All Hell Let Loose (99 page)

Histories which depict Hitler’s 1945 ‘armies’ and ‘divisions’ as serious fighting formations mock the reality: every unit was reduced to a fragment of its proper strength in men, tanks, artillery, transport. Between June 1944 and March 1945, the Wehrmacht lost 3½ million rifles, so that in its last campaigns even small arms were in short supply. Many soldiers were in wretched physical condition: a medical report from a parachute artillery battery on 10 January observed that of its seventy-nine men, all but two were suffering from lice, and eighteen from eczema caused by poor diet. Efforts to sustain discipline invited derision; it must have seemed fantastic to the soldiers of 1/1120 Volksgrenadiers that in January, as the Reich collapsed, their CO Major Beiss issued an order of the day deploring personal slovenliness: ‘Rifles will be carried on the right shoulder, barrel up. If I should again see a “Sunday sportsman” wandering about with his rifle pointing downwards, he will be punished by seven days’ close arrest. Fresh dirt graces a soldier, but old filth exposes laziness. If I again see any man with a “lion’s mane” or any other fancy hairstyle, I shall personally cut his hair.’

The 1945 Western Drive into Germany

It is a commonplace among armies, especially those facing adversity, that men must never be left idle to brood. In the early days of 1945, when the war was going very badly indeed for Germany, panzer company commander Lt. Tony Saurma sought to divert his men’s leisure hours with lectures: he once addressed them for an hour about the United States, its cornbelt, industrial areas and great cities. He knew, as did his audience, that the country would soon loom large in their lives, if they were fortunate enough to survive. What was remarkable was not that hundreds of thousands of Germans abandoned the war in its last months, but that others continued to resist – a few even professing to find their predicament acceptable. An SS panzer platoon commander, posted to Hungary, wrote of a lull behind the battlefield in mid-February: ‘rations were excellent. We learned from the civilian population the various uses of paprika. The people were very friendly. During the evenings we drove to see films in Nové Zámky.’

The 1 February Western Allied combined chiefs of staff meeting, held on Malta before the Yalta summit, endorsed Eisenhower’s plan to entrust his main effort, in this last phase of the campaign, to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in north Germany, reinforced by Simpson’s US Ninth Army. The heavy bomber forces were directed to assault Germany’s transport infrastructure, including such rail centres as Dresden
^*
and Leipzig in the path of the Russian advance. But the ground advance proved slow: Montgomery’s next big attack, Operation
Veritable
, ran into trouble in the Reichwald forest; Simpson’s formations were held back until 23 February by German flooding of large areas of their front. Only after painful fighting did Montgomery’s forces close up to the Rhine between the Dutch border and Koblenz on 10 March.

In Germany’s desperate circumstances, Hitler adopted a familiar panacea: changing generals. Kesselring, who had conducted the brilliant defence of Italy, succeeded von Rundstedt as commander in the west. Yet Kesselring was no more capable than his predecessor of carrying out a coherent campaign with fifty-five enfeebled divisions against Eisenhower’s eighty-five full-strength formations backed by overwhelming air power. Hodges’ First Army secured the Ludendorff rail bridge over the river at Remagen on 7 March, and immediately began to establish a perimeter on the eastern bank; Patton seized his own bridgehead at Oppenheim, further south, on 22 March. The last Germans on the western bank of the Rhine were mopped up three days later. On the 24th, Montgomery’s troops staged their huge set-piece Rhine crossing at Wesel, marred only by heavy casualties among airborne units which parachuted onto the far bank: the defenders proved to be lavishly equipped with anti-aircraft artillery, if nothing else.

At the end of the month, Bradley’s spearheads linked with Simpson’s forces at Lippstadt to encircle Model’s Army Group B in the so-called Ruhr pocket; Model shot himself on 17 April, and 317,000 of his men became Allied prisoners. The Americans, rather than the British, now had the best opportunities for a swift final advance. To Montgomery’s fury, his formations were relegated to the secondary task of clearing northern Germany as far as Hamburg and Lübeck. It was thought urgent to push forces across the base of the Danish peninsula, to protect Denmark from any threat of Soviet occupation. Eisenhower formally abandoned Berlin as an objective, and informed Stalin accordingly. He diverted two armies south towards the Austrian border, to forestall any Nazi attempt to create a ‘National Redoubt’ from which to keep the war going after the Russians and Anglo-American forces met in north Germany. The ‘National Redoubt’ was a figment of the imagination of Eisenhower’s intelligence staff; this division of forces decisively weakened his main central thrust, and left the Russians to occupy Czechoslovakia.

It is hard, however, to make a plausible case that any of this changed the post-war political map of Europe, as the Supreme Commander’s detractors claimed. The Allied occupation zones had been agreed many months earlier, and confirmed at the Yalta summit in February. The Russians got to Eastern Europe first. To have frustrated their imperialistic purposes, sparing Central Europe from a Soviet tyranny in succession to that of the Nazis, it would have been necessary for the Western Allies to fight a very different and more ruthless war, at much higher cost in casualties. They would have had to acknowledge the possibility, even the probability, of overcoming the Red Army as well as the Wehrmacht. Such a course was politically and militarily unthinkable, whatever Churchill’s brief delusions that East European freedom might be recovered by force.

