Historical Commentary
In November 1943, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met in Tehran to forge a common strategy for the conduct of the remainder of the war. Among other agreements, Britain's Prime Minister and the American President promised to pressure the Finns to accept a separate peace, thus freeing even more Soviet troops for operations aimed at Germany herself. They also promised an invasion of France in the spring of 1944, and, in return, Stalin guaranteed a Soviet
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offensive in parallel.
The Soviet offensive, intended to coincide with the Allied landings in France (which were originally scheduled for May 1944), was Operation BAGRATION.
Starting in the early summer of 1944, the Soviets hurled at least 5.5 million men and hordes of tanks against no more than 2.5 million German and Rumanian soldiers, from Bessarabia in the south to the Arctic Circle. In the far north, although they had no appreciable success against the German Twentieth Mountain Army, the Soviets succeeded in inflicting sufficient damage on the Finns to convince them to agree to the American and British entreaties to pursue a separate peace. By September, Finland was out of the war.
By August, this massive push brought the Soviets into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in the north; East Prussia and Poland in the center; and Hungary and Rumania in the south. In Italy, the Allies broke through the Gustav Line in May and began the final drive on Rome. On 6 June, the Allies invaded Normandy and forced still more German forces to be diverted from the East.
Operation BAGRATION had succeeded in bleeding the German Army and their allies white, and now their soldiers were desperately fighting on three
"conventional" fronts, as well as the massive antipartisan campaign in the Balkans. Fortunately for the 198th Infantry Division, after three hellish years of fighting in the East, none of the three great enemy offensives of the spring of 1944 directly involved them—they were withdrawn first to Rumania, then to the still-quiet south of France for reconstitution as a full infantry division.
Georg Grossjohann Remembers ...
During our next required withdrawal towards the Rumanian border, I almost fell from my horse due to weakness. My temperature was almost 41 degrees Centigrade (about 106 degrees Fahrenheit). Somewhere I was put on a hospital train on which I left Russia, for good. It was almost at the same spot where, in 1941, our division had started its advance towards Russia, crossing the border river Pruth. Now in April 1944, almost three hard years of war, full of deprivation, were behind the gallant 198th Infantry Division, yet all the sacrifices were in vain!
Little by little, the hospital train took me to Galatz, Rumania, and during this time I recovered enough to make me want to return to the troops. In Galatz, I had the opportunity to fly to Bacau on a dispatch plane. If I remember well, beginning in April 1944, this was the location of the Eighth Army staff. In any event, I had gone from a saddle onto a train during wet and cold weather, just the way I was, carrying nothing with me. No underwear, no socks, nothing—
just my uniform and those heavy felt winter boots. In the meantime, beautiful spring weather had arrived in Rumania. I almost felt like a bum among the well-clad Rumanians and the sharply dressed soldiers of our rear-echelon elements. This became very clear to me when I tried to get information about the current location of the 198th Infantry Division from the Eighth Army staff.
The "chain dog" at the main entrance of the impressive building serving as residence of the staff wouldn't even let me enter. That's how shocked he was by my sad appearance. He then relented and at least allowed me into the lobby. It had an aura of noble calmness. With curiosity, I read the signs on those huge French doors. Demigods all, they included the Army commander, chief of staff, la, lb, Ic, first aide-de-camp, and so on. Sometimes one of the doors opened quietly and an elegantly clad military gentleman strode across the hall and disappeared behind another door. Sharply creased trousers, mostly with red stripes,27 and highly polished shoes seemed to be the rule here. I looked down at myself and began to be ashamed! Nobody noticed me anyway, until one of the "chain dogs" had pity on me and offered to find out where the command post of my division was supposed to be at this time. Once I got the information, I promptly proceeded to the army motor pool, and there I found a truck that was going in the corresponding direction. In the second half of April, I reached the division or, more accurately, what was left of it. It was in Roman, some sixty kilometers west of the Pruth, the border river between Russia and Rumania.
In the imagination of our highest commander in chief, Roman, too, was apparently supposed to become a "stronghold" or even a fortress! In any case, right after my return, I was entrusted with the management of the construction of fortifications around Roman. If I was informed correctly at that time, an agreement with the Rumanian head of state, Marshal Ion Antonescu, stated that no measures could be taken against the Jewish part of the Rumanian population. But the Jews came by the thousands, probably under duress, to work on the bulwarks. They were mostly deployed where they lived and so I set up a two-hour break at noontime every day to enable these people to eat at home.
