Blood Spilled In a Battered City, December 1944
General Antonov’s weak performance in the field had caused him to ask Stalin to allow him to return to STAVKA and resume his old position, thinking that he would be more useful to the Soviet cause as a staff officer. Stalin, with five years of experience handling the war, was much more inclined to listen to his generals now than when he had ordered Zhukov to push the Japanese out of Mongolia in 1939. Antonov’s replacement was another STAVKA man, Ivan Bagramyan, who had been a corps commander during the Turkish operation in 1941 and was known for his fussily precise staff work much like Antonov, with a cautious commander still believed to be the answer to an unpredictable and aggressive Patton.
General Bagramyan arrived at the front with orders to finally finish the Battle of Berlin, where Soviet, German and Allied men had been locked down in intense battle for six months, and some streets had changed hands as many as fifteen times. Only ruins were left of a city that Adolf Hitler had once declared would become the greatest city in the world, now being destroyed by soldiers fighting in the hopes of restoring Hitler’s successor to power.
As winter approached, Bagramyan decided that it was time for an all-out offensive to take the rest of Berlin from the Allies. Poor weather would prevent the ever-present Allied air forces from interfering, while new issue of assault rifles would give the Soviet infantry an advantage over those of their enemies, which could be decisive in a city battle where tanks were vulnerable and heavy artillery support near-impossible to accurately aim. Most importantly of all, Bagramyan hoped to pin down Patton, who was well known to be operating in the area, as his force was considered the most dangerous of all Allied armies.
Patton had no interest in fighting Bagramyan’s ideal battle. British code-breakers intercepted a message from Bagramyan to Stalin that described his battle plan in great deal (as the general was known for doing), which included the date of the battle’s beginning. The day before, Patton quietly pulled most of his forces out of the city towards Potsdam, hoping to make the Soviets waste their momentum against a non-existent force. As the Red Army swarmed into Berlin, Patton was on a platform in Potsdam giving a speech to his troops, declaring “We’re not going to hold a single god-damned thing. There is only attack, and attack always.”
The next day, Patton struck back. While parts of his forces defended positions behind rivers just to the west of Berlin, the bulk of Patton’s forces launched a massive attack to the south, avoiding the city entirely. Bagramyan’s flank was immediately put into jeopardy, while his tank forces were obliterated by the arrival of the first true Allied heavy tank of the war: the M29 MacArthur. With eleven inches of frontal armour, the MacArthur was the only tank currently fielded by the Allies that could survive a hit from the Wolf’s massive gun at extreme long-range, finally ending the Red Army’s complete dominance in armour and making large scale offensives possible once more.
Patton made good on his promise of not holding any ground, completely bypassing Berlin as he crossed the Spree River at Wildau and stormed towards the Oder. A break in the weather allowed the USAAF to bombard the Soviet positions from above, while P-80 Shooting Stars and MiG-262s clashed in the first large air battle fought between jet fighters in history. Patton’s Third American Army seized Frankfurt-an-der-Oder on Christmas 1944, for which he would be awarded a fourth star early into the New Year.
An Axis in One Country, January 1945
The destruction of Soviet airfields in accordance with the Oil Plan had left the Red Army vulnerable to aerial attack from the increasingly dominant RAF and USAAF, and as Patton marched in the north, south of the Danube the Italians looked ready to make another move. Their last battle against the Red Army had seen brave Italian soldiers thrown back across the Danube in face of Guards Tank units, which contained heavy tanks far superior to anything the Italians had fielded then. With variants of the M4 Sherman carrying 17lber cannons, and the best of the Red Army being crushed by Patton in Germany, Graziani wanted to secure more glory for Italy.
Graziani was not going to strike the Red Army directly however. In Hungary, Stalin and the NKVD had overthrown Admiral Horthy (who was now well acquainted with the inner workings of a gulag) and installed a communist government instead. The Hungarian army, which was now mostly equipped with weapons stolen from the SS during the German Civil War, had little interest in fighting for a hated ruler and his despised master. The people of Hungary wanted peace, but anyone who voiced that opinion was certain to join Horthy in Siberia.
The Italian offensive began on December 22nd, 1944, with thousands of Hungarians abandoning the fight at the first chance they got, hoping to escape Stalin and Rakosi’s grip, sitting out the rest of the war in a PoW camp. The Hungarian line was quickly broken through, and Budapest was taken with minimal resistance. Angry Hungarian citizens stormed the Sandor Palace and shot Rakosi, while the NKVD was left powerless to resist in face of the approaching Allied armies. Shortly afterwards, the French 2nd Army would capture Bratislava, overthrowing Jozef Tiso and forcing Stalin’s last independent ally out of the war.
A New Direction, January 1945
Within hours of his inauguration, President Harry Truman was on the telephone with Winston Churchill, hoping to determine how much the British were capable of contributing to the war. Churchill, like Daladier, was beginning to grow concerned about the ability of his nation to provide enough manpower for the front while maintaining a productive economy back home. Unlike France, for Britain the situation was not so urgent as to require the immediate transfer of units to quiet parts of the line or occupation duty in Germany, but Churchill did say that the war needed to be ended within the next twelve or eighteen months.
As Patton’s troops were nearing Poland, the possibility of using liberated populations in the fight against communism was also raised. A brief discussion on the use of Germans had been shut down by Roosevelt as it risked allowing a revival of Nazism, but the formation of a new Polish Army carried no such risk, and similar liberation movements were also possible in Romania, the Baltic Region and even the Ukraine, the latter in particular having acquired considerable support after Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera had been freed from Nazi house arrest in Munich (his arrest likely having taken place at Stalin’s request).
Churchill, like Truman, was also determined to rid Russia of the communist regime at the end of the war, in a similar manner to the denazification efforts already taking place in Germany. Without a complete defeat of the Red Army however, this would likely be too large a demand at a future peace conference, but Truman pledged that at the very least, Stalin would be removed from power and the remaining Nazi leadership would have to be handed over as a minimum requirement for peace. After the other Allies agreed to this, a message was communicated to Moscow in the hope that the Communist Party would remove Stalin from power.
Although this did not prompt an immediate overthrow of Stalin, Truman still found success on the diplomatic front. Within days of Truman’s inauguration, Francisco Franco offered to commit the million-strong Spanish Army to the “crusade against communism” if the United States was prepared to provide the army with modern equipment to replace weapons dating back to the Spanish Civil War. With American factories producing more than a thousand tanks every month, most of them M26 Pershings, the decision was obvious, and Spain joined the Allies on February 6th, 1945.
- BNC
