Armageddon Read Online Free PDF

captives from the Fourth Army were marched through the streets of Moscow on 17 July. Muscovite children jeered and threw stones. A watching six-year-old was so conditioned by propaganda images of the enemy that she noted her own astonishment on seeing that these Germans possessed human faces. She had expected to see the features of wild beasts. Most Russian adults looked on in grim silence. Yet a Western correspondent watching the shuffling parade of Germans was surprised to hear an old Russian woman mutter: “Just like our poor boys . . . driven into the war.” Between July and September, Hitler’s forces lost 215,000 men killed and 627,000 missing or captured in the east. One hundred and six divisions were shattered. Total German losses on the Eastern Front that summer—more than two million men killed, wounded, captured and missing—dwarfed those of Stalingrad. It was little wonder that Stalin and his marshals were dismissive of Anglo-American successes in France. A recent American study has described Bagration as “the most impressive ground operation of the war.” Yet if its gains were awesome, so was its human price. Russia’s summer triumphs cost the Red Army 243,508 men killed and 811,603 wounded.
    In the second week of August, Marshal Georgi Zhukov—who had brilliantly orchestrated the summer operations of the two Belorussian Fronts—together with Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, his subordinate at 1st Belorussian Front, considered with Stalin the possibilities of an early thrust west across Poland, on an axis which would lead finally to Berlin. This was rejected, chiefly because Rokossovsky’s forces were exhausted by their long advance, and also because Stalin perceived opportunities elsewhere. Russia’s warlord committed his forces, first, to new operations on the Baltic Front, where some thirty German divisions held out in coastal enclaves, some of which they retained until May 1945; and, second, to a series of major offensives in the Balkans, where several countries lay ripe for Moscow’s taking.
    Militarily, the Balkan campaign was rational but not essential. Politically, however, from Stalin’s viewpoint the temptation was irresistible. On 20 August, the Red Army launched a million men into Rumania, whose people were known to be ready to abandon Hitler’s cause. Allied bomber attacks were destroying the country’s oil industry. For many months, the Rumanian government had been exploring the possibilities of a deal with Moscow to change sides. Now, the Soviets advanced twenty-five miles on their first day in sectors unconvincingly defended by Bucharest’s forces. On 23 August, after a coup in the capital, Rumania announced its defection to the Allies. German intelligence, always the weakest arm of Hitler’s war effort, was taken wholly by surprise. Rumania would now provide the Red Army’s path to the Danube delta, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Some 70,000 German troops staged a fierce, brilliant breakout from Soviet encirclement, but many more found themselves cut off. The Red Army entered Bucharest on 31 August, having covered 250 miles in twelve days. The Rumanian Army had fought alongside the Germans, albeit ineffectually, throughout Hitler’s campaigns in Russia. Now, when a Rumanian delegation arrived in Moscow and was shown into the office of Stalin’s foreign minister, Molotov demanded contemptuously: “What were you looking for in Stalingrad?”
    In Bucharest, the Rumanian Jewish writer Iosif Hechter described in his diary a mood of:
     
bewilderment, fear, doubt. Russian soldiers who rape women . . . Soldiers who stop cars in the street, order the driver and passengers out, then get behind the wheel and disappear. This afternoon three of them burst into Zaharia’s, rummaged through the strongbox, and made off with some watches . . . I can’t treat these incidents and accidents as too tragic. They strike me as normal—even just. It is not right that