VICTORY IN EUROPE

THE END OF HITLER'S GERMANY

As we noted in the previous chapter, Field-Marshal Kesselring had been recalled by Hitler early in March to take over as Commander-in-Chief in the West, and found himself heir to a situation in which Hitler and the commanders of OKW had devoted most of the remaining strength of the Wehrmacht to the defence of the Eastern frontier of Greater Germany, and to the fortification of Berlin. With some measure of credibility, although nonetheless with tremendous optimism, Hitler and Guderian hoped to hold and defeat the Soviet armies on the Oder, and thereby to be able in time to transfer reinforcements from the East to the West. Kesselring's task, he was assured by Hitler, was to stabilise the present position, mop up the Allied bridgehead at Remagen, and then, when the reinforcements were available, to launch a counter-offensive to repel the invaders from the Reich.

Kesselring was nothing if not a realist, and soon realised that Hitler's requirement of him to hold the position along the Rhine was simply not practicable unless entirely unforeseen circumstances worked in his favour. The total complement of the Wehrmacht armies in the West amounted to 55 divisions, all of which were seriously under strength, and most of which were "padded" with troops who were inadequately trained. Although the concentration of the German troops in and around Germany had largely resolved the supplies problem, and there was sufficient ammunition for defensive operations, the ammunition stocks were nowhere near enough for the scale of offensive that would be required to recapture the bridge-head at Remagen. There was also a desperate shortage of fuel which made reliance upon armoured strength risky in the extreme. With only some 63 armed fighting men per mile of the long Western Front, Kesselring was facing 85 Allied Divisions, all at full strength, all with plenty of fuel and all with high morale.

Yet, despite this depressing situation, Kesselring remained loyal to his leader to the extent of refusing to conspire against him. When the Waffen SS officer, Karl Wolff, who had been secretly negotiating with Allen Dullen of the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services) for an armistice in Italy, approached Kesselring in March suggesting that the whole German Western Front should be included in the offer of a surrender, Kesselring refused - but he nonetheless approved of Wolff's efforts to secure the end to fighting in Italy. When, on March 19th, Hitler issued his notorious Order instructing the German armies to destroy everything in their path as they retreated across Germany, regardless of the needs of the German population, Kesselring secretly connived at Albert Speer's plan to frustrate the transmission and execution of this order, a sensible disloyalty that was made easier for the ever-correct Kesselring to justify to himself by the sheer speed of the Allied advance, and hence the German retreat, and by the acute lack of explosives to destroy anything in their path.

Montgomery Crosses the Rhine

Although, when Kesselring took over his new command, the Americans were already well established in some force East of the Rhine in the Remagen bridge-head, Montgomery's 21st Army Group, made up from North to South of the Canadian 1st Army Group, the British 2nd Army and the US 9th Army, was still on the West bank. Field-Marshal Montgomery, its commander, was engrossed in what seemed to the less detail-conscious Americans to be apparently endless preparations for his crossing in force. By the third week of March, all was prepared. A Royal Navy detachment under Vice-Admiral Sir Harold Burrough had ferried 45 landing craft and a formation of Buffalo amphibious tanks from Antwerp through the canals of Belgium, Holland and Germany to the ten crossing areas along the 21st Army Group's 20-mile Rhine front, where the river is almost a quarter of a mile wide. Between March 20th and 22nd, RAF Bomber Command and the US 8th and 9th Air Forces flew some 16,000 sorties over the area selected for the assault and the supply lines beyond it, dropping almost 50,000 tons of bombs. Huge quantities of ammunition and fuel had been accumulated in dumps before the attack - the quantities gave the US generals cause for derision, although it should be pointed out that Montgomery's assaults rarely ran short of supplies, whereas those of the US forces were more troubled. For the mammoth bridge-building tasks that lay ahead once the river had been crossed, 30,000 tons of bridge-building equipment and almost 60,000 engineers had been moved up to the assault zone. Finally, before the initial assault of 80,000 men made the first crossing and opened the way for almost a million more, a smoke-screen was laid along 75 miles of the Rhine from dawn on March 21st until early evening on the 23rd to conceal troop movements and final preparations.

Through the night of March 23rd/24th, the formidable artillery resources of the British 2nd Army and the US 9th Army pounded the German positions across the river with over 3,000 guns, as the British 15th and 51st Divisions and the US 30th and 79th poured across the river in the Buffalo swimming tanks. By dawn, the Allied armies had bridge-heads and were expanding them, and the 1st British Commando Brigade was in Wesel clearing the German defenders. Under the watching eye of Winston Churchill in a command post on the Allied side of the river, the next stage of the drama unfolded as an armada of more than 2,000 aircraft, including the fighter escort, carried the British 6th Airborne Division and the US 17th Airborne Division to a parachute and glider attack around Hamminkeln, only some five miles inland from the river bank. More than 1,300 gliders took part in this landing, which was a considerable success and enabled the Allied army to silence the German artillery that might otherwise have greatly slowed the vital bridge building operations on the Rhine. By evening on the 24th, the 17th Airborne had made contact with the British XII Corps, and had also taken intact vital bridges over the Ijssel which helped to make possible the subsequent rapid expansion of the bridge-head. The German 84th Division, caught between the Airborne troops in the rear, and the infantry in the front, had been virtually wiped out, with almost 4,000 prisoners being taken by the Allies. The heaviest resistance to the crossing was encountered at Rees, where a battalion of German parachutists held out bravely for three days before being forced to surrender.

