Hitler had studied history, but he drew fatally unbalanced conclusions from it. He knew the Balkans had always spelled trouble, and he initially held back from that glue pot. In 1939, after the conquest and dismemberment of Poland, he entered into the infamous pact with Stalin and turned his attention to France and Britain. By midsummer of 1940, it seemed that Nazi Germany had all but won the war.
The swastika flag flew from the North Cape to the Spanish border, and the Axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan appeared firmly in the ascendant. But even as he received the rapturous plaudits of the crowds in Berlin following the defeat of France, Belgium, and Holland, Hitler was already nursing his wish to exterminate the forces of Bolshevism. The only way to do that was to conquer the Soviet Union. Once the Red Army was destroyed, Germany would acquire vast tracts of territory to be colonized by Germans, who would work the land using masses of slave labor provided by the Russian rural masses.
For this, Hitler needed a secure southern flank as well as the oil resources of Romania and Hungary. Initially, good German diplomacy seemed to be securing alliances in Southeast Europe that would guarantee a bloodless campaign. But when Mussolini, hoping to match the success of the German march into Czechoslovakia, sent his army across the Albanian border into Greece in October 1940, Hitler’s plans collapsed. The Italians were ignominiously hurled back, and British ground and air elements arrived in mainland Greece, Crete, and the Aegean islands within weeks to support the Greeks.
British bombers on Greek airfields were now within range of the vast Romanian oil fields and refineries at Ploesti, one of Hitler’s main strategic objectives. Something had to be done. A furious Hitler gave orders for German forces to invade Greece. This was impossible in the face of approaching winter, so Hitler had to turn to emergency diplomacy to buy time as his forces redeployed to Southern Europe for a campaign in the spring of 1941.
Hungary and Romania were signed up as members of the Axis in November 1940. Bulgaria took more persuasion, being that much closer to the Soviet Union, already rumbling menacingly at the threat of an Axis bulwark on its southwestern approaches. German patience paid off, and the Bulgarians agreed to the entry of German support troops. During the winter months, their engineers were busily preparing assembly areas in Southern Bulgaria from which the Greek invasion would be launched.
As spring approached, numerous military bridges were thrown across the Danube, and Bulgaria finally signed into the Axis on the 1st of March, 1941. Until now, Yugoslavia had remained neutral and outside the Axis, although its large Catholic Croat population was inclined to be pro-German. Up to a point, Hitler accepted its government’s stance but demanded unlimited use by the Wehrmacht of the key strategic rail link from Belgrade to Salonika. A reluctant Yugoslav government signed into the Axis on the 25th of March.
But a few days later, a coup by officers sympathetic to the Allies forced the pro-German regent, Prince Paul, into exile and placed the 18-year-old King Peter II on the throne, declaring him to be of age. The new Prime Minister, General Simović, refused to ratify the signature of his predecessor on the Axis treaty, and a furious Hitler announced on the 27th of March that he would destroy Yugoslavia as both military power and sovereign state. Simović called on Russia, traditional protector of the Slavs, for help but received only a bland assurance of friendship and non-aggression. On the 6th of April, the Germans simultaneously invaded Greece and Yugoslavia, which from the start was a divided nation.
The Orthodox Serbs loathed the Catholic Croats, and both detested the Muslim Bosnians. Once the country had been occupied by the Germans, these age-old hatreds continued to affect the subsequent guerrilla campaign, making it extremely difficult for the SOE, Special Operations Executive in London, to determine which faction, whether royalist, liberal democrat, or communist, was actually fighting the Germans, and which was preparing to seize political power once the war had ended. The German blitzkrieg, devastatingly supported from the air, quickly overwhelmed Yugoslavia. Pro-German Croat units of the Royal Yugoslav Army mutinied at once, and some actually began to fight Serbs.
An armistice was signed on the 17th of April. The Germans had conquered Yugoslavia for the loss of less than 500 men. King Peter and his supporters fled into exile, from which they emerged briefly in 1945, only to be expelled once more by Tito’s communist government. The exhausted Greek Army that had fought so valiantly against the Italians was forced to capitulate within days of the German intervention.
And the British and Empire troops sent to its aid were forced out of mainland Greece, then Crete, with heavy losses of men, ships, and material. German troops entered Athens on the 27th of April. Hitler had now secured his southern flank, but the delay caused by the need to invade Yugoslavia and then Greece had fatally interfered with the timetable for invading Russia. The brilliant staff work for which the German Army had long been famous was not in itself enough to beat the clock.
