Armageddon (3 page)

3rd Baltic Front:
Colonel-General Ivan Maslennikov
(terminated October 1944)

2nd Baltic Front:
General Andrei Eremenko
then
Govorov
from February 1945

1st Baltic Front:
Marshal I. Kh. Bagramyan
(merged into 3rd Belorussian 24 January 1945)

3rd Belorussian Front:
General I. Chernyakhovsky
, then
Marshal Alexandr Vasilevsky
from February 1945

2nd Belorussian Front:
Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky
from September 1944

1st Belorussian Front:
Rokossovsky
, then
Marshal Georgi Zhukov
from November 1944

1st Ukrainian Front:
Marshal Ivan Konev

4th Ukrainian Front:
General I. Ye. Petrov
, then
General A. I. Yeremenko
from March 1945

2nd Ukrainian Front:
Marshal Rodion Malinovsky

3rd Ukrainian Front:
Marshal Fydor Tolbukhin

The Soviet Union used the same nomenclature for its formations as the Western allies—armies, corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions—but all were much smaller than their Anglo-American counterparts. A Soviet rifle division usually comprised between 3,000 and 7,000 men. Formations were granted the honorific title of “Guards” for distinguished conduct in action. “Shock” and “Tank” armies fulfilled the functions their titles suggest. Elite formations were trained and equipped to a much higher standard than the huge armed rabble which followed the spearheads, of whom little was expected save an ability to occupy ground and absorb enemy fire.

GERMANY

Army Commander-in-Chief:
Adolf Hitler

Chief of Staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW):
Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

Chief of the Operations Staff of OKW:
Colonel-General Alfred Jodl

Chief of the General Staff of OKH (Army High Command):
Colonel-General Heinz Guderian
, then
General Hans Krebs
from 28 March 1945

Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army:
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler

If this structure sounds ambivalent and confusing, so it was to senior German officers at the time, reflecting rival centres of power within the Nazi military hierarchy. Hitler changed operational commanders so frequently that it would be wearisome to list all incumbents. The following were the principal holders of some major operational posts in the last months of the war:

GERMAN FORCES IN THE WEST

Commander-in-Chief West:
Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt
, then
Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring
from 10 March 1945

Army Group B (
Field-Marshal Walter Model
) comprised Fifth Panzer Army (
Lieutenant-General Hasso von Manteuffel
to March 1945), Seventh Army (
General Erich Brandenburger
, then from 20 February 1945
General Hans Felber
, then from 25 March 1945
General Von Olstfelder
) and Fifteenth Army (
General von Zangen
). Sixth SS Panzer Army (
Colonel-General Sepp Dietrich
) was also under command until January 1945

Army Group G (
Colonel-General Paul Hausser
) comprised First Army (
General Otto von Knobelsdorff
, then
General Hermann Foertsch
) and Nineteenth Army (
General Wiese
to 16 February 1945, then
Foertsch
)

Army Group H (
Colonel-General Kurt Student
from November 1944 to January 1945, then
Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz
) comprised First Parachute Army (
Student
then
General Alfred Schlemm
) and Twenty-fifth Army (
Günther Blumentritt
then from March 1945
Philipp Kleffel
)

GERMAN FORCES IN ITALY

Army Group C (
Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring
to March 1945, then
General Heinrich von Vietinghoff
)

GERMAN FORCES IN THE EAST

Army Group Centre, which became AG North in January 1945 (
General Hans Reinhardt
to January 1945, then
Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic
to March 1945, then
Walter Weiss
to April 1945)

Army Group Vistula, organized in East Prussia in January 1945 (
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler
then
Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici
)

Army Group North Ukraine, which became AG Centre in January 1945 (
General Josef Harpe
, then from January 1945
Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner
)

Army Group South Ukraine, which became AG Ostmark in April 1945 (
General Johannes Friessner
until December 1944, then
General Otto Wohler
, then from April 1945
Rendulic
)

Army Group E (
Colonel-General Alexander Lohr
)

Army Group F, until disbanded in March 1945 (
Field-Marshal Maximilian von Weichs
)

Army Group Kurland (
Rendulic
in January 1945,
von Vietinghoff
to March 1945, then
Carl Hilpert
)

German forces were organized on roughly similar lines to those of the Allies but there was vastly more movement of corps and divisions between commands and fronts. The Waffen SS was responsible organizationally to Heinrich Himmler rather than to the Wehrmacht, but its formations were placed under the orders of local commanders as operational requirements and the whims of Hitler dictated. In this text, SS officers are described by their military, not SS ranks.

CHAPTER ONE

Time of Hope

ALLIES OF A KIND

T
HE FIRST OF
September 1944 marked the fifth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, outbreak of the Second World War. The struggle had already continued for nine months longer than the earlier conflict, once called the Great War. The 1914–18 conflict cost the lives of a mere nine million people. Its successor would account for at least five times that number, the overwhelming majority of whom died in the Soviet Union or in China (where their passing remained largely unremarked by Westerners, then or since).

