Armageddon - Max Hastings [89]
Every Russian with a spark of honesty acknowledged respect for the enemy’s fighting power. “I was not surprised the Germans fought to the end,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “They did what we would have done. They were the only fighters in Europe who deserved our respect.” “They were wonderful soldiers,” said Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko, a Cossack. “The Hungarians, Rumanians, were nothing to the Germans. The German nation has a marvellous discipline, and they were very well trained. Russian history has always been entwined with that of Germany. Russians are good soldiers, but our culture is different. We had to teach ourselves how to fight—our training was poor. When we advanced, we often found ourselves outrunning our supplies. The Germans were better organized.” Yet none of this diminished his hatred for Hitler’s nation. “A soldier who hates the enemy is a good soldier,” said Timoshenko. Most of his schoolfriends were killed in the years of war—the rollcall of death was endless. Many of his old schoolteachers were slaughtered by the Germans during their occupation of his home district around Kuban. Like a host of Soviet soldiers, he entered the last phase of the war with the sense of a long, bloody score to pay off.
Through the autumn of 1944, the Soviets made dramatic advances in southern Europe. While the Western allies were closing up to the German frontier, in the east throughout September the 1st and 4th Ukrainian Fronts drove west, deep into Hungary, “a land so flat that you could have played golf on it,” as Lieutenant Valentin Krulik of Sixth Guards Tank Army observed laconically. Bitter fighting persisted through November and December, with the Germans in Budapest encircled and cut off by the end of the year. Most of the Hungarian population fled before the Red Army. One report to Stalin at the end of November described how when Soviet forces entered Kethemet, a town once occupied by 87,000 people, only 7,000 remained. The NKVD claimed that Hungarians fired on Soviet troops when they were obliged to withdraw during a local German counter-attack: “a Hungarian fascist shot a Soviet lieutenant with a hunting rifle.”
Such allegations were, of course, employed to justify savage retribution when Soviet forces secured an area. And as news of the Red Army’s ruthlessness spread, so the great migration before the Soviet advance increased in scale and desperation. “[Russian] soldiers’ conduct in this enemy country was influenced by the press, and by [political officers’] talks invoking hatred, and calling for revenge and retribution,” wrote Gabriel Temkin, an interpreter with 78th Rifle Division of Twenty-seventh Army. “The simplest way to avenge was to prevail over the enemy’s women, to satisfy a sexual need, while simultaneously retaliating for actual or perceived wrongs.”
While the qualitative superiority of the German Army to its opponents should be acknowledged by every student of the Second World War, it would be mistaken to imagine the Wehrmacht fighting with skill and imagination on all occasions. The gun in Tony Saurma’s Tiger of the Grossdeutschland once jammed in action, because his loader was drunk. Especially in the last months of the war, many German after-action reports contain cries of anguish about command follies and poor performance by untrained soldiers with inadequate support. A characteristic account from Kampfgruppe Oelmer, about an action at Tapiostentmarton on 11 November 1944, paints a sorry picture of incompetence. Oelmer violently protested orders from 13th Panzer Division to conduct a night attack with his Tiger battalion:
1. The wood was heavily occupied by the enemy . . . it was not possible, even in daylight, to push through it with Tigers without very strong infantry close support. 2. The terrain was very marshy, and it was impossible to