Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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outset, to a united 500 kilometres by the fourth day, and to

1,000 kilometres by the end of the operation.

Progress of some sort was made day and night, though for

action in darkness in Upper Silesia in March Konev

picked out the men who were best adapted to it and or-

ganised special battalions. These battalions, fighting only at

night and withdrawing for rest at daybreak, played a very

important role. In night fighting their operations were sup-

ported mainly by point-blank artillery fire, the guns being

moved forward as far as possible before nightfall. (Konev,

1969, 73)

In general, the high Soviet rates of advance depended on:

1. Bold and enterprising leadership.

2. Beating the enemy to their own prepared positions. This was

achieved again and again, and prevented the Germans from

making a firm stand anywhere east of Posen.

3. Avoiding action in built-up areas:

In January 1945 we accumulated sufficient experience to

prove that the liberation of populated localities was in no

respect the chief task of tank forces. To cut the commu-

nications of the enemy, reduce their defence to chaos, bar

the routes by which their forward forces might retire, or

the paths along which they might throw their reserves—

those were the missions that we gave first priority. (Ka-

tukov, 1976, 353)

4. Using the hard-frozen ground to travel cross-country when

necessary, by-passing towns and strongpoints. Conversely,

the thaw helped to reduce the progress of the Upper Silesian

Operation in March to a virtual standstill:

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

339

The situation was aggravated by the spring flooding which

forced the tankmen to fight along the roads and for pos-

session of them, and to break through built-up areas. And

it was precisely from behind buildings and shelters that it

was very easy for the enemy to operate with Panzerfausts.

(Konev, 1969, 73)

It was much the same story in East Pomerania.

Mobile Groups and Forward Detachments

The momentum of the Soviet forces as a whole was sustained

by systems of 'mobile groups' and forward detachments' which

were identical in principle with the fighting advance guards

employed by Fredrick the Great of Prussia in the Seven Years'

War.

'Mobile group' was the designation for a large and immensely

powerful formation which acted as the operational spearhead

of the offensive. For the Vistula-Oder Operation the two Fronts

had their two tank armies each (the 1st Ukrainian Front's Third

Guards Tank Army and Fourth Tank Army; the 1st Belorussian

Front's First and Second Guards Tank armies), while the all-

arms armies had their independent tank corps (the Fifth Guards

Army's IV and XXI Guards Tank corps; the Third Guards Ar-

my's XXV Tank Corps; the Sixty-Ninth and Thirty-Third armies'

XI and IX Tank corps).

Forward detachments were small but hard-fighting battle

groups which were sent out by their parent tank armies or tank

corps. Their tasks were to beat the enemy mobile forces in

'meeting engagements,' and anticipate the Germans on defen-

sive positions, road junctions, river crossings and the like, and

hold them until the main body arrived on the scene.

The forward detachment was usually formed around an in-

dependent tank brigade (see p. 318), with its sixty-five or so

tanks, and with an accretion of infantry, conventional tubed

artillery, assault guns, mortars and Katyushas, anti-aircraft

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

340

guns and supporting services. As a typical example, we may

cite the forward detachment of the Fifth Shock Army, consisting

of the 220th Independent Tank Brigade, the 89th Independent

Heavy Tank Regiment and the 1,006th Rifle Regiment. It got

under way on 19 January, and

one after another the tanks set off down the glassy road,

followed by three hundred trucks. Although it might seem

strange, Colonel Esipenko placed the main force, including

the heavy tank regiment, not at the head of the column but

at the tail. He calculated that the enemy, in the process of

retreating under the impact of our army, would appear be-

hind the detachment, and it was there that the greatest dan-

ger was to be expected. Concealed under tarpaulins, the

Katyushas were travelling in the middle of the column. It

was an imposing sight as the column moved along the

road—the trucks filled with troops, the tanks, the guns, and

the anti-aircraft pieces. (Bokov, 1979, 74)

Within three days (20-23 January) Esipenko seized the crossing

over the Warthe at Wolow, and captured Strezelno and the

important strongpoint of Wagrowiec. Shortly before the end of

the Vistula-Oder Operation, the same forward detachment

crossed the ice of the Oder to Kienitz and planted itself on the

west side of the river directly in front of Berlin (see p. 111).