Advances into Germany

By March 26th, in an incredible feat of engineering and endurance, the engineers of the 21st Army Group had opened seven 40-ton bridges to traffic across the Rhine. The German 1st Parachute Army was cut off by US and British troops advancing on both banks of the River Lippe, a tributary of the Rhine, and by the 28th March the 8th Armoured Division was 25 miles east of the Rhine, the Guards Armoured Division was approaching Munster, and the Canadian II Corps with XXX Corps reached the Dutch frontier. Now, as the US 3rd Armoured approached the 8th Armoured, it became clear that their throwing back on to German Army Group B of the five threadbare Panzer divisions that had opposed their advance could mean the encirclement of the whole of Army Group B. On April 2nd, the two Allied Armoured Divisions joined up. The remains of the 5th Panzerarmee , plus the 19 divisions of the German 15th Army were encircled in what Hitler quickly and opportunistically named the "Fortified Area of the Ruhr".

General Bradley allotted the task of reducing and destroying the German 15th Army, and of capturing the Ruhr, to a new 15th Army under the command of Lieutenant-General Grerow, consisting of 18 divisions taken from the US 9th and 1st Armies and organised as five corps. By April 12th, after attacking South across the Ruhr and West across the Sieg, Grerow had occupied the entire coal-producing area, and by the 14th the two converging US forces had cut the German defences in two. By now, Field Marshal Model, who was nominally in command of Army Group B had vanished, and Colonel-General Harpe, the commander of the 5th Panzerarmee assumed command and ordered the whole of German Army Group B to cease fire. His surrender added a further 325,000 prisoners, including 29 Generals, to the Allied bag. Field Marshal Model committed suicide on April 21st.Advances into Germany on the Western front continued apace, and the average number of prisoners taken per day rose by mid April to an incredible 50,000. The US 9th Army took Hanover on April 10th and reached the Elbe on April 13th, crossing to take Barby and establish the first Allied bridge-head East of the river. Now the US Army was only 75 miles from Berlin, and advancing at such a pace that, had Eisenhower been prepared to recognise the political desirability, as urged upon him by Churchill repeatedly over the preceding months, of reaching Berlin either ahead of or at the same time as the Russians, the history of Europe, despite the decisions of Yalta, might have been dramatically altered. Eisenhower, however, chose to view his task only in military terms, and saw, quite correctly, that the Soviet armies were better able to capture Berlin than those of the Allies. He continued to take the view that to advance to Berlin would cost the Allies unnecessary casualties, and that the occupation of Southern Germany was also of pressing importance. In this his conviction was fuelled by the Intelligence Department of SHAEF, who had convinced him that Hitler and the central figures of the Nazi regime intended to take themselves and several crack SS divisions into the mountains of Southern Germany and create there a remote "Southern Redoubt" which could be defended almost indefinitely. Postwar evidence showed conclusively that such a plan simply did not exist, and that the Nazi hierarchy were by this time far too fragmented for the plan ever to have been practicable. This raises the interesting possibility, for which, as far as is known, there is no shred of evidence, that the whole "Last Redoubt" notion was planted at SHAEF by Russian agents intent on ensuring that the US Army turned South, and left Berlin to the Russians.

The US 1st Army crossed the Weser at Munden on April 8th, and pushed on at high speed across Thuringia, covering some 75 miles in five days. Its left flank joined up with the right of the US 9th Army, and thereby cut off the German 11th Army in the Harz Mountains. The "Clausewitz" Panzer Division, sent to rescue the 11th Army, was encircled before it arrived, and both it and the 11th Army were wiped out. On April 14th, the US VII Corps took Halle and Leipzig, joining at Leipzig the 9th Armoured Division from General Patton's 3rd Army.

General Patton had, since March 30th, pushed eastwards to Jena and on to Muhlhausen. By the 21st, his XX Corps had reached Chemnitz in Saxony, and XII Corps had moved South-East to Bavaria and was well beyond Bayreuth. By the day of the final German surrender, Patton's troops were in Linz, where Hitler had gone to school, and his 13th Armoured Division had, on May 2nd, crossed the River Inn at Braunau, where Hitler had been born. Once again, Eisenhower's misplaced trust in the Russians played Europe false. Patton was all set to push on and take Prague, but after some argument, Eisenhower ordered him on May 6th not to do so. The outcome we know.

