The Road to Berlin (117 page)

Within forty-eight hours Soviet troops moved forward and occupied a line running from the river Morava, through Stockerau and Sankt-Pölten, on to the west of Glognitz and the east of Maribor. This breakthrough to the junction of the frontiers of Hungary, Austria and Yugoslavia, coupled with the capture of
Vienna itself, effectively trapped German armies in Yugoslavia and northern Italy. The immediate Soviet advance to the west of Vienna also contributed to a deep outflanking of the German army group defending Czechoslovakia and thus prepared the way for the Soviet drive on Prague. Hitler correctly divined Prague as a Soviet objective but he was disastrously deceived by his ‘intuition’ in not identifying Berlin as
the
Soviet target, a prize which outshone all others and one for which Stalin had amassed mighty numbers of men and a stupefying quantity of war material. Prague could wait.

‘We’re not going to Berlin, Sid. This is the end of the war for us.’ Completely stunned, Brigadier-General Sidney R. Hinds commanding the US 2nd Armoured Division—with his men already on the eastern bank of the Elbe—learned this directly from General Simpson, US Ninth Army commander. The instruction came through General Omar Bradley at Twelfth Army Group and emanated from the very highest level of the Allied command, none other than General Eisenhower himself. There could be no contravention or slightest insubordination. During the night of 14 April the Supreme Commander went on to transmit his operational plans to Washington, delineating his intentions now that the thrust into the centre of Germany had been successfully concluded: pursuing the aim of destroying the remaining German forces and capturing those areas where the enemy might mount a ‘last stand’, he proposed to hold a firm front on the Elbe, strike towards Denmark and Lübeck, and also drive into the Danube valley to link up with Soviet troops as well as overwhelming the ‘National Redoubt’. The capture of Berlin simply did not figure in these operational assignments.

On the evening of 11 April American tanks had reached the Elbe, the columns of the US 2nd Armoured Division slicing through German positions and startled defenders with immense speed. In the van of the tanks hurtling forward like cavalry, an American reconnaissance group driving at an astonishing pace swept into the suburbs of Magdeburg on the western bank of the Elbe, careering into terrified shopping crowds and jammed traffic. With the city defences now alerted, it was no longer possible to seize the
autobahn
bridge to the north of the city off the march. Meanwhile further south Major Hollingsworth raced for the bridge at Schönebeck, only to see it disintegrate at dawn on 12 April when German engineers blew it up, but General Hinds with Combat Command D (2nd Armoured Division) forced a crossing of the Elbe at Westerhüsen, south of Magdeburg. By the evening of 12 April three battalions were across the Elbe and digging in. To the north of Magdeburg the US 5th Armoured Division closed on Tangermünde shortly after noon on 12 April, but even more dramatically at Barby, about fifteen miles south-east of Magdeburg, the men of the US 83rd Infantry Division launched an immediate assault crossing of the Elbe, put one battalion across the river and set about building their pontoon bridge to serve in place of the local bridge demolished by the Germans. Upstream at Westerhüsen
General Hinds with 2nd Armoured laboured prodigiously to improvise crossing equipment, using a cable ferry in a furious attempt to stiffen his eastern bridgehead with armour and artillery, only to be swept off the eastern bank by a sudden, slashing attack by General Wenck’s ardent young men, striplings from cadet battalions thirsting for action and undaunted by any odds in men or equipment. The shock blow proved to be decisive; 2nd Armoured rolled back and turned towards 38th Division’s crossing points at Barby, where a second bridge now supplemented the first. Armour and infantry piled over the Elbe during the night of 14 April and the omens appeared to be good: the commanders assumed that the momentum of the American drive could be speedily resumed and already patrols from the 83rd had pushed as far as Zerbst, less than fifty miles from Berlin. Yet within hours the order to hold fast on the eastern bank of the Elbe was clamped on the US Ninth Army and any idea of a drive on Berlin abandoned.

