The Last Battle

1

A LITTLE BEFORE MIDNIGHT on Palm Sunday, an American staff car pulled up outside the gray stone headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division in Sissonne, northern France. Two officers got out. One was in American uniform, the other was dressed in British battle dress without insignia. The second man, tall and lanky, wore a neat green beret and, in vivid contrast to his blond hair, sported a large, fierce-looking red moustache. To the British and Americans his name was almost unpronounceable: Arie D. Bestebreurtje. He was widely known among them as “Arie,” or “Captain Harry.” Even those names changed from mission to mission, for he spent most of his time behind German lines. Arie was a Special Forces Agent and a member of the Dutch Intelligence Service.

A few days before, Arie had been called to Brussels by his superiors and told that he was being assigned to the 82nd Division for a special operation. He was to report to the youthful 38-year-old Major General James M. Gavin, 82nd Division commander, to take part in a top-secret briefing. Now, Arie and his escorting officer entered the headquarters, hurried up a flight of stairs to the second floor and down a corridor to a well-guarded map room. Here, their credentials were checked by a military policeman who then saluted and opened the door.

Inside, Arie was warmly greeted by General Gavin and his Chief of Staff, Colonel Robert Wienecke. Most of the men in the room, Arie saw, were old friends: he had jumped and fought with them during the 82nd’s assault on Nijmegen, Holland. His superiors in Brussels had not exaggerated the security measures he could expect. There were only fifteen officers present—regimental commanders and certain members of their staffs, all clearly hand-picked. The room itself was quite plain. There were a few benches and tables, some charts on the walls. At one end of the room a curtain covered a large, wall-sized map.

Each man’s name was now called out by a security officer who checked it off against a roster; then General Gavin quickly opened the proceedings. Standing by the curtained map, he motioned everyone to gather around. “Only those of you with an absolute reason to know have been asked to this briefing,” he began, “and I must emphasize that, until further orders, nothing you hear tonight is to go beyond this room. In a way, you will be training your men in the dark, for you will not be able to reveal to them the objective. Actually, you’ve already been giving them part of their training, although most of you were completely unaware of it. Over the last few weeks you and your men have been jumping or flying onto a specific training area deliberately marked and laid out to simulate the actual dimensions of our next assault target.

“Gentlemen, we’re going in for the kill. This is the Sunday punch.” He yanked the cords at the side of the map. The curtains slid back, revealing the target: Berlin.

Arie looked closely at the faces of the officers as they stared at the map. He thought he saw eagerness and anticipation. It did not surprise him. These commanders had been frustrated for months. Most of them had jumped with their units into Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Holland, but lately the division had been relegated to ground actions, mainly in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. Arie knew that as crack airborne troops they felt they had been denied their true role: assaulting objectives in front of the advancing armies and then holding on until relieved. The truth was that the Allied advance had been so fast that planned parachute drops had been canceled again and again.

The assault on Berlin, Gavin explained, would be part of a First Allied Airborne Army operation calling for units from three divisions. The 82nd, designated “Task Force A,” was to have the major role. Unrolling a transparent overlay from the top of the map, Gavin pointed to a series of squares and ovals marked in black grease pencil that outlined the various objectives and drop zones. “As plans now stand,” he said, “the 101st Airborne Division will grab Gatow Airfield, west of the city. A brigade from the British 1st Airborne Corps is to seize Oranienburg Airfield to the northwest.” He paused and then continued. “Our piece of real estate is right in Berlin itself—Tempelhof Airport.”

The 82nd’s target seemed incredibly small. In the sprawling 321 square miles of the city and its environs, the airport looked like a postage stamp—a smudge of green barely one and a half miles square, lying in a heavily built-up area. On its north, east and southern fringes there were, rather ominously, no less than nine cemeteries. “Two regiments will hold the perimeters,” Gavin said, “and the third will move into the buildings north of the field, toward the center of Berlin. We’ll hang on to this airhead until the ground forces get to us. That should not be long—not more than a few days at the most.”

“Blind” training of the paratroopers, Gavin said, was to be intensified. Terrain models of Tempelhof and the surrounding areas would be set up in a “secure” room of the headquarters; photographic coverage of the drop zone, intelligence appreciations and other materials would be made available to the regimental commanders and their staffs for specific planning. “We are also lucky,” said Gavin, “to have the services of Captain Harry. He is an expert on Berlin—particularly on Tempelhof and the surrounding region. He will be jumping with us and from now on will be available for briefings and to answer all your questions.”

Gavin paused again and looked at his officers. “I’m sure all of you want to know the answer to the big question: how soon? That’s up to the Germans. The airborne plan has been in the works since last November. There have been constant changes and we must expect many more before we get a target date. ‘A-Day,’ as that day has been designated, will depend on the speed of the Allied advance toward Berlin. Certainly the drop won’t be scheduled until the ground forces are within a reasonable distance of the city. But A-Day may only be a matter of two or three weeks away. So we don’t have much time. That’s all I can tell you now.”

Gavin stepped back and turned the meeting over to his staff officers. One after the other they went into each phase of the operation, and as they talked Gavin sat half listening. As he later recalled, he regretted the fact that security had prevented him from revealing the details fully. He had been less than candid, for he had told his men only one part of the First Allied Airborne operation—the operational section calling for the assault in conjunction with the Allied drive to capture Berlin. What he had not mentioned was that the same airborne drop might be ordered under a different military condition: the sudden collapse or surrender of Germany and her armed forces. But that part of the plan was still top secret. It was the logical extension to Operation Overlord—the invasion of Europe—and for a time had been known as Operation Rankin, Case C, and later as Operation Talisman. That last title had been changed in November, 1944, for security reasons. Now it bore the code name Operation Eclipse.

Eclipse was so secret that, apart from high-ranking staff officers at Supreme Headquarters, only a score of generals had been permitted to study it. They were army or corps commanders or those in the other services with equivalent responsibilities. Few division commanders knew anything about Eclipse. Gavin had learned only some of the plan’s objectives and those parts of it that specifically concerned him and his division.

During the previous months, at numerous conferences attended by General Lewis H. Brereton, Commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, and Gavin’s immediate superior, Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, Commander of the 18th Corps, Eclipse had been referred to as the occupation plan for Germany. It detailed the operational moves which would immediately take place in the event of a German surrender or collapse. Its main objectives were the enforcement of unconditional surrender and the disarmament and control of all German forces.

Under Eclipse conditions the airborne assault plan on Berlin called for the paratroopers to move swiftly to “gain control over the enemy’s capital and foremost administrative and transportation center… and display our armed strength.” They were to subdue any remaining pockets of fanatics who might continue to resist; rescue and care for prisoners of war; seize top-secret documents, files and films before they could be destroyed; control information centers such as postal and telecommunications offices, radio stations, newspaper and printing plants; capture war criminals and surviving principals of the government, and establish law and order. The airborne troops were to initiate all these moves pending the arrival of land forces and military government teams.

That was as much as Gavin had been told about Operation Eclipse. As to what the plan contained regarding the manner in which Germany or Berlin was to be occupied or zoned after the defeat, he had no knowledge. Right now Gavin’s only concern was to prepare the 82nd. But as a result of all the requirements, this meant the preparation of two distinct plans. The first was the operational assault to capture the city. The second, as conceived under Eclipse conditions, called for airborne units to drop on Berlin as an advance guard, but charged with a police action only. Gavin had told his commanders all he dared—even though he knew that if the war were to end suddenly the entire airborne mission would change dramatically. As things stood his orders were explicit. He was to follow the operational plan and get the 82nd ready for an airborne assault to capture Berlin.

Gavin was suddenly aware that the Dutch intelligence officer was concluding his part of the briefing. “I must repeat that if you are expecting help from anyone in Berlin, forget it,” Captain Harry was saying. “Will you find guides willing to help? Answer: No. Is there an underground such as we had in France and Holland? Answer: No. Even if some Berliners are privately sympathetic, they will be too frightened to show it. We can discuss all these matters in greater detail later, but right now let me assure you of this: do not have any illusions that you will be greeted as liberators with champagne and roses. The army, the SS and the police will fight until the last bullet, and then they will come out with their hands in the air, tell you that the whole thing was really a dreadful mistake, that it was all Hitler’s fault and thank you for getting to the city before the Russians.”

The big Dutchman tugged at his moustache. “But they are going to fight like blazes,” he said, “and it may be a bit sticky for a time. It will be worth it and I’m proud to be going with you. My friends, when we take Berlin, the war is over.”

Taking Berlin would not be easy, Gavin knew, but he thought that the psychological shock of the assault might in itself overwhelm the German defenders. It would be one of the war’s biggest airborne attacks. In the initial planning, the operation called for 3,000 protective fighters, 1,500 transport planes, probably more than 1,000 gliders and some 20,000 paratroopers—more than had been dropped in Normandy on D-Day. “All we need now,” Gavin told his officers as the meeting broke up, “is a decision and the word ‘Go.’”

Thirty miles away, at Mourmelon-le-Grand, the tough 101st Airborne Division was also in training and stood ready for any operation, but nobody in the 101st knew which one would be ordered. So many paratroop assault plans had “come down the pipe” from higher headquarters that the commander, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, his assistant, Brigadier General Gerald J. Higgins, and the staff found themselves in a quandary. They had to prepare for all of them, but they seriously wondered if any of the projected drops would ever take place.

Besides the Berlin project there were plans for an airborne attack on the German naval base at Kiel (Operation Eruption); for a series of drops on prisoner-of-war camps (Operation Jubilant); and for an assault to seize objectives ahead of the U.S. Seventh Army as it drove toward the Black Forest (Operation Effective). Many others were under study—and some were quite fantastic. The 101st headquarters had learned that the staff of the First Allied Airborne Army was even considering a jump on the mountains around Berchtesgaden, in Bavaria, to seize the Eagle’s Nest on the Obersalzberg and perhaps its owner, Adolf Hitler.

Obviously not all the drops could be scheduled. As General Higgins told the staff: “There just aren’t that many transport planes to accommodate the airborne demands if all these operations are ordered. Anyway, we’re not greedy—all we want is one!” But which operation would the airborne army get—and, in particular, what would be the role of the 101st? The Berlin drop seemed the most likely—even though the operations chief, Colonel Harry Kinnard, thought it would be “quite a hairy bit of business.” Everyone was bitter that in the event of a Berlin drop the men of the 101st had drawn Gatow Airfield, while their arch rivals, the 82nd, had been given the primary objective, Tempelhof. Still, Berlin was the biggest target of the war; there was enough for everyone.

To Colonel Kinnard an airborne drop seemed the perfect way to end the war in Europe. On the war room map he had even drawn a red line from the staging areas in France to the 101st’s drop zones in Berlin: the German capital was only 475 air miles away. If they got the green light he thought the first Americans could be in Berlin in just about five hours.

General Taylor, the 101st’s Commander, and his assistant, General Higgins, while eager for the attack, wondered if the airborne would even get the chance. Higgins morosely studied the map. “The way the ground forces are moving,” he said, “they’re going to put us out of business.”

On this same day, Sunday, March 25, the military leaders of the Western Allies received gratifying news from Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). In Washington and London, General George C. Marshall, U.S. Chief of Staff, and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, studied a cable from General Dwight D. Eisenhower that had arrived the night before. “The recent series of victories west of the Rhine has resulted as planned in the destruction of a large proportion of available enemy forces on the Western Front. While not desiring to appear over-optimistic it is my conviction that the situation today presents opportunities for which we have struggled and which must be seized boldly…. It is my personal belief that the enemy strength… is becoming so stretched that penetrations and advances will soon be limited only by our maintenance…. I am directing the most vigorous actions on all fronts… I intend to reinforce every success with utmost speed.”

