Armageddon - Max Hastings [90]
Despite heavy rain and pitch-black conditions, 13th Panzer insisted that the attack should go ahead. One Tiger soon threw a track, and two others became bogged down. A Russian anti-tank gun disposed of another, killing its crew. The remainder were soon immobilized by the terrain. “Working with this division was extremely disagreeable,” observed the German tank commander angrily. “Absolutely no attention was paid to the tactical principles for employing Tigers. When a vehicle carrying forward supplies broke down and a request was made for the loan of another for a few hours, the division’s senior staff officer refused, saying: ‘it’s your problem to get your own fuel forward! I’m not here to lug fuel for you!’ ” In the east as in the west, therefore, immense frustrations and setbacks dogged the operations of the German Army in the last year of the war. Not every German commander was a von Manstein, not every soldier a young Waffen SS fanatic. Yet the achievement of the Wehrmacht in resisting the Red Army against overwhelming odds, and amid such follies as that described above, remained remarkable.
The Russians swiftly secured Bulgaria and began to move into Yugoslavia. Major Dmitry Kalafati, a thirty-year-old graduate student from the Ukraine who became a distinguished scientist after the war, was ordered to take four artillery regiments to provide support for infantry of the 6th People’s Proletarian Division of Tito’s army. He found this a disturbing experience, since the partisans were prone to decamp to local villages at night, leaving the Russian guns unprotected. Tito’s men were also studiedly vague about where they might encounter the Germans. By the autumn of 1944, Russian ground forces were receiving highly effective tactical air support, but in Yugoslavia Kalafati was constantly frustrated by the refusal of Sixteenth Aviation Army to respond to his coded requests for Stormoviks. In desperation he sent a plain-language signal, “Fuck you—where are the planes?,” which at last produced Soviet dive-bombers.
Just as the British failed to cut off the retreat of the German Fifteenth Army through Holland, so in the east the German Army Groups E and F retreated north and west from the Balkans, escaping entrapment by the Russians sweeping through Rumania. Once again, the Wehrmacht demonstrated its skill in postponing the inevitable. Although the Warsaw Rising is well known in the West, much less familiar is the Slovak revolt in the autumn of 1944. It began in eastern Slovakia in late August. Local partisans—who were, unlike those of Warsaw, overwhelmingly loyal to Moscow—perceived their Soviet liberators close at hand beyond the Carpathians. When the Slovaks rebelled against their German occupiers, the Russians marched to their aid. Soviet troops pushed west with the support of Moscow-trained Czech troops. But the Germans concentrated two SS and five Wehrmacht divisions to resist the Soviet advance, and they were successful. “Because of the mountainous terrain, we would not use tanks and cavalry effectively, so could not exploit our successes,” Konev wrote to Zhukov on 27 September. “Our infantry was also untrained in mountain warfare. We advanced so slowly that the enemy had time to move troops to threatened sectors.” Konev reported that most of his infantry divisions were reduced to barely 3,000 men apiece, and his tank corps to an average of sixty tanks, most of which suffered constant mechanical breakdown in the mountains. Shortages of ammunition and fuel made it impossible to use artillery effectively. Between 8 September and 28 October, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front in the East Carpathians