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

by Cornelius Ryan

  Now he answered the Supreme Commander, “I estimate that it might cost us 100,000 men.”

  There was a pause. Then Bradley added, “It would be a pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective, especially when we know that we’ve got to pull back and let the other fellow take over.”*

  There the conversation ended. The Supreme Commander did not reveal his intentions. But Bradley had made his own opinion unmistakably clear: U.S. lives were more important than mere prestige or the temporary occupation of meaningless real estate.

  At headquarters of the 19th Corps, General McLain stood before his map studying the situation. In his opinion the enemy line on the eastern bank of the Elbe was a hard crust, nothing more. Once his divisions got across and broke through it, nothing would stop them from rolling into Berlin. Colonel George B. Sloan, McLain’s Operations Officer, believed the Americans would hit the same sort of opposition they had encountered en route from the Rhine—pockets of last-ditch resistance that could be bypassed by fast-moving forces. He had every confidence that within forty-eight hours of resuming the attack, leading elements of U. S. armored units would enter Berlin.

  McLain made a few quick decisions. The surprising accomplishment of the Rag-Tag Circus in grabbing a bridgehead, rushing troops across and then straddling the Elbe with a bridge, all within a few hours, had changed the whole river picture. The men of the 83rd were not merely expanding the beachhead on the eastern bank; they were advancing out of it. McLain was sure that the 83rd’s bridgehead was permanent. He was not so sure that the 2nd Armored’s puny cable ferry operation would survive the shelling. Still, the 2nd had three battalions across and they were holding. Arrangements had been made for part of the 2nd Armored to begin crossing the 83rd’s “Truman Bridge.” McLain, therefore, saw no reason for the 30th Division, now moving into position, to attack Magdeburg and go for the Autobahn bridge. At the rate the troops were moving now, the 83rd’s bridgehead could be quickly expanded to link with the cut-off battalions opposite the and’s cable ferry site. From this vastly enlarged bridgehead, the drive could continue. McLain decided to bypass Magdeburg entirely. The Truman Bridge, as the 83rd had anticipated, would be the gateway to Berlin.

  At dawn, Saturday, April 14, at the 2nd Armored’s cable ferry, General Hinds waited for the three pontoons to be strapped together. They would form the ferry platform which the cable would pull back and forth pending construction of a bridge. Shells were still falling about both banks of the bridgehead and troops on the eastern side were involved in heavy fighting. They could hold out for some time against opposing infantry, but Hinds’s great fear was of a panzer attack. The Americans on the east bank were still without supporting artillery or armor.

  The first vehicle to roll onto the pontoon ferry was a bulldozer; the eastern bank of the river had to be scraped and graded before tanks and heavy weapons could climb it. A DUKW would tow the platform, speeding the ferry by helping the cable move faster. Hinds watched anxiously. Two cables had been damaged and washed downstream. He had only one left; and his last outsized pontoons had gone to make the ferry.

  The cumbersome operation began. As men watched, the ferry moved slowly out into the middle of the Elbe. Then, as it neared the eastern shore, the unbelievable happened. A single shell screamed in and, in a million-to-one shot, severed the cable. Hinds stood frozen in shock as cable, ferry and bulldozer disappeared down the river. Bitterly he said, “There it goes to hell!”

  As though the incredible bull’s-eye had been a signal for total disaster, word now came that the troops on the eastern bank were being attacked by armored vehicles.

  On the eastern side of the Elbe, through the wisps of morning haze and the smoke from artillery fire, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Anderson watched the German armor smashing through his infantry defense lines. There were seven or eight armored vehicles, among them a couple of tanks. Through his glasses Anderson saw the group, well out of range of his own anti-tank bazookas, firing methodically into the American foxholes. Even as he watched, one of his companies holding positions on the far right of his command post was overrun. Troops dashed from their foxholes, making for the safety of the woods. Now the Germans were working over the positions of Anderson’s other two companies, blasting the foxholes one by one. Frantically Anderson radioed the batteries on the Elbe’s western bank for help. But the attack had taken place so fast that even as the 2nd Armored’s shells came screaming in, Anderson knew they were too late.

