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

by Cornelius Ryan

  The men of the British 6th Airborne Division had led their countrymen into Normandy on D-Day; they were determined to lead them on to the end. Sergeant Hugh McWhinnie had heard from German prisoners that the moment the British crossed the Elbe, the enemy would “open the door and let them through to Berlin.” He doubted it. The 6th was used to fighting for every mile. Captain Wilfred Davison of the 13th Parachute Battalion was certain that there would be a race for the city but, like most of the division, he had no doubt that “the 6th was in the running to lead the way.” But at division headquarters, Captain John L. Shearer was becoming a little anxious. He had heard a rumor that “Berlin was being left to the Americans.”

  U.S. Airborne divisions had heard the same rumor. The trouble was that it made no mention of paratroopers. At General James Gavin’s 82nd Airborne staging area, where chutists had been training for days, it was now all too clear that a fighting drop on Berlin was out. Apparently an airborne operation would result only if a sudden enemy collapse put the Eclipse plan into action, making it necessary for the troopers to go to Berlin on a policing mission. But this seemed remote. SHAEF had already instructed General Lewis Brereton’s First Airborne Army that it would soon be making relief drops on Allied POW camps, under the code name “Operation Jubilant.” Much as they wanted POWs freed, the prospect of a rescue operation instead of a fighting assignment filled the men of the airborne army with something less than jubilance.

  Similar frustration characterized other airborne groups. General Maxwell Taylor’s “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division were once more fighting as foot soldiers, this time in the Ruhr. One regiment of Gavin’s 82nd had been ordered there, too. The 82nd had also been alerted to help Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group in a later operation across the Elbe.

  It was Private Arthur “Dutch” Schultz of the 505th Parachute Regiment who perhaps best summed up the feelings of the men of the airborne divisions. Climbing aboard a truck headed for the Ruhr, he cynically told his pal, Private Joe Tallett, “So. I lead ’em into Normandy, yes? Into Holland, yes? Look at me, kid. I’m a blue-blooded American and the country’s got only one of me. They want to get their money’s worth. They ain’t gonna waste me on Berlin. Hell, no! They’re saving me up! They’re gonna drop me on Tokyo!”

  But if the airborne divisions were dispirited, the land armies were brimming over with anticipation.

  In the center, U.S. forces were going all out and their strength was enormous. With the return of Simpson’s massive Ninth Army from Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group, Bradley had become the first general in American history to command four field armies. Besides the Ninth, his forces included the First, Third and Fifteenth—close to a million men.

  On April 2, just nine days after crossing the Rhine, his troops had finished springing the trap encircling the Ruhr. Caught in the 4,000-square-mile pocket was Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B, numbering no fewer than 325,000 men. With Model contained, the western front was wide open and Bradley swept boldly on, leaving part of the Ninth and First armies to mop up the pocket. Now his forces were in full cry. With the British in the north and General Devers’ U.S. Sixth Army Group in the south holding the flanks, Bradley was driving furiously through Germany’s center, toward Leipzig and Dresden. In the north-to-south line-up of U.S. armies the Ninth was the shortest distance from the Elbe, and it looked to commanders as if Bradley had given Simpson the go-ahead for the dash that, by its very momentum, should take U.S. forces to Berlin.

  The day the encirclement of the Ruhr was completed, Eisenhower issued orders to his forces. Bradley’s group was to “mop up the … Ruhr “ launch a thrust with its main axis: Kassel-Leipzig … seize any opportunity to capture a bridgehead over the River Elbe and be prepared to conduct operations beyond the Elbe.” On April 4, the day the Ninth was returned to him, Bradley himself gave new commands to his armies. In the Twelfth Army Group’s “Letter of Instructions, No. 20,” the Ninth was directed, first, to drive for a line roughly south of Hanover with the army center in the approximate area of the town of Hildesheim—about seventy miles from the Elbe. Then, “on order,” the second phase would begin. It was this vital paragraph that spelled out the role of the Ninth Army and, to its commander, left no doubt as to the destination of his forces. It read: “Phase 2. Advance on order to the east … exploit any opportunity for seizing a bridgehead over the Elbe and be prepared to continue the advance on BERLIN or to the northeast.” Phase 1—the drive toward Hildesheim—seemed to be simply a directional order. No one expected to be held there. But Phase 2 was the starting flag that every division in the Ninth Army had been awaiting, none more eagerly than the commander, Lieutenant General William “Big Simp” Simpson.*