The invasion of Russia began on the 21st of June, following the major redeployment of forces necessary to bring the conquerors of the Balkans up to the Soviet border. The events of the following three years were to prove that Hitler’s judgment in launching his forces against the Soviet Union at least a month after they would have stood a good chance of forcing their way through to Moscow in the summer of 1941 proved his and his country’s downfall. As it was, the German army came within an ace of taking Moscow, but they arrived on the outskirts of the sprawling city as the grip of winter seized the land. They had not bargained for a winter campaign, and their clothing and equipment were nowhere near adequate for the savagery of the climate.
Hitler, remarked Winston Churchill, had failed to notice that Russia had a winter. By 1944, it was clear that Germany could not hope to win the war. The seemingly limitless manpower and industrial resources of the Soviet Union, aided by massive support from the Western allies, the United States in particular, had ground down the Nazi war machine. Within Germany itself, the adverse trend of the war was beginning to make itself felt.
One German eyewitness described a typical scene on a main line railway station as the troops left for the Netherlands, Belgium, and France carrying cheerful drafts back from home leave, and others departed bound for the Eastern Front. For those leaving on the westbound trains, there was laughter, affectionate farewells, instructions as to what gifts were to be brought back from Paris on the next leave. For the men departing for the Eastern Front, there was a tense silence and an aura of gloom and foreboding as wives, mothers, and sweethearts bade tearful farewells to men who felt there was scant chance of return. Those left at home faced increasing shortages from mid-1944 as the copious supplies from Normandy and the low countries dried up with the steady Allied advance from the Normandy beachheads.
By night, the RAF pursued its inexorable bombing campaign against the German cities, and by day, massed formations of American bombers pounded away at pinpoint targets aiming to destroy the transport and industrial infrastructure of the Third Reich. Until early in 1944, the Luftwaffe’s fighters had been able to shoot down hundreds of American bombers. But with the introduction of the long-range Mustang air superiority fighter, whose drop tanks, Rolls-Royce engine, and powerful armament enabled it to accompany the lumbering bomber formations into the very heart of the Third Reich, the German fighters were outclassed and driven from the sky. But although the Allied proponents of this remorseless bombardment claimed that it would result in a collapse of German national morale, nothing of the sort happened.
A weary populace dug itself out of the ruins every morning and continued to obey the will of the Führer, whose ambitions had created this dire situation. As the Allies wrested mastery of the air from the Luftwaffe, the bombing offensive intensified. It was not directed solely at the German cities, battered as these had become by 1943. Other important strategic targets competed for attention.
Prominent among these were the enormous refinery and oil well complexes around the town of Ploiești in Romania, upon which much of the German war economy depended. Germany had no oil supplies of its own and was reliant on what could be obtained from Russia and the occupied territories, particularly Romania. These provided a third of Germany’s oil requirements, even when running at half capacity of a million refined tons a month. Their sheer area posed a problem, for they could not be destroyed in a single attack, but had to be totally flattened and put permanently out of commission.
As the Allied airmen discovered to their cost, this was virtually impossible. Bombing attacks as early as 1942 had been ineffectual, and it was not until the following year that a considerable force of long-range heavy bombers was available to prosecute a major attack. On the 1st of August, 1943, a force of B-24 Liberators based in North Africa took off for Ploesti. This was a heavily defended target surrounded by batteries of guns and protected aloft by four groups of ME-109 fighters.
Some 200 Italian fighters were based on airfields astride the likely bomber routes to and from the target. Casualties reduced the force as it flew towards Romania. Poor navigation led many aircraft to drift, and one formation is said to have flown low over the capital, Bucharest. One bomber flying low up the city’s main thoroughfare.
Chaos reigned over the target as different bomber groups tried desperately to avoid mid-air collisions. The anti-aircraft defenses were alert and ready, and a tornado of fire greeted the lumbering bombers as they fought their way into the refinery area. Many, flying at maximum speed no more than 30 ft above the ground, were brought down by other aircraft’s delayed action bombs. Harried by fighters and riddled with shot, bombers crashed in all directions.
Five Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to air crew in this desperate attempt to destroy the Ploesti complex. Of the original force, over 57 were shot down, and another 11 had to turn back without bombing. Little lasting damage was done to the refineries. The Allied Air Commanders meeting in 1944 had tabulated their list of bombing priorities in order to give maximum support for Overlord, the invasion of the continent.
