World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY (East): Punch for Punch

In Moscow, where the first snow of the winter fell, the names of fallen East Prussian towns—Ebenrode, Schlossberg, Grün-weitschen—came sweetly to the ears of Russian civilians. They enjoyed the report of a Red Army correspondent, who described deserted German houses “with doors swinging in the wind to reveal tables set with meals which the escaping owners had no time to eat.” But in East Prussia, the soldiers of young General Ivan Chern-yakhovsky were discovering, as their Allies in the west had already discovered, the almost epileptic ferocity with which the Germans fight for their own soil.

Around Gumbinnen, the first sizable town on the rail line to Königsberg, Chern-yakhovsky ran into progressively stronger defenses—trenches, minefields, barbed wire. Every settlement was a fortress, every house and hillock a gun position. Heinrich Himmler’s Home Army units were easily killed or captured, but the Wehrmacht traded punch for punch.

Russia’s new 63-ton “Joseph Stalin” tanks were met by Germany’s new 67-ton “Royal Tigers.” Germany’s six-barreled mortars answered Russia’s 24-barreled katushas. Both attackers and defenders had thundering masses of field guns; one reporter called it “the greatest artillery battle of history.”

If the Nazis took too long to tire, General Ivan Bagramyan’s army group, poised on the banks of the Niemen on Chern-yakhovsky’s right flank, could help things along by a breakthrough from the north. On Chernyakhovsky’s left, Colonel General Georgi Zakharov was reported by the Germans to be attacking in the Masurian Lakes region with hundreds of tanks and planes, behind a “drumfire of artillery” (the usual German phrase indicating a breakthrough assault).

In this dire emergency, Hitler appointed his tank expert, Chief of Staff Heinz Guderian, to take command of the whole Russian front from the Baltic to Yugoslavia, Guderian conferred in Königsberg (according to the Soviet news agency Tass) with fat Hermann Göring, who had a personal reason for fury. The Russians had seized Göring’s favorite hunting lodge in the East Prussian deer forest of Rominter Heide, after scattering the SS regiment on guard there. They found the lodge’s wine cellar well stocked with French champagne, the study table piled with topographical maps annotated in handwriting believed to be Göring’s own. A meal prepared in the kitchen had never been served.