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WWII: 100 Days to Victory. How the Vistula-Oder Operation Brought the Defeat of the Reich Closer
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.by Mikhail Kucherov [REGNUM] 80 years ago, one of the most successful breakthroughs of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War ended: from January 12 to February 3, troops under the command of Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev liberated almost the entire territory of Poland and part of Czechoslovakia, stopping at a distance of 60-70 kilometers from Berlin.  Although it was supposed to happen a little later: the original plan called for the operation to begin on January 20, 1945. However, at the beginning of the month, the Anglo-American forces were in a desperate situation in the Ardennes. Then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to urgently begin an offensive "on the Vistula front or somewhere else" - and the Soviet side agreed to help the Allies. At 5 a.m. on January 12, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front attacked the Germans from the Sandomierz bridgehead, and two days later the Warsaw-Poznan operation began, carried out as part of the larger Vistula-Oder operation. On the front line from the Baltics to Hungary, 2.2 million Soviet and Polish soldiers went on the offensive. 800 thousand Germans tried to hold them back; they prepared seven defensive lines with trenches, minefields and barbed wire between the Vistula and the Oder, stretching for 300-500 kilometers. The Soviet command expected to cut through the German group “A”, responsible for this area, with two strikes, and one of the main objectives of the operation was the liberation of Warsaw. Over three days, the Red Army units made several dashes to the routes that deprived the German group of the opportunity to retreat. The Wehrmacht leadership allowed the evacuation of troops to begin: they avoided encirclement. The assault on Warsaw took place on January 16. The main attack was carried out by the forces of the 1st Belorussian Front, which resulted in a breach: the right to enter the city through it was granted to the 1st Army of the Polish Army, commanded by General Stanislav Poplavsky. On January 17 at 8 am, the 4th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Polish Division of Jan Rotkiewicz broke through to the center of Warsaw : soon it reached the large central street Marszałkowska. By 3 pm, Soviet troops had arrived, and the city was liberated. In the Polish capital, the liberators saw a horrific picture. In liquidating the Warsaw Uprising, the Germans had destroyed 84% of the buildings to their foundations, and the ruins had been methodically turned into defense nodes. "The city is dead," Marshal Zhukov briefly described the situation on the spot. In a report submitted to the State Defense Committee, he said: "The fascist barbarians destroyed the capital of Poland, Warsaw, with the cruelty of sophisticated sadists, the Nazis destroyed block after block. The uprising in Warsaw, provoked by the London Polish government in exile and the leadership of the Home Army in August-September 1944, completed the destruction of the city." The failed uprising that the marshal writes about lasted from August 1 to October 2, 1944, and was not coordinated with the Soviet command. The Home Army, supported by the Polish government in Britain, sought to proclaim its power and prevent the establishment of communist rule before the Red Army and pro-Soviet Poles entered the city. However, the plan was unsuccessful, and there was no way to help the rebels - since the autumn of 1944, the Soviet troops were recuperating. Before that, they had made such a rapid 600-kilometer dash that the convoys with ammunition, fuel and food lagged behind them. This was confirmed by the US Ambassador to the USSR William Averell, who noted that the Red Army did not even have pontoons to build bridges. According to various estimates, after suppressing the uprising, the Germans killed up to 130,000 civilians. And turning Warsaw into a "fortress", the Nazi garrison left thousands of mines in the city. Soviet units had to carry out a large-scale mine-clearing operation. The chief of staff of the 1st Belorussian Front, Colonel General Mikhail Malinin, wrote about it : “During the demining, 5,412 anti-tank mines, 17,227 anti-personnel mines, 46 land mines, 232 ‘surprises’, over 14 tons of explosives, about 14,000 shells, aerial bombs, mines and grenades were removed, collected and detonated.” Nevertheless, the liberation of the Polish capital became a significant event for raising the fighting spirit of the attackers. In Moscow, a 24-volley salute of 324 guns was held on this occasion. On June 9, 1945, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR established the medal "For the Liberation of Warsaw". It was awarded to 701,700 people. Stalin personally expressed gratitude