command of the operation were faulty, the courage, stamina and self-sacrifice of most Red Army soldiers and junior officers cannot be doubted for a moment. This genuine heroism — as distinct from the lifeless propaganda version to be served up as a moral lesson for future generations — sadly did nothing to lessen the essential callousness of senior commanders and the Soviet political leadership. References to soldiers in veiled speech during telephone conversations were revealing. Commanders used to say, ‘How many matches were burnt?’ or ‘How many pencils were broken?’ when asking for casualty estimates.
On the German side, General Heinrici, the commander-in-chief of Army Group Vistula, and General Busse could not be expected to have done much better in the circumstances. German survivors of the battle still bless them for having saved countless lives by withdrawing the majority of troops from the forward positions just before the bombardment. But some senior officers still believed in Adolf Hitler. After nightfall on 16 April, Colonel Hans- Oscar Wohlermann, the artillery commander in the LVI Panzer Corps, went to see his commander, General Weidling, at Waldsieversdorf, north-west of Muncheberg. Corps headquarters were established in the weekend house of a Berlin family. A single candle lit the room on the first floor. Weidling, who had no illusions about Hitler’s conduct of the war, spoke his mind. The monocled Wohlermann was shaken.’I was deeply dismayed,’ he wrote later, ‘to find that even this dedicated soldier and daredevil, our old “Hard as Bones”, as he had been known in the regiment, had lost faith in our highest leadership.’
Their conversation was brought to an abrupt halt by a bombing attack. Then reports came in indicating that a hole had opened up between them and the XI SS Panzer Corps on their right, and that another gap on their left was developing which threatened to break their link with General Berlin’s CI Corps. Goebbels’s notion of a wall against the Mongol hordes was disintegrating rapidly.
That night must have been one of the worst of Zhukov’s life. The eyes of the army and, more crucially, the eyes of the Kremlin were fixed on the Seelow Heights, which he had failed to secure. His armies could not now perform their task of taking ‘Berlin on the sixth day of the operation’. One of Chuikov’s rifle regiments had reached the edge of the town of Seelow, and some of Katukov’s tanks were nearly at the crest at one point, but this would certainly not satisfy Stalin.
The Soviet leader, who had sounded fairly relaxed during the afternoon, was clearly angry when Zhukov reported on the radio-telephone shortly before midnight that the heights were not occupied. Stalin blamed him for having changed the
‘By the end of the day, tomorrow, 17 April,’ Zhukov answered, trying to sound calm, ‘the defence of Seelow Heights will be broken. I am convinced that the more troops the enemy sends against us here, the easier it will be to capture Berlin. It is much easier to destroy troops in open countryside than in a fortified city.’
Stalin did not sound convinced. Perhaps he was thinking of the Americans, who might come up from the south-west, rather than the German forces to the east of the capital. ‘We are thinking,’ Stalin said, ‘of ordering Konev to send the tank armies of Rybalko and Lelyushenko towards Berlin from the south, and telling Rokossovsky to speed up the crossing and also attack from the north.’ Stalin hung up with a curt ‘
Russian soldiers — in 1945 as in 1814 — despised the rivers of western Europe. They seemed miserable in comparison with the great rivers of the Motherland. Yet every river which they had crossed held a special significance, because it marked the advance in their relentless fight back against the invader. ‘Even when I was wounded on the Volga near Stalingrad,’ said Junior Lieutenant Maslov,’I was convinced that I would return to the front and finally see the accursed Spree.’
The Neisse between Forst and Muskau was only about half the width of the Oder, but a river crossing against enemy troops in prepared positions was not a simple task. Marshal Konev decided that the best tactic for his 1st Ukrainian Front was to keep the enemy occupied and blind them while his point units crossed the river.