  “My people were keyed up,” General Simpson was to recall later. “We’d been the first to the Rhine and now we were going to be the first to Berlin. All along we thought of just one thing—capturing Berlin, going through and meeting the Russians on the other side.” From the time the Letter of Instructions came down from the Army Group, Simpson had not wasted a minute. He expected to reach the Hildesheim phase line in a matter of days. After that, Simpson told his staff officers, he planned “to get an armored and an infantry division set up on the autobahn running just above Magdeburg on the Elbe to Potsdam, where we’ll be ready to close in on Berlin.” Then Simpson intended to commit the rest of the Ninth “as fast as we can … if we get the bridgehead and they turn us loose.” Jubilantly he told his staff, “Damn, I want to get to Berlin and all you people, right down to the last private, I think, want it, too.”

  Major General Isaac D. White, the determined, wiry commander of the 2nd Armored “Hell on Wheels” Division, was a good step ahead of Simpson: his plan to take Berlin had been ready even before his men crossed the Rhine. White’s Operations Chief, Colonel Briard P. Johnson, had plotted the drive on the capital weeks before. So thorough was his plan that detailed orders and map overlays were ready by March 25.

  The 2nd’s assault plan was somewhat similar to Simpson’s own concept. It, too, followed the autobahn from Magdeburg on the Elbe. Proposed day-by-day advances were drawn on the map overlays and each stage was given a code name. The last dash of about sixty miles from Magdeburg carried phase lines with the names: “Silver,” “Silk,” “Satin,” “Daisy,” “Pansy,” “Jug,” and finally, imposed on a huge blue swastika covering Berlin, the code word “Goal.” At the rate the 2nd was moving, against only spotty opposition, often achieving upward of thirty-five miles a day, White was confident of grabbing the capital. If his men could secure a bridgehead at Magdeburg, now only eighty miles away, White expected to dash into Berlin within forty-eight hours.

  Now, along the Ninth Army’s fifty-odd miles of front, White’s 2nd Armored was spearheading the drive. The division was one of the largest formations on the western front. With its tanks, self-propelled guns, armored cars, bulldozers, trucks, jeeps and artillery, it formed a stream more than seventy-two miles long. To create maximum fighting effectiveness, the force had been broken into three armored units—Combat Commands A, B and R, the latter held in reserve. Even so, the division, moving in tandem and averaging about two miles an hour, took nearly twelve hours to pass a given point. This ponderous armored force was running ahead of every other unit of the Ninth Army—with one notable exception.

  On its right flank, tenaciously pacing the 2nd mile for mile and fighting all the way, was a wildly assorted collection of vehicles crammed with troops. From the air it bore no resemblance to either an armored or an infantry division. In fact, but for a number of U.S. Army trucks interspersed among its columns, it might easily have been mistaken for a German convoy. Major General Robert C. Macon’s highly individualistic 83rd Infantry Division, the “Rag-Tag Circus,” was going hell-for-leather toward the Elbe in its captured booty. Every enemy unit or town that surrendered or was captured subscribed its quota of rolling stock for the division, usually at gunpoint. Every newly acquired vehicle got a quic
k coat of olive-green paint and a U.S. star slapped on its side; then it joined the 83rd. The men of the Rag-Tag Circus had even managed to liberate a German airplane and, harder, had found someone to fly it, and it was spreading consternation all over the front. First Sergeant William G. Presnell of the 30th Infantry Division, who had fought all the way from Omaha Beach, knew the silhouette of every Luftwaffe fighter. So when he saw what was obviously a German plane heading in his direction, he yelled “ME-109!” and dived for cover. Puzzled when there was no burst of machine gun fire, he raised his head and stared as the fighter sped away. The plane was painted a blotchy olive-green. On the undersides of the wings were the words “83rd Inf. Div.”

