A World at Arms (138 page)

The Germans first used police and SS units to slaughter as many Poles and destroy as many buildings as possible. Deploying units primarily interested in killing, raping, and looting, they initially made little headway beyond containing the insurgents. Slowly they added regular
units, demolished the city block by block, split the Polish held area, drove the AK from the left bank of the Vistula, and in a steady, murderous advance ground down the defending Polish forces. As the front to the east grew silent, Soviet planes dropped not weapons but leaflets on August 18–19 calling for an end of resistance and berating the Polish government-in-exile.
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When the Germans were obviously winning, Stalin decided to reduce tension with the Western Allies by indicating he did not object to their helping the Poles–as long as their planes did not land on Soviet airfields–and sent a little help himself. But the strategy had worked; the Germans crushed the AK for him. In early October the remaining AK forces surrendered, and the Germans levelled to the ground most of what was left standing of Warsaw.
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The argument that the Germans were blunting the Red Army offensive so that help could not be provided by the Soviet Union will not hold up when nearby offensive operations are examined. Now that the regimes of Poland and the former Soviet Union have publicly admitted Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre, the line on the events of 1944 may also change.
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It is possible that as in the case of Finland in 1939, so in this instance Stalin was initially misled by Communist Party leaders from the area into underrating the strength of the local forces, but this very strength gave him pause. Let the Germans crush them; it would save him the trouble. The advice which Polish Communists gave Mikolajczyk in Moscow–to dissolve his government and the AK–certainly fits in with Stalin’s hope of ending Poland’s independence. If seizing Warsaw was so hard for the Red Army, surely an uprising in the city would make that task easier, not more difficult. With both the British and American governments pressing him repeatedly, Stalin opted as he had in 1939 for an accommodation, even if tacit and temporary, with Germany if that helped accomplish the final destruction of Polish independence. If the cost was to be great damage to the alliance with his two Western partners, so be it. The priorities in Soviet policy seemed clear to Stalin.

If the spectacular scene of those months was the bloody battle for Warsaw, the quiet one was a permanent change in British and United States attitudes. Neither allowed the issue to cause a break in the wartime coalition against Hitler; with much of the war still ahead, they needed to have the Soviet Union continue in the fight against Germany. But there was a sea change in the attitudes at the top in both countries, and their relationship with the Soviet Union would never be the same afterwards. There was nothing they could do in an area far from their military power and a few miles from the Red Army, but having themselves sent aid to the Soviet Union and to Marshal Tito’s partisans, they
remembered Stalin’s attitude toward an independent Poland.
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And so did the people of Poland.

When the Warsaw insurgents surrendered on October 2, another uprising in Eastern Europe was also in the process of being brutally crushed by the Germans. Resistance elements in the puppet state of Slovakia had contacts and sympathizers in the Slovak armed forces and were preparing a coup to shift Slovakia to the Allied side, open the door to the Red Army, and begin the return of Czechoslovakia to independent status. The weeks after the First Ukrainian Front reached the border of Czechoslovakia on April 8 were a time of preparation inside the Axis satellite. Pro-Soviet partisans, commanded by Russian officers, carried out a number of attacks on Germans, and this, together with rumors of a coup by the Slovak army, led by Defense Minister Ferdinand Catlos, precipitated a German move to occupy the country on August 29. This in turn provoked the Slovak uprising which quickly came to control large portions of Slovakia.
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Here there was an opportunity to fly in reinforcements and supplies since the insurgents held airports and substantial areas for drop zones. The Western Allies, though publicly sympathetic and providing a little assistance, had clearly decided not to try for any large-scale supply operation; it seemed pointless to them to try to support another uprising right in front of the Red Army front.
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Although it had been possible for the Russians to fly in officers for partisan bands, they now sent in few reinforcements and slowly at that. There was an effort, utilizing regular Red Army units and a Czechoslovak army raised and trained in the Soviet Union, to break into Slovakia through the Carpathian mountains at the Dukla Pass. All this was inadequate, however. Mistakes by insurgent leadership on the first days of the rising, German seizure of full control of Hungary in October which opened up the southern flank to them, conflicts among the insurgents between those loyal to the government-in-exile in London and those looking to a Communist Czechoslovakia, and entirely insufficient Soviet aid enabled the Germans to crush the Slovak uprising by the end of October. It had all lasted just as long as the battle in Warsaw and came to the same end. The Germans slaughtered to their hearts’ content, though in the rural areas of Slovakia, unlike the urban rubble piles of Warsaw, some guerilla activities continued into the following year.

