The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

by Cornelius Ryan

  “Canadian Army will operate … to clear Northeast Holland and West Holland and the coastal area to the north of the left boundary of the Second Army….

  “I have ordered Ninth and Second Armies to move their armored and mobile forces forward at once to get through to the Elbe with utmost speed and drive. The situation looks good and events should begin to move rapidly in a few days.

  “My tactical headquarters move to northwest of Bonninghardt on Thursday, March 29. Thereafter … my headquarters will move to Wesel-Münster-Wiedenbrück-Herford-Hanover—thence by autobahn to Berlin, I hope.”

  Turning slowly in midair on the end of their ropes, Aunt Effie and Uncle Otto gazed mournfully down on the rubble-filled Berlin courtyard. From the back balcony of his second-story Wilmersdorf flat, Carl Wiberg spoke softly and encouragingly to the dachshunds as he pulled them up to safety. He was putting them through the air raid escape procedure he had devised, and the dogs, after weeks of training, were now well conditioned. So were Wiberg’s neighbors, although they thought that the Swede’s concern for his pets was excessive. Everyone had grown accustomed to the sight of Aunt Effie and Uncle Otto, coats brushed and gleaming, going up and down past the windows. No one paid much attention to the dangling ropes, either, which was exactly the way Wiberg wanted it. One day, if the Gestapo ever closed in, he might have to go over the back balcony and make his getaway down the same ropes.

  He had thought out everything very carefully. A single slip could mean his exposure as an Allied spy, and now, with Berliners growing daily more suspicious and anxious, Wiberg was taking no chances. He had still not discovered Hitler’s whereabouts. His casual and innocent-seeming questions apparently evoked no suspicion, but they turned up no information, either. Even his high-ranking friends in the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe knew nothing. Wiberg was beginning to believe that the Führer and his court were not in Berlin.

  Suddenly, as he lifted the dogs onto the balcony, the doorbell rang. Wiberg tensed; he was not expecting visitors, and he lived with a gnawing fear that one time he would go to the door and find the police. He carefully freed the dogs and then went to the door. Outside stood a stranger. He was tall and husky, dressed in working clothes and a leather jacket. Balanced on his right shoulder was a large carton.

  “Carl Wiberg?” he asked.

  Wiberg nodded.

  The stranger dumped the carton inside the door. “A little present from your friends in Sweden,” he said with a smile.

  “My friends in Sweden?” said Wiberg warily.

  “Oh, you know damned well what it is,” said the stranger. He turned and went quickly down the stairs.

  Wiberg softly closed the door. He stood frozen, looking down at the carton. The only “presents” he got from Sweden were supplies for the Berlin espionage operation. Was this a trap? Would the police come bursting into the apartment the moment he opened the box? Quickly he crossed the living room and looked cautiously down into the street. It was empty. There was no sign of his visitor. Wiberg returned to the door and stood for some time listening. He heard nothing out of the ordinary. At last he lugged the carton onto the living-room sofa and opened it. The box which had been so casually delivered contained a large radio transmitter. Wiberg suddenly discovered he was sweating.

  Some weeks before, Wiberg had been notified by his superior, a Dane named Hennings Jessen-Schmidt, that henceforth he was to be “storekeeper” for the spy network in Berlin. Ever since, he had been receiving a variety of supplies through couriers. But up to now he had always been warned beforehand, and the actual deliveries had always been handled with extreme caution. His phone would ring twice, then stop; that was the signal that a delivery was to be made. The supplies arrived only during the hours of darkness, and generally during an air raid. Never before had Wiberg been approached in broad daylight. He was furious. “Somebody,” he was later to put it, “had acted in a very naïve and amateurish way and seemed bent on wrecking the entire operation.”

  Wiberg’s position had become increasingly dangerous; he could not afford a visit from the police. For his apartment was now a virtual warehouse of espionage equipment. Cached in his rooms were a large quantity of currency, some code tables and a variety of drugs and poisons—from quick-acting “knockout” pellets, capable of producing unconsciousness for varying durations of time, to deadly cyanide compounds. In his coal cellar and in a rented garage nearby was a small arsenal of rifles, revolvers and ammunition. Wiberg even had a suitcase of highly volatile explosives. Because of air raids, this consignment had worried him considerably. But he and Jessen-Schmidt had found the perfect hiding place. The explosives were now in a large safety deposit box in the vault of the Deutsche Union Bank.

  Wiberg’s apartment had miraculously survived the air raids up to now, but he dreaded to think of the consequences if it were hit. He would be immediately exposed. Jessen-Schmidt had told Wiberg that at the right time the supplies would be issued to various groups of operatives and saboteurs who would shortly arrive in Berlin. The operations of these selected agents were to begin on the receipt of a signal sent either by radio or through the courier network from London. Wiberg expected the distribution to be made soon. Jessen-Schmidt had been warned to stand by for the message sometime during the next few weeks, for the work of the teams would coincide with the capture of the city. According to the information Jessen-Schmidt and Wiberg had received, the British and Americans would reach Berlin around the middle of April.