2

FROM 800 FEET UP, the lines of men and vehicles seemed endless. Peering out of his unarmed Piper Cub, the scouting plane Miss Me, Lieutenant Duane Francies gazed down fascinated at the spectacle below. The landscape swarmed with troops, tanks and vehicles. Ever since late March, when the last of the armies crossed the Rhine, Francies had watched the breakout develop. Now the great river was far behind, and off to the right and left and stretching ahead as far as Francies could see was a vast khaki panorama.

Francies pushed the stick forward and Miss Me swooped down along the boundary of the British Second and U.S. Ninth armies. He waggled the wings, saw the answering waves of the troops, and headed due east to take up his task as the “eyes” of the leading tank columns of the 5th Armored Division. Victory was near, of that he was sure. Nothing could stop this advance. It seemed to the 24-year-old pilot, he later recalled, that “the very crust of the earth itself had shaken loose and was rushing like hell for the Elbe,” the last major water barrier before Berlin.

What Francies saw was only a minuscule part of the great Allied assault. For days now, in biting cold, in driving rain and through mud, in sleet and over ice, all along the Western Front from Holland almost to the Swiss border, a 350-mile-wide torrent of men, supplies and machines had been flooding into the German plains. The last great offensive was on. To destroy the German military might, seven powerful armies—eighty-five huge divisions, five of them airborne and twenty-three armored, the bulk of the immense Western Allied force of 4,600,000 men—were swarming into the Reich for the kill.

Makeshift flags of surrender—white sheets, towels, scraps of cloth—hung everywhere. In the towns and villages frightened Germans, still dazed by the battles that had washed over them, stared in amazement from doorways and shattered windows at the vast strength of the Allies that flowed all about them. The operation was gigantic, its speed breathtaking.

Hammering down every road were convoys of tanks, self-propelled guns, heavy artillery, armored cars, Bren gun carriers, ammunition conveyors, ambulances, gasoline trucks and huge Diesel transporters towing block-long trailers loaded with equipment—bridging sections, pontoons, armored bulldozers and even landing craft. Division headquarters were on the move, with their jeeps, staff cars, command caravans and massive radio trucks sprouting forests of trembling antennae. And in wave after wave, choking every road, were the troops—in trucks and on the backs of armored vehicles, marching by the sides of the motorized columns or slogging through the adjoining fields.

They formed a violent, gaudy parade, and in their midst were battle flags, regimental badges and insignia that had made history in World War II. In the divisions, brigades and regiments were Guardsmen who had fought the rearguard action during the evacuation of Dunkirk, bearded Commandos in faded green berets, veterans of Lord Lovat’s brigade who had raided the coasts of occupied Europe in the darkest years of the war, tough Canadians of the famous 2nd Division who had landed at Dieppe in the bloody rehearsal for the Normandy invasion. In the armored columns, pennants fluttering, were a few of the original “Desert Rats” of the 7th Armored Division who had helped run Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to ground in the Libyan sands. And riding high above the tremendous din of men and arms was the skirling music of the “Devils in Skirts,” the 51st Highland Division, their pipes sounding the prelude to battle as they had always done.

In the phalanxes of Americans were divisions with impudent names and colorful legends—the “Fighting 69th,” the 5th Armored “Victory Division,” “The Railsplitters” of the 84th Infantry, the 4th Infantry “Ivy Division.” There was the 2nd Armored, “Hell on Wheels,” whose unconventional tank tactics had caused havoc for the Germans all the way from the wadis of North Africa to the banks of the Rhine. There was the 1st Division, “The Big Red One,” with a record of more assault landings than any other American unit: the 1st, together with one of the oldest U.S. forces, the tough, tradition-steeped 29th “Blue and Gray” Division, had hung on when all seemed lost to a narrow strip of Normandy beach called “Omaha.”

One unit, the illustrious 83rd Infantry Division, which was moving as fast as an armored task force, had recently been nicknamed “The Rag-Tag Circus” by the correspondents. Its resourceful commander, Major General Robert C. Macon, had given orders to supplement the division’s transport with anything that moved; “no questions asked.” Now the Rag-Tag Circus was going flat out in a weird assortment of hurriedly repainted captured German vehicles: Wehrmacht jeeps, staff cars, ammunition trucks, Mark V and Tiger panzers, motor bikes, buses and two cherished fire engines. Out in front, with infantrymen hanging all over it, was one of the fire trucks. On its rear bumper was a large, flapping banner. It read, NEXT STOP: BERLIN.

There were three great army groups. Between Nijmegen in Holland and Düsseldorf on the Rhine, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group had erupted across the Rhine on March 23 and was now racing across the Westphalian plains, north of the great Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial mainspring. Under Montgomery’s command and holding his northern flank was the Canadian First Army under Lieutenant General Henry D. Crerar. In the center was Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey’s British Second Army (the most “allied” of all the Allied armies, the Second had, besides British, Scottish and Irish units, contingents of Poles, Dutch, Belgians, Czechs—and even a U.S. division, the 17th Airborne). Driving along the Army Group’s southern flank was Montgomery’s third force: Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s powerful U.S. Ninth Army. Already Montgomery’s forces had left the Rhine almost fifty miles behind.

Next in the Allied line, holding a front of about 125 miles along the Rhine from Düsseldorf to the Mainz area, was the Twelfth Army Group under the quiet, unassuming General Omar N. Bradley. Like Montgomery, Bradley had three armies. However, one of them, the U.S. Fifteenth under Lieutenant General Leonard Gerow, was a “ghost” army; it was being prepared for occupation duties and for the moment was playing a relatively non-active role, holding the western bank of the Rhine, directly in front of the Ruhr, from the Düsseldorf area to Bonn. Bradley’s strength lay with the powerful U.S. First and Third armies, a force totaling close to 500,000 men. General Courtney Hodges’ U.S. First Army—the “workhorse” of the European theater and the army that had led the Normandy invasion—was surging south of the Ruhr, charging east at a breakneck pace. Ever since the capture of the Remagen bridge on March 7, Hodges had steadily enlarged the bridgehead on the Rhine’s eastern bank. Division after division packed into it. Then on March 25 the men of the First had burst out of the lodgement with incredible force. Now, three days later, they were more than forty miles from their jump-off point. Storming across central Germany next to the First Army was General George S. Patton’s famous U.S. Third Army. The controversial and explosive Patton—whose boast was that his Third Army had traveled farther and faster, liberated more square miles of the continent and killed and captured more Germans than any other—racked up another first. He had stolen Montgomery’s thunder by secretly crossing the Rhine on the run more than twenty-four hours before the Twenty-first Army Group’s much-publicized assault on March 23. Now Patton’s tank columns were advancing eastward at the rate of thirty miles a day.

Next to Patton and on the right flank of General Bradley’s command was the third great Allied ground force, General Jacob Devers’ Sixth Army Group. Devers’ two armies—Lieutenant General Alexander Patch’s U.S. Seventh and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French First—held the front’s southern wing for roughly 150 miles. The armies of Patch and Patton were driving almost abreast of each other. De Tassigny’s army was fighting over some of the most rugged terrain on the entire front, through the mountainous Vosges and Black Forest. His force, the first post-liberation French army, had not existed six months before. Now its 100,000 soldiers hoped there was still time before the war ended to settle accounts with les boches.

Everyone had a score to settle. But along the Western Front the German Army scarcely existed any longer as a cohesive, organized force. Decimated during the Ardennes offensive, the Reich’s once-powerful armies had been finally smashed in the month-long campaign between the Moselle and the Rhine. Hitler’s decision to fight west of the Rhine rather than withdraw his battered forces to prepared positions on the eastern banks had proved disastrous; it would be recorded as one of the greatest military blunders of the war. Nearly 300,000 men had been taken prisoner and 60,000 were killed or wounded. In all, the Germans lost the equivalent of more than twenty full divisions.

Now it was estimated that although more than sixty German divisions remained, they were merely paper divisions, with only 5,000 men apiece instead of the full-strength complement of 9- to 12,000 each. In fact, it was believed that there were barely twenty-six complete divisions left in the West, and even these were ill-equipped, lacking ammunition, drastically short of fuel and transport, artillery and tanks. In addition, there were the shattered remnants of divisions, splintered SS groups, anti-aircraft gun troops, thousands of Luftwaffe men (the German air force had almost disappeared), quasi-military organizations, Home Guard Volkssturm units composed of untrained old men and boys, and even cadres of teen-age officer cadets. Disorganized, lacking communications and often without competent leaders, the German Army was unable to stop or even slow up the systematic onslaught of Eisenhower’s armies.

With the offensive from the Rhine barely a week old, the racing armies from Montgomery’s and Bradley’s groups were already closing in on the last German stronghold: the heavily defended Ruhr. Simultaneous with the developing drive eastward, three U.S. armies had suddenly and abruptly wheeled to take on the envelopment of the Ruhr from north and south. On the north, Simpson’s Ninth Army changed direction from due east and was beginning to march southeast. To the south, Hodges’ First and Patton’s Third armies, moving parallel, with Patton on the outside, were also turning and heading northeast for a link-up with Simpson. The trap had been sprung so quickly that the Germans—principally Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B, a force of no less than twenty-one divisions—seemed almost unaware of the pincers closing around them. Now they were threatened with encirclement, caught up in a pocket some 70 miles long and 55 miles wide—a pocket that Allied Intelligence said contained more men and equipment than the Russians had captured at Stalingrad.

In the overall plan to defeat Germany, the crossing of the Rhine and the capture of the Ruhr had always been considered essential—and formidable—objectives. The sprawling industrial Ruhr basin, with its coal mines, oil refineries, steel mills and armament factories covered almost 4,000 square miles. It had been thought that its capture might take months—but that was before the German debacle on the Rhine. Now the pincer maneuver—the stratagem of the quiet Missourian, Omar Bradley—was being executed at breathtaking pace. The Americans were moving so fast that division commanders now talked of completing the encirclement in a matter of days. Once the Ruhr was sealed, Germany would have little strength left to impede the progress of the great Allied offensive. Even now the enemy was so disrupted that there was no continuous defense line.

So disorganized were the German forces, in fact, that Major General Isaac D. White, commanding the U.S. 2nd Armored Division, ordered his men to bypass any major resistance and keep on going. The 2nd, spearheading the Ninth Army’s pincer movement along the northern rim of the Ruhr, had thereupon dashed more than fifty miles in just under three days. The Germans fought hard in isolated pockets but the 2nd encountered more trouble from blown bridges, hurriedly erected roadblocks, minefields and bad terrain than from enemy action. It was the same nearly everywhere.

Lieutenant Colonel Wheeler G. Merriam, leading the 2nd’s dash with his 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion, was encountering a great deal of confusion and very little fighting. On March 28, with his tanks spread out on either side of a main railway line running east and west, Merriam called a halt to report his new position. As his radio man tried to raise headquarters, Merriam thought he heard a steam whistle. Suddenly a German train, filled with troops and hauling flat cars loaded with armored vehicles and guns, puffed along the line, passing right through his units. Germans and Americans gazed at each other in amazement. Merriam, looking up at the Wehrmacht soldiers leaning out of the train windows, was so close that he distinctly noted “the individual hairs on men’s faces where they hadn’t shaved.” His men, flabbergasted, gazed after the train as it headed west. Not a single shot was fired by either side.

