Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The Russian tactics were those that they had used with considerable success so far: with one artillery piece per ten yards of front, they would unleash a devastating bombardment, after which the infantry would move forward and attack the German defences. Once the infantry had created a breach, the armour would pour through and the advance would continue. For the Germans, Hitler had at last sanctioned the methods that his generals had constantly been urging but had not been allowed to use. Two lines of defences would be prepared, and the troops would move back to the second line while the Russian artillery barrage came down, emerging and moving forward again when it lifted. This would protect the infantry from the preliminary bombardment and allow them to destroy the attacking infantry with artillery, mortars and machine-guns, and the armour which followed with anti-tank weapons including the primitive but highly effective hand-held Panzerfaust.

  At 0500 hours on 16 April, Zhukov began his attack with the usual artillery bombardment and then launched his infantry against the German Ninth Army on the Seelow Heights. The Germans emerged more or less intact from their bunkers and took on the Soviet infantry, who could not break through. Infuriated, Zhukov sent in the armour of his First Guards Tank Army, but the tanks found themselves mixed up with the infantry and in a minefield with the Germans picking them off with 88mm guns and Panzerfausts. Losing his temper completely, Zhukov sent in his second tank army, which only produced complete traffic gridlock and gave the Germans a host of juicy targets. Zhukov had mounted batteries of searchlights in his own forward positions and also on his tanks, the idea being that their beams would reflect off the clouds and illuminate the Germans, but now they worked in reverse, reflecting off the dust and smoke caused by the artillery and illuminating themselves, for which the Germans were no doubt suitably grateful. The following day, with more and more Russian troops thrown in and supported by constant attacks from the air, the town of Seelow eventually fell in the early afternoon, and Busse withdrew his units back to their next prepared defence position. It was not until 19 April that Zhukov finally broke through the defences on the Seelow Heights and was able to continue the advance towards Berlin. In the south, Konev had more success: attacking behind a smoke screen, he managed to force a crossing of the Neisse and establish a bridgehead big enough to get his tanks across on pontoon bridges, and the Soviet armour then penetrated Fifth Panzer Army’s forward defences. The following day he reached and then crossed the River Spree and hooked north. Meanwhile, on 19 April, Stalin removed the Front boundaries and declared that whichever Front got there first would have the honour of capturing the German capital.

  In Berlin itself, it was apparent that the city now risked encirclement and officials not essential to the defence and archives were being moved southwest into Bavaria – Hitler had already allowed Ribbentrop and his Foreign Office staff and those diplomats still accredited to Germany to go on 13 April, but announced that he himself would remain in Berlin to direct its defence along with Eva Braun, his long-term girlfriend, and his immediate entourage, including General Krebs and the OKH staff, while OKW moved to Zossen, thirty miles to the south. Hitler still seems to have clung to the notion that the alliance between East and West would break down, and he had ordered that Berlin should be stocked with sufficient stores, ammunition and rations for three divisions for three weeks, presumably calculating that, if the expected rupture did not come in that time, then the game would be up. On 20 April it was Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday. He had told his staff that he wanted no celebrations, but that afternoon he presented awards to members of the Hitler Youth and the Volksturm for bravery on the Oder Front. That day too, Göring, the titular head of the Luftwaffe, and Himmler, the head of the SS, left Berlin, supposedly to galvanize resistance against the Soviets.

