surrender. They just sat or lay there. Tolliver leaned down to see if one of them was alive or dead. His face was all burned up and the skin had peeled off in gobs.
“Don’t touch,” said the scientist, and Tolliver withdrew his hand like a shot. “Radiation sickness. Don’t take a chance.”
A few feet away, Burke leaned over and said something in Russian to a soldier who tried to focus on them. The soldier managed to mutter a response, and then began coughing.
“What’d he say, sir?” Tolliver asked.
“He said his friend died an hour ago and he will die soon as well. He said his name is Suslov and we should pray for him.”
With that, Burke began to shake and tears ran down his face. It was just too awful to even begin to comprehend.
Tolliver tried to be helpful. He walked over and, instinctively and in total disregard of the difference in their ranks, put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Hey, Colonel, don’t take it so hard. It’s not as if this was your fault or something.”
Five days after the massive assault on Potsdam, two battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division parachuted onto the runways of Berlin’s Gatow Airport and secured it. There was little resistance, only scattered sniper fire, which the airborne soldiers quickly eliminated. Additional drops were made and work began immediately on filling in the craters so that at least one runway would be ready for planes to take off and land. All this occurred while additional paratroops continued to descend from the sky. By nightfall, the entire division was on the ground and had linked up with the defenders of Potsdam, who had sent a strong patrol to Gatow.
Early the next morning, C-47 transports began to arrive with supplies, medical personnel, and additional soldiers to protect the expanding perimeter. One of the first planes carried General Omar Bradley and a handful of his staff.
Bradley had not announced that he was coming, so no one was waiting for him at Gatow. That neither surprised nor disturbed him. He was certain his men at Potsdam had more important things to do than arrange a ceremony for him. He and two of his staff hitched rides to Potsdam from an astonished young private.
“Shit,” said General Miller as he ran out to greet Bradley. “You could have warned me you were coming.” He snapped to attention and saluted. Bradley returned the salute. The two men then shook hands and, spontaneously, embraced warmly. “Good to see you anyhow, Brad,” Miller said.
“Good to see you too, Puff. What on earth have you done with this lovely little town?” he said half jokingly. “And what have you done to your head?” he added, commenting on the bandage on Miller’s scalp.
Inwardly, Bradley was appalled by the devastation. Few buildings still stood, and the ground was pocked with so many craters that it looked like a moonscape. Broken vehicles were everywhere, as were signs that showed where graves had been dug. Soldiers’ graves were marked by crude crosses with dog tags nailed to them, while civilians had been buried in mass graves that were now large mounds on the ground. Worse, almost everyone seemed to be at least slightly wounded.
“It was a helluva fight, Brad. I got off easy.”
Bradley took Miller by the elbow. “Let’s go take a look around and talk about it.”
Typically, the first thing Bradley wanted to see was the wounded. He toured the hospitals and talked to the men for several hours. He was gratified to see the fresh medical personnel moving in to take over from others who looked like they were dead on their feet. As always, he was sincerely moved, and they responded to him. He noticed German and American wounded were together while the Russians were separate. After all, they were still at war and they were still prisoners even though they didn’t look like they had any fight left in them. The Russians smiled and nodded at everyone who passed by.
It was much later before he had a chance to sit down with Miller and talk over the situation.
“I lost a third of my men dead and wounded in that last attack, Brad. I really thought they were going to smash their way in. They had those damned big tanks and there wasn’t anything we could do to stop them. Behind those tanks they had numbers equivalent to almost a whole field army. We would have killed a lot of them, but they might have killed all of us. When the air force came and started bombing from such low height, I knew the Reds were in for it.”
Bradley chuckled. “Some of the higher brass wanted to bomb from greater altitude for safety’s sake. The pilots and crews wouldn’t hear of it. Many of those boys who bombed the Reds were the same ones who dropped supplies to you during the siege. I think they kind of adopted you people and were angry at the thought of losing you.”
Miller nodded appreciatively. “Well, whatever the reason, it worked, even though they had to drop their bomb loads on our own lines and caused some casualties among our troops. It was war and it had to be done. And I have never seen anything as terrible as napalm.”
“Then,” said Bradley sadly, “you haven’t seen what the atomic bomb did.”
“I guess not.”
“Puff, it was as bad as anything I’ve ever dreamed. We will never know the total butcher’s bill for that first bomb, but it looks like about thirty thousand Russian dead and another eighty thousand wounded. Worse, there are at least a hundred thousand more suffering from various levels of radiation sickness. Many of them will die within the next few weeks and months and there’s nothing we can do to treat it. The second bomb, dropped on Koniev’s troops, was just about as bad.
“Even with precautions, we still had a couple of hundred of our boys killed or wounded by the bomb. Some were blinded by the flash, while others suffered broken bones from falls and crashes. Saddest were the handful of our soldiers who got too close afterward and got radiation poisoning. We also lost three brave OSS men who pinpointed Zhukov and died for their efforts.”
“What about Zhukov and Chuikov?”
“Not found and presumed dead, and Koniev is reported to be badly wounded. There are areas near the center of the explosion that we won’t be able to enter for a long time, and only then with protective clothing on. The net result is that the First Belorussian Army Front no longer exists, and Koniev’s First Ukrainian Front has been decimated. It’s as if my entire Twelfth Army Group had been destroyed.”
Miller shuddered. “It’s awful. But it’s ending the war, isn’t it?”
“It appears that way. Let me give you a rundown. The Germans and British in the Netherlands are now south of Hamburg and have linked up with the British airborne who retook Bremen. Alexander has Dempsey’s British troops moving south to meet Patton, who has crossed the Weser and is running free in the Russians’ rear. He’s approaching Brunswick if he hasn’t taken it already. There’s very little resistance. When our two armies do meet up, there will likely be a very empty bag, as so many of the Russians were either killed or wounded by the blasts or have already surrendered. The experts were right. Without their senior commanders, the Russians don’t know what to do.
“Rokossovsky is pulling his Second Belorussian Front back as quickly as he can.”
“Will we stop?”
Bradley grinned. “Did the Russians? No, we will continue on. There have been some political changes. Truman managed to inform the Soviets that we have other bombs and told them we wouldn’t hesitate to use them on any target we wanted, and that included Leningrad and Moscow. The air force thinks they are both out of reach and too dangerous, but the Russians don’t know that. According to overtures from Molotov, the Russians are willing to return to their prewar boundaries east of Poland if we’ll leave them to withdraw in peace. I think those terms will be accepted.”
“I think I may have fought my last campaign,” Miller said.
“I understand, Chris. Maybe I have too. I mentioned we’ve been talking with Molotov. Well, no one’s heard from Stalin for the last few days. There’s a rumor that there’s been a coup and he’s been toppled. He may even be dead.”
Miller chuckled. “That’d be nice.”
“You won’t get an argument from me, Chris. It also seems that the Japs may have gotten the message. They understand how much we hate them and have figured that if we’d use the bomb on white Europeans, we’d have no qualms about bombing their cities and their culture into ashes along with their yellow skins. They may be as racially bigoted as we are, but they’re not stupid. It may be too early, but we’ll see.”
Miller had mixed emotions about the Japanese. While he wanted no more war, he wondered if they, like the