  If their compatriots were confused by the 83rd’s vehicles, the Germans were even more so. As the division rushed pell mell toward the Elbe, Major Haley Kohler heard the insistent blowing of a car horn. “This Mercedes came up behind us,” he recalled, “and then began passing everything on the road.” Captain John J. Devenney saw it, too. “The car weaved in and out of our column, going in our direction,” he remembered. As it passed, Devenney was astounded to see that it was a chauffeur-driven German staff car with a full load of officers. A burst of machine gun fire stopped the vehicle, and the bewildered Germans were taken prisoner in the middle of what they had supposed to be one of their own columns. The Mercedes, in top condition, received the usual hurried paint job and was immediately put to use.

  This map shows the U.S. Ninth Army’s plan for the advance to Berlin.

  General Macon was determined that the 83rd would be the first infantry division to cross the Elbe and advance to Berlin. The rivalry between the 83rd and the 2nd Armored was now so intense that when leading units of the two divisions reached the Weser River at the same time on April 5 “there was considerable argument,” as Macon put it, “as to who was to cross the river first.” Eventually a compromise was reached: the divisions crossed together, by sandwiching their units. Back at 83rd headquarters rumor had it that General White was furious with the Rag-Tag Circus. “No damned infantry division,” the 2nd’s commander was quoted as saying, “is going to beat my outfit to the Elbe.”

  The 2nd was running into other competition, too. The 5th Armored “Victory Division” was rolling almost as fast as White’s columns, and its men had plans of their own for taking the capital. “The only big question at the time was who was going to get Berlin first,” remembers Colonel Gilbert Farrand, the 5th’s Chief of Staff. “We planned to cross the Elbe at Tangermünde, Sandau, Arneburg and Werben. We heard that the Russians were ready to go, so we made every possible preparation.” The division was on the move so continuously that, as Farrand remembers it, no one slept more than four or five hours a night—and often no one slept at all. Because of the steadiness of the advance, Farrand’s own half-track was now the division’s headquarters. The 5th’s progress was greatly helped by the spottiness of the opposition. “The advance was really nothing more,” Farrand recalls, “than cracking rear guard actions.” But these could be deadly, as Farrand discovered when a shell plowed through his half-track.

  Among the infantry divisions, the 84th, 30th and 102nd had their eyes on Berlin, too. Everywhere in the Ninth, tired and dirty men, eating on the move, were hoping to be in on the kill. The very momentum of the drive was exhilarating. Still, despite the absence of a general pattern of German defense, there was fighting—and at times it was heavy.

  In some areas diehards put up fierce resistance before surrendering. Lieutenant Colonel Roland Kolb of the 84th “Railsplitters” Division noticed that the worst fighting came from scattered SS units that hid in the woods and harassed the advancing troops. The armored columns usually bypassed these fanatic remnants and left them to the infantry to mop up. Desperate encounters often took place in small towns. At one point in the advance, Kolb was shocked to find children of twelve and under manning artillery pieces. “Rather than surrender,” he remembers, “the boys fought until killed.”

  Other men also experienced moments of horror. Near the wooded ridges of the Teutoburger Wald, Major James F. Hollingsworth, leading the 2nd Armored’s advance guard, found himself suddenly surrounded by German tanks. His column had run directly into a panzer training ground. Luckily for Hollingsworth, the tanks were relics from which the engines had been long since removed. But their guns were in place for use in training recruits, and the Germans quickly opened fire, Staff Sergeant Clyde W. Cooley, a veteran of North Africa and the gunner on Hollingsworth’s tank, swung into action. Revolving his turret, he knocked out a German tank at 1,500 yards. Turning again, he blasted another 75 yards away. “All hell broke loose as everyone opened up,” recalls Hollingsworth. Then just as the fight ended, a German truck filled with soldiers came barreling down the road toward the 2nd Armored’s column. Hollingsworth hastily ordered his men to wait until the truck was in range. At 75 yards, he gave the order to open fire. The truck, riddled by .50 caliber machine gun bullets, blazed, turned over and threw its uniformed occupants out onto the road. Most were dead by the time they hit the ground, but a few were still alive and screaming horribly. It was only when he came up to inspect the torn and riddled bodies that Hollingsworth discovered the soldiers were uniformed German women—the equivalent of U.S. WACs.

