The Soviet Vistula-Oder Offensive, launched on 12 January 1945, had torn a gap hundreds of kilometres wide in the German line and carried the Red Army from the Vistula to the Oder in a fortnight. As the advance ran out of momentum its leading edge narrowed, leaving long exposed flanks into which retreating German formations were feeding. Heinz Guderian proposed cutting off Zhukov's spearheads with converging attacks from Stargard in the north and Glogau and Guben in the south. To do it he wanted the Courland Pocket evacuated, troops brought from Italy and Norway, and Sepp Dietrich's 6th Panzer Army released from Hungary. Hitler refused all three, and the meeting degenerated into a shouting match. A second row followed over who would run the reduced version. Guderian insisted on Walther Wenck rather than Heinrich Himmler, who commanded Army Group Vistula and had no business directing an armoured offensive. Hitler, according to Guderian, was almost screaming - and gave in.

What survived the argument was modest: three corps of Felix Steiner's Eleventh SS Panzer Army, assembling in Pomerania, attacking on a fifty-kilometre front around Stargard toward Arnswalde, where a small German garrison was cut off, with the eventual object of relieving Kustrin on the Oder. Both sides were wrecked. German forces between the Baltic and the Carpathians admitted 198,000 dead and missing across January and February. The Soviets were in no better shape: rifle divisions of the 1st Belorussian Front averaged around four thousand men, the 2nd Belorussian Front could field only 297 worn tanks in early February, and the two fronts had taken 77,342 and 159,490 casualties in the preceding weeks. Zhukov knew a German force was building opposite him - Stavka had counted thirty-three divisions in Pomerania against thirteen between his armies and Berlin - but not when or where it would come.

Not everything was ready on the fifteenth, since the units had to funnel across the bridges at Stettin, so the SS Division Nordland went in alone that day, took the 61st Army by surprise and reached the encircled garrison at Arnswalde. The general attack opened next morning. III SS Panzer Corps widened the corridor and pushed the Soviet line back eight to twelve kilometres. On the right, XXXIX Panzer Corps retook Pyritz and recovered ground on the eastern shore of Lake Madu, then ran into the 2nd Guards Tank Army short of Plone Lake and stopped - about seventy kilometres from Kustrin, which is to say nowhere near it. Gruppe Munzel made four kilometres to Liebenow. III SS Panzer Corps made one, to Reetz. Tiger II heavy tanks knocked out Soviet armour and were knocked out in turn. Every one of those place names is a Polish town today - Pyrzyce, Recz, Lubieniow, Lake Miedwie - and every one was fought over by men who had three days of fuel and knew it.

On 17 February the operation lost its commander in the most banal way imaginable. Wenck was being driven back from a briefing in Berlin by a driver who had been awake and on duty for forty-eight hours. He took the wheel himself to spare the man, fell asleep, and was seriously injured in the crash. Hans Krebs replaced him, but whatever initiative the attack had was already gone, and Zhukov spent that same day committing the 3rd Shock Army against it. Army Group Vistula called Sonnenwende off on the eighteenth. The Soviets attacked on the nineteenth, aiming at Stettin, and got bogged down in street fighting to take Arnswalde back. On the twenty-first the German command began pulling formations west behind Army Group Centre, effectively conceding eastern Pomerania. When Zhukov threw in the 70th Army on the twenty-third the retreat became general, and tanks that could not be fuelled were left where they stood.

Judged against its own aims the operation was a complete failure. Judged by its effect it was the most consequential thing the Germans did that winter. The appearance of a serious armoured force on his northern flank convinced Stavka that Pomerania had to be cleared before anyone marched on Berlin, and the assault on the capital was pushed from February to April. On 24 February Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front opened the East Pomeranian Offensive, which ran until 4 April. Those six weeks were paid for on the ground the offensive had crossed. Stargard, where the tanks started, lost more than three-quarters of its buildings and had to rebuild its Gothic church and town hall from rubble. It is Stargard again now, on the Ina, a city of some 67,000 people about 35 km east of Szczecin, and the flat farmland and shallow lakes between it and Choszczno give no sign at all of what crossed them in four days of February 1945.