Countdown to Victory: January 1945

Surrender to Montgomery, Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag,
Keitel signs the document of unconditional surrender

At the beginning of the new year Hitler’s Nazi empire, which had once encompassed most of Europe and much of western Russia, was being slowly squeezed by a giant pincer movement.

• Coming from the east, Stalin’s forces had rebounded from their low point in Stalingrad (as I examined in a recent blog) and were pushing Hitler’s forces back across Ukraine and Belarus, back to Poland. Both sides and the helpless civilian populations were suffering horrendous casualties.
• Coming from the west, US, British and Canadian forces had successfully landed in France on D Day and freed France, Belgium and parts of eastern Holland. But the advance had slowed when the Allies overextended their supply lines.
• To the south, most of Italy had been freed from German forces and Mussolini’s few remaining Fascists. Major contributions to Allied successes were coming from the (now largely forgotten) Free Polish and Brazilian forces.

Soviet troops advance in a Lease/Lend Canadian-built Valentine tank; Brazilian troops free a town in northern Italy; German counterattack in the Ardennes

At the risk of oversimplifying the strategic position at the beginning of 1945, Soviet forces had reached the Vistula in German-occupied Poland and Anglo-American-Canadian forces were almost to the Rhine on Germany’s western frontier.

January on the Western Front: The End of the Bulge

The western front line had remained essentially static since September 1944, when the Allies had been unable to cross the Rhine at Arnhem in Operation Market Garden.

Then, as we have examined in other blogs, the Germans shocked the western Allies with a sudden counterattack through the Ardennes in Belgium in December 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge. It took the Allies until the end of January—at the cost of 100,000 casualties—to push the German army back to its starting positions.

But even though the Allies had erased the bulge they were still not in Germany. They were facing the heavily fortified Seigfried Line, and they were still on the wrong side of the Rhine.

January on the Eastern Front: The Vistula-Oder Offensive

In sharp contrast to the western front, the eastern front saw a dramatic advance by the Russian armies through Poland, from the Vistula to the Oder, which is only 50 miles from Berlin. Two major army groups, the 1^st Belorussian Front led by Marshal Zhukov and the 1^st Ukrainian Front led by Marshal Konev, advanced an astonishing 300 miles in four weeks, from January 12^th to February 2^nd, 1945.

The German Army Group A was hopelessly outnumbered: Zhukov and Konev had over 2 million men while Army Group A had less than half-a-million. The Russians had 45,000 tanks versus a little over a thousand panzers. In addition, Hitler refused to allow his commanders to make tactical retreats, insisting that the hopelessly outnumbered Wehrmacht must stand a fight.

The Offensive also uncovered one of history’s great crimes. As the Russians advanced and the Wehrmacht retreated, the SS began emptying their concentration camps and driving their helpless inmates westward on death marches. Auschwitz was discovered on January 27^th.  Many of the early reports were discounted as too horrific to be true—obviously over a million people could not possibly have been murdered in one camp, or so it was assumed.

The Aftermath

The remarkable Russian advance across Poland and the effective stalemate on the western front in January had a crucial effect on the outcome of the war, and the future of Europe.

The Yalta conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin began on February 4^th, two days after the Russians reached the Oder. The purpose of the conference was to settle the political map of post-war Europe. Stalin sat down with a sudden huge advantage: he had de facto control of eastern Europe and would soon attack and occupy Berlin, while American and British forces still hadn’t been able to cross the Rhine and were hundreds of miles from Berlin.

Next month we’ll see what happened in the war in February and look at Yalta in more detail.