At last, galvanized into action, Merriam grabbed the radio telephone. Some miles to the west, the Division Commander, Major General White, saw the train come into sight at almost the same time that he heard Merriam’s excited warning on his jeep radio. White saw an MP, directing the and’s columns, suddenly halt the traffic that was moving across the tracks—and then White, like Merriam, stood mesmerized as the train rolled by. Seconds later, field telephone in hand, White was calling for artillery fire. Within minutes, the 92nd Field Artillery, set up farther west, let loose a salvo that cut the train cleanly in two. Later it was discovered that the flat cars carried numerous anti-tank guns, field pieces and a 16-inch railway gun. Captured soldiers who had been on the train said that they had been completely ignorant of the Allied advance. They had thought the Americans and British were still west of the Rhine.

Confusion was both an ally and a foe. Lieutenant Colonel Ellis W. Williamson of the 30th Infantry Division was moving so fast that he was even fired on by the artillerymen of another Allied division. They thought Williamson’s men were Germans retreating to the east. Lieutenant Clarence Nelson of the 5th Armored had an equally bizarre experience. His jeep was shot out from under him and Nelson jumped into a half-track which came under heavy fire. He ordered a tank to wipe out the enemy strong-point. It moved out, breasted a hill, and fired two rounds—into a British armored car. The occupants were irate but unhurt. They had been lying in wait hoping to find a target of their own. And Chaplain Ben L. Rose of the 113th Mechanized Cavalry remembers a tank commander reporting solemnly to the group leader: “We advanced the last hundred yards, sir—under grass. Resistance is heavy—both enemy and friendly.”

So rapid were the maneuvers and so fast were the German defenses crumbling that many commanders worried more about fatalities from road accidents than from enemy fire. Captain Charles King of the famed British 7th Armored Division begged his men to “be careful driving on these roads. It would be a pity,” he warned, “to die in an accident just now.” A few hours later King, one of the original Desert Rats, was dead; his jeep had hit a German landmine.

Most men had no idea where they were or who was on their flanks. Forward units, in many instances, were already running off their maps. The resourceful scouts of the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion were not in the least concerned. They were using emergency charts: silken handkerchief-size U.S. Air Force escape maps supplied to all combat fliers earlier in the war to help them slip out of enemy territory if they were shot down. The 82nd scouts confirmed their positions simply by checking with German signposts. In the 84th Division sector, Lieutenant Colonel Norman D. Carnes discovered that in his whole battalion there were only two maps left showing proposed advances. He was not worried either—not so long as his radios worked and he could keep in touch with headquarters. Lieutenant Arthur T. Hadley, a psychological warfare expert attached to the 2nd Armored Division, who used a loudspeaker on his tank instead of a gun to demand the surrender of German towns, was now using the maps in an ancient Baedeker guide intended for tourists. And Captain Francis Schommer of the 83rd Division always knew where he had led his battalion. He just grabbed the first German he saw, stuck a gun in his ribs, and in fluent German demanded to know where he was. He hadn’t had a wrong answer yet.

To the men of the armored divisions, the advance from the Rhine was their kind of warfare. The snaking lines of armor that now thrust, bypassed, encircled and carved through the German towns and armies were offering a classic example of armored tactics at their best. Some men tried to describe in letters the great armored race to the east. Lieutenant Colonel Clifton Batchelder, commander of the 1st Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, thought that the drive had “all the dash and daring of the great cavalry operations of the Civil War.” Lieutenant Gerald P. Leibman, noting that as the 5th Armored Division cut through the enemy, thousands of Germans were left behind fighting in isolated pockets, wrote tongue-in-cheek that “We are exploiting the enemy’s rear areas after breaching his frontal positions.” To Leibman the attack was reminiscent of General Patton’s armored dash out of the Normandy hedgerows, in which he had also participated. “No one eats or sleeps,” he noted. “All we do is attack and push on, attack and push on. It is France all over again—except this time the flags flying from the houses are not French Tricolors, but flags of surrender.” In the Devonshire Regiment racing along with the British 7th Armored Division, Lieutenant Frank Barnes told his friend Lieutenant Robert Davey that “it is wonderful to be going forward all the time.” Both men were elated, for at the briefing before the attack, they had been told that this was the last great push and that the ultimate objective was Berlin.

Field Marshal Montgomery had always known that Berlin was the ultimate objective. Quick to anger, impatient of delays, temperamental and often tactless, but always both realistic and courageous, Montgomery had fixed his sights on Berlin as far back as his great victory in the desert at El Alamein. The one man who had unreservedly said “Go” when weather might have delayed the invasion of Normandy, he now demanded the green light again. In the absence of any clear-cut decision from the Supreme Commander, Montgomery had announced his own. At 6:10 P.M. on Tuesday, March 27, in a coded message to Supreme Headquarters, he informed General Eisenhower: “Today I issued orders to Army Commanders for the operations eastwards which are now about to begin…. My intention is to drive hard for the line of the Elbe using the Ninth and Second Armies. The right of the Ninth Army will be directed on Magdeburg and the left of the Second Army on Hamburg….

“Canadian Army will operate… to clear Northeast Holland and West Holland and the coastal area to the north of the left boundary of the Second Army….

“I have ordered Ninth and Second Armies to move their armored and mobile forces forward at once to get through to the Elbe with utmost speed and drive. The situation looks good and events should begin to move rapidly in a few days.

“My tactical headquarters move to northwest of Bonninghardt on Thursday, March 29. Thereafter… my headquarters will move to Wesel-Münster-Wiedenbrück-Herford-Hanover—thence by autobahn to Berlin, I hope.”

Turning slowly in midair on the end of their ropes, Aunt Effie and Uncle Otto gazed mournfully down on the rubble-filled Berlin courtyard. From the back balcony of his second-story Wilmersdorf flat, Carl Wiberg spoke softly and encouragingly to the dachshunds as he pulled them up to safety. He was putting them through the air raid escape procedure he had devised, and the dogs, after weeks of training, were now well conditioned. So were Wiberg’s neighbors, although they thought that the Swede’s concern for his pets was excessive. Everyone had grown accustomed to the sight of Aunt Effie and Uncle Otto, coats brushed and gleaming, going up and down past the windows. No one paid much attention to the dangling ropes, either, which was exactly the way Wiberg wanted it. One day, if the Gestapo ever closed in, he might have to go over the back balcony and make his getaway down the same ropes.

He had thought out everything very carefully. A single slip could mean his exposure as an Allied spy, and now, with Berliners growing daily more suspicious and anxious, Wiberg was taking no chances. He had still not discovered Hitler’s whereabouts. His casual and innocent-seeming questions apparently evoked no suspicion, but they turned up no information, either. Even his high-ranking friends in the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe knew nothing. Wiberg was beginning to believe that the Führer and his court were not in Berlin.

Suddenly, as he lifted the dogs onto the balcony, the doorbell rang. Wiberg tensed; he was not expecting visitors, and he lived with a gnawing fear that one time he would go to the door and find the police. He carefully freed the dogs and then went to the door. Outside stood a stranger. He was tall and husky, dressed in working clothes and a leather jacket. Balanced on his right shoulder was a large carton.

“Carl Wiberg?” he asked.

Wiberg nodded.

The stranger dumped the carton inside the door. “A little present from your friends in Sweden,” he said with a smile.

“My friends in Sweden?” said Wiberg warily.

“Oh, you know damned well what it is,” said the stranger. He turned and went quickly down the stairs.

Wiberg softly closed the door. He stood frozen, looking down at the carton. The only “presents” he got from Sweden were supplies for the Berlin espionage operation. Was this a trap? Would the police come bursting into the apartment the moment he opened the box? Quickly he crossed the living room and looked cautiously down into the street. It was empty. There was no sign of his visitor. Wiberg returned to the door and stood for some time listening. He heard nothing out of the ordinary. At last he lugged the carton onto the living-room sofa and opened it. The box which had been so casually delivered contained a large radio transmitter. Wiberg suddenly discovered he was sweating.

Some weeks before, Wiberg had been notified by his superior, a Dane named Hennings Jessen-Schmidt, that henceforth he was to be “storekeeper” for the spy network in Berlin. Ever since, he had been receiving a variety of supplies through couriers. But up to now he had always been warned beforehand, and the actual deliveries had always been handled with extreme caution. His phone would ring twice, then stop; that was the signal that a delivery was to be made. The supplies arrived only during the hours of darkness, and generally during an air raid. Never before had Wiberg been approached in broad daylight. He was furious. “Somebody,” he was later to put it, “had acted in a very naïve and amateurish way and seemed bent on wrecking the entire operation.”

Wiberg’s position had become increasingly dangerous; he could not afford a visit from the police. For his apartment was now a virtual warehouse of espionage equipment. Cached in his rooms were a large quantity of currency, some code tables and a variety of drugs and poisons—from quick-acting “knockout” pellets, capable of producing unconsciousness for varying durations of time, to deadly cyanide compounds. In his coal cellar and in a rented garage nearby was a small arsenal of rifles, revolvers and ammunition. Wiberg even had a suitcase of highly volatile explosives. Because of air raids, this consignment had worried him considerably. But he and Jessen-Schmidt had found the perfect hiding place. The explosives were now in a large safety deposit box in the vault of the Deutsche Union Bank.

Wiberg’s apartment had miraculously survived the air raids up to now, but he dreaded to think of the consequences if it were hit. He would be immediately exposed. Jessen-Schmidt had told Wiberg that at the right time the supplies would be issued to various groups of operatives and saboteurs who would shortly arrive in Berlin. The operations of these selected agents were to begin on the receipt of a signal sent either by radio or through the courier network from London. Wiberg expected the distribution to be made soon. Jessen-Schmidt had been warned to stand by for the message sometime during the next few weeks, for the work of the teams would coincide with the capture of the city. According to the information Jessen-Schmidt and Wiberg had received, the British and Americans would reach Berlin around the middle of April.

3

IN THE QUIET of his study at No. 10 Downing Street, Winston Churchill sat hunched in his favorite leather chair, telephone cupped to his ear. The Prime Minister was listening to his Chief of Staff, General Sir Hastings Ismay, read a copy of Montgomery’s message to the Supreme Commander. The Field Marshal’s promise of “utmost speed and drive” was good news indeed; even better was his declared intention of heading for Berlin. “Montgomery,” the Prime Minister told Ismay, “is making remarkable progress.”

After months of stormy discussion between British and U.S. military leaders, Allied strategy seemed to have smoothed out. General Eisenhower’s plans, outlined in the fall of 1944 and approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff at Malta in January, 1945, called for Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group to make the main drive over the Lower Rhine and north of the Ruhr; this was the route that Churchill, in a letter to Roosevelt, had called “the shortest road to Berlin.” In the south, American forces were to cross the river and head into the Frankfurt area, drawing off the enemy from Montgomery. This supplementary advance could become the main line of attack if Montgomery’s offensive faltered. But as far as Churchill was concerned, the matter was settled. The “Great Crusade” was nearing its end, and for Churchill it was immensely satisfying that of all the Allied commanders it was the hero of El Alamein who seemed destined to capture the enemy capital. The Twenty-first Army Group had been specially reinforced for the offensive, with top priority in troops, air support, supplies and equipment. In all, Montgomery had under his command almost one million men in some thirty-five divisions and attached units, including the U.S. Ninth Army.

Four days before, Churchill had traveled with General Eisenhower to Germany to witness the opening phase of the river assault. As he stood on the banks of the Rhine watching the monumental offensive unfold, Churchill said to Eisenhower, “My dear General, the German is whipped. We’ve got him. He’s all through.”

