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As the fighting turned against the Germans on the Eastern Front in 1944-45 Hitler designated a series of towns and cities as ‘Fortresses’. The intention was that these locations would be given a strong garrision, and kept in German hands as the Soviets advanced west, disrupting the Soviet advance and forcing them to devote resources to eliminating these German held strongholds. Ideally these fortresses would be located in key transport hubs, so holding the city would prevent the Soviets from using key rail links, thus making it harder for them to get supplies to the front line, slowing the advance, and in theory giving the Germans time to restore their front lines.
The author looks at four examples of these fortresses, each of which had a rather different fate. The first example, Ternopol, was something of a disaster, with the city not holding out for long and only a handful of the defenders escaping back to German lines. At Kovel the line was actually restored and Kovel became part of the front line instead of an isolated garrison. Poznan was probably the best example of the concept working as the Germans had hoped – it was a key transport junction on the main route from Warsaw to Berlin, and held out for a month, slowing down the Soviet advance west. Breslau held out for three months, and didn’t surrender until 6 May, after the fall of Berlin, but the city wasn’t on a key transport link, and although the Soviets did attempt to capture the city it thus wasn’t quite such an important target.
In each case we get an examination of the efforts made to made the city into a fortress, the troops who happened to be encircled when the siege began, how they were equipped and armed and how the city was defended, and from the Soviet side a look at the units involved, the tactics and equipment used, and how that changed over time. At the heart of each chapter is a detailed account of the fighting for the four cities, often taking us down to the level of individual buildings. Over the course of these four battles both sides developed new methods for urban warfare, and found new uses for their weapons (in particular for the various forms of man-portable anti-tank weapons, which became a replacement for normal artillery for the Germans and an easily adapted item of loot for the Soviets).
The overall impression one gets is that these fortresses were a wasted effort for the Germans. In part this was because in the chaotic final few months of the Third Reich it wasn’t possibly to equip them properly, so although some work had been done on deciding which weapons would be most useful in a fortress, very little use was made of that work, and the cities ended up being defended by whatever troops got trapped inside them, with whatever guns happened to be available. Of these four examples only Poznan did what it was expected to do and actually slowed down the Soviets by denying them a direct route from Warsaw to Berlin, but the effort that went into holding the other three would probably have been better used elsewhere.
This is a well researched book, with good material from both sides. In general the work focuses on the higher and medium levels of command, and the tactics that were used by both sides. We do of course get plenty of accounts of the fighting at street level, but generally down to battalion level rather than the individual troops on the street. This works well and gives the author the space to cover all four of these sieges without getting bogged down in too much minor detail.
Chapters
1 – Ternopol – The First Attempt
2 – Kovel – An Exception to the Rule
3 – Poznan – A Fortress in the Right Place
4 – Breslau – The Reich’s Last Fortress
Author: Alexey Isaev
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
Year: 2021