  Despite the heroic struggle of General Busse with Ninth Army and that of Third Panzer Army in support, the Russians were getting closer and closer, Zhukov from the east and Konev from the south, so much so that from 20 April onwards Hitler could not use the Reich Chancellery building but stayed in the extensive headquarters bunker dug deep into the ground beside it. On 21 April the Russians got to within artillery range and began to pour a rain of shells into the heart of the city. Observers reported the gun battery in question was only eight miles away. Hitler now ordered Heinrici to cut off the Russian salient created by Zhukov and Konev’s advance by a pincer attack using SS Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner’s Army Detachment Steiner attacking from the north and Busse’s Ninth Army from the south. Theoretically this was all very well, but Army Detachment Steiner was in fact only a corps of three divisions, one police, one panzer grenadier and one light infantry, all well under-strength, and Busse’s army was almost surrounded and pinned against the Oder. When Steiner pointed out that he himself was defending against the Second Byelorusian Front with his back to the Baltic and unless relieved had only three battalions available for anything else, Heinrici accepted that the attack could not happen. Hitler flew into a rage, fulminating against his generals. A summons to Heinrici to come and see him was evaded by the army group staff, who said that the commander was too busy planning the relief of Berlin to see anybody. That same day, Konev’s Third Guards Tank Army stormed Zossen, arriving just after the staff of OKW had hurriedly evacuated their headquarters and dashed to Berlin before moving again to Neu-Roofen, forty miles north-west in Brandenburg, and Hitler was given the news that Field Marshal Model, whose Army Group B had held out in the Ruhr until all hope and ammunition was gone, had committed suicide, with 300,000 of his men being taken prisoner.

  Further bad news arrived when it was reported that Nuremberg, the spiritual capital of National Socialism, had fallen to Patton’s US Third Army after five days of bitter fighting. The next day, 22 April, largely to mollify Hitler and without much expectation that it would actually work, Keitel and Jodl of OKW presented a new plan involving an attack eastwards and north-eastwards by Busse and General of Panzer Troops Walter Wenck’s Twelfth Army, which was currently on the Elbe fifty miles from Berlin and facing west against the American Ninth Army at Magdeburg. Wenck was to about turn and drive east, linking up with Busse south of Berlin, whereupon both armies would strike north-east and cut off the Russian forces attacking Berlin. At the same time Lieutenant-General Rudolf Holste’s LXI Panzer Corps, part of Fourth Army on the Baltic coast, was to attack south.

  Wenck did manage to turn his army round and initially made good progress towards Berlin, but he was stopped at Potsdam by strong Russian forces, and on 25 April the Red Army closed the ring around the city and Berlin was cut off, while in the west the British were into Hamburg. It is likely that Heinrici had now given up any idea of relieving Berlin and was concerned only with keeping the routes to the west open to the south of the capital to allow civilians to flee the Russians, and with trying to withdraw Busse’s Ninth Army to the west. Now the Russians were in the suburbs of Berlin and only a few miles from the central government quarter. The garrison totalled around 150,000 under the command of General of Artillery Helmuth Weidling, but of those only 45,000 were regular soldiers or Waffen SS, the rest being made up of police, anti-aircraft gunners, Hitler Youth (schoolboys on bicycles armed with Panzerfausts) and Volksturm. The defence was fierce, for many of the defenders – including Dutch and French SS – had nothing to lose, and even at this last minute of the last hour Hitler’s baleful presence stiffened resistance, as did ‘flying’ courts martial mainly composed of very young SS officers who were charged with the summary execution of anyone who appeared not to be doing their duty. These bodies tended to keep away from formed army units, whose commanders threatened to shoot them should they interfere, but they did inject a certain amount of terror into members of the Volksturm or the Hitler Youth whom the SS considered were displaying insufficient enthusiasm for the fight. Politically, too, the Reich was collapsing: Göring had signalled Hitler suggesting that, as the Führer was now cut off in Berlin and unable to discharge his duties as head of state, then perhaps he, Göring
, should assume the leadership of Germany and try to arrange peace terms with the Western Allies. Hitler ordered him arrested and stripped of all his offices. The news that Himmler was trying to arrange an armistice through Swiss intermediaries brought an order for his dismissal too, and the fact that SS Obergruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, Hitler’s Waffen SS liaison officer, was married to Margarethe Braun, Eva’s sister, did not save him from being shot when he attempted to get out of Berlin in civilian clothes.

  The last attempt to relieve Berlin failed when Wenck could make no progress beyond Potsdam, and Busse realized that his only possible choice was to try to break out west to join with Wenck, and on 24 April this he attempted to do, striking to the south of Berlin. Under heavy attack from Konev’s troops in his flank and rear, Busse did manage to get some 25,000 of his men out to link up with Wenck, which at least meant that they could eventually surrender to the Americans rather than to the Russians.