Stalin’s obsessive determination that the Soviet Union should accomplish the capture of Berlin accorded with the vision of his people: they saw this symbolic triumph as the only proper end of their struggle, the fulfilment of everything for which they had striven since 1941. Militarily, it might have been feasible for Eisenhower’s forces to reach Hitler’s capital before the Red Army, but such an advance would have precipitated a clash between the Allies. The Russians would have been outraged by any attempt to deprive them of their prize.

Soviet conduct throughout March and April was prompted by paranoia about Western intentions. Stalin lied again and again to Washington and London, professing his own indifference to Berlin as an objective; he could not credit the notion that the Americans and British would spurn a chance to beat the Red Army to the German capital. The Soviet encirclement of Berlin partly addressed the requirement of taking it from Hitler, but partly also that of ensuring its denial to Roosevelt and Churchill. There was a further consideration: the Russians were desperate to secure the Nazis’ nuclear scientists and research material. Knowing from his agents in the West that the Americans were close to perfecting an atomic bomb, Stalin wanted everything that would help to kick-start the rival Soviet project: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Dahlem was identified as a vital objective for the Red Army.

In the final stage of the western war, the Anglo-American armies advanced in the face of sporadic and ill-coordinated opposition. As always, the infantry bore most of the pain of clearing pockets of resistance. Service in a tank crew was never a sinecure, but in the last six weeks of the northwest Europe campaign, the Scots Guards tank battalion – for instance – lost only one officer and seven other ranks killed, along with a handful of men wounded. Meanwhile in the same period, the infantry of 2nd Scots Guards lost nine officers and seventy-six other ranks killed, seventeen officers and 248 other ranks wounded. Some Allied units encountered groups of fanatics, stubbornly defending river crossings and key junctions. One by one these were overcome, until the victors approached the Elbe. On 12 April, First Army was ordered to stop short of Dresden, and wait for the Soviets. Russian and American patrols met at the little Saxon town of Strehla on the Elbe on the morning of 24 April, followed later that day by the celebrated encounter upstream at Torgau, amid exuberant Anglo-American enthusiasm, wary and stilted Russian formality. The British reached the Baltic port of Lübeck on 2 May, allaying Allied fears that the Soviets would attempt to occupy Denmark. Fortunately for the Danish people, Russian attention was overwhelmingly focused elsewhere: upon Berlin, the capital and last bastion of Nazism.

3
BERLIN: THE LAST BATTLE

Stalin assumed personal responsibility for the final great operations of the war, chiefly in order to deny the personal glory to Zhukov, who was relegated to command of 1st Belorussian
Front
. On 12 January the Soviets launched a general offensive out of their Vistula bridgeheads. Outnumbering the defenders by ten to one, their tanks and infantry streamed westward, crushing everything in their path. In an almost hysterical bulletin broadcast on the 20th, Berlin Radio described the Soviet offensive as ‘a mass invasion, to be compared in scale and significance with the past comings of the Mongol hordes, the Huns and Tatars’.

Commentator Hans Fritsche asserted that the enemy’s objective was ‘total destruction’, and that defeat ‘would signal the end of civilisation’. He claimed that Germans now had the advantages of short lines of communication and their ‘impassioned determination to defend their homeland’. Germany, he said, had become ‘Europe’s bulwark against the barbarian hordes descending from the eastern steppes’. He expressed dismay at the failure of the British to align themselves with the German people against the Bolsheviks; far from dismissing the threat of defeat, as so often in the past, the Nazis called on their people for a desperate resistance in an admittedly desperate situation. ‘Germany’s leadership is now faced with the most serious crisis of the war,’ declared Berlin Radio on 22 January. ‘Withdrawals and disengagements are no longer possible, because our armies are disputing territory of vital importance to German war industry … The utmost effort is required from every German. The German people are responding willingly to this call, because they know that our leadership has always in the past been able to restore situations in spite of all difficulties.’

If Hitler’s people were gripped by despair, those of Stalin were exultant: war correspondent Vasily Grossman expressed a sense of ‘fierce joy’ as he, who had seen so many battles since 1941, witnessed the crossing of the Vistula. He wrote a little later: ‘I wanted to shout, to call to all our brothers, our soldiers, who are lying in the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Polish earth, who sleep forever on our battlefields, “Comrades, can you hear us? We’ve done it.”’ The casualties of the Vistula offensive were staggering, even by the standards of the Eastern Front: the Russians inflicted slaughter on every formation in their path. In January alone, 450,000 Germans died; in each of the ensuing three months, more than 280,000, a figure that included victims of the Anglo-American bombings of Dresden, Leipzig and other eastern cities. During the last four months of the war, more Germans perished than in the whole of 1942–43. Such numbers emphasise the price paid by the German people for their army leadership’s failure to depose the Nazis and quit the war before its last terrible act.

The Russian Drive to the Oder

Early in February, the C-in-C of Army Group Vistula wrote: ‘In the Wehrmacht we find ourselves in a leadership crisis of the gravest magnitude. The officer corps no longer has firm control of the troops. Among soldiers there are the most serious manifestations of disintegration. Examples of soldiers removing their uniforms and exploiting every possible means to acquire civilian clothing in order to escape are far from isolated.’ Further humiliations were heaped upon Germany’s generals: Guderian was interrogated by security chiefs Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Heinrich Müller about his role in the evacuation of Warsaw against Hitler’s orders.