The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Then, in late March, Eisenhower, without explaining the decision to the satisfaction of the British Chiefs of Staff (and Churchill), swung his main American forces south, on the Leipzig-Dresden axis, and away from Berlin, in an effort to cut Germany in two. To Montgomery’s fury, Eisenhower soon detached the American Ninth Army from his command and swung it toward the southeast rather than into the heart of the Ruhr Valley. To the further displeasure of Churchill and the British military chiefs, Eisenhower had cabled his plans directly to Stalin on March 29, thus bypassing his civilian leaders in London and Washington as well as his only military boss, George Marshall. “Eisenhower,” Brooke told his diary, “has no business to address Stalin direct… he produced a telegram that was unintelligible, and finally what was implied in it appeared to be entirely adrift and a change in all that had been previously agreed upon.” Churchill, Brooke wrote, “was in a hopeless mood.” Montgomery, in his memoirs, produced a telegram Eisenhower had sent him six months earlier: “Clearly, Berlin is the main prize. There is no doubt whatsoever, in my mind, that we should concentrate all our resources and energy on a rapid thrust to Berlin.” “But now,” wrote Montgomery, “he did not agree…. It was useless for me to pursue the matter further.”128

  Eisenhower, William L. Shirer wrote, had become “obsessed” by the idea of an Alpine German national redoubt, where, Ike’s intelligence chiefs told him, Hitler and the remainder of his armies would take to caves and Alpine passes to fight on for months, perhaps years. Food, weapons, and ammunition had been gathered or manufactured in deep underground chambers, Ike was told. It was a myth; the national redoubt never existed other than in Goebbels’ propaganda bleats. “It would seem,” Shirer wrote, “that the allied Supreme Commander’s intelligence staff had been infiltrated by British and American mystery writers.” Eisenhower had long claimed his objective was to kill German armies; now he thought there were German armies where there were none.129

  Montgomery might not have been willing to pursue the matter of Eisenhower’s new strategy, but Churchill was. For Churchill, Berlin had always been both a military objective and a political objective. He believed, he told Roosevelt in an April 1 cable, that “nothing will exert a psychological effect of despair upon all German forces… equal to that of the fall of Berlin.” With the probable betrayal of the Poles and the Yalta agreement in mind, he warned Roosevelt: “If they [the Russians] also take Berlin will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds…. I therefore consider that from a political standpoint we should march as far east into Germany as possible, and that should Berlin be in our grasp we should certainly take it. This also appears sound on military grounds.” Roosevelt, having gone down to Warm Springs on March 29 in hopes of regaining some of his waning strength, replied on April 4 in a long and imprecise telegram that said little to address Churchill’s concerns but included the line: “I do not get the point.” Eisenhower by then was hell-bent for the national redoubt.130

  As well, unbeknownst to Eisenhower, who had been told by the Soviets in mid-March that their attack from the northern Oder would not begin until mid-May, the Soviets had moved up the date. On April 1 Stalin met in Moscow with his high command, including generals Zhukov and Konev, whose two armies sat near the Oder just fifty miles east of Berlin. Even with Eisenhower’s disarmingly honest disclosure of his strategy in hand, Stalin believed the British and Americans were about to launch an operation toward Berlin. It made good military sense for Eisenhower to do so. Therefore, the marshal told Zhukov and Konev to commence a friendly race from the Oder to Berlin as soon as possible. This decision moved up the attack from mid-May to mid-April. Stalin informed the American ambassador of the decision the next day.131

  At about this time Czechoslovakian president Eduard Beneš made a comment to Churchill over lunch; as paraphrased by Jock Colville, Beneš said that “America might be materially far more powerful than England,” but that “England’s cultural dominance was supreme and unchallenged.” For Churchill, this was no mean consolation, for he agreed mightily with Macaulay that were Englishmen ever to lose their physical empire, they could be justifiably proud of leaving behind “the imperishable empire” of their laws, their morals, their literature, their sense of justice. England, Churchill told Beneš, “was a small lion walking between a huge Russian bear and a great American elephant, but perhaps it would prove to be the lion which knew the way.” It was much the same thought he expressed to Violet Bonham Carter, with the Tehran conference in mind. But now, as the war entered its final weeks, it no longer mattered if Churchill knew the way.132

