grace.3 Zhukov had won the debate at the expense of piling up problems for his relations with Stalin at the war’s end. The Red Army drew itself up on the eastern bank of the Vistula and stayed put for the rest of the year.
What Stalin said to Zhukov was probably not the full extent of his thinking. The weary condition of the Red Army was only one of the factors to be weighed in the balance. Stalin was already looking for ways to secure political dominance over Poland during and after the war. His experience in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920 had convinced him that Poles were untrustworthy because their patriotism outweighed their class consciousness. ‘Once a Pole, always a Pole’ might have been his motto in dealing with them and their elites. He was determined that whatever Polish state emerged from the debris of the war would stay under the hegemony of the USSR. This meant that the emigre government based in London was to be treated as illegitimate and that any armed organisation formed by the Poles in Poland would be treated likewise. Stalin felt no incentive to handle Poles sympathetically. He had ordered the murder of thousands of captured Polish officers in April 1940 in Katyn forest in Russia. He no more wanted the survival of Poland’s political and military elite than he aimed to preserve the elites in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and he was long practised in the art of solving public problems by means of the physical liquidation of those who embodied them.
Stalin also had objective strategic reasons for refusing to start an early offensive across the Vistula. Hitler and his commanders in August had treated the Red Army as the most urgent enemy and left the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising to their security units while the Wehrmacht massed by the river to repulse any attempt at a crossing by Rokossovski. The German authorities were confident they could easily suppress Polish insurgents. What was militarily inexcusable in Stalin’s behaviour, however, was his rejection of all Polish pleas for assistance once the Warsaw Uprising had begun on 1 August 1944. Churchill detected the dirty work and rebuked the Kremlin.4 British aircraft based in Italy were dispatched to drop supplies to the Poles. But Stalin was immovable and the Red Army did not budge.
The Warsaw Uprising was neither soon nor easily suppressed. While the Red Army took the opportunity for rest, recovery and resupply, the Home Army of the Poles got about its business. The insurgents were flexible, well organised and utterly determined. The Germans had no idea how to contain them until the order was given to raze the districts of insurgence to the ground. Stalin might have had justified doubts that aid for the Polish rebels by means of an amphibious assault across the Vistula would decisively weaken the Wehrmacht. But if it had been a large group of Russian or Ukrainian partisans rising against the Third Reich, he would surely have dropped guns and food for their use and bombed the Germans. His prevention of assistance to Warsaw involved a calculated decision about Poland’s future. Already Stalin had set up a Provisional Government. This was the cabinet, appointed by the Kremlin and beholden to it, which he intended to put into power after Germany’s defeat. Other Polish leaders, however popular they might be across the country, were to be kept away from the centre of events. Stalin aspired to rule Poland through his communist stooges. The more insurgents were wiped out by the Germans, the nearer he would come to his objective. Churchill’s imprecations about Stalin’s military and political measures were justified ones.
Nevertheless Churchill was to impress on Stalin at their Moscow meeting in October 1944 that he held no suspicion that the Red Army had been deliberately held back.5 The cohesion of the Grand Alliance took precedence. The Wehrmacht, despite being on the defensive in East and West, had not lost its resilience. The Allies knew they had a fight on their hands as Germans, despite grumbling about Hitler’s military and economic failures, stood by their Fuhrer. Churchill and Stalin understood the importance of getting to Berlin first. The conquest of territory would put the conqueror in a position to prescribe the terms of peace. Roosevelt and Eisenhower felt differently; their strategy was premised on the desire to minimise casualties on their side rather than join a race to reach Berlin first. Stalin was determined to win the race even if the Americans declined to compete. He was worried that the USA and the United Kingdom might do a deal with the Germans for an end to the fighting. This could lead to a joint crusade against the Soviet Union; and even if this did not happen, the Germans might surrender to the Western Allies and deprive the Soviet Union of post-war gains. Stalin selected his finest field commanders — Rokossovski, Konev and Zhukov — to reinforce the campaign to seize the German capital.
