“The thrust is
the best parry”
Worried by the threatening developments the day before on
his front and flanks, Model, early on 23 July, predicted that the Russians
would strike via L’vov to the San River, thrust past Lublin to Warsaw, encircle
Second Army at Brest, advance on East Prussia across the Bialystok-Grodno line
and by way of Kaunas, and attack past the army group left flank via Shaulyay to
Memel or Riga. During the day Model’s concern, particularly for his south
flank, grew to alarm as the Russians moved north rapidly between the Vistula
and the Bug toward Siedlce, the main road junction between Warsaw and Brest. In
the late afternoon, after several of his reports had gone unanswered, Model
called to tell the Operations Branch, OKH, it was “no use sitting on one’s
hands, there could be only one decision and that was to retreat to the
Vistula-San line.” The branch chief replied that he agreed, but Guderian
wanted to set a different objective. Later the army group chief of staff talked
to Guderian, who quickly took up a proposal to create a strong tank force around
Siedlce but would not hear of giving up any of the most threatened points.
“We must take the offensive everywhere!” he demanded, “To
retreat any farther is absolutely not tolerable.”
Before daylight the next morning Guderian had completed a
directive which was issued over Hitler’s signature. Army Groups North and North
Ukraine were to halt where they were and start attacking to close the gaps.
Army Group Center was to create a solid front on the line
Kaunas-Bialystok-Brest and assemble strong forces on both its flanks. These
would strike north and south to restore contact with the neighboring army
groups. All three army groups were promised reinforcements. The directive ended
with the aphorism “The thrust is the best parry” (der Hieb ist die
beste Parade). After reading the directive Model’s chief of staff told the OKH
operations chief it would be seven days before the army groups would get any
sizable reinforcements—in that time much could happen.
During the last week in the month the Soviet armies rolled
west through the shattered German front. On 24 July First Panzer Army still
held L’vov and its front to the south, but behind the panzer army’s flank, 50
miles west of L’vov, First Tank Army, Third Guards Tank Army, and the
Cavalry-Mechanized Group Baranov had four tank and mechanized corps closing to
the San River on the stretch between Jaroslaw and Przemysl. That day Fourth
Panzer Army fell back 25 miles to a 40-mile front on the Wieprz River southeast
of Lublin; off both its flanks the Russians tore open the front for a distance
of 65 miles in the south and 55 miles in the north. Second Army had drawn its
three right flank corps back to form a horizontal V with the point at Brest.
Behind the army a Second Tank Army spearhead reached the outskirts of Siedlce
at nightfall on the 24th, and during the day Forty-seventh and Seventieth
Armies had turned in against the south flank.
To defend Siedlce, Warsaw, and the Vistula south to Pulawy,
Model, on the 24th, returned Headquarters, Ninth Army, to the front and gave it
the Hermann Göring Division, the SS Totenkopf Division, and two infantry
divisions, the latter three divisions still in transit. From the long columns
coming west across the Vistula, the army began screening out what troops it
could. In Warsaw it expected an uprising any day.
The next day Fourth Tank Army crossed the San between
Jaroslaw and Przemysl. To try to stop that thrust, Army Group North Ukraine, on
orders from the OKH, took two divisions from Fourth Panzer Army and gave the
army permission to withdraw to the Vistula. In the Ninth Army sector
Rokossovskiy’s armor pierced a thin screening line around the Vistula crossings
at Deblin and Pulawy and reached the east bank of the river.
Morning air reconnaissance on the 26th reported 1,400 Soviet
trucks and tanks heading north past Deblin on the Warsaw road. At the same
time, on the Army Group Center north flank reconnaissance planes located
“endless” motorized columns moving west out of Panevezhis behind
Third Panzer Army. During the day Second Army declared it could not hold Brest
any longer, but Hitler and Guderian refused a decision until after midnight, by
which time the corps in and around the city were virtually encircled.
In two more days First Panzer Army lost L’vov and fell back
to the southwest toward the Carpathians. Fourth Panzer Army went behind the
Vistula and beat off several attempts to carry the pursuit across the river.
Ninth Army threw all the forces it could muster east of Warsaw to defend the
city, hold Siedlce, and keep open a route to the west for the divisions coming
out of Brest. South of Pulawy two Soviet platoons crossed the Vistula and
created a bridgehead; Ninth Army noted that the Russians were expert at
building on such small beginnings.