  The last substantive exchange of views among the Big Three took place during the final days of March and the early days of April. On March 27 Churchill pleaded with Roosevelt to join him in taking a firm stand against Stalin on the Polish question:

  As you know, if we fail altogether to get a satisfactory solution on Poland, and are in fact defrauded by Russia, both Eden and I are pledged to report the fact openly to the House of Commons. There I advised critics of the Yalta settlement to trust Stalin. If I have to make statement of facts to the House, the whole world will draw the deduction that such advice was wrong…. Surely we must not be manoeuvered into becoming parties to imposing on Poland, and on much more of Eastern Europe, the Russian version of democracy?… There seems to be only one possible alternative to confessing our total failure. That alternative is to stand by our interpretation of the Yalta declaration.133

  In a cable to Stalin on March 29, Roosevelt addressed Stalin’s intransigence as well as a threat by Stalin to effectively boycott the San Francisco conference by not sending Molotov:

  I MUST MAKE IT PLAIN TO YOU THAT ANY SOLUTION WHICH WOULD RESULT IN A THINLY DISGUISED CONTINUANCE OF THE PRESENT WARSAW REGIME [THE LUBLIN GOVERNMENT] WOULD BE UNACCEPTABLE AND WOULD CAUSE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES TO REGARD THE YALTA AGREEMENT AS HAVING FAILED…. 134

  Stalin had also accused Churchill and Roosevelt of encouraging secret negotiations in Bern, Switzerland, between Allen Dulles, the OSS bureau chief in Bern, and SS General Karl Wolff, who served under the theater commander, Albert Kesselring. Bern, like Stockholm, was a hotbed of intrigue, and Dulles had indeed held preliminary talks with Wolff, but he had not, strictly speaking, conducted surrender talks. Wolff, for his part, had no authority to do so and was only putting out feelers—and seeking terms—in hopes of bringing Kesselring and Field Marshal Alexander to the table. Why, Stalin asked Roosevelt, were Soviet representatives excluded from the Bern talks? Roosevelt replied—without answering Stalin’s question—that the entire unfortunate episode “has developed an atmosphere of fear and distrust deserving regrets.” Stalin’s reply to Roosevelt was scathing; the marshal quoted Roosevelt’s fear and distrust line, and wrote: “You are absolutely right.” Churchill, upon seeing Stalin’s note, wrote to Roosevelt: “I am astounded that Stalin should have addressed to you a message so insulting to the honour of the United States and also Great Britain…. All this makes it the more important that we should join hands with the Russian army as far to the east as possible, and if circumstances allow, enter Berlin.” But Roosevelt had already rejected that strategy. Churchill added: “If they [the Russians] are ever convinced that we are afraid of them and can be bullied into submission, then indeed I shall despair of our future relations with them, and much more.”135

  On April 5 Churchill followed his cable to Roosevelt with his own reply to Stalin, in which he categorically rejected the charge that military negotiations had taken place in Bern. He added: “Still less did any political-military plot, as alleged in your telegram to the president, enter into our thoughts, which are not as suggested of so dishonourable a character.”136

  On that subject, as on Poland and Eastern Europe, there was little left to say, and nothing left to do. It was done.

  Early in the afternoon of April 12, in his Warm Springs parlor, Roosevelt complained of “a terrible heada
che” before slumping over in his chair. He had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. At 3:35 P.M., doctors declared the president dead. The news did not reach Churchill until almost midnight. He ordered his plane to be made ready for the trip to the United States in order to attend the funeral on April 14. He sent off three cables, to Harry Hopkins, to the new president, Harry Truman, and to Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he told: “I have lost a dear and cherished friendship which was forged in the fire of war. I trust you may find some consolation in the magnitude of his work and the glory of his name.” Churchill did not in the end travel to Hyde Park. With the war nearing its finish—perhaps within days—it was clear that he considered London the most advantageous place to be. Clementine was not there to advise him. She had left for Moscow two weeks earlier, to tour Red Cross installations as the guest of Stalin. On the fourteenth, Churchill wrote to her: “At the last moment I decided not to fly to Roosevelt’s funeral on account of much that’s going on here.”137

