by Ian Slater
One of the refugees was Leonhard Meir. He had been in West Berlin only a few hours when war broke out. The fifty-seven-year-old shoe salesman from Frankfurt had been sitting at a sidewalk cafe’ off the Kurfürstendamm, sipping a “Berliner” Motte, savoring the taste of the cool, frothy beer, when the first shots of the war in Europe were fired.
An hour later in a rented “Golf” and with two elderly couples who’d waved him down, Leonhard Meir was on the autobahn fleeing the city. The famed air of Berlin, said one of his four passengers, was a “trifle unhealthy” this evening. They were all silent for a second, but the famed Berlin wit, never far from the surface, suddenly exploded and the car was rocked with laughter tinged with hysteria as they headed west with the thousands of other cars, having no option but to go as fast as possible along the 120-mile autobahn through what in the old days West Berliners called the Ozean, the ocean of what used to be East Germany.
One of the women kept talking about the wonderful follies she had been watching at the Europa-Center Ice Rink and how just as a beautiful butterfly number “suspended in the air” was about to begin, all the lights had gone out. She told the story three times in as many minutes, and in the darkness of the car, her husband finally took her hand, pointing out at the ethereal moonlit countryside. “Deep in my heart,” he said, “there has always been only one Germany.” He turned to the others. “Is that not so?”
“Of course,” they all agreed, though Meir didn’t quite know what the hell he meant.
“Some of the fools have turned off their lights,” Meir said. “They think the Russian pilots don’t know where the road is.” He told them he was worried, too, about his son in the army.
“Where is he stationed?” one of the older men asked.
“At Fulda.”
“Mulda?” said the man’s wife. “Oh — I have a friend—”
“Nein,” said her husband, “he said Fulda.”
“Oh—” It was the furthest extension of what had been East Germany into the West.
No one spoke until Leonhard himself broke the silence. “They’ll probably leave the autobahn alone.”
“They have other roads,” said one of the women, but Leonhard didn’t know what she meant. Did she mean that because there were other roads westwards, the Russians wouldn’t bother bombing the autobahn, or did she mean that because there were other roads to carry the Soviet supplies to the west, they could afford to bomb the autobahn and cut off the main escape route from Berlin to western Germany?
“It really was a wonderful show,” the other woman started up again. “So fluid, so graceful, when all of a sudden—”
“Ja, ja! “ cut in her husband.
“Shh!” said the other woman, looking out the window into the moonlit sky. “Aircraft?”
“Tempelhof is closed,” said her husband irritably.
“That’s what I mean.”
The traffic began to slow despite the strictly enforced German law, enacted after several shootings years ago on the autobahn, that forbade anyone to stop or get out of a vehicle. Finally all traffic stopped and drivers were getting out, doors slamming, horns beeping.
“Such language,” the ice rink lady said.
“The Havel,” said the other man. “Mein Gott! They have bombed the Havel crossing!”
“We don’t know that yet,” said his wife.
“Then you tell me,” said the man. “Why do they stop us?” Over sixty years ago, when he was just a boy, he’d been in Berlin when the Russians had entered and he had seen his mother and sisters raped. “My God, they have broken the Havel Bridge,” he repeated.
“Of course they haven’t,” said his wife sternly. “There have been no bombs.”
“Zurückgehen!”— “Go back!” ordered the motorcycle police, their blue and white pinion lights illuminating their crash helmets as their motorcycles came up the line.
One by one the cars were pulling out and making their U-turns, and when Meir’s turn came, he could hear people calling out, “They’ve closed the Corridor.”
Who had? wondered Meir — the German police or Soviet bombers?
“One by one, please,” said the policeman. “No rush. Orderly now. Go back!”
“I told you,” said the man in the backseat. “It’s just like them, you see. First they give you hope, then they close the road. The bastards. I’m not going. Stop, mister. I’m not going back.”
