know his view of the casualties they would have to face taking the city. Bradley estimated that it might involve 100,000 casualties (a figure which, he later admitted, was far too high). He then added that it would be a stiff price to pay for a prestige objective when they would have to withdraw again once Germany surrendered. This clearly coincided with Eisenhower’s thoughts, although he claimed later that the ‘future division of Germany did not influence our military plans for the final conquest of the country’.
Eisenhower was also concerned about his extended lines of communication. The British Second Army was on the edge of Bremen, the US First Army was approaching Leipzig and Patton’s lead units were close to the Czechoslovak border. The distances were so great that forward units had to be supplied by Dakotas. Large numbers of civilians, including prison and concentration camp inmates, also had to be fed. Considerable resources were required. Like many others, Eisenhower was totally unprepared for the full horror of the concentration camps. Seeing such unbelievable suffering at first hand affected many for years afterwards in a liberator’s version of survivor guilt.
Commanders on the Western Front had little idea of the situation on the Eastern Front. They did not appreciate quite how keen the German Army was to allow the Americans in to Berlin before the Red Army reached it. ‘Soldiers and officers,’ observed Colonel de Maiziere of the OKH, ‘believed that it was far better to be beaten by the west. The exhausted Wehrmacht fought to the end purely to leave the Russians as little territory as possible.’ The instincts of Simpson and his formation commanders in the Ninth Army proved much more accurate than those of the Supreme Commander. They estimated that there would be pockets of resistance but that these could be bypassed in a charge to the capital of the Reich, which lay less than 100 kilometres away.
The 83rd Infantry Division had already set up a bridge capable of taking the 2nd Armored Division’s tanks, and during the night of Saturday 14 April, vehicles crossed in a steady stream. The forces in the bridgehead, which now stretched to Zerbst, started to build up rapidly. The excitement among the American troops was infectious. They longed for their orders to move out. But early on the Sunday morning, 15 April, their army commander, General Simpson, was summoned by General Bradley to his army group headquarters at Wiesbaden. Bradley met Simpson at the airfield. They shook hands as he climbed out of the plane. Bradley, without any preamble, told him that the Ninth Army was to halt on the Elbe. It was not to advance any further in the direction of Berlin.
‘Where in the hell did you get this?’ Simpson asked.
‘From Ike,’ Bradley answered.
Simpson, feeling dazed and dejected, flew back to his headquarters, wondering how he was going to tell his commanders and his men.
These orders to stand fast on the Elbe, coming on top of the unexpected death of President Roosevelt, constituted a great blow to American morale. Roosevelt had died on 12 April, but the news was not released until the following day. Goebbels was ecstatic when told on his return from a visit to the front near Kustrin. He telephoned Hitler in the Reich Chancellery bunker immediately. ‘My Fuhrer, I congratulate you!’ he said. ‘Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This Friday, 13 April. It is the turning point!’
Just a few days before, Goebbels had been reading Carlyle’s
Another symbolic event involving Frederick the Great took place, but Hitler never mentioned it. In a massive air raid that night, Allied bombers attacked Potsdam. A Hitler Youth sheltering in a basement that night found the walls around him ‘rocking like a ship’. The bombs destroyed much of the old town, including the Garnisonkirche, the spiritual home of the Prussian military caste and aristocracy. Ursula von Kardorff burst into tears in the street after hearing the news. ‘A whole world was destroyed with it,’ she wrote in her diary. But many officers still refused to acknowledge the responsibility of the German military leadership for supporting Hitler. Talk of the honour of a German officer when the liberation of concentration camps showed the nature of the regime they had fought for was unlikely to arouse sympathy, even among their most sporting opponents.
14. Eve of Battle
The Red Army, despite all its efforts and talent for camouflage, could not hope to conceal the huge attack about to be unleashed on the Oder and Neisse fronts. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front were to attack on 16 April. To the north, Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front would follow on soon afterwards across the lower Oder. Soviet forces amounted to 2.5 million men. They were backed by 41,600 guns and heavy mortars as well as 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns and four air armies. It was the greatest concentration of firepower ever amassed.
On 14 April, a fighting reconnaissance from the Kustrin bridgehead proved most successful. Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army managed to push the 20th Panzergrenadier Division back between two and five kilometres in places. Hitler is said to have been so angry that he gave orders to strip medals from all members of the division until they had been won back.
This extension of the bridgehead also helped the build-up of forces. That night the 1st Guards Tank Army began moving its brigades across the Oder under the cover of darkness. ‘During the night there was a constant flow of tanks, guns, Studebakers loaded with ammunition, and columns of soldiers.’ Young women traffic controllers waved their discs desperately, urging the tanks into the line marked by white tapes. Loud music and propaganda exhortations reverberated from 7th Department loudspeakers in an attempt to cover the noise of tank engines, but the Germans knew what was happening.
For the whole of 15 April, Red Army soldiers watched the German positions ‘until our eyes ached’, in case last-minute reinforcements were brought up or changes made. In the Oderbruch, April flowers had appeared on hillocks, but large chunks of ice still floated down the river, as well as branches and weed which caught on a wrecked railway bridge. In pine forests on the east bank, ‘mysteriously quiet’ by day, chopped branches camouflaged thousands of armoured vehicles and guns.
On the Neisse front, to the south, the 1st Ukrainian Front organized relentless political activity up to the last moment. ‘Active Komsomol members were teaching young soldiers to love their tanks and to try to use the whole potential of this powerful weapon.’ The Aleksandrov message had evidently not been digested, even by political departments. The message of revenge was clear in the latest slogan: ‘There will be no pity. They have sown the wind and now they are harvesting the whirlwind.’
The 1st Ukrainian Front was more preoccupied by bad radio discipline. Even NKVD regiments had recently been ‘transmitting in clear, using out-of-date codes and not answering signals’. No sub-units were allowed to use the radio: their sets had to be on receive and never on send. Concern about lapses of security was even greater on the night of 15 April, because the new wavelengths and codes up to the end of May 1945 were issued to headquarters.
Even though officers were told not to give out orders more than three hours before the attack, SMERSH was determined that there should be no last-minute desertions by Red Army soldiers who might warn the enemy. The SMERSH representative with the 1st Belorussian Front ordered all political officers to check every man in the front line and identify any who seemed suspicious or ‘morally and politically unstable’. In an earlier round-up, SMERSH had arrested those denounced for making negative comments about collective farms. A special cordon was put in place ‘so that our men will not manage to flee to the Germans’ and to prevent the Germans from seizing ‘tongues’. But all their efforts were in vain. On 15 April, a Red Army soldier south of Kustrin told his German captors that the great offensive was starting early the next morning.
Considering the proximity of defeat, the Germans had even stronger reasons to fear that their soldiers would