The Soviet advance on the central portion of the Eastern Front, which had stimulated the risings in Warsaw and Slovakia, had also reversed the geographic situation of the central sector as compared with the north and south. Instead of a German bulge eastwards in the center, there was now a Soviet bulge westwards. This made the German positions both to the south and the north more vulnerable than before; and as the
Soviet offensive on the central sector ran out of steam, the Red Army struck on the flanks. The German forces pushed back into Romania held the front reached at the end of the Soviet spring offensive, but they held a ramshackle line. German units alternated with Romanian armies. The former were steadily weakened during the summer by the transfer of divisions–eventually more than a quarter of the total–to the threatened front further north. The rest were assured by German army intelligence, wrong as usual, that there would be no more Soviet offensive .

The Romanian armies had been greatly reduced by the calamitous defeats of 1943 and early 1944; Romania’s best divisions had been lost in the previous battles at Stalingrad and in the Crimea. Furthermore, both the government and the army had lost the will to fight. Although Marshal Antonescu assured the Germans of his loyalty, he had himself authorized peace sounding with the Allies, first in the West and then with the Soviet Union. If the marshal had doubts, most others in the government were certain that Romania should get out of the war as quickly as possible. Only their desire to do so safely–a preposterous hope–had kept them from making peace. The army itself had simply collapsed internally. The officers and men were through with the fighting, and it would take only a forthright push from the Soviet side to reveal in practice that there was to be no effort at resistance.

The Soviet offensive on the Romanian front, following plans largely developed on the spot with only timing determined by the Stavka, began on August 20 with the Second Ukrainian Front under Malinovsky on the right and General Fedor 1. Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front on the left. Both had been strengthened by several hundred thousand men conscripted in the recently liberated Ukraine and trained as well as indoctrinated in the preceding months. While the sectors held by the German 8th and 6th Armies resisted, the Romanian 4th and 3rd Armies simply did not fight, and Red Army advance guards quickly pushed through. Soviet armor could drive forward at will, and this meant that the German 6th Army, rebuilt after its disaster at Stalingrad, was once again cut off by the Red Army when its pincers closed around most of it on August 23rd. Its eighteen divisions were destroyed by the Russians as the German 8th Army–or what was left of it–fell back on the Carpathian mountains. In the same days that the Army Group South Ukraine, now commanded by General Friessner who had exchanged places with Schörner earlier, was being destroyed, the Romanian government pulled out of the war.

On August 23 a coup in Bukarest displaced Marshal Antonescu as King Michael and the political leaders tried to arrange peace. An effort
by the surprised Germans to salvage their position and their hold on the unoccupied parts of the country, which included an air raid on the Romanian capital, only served to hasten the change of regime and of fronts. Now the Romanians not merely withdrew from the Axis but declared war, on Hungary with great enthusiasm and on Germany with no pleasure but with a sense of taking revenge on an ally who had first exploited, always neglected, and finally turned on them.

