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German Strategy in 1945
By Joseph Miranda
The US Army’s official painting depicting the assault-crossing of Remagen bridge.
Ed’s Note: the following is excerpted
and adapted from Chapter 15 of our
forthcoming S&T Press book, The Devil’s
Due: An Analysis & Critique of German
Strategy in World War II, which will be
released in the near future. To preorder,
visit: <shop.decisiongames.com>
Destruction of Army
Group Center
O
n 22 June 1944 the Soviets
launched one of the greatest offensives of the war,
Operation Bagration. Their target was
Army Group Center, which occupied
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a large bulge running east and north
of the Pripet Marshes. Bagration was
a surprise to the German high command. Soviet deception operations
had convinced them the enemy’s
effort that summer would be in the
south, against Hitler’s allies in the
Balkans and the Romanian and
Hungarian oilfields. Consequently,
German reserves were deployed
elsewhere when the Soviets struck.
The Soviets demonstrated they
had acquired the leadership and skill
necessary to fight a mobile campaign in
depth. They concentrated overwhelming force—artillery, armor and air—at
WORLD at WAR 25 | AUG–SEP 2012
the main points of their attack, breaking
through while inflicting great carnage
on the Germans. The offensive didn’t
stop after the initial breakthrough.
Soviet forces kept going until they’d
cleared the Germans from Belorussia.
They enveloped large groups at three
strongpoints: Vitebsk, Bobruisk and
near Minsk. Hitler’s orders to stand
fast had hobbled the German units
in those locales. Soviet mechanized
forces bypassed centers of resistance,
and succeeding waves of infantry overwhelmed the strongpoints themselves.
That was something the Germans
themselves had first demonstrated in
their 1939-42 offensive campaigns, but
their system broke down once they
were themselves forced onto the defensive. By trying to hold the entire front,
the Germans only set in place an illusion of strength. Linear defense actually
only meant the majority of their troops
were deployed in positions from which
they couldn’t contribute to the decisive
parts of the battle, which was fought at
the points of breakthrough and along
the enemy axes of exploitation. By putting most of their troops up front, the
Germans were, in effect, ensuring they
would lack the force needed to fight at
those decisive points, and further, they
were placing more units in positions in
which they could be quickly enveloped.
Because the Soviets had gained the
expertise necessary to be able to fight
their offensives in depth, the Germans
should’ve responded by positioning
themselves so as to be able to conduct
their defense in depth. Conceivably,
the Germans could’ve pulled back,
say, 20 percent of their divisions from
the front and used those units to
create centralized reserves that would
conduct counterattacks. That wouldn’t
necessarily have meant permanently
abandoning any terrain, since the
front could’ve been held temporarily
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by patrols and screening forces.
Superficially, such a scheme
would appear to provide only a fragile
defense, but since the decisive parts
of the late war battles were fought
behind the front line, the numbers
that counted were in that area. A
further advantage of a defense in
depth was that it would’ve given the
Germans fresh troops to commit at
times and places of their choosing.
The role of armor was then also
being debated within the German
command structure. The infantry
commanders wanted armored vehicles
deployed up front to stiffen their lines.
The panzer commanders wanted
mechanized units held in reserve
and massed for counterattacks. The
debate was never settled, though it
was partially resolved by assigning
assault guns to the infantry units,
thereby freeing the turreted panzers
for mobile operations (the turretless
assault guns were technically part of
the artillery, not the armor branch).
By 11 July, then, Army Group
Center had lost 28 divisions. That was
more than had been destroyed at
Stalingrad, and the Soviet offensive
was still rolling. Reinforcements
were rushed to the front, but the
Germans found they couldn’t
maneuver due to fuel shortages.
The Soviets made extensive use of
their airpower and partisans to press
the attack deeper into the German rear
area. Those advances further disrupted
German movement and caused casualties before units reached the front line.
The Soviets pressed on throughout
July. Vilna and Kaunus fell in Lithuania.
By the end of the month, Soviet
spearheads had reached the Baltic
coast near Riga. Meanwhile the Soviets
launched another offensive, this time
on the Leningrad front. With its lines
of communication already threatened
by Bagration to the south, Army
Group North could only fall back.
The Soviets then threw their weight
against Finland, pushing through
that nation’s border defenses. The
Finns requested a cease-fire and
it was granted on 4 September.
The Soviets also went over to
the offensive in the Ukraine, driving from there into southeastern
Poland. Axis strongpoints along the
Black Sea coast were cut off and
destroyed. The drive continued into
the Balkans in August and September.
Romania and Bulgaria defected from
the Axis and joined the Allies.
Home
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armies in the Balkans would be cut off.
Hitler sent in Otto Skorzeny to troubleshoot. Staging a palace coup, Skorzeny
placed Horthy under house arrest and
then set up a new government loyal
to Berlin. That salvaged the Balkan
front, at least for a few more months.
The Balkans were still a close run
affair for the retreating Germans. The
Soviets, along with Tito’s partisans,
took Belgrade on 20 October, though
the Germans managed to evacuate
their forces through Sarajevo.
The Soviets decided to clean up the
Baltic coast in October. Guderian, by
that time OKH chief of staff, wanted to
pull back Army Group North before it
was completely cut off. Hitler refused
until it was too late (having given in
to his naval chief’s calls to maintain
control of that coast at all costs or
risk seeing Stalin’s fleet run wild
across the Baltic). Army Group North,
renamed Army Group Courland, then
ended up clinging to the peninsula
of that name in Latvia until the end
of the war. Back in the Balkans, the
Soviets reached the Danube in late
November, and by the end of the
year had also encircled Budapest.