  With the Russians on the Elbe meeting the Americans at Torgau, Germany was now split in two, and on 25 April an RAF raid on Obersalzburg destroyed the Berghof, Hitler’s erstwhile mountain retreat. As the Russians came closer and closer to the centre of Berlin and headed towards the Reichstag,fromwhere they thought the defence was being directed, and Weidling’s men began to run out of ammunition, it was none the less still possible, just, for aircraft to get in and out, and on 25 April a few naval infantry and SS did arrive. But with the only German formation still intact and capable of action – Army Group Centre, commanded by Ferdinand Schorner, a field marshal since 5 April – too far away in Czechoslovakia to help and with the loss of Gatow and Tempelhof airports over the next few days, there really was now no hope of salvation. On 27 April the Berlin underground system was flooded to prevent the Russians using it, in the process drowning many civilians who had taken shelter there. By 28 April the Chancellery was under direct shellfire and Keitel had discovered that Heinrici had no intention of coming to the relief of Berlin – such a move would anyway have been futile – but was instead pulling his troops back west as fast as they could go. Keitel dismissed Heinrici and his chief of staff, but in practice there was nothing he could do to enforce the sacking.

  At last Hitler accepted the inevitable, and in the early hours of 29 April, with the bunker vibrating under the weight of high explosive raining down above, he issued cyanide capsules to his staff and dictated his political testament to his secretary, Frau Traudl Junge, widow of SS Obersturmführer Hans Junge, who had been killed in action in Normandy in 1944. In it, Hitler appointed three men as his successors: Grand Admiral Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German navy and based in Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, as president of the Reich; Josef Goebbels as Reich chancellor; and Field Marshal Schorner as Commander-in-Chief of the army. Next, a registrar was summoned from Goebbels’s ministry to preside over the marriage of Hitler and Eva Braun. There was a necessarily small wedding reception, during which Hitler spent most of his time discussing with Bormann and Goebbels the composition of the new cabinet, as if it could possibly matter now. That evening, General Weidling reported that there were no more Panzerfausts, tanks could not be repaired, his men were nearly out of small arms ammunition, there was heavy fighting less than a mile away from the Chancellery and that in his opinion they could hold out for no more than twenty-four hours. Hitler asked SS Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke to become responsible for the immediate defence of the Chancellery if he agreed, and he did. The following day, at around 1530 hours in his study in the bunker, Eva Braun took poison and Hitler put a cyanide capsule in his mouth and, as he bit down on it, shot himself through the head. The bodies were taken out into the open, doused with petrol and burned in a shell crater.

  The next day, 1 May, General Krebs, a Russian-speaker from his days as an assistant military attaché in Moscow, went out with a white flag to arrange a ceasefire. He was eventually taken to Colonel-General Vasili Chuikov, the commander of Zhukov’s Eighth Guards Army that had spearheaded the final assault on Berlin. Krebs wanted to discuss terms but, after Chuikov had consulted Zhukov and he Stalin, Krebs was told that only unconditional surrender was acceptable. As Krebs did not have the authority from Goebbels to agree this, he returned to the bunker and the fighting continued. On 2 May, with his men out of ammunition and many surrendering on their own account, Weidling surrendered the Berlin garrison unconditionally. Krebs committed suicide, as did Goebbels and his wife, but only after first poisoning their children, while the party secretary, Bormann, and all those who could go with him attempted to break out west through the Russian lines in small groups. Many never made it.

  Now the long nightmare of the civilians in Berlin began as Russian troops searched for alcohol, plunder and women, and began to exact vengeance for the 67,000 Red Army soldiers killed in the battle. The cost to the Germans of the fighting from the Oder–Neisse line to the fall of Berlin was around half a million killed or captured, with commensurate losses of equipment that could not be replaced. Elsewhere on the Eastern Front, the priority was to get as far away from the Russians as possible, and on 3 May the German navy began the evacuation of Army Group Kurland. Any Russian designs on Denmark were scuppered on the same day when the British Second Army reached Wismar on the Baltic, meeting the Russian Seventieth Army there; in Czechoslovakia, despite a partisan uprising in Prague and the re-defection back to the Red Army of General Vlasov’s Russians (which did them no good at all, most subsequently being either executed or sent to the gulags), Schorner continued to hold out and edge westwards, and on the Elbe the American First and Ninth Armies met the Soviet First Byelorussian and First Ukrainian Fronts.