  Farther along the bridgehead, Lieutenant Bill Parkins, commanding I Company, suddenly heard his machine guns open up and then the answering fire of German burp guns. A platoon runner dashed up. Three German vehicles with infantry, he reported, were coming down along the line, “cleaning out everything as they go.” Parkins sent back word to the troops to remain in position and to keep firing. Then he dashed out of his command post to find out for himself what was happening. “I saw three Mark V tanks about a hundred yards away, approaching from the east,” he later reported, “and each one appeared to have a platoon of infantry with it. They had American prisoners marching in front. Their guns were firing right through them.” Some of Parkins’ men returned the fire with their bazookas, but the range was too great; those projectiles that hit merely ricocheted off the tanks. His men were being chewed up. Parkins ordered them to pull back, before they were all captured or killed.

  From north, east and south of the bridgehead German vehicles came in fast. Staff Sergeant Wilfred Kramer, in charge of an infantry platoon, saw a German tank about 220 yards away. Infantry was fanned out about it and coming up behind. Kramer ordered his men to wait. Then, when the Germans were about forty yards away, he yelled to open fire. “We were doing all right and holding our own,” he later explained. “But then the tank opened up. The first round landed about ten yards from our machine gun. Then Jerry went right down the line. He could see where every one of our holes was. It was point-blank fire.” Kramer held out for as long as he dared; then he, too, ordered his men back.

  The fighting was so fierce around Grünewalde that Lieutenant Colonel Carlton E. Stewart, commanding a battalion, got a call for artillery from one of his companies and was told to “throw it right on our positions as our men are in the cellars of the houses.” Everyone was asking for air strikes to knock out the tanks, but only a few planes showed up during the entire dawn-to-noon battle. In the dash to the Elbe, fighter strips had been left so far behind that the planes had to carry extra gasoline wing tanks to keep up with the ground advance and that meant they couldn’t carry bombs.

  By noon General Hinds had ordered all infantry on the east bank to withdraw back across the Elbe. Although casualties were at first thought to be high, men kept trickling in for days. Total cast bank casualties were ultimately set at 304; one battalion lost 7 officers and 146 enlisted men killed, wounded or missing. The fight ended the last hope of getting a 2nd Armored bridge or bridgehead across the Elbe. Now General White, the 2nd’s commander, had no choice but to use the 83rd’s bridge at Barby. The Germans had halted successfully, and with lightning speed, the great momentum that the 2nd Armored had built up.

  The erasing of the bridgehead had been so sudden and the lighting so fierce that American commanders did not even know what units had attacked them. In fact, they were scarcely units at all. As General Wenck had foreseen, his fledgling cadets and training officers had served him well. Ambitious and eager for glory, they had pushed themselves and their meager equipment to the limit, buying the time Wenck needed. In throwing back the 2nd Armored Division these mobile shock troops had accomplished something no other German unit had managed in thirty months of combat. Had the division been able to secure either a bridge or a bridgehead across the Elbe, the 2nd might have roared right on to Berlin without ever waiting for orders.

  The Supreme Commander’s plan of attack on Germany had unfolded brilliantly; indeed, the speed of the great Anglo-American advance had clearly surprised even him. In the north Montgomery’s Twenty-first
Army Group was moving steadily. The Canadians, closing on Arnhem, were ready to begin clearing out the big enemy pocket that remained in northeast Holland. The British Second Army had crossed the river Leine, captured the town of Celle and were on the outskirts of Bremen. In the center of the Reich the surrounded Ruhr was almost reduced and, most important, Simpson’s Ninth Army, along with the U.S. First and Third armies, had almost cut Germany in two. The First was advancing on Leipzig. Patton’s Third was nearing the Czech border.