And indeed, enemy resistance proved surprisingly light in most areas. In the U.S. Ninth Army sector, where two divisions—about 34,000 men—crossed shoulder to shoulder with the British, there were only thirty-one casualties. Now, Montgomery had more than twenty divisions and fifteen hundred tanks across the river and was driving for the Elbe. The road to Berlin—which Churchill had called “the prime and true objective of the Anglo-American armies”—seemed wide open.

It was open politically, too. There had never been any Big Three discussions about which army would take the city. Berlin was an open target, waiting to be captured by the Allied army that reached it first.

However, there had been discussions, plenty of them, regarding the occupation of the rest of the enemy nation—as the sectors laid out in the Operation Eclipse maps indicated. And the decisions regarding the occupation of Germany were to have a crucial effect on the capture and political future of Berlin. At least one of the Allied leaders had realized this from the start. “There will definitely be a race for Berlin,” he had said. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It had been seventeen months earlier, on November 19, 1943, that the matter was brought before Roosevelt. On that occasion the President had sat at the head of the table in a conference room of Admiral Ernest J. King’s suite aboard the battleship, U.S.S. Iowa. Flanking him were assistants and advisors, among them the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Roosevelt was en route to the Middle East for the Cairo and Teheran conferences—the fifth and sixth of the Allied leaders’ wartime meetings.

These were momentous days in the global struggle with the Axis powers. On the Russian front the Germans had suffered their biggest and bloodiest defeat: Stalingrad, encircled and cut off for twenty-three days, had fallen, and more than 300,000 Germans had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. In the Pacific, where more than one million Americans were fighting, the Japanese were being forced back on every front. In the West, Rommel had been routed from North Africa. Italy, invaded from Africa via Sicily, had surrendered; the Germans were hanging on grimly to the northern part of the country. And now the Anglo-Americans were preparing plans for the coup de grâce—Operation Overlord, the all-out invasion of Europe.

Aboard the Iowa, Roosevelt was showing sharp annoyance. The documents and maps before him were the essentials of a plan called Operation Rankin, Case C, one of many studies developed in connection with the forthcoming invasion. Rankin C considered the steps that should be taken if there was a sudden collapse or capitulation of the enemy. In that event the plan suggested that the Reich and Berlin should be divided into sectors, with each of the Big Three occupying a zone. What troubled the President was the area that had been chosen for his country by the British planners.

Rankin C had been created under peculiar and frustrating circumstances. The one man most directly affected by its provisions would be the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe. But this officer was still to be appointed. The difficult task of trying to plan ahead for the Supreme Commander—that is, to prepare both the cross-channel offensive, Operation Overlord, and a plan in the event Germany crumbled, Operation Rankin—had been given to Britain’s Lieutenant General Frederick E. Morgan,[9] known by the code name “COSSAC” (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, designate). It was a staggering and thankless job. When he was named to the post, Morgan was told by Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff: “Well there it is; it won’t work, of course, but you must bloody well make it!”

In preparing Rankin C Morgan had to consider all sorts of imponderables. What would happen if the enemy capitulated so abruptly that the Allies were caught off balance, as they were in World War I by the unforeseen German surrender of November, 1918? Whose troops would go where? What parts of Germany would be occupied by American, British and Russian forces? Who would take Berlin? These were the basic questions, and they had to be solved in clear and decisive ways if the Allies were not to be surprised by a sudden collapse.

Up to that time no specific plan for the war’s end had ever been set down. Although in the United States and Britain various governmental bodies discussed the problems that would arise on the cessation of hostilities, little headway was made in the formulation of an overall policy. There was agreement on only one point: that the enemy country would be occupied.

The Russians, by contrast, had no difficulty arriving at a policy. Occupation had always been taken for granted by Josef Stalin and he had always known exactly how he would go about it. As far back as December, 1941, he bluntly informed Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, of his post-war demands, naming the territories he intended to occupy and annex. It was an impressive list: included in his victory booty Stalin wanted recognition of his claims to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia; that part of Finland which he had taken when he attacked the Finns in 1939; the province of Bessarabia in Rumania; that part of eastern Poland which the Soviets had overrun in 1939 by agreement with the Nazis; and most of East Prussia. As he calmly laid down his terms guns were firing only fifteen miles from the Kremlin, in the Moscow suburbs, where German forces were still fighting desperately.

Although the British considered Stalin’s 1941 demands premature to say the least,[10] by 1943 they were preparing plans of their own. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had recommended that Germany be totally occupied and divided among the Allies into three zones. A cabinet body called the Armistice and Post-war Committee was thereupon set up under Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee, head of the Labour Party. The Attlee group issued a broad recommendation which also advocated a tripartite division, with Britain occupying the industry- and commerce-rich northwestern areas. Berlin, it was suggested, should be jointly occupied by the three powers. The only Ally with virtually no plans for a defeated Germany was the United States. The official U.S. view was that post-war settlements should await a time nearer the final victory. Occupation policy, it was felt, was primarily a military concern.

But now, with the collective strength of the Allies beginning to be felt on every front and with the tempo of their offensives mounting, the need for coordinating political planning had become acute. In October, 1943, at the Foreign Ministers Conference in Moscow, the first tentative step was taken to define a common Allied post-war policy. The Allies accepted the idea of joint responsibility in the control and occupation of Germany, and set up a tripartite body, the European Advisory Commission (EAC), to “study and make recommendations to the three governments upon European questions connected with the termination of hostilities.”

But in the meantime Morgan had produced his plan—a rough blueprint for the occupation of Germany—“prepared,” he later explained, “only after a powerful amount of crystal-ball gazing.” Initially, without political guidance, Morgan had produced a plan calling for a limited occupation. But his final Rankin C proposals reflected the Attlee committee’s more elaborate scheme. Morgan had sat down with a map and divided Germany into mathematical thirds, “faintly sketching in blue pencil along the existing provincial boundaries.” It was obvious that the Russians, driving from the east, must occupy an eastern sector. The division between the Anglo-Americans and the Russians in the revised Rankin C plan was a suggested line running from Lübeck on the Baltic to Eisenach in central Germany and from there to the Czech border. What the extent of the Soviet zone would be was of no concern to Morgan. He had not been asked to consider that since it “would naturally be the affair of the Russians who were not included in our COSSAC party.” But Berlin did bother him, for it would lie within the Russian sector. “Were we to continue to regard the place as a capital or was there to be a capital at all?” he wondered. “The internationality of the operation suggested that occupation of Berlin or any other capital, were there to be one, should be in equal tripartite force, by a division each of United States, British and Russian troops.”

As for the British and American zones, their north-south relationship seemed to Morgan to have been predetermined by one seemingly ridiculous but relevant fact: the location of the British and American bases and depots back in England. From the time the first American troops arrived in the United Kingdom they had been quartered first in Northern Ireland and later in the south and southwest of England. British forces were situated in the north and southeast. Thus the concentration of troops, their supplies and communications were separate—the Americans always on the right, the British on the left facing the continent of Europe. As Morgan foresaw Overlord, this design was to continue across the Channel to the invasion beaches of Normandy—and, presumably, through Europe to the heart of Germany itself. The British were to enter northern Germany and liberate Holland, Denmark and Norway. On the right, the Americans, following their line of advance through France, Belgium and Luxembourg, would end up in the southern German provinces.

“I do not believe,” Morgan said later, “that anyone at the time could have realized the full and ultimate implications of the quartering decision—which in all probability was made by some minor official in the War Office. But from it flowed all the rest.”

Aboard the Iowa, the President of the United States realized the full and ultimate implications perfectly well. Those implications were precisely what he did not like about the Rankin C plan. Immediately the afternoon session began at 3 P.M., Roosevelt launched into the subject, and he was plainly irritated. Commenting on the accompanying memorandum, in which the Chiefs of Staff asked for guidance on Morgan’s revised plan, Roosevelt rebuked his military advisors for “making certain suppositions”—in particular, that the U.S. should accept the British proposal to occupy southern Germany. “I do not like that arrangement,” declared the President. He wanted northwest Germany. He wanted access to the ports of Bremen and Hamburg, and also those of Norway and Denmark. And Roosevelt was firm on something else: the extent of the U.S. zone. “We should go as far as Berlin,” he said. “The U.S. should have Berlin.” Then he added: “The Soviets can take the territory to the east.”

Roosevelt was also displeased by another aspect of Rankin C. The U.S., in the south, would have a sphere of responsibility that included France, Belgium and Luxembourg. He was worried about France, and especially about the leader of the Free French Forces, General Charles de Gaulle, whom he saw as a “political headache.” As forces advanced into that country, the President told his advisors, De Gaulle would be “one mile behind the troops,” ready to take over the government. Above all, Roosevelt feared that civil war might break out in France when the war ended. He did not want to be involved, he said, “in reconstituting France. France,” declared the President, “is a British baby.”

And not only France. He felt that Britain should have the responsibility for Luxembourg and Belgium as well—and for the southern zone of Germany. As for the American zone—as the President visualized it, it would sweep across northern Germany (including Berlin) all the way to Stettin on the Oder. Then once again, measuring his words, he emphasized his displeasure over proposed zonal arrangements. “The British plan for the U.S. to have the southern zone,” Roosevelt said, “and I do not like it.”

The President’s suggestions startled his military advisors. Three months before, at the Quebec Conference, the Joint Chiefs had approved the plan in principle. So had the Combined American and British Chiefs of Staff. At that time, President Roosevelt expressed great interest in the division of Germany and added his weight to the urgency of the planning by expressing the desire that troops should “be ready to get to Berlin as soon as the Russians.”

The Joint Chiefs had believed the issues involved in Rankin C were all settled. They had brought up the plan on the Iowa only because political and economic matters, as well as military policy, were involved. Now the President was challenging not only the occupation plan but the very basis of Operation Overlord itself. If the projected zones of occupation were switched to accommodate the President’s wishes, a troop changeover would have to be made in England before the invasion. This would delay—and might thus jeopardize—the cross-Channel offensive, one of the most complicated operations ever undertaken in any war. It seemed clear to his military advisors that President Roosevelt either did not understand the immense logistical movements involved—or understood them perfectly well and was simply prepared to pay a phenomenal cost in order to get the northwest zone and Berlin for the United States. In their view, the cost was prohibitive.

General Marshall began diplomatically to elaborate on the situation. He agreed “that the matter should be gone into.” But, he said, the Rankin C proposals stemmed from prime military considerations. From a logistical standpoint, he reasoned, “We must have U.S. forces on the right… the whole matter goes back to the question of the ports of England.”

Admiral Ernest King, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, backed Marshall; the invasion plans were so far developed, he said, that it would be impractical to accept any change in the deployment of troops.

The immensity of the problem was such that Marshall believed an entire new scheme would be needed just for the switching of troops—one flexible enough to be applied “at any stage of development” in order to get the President what he wanted in Germany.

Roosevelt didn’t think so. He felt that if there was a total collapse of Hitler’s Reich the U.S. would have to get as many men as possible into Germany, and he suggested that some of them could be sent “around Scotland”—thereby entering Germany on the north. It was at this point that he expressed certainty that the Allies would race for Berlin; in that case, U.S. divisions would have to get there “as soon as possible.” Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s confidant and advisor, who was present on the Iowa, had the same sense of urgency: he thought that the U.S. would have to be “ready to put an airborne division into Berlin within two hours of the collapse.”

