Opening Moves (The Red Gambit Series) (60 page)

0526 hrs.

Malinin looked back at his Commander and shrugged slightly. They had always known that it was likely that some timing would go awry.

On invite, the door opened and an immaculate staff-Major entered, his face beaming with success.

The message form he passed to Zhukov was exquisitely simple and yet spoke volumes to the Marshall.

‘Message sent in clear – Volga, Borodin 5’

This message indicated that the paratrooper unit codenamed Volga sent to attack the headquarters of British 21st Army Group had been successful. Borodin equated to Field-Marshall Montgomery and the code 5 indicated he had been liquidated.

Whilst Zhukov was not overly concerned with Montgomery’s limited skills as a commander, he welcomed the confusion and disruption the death would bring to the British, Free and Commonwealth forces.

In actual fact, the report was at error and Montgomery was not dead but was severely wounded. However, the net effect was the same and 21st Army Group was temporarily leaderless.

“Very well Major Yassin. We will move to the operations room now.”

Zhukov and Malinin walked briskly from the salon as the clock moved remorselessly to 0530.

0531 hrs Monday, 6th August 1945, Sterninghofen Bridge, US Occupied Lower Austria.

The message sent by General Clark had reached many ears in the all too short time between its sending and the Soviet attack. Unfortunately, some ears remained deaf to its message and many a young allied soldier died at his post for no other reason than his superior did not believe the report or refused to act in a precipitous fashion.

Along the European divide, allied soldiers tumbled from their slumber as the Soviet attack rolled in close, often not preceded by artillery in order to permit the infantry to get close without warning. Once contact ensued then Soviet artillery was mainly used on rear-line and artillery positions.

Nothing the allied soldiers had experienced in their war with the Germans had prepared them for the intensity and ferocity of what the Soviet artillery could bring down upon them.

In some areas, American and British tanks received under the lend-lease scheme and marked up appropriately led the Soviet advance in an attempt to get through the first-line and onto an important second or rear-line location.

The tanks that had been seen by Uhlmann and Braun in the Persenbeug sidings were M-10 Tank Destroyers marked as 1st US Armored Division, but which were actually crewed by experienced tankers from a company of 63rd Cavalry Division, 5th Guards Cavalry Corps.

They ground down the road from their staging area west of Seitenstetten, heading west on the road to Steyr with all lights blazing and American-speaking personnel to talk their way through any roadblocks.

At the Sterninghofen Bridge over the Enns River, their self-propelled guns were waved through a checkpoint manned by American soldiers of 305th Combat Engineer Battalion, 80th US Infantry Division. Four Studebaker 6x6 trucks followed closely.

With perfect timing, the sky lit up as Soviet artillery commenced firing at its targets elsewhere. All awake American eyes were drawn to the display and none noticed the four trucks disgorge their malicious contents.

The assignment of this ill-fated platoon of the 305th had been to destroy the bridge on receipt of orders, or under the initiative of the Officer in charge as necessary.

That same Officer in charge was slumbering in his tent oblivious, and only woke up briefly as a strong hand clamped over his mouth and a blade ripped his throat open.

As the tanks took up their defensive positions, the Soviet Cossacks moved swiftly on foot through the area, dispatching the sleeping men in a wide variety of ways whose only common factor was silence. The sound of artillery was now rousing the slumberers but none offered any resistance and all were butchered where they lay.

Private First class Jan F. Podolski, one of the sentries on the prowl, had disappeared for a call of nature and so was missed by the systematic destruction of the engineer platoon. Emerging from behind a thick bush, he saw swiftly moving silent shapes. Despite his youth and lack of experience, he immediately grasped what was going on and pulled his weapon off his shoulder. With remarkably steady hands, he took rough aim at the nearest figure, which was crouched down, back towards him. Podolski got off an eight round clip from his Garand before he was cut down by a hail of bullets from PPSH sub-machine guns. He had dropped Yefreytor Alexey Passov to the ground where he bled his life out quickly, shot through the neck, groin, and thigh.

Both were only nineteen years of age.

In the perverse way that history does these things, the 80th US Infantry Division had been credited with firing the final shot of the Second World War in Europe and it had now probably fired the first shot of the new ground war.

The bridge was inspected for explosives and the experienced Captain in charge ordered a second and third inspection before he accepted that none had been laid.

The discovery of a cache of explosives in the rear of one of the American trucks evidenced the omission.

With the bridge intact, the follow-up forces of 32nd Rifle Corps and 220th Independent Tank Brigade could drive straight into and through Steyr.

All along the thin lines the Soviet forces broke through, sometimes with no resistance, others fiercely contested.

Advances were made on every assault, of which there were a total of twenty-one independent main attacks from Sterninghofen in the south to Selmsdorf on the Baltic.

The Soviet plan departed from their standard tactics by utilising a general assault plan throughout Europe. Zhukov and his staff reasoned that the Allied soldiers would not be ready and little organised resistance would be found initially, so a broad front approach should yield more territory and offer the more opportunity for substantial penetrations at first.

The low opinion that the Soviet Military had for the Allies had translated into a rough expectation of about one week before any real organised counter-attacks came their way.

