Armageddon (86 page)

More than one major historian of the campaign has voiced the suspicion that, if American rather than British troops had occupied the Allied left flank, natural focus of a push for Berlin, Eisenhower would have unleashed them towards Hitler’s capital. As it was, so deep had become his loathing of Montgomery, so determined was he to frustrate the field-marshal’s “efforts to make sure that the Americans—and me in particular—got no credit” for the campaign, that he set his face against any course that would enable Montgomery to lead a triumphal march on Berlin. Stephen Ambrose, the Supreme Commander’s biographer, has suggested that if Bradley had commanded in the north “Eisenhower might well have sent him to Berlin.” Yet it seems implausible to suppose that Eisenhower’s last big decision of the war was founded upon personal animosity, real though this was. He was still much troubled about the possibility that the enemy would make a last stand in south Germany, at the mythical “Alpine Redoubt” which preoccupied SHAEF intelligence.

There was a much more substantial issue. If the Germans defended Berlin with the desperation they had displayed in other last-ditch actions, Allied casualties would be enormous. When Eisenhower asked Bradley for his estimate of American losses in a drive for Berlin, 12th Army Group’s commander suggested a figure of 100,000. This estimate does not seem unrealistic—it amounts to barely one-third of the casualties actually sustained by the Russians. It is true that in early April the Americans overestimated Germany’s residual capacity to sustain the campaign. Yet it is striking that U.S. casualties in April 1945 declined only slightly against those of February, as the Germans maintained disorganized but often fanatical resistance. It is plausible that Germany’s soldiers would have resisted an Anglo-American assault on Berlin much less vigorously than the Soviet one. But it would have been rash for Eisenhower to make any such assumption while Hitler lived, or indeed for history to do so.

When Russian forces were already within thirty miles of the city, while the nearest Americans were still four times that distance away, wherein lay the virtue of a commitment to conclude the Western allied campaign with a bloodbath? Berlin stood more than a hundred miles inside the designated, unalterable Soviet occupation zone of Germany. What would Eisenhower have said to the mother or husband of an American or British soldier killed in a battle for Hitler’s capital, which at best would have yielded only a symbolic triumph for the Western allies? Was any symbol worth tens of thousands of American and British lives? “I decided,” he wrote in his post-war memoirs, “that [Berlin] was not the most logical nor the most desirable objective for the forces of Western Allies.”

Eisenhower’s decision provoked the wrath of his subordinate commanders at the time, and the censure of posterity informed by the Cold War. Robert E. Murphy, the influential American diplomat acting as political adviser to Eisenhower and the German Control Commission, expressed his dismay in a letter to Washington on 14 April. “Apparently,” Murphy wrote, “there is on the part of some of our officers no particular eagerness to occupy Berlin first . . . One thing seems to be that what is left of Berlin may be tenaciously defended house by house, brick by brick. I have suggested the modest opinion that there should be a certain political advantage in the capture of Berlin, even though the military advantage may be insignificant.” To put the matter bluntly—which, surprisingly, none of the Anglo-Americans engaged in this debate did at the time—somebody had to assume responsibility for capturing or killing Adolf Hitler, as well as securing his capital. Militarily, the fate of the Führer was merely incidental to the defeat of Germany, but he could hardly be permitted to depart into retirement in Buenos Aires. Once again, it was Stalin alone who knew exactly what he wanted—Hitler’s capture alive, for the greatest of all show trials.

There is no doubt that the Anglo-Americans could have reached the Ber-lin area swiftly, whatever uncertainties persist about what might have happened once they had done so. Eisenhower’s decision seemed to his critics to mark the nadir of an advance dominated by cautious and unimaginative strategic leadership since he had assumed command of the Allied ground forces on 1 September 1944. For the Americans and British, the new policy ensured an anticlimactic end to the greatest military campaign in the history of the world. The occupation of Bremen and Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart scarcely offered the peerless drama of a march through the streets of Hitler’s conquered capital.

