Triumph (1993)

by Ben Bova

  The voice in the phone said through crackling static, "One moment for the President, Mr. Prime Minister."

  Looking into Eden's troubled eyes, Churchill thought how odd it was that men could send millions into battle and accept with perfect ease the slaughter of ten thousand of the enemy, yet feel so queasy at the death of one man. Secretly, he felt some pangs of remorse himself. He had known Stalin for nearly four years. The man was a tyrant, a beast, as bad as Hitler for certain. Yet Churchill had eaten and drunk with him. And coldly had him murdered.

  "Winston?" came Roosevelt's voice.

  Churchill visibly brightened. He smiled as he said into the phone, "Franklin, have you heard the news?"

  Washington, D.C., April 14

  Roosevelt was sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, golden afternoon sunshine lighting the tall windows behind him.

  "Yes, Winston, I agree," he was saying into the phone.

  "This changes everything. I have already spoken with our ambassador in Moscow. Harry Hopkins is on his way to meet the new leaders, and I will speak with Molotov later today. As I understand it, things are in a considerable turmoil over there."

  General Marshall watched the President's face and waited to hear the word "Berlin." He knew Churchill would bring it up again.

  Beside Marshall sat Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War. A gentleman from the old school, lean, reserved, almost seventy-seven years old, Stimson had served every president since Woodrow Wilson. He was a Republican, and he could be flinty at times. But he had Roosevelt's absolute trust, and Marshall's unreserved admiration.

  The third man facing the desk was Bill Donovan, looking more like a Wall Street lawyer—which he had been—than the head of the intelligence organization, the innocuously named Office of Strategic Services. He puffed nervously on a cigarette as Roosevelt chatted with Churchill.

  Finally, "I'll call you later this evening, Winston, about that. We have a lot of thinking to do, and we have to do it quickly. . . . Yes, I agree. . . . Yes. If we can, I think we should, yes. . . . Very well, Winston. I'll ring you back about midnight, your time. . . . Good. Until then."

  The three men waited expectantly as the President put the phone down.

  Roosevelt was silent for a moment, then he asked Donovan, "Bill, what's going on inside the Kremlin now?"

  "Hard to tell, Mr. President."

  "The Russian armies have stopped their advances," General Marshall volunteered. "That may be for resupply, before they launch their assault on Berlin. Or it may be for political reasons. We can't tell."

  "Henry," the President turned to Stimson, "if you were sitting behind this desk, what would you do?"

  Stimson, dressed as usual in a dark three-piece suit with his Phi Beta Kappa key on a gold chain, looked up at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. "I would move ahead just as planned. I would wait to see some indication from the Russians as to how this sudden change in leadership is going to effect them."

  "There is one thing that we ought to keep in mind,"

  Donovan said. "Goering is willing to surrender all the German forces on the western and Italian fronts."

  "So that they can be moved against the Russians," Marshall added, his voice crisp with disdain.

  "Winston still wants us to take Berlin," said the President.

  The three men fell silent.

  "Could we do it?" Roosevelt asked.

  "I don't think there's much fight left in the German armies facing us," Donovan said.

  "There is bound to be some confusion among the Russians," said Stimson. "At least for the next few days. Perhaps longer. There may be a power struggle in the Kremlin. I understand they have already liquidated Beria."

  "General Marshall," asked the President, "what do you say?"

  A thousand thoughts raced through Marshall's mind. He saw the coffins and the rows of crosses in military cemeteries all across Europe. He saw Churchill glowing in the light of conquest, cigar in one hand and the other lifted in his V-for-Victory sign. But he also saw American soldiers marching down Unter den Linden, past the Brandenberg Gate, triumphant for all the world to see.

  "Sir," said the general, his mind made up, "I still regard Berlin as a political prize that is not worth the casualties it would cost to take it. But if you decide that it should be taken, then I ask only one thing."

  "Yes, General?" Roosevelt was starting to smile.

  "That we don't hand this plum to Montgomery and the British. If you're going to order Ike to take Berlin, then it has to be an American army that takes it."

