Red Storm on the Reich

The Soviet March on Germany 1945

Christopher Duffy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415228299
• eBook ISBN: 9781136360404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Eastern Front witnessed the critical battles between the German and Russian armies which won and lost the Second World War. In Red Storm on the Reich, Christopher Duffy uncovers a military campaign of unprecedented scale and ferocity during which thirty million lives were lost - a deadly harvest in which the slaughter and suffering of German civilians reached unfathomable dimensions.
By quoting extensively from the memoirs of Soviet and German commanders and the diaries of infantrymen, Red Storm on the Reich brings to life not only the Russian military assault on the lands of Germany, but also the human drama behind what can only be called epic seiges of the fortress cities of Danzig, Kolberg and Breslau.
Christopher Duffy's gripping narrative of this unexplored offensive and the psyches behind it makes for essential reading for all those interested in the Second World War and European history.

PART I

---

Total War

CHAPTER 1

---

The Evolution of Total War

The Berlin Sportpalast, 18 February 1943

GOEBBELS: ‘Do you desire total war?’

AUDIENCE: ‘Ja!’

ESSENTIALLY, the Second World War was won and lost on the Eastern Front. Only nations which were spared the experience of that holocaust have been able to regard the Second World War as somehow more light-hearted than the Great War, and a fit subject for adventure stories and comedies.

Statistics by their nature carry little emotional impact, but a few figures bear some repetition. Russian deaths in the Great Patriotic War exceed 27 million. This makes up about 40 per cent of all the people killed in the Second World War, and equates to at least ten souls for every metre of ground between Moscow and Berlin. At least seven million of the Russians who died were civilians, and 3.25 million were soldiers who perished in German captivity.

On its side, the Soviet military effort accounted for the greater part of the 3.25 million German military fatalities in the war. Approximately 3 million further German troops were captured by the Russians, and about one-third of them did not survive the ordeal. Altogether the German human sacrifice on the Eastern Front came to around 10 million killed, missing, wounded or captured, and the loss of equipment amounted to some 48,000 tanks, 167,000 artillery pieces and nearly 77,000 aircraft.

Historians have striven to explain how humanity could have come to this pass. They have identified a first turning point in the late eighteenth century, when the young French Republic, at war with most of Europe, created a mass army through the mechanism of conscription. The French had three-quarters of a million men under arms in 1794, and by 1815 literally millions of troops had been mobilised by Napoleonic France and by the successive enemy alliances. Just as important was the impulse of nationalism, which powered the ragged armies of the French Revolution and then provoked a spirited reaction among the other peoples of Europe, especially in Spain, Russia and a number of the states of Germany.

Altogether the continual fighting between 1792 and 1815 established that warfare had ceased to be the exclusive affair of kings, the ruling circles and the professional armies. In former times defeated states had been able to buy off their victors by making over frontier fortresses, trading concessions or other small coinage of the currency of international relations. Now the price of defeat could amount to the extinction of a regime or state.

The next two centuries brought important social and economic advances, and many of them had a significant military dimension. Seemingly unlimited cannon fodder for the Millionenheeren—the mass conscript armies—was provided by five-or tenfold increases in population. These probably had less to do with burgeoning fertility than with simple improvements in the conditions of everyday life, which caused infant mortality to fall.

The accompanying Industrial Revolution went through two phases. The first was a ‘heavy’ revolution, which bore images of coal, coke, jets of steam and the grinding and clanking of pieces of heavy metal. By the middle of the nineteenth century the process of industrialisation was spreading fast from Britain to many areas of continental Europe, and 1849 saw the first operational movement of troops by rail, when the tsar of Russia sent forces to help the Austrian emperor to put down a rebellion in Hungary.

The Industrial Revolution furnished armies with mass-produced weapons that were at once precisely manufactured and cheap. In the second half of the century almost every span of five years brought radical changes in the technology of killing: the first rifled small arms and artillery gave unprecedented increases in accuracy and range in the 1850s; and over the next three decades single-shot breech-loaders, magazine rifles and the Maxim gun produced successive and significant increases in the rate of fire. By the end of the century high explosives, ‘smokeless’ powders and barbed wire were all available for military use.

We associate the second, or ‘light’ Industrial Revolution with oil, the internal-combustion engine and electricity. In warfare the effect was felt in the dimensions of speed, range and control. The first man-carrying mechanical aircraft took to the air in 1903, and within eight years the Italians were employing bomber aircraft in Libya. The first tanks were seen in 1916. They were slow, thin-skinned and unreliable, but they were used with increasing force and effect, and by the end of the Great War they had established a claim to be considered, at the very least, as an important adjunct of modern warfare.