Again and again the President’s military advisors tried to impress on him the seriousness of the problems that a change in Rankin C would entail. Roosevelt remained adamant. Finally he pulled toward him a National Geographic map of Germany that lay on the table and began drawing. First he drew a line across Germany’s western frontier to Düsseldorf and south along the Rhine to Mainz. From there, with a broad stroke, he cut Germany in half along the 50th parallel roughly between Mainz on the west and Asch on the Czech border to the east. Then his pencil moved northeast to Stettin on the Oder. The Americans would have the area above the line, the British the sector below it. But as Roosevelt outlined it, the eastern boundary of the U.S. and British zones would form a rough wedge. Its apex was at Leipzig; from there it ran northeast to Stettin and southeast to Asch. The President did not say so, but this shallow triangle was obviously to be the Soviet zone. It contained less than half of the area allotted to Russia in the Rankin C proposal. Nor was Berlin located within the territory he left to Russia. It lay on the boundary line between the Soviet and U.S. zones. It was Marshall’s understanding that the President intended Berlin to be jointly occupied by U.S., British and Soviet troops.

The map showed unmistakably what the President had in mind. If the U.S. took the southern zone proposed by COSSAC in the Rankin paper, the President told his military chiefs, the “British will undercut us in every move we make.” It was quite evident, Roosevelt said, that “British political considerations are in back of the proposals.”

The discussion ended without any clear-cut decision, but Roosevelt had left no doubt in the minds of his military chiefs as to what he expected. United States occupation as envisaged by Roosevelt meant the quartering of one million troops in Europe “for at least one year, or maybe two.” His post-war plan was similar to the American approach to the war itself—an all-out effort, but with a minimum of time and involvement in European affairs. He foresaw a swift and successful thrust into the enemy’s heartland—“a railroad invasion of Germany with little or no fighting”—that would carry U.S. troops into the northwest zone and from there, into Berlin. Above all, the President of the United States was determined to have Berlin.[11]

Thus was offered the first concrete U.S. plan for Germany. There was just one trouble. Roosevelt, often criticized for acting as his own Secretary of State, had told no one his views except his military chiefs. They were to sit on the plan for almost four months.

After the Iowa conference, General Marshall gave the Roosevelt map—the one tangible evidence of administration thinking about the occupation of Germany—to Major General Thomas T. Handy, Chief of the War Department’s Operations Division. When General Handy returned to Washington the map was filed away in the archives of the top secret Operations Division. “To the best of my knowledge,” he was later to recall, “we never received instructions to send it to anyone at the Department of State.”

The shelving of the Roosevelt plan by his own military advisors was just one of a series of strange and costly blunders and errors of judgment that occurred among American officials in the days following the Iowa meeting. They were to have a profound influence on the future of Germany and Berlin.

On November 29, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met for the first time at the Teheran Conference. At this meeting the Big Three named the representatives who would sit in London on the all-important European Advisory Commission—the body charged with drafting surrender terms for Germany, defining the zones of occupation, and formulating plans for Allied administration of the country. To the EAC the British named a close friend of Anthony Eden, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Sir William Strang. The Russians chose a hard-headed bargainer, already known for his obstinacy—Fedor T. Gusev, Soviet Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Roosevelt appointed his envoy to the Court of St. James’s, the dedicated but shy and often inarticulate John G. Winant. Winant was never briefed on his new job, nor was he told of the President’s objectives in Germany.

However, an opportunity soon arose for the Ambassador to learn the nature of the policy he was supposed to espouse on the EAC—but the opportunity was lost. The Cairo Conference (Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek) ran from November 22 to 26; the Teheran meeting (Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin) began on November 28 and continued until December 1; after Teheran, Roosevelt and Churchill met again at Cairo on December 4. That night, at a long dinner meeting with Churchill, Eden and the President’s Chief of Staff, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt once again voiced objections to the Rankin C proposals. He told the British—apparently without divulging the contents of his map or the extent of his revisions—that he felt the U.S. should have the northwest zone of Germany. Churchill and Eden strongly opposed the suggestion, but the matter was passed on to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for study. They, in turn, recommended that COSSAC, General Morgan, should consider the possibility of revising the Rankin C plan.

Winant, although part of the delegation in Cairo, was not invited to the dinner meeting and apparently was never informed about the matters discussed there. As Roosevelt set out for home, Winant flew back to London for the first meeting of the EAC, only vaguely aware of what the President and the administration really wanted.

Ironically, only a few miles away from the U.S. Embassy in London, at Norfolk House in St. James’s Square, was a man who knew only too well what President Roosevelt wanted. Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, flabbergasted by his new orders to re-examine his Rankin C plan with a view to switching the British and U.S. zones, put his hard-pressed staff to work immediately. He very quickly reached the conclusion that it was impossible—at least until after Germany was defeated. He so reported to his superiors—and “that,” he later recorded, “ended the affair” so far as he was concerned.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military chiefs, despite their protestations that they did not want to be involved in politics, were, in fact, left to decide U.S. policy in post-war Europe. To them, the zoning and occupation of Germany were strictly military matters, to be handled by the Civil Affairs Division of the War Department. As an inevitable result, the War Department found itself at odds with the State Department over Germany. The consequence was a tug of war, in the course of which any hope of achieving a coherent, unified U.S. policy on the subject was irretrievably lost.

First, it was clear to all that something had to be done to direct Ambassador Winant in his negotiations with the EAC in London. To coordinate the conflicting U.S. views, a special group called the Working Security Committee was established in Washington early in December, 1943, with representatives from the State, War and Navy departments. The War Department representatives, officers from the Civil Affairs Division, actually refused at first to sit on the committee—or for that matter, to recognize the need for a European Advisory Commission at all. The entire problem of the surrender and occupation of Germany, the Army officers maintained, was purely a military matter that would be decided at the right time, and “at a military level,” by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Because of this farcical situation, the proceedings were held up for two weeks. Meanwhile, Winant sat in London without instructions.

At last, the military men agreed to the meetings and the committee settled down to work—but little was accomplished. Each group on the committee had to clear recommendations with its departmental superiors before anything could be cabled to Winant in London. Worse, each of the department heads could veto a suggested directive—a prerogative the War Department exercised repeatedly. The Acting Chairman of the Committee, Professor Philip E. Mosely of the State Department, who was to become Political Advisor to Ambassador Winant, commented later that the Civil Affairs officers “had been given strict instructions to agree to nothing, or almost nothing, and could only report the discussions back to their superiors. The system of negotiating at arm’s length, under rigid instructions and with the exercise of the veto, resembled the procedures of Soviet negotiators in their more intransigent moods.”

All through December, 1943, the haggling went on. In the Army’s opinion the zones of occupation probably would be determined more or less by the final position of troops when the surrender was signed. Under the circumstances, the Army representatives saw no sense in permitting Winant to negotiate any agreement about zones in the EAC.

So adamant were the military men that they even turned down a State Department plan which, though similar to the British scheme—it, too, divided Germany into three equal parts—had one vital additional element: a corridor linking Berlin, deep inside the Soviet area, with the Western zones. The author of the corridor was Professor Mosely. He fully expected the Soviets to object but he pressed for its inclusion for, as he was later to explain, “I believed, if the plan was presented first with impressive firmness, it might be taken into account when the Soviets began framing their own proposals.” Provision had to be made, he contended, “for free and direct territorial access to Berlin from the west.”

The State Department’s plan was submitted to the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division for study prior to a meeting of the full committee. For some time it was held up. Finally Mosely visited the offices of the Civil Affairs Division and sought out the colonel who was handling the matter. He asked the officer if he had received the plan. The colonel opened a bottom drawer of his desk and said, “It’s right there.” Then he leaned back in his chair, put both feet in the drawer and said, “It’s damn well going to stay there, too.” The plan was never transmitted to Winant.

In London the EAC met informally for the first time on December 15, 1943, and for Ambassador Winant it was perhaps just as well that the meeting dealt only with rules of procedure. He was still without official instructions. He had learned unofficially from British sources about the plan which had so upset Roosevelt but he did not know it as Morgan’s Rankin C: it was described to him as the Attlee Plan. He had also been informed, again unofficially (by U.S. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy), that the President wanted the northwest zone. Winant did not expect the British to switch.[12] Winant’s estimate was absolutely right.

On January 14, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the newly appointed Supreme Commander, arrived in London to take over his post, and all the machinery of military planning, heretofore in the hands of General Morgan, was officially transferred to his authority. But there was one plan that even he could hardly influence at this late date. The day following Eisenhower’s arrival, at the first formal meeting of the EAC, Morgan’s Rankin C plan was presented by Sir William Strang to Ambassador Winant and the Russian envoy, Fedor Gusev. The U.S., because of the deadlock in Washington, had lost the initiative. It would never regain it. Strang was later to write that he had an advantage over his colleagues, “in that, whereas they had to telegraph for instructions to a remote and sometimes unsympathetic and uncomprehending government, I was at the center of things, usually able at short notice to have my line of action defined for me. I had a further advantage in that the Government had begun post-war planning in good time and in an orderly way.”

On February 18, at the EAC’s second formal meeting, in what was surely a record for a Soviet diplomatic decision, the inscrutable Gusev, without argument of any kind, solemnly accepted the British zonal proposals.

The British proposal gave the Soviets almost 40 per cent of Germany’s area, 36 per cent of its population and 33 per cent of its productive resources. Berlin, though divided between the Allies, lay deep inside the proposed Soviet zone, 110 miles from the western Anglo-American demarcation line. “The division proposed seemed fair as any,” Strang later recalled, “and if it perhaps erred somewhat in generosity to the Soviets, this was in line with the desire of our military authorities who had preoccupations about post-war shortages of manpower, not to take on a larger area of occupation than need be.” There were many other reasons. One of them was the fear of both British and American leaders that Russia might make a separate peace with Germany. Another, which particularly concerned the U.S. military, was the fear that Russia would not join the war against Japan. And finally, the British believed that Russia, if not forestalled, might actually demand up to 50 per cent of Germany because of her wartime sufferings.

As far as the U.S. was concerned, the die now seemed cast. Although the Big Three still had to approve the British plan, the hard fact for the U.S. was that Britain and Russia were in agreement.[13] In a way it was a fait accompli and there was little that Winant could do except inform his government.

The Soviets’ quick acceptance of the British plan caught Washington and the President off balance. Roosevelt hurriedly dashed off a note to the State Department. “What are the zones in the British and Russian drafts and what is the zone we are proposing?” he asked. “I must know this in order that it conform with what I decided on months ago.” State Department officials were baffled and for a very good reason: they did not know what decisions Roosevelt had made at Teheran and Cairo regarding the zones.

There was a flurry of calls between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department before the President got his information. Then, on February 21, having seen the Anglo-Russian plan, Roosevelt reacted. “I disagree with the British proposal of the demarcation of boundaries,” he bluntly stated in a formal memorandum to the State Department. He made no mention of the Soviet zone, but instead took sharp exception once again to the sector proposed for the U.S., repeating even more forcefully what he had told his military advisors on the Iowa. The President’s memo was a revelation to the State Department.

“Our principal object,” he wrote, “is not to take part in the internal problems in southern Europe but is rather to take part in eliminating Germany as a possible and probable cause of a third World War. Various points have been raised about the difficulties of transferring our troops… from a French front to a northern German front—what is called a ‘leap-frog.’ These objections are specious because no matter where British and American troops are on the day of Germany’s surrender it is physically easy for them to go anywhere—north, east or south…. All things considered, and remembering that supplies come 3,500 miles or more by sea, the United States should use the ports of Northern Germany—Hamburg and Bremen—and… the Netherlands…. Therefore, I think American policy should be to occupy northwestern Germany….