  "My thinking exactly," said the President, his smile beaming radiantly. "That is what I'll tell the Prime Minister this evening. If he wants Berlin, he's got to allow us to take it."

  Chapter 18

  Buchenwald, 15 April

  Stalin's death made scant difference to the men of the U.S. Third Army. But their capture of the German town of Buchenwald did. You could smell the nearby camp from the town. The strong springtime breeze carried the stench of burnt flesh on it.

  General Patton was sitting in the right-hand seat of the jeep as it jounced along the paved road toward the camp.

  His sergeant driver kept his eyes straight ahead. Major Leslie, commander of the unit that had stumbled onto the death camp the previous day, sat in the back, his long legs crammed in so that his knees were almost touching his lantern jaw.

  Patton twisted around and yelled over the noise of the jeep's engine, "The people in the town claim they didn't know anything about this camp?"

  "Yessir," said Leslie, his face grim. "I spoke with the burgomeister and several members of the town council. They all told me that the camp was off-limits and they had no idea of what was going on there."

  Patton grumbled something unintelligible. His face had a pinched, nervous look to it.

  The smell was getting worse. Overhead the sky was an innocent clear blue. The ground around the road seemed untouched by war. The German troops had retreated here without much of a fight; there was hardly a shell crater to be seen. Farmhouses looked intact. There were even a couple of scrawny cows grazing on the new grass out there.

  "Gates coming up, sir," said the driver. Patton nodded.

  A full squad of GIs was in front of the main gate of the tall barbed-wire fence. They snapped to attention and shouldered their guns as the jeep rolled past them. Patton scowled at the sign over the gate; he knew enough German to translate, "Freedom through work."

  The general saw his first prisoners as the jeep rolled to a stop just inside the gate. Human scarecrows in filthy, lice-ridden striped pajamas, their emaciated limbs barely able to hold them up, their faces hollow and gaunt with starvation and enduring agony. Their eyes had the expression that GIs called "the thousand-yard stare": unfocused, unwilling to see the horror that had engulfed them. They had not the strength to celebrate their liberation; happiness was an emotion that had long since been beaten out of them. They simply stood to one side of the gate and stared like accusing ghosts.

  Patton stared back at them. "My sweet Christ," he muttered as he climbed out of the jeep. "My sweet Jesus Christ."

  "Those are the ones strong enough to stand," said Major Leslie.

  The major led the tour. Barracks where the living dead lay stacked in makeshift bunks five high; those in the top bunks too weak to get down. "So far we've found about half of them already dead from starvation," Leslie explained.

  Rooms that Patton at first thought were public showers. Leslie explained they were gas chambers; the prisoners were herded inside after being stripped, then the "water faucets" streamed cyanide gas. After any gold in their teeth was pried out they were carried by the cartload to the ovens. Patton scowled at the ovens, huge commercial bakery ovens, and told one of the officers accompanying him to make a note of the manufacturer's name engraved clearly on the doors.

  Then they went outside to the mass graves, where bodies had been bulldozed by the hundreds into open pits to get them hidden before the advancing Americans
could discover what had gone on here. "They had too many corpses to burn," said Leslie in a flat, strained voice. "The ovens couldn't keep up with the killings."

  Patton stared into a half-covered pit, stared at the naked, dirt-encrusted bodies of men and women and little girls and babies, their mouths open in screams, their eyes wide and pleading.

  His guts churned. Suddenly the general wheeled and ran off several paces, vomiting like a green soldier who had seen his first dead body.

  The officers milled around nervously, not knowing what to do for their general. A corporal ran over to Patton with a white handkerchief in his hand.

  "It got me the same way, sir, first time I saw it," the corporal said. Patton took the handkerchief and wiped his mouth, his eyes scanning the kid's face. No more then nineteen or twenty years old.

  "God help me, son," he muttered. "I've seen battle and I've led men to their deaths, but I've never seen anything like this."

  The corporal nodded sympathetically. "There ain't nothing like this to see, sir. Except maybe the other camps these bastards set up."