The all-arms armies had forward detachments of their own,

which helped to keep contact with the faster-moving armoured

and mechanised forces in front. The result was a straggling

chain of formations which is represented here in a simplified

form. All of the intervals are very approximate:

Forward

detachment

60 km

Main

body of

tank

50 km

Forward

detachment

40 km

Main

body of

all-arms

of tank

Main

body of

tank of all-arms

Main

body of

all-arms

army

army army army

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

341

The regulations required artillery commanders to 'direct fire

from mobile observation posts from tanks equipped with radio

sets.' It was usual for artillery observation officers to be attached

to every tank battalion of the spearhead forces, so as to direct

the gunners to lay down carpets of fire in front of the attacking

armour. In the case of the XI Guards Tank Corps of the Sixty-

Ninth Army the artillery concentrated its fire in successive roll-

ing barrages falling at intervals of 1.5 to 2.5 kilometres to a total

depth of 12 kilometres.

By 1945 large numbers of assault guns and tank-destroyers

had come into service, and they were able to provide a partic-

ularly fluid kind of fire support. Among the partnerships which

resulted was the one in the 2nd Belorussian Front between the

1,989th Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment and the 239th Guards

Rifle Regiment. These comrades-in-arms survived all attempts

on the part of superior officers to have the guns assigned to

other regiments or divisions:

A specified group of soldiers, under the command of a

sergeant or an officer, was attached to every assault gun for

the whole duration of combat. The group never left the gun,

whether in action or during our short periods of rest. They

helped the gun detachment in every way, and protected it

valiantly from the enemy armour-piercing guns and Panzer-

fausts. (Gorb, 1976, 245)

Close Air Support

In the Russian way of thinking, the military aviation was very

much the servant of the ground forces. Thus more than three-

quarters of the 54,000 sorties of the Second and Sixteenth Air

armies in the Vistula-Oder Operation were committed to im-

mediate support of the Russian spearheads. Liaison between

the two elements had long been bad, but the aviation began to

address itself to the problem seriously after STAVKA issued a

sternly worded instruction on 30 November 1944.

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

342

Ground and airborne radio relay stations helped to extend

the chain of communications, and aviation officers with staffs

and radios were attached to the headquarters of armies, corps

and the leading brigades: 'This made it possible to set supple-

mentary tasks for the air forces, and enabled them to strike at

new targets as they happened to appear' (Lelyushenko, 1970,

273). When the aviation radios failed, it was technically possible

to restore communications with the aircraft by means of the

radios of the tank commanders. On 16 and 17 January liaison

was re-established in this way between the IX and XI Tank

corps and their assigned close air support aviation division.

It was nobody's fault in particular that air support often failed

during the Vistula-Oder Operation. The snowy and foggy

weather in the middle of January limited the number of planes

which could take to the air at the beginning of the offensive.

Thereafter, the main problem was to secure enough airfields

within close range of the fast-moving ground battle. The Rus-

sians tried to help themselves out by utilising stretches of road

like the highway near Posen or the Breslau-Berlin autobahn. In

the same way, the semi-combatant airfields service battalions

moved with or immediately behind the foremost troops to seize

German airfields and make them operational as soon as pos-

sible. The speed and urgency of the thing was demonstrated

soon after the offensive had opened, when the fighters of the

III Aviation Corps landed on the airfield at Sochaczew while

fighting was proceeding on the western perimeter between the

Germans and a tank brigade of the Second Guards Tank Army.

The field was still insecure when the 402nd Fighter Aviation

Regiment was rebased there on 18 January.

Even heroic measures like these were inadequate to support

the ground forces in the later stages of the Vistula-Oder Op-

eration. The thaw rendered many of the grass airstrips unusable

and left the Sixteenth Air Army, for example, with only three

airfields within efficient flying range of the ground fighting.

