A World at Arms (139 page)

The dramatic developments in Budapest led to a long and bitter battle in Hungary which lasted from October 1944 into the last days of World War II, causing enormous devastation and heavy casualties for both sides. The repercussions of the collapse of the German position in Romania on the situation in Greece and related parts of South and Southeast Europe were equally dramatic but less destructive. When the first news of the coup which overthrew Antonescu reached German headquarters on August 23, the Commander-in-Chief in Southeast Europe, Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, was at Hitler’s headquarters. In the conference held that day, Hitler made several decisions which crucially affected German strategy and general developments in the whole theater of war. For years Hitler had insisted on building up forces and positions in Greece, Crete, and the islands in the Aegean, and in September 1943 the Germans had quickly taken over the portions of Greece occupied by Italy as well as the Italian Dodecanese islands. At one time a basis for possible further advances into the Middle East through Turkey, the German positions in the area had more recently served the purpose of restraining Turkey from entering the war on the Allied side as well as insuring the supply of chrome from that country, simultaneously denying to the Allies air bases from which their planes could more easily attack the Romanian oil fields.

Turkey had already broken diplomatic relations with Germany on August 2.
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With Romania lost and Bulgaria doubtful, the prior considerations all fell by the wayside; and under the new circumstances Hitler wanted the focus of attention shifted to a defensive posture further north. Southern Greece should be evacuated if attacked, and a key concern must be to make certain that the Bulgarians did not seize the only railway line through Serbia to Greece and turn it over to the Allies. Some garrisons on the islands in the Mediterranean, especially the large one on Crete, would have to be abandoned while others might be evacuated.
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It will be noted that here Hitler set the stage for a major withdrawal of German forces in Southeast Europe right after he had agreed to the evacuation of southwest France; clearly he was prepared to go into a defensive position and evacuate substantial areas when this appeared to him to be the appropriate procedure. In this instance, the local commander in fact moved quite slowly in carrying out the evacuations
ordered; over a period of weeks German garrisons were evacuated from most of the islands in the Aegean and from southernmost Greece. Only as the danger of a Soviet breakthrough westwards from Bulgaria, cutting the key railway through southern Yugoslavia into Greece, began to develop during October did von Weichs move on the basis of his authorization. In a lengthy and carefully orchestrated withdrawal, German troops evacuated Greece, which they had conquered with such fanfare in 1941, and drew back into Macedonia, establishing a new defensive position in October. On the 10th, the withdrawal started; on the 13th, Athens was evacuated; and at the end of the month German troops pulled out of Salonika. The Germans had deported to their murder factories practically all of the country’s Jews; now they themselves left in an almost peaceful evacuation after the liberation of Belgrade and Nish had made the precariousness of their position further south evident. With the forces of the Western Allies fully engaged elsewhere, the latter struck only air blows at the evacuation routes, and the British landing force which began to disembark in the Peleponnesus at the beginning of October made no effort to interfere with the departing Germans. They would soon be in battle with Greek, not German fighters; occupation was soon followed by civil war, but the first of the two ordeals for the Greeks was over.
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The Soviet Union and Great Britain had already decided that Greece would fall into Britain’s sphere of interest while Romania was allocated to the Soviet Union; neither great power was interested in upsetting these arrangements at a time when the war against Germany was still bitter and bloody.

