The Road to Berlin (15 page)

To the north the situation had also eased considerably. Operation
Iskra
, piercing the Leningrad blockade, was finally successful when the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts linked up, forging a seven-mile ‘corridor’ through the German investment. At 0930 hours on 12 January 1943, Maj.-Gen. M.P. Dukhanov’s 67th Army began its attack from inside the ring, attacking from west to east; after forcing the Neva, 67th Army was to break the German defences in the Moskovskaya Dubrovskaya–Schlusselburg sector and then strike eastwards to link up with Lt.-Gen. V.Z. Romanovskii’s 2nd Shock Army attacking westwards from the Volkhov Front. Dukhanov’s 67th had trained furiously throughout the latter half of December (1942) for the formidable job of launching itself across the ice of the Neva straight into the German fixed defences. On 25 December, a meeting of commanders—attended by Zhdanov, Govorov (Leningrad Front commander) and Marshal Voroshilov
(Stavka
‘co-ordinator’)—looked into questions raised by the assault exercise. Until well into the first week in January 1943, regiments underwent special training on the Toksovskii grounds to learn how to move through ‘fire walls’ put up by Soviet artillery. The 67th had no combat experience behind it in tackling the storming of heavily fortified positions; for this reason, training was essential. During the night of 11 January the assault units changed positions with 11th Rifle Brigade and took up their posts on their start lines; during the night of 12 January the remainder of the first echelon of 67th Army moved into position and at 0800 hours, the assault group was lined up ready to go. At 0930 hours 286 guns opened fire, sustaining the bombardment for 140 minutes; at 1150 hours, after a salvo from the Guards
Katyusha
rocket launchers, Dukhanov’s assault groups were launched on to the ice. That same cold, clear morning, Romanovskii’s 2nd Shock Army to the east attacked on the Volkhov Front.

Six days later, after heavy fighting amidst the German strong-points immured in the frozen bog and snow-covered woods, Soviet troops finally drove through their ‘corridor’ between the two fronts. South-east of Schlusselburg, units of 123rd Rifle Brigade of the Leningrad Front made contact to the east of Settlement No. 1 with forward elements of 372nd Rifle Division (Volkhov Front) at 0930 hours on 18 January. A little to the south, at Settlement No. 5, Leningrad and Volkhov Front forces also linked up; Schlusselburg was also cleared of German troops on the eighteenth, and by the evening the southern shore of lake Ladoga swept clean of German units. Leningrad had established direct overland communication with the rest of the country. Work began at once on building a railway line some eighteen miles long through the ‘corridor’ from Schlusselburg to Polyany. The first train steamed along it on 6 February, though with German guns still within range of the ‘corridor’ it proved to be a hazardous route, full of death-traps. With the first trains came coal, and coal meant more power for the factories and more electricity. The Ladoga ‘ice road’ (augmented by a fuel pipeline), for all the German bombing and mine-dropping, continued to carry essential supplies, but with the new railway greater bulk could be handled. The grip of the ‘bony hand of hunger’, which had crushed the life out of so many Leningraders, men, women, old people and children alike, was now a little loosened, but the attempt to snap it completely—by taking Mga and thereby opening the Leningrad–Volkhov line—failed as German reserves clustered in the Sinyavino area. The ‘corridor’ just south of lake Ladoga would have to do, and Soviet troops set about fortifying villages and exposed sectors to hold off any German attempt to re-impose total blockade.

Southwards, below lake Ilmen and to the north of Smolensk, lay the ‘Demyansk salient’, sticking into the North-Western Front (presently under the command of Marshal Timoshenko). The German forces encircled at Demyansk had been marked down for the kill in 1942, but that plan misfired; the ‘Ramushevo corridor’ had been blasted through to join the encircled Demyansk garrisons with the main body of the German forces. Once again the divisions of Sixteenth Army in the Demyansk salient were marked down for annihilation. The
Stavka
plan envisaged shutting off the ‘Ramushevo corridor’ with the 27th and 1st Shock Armies, then using 11th, 34th and 53rd Armies to reduce the pocket; at the same time, a new combat group under Lt.-Gen. Khozin (including the reformed 1st Tank Army and 68th Army) was to concentrate at the end of January in the Ostashkov area, from which it would pass through the gap blown by 1st Shock Army to turn to Soltsy and drive north-westwards to Luga into the flank and rear of the Eighteenth Army investing Leningrad. Timoshenko’s offensive was due to begin in mid-February, but the main assault mounted by 27th and 1st Shock Armies was seriously delayed, though 11th and 53rd Armies opened the attack on 15 February. Kurochkin’s Kalinin Front, which in January had cleared Velikie Luki, now attacked northwards with the 3rd Shock Army.