While many of the Russian aircraft had to make round trips of

up to four hundred kilometres, the Luftwaffe was able to keep

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

343

up a high rate of sorties from the airfields around Berlin and

win a temporary but crucial command in the area of the Oder

bridgeheads (see p. 118).

Long spells of clearer weather arrived in the spring, and the

Russians could at last bring their great numerical superiority

in aircraft into play. In the fighting for Danzig 'the Soviet aircraft

were in the air all day long. The strike planes with the red stars

on their wings shot up every vehicle which appeared on the

roads and flogged our front line repeatedly with their rockets'

(Schäufler, 1979, 86). Air support reached its apogee in the siege

of Königsberg, where the air forces carried out more than 20,000

sorties, and on occasion had 300 planes in the air at the same

time.

Engineering Support

The main contribution which the military engineers made to

speeding the advance was to bridge the rivers. During the Vis-

tula-Oder Operation, for example, water obstacles were en-

countered every fifty to ninety kilometres, and were defined

as 'wide' (over 300 metres), 'medium' (100 to 300 metres) and

'narrow' (up to 100 metres). The ice on most of the rivers lay

10 to 25 centimetres thick, which was strong enough to permit

the passage of infantry and light artillery, if necessary with the

help of plank causeways, but was too weak to bear tanks. It is

not surprising that nearly one-third of the operations of the

tank armies were concerned with mastering these awkward

obstacles.

The highest level of engineering organisation was that of the

Front reserve. This was particularly large in the case of the 1st

Ukrainian Front, for the Oder on its sector of advance slanted

away to the north-west, and the component armies could be

expected to reach the river at intervals, with those on the left

arriving first. Konev therefore assigned his reserves to each

sector in succession. The formations of the 1st Belorussian

Front, on the other hand, approached the lower Oder perpen-

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

344

dicularly, and Zhukov decentralised his engineering assets to

the armies.

When it came to crossing rivers, much depended on the

adroitness of the forward detachment and its accompanying

companies of engineers. The leading battalions or the core tank

brigade of the detachment arrived hard on the heels of the

preliminary reconnaissance parties and tried to effect two or

three passages. The forces then fanned out on the far side and

held the bridgehead until the main force arrived with the

heavier bridging equipment. A full-scale passage by a tank army

involved about five planked ice causeways for the infantry and

light artillery, and three or four girder bridges, at least two of

which would be capable of bearing sixty tons. Such a bridge

could be built in as little as seven and a half hours, like the 60-

ton 120-metre-long bridge over the Pilica near Palchev.

In their river crossings, as in so much else, the Russians found

that old solutions no longer applied to the unfamiliar terrain

of the Reich. When it exploited from the Steinau bridgehead,

the 53rd Guards Tank Brigade of the Third Guards Tank Army

reached the Bober on the night of 9-10 February after a rapid

advance, but found that it could make no progress to the far

side, for the Germans were playing tricks with the five locks

upstream: 'The experience we had of building low-lying

bridges, which we had amassed during the offensives in the

Ukraine and Poland, no longer held good here. Every time we

tried, the enemy raised the level of the water and the bridge

was swept away by the current' (Nersesyan, 1964, 175). The

Russians were forced to build a much higher bridge than usual,

and they finally crossed the river only on the morning of the

twelfth.

Logistic Support

The Russians launched the Vistula-Oder Operation on the fol-

lowing margins of foodstuffs:

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

345

Rations by Days

1st Ukrainian Front 1st Belorussian Front

Bread 21.8

Groats

20 65

Fats

28.8 33

Sugar 35.5 66

During the operation detachments were sent out to herd back

the cows, pigs and sheep which had been abandoned by the

German refugees:

They were of prime importance to the Red Army because

for a long time Russia had been so impoverished that she

could not feed her soldiers and had to depend on American

food supplies and Polish grain, and because during the Jan-

uary advance the supply lines had become over-extended.