The prime target here remained Ploesti as the single largest source of oil fuels. The task was assigned to the American 15th Air Force, which reopened the Ploesti attacks in April 1944. After Berlin and the Ruhr, this was the most heavily defended target in Europe and became known as the graveyard of the 15th, whose crews bravely went back again and again despite appalling losses. Four times in April and May, the bombers struck in broad daylight.
Great damage was done. Persistence paid off. Ploesti was subjected to further raids through the summer, and finally after four huge attacks in August, each by more than a thousand bombers, the defenses were overwhelmed and production of refined fuels ended. Over 300 heavy bombers had been lost together with their 10-man crews.
In the end, sheer weight of numbers, the presence of P-51 Mustang fighter escorts, and the waning power of the Luftwaffe’s depleted fighter force enabled the Americans to win this desperate aerial battle. From now on, Germany had to rely on its synthetic oil plants. The RAF’s Bomber Command turned its attention to these small targets, difficult enough to hit by day, even more so at night. Despite heavy casualties, for the air defenses over Germany were still as formidable as ever, these attacks were continued to the end of the war.
The winter of 1943-44 had seen a series of defeats for the Wehrmacht. Having been driven out of Africa, it was fighting a dogged rearguard action up the spine of Italy, where Mussolini had been ousted following Italy’s capitulation on the 8th of September 1943, but where a prompt reaction by the Germans had seen their forces occupying most of the country within hours of the Italian defection. On the Eastern Front, a series of devastating thrusts by the Red Army, following their destruction of the German 4th and 9th Panzer Armies in the gigantic battle around Kursk in July 1943, had steadily forced the Germans back, despite Hitler’s insistence that every bit of Russian soil must be held, and no retreat permitted. Kursk was a landmark, probably the greatest tank battle of all time, and the last great effort by the Germans to break the Soviets by means of massed armored formations in set piece battles.
At the same time, Hitler, faced with Allied landings in Sicily, then Italy, found that the nightmare of war on several fronts was a reality. Furthermore, the impending threat of an Allied invasion of Europe, the second front, was tying down yet more troops. High quality divisions had been moved to Southern Europe to fight the campaign in Italy, and more forces were deployed in Scandinavia, the low countries, and the Balkans on occupation duties that frequently involved pitched battles with ever-increasing numbers of assorted partisans and guerrillas. In spite of this drain on their resources, the German generals in the East continued to fight with great skill, inflicting heavy losses on their opponents as they slowly yielded ground.
But even after the Allied invasion of France in June 1944, and the subsequent advance towards the Rhine, Hitler was curiously undismayed. He sensed that the Western Allies were finding it hard to agree on the terms demanded in the event of a final victory that now seemed increasingly certain. In January 1943, an Anglo-American summit conference had been held at Casablanca, where Churchill and Roosevelt had declared themselves in favor of unconditional surrender by Germany and its then allies Italy and Japan. Although this kept Stalin, the Soviet leader, happy, he repeatedly voiced his anger that the promised Anglo-American landings in France had not taken place by the end of 1943.
He had grounds for this. The Red Army was undeniably bearing the brunt of the war. On the Eastern Front, the numerical odds now favored the Russians. Three German Army Groups were confronted by eight Russian Fronts, each more or less the equivalent of an Army Group.
The earlier superiority in equipment enjoyed by the Germans had gone. The Soviet T-34 tank, mass-produced, was designed for operation by hastily trained crews. Simple in construction, it combined armored protection with high mobility and firepower. Its original 76-mm gun had been replaced in later marks by a potent 85-mm cannon.
Although the German Tiger tank was heavier and carried an even bigger 88-mm gun, it was heavily outnumbered and prone to mechanical breakdown. Although nowhere near to the extent that unreliability was to dog the lighter and more mobile Panther, which entered service from 1943. The earlier German Mark III and IV tanks were now no match for the T-34. The German military logistics system, its Achilles’ heel, much of it being still horse-drawn, was under extreme strain, operating over extended distances on primitive roads that readily broke up, turning into deeply rutted quagmires in the thaw.
These roads and the rickety rail system in the USSR were also under constant risk of attack from partisan forces operating deep in the German rear areas. The Russian pressure was maintained on all sectors of the huge Eastern Front. In January 1944, Leningrad was finally relieved. A great psychological as well as military triumph for Moscow.