The Red Army on his orders started the Vistula–Oder Operation on 12 January 1945. Although his Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by three to one, the German will to resist had not faded. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front burst forward on the southern wing of a military force which stretched across the length of the Polish lands. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front advanced in the north. As German defences crumbled, Zhukov could report that he held the banks of the River Oder. The pockets of Germans who had not retreated were caught in a trap. Konigsberg and its population were cut off. On its way through Poland the Red Army came across terrible sights as it entered the concentration camps. Evidence of mass murder had been obliterated at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz (Oswiecim) the fleeing Germans had not had time to disguise the incarceration, forced labour, starvation and murder. Soviet soldiers would have acted furiously even without such an experience. German atrocities in the USSR had been systematic from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and Soviet wartime propaganda had dulled any lingering sensitivities towards the Germans as a people. As it moved into central Europe, the Red Army went on the rampage; its troops pillaged and raped with almost no restraint by its commanders.
Red troops acted with almost no discrimination about nationality. Not only Germans but also other peoples were brutally treated and Stalin refused to punish the offenders. The Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas complained to him in vain. ‘Well, then,’ Stalin replied:6
imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade — over a thousand kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be… The important thing is that it fights Germans.
Djilas, who had fought in the Balkans and was not noted for sensitivity, could hardly believe his ears.
Careless about how his soldiers behaved off-duty, Stalin was determined that they should take the German capital. He deceived the Western Allies about his intention. On 1 April 1945, as he was settling his military plans in Moscow, he telegraphed Eisenhower, agreeing that Soviet and Western forces should aim to converge in the region of Erfurt, Leipzig and Dresden; and he added: ‘Berlin has lost its previous strategic significance. Therefore the Soviet Supreme Command is thinking of assigning second-level forces to the Berlin side.’7 Compounding the lie, he proposed that the ‘main blow’ should be delivered in the second half of May. Simultaneously he ordered Zhukov and Konev to hurry forward their preparations.8 Churchill became ever more concerned. Politically, in his view it was vital to meet up with the Red Army as far to the east as was possible. But he failed to get a positive response from Roosevelt before the Soviet forces were on the move again. On 19 April they threw down the Wehrmacht defences between the river Oder and the river Neisse. On 25 April they had reached the outskirts of Potsdam outside Berlin. This was on the same day that Konev’s divisions made direct contact with the First US Army at Torgau on the River Elbe. Yet the Reds got to Berlin first. Zhukov prevailed over Konev in their race. On 30 April Hitler, recognising the hopelessness of his position, committed suicide. Unconditional surrender followed.9
Many divisions of the Wehrmacht surrendered to the American and British forces on 8 May, whereas Zhukov received such offers only the next day. The collapse of German military power permitted Stalin to turn his face eastwards. The USSR could never be secure while an aggressive Japan sat on its borders. He was to refer to the ‘shame’ heaped upon the Russian Empire through defeat in the naval battle of Tsushima in 1905. Tokyo had put forces into the Soviet Far East in the Civil War. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. War had exploded between Japan and the USSR in 1938, involving the largest tank battles yet seen in the world. It was not until mid-1941 that Japanese rulers decided to undertake expansion southwards along the rim of the Pacific rather than westward through Siberia.
The Western Allies, having to husband their human and material resources, continued to need help from the Red Army. There was every sign that the Japanese were readying themselves to defend their territory to the last soldier. Stalin at Yalta had exacted the promise from Roosevelt and Churchill that the USSR would receive the Kurile islands in the event of Allied victory. This was still Stalin’s objective after the victory in Europe. Rapid preparations were made by Stavka for the Red Army’s entry into the war in the Pacific. Having suffered from Japanese expansionism in the 1930s, Stalin intended to secure a peace settlement that would permanently protect the interests of the USSR in the Far East. Nearly half a million troops were transferred along the Trans-Siberian railway
