Armageddon - Max Hastings [179]
Worse, Hitler transferred to Hungary two of the fourteen and a half panzer and panzergrenadier divisions available to face the Russians on a 750-mile front from the Baltic through Poland, because of his obsessive anxiety about the Lake Balaton oilfields. “If something happens down there, it’s over,” he told Guderian. “That’s the most dangerous point. We can improvise everywhere else, but not there. I can’t improvise with the fuel. Unfortunately, I can’t hang a generator on a panzer [to power it electrically].” The Russians were delighted by this folly. “A very stupid disposition,” Stalin observed on learning of the German diversion of forces to Hungary. On 1 January 1945, the only major German armoured reserve on the Eastern Front was thrown into Operation Konrad, to relieve Hitler’s forces beleaguered in Budapest. The counter-attack came within sight of the Hungarian capital before it was halted on 13 January. Hitler’s obsession with Hungary caused seven of the eighteen panzer divisions available in the east to be deployed there, while four were in East Prussia, two in Courland and just five faced Zhukov and Konev. In January on the Eastern Front the Germans could deploy only 4,800 tanks against the Red Army’s 14,000, and 1,500 combat aircraft against 15,000.
Soviet propaganda loudspeakers blared music towards the German lines night after night of early January, to drown the engine noise of thousands of tanks and guns moving towards their start lines on the east bank, or preparing their breakout from the western beachhead already established at Sandomierz. Some of the men who occupied listening posts beyond the Russian lines, watching the Germans, lay prone all day in the snow. Only when darkness fell could they rise to relieve themselves, to force some movement back into paralysed limbs. Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko, one of the Red Army’s superbly skilled patrol leaders, spent Russian New Year’s Eve, 7 January, crawling for hours across the ice of a frozen river to reach German positions on the far bank. As always ahead of an attack, the Red Army needed prisoners. His patrol stormed a house where they had identified a German machine-gun post, killed three and captured three of the enemy, and returned across the ice before dawn. In the early days of January, such operations were repeated a thousand times along the entire front from East Prussia to Yugoslavia.
Until the very eve of Stalin’s assault, Hitler’s fawning military courtiers Keitel and Jodl continued to feed their Führer’s belief that the Soviet threat was a bluff. There were scant grounds for such a delusion. A steady stream of reports from prisoners and deserters—how strange it seems that Red Army soldiers were still deserting to the Wehrmacht in these last months—confirmed the scale of Russian preparations. “A deserter from 118th Guards Army at Baranov says the Soviet attack will start in three days, aims to reach the German border in a single bound, and will mask Cracow,” observed a Wehrmacht situation report sent to Berlin on 9 January. A prisoner from 13th Guards Division likewise declared that the attack would start in three days, and that the River Nida was his unit’s first objective. Another PoW from 370th Guards Division said his formation had been given the cheering reassurance that its assault would be preceded by a penal battalion’s “fighting reconnaissance.” Soviet mine-clearing, bridge-building and reinforcement on a huge scale were reported