by Jeff Shaara
As the Third Army pressed closer to the Czech border, the Germans in their path were surrendering in massive numbers, entire regiments laying down their arms, greeting the Americans like liberators. Patton had been amazed by that, had always respected the German fighting man as a warrior even more than he had his own troops. It was one of Patton’s particular complaints about American training, that the foot soldier wasn’t given whatever the ingredient was that made a man a ruthless killer. Eisenhower had believed that as well, that the American soldier would never prove as vicious as the enemy he faced. But now the Germans had changed completely, the officers who brought their men into American lines desperately relieved that they had escaped the Russians.
PRISONER OF WAR COMPOUND
NEAR REGENSBURG, GERMANY
MAY 5, 1945
He stood on a grassy rise outside the wire enclosure, stared out over a sea of humanity. Troops outside the wire were cheering him, the same shouts he heard everywhere he went. Close to one side, he saw a man with a camera, and Patton turned that way, a brief accommodation, stood tall with his hands resting on the butts of his pistols. Behind the wire, the Germans were staring as well, a strange openmouthed awe, which surprised him. He puffed out his chest, thought of the four stars on his shoulders. The same promotion had already gone to Bradley and Devers, and to others, including Mark Clark, the American commander who was finally wrapping up the campaign in Italy. Patton had no idea if any of the others were actually wearing their stars yet, and he didn’t care. He glanced at the jeep, the red four-starred flags, thought, gotta make sure I take that home. Beatrice will enjoy that, maybe put it over the mantel, or frame it. It’s as high as anyone will get in this army, and the way things are going, the army’s not going to need a whole flock of four-stars wandering around Washington.
He turned slightly, tried to aim the reflection of the sun on his helmet, trying to make a display for the POWs. I wonder if those Krauts have the slightest idea what these stars mean? He felt a little obnoxious for the preening, thought, even if you don’t have any idea, you know that I’m the guy in charge. A German understands how to spot authority. It’s part of how he’s bred. That’s right, boys. This is my command, and my camp and my damn army. And for now, until somebody signs one big pile of papers that spells out how this mess is going to end, you belong to me.
“Sir?”
Patton felt interrupted, annoyed, saw Codman beside the tank holding a paper.
“What the hell is it?”
“Message from SHAEF, sir. They’ve established the forward limits of our advance. They insist that you establish our forward position along the Elbe–Pilsen line.”
Patton was more than annoyed now, knew something like this was coming.
“Do they say why?”
“Because that’s the line agreed upon with the Russians, sir.”
“Are the damn Russians there yet?”
“I’m not sure, sir. I could call the forward observers. We’ve got people close to Pilsen right now. Since we’ve hit the Czech border, we’ve been pushing ahead pretty much unopposed.”
“Never mind. I hate this, Charlie. Absolutely hate it. We should be drawing that damn line ourselves, with tanks and artillery positions, not lines of a map. This is the only part of the entire theater where our boys can still push ahead, and Ike is ordering me to halt. We should be telling the damn Russians where we’re gonna stop, and let them come up and meet us at the spot we choose. No reason why we can’t be sleeping in Prague tonight.”
“There is one good reason, sir. It’s against our orders.”
For several days in late April and early May, Eisenhower had been receiving reports of requests for armistice, separate attempts by various German commanders to surrender their armies. It made perfect sense that if a local commander knew his men had no hope, the logical move was to put up the white flag. But the entreaties were coming in from strange corners of the Western Theater, passing through Sweden and Switzerland, some coming directly from the most senior commanders themselves. Eisenhower had received a message directly from Kesselring, offering to end the war in the west, the same sort of message Churchill had received from Himmler, by way of the Swedes. Despite the excited optimism that spread through the Allied commands, Eisenhower knew he could not accept any offer that did not include one simple condition: unconditional surrender from every front where the Germans were engaged. That policy had been publicly announced more than two years earlier by President Roosevelt, and Roosevelt’s death had not changed what had been declared the official policy of the Allied forces. Confirmation of that had come from General George Marshall in Washington. The new president, Harry Truman, would not alter the terms that his predecessor had set down. There was no other consideration, no other negotiation that Eisenhower could offer. Thus, no matter how many entreaties flowed westward, Eisenhower would not entertain any offers of surrender that did not include those German forces still opposing the Russians. Kesselring had no authority over those troops, and the authority Himmler possessed was a complete mystery. In either case, no official surrender could take place.
As word filtered through to the Allies that Hitler was in fact dead, Eisenhower had to believe that the German High Command had been thrown into chaos. Berlin was in ashes, and the various German field commands were certainly being controlled only by their local headquarters. The German army itself was a complete shambles. By the third week of April, more than a million German soldiers had surrendered into American and British lines. That number was increasing daily, and Eisenhower knew that the facilities for handling the prisoners were enormously overwhelmed.