In the gap between Army Groups Center and North, Bagramyan’s
motorized columns passed through Shaulyay, turned north, covered the fifty
miles to Jelgava, and cut the last rail line to Army Group North. In a
desperate attempt to slow that advance, Third Panzer Army dispatched one panzer
division on a thrust toward Panevezhis. Hitler wanted two more divisions put
in, but they could only have come from the front on the Neman, where the army
was already losing its struggle to hold Kaunas.
The 29th brought Army Group Center fresh troubles. Nine rifle divisions and two guards tank corps hit the Third Panzer Army right flank on the Neman front south of Kaunas. Rokossovsky’s armor drove north past Warsaw, cutting the road and rail connections between the Ninth and Second Armies and setting the stage for converging attacks on Warsaw from the southeast, east, and north.
On the 30th the Third Panzer Army flank collapsed, the
Russians advanced to Mariampol, twenty miles from the East Prussian border, and
could have gone even farther had they so desired. Between Mariampol and Kaunas
the front was shattered. In Kaunas and in the World War I fortifications east
of the city two divisions were in danger of being ground to pieces as the enemy
swung in behind them from the south. Model told Reinhardt that the army group
could not grant permission to give up the city and it was useless to ask the
OKH. Reinhardt replied, “Very well, if that is how things stand, I will
save my troops”; at ten minutes after midnight he ordered the corps
holding Kaunas to retreat to the Nevayazha River ten miles to the west.
On the Warsaw approaches during the day Second Tank Army
came within seven miles of the city on the southeast and took Wolomin eight
miles to the northeast. In the city shooting erupted in numerous places. In the
San-Vistula triangle First Tank Army stabbed past Fourth Army and headed
northwest toward an open stretch of the Vistula on both sides of Baranow. Off
the tank army’s south flank the OKH gave the Headquarters, Seventeenth Army,
command of two and a half divisions to try to plug the gap between Fourth Army
and First Panzer Army.
On the last day of the month elements of a guards mechanized corps reached the Gulf of Riga west of Riga. Forty miles south of Warsaw Eighth Guards Army took a small bridgehead near Magnuszew. Between the Fourth and Seventeenth Armies, First Tank Army began taking its armor across the Vistula at Baranow. That day, too, for the first time, the offensive faltered: Bagramyan did not move to expand his handhold on the Baltic; apparently short of gasoline, the tanks attacking toward Warsaw suddenly slowed almost to a stop; a German counterattack west from Siedlce began to make progress; and General Ivan Danilovich Chernyakovsky did not take advantage of the opening between Mariampol and Kaunas.
At midnight on 31 July Hitler reviewed the total German
situation in a long, erratic, monologue delivered to Jodl and a handful of
other officers. The news from the West was also grim: there the Allies were
breaking out of the Cotentin Peninsula, and on the 31st U.S. First Army had
passed Avranches. Nevertheless, the most immediate danger, Hitler said, was in
the East, because if the fighting reached into Upper Silesia or East Prussia,
the psychological effects in Germany would be severe. As it was, the retreat was
arousing apprehension in Finland and the Balkan countries, and Turkey was on
the verge of abandoning its neutrality. What was needed was to stabilize the
front and, possibly, win a battle or two to restore German prestige.
The deeper problem, as Hitler saw it, was “this human,
this moral crisis,” in other words, the recently revealed officers’
conspiracy against him; he went on:
“In the final
analysis, what can we expect of a front . . . . if one now sees that in the
rear the most important posts were occupied by downright destructionists, not
defeatists but destructionists. One does not even know how long they have been
conspiring with the enemy or with those people over there [Seydlitz’s League of
German Officers]. In a year or two the Russians have not become that much
better; we have become worse because we have that outfit over there constantly
spreading poison by means of the General Staff, the Quartermaster General, the
Chief of Communications, and so on. If we overcome this moral crisis . . . in
my opinion we will be able to set things right in the East.”
Fifteen new grenadier divisions and ten panzer brigades
being set up, he predicted, would be enough to stabilize the Eastern Front.
Being pushed into a relatively narrow space, he thought, was not entirely bad;
it reduced the Army’s need for manpower-consuming service and support
organizations.
The Recovery
In predicting that the front could be stabilized, Hitler
came close to the mark. In fact, even his expressed wish for a victory or two
was about to be partially gratified. Model was keeping his forces in hand, and
he was gradually gaining strength. Having advanced, in some instances more than
150 miles, the Soviet armies were again getting ahead of their supplies. The
flood had reached its crest. It would do more damage; but in places it could
also be dammed and diverted.
