Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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he had proved himself a successful leader of men on many

critical occasions. He was one of those generals who led their

troops from the front rank, and his unimpeachable conduct

earned him the unreserved trust of his men and his superiors

alike. (Dieckert and Grossmann, 1960, 182-83)

However, von Saucken had been sent too late to save even this

remaining corner of East Prussia, where six badly run-down

German divisions were deployed on an irregular frontage

across the Samland peninsula against an entire Russian army

group.

On 13 April, the first day of the new offensive, the Russians

broke through the two divisions on the German left and began

to flood northern Samland with tanks. The Germans fought to

hold a coherent front until the fifteenth, when they collapsed

in the direction of the southern coast. The disintegration was

almost total in the 5th Panzer Division, which had been a crack

armoured formation but was now reduced to a loose collection

of infantry combat teams. The main forces of the 5th Panzer

now augmented the general confusion when they cut across

the general axis of retreat, which was towards the narrow

tongue of land leading to Pillau, and instead made south-east

to their old base at Peyse. Colonel Hoppe, four officers and

thirty-one men covered themselves with honour by halting the

shipment of the wounded in order to make good their own

escape: 'Here was further proof of the hopeless position of the

troops and their desperation in the final days of the struggle

—the fact that men of this battle-tested regiment could take it

on themselves to abandon their comrades. . . . Nevertheless,

the division as a whole kept up the fight in an exemplary way

until the bitter end' (Plato, 1978, 397).

On 16 April the Russians broke into the northern part of

Fischhausen, half-way along the coast between Peyse and Pil-

lau. 'Sea, sun and springtime weather! . . . The guns were still

thundering before Pillau, but the soldiers were already talking

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

218

about a rapid end to the war, about home' (Beloborodov, 1978,

391).

Colonel Herzog had taken command of the 5th Panzer Di-

vision only a matter of days before. He had been a lawyer in

civilian life, but in eight years of service in the division he had

risen from private soldier to become one of its most respected

officers. His confidence, however, was sapped because he

knew that the war was being mismanaged at every political

and military level, and now that the Russians were in Fisch-

hausen he concluded that his forces in the Peyse peninsula

were lost. At 1530 on 16 April he ordered a sauve qui peut: 'The

division is cut off on the Peyse peninsula, and there is no

prospect of restoring communications. I wish you the best of

luck!' (Plato, 1978, 309).

A number of men were able to take the last craft to leave

Peyse harbour. The rest tried to make rafts out of whatever

materials were available, or melted into the wooded hinterland.

Herzog and probably the greater part of his troops were cap-

tured almost at once.

The remaining forces of the Armee Ostpreussen fell back

south-west to the narrow Pillau peninsula, where a comparable

disaster was threatening. However, a band of assorted heroes

held the Russians for four days at the improvised Tenkitten

barrier, running across the base of the peninsula, which won

time for most of von Saucken's command to be ferried the few

hundred metres to the relative safety of the Nehrung sandspit.

The last stages of the evacuation were covered by three per-

manent artillery emplacements in the neighbourhood of Pillau.

The last to fall was Batterie Lehmberg, where Major Karl Henke

and his little combat team fought on at bayonet point until they

were wiped out by the Russians at 1530 on 27 April.

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CHAPTER 18

Danzig and Gotenhafen

The Massing of Forces, 10-14 March 1945

THE SOVIET THREAT to West Prussia had materialised very

quickly indeed (see p. 192). In the first week of March the

Russians drove north through East Pomerania to the sea,

whereupon Marshal Rokossovskii's 2nd Belorussian Front

wheeled north-east like a giant gate, with its hinge on the Vis-

tula near Marienwerder, and the outer edge sweeping clock-

wise along the Baltic coastlands. This movement jammed the

Germans in West Prussia against the western shore of the Bight

of Danzig in the area of Gotenhafen and the city of Danzig,

where the mass of humanity comprised about 1.5 million Ger-

man civilian refugees, 100,000 wounded troops, and what was

left of the German Second Army (from north to south the 4th

SS Police Division, the 7th Panzer Division, the 215th, 32nd,

227th, 83rd, 73rd, 389th and 252nd Infantry divisions, the 4th

Panzer Division, the 12th Luftwaffe Field Division, the 542nd

Volksgrenadier Division, and the 35th and 23rd Infantry divi-

sions, with the 7th Infantry Division between the mouth of the

Vistula and the Nogat branch).

Behind the retreating German field army, General Karl-

Wilhelm Specht, the local commander of the Danzig military

district, was doing all he could to turn the region of Danzig

and Gotenhafen into a fortress which would hold out 'to the

last round,' as Hitler has just decreed. During the period of

Polish rule in West Prussia (1920-39), the Poles had built the

new port of Gotenhafen (Gdynia) and furnished it with a series

220

of coastal fortifications. However, less attention had been paid

to the landward approaches, and the first task for Specht was

to establish defensive positions along the wooded heights

which ran to the west of Danzig and Gotenhafen.

