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

by Cornelius Ryan

  During the interval the Führer had calmed down, too. When Guderian returned, Hitler was conducting the conference as though nothing had happened. Seeing him enter, the Führer ordered everyone out of the room except Keitel and Guderian. Then he said, coldly, “Colonel General Guderian, your physical health requires that you immediately take six weeks’ convalescent leave.” His voice betraying no emotion, Guderian said, “I’ll go.” But Hitler was not quite finished. “Please wait until the conference is over,” he ordered. It was several hours before the meeting broke up. By that time, Hitler was almost solicitous. “Please do your best to get your health back,” he said. “In six weeks the situation will be very critical. Then I shall need you urgently. Where do you think you will go?” Keitel wanted to know, too. Suspicious at their sudden concern, Guderian prudently decided not to tell them his plans. Excusing himself, he left the Reichskanzlei. Guderian was out. The innovator of the panzer techniques, the last of Hitler’s big-name generals was gone; with him went the last vestiges of sound judgment in the German High Command.

  By 6 A.M. the following morning, Thursday, March 29, Heinrici had good reason to feel Guderian’s loss. He had just been handed a teletyped message informing him that Hitler had appointed Krebs as Chief of the OKH. Krebs was a smooth-talking man who was a fanatical supporter of Hitler; he was widely and cordially disliked. Among the Vistula staff, the news of his appointment, following so closely that of Guderian’s departure, produced an atmosphere of gloom. The Operations Chief, Colonel Eismann, summed up the prevailing attitude. As he was later to record: “This man, with his eternally friendly smile, reminded me somehow of a fawn … it was clear what we could expect. Krebs had only to spout out a few confident phrases—and the situation was rosy again. Hitler would get much better support from him than from Guderian.”

  Heinrici made no comment on the appointment. Guderian’s spirited defense of Busse had saved that commander and there would be no more suicidal attacks against Küstrin. For that Heinrici was grateful to a man with whom he had often disagreed. He would miss Guderian, for he knew Krebs of old and expected little support from him. There would be no outspoken Guderian to back up Heinrici when he saw Hitler to discuss the problems of the Oder front. He was to see the Führer for a full-dress conference on Friday, April 6.

  The car pulled up outside Vistula’s main headquarters building a little after 9 A.M., on March 29, and the broad-shouldered, sixfoot Berlin Chief of Staff bounded out. The energetic Colonel Hans “Teddy” Refior was looking forward enthusiastically to his meeting with Heinrici’s Chief of Staff, General Kinzel. He had high hopes that the conference would go well; coming under Heinrici’s command would be the best thing that could happen to the Berlin Defense Area. Lugging maps and charts for his presentation, the husky 39-year-old Refior entered the building. Small though the Berlin garrison was, Refior believed, as he later wrote in his diary, that Heinrici “would be delighted at this increase in his forces.”

  He had his first moments of doubt on meeting the Chief of Staff. Kinzel’s greeting was restrained, though not unfriendly. Refior had hoped that his old classmate Colonel Eismann would be present—they had gone over the Berlin situation together a few weeks before—but Kinzel received him alone. The Vistula Chief of Staff seemed harassed, his manner bordering on impatience. Taking his cue from Kinzel, Refior opened his maps and charts and quickly began the briefing. The lack of a major authority to direct Reymann had produced an almost impossible situation for the Berlin command, he explained. “When we asked the OKH if we came under them,” he elaborated, “we were told ‘the OKH is responsible only for the eastern front. You people come under the OKW [Armed Forces High Command].’ So we went to OKW. They said, ‘Why come to us? Berlin’s front faces east—you are the responsibility of OKH.’” As Refior talked, Kinzel examined the maps and disposition of the Berlin forces. Suddenly Kinzel looked up at Refior and quietly told him of Heinrici’s decision of the night before not to accept responsibility for the city’s defense. Then, as Refior later recorded, Kinzel spoke briefly of Hitler, Goebbels and the other bureaucrats. “As far as I am personally concerned,” he said, “those madmen in Berlin can fry in their own juice.”

