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

by Cornelius Ryan

  Roosevelt was also displeased by another aspect of Rankin C. The U.S., in the south, would have a sphere of responsibility that included France, Belgium and Luxembourg. He was worried about France, and especially about the leader of the Free French Forces, General Charles de Gaulle, whom he saw as a “political headache.” As forces advanced into that country, the President told his advisors, De Gaulle would be “one mile behind the troops,” ready to take over the government. Above all, Roosevelt feared that civil war might break out in France when the war ended. He did not want to be involved, he said, “in reconstituting France. France,” declared the President, “is a British baby.”

  And not only France. He felt that Britain should have the responsibility for Luxembourg and Belgium as well—and for the southern zone of Germany. As for the American zone—as the President visualized it, it would sweep across northern Germany (including Berlin) all the way to Stettin on the Oder. Then once again, measuring his words, he emphasized his displeasure over proposed zonal arrangements. “The British plan for the U.S. to have the southern zone,” Roosevelt said, “and I do not like it.”

  The President’s suggestions startled his military advisors. Three months before, at the Quebec Conference, the Joint Chiefs had approved the plan in principle. So had the Combined American and British Chiefs of Staff. At that time, President Roosevelt expressed great interest in the division of Germany and added his weight to the urgency of the planning by expressing the desire that troops should “be ready to get to Berlin as soon as the Russians.”

  The Joint Chiefs had believed the issues involved in Rankin C were all settled. They had brought up the plan on the Iowa only because political and economic matters, as well as military policy, were involved. Now the President was challenging not only the occupation plan but the very basis of Operation Overlord itself. If the projected zones of occupation were switched to accommodate the President’s wishes, a troop changeover would have to be made in England before the invasion. This would delay—and might thus jeopardize—the cross-Channel offensive, one of the most complicated operations ever undertaken in any war. It seemed clear to his military advisors that President Roosevelt either did not understand the immense logistical movements involved—or understood them perfectly well and was simply prepared to pay a phenomenal cost in order to get the northwest zone and Berlin for the United States. In their view, the cost was prohibitive.

  General Marshall began diplomatically to elaborate on the situation. He agreed “that the matter should be gone into.” But, he said, the Rankin C proposals stemmed from prime military considerations. From a logistical standpoint, he reasoned, “We must have U.S. forces on the right … the whole matter goes back to the question of the ports of England.”

  Admiral Ernest King, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, backed Marshall; the invasion plans were so far developed, he said, that it would be impractical to accept any change in the deployment of troops.

  The immensity of the problem was such that Marshall believed an entire new scheme would be needed just for the switching of troops—one flexible enough to be applied “at any stage of development” in order to get the President what he wanted in Germany.

  Roosevelt didn’t think so. He felt that if there was a total collapse of Hitler’s Reich the U.S. would have to get as many men as possible into Germany, and he suggested that some of them could be sent “around Scotland”—thereby entering Germany on the north. It was at this point that he expressed certainty that the Allies would race for Berlin; in that case, U.S. divisions would have to get there “as soon as possible.” Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s confidant and advisor, who was present on the Iowa, had the same sense of urgency: he thought that the U.S. would have to be “ready to put an airborne division into Berlin within two hours of the collapse.”

  Again and again the President’s military advisors tried to impress on him the seriousness of the problems that a change in Rankin C would entail. Roosevelt remained adamant. Finally he pulled toward him a National Geographic map of Germany that lay on the table and began drawing. First he drew a line across Germany’s western frontier to Düsseldorf and south along the Rhine to Mainz. From there, with a broad stroke, he cut Germany in half along the 50th parallel roughly between Mainz on the west and Asch on the Czech border to the east. Then his pencil moved northeast to Stettin on the Oder. The Americans would have the area above the line, the British the sector below it. But as Roosevelt outlined it, the eastern boundary of the U.S. and British zones would form a rough wedge. Its apex was at Leipzig; from there it ran northeast to Stettin and southeast to Asch. The President did not say so, but this shallow triangle was obviously to be the Soviet zone. It contained less than half of the area allotted to Russia in the Rankin C proposal. Nor was Berlin located within the territory he left to Russia. It lay on the boundary line between the Soviet and U.S. zones. It was Marshall’s understanding that the President intended Berlin to be jointly occupied by U.S., British and Soviet troops.

  The map showed unmistakably what the President had in mind. If the U.S. took the southern zone proposed by COSSAC in the Rankin paper, the President told his military chiefs, the “British will undercut us in every move we make.” It was quite evident, Roosevelt said, that “British political considerations are in back of the proposals.”

  The discussion ended without any clear-cut decision, but Roosevelt had left no doubt in the minds of his military chiefs as to what he expected. United States occupation as envisaged by Roosevelt meant the quartering of one million troops in Europe “for at least one year, or maybe two.” His post-war plan was similar to the American approach to the war itself—an all-out effort, but with a minimum of time and involvement in European affairs. He foresaw a swift and successful thrust into the enemy’s heartland—“a railroad invasion of Germany with little or no fighting”—that would carry U.S. troops into the northwest zone and from there, into Berlin. Above all, the President of the United States was determined to have Berlin.*

  Thus was offered the first concrete U.S. plan for Germany. There was just one trouble. Roosevelt, often criticized for acting as his own Secretary of State, had told no one his views except his military chiefs. They were to sit on the plan for almost four months.