The artillery bombardment began at 6 a.m. Moscow time, 4 a.m. Berlin time. It boasted 249 guns per kilometre, their greatest concentration of the war, and was intensified by heavy carpet-bombing from the 2nd Air Army. ‘The drone of aircraft and the thunder of guns and exploding bombs were so loud that one could not hear one’s comrade shouting even a metre away,’ one officer recorded. It was also a much longer barrage than Zhukov’s, extending altogether to 145 minutes. ‘The god of war is thundering very nicely today,’ remarked a battery commander during a pause. The gun crews threw themselves into their work with the joy of vengeance, egged on by their commanders’ orders: ‘At the fascist lair — fire!’, ‘At the possessed Hitler — fire!’, ‘For the blood and suffering of our people — fire!’
Konev, to watch the battle open, had come from his Front headquarters near Breslau, where the bitter siege of the Silesian capital still continued. He went forward to the observation post of General Pukhov’s 13th Army. This consisted of a dugout and trenches at the edge of a pine forest on a cliff which overlooked the river. Being within small-arms range of enemy positions on the west bank of the Neisse, they watched through trench telescopes. But their grand-circle view of events came to an end with the second phase of the bombardment when General Krasovsky’s pilots in the 2nd Air Army flew fast at low level up the west bank of the river, dropping smoke bombs. This screen was laid along a frontage of 390 kilometres, which prevented the Fourth Panzer Army defenders from rapidly identifying the point of the main attack. Konev was fortunate. A breath of wind spread the screen without dispersing it too quickly.
The lead units dashed forward, carrying their assault boats, and launched themselves into the stream, paddling furiously. ‘The assault boats were launched,’ the 1st Ukrainian Front reported, ‘before the guns fell silent. Communist Party activists and Komsomol members tried to be the first into the boats, and shouted encouraging slogans to their comrades: “For the Motherland! For Stalin!” ’ When the first landings were made on the western bank, little red flags were set up to encourage the next wave. Some battalions started to cross simply by swimming, an action that the veterans among them had performed several times before in the advance across the Ukraine. Other troops were able to make use of previously reconnoitred fords and waded across, their weapons held above their heads. Sappers responsible for preparing the first ferries and pontoon bridges jumped into the water and struck out for the far shore. Some 85mm anti-tank guns soon followed the first rifle battalions, and small bridgeheads were established.
The massive bombardment meant that few Germans in the forward positions were capable of effective resistance. Many were seriously shell-shocked. ‘We had nowhere to hide,’ Obergefreiter Karl Pafflik told his captors. ‘The air was full of whistling and explosions. We suffered unimaginable losses. Those who survived were rushing around in trenches and bunkers like madmen trying to save themselves. We were speechless with terror.’ Many took advantage of the smoke and chaos to surrender. No fewer than twenty-five men from the 500th Straf Regiment, who had better reasons to desert than most, gave themselves up in one group. German soldiers on their own or in batches would put up their hands, shouting in pidgin-Russian, ‘Ivan, don’t shoot, we are prison.’ A deserter from the 500th Straf Regiment told his interrogators the well-known Berlin remark, ‘The only promise Hitler has kept is the one he made before coming to power. Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany.’ Other
Once cables were secured over the river, ferries brought across the first T-34 tanks to support the infantry. The 1st Ukrainian Front engineer formations had planned no fewer than 133 crossing points in the main attack sectors. They were responsible for all the Neisse crossings. The engineers attached to the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies had been ordered to keep all their equipment ready for the next river, the Spree. Soon after midday, with the first of the sixty-ton bridges in position in the area of the 5th Guards Army, the lead elements of Lelyushenko’s 4th Guards Tank Army began to cross. During the afternoon, the remaining bulk of the fighting forces crossed the river and continued the advance. The tank brigades, ordered to push ahead with all speed, were ready to take on the Fourth Panzer Army’s counterattack spearheaded by the 21st Panzer Division. On the southern part of the sector, the 2nd Polish Army and the 52nd Army had also crossed successfully and were pushing forward. Their orders were to make for Dresden.
Konev had good reason to be satisfied with the first day of the offensive. His lead units were halfway to the River Spree. The only fault established afterwards was that the evacuation of the wounded to hospitals was