  But these whirlwind gains had taken a toll: they had stretched Eisenhower’s supply lines almost to the limit. Apart from truck convoys, there was virtually no land transport available to Bradley’s forces; only one railroad bridge was still in operation over the Rhine. The fighting forces remained well supplied, but SHAEF staff officers were disturbed by the total picture. To serve the farflung armies, hundreds of Troop Carrier Command planes had been ordered to fly around the clock, bringing up supplies. On April 5 alone, a flying train of C-47S had carried more than 3,500 tons of ammunition and supplies and almost 750,000 gallons of gasoline to the front.

  In addition, as the Allies pushed deeper and deeper into Germany, they had to supply increasing thousands of noncombatants. Hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war had to be fed. Forced laborers from a score of countries and liberated British and American POWs had to be given shelter, food and medical services. Hospitals, ambulance convoys and medical supplies were only now moving up. And although these medical facilities were vast, an unforeseen demand was suddenly thrust upon them.

  In recent days, what would prove to be the greatest hidden horror of the Third Reich had begun to be uncovered. All along the front in this tremendous week of advance, men had recoiled in shock and revulsion as they encountered Hitler’s concentration camps, their hundreds of thousands of inmates, and the evidence of their millions of dead.

  Battle-hardened soldiers could scarcely believe what they were seeing as scores of camps and prisons fell into their hands. Twenty years later men would remember those scenes with grim anger: the emaciated walking skeletons who tottered toward them, their will to survive the only possession they had saved from the Nazi regime; the mass graves, pits and trenches; the lines of crematoriums filled with charred bones, mute and awful testimony to the systematic mass extermination of “political prisoners”—who had been put to death, as one Buchenwald guard explained, because “they were only Jews.”

  Troops found gas chambers, set up like shower rooms except that cyanide gas instead of water sprayed from the nozzles. In the Buchenwald commandant’s home there were lampshades made from human skin. The commandant’s wife, Ilse Koch, had book covers and gloves made from the flesh of inmates; two human heads, shrunken and stuffed, were displayed on small wooden stands. There were warehouses full of shoes, clothing, artificial limbs, dentures and eyeglasses—sorted and numbered with detached and methodical efficiency. Gold had been removed from the dentures and forwarded to the Reich finance ministry.

  How many had been exterminated? In the first shock of discovery no one could even estimate. But it was clear as reports came in from all along the front that the total would be astronomical. As to who the victims were, that was only too obvious. They were, by the Third Reich’s definition, the “non-Aryans,” the “culture-tainting inferiors,” peoples of a dozen nations and of a dozen faiths, but predominantly Jews. Among them were Poles, Frenchmen, Czechs, Dutchmen, Norwegians, Russians, Germans. In history’s most diabolical mass murder, they had been slain in a variety of unnatural ways. Some were used as guinea pigs in laboratory experiments. Thousands were shot, poisoned, hanged or gassed; others were simply allowed to starve to death.

  In the camp at Ohrdruf, overrun by the U.S. Third Army on April 12, General George S. Patton, one of the U.S. Army’s most hard-bitten officers, walked through the death houses, then turned away, his face wet with tears, and was uncontrollably ill. The next day Patton ordered the population of a nearby village, whose inhabitants claimed ignorance of the situation within the camp, to view it for themselves; those who hung back were escorted at rifle point. The following morning the mayor of the village and his wife hanged themselves.

  Along the British route of advance, the discoveries were equally terrible. Brigadier Hugh Glyn Hughes, the British Second Army’s Senior Medical Officer, had been worrying for days about the possibility of infectious diseases in a camp he had been warned about at a place called Belsen. Upon arrival there, Hughes discovered that typhus and typhoid were the least of his worries. “No photograph, no description could bring home the horrors I saw,” he said, years later. “There were 56,000 people still alive in the camp. They were living in 45 huts. There were anywhere from 600 to 1,000 people living in accommodations which could take barely 100. The huts overflowed with inmates in every state of emaciation and disease. They were suffering from starvation, gastroenteritis, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis. There were dead everywhere, some in the same bunks as the living. Lying in the compounds, in uncovered mass graves, in trenches, in the gutters, by the side of the barbed wire surrounding the camp and by the huts, were some 10,000 more. In my thirty years as a doctor, I had never seen anything like it.”