  After the Iowa conference, General Marshall gave the Roosevelt map—the one tangible evidence of administration thinking about the occupation of Germany—to Major General Thomas T. Handy, Chief of the War Department’s Operations Division. When General Handy returned to Washington the map was filed away in the archives of the top secret Operations Division. “To the best of my knowledge,” he was later to recall, “we never received instructions to send it to anyone at the Department of State.”

  The shelving of the Roosevelt plan by his own military advisors was just one of a series of strange and costly blunders and errors of judgment that occurred among American officials in the days following the Iowa meeting. They were to have a profound influence on the future of Germany and Berlin.

  On November 29, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met for the first time at the Teheran Conference. At this meeting the Big Three named the representatives who would sit in London on the all-important European Advisory Commission—the body charged with drafting surrender terms for Germany, defining the zones of occupation, and formulating plans for Allied administration of the country. To the EAC the British named a close friend of Anthony Eden, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Sir William Strang. The Russians chose a hard-headed bargainer, already known for his obstinacy—Fedor T. Gusev, Soviet Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Roosevelt appointed his envoy to the Court of St. James’s, the dedicated but shy and often inarticulate John G. Winant. Winant was never briefed on his new job, nor was he told of the President’s objectives in Germany.

  However, an opportunity soon arose for the Ambassador to learn the nature of the policy he was supposed to espouse on the EAC—but the opportunity was lost. The Cairo Conference (Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek) ran from
November 22 to 26; the Teheran meeting (Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin) began on November 28 and continued until December 1; after Teheran, Roosevelt and Churchill met again at Cairo on December 4. That night, at a long dinner meeting with Churchill, Eden and the President’s Chief of Staff, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt once again voiced objections to the Rankin C proposals. He told the British—apparently without divulging the contents of his map or the extent of his revisions—that he felt the U.S. should have the northwest zone of Germany. Churchill and Eden strongly opposed the suggestion, but the matter was passed on to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for study. They, in turn, recommended that COSSAC, General Morgan, should consider the possibility of revising the Rankin C plan.

  Winant, although part of the delegation in Cairo, was not invited to the dinner meeting and apparently was never informed about the matters discussed there. As Roosevelt set out for home, Winant flew back to London for the first meeting of the EAC, only vaguely aware of what the President and the administration really wanted.

  Ironically, only a few miles away from the U. S. Embassy in London, at Norfolk House in St. James’s Square, was a man who knew only too well what President Roosevelt wanted. Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, flabbergasted by his new orders to re-examine his Rankin C plan with a view to switching the British and U.S. zones, put his hard-pressed staff to work immediately. He very quickly reached the conclusion that it was impossible—at least until after Germany was defeated. He so reported to his superiors—and “that,” he later recorded, “ended the affair” so far as he was concerned.

  Meanwhile, the U.S. military chiefs, despite their protestations that they did not want to be involved in politics, were, in fact, left to decide U.S. policy in post-war Europe. To them, the zoning and occupation of Germany were strictly military matters, to be handled by the Civil Affairs Division of the War Department. As an inevitable result, the War Department found itself at odds with the State Department over Germany. The consequence was a tug of war, in the course of which any hope of achieving a coherent, unified U.S. policy on the subject was irretrievably lost.

  First, it was clear to all that something had to be done to direct Ambassador Winant in his negotiations with the EAC in London. To coordinate the conflicting U.S. views, a special group called the Working Security Committee was established in Washington early in December, 1943, with representatives from the State, War and Navy departments. The War Department representatives, officers from the Civil Affairs Division, actually refused at first to sit on the committee—or for that matter, to recognize the need for a European Advisory Commission at all. The entire problem of the surrender and occupation of Germany, the Army officers maintained, was purely a military matter that would be decided at the right time, and “at a military level,” by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Because of this farcical situation, the proceedings were held up for two weeks. Meanwhile, Winant sat in London without instructions.

  At last, the military men agreed to the meetings and the committee settled down to work—but little was accomplished. Each group on the committee had to clear recommendations with its departmental superiors before anything could be cabled to Winant in London. Worse, each of the department heads could veto a suggested directive—a prerogative the War Department exercised repeatedly. The Acting Chairman of the Committee, Professor Philip E. Mosely of the State Department, who was to become Political Advisor to Ambassador Winant, commented later that the Civil Affairs officers “had been given strict instructions to agree to nothing, or almost nothing, and could only report the discussions back to their superiors. The system of negotiating at arm’s length, under rigid instructions and with the exercise of the veto, resembled the procedures of Soviet negotiators in their more intransigent moods.”

  All through December, 1943, the haggling went on. In the Army’s opinion the zones of occupation probably would be determined more or less by the final position of troops when the surrender was signed. Under the circumstances, the Army representatives saw no sense in permitting Winant to negotiate any agreement about zones in the EAC.