  With Hitler dead, suggestions of negotiations for an armistice no longer risked court martial and a firing squad, and Admiral Dönitz, having consulted with Kesselring and all the senior officers who could be contacted, accepted that the war could not be continued. Emissaries were sent out under flags of truce and at 0500 hours on 4 May Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and a delegation arrived at Montgomery’s headquarters on Lüneburg Heath, twenty-five miles south-east of Hamburg. After being unnecessarily humiliated by the British field marshal by being kept waiting and then not allowed to smoke, von Friedeburg surrendered all German forces in Holland, Denmark and north-west Germany. The German party were then taken to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, where they were joined by Jodl from OKW. They again suggested a separate peace, which was turned down, and, when it became apparent that the Germans were playing for time to get as many of their troops and civilians into the West as they could, Eisenhower responded that, unless they signed, he would close his front and allow no more refugees through it. At 0241 hours on 7 May, Jodl signed the instrument of unconditional surrender of all German forces, wherever they were, the ceasefire to come into effect no later than midnight on 8 May. This was not acceptable to Stalin, who demanded a further surrender ceremony in Berlin, where at 2330 hours on 8 May Jodl signed again. Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) is therefore 8 May 1945 in Britain and America, and 9 May in Russia and the states of the former USSR. Although fighting officially ended on 8 May, many German units fought on and it was not until 15 May, in Yugoslavia, that the last German laid down his arms.

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  The victory parade in Burma took place in Rangoon on 15 June 1945, although mopping-up operations continued and the formal surrender did not take place until August. While the Americans had ordered that Japanese officers were permitted to retain their swords, Slim insisted that Japanese officers surrendering to or taken prisoner by the British were required to surrender their swords to a British officer of the same or higher rank, for only by doing so could they be made to understand that they had been defeated.* For now the next objective for the British was Malaya and Singapore – Operations Zipper and Mailfist – followed by Thailand and the Dutch East Indies, and it was intended to launch Zipper on 1 September 1945. There were 86,000 Japanese troops in Malaya, seasoned combatants, and, as the Malayan terrain was unsuitable for the employm
ent of mass armoured sweeps, the British preponderance of tanks and self-propelled guns would no longer be a major advantage. Slim, backed by Mountbatten and Auchinleck, thought that the minimum force for Zipper was seven divisions, but there were problems. In June the British government intimated that it was intending to reduce even further the length of a Far East tour to three years and four months for British soldiers – the Python scheme – after which they were to be repatriated to the UK. Theoretically, these men would be replaced, albeit by men with no experience of the East and who would require training on arrival, but the main problem was transport and the wherewithal to organize it. If all the British officers and men due to be sent home were to be withdrawn from their units, moved to and accommodated at ports of embarkation, and shipped to the UK, then the rail and transit facilities in India would not be able to cope, and nor would the available shipping. Not only that, but, as Auchinleck pointed out in a letter to the CIGS, there would be no shipping available for the Indian Army units in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, most of whom had been away from home for longer than the British and were long overdue for leave, to say nothing of the 23,000 West African troops in India waiting to be sent home to Africa. While Brooke understood the problem, there was little sympathy from British politicians – there was a general election due and Indians, Gurkhas and West Africans had no votes. The end result was an unhappy compromise: Zipper would be postponed until 9 September 1945, all British soldiers whose three years and four months was up before the end of the year would be withdrawn and repatriated when shipping became available, and Zipper would be mounted with six divisions rather than seven. In the meantime, with Iwo Jima and Okinawa secure, the Americans were planning for the invasion of Japan, with a view to landing on the southern island of Kyushu in November 1945 and then moving on to Honshu in March 1946.