One of the more bitter and bloody of the engagements in that war was taking place at the opposite end of the Eastern Front in the very days of the major changes at the southern part of that front. Army Group North, after land contact had been reestablished with it, still held most of Estonia, much of Latvia, and the western quarter of Lithuania in early September, 1944. Their situation on this portion of the front, like that at the southern end, had however been made extremely tenuous by the Soviet victory in the central sector; and where the Germans had reopened a corridor to their Army Group North just west of Riga, the troops of General Ivan Bagramian’s First Baltic Front were less than twenty miles from the Baltic Sea. There were repeated German projects for offensives to widen this corridor by pincer attacks on the three Soviet armies in the bulge toward the sea west of Riga, but these operations were never carried through. The German hopes of regaining the initiative were thwarted by Red Army offensives. On September 17 an offensive by the Leningrad Front broke into the rear of the German Narva Army holding the northernmost end of the front, and this army (named
for the city and river it was to defend) and the adjacent 18th Army had to be withdrawn toward Riga. The Third and Second Baltic Fronts pushed against the retreating Germans without breaking through and the First Baltic Front did not or could not reach the sea. The September Soviet offensive, therefore, drove the Germans back, forcing them entirely out of Estonia and out of more of Latvia, but without cutting them off in a major breakthrough of the sort which had taken place in Romania. But that now changed.

Once the German armies had concentrated in the immediate vicinity of Riga, they thought once again of the pincer operation against First Baltic Front; and the Army Group North commander, Field Marshal Schörner, probably looked to Hitler like the ideal leader to drive it through. This time, however, the Red Army redeployed rapidly, effectively, and without German intelligence getting any clear picture of what was afoot. Bagramian shifted his weight from the right to the left flank, and on October 5, before the Germans realized what was happening, launched a major offensive west of Shaulyay to the Baltic. Breaking through the front of 3rd Panzer Army, the Russians reached the Baltic on October 9 both north and south of the port city of Klaipeda (Memel)
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, isolating a German corps in that city and cutting off the two German armies, the 16th and 18th, in western Latvia.

This time the Germans could not reopen a corridor to Army Group North because a major Soviet offensive into East Prussia by the Third Belorussian Front occupied all their attention. The German army recovered sufficiently to contain in mid-October this last major offensive of the Red Army on the northern and central parts of the Eastern Front in 1944; but they simply did not have the strength, especially in armor, to make even an attempt to drive north into the Soviet wedge between East Prussia and the German armies stranded in the Courland area of Latvia.

This set of events merits further examination. On the one hand, the Red Army was clearly coming to the end of its ability to sustain major offensive operations against substantial resistance until there had been time to rebuild communication systems behind the new front line reached in the summer and fall offensives, as well as an opportunity to replace casualties, rest and reform units, and replenish weapons and ammunition.. On the other hand, as the fighting approached the old German border, desperate German resistance, shorter German lines of communications, and newly activated German divisions made the going slower and harder for the Allies in both East and West. In the days that the Red Army was trying unsuccessfully to break deeply into East Prussia, the last soldiers of the British 1st Airborne Division had just been
rounded up in Arnhem and the American 9th Army was slowly battering its way block by block into the city of Aachen. This was the first major German city to be taken by the Allies, but it was obvious that on all major fronts the time of rapid Allied advances was over and a new stage in the war had been reached.

The other, and related, question was the decision of Hitler to hold on to the Courland portion of Latvia rather than either order Army Group North to break through to the south or evacuate entirely by sea. Some divisions were transferred by sea to strengthen other portions of the Eastern Front, but in spite of the preference of army Chief-of-Staff Heinz Guderian, a large force was left there, fending off a series of Red Army attacks until the final surrender of May, 1945.
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Why was this piece of Latvia important enough for Hitler to insist it be held at a time when he had just decided to evacuate southwest France as well as all of Greece, Albania and southern Yugoslavia? The possibility of direct communication by sea across the Baltic made it easier to contact, re-supply, or pull out troops from the Courland area than either of the other territories evacuated in the fall of 1944, but this difference facilitated rather than caused the different decisions made about them. To understand that difference, it is necessary to examine German strategy in this period.