By that time, the picture should have developed more clearly and the large forces held in reserve would be employed to make the drives on their main targets through areas of weakness.

The Rhine beckoned to the Soviets as much as it had done to the Allies coming from the other direction a year before, and so Soviet planning for the first phase of the assault expected a large drive on the Rhine via the Ruhr, and also via Frankfurt and on into Luxembourg and Saarland. Two major targets were the port city of Hamburg and nearby Bremen, and to a lesser extent Cuxhaven. Of particular interest was the ability to operate submarines to interdict allied supply routes, much as the Germans had done in the preceding years, and both Hamburg and Bremen has bunkers suitable for the task.

Soviet planning also required the destruction, or at minimum negation, of the Allied fighter and ground attack capability throughout Europe and from the beginning artillery, saboteurs and aircraft were fulfilling this requirement with mixed results, in line with the requirements of Operation Kurgan.

A six man observation force was landed clandestinely by a Beriev MP1 seaplane on Saltholm Island in the Oresund, sovereign territory of Denmark, to observe shipping movement. The small group of naval specialists were concealed on the southern edge of the island, away from the farming community of Barakkebro to the north-west end. Soviet naval vessels stood ready to converge on any allied naval force attempting to enter the Baltic.

Elements of the Baltic Fleet landed large Soviet forces on the islands of Lolland and Falster, also Danish territory, supporting the landings with ships gunfire.

As soon as bridgeheads were established, auxiliary vessels began to unload heavy artillery pieces that were to be sited to cover shipping routes around the island.

Aircraft flew in and established a fighter base at Marthasminde on Lolland, and a combined bomber and fighter base at a larger field near Rødby. Ingenious use of the Sydmotorvejen road running north from its junction with the Ringsebøllevej adjacent to Rødby permitted operations by 571st Assault Aviation Regiment, recently equipped with the new IL-10 ground attack aircraft. Three Tupolev TU-2t torpedo bombers, specially enhanced for maritime reconnaissance completed the allocation on Lolland.

On Falster, a similar provision had been found on the Gedser Landveg road angling north from the village of Gedesby, and more aircraft arrived, this time IL-4 torpedo bombers of Soviet Naval Aviation. In fact, the Soviets had learned a great deal from the Luftwaffe’s use of roads as airfields and had hidden air regiments the length and breadth of Europe in such a manner. All the better to evade any air raids by the Western Allies.

A smaller force similarly equipped and tasked landed simultaneously on the island of Mon. Fighters flew into Kostervig to complete the defence.

To all intents and purposes, the Baltic was closed and the Northern shores of Germany secure from interference.

To the south of the Austrian attacks, all would remain quiet for now. It had not been thought prudent for security to advise the Yugoslavs of their plans. Sometime after the first Soviet units rolled forward into the attack, Russian liaison officers were being unceremoniously woken and virtually interrogated by their Yugoslavian allies, keen to understand what was happening and why they had not been informed. The delay also suited the Soviets as the Allies could not afford to ignore the large field forces of the Yugoslavian Army and their existence pinned numerous high quality allied divisions in place, divisions that could make a difference elsewhere.

GRU’S report, endorsed by Pekunin, guaranteed that once Tito was onside then the plan existed to carry Soviet and Yugoslavian forces into Northern Italy to the Mediterranean and beyond. A high-level Soviet delegation led by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Vyshinski was already on its way to Belgrade to seek cooperation and support in the coming months. The GRU report also indicated that the omission of Yugoslav forces from the planning and conception of the operation would be easily explained away by operational security needs and no harm would be done.

The first hitch in the Soviet planning occurred later that same morning. During the high-level meeting Vyshinski was told, in no uncertain terms, that his Yugoslavian Communist Allies took an extremely jaundiced view of their exclusion from planning or even being able to offer their views on this, as Tito put it, ‘
fucking lunacy
’. There would be no Yugoslavian contribution to military matters.

Using extremely earthy language, Tito let Vyshinski know that the Soviets should be eternally grateful that the Yugoslav Army would stand its ground and remain a problem to affect Allied thinking. None the less, Soviet units were banned from overflying or setting foot on Yugoslavian soil until further notice.

The senior GRU officer previously attached to Tito’s headquarters accompanied the party back to Moscow under escort, where his report assuring his seniors of Tito’s compliance was examined at painful length before he succumbed in the cellars of the Lubyanka.

The great defence against the air menace is to attack the enemy's aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

Sir
Winston Spencer Churchill

0535 hrs Monday, 6th August 1945, 182 Squadron, RAF, Rheine Airfield, Germany.

Andrew Mackenzie had been in short trousers when Hitler’s legions rolled across the Polish border. Admittedly, that was because the family had little by the way of spare cash, for his parents ploughed their money into the education of their three sons. His father and mother worked hard, long hours away from home or taking in washing and sewing. Even though the Canadian education system was good, extra books and tuition went a long way towards their goal of givingthe three apples of their eyes the best possible start in life and an opportunity to escape the poverty trap that had ensnared the parents.

From such a humble background sprang Mackenzie, a fresh-faced gangly Canadian youth of nineteen from an impoverished family, who arrived in Europe with the rank of Pilot Officer and wings earned in basic training, when he passed out top of his course by some notable distance.