The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (478 page)

By the evening of May 1, the abandoned
Führerbunker
had been set ablaze by the Red Army. The Reichstag had been shelled at point-blank range by eighty-nine Red Army field guns, and then taken after a fifteen-hour gunfight between Russians, who occupied the second floor, and a band of Germans, who occupied the third. The civilian population of Berlin took shelter in the city’s basements. The streets above contained only
Soviet troops and dead Berliners. The last Nazi holdouts were fighting from the sewers. Bormann and several hundred of Hitler’s entourage had taken refuge at the New Chancellery. They attempted a breakout on foot to the River Spree by way of a subway tunnel under the Wilhelmsplatz. Hunched over in their filthy gray greatcoats, they leaned into the walls and crept through the destruction en masse in the dark. Bormann didn’t make it, the victim of a shell that crashed into a tank he had hoped would afford him shelter.
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Across the Continent, April had brought splendid weather, with temperatures more reminiscent of the dog days of summer than early spring. “Nobody seems to remember such weather in April before,” Colville told his diary. “Surely there has never been such a spring…. The cherries are weighed down with blossom, the chestnuts and the lilac are already out, as is the wisteria in Great Court, before the daffodils have faded.” Beneath a “China blue sky” tall elms wore their early coats of pale green. In London during the early hours of May 1, after two weeks of such glorious weather, a wet, heavy snow fell. By daybreak, window boxes were encrusted and lilacs bent under the hoary cloak, but their stubborn blooms pushed through the puffs of snow, an odd sight but somehow appropriate for the day of rebirth. Late in the afternoon, as Churchill strolled through the smoking room of the House, he was asked by an MP how the war was going. He replied, “Yes, it is definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago.”
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That evening Hamburg radio interrupted Hitler’s favorite Wagner,
Götterdämmerung,
with the announcement that “
Unser führer, Adolf Hitler, ist… gefallen.
” He had died bravely, according to Hamburg, “fighting with his last breath against Bolshevism.” Wagner himself wrote the original program note for
Götterdämmerung:
“The will that wanted to shape an entire world according to its wish can finally attain nothing more satisfactory than… annihilation.”
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Churchill hosted a political dinner in the Annexe that night; no military marshals sat in. It was nigh time to reposition himself as England’s best choice as peacetime leader. The Japanese had yet to be vanquished, but the war in Europe—England’s war—was over. A general election would have to be called. Beaverbrook (and Eden, from San Francisco) argued for a June vote, when victory would be fresh in the minds of the people, rather than a later date. Joining Churchill at dinner were the Beaver, Oliver Lyttelton, the chief whip James Stuart, and Ralph Assheton, all of them Tory political operatives, the field marshals of their party. Brendan Bracken did not attend. Tory regulars had begun to “look askance at the
Brendan-Beaver combination,” Colville later wrote, in part because these two supreme Churchill loyalists violently opposed the liberal Tory stance on national health care, housing, and education, which Churchill (an old Liberal) supported. His support of reform in those three spheres, he believed, would deliver him and the party a victory in the general election. He was thus forced to preserve party unity by relegating one of his two best friends to the sidelines. It was Bracken, soon awarded first lord of the Admiralty for his services and loyalty. He had desired the Exchequer, an office even his old friend Winston Churchill knew he was unqualified for. For the first time in five years, Adolf Hitler was not a subject of dinner conversation, or wasn’t until Jock Colville brought Churchill the news of the Führer’s death. The Old Man, believing Hitler had died fighting, said, “Well, I must say I think he was perfectly right to die like that.”
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And with that, the party caucus resumed, and continued on past 3:00
A.M.
A plan took shape, which had been fermenting since late March, to ask Attlee and Labour to continue the national government until the defeat of Japan, at which time a general election would be held. That might take the elections well into 1946, when Churchill would presumably still be basking in the light of victory. Attlee and Labour, for their part, sought an election by October at the latest, regardless of the status of the Pacific war. All believed that an invasion of Japan would be necessary, a bloody business in which Churchill fully intended Britain would meet its obligations.

H
itler’s cannonade of June of 1941 had announced his intention to liquidate Russia; Zhukov’s twelve-day barrage had reduced Berlin to rubble. Russian
Katyusha
rockets now raked the rubble, which heaved from underground explosions as Soviet sappers used dynamite and flamethrowers to clear subway tunnels where Nazi holdouts fought on, and from where the stench of burnt flesh drifted up to the streets. The Russians outnumbered the three hundred thousand defenders of Berlin by more than five to one, outnumbered them in artillery by fifteen to one, and in tanks by six to one. When the end came, the Soviets had suffered 350,000 casualties, including almost 80,000 killed. Within the city limits, where barricaded defenders could hold off large numbers of Soviet attackers, five times as many Red Army troops as Germans had been killed. More than 125,000 Berliners died, many by suicide, and as many women were raped, although exact counts were impossible to ascertain given the fury of the final days. To this day, bones of the dead are unearthed. Hitler’s bones will not be among them. The Soviets scraped
together Hitler’s remains by the night of May 1 and sent them east, toward Russia. Immediately a rumor took hold across the Continent: Hitler had escaped, to his mountain redoubt, to the west, to places unknown. Churchill suspected the Russians were behind it. They were. Weeks later, Stalin “speculated” that Hitler and his top aides might have escaped to Japan via giant U-boats. It was a clever way of manipulating popular fears, a twist on
Walpurgisnacht
that held out the terrible possibility that Hitler might emerge from hiding to rekindle the ashes of his Reich. In fact, parts of Hitler’s jaws and skull made it to Moscow. The rest of him was buried beneath a military parade ground in Magdeburg, Germany, which the Soviets occupied for more than forty years. Sometime in the 1970s, the Führer’s remains were exhumed and incinerated for a second time. The ashes were flushed into the city’s sewer system, where they suffered the fate of Mary Shelley’s monster,
borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.
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By May 1, Eisenhower had shifted his attention to the Pacific theater. He was sending the First Army as soon as possible, and he was likely to send Patton and the Third Army as well. Half the American air forces in Europe would be going. In Germany, those American units that had overshot the agreed-upon Soviet and Anglo-American lines of demarcation were already retiring westward.