“If anything further is needed to justify this disagreement with the British… I can only add that political considerations in the United States make my decision conclusive.” Then, to make absolutely sure that his Secretary of State really understood what he wanted, Roosevelt added, underlining the words: “You might speak to me about this if the above is not wholly clear.”

In a more jocular vein, he explained his position to Churchill. “Do please don’t ask me to keep any American forces in France,” he wrote the Prime Minister. “I just cannot do it! As I suggested before, I denounce in protest the paternity of Belgium, France and Italy. You really ought to bring up and discipline your own children. In view of the fact that they may be your bulwark in future days, you should at least pay for the schooling now!”

The U.S. Chiefs of Staff apparently heard from the President, too. Almost immediately the Army officers from the Civil Affairs Division reversed their position in the Working Security Committee. A few days after the London EAC meeting, a colonel strode into Professor Mosely’s office in the State Department and spread a map before him. “That’s what the President really wants,” he said. Mosely looked at the map. He had no idea when or under what circumstances it had been prepared. He had never seen it before—nor had anyone else in the State Department. The map was the one President Roosevelt had marked aboard the Iowa.

As mysteriously as it had emerged, the Roosevelt map thereupon again dropped out of sight. Mosely expected it to be brought up at the next meeting of the Washington committee. It never was. “What happened to it, I do not know,” Mosely said years later. “The next time we met, the Civil Affairs officers produced a brand-new map, a variation which they explained was based on the President’s instructions. Who received these instructions I was never able to discover.”

The new concept was somewhat similar to the President’s Iowa map, but not quite. The U.S. zone still lay in the northwest, the British in the south, but the dividing line between them running along the 50th parallel now stopped short of the Czech border. Furthermore, the eastern boundary of the U.S. zone swung sharply due east above Leipzig to encompass even more territory. There was one other change, more important than all the others: the U.S. zone no longer included Berlin. In Roosevelt’s original version, the eastern boundary of the U.S. zone had passed through the capital; now that line swung west in a wavering semi-circle around the city. Had Roosevelt—after insisting to his military chiefs that “We should go as far as Berlin” and that “the U.S. should have Berlin”—now changed his mind? The Civil Affairs officers did not say. But they demanded that the new proposal be immediately transmitted to London, where Winant was to demand its acceptance by EAC!

It was a preposterous proposal anyway, and the State Department knew it. Under the new plan both Britain and Russia would get smaller occupation areas; it seemed hardly likely that they would accept such an arrangement after both had approved an earlier, more favorable division of territory. The Civil Affairs officers had produced the proposal without any accompanying memoranda to assist Winant in rationalizing it before the EAC; when asked to prepare such background papers they refused and said that was the State Department’s job. The proposal was finally submitted to Winant without papers of any sort. The Ambassador frantically cabled for more detailed instructions. When they were not forthcoming, he shelved the plan; it was never submitted.

That was the last effort made to introduce a U.S. plan. Roosevelt continued to hold out against accepting the British scheme until late March, 1944. At that time, George F. Kennan, Ambassador Winant’s political advisor, flew to Washington to explain to the President the problems that had arisen in the EAC because of the deadlock. Roosevelt reviewed the situation and after examining the British proposal once again, told Kennan that “considering everything, it is probably a fair decision.” He then approved the Soviet zone and the overall plan, but with one proviso: the U.S., he insisted, must have the northwestern sector. According to the account that Kennan later gave Mosely, as the meeting broke up Kennan asked the President what had happened to his own plan. Roosevelt laughed. “Oh,” he said, “that was just an idea.”

All through the momentous months of 1944, as Anglo-American troops invaded the continent, routed the Germans out of France and began driving for the Reich, the behind-the-scenes political battles went on. Roosevelt clung firmly to his demands for the northwest zone of Germany. Churchill just as tenaciously refused to budge from his position.

In April Winant verbally informed the EAC of his government’s position, but he did not immediately put the President’s desires before the delegates in writing. The Ambassador was not prepared to do so until he received instructions on one matter that he thought was crucial. In the British plan there was still no provision for Western access to Berlin.

The British foresaw no problem about access. They assumed that when hostilities ended some form of German authority would sign the surrender and administer the country under the control of the Supreme Commander. No zone would be sealed off from any other and, as Strang saw it, there would be “some free movement of Germans from zone to zone and from western zones to the capital… also freedom of movement for all proper purposes for Allied military and civilian staffs in Germany.” Furthermore, whenever the subject had been mentioned in the EAC, Russia’s Gusev had smoothly assured Strang and Winant that he foresaw no difficulties. After all, as Gusev repeatedly put it, the mere presence of U.S. and British forces in Berlin automatically carried with it rights of access. It was a matter that was taken for granted, a kind of gentlemen’s agreement.

Nevertheless, Winant thought the provision should be nailed down. He believed that “corridors” such as those originally suggested by Mosely had to be included before the Big Three formally accepted the British scheme. He intended to present such a proposal at the same time he formally placed the President’s views on the zones before EAC. He wanted guarantees of specific rail, highway, and air routes through the Soviet zone to Berlin.

In May the Ambassador flew to Washington, saw the President, and then outlined his corridor provisions to the War Department. The Civil Affairs Division flatly turned down Winant’s plan.[14] Its officers assured him that the question of access to Berlin was “strictly a military matter anyway” and would be handled by local commanding officers through military channels when Germany was occupied. Winant, defeated, returned to London. On June 1 he formally agreed to the British plan and the proposed Soviet sector, with the one exception that the U.S. should have the northwestern zone. The document contained no clause providing for access to Berlin.[15] In tentative form, at least, the Allies had decided the future of the city: when the war ended it would be a jointly occupied island almost in the center of the Soviet zone.

The power struggle now moved swiftly to its conclusion. In late July, 1944, Gusev, eager to formalize Soviet gains in the EAC, deliberately brought matters to a head. Unless the Anglo-American dispute was settled so that the Big Three could sign the agreement, he said blandly, the U.S.S.R. could see little reason for further EAC discussions. The implied threat to pull out of the Advisory Commission, thus nullifying the work of months, had the desired effect.

On both sides of the Atlantic, anxious diplomats and military advisors urged their leaders to give in. Both Churchill and Roosevelt remained adamant. Roosevelt seemed to be the least flustered by the Soviet threat. Winant was told that since the U.S. had already agreed on the Soviet zone, the President could not understand why “any further discussion with the Soviets is necessary at this time.”

But Roosevelt was now being pressed from all sides. While the political squabbles went on, the great Anglo-American armies were swarming toward Germany. In the middle of August, General Eisenhower cabled the Combined Chiefs of Staff, warning that they might be “faced with the occupation of Germany sooner than had been expected.” Once again the disposition of troops as originally foreseen by Morgan in his Rankin C plan had returned to plague the planners: British troops on the left were heading for northern Germany, Americans on the right were advancing toward the south. Eisenhower now sought political guidance on the occupation zones—the first U.S. military man to do so. “All we can do,” he said, “is approach the problem on a purely military basis” and that would mean keeping the “present deployment of our armies….” Eisenhower added: “Unless we receive instructions to the contrary, we must assume this solution is acceptable… considering the situation which may confront us and the absence of basic decisions as to the zones of occupation.”

The crisis, long inevitable, had now been reached. The U.S. War and State departments, for once in complete agreement, were faced with a dilemma: no one was prepared to reopen the issue with the President again. In any case, the matter was due to be discussed at a new Roosevelt-Churchill meeting scheduled for the fall; any final decision would have to be put off till then. In the meantime, Eisenhower’s planning could not be delayed. Since the U.S. Chiefs had plans already prepared for a U.S. occupation of either the northwest or southern zones, on August 18 they advised Eisenhower that they were “in complete agreement” with his solution. Thus, although Roosevelt had not yet announced his decision, the assumption that the U.S. would occupy the southern zone was allowed to stand.

Roosevelt and Churchill met once again in Quebec in September, 1944. Roosevelt had changed visibly. The usually vital President looked frail and wan. The crippling polio which his renowned charm and witty informality cloaked was now evident in the painful hesitancy of his every move. But there was more than that. He had been in office since 1933—longer than any other U.S. President—and even now was seeking a fourth term. The campaigning, the diplomacy at home and abroad, the strain of the heavy burdens of the war years, were fast taking their toll. It was easy to see why his doctors, family and friends were begging him not to run again. To the British delegation at Quebec, Roosevelt appeared to be failing rapidly. Churchill’s Chief of Staff, General Sir Hastings Ismay, was shocked by his appearance. “Two years before,” he said, “the President had been the picture of health and vitality, but now he had lost so much weight that he seemed to have shrunk: his coat sagged over his broad shoulders and his collar looked several sizes too big. We knew the shadows were closing in.”

Tired, frustrated, trapped by circumstances and under pressure from his advisors and Churchill, the President finally gave in and accepted the southern zone. The British met him halfway. Among other concessions, they agreed to give the U.S. control of the great harbors and staging areas of Bremen and Bremerhaven.[16]

The final wartime meeting of the Big Three occurred at Yalta, in February, 1945. It was a crucial conference. Victory lay ahead, but it was clear that the bonds binding the Allied leaders were weakening as political considerations replaced military realities. The Russians were becoming more demanding and arrogant with every mile they advanced into central Europe. Churchill, long a foe of Communism, was particularly concerned about the future of countries like Poland, which the Red Army had liberated and now controlled.

Roosevelt, gaunt and much weaker than he had been at Quebec, still saw himself in the role of the Great Arbiter. In his view a peaceful post-war world could be achieved only with the cooperation of Stalin. He had once expressed his policy toward the Red leader in these terms: “I think that if I give him everything I can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” The President believed that the U.S. could “get along with Russia” and that he could “manage Stalin” for, as he had once explained, “on a man-to-man basis… Uncle Joe… is get-at-able.” Although the President was growing increasingly concerned about Soviet post-war intentions, he still seemed almost determinedly optimistic.

At Yalta the last great wartime decisions were made. Among them was one giving France full partnership in the occupation of Germany. The French zone of Germany and the French sector of Berlin were carved out of the British and U.S. areas; Stalin, who was opposed to French participation, refused to contribute any part of the Russian zone. On February 11, 1945, the Big Three formally accepted their respective zones.

Thus, after sixteen months of confusion and squabbling, the U.S. and Britain at last were in accord. The occupation plan, based on a scheme originally called Rankin C but now known to the military as Operation Eclipse, contained one staggering omission: there was no provision whatever for Anglo-American access to Berlin.

It took just six weeks for Stalin to violate the Yalta agreement. Within three weeks of the conference, Russia had ousted the government of Soviet-occupied Rumania. In an ultimatum to King Michael, the Reds bluntly ordered the appointment of Petru Groza, the Rumanian Communist chief, as Prime Minister. Poland was lost, too: the promised free elections had not taken place. Contemptuously, Stalin seemed to have turned his back on the very heart of the Yalta pact, which stated that the Allied powers would assist “peoples liberated from the dominion of Nazi Germany and… former Axis satellite states… to create democratic institutions of their own choice.” But Stalin saw to it that any Yalta provisions that favored him—such as the division of Germany and Berlin—were carried out scrupulously.