“Fritz, don’t — please.” They had difficulty holding him back from opening the door, and as Meir swung the wheel about, his headlights picking up the high wire fences either side of the road, he could hear the old man weeping — his wife making clucking sounds like a grandmother comforting a baby. “Shush now. Everything will be all right,” she said.
“Of course it won’t be!” shouted the old man. “We are finished.”
* * *
The Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket was faced with either surrender or “elimination,” as spelled out in the propaganda sheets dropped all along the forty-mile front: “The French are not coming, Englanders,” proclaimed the pamphlets. “You have now been fighting for two weeks and they are not here.”
“There will be no convoys,” they were telling the Americans, the messages printed on poor-quality unpolished paper, which the GIs and Tommies found useful as toilet paper, having been out of it for a week already. It had gone up in flames with other NATO supplies in one of the explosions that destroyed over ten thousand tons in prepo sites all over Germany. So many of the supply depots had been hit by the SPETS teams that their smoke, together with the smoke of the battlefields, turned sunsets into the most beautiful reds and oranges over Western Europe, some of the palls so dense, however, that at times it seemed like an eclipse.
* * *
Had it not been for the American Thunderbolts, the Wunderzeug— “wonder planes”—as the Germans were calling the remarkably maneuverable planes, the situation would have been hopeless. Time and again the Thunderbolts’ tank-killing nose cannon and antitank bombs had been thrown into the breach where the Soviet armor found holes in the precarious dyke of the Allied defense.
There was another cause, seen by most NATO commanders as fortuitously accidental, that might yet help the Allies to stiffen their resistance enough to slow the Russian colossus. As well as blowing bridges and rail crossings on the borders between France, the low countries, and Germany to further impede any British reinforcements that might get across the Channel, the SPETS teams, unintentionally or otherwise, had cut off the evacuation of several hundred thousand American and British dependents.
This meant that the British and American troops fighting in western Germany knew they were not fighting just to defend Europe but for their loved ones. Some French intelligence sources hinted that a ranking officer in the Bundeswehr, long unhappy about the fact that American and British civilians, “even their pets,” were to be given priority on preordained evacuation routes, had purposely dispatched a battalion of Einzel KA MPF — West Germany’s Ranger troops — to blow the bridges. But as in all wars, rumors abounded, and whether the French were correct, it was impossible to say.
Rumor or not, the predicament of the British and American dependents was certainly stiffening their resistance. The question was, however, would beleaguered American and British divisions fighting side by side with the Bundeswehr, Dutch, and Belgian troops be sufficient to turn the tide?
The rapidly changing fronts over the entire length of Germany were new in the annals of war, for while fast-moving armor and motorized infantry had been the most marked feature of modern wars to date, especially the Arab/Israeli Wars, never had armor or infantry moved so quickly on such a vast scale. And never had men had to endure such sustained and furious attack on a battlefield bristling with such a range of terrible weapons. The old definitions of “battle fatigue” were no longer useful. The stress levels were so intense, yet so fluid, that save for the Battle of Britain and the lot of German pilots attacking the aerial armadas of American
Superfortresses in the final days of World War II, this kind of stress was hitherto unknown in the history of battle. It meant that whereas in the 1940s men could, in a pinch, be left on the battlefield for weeks, even months, now endurance was measured only in days — often, as with the tank crews, in hours.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
For over two months Leonhard Meir and the two elderly couples he had tried to take out with him had lived in a roller coaster of uncertainty as the normally well-ordered Stasi police did not seem to know what to do with them. At first they were told they must stay inside, a twenty-four-hour curfew in effect, but then they had been issued brown passbooks allowing them to go outside but no farther man two kilometers.
* * *
At Allied headquarters in Brussels, the punishing cost in pilots trying to keep the Soviet-supply lines through eastern Germany closed could no longer be justified. It was clear that if NATO kept losing pilots at this rate, the equation would turn, especially with the enormous stockpiling of arms and materiel SATINT showed was going on in Berlin, the Russians in effect holding the Berliners as hostages in as coldblooded a calculation as the NKA’s General Kim had made in his advance down the beleaguered Korean peninsula.