  On the drive back to Berlin, Refior, his buoyant enthusiasm shattered, realized for the first time what it meant to be “a rejected orphan.” He loved Berlin. He had attended the War Academy, married and raised his two children—a boy and girl—in the capital. Now, it seemed to him that he was working in ever-increasing loneliness to defend the city in which he had spent the happiest years of his life. No one in the chain of command was prepared to make what Refior saw as the gravest of all decisions: the responsibility for the defense and preservation of Berlin.

  All that was left to do was to put the few possessions on his desk into a small case. He had said good-bye to his staff, briefed his successor, Krebs, and now Colonel General Heinz Guderian was ready to leave his Zossen headquarters, his eventual destination a well-guarded secret. First, however, he intended to go with his wife to a sanatorium near Munich where Guderian could get treatment for his ailing heart. Afterward he planned to head for the only peaceful place left in Germany: Southern Bavaria. The only activities in that region centered around army hospitals and convalescent homes, retired or dismissed generals and evacuated government officials and their departments. The General had chosen carefully. He would sit out the war in the unwarlike climate of the Bavarian Alps. As former Chief of the OKH, Guderian knew that absolutely nothing was happening down there.

  *In 1948, following a sudden rise in pulse rate, his doctors told him to give up tobacco. Eisenhower never smoked again.

  *His pride was somewhat restored when, shortly after this incident, the British showed their confidence in Montgomery and his policies by naming him a Field Marshal. For the man who had turned the tide of British defeat in the desert and chased Rommel out of North Africa, it was an honor long overdue.

  *These figures were given by Winston Churchill on Jaunary 18, 1945, in a speech before the House of Commons. Appalled by the breakdown in amity, he announced that “U.S. troops have done almost all the fighting” in the Ardennes, suffering losses “equal to those of both sides at the Battle or Gettysburg.” Then, in what could only be interpreted as a direct slap at Montgomery and his supporters, he warned the British not to “lend themselves to the shouting of mischief makers.”

  *“I should never have held the press conference at all,” Montgomery told the author in 1963. “The Americans seemed over-sensitive at the time and many of their generals disliked me so much that no matter what I said, it would have been wrong.”

  *“Montgomery,” Eisenhower later stated, “believed in the appointment of a field commander as a matter of principle. He even offered to serve under Bradley if I would approve.”

  ** On March 11, for example, SHAEF intelligence reported that Zhukov’s “spearheads” had reached Seelow, west of the Oder and just twenty-eight miles from Berlin. When the author interviewed Soviet defense officials in Moscow in 1963, he learned that Zhukov did not actually reach Seelow, in the center of the German Oder defense system, until April 17.

  *Whoever prepared the counterintelligence paper was in error about Barbarossa’s last resting place. Barbarossa (Red Beard)—the surname of Frederick I (11211190)—is not buried in Berchtesgaden. As the myth goes, “he never died, but merely sleeps” in the hills of Thuringia. He sits at a “stone table with his six knights waiting for the fullness of time when he will rescue Germany from bondage and give her the foremost place in the world … his beard has already grown through the stone slab, but must wind itself thrice around the table before his second advent.”

  ** One of Marshall’s senior staff officers, General John Hull, who in 1945 was the U.S. Army’s Acting Chief of Staff for Operations, says that “Ike was Marshall’s protégé and, though Ike might resent me saying this, there was between the two men a sort of father-son relationship.”

  *There are many version
s of the row, ranging from a detailed report in Juergen Thorwald’s Flight in the Winter to a two-line account in Die Leitzen Tage der Reichskanzlei by Gerhard Boldt, one of Guderian’s aides. Passing lightly over the matter, Boldt writes that Hitler advised the OKH Chief “to go to a spa for treatment” and Guderian “took the hint.” He gives the conference date as March 20, seven days before the fateful Küstrin attack. Guderian, in his memoirs Panzer Leader, gives the time and date as precisely 14.00 hours on March 28. For the most part, my reconstruction is based on Guderian’s memoirs, supplemented by interviews with Heinrici, Busse and their respective staffs.

