Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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There is ample evidence to indicate that the enemy is bring-

ing up forces to take up defensive positions on the ap-

proaches to the Oder. But if we manage to establish ourselves

on the west [i.e. far] bank of the Oder, the success of the

operation to capture Berlin will be guaranteed.

This was the first time that the word 'Berlin' had been men-

tioned in such an order, and the impact on the soldiers was

considerable.

A great blizzard was blowing when the borders of the

heartland of Brandenburg were attacked by the 1st Belorus-

sian Front on 28 January. By now Zhukov's western frontage

had been squeezed to about one hundred kilometres, be-

tween the boundary with Konev's command in the south,

and the increasing German resistance in Pomerania to the

north.

Zhukov's left-flanking armies ran almost at once into a se-

quence of defensive lines which extended backwards from the

old Polish-German border along the marshy Obra River. The

Russians called this defensive system the Meseritz Fortified

Region, while the Germans termed it the Tirschtiegel Barrier

('Tirschtiegel Riegel). The region had been constructed before the

war in order to defend the shortest routes to Berlin from Poland,

and the positions were inherently strong, even though the

works had been stripped of most of their equipment and the

guard was abandoned to the Volkssturm. The result was some

very confused fighting which escaped from the control of the

respective high commands.

On some sectors the Volkssturm were left undisturbed or

were able to beat off the Russians with a show of resistance.

Friedrich Helmigk and his company were holding a bunker

about ten kilometres south-west of the town of Meseritz, and

they caught their first sight of the enemy in the shape of a force

of thirteen tanks which rolled towards the outlying anti-tank

obstacle:

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

108

The first tank now emerged from the sunken road, fol-

lowed by a second and a third. They halted in front of the

barrier. In addition to my hunting binoculars I had my rifle

with the telescopic sight, which had been accurately zeroed

in. The hatch of the leading tank opened, and a number of

Russians climbed out. A stout officer with a crooked stick

walked with two men to the barrier and inspected the ob-

structions. . . . They were behaving as if it were peacetime.

After I had spoken a couple of words to my sergeant-major,

I laid my graticules on the officer, aimed at the navel and

fired. The range was only 150 metres, and he folded like a

jackknife. The Russians sped off in all directions at the sound

of my shot, and our machine gun hammered away at the

running men. We had already settled on a shot as a signal

for the six turrets to fire at will, and at the same time our

mortar peppered the Russians with a sequence of ten or a

dozen bombs. The sergeant-major and I slid into our shelter

like greased lightning. We had scarcely got inside before five

or six 152-mm rounds blocked our door with rubble. The

machine gun fell silent—it had been wrecked by the fire, and

one of our men had been lightly wounded. We did not know

what, if any, casualties the Russians had sustained. They had

disappeared, and only the tanks stood where they were.

Not long afterwards Helmigk and his men drove off an attack

by Russian infantry, and at 1500 the enemy tanks retired by

the way they had come (Kissel, 1962, 165).

In contrast, a deep and damaging penetration of the Meseritz

Fortified Region was made by Babadzhanyan's XI Guards Tank

Corps, which spearheaded the advance of the First Guards

Tank Army. Babadzhanyan forced the Obra on the night of

28-29 January, then formed his forward detachment into two

brigade columns. The left-hand column comprised the 44th

Guards Tank Brigade under Colonel I. I. Gusakovskii, whom

we last encountered in the middle of January when he was

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wading the Pilica (see p. 77). Gusakovskii sent out a party of

sappers to investigate the chosen route in the direction of Koch-

wald, and the commander duly returned:

'Comrade Colonel,' he reported in some haste, 'Our troops

have discovered that the main road is obstructed by a bar-

ricade. It's made of rails.'

'But can you pull them out of the way?' asked Gusakovskii.

'I think so, Comrade Brigade Commander!'

'Well then, clear the road as quickly as you can.'

Gusakovskii decided to press on without waiting for the main

body of the corps. In the evening the sappers levered the ob-

stacle out of the way, and they established that the road beyond

had not been mined. This was good news in itself, but it in-

dicated that a German armoured counterattack was on the way.

