Gehlen had pieced together an accurate idea of the time of the Soviet attack by analyzing the vast buildup of forces and supplies. Tens of thousands of Soviet guns were in place in the first week of January 1945, ready to be fed by carefully massed ammunition dumps. It had taken the Soviets months to mass the forces and support for the coming offensive. On January 7, von Manstein ordered the evacuation of the Loki Line. The relatively light German forces there quickly moved back from twenty to sixty miles to the Scharnhorst Line. Zhukov was caught unprepared. His entire logistics plan was compromised. The new German front line was now far out of artillery range. Even if the guns had been moved forward, their ammunition dumps were too far to the rear to support them. Zhukov drove his logisticians to Herculean efforts to reposition their ammunition as his commanders worked out the complex plans to move millions of men and hundreds of thousands of vehicles and horses to entirely new positions. They engaged in equally Herculean efforts to replan their attacks. Everywhere Zhukov threatened, often relieved officers, and occasionally sent one of them to the camps. An entire month was consumed in moving his host forward.
The blow fell on February 14, along the entire front. Thousands of Soviet aircraft took off at predawn and headed for the forward Luftwaffe airfields just as they had at Kursk, and just as at Kursk the Germans were one step ahead. Ferocious air battles filled the skies.
As the Red Falcons flew west, tens of thousands of guns lashed the forward German defenses, crushing them in many places. The weight of iron was overwhelming. Von Manstein, however, had again reached into his bag of tricks and made sure most of the Soviet metal was wasted. Good intelligence had alerted the Germans, in many areas giving twenty-four-hours notice of the artillery preparation. As planned, the Germans again abandoned their forward positions and occupied secondary and even more powerful positions in the depths of the Scharnhorst Line. The attacking Soviet armies fought their way through the light screening forces for miles before encountering the main line of resistance. By then they had exhausted their impetus and did not have the crushing weight of massive preplanned fires to prepare the way, it was the turn of the German artillery and close air support to take their toll. Nowhere did the Soviets penetrate more than a few miles on the first day.
The weeks burned through February as the Soviets ground forward, leaving the blood trail of a nation behind them in the frozen Polish earth. By the end of the month they had barely reached the Vistula and Narew Rivers in a few places, and their losses were enormous. Thousands of burned-out tanks and assault guns littered their path westward through the Scharnhorst Line. The front-line infantry divisions had been in many cases reduced to regiments. Everywhere, the Germans had fought on until the point of destruction then withdrawn deeper into their endless defensive system. Tanks became as useless as cavalry in the trench system of the First World War. Every time it seemed that a penetration had been made in the system, the tank corps that rushed through the gaps found themselves in enormous antitank ambushes with Panzers in force waiting for the counterstroke. The brunt of the battle fell to the infantry again, and Stalin was profligate, but as the month wore on, even he began to draw back and consider his dwindling human bank account. The British and Americans were also telling him that they could no longer justify continued assistance, due to domestic political pressure. “Make peace,” they said. “You have already restored your borders. Expect nothing more after the end of this month.”
March began with more blood as the fighting slowly burned west, but by the second week, the 1st Ukrainian Front made better progress as it fought its way first across the San then the Vistula at Baranow. The 1st Byelorussian Front reached the Vistula south of Warsaw about the same time on March 5-6. In one of the most costly and heroic actions of the war, the Red Army threw itself across the river at Magnuszew and Pulawy three days later to carve out a substantial bridgehead. By the third week the good news was that the final belt of defensive systems of the Gneisenau Line had been breached by both fronts. The Soviets, however, had the utmost difficulty in widening the breaches against the Germans’ determination to hold the shoulders in strength: Nevertheless, Zhukov ordered his tank armies forward, demanding a deep exploitation. Through the narrow breaches in the front on March 17, Marshal Koniev released his 3rd Guards Tank and 4th Tank Armies, and Vasilievskiy his 1st Guards and 2nd Guards Tank Armies. North of Warsaw, the 2nd Byelorussian Front had gained a strong bridgehead over the Narew as well and was sending its 5th Guards Tank Army across.
Thousands of Soviet tanks drove west and north for the great encirclement of Warsaw, which at one stroke would take a 200-mile bite out of the front. Zhukov was determined finally to drive a stake through the heart of Army Group Center. The deeper the Soviet tanks drove, though, the more dangerous became the rejuvenated Luftwaffe’s ground attacks and the less effective their own air support as the German fighters took a higher and higher toll. Deep behind the German front, the open ground suddenly ended as the tank armies came up against the deep defenses of the Friedrich der Grosse Line on March 23. Rage as they might, the Soviet tank masses were useless in this new maze of antitank weapons and obstacles. They were desperately short of the necessary infantry and heavy artillery. Neither Vasilievskiy nor Koniev had been able to widen the breaches in the main German line, which still held and bent back strong shoulders.