  3

  IN THE QUIET of his study at No. 10 Downing Street, Winston Churchill sat hunched in his favorite leather chair, telephone cupped to his ear. The Prime Minister was listening to his Chief of Staff, General Sir Hastings Ismay, read a copy of Montgomery’s message to the Supreme Commander. The Field Marshal’s promise of “utmost speed and drive” was good news indeed; even better was his declared intention of heading for Berlin. “Montgomery,” the Prime Minister told Ismay, “is making remarkable progress.”

  After months of stormy discussion between British and U.S. military leaders, Allied strategy seemed to have smoothed out. General Eisenhower’s plans, outlined in the fall of 1944 and approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff at Malta in January, 1945, called for Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group to make the main drive over the Lower Rhine and north of the Ruhr; this was the route that Churchill, in a letter to Roosevelt, had called “the shortest road to Berlin.” In the south, American forces were to cross the river and head into the Frankfurt area, drawing off the enemy from Montgomery. This supplementary advance could become the main line of attack if Montgomery’s offensive faltered. But as far as Churchill was concerned, the matter was settled. The “Great Crusade” was nearing its end, and for Churchill it was immensely satisfying that of all the Allied commanders it was the hero of El Alamein who seemed destined to capture the enemy capital. The Twenty-first Army Group had been specially reinforced for the offensive, with top priority in troops, air support, supplies and equipment. In all, Montgomery had under his command almost one million men in some thirty-five divisions and attached units, including the U. S. Ninth Army.

  Four days before, Churchill had traveled with General Eisenhower to Germany to witness the opening phase of the river assault. As he stood on the banks of the Rhine watching the monumental offensive unfold, Churchill said to Eisenhower, “My dear General, the German is whipped. We’ve got him. He’s all through.”

  And indeed, enemy resistance proved surprisingly light in most areas. In the U.S. Ninth Army sector, where two divisions—about 34,000 men—crossed shoulder to shoulder with the British, there were only thirty-one casualties. Now, Montgomery had more than twenty divisions and fifteen hundred tanks across the river and was driving for the Elbe. The road to Berlin—which Churchill had called “the prime and true objective of the Anglo-American armies”—seemed wide open.

  It was open politically, too. There had never been any Big Three discussions about which army would take the city. Berlin was an open target, w
aiting to be captured by the Allied army that reached it first.

  However, there had been discussions, plenty of them, regarding the occupation of the rest of the enemy nation—as the sectors laid out in the Operation Eclipse maps indicated. And the decisions regarding the occupation of Germany were to have a crucial effect on the capture and political future of Berlin. At least one of the Allied leaders had realized this from the start. “There will definitely be a race for Berlin,” he had said. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  It had been seventeen months earlier, on November 19, 1943, that the matter was brought before Roosevelt. On that occasion the President had sat at the head of the table in a conference room of Admiral Ernest J. King’s suite aboard the battleship, U.S.S. Iowa. Flanking him were assistants and advisors, among them the U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Roosevelt was en route to the Middle East for the Cairo and Teheran conferences—the fifth and sixth of the Allied leaders’ wartime meetings.

  These were momentous days in the global struggle with the Axis powers. On the Russian front the Germans had suffered their biggest and bloodiest defeat: Stalingrad, encircled and cut off for twenty-three days, had fallen, and more than 300,000 Germans had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. In the Pacific, where more than one million Americans were fighting, the Japanese were being forced back on every front. In the West, Rommel had been routed from North Africa. Italy, invaded from Africa via Sicily, had surrendered; the Germans were hanging on grimly to the northern part of the country. And now the Anglo-Americans were preparing plans for the coup de grâce—Operation Overlord, the all-out invasion of Europe.

  Aboard the Iowa, Roosevelt was showing sharp annoyance. The documents and maps before him were the essentials of a plan called Operation Rankin, Case C, one of many studies developed in connection with the forthcoming invasion. Rankin C considered the steps that should be taken if there was a sudden collapse or capitulation of the enemy. In that event the plan suggested that the Reich and Berlin should be divided into sectors, with each of the Big Three occupying a zone. What troubled the President was the area that had been chosen for his country by the British planners.

  Rankin C had been created under peculiar and frustrating circumstances. The one man most directly affected by its provisions would be the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe. But this officer was still to be appointed. The difficult task of trying to plan ahead for the Supreme Commander—that is, to prepare both the cross-channel offensive, Operation Overlord, and a plan in the event Germany crumbled, Operation Rankin—had been given to Britain’s Lieutenant General Frederick E. Morgan,* known by the code name “COSSAC” (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, designate). It was a staggering and thankless job. When he was named to the post, Morgan was told by Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff: “Well there it is; it won’t work, of course, but you must bloody well make it!”

  In preparing Rankin C Morgan had to consider all sorts of imponderables. What would happen if the enemy capitulated so abruptly that the Allies were caught off balance, as they were in World War I by the unforeseen German surrender of November, 1918? Whose troops would go where? What parts of Germany would be occupied by American, British and Russian forces? Who would take Berlin? These were the basic questions, and they had to be solved in clear and decisive ways if the Allies were not to be surprised by a sudden collapse.