  2

  IT WAS Good Friday, March 30, the beginning of the Easter weekend. In Warm Springs, Georgia, President Roosevelt had arrived for a stay at the Little White House; near the railroad station crowds stood in the hot sun waiting, as always, to greet him. At the first appearance of the President a murmur of surprise swept the onlookers. He was being carried from the train in the arms of a Secret Service man, almost inert, his body sagging. There was no jaunty wave, no good-humored joke shared with the crowd. To many, Roosevelt seemed almost comatose, only vaguely aware of what was happening. Shocked and apprehensive, the people watched in silence as the Presidential limousine moved slowly away.

  In Moscow the weather was unseasonably mild. From his second-floor apartment in the embassy building on Mokhavaya Street, Major General John R. Deane gazed out across the square at the green Byzantine domes and minarets of the Kremlin. Deane, the Chief of the U.S. Military Mission, and his British counterpart, Admiral Ernest R. Archer, were awaiting confirmation from their respective ambassadors, W. Averell Harriman and Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, that a meeting with Stalin had been arranged. At that conference they would deliver to Stalin “SCAF 252,” the cable which had arrived from General Eisenhower the day before (and which the ailing U.S. President had not seen).

  In London Winston Churchill, cigar jutting from his mouth, waved to onlookers outside No. 10 Downing Street. He was preparing to leave by car for Chequers, the 700-acre official residence of British Prime Ministers in Buckinghamshire. Despite his cheerful appearance, Churchill was both worried and angry. Among his papers was a copy of the Supreme Commander’s cable to Stalin. For the first time in almost three years of close cooperation, the Prime Minister was furious with Eisenhower.

  British reaction to Eisenhower’s cable had been mounting for more than twenty-four hours. The British had been bewildered at first, then shocked, and finally angered. Like the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, London had learned of the message at second hand—through copies passed along “for information.” Not even the British Deputy Supreme Commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, had known of the cable beforehand; London had heard nothing from him. Churchill himself was caught completely off balance. Remembering Montgomery’s signal of March 27 announcing his drive to the Elbe and “thence by autobahn to Berlin, I hope,” the Prime Minister whipped off an anxious note to his Chief of Staff, General Sir Hastings Ismay. Eisenhower’s message to Stalin, he wrote, “seems to differ from Montgomery who spoke of Elbe. Please explain.” For the moment Ismay could not.

  At that point Montgomery gave his superiors another surprise. The powerful U.S. Ninth Army, he reported to Field Marshal Brooke, was to be switched back from his command to General Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group, which would then make the central thrust to Leipzig and Dresden. “I consider we are about to make a terrible mistake,” Montgomery said.

  Once again the British were incensed. In the first place, such information should have come from Eisenhower, not Montgomery. But worse, the Supreme Commander seemed to London to be taking too much into his own hands. In the British view he had not only stepped far beyond his authority by dealing directly with Stalin, but he had also changed longstanding plans without warning. Instead of attacking across Germany’s northern plains with Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group, which had been specially built up for the offensive, Eisenhower had suddenly tapped Bradley to make the last drive of the war through the heart of the Reich. Brooke bitterly summed up the British attitude: “To start with, Eisenhower has no business to address Stalin direct, his communications should be through the Combined Chiefs of Staff; secondly, he produced a telegram which was unintelligible; and finally, what was implied in it appeared to be adrift and a change from all that had been agreed on.” On the afternoon of March 29, an irate Brooke, without consulting Churchill, fired off a sharp protest to Washington. A bitter and vitriolic debate was slowly building up about SCAF 252.

  At about the same time, General Deane in Moscow, having taken the first steps to arrange a meeting with Stalin, sent an urgent cable to Eisenhower. Deane wanted “some additional background information in case [Stalin] wishes to discuss your plans in more detail.” After months of frustrating dealings with the Russians, Deane knew full well what the Generalissimo would ask for, and he spelled it all out for Eisenhower: “1) The present composition of Armies; 2) A little more detail on the scheme of maneuver; 3) Which Army or Armies you envisage making the main and secondary advances …; 4) Brief current estimate of enemy dispositions and intentions.” SHAEF quickly complied. At eight-fifteen that night the intelligence was on its way to Moscow. Deane got the composition of the Anglo-American armies and their order of battle from north to south. So detailed was the information that it even included the fact that the U.S. Ninth Army was to revert back from Montgomery to Bradley.