Because the 2nd Belorussian Front came from Pomerania, the

Russians were in the odd position of advancing east, while the

Germans awaiting them faced west. Both the Russians (Babad-

zhanyan, 1981, 272) and the Germans found the reversal of

front disconcerting. Some of the German soldiers were put to

work thirty-two kilometres inland of the coastal resort of Zop-

pot:

I had no idea where the enemy was, but it seemed to me

that the positions that we were organising faced the wrong

way. The anti-tank guns and anti-aircraft guns pointed west

and south-west—the only directions in which retreat was

possible. I couldn't understand it—but that made no differ-

ence! It wasn't the first time, and others were undoubtedly

thinking for us. (Sajer, 1971, 444)

In the second week of March the contest for the fortified

region began to assume a recognisable shape. The main force

of the German Second Army was consolidating in the prepared

positions in the tangled country inland of Danzig and Goten-

hafen. The outer defences were probed by the enemy as early

as 8 March, but the Russian armoured spearheads made little

further progress until the rifle forces came up to support them,

which took several days more. The going was difficult in this

bosky and broken terrain, and the streams overflowed their

banks in the thaw and rain: 'The infantry were in sodden, heavy

greatcoats, and in mud up to their knees. The vehicles had to

be towed along the disintegrating roads' (Ivanov, 1980, 23).

On 12 March General Dietrich von Saucken took over com-

mand of the Second Army from Colonel-General Walter Weiss,

who was an Austrian and a stranger to this part of the world.

We have come across von Saucken twice before—when he re-

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treated across Poland with the Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps,

and when he arrived in his native Samland in the closing stages

of the defence of East Prussia. He was a first-class professional

soldier, and he came to West Prussia with a clear sense of where

his duties lay, which was not necessarily in obedience to orders:

'He was a son of East Prussia, and what mattered to him still

more was his concern for the conglomerated mass of the ref-

ugees, whom he was determined to save from the grasp of the

Russians' (Dieckert and Grossmann, 1960, 165). This principle

guided all his dealings with the High Command and the Party

authorities.

Von Saucken was repeatedly assured from Berlin that am-

munition for the Second Army was 'on the way' by sea. Nothing

materialised until a freighter bound for Kurland was immobi-

lised by fire in Danzig harbour. For the best reasons of safety

von Saucken took the cargo of ammunition on shore, where

the Second Army naturally found good uses for it. The military

bureaucracy threatened him with a dire fate if he attempted

anything of the sort again.

Within the theatre of war von Saucken took direct control

over all matters which concerned the welfare of the civilians.

The Party leadership of the Gau of Danzig-West Prussia was in

no state to offer effective competition, for it lay in the hands

of that complex and not unsympathetic figure, Albert Forster.

He was a fundamentally decent man (which could not be said

of many of his fellow gauleiters), but one who was now break-

ing apart under a weight of contradictions.

Forster was a fervent Catholic, who nevertheless continued

to find in Hitler an unfailing source of inspiration:

I still believe in some kind of miracle. I still believe in

Almighty God, who has given us our Führer, and destined

him to make Germany free and turn it into a final bulwark

of Western culture against the onslaught from the East. There

can be no other explanation for the way God preserved him

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

222

on 20 July. All that is left is for the West to recognise where

its real enemy lies, (quoted in Thorwald, 1950, 262)

The turn of events in West Prussia in 1945 reduced Forster to

incapacity. He took refuge on the Hela peninsula, and he re-

turned to the mainland for a single visit on 4 April, when the

sights on the Vistula delta struck him literally dumb and pre-

cipitated a total collapse.

From the Opening of the Attack to the

Breakthrough at Zoppot, 15-22 March 1945

On 13 March the Soviet 2nd Belorussian Front was concen-

trating in front of the Danzig-Gotenhafen fortified region, and

Marshal Rokossovskii cast his plans for the assault. The action

was going to be continuous along the whole frontage, with six

armies converging from west, south-west and south, but Ro-

kossovskii assigned a particularly important role to the Sev-

entieth and the Forty-Ninth, which were ordered to advance

shoulder-to-shoulder to the coast in the neighbourhood of Zop-

pot, thereby cutting the region in two, Danzig and Gotenhafen

could then be reduced as isolated halves.

Heavy fighting raged on all sectors from 15 March. The

Kriegsmarine continued to evacuate the refugees by day and

night under heavy air attack, while the German troops con-

tested the wet country south-east of Danzig and the wooded

hills to the west of the fortified region. Forward observers di-

rected the supporting fire from the old battleship Schlesien, the

heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the light cruiser Leipzig, whose

silhouettes were outlined clearly against the horizon of the

bight, and when the shells arrived, 'the ground trembled and

shook, and any window panes still in place fell out' (Sajer,

1971, 445).