  So adamant were the military men that they even turned down a State Department plan which, though similar to the British scheme—it, too, divided Germany into three equal parts—had one vital additional element: a corridor linking Berlin, deep inside the Soviet area, with the Western zones. The author of the corridor was Professor Mosely. He fully expected the Soviets to object but he pressed for its inclusion for, as he was later to explain, “I believed, if the plan was presented first with impressive firmness, it might be taken into account when the Soviets began framing their own proposals.” Provision had to be made, he contended, “for free and direct territorial access to Berlin from the west.”

  The State Department’s plan was submitted to the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division for study prior to a meeting of the full committee. For some time it was held up. Finally Mosely visited the offices of the Civil Affairs Division and sought out the colonel who was handling the matter. He asked the officer if he had received the plan. The colonel opened a bottom drawer of his desk and said, “It’s right there.” Then he leaned back in his chair, put both feet in the drawer and said, “It’s damn well going to stay there, too.” The plan was never transmitted to Winant.

  In London the EAC met informally for the first time on December 15, 1943, and for Ambassador Winant it was perhaps just as well that the meeting dealt only with rules of procedure. He was still without official instructions. He had learned unofficially from British sources about the plan which had so upset Roosevelt but he did not know it as Morgan’s Rankin C: it was described to him as the Attlee Plan. He had also been informed, again unofficially (by U. S. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy), that the President wanted the northwest zone. Winant did not expect the British to switch.* Winant’s estimate was absolutely right.

  On January 14, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the newly appointed Supreme Commander, arrived in London to take over his post, and all the machinery of military planning, heretofore in the hands of General Morgan, was officially transferred to his authority. But there was one plan that even he could hardly influence at this late date. The day following Eisenhower’s arrival, at the first formal meeting of the EAC, Morgan’s Rankin C plan was presented by Sir William Strang to Ambassador Winant and the Russian envoy, Fedor Gusev. The U.S., because of the deadlock in Washington, had lost the initiative. It would never regain it. Strang was later to write that he had an advantage over his colleagues, “in that, whereas they had to telegraph for instructions to a remote and sometimes unsympathetic and uncomprehending government, I was at the center of things, usually able at short notice to have my line of action defined for me. I had a further advantage in that the Government had begun post-war planning in good time and in an orderly way.”

  On February 18, at the EAC’s second formal meeting, in what was surely a record for a Soviet diplomatic decision, the inscrutable Gusev, without argument of any kind, solemnly accepted the British zonal proposals.

  The British proposal gave the Soviets almost 40 per cent of Germany’s area, 36 per cent of its population and 33 per cent of its productive resources. Berlin, though divided between the Allies, lay deep inside the proposed Soviet zone, 110 miles from the western Anglo-American demarcation line. “The division proposed seemed fair as any,” Strang later recalled, “and if it perhaps erred somewhat in generosity to the Soviets, this was in line with the desire of our military authorities who had preoccupations about post-war shortages of manpower, not to take on a larger area of occupation than need be.” There were many other reasons. One of them was the fear of both British and American leaders that Russia might make a separate peace with Germany. Another, which particularly concerned the U.S. military, was the fear that Russia would not join the war against Japan. And finally, the British believed that Russia, if not forestalled, might actually demand up to 50 per cent of Germany because of her wartime sufferings.

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nbsp; As far as the U.S. was concerned, the die now seemed cast. Although the Big Three still had to approve the British plan, the hard fact for the U.S. was that Britain and Russia were in agreement.* In a way it was a fait accompli and there was little that Winant could do except inform his government.

  The Soviets’ quick acceptance of the British plan caught Washington and the President off balance. Roosevelt hurriedly dashed off a note to the State Department. “What are the zones in the British and Russian drafts and what is the zone we are proposing?” he asked. “I must know this in order that it conform with what I decided on months ago.” State Department officials were baffled and for a very good reason: they did not know what decisions Roosevelt had made at Teheran and Cairo regarding the zones.

  There was a flurry of calls between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department before the President got his information. Then, on February 21, having seen the Anglo-Russian plan, Roosevelt reacted. “I disagree with the British proposal of the demarcation of boundaries,” he bluntly stated in a formal memorandum to the State Department. He made no mention of the Soviet zone, but instead took sharp exception once again to the sector proposed for the U.S., repeating even more forcefully what he had told his military advisors on the Iowa. The President’s memo was a revelation to the State Department.

  “Our principal object,” he wrote, “is not to take part in the internal problems in southern Europe but is rather to take part in eliminating Germany as a possible and probable cause of a third World War. Various points have been raised about the difficulties of transferring our troops … from a French front to a northern German front—what is called a ‘leap-frog.’ These objections are specious because no matter where British and American troops are on the day of Germany’s surrender it is physically easy for them to go anywhere—north, east or south…. All things considered, and remembering that supplies come 3,500 miles or more by sea, the United States should use the ports of Northern Germany—Hamburg and Bremen—and … the Netherlands…. Therefore, I think American policy should be to occupy northwestern Germany….