In a few days the Red Army rolled through Romania and across the Danube while Romanian units joined with them in the battle toward the northwest. There in the Carpathian passes, the Germans and the Hungarians tried to build up a new front as the Red Army pushed them back in pursuit, and the Romanians now hoped to reclaim the portions of Transylvania they had lost to Hungary in the 1940 territorial settlement. Like Finland at the other end of the front, Romania had switched sides but in far more dramatic circumstances and in a much greater Soviet victory over the German army, which lost more than 380,000 men in about two weeks.
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The Red Army occupied practically all of Romania including the Black Sea port of Constanza and the oil fields and refineries of Ploesti, the latter largely wrecked by prior American bombing.
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The Germans still had in their concentration camps Horia Sima and other Iron Guard members, who had fled or been brought to Germany after their failed coup of January 1941. These now organized a government-in-exile under German auspices since no Romanian military leader, any more than any Finnish one, was willing to rebuild a pro-German regime; instead they fought hard against the Germans. Like the French collaborationists, the Iron Guardists could only conduct feuds with each other and propaganda under German auspices.
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They were soon joined by still another shadow regime, this one for Bulgaria.

Bulgaria had thought it wise to join Germany in the war, first against Greece and Yugoslavia, then against Britain and the United States. In 1943 and 1944 the Bulgarian government, which had carefully avoided joining the Axis war against the Soviet Union, had carried out some soundings with the Western Allies; but, with a degree of stupidity difficult to credit, had refused to surrender to them when it still had the chance. On the other hand, the Western Allies, of whom the United States in particular had originally tried to persuade the Bulgarians that they could live very happily without a war with America, had not pushed them very effectively.
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Their effort to pull out of the war now was far too late. On September 5, 1944, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria, on the 8th the Third Ukrainian Front crossed the border, and on the same day Bulgaria declared war on Germany. In a few days, the
whole country was occupied by the Red Army, and the Bulgarian army insofar as it did not dissolve began to fight alongside it.
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A “National Bulgarian Government” under Professor Alexander Zankoff was established in Vienna
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but would have no influence in the country which the Soviet Union had decided to occupy, place under a Communist dictatorship, and retain in its control.

The collapse of Romania had dramatic repercussions not only for Bulgaria but also for Hungary and the whole German position in Southeast Europe, especially in the Aegean, Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia. In Hungary, the approach of the Red Army to the Carpathians earlier in the year had stimulated both projects to leave the war, and reinforcement of the army. The events in Romania were of special importance in both directions. On the one hand, the Hungarian army now fought more vigorously and effectively than before: the Russian army was at the gates and the Romanian army was fighting alongside it. Especially in the new front being built up in Transylvania, the Hungarian army fought hard, and at first successfully, to halt and even throw back the invaders. The old territorial dispute with Romania provided an added incentive here for the Hungarians as for the Romanians. On the other hand, elements in both the government and in the army, led by the regent, Admiral Horthy, now began sounding the Soviet Union seriously about peace. On September 24, during the fighting in eastern Hungary, Horthy decided to send a delegation to Moscow; he personally wrote a letter to Stalin, now claiming to have been misinformed about the incident in 1941, which had been utilized to have Hungary join Germany in attacking the Soviet Union.
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The Hungarian faction hoping for peace planned to pull out of the Axis on October 15, 1944, but botched the operation about as effectively as the Italians had in the preceding year.
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The Germans seized Horthy and took over the capital. There they instituted a new regime under Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement, a lunatic fringe organization of the right whose chief was seriously thought to be a lunatic himself by many.
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Much but by no means all of the Hungarian army rallied to the new regime. The Germans were now in direct control of most of Hungary, and with the enthusiastic aid of Szálasi and the Arrow Cross began what they considered their most important task: the deportation to slaughter of Hungary’s over half a million Jews. The last refuge for Jews in German-controlled Europe provided the last large contingents of victims until pressure from the Allies and the advance of the Red Army combined to halt the deportations. In the meantime, in late October a German counter-offensive drove back the Second Ukrainian Front temporarily as the Germans
tried to protect the agricultural and oil resources of Hungary.
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By the end of October a coherent front had been put together by what was now being called the German Army Group South, but most of Transylvania had been occupied by Soviet and Romanian troops. The prospects for a continued holding of this front by the Axis were very poor; the Second Ukrainian Front was already in the open Hungarian plain.