In August–September 1944 the German government was once again being urged by its Japanese ally to make peace with the Soviet Union. The hope of the Japanese, as earlier, was that such a peace would make it possible for the Germans to concentrate on fighting the United States and Great Britain. They thought that the prospect of actually obtaining a German–Soviet peace was easier now than earlier as both countries had suffered vast casualties and were back practically where the campaign had started in 1941: the Soviets had regained and the Germans had lost practically everything that the German army had originally overrun. This looked to Tokyo like a good opportunity, especially since in their eyes–opened by frank reporting of Japanese diplomats in Europe–the Germans had suffered very serious defeats on both the Eastern and the Western Fronts.
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The efforts of the Japanese to persuade the Germans of the wisdom of such a course did not fall on quite such deaf ears as earlier in the war. It was by now obvious to Hitler and his associates that the invasion in the West had succeeded and that the offensive capabilities of the Red Army in the East remained great. Perhaps it would be wise to get the fighting on one front ended and concentrate on the other. As it was very publicly obvious that the Western Powers were continuing to insist on a German surrender, the possibility of a peace in the East remained.
There is some evidence that in the fall of 1944 Hitler for the first time seriously considered a possibility he had hitherto always dismissed out of hand; it cannot be documented, but there is reason to believe that the fact that the Germans had been driven out of the Ukraine and now had no prospect of retaking it as Hitler had still anticipated earlier in 1944 was a significant factor in his willingness to rethink the question. As long as the Germans had held it, he argued–with Goebbels for example–that Stalin simply could not give up that valuable area; when it was originally lost in the fall of 1943 and the first months of 1944, Hitler was still confident of regaining it by a new offensive after the invasion in the West had been beaten off. Now that the invasion had succeeded and the central and southern sectors of the German Eastern Front had collapsed, there was no visible prospect of reconquering the major goal in the East. Under these circumstances, it would appear, Hitler briefly did think of some accommodation with the Soviet Union.
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It is not at all clear whether the Soviet government would have been willing to make peace with Germany in 1944. There appear to have been contacts in Stockholm with adherents of the opposition to Hitler before July 20 as well as with representations of the Nazi regime, and in some instances it is impossible to tell–and was presumably impossible for the Soviets to tell–which group specific individuals represented. But it all made no difference because Hitler came to an entirely different strategy. In combination with the holding of ports in the West to make it more difficult to supply and reinforce the Allied invasion armies, Germany was building up new armies of its own which would strike a major offensive blow at the Western Powers. That offensive was to be two-pronged: a land offensive which eventually became what the Germans called the Ardennes Offensive and the Allies referred to as the Battle of the Bulge. At the same time, a revived U-Boat warfare with the radically new submarines, against which the Allies had no effective defense at all, would sever the transatlantic routes, return the initiative in the war at sea to the Germans, and contribute to a massive victory over the Western Allies who could then neither supply nor reinforce nor evacuate whatever armies they had on the continent. Once that combination of land and sea offensives had succeeded, new blows were to be struck on the Eastern Front by a German army which could then concentrate on that theater. If those blows caused Stalin to try for a settlement with Germany, a new situation would arise for the German government to examine; but in the meantime it was essential that Japan take no steps in Moscow.

While the Japanese reluctantly agreed to this German request, it
hardly reassured them about the future; by the last days of September 1944 they began preparations for the fate of their diplomatic personnel in Europe in case of a German collapse.
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For the Germans, however, this set of decisions had major and immediate implications of a different sort. For the land offensive in the West, they would need the new formations being organized and equipped. For the sea offensive in the West, they would need to train the crews in the new U-Boats–and for
this,
the safety of the training area in the Baltic was essential.

It was the need for keeping the Red Army away from the coast and the Red navy away from the sea in the central Baltic which played the determining role in Hitler’s decision to hold on to Courland. He was very much encouraged in this decision by Admiral Dönitz, who expected the new U-Boats to be ready at any moment and who knew that they could not be employed without proper trials of the ships and training of the crews. The whole Courland issue, therefore, revolved about naval strategy against the
West.
The navy worked hard not only to influence Hitler’s thinking but also to assist in the holding of portions of the Baltic area.
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