Crosscurrents
On 1 August Third Panzer Army, not yet recovered from the
beating it had taken between Kaunas and Mariampol, shifted the right half of
its front into the East Prussia defense position. Third Belorussian Front,
following close, cut through this last line forward of German territory in
three places and took Vilkavishkis, ten miles east of the border. The general
commanding the corps in the weakened sector warned that the Russians could be
in East Prussia in another day.
The panzer army staff, set up in Schlossberg on the west
side of the border, found being in an “orderly little German city almost
incomprehensible after three years on Soviet soil.” But Reinhardt was
shaken, almost horrified, when he discovered that the Gauleiter of East
Prussia, Erich Koch, who was also civil defense commissioner for East Prussia,
had not so much as established a plan for evacuating women and children from
the areas closest to the front. The army group chief of staff said that he had
been protesting daily and had been ignored; apparently Koch was carrying out a
Führer directive.
In Warsaw on 1 August the Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army),
under General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, staged an insurrection. The Poles were
trained and well-armed. They moved quickly to take over the heart of the city
and the through streets, but the key points the insurgents needed to establish
contact with the Russians, the four Vistula bridges and Praga, the suburb on
the east bank, stayed in German hands. Worse yet for the insurgents, south of
Wolomin the Hermann Göring Division, 19th Panzer Division, and SS Wiking
Division closed in behind the III Tank Corps, which after sweeping north past
Warsaw had slowed to a near stop on 31 July. In the next two or three days,
while the German divisions set about destroying III Tank Corps, Second Tank
Army shifted its effort away from Warsaw and began to concentrate on enlarging
the bridgehead at Magnuszew, thirty-five miles to the south.
Stalin was obviously not interested in helping the
insurgents achieve their objectives: a share in liberating the Polish capital
and, based on that, a claim to a stronger voice in the post-war settlement for
Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk’s British-and-American-supported exile
government. On 22 July the Soviet Union had established in Lublin the
hand-picked Polish Committee of National Liberation, which as one of its first
official acts came out wholeheartedly in favor of the Soviet-proposed border on
the old Curzon Line, the main point of contention between the Soviet Union and
the Mikolajczyk government. That Mikolajczyk was then in Moscow (he had arrived
on 30 July) negotiating for a free and independent Poland added urgency to the
revolt but at the same time reduced the insurgents in Soviet eyes to the status
of inconvenient political pawns.
Army Group North Ukraine on 1 August was in the second day
of a counterattack, which had originally aimed at clearing the entire
San-Vistula triangle, but which had been reduced before it started to an
attempt to cut off the First Tank Army elements that had crossed the Vistula at
Baranow. Although Seventeenth Army and Fourth Panzer Army both gained ground,
they did not slow or, for that matter, much disturb Konev’s thrust across the
Vistula. A dozen large pontoon ferries, capable of floating up to sixty tons,
were transporting troops, tanks, equipment, and supplies of Third Guards Tank
and Thirteenth Armies across the river. By the end of the day Fourth Panzer
Army had gone as far as it could. The next afternoon the army group had to call
a halt altogether. The divisions were needed west of the river where First Tank
Army, backed by Third Guards Tank Army and Thirteenth Army, had forces strong
enough to strike, if it chose, north toward Radom or southwest toward Krakow.
On the night of 3 August Model sent Hitler a cautiously
optimistic report. Army Group Center, he said, had set up a continuous front
from south of Shaulyay to the right boundary on the Vistula near Pulawy. It was
thin—on the 420 miles of front thirty-nine German divisions and brigades faced
an estimated third of the total Soviet strength—but it seemed that the time had
come when the army group could hold its own, react deliberately, and start
planning to take the initiative itself. Model proposed to take the 19th Panzer
Division and the Hermann Göring Division behind the Vistula to seal off the
Magnuszew bridgehead, to move a panzer division into the Tilsit area to support
the Army Group North flank, and to use the Grossdeutschland Division, coming
from Army Group South Ukraine, to counterattack at Vilkavishkis. He planned to
free two panzer divisions by letting Second Army and the right flank of Fourth
Army withdraw toward the Narew River. With luck, he thought, these missions
could be completed by 15 August. After that, he could assemble six panzer
divisions on the north flank and attack to regain contact with Army Group
North.
