SS Gen. Sepp Dietrich’s quiet support in the days before and after Hitler’s assassination had proved vital in getting the SS under control. Most Germans were too concentrated on the implacable Bolshevik enemy to have any taste for civil war. As the fantastic days of early July sped by, the German people clung to obedience and duty.
The railroad officer also had to admit that the sudden disappearance of all those swastikas and the return of the old imperial colors was a welcome change. He also gathered from the movement orders that his little operation was only part of an incredible shift of forces across Europe, dwarfing the transfer of over a million German troops from the Eastern Front in 1917 after the defeat of Czarist Russia. He was right. The movements truly dwarfed 1917 in scope and speed. At the beginning of June, German ground forces were stretched far too thin along a great circle. Hitler’s conquests in every direction had left him with an immense area to garrison, as shown by the table below. Everything was important to Hitler, who thereby dissipated the fighting strength of Germany in every direction. The consequences of a two-front war were devouring the substance of Germany’s ability to continue fighting at an alarming rate.
| Eastern Front | Finland | Norway/Denmark | West | Italy | Balkans | |
| Army | 149 | 6 | 15 | 47 | 23 | 18 |
| Luftwaffe | — | — | — | 3 | 3 | — |
| SS | 8 | 1 | — | 4 | 1 | 7 |
| Totals | 157 | 7 | 15 | 54 | 27 | 25 |
The commitment to build up the West to counter the Allied invasion had sucked fighting forces from the Eastern Front, which by June stood at only 2,160,000 men, barely two-thirds of the force with which Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The total Wehrmacht forces in France at the same time were almost 1.4 mllion, of which 900,000 were in the field formations of the army and SS. Another 340,000 were in the Luftwaffe, of which over 30,000 were in its field divisions and paratrooper units and 100,000 were flak troops. The remainder were naval personnel.
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