Proud of its achievement, 83rd Infantry Division ostentatiously signposted ‘their’ bridge at Barby the ‘Truman Bridge’, doing a little highway decorating in their flamboyant style and also saluting the new President of the United States, Harry S. Truman. On 12 April President Roosevelt had died suddenly, a signal for unrestrained grief among friends and wild exultation within the
Führer
’s circle (where Goebbels sent up the manic cry, ‘this
is
the turning point!’). News of Wenck’s sudden success on the Elbe served only to add substance to these weird and fevered fancies, nurtured already on the expectation of a military clash between Anglo–American forces and the Red Army, or if not that, then anticipation of victory on both the Oder and the Elbe, or yet again triumph secured by new and terrible secret ‘revenge weapons’.

Unable or unwilling at one moment to entertain the very idea of a battle for Berlin, Hitler nevertheless sat down on the morning of 13 April to pen his proclamation to the troops of the
Ostfront
, an envenomed document breathing hatred of the ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’, predicting the martyrdom of Germany at their hands but promising deliverance with the defeat of the enemy at the very gates of the capital of the German
Reich
. Berlin would remain German and Vienna—which had only that day fallen to the Red Army—would once more be German. This order of the day, intended to be released the moment the Soviet offensive broke, was committed to paper at a time when reports of the imminence of the Red Army attack on Berlin grew apace, information culled from field reconnaissance, agents and interrogation of prisoners or deserters, all artfully compiled by Colonel Wessel (successor to Gehlen as head of
Fremde Heere Ost
) and laced with enticing hints of Soviet–American discord, anti-Soviet British military moves and common talk in Soviet ranks of drenching American units with shellfire just ‘by mistake’ to teach them their place. General Heinrici, commanding Army Group Vistula, was neither impressed by this devious piffle nor deceived when on 14 April Soviet guns opened fire on General Busse’s Ninth Army, shelling accompanied by attacks with reinforced rifle battalions. The artillery fire and battalion attacks signalled standard Soviet reconnaissance missions, but Heinrici waited to divine the true
timing of the main assault, a critically important factor which would enable him to pull back Ninth Army into a second, secret defence line and leave Soviet guns to pulverize the vacant ground to the front.

News of President Roosevelt’s death produced its own effect in the Soviet Union and upon Stalin. Black-bordered newspapers carrying this sombre announcement were no mere formality, for the sorrow and dismay proved to be both genuine and widespread. To the astonishment of Ambassador Harriman it was an emotional Molotov who intruded on a dinner party to deliver news of the death of the President and the same Molotov who expressed great sympathy and a deep sense of loss at the passing of a true friend of Russia. In the company of Stalin, at a meeting attended by General Patrick Hurley and Molotov, Ambassador Harriman roundly countered charges about a ‘conspiracy’ on the part of Americans with the Polish underground against the Red Army—the details involved the indiscretions of some American airmen—but with admirable self-control and promptitude he responded to Stalin’s show of ‘immediate assurance’ of Soviet willingness to continue a ‘co-operative policy’ with the United States by suggesting the attendance of Molotov at the San Francisco Conference. Molotov squirmed visibly, but Stalin agreed to the proposal and peremptorily ordered the discomfited Molotov to San Francisco.

With this new man in the White House and with the Polish question at such a critical impasse Stalin no doubt felt that he must tread softly, if not warily. The reassurance he received from Ambassador Harriman must needs be put to some practical test: President Truman proposed to continue those policies clearly ordained and delineated by President Roosevelt, he learned, but what precisely did that mean, in view of the late President’s political vagaries? In addition, Stalin was bemused (according to General Shtemenko) by the flood of reports on German shuttling to the ‘National Redoubt’ in the south, and immersed in reports from Soviet intelligence agents about the transfer of German troops to the Eastern Front, a process speeded by the suspiciously high incidence of ‘surrenders by telephone’ enacted by German units in contact with the American army. What larger design lay behind these all too casual surrenders? Was there indeed a secret Anglo–American plan to seize Berlin by
coup de main
using those two airborne divisions, or yet again might the Germans contrive to surrender the capital to Anglo–American troops and thus head off the Red Army? Another ‘surrender by telephone’.… Might the Fascist leaders make a final dash for, and a last stand in, the Alpine redoubt? What did these trains loaded with cement and heavy construction equipment signify as they thundered daily through Czechoslovakia, making for mountainous country? (Stalin was well served with intelligence from the heart of Czechoslovakia.) There was also the matter of Winston Churchill’s letter to General Eisenhower written at the end of March, urging a rapid advance to the Elbe and a thrust on Berlin. What exactly was happening in Italy with the devious armistice talks and what significance attached to all the muffled rumours of wider peace negotiations and surrender parleys?