From southern Germany Second German Corps, consisting of a badly mauled armored division and mountain brigade, fighting next to Seventh and Fifth American Corps, were requesting WFS — weapons-free status — for the mobile, nuclear-tipped Lance missile batteries, which, other than chemical weapons, were considered NATO’s land weapon of last resort. Permission was denied, though the Lances were authorized to fire as many conventional warheads as “deemed necessary,” NATO’s way of signaling its commanders that stockpiles were rapidly diminishing.
* * *
Ironically, 130 miles behind the western front, Berlin had been one of the safest places in the opening stages of the war. The Soviet divisions and fighter squadrons situated between the city and western Germany protected the inhabitants from NATO bombing — the area so heavily armed that as well as the central front being festooned with SAM sites, some farmers, members of Stasi reserves, had been issued with the deadly hand-held Soviet SAM-7Ds, so that low-level attacks had become increasingly dangerous. And yet NATO HQ knew the buildup of supplies in Berlin must somehow be checked.
* * *
Battling his boredom, Leonhard Meir had started to take much more notice of his surroundings and discovered that the northern suburb of Lübars, where he was being kept along with his elderly acquaintances, could actually take on the air of a rural village, its crossed wooden gateposts and ornamental fences reminding Meir of his country childhood.
Perhaps it was the air, the pervasive smell of stored hay in the farms all about the city, with the soft tones of autumn, that reminded him of another age. If you ignored the jets— the two elderly couples seemed to have no trouble doing this — you could even delude yourself at times that you were on a farm.
At first Leonhard felt ashamed because the older people seemed more able to stand the strain of not knowing what was going to happen. Even the old man who had panicked in the car and had not wanted to return to the city now seemed calmer than he. But what Leonhard Meir didn’t realize was that the old peoples’ hearing had deteriorated to the point that they simply didn’t hear many of the jets. Even so, Meir saw things were changing; morale began slipping rapidly in proportion to the depletion of their canned food stocks and the introduction of severe rationing, all farms’ produce being claimed by the Russian authorities. For a while, supplies of canned goods had held out, and the fall having been reasonably mild to this point meant that some of the late vegetables were also available, though these, too, very quickly ran out. Still, for a time, the Berliners’ renowned sense of humor, never entirely understood by most other Germans, who had never lived surrounded in a Communist sea, had held. Then, when all reserves were gone, shops looted, the sense of humor began to wane — even around the outer suburbs such as Lübars, closer to farms than the inner suburbs. It became evident that “old” Berliners, especially those who had lived in what had once been the old, Western sector, were expendable.
It was on a Friday morning, one of the old men complaining again about how they had become prisoners in their own apartment, that Leonhard first sensed a resentment of his presence. Once grateful to him for trying to get them out of Berlin, the two couples now saw him as merely another mouth to feed.
Going for a walk to let things cool off a little, Meir pondered how long it would be, if ever, before he’d have any knowledge of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, let alone his son, who had been stationed at Fulda. But he was determined not to let the depression overwhelm him, always telling himself that tomorrow would see some small improvement. Surely the war couldn’t last much longer. All the experts had said that another war couldn’t last very long. Just as they had told the world Adolf Schicklgruber wouldn’t last long.
Meir heard the village clock strike noon and set his watch ten minutes ahead, an old habit he’d developed on his shoe salesman’s route to make sure he was never late for appointments.
At that moment a squadron of twenty-four British Canberra Mk-8 bombers were taking off from Greenham Common in southern England, their yellow lightning flash insignias either side of the RAF’s blue-circled red bull’s-eye streaked with water from a passing shower. Their target was Berlin.
MiG fighters scrambled in northern Holland, flying out over the hook high above the North Sea.