There was to be no letup. In the face of remorseless pressure, the whole of the German Army Group North fell back along the Baltic coast. Hitler, alarmed by the turn of events and desperate to keep a hold on the Baltic training ground for the new generation of U-boats and their crews, sacked and replaced the northern Army Group’s commander, General Kuchler. His successor, Field Marshal Walter Model, had begun his campaigning in Russia in 1941 as a divisional commander, but had gained accelerated promotion through personal bravery, professional competence, and loyalty to his Führer.
Although he had experienced serious reverses, notably at Kursk in 1943, his reputation as the Führer’s fireman and shield and sword still held good, and he enjoyed the confidence of the troops under his command. Thanks to his efforts, the Soviet advance was stemmed, at least temporarily, on the Polish border, giving time for the Germans to regroup. At the same time in the south, the Russian first and second Ukrainian fronts broke out across the river Dnieper to savage Manstein’s Army Group South. Further south, with its right flank on the Black Sea, Kleist’s Army Group A was assailed by the second, third, and fourth Ukrainian fronts under the formidable Marshals Konev, Malinovsky, and Tolbukhin.
Odessa fell on the 10th of April, 1944. The Russians were now ready to cross into Poland and were already deep into Romania. The last Germans were ejected from the Crimea, and Sevastopol fell on the 12th of May. Field Marshals Manstein and Kleist, who had conducted brilliant fighting withdrawals, were sacked in March 1944 for their pains by an infuriated Hitler.
In the case of Erich von Manstein, Hitler made a potentially fatal error. The Germans now reorganized their forces in the Southern Fronts into Army Groups North and South Ukraine under the respective commands of Field Marshals Model and Schörner, both regarded as safe Nazi apostles. Neither, however, was in the class of Manstein, whose ability amounted to genius, as with depleted forces, he had fought the road back from Stalingrad, inflicting devastating losses on his numerically superior but professionally inferior opponents. Three hammer blows delivered by the Russians in 1943 had not only cost the Germans huge losses of tanks and other military equipment, but had seriously eroded the morale of their troops.
The incidents of self-inflicted wounds and of what is now known as post-traumatic stress rose alarmingly, despite draconian disciplinary measures imposed on Hitler’s personal orders, such as drumhead courts-martial with mandatory death sentences. Curiously, there was little evidence to show that Russian soldiers were similarly affected. It seems that they and their officers were more frightened of the consequences of failure than of the enemy. The German General von Mellenthin attributed this to a mixture of iron discipline ruthlessly enforced by officers and political commissars.
One cause of the loss of German morale was the self-evident fact that the Soviets appeared to have inexhaustible manpower resources coupled with the ability to mass produce munitions of war, particularly tanks, aircraft, and artillery. The factories and arsenals producing them were far to the east, far beyond the range of any German bomber, in many cases behind the Ural Mountains where they had been relocated shortly after the German invasion of 1941. Of the Soviet artillery weapons, the most feared were the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher or Stalin Organ and the widespread use of mortars. One German soldier describing what it was like to come under fire from a Stalin Organ said that it started with the roar of an infuriated beast in the distance, a dull groaning noise unlike anything else in the world.
Then came the creaking of a badly tuned organ. Paralysis descended on the front line and the rattle of machine guns fell silent. Then hell was let loose as nearly a hundred shells burst in the trees or on the ground creating a deafening thunder, flames, gunpowder, and pieces of copper as big as a fist. Hitler’s obsession over not yielding ground had now cost his country dear.
Instead of using the spring of 1944 to disengage from the Russians and fall well back to a shorter prepared defensive line, buying time whilst his array of war-winning secret weaponry came online, he persisted in issuing directives denying his able generals the chance to use their superior tactical skills. Time and time again, the superior fighting skills of the Germans defeated the stolidly executed attacks of the Soviet armor and infantry, whose tactics were consistently predictable, being the result of training based on a largely semi-literate peasantry incapable of mastering complex tactical doctrine and limited by the need to follow easily assimilated drills. The new weapons on which Hitler now placed his faith were indeed formidable, at least on paper. The V1 pilotless aircraft, V2 ballistic rocket, jet fighter aircraft, and a new generation of fast U-boats would have created immense problems for the Allies had they entered service in quantity in 1944.