  Up to that time no specific plan for the war’s end had ever been set down. Although in the United States and Britain various governmental bodies discussed the problems that would arise on the cessation of hostilities, little headway was made in the formulation of an overall policy. There was agreement on only one point: that the enemy country would be occupied.

  The Russians, by contrast, had no difficulty arriving at a policy. Occupation had always been taken for granted by Josef Stalin and he had always known exactly how he would go about it. As far back as December, 1941, he bluntly informed Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, of his post-war demands, naming the territories he intended to occupy and annex. It was an impressive list: included in his victory booty Stalin wanted recognition of his claims to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia; that part of Finland which he had taken when he attacked the Finns in 1939; the province of Bessarabia in Rumania; that part of eastern Poland which the Soviets had overrun in 1939 by agreement with the Nazis; and most of East Prussia. As he calmly laid down his terms guns were firing only fifteen miles from the Kremlin, in the Moscow suburbs, where German forces were still fighting desperately.

  Although the British considered Stalin’s 1941 demands premature to say the least,* by 1943 they were preparing plans of their own. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had recommended that Germany be totally occupied and divided among the Allies into three zones. A cabinet body called the Armistice and Post-war Committee was thereupon set up under Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee, head of the Labour Party. The Attlee group issued a broad recommendation which also advocated a tripartite division, with Britain occupying the industry- and commerce-rich northwestern areas. Berlin, it was suggested, should be jointly occupied by the three powers. The only Ally with virtually no plans for a defeated Germany was the United States. The official U.S. view was that post-war settlements should await a time nearer the final victory. Occupation policy, it was felt, was primarily a military concern.

  But now, with the collective strength of the Allies beginning to be felt on every front and with the tempo of their offensives mounting, the need for coordinating political planning had become acute. In October, 1943, at the Foreign Ministers Conference in Moscow, the first tentative step was taken to define a common Allied post-war policy. The Allies accepted the idea of joint responsibility in the control and occupation of Germany, and set up a tripartite body, the European Advisory Commission (EAC), to “study and make recommendations to the three governments upon European questions connected with the termination of hostilities.”

  But in the meantime Morgan had produced his plan—a rough blueprint for the occupation of Germany—“prepared,” he later explained, “only after a powerful amount of crystal-ball gazing.” Initially, without political guidance, Morgan had produced a plan calling for a limited occupation. But his final Rankin C proposals reflected the Attlee committee’s more elaborate scheme. Morgan had sat down with a map and divided Germany into mathematical thirds, “faintly sketching in blue pencil along the existing provincial boundaries.” It was obvious that the Russians, driving from the east, must occupy an eastern sector. The division between the Anglo-Americans and the Russians in the revised Rankin C plan was a suggested line running from Lübeck on the Baltic to Eisenach in central Germany and from there to the Czech border. What the extent of the Soviet zone would be was of no concern to Morgan. He had not been asked to consider that since it “would naturally be the affair of the Russians who were not included in our COSSAC party.” But Berlin did bother him, for it would lie within the Russian sector. “Were we to continue to regard the place as a capital or was there to be a capital at all?” he wondered. “The internationality of the operation suggested that occupation of Berlin or any other capital, were there to be one, should be in equal tripartite force, by a division each of United States, British and Russian troops.”

  As for the British and American zones, their north-south relationship seemed to Morgan to have been predetermined by one seemingly ridiculous but relevant fact: the location of the British and American bases and depots back in England. From the time the first American troops arrived in the United Kingdom they had been quartered first in Northern Ireland and later in the south and southwest of England. British forces were situated in the north and southeast. Thus the concentration of troops, their supplies and communications were separate—the Americans always on the right, the British on the left facing the continent of Europe. As Morgan foresaw Overlord, this design was to continue across the Channel to the invasion beaches of Normandy—and, presumably, through Europe to the heart o
f Germany itself. The British were to enter northern Germany and liberate Holland, Denmark and Norway. On the right, the Americans, following their line of advance through France, Belgium and Luxembourg, would end up in the southern German provinces.

  “I do not believe,” Morgan said later, “that anyone at the time could have realized the full and ultimate implications of the quartering decision—which in all probability was made by some minor official in the War Office. But from it flowed all the rest.”

  Aboard the Iowa, the President of the United States realized the full and ultimate implications perfectly well. Those implications were precisely what he did not like about the Rankin C plan. Immediately the afternoon session began at 3 P.M., Roosevelt launched into the subject, and he was plainly irritated. Commenting on the accompanying memorandum, in which the Chiefs of Staff asked for guidance on Morgan’s revised plan, Roosevelt rebuked his military advisors for “making certain suppositions”—in particular, that the U.S. should accept the British proposal to occupy southern Germany. “I do not like that arrangement,” declared the President. He wanted northwest Germany. He wanted access to the ports of Bremen and Hamburg, and also those of Norway and Denmark. And Roosevelt was firm on something else: the extent of the U.S. zone. “We should go as far as Berlin,” he said. “The U.S. should have Berlin.” Then he added: “The Soviets can take the territory to the east.”