Roosevelt had been warned often of Stalin’s ruthless territorial ambitions by his Ambassador to Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, but now the Soviet leader’s flagrant breach of faith came to him as a staggering shock. On the afternoon of Saturday, March 24, in a small room on the top floor of the White House, Roosevelt had just finished lunch with Mrs. Anna Rosenberg, his personal representative charged with studying the problems of returning veterans, when a cable arrived from Harriman on the Polish situation. The President read the message and erupted in a violent display of anger, repeatedly pounding the arms of his wheelchair. “As he banged the chair,” Mrs. Rosenberg later recalled, “he kept repeating: ‘Averell is right! We can’t do business with Stalin! He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta!’”[17]

In London, Churchill was so disturbed by Stalin’s departure from the spirit of Yalta that he told his secretary he feared the world might consider that “Mr. Roosevelt and I have underwritten a fraudulent prospectus.” On his return from Yalta he had told the British people that “Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honorable friendship and equality with the western democracies. I feel… their word is their bond.” But on this same Saturday, March 24, the worried Prime Minister remarked to his aide: “I hardly like dismembering Germany until my doubts about Russia’s intentions have been cleared away.”

With Soviet moves becoming “as plain as a pikestaff,” Churchill felt that the Western Allies’ most potent bargaining force would be the presence of Anglo-American troops deep inside Germany, so they could meet with the Russians “as far to the east as possible.” Thus, Field Marshal Montgomery’s message announcing his intention of dashing for the Elbe and Berlin was heartening news indeed: to Churchill, the quick capture of Berlin now seemed vital. But, despite the Montgomery message, no commander along the western front had as yet been ordered to take the city. That order could come from only one man: the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower.

4

THE RAID took Berlin’s defenders completely by surprise. Shortly before 11 A.M. on Wednesday, March 28, the first planes appeared. Immediately, batteries all over the city crashed into action, belching shells into the sky. The racket of the guns, coupled with the belated wailing of air raid sirens, was earsplitting. These planes were not American. U.S. raids were almost predictable: they usually occurred at 9 A.M. and then again at midday. This attack was different. It came from the east, and both the timing and tactics were new. Screaming in at rooftop level, scores of Russian fighters emptied their guns into the streets.

In Potsdamer Platz, people ran in all directions. Along the Kurfürstendamm, shoppers dived for doorways, ran for subway entrances, or headed for the protective ruins of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church. But some Berliners, who had been standing for hours in long queues waiting to buy their weekly rations, refused to budge. In Wilmersdorf, 36-year-old Nurse Charlotte Winckler was determined to get food for her two children, Ekkehart, six, and Barbara, nine months old. In Adolf-Hitler-Platz, Gertrud Ketzler and Inge Rühling, long-time friends, waited calmly with others before a grocery store. Some time ago both had decided to commit suicide if the Russians ever reached Berlin, but they weren’t thinking about that now. They intended to bake an Easter cake, and for days had been shopping and storing the items they would require. Over in Köpenick, plump 40-year-old Hanna Schultze was hoping to get some extra flour for a holiday marble cake. During the day’s shopping, Hanna also hoped to find something else: a pair of suspenders for her husband, Robert. His last remaining pair was almost beyond saving.

During air raids Erna Saenger always worried about “Papa,” as she called her husband Konrad. He obstinately refused to go into a Zehlendorf shelter and, as usual, he was out. Konrad was trudging toward his favorite restaurant, the Alte Krug, on Königin-Luise Strasse. No air raid yet had ever stopped the 78-year-old veteran from meeting with his World War I comrades every Wednesday, He wouldn’t be stopped today, either.

One Berliner was actually enjoying every minute of the attack. Wearing an old army helmet, young Rudolf Reschke ran back and forth between the door of his Dahlem home and the center of the street, deliberately taunting the low-flying planes. Each time Rudolf waved to the pilots. One of them, apparently seeing his antics, dived right for him. As Rudolf ran, a burst of fire ripped across the sidewalk behind him. It was just part of the game for Rudolf. As far as he was concerned, the war was the greatest thing that had ever happened in his fourteen years of life.

Wave after wave of planes hit the city. As fast as squadrons exhausted their ammunition, they peeled off to the east, to be replaced by others swarming in to the attack. The surprise Russian raid added a new dimension of terror to life in Berlin. Casualties were heavy. Many civilians were hit not by enemy bullets, but by the returning fire from the city’s defenders. To get the low-flying planes in their sights, anti-aircraft crews had to depress their gun barrels almost to tree-top level. As a result, the city was sprayed with red-hot shrapnel. The shell fragments came mainly from the six great flak towers that rose above the city at Humboldthain, Friedrichshain, and from the grounds of the Berlin Zoo. These massive bombproof forts had been built in 1941-42 after the first Allied attacks on the city. Each was huge, but the largest was the anti-aircraft complex built, incongruously, near the bird sanctuary in the zoo. It had twin towers. The smaller, called L Tower, was a communications control center, bristling with radar antennae. Next to it, guns now erupting with flame, stood G Tower.

G Tower was immense. It covered almost the area of a city block and stood 132 feet high—equivalent to a 13-story building. The reinforced concrete walls were more than 8 feet thick, and deep-cut apertures, shuttered by 3- to 4-inch steel plates, lined its sides. On the roof a battery of eight 5-inch guns was firing continuously, and in each of the four turreted corners multiple-barreled, quick-firing “pom pom” cannons pumped shells into the sky.

Inside the fort the noise was almost intolerable. Added to the firing of the batteries was the constant rattling of automatic shell elevators, which carried ammunition in an endless stream from a ground floor arsenal to each gun. G Tower was designed not only as a gun platform but as a huge five-story warehouse, hospital and air raid shelter. The top floor, directly underneath the batteries, housed the 100-man military garrison. Beneath that was a 95-bed Luftwaffe hospital, complete with X-ray rooms and two fully equipped operating theaters. It was staffed by six doctors, twenty nurses and some thirty orderlies. The next floor down, the third, was a treasure trove. Its storerooms contained the prize exhibits of Berlin’s top museums. Housed here were the famous Pergamon sculptures, parts of the huge sacrificial altar built by King Eumenes II of the Hellenes around 180 B.C.; various other Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, including statues, reliefs, vessels and vases; “The Gold Treasure of Priam,” a huge collection of gold and silver bracelets, necklaces, earrings, amulets, ornaments and jewels, excavated by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1872 on the site of the ancient city of Troy. There were priceless Gobelin tapestries, a vast quantity of paintings—among them the fine portraits of the 19th-century German artist Wilhelm Leibl—and the enormous Kaiser Wilhelm coin collection. The two lower floors of the tower were mammoth air raid shelters, with large kitchens, food storerooms and emergency quarters for the German broadcasting station, Deutschlandsender.

Entirely self-contained, G Tower had its own water and power, and easily accommodated fifteen thousand people during air raids. The complex was so well stocked with supplies and ammunition that the military garrison believed that, no matter what happened to the rest of Berlin, the zoo tower could hold out for a year if need be.

As suddenly as it had begun, the raid was over. The guns atop G Tower stuttered to a stop. Here and there over Berlin black smoke curled up from fires started by incendiary bullets. The raid had lasted slightly longer than twenty minutes. As quickly as they had emptied, the Berlin streets filled again. Outside the markets and shops, those who had left the queues now angrily tried to regain their former places from others who just as stubbornly refused to give them up.

In the zoo itself, one man hurried outside as soon as the guns of G Tower stopped firing. Anxious as always after a raid, 63-year-old Heinrich Schwarz headed for the bird sanctuary, carrying with him a small pail of horse meat. “Abu, Abu,” he called. A strange clapping sound came from the edge of a pond. Then the weird-looking bird from the Nile, with the blue-gray plumage and the huge beak resembling an up-ended Dutch clog, stepped daintily out of the water on thin stilt-like legs and came toward the man. Schwarz felt an immense relief. The rare Abu Markub stork was still safe.

Even without the raids, the daily encounter with the bird was becoming more and more of an ordeal for Schwarz. He held out the horse meat. “I have to give you this,” he said. “What can I do? I have no fish. Do you want it or not?” The bird closed its eyes. Schwarz sadly shook his head. The Abu Markub made the same refusal every day. If its stubbornness persisted, the stork would surely die. Yet there was nothing Schwarz could do. The last of the tinned tuna was gone and fresh fish was nowhere to be found in Berlin—at least not for the Berlin Zoo.

Of the birds still remaining, the Abu Markub was the real pet of head bird-keeper Schwarz. His other favorites had long since gone—“Arra,” the 75-year-old parrot which Schwarz had taught to say “Papa,” had been shipped to the Saar for safety two years ago. All the German “Trappen” ostriches had died from concussion or shock during the air raids. Only Abu was left—and he was slowly dying of starvation. Schwarz was desperate with worry. “He is getting thinner and thinner,” he told his wife Anna. “His joints are beginning to swell. Yet each time I try to feed him, he looks at me as though to say, ‘Surely you have made a mistake. This is not for me.’”

Of the fourteen thousand animals, birds, reptiles and fish which had populated the zoo in 1939, there were now only sixteen hundred of all species left. In the six years of the war, the sprawling zoological gardens—which included an aquarium, insectarium, elephant and reptile houses, restaurants, movie theaters, ballrooms and administration buildings—had been hit by more than a hundred high-explosive bombs. The worst raid had been in November, 1943, when scores of animals had been killed. Soon after, many of those remaining had been evacuated to other zoos in Germany. Finding supplies for the remaining sixteen hundred animals and birds was becoming daily more difficult in food-rationed Berlin. The zoo’s requirements, even for its reduced menagerie, were staggering: not only large quantities of horse meat and fish, but thirty-six different kinds of other food, ranging from noodles, rice and cracked wheat to canned fruit, marmalade and ant larvae. There was plenty of hay, straw, clover and raw vegetables, but nearly everything else had become almost unobtainable. Although ersatz food was being used, every bird or animal was on less than half-rations—and looked it.

Of the zoo’s nine elephants, only one now remained. Siam, his skin hanging in great gray folds, had become so bad-tempered that keepers were afraid to enter his cage. Rosa, the big hippo, was miserable, her skin dry and crusted, but her 2-year-old baby, Knautschke, everybody’s favorite, still maintained his youthful jauntiness. Pongo, the usually good-natured 530-pound gorilla, had lost more than 50 pounds and sat in his cage, sometimes motionless for hours, glowering morosely at everyone. The five lions (two of them cubs), the bears, zebras, hartebeests, monkeys and the rare wild horses, all were showing effects of diet deficiencies.

There was a third threat to the existence of the zoo creatures. Every now and then, Keeper Walter Wendt reported the disappearance of some of his rare cattle. There was only one possible conclusion: some Berliners were stealing and slaughtering the animals to supplement their own meager rations.

Zoo Director Lutz Heck was faced with a dilemma—a dilemma that not even the friendship of his hunting companion, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, or anyone else for that matter, could alleviate. In the event of a prolonged siege, the birds and animals would surely die from starvation. Worse, the dangerous animals—the lions, bears, foxes, hyenas, Tibetan cats and the zoo’s prize baboon, one of a rare species which Heck had personally brought back from the Cameroons—might escape during the battle. How soon, wondered Heck, should he destroy the baboon and the five lions he loved so much?

Gustav Riedel, the lion-keeper, who had bottle-fed the g-month-old lion cubs, Sultan and Bussy, had made up his mind about one thing: despite any orders, he intended to save the little lions. Riedel was not alone in his feeling. Almost every keeper had plans for the survival of his favorite. Dr. Katherina Heinroth, wife of the 74-year-old director of the bombed-out aquarium, was already caring for a small monkey, Pia, in her apartment. Keeper Robert Eberhard was obsessed with protecting the rare horses and the zebras entrusted to his care. Walter Wendt’s greatest concern were the ten wisent—near cousins of the American bison. They were his pride and joy. He had spent the best part of thirty years in scientific breeding to produce them. They were unique and worth well over one million marks—roughly a quarter of a million dollars.

