Armageddon - Max Hastings [192]
While Zhukov paused at the Oder, further south Konev renewed his own massive operation to clear south-east Germany. First, his men closed upon the ancient city of Breslau, Silesia’s capital. At 0600 on 8 February, at first moving sluggishly through the quagmire created by the thaw, the Russians advanced from their bridgeheads on the upper Oder. Against slight resistance from the remains of Fourth Panzer Army, the attackers gained almost forty miles on the first day. By 15 February, 35,000 troops and 80,000 civilians in Breslau were encircled by Konev’s armies. The Germans of Seventeenth Army attempted a counter-attack which met some of the Breslau fortress troops on 14 February, but were then driven back by overwhelming Russian forces. The only consequence of the German effort was to impose a delay on Konev, during which he was able to rest and resupply his men. Like Zhukov his great rival, the marshal had cherished his own hopes of reaching Berlin in a single bound. He, too, was now obliged to acknowledge that this was unrealistic.
Nehring’s XXIV Panzer Corps launched an ambitious counter-attack in the south on the night of 1 March, which surprised the Russians and inflicted substantial casualties before it ran its course—Konev lost 162 tanks to the Germans’ ten. Goebbels joined Schörner for a parade in the recaptured town of Lauban on 8 March, at which the field-marshal, a devout Nazi, flattered the propaganda minister outrageously. Next day, amid snow showers, a new German counter-attack began at Streigau, forty miles eastwards. This recaptured the town. Revelations of atrocities committed by the Russians during their brief occupation may have done something to stiffen the determination of Schörner’s soldiers. The Russians did not make an impressive military showing during these operations. They had grown over-confident, allowed themselves to be taken by surprise, and retired in disarray.
German Intelligence was still making extraordinary efforts to gather information from behind the Russian front. Four Ukrainians were parachuted from a Ju-88 on the night of 27 February, led by a former Red Army sergeant, carrying a radio and 206,000 roubles. They were immediately captured. On the night of 4 March, troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front met a twenty-two-man German patrol nine miles beyond the Oder. After a protracted firefight in which thirteen Germans and five Russians were killed, the survivors were found to be members of Abwehr Group 306, guided by three Red Army defectors. It seems remarkable that even the legendary Reinhard Gehlen, chief of German Intelligence for the Eastern Front, still considered operations of this kind practicable or worthwhile, though as late as New Year’s Day 1945 a U-boat landed two German spies on the Maine coast, to conduct ill-defined intelligence operations against the United States.
German counter-attacks seemed irrelevant. It was meaningless to expend lives and irreplaceable equipment to recapture small fragments of lost Reich territory, which were doomed to be lost again within a matter of days. Army Group Balck reported miserably from Hungary on 5 February: “Amid all the stresses and strains, no improvement in morale or performance is visible. The numerical superiority of the enemy, combined with the knowledge that fighting is now taking place on German soil, has proved very demoralizing to the men. Their only nourishment is a slice of bread and some horsemeat. Movement of any kind is hampered by men’s physical weakness.” The staff officer cataloguing these dismal realities concluded in wonder: “In spite of all this, and six