“Sneg!”— “Snow!” IT was the one word in Russian that gave pause to Soviet commanders all the way from the northern reaches of the Kara south to Bavaria.
“Sneg nemozhet byt’ neytral’nym”—”Snow is not neutral”—was one of the maxims of the Frunze Military Academy. Only fools thought it an equal impediment to friend and foe alike. Snow was regarded by the Russian armies with the same passionate intensity as that with which a priest might look to the Holy See. Time and again fate had used it to preserve their destiny, to deliver them from the darkest hours of their history. It had defeated Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler at Stalingrad in 1943. If you were a Russian, you did not complain about the snow, you melded in with it, became part of it, used it, your Russian “greatcoat” enfolding you, and you kept moving, for you understood snow better than anyone on earth, save the Eskimos. You could tell better than anyone else the temperature by the white-blue aura of the northern light, how falling powder snow was the best for attack, the worst for defense, whiting out one’s vision, the great soft billows hiding you from the enemy and muffling the sound of your tanks.
Preceded by a barrage of over a thousand guns for two hours, the Soviet divisions under Marshal Leonid Kirov led the attack on a hundred-mile front against the north-south sausage-shaped pocket. Surging ahead with their four-to-one advantage, the tanks converged in thousands, refugees and tens of thousands of farm animals scattering pathetically before them.
With only twenty miles to go, Marshal Kirov estimated that if all went well, his forces would reach the outer defenses of the DB perimeter in the next two hours. The British and Americans, Marshal Kirov assured the Russian premier, would be dug in, in defilade positions, and with thermal imagers in addition to their laser range finders, would take a heavy toll of Soviet tanks. But dug in, the NATO armor would be loath to risk leaving their defilade positions and revetment areas in deference to the sound military axiom that defense was easier than attack — especially in such foul weather. On the other hand, the only pause his armor had to make, reported Kirov, in the sudden change in the Arctic front from heavy rain to snow, was for some of his most forward tanks to make the switch from summer thirty-weight oil to winter ten-weight.
This was achieved with remarkable efficiency by the crack Soviet armored divisions coming down on the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket from the north and those coming from the far south, where the Tyrol was already blanketed by early snowfall.
The very mention of snow, even to those Russian troops in the green flats of the Palatinate, was welcome because, except for the odd Canadian contingent in the pocket, it was more their element than the Americans’ and British. And it was this point that General Marchenko pressed home to his political officers in charge of morale. Oh, certainly the NATO forces had run maneuvers in the Arctic, but that was a stop-and-start affair compared to the Russian soldiers, who’d been raised to it and who, like those from Khabarovsk, knew what it was to go fishing in the ice-covered lakes, not for sport but for survival. It was this edge, Kiril Marchenko confidently assured the STAVKA, that would finally tell in the Soviets’ favor.
Marchenko also brought them good news about the last-minute Allied airlift out of Heidelberg. Here, Hungarian divisions had outflanked NATO’s Southern Command’s Wermacht divisions with such unexpected speed, it was reported that paper shredders had overheated and caught fire in the haste that verged on panic during the Allied withdrawal. That the Hungarians had achieved such a success was no surprise to Marchenko and other Soviets old enough to remember the Hungarians’ tenaciousness in battle, but it was around Heidelberg that one of the most pervasive Allied illusions was shattered. Namely, it was the belief that because Hungarians hated Russians, they would either turn against Marshal Kirov’s forces or surrender in droves to the Allies. And yet any cold, objective analysis of the prewar situation would have shown what would happen with Russia literally behind them, virtually holding Hungary as hostage. In an otherwise complex world, the answer was as simple as it was brutal: If the Warsaw Pact did not win, the Russians would raze eastern Europe in their retreat. The Russians’ strategiya vyzhzhennoy zemli— “scorched earth policy”—would turn the Hungarian plain into a slaughterhouse such as the world had never seen and which, in its utter desolation as a base from which to wage war, would as likely stop the Allies just as it had Hitler. For the Hungarians, there was no choice — better to be on the winning side. In any case, the West could not be relied upon. The martyrs had called upon Britain and America and all the other democracies to help them when they’d rebelled against the Soviets in ‘56 and then were brutally crushed by Russian tanks as the West looked on in paralyzed horror.