As it was, delays caused by Hitler’s personal intervention in their design and deployment proved fatal for Germany. One example is that of the Messerschmitt 262, the first operational jet fighter in the world. An outstanding potential interceptor, vastly superior in speed to the American P-51 Mustang, it offered a last-minute reprieve in the air defense of Germany. But Hitler’s insistence that it be redesigned for the light bomber role led to many months of delay in its entry into service.
Once launched at the American bomber formations, it performed sensationally in the hands of aces such as Colonel Galland, who describing the new sensation of flying with jet propulsion, felt it was as though angels were pushing. Galland, who was one of the outstanding fighter pilots of all time and subsequently staunch friend of many against whom he had flown, flew the Me 262 successfully against the American bombers. But it was too late. By the spring of 1945, the Luftwaffe’s fuel supplies were virtually exhausted.
And even though the jets could fly on inferior fuel, similar to diesel, there was a dearth of even that. In any case, the short range and endurance of the Me 262 rendered it useless for support of the army above the battlefield. And in this respect, the Soviets had long held the upper hand. The summer of 1944 saw no easing of the Red Army’s pressure.
On the 6th of June, the British and Americans had landed in Normandy, drawing further Wehrmacht resources westwards. The 1,200-mile frontage in the east was now held by dangerously thinned-out forces, and at the end of June, the Russians resumed the offensive. Hitler continued to ignore the generals who advised a retirement that would enable the Germans to hold a shorter and stronger line. General Busch of Army Group Center faced the assault of no less than three Soviet fronts under command of the Soviet Deputy Supreme Commander Marshal Zhukov on a frontage of some 350 miles.
In order to achieve overwhelming firepower at the main points of attack, the Russians had massed a staggering 400 guns per mile of front. Behind the German forward positions, thousands of guerrillas attacked administrative units, headquarters, and airfields. Not all of these were fighting for Stalin and communism. There were numerous bands of dissident Russians, Ukrainians, Red Army deserters, and Cossacks who had initially greeted the Germans’ invasion of 1941 as a liberation, but who had rapidly become disillusioned by the conquerors’ savage treatment of the civil population.
To one such band of guerrillas fell the Soviet Marshal Vatutin, mortally wounded in an ambush when in command of the First Ukrainian Front. The Luftwaffe, now short of aircraft, trained aircrew, and aviation fuel, was shot out of the sky by overwhelming numbers of Russian fighter aircraft. Advancing Red Army troops were closely supported by masses of fighter-bombers operating as flying artillery to overwhelm any points of resistance. The Ilyushin Il-2, known as the Sturmovik, was one of the most significant warplanes to emerge in World War II.
Heavily armored against ground fire and with a two-man crew, it could carry a formidable war load of cannon, rockets, and bombs. Almost 25,000 of them were built, and by sheer weight of numbers, they swamped the German ground forces when unleashed against them. Formally, the Luftwaffe had enjoyed air superiority, destroying hundreds of Stormoviks. The tables had been turned.
Earlier in the campaign, Junkers 87 Stuka dive bombers, fitted with powerful cannon, had wrought great execution on Soviet tanks by attacking their vulnerable upper surface armor with cannon fire. But the cumbersome Stukas needed conditions of air superiority and plentiful fighter cover in which to operate. Lacking the close protection of their escorting fighters, they vanished from above the troops who had relied on their support. At the end of August, Zhukov was within easy reach of Warsaw on the central front, where the Polish Home Army, loyal to the government in exile in London, rose against the German occupiers in the mistaken belief that the Russians were about to arrive.
Elsewhere in Poland, this 300,000-strong army, well organized, had been fighting earlier in the year in support of the Russian advance. Its commander, General Bor-Komorowski, issued a proclamation on the 1st of August, copies of which were printed by the thousand. Addressing the people as soldiers of the city, he issued orders for everyone to fight against the German invader, to take up arms openly to restore the freedom of their country, and to punish the German criminals for the terror and bestiality they had committed within their frontiers. He did so in the belief that the Russians, already within field artillery range, would join in the fight and help in the liberation of the capital.
It would have been easy for them to do so, for the Germans in Warsaw were initially taken by surprise and the Home Army captured many key buildings. Instead, in an act of cynical treachery almost beyond belief, the Russians halted before the gates of the Polish capital, ostensibly to replenish as the SS and Gestapo went into Warsaw to settle with Bor-Komorowski’s gallant citizen soldiers. Who were non-communists were left to fight to the death. General Bor had provisioned for no more than a week’s fighting on the assumption that once it started, the Russians would come to his rescue.
