All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [345]
Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat. Its moral, they said, was that ‘Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.’ The Soviet ‘liberation’ of Poland, which began with Bagration, obliged its people to exchange the rule of one tyranny for another. On 14 July the Stavka issued an order to all Russian commanders: ‘Soviet troops … have encountered Polish military detachments run by the Polish émigré government. These detachments have behaved suspiciously and have everywhere acted against the interests of the Red Army. Contact with them [is] therefore forbidden. When these formations are found, they must be immediately disarmed and sent to specially organised collection points for investigation.’ The Russians murdered thousands of Poles whose only crime was a commitment to democratic freedom. Most notoriously, they declined to succour the August Warsaw Uprising. Russians nursed a historic hatred for the Polish people, and indulged this in 1944–45 with indiscriminate savagery towards both sexes.
The 1944 Thrust into Poland
Even as the Red Army approached the Vistula, its Karelian Front drove deep into Finland, breaching the Mannerheim line which the Finns had defended so staunchly in 1940. The Finnish people paid dearly for their second challenge to Stalin: on 2 September the Helsinki government signed an armistice which rendered its eastern territories forever forfeit. Hitler refused to evacuate the Baltic Courland peninsula in Latvia, though his generals pleaded that the forces holding the perimeter there might contribute importantly to the defence of Germany. Twenty-one divisions – 149,000 men and forty-two generals – remained beleaguered in Courland until May 1945.
When Bagration reached its triumphant conclusion, the Russians claimed to have killed 400,000 Germans, destroyed 2,000 tanks and taken 158,000 prisoners. The victors were struck by the poor physique of many captured Germans. One soldier wrote, ‘They all looked pitiful. They are like bank clerks. Many of them wear glasses.’ By the end of August 1944 the Russians stood on the Vistula, almost within reach of Warsaw and at the border of East Prussia. They were besieging Riga, and in the south had reached the Danube. In two months they had advanced 450 miles. A Russian officer marvelled at the endless wrecked tanks he and his men passed on their lines of march westwards, which he fancifully likened to ‘camels on their knees’. As the Red Army savoured its dominance of the battlefield, for the first time men found opportunities to enjoy the pleasures of living and fighting in the territories of other nations. ‘One night you sleep under the open sky, the following night you are sunk into a feather bed like a nobleman,’ Gennady Petrov wrote to his parents from Ukraine. ‘I am living so well I have no complaints about anything save lack of music records and camera film.’
On the far left of the Soviet line, on 20 August two Ukrainian fronts began a drive into south-east Europe of which the objectives were political rather than military. Stalin, bent upon securing most of the Balkans ahead of the Western Allies, committed his forces first against Romania, which surrendered on the 23rd. The Romanians’ change of allegiance cost them dear: by 25 October their army had suffered a further 25,000 casualties, after being conscripted to assist the Red Army to evict the Germans from their country. On 5 September Russia declared war on Bulgaria, which was officially fighting only the Anglo-Americans. Facing overwhelming Soviet might, the Bulgarians surrendered four days later. A communist government was installed in Sofia, enabling the Red Army to shift forces to Transylvania and Yugoslavia – Belgrade fell on 19 October.
Only a Nazi-engineered coup in Budapest on 15 October prevented the Hungarian government also from yielding to the Soviets: