Inferno - Max Hastings [347]
The Red Army advanced more swiftly than Eisenhower’s forces in 1944–45, partly because its soldiers lived off the land and required much lower scales of supply; they were the least cosseted of the war. Among the long list of comforts and facilities routinely provided to Western Allied troops but denied their Russian counterparts were razors, delousing chambers, pencils, ink, paper, knives, torches, candles, games. Vodka was the only Red Army–issue stimulant to morale, and some sections pooled their rations, so that men could take turns to drink themselves into stupefaction. To the end, many men advanced to attack while suffering hunger, lice, piles, toothache, bleeding gums caused by scurvy, and sometimes tuberculosis.
The foremost Russian advantages in waging war were a willingness to accept almost unlimited casualties, together with men’s knowledge of the draconian penalties awaiting those who flinched or failed. Russian units confronted with German resistance were never permitted to adopt the familiar Anglo-American expedient of taking cover and calling for artillery and air support. They were expected to drive on, heedless of obstacles or minefields, and to pay the price: there were always more men. On 5 July, the first phase of Bagration ended with the German Ninth Army destroyed. The First Panzer Army and the Fourth Army had each lost around 130,000 of the 165,000 men with which they started the battle. Vast columns of bedraggled German prisoners shuffled to the Russian rear, flotsam of the once-invincible Wehrmacht. The 1st Belorussian Front now swung west towards Warsaw, while two other army groups headed for East Prussia and into Lithuania. On 13 July, the 1st Ukrainian Front began an advance towards the Vistula. By the month’s end, Vilnyus and Brest-Litovsk were in Russian hands.
Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat; its moral, they said, was that “Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.” The Soviet “liberation” of Poland, which began with Bagration, obliged its people to exchange the rule of one tyranny for another. On 14 July the Stavka issued an order to all Russian commanders: “Soviet troops … have encountered Polish military detachments run by the Polish émigré government. These detachments have behaved suspiciously and have everywhere acted against the interests of the Red Army. Contact with them [is] therefore forbidden. When these formations are found, they must be immediately disarmed and sent to specially organised collection points for investigation.” The Russians murdered thousands of Poles whose only crime was a commitment to democratic freedom. Most notoriously, they declined to succour the August Warsaw Uprising. Russians nursed a historic hatred for the Polish people, and indulged this in 1944–45 with indiscriminate savagery towards both sexes.
Even as the Red Army approached the Vistula, its Karelian Front drove deep into Finland, breaching the Mannerheim Line, which the Finns had defended so staunchly in 1940. The Finnish people paid dearly for their second challenge to Stalin: on 2 September the Helsinki government signed an armistice which rendered its eastern territories forever forfeit. Hitler refused to evacuate the Baltic Courland Peninsula in Latvia, though his generals pleaded that the forces holding the perimeter there might contribute importantly to the defence of Germany. Twenty-one divisions—149,000 men and 42 generals—remained beleaguered in Courland until May 1945.
When Bagration reached its triumphant conclusion, the Russians claimed to have killed 400,000 Germans, destroyed 2,000 tanks and taken 158,000 prisoners. The victors were struck by the poor physique of many captured Germans; one soldier wrote, “They all looked pitiful. They are like bank clerks. Many of them wear glasses.” By the end of August 1944 the Russians stood on the Vistula, almost within