I have just watched the excellent summary of the eastern front 1944-45 by Eastery. What caught my interest is the part at 12:43, where Red Army generals had a decision to make - whether to go towards Berlin or to expand towards the flanks and secure their position. From Wikipedia:
On 31 January, the Soviet offensive was voluntarily halted, though Berlin was
undefended and only approximately 70 km (43 mi) away from the Soviet bridgeheads
across the Oder river. After the war a debate raged, mainly between Vasily Chuikov
and Georgy Zhukov whether it was wise to stop the offensive. Chuikov argued Berlin
should have been taken then, while Zhukov defended the decision to stop.
Would it have been a better decision to attack the Berlin immediately, given that Berlin was undefended?
I am looking for best resources to consider that question and also provide a wider context for the consideration that went into delaying such move and what the consequences of early Berlin capture would be.
I will be very grateful for any pointers - papers, books, authors that would help me narrow down my search and answer that question.
There were several factors at work in the decision to pause the drive to Berlin from February to April 1945, and it is somewhat a matter of interpretation as to which the 'true' explanation is. The first set of factors are the pure military factors; these formed the official explanation offered by Zhukov, Konev, et alia. Glantz & House summarize this set of explanations succinctly (2015 edition of When Titans Clashed, footnote 43 to Chapter 15):
Chuikov was the lone voice of public dissent among the senior officers; he advanced his February assault counterfactual in a 1964 article in the journal Novaia i noveishchaia istoriia [New and Recent History] and subsequently in his memoir Konets tret’evo reikhha [The End of the Third Reich]. As evidence for this position, Chuikov claimed:
That we had sufficient forces to continue the Vistula-Oder operation right on to the storming of Berlin;
That the fears for the right flank of the 1st Belorussian Front were groundless, since the enemy had not got sufficient reserves at his disposal to mount a serious counter-blow (incidentally, Guderian admits to as much himself in his memoirs);
That the blow which the enemy planned to launch from the Stettin region could not have been carried through earlier than 15 February, and with only insignificant forces at that;
That a determined advance on Berlin in the beginning of February by seven or eight armies, including three or four tank armies, would have enabled us to wreck the enemy’s blow from the Stettin area and continue our westward advance;
That at the beginning of February, Hitler had not sufficient forces and materials to defend the capital, nor any properly engineered lines of defense;
As a result, the road to Berlin lay open.
(Transl. & quoted from Glantz & House, When Titans Clashed (2015), footnote 44 to Chapter 15.
Chuikov's dissent notwithstanding, I am inclined to believe that the official version is "true" for a given definition of true. What I mean by this is that none of those factors are wholly false or fabricated. Despite the serious losses inflicted on the Wehrmacht through 1944 and the January 1945 offensives, they were still capable of damaging counterattacks. Major counterattacks around Budapest in late fall 1944 (and, perhaps confirming some of Zhukov and Stalin's cautious instincts via hindsight, the German Lake Balaton offensive [Unternehmen Fruhlingserwachen] in March '45) stood as testament. The Soviets had already learned costly lessons in 1942 and 1943 against leaving their flanks vulnerable during aggressive exploitations, and were not eager to give the Wehrmacht - battered and undermanned as it was - the opportunity to turn an overextended flank.
It also is worth noting that the Wikipedia article mistakenly blends several events together. The Vistula-Oder offensive itself culminated naturally on 31st January because the units involved in the offensive were absolutely exhausted from over three weeks of continuous advance and combat. 1st Belorussian Front, for instance, had advanced a whopping 500 kilometers from the outset of the operation, crossing six different German defensive belts. Map 3.1 from Dick's From Defeat to Victory is helpful here. The rapid pace of advance, up to 45 kilometers per day for the fastest tank armies, left the Soviet logistics train far behind. As an aside, I think Table 15.1 from Titans should also go here, so you can get a sense of the forces involved in the Vistula-Oder operation.
Armed with this overview of the operational-strategic picture, we must now turn to the other factor in Stalin's decision to pause the offensive: the political. From mid-1944 onwards, Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership had begun to conduct strategy with an eye not only towards the final defeat of the Nazi war machine, but the postwar political state. This explains, for instance, the strategic offensive into Silesia (contemporaneous with the Vistula-Oder offensive) to seize key industrial areas (the military necessity of destroying German 12th Army notwithstanding). Stalin issued his formal decision to pause the drive to Berlin immediately after returning from the Yalta conference, during which the French, American, British, and Soviet leaders determined the final agreements for the partition & occupation of postwar Germany. As Glantz & House argue in Titans, it is quite likely that the specific terms of the partition were on Stalin's mind when he ordered Zhukov to pause on the banks of the Oder. At Yalta, Stalin had secured the rights to occupy Eastern Germany and part of Berlin; this reduced, in the Soviet calculus, the need to beat the Western Allies to Berlin for the sake of postwar claims. However, Yalta did not provide postwar terms for Nazi-occupied territories outside of Germany proper, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia. Thus, at the same time as he ordered Zhukov to pause on the Oder, he also ordered 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts to launch a strategic offensive to secure Vienna and the economically-valuable Danube Basin. This offensive also received the lion's share of the Soviet High Command's reserves, which would have been necessary to ensure the success of a swift assault on Berlin. Having timed the offensives carefully, the assault on Berlin began the day after the Danube offensive concluded. This consolidation of Soviet political-strategic goals came, of course, at the cost of the high casualties incurred during the April-May assault on a now-fortified Berlin.
Hey there,
Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.
If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!