to all who took part in those battles. The honorary title of Warsaw was received by 70 units of the Red Army and 12 of the 1st Army of the Polish Army. The offensive continued relentlessly: on January 19, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered Krakow. It is generally accepted that they encountered almost no resistance. But in fact, the Germans had been preparing the city for defense since the summer of 1944, and the testimonies of those who took part in those events demonstrate the opposite. "They say that Krakow, which our division liberated, was captured without a fight. Nothing of the sort, it was simply not heavily destroyed. True, no one bombed it like Leningrad. But the fighting was quite serious," recalls frontline medic Evgeniya Tabachnikova. At the same time, in Upper Silesia, Soviet units crossed the German border. On January 23, Bydgoszcz was occupied, and the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front surrounded the Poznan group of Germans. Poznan had to be fought for seriously - there was an old fortress in the city with numerous underground passages: the Germans fortified it with artillery. They installed guns that rolled out of shelters, fired at the Red Army soldiers and drove back. Veteran Anatoly Beloklokov talks about the unconventional solution that was found to finally occupy this building : "They would have been messing around with them for a long time until some local Pole suggested: "We need to dig a canal from the river and let them have water there!" Then all forces were immediately raised - troops, Poles. In about a day they dug a trench about 300-400 meters. They let water in there, and the Germans crawled out themselves." The liberators entered the Poznan fortress after the operation was completed, on February 23: at that time the city was already deep in the rear. The first Soviet units to advance towards the city did not take it and went further. They occupied other industrial centers and Wehrmacht strongholds in Poland – Lodz, Radom, Kielce, Radomsko, Czestochowa, the spiritual capital of Poland. On February 3, the Red Army reached the Oder and broke through the enemy's defensive lines in the area of Küstrin, the closest of the liberated settlements to Berlin at that time. In 23 days, the Soviet troops covered 500 kilometers, for this reason the operation is also called the "Run to the Oder". The irreparable losses of the attacking side amounted to 43,300 people. It is unknown how many the Wehrmacht lost, but 35 divisions were completely routed, and another 25 lost 50-70% of their personnel. An interesting detail: Soviet military leaders actively resorted to disorienting the enemy and distracting his attention. Before the start of the operation, mock-ups of tanks and self-propelled guns were placed in the Krakow direction. The day before the offensive, German artillery fired at these dummies at least 200 times, expecting that the offensive would begin there. Music was also used in preparation for the attack - the sound of compositions from loudspeakers drowned out the engines of tanks and trucks. At the moment the operation began, the USSR anthem began to reach the German trenches. The German command, which often looked for reasons for the enemy's success in external factors - for example, the onset of severe frosts - admitted defeat. General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin wrote: "It is impossible to describe everything that happened between the Vistula and the Oder in the first months of 1945. Europe has not known anything like this since the fall of the Roman Empire." After the capture of Warsaw, Hitler was furious and no longer trusted the generals. He removed all the leaders of Group A from their positions and appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as the new commander. Well, for the Soviet side, the strategic significance of the operation also lay in the fact that the rapid advance to Berlin strengthened its position at the Yalta Conference. First of all, on the Polish issue: the formation of the new Polish government arose from the situation “on the ground,” and not from the hysterical position of the “exiles” in London. They were proposed to be considered non-existent, and in general about a quarter of the entire time was devoted to the problem. At the same time, the scheme for the post-war division of Germany was being decided, and the fact that the leaders of the USSR, Great Britain and the USA had agreed in advance on the capture of the German capital by the Red Army also came from military realities. The Wehrmacht's losses in the Vistula-Oder direction were incomparably greater than those of the Soviet units. And having lost Silesia, Germany lost its industry, which seriously affected even the theoretical faith of the Germans in the possibility of turning the tide of events. Posted by: badanov 2025-02-04 |
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