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

by Cornelius Ryan

  Three red flares soared up suddenly into the night sky. For one interminable moment the lights hung in midair, bathing the Oder in a garish crimson. Then, in the Küstrin bridgehead Zhukov’s phalanx of searchlights flashed on. With blinding intensity the 140 huge anti-aircraft lights, supplemented by the lights of tanks, trucks and other vehicles, focused directly ahead on the German positions. The dazzling glare reminded war correspondent Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Troyanoskii of “a thousand suns joined together.” Colonel General Mikhail Katukov, Commander of the First Guards Tank Army, was taken completely by surprise. “Where the hell did we get all the searchlights?” he asked Lieutenant General N. N. Popiel of Zhukov’s staff. “The devil only knows,” Popiel replied, “hut I think they stripped the entire Moscow anti-aircraft defense zone.” For just a moment there was silence as the searchlights illuminated the area ahead of Küstrin. Then three green flares soared into the heavens and Zhukov’s guns spoke.

  With an earsplitting, earthshaking roar the front erupted in flame. In a bombardment that had never been equaled on the eastern front, more than twenty thousand guns of all calibers poured a storm of fire onto the German positions. Pinned in the merciless glare of the searchlights, the German countryside beyond the western Küstrin bridgehead seemed to disappear before a rolling wall of bursting shells. Whole villages disintegrated. Earth, concrete, steel, parts of trees spewed into the air and in the distance forests began to blaze. To the north and south of Küstrin thousands of gun flashes stabbed the darkness. Pinpoints of light, like deadly firecrackers, winked in rapid succession as tons of shells slammed into targets. The hurricane of explosives was so intense that an atmospheric disturbance was created. Years later German survivors would vividly recall the strange hot wind that suddenly sprang up and howled through the forests, bending saplings and whipping dust and debris into the air. And men on both sides of the line would never forget the violent thunder of the guns. They created a concussion so tremendous that troops and equipment alike shook uncontrollably from the shock.

  The storm of sound was stupefying. At Sergeant Svishchev’s battery the gunners yelled at the tops of their voices but the concussion of their guns was so great that blood ran from their ears. The most fearsome sound of all came from the Katushkas or “Stalin Organs,” as the troops called them. The rocket projectiles whooshed off the launchers in fiery batches and screeched through the night, leaving long white trails behind them. The terrifying noise they made reminded Captain Golbov of huge blocks of steel grinding together. Despite the terrible racket, Golbov found the bombardment exhilarating. All around him he saw “troops cheering as though they were fighting the Germans hand-to-hand and everywhere men were firing whatever weapon they had even though they could see no target.” As he watched the guns belching flames, he remembered some words his grandmother had once uttered about the end of the world, “when the earth would burn and the bad ones would be devoured by fire.”

  Amid the tumult of the bombardment Zhukov’s troops began to move out. Chuikov’s well-disciplined Eighth Guards led the way from the Küstrin bridgehead on the Oder’s western banks. As they surged forward, the artillery barrage remained always in front of them, carpeting the area ahead. North and south of Küstrin, where assault crossings had to be made across the flooded river, engineers were in the water laying pontoons and fitting together prefabricated sections of wooden bridges. All around them waves of shock troops were crossing the Oder without waiting for the bridges, tossing and bobbing in a variety of assault boats.

  In the ranks were troops who had stood at Leningrad, Smolensk, Stalingrad and before Moscow, men who had fought their way across half a continent to reach the Oder. There were soldiers who had seen their villages and towns obliterated by German guns, their crops burned, their families slain by German soldiers. For all these the assault had special meaning. They had lived for this moment of revenge. The Germans had left them nothing at home to return to; they had nowhere to go but forward. Now they attacked savagely. Equally avid were the thousands of recently released prisoners of war: reinforcements had been so urgently needed by the Red Army that the newly freed prisoners—tattered, emaciated, many still showing the effects of brutal treatment—had been given arms. Now they, too, rushed forward, seeking a terrible vengeance.