As for Heinrich Schwarz, the bird-keeper, he could no longer stand the suffering of the Abu Markub. He stood by the pond and called the great bird once more. When it came, Schwarz bent over and tenderly lifted it into his arms. From now on the bird would live—or die—in the Schwarz family bathroom.

In the baroque red and gold Beethoven Hall, the sharp rapping of the baton brought a sudden hush. Conductor Robert Heger raised his right arm and stood poised. Outside, somewhere in the devastated city, the sound of a fire engine’s wailing siren faded slowly away. For a moment longer Heger held the pose. Then his baton dropped and, heralded by four muffled drumbeats, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto welled softly out from the huge Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

As the woodwinds began their quiet dialogue with the drums, soloist Gerhard Taschner waited, his eyes on the conductor. Most of the audience that crowded the undamaged concert hall on Köthenerstrasse had come to hear the brilliant 23-year-old violinist, and as the bell-clear notes of his violin suddenly soared, faded away and soared again, they listened, rapt. Witnesses present at this afternoon concert in the last week of March recall that some Berliners were so overcome by Taschner’s playing that they quietly wept.

All during the war the 105-man Philharmonic had offered Berliners a rare and welcome release from fear and despair. The orchestra came under Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, and its members had been exempted from military service, since the Nazis considered the Philharmonic good for morale. With this, Berliners completely agreed. For music lovers the orchestra was like a tranquilizer transporting them away from the war and its terrors for a little while.

One man who was always deeply moved by the orchestra was Reichsminister Albert Speer, Hitler’s Armament and War Production chief, now sitting in his usual seat in the middle of the orchestra section. Speer, the most cultured member of the Nazi hierarchy, rarely missed a performance. Music, more than anything else, helped him shed his anxieties—and he had never needed its help more than he did now.

Reichsminister Speer was facing the greatest problem of his career. All through the war, despite every conceivable kind of setback, he had kept the Reich’s industrial might producing. But long ago his statistics and projections had spelled out the inevitable: the Third Reich’s days were numbered. As the Allies penetrated ever deeper into Germany the realistic Speer was the only cabinet minister who dared tell Hitler the truth. “The war is lost,” he wrote the Führer on March 15, 1945. “If the war is lost,” Hitler snapped back, “then the nation will also perish.” On March 19, Hitler issued a monstrous directive: Germany was to be totally destroyed. Everything was to be blown up or burned—power plants, water and gas works, dams and locks, ports and waterways, industrial complexes and electrical networks, all shipping and bridges, all railroad rolling stock and communications installations, all vehicles and stores of whatever kind, even the country’s highways.

The incredulous Speer appealed to Hitler. He had a special. personal stake in getting this policy reversed. If Hitler succeeded in eliminating German industry, commerce and architecture, he would be destroying many of Speer’s own creations—his bridges, his broad highways, his buildings. The man who, more than anyone else, was responsible for forging the terrible tools of Hitler’s total war could not face their total destruction. But there was another, more important consideration as well. No matter what happens to the regime, Speer told Hitler, “we must do everything to maintain, even if only in a primitive manner, a basis for the existence of the nation…. We have no right to carry out demolitions which might affect the life of the people….”

Hitler was unmoved. “There is no need to consider the basis of even a most primitive existence any longer,” he replied. “On the contrary, it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves. The nation has proved itself weak….” With these words Hitler wrote off the German people. As he explained to Speer, “those who remain after the battle are of little value, for the good have fallen.”

Speer was horrified. The people who had fought so hard for their leader apparently now meant less than nothing to the Führer. For years Speer had closed his eyes to the more brutal side of the Nazis’ operations, believing himself to be intellectually above it all. Now, belatedly, he came to a realization which he had refused to face for months. As he put it to General Alfred Jodl, “Hitler is totally mad… he must be stopped.”

Between March 19 and 23 a stream of “scorched earth” orders flashed out from Hitler’s headquarters to gauleiters and military commanders all over Germany. Those who were slow to comply were threatened with execution. Speer immediately went into action. Fully aware that he was placing his own life in jeopardy, he set out to stop Hitler’s plan, aided by a small coterie of high-ranking military friends. Speer telephoned industrialists, flew to military garrisons, visited provincial officials, everywhere insisting, even to the most die-hard Nazis, that Hitler’s plan spelled the end of Germany forever.

Considering the serious purpose of the Reichsminister’s campaign, his presence at the Philharmonic concert might have seemed frivolous—were it not for one fact: high on the list of German resources Speer was fighting to preserve was the Philharmonic itself. A few weeks earlier, Dr. Gerhart von Westermann, the orchestra manager, had asked violinist Taschner, a favorite of Speer’s, to seek the Reichsminister’s help in keeping the Philharmonic intact. Technically, the musicians were exempt from military service. But with the battle for Berlin approaching, Von Westermann feared that any day now the entire orchestra might be ordered into the Volkssturm, the Home Guard. Although the orchestra’s affairs were supposed to be administered by Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, Von Westermann knew there was no hope of assistance from that quarter. He told the violinist, “You’ve got to help us. Goebbels has forgotten us… go to Speer and ask him for help… we’ll all be on our knees to you.”

Taschner was extremely reluctant: any talk of shirking or flight was considered treasonable and could lead to disgrace or imprisonment. But at last he agreed.

At his meeting with Speer, Taschner began hesitantly. “Mr. Minister,” he said, “I would like to speak with you about a rather delicate matter. I hope you will not misunderstand… but nowadays some things are difficult to talk about….” Looking at him sharply, Speer quickly put him at his ease and, encouraged, Taschner poured out the story of the orchestra’s plight. The Reichsminister listened intently. Then Speer told Taschner that Von Westermann was not to worry. He had thought of a plan to do much more than keep the musicians out of the Volkssturm. At the very last moment he intended secretly to evacuate the entire 105-man orchestra.

Speer had now carried out the first part of the plan. The 105 men seated on the stage of Beethoven Hall were wearing dark business suits instead of the usual tuxedos, but of all the audience, only Speer knew the reason. The tuxedos—along with the orchestra’s fine pianos, harps, famous Wagner tubas and musical scores—had been removed quietly from the city by truck convoy three weeks before. The bulk of the precious cargo was cached at Plassenburg near Kulmbach, 240 miles southwest of Berlin—conveniently in the path of the advancing Americans.

The second part of Speer’s plan—saving the men—was more complicated. Despite the intensity of the air raids, and the proximity of the invading armies, the Propaganda Ministry had never suggested cutting short the Philharmonic’s schedule. Concerts were scheduled at the rate of three or four a week, in between air raids, right through to the end of April, when the season would officially end. Any evacuation of the musicians before that time was out of the question: Goebbels undoubtedly would charge the musicians with desertion. Speer was determined to evacuate the orchestra to the west; he had absolutely no intention of allowing the men to fall into Russian hands. But his scheme was entirely dependent on the speed of the Western Allies’ advance: he was counting on the Anglo-Americans to beat the Russians to Berlin.

Speer did not intend to wait until the Western Allies entered the city. As soon as they were close enough to be reached by an overnight bus trip, he would give the order to evacuate. The crux of the plan lay in the signal to leave. The musicians would all have to leave at once, and after dark. That meant the flight must start right after the concert. To avoid a breach of security, word of the move would have to be withheld as long as possible. Speer had come up with an ingenious method of alerting the musicians: at the very last minute the orchestra conductor would announce a change in the program and the Philharmonic would then play a specific selection which Speer had chosen. That would be the musicians’ cue; immediately after the performance they would board a convoy of buses waiting in the darkness outside Beethoven Hall.

In Von Westermann’s possession was the music Speer had requested as the signal. When it was delivered by Speer’s cultural affairs specialist, Von Westermann had been unable to hide his surprise. He queried Speer’s assistant. “Of course you are familiar with the music of the last scenes,” he said. “You know they picture the death of the gods, the destruction of Valhalla and the end of the world. Are you sure this is what the Minister ordered?” There was no mistake. For the Berlin Philharmonic’s last concert, Speer had requested music from Wagner’s Die Götterdämmerung—The Twilight of the Gods.

In this choice, if Von Westermann had known it, lay a clue to Speer’s final and most ambitious project. The Reichsminister, determined to save as much of Germany as he could, had decided that there was just one way to do it. For weeks now, perfectionist Albert Speer had been trying to find just the right way to murder Adolf Hitler.

All along the eastern front the great Russian armies were massing, but they were still far from ready to open the Berlin offensive. The Soviet commanders chafed at the delay. The Oder was a formidable barrier and the spring thaw late: the river was still partly covered with ice. Beyond it lay the German defenses—the bunkers, minefields, anti-tank ditches and dug-in artillery positions. Each day now the Germans grew stronger, and this fact worried the Red Army generals.

No one was more anxious to get started than the 45-year-old Colonel General Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov, commander of the crack Eighth Guards Army, who had earned great renown in the Soviet Union as the defender of Stalingrad. Chuikov blamed the holdup on the Western Allies. After the surprise German attack in the Ardennes in December, the British and Americans had asked Stalin to ease the pressure by speeding up the Red Army’s drive from the east. Stalin had agreed and had launched the Russian offensive in Poland sooner than planned. Chuikov believed, as he was later to say, that “if our lines of communications had not been so spread out and strained in the rear, we could have struck out for Berlin itself in February.” But so fast was the Soviet advance out of Poland that when the armies reached the Oder they found that they had outrun their supplies and communications. The offensive came to a halt, as Chuikov put it, because “we needed ammunition, fuel and pontoons for forcing the Oder, the riverways and canals that lay in front of Berlin.” The need to regroup and prepare had already given the Germans nearly two months in which to organize their defenses. Chuikov was bitter. Each day’s wait meant more casualties for his Guardsmen when the attack began.

Colonel General Mikhail Yefimovich Katukov, Commander of the First Guards Tank Army, was equally eager for the offensive to begin, yet he was grateful for the delay. His men needed the rest, and his maintenance crews needed a chance to repair the armored vehicles. “The tanks have traveled, in a straight line, perhaps 570 kilometers,” he had told one of his corps commanders, General Getman, after they reached the Oder. “But, Andreya Levrentevich,” he continued, “their speedometers show more than 2,000. A man has no speedometer and nobody knows what wear and tear has taken place there.”

Getman agreed. He had no doubt that the Germans would be crushed and Berlin captured, but he, too, was glad of the opportunity to reorganize. “The alphabet of war, Comrade General, ” he told Katukov, “says that victory is achieved not by taking towns but by destroying the enemy. In 1812, Napoleon forgot that. He lost Moscow—and Napoleon was no mean leader of men.”

The attitude was much the same at other army headquarters all along the front. Everyone, though impatient of delay, was tirelessly taking advantage of the respite, for there were no illusions about the desperate battle that lay ahead. Marshals Zhukov, Rokossovskii and Koniev had received chilling reports of what they might encounter. Their intelligence estimates indicated that more than a million Germans manned the defenses and that up to three million civilians might help fight for Berlin. If the reports were true, the Red Army might be outnumbered more than three to one.

When would the attack take place? As yet, the marshals did not know. Zhukov’s huge army group was scheduled to take the city— but that, too, could be changed. Just as Anglo-American armies on the western front waited for the word “Go” from Eisenhower, the Red Army commanders waited on their Supreme Commander. What worried the marshals more than anything else was the speed of the Anglo-American drive from the Rhine. Each day now they were drawing closer to the Elbe—and Berlin. If Moscow failed to order the offensive soon, the British and Americans might beat the Red Army into the city. So far the word “Go” had not come down from Josef Stalin. He almost seemed to be waiting himself.

THE ATTACKERS