The Vistula–Oder Operation
In mid-January 1945 a red tidal wave broke over the German front lines in Poland and began sweeping before it westwards all that survived the initial onslaught. The senior German commanders were sacked and hasty attempts were made to reorganise what resources remained.
The Red Army had been astride the Vistula upstream from Warsaw since August 1944 when Marshal Georgi Zhukov had brought Operation Bagration to a successful conclusion, clearing the Germans from Soviet soil. To do this he had been given overall command of three Red Army Fronts, or Army Groups, the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian and the 1st Ukrainian. As Stalin’s Deputy Supreme Commander he had already brought victorious conclusions to such campaigns as the defence of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, and the battle of Kursk. However, his successes had aroused Stalin’s jealousy, and as early as 1942 the Russian leader had commissioned Viktor Abakumov, head of the Special Department in the Ministry of the Interior that was later to be renamed SMERSH, to try to discover something with which to discredit Zhukov. Abakumov had begun by interrogating Zhukov’s former Chief of Operations in an unsuccessful attempt to produce such evidence. Then Stalin had tasked the Commissar for Defence with finding some error or omission with which Zhukov could be charged, and eventually two artillery manuals were found that Zhukov had personally approved without clearing them with the Stavka, the supreme high command, and an order was then distributed among the upper echelons of the command structure openly warning Zhukov not to take hasty decisions. This activity gave Zhukov serious cause for concern, to the extent that he was prepared to be arrested at any moment on some trumped-up charge.
In early October 1944 Stalin informed Zhukov that he proposed taking over the supervision of the three Fronts facing Berlin himself, but that Zhukov would have command of the 1st Byelorussian Front tasked with taking the city. Presumably Stalin believed that he now had sufficient experience to do this, being confident of ultimate victory in an atmosphere in which post-war political considerations were beginning to come to the fore. This decision amounted to a humiliating demotion for Zhukov but, as a loyal soldier, there was nothing he could do but accept it, and he assumed the appointment on 16 November 1944 after a spell at work on the operational plans at the Stavka.
The initial campaign was called the Warsaw–Lodz Operation after its somewhat limited aims. For Zhukov’s 1st Byelorussian Front this meant breaking out of the Maguszev bridgehead, eliminating the German forces in the area between Warsaw and Radom, and then pushing forwards via Lodz to Posen to form a line extending north to Bromberg and south towards Breslau, which Marshal Ivan Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front should by then have reached in its clearance of Upper Silesia. Nothing was planned in detail beyond that stage, for the outcome of the type of breakthrough battle envisaged could not be gauged with any accuracy.
Koniev began the offensive with his 1st Ukrainian Front on 12 January, followed by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky with the 2nd Byelorussian Front on the 13th sweeping northwards on Danzig and Gotenhafen, and lastly Zhukov joined in with the 1st Byelorussian Front on the 14th. By the time Zhukov attacked, the 9th Army opposing him was fully alert, but to little avail. By the end of the following day the 9th Army’s defensive system had been destroyed and Zhukov’s 1st and 2nd Guards Tank Armies were through and advancing up to 100 kilometres beyond their start lines. To the south Koniev’s forces were enjoying similar success with a rapid advance.
The Soviet progress was aided by the weather. There was little snow to hinder them, and as the frozen ground and iced-up waterways could take the weight of the infantry and light artillery pieces, they did not have to stick to the roads and thus built-up areas could easily be bypassed. The movement was so swift that the Soviets were constantly catching the Germans unprepared, their defences unmanned. Consequently, on 17 January, the day the two ‘Berlin’ Fronts drew abreast and Warsaw fell, Stalin ordered Zhukov to reach the Bromberg–Posen line by 3 or 4 February.
The Soviet advance continued with increasing speed. Posen was reached on the 22nd and Bromberg fell the next day, a full week ahead of schedule. However, Posen was an important communications centre, where seven railway lines and six major roads met, and it would not be taken that easily. It was a genuine nineteenth-century fortress city with an inner citadel and a ring of massive forts manned by a garrison of some 60,000 troops of various kinds. But a single city could not be allowed to hold up the Soviet advance, so the leading troops pressed on while Colonel-General Vassili Chuikov of the 8th Guards Army was detailed to supervise the reduction of the fortress with four of his divisions and two from the slower-moving 69th Army that was following behind. The siege of Posen was to last until 23 February, and it proved to be an important delaying factor for the Germans.[1]
The armoured vanguards of each corps consisted of a reinforced brigade operating 30 to 40 kilometres ahead of the main body, while the infantry armies formed similar vanguards from their own integral armour and motorised infantry units to operate up to 60 kilometres ahead of the main body. These were flexible distances, of course. As the fighting was done almost exclusively by the vanguards, the main body followed in column of route and only deployed when larger enemy forces were encountered, thus enabling the infantry armies to maintain virtually the same pace as the armoured ones.
The Soviet advance, however, was hampered by the limited quantities of fuel, ammunition and supplies it could carry with it, for its basic supply system depended almost exclusively on the railways with local distribution by trucks, and, as the following accounts reveal, the depots were still east of the Vistula. The Soviet railway gauge was wider than the European, and the German invasion of the Soviet Union had therefore entailed adapting the tracks to suit their trains; the Soviets simply reversed this process as they reconquered lost territory and advanced into Poland and Germany. As Colonel-General Chuikov put it:
The logic of combat is inexorable; it accepts neither justifications nor plausible excuses if during the fighting the logistical services fail to supply the frontline troops with everything necessary.
We can find any number of valid explanations and excuses why on reaching the walls of Posen we did not have enough heavy guns to pulverise the enemy fortifications. But the fact remains that the assault on Posen dragged out for a whole month instead of the several days allotted for the operation by the Front Command.
It was not a simple matter to adapt the logistical services to the troops’ heightened rate and depth of advance. The Front Commander’s orders and his determination could not solve the problem. Within a few days the advancing troops had considerably outdistanced their supplies. Motor vehicles had to make longer runs. As a result fuel consumption increased. And there was no magic to turn 100 trucks into 300. You’ve got to have them, man them and provide the maintenance for them, which means additional repair shops and whole repair complexes. In a word, combat operations demanded that the logistical services perform their functions faultlessly, for a miscalculation or blunder in the transport operations could cost thousands of lives.
But the closer we approached the Oder, the deeper we penetrated into Germany, the more complex became the supply system.
Here is an example. Railways were a constant source of worry. The absence of a standard railway gauge during the initial stage of our advance into Germany adversely affected the supply of the advancing troops. The oversight was put right eventually, but time was lost.
In order to save fuel, half the motor vehicles making empty runs from the front were towed to their destination. All captured fuel was registered and distributed under strict control. Captured alcohol was mixed with other components and used as fuel, and all serviceable captured guns and ammunition were used against the enemy.[2]