Two days after the Soviet attacks at Demyansk began, the twelve German divisions in the salient began to draw themselves out, with the inevitable result that considerable strength gathered at ‘the neck’ of the salient, the very place 1st Shock and 27th Armies hoped to pierce. Only on 23 February did 27th Army begin its attacks, followed by 1st Shock three days later, by which time German units were draining out of the salient; within two days (28 February) Soviet troops reached the river Lovat and the salient was erased. The idea of the sweep into the rear of Eighteenth Army had to be abandoned. All of Marshal Zhukov’s thunder had been in vain. During the planning of the offensive, together with Marshal Voronov he had, in his capacity as
‘Stavka
representative’, visited his particular wrath on the formation commanders; half a year they had sat down in front of Demyansk and still they did not know the terrain, nor apparently was much known about German dispositions except perhaps for what they read in the newspapers, ‘A captured NCO reported.…’ Staffs were much too far from their formations and units; no contact had been maintained with partisan
HQ
in Dno and consequently no information exchanged; commanders had their eyes glued to the rear (where in truth great confusion and shortage did prevail, the tank army especially suffering critical shortage). The tanks of Khozin’s ‘special group’, Katukov’s 1st Tank Army, once they got up to their positions, made almost no progress as they sank up to the turret in the snowy slush of the bogs. In the midst of sending up for tractors to pull the tanks out, Katukov received orders to abandon his attack and within the hour received further orders to turn his armour to the railhead. Early in March, at all the stations between Ostashkov and Andreapol, Katukov’s brigades were loading their tanks on to flat-cars, destination unknown, with instructions enjoining great urgency. Katukov’s 1st Tank was in fact being speeded to Kursk. North-Western Front meanwhile received revised assignments—to capture Staraya Russa and to break through to the river Polist; on 4 March the abortive offensive was renewed, bogging down finally on the evening of 17 March when Soviet troops reached the river Redya after moving forward some eight miles.

With March came the mud and the end of the Soviet winter offensive for 1942–3. The entire Soviet–German front from the Baltic to the Black Sea now wore a much foreshortened look: it was more of a straight line, though bent back in the north on Leningrad and in the south on the Donets-Mius line. The most striking feature was the massive Soviet salient at Kursk, which jutted out westwards. German troops had abandoned their Gzhatsk–Vyazma–Rzhev
place d’armes:
the Demyansk salient was now emptied. The Soviet armies had not unhinged the German southern wing, though they came within an ace of it. If Rokossovskii’s Don Front had been committed alongside Vatutin, the outcome might have been the decisive success Stalin was so determinedly seeking. The results over four months were nevertheless very impressive: the great strike force in the Stalingrad area had been blotted out; the encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army and elements of Fourth
Panzer
, 3rd and 4th Rumanian
with the 8th Italian Armies, had transformed the scene on the southern wing; Army Group A in the Caucasus had been badly mauled and Army Group B, assaulted by three Soviet fronts (Bryansk, Voronezh and South-Western), had been pounded to pieces; Second
Panzer
had taken heavy punishment in the Orel area. The Soviet tally of damage inflicted on enemy forces ran to over 100 divisions (43 per cent of the strength committed on the Eastern Front): 68 German divisions, along with 19 Rumanian, 10 Hungarian and 10 Italian divisions, were completely wrecked. German losses in senior commanders climbed steeply, with more than a score of generals taken prisoner at Stalingrad (with one field-marshal at their head) and seventeen others killed. The Italians had lost 185,000 men, the Hungarians some 140,000, the Rumanians over a quarter of a million in killed, wounded, prisoners and missing. The Russians claim to have put over one million men out of action between November 1942 and March 1943; on 1 March 1943 German estimates of
Ostfront
strength set it short of 470,000 men. In the north Leningrad had been linked once more with ‘the country’; in the south, the main rail and waterway communications with the centre had been re-established. Full of the exhilaration of Stalingrad, the Red Army rushed headlong into an enormous offensive. The great mistake of 1942, the dispersal of effort, had been repeated (and certainly cost the Soviet command the Donbas), but for all the over-straining of Soviet resources, the
Wehrmacht
and its allies had taken a bludgeoning the like of which they had never before experienced.