The going deteriorated by the minute:

The sky was hidden by low, fast-moving clouds—a sure

sign of the gusty and humid weather blowing from the Baltic.

The icy crust on the roads was contracting, and water now

shone from puddles. The sound of bursts of machine-gun

fire carried from the heights at Kochwald—this was the en-

emy firing at the brigade's patrols. (Katukov, 1976, 362)

Gusakovskii deployed his brigade into combat formation and

by 0300 on 30 January he had slipped through the main zone

of the fortified region in the neighbourhood of Calau without

losing a single tank. By now the Russians had a German map

of the defences (see p. 179), and probably Gusakovskii was one

of the Russian commanders who were able to take advantage

of this great asset. At any rate, he pressed on in the course of

the day to Schwiebus, where units of the Sixty-Ninth and

Thirty-Third armies and the VIII Guards Mechanised Corps

were in the process of dealing the coup de grace to a Ger-

man roving cauldron which had attempted to break through

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

110

to the west. Barrages from German tanks and divisional artillery

were falling on both sides of the town, and the sky was lit in

an incongruous style by flares of rose red and a delicate salad

green.

Gusakovskii continued his advance well into the rear of the

fortified region, and he lost all contact with his parent formation

when the Germans closed the road behind him. The cut-off

force now had to go into an all-round defence while the rest

of Babadzhanyan's corps and the First Guards Tank Army bat-

tled forward to the Oder. On 1 February the leading brigade

of the VIII Guards Mechanised Corps on the left flank was itself

cut off at Kunersdorf, where the V SS Gebirgsjäger Corps

seemed to be bent on revenging the defeat which Frederick the

Great had suffered in the same location at the hands of Russians

and Austrians on 12 August 1759. The Germans were repulsed

with the help of a battery of Katyusha multiple rocket launchers,

and the 'fields around Kunersdorf were littered with the

scorched corpses of the Hitlerites. Our tank crews, when they

had run out of ammunition, opened their hatches and beat off

the attacks of the SS with grenades' (Katukov, 1976, 370).

The First Guards Tank Army, the Sixty-Ninth Army and the

Thirty-Third Army all broke through to the Oder in the course

of the same day, and established small lodgments on the far

bank.

On the whole of Zhukov's frontage the nearest thing to a

clear run to the river was enjoyed by his right flank, where the

Second Guards Tank Army and the Fifth Shock Army raced

across the rolling country north of the marshy depression of

the Warthe. On 30 January the Russians crossed the field of

Zorndorf (the scene of a bloody and indecisive battle between

the Russians and the Prussians in 1758), and on the morning

of the thirty-first Colonel Khariton F. Esipenko with his forward

detachment of the Fifth Shock Army passed the ice of the Oder

on foot and took unopposed possession of the little town of

Kienitz.

The episode appeared totally unreal. Berlin radio was broad-

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casting that the Germans were putting up a brilliant defence

in prepared positions on the Bzura, not far from Warsaw, and

yet here were the Russians only sixty-eight kilometres from

Berlin. German soldiers were strolling through the streets of

Kienitz, and officers were sitting in a restaurant. It seemed

natural for the station master to approach Esipenko:

'Are you going to allow the Berlin train to leave?'

To this Khariton Fedorovich replied with due solemnity

and elaborate courtesy: 'I am sorry, Station Master, but that

is impossible, the passenger service to Berlin will undergo a

short interruption—let's say until the end of the war.' (Bo-

kov, 1979, 80)

The Russians clung to their, foothold at Kienitz, but the follow-

on forces of the Fifth Shock Army were faced with all the dif-

ficulties of an opposed crossing when they arrived at the edge

of the high river bank to support and expand the bridgehead.

Below they could see how the white level of the frozen river

extended to the western side, where a dark strip signified the

embankment where the Germans were waiting.

The army's 301st Rifle Division was ordered to execute an

assault crossing on the night of 2-3 February. Secrecy was so

important that the Russians did without their artillery bom-

bardment, and a group of officers was standing in some anxiety

at their observation post when the attack began:

Suddenly, a rocket rose from the opposite bank. It burst,

and a series of flares was suspended over the river. The white

surface of the ice stood out clearly, and across it were moving

the dark lines of our regiments.