(Koriakov, 1948, 67)

Otherwise, hungry soldiers were left to forage for themselves.

The Russians were rarely embarrassed by any shortage of

ammunition, even in the Third Guards Tank Army, which had

the highest expenditure of all in the Vistula-Oder Operation.

The First and Second Guards Tank armies did not consume as

much, and so came nowhere near exhausting the initial Boe-

komplets (see p. 329) which they took with them on that cam-

paign:

Ammunition Expenditure in Boekomplets

Rifle Mg 82-mm 120-mm 76-mm 76-85-mm

mortar mortar art'y tank

1GTA .5 .6 .6 .4 .5 .7

2GTA .5 .6 .2 .5 .4 .65

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

346

Rifle Mg

82-mm

120-mm 76-mm 76-85-mm Mg

mortar mortar

art'y tank

3GTA .6 .8 .6 2.5

1.4

1.5

4TA .54 1.25 .57 1.11 1.22 .59

The 1st Belorussian Front was helped in the final phase of the

Vistula-Oder Operation by a mighty lift by road which moved

the artillery dumps 150 to 200 kilometres forward on 24 January.

By the time of the siege of Danzig in March, a German noted

that his forces had almost nothing left to fire,

whereas the troops of the Red Army had ammunition in

enormous quantities, and expended it lavishly. They un-

loaded their stocks almost under our eyes in the station at

Zuckau [eighteen kilometres east of Danzig], since they knew

we could not disturb them. Acting with astonishing speed,

their service troops had restored the German railway network

up to this point in a matter of days. (Schäufler, 1979, 80)

It was much more difficult to supply fuel. The consumption

of the spearhead tank and mechanised formations was pro-

portionately much higher than that of ammunition, with the

tank armies in the Vistula-Oder Operation gobbling the equiv-

alent of the initial Napravkas between 3 and 7.6 times over. Thus:

Consumption of Fuel

Diesel Petrol (gasoline)

Tons

Napravkas

Tons

Napravkas

1GTA 1,175 3.9 2,535

6.5

2GTA 885

2,182

4.0

3GTA 1,920 6

3,519 7.6

4TA

1,214 4.7 1,739

6.7

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

347

The direct line between the Vistula and the Oder was a for-

midable 500 kilometres or so, but the actual journeys of the

tank armies were much greater still (see p. 338) on account of

the changes of axes of advance, of which the most famous were

probably those of the Third Guards Tank Army. Again in the

East Pomeranian Operation the First Guards Tank Army

changed its fundamental direction of advance four times.

The Russian transport system was unable to meet the de-

mand, and towards the end of the Vistula-Oder Operation in

particular, the tanks and mechanised forces proceeded by fits

and starts according to the availability of fuel. In sixteen days

of offensive action the Second Guards Tank Army had to halt

for no less than five days (30 per cent) and the Fourth Tank

Army for six (33 per cent). The fuel of the Third Guards Tank

Army was almost exhausted by 24 January, during its move to

the south-east to cut off the Upper Silesian Industrial Region,

and General Rybalko kept the manoeuvre from coming to a

complete stand still only by diverting all his remaining re-

sources to General Sukhov's IX Mechanised Corps.

The captured dumps of fuel were very welcome, and ac-

counted, for example, for 25 per cent of the consumption of

the Second Guards Tank Army in the Vistula-Oder Operation;

the trucks were making journeys of 500 kilometres or more

from the distant dumps and railheads behind the Vistula, and

they returned in pairs, one towing the other, so as to economise

on fuel; the 1st Belorussian Front denuded several regiments

of all their fuel-carrying trucks, and centralised the vehicles in

two Front supply battalions of 130 and 160 vehicles respectively.

But nothing seemed to help. The Soviets concluded in their

post-war analyses that road transport is unable to sustain an

operation in great depth, and they proceeded to set up field

pipeline brigades which were each capable of laying about thirty

kilometres of fuel pipe every twenty-four hours.

* * *

APPENDIX: THE SOVIET STYLE

348