German POWs in Berlin shortly after their surrender.
Across the Rhine
A German people’s militia (Volksturm) unit assembling for
training in Berlin late in the winter of 1945.
As the Soviets approached Warsaw,
the Polish underground rose in revolt
on 1 August. The Germans immediately
reacted, throwing the full weight of
their counterinsurgency forces against
the city. SS Gen. Erich von dem
Bach-Zelewski, Germany’s chief of
anti-partisan operations, was given
command of what amounted to a hastily assembled ad hoc army consisting
of everything from elite panzer units
to penal battalions. Bach-Zelewski
reduced Warsaw to rubble in stamping out the uprising. The insurgent
Polish Home Army fought heroically,
but was isolated and destroyed.
Stalin was criticized by the
West, both during and after the
war, for not providing support to
the Poles. The claim was he let the
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Germans finish off the resistance
so he wouldn’t have to worry about
their forming a government to rival
his puppet regime, already set up in
liberated Lublin, or engaging in anticommunist partisan activities later.
He claimed his armies were
overextended and incapable of relieving Warsaw. Indeed, as the summer
waned, the Soviet leviathan was clearly
beginning to slow. Casualties, German
counterattacks, and overextended lines
of communication all took their toll.
A Soviet drive into Hungary was
repulsed. Even so, at that time Adm.
Horthy, the Hungarian chief of state,
declared his readiness for an armistice.
Such a move would’ve left a huge new
hole in the German line, and would
probably have meant the German
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In the west, 1945 opened with
the Anglo-Allies completing their
counterattack against the German
salient in the Ardennes. The Germans
gave ground grudgingly, but by midJanuary the line had been restored to
its mid-December position. Farther
south, German Army Group G launched
an offensive against Allied forces in
Alsace and Lorraine. US 7th Army was
pushed back but, by making a stand
at Strasbourg, stopped the offensive.
For the final assault on Germany,
the Allied lineup in the west was,
from north to south, as follows.
Twenty-First Army Group
(Montgomery): First Canadian
and Second British Armies.
Twelfth Army Group (Bradley):
US First and Third Armies.
Sixth Army Group (Devers): US
Seventh and French First Armies.
By late January, Eisenhower was
ready to resume the advance. The
first stage was clearing the west bank
of the Rhine. That was done by early
March. On 7 March a patrol from US
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9th Armored Division discovered the
Ludendorff Bridge, which crossed
the Rhine at Remagen, was still intact
and, even better, was only lightly
defended. A fast moving task force
then seized the bridge despite German
attempts to destroy it. Eisenhower
quickly exploited the opportunity,
pouring across US First Army.
In Germany’s main industrial center,
the Ruhr, the Allies surrounded the
last effective German units in the west.
Field Marshal Model, commanding
from inside the pocket, led a skillful
delaying action, but it was hopeless.
By 18 April the Allies had completely
reduced the Ruhr pocket, taking over
300,000 prisoners. The loss of the
Ruhr—as well as industrial Upper
Silesia in the east to the Soviets—meant
Germany could no longer provide
the arms needed to continue the
war even if it was able to somehow
reverse the disasters at the front.
Farther south, Patton bridged the
Rhine in another surprise crossing,
and within a week his spearheads
were 100 miles east of that river.
With the German position collapsing
along the central Rhine, Eisenhower
decided to shift his main axis of
attack. The new effort would be made
by 12th Army Group toward Leipzig.
That would limit the Allied advance
in the north, and it would also mean
the Soviets would get to Berlin first.
That was a decision that generated
much post-war controversy, but at the
time it was a logical military move.
Eisenhower was concerned about
winning the war as quickly and cheaply
(in US lives) as possible, then sorting
out the politics later. He was acting
precisely the opposite of Hitler at that
stage in the war, in that the dictator
remained more interested in political
objectives than in actually winning
campaigns. In retrospect, it can be
claimed Eisenhower’s strategy gave
eastern Europe to the Soviets, though
the reality was the postwar division
of the continent reflected the relative
military positions of the Western Allies
and the Soviets in 1945, as well as
the overall split earlier agreed to by
all parties at the Yalta conference.
The alternative would’ve been
for Eisenhower to have operationally
reneged on that agreement with the
Soviet Union, something that might’ve
brought on the Allied split Hitler was
still counting on to end the war in
his favor. In the event, the Soviets
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Home
above — Modern-day German historical reenactors shown recreating scenes from the end of the war.
above — SS officers plot the German counteroffensive into Warsaw.
took massive casualties in the battle
for Berlin, while the US, Britain and
France still got half the city as part of
the postwar settlement. If Eisenhower
had taken Berlin, the Anglo-American
armies would’ve taken those casualties
instead of the Red Army, and would
then also have had to have given
up half the city to the Soviets.
One reason for Eisenhower’s shift
away from Berlin was his concern the
Nazis would be making a last stand in
the mountains of southern Germany.
Nazi propaganda had spread word
of a “National Redoubt,” complete
with arms factories and fanatic storm
troopers, where a last-ditch stand,
perhaps lasting years, would be made.
That redoubt was, of course, a myth,
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but at the time it was considered a real
possibility by the Allied high command.
The need to prevent the Nazis from
being able to drag out the war held
sway in Allied command circles.
Twelfth and Sixth Army Groups
quickly overran southern and central
Germany. The National Redoubt
proved a canard, as German resistance
crumbled everywhere. Seventh Army
took the Nazi shrines of Nuremberg
and Berchtesgaden, then headed
for the Brenner Pass to meet Allied
forces coming up from Italy.
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