It was, therefore, with the utmost wariness that Stalin parried Harriman’s carefully modulated query about the imminence of a Red Army attack directed against Berlin. His response was studiously offhand, even dismissive: a Soviet offensive was indeed in the offing, it might or might not be successful, but the main axis was directed towards Dresden rather than Berlin, a fact already well known to General Eisenhower. Yet almost at that same hour the thousands of Soviet guns massed along the Oder–Neisse front were being readied and loaded, all positioned to fire off a stupendous opening barrage heralding the Red Army’s assault on Berlin. What Stalin himself would not tell the Ambassador of the United States of America was confided at once by a lowly Red Army soldier, captured south of Küstrin, to his German captors—that a gigantic attack on Berlin was timed to open early the next day, 16 April. Hitler found this credible, Heinrici was convinced and so during what was left of the night of 15–16 April Busse’s Ninth Army pulled back to its second defensive line, the fortifications sited and fitted out in accordance with Hitler’s previous instructions.

While Soviet armies were gouging their way into Königsberg and hammering a path into Vienna, the final operational planning and preparation for the attack on Berlin went ahead at a feverish pace. The tension mounted, with the masses of men on both main fronts—1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian—sensing and seeing that a gigantic operation was in the offing. Crack armies jammed ever more tightly into bridgeheads or assault positions, armadas of tanks crammed the Front areas and on Zhukov’s Front in particular the miles of guns snugged under camouflage or screened in woods and forest lengthened day by day. Both fronts set about extensive reconnaissance, using ground observation posts and aerial photographs; Soviet aircraft photographed German defences to a depth of 50–60 miles, covering certain sectors eight times over and flying more than 2,500 sorties for the 1st Belorussian Front alone. Marshal Koniev used not only two photo-reconnaissance regiments but also the 10th Artillery Observation Balloon Squadron to build up a complete aerial survey of the first line of German defences. Nor did the
Luftwaffe
escape the attention of Soviet aerial reconnaissance, which aimed to locate enemy air bases and establish the German air order of battle.

The immensity of the artillery resources available, as well as the complexity of the operational tasks, demanded major consideration. The density of guns and mortars (all over 76mm calibre) per kilometre of frontage varied between 233 and 295. Zhukov determined upon a density of 189 guns for each kilometre of front, increasing this to 295 on the frontages of the assault armies; during the breakthrough operation each first-echelon rifle regiment would have 4–5 artillery regiments in support with the regimental artillery group supplying about seventy guns. While army commanders controlled regimental, divisional and corps artillery groups, army artillery groups—243 guns and mortars, including 152mm howitzers, 203mm howitzers, 160mm mortars, M-13 and M-12-31 multiple-rocket launchers—could be called on for further support. Each army also included mobile anti-tank reserves formed from two ‘tank-killer’ brigades with 136 guns.

In order to achieve maximum surprise, Zhukov planned a very powerful but relatively short opening barrage. The Front fire plan, confirmed on 8 April, stipulated a ten-minute artillery strike, followed by ten minutes of battery fire followed in turn by a second ten-minute artillery strike. The infantry and tank attacks would be supported to a depth of 2,000 yards by a double rolling barrage and up to 4,000 yards with a single barrage. To support 8th Guards Army in storming the Seelow Heights, the double rolling barrage would be followed by massed fire as the assault opened. The night attack, however, posed a number of problems for Soviet gunners. On some sectors Soviet infantry would be within 100–150 yards of the enemy’s forward positions, requiring very careful artillery registration. To improve their techniques Soviet gunners retired to training areas in the rear and worked on practising night-firing procedures.

Not all would be total darkness, in spite of the hour of the attack. Marshal Zhukov planned to illuminate the battlefield with 143 searchlights, sited some 150–200 yards from each other along the length of the front and about 400–500 yards from the forward edge of the German positions, the beams shining out for a distance of three miles and more. The sight of all these searchlights caused tongues to wag and heads to shake in disbelief or sheer bemusement, and few divined the purpose behind this extraordinary array. Even senior commanders found themselves at something of a loss to understand what was intended, simply siting the lights and their crews according to instructions.