  Cheering and yelling like wild tribesmen, the Russian troops advanced on the Oder’s eastern hanks. Caught up in a kind of frenzy, they found it impossible to wait for boats or bridges. Golbov watched in amazement as soldiers dived in, fully equipped, and began swimming the river. Others floated across clutching empty gasoline cans, planks, blocks of wood, tree trunks—anything that would float. It was a fantastic spectacle. It reminded Golbov of “a huge army of ants, floating across the water on leaves and twigs. The Oder was swarming with boatloads of men, rafts full of supplies, log floats supporting guns. Everywhere were the bobbing heads of men as they floated or swam across.” At one point Golbov saw his friend, the regimental doctor, “a huge man named Nicolaieff, running down the river bank dragging behind him a ridiculously small boat.” Golbov knew that Nicolaieff was “supposed to stay behind the lines at the field hospital, but there he was in this tiny boat, rowing like hell.” It seemed to Golbov that no power on earth could stop this onslaught.

  Abruptly the bombardment ended, leaving a stunning silence. The cannonade had lasted a full thirty-five minutes. In Zhukov’s command bunker, staff officers suddenly became aware that the phones were ringing. How long the sound had been going on, no one could say; all were suffering from some degree of deafness. Officers began taking the calls. Chuikov’s commanders were making their first reports. “So far everything is going as planned,” Chuikov told Zhukov. A few moments later he had even better news. “The first objectives have been taken,” he announced proudly. Zhukov, a tense figure since the opening of the attack, became suddenly expansive. As General Popiel recalled, Zhukov “seized Chuikov by the hand and said, ‘Excellent! Excellent! Very good indeed!’” But pleased as he was, Zhukov had too much experience to underestimate his enemy. The stocky Marshal would feel better when the vital Seelow Heights near Küstrin was seized. Then, he felt, success would be assured. Still, that should not take long. Apart from everything else, Russian bombers were now airborne and beginning to pound the areas ahead. More than 6,500 planes were scheduled to support his and Koniev’s attacks. But Zhukov believed that the artillery bombardment alone must certainly have demoralized the enemy.

  In the operations room of his advance command post in the Schönewalde forest north of Berlin, Colonel General Gotthard Heinrici paced the floor, hands behind his back. Around him telephones shrilled and staff officers took reports, carefully transcribing the information onto the war map lying on a table in the center of the room. Every now and then Heinrici paused in his pacing to glance at the map or to read a message handed him by Colonel Eismann. He was not surprised by the way the Russian offensive was being carried out, although most of his officers were awestruck by the massiveness of the bombardment. General Busse of the Ninth Army described it as “the worst ever,” and Colonel Eismann, basing his opinion on early reports, believed the “annihilating fire had practically destroyed our front-line fortifications.”

  Under darkness on the night of the fifteenth, the majority of the Vistula troops had swung back to the second line of positions as Heinrici had ordered. But there had been difficulties. Some officers had bitterly resented giving up their front-line positions. It looked to them as though they were retreating. Several commanders had complained to Heinrici. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he inquired icily of one protesting general, “that nothing will be left of your nice front-line fortifications or of your men after the Russians open fire? If you’re in a steel mill you don’t put your head under a trip hammer, do you? You pull it back in time. That is precisely what we’re doing.”

  The difficult stratagem had taken most of the night. From all reports, in the areas where troops had been withdrawn the maneuver had proved
successful. Now in the second line the men waited for the advancing Russians. On one part of the front Heinrici had the advantage: west of Küstrin was the sandy, horseshoe-shaped plateau of the Seelow Heights. It ranged in height from one hundred to two hundred feet and it overlooked a spongy valley known, for the streams veining through it, as the Oder Bruch. The Russians would have to cross this valley in their advance from the Oder, and all along the crescent-shaped plateau Heinrici’s guns were trained on the lines of approach.

  Here, on these critical heights, lay Heinrici’s only chance to blunt Zhukov’s attack, and Heinrici knew Zhukov would undoubtedly have given this fact great consideration in his planning. The Russian would need to seize the plateau quickly, before Heinrici’s guns could shell the Red Army’s Oder bridges and create havoc among the troops advancing across the low-lying, marshy terrain. Obviously Zhukov had hoped to knock out almost all resistance with his massive bombardment, making the capture of the Heights that much easier. But because of the German withdrawal from the front lines, the majority of Heinrici’s army and artillery were intact and in position. The defensive plan had gone well. There was only one thing wrong: Heinrici did not have enough of either men or guns. Without Luftwaffe help in the air and without reserves in men, guns, panzers, ammunition or fuel, Heinrici could only delay Zhukov’s offensive. Eventually his enemy must break through.