On May 2, Eamon de Valera, prime minister of Ireland, motored to the German legation in Dublin to offer his condolences on the occasion of Hitler’s death. The “Dev” and Ireland had pulled it off, the only English-speaking country in the world to win the war by missing it. Days later Churchill excoriated de Valera during a worldwide broadcast. Referring to the U-boat menace of 1940 and 1941, Churchill said, “This was indeed a deadly moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland, we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr. de Valera or perish forever from the earth. However, with a restraint and poise to which, I say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the de Valera government to frolic with the Germans and later with the Japanese representatives to their heart’s content.”
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In Flensburg on May 2,
Reichspräsident
Dönitz’s newly appointed leading minister, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, made a radio broadcast to Germans in which he told them, “In the East the iron curtain behind which, unseen by the eyes of the world, the work of destruction goes on, is moving steadily forward.” The London
Times
ran the story the next day.
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Montgomery took Lübeck on May 2, just twelve hours before the Russians got there. That put Monty’s army astride the neck of the Danish peninsula.
The next morning, shortly before noon, four German officers were escorted to Montgomery’s trailer under a flag of truce. Monty, like the neighborhood curmudgeon who neither seeks nor welcomes visitors, threw open the door and demanded of his interpreter, “Who are these men? What do they want?” They were representatives of Field Marshal Keitel, and they wanted to surrender to the British three German armies that faced the Russians. They said they feared for civilians caught between the armies, and they feared savage treatment at the hands of the Red Army were they to surrender in that direction. Montgomery told them they should have thought of that before they started the war. The Germans asked how they could be saved. Essentially they were seeking Montgomery’s approval to continue the fight against the Russians without British interference in their rear. Montgomery refused. He told them that their situation was hopeless, and that until they surrendered, he would continue killing German soldiers and civilians. Then he directed them to a tent where he suggested they have lunch and think things over. They ate, they pondered; they agreed to return the next day with an answer. Two of the officers went back to Flensburg with Montgomery’s ultimatum. After consulting Dönitz, they returned the next day, May 4, and at 6:30
P.M.
signed the instrument of surrender Montgomery had prepared. Expecting the Germans to do just that, Montgomery had ordered his troops to cease fire late on the third.
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The British war in Europe was over. And in the Far East, British and colonial troops had freed Rangoon the previous day. That afternoon, Churchill called his military chiefs to No. 10, where Brooke found him “evidently seriously affected by the fact that the war was to all intents and purposes over as far as Germany was concerned. He thanked us all very nicely and with tears in his eyes for all we had done in the war…. He then shook hands with all of us.”
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In San Francisco that day, May 4, Molotov admitted to Eden that the sixteen Poles who had been granted safe passage from Warsaw to Lublin had been arrested. Stalin, calling the Poles “diverginists,” admitted likewise in a cable to Churchill. Fifty of the fifty-one Allied nations had sent representatives to San Francisco. The fifty-first, Poland, had in effect ceased to exist. The Soviets proposed a horse trade to the British: they would approve the British and American nomination of Argentina for admittance to the United Nations in return for the admission of—in Cadogan’s words—“[the] beastly sham Polish Government.” This was a deft ploy on the part of Stalin and Molotov. Argentina, its government quasi-Fascist, had been a pro-Axis neutral for five years until finally seeing the light in late March, when Colonel Juan Perón took over and declared war on Germany. The Lublin Poles, whatever their Bolshevik leanings, had fought against the Nazis since 1939.
If Argentina was to be granted admittance, Molotov argued, why not the new Polish government? Eden refused.
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E
isenhower’s turn to accept a German surrender came at 2:41
A.M.
British Double Summer Time on Monday, May 7, at his headquarters in Reims. General Alfred Jodl, for Dönitz, and Bedell Smith, for SHAEF, signed the instrument of unconditional surrender, with French and Russian officers as witnesses. Hostilities were to cease at midnight, and the German entourage was to proceed to Berlin to sign the Russian ratification on the ninth. Shortly before dawn, Pug Ismay had received a call from Eisenhower. “What’s happened?” Ismay asked. Came the reply: “It’s all over.” But it wasn’t over until Stalin said it was over. His troops were still mopping up in Czechoslovakia and along the Baltic. He sought to postpone any official announcement until the formal ratification by all parties in Berlin on the ninth.
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