At that instant the enemy machine-guns opened up from

the far bank, and a fiery stream of white tracer coursed

through the darkness of the night. In turn, our artillery pieces

struck back at the German machine-guns. The rifle companies

raced across the ice with an impetuous urgency, but even

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

112

now they refrained from their customary battle cry of Ura!

The mighty wave rolled over the embankment and the night

battle on the western side of the Oder now began. (Antonov,

1975, 325)

Lastly, in the centre of Zhukov's Front, Colonel-General

Chuikov came up with the two disposable corps of his Eighth

Guards Tank Army from the direction of Posen, and on 2 Feb-

ruary he ordered his troops to cross the river barrier with what-

ever materials were at hand: 'I looked at the Oder through a

telescope. A wide river it was, lined with dykes' (Chuikov,

1978, 155). The infantry made their way gingerly across the

frozen surface, bearing planks and bales of brushwood which

they arranged into ice bridges. A few anti-aircraft guns were

mounted on improvised skis and pushed onto the far side, but

all activity for the day was terminated when Focke-Wulf 190s

arrived in waves of seven or nine at a time, bombing and straf-

ing. The Russians renewed the crossing under still more dif-

ficult circumstances on the following day.

On the 'Russian' bank of the river the Germans still held

significant bridgeheads of their own at Frankfurt, and down-

stream at Küstrin, where Russian tanks were driven out by a

scratch force of Volkssturm and Hitlerjugend armed with Pan-

zerfausts. Elsewhere the defence of the Oder was thin or non-

existent.

By 2 February, therefore, the army groups of Konev and

Zhukov had reached the middle Oder at points along almost

all its length and had established a multitude of greater or

smaller bridgeheads on its left bank. On that day STAVKA

declared that the Vistula-Oder Operation was at a formal end.

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CHAPTER 9

Stay of Execution

Stalin at the Gates!

STALIN ANTE PORTAS! This was the tenor oí the panic-stricken

cry which sped through the capital of the Reich, when news

arrived this morning that the Russians had succeeded in

crossing the Oder. They have established a bridgehead west

of the Oder at Kienitz, and they are advancing with one

hundred tanks on Wriezen, which is only sixty or seventy

kilometres from the municipal boundary of Berlin. There is

nothing between Wriezen and Berlin—no anti-tank gun, no

anti-tank obstacles, not a single soldier.

So runs the entry which Goebbels' secretary Wilfred von Oven

penned in his diary on 31 January 1945 (Oven, 1974, 564).

Four days later General A. I. Antonov, chief of the Soviet

General Staff, outlined for the benefit of the Allied leaders at

Yalta what the Russians had achieved since 12 January, when

they had begun the series of offensives which had extended in

breadth from the Carpathians to the Baltic. The centrepiece was

the Vistula-Oder Operation, which had taken the Upper Sile-

sian Industrial Region, isolated East Prussia, liberated Poland

and carried the Russians as far as the Oder. The Soviets had

advanced at an unprecedented average rate of thirty kilometres

a day. They had destroyed Army Group A, and inflicted losses

which STAVKA put at 400,000 men and at least forty-five di-

visions [the Russian casualties were very light, at around 15,000

killed and 60,000 wounded, which is about the same order as

114

the British losses on the first day of the battle of the Somme,

on 1 July 1916],

At first the Germans almost despaired of containing the Rus-

sian bridgeheads across the Oder, or of holding the stretches

of the river in between. Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel

had arrived from Hungary with his flight of tank-killing Ju-87G

Stukas, and the 1st Flieger Division now put all its aircraft at

his disposal. However, the celebrated Panzerknacker could see

little profit in strikes against the ice passages, for it appeared

simple for the enemy to cross the ice between the isolated holes

which were made by the bombs. On other stretches of the river,

where the Russians had not yet arrived, the Germans tried to

break the ice with explosive charges. These had little effect.