  Along the entire front Heinrici’s two armies had fewer than 700 operable tanks and self-propelled guns. These had been dispersed among the various units of the Ninth and Third armies. The heaviest division, the 25th Panzer, had seventy-nine such vehicles; the smallest unit had two. In contrast to Zhukov’s artillery strength—20,000 guns of all calibers*—Heinrici had 744 guns, plus 600 antiaircraft guns being used as artillery. Ammunition and fuel supplies were equally critical. Apart from shells stored at battery sites, the Ninth Army had reserves sufficient for only two and a half days.

  Heinrici could not hold the Russians for any appreciable length of time—nor could he counterattack, because he had dispersed what little armor and artillery there was to give each unit a fighting chance. He could do only what he had known was possible all along: he could buy a little time. As Heinrici looked at the map and the thick red arrows marking the Russian advances, he thought bitterly of the panzers that had been transferred to Field Marshal Schorner’s southern army group to stem the Russian attack which Hitler and Schörner had insisted was heading for Prague. Those armored units would have given Heinrici seven panzer divisions in all. “If I had them,” he told Eismann sourly, “the Russians wouldn’t be having much fun now.”

  Bad as matters were, the crisis still lay ahead. Zhukov’s attack was only the beginning. There were Rokossovskii’s forces in the north to reckon with. How soon would they attack Von Manteuffel’s Third Army? And when would Koniev launch his offensive in the south?

  Heinrici did not have to wait long to learn of Koniev’s intentions. The Russians’ second blow came along the extreme southern edge of the line held by Busse’s army, and into Field Marshal Ferdinand Schorner’s sector. At exactly 6 A.M. the troops of Koniev’s First Ukrainian Front attacked across the river Neisse.

  In tight V-formations, the Red fighter planes banked and headed for the river through bursts of bright pink flak and streams of red, yellow and white tracer bullets. Then with dense clouds of white smoke pouring out behind them they screamed up the valley, less than fifty feet above the metallic-gray river Neisse. Again and again the fighters bored through the anti-aircraft barrage, laying a thick, fluffy blanket of smoke that obscured not only the river but the eastern and western banks as well. Marshal Ivan Koniev, watching from an observation post on a high point directly above the river, was well pleased. Turning to General N. P. Pukhov, whose Thirteenth Army would soon join in the assault, Koniev said, “Our neighbors use searchlights, for they want more 0light. I tell you, Nikolai Pavlovich, we need more darkness.”

  Although Koniev was attacking on a front of about fifty miles, he had ordered the smoke screen laid over a distance almost four times as long to confuse the Germans. Now watching through artillery glasses mounted on a tripod, Koniev noted that the smoke was holding. The wind velocity had been figured at only half a meter a second—no more than a mile an hour. With satisfaction he announced that the screen was “the right thickness and density, and exactly the correct height.” Then, as the planes continued to lay smoke, Koniev’s massed artillery opened up with a tremendous roar.

  His bombardment was as merciless as Zhukov’s had been, but Koniev was using his artillery strength more selectively. Prior to the attack Koniev’s artillery commanders, knowing their observers would be blinded by the smoke screen, had pinpointed every known defense line and enemy strongpoint on topographical maps and had then zeroed in their guns. Besides hitting these preselected targets, the First Ukrainian guns were deliberately blasting out avenues running west from the Neisse for the assault troops and tanks that would follow. Rolling barrages, like fiery scythes, methodically chopped paths several hundred yards wide through the German positions. As they did, forests began blazing as they had in Zhukov’s area, and seas of flame stretched away from the river for miles ahead.