For a change, fortune half-favored the Germans. The Hermann
Göring Division and the 15th Panzer Division boxed in the Magnuszew bridgehead.
Against the promise of a replacement in a week or so, Model gave up the panzer
division he had expected to station near Tilsit. The division went to Army
Group North Ukraine where Konev, after relinquishing the left half of his front
to the reconstituted Headquarters, Fourth Ukrainian Front, under General
Polkovnik Ivan Y. Petrov, was now also pushing Fourth Tank Army into the
Baranow bridgehead. The bridgehead continued to expand like a growing boil but
not as rapidly as might have been expected considering the inequality of the
opposing forces.
In the second week of the month three grenadier divisions
and two panzer brigades arrived at Army Group Center. On 9 August the
Grossdeutschland Division attacked south of Vilkavishkis. Through their agents
the Russians were forewarned. They were ready with heavy air support and two
fresh divisions. This opposition blunted the German attack somewhat, but the
Grossdeutschland Division took Vilkavishkis, even though it could not
completely eliminate the salient north of the town before it was taken out and
sent north on 10 August.
A Corridor to Army
Group North
In the first week of August the most urgent question was
whether help could be brought to Army Group North before it collapsed completely.
On 6 August Schörner told Hitler that his front would hold until Army Group
Center had restored contact, provided “not too much time elapsed” in
the interval; his troops were exhausted, and the Russians were relentlessly
driving them back by pouring in troops, often 14-year-old boys and old men, at
every weak point on the long, thickly forested front. To Guderian he said that
if Army Group Center could not attack soon, all that was left was to retreat
south and go back to a line Riga-Shaulyay-Kaunas, and even that was becoming
more difficult every day.
On 10 August Third Baltic and Second Baltic Fronts launched
massive air and artillery-supported assaults against Eighteenth Army below
Pskov Lake and north of the Dvina. They broke through in both places on the
first day. Having no reserves worth mentioning, Schörner applied his talent for
wringing the last drop of effort out of the troops. To one of the division
commanders he sent the message: “Generalleutnant Charles de Beaulieu is to
be told that he is to restore his own and his division’s honor by a courageous
deed or I will chase him out in disgrace. Furthermore, he is to report by 2100
which commanders he has had shot or is having shot for cowardice.” From
the Commanding General, Eighteenth Army, he demanded “Draconian
intervention” and “ruthlessness to the point of brutality.”
To boost morale in Schörner’s command, the Air Force sent
the Stuka squadron commanded by Major Hans Rudel, the famous Panzerknacker
(tank cracker), who a few days before had chalked up his 300th Soviet tank
destroyed by dive bombing. Hitler sent word on the 12th that Army Group Center
would attack two days earlier than planned. From Königsberg the OKH had a
grenadier division airlifted to Eighteenth Army.
Army Group Center began the relief operation on 16 August.
Two panzer corps, neither fully assembled, jumped off west and north of
Shaulyay. Simultaneously, Third Belorussian Front threw the Fifth,
Thirty-third, and Eleventh Guards Armies against Third Panzer Army’s right
flank and retook Vilkavishkis. During the day Model received an order
appointing him to command the Western Theater. Reinhardt, the senior army
commander, took command of the army group, and Generaloberst Erhard Raus
replaced him as Commanding General, Third Panzer Army.
The next day, while the offensive on the north flank rolled ahead, Chernyakovsky’s thrust reached the East Prussian border northwest of Vilkavishkis. One platoon, wiped out before the day’s end, crossed the border and for the first time carried the war to German soil. In the next two days the Russians came perilously close to breaking into East Prussia.
On the extreme north flank of Third Panzer Army two panzer
brigades, with artillery support from the cruiser Prinz Eugen standing offshore
in the Gulf of Riga, on the 10th took Tukums and made contact with Army Group
North. On orders from the OKH, the brigades were immediately put aboard trains
in Riga and dispatched to the front below Lake Peipus. The next day Third
Panzer Army took a firmer foothold along the coast from Tukums east and
dispatched a truck column with supplies for Army Group North. On the East
Prussian border the army’s front was weak and beginning to waver, but the
Russians were by then concentrating entirely on the north and did not make the
bid to enter German territory. Reinhardt told Guderian during the day that to
expand the corridor and get control of the railroad to Army Group North through
Jelgava would take too long. He recommended evacuating Army Group North.