There is abundant evidence that whilst the fighting in Warsaw went on, a degree of fraternization existed between German units defending the line of the river Vistula and the Russians on the far bank. It should also be borne in mind that the latter were exhausted by several months of unrelenting combat, had greatly overstretched their logistic system and needed up to a month’s respite in which to service worn-out equipment, obtain badly needed reinforcements and rehearse the inevitable river crossings that lay ahead. In Warsaw itself, the battle reached new levels of savagery when it became clear to the Poles that their allies were not going to help them. The German officer in charge of the ruthless street clearing operation, Gruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski of the SS, had his orders.
The Poles were to be exterminated. Offers by the British and Americans to fly supplies to the beleaguered Poles were refused by the Soviets, who denied the RAF and the US Air Force the use of airfields on which to refuel. Bach-Zelewski assumed command when the Warsaw rebellion had been underway for nearly a week and the Poles were almost, it seemed, on the point of vanquishing the German garrison. So confident indeed that the various political factions within the Home Army, gleefully using much captured German equipment, were already beginning to fight each other.
The decision to deploy the SS was a conscious one. It freed conventional army units to deploy on the line of the Vistula to face the impending Russian assault. And it was an ominous sign that no quarter was to be given to Bor-Komorowski’s army. Bach-Zelewski’s SS men were an unsavory mix of Russian ex-prisoners and other turncoats and convicts from German jails, taking the chance of winning remission through good conduct in battle.
They pitched into the Home Army with merciless gusto. The hellish battle took place in the midst of the luckless civilian population who had been unable to escape from the city. Atrocities sanctioned personally by Heinrich Himmler were committed freely against any Pole unlucky enough to get in the way. Even so, the SS found the going tough.
The Poles had already been supplied with British weapons and ammunition airdropped earlier in the year and they now had much captured German equipment. Despite the Russians’ bloody-minded refusal to grant refueling facilities, a few RAF aircraft managed to reach Warsaw with small loads and drop them by night to the Poles. As the battle continued, reports of the atrocious behavior of the SS were circulating in the General Staff. Several senior generals, notably Heinz Guderian, actually remonstrated to the Führer, in itself an act of moral courage.
Even Bach-Zelewski was uneasy over the barbarism of some of his subordinates. Well may he have been, for it was dawning on many of his kind that the Allies were going to win and would be calling to account any German officers who had been involved with offenses against the rules of war. He therefore agreed to meet General Bor, and a truce was agreed. The fighting had lasted for 2 months.
In addition to 15,000 Home Army dead, at least 200,000 civilians had perished. On surrendering, the surviving Poles were, strangely enough, granted prisoner of war status by the Germans and marched off into prison camps, that all too soon would be in Russian hands, and from which only a handful would emerge alive. As the Poles fought in vain for their capital, the Russian advance continued to the south. Until the beginning of August 1944, the German Army Group South Ukraine had been granted a quiet summer.
It was, however, only a shadow of its former strength. Five armored and four infantry divisions had been transferred elsewhere, and the remainder had been badly affected by casualties to men and material. To make matters worse, Germany’s weaker partners in the Axis were beginning to fall. The Romanians were contemplating changing sides, joining the Russians, and suing the Allies for acceptable peace terms.
On the 20th of August, the storm broke. The Russian 2nd Ukrainian Front struck south as the 4th Ukrainian Front headed west from its bridgeheads on the river Dniester near Kishinev. The 1st and 4th Ukrainian Fronts drove west towards the river Vistula, which they reached at the end of the month, halting on its banks as their logistic tail, left far behind in the precipitated advance, caught up. The respite offered little comfort to what remained of Army Group Center defending the river line.
Behind them lay 250 miles of the plains of Poland offering little or no comfort to the defenders, but ideal country for the advancing Russians where massed formations of armored vehicles could range freely. The next river defense line available to the Germans was that of the Oder, and behind that, a bare 50 miles distant, Berlin itself. The German army was now a shadow of its former self. In dead, wounded, sick, and captured, it was to suffer almost 2 million casualties in the year ending December 1944.