In the Great War it was still very difficult to coordinate the action of the new weapons and forces. However, a solution was at hand by the 1930s, and it was provided by compact, reliable and long-range field radios—which became a vital ingredient of the blitzkrieg style of warfare. It was probably no coincidence that Heinz Guderian, the creator of the German Panzer arm, had specialised experience of signals. Taken together, the products of the ‘light’ Industrial Revolution gave skilled commanders the means of overcoming the defensive firepower which had dominated most battlefields in the Great War.

Notions about the purpose and general conduct of warfare were strongly influenced not just by increases in technical potential but by the example of Napoleon and the reading, or rather the misreading, of the writings of the Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). Military activity focused on a search for victory in the big battle—finding the main body of the enemy and destroying it in short order by the maximum application of force.

Spontaneous popular nationalism, which we have noted at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was increasingly taken under political guidance, and it assumed a particularly potent form when it was reinforced by military victories. These processes were harnessed by Piedmont-Sardinia and Prussia to form the new united nations of Italy (1870) and Germany (1871).

Still more disquieting in the long term was the rise of totalitarian ideologies of the left and the right in the twentieth century. These were secular religions that overthrew traditional notions of authority which had represented continuity and had been willing to allow some limitation on the power of the state. No such restraints were observed in Leninist-Stalinist Russia, or in Nazi Germany, where the old certitudes were overset by defeat in the Great War, the harsh Versailles peace settlement, and subsequent financial crises which destroyed the economic order twice over.

Early in the Great War statesmen and generals learned to familiarise themselves with a scale of ‘acceptable’ casualties which far exceeded anything previously known in Western warfare. Another psychological barrier was crossed at the same time, when in 1915 the Turks massacred about 1.5 million Armenians, which proved that it was technically possible to take action against an entire racial stock. Hitler referred specifically to this episode on 22 August 1939, in his instructions to SS units for the imminent campaign in Poland: ‘Who now talks of the Armenians?’

Such was the background of technical advance and moral regression which shaped the war on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945. Seeking to convey the character of that struggle, commentators have compared it with a combat between tribes of insects, or creatures from warring planets. The images differ, but they all remind us that we are touching on an episode of unprecedented scale and ferocity.

CHAPTER 2

---

The War Until 1945

The Little War, 1939–41

THE SECOND WORLD WAR took some time to assume its global character. For the Germans the first campaigns were a series of expeditions from an invulnerable heartland. They invaded and defeated Poland in the autumn of 1939 with the collusion, and later the active participation, of the Soviet Union. In the West the ‘Phoney War’ gave way on 10 May 1940 to an all-out German offensive, and within eleven days the leading forces of Army Group A carved their way to the English Channel. The greater part of the British Expeditionary Force escaped by way of the port of Dunkirk, at the price of abandoning its heavy weapons and equipment, and the French gave up the fight on 25 June.

It is instructive to see the uncut version of the German film Triumph in the West, which was released after this second blitzkrieg. The editors hark back repeatedly to the monuments and grievances of the Great War, and there is relief as well as jubilation in the welcome that was given to the returning troops. The impression is that of closing an old book rather than opening a new one.

The Great Patriotic War, 1941–45

1941

The fighting continued in the early months of 1941 because the British unaccountably refused to come to terms, and the Germans intervened in south-eastern Europe and North Africa, not least because Hitler’s Italian allies had run into difficulties. These were small items of unfinished business compared with the great enterprise which Hitler now had in mind, which was a single crushing blow against his Soviet associates, whereby he intended to destroy the Bolshevik system, throw the surviving Russian forces into the emptiness beyond the Urals and open European Russia to German exploitation and colonisation. Europe would then indeed become a single geopolitical heartland, in which Russian oil, grain, coal and iron would sustain the German population and industries.

What the Russians call their ‘Great Patriotic War’ began on 22 June 1941, when the Germans attacked from their start lines in occupied Poland on the first day of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet forces, unprepared and maldeployed, went on to suffer the most severe losses ever recorded in military history up to that time. No less than 660,000 Russian troops were lost in one of the episodes, when in September the Second Panzer Army cut south and isolated the Russian forces in the northern Ukraine. The Germans fell short of total victory only by the narrowest margins of time and space. Their forces were fighting on the immediate approaches to Moscow and Leningrad when they were overtaken by the first Soviet counteroffensives and the arrival of the Russian winter.

Five days in December 1941 probably have a better claim than any other span of time to be considered the turning point of the Second World War. On 6 December the Russians launched the first of their major counteroffensives outside Moscow. On 7 December Japan attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor, and five days later Hitler declared war on the United States. Within less than a week, therefore, Germany was faced not only with the immediate reality of a winter campaign on the Eastern Front, but with the prospect of a multi-front war with two economic and military giants. This was why Winston Churchill, after a run of almost unrelieved British reverses, could look forward to an ultimate victory over Germany. Inevitably, the form, timing and cost of that victory remained in doubt.