Guderian replied that he himself agreed but that Hitler refused on political
grounds. The offensive continued through 27 August, when Hitler ordered a
panzer division transferred to Army Group North.
At the end, the contact with Army Group North was still
restricted to an 18-mile-wide coastal corridor. For the time being that was
enough. On the last day of the month the Second and Third Baltic Fronts
suddenly went over to the defensive.
The Battle Subsides
Throughout the zones of Army Groups Center and North Ukraine, the Soviet offensive, as the month ended, trailed off into random swirls and eddies. After taking Sandomierz on 18 August First Ukrainian Front gradually shifted to the defensive even though it had four full armies, three of them tank armies, jammed into its Vistula bridgehead. North of Warsaw First Belorussian Front had harried Second Army mercilessly as it withdrew toward the Narew, and in the first week of September, when the army went behind the river, took sizable bridgeheads at Serock and Rozan. But for more than two weeks Rokossovsky evinced no interest in the bridgehead around Warsaw, which Ninth Army was left holding after Second Army withdrew.
In Warsaw at the turn of the month the uprising seemed to be
nearing its end. One reason why the insurgents had held out as long as they did
was that the Germans had been unable and unwilling to employ regular troops in
the house-to-house fighting. They had brought up various remote-controlled
demolition vehicles, rocket projectors, and artillery—including a 24-inch
howitzer—and had turned the operations against the insurgents over to General
von dem Bach-Zelewski and SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth. The units engaged
were mostly SS and police and included such oddments as the Kaminski Brigade
and the Dirlewanger Brigade. As a consequence, the fighting was carried on at
an unprecedented level of viciousness without commensurate tactical results.
On 2 September Polish resistance in the city center
collapsed and 50,000 civilians passed through the German lines. On the 9th
Bor-Komorowski sent out two officer parliamentaries, and the Germans offered
prisoner of war treatment for the members of the Armia Krajowa. The next day,
in a lukewarm effort to keep the uprising alive, the Soviet Forty-seventh Army
attacked the Warsaw bridgehead, and the Poles did not reply to the German
offer. Under the attack, the 73d Infantry Division, a hastily rebuilt Crimea
division, collapsed and in another two days Ninth Army had to give up the
bridgehead, evacuate Praga, and destroy the Vistula bridges. The success
apparently was bigger than the Stavka had wanted; on the 14th, even though 100
U.S. 4-motored bombers flew a support mission for the insurgents, the fighting
subsided. Until 10 September the Soviet Government had refused to open its
airfields to American planes flying supplies to the insurgents. On 18 September
American planes flew a shuttle mission, but the areas under insurgent control
were by then too small for accurate drops and a second planned mission had to
be canceled.
During the night of 16-17 September Polish First Army, its
Soviet support limited to artillery fire from the east bank, staged crossings
into Warsaw. The Soviet account claims that half a dozen battalions of a
planned three-division force were put across. The German estimates put the
strength at no more than a few companies, and Ninth Army observed that the
whole operation became dormant on the second day. The Poles who had crossed
were evacuated on 23 September. On the 26th Bor-Komorowski sent parliamentaries
a second time, and on 2 October his representatives signed the capitulation.
The psychological reverberations of the summer’s disasters
continued after the battles died down. In September Reinhardt wrote Guderian
that rumors in Germany concerning Busch’s alleged disgrace, demotion, suicide,
and even desertion were undermining the nation’s confidence in Army Group
Center. He asked that Busch be given some sort of public token of the Führer’s
continuing esteem. In the first week of October, Busch was permitted to give an
address at the funeral of Hitler’s chief adjutant, Schmundt, who had died of
wounds he received on 20 July. If that restored public confidence, it was
certainly no mark of Hitler’s renewed faith either in Busch or in the generals
as a class. He had already placed Busch on the select list of generals who were
not to be considered for future assignments as army or army group commanders.
After most of the eighteen generals captured by the Russians during the retreat
joined the Soviet-sponsored League of German Officers, Hitler also decreed that
henceforth none of the higher decorations were to be awarded to Army Group
Center officers.
Where Hitler saw treason in high places, others saw more
widespread, more virulent, more disabling maladies: the fear of being encircled
and captured and the fear of being wounded and abandoned. The German soldier
was being pursued by the specters of Stalingrad, Cherkassy, and the Crimea. Once,
he could not even imagine the ultimate disaster—now he expected it.