  Patton pulled himself together and strode back to his waiting officers. "I want pictures of all this. All of it! Movie pictures. The whole world's got to see what vermin these Krauts are. The whole goddamned world!"

  "Yessir."

  He wheeled on Major Leslie. "And you get that goddamned burgomeister and his town council down here. I want them to get a good look at this. Get the whole damned town to look! Make 'em see it!"

  "Yes, sir," said the major.

  Patton started back toward his jeep. "They didn't know what was going on, did they? I'll bet not one of them was a fucking Nazi, either."

  Paris, 16 April

  "George, you shouldn't have come here," said General Eisenhower.

  The raging fury that Patton had felt the previous day at Buchenwald had burned away. Now, at SHAEF headquarters in this luxurious Parisian hotel it had been replaced by a searing urgency: hatred had turned into zeal, anger at the Germans into impatience with his own commander.

  Ike was standing beside his desk, an ornate French creation with frail little legs and baroque decorations carved into its bleached wood. In his waist-length combat jacket and comfortable slacks he seemed almost unmilitary compared against the bristling figure of George Patton, pistols on his hips, boots polished to a mirror shine, rows of ribbons adorning his chest.

  General Omar Bradley sat on one of the funny little French chairs set against the wall between the long windows, his pipe-stem legs stretched out like a pair of soda straws. The hotel room had a high, coffered ceiling, exquisitely detailed drapes and wallpaper, and lovely fragile looking furniture. But its floor was bare. Some retreating Nazi officer had rolled up the rug and carted it back to Germany with him.

  Patton's gleaming helmet rested on the desk beside Eisenhower.

  "Ike, I'm trying to help you. I'll make you President of the United States with this!"

  Eisenhower's patience was at the breaking point. Not only had Washington countermanded his decision to leave Berlin to the Russians, but now George was here hot and steaming to lead the charge to the German capital.

  Instead of replying to his old friend, Eisenhower turned his back on Patton and went over to the window. It was raining out there, not much to see. Patton suddenly felt as gray and chilled as the weather.

  "George," Bradley said, slowly getting up from his chair, "you can see how impractical it would be . . ."

  "I can get Berlin for you!" Patton insisted, his thin voice flaring high, almost girlish. "I want to get my hands on that bastard Hitler. After what I saw a couple of days ago, I want to personally kick his balls off!"

  Bradley looked like a tired schoolteacher: high forehead, face creased from decisions, round little wire-rimmed glasses. He just shook his head, the expression on his face half amused, half disgusted.

  "You think Simpson or Hodges can do it. Brad? Hell, Simpson just retreated back across the goddamned Elbe! Retreated!"

  Eisenhower turned to face Patton, his composure somewhat restored. "George, Simpson's advanced guard retreated because they were out of fuel and ammunition. You know that. As soon as they're resupplied they'll move forward again."

  Bradley put a hand on Patton's shoulder. "George, if we had been planning to punch through to Berlin from the beginning, you would have been placed in the center of the drive. You know that. But until two days ago it was decided to leave Berlin to the Russians. As things stand now your Third Army is too far south for the drive to Berlin."

  "The hell it is!" Patton snapped. "Brad, you remember in Tunisia when I moved the whole damned II Corps for the assault on Bizerte? Turned a hundred thousand men and their supporting units around behind that limey Alexander's rear in two days. Remember?"

  Bradley grinned. "Yeah, I remember."

  "And Bastogne?" Patton's eyes moved to Eisenhower.

  "Turned the whole Third Army ninety degrees and relieved Bastogne. Through the snow and fog."

  Eisenhower said nothing. But he knew that Patton was calling in the due bills that he owed him.

  "Let me show you how I can do this," Patton said, unbuttoning the flap of his tunic pocket. He pulled out a square of paper, unfolded it and spread it across the rickety-looking desk. Bradley and Eisenhower saw that it was a map.

  "Now here's where my Third Army is, in the south. I can pivot my men on this axis here, swing behind Hodge's First Army and come out punching right here, between Dessau and Magdeburg. That's less than a hundred twenty kilometers from Berlin. Whatever old Adolph's got in that area won't be expecting the whole weight of the Third Army against them. They'll crack wide open and I'll get to Berlin before the Russians even know we're coming. It'll be like the dash across France, all over again!"