  On the seventeenth, Churchill paid tribute to Roosevelt in the House. Harold Nicolson thought the address uninspired, “nothing like as good as when he [Churchill] made the funeral oration on Neville Chamberlain, which was truly Periclean.” Yet, Nicolson offered to his diary, Churchill’s speech showed that “when one really does mind deeply about a thing, it is more difficult to write or speak about it than when one is just faintly moved by pity or terror.” Churchill ended his remarks with the words “For us, it remains only to say that in Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old.”138

  On April 13, three days before Zhukov and Konev launched their final drive to Berlin, Vienna fell to the Red Army. Stalin’s troops then began moving up the Danube while Eisenhower’s forces moved down, in the general direction of Linz. On April 16, American troops took Nuremberg, the locus of Nazidom’s most holy rallies. It was a symbolic victory; Nuremberg lay almost 240 miles south of Berlin. The Americans, committed to their broad-front strategy, were wandering farther and farther away from the battlefield that Churchill considered most important: Berlin.

  On April 20 Churchill dined alone with his first true love of almost a half century earlier, Pamela Plowden, now the Countess Lytton. Her son John had been killed at El Alamein. Churchill had first met her at a polo match in Assam, India, where her father was the police chief. She was both handsome and pretty, the belle of any city she chose to grace with her presence. After two years of polite courtship by Churchill, she had sought more ardor from him, and informed him so by letter. His pride wounded, he responded, “Why do you think I am incapable of affection? Perish the thought. I love one above all others. And I shall be constant.” He proposed marriage while rowing a punt on the Avon under the ramparts of Warwick Castle. Pamela declined. In a sense, his declaration that he loved one above all others was true, but his love was for politics, and to politics he had remained constant during all the ensuing decades.139

  The previous day, Eisenhower told Churchill of the horrors uncovered at the newly liberated concentration camp at Buchenwald. Only then did Churchill and the British people begin to realize that the propaganda stories about unspeakable murders on an unimaginable scale had been true all along. With some satisfaction Colville told his diary that after the mayor of Weimar and his wife were escorted to Buchenwald to survey the carnage, they went home and hanged themselves.140

  As Churchill and the countess dined on April 20, the RAF bombed Berlin for the last time, not in order to give any respite to Berliners, but to avoid hitting Britain’s allies, the Red Army, who were now at the gates. It was Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday.

  That day in Hamburg, twenty Jewish children who had been brought there for medical experimentation were hanged by the SS in the basement of a former school at Bullenhuser Damm, a part of the Neuengamme concentration camp. Twenty Soviet prisoners were also hanged. British troops were inside the Hamburg city limits, but the Germans held the port, where ten thousand Russian POWs and Jews were made ready to march to the Bay of Lübeck, forty miles distant on the Baltic, from where the Germans intended to ship them up the coast to Kiel. Eden and Churchill believed that Montgomery should push on and take Lübeck. This would bar the door to Denmark, which would not only keep the Germans in, but keep the Red Army out. A Russian occupation of Denmark, Eden wrote, “would cause us much embarrassment.” Churchill and Eden also agreed on the wisdom of the Americans getting to Prague before the Soviets.141

  On April 20, Soviet artillery of the 1st Belorussian Front, positioned just outside Berlin, began to shell the heart of the city. Other Russian artillery units soon joined in, lofting high explosives from the east, northeast, and southeast into the Tiergarten, a dead landscape now, where no May flowers bloomed. The shells raked the zoo, empty now of zoological exhibits but for the three hundred German artillerymen who occupied a massive concrete pillbox from which they fired their 88s toward the Soviet lines. Soviet Katyusha rockets fired from American Studebaker chassis raked the Unter den Linden boulevard until only long rows of shredded, blackened stumps of linden trees remained. Heavy Red Army artillery lobbed ordnance into the Reich Chancellery, and into the shell of the old, burned-out Reichstag at virtual point-blank range. Russian gunners hurled tons of explosives into the immediate neighborhood around the Brandenburg Gate, which somehow survived the onslaught and where Victory, astride her quadriga, still clutched the Iron Cross, which the Nazis had substituted for her olive branch. The Pariser Platz was in ruins, yet somehow the Academy of Arts remained unscathed, although its next patrons would be drunken Soviet troops. Nearby, the Adlon Hotel, partially aflame, did not lack for patrons, of a sort: the basement, where Nazi swells had once sheltered themselves at leisure from errant British bombs, had been converted into a field hospital. Yet, for the wounded, there was little medicine, and no hope.142