Finally, on May 5, much of the mystery about German authority was cleared up. Reports were received directly through the offices of Admiral Dönitz that Hitler’s last will and testament had named Dönitz as the Führer’s successor. Eisenhower knew very little about Dönitz, and at first his claim of authority was a surprise. Dönitz was certainly a capable commander, and had earned respect for his brilliant tactical use of the U-boats. But Eisenhower had always assumed that if Hitler was removed from power, dead or not, someone with far more visibility to the German people would have stepped in to assume power. Hermann Göring seemed to be the most obvious choice, or Heinrich Himmler. But the intelligence officers under General Strong had been thoroughly sifting through the chaotic German communications, and so had learned a great deal about Hitler’s own bizarre collapse, the mistrust and paranoia that seemed to erase once-prominent commanders from any role at all. Von Rundstedt had virtually disappeared, and Eisenhower had received confirmed reports that Field Marshal Model was dead. In the Ruhr pocket, the Allies had captured not only a larger German force than had been lost at Stalingrad, but also thirty German generals. Every one of those had his own story to tell, and though most seemed to accept their defeat with stoic relief, there were those who expressed unabashed honesty, intense regret that such a skilled and dominant army had been crushed not by any superior enemy, but by the insane manipulations of the madman they had served.
Eisenhower also began to understand that the messages coming from various German commanders were having another effect. With Germany squeezed between the Russians and the western Allies, it had become obvious that the flow of refugees, military and civilian, was moving west. Every day that the Germans could drag out the surrender process allowed that many more Germans to escape capture, or worse, by the Russians.
Throughout Europe, the pieces of the pie were sliding together. On May 2, German troops in Italy capitulated. By May 3, Montgomery had captured the city of Lübeck, which sealed off the Danish peninsula and the German troops who were stranded there. In Holland, the Canadian First Army had hemmed in the remaining Germans who had held out in a corner of Europe that, for the time being, the Allies had simply bypassed. In other strongholds, including the Brittany peninsula in France, Germans simply had nowhere to go. Then, on May 5, Jacob Devers’s Sixth Army captured Salzburg, Austria, which allowed them
to link up with the American Fifth Army moving north from Italy, effectively ending the fight along the entire Western Front.
On May 5, as the confusion over German authority cleared, Eisenhower received a representative who had come directly from Admiral Dönitz. But Dönitz’s man was only authorized to surrender to the western Allies, a diplomatic booby trap Eisenhower knew he had to avoid. If the Germans intended to accept unconditional surrender, they would do so everywhere, to representatives of all the Allied powers. Only after representatives of the Russian and French armies were present would Eisenhower permit any kind of official documents to be signed. Dönitz had no choice but to agree, and he informed Eisenhower that he was authorizing Alfred Jodl as Germany’s official signatory. Jodl had been Hitler’s closest military adviser, and Eisenhower knew that Jodl was regarded by the best German field commanders as nothing more than Hitler’s puppet. Eisenhower didn’t care. If anything, that description made Jodl the logical choice as the German most suitable to surrender their army.
SHAEF, RHEIMS, FRANCE
MAY 7, 1945
It was well after midnight, and the men were gathering in what had been Eisenhower’s War Room, walls plastered with maps that were still alive with the various colored pins that designated troop positions. He purposely stayed out of the way, confining himself to his office to the side of the main room. He felt uneasy about participating in a ceremony that did not include Germany’s highest-ranking military official. Dönitz had of course stayed away, what Eisenhower assumed was either a show of defiance or a problem with logistics. Regardless, since the Germans were sending their chief of staff, the Allies would do the same. The ceremony would be handled by Bedell Smith. The British were represented by Eisenhower’s second in command, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder. Tedder was accompanied by another Brit, a man Eisenhower felt should be included in any kind of ceremony as significant as the German surrender, General Frederick Morgan. Morgan had created most of the original plan for the Normandy invasion, and was now a well-respected and well-liked member of Eisenhower’s staff. The air forces were represented not only by Tedder but also by American general Carl Spaatz, the navies by British admiral Sir Harold Burrough. The French had sent General François Sevez. Already there was a stickiness brewing with the Russians, messages from Moscow that the Russians insisted on a separate ceremony to take place in Berlin. Eisenhower had learned enough about Russian pride to understand that if Stalin could not enjoy humiliating Hitler, he would find some way to humiliate the Germans who remained in power. But the diplomatic minefield that Eisenhower faced with the signing of the documents at Rheims was solved when the Russians agreed to the participation of their liaison to their French mission, General Ivan Susloparov. The wrangling caused grumbles in both London and Washington, but Eisenhower had no objection to the Russian maneuver. He respected his Russian counterpart, and Eisenhower believed that Marshal Zhukov had earned the right to have the Germans capitulate to him any way he saw fit.