And the supply of fit men to replace these seasoned troops had dried up. Whole divisions had actually disappeared from the German army order of battle. But Hitler, who refused to acknowledge facts that displeased him, insisted that newly raised divisions of so-called People’s Grenadiers bore the designations of those that had been effectively destroyed, mostly in the east. The new formations, lacking heavy weapons or armor and well below the manning levels of those they replaced, were assigned to the German Home Army under command of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Gestapo or secret police, and now Minister of the Interior, to which post he was appointed after the failure of the assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944.
After his narrow escape from the bomb placed under the conference table at Rastenburg, Hitler became even more paranoid, insisting that only the Nazi salute was to be given and the old one abolished. Despite their growing unease at the way in which the war was being directed by the Führer and his close associates, the General Staff, including Germany’s proven soldiers like Guderian, Manstein and their contemporaries, conformed. They were warned of the perils of doing otherwise by the fate of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who, suspected of implication in the assassination attempt, was given the choice of facing a People’s Court and a degrading execution or suicide and a soldier’s funeral. He took the latter.
Hitler still relied for military advice on Field Marshals Keitel and Jodl, respectively chief and chief of staff of the German Armed Forces or OKW. These lackeys were despised by the rest of the General Staff, whose allegiance to the Nazi Party had long been questionable, but whose failure to curb Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930s remains one of the prime causes of what befell their nation and the rest of Europe in the years that followed. As the certainty of eventual German defeat became clear, Hitler’s Balkan allies, shakily held together by the Tripartite Pact of 1940 and 1941, faltered. The Romanians were the first to crack.
Between the wars, they had appeared to be under French influence, but the increasing strength of neo-military far-right parties shifted the allegiance towards Germany. King Carol was deposed in 1940 and power was seized by the pro-German Marshal Antonescu, who took his country into war against Russia in 1941 and continued, unlike some of the other Axis Allied leaders, to enjoy the confidence, even respect, of Hitler to the end. Romania’s contribution in the Eastern campaign exceeded those of Germany’s other southern satellites, Hungary and Bulgaria. Romanian casualties were enormous, particularly in the Stalingrad operations, where the Germans cynically used them as cannon fodder.
Of the 600,000 Romanians who served in the Axis armed forces, over half were killed. By midsummer 1944, the survivors had been forced back to their own Eastern frontier and at the beginning of August, the Russians were pouring into their country. On the 23rd of August, a coup led by Prince Michael, who assumed the crown, overthrew Antonescu, who was subsequently executed by the Russians, and Romania immediately changed sides. The Luftwaffe bombed Bucharest on the following day as the remnants of the Romanian army invaded Hungary in order to recover Transylvanian territory lost in 1940 as the result of the Tripartite Pact.
A total of 14 Romanian divisions in varying states of military effectiveness were now placed at the disposal of the Russians, who formed two further divisions from the Romanian prisoners and used them much as had the Germans as cannon fodder for their advance into the German heartland. The Russian army entered Bucharest in triumph on the 30th of August 1944. The Romanians were allowed to retain Transylvania but had to give the Russians back the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina given to them as part of the German-Russian Pact of 1939. As a result of these Balkan convulsions, all German forces in that theater were now placed at risk, especially those comprising the garrisons of Greece and Yugoslavia whose escape routes back to Germany were increasingly under attack by partisan forces.
The Bulgarians were the next German ally to fall. They had not as good Slavs actually fought against the Russians but had allowed the Germans to use their country as a staging area for operations elsewhere in the Balkans and against Russia. Their new provisional government asked Russia for terms in September, declared war on Germany, and a left-wing Fatherland Front seized power. The Red Army marched into Sofia on the 18th of October.
The hitherto inactive Bulgarian army now deployed in the field alongside the Red Army as it headed off into Yugoslavia whose capital Belgrade was liberated on the 20th of October. Hungary had been ruled by an authoritarian conservative regime under the regent Admiral Horthy since 1920. Having commanded the old Austro-Hungarian Navy in World War I, he was naturally inclined towards Germany and had readily allowed Hitler’s troops into his country on their way to attack Yugoslavia in 1941. Thus committed to the Axis cause, he agreed to send an initially small detachment to fight the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded the USSR in June that year.
It was not long before Hitler demanded further Hungarian troops. These were forthcoming but lacked experience and equipment. The Hungarians suffered heavily at Voronezh in 1943, and further semi-trained levies were dispatched to the slaughter.
Almost half the 350,000 Hungarian troops committed to the Eastern Front were killed.