Seeing the blips of ten MiGs fifty miles east of him, the squadron leader of the twenty-six Canberra bombers crossing the North Sea called for interceptor assist. This wasn’t necessary, however, as RAF ground radar on England’s south coast had already dispatched six aquamarine, bullet-nosed “Tigers” out over East Anglia into a fish-scaled sky to do battle with the MiGs. The Canberras’ commander looked out across his bomber’s wide, stubby-looking wings and, seeing heavy cloud cover over Holland, instructed his pilots that the squadron would detour farther south, below the hook of Holland, which arced like a left-handed scythe toward Germany, then go in for the attack south of Hannover. The Canberras’ navigators recalculated, under instructions from the wing commander to use Magdeburg, twenty-three miles east of the old West/East German line, as the IAP, initial aiming point, for the bombing run on Berlin.
* * *
Of the nine remaining Canberra bombers that had survived the German Roland missiles, three were hit by SAM-16s, the advance hand-held Soviet surface-to-air missiles in plentiful supply along the Berlin Corridor. One Canberra crew managed to bail out over the Havel River in Grunewald Forest in what used to be the American sector of West Berlin. He pulled the cord for his inflatable vest well before he hit the water, but the carbon dioxide cartridge was a dud. One of the coolest of the cool in aerial combat, the pilot, Kevin Murphy, an Australian born and raised in the outback, had a dread of water, and was now desperately telling himself to calm down, which he did after a few anxious moments, unhitching the chute harness and breaking free before beginning to blow into the mouthpiece of the Mae West. Now his uniform, particularly the elastic G suit, was beginning to soak up water at an alarming rate. His finger slipped from where he was holding the mouthpiece. He grabbed for it and resumed blowing as he heard a power boat start out from the shore. He was going under.
* * *
The Stasi people’s patrol boat dragged the river for two hours: slow, monotonous work, a crowd gathering on the eastern shore by the picnic tables to see whether they would find the “terror bomber.”
“Why bother?” said one of the three men aboard the patrol boat.
“Because, you Dummkopf” said the oldest comrade in charge of the boat, “it is important.”
“Why?”
“Because, you Dummkopf, headquarters wishes to know what squadron he is from. This is vital intelligence.”
The crew member, a youth in his midtwenties, made a rude noise at the acne-faced teenage boy who was the third member of the c
rew. “Intelligence, nonsense,” said the crewman. “We know what squadron they came from. Three of them crashed out near Lübars. Can’t you see?” He was pointing north.
The older man in charge knew he was correct, but the thick, coal-brown smoke that was rising and flattening over Berlin was coming not from the Allied bombers that had crashed but from farther in than Lübars, from Tegel Airport and from around Schönefeld Airport to the east, where storage sheds, hit during the raid, were burning out of control.
“So,” pressed the crewman, “why do we waste our time dragging the river? Let the fishes have him, ja?”
The people’s captain, a thickset man with a game leg, was kneeling awkwardly on the deck, face showing the strain, untwisting one of the lines on the chain-weighted drag. When he looked up, his face was beet red from the effort. “If you don’t wish to be sent to the Fulda Gap, my young friend, you’ll help me and stop your complaining, ja?”
“They cannot send me,” answered the crewman insolently. “I have medical exemption.”
“Ah,” said the people’s captain, pushing himself up from the gunwale. “And if the Americans counterattack? If then-ships do come? What then, eh?” Before the crewman could answer, the people’s captain spat into the lake. “That is what your exemption will be worth, Comrade. Nothing.”
“Their ships will not come,” answered the other boy sharply. “And even if they do — where will they land them? We have all the ports. Bremen will fall in a few days. You’ll see.”
“They will use La Rochelle and Saint Nazaire,” said the captain. “They will not need Bremen or Hamburg if they land there. It will also save them two hundred kilometers.”
This gave the two boys food for thought, but the one who had started the argument was not deterred. “Paris will not permit them to use the French ports.”