In mid-February, at the very height of the crisis facing the southern wing of the German armies, Manstein on the occasion of the
Führer’s
visit to his headquarters had drawn attention not only to the problems of immediate military rescue but also to some of the implications of a summer campaign in the east. These talks began on 17 February at Zaporozhe and lasted until 19 February, the day on which lead tanks of the Soviet 25th Tank Crops, driving for the Dnieper, were less than fifty miles away. That afternoon Hitler flew out, to Manstein’s relief. In considering future operations, Manstein and his officers had already submitted a ‘tentative plan’ to Hitler covering German offensive action, which might either pre-empt or take advantage of a Russian offensive. In anticipating a Russian attack on the Donbas from north and south, Manstein preferred to see German forces pulled back to the Dnieper while strong armoured forces assembled west of Kharhov to destroy Soviet forces in that area, and then to lunge into the flank of Soviet formations on the move to the Dnieper. This backhand chop would slice up Soviet troops and pin them down for destruction on the sea of Azov. Since it smacked too much of ‘withdrawal’, Hitler rejected this variant. The second solution centred on the Russian salient at Kursk, which presented the Red Army with favourable positions from which to strike into the flanks of both Army Group Centre and Army Group South. A rapid attack in the wake of
the thaw would catch the Russians on the wrong foot, slice away the salient and engulf Soviet armoured forces in the process of refitting. The massed attack on the Kursk salient finally took shape as
Zitadelle
, Operation ‘Citadel’.

Much as Manstein wished it, the elimination of the salient by extension of the Kharkov counter-stroke in March, breaking into the rear of the Voronezh and Central Fronts to accomplish what Stalin subsequently called ‘a German Stalingrad’, proved impossible; Army Group Centre declared itself unable to ‘cooperate’ in any extensive operation on the northern face. In the second half of March, the Voronezh and Central Fronts had gone over to the defensive to hold the German thrusts at Belgorod and south-east of Kharkov. Fresh from the bogs of Demyansk, Katukov’s 1st Tank Army was concentrating in the Oboyan area: 64th Army, rushed up from the
Stavka
reserve, was lining the northern Donets: 21st Army was in position some fifteen miles north of Belgorod. Further south, three groups from Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army had broken through German encirclement south-east of Kharkov to reach the eastern bank of the northern Donets not far from Chuguev by 17 March; here the remnants of 3rd Tank were incorporated into the South-Western Front. As German tanks ploughed through the mud, the Soviet defence settled on the Belgorod–Volchansk–Chuguev sector.

The huge salient (about half the size of England) presented both dangers and opportunities. While Soviet troops were positioned to strike north and south, the presence of German
place d’armes
to the north (the Orel salient) and the south (the Kharkov–Belgorod salient) put the Voronezh and Central Fronts themselves at risk. Soviet intelligence data at the end of March emphasized the risk; by these calculations, the German command had in the Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov areas up to 40 infantry divisions, up to 20
Panzer
divisions, one motorized and one cavalry division, with a powerful shock group in the Kharkov area—
SS
divisions
Gross Deutschland, Adolf Hitler, Totenkopf
and
Das Reich
. The distribution of these German forces—15–17 infantry, 7–8
Panzer
divisions facing the Central Front, 12–13 infantry and 4
Panzer
divisions at Belgorod facing the Voronezh Front, 7–9 infantry and 9
Panzer
divisions (six of them
SS
formations) facing the South-Western Front—meant by Soviet reading of the signs a definite offensive intention. Stalin had already conceived a grand plan for the Central and Voronezh Fronts; his first idea was to use these fronts in an attack towards Gomel and Kharkov, to force the Dnieper and thereby lay the foundations for the recapture of both the Donbas and Belorussia. With such formidable force, however, building up on either side of the salient, this plan was unworkable in such simple form. At the beginning of April, Stalin, the
Stavka
, the General Staff and the Front commanders had to work out new plans to deal with a disquieting and potentially very dangerous situation.