  The opposition was completely unpredictable. Many areas capitulated without firing a shot. In some towns and cities burgomasters surrendered while the withdrawing German troops were still moving through the populated areas, often no more than a block away from American tanks and infantry. At Detmold, where one of Germany’s largest armament works was located, a civilian met the lead tank of Lieutenant Colonel Wheeler G. Merriam’s 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion, scouting ahead of the 2nd Armored. The German representative announced that the superintendent of the factory wished to surrender. “Shells were falling all about us as we drove in,” Merriam recalls. “Lined up outside the factory were the superintendent, the factory manager and the workers. The superintendent made a little speech of surrender and then presented me with a beautifully chromed Mauser pistol.” A few blocks farther on, Merriam took the surrender of an entire German paymaster company—complete with vast quantities of bank notes. But a few hours later, U.S. infantry coming up behind Merriam fought a bitter and prolonged battle to clean out the same town. Detmold, as it turned out, was in the center of an SS training area.

  Similar incidents occurred everywhere. In some small cities the silence of surrender in one area would be suddenly shattered by the din of fierce fighting a few blocks away. On the main street of one such city. General Macon, the 83rd’s commander, remembers “walking quite safely through the front entrance of my headquarters, but when I tried to leave by the back door, I almost had to fight my way out.” On the outskirts of one town, troops of the 30th Infantry were met by German soldiers with white handkerchiefs tied to their rifles. As the Germans tried to surrender to the Americans, they were machine gunned in the back by SS stragglers who still fought on.

  Some men developed new techniques for securing surrenders. Captain Francis Schommer of the 83rd Division, who spoke fluent German, several times conducted capitulations by telephone—bolstered by a Colt .45. Schommer, his pistol pointed at a newly captured burgomaster, would inform the mayor that “it might be wise for you to telephone the burgomaster of the next town and inform him that, if he wants the place to remain standing, he better surrender it right now. Tell him to get the people to hang sheets from their windows—or else.” The frightened burgomaster “would usually pour it on, telling his neighbor that the Americans in his town had hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces, and thousands upon thousands of troops. The ruse worked again and again.”

  As the great drive gathered momentum, the roads became jammed with motorized troops and armored columns pushing east past thousands of German prisoners going west. There was not even time to take charge of the prisoners. Exhausted and unshaven, Wehrmacht officers and privates trudged back toward the Rhine unaccompanied. Some of them still ca
rried weapons. Chaplain Ben L. Rose of the 113th Mechanized Cavalry Group recalls the hopeless look of two officers who, in full dress uniform, walked alongside his column “trying to get someone to notice them long enough to surrender their side arms.” But the troopers, intent on piling up mileage, simply thumbed them west.

  Cities and towns fell to the onrushing forces one after another. Few men had heard their names before and, in any case, no one stayed long enough to remember them. Places like Minden, Bückeburg, Tündern and Stadthagen were merely checkpoints on the way to the Elbe. But the troops of the 30th Division encountered a familiar name—so familiar that most men remember being surprised that it actually existed. The town was Hamelin, of Pied Piper fame. Suicidal opposition from a few SS strongpoints by-passed earlier by the 2nd Armored, and heavy retaliatory shelling by the 30th, reduced the storybook city of gingerbread houses and cobblestoned streets to a burned and blasted rubble by April 5. “This time,” said Colonel Walter M. Johnson of the 117th Regiment, “we got the rats out with a slightly different kind of flute.”

  By April 8, the 84th Division had reached the outskirts of 15th-century Hanover. On the long drive from the Rhine, Hanover, with a population of 400,000, was the largest city to fall to any division of the Ninth Army. Major General Alexander R. Bolling, commander of the 84th, had expected to bypass the city, but instructions came down to capture it instead. Bolling was less than happy. To commit his troops at Hanover would lose him precious time in his race against other infantry divisions for the Elbe. The battle was fierce; yet within forty-eight hours resistance had been reduced to small isolated actions. Bolling, proud of the 84th’s prowess, yet chafing to get on with the advance, was both surprised and pleased to be visited in Hanover by the Supreme Commander, his Chief of Staff, General Smith, and the Ninth Army’s General Simpson. At the end of their formal meeting, Bolling remembered, “Ike said to me, ‘Alex, where are you going next?’ I replied, ‘General, we’re going to push on ahead, we have a clear go to Berlin and nothing can stop us.’”