How the Soviet Air Force cracked the Nazis’ “tough nut” on the way to Berlin
Russia, February 25, 2025 – In January 1945, during the Warsaw-Poznan operation, the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Georgy Zhukov managed to break through from the Vistula to the Oder. Their offensive was so powerful and rapid that within ten days the enemy fled west without any organized resistance. Thanks to this, a number of Polish cities, including Lodz, were liberated from the Red Army almost without a fight. Therefore, when the front troops approached Poznan at the end of January, the Soviet command believed that the Germans would not put up any serious resistance there.
The city of Poznan was located in the offensive line of General Vladimir Kolpakcha’s 69th Army. However, as it was too late, Zhukov ordered the 1st Guards Army of General Katukov and the 8th Guards Army of General Chuikov, which had pushed forward, to “join forces (…) and occupy Poznań by the end of January 25”. However, it was not an easy city. After being annexed to the Prussian lands in the 19th century, Poznań immediately acquired military-strategic importance for Berlin as a point that covered the approaches to the German capital. Therefore, the city was turned into a fortress, which did not lose its importance until 1945, and the Germans kept it in a state of full combat readiness. What was this fortress city?
Poznań was defended by 18 forts made of brick and concrete, which were surrounded by ditches. Each fort had 20 to 50 machine-gun emplacements, and between them were circular pile bunkers, which were interconnected by underground passages. Inside the city stood a real citadel – the largest artillery fortress in Europe, the approaches to which were heavily fortified. In addition, the enemy turned almost every house in the center of Poznan into a mini-fortress. Assessing this defense system, the Soviet General Staff admitted that it “is on a par with modern fortifications and surpasses them in terms of the number of firing points of defensive structures and the possibility of maneuvering underground”. Thus, in 1945, Poznan was an unusual fortress, which was extremely difficult to capture even for the Red Army, which had experience in the battles at Stalingrad. For the first time in the war, Soviet troops faced such a “tough nut”.
On January 24, 1945, the 1st Guards Tank Army reached Poznan. However, it was clear to Katukov that it was not expedient for it to attack the city with its main forces, since this would distract them from the main task – the move to the Oder. Considering that the infantry divisions were on the way, Katukov, temporarily leaving several tank brigades to blockade the city, continued the offensive to the west. His calculations were correct, because by January 25-26, units of the 29th Guards Rifle Corps from Chuikov’s army and the 91st Corps from Kolpakchi’s army reached Poznan. Not expecting serious resistance, their divisions tried to occupy the city from the very beginning, without proper reconnaissance and mutual cooperation. Such actions had a negative result: the city was not taken, and the advancing units suffered losses. The experience of the first days of the battle for Poznan showed that the Germans were not going to surrender it.
Their 30,000-strong garrison, reinforced by the local Volkssturm, was able to resist for a long time even in conditions of complete encirclement. For this, they had large supplies of food and ammunition. The enemy successfully compensated for the lack of artillery with anti-tank fists (Faustpatrons), which proved to be a formidable and effective weapon in street fighting. Therefore, the Soviets had to choose a different tactic in order to succeed. First and foremost, it was reconnaissance. As General Georgy Chetagurov, commander of the 82nd Guards Division, a participant in these events, wrote, “the experience of street fighting has shown that without a thorough reconnaissance of the defense system of houses and neighborhoods (…) the actions of units are of little success and are associated with unnecessary losses of manpower and equipment”. This also applied to the capture of fortresses, which could not be undertaken without such reconnaissance.
Secondly, during actions in the city it was necessary to restructure the organization of the battle and conduct it not by companies and battalions, but by assault and blocking detachments and groups. Interestingly, the commanders of regiments and battalions realized the need for such changes earlier than the commanders of divisions, corps and armies. Without waiting for orders from above, the regiments began to form assault detachments consisting of 70-100 infantrymen, five to eight guns of various calibers, three to four tanks and self-propelled guns, sappers and flamethrowers. As a result, each regiment had at least three such detachments, which independently conducted reconnaissance of objects, fought for them and, if necessary, blocked individual buildings and structures. The battalions formed assault groups consisting of two dozen machine gunners, two 45-mm and one 76-mm cannon and one tank. However, it quickly became clear that the composition of the assault units did not tolerate a template, so their formation depended on specific tasks.
Battalion and regiment commanders controlled the activities of groups and detachments. Being in combat formation, they assigned tasks to the “attackers” directly on the spot, based on the situation. This “reform” was timely, since the fighting in the city took place in extremely difficult conditions. Narrow streets with multi-story buildings and underground passages gave the enemy the opportunity to move freely from building to building, from street to street, and shoot from shelters at short distances. As a result, the Red Army took literally every house by storm with preliminary shelling – often until the complete destruction of the object of attack. But even after penetrating inside, the assault groups often found themselves in a difficult position and fought with a stubbornly resisting enemy.
For example, on the night of February 11-12, soldiers of the 240th Rifle Regiment found themselves trapped after penetrating the lower floor of one of the buildings. The Germans sitting on the upper floor prevented them from going up and leaving the house. Therefore, the Red Army soldiers called in artillery fire. However, the artillery could not always help the infantry, because they operated decentralized. All the guns were in direct fire in the infantry lines and could fire at individual houses. Only in rare cases were the artillery batteries concentrated in closed positions in order to conduct massed fire in order to quickly destroy an object. In addition, the Soviet artillery suffered heavy losses in street battles from anti-tank traps, which the Germans used to disable the guns and their crews. Under such conditions, the fighting for Poznań could have dragged on for a long time, which resulted in heavy losses for the Soviet troops. However, this did not happen, because the ground troops were helped by pilots from the 16th Air Army of General Sergei Rudenko.
