Inferno - Max Hastings [333]
Kiev’s inhabitants warned visitors to beware of some local girls: “They slept with Germans for a piece of sausage.” A steady stream of refugees returned to the city, pushing their pathetic property on carts and wheelbarrows. Trams began to run again, some shops and cinemas reopened; water could be drawn at street hydrants, and even electricity became sporadically available. But long queues waited hours for a chance to purchase any commodity, and the streets remained uncleaned. Nazi propaganda posters, images of “Hitler the Liberator,” still clung to some walls. Destitution was the common condition of tens of millions of Russians: when three little street urchins approached the Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman on a street in Yelsk, he expected them to plead for money or food. Instead, they asked, “Uncle, have you got a little pencil, by any chance? At school we have nothing to write with.” Brontman gave them a pencil. “They forgot even to thank me and disappeared hurriedly down the street, staring at their new acquisition, and apparently arguing about who should be its owner.”
In May 1944, 2.2 million German troops confronted the Russians; Hitler derived comfort from the fact that the enemy was still 560 miles from Berlin at the westernmost point of the front. He believed the main Soviet summer effort would come in northern Ukraine, and apportioned his strength accordingly. But he was wrong: the objectives of Zhukov’s impending Operation Bagration, the most spectacular Soviet offensive of the war, lay in the zone defended by Army Group Centre. Scheduled to commence in June, its scale reflected the enormous resources now available to the Red Army. Some 2.4 million men, 5,200 tanks and 5,300 aircraft would make an initial thrust towards Minsk; in the second phase, the 2nd Baltic and 1st Ukrainian Fronts would punch forward on both flanks, exploiting the breakthrough. Bagration was hugely ambitious, but at last the Red Army’s capabilities and the Wehrmacht’s vulnerability rendered such strokes possible.
Just praise has been lavished upon the ingenuity and success of British and American deception operations in World War II, but less attention has been paid to the matching achievement of Soviet maskirovka, literally “camouflage.” This became progressively more sophisticated in 1943, and attained its zenith in deluding the enemy about the objectives of Bagration. Large resources were committed to building dummy tanks, guns and installations, to persuade the Germans that the main Russian thrust would come in northern Ukraine, where fake roads and crossings were also created. Meanwhile, Soviet formations facing Army Group Centre maintained static defensive deployments; reinforcements moved up only by night under rigorous blackout, and until the last moment were held thirty to sixty miles behind the front. Zhukov’s intentions were revealed on a strict need-to-know basis to only a handful of senior officers. The Germans identified 60 percent of the Soviet forces facing Army Group Centre, but missed a vital guards tank army, and supposed they would meet only 1,800 tanks and self-propelled guns, instead of the real 5,200. The Wehrmacht’s eastern intelligence chief, the highly regarded Reinhard Gehlen, was entirely misled by the Russian maskirovka, as skilful and significant as similar Anglo-American operations before D-Day. The collapse of Hitler’s residual illusions in the east waited only upon Russian readiness to strike.
Around the world that spring, cynicism persisted about the modest Anglo-American contribution to the struggle, compared with that of the Soviets. The Polish corps commander in Italy, Gen. Władysław Anders, wrote gloomily in mid-April: “The course of the war is still the same; the Red Army continues to gain victories and the British are either being defeated, as in Burma, or, together with the Americans, have stuck fast in Italy.” The Western Allied invasion of Normandy is customarily described as the Second Front; yet in southern Europe around one-tenth of Hitler