1942

Having stabilised their lines just in front of Moscow and Leningrad, the Russians began to rebuild their army and relocate their vital war industries to the east of the Urals. For most of 1942, however, the initiative still lay in the hands of the Germans. This time they put the weight of the attack on the southern flank of that vast theatre of war. The fronts outside Moscow and Leningrad were still deadlocked, but in the summer of 1942 two German army groups coursed across the open fields of the Ukraine, one of them veering right and lodging in the Caucasus Mountains, while the other, which was spearheaded by the Sixth Army, made for the industrial city of Stalingrad on the Volga.

The obstinate defence which the Russians put up at Stalingrad is one of the most famous passages of the Second World War. Less well known is the technical skill with which the Soviet commanders managed their resources—they held the Germans frontally at Stalingrad with the necessary minimum of troops while they built up reserves for counterattacks from both flanks. The Russian counteroffensive broke on 19 November. On 23 November the jaws of the pincers closed behind the Sixth Army and elements öf the Fourth Panzer Army and two Romanian armies. The Germans, from having been on the attack, were now besieged in the western part of Stalingrad, and General Friedrich von Paulus with 94,000 survivors finally surrendered on 2 February 1943.

1943

The Russians still had to prove that they were superior in mobile warfare, and in February and March a spirited counteroffensive by General Erich von Manstein forced the Soviets to give up some of the ground they had gained in the south, and left them holding a potentially vulnerable salient, or bulge, around the city of Kursk.

The Germans chose the Kursk salient as the target of a concerted attack (Operation Citadel) by their main armoured forces, and they now had some excellent tanks—the Tigers and the Panthers—to pit against ‘those little beasts,’ the Russian T-34s. This time the Soviets acted on good intelligence of what was coming, and a lull of sixty-six days gave them the opportunity to create deep zones of anti-tank defences on all three sides of the Kursk bulge. The German armoured wedges attacked on 5 July, but within ten days they had been ground down by the Soviet armour, static defences and massed batteries of anti-tank guns. On 12 July the Russians opened a counteroffensive from the flanks. This time they did not manage to encircle the enemy forces, as had happened at Stalingrad, but the Germans suffered such heavy losses in tanks and assault guns that they were never again able to bring together such a powerful theatre-level reserve on the Eastern Front. From now on the Soviets were almost invariably on the attack, and by October they exploited their success as far as the Dnieper River.

1944

On 17 January the Russians relieved the city of Leningrad, which broke a siege which had lasted more than two years. On the southern flank the 2nd Ukrainian Front opened the Uman-Botosumi Operation in the spring, and pushed the Germans out of the western Ukraine. All the Soviet vehicles bogged down in the mud, except for the tanks, and even these were sliding on their bellies, yet

the Germans were not merely defeated, they fled from the Ukraine naked, without their artillery, Panzers and motor transport. They fled on oxen, cows, even on foot, and abandoned all their equipment. (Konev, 1969, 16)

The main campaigning season of 1944 was remarkable for a series of Soviet operations which cleared Russian territory, carried the war into south-eastern Europe and central Poland, and established the Soviets in the positions from which they were going to assault the German Reich in 1945. These campaigns are therefore directly relevant to our story, and they deserve to be examined in some detail.

First of all, we turn to the breakthrough in the centre. This was a sequence of two hammer blows which smashed the Germans in western Russia and eastern Poland, and brought the Soviets as far as the Vistula River. The Belorussian Operation opened on 22 June 1944. It was a day of great heat, and the anniversary of the German attack on Russia three years before. Before the sun had set the 1st Belorussian Front had broken through the left wing of German Army Group Centre, and within three weeks the Germans had lost about 350,000 troops, amounting to twenty-eight of their forty divisions, and the breach in their front attained a width of three hundred kilometres. The 1st Belorussian Front kept up the impetus of its advance into central Poland, and between 27 July and 4 August it won two bridgeheads on the far side of the great natural barrier of the Vistula.

Now that liberation appeared so close, the Polish Home Army took up arms against the Germans in Warsaw on 1 August. The Home Army was a nationalist resistance movement which owed allegiance to the government in exile in London, and not to the Polish ‘Lublin government’ which was sponsored by the Soviets, and it is a moot point whether the 1st Belorussian Front could have done more than it did to bring help to the battling Poles in Warsaw. By 20 September the last Russian attack in this area was beaten off, and the uprising was finall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Part I: Total War
• Part II: From the Vistula to the Oder
• Part III: The Southern Flank: Konev and the Continuing Contest for Silesia
• Part IV: The Baltic Flank
• Part V: The Siege of the Fortress Cities
• Part VI: 1945 and Germanic Eastern Europe
• Appendix: The Conduct of War: Soviet Science and German Art
• Bibliography
• Index