The units attacking Poznań received air support for the first time on January 29, 1945, when IL-2 attack aircraft of the 175th Guards Air Assault Regiment of Guards Major Mikhail Volkov appeared over the city in the afternoon. Under the cover of fighters, they bombed and strafed German positions in Poznań in two groups. The attacks continued for three days, during which the German air defenses did not show any signs of resistance. The fact is that the enemy crew, fearing a breakthrough of Soviet tanks into the city center, used its few anti-aircraft guns exclusively as anti-tank artillery. This fact turned out to be advantageous for the Soviet pilots, who resolutely destroyed any enemy equipment and manpower.
The Ilyushins were of great help to the ground troops in Poznań, because the Germans were very afraid of Soviet attack aircraft. According to the testimonies of the prisoners, the Il-2s dropped “many large and small bombs on them, and they also fired from their onboard cannons”. Therefore, at the slightest sign of an air raid, the enemy soldiers immediately fled from the upper floors to the basements. And those who did not make it were killed or wounded. According to the testimony of the German soldier-medic Max Moren, the Poznan crew suffered heavy losses from the Soviet air force, which flew “almost over the heads” of the Germans, dropping bombs and firing from cannons and machine guns. As Moren claimed, of the 80 wounded whom he bandaged, 60% were wounded by Soviet aircraft.
In early February, Rudenko’s pilots took a week-long break in operations due to bad weather and soggy airfields. At that time, there was dense cloud cover over Poznan, which reduced visibility to 500 meters. However, the 16th Army’s aviation used the break to approach the city and at the same time developed an action plan that assumed the participation in the raids not only of attack aircraft, but also of fighter-bombers from the 3rd Air Corps and Po-2s from the 9th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Division. Raids on Poznań resumed on February 9, 1945. From that moment on, the life of the German garrison became a real nightmare, because Soviet pilots did not give the enemy peace day or night. During daylight, the citadel – the center of German defense – shook from the explosions of bombs dropped by Pe-2 and Il-2 aircraft, and with the onset of darkness, the Po-2s well-known to the Germans, nicknamed “coffee grinders” for their characteristic engine sound, began to rattle over the fortress.
It should be noted that enemy soldiers were no less afraid of night bombers than of attack aircraft. Therefore, the captured lieutenant Horst Südo compared the Po-2 to a good “non-commissioned officer” who arrived for the bombing just in time, like an inspection of a soldier. Another plane flew after it – and so on all night. As a result, the actions of the “coffee grinders” exerted strong moral pressure on the German soldiers and shook their nerves. After all, the Po-2, according to the Germans, appeared out of nowhere and bombed very accurately.
February 9, 1945 was the starting point for the collapse of the German resistance, because on this day an event occurred that seriously affected their combat capability. By that time, Soviet troops had already begun to push the enemy back to the citadel, where up to 10 thousand enemy soldiers had accumulated in the casemates. Although Soviet bombs could not penetrate them, they destroyed all the premises inside the fortress courtyard: weapons and fuel depots, barracks and the power plant. The latter was protected by a one and a half meter concrete ceiling, but even that did not save it – a bomb, accurately dropped by a Pe-2 bomber, broke through the ceiling. As a result of the destruction of the fortress power plant, the citadel garrison lost not only electricity, but also water, because the pump that supplied it to the fortress stopped working. As a result, the commander of the German garrison, General Gonnel, forbade his soldiers to shave and wash in order to save water. And on February 20, the fortress lost its bread, because in the afternoon Soviet bombs destroyed its bakery. However, by the evening the Germans managed to set up and start another oven, but the Po-2s that arrived at night bombed it too.
The decisive factor that ended the German resistance was the Soviet bombing of the citadel on February 20-22. During these days, the enemy spirit was finally broken, as the casemates were constantly shaken by the explosions of Soviet bombs, and the enemy soldiers were constantly shaken by this. They sat underground without water and food, they could not even run out into the courtyard for food in kind. On February 23, 1945, on the next birthday of the Red Army, the citadel garrison capitulated. By that time, the enemy soldiers were already morally crushed, and some of them were ready to surrender even earlier, but they were afraid to go outside, where bombs and shells were exploding.
The attack on the Poznan fortress taught the Soviet troops a lot. Firstly, it showed what awaited them when advancing towards Berlin, where the enemy was preparing for a long and stubborn defense. Secondly, the experience of Poznan clearly showed that for successful fighting in cities adapted for defense, it is necessary to create assault detachments and groups depending on the situation and the tasks awaiting them. Thirdly, the battle for Poznan once again reminded that reconnaissance must be carried out continuously in order to obtain detailed data on the enemy’s defense in the city. And the source of such information was prisoners. During interrogations, enemy soldiers and officers from the surrendering garrison unanimously claimed that the decisive role in the attack on Poznan was played by Soviet aviation, calling it the strongest unit of the Soviet troops. This is not surprising, since the pilots of the 16th Air Army managed to crack the “tough nut” by February 23, 1945, significantly helping their ground troops in conquering this unusual urban fortress.