The room was thirty feet on a side, and the principals who were directly involved in the ceremony were accompanied by a flock of aides and other senior staffers, who jostled one another for some view of the rectangular table, a tense scramble that also included selected photographers, who were kept against one wall. The packed crowd was an unwieldy situation, but Bedell Smith had taken charge, and any controversy over who had the better view was settled without discussion. Smith understood the role he was playing, and Eisenhower’s chief of staff had never been known for his patience. Once Eisenhower was comfortable that Beetle had everything under control, Eisenhower finally accepted that the best thing for him to do was stay out of the way.
The actual negotiations, the examination of documents, were dealt with privately, away from the reporters. Eisenhower knew that any hitch or last-minute controversy could get blown into a major explosion if the various governments suddenly felt their interests weren’t being properly represented. In the War Room itself, the ceremony represented Germany’s official capitulation, but the signing of the documents would be a formality. Unlike the chaos of the Versailles Conference in 1919, this time the Germans would not be handed a surprise.
As the packed crowd waited nervously, the Germans were ushered in last. Jodl was led to a seat directly across from Smith. In forty minutes’ time, the documents that ended the war in Europe were signed. It was two forty-one in the morning.
For one tense hour, Eisenhower had waited in the office, agonizing through every minute by wrestling with the details, second-guessing himself in tense silence, the ridiculous menu of minutiae that had presumably been handled by Smith and the men he had assigned. He could hear the popping of flashbulbs, a rising volume to the hum of voices, and he stared at the door, his brain focusing on the idiotic mistakes that could still happen, all those things that could go wrong. His brain had fixed itself on one detail, what he knew was an irrational fear. It had been handled, he thought. It was handled. Forget about it. But his mind gripped tightly to the thought, and he rehashed the moments yet again. The fantasy would not leave him: that the moment would come and history would pause, the entire world forced to hold its breath while someone suddenly scrambled to find a working ballpoint pen. He knew he was being ridiculous, but the thought of that kind of hitch in the proceedings, one absurdly stupid moment in history, had festered through the agony of the slow passage of time. He replayed the scene one more time, knew that he had provided the pens himself, two of them. One was solid gold, one gold-plated, gifts from an old friend. He recalled the moment, giving the pens with hand-quivering nervousness to Harry Butcher, who tested them on blank paper, making sure they would actually write. He tried to laugh it off, to scold himself for being an idiot. But the humor wasn’t there. No thoughts invaded his mind but raging impatience that the ceremony be concluded. And, he thought, will someone please remember to come and tell me?
He looked again at his watch, nearly three o’clock in the morning. Outside the office, he could hear a rising hum of activity, and looked again at his watch, had done so at least four or five times for each minute that passed. This is a hell of an hour to end a war. I should have been in there, he thought. I should have seen this. They’ll ask me about that, those damn reporters. But no, it’s protocol, and protocol matters. Not to me, but to someone, somewhere.
The tension was swirling through him, and he thought of going to the window, counting stars, counting anything he could see in the darkness. No, I should just go out there. But I can’t. Dammit! He was jolted by a soft knock at the door, his response immediate and far too loud.
“Yes. What is it? Come in.”
He saw Smith, a hard clench to the man’s jaw, a slight wink of his eye. Smith stood aside, and Eisenhower saw the uniform behind him, splendid with medals, the man tall, regal in his walk, a monocle in his eye. It was Alfred Jodl.
Behind Jodl came Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s intelligence chief. Strong was there for one very specific reason. He spoke German. Eisenhower looked at Jodl for a long silent moment, saw a hint of sadness in the man’s eyes, camouflaged by an unmistakable curtain of arrogance. Eisenhower kept his seat, measured his voice, held a tight grip on his words.
“Do you understand the documents you have signed?”
Strong repeated the words, and Jodl looked directly at Eisenhower, studied him, a slip of curiosity. Jodl made a brief nod.
“Ja.”
“Good. Then understand this. You will be held personally and officially responsible for any violation of the terms of surrender. That will include the provisions for German commanders to appear in Berlin before the Russian High Command to accomplish your formal surrender to that government.” He paused, angry he had not thought of more to say. But Jodl had no real purpose there, a courtesy that meant nothing to the ceremony. Jodl remained silent.
Eisenhower said, “That is all.”
Jodl clicked his heels together, kept his back stiff, stared past Eisenhower through the monocle. He said nothing more, ma
de a simple salute. Then he turned and, followed by Smith and Strong, left the office. Eisenhower slumped back, his heart racing, allowed his hands to release the arms of his chair, sweat running down the inside of his shirt. The surge of energy was overwhelming him, and he stood, moved out to the sea of activity in the War Room. He slipped through the crowd, acknowledged no one, moved to one of the chairs that lined the long table, sat. Gradually the room grew more quiet, men suddenly aware of his presence. Smith was beside him now, put a hand on Eisenhower’s shoulder.
“It’s over, Ike.”
He heard the quiver in Smith’s voice, emotion he had never seen before.
“Good job, Beetle. Thank you.”