Churchill’s anger that Berlin was to be forsaken as a prize reflected the deeper grief which haunted the last months of his war, that Hitler’s dominance of eastern Europe was now to be supplanted by that of Stalin. Yet the Washington administration refused to share the British prime minister’s fear of the Russians. Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger said, half a century later:

If you look at the world geopolitically, the mistakes were avoidable. But if you look at them as Americans did in 1945, when they were trying to escape history, they were understandable. America was determined not to do what other nations had always done after winning wars—grab as much as they could. There was no excuse for the way Roosevelt treated Churchill. FDR was naive. But one must make allowances for the spirit of the time. If Roosevelt had resisted Soviet demands, a big slice of the U.S. intellectual community would have accused him of provoking Stalin.

If the Allies had identified seizure of Berlin and Anglo-American liberation of large tracts of eastern Europe as vital war aims early in 1944, it would have been necessary for the U.S. and British governments to order Eisenhower to pursue his advance across north-west Europe in a wholly different spirit, with vastly greater urgency. Washington and London would have needed to assert a political agenda for the last months of the conflict. Instead, from beginning to end, the SHAEF Supreme Commander’s orders were explicitly military in character, directed towards the destruction of the Nazi regime. Stalin’s suspicion, indeed paranoia, about American intentions was prompted by disbelief that any great nation could conduct a war without political ambitions, when those of the Soviet Union now dominated its military strategy.

Yet even before Roosevelt’s health failed, America’s conduct of the war was overwhelmingly determined by her Chiefs of Staff, military men. It was impossible, in the last weeks of war, abruptly to invite the army commanders in the field to adopt different priorities. And who in Washington was going to do this, in the last weeks of a dying president, or the first days of a novice one? No military action undertaken by the Anglo-Americans in the spring of 1945 could have undone the decisions of the Teheran and Yalta conferences about the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, to which Churchill had acceded. No belated Anglo-American military success could snatch the east European nations from communist tyranny, because the Russians already occupied them. It is true that geographical limits had not been agreed at Yalta for Allied military operations, because no one could guess in February where the armies’ respective advances might end. This was why Eisenhower felt obliged to signal Stalin at the end of March about his intentions. But wherein lay the purpose of losing American and British lives to gain territory destined to become the responsibility of the Red Army? Millions of Germans were fleeing in terror from the Russians, and praying to be occupied by the Western allies. This was, however, a problem for the vanquished, rather than for the victors.

The Allies had tacitly, and in considerable degree explicitly, conceded Stalin’s claims to a blood price, in recognition of Russia’s sacrifice. Even in the last year of war, the Red Army had accepted casualties many times those of the Americans and British, to complete the destruction of the Third Reich. If the Western allies had dashed for Berlin, the Russians would unquestionably have pre-empted them. Stalin would never have stood by while the Anglo-Americans occupied Hitler’s capital. Zhukov and Konev had held their line on the Oder since the end of January, when the Americans were still struggling above the Roer. If the Americans and British had made a rush for Berlin, exactly the kind of messy, perhaps politically disastrous collision Marshall feared could have taken place between the Russians and Anglo-Americans. Eisenhower’s last major decision of the campaign lacked any Pattonesque “lust for glory.” But it was surely the correct one. No Western military action in April 1945 would have changed the post-war settlement. The manner in which Eisenhower allowed the momentous decision to trickle down among his commanders, almost as an afterthought, scarcely suggested the behaviour of a man who was making an important considered judgement, conscious of history’s eyes upon him. Yet Eisenhower’s forbearance about Berlin highlighted his political common sense, together with his rare gift for bearing responsibility, which is too readily taken for granted in a man who had risen from the rank of colonel to five-star general in less than three years.

Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger observed: “America doesn’t produce great generals. Eisenhower was the manager of an alliance. If Rommel had commanded the Allied armies, he might have got to Berlin in one go. But what did we have to gain by haste?” It is impossible to share the view of Cornelius Ryan and others that Eisenhower made an historic blunder in April 1945 by declining to drive for Berlin. The die was cast. Churchill’s anguish about the plight of eastern Europe caused him to clutch at unrealistic hopes in April 1945. Even if the British prime minister possessed an historic vision lacking at the summits of U.S. power in those days, it was Churchill and not Eisenhower who displayed naivety about the options open to the Western allied forces to frustrate Soviet imperialism in arms, unless they were prepared to go to war with Stalin.