  Koniev was leaving nothing to chance. He was driven not only by his ambition to reach Berlin before Zhukov but by another even more important reason: the unexpected speed of the Western Allies, who were now only forty miles from the city. Koniev thought one or both of two things might happen: Eisenhower’s forces might try to reach the capital before the Red Army—and the Germans probably would attempt to make a separate peace with the Western Allies. As Koniev was later to put it: “We did not want to believe that our Allies would enter into any sort of separate agreement with the Germans. However in the atmosphere … which abounded in both fact and rumor, we as military men had no right to exclude the possibility…. This gave the Berlin operation special urgency. We had to consider the possibility that … the Fascist leaders would prefer to surrender Berlin to the Americans and British rather than to us. The Germans would open the way for them, but with us they would fight fiercely and to the last soldier.”* In his planning Koniev had “soberly considered the prospect.” In order to beat either Marshal Zhukov or the Western Allies to Berlin, Koniev knew that he had to overwhelm the enemy within the first few hours of his attack. Unlike Zhukov, Koniev had no infantry-filled bridgehead on the Neisse’s western bank. He had to hurdle the river in force, and it was a formidable obstacle.

  The Neisse was an icy, swift-flowing river. In places it was 150 yards wide, and although the eastern banks were relatively flat, the western shore sloped up steeply. The Germans had taken full advantage of these natural defenses; they were now entrenched in a number of heavily fortified concrete bunkers overlooking the river and its eastern approaches. Koniev had to overwhelm the enemy quickly if he was to avoid being pinned down by fire from these bunkers. His plan called for armored divisions to be thrown into the attack the moment footholds were secured on the western banks. But that meant building bridges across the river even before the protective smoke screen dissipated and, if the bombardment had not knocked out the enemy, it might have to be done under heavy fire. He intended to make his main crossing in the area of Buchholz and Triebel. But there would also be others. Koniev, convinced that he must achieve the complete and rapid smothering of the enemy, had ordered an enormous river assault, with crossings at more than 150 places. At each site, his engineers had vowed to have bridges or ferries available in one to three hours.

  At 6:55 A.M. the second stage of Koniev’s plan unfolded. All along the eastern bank first-wave troops emerged from the forests under cover of the continuing artillery fire and, in a miscellaneous collection of boats, headed across the Neisse. Immediately behind them came a second wave of men and behind them a third. In the Buchholz-Triebel area, shock troops of Pukhov’s Thirteenth Army swarmed across the choppy waters, dragging sections of pontoon bridges. Leading the way was the 6th Guards Rifle Division, command
ed by Major General Georgi Ivanov, a tough 44-year-old Cossack. Ivanov had put everything that would float into the water. Besides pontoons, he used empty aviation fuel tanks and large German fertilizer bins which he had ordered welded to make them airtight; these were manhandled into position as bridging supports. In the water were hundreds of engineers; as fast as prefabricated wooden bridge sections were pushed off the eastern bank the engineers bolted them together. Scores of men stood neck-deep in the icy Neisse holding heavy bridging beams above their heads, while others drove wooden supports into the river bed. Special teams of engineers hauled cables across the Neisse in boats equipped with hand-operated winches. On the western bank they set up ferry heads and then manually wound in the cables, pulling floats with guns and tanks across the river. At some places engineers got guns across without the ferry-floats: they simply dragged them along the river bed on the end of the cables. The operations were moving steadily forward despite enemy fire nearly everywhere along the line. To protect the crossings Ivanov used shore batteries which fired directly above the heads of his troops and into the German defenses on the western bank. He supported these batteries with a hail of fire from no less than two hundred machine guns, “just to keep their heads down.”

  At 7:15 A.M. Koniev got good news: the first bridgehead had been seized on the western bank. One hour later he learned that tanks and self-propelled guns had been ferried across and were already engaging the enemy. By 8:35, A.M., at the end of a two hour and thirty-five minute bombardment, Koniev knew with absolute certainty that his troops were well established west of the Neisse. They had so far secured 133 of the 150 crossings. Units of Pukhov’s Thirteenth Army, together with forces of the Third Guards Tank Army, had already punched through the center in the assault area at Triebel, and by all accounts the enemy in front of them seemed to have cracked. The armor of the Fourth Guards Tank Army was now moving across in the same sector, and to the south men of the Fifth Guards Army were over the river. It looked to Koniev as if his tanks might achieve a breakthrough at any moment.