Then von Manstein struck. The carefully husbanded Panzer armies appeared and hit the Soviets on March 25 at the base of their penetrations north and south of Warsaw, severed them, then turned west to take the Soviet tanks in the rear and press them up against the German antitank defenses. Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army closed in on Koniev’s tanks in the south outside of Krakow, slicing across their rear. Raus’s 1st Panzer Army cut down across the rear of Vasilievskiy’s two tank armies. Both Panzer armies smashed into the Soviet bridgeheads. Those at Baranow and Magnuszew were broken, yielding thousands of prisoners. It was Fritz Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr Division (XLVII Panzer Corps) that threw the last of the Russians into the Vistula at Magnuszew. Bayerlein had little time to contemplate the carnage, but it was obvious that the Russians had paid an appalling price getting across the river and then grinding their way through the German defenses.
“I was struck by the endless number of destroyed enemy armored vehicles caught up in the antitank defenses and by the numbers of dead infantry they had not bothered to bury. I could only think how prescient Rommel had been.”
23
Hoth and Raus immediately turned their forces west in the rear of the tank armies, still only vaguely aware of the threat to their rear. They soon found out. The battles raged across south-central Poland as the Soviets were struck in the rear and turned to fight, caught between the Friedrich der Grosse Line defenses and the Panzers. Then von Manstein committed the 5th Panzer Army (less one corps) on March 27. Vasilievskiy’s tanks were now fighting front and rear. Day after day hundreds of vehicles gushed smoke and flame up into the sky. Zhukov ordered an all-out attack by the Red Air Force to support his embattled tank armies and instructed his other front commanders to reestablish the bridgeheads. In the sky, the greatest air battle in history raged over the greatest tank battle as thousands of planes fell to the earth. At this critical moment Galland unleashed his carefully husbanded Me 262 jet fighters. The Red Falcons were attacked even before they reached the Vistula, their squadrons savaged and disrupted.
The only bright spot for Zhukov was the successful breakout of the 5th Guards Tank Army north of Warsaw. He ordered it to swing south behind Warsaw and into the German rear. Von Manstein then released his final Panzer reserve—5th Panzer Army’s remaining corps—the II SS Panzer Corps.
24
They had fought these Russians before—at the great tank engagement at Prokorovka at Kursk in 1943, and been stopped. There were a few men left from both sides who had been there, but it would not be a happy reunion. The two tank masses met at Szrensk northwest of Warsaw on March 28 in a titanic engagement.
25
Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov cordially met the ambassadors at the door and ushered them into his offices. He was a master diplomat and could put on any face required. This time it would be that of a genial and cooperative host. It ate at his gut like a bellyful of glass. He remembered the morning almost four years ago, on June 22, 1941, when the German ambassador had delivered the German declaration of war to this
very same
room—after the invasion was well under way. Then Molotov had spat upon the German paper and ordered the Germans shown out the back entrance.
Now he had to hint that the Soviet government, in the interest of the international working class, would be pleased to employ the good offices of the Swedish and Uruguayan governments. The debacle on the plains of Poland had made all this necessary.
26
It was 1914 all over again—the two Russian armies destroyed at Tannenberg now writ much larger. And the Germans were quick to make the analogy. The church bells had rung all over that cursed country. Central Poland had been the graveyard of Russian revenge—more than 4,000 tanks lost and the cream of the tank force destroyed. The offensive arm of the Red Army was broken. The spring thaw had come early, encasing both armies in a sea of mud. At least Zhukov had been sent to chop wood in Siberia.
27
Now Molotov had to smile and beg help from these men he considered fools to end this war. Of course, Stalin would portray it as a victorious war—after all, the fascists had been driven completely out of the Soviet Union and had suffered great losses. The border, he suspected, would essentially be the one drawn over the body of murdered Poland, the one he had helped draw in 1939—an ocean of blood spilled to come back to the same spot. He smiled again.
Of course, the pivot point of this alternate history is the defeat of the Western Allies in Normandy. It was the only plausible scenario, however remote, in which Germany could have survived World War II, and it was one that Rommel identified in his papers. The extensive comments by Rommel to Fritz Bayerlein about how to deal with the Soviets were the most common-sense approach, given the circumstances. Common sense, however, was the one critical resource disallowed the Germans while Hitler remained in power.
This alternate history has attempted to explore the optimum scenario in which Germany could have escaped destruction that late in the war. Irreplaceable elements in this scenario were the removal of Hitler, the cessation of the Allied bombing campaign, and a one-front war. The industrial resources and the military manpower remaining to Germany, even after the disaster of the destruction of Army Group Center, if intelligently used under these circumstances (admittedly a big if), could well have stalemated the Soviets in the east. The Soviets were approaching the bottom of even their vast manpower barrel, despite being flush with Lend-Lease equipment and their own war production. In the final assault on Berlin in 1945, Stalin cautioned both Zhukov and Koniev that there were no replacements.
This alternate history also clarifies the mutually supportive roles of the Soviets and the Western Allies. The Soviets rightly claimed to have fought the overwhelming part of the German ground forces, but they went on to assert that they essentially won the war. The truth is that they were successful because the bombing campaign, the Allied campaigns in the Mediterranean, and ultimately the Second Front, so dissipated German resources that they could only fail everywhere.
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———,
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*
1
. Stauffenberg, Claus von,
Saving Germany
(Verlagshaus Hindrichs, Potsdam and Leipzig, 1949), 49-53. Von Stauffenberg’s account of Rommel at Dachau owes nothing to the postwar Rommel myth. If anything, other eyewitnesses state that von Stauffenberg understated Rommel’s rage.