Inferno - Max Hastings [332]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
EUROPE BECOMES A BATTLEFIELD
ON 3 NOVEMBER 1943, Hitler announced to his generals a strategic decision that no further reinforcements would be dispatched to the Eastern Front. He reasoned that German forces still held a wide buffer zone protecting the Reich from the Russians; he must reinforce Italy, where Anglo-American armies were established, and France, where they were certain soon to land. Yet even as he sought to address the western threats, on 14 January 1944 the Russians renewed their assaults in the north. Strategic retreat was the obvious response, because the German threat to Leningrad was no longer credible; but the Führer, after some vacillation, once more insisted that his forces should hold their positions. “Hitler could think only in lines, not in movements,” sighed a German officer, Rolf-Helmut Schröder, long afterwards. “If he had allowed his generals to do their job, so much could have been different.” The Russians broke through, fragmenting the German line; on 27 January, Stalin declared Leningrad officially liberated. Hitler sent Model, his favourite general, to retrieve the situation, but within a month the new commander pulled back more than a hundred miles, to prepared positions along the river Neva, Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov. Then the spring thaw imposed its usual check on operations.
Between January and March repeated Soviet thrusts made little progress. The weather imposed difficulties on all the combatants, but afflicted the Russians most, because they were attempting to advance. On 11 February, Zhukov persuaded Stalin to approve a new attempt at encirclement. This time he sought to cut off six German divisions on the west bank of the Dnieper between two Soviet bridgeheads. The manoeuvre was eventually successful, and earned Ivan Konev a marshal’s star, but on 17 February, 30,000 German troops broke out; yet again, the Wehrmacht demonstrated the ferocity with which it could respond to desperate circumstances.
Farther south, through March three Ukrainian fronts battered their way westwards. The German commanders in their path, Kleist and Manstein, defied Berlin’s explicit injunctions by conducting major withdrawals to save threatened formations from destruction. Hitler responded by sacking both field marshals, replacing them with Model and the brutish Ferdinand Schörner, whom he deemed to have the ruthlessness indispensable to the times. Schörner mounted a stubborn defence of the Crimea against his own judgement, but was eventually obliged to accept the inevitable: on 12 May 27,000 survivors of the garrison’s 150,000 men were evacuated by sea. The Russians had held Sevastopol for 250 days, but the Germans abandoned the fortress after defending it for only 7.
Capt. Nikolai Belov wrote from the front in mid-April: “Everything is melting. There will be a terrible amount of mud here, and it won’t clear up till June.” That spring, the condition of the Russian people improved a little. The Luftwaffe could spare few aircraft to bomb cities and civilians and in many places German prisoners were put to work, clearing debris. Across thousands of square miles of contested territory, soldiers and civilians picked a path between wrecked vehicles, abandoned trenches, uncleared mines and burnt-out villages. In communities clinging to the precipice of survival on a daily ration of ten ounces of bread, local people grudged food to German POWs, but admitted that they were good workers. The NKVD and SMERSH—“the Soviet bacillus of mistrust,” in Catherine Merridale’s phrase—conducted a ruthless hunt for alleged traitors, collaborators and spies in areas that had been occupied by the Wehrmacht. In Chernigov, for instance, during February the bodies of four hanged traitors, one of them a woman, swung