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The German commanders conducted the defence in a very

aggressive way. They counterattacked the Russian gains, and

if the Russians failed to come forward, the Landser were liable

to be sent out to attack them. In such a way Guy Sajer and a

few comrades of Grossdeutschland found themselves pitted in

open ground against three Russian tanks. Two of the monsters

were stopped by anti-tank rockets, but the third rolled forward:

It had accelerated, and was no more than thirty yards from

us, when I grabbed the last Panzerfaust. One of my comrades

had already fired, and I was temporarily blinded. I stiffened

my powers of vision and regained my sight to see a multitude

of rollers caked with mud churning past in a dull roar of

sound some five or six yards from me. An inhuman cry of

terror rose from our helpless throats.

The tank withdrew into the noise of battle, and finally

disappeared in a volcanic eruption which lifted it from the

ground in a thick cloud of smoke. Our wildly staring eyes

tried to fix on something solid, but could find nothing but

smoke and flame. (Sajer, 1971, 447)

On 19 March, however, the grinding Russian progress began

to yield tangible results. On the Zoppot sector the Russian

storm detachments mastered a height which gave them a view

over the town of Zoppot and the shore of the bight. Further

south Danzig came under artillery fire, and the 4th Panzer

Division was pushed back to within two kilometres of the west-

ern edge. Von Saucken had once commanded this formation,

and he now visited his old comrades, who demanded to know

why they were expected to put up such a tough fight for 'an

insignificant scrap of land' (Paul, 1978, 227). He explained that

the army must cover the naval base at Hela and provide a shield

for the evacuation of the civilians and the wounded from Danzig

and Gotenhafen.

On 20 March the Russian tanks still encountered heavy op-

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

224

position in the dripping woods west of Zoppot, but the German

shipping came under artillery fire for the first time, and the

Russians standing on the hills had a fine prospect of the sup-

porting strike by Western bombers:

They flew in above our heads, and proceeded to engage

the town, the port and the Hitlerite naval squadron. The

whole sky was flecked with tufts of detonating anti-aircraft

shells, and a few of the planes exploded in the air. For the

whole day the earth shuddered with the bursts of bombs and

artillery rounds. (Gorb, 1976, 251)

22 March was the decisive day of the whole operation, for the

Russians broke through to the sea north of Zoppot, and the

Danzig-Gotenhafen Fortified Region was therefore reduced to

two contracting bridgeheads.

The End at Gotenhafen, 23-27 March 1945

The Russians were now within artillery range of the centre of

Danzig, and their commanders were now meditating how best

to take Gotenhafen—an enterprise which demanded a very

carefully planned attack. At this juncture the First Guards Tank

Army was rewarded with a stroke of luck:

A pretty young Polish girl reached one of the little villages

not far from Gotenhafen and presented herself to I. F. Dre-

mov, the commander of the VIII Guards Mechanised Corps.

She delivered a map. Dremov scrutinised it narrowly, and

realised that he had in his hands a map of the fortress of

Gotenhafen, showing the entire German fire system. Dremov

paused for thought; was this a happy chance, or was it some

kind of fascist provocation?

Mixing Polish words with Russian, the girl drew attention

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13. The siege of Danzig, 15-28 March 1945

to the most vulnerable locations of the fortress, and the sec-

tors where it could be attacked to the best advantage. (Ka-

tukov, 1976, 385)

The map proved to be authentic, and storm detachments of the

First Guards Tank Army proceeded to make their first pene-

trations of the town proper. The girl saved much Russian blood,

and it transpired after the war that she had been a member of

a Polish resistance network.

Between 24 and 26 March the Kriegsmarine put all its avail-

able resources into rescuing the refugees and the wounded,

while the Russians fought their way through the town centre

and brought the German steamers, barges and motor boats

under direct fire. At first the storm detachments of the First

Guards Tank Army made poor practice:

Our observers were accustomed to directing fire on dry

land, and to begin with, the range to the targets across water

proved deceptive. Gradually, however, the tank gunners and

the artillerymen learned to adjust their elevation. A gun

would fire, then came the explosion of the shell, and another

craft capsized and went to the bottom with its load of fascists.

Another shot, then another—and a barge flared up and

heeled over. (Katukov, 1976, 386)

On 26 March the artillery of the Russian Nineteenth Army

heralded the final assault on Gotenhafen:

We could see the houses where the Germans were hiding,

and also the town cemetery, where the Hitlerites were like-

wise ensconced. The brigade signals commander Major Banit

reported that the network for directing the fire was ready.

Then, all of a sudden, the Katyushas opened up behind our

backs and the rockets flew over our heads. The softening up

by the tubed artillery then began, and the town was envel-

oped in clouds of dust and smoke. (Skorobogatov, 1976, 199)

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