Armageddon - Max Hastings [266]
In the frenzied movements of those last months, tanks of the Grossdeutschland once found themselves engaging the Russians from the railway flatcars on which they had been brought to the battlefield. At night, when the tanks leaguered to rearm and perform maintenance, the crews now had to provide their own local defence, for they lacked panzergrenadiers to do the job for them. Rations shrank. They found themselves obliged to eat the army-issue cheese which everyone detested, because there was little else. Some days, there was only bread.
Once, after Saurma’s troop had spent a night on a serious drinking binge, he sensed them to be on the edge of mutiny. “For God’s sake, let’s end this,” they said. The young officer gathered his tank crews together and harangued them: “You were born—some time you’re going to die,” he said. “In between, there is a parabola of life, which has its good moments and its bad ones. You must not think of yourselves, but of others who depend on you. You can’t just give up.” Heaven knows what Saurma’s men thought of these lofty sentiments, but they fought on. Between 15 January and 22 April 1945, his division suffered an astounding 16,988 casualties, 170 per cent of its strength. In the three years of its existence, the Grossdeutschland lost 50,000 men and 1,500 officers.
“Most German soldiers realize the hopelessness of their country’s predicament,” observed a Soviet intelligence report on 2 March, “but a few still express faith in victory. There is no sign of a collapse in enemy morale. Germans still fight with dogged persistence and unbroken discipline, and some prisoners express their pride about this. A captured company commander said: ‘We must hold to the last man.’ A soldier named Viktor Schubert said: ‘The war will end this year, and we shall win it.’ ” It is hard to deny bemused respect to Germans capable of addressing Soviet intelligence officers in such terms in the spring of 1945.
The Ardennes was the last large-scale armoured battle Hitler’s armies fought on the Western Front. Thereafter, the Wehrmacht was obliged to fight a campaign against the Americans and British which was overwhelmingly dependent upon footsoldiers with hand-held anti-tank weapons. There was no further scope for grand strategy, because Germany possessed no more choices about how or where to fight. A few officers were already discreetly telling their men to go home, and more did so with every week that passed. Commanders instructed to fight to the last round frequently interpreted this as meaning the last artillery shell. Even where tubes and ammunition still existed, lack of trained personnel and prime movers critically hampered the deployment of heavy guns. Units overwhelmingly composed of untrained replacements lacked the tactical skills to mount counter-attacks. So incompetent were some novice armoured crews that, when they collected new tanks direct from the factories, they frequently ditched or crashed them on the road to the front.
“I have four divisions, facing 22 Soviet divisions with two in reserve,” the officer commanding the Hermann Göring Parachute Corps reported to OKH on 12 March. “Each of our divisions is holding six miles of front. I have 41 tanks and self-propelled guns against four tank brigades. I have 58 artillery pieces against 700. In the first two months of 1945 the Corps has lost 37,000 men; of 106 grenadier companies, 45 are commanded by NCOs, the remainder by young and untrained officers. The average company changes its entire personnel in 9 to 12 days.”
On 13 March, the Luftwaffe’s Luftflotte 6 reported that it possessed fuel for its aircraft to make just one sortie apiece, and pleaded for further supplies before the Russians launched their next offensive. It was impossible, said Luftflotte 6’s commander, to take any action at all against the enemy’s Oder