Among Eisenhower’s last big operational decisions of the campaign, one was indeed political. Montgomery was ordered to abandon his earlier task of covering the American left flank and to strike fast for the Baltic coast at Lübeck, to “seal off the Danish peninsula.” There were real fears that the Soviets might aspire to seize Denmark. Simpson’s U.S. Ninth Army would march east towards the Elbe river. The remainder of the American armies would swing south, to take southern Germany and address Hitler’s Alpine Redoubt, where large enemy forces including many SS fanatics were reported to be gathering. The Alpine Redoubt was, of course, a myth, and it was bizarre in the extreme that SHAEF intelligence embraced it. But it is impossible to argue that the Allied turn southwards made any significant adverse impact upon the last days of the campaign, as the remains of the German Army crumbled in their path. The U.S. Seventh Army drove south on a route that finally took it to Munich and the Brenner Pass. Patton’s Third Army advanced in a great sweep which embraced Chemnitz, western Czechoslovakia and northern Austria. Hodges’s First Army attacked south of the Harz Mountains, towards Halle and Leipzig, while Simpson’s Ninth took an easterly line through Brunswick and Magdeburg which led, at last, to the historic junction with the Russians.

DRIVING TO THE ELBE

L
ATE ON THE
afternoon of 11 April, the 67th Armored Regiment became the first American unit to reach the Elbe, after travelling almost sixty miles in a single day. They found themselves shooting their way through the streets of Schönebeck, south-east of Magdeburg, while other elements of 2nd Armored Division disposed of desultory resistance in the western suburbs of that city. Within a few hours, the Americans had thrown a bridge across the river and established forces on the eastern bank. The colonel of one American regiment, oblivious of Eisenhower’s intentions, told his men exultantly: “You are on your way to Berlin.” Many senior officers still shared this delusion, and the Supreme Commander seemed in no hurry to disabuse them. Only on 12 April did he inform Patton of his decision that most of the Allied armies would stop at the Elbe, unless there were local tactical reasons to advance a little further. Third Army would halt on a north–south line parallel with the river in western Czechoslovakia and northern Austria.

Yet although the Americans quickly secured several Elbe crossing points, incredibly the Germans continued to counter-attack. As late as 14 April, Ninth Army felt obliged to pull back from one of its bridgeheads under fierce enemy pressure, after taking more than 300 casualties. Eisenhower repeatedly checked the great joy-ride of Patton’s Third Army to ensure that, to the very end, his forces maintained a more or less straight frontage. In the south, the Germans’ Army Group G simply disintegrated in the face of Devers’s 6th Army Group.

“There was little that was cheerful or exhilarating about the last stages of the war,” wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder at SHAEF. The final Anglo-American drive across Germany offered few moments of glory, and many foolish little battles which wasted men’s lives even more pitiably than all war wastes lives. For instance, as tanks of the U.S. 12th Armored Division entered the little town of Boxberg on 12 April, at first they encountered only a few snipers. When the column was halfway down the main street, however, enemy troops armed with fausts and small arms began to fire upon them from upper storeys. This was a battalion of officer cadets who were “young, tough and smart,” Colonel Richard Gordon reported. The Americans hastily withdrew. “Then we converged the fire of our tanks, artillery and infantry on the town, and blasted it down,” said Gordon.

A routine was established across the breadth of the American and British fronts. A tank column clattered across the countryside until it approached a town or village. Then vehicles halted, and officers peered forward through their binoculars. Any sign of movement provoked a radio call: “Put one through the window.” A brisk succession of tank or howitzer shells smashed into the buildings, throwing up dust and smoke. Then the liberators pushed on, unless the town was unfortunate enough to be defended by SS or Hitler Jugend, in which case absolute devastation followed. Many communities pleaded with combatants of both armies to be spared from destruction. Allied officers often enlisted the services of local burgomasters to telephone ahead to the next village on the road, warning its people to put out white flags or face the consequences. Only Nazi fanatics remained heedless and allowed their own people to pay the price.