  Fifty-one minutes later SHAEF heard from Montgomery. He was understandably distressed. With the loss of Simpson’s Army the strength of his drive was sapped and his chance of triumphantly capturing Berlin seemed gone. But he still hoped to persuade Eisenhower to delay the transfer. He sent an unusually tactful message. “I note,” he said, “that you intend to change the command set up. If you feel this is necessary I pray you not to do so until we reach the Elbe as such action would not help the great movement which is now beginning to develop.”

  Montgomery’s British superiors were in no mood to be tactful, as Washington officials quickly discovered. At the Pentagon Brooke’s protest was formally delivered to General Marshall by the British representative to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson. The British note condemned the procedure Eisenhower had adopted in communicating with Stalin and charged that the Supreme Commander had changed plans. Marshall, both surprised and concerned, promptly radioed Eisenhower. His message was mainly a straightforward report on the British protest. It argued, he said, that existing strategy should be followed—that Montgomery’s northern drive would secure the German ports and thereby “to a great extent annul the U-boat war,” and that it would also free Holland, Denmark and open up communications with Sweden again, making available “nearly two million tons of Swedish and Norwegian shipping now lying idle in Swedish ports.” The British Chiefs, Marshall quoted, “feel strongly that the main thrust … across the open plains of N.W. Germany with the object of capturing Berlin should be adhered to …”

  To fend off Eisenhower’s British critics and to patch up Anglo-American unity as quickly as possible, Marshall was prepared to give latitude and understanding to both sides. Yet his own puzzlement and annoyance with the Supreme Commander’s actions showed through the last paragraph of his message: “Prior to your dispatch of SCAF 252 had the naval aspects of the British been considered?” He ended with: “Your comments are requested as a matter of urgency.”

  One man above all others felt urgency—and, indeed, impending chaos—in the situation. Winston Churchill’s anxiety had been mounting almost hourly. The Eisenhower incident had arisen at a moment when relations among the three allies were not going well. It was a critical period, and Churchill felt very much alone. He did not know how ill Roosevelt was, but for some time previous he had been puzzled and uneasy about his correspondence with the President. As he was later to put it: “In my long telegrams I thought I was talking to my trusted friend and colleague … [but] I was no longer being
fully heard by him … various hands drafted in combination the answers which were sent in his name … Roosevelt could only give general guidance and approval … these were costly weeks for all.”

  Even more worrisome was the rapid political deterioration that was evident between the West and Russia. Churchill’s suspicions about Stalin’s post-war aims had grown steadily since Yalta. The Soviet Premier had contemptuously disregarded the promises made there; nearly every day now, new and ominous trends appeared. Eastern Europe was slowly being swallowed up by the U.S.S.R.; Anglo-American bombers, downed behind Red Army lines because of fuel or mechanical problems, were being interned along with their crews; air bases and facilities promised by Stalin for the use of American bombers had been suddenly denied; the Russians, granted free access to liberated prisoner-of-war camps in western Germany for the repatriation of their troops, refused similar permission to Western representatives to enter, evacuate or in any way aid Anglo-American soldiers in eastern European camps. Worse, Stalin had charged that “Soviet ex-prisoners of war in U.S. camps … were subjected to unfair treatment and unlawful persecution, including beating.” When the Germans in Italy tried to negotiate secretly the surrender of their forces, Russian reaction was to fire off an insulting note accusing the Allies of treacherously dealing with the enemy “behind the back of the Soviet Union, which is bearing the brunt of the war …”*

  And now had come the Eisenhower message to Stalin. At a time when the choice of military objectives might well determine the future of post-war Europe, Churchill considered that Eisenhower’s communication with the Soviet dictator constituted a dangerous intervention into global and political strategy—realms that were strictly the concern of Roosevelt and the Prime Minister. To Churchill, Berlin was of crucial political importance and it now looked as though Eisenhower did not intend to make an all-out effort to capture the city.