Armageddon - Max Hastings [88]
American supplies made a critical contribution. It was often suggested in Washington and London that the Soviets were ungrateful. Stalin might have given the contemptuous response he once gave to Zinoviev, who made the same charge: “Gratitude? Gratitude is a dog’s disease!” Russians observed that America’s contribution to the war cost mere money. Russia was paying for her victories with blood, torrents of blood. Woven into the entire Soviet vision of the Second World War from 1941 to the present day, transcending any issue of mere ideology or propaganda, has been the conviction that the Western allies were content to wage war against the Nazis at their leisure, husbanding the lives of their peoples with bourgeois parsimony. Churchill observed, with justice, that Britain entered the war in 1939 as a matter of principle, and fought alone for almost two years, while Russia was content to play vulture on the carcasses of Hitler’s kills until Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It was impossible to dispute, however, that Stalin’s people were overwhelmingly responsible for destroying Hitler’s armies.
The remains of Germany’s Army Group Centre now stood on the Vistula less than 400 miles from Berlin. Marshals Rokossovsky and Zhukov held several bridgeheads westwards across the river, which repeated German counter-attacks had failed to dislodge. On the great Polish plain, the River Oder was the only major natural obstacle which remained between Stalin’s armies and Hitler’s capital. Yet the price of the Russians’ huge summer advances was that months of labour became necessary, to rearm and resupply Stalin’s armies before they could strike anew. Their difficulties in the autumn of 1944 mirrored those of the Americans and British on a larger scale and over much greater distances. The Russians customarily required three months after a big offensive on a given front before they were ready to hurl themselves forward once more. From Poland southwards to the Czech border, between September and the turn of the year there were no significant advances. Men on both sides dug, patrolled, rested as best they could, and harassed each other’s positions. Germans and Soviets alike recognized that this was a mere respite before a new and even more terrible battle.
Yet, even while the central front lay quiescent through the autumn months, bitter fighting continued in the Baltic states. The German Army Group North still possessed some powerful formations and commanders. Nine hundred thousand Soviet troops together with 1,328 tanks and self-propelled guns were deployed on a battlefront that sometimes extended to 750 miles. Advancing Soviet forces which broke through a German line repeatedly found the enemy retreating to new prepared positions a few miles back. The Wehrmacht’s appetite for counter-attack seldom faltered. Between 14 September and 24 November 1944, Stalin’s three Baltic Fronts suffered 103,946, 73,735 and 55,488 casualties respectively. The Leningrad Front added a further 28,776. The Germans were pushed back into Baltic enclaves at Courland and Memel, but the Russians failed to achieve the absolute destruction of the enemy’s forces which they had sought. Any rational commander would have pulled back German forces from the Baltic states to East Prussia and Poland, to provide desperately needed reinforcements for the defence of the German