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Guards Tank Army were the industrial regions of Silesia. When Stalin had briefed Konev in Moscow, he had pointed at the map and circled the area with his finger. He mouthed a single word: 'Gold'. No further comment was needed. Konev knew that Stalin wanted the factories and mines to be taken intact.
    On the morning after Konev's attack from the Sandomierz bridgehead, the assault on East Prussia began with General Chernyakhovsky's 3rd Belorussian Front. On the following day, 14 January, Rokossovsky's forces attacked East Prussia from the River Narew bridgeheads. Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front went into action on its two bridgeheads on the Vistula at Magnuszew and Pulawy. A thin layer of snow covered the ground and dense mist lasted until noon. At 8.30 a.m., Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front opened up with twenty-five minutes of'rolling fire'. The advanced rifle battalions, supported by self-propelled assault guns, seized the front lines in the Magnuszew bridgehead. The 8th Guards Army and the 5th Shock Army, with heavy artillery support, then broke open the third line. The main barrier beyond was the River Pilica. Zhukov's plan was for rifle divisions to seize crossing places for the guards tank brigades following on behind.
    The right-hand tank brigade of Bogdanov's 2nd Guards Tank Army was one of the first to cross the Pilica. As a lead unit, the 47th Guards Tank Brigade had a variety of support attached, including sappers, self-propelled artillery, motorized anti-aircraft guns, and a battalion of sub-machine gunners mounted in trucks. Its objective was an airfield just south of the town of Sochaczew, an important junction due west of Warsaw. Over the next two days, the brigade charged northwards, destroying columns of fleeing Germans on the way and crushing staff cars 'with their tracks'.
    It took much longer for the 1st Guards Tank Army on the left to break through. Colonel Gusakovsky, a Hero of the Soviet Union twice over, was so impatient after the long wait that when his 44th Guards Tank Brigade reached the Pilica, he refused to wait for the bridging equipment. It appeared to be a shallow stretch of the river, so to save 'two or three hours' he ordered his tank commanders first to smash the ice with gunfire, then to drive their vehicles across the river bed. The tanks, acting like icebreakers, pushed the broken ice aside 'with a terrible thundering noise'. It must have been terrifying for the tank drivers, but Gusakovsky did not seem concerned by such problems. Zhukov too was interested only in getting the tank brigades across so that they could deal with the 25th and the 19th Panzer Divisions. After that, the country lay open ahead.
    Things had gone just as well for him at the Pulawy bridgehead on 14 January. The plan was not to bombard the whole line, but simply to blast corridors through it. By that evening they were well on the way to the city of Radom. Meanwhile on the 1st Belorussian Front's extreme right, the 47th Army began to encircle Warsaw from the north and the 1st Polish Army fought into the suburbs.
    In the late afternoon of Monday 15 January, 'because of the big advance in the east', Hitler left the Adlerhorst at Ziegenberg to return to Berlin on his special train. Guderian had been forcefully requesting his return for the last three days. At first, Hitler had said that the Eastern Front must sort itself out, but finally he agreed to halt all activity in the west and return. Without consulting Guderian or the two army groups involved, he had just issued orders for the Grossdeutschland Corps to be moved from East Prussia to Kielce to shore up the Vistula front, even though this meant taking it out of the battle for at least a week.
    Hitler's journey by rail to Berlin took nineteen hours. He did not entirely neglect domestic matters. He told Martin Bormann to stay at the Obersalzburg for the time being, where he and his wife kept Eva Braun and her sister Gretl Fegelein company.
    Stalin, meanwhile, was in