  Hitler’s Olympischer Platz, its columns and walls ripped by shrapnel, resembled the ancient ruins of Carthage. The Russian artillery fire persisted for twelve straight days without a moment’s pause, an inundation of tons upon thousands of tons of steel. Hundreds of Berliners were driven mad. Thousands now committed suicide rather than face the murderous wrath of the Red Army. Fathers murdered wives and daughters rather than allow them to fall into the hands of rapacious Soviet troops. The city waited for the end. In his Führerbunker thirty feet below the Chancellery—under six feet of compacted earth and a sixteen-foot-thick concrete roof—Adolf Hitler waited, waited for his imaginary armies to appear to crush the invaders and save everything he had striven to create. Yet the crump of each Soviet shell exploding in the streets above was heard, felt by Hitler and his dwindling band of fellow true believers. Hitler’s oldest and most trusted Nazi cohorts were on hand to celebrate the Führer’s birthday—Goebbels, Himmler, Göring, Bormann, and Ribbentrop. The last of the military chiefs were there—Dönitz, Jodl, and Keitel. Albert Speer arrived with birthday greetings but departed soon after, his orders from Hitler clear: to destroy any industrial and electrical centers that the Allies had not. Nothing was to remain standing or operational; the German people, having failed their Führer, deserved nothing. Speer departed with no intention of obeying the order. After the subdued birthday ceremony, Hitler made the trip up to the courtyard in order to encourage a platoon of Hitlerjugend—adolescent boys—to fight to the end. He patted one or two on the head, then sent them off to die. Late in the day, Hitler’s generals advised the warlord to leave the city and set up a new command. He made no decision, but sent Dönitz to Flensburg, near the Danish frontier, to take command there. That night, Göring made good his escape in a caravan of automobiles loaded down with the air marshal’s stolen loot. Himmler, too, fled. Ribbentrop also prepared to flee. Each was secure in his knowledge that Hitler would soon be dead, and each presumed he would soon take control.143

  On April 22, both Dönitz and Himmler telephoned the bunker and urged Hitler to leave, but
by then the Führer had decided to stay, to die at a time and place of his choosing. That night, he sent Keitel and Jodl south, toward Bavaria, to prepare for a last stand under the command of Göring in the phantom mountain redoubt (Hitler, like Eisenhower, had come to believe Goebbels’ propaganda). Jodl protested that Hitler, cut off in Berlin, could not control the battle, and added that the Wehrmacht would not fight under Göring. Hitler shot back: “What do you mean, fight? There’s precious little more fighting to be done!” The moment was a small island of clarity in a sea of delusion. Albert Speer called the surreal world in the bunker “the Isle of the Departed.”144

  On April 23, Himmler and Göring made their respective bids to supplant Hitler. Göring, by then in Berchtesgaden, wrote a letter to Hitler that cited a 1941 decree that should Hitler lose control of the government, the Reichsmarschall was to take command. Himmler that night met with Count Bernadotte in the Swedish consulate at Lübeck, on the Baltic. Himmler proposed, in writing, an astoundingly naive yet not unsound concept: he would arrange for the surrender of German armies in the west while continuing the fight against the Red Army until such time as Eisenhower and the Allies appeared on the scene to take over the battle against the Bolsheviks. By that night, only Hitler’s SS guards, Ribbentrop, and Bormann remained with Hitler. Bormann, like Himmler and Göring, was plotting his own escape and ascendancy to supreme power. Hitler, learning of Himmler’s and Göring’s gambits, flew into a rage. He declared the fat Reichsmarschall a traitor, and ordered that he be found and shot, an order Bormann was only too happy to send out over the airwaves. Albert Speer that day had made the dangerous journey by air from Mecklenburg to Berlin, where he landed his cub aircraft in front of the Brandenburg Gate. He had come to ask Hitler to grant him his leave, and he fully expected to be hauled outside and shot for failing to obey Hitler’s scorched-earth directive. Instead, after Speer confessed his disobedience, the two chatted amiably, if clumsily. For a moment, Hitler’s “eyes filled with tears.” Then he waved off Speer with a curt auf Wiedersehen. They parted without a handshake, and for the last time Speer left the Chancellery, now in ruins, which he had designed and built seven years earlier.145