• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Between January and March repeated Soviet thrusts made little progress. The weather imposed difficulties on all the combatants, but afflicted the Russians most, because they were attempting to advance. On 11 February, Zhukov persuaded Stalin to approve a new attempt at encirclement. This time he sought to cut off six German divisions on the west bank of the Dnieper between two Soviet bridgeheads. The manoeuvre was eventually successful, and earned Konev a marshal’s star, but on 17 February, 30,000 German troops broke out; yet again, the Wehrmacht demonstrated the ferocity with which it could respond to desperate circumstances.

Further south, through March three Ukrainian fronts battered their way westwards. The German commanders in their path, Kleist and Manstein, defied Berlin’s explicit injunctions by conducting major withdrawals, to save threatened formations from destruction. Hitler responded by sacking both field marshals, replacing them with Model and the brutish Ferdinand Schörner, whom he deemed to have the ruthlessness indispensable to the times. Schörner mounted a stubborn defence of the Crimea against his own judgement, but was eventually obliged to accept the inevitable: on 12 May 27,000 survivors of the garrison’s 150,000 men were evacuated by sea. The Russians had held Sevastopol for 250 days, but the Germans abandoned the fortress after defending it for only seven.

Captain Nikolai Belov wrote from the front in mid-April: ‘Everything is melting. There will be a terrible amount of mud here, and it won’t clear up till June.’ That spring, the condition of the Russian people improved a little. The Luftwaffe could spare few aircraft to bomb cities and civilians; in many places German prisoners were put to work, clearing debris. Across thousands of square miles of contested territory, soldiers and civilians picked a path between wrecked vehicles, abandoned trenches, uncleared mines and burnt-out villages. In communities clinging to the precipice of survival on a daily ration of three hundred grams of bread, local people grudged food to German PoWs, but admitted that they were good workers. The NKVD and Smersh – ‘the Soviet bacillus of mistrust’, in Catherine Merridale’s phrase – conducted a ruthless hunt for alleged traitors, collaborators and spies in areas that had been occupied by the Wehrmacht. In Chernigov, for instance, during February the bodies of four hanged traitors, one of them a woman, swung for days from a gallows in the central square.

Kiev’s inhabitants warned visitors to beware of some local girls: ‘They slept with Germans for a piece of sausage.’ A steady stream of refugees returned to the city, pushing their pathetic property on carts and wheelbarrows. Trams began to run again, some shops and cinemas reopened; water could be drawn at street hydrants, and even electricity became sporadically available. But long queues waited hours for a chance to purchase any commodity, and the streets remained uncleaned. Nazi propaganda posters, images of ‘Hitler the Liberator’, still clung to some walls. Destitution was the common condition of tens of millions of Russians: when three little street urchins approached Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman on a street in Yelsk, he expected them to plead for money or food. Instead, they asked, ‘Uncle, have you got a little pencil, by any chance? At school we have nothing to write with.’ Brontman gave them a pencil. ‘They forgot even to thank me and disappeared hurriedly down the street, staring at their new acquisition, and apparently arguing about who should be its owner.’

In May 1944, 2.2 million German troops confronted the Russians; Hitler derived comfort from the fact that the enemy was still 560 miles from Berlin at the westernmost point of the front. He believed the main Soviet summer effort would come in north Ukraine, and apportioned his strength accordingly. But he was wrong: the objectives of Zhukov’s impending Operation Bagration, most spectacular Soviet offensive of the war, lay in the zone