  Bradley shook his head in a mixture of admiration and exasperation. "I've got to admit, George, if anybody could do it, you could."

  Eisenhower snorted with ill-concealed discontent. "It makes a stew out of all our plans. The logistics . . ." He frowned. But kept on studying the map.

  "Ike, you know Hodges can't make that kind of a breakthrough. What would you prefer, letting Montgomery try it? It'd take him a fucking month just to get his tea things ready!"

  Despite himself, Eisenhower grinned.

  Bradley added, "If we can punch through the way George wants to, the casualties might not be so bad."

  "The Krauts don't want to fight us," Patton said.

  "They'll fold up and quit."

  "There was talk of Goering arranging a truce," Eisenhower said.

  Patton's nostrils twitched. "Wait till you see Buchenwald, Ike. We can't make a truce with these murdering sonsofbitches."

  Eisenhower gave one of his snorting sighs. "It's the logistics that worries me. Keeping your lead elements from bogging down means supplying them with fuel and ammo . . ."

  "We'll start the Red Ball Express again," Patton said eagerly. "Get those truckdrivers on the road again, just like in France."

  "It worked in France," Bradley admitted.

  "Not all the way to the Rhine, though," said Eisenhower.

  "Come on, Ike! It's only a lousy hundred twenty kilometers. You'll be leading the parade down Unter den Linden before the month is out! They'll elect you President for this!"

  Eisenhower's face flushed slightly. He bent over the map and asked, "What do you think of having airborne troops dropped in advance of your lead elements?"

  Chapter 19

  Berlin, 16 April

  "I absolutely forbid it!" Hitler shouted.

  "But my Führer," pleaded Goering.

  "Surrender? Never! Not to the mongrel Americans and certainly not to that fat monster Churchill."

  Goering did not even wince at the word "fat." He was too concerned with winning Hitler to his plan.

  "It's not a surrender, not really," he said. "We negotiate a truce and move our armies to face the Russians."

  "No!" Hitler shouted, so loud that his voice rang echoes o
ff the concrete walls.

  "But my Führer . . ."

  Hitler stared at his Reichsmarschall with a mixture of fury and loathing in his gray eyes. He had received Goering in the cramped little room he used as a study, deep in the bunker that Goering more and more thought of as a crypt.

  The final resting place for all the dreams of a greater Germany.

  Hitler strode to the door, abruptly turned and said in a milder voice, "Sit down, Goering. Sit. We should not raise our voices to one another; it's bad for the morale of the others."

  Goering took one of the overstuffed chairs, thinking that only one of them had raised his voice. Hitler sat opposite him, on his favorite armchair.

  "The Americans and British cannot be trusted to abide by a truce," Hitler said. "Once our armies are withdrawn to the east, they will march in and occupy as much of the Fatherland as they can."

  Goering wanted to say that he did not agree, but he kept silent.

  "The Russians, on the other hand," Hitler went on, "are in a state of confusion. Their advance has stopped. And we know that their two leading generals, Koniev and Zhukov, hate each other."

  Goering nodded glumly.

  "History goes in cycles, my dear Goering. In cycles. We are now at a turning point. In Frederick the Great's time, Prussia was surrounded by enemies and on the verge of annihilation. But the tsarina died and the coalition against Prussia fell apart. In Nineteen Seventeen Russia collapsed in the Bolshevik Revolution. I tell you that Russia will collapse again, now. With Stalin dead, the people will revolt against their Bolshevik government. I know they will. All we have to do is wait for it to happen."

  "But while we wait, brave men are dying needlessly,"

  Goering found the courage to say.

  "It is not needless if they protect the Fatherland from the invaders!"

  Goering admitted it with a shrug.

  "Nor will we passively wait for events to sort themselves out," Hitler said. "In the west, we will remain on the defensive. Eisenhower shows no great will to push us hard. He is a political general, not a fighting general."