Battalions of air-defence personnel were then sent out on the

river with power saws to cut the ice into sections, but the blocks

obstinately froze together again before they could be hauled

out.

For the Germans twenty-two nightmarish days had trans-

ported the theatre of war from somewhere in central Poland to

within earshot of the capital of the Reich. The loss of the Upper

Silesian Industrial Region was a death blow in itself. Arma-

ments Minister Albert Speer had emphasised repeatedly how

important the region's mines and factories were, and at the end

of January he composed a new memorandum which

began unambiguously enough with the simple statement:

'The war is lost.' He gave it to me [Guderian] to read before

submitting it to Hitler. Unfortunately there was no contra-

dicting it. He [Hitler] read the first sentence and then locked

it away in his safe along with all the other warnings he had

received. (Guderian, 1952, 407)

It requires only a passing acquaintance with the chronology

of the Second World War for us to be aware of something very

odd—we have accompanied the Russians to within a few hours'

drive of Berlin, and yet we know that the war in Europe lasted

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a good three months more. The reasons are complicated, and

it would be insulting to the reader to pretend otherwise, but it

is possible to present them in some kind of order. Very briefly:

• The Vistula-Oder Operation, although it was the focus of the

Russian offensives early in 1945, could not be consolidated

or exploited unless the supporting attacks on either flank kept

pace. In the event, the Soviet forces on both the highland

and the Baltic flanks ran into unexpected difficulties, and

Konev was forced to turn his attention south, just as Zhukov

had to look north. These developments will be followed in

later parts of the book.

• An early push across the Oder became unappealing to the

Soviet High Command for more immediate reasons. The ar-

mies were distant from their bases of supply, the troops were

exhausted and increasingly undisciplined, air support failed

and the Germans on the Oder were beginning to fight very

hard. The relevant details now claim our attention.

'Avalanche of Fire and Metal'—The German

Frontal Defence of the Oder

The Russians lost the momentum of their victory very sud-

denly, you might almost say instantaneously. The fourth of

February, the first day of the meeting of the Allied leaders at

Yalta, was devoted to introductions and briefings. Churchill

and Stalin met early in the crowded schedule, when the Soviet

leader was still buoyed up by the unprecedented success of his

forces in Poland and eastern Germany. Only hours later Stalin

went to Roosevelt in a state of some despair and talked about

the tremendous opposition which was building up on the Oder.

In the evening General Antonov outlined what the Russians

had achieved so far (above), but he confirmed that the Germans

were determined to defend Berlin with all the resources at their

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command and that reinforcements were pouring in from the

west.

We return to von Oven's diary for a first clue as to the pro-

cesses at work:

1 February: The formerly threatening situation before Berlin

has changed in our favour literally overnight. The splashing

in the gutters sounds to our ears like choirs of angels. The

Oder and the Warthe, and the marshes of those two rivers

and the Netze, together with a multitude of little water-

courses, have become obstacles which enable us to consoli-

date our defence on the threatened sectors. . . .

3 February: The thaw continues. Mild spring air wafts through

the streets of Berlin, and everywhere we are working ener-

getically to build anti-tank obstacles and emplacements for

the anti-tank guns.

The thaw rendered the grass airstrips in Poland unusable and

contributed to depriving the Russians of air support at a crucial

moment. More important still, the thaw melted the dirt roads

across Poland and disrupted the flow of supplies to the Russian

armies, which had approached the Oder at their last logistic

gasp. The usable railways extended only as far as central Po-

land, and trucks were faced with round trips of one thousand

kilometres or more.

The Oder ice now began to melt at a gratifying rate, and the

Germans speeded the process by explosives and ice-

breakers. The river embankments and other defensive positions

were lined with high-velocity guns from more than three

hundred anti-aircraft batteries which had been removed from

their static installations in the interior of the Reich and rushed

to the Oder theatre on the direct orders of Hitler. These guns

made excellent tank-killers. Substantial ground forces were dis-

engaged from the Western Front, and with the help of the

railways and hard-topped roads of the Reich they were rede-

ployed at speed against the Russians. Thirteen or fourteen di-

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