The British people somewhat flattered themselves about their own role. France, Britain and the dominion were the only belligerents voluntarily to have entered the conflict against totalitarianism as a matter of principle in support of Polish freedom, rather than as victims of aggression or in hopes of booty. Churchill’s brilliant defiance in 1940 mitigated Hitler’s triumph in western Europe that year. Without his genius, it is likely that Britain would have sued for peace. At no time after June 1940 was there a possibility that British arms could defeat Germany, or even play the principal part in doing so. Yet it was characteristic of British self-indulgence that, when Hitler invaded in Russia in June 1941, some thoughtful people recoiled in disgust from the notion of fighting alongside the bloodstained Soviets, even though their participation opened up the first, perhaps only realistic, prospect of overcoming Hitler.

In Evelyn Waugh’s great novel
Sword of Honour,
the British officer Guy Crouchback embraces war in 1939 as a crusade against the modern world in arms. His faith is lost, however, when he finds his country allied with the Russians. That was fiction, yet in cool reality the head of the British Army, Sir John Dill, said in 1941 that he considered the Russians “so foul that he hated the idea of any close association with them.” Dill’s successor as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, initially regarded the Soviets with both moral and military contempt. Churchill’s government embarked upon a huge propaganda campaign, to convince the British people that “Uncle Joe” Stalin and his nation were worthy friends of freedom. This was so successful that in 1945 it proved a painful task to shatter public delusions, to break the news that perhaps the Soviet Union was not quite such a good thing after all.

Yet if the accession of the Soviet Union as an ally prompted equivocal sentiments, that of the United States provided cause for unstinting celebration. “So we had won after all!” Winston Churchill exulted, on hearing news of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Between that date and May 1945, the United States devoted 85 per cent of its entire war effort to the struggle against Germany. Yet, paradoxically, few Americans ever felt deep animosity towards the Germans, of the kind which they cherished towards the “yellow barbarians” who had attacked them at Pearl Harbor. “I didn’t work up a great hate of the Germans,” said Nicholas Kafkalas, a twenty-four-year-old captain commanding an armoured infantry company of 10th Armored Division in north-west Europe. “They were pretty good soldiers. A lot of Americans felt less engaged against the Germans than against the Japanese.” By the autumn of 1944, largely armed and equipped by the industrial might of the United States, the Allies were in no doubt of victory. But the gratitude of the weary, battered, hungry British people was mingled with resentment as they watched Americans in their tens of thousands, brash and fresh, clean and rich, pour off the ships on their way to join Eisenhower’s armies. The New World’s soldiers came to harvest the fruits of victory without, as the British saw it, having endured their share of the Old World’s pain.

A thirty-two-year-old academic serving as a combat historian with the U.S. Army in September 1944 read British newspapers. He noted the fears these expressed, that the Americans would claim to have won the war on their own. “Unfortunately [for the British], nothing can stop our people from claiming the victory,” Forrest Pogue wrote presciently.

They believe the British slow, they over-emphasize their [own] total contribution. The British will never get full credit for their part in winning the war, since their greatest glory was holding on in the 1939–42 period. This was negative type of fighting, and will fade . . . Russia will be played down, perhaps, in later years at home . . . Hers was the positive sacrifice that broke Germany and made the landing [in Normandy] possible. However, ours was the voice and the helping hand that encouraged England to keep fighting, that replaced the terrific loss of
matériel
suffered by the Russians.

All this was true.

Winston Churchill, whose irrational stubbornness in 1940 had averted Hitler’s triumph, enjoyed the years of victory much less than he had expected. Like his people he was weary, as well a man of sixty-nine might be. He suffered increasing ill-health. He was made wretched by consciousness of his shrinking power in the Grand Alliance of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. He was haunted by apprehension that Hitler’s tyranny in eastern Europe would be supplanted by that of Stalin. In 1940, Britain’s prime minister had been warlord of the sole bastion of resistance to the Nazis. In 1942, even if the Soviets treated him with the morbid suspicion due to an old imperialist and adversary of revolution, the Americans deferred to his greatness and to his nation’s experience of war. From 1943 onwards, however, Churchill’s influence upon the Grand Alliance dwindled almost to vanishing point. The Soviet Union displayed the icy arrogance it considered appropriate, as paymaster of the vast blood sacrifice necessary to bring Hitler’s empire to bay. The United States made plain its intention to determine strategy in the west and invade Normandy in summer 1944—Operation Overlord—as its forces waxed in might while those of Britain waned.

“Up till Overlord,” wrote Churchill’s private secretary when it was all over, “he saw himself as the supreme authority to whom all military decisions were referred. Now, he is by force of circumstances little more than a spectator.” Churchill himself acknowledged this: “Up to July 1944 England had a considerable say in things; after that I was conscious that it was America who made the big decisions.” In 1944, the United States produced as many weapons as all the Axis powers together—40 per cent of the entire armaments employed by all the combatants on every front in the Second World War. Tensions grew between Britain’s prime minister and America’s president: “Roosevelt envied Churchill’s genius, and Churchill increasingly envied Roosevelt’s power,” in the words of the historian John Grigg. The warmth of public exchanges between the two men masked a private coolness, and especially the consequences of Roosevelt’s impatience with Churchill, which became ever more marked in the last months of the war.