At some time or another, I was appointed liaison officer with the Rumanians. My impression of the plain soldiers was positive, but regrettably it was not so of their officers. Most of the soldiers were unpretentious sons of farmers, since Rumania was, as it is to this day, a fertile agrarian country. The officer corps came almost exclusively from the large cities and was heavily Franco-philiac. These officers seemed none too anxious to get near the fighting. When I mentioned to the Rumanian officers that their staffs were much too far removed from the front, they responded that there was "sufficient telephone wire"
available.. . .
There were other indications of problems with their leadership. Several times I was invited to dine at a Rumanian division command post. Each time it was a big dinner of several courses, and the affairs could go on for hours. Yet I never saw the regular soldiers eat anything else but one-pot meals, consisting mostly of big beans.
The German officer corps had a different attitude in that matter. The German company commander was last in line at the field kitchen. This was tradition!
On 11 May 1944, the 198th Infantry Division was reassigned from Eighth Army, and General der Infanterie Otto Wöhler, its commanding general, gave them a heartfelt farewell. In 1984, I had the pleasure of a telephone conversation with the ninety-year-old general, who was spending his golden years in his home and birthplace, Gross Burgwedel.
The division was to be reconstituted in a training camp in the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia."28 I had asked for home leave, which I was granted. It was one of the few I had during the war, and it also became my last one. Barely ten months later, the Red Army swamped my East Prussian homeland. I spent my short leave in a convalescent home for officers in the once so elegant Zoppot, which was well known to me since my childhood. (See Map 2-2.) When my leave was over, I had to report to the replacement center in Dresden. (See Map 4-1.) There I learned, as a great surprise to me, that my destination would not be the Protectorate, but southern France!
I had to ask twice to be sure that the sergeant behind the desk had not made a mistake. It would take a few days for the transportation officer to be able to give me precise information. Before that, they said the exact position of the division was still unknown. So I could stay a few days in beautiful "Florence on the Elbe" (Dresden), which at this point in time was still without any sign of destruction. It had been declared an open city.
One day I visited the world-famous Semper Opera, the builder of which had also created the Burg theater in Vienna. Another time, I went to see the Volks 45
Opera. Out of respect for the many wounded in the hospitals of the city, the repertories proferred light works. Eight months later, of course, Dresden was extinct, totally destroyed in a firestorm caused by Royal Air Force bombing. . . .
Russia was now behind me. What we soldiers on the River Mius in 1941 had perceived would happen had come to pass. In our guts we had known, even then, that for us the war was lost. Later, many different versions about losing the war circulated. For example, General-major Karl Wagener, onetime Chief of Staff of Army Group South, felt that Hitler's "Orders, #45," issued on 23 July 1942, after the successful conclusion of the spring campaign and the battle of Kharkov, were probably the decisive cause for the loss of the Russian campaign. The objectives contained in these orders caused an expansion of the front line of the Eastern Front to a total of 4,000 kilometers, including the drive into the Caucasus. It was just too much for an army that had yet to make good its losses of the previous autumn and winter.
General Wagener also felt that the OKW always made "Step 2" before "Step 1," meaning, going directly after geographic and economic targets, instead of considering them a gift of a military accomplishment.
In another vein, von Manstein believed that the irreversible loss occurred at Stalingrad, and that it came about as a result of a combination of mistakes. He thought that covering the whole northern flank of the Sixth Army fighting around Stalingrad with almost exclusively non-German units—Hungarian, Italian, but mostly Rumanian—was an unusually high risk. This enticed the Russians, who were always exceptionally well informed, to start their penetration of the front lines right there, and ultimately to destroy the Sixth Army as well in the huge encirclement that was our debacle at Stalingrad.
We valued the Rumanian units as the best of our allies, but based on my observations of their leadership, I feel that leadership in the field should have been given to their field marshal and chief of state, Antonescu. He was an effective soldier and expressed his willingness to take over the command. Looking over the strategic map of our Army Group South in the fall of 1942, one did not have to be a field marshal to understand what an enormous, immeasurable risk our highest leadership had taken at Stalingrad.
There are many other explanations for our loss in the East. To those of us at the front, it seemed as if the decision makers in the higher command had lost their senses. In the presence of my division commander and his staff, I once stated, "Our highest leadership at this time only knows two principles, 'Comb out the rear echelons,' and 'hold positions.' We seem to have forgotten everything else."
Whatever the problems were, though, it is difficult to comprehend that all our experienced, talented, and trained generals, as well as general staff officers, did not succeed in forcing their convictions upon the OKW and Hitler—for once! In my opinion, this was truly the real reason for our greatest failure, that of our Army in the Russian gambit.