  To save those still living, armies all along the front had to get immediate medical help. In some instances military needs had to take second place. “I do not believe,” Hughes later said, “that anyone realized what we were going to be faced with or the demands that would be made on the medical services.” Doctors, nurses, hospital beds and thousands of tons of medical stores and equipment were urgently needed. Brigadier Hughes alone required a 14,000-bed hospital—even though he knew that, no matter what steps were taken, at least 500 inmates would die each day until the situation could be brought under control.

  General Eisenhower made a personal tour of a camp near Gotha. Ashen-faced, his teeth clenched, he walked through every part of the camp. “Up to that moment,” he later recalled, “I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources…. I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.”

  The psychological effect of the camps on officers and men was beyond assessment. On the Ninth Army front in a village near Magdeburg, Major Julius Rock, a medical officer with the 30th Infantry, came up to inspect a freight train which the 30th had stopped. It was loaded with concentration camp inmates. Rock, horrified, immediately unloaded the train. Over the local burgomaster’s vehement protests, Rock billeted the inmates in German homes—but not until his battalion commander had given a crisp command to the complaining burgomaster. “If you refuse,” he said simply, “I’ll take hostages and shoot them.”

  A cold determination to win and win quickly was replacing every other emotion in the men who had seen concentration camps. The Supreme Commander felt much the same way. On his return to SHAEF from Gotha he wired Washington and London urging that editors and legislators be sent immediately to Germany to see the horror camps at first hand so that the evidence could be “placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”

  But before Eisenhower could press on to end the war, he had to consolidate his farflung forces. On the night of the fourteenth, from his office in Reims, Eisenhower cabled Washington of his future plans.

  Having successfully completed his thrust in the center, Eisenhower said, he was confronted by two main tasks: “the further sub-division of the enemy’s remaining forces; and the capture of those areas where he might form a last stand effectively.” Those latter places, Eisenhower thought, would be Norway and the National Redoubt of Bavaria. In the north, he planned to throw Montgomery’s forces forward across the Elbe, to secure Hamburg and drive for Lübeck and Kiel. In the south, he planned to send General Devers’ Sixth Army Group toward the Salzburg area.

  “Operations in the winter,” Eisenhower stated, “would be extremely difficult in the National Redoubt…. The National Redoubt could remain in being even after we join the Russians …
so we must move rapidly before the Germans have the opportunity to thoroughly prepare its defenses with men and material.”

  As for the German capital, Eisenhower thought it would also be “most desirable to make a thrust to Berlin as the enemy may group forces around his capital and, in any event, its fall would greatly affect the morale of the enemy and that of our own peoples.” But, said the Supreme Commander, that operation “must take a low priority in point of time unless operations to clear our flanks proceed with unexpected rapidity.”

  In brief, then, his plan was:

  (1) “to hold a firm front in the central area on the Elbe”

  (2) to begin operations toward Lübeck and Denmark;

  and (3) to initiate a powerful thrust” to meet Soviet troops in the Danube valley and break up the National Redoubt. “Since the thrust on Berlin must await the outcome of the first three above,” Eisenhower said, “I do not include it as a part of my plan.”

  On the Elbe, all through the night of the fourteenth, men of the Rag-Tag Circus and the 2nd Armored moved across the 83rd’s bridges at Barby. Although a second bridge had been built near the first, the movement across remained slow. General White’s armored column, however, planned to begin the Berlin drive again the moment it reassembled on the western bank. Among the troops of the 83rd the story was going the rounds that Colonel Crabill had offered to lend the 2nd Armored a large, newly confiscated red bus, capable of holding fifty soldiers, which he had liberated in Barby. The 83rd had every reason to feel triumphant. Already its patrols were north of the town of Zerbst, less than forty-eight miles from Berlin.