The North German Plain and Holland

In the North, Montgomery's 21st Army Group faced the task of cutting across the North German plain to Lubeck, thereby securing the entrance to the Baltic and cutting off the German armies in Denmark and Norway. Montgomery, being more politically inclined than Eisenhower, also saw his manoeuvre in terms of preventing the Soviet armies from adding Denmark to their gains in Europe. The 16 divisions of the British 2nd Army and the Canadian 1st Army, of which six were armoured, faced the German 25th Army under General von Blumentritt plus the remnants of the 1st Parachute Army, responsible for the "Northern Defence Zone" made up of the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and North-West Germany.

By April 29th, the British VIII Corps of the 2nd Army, reinforced at Montgomery's request by the XVIII Airborne Corps (five divisions) had reached the Elbe on its way to Lubeck. Over two days, reinforced by the formidable support of the newly operational British Gloster Meteor jet fighters, Montgomery's force fought its way across the Elbe and by May 2nd the spearhead of VIII Corps was in Lubeck. Just 28 miles further East, on May 2nd, the 6th Airborne Division entered and took Wismar only six hours before Marshal Rokossovsy's troops arrived.

Bremen had fallen on April 26th to General Sir Brian Horrocks and XXX Corps, and on May 2nd, Hamburg was surrendered to the Allies by Lieutenant-General Wolz. On the 4th, the 7th Armoured Division took intact a bridge over the Kiel Canal, and on the same day the Guards Armoured Division took Cuxhaven. Thus did the Baltic coast and the great German naval base at Kiel fall into British rather than Russian hands.

In Holland, General Crerar had begun April with the dual tasks of driving up between the Weser and the Zuider Zee alongside XXX Corps in the general direction of Wilhelmshaven and Emden, and also of freeing those areas of Holland that were still occupied by German troops. The push to Wilhelmshaven and Emden was allotted to the Canadian II Corps, and progress through Holland towards Germany was brisk, Zutphen and Almelo falling to the Canadians on April 6th, and Groningen and Leeuwarden on April 10th. Once in Germany, the defenders' resistance was extremely fierce, and Lieutenant-General Simonds, in command of II Corps, called for reinforcements to deal with the German II Parachute Corps. With the help of the Canadian 5th Armoured Division, the Polish 1st Armoured Division and the British 3rd Division, General Straube's parachutists were pushed back. By the time the German army surrendered in the North, the Canadians were almost in Emden, and the Poles were a few miles short of Wilhelmshaven.

In Holland, Arnhem had been captured by the Canadian I Corps, who then pushed on to the Zuider Zee at Harderwijk. The Germans, as the Allied armies approached, opened the sea dykes and thereby threatened the lowlands of the reclaimed areas with flooding that would have cost thousands of civilian lives and great damage to property and homes. To prevent this disaster in Holland, General Crerar agreed to a cease-fire with General Blumentritt provided that Allied aircraft bringing supplies of food and medicines to the Dutch civilian population were not molested. This arrangement worked well for the remaining few days of the war.

Southern Germany and Austria

In yet another change of command in the closing days of the war, Field-Marshal Kesselring was obliged, in addition to his role as C-in-C West, to undertake the direct command of the "Southern Defence Zone", the counterpart in the South of Field-Marshal Busch's command in North Germany and Holland. Thus, Kesselring found himself once more in command of a motley assortment of German formations of varying degrees of competence, facing General Devers' 6th Army Group.

On March 26th, the American 7th Army had crossed the Rhine at Gernsheim, and had gone on rapidly to take Mannheim and Heidelberg on March 30th. Despite quite firm resistance from the German defenders, Wurzburg fell on April 5th, and General Patch, commanding the 7th Army, launched a determined thrust to capture the heavily defended areas of Schweinfurt and Nuremberg. The American troops met determined resistance, but by the end of April were across the Danube, had captured Munich and had taken the remains of the German XIII Corps as prisoners. On May 4th, the French 2nd Armoured Division captured Hitler's mountain retreat, the Berghof, on the Obersalzberg mountain.

Meanwhile, the French II Corps had been fighting hard throughout April after an improvised but brilliantly successful crossing of the Rhine at Speyer. Against powerful and effective resistance from the German 19th Army, the French took Karlsruhe on April 4th and, in a constantly changing battle reminiscent of greater days of the German army, captured Pforzheim on April 8th. On April 20th, again after fierce battles, the French captured Tubingen and took 28,000 prisoners. Five days later, General de Lattre's formidable French Colonial Army took another 40,000 German prisoners when General Keppler's XVIII SS Corps was cut off and encircled on the Swiss border.

At the end of April, General de Lattre ordered his I Corps to attack the German 24th Army, whose defined role was to prevent the French entering Austria. They lost no time. On April 30th, the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division and the French 5th Armoured Division took Bregenz, and from there on made a flower-decked progress through Austria as the populace welcomed them as liberators. On May 7th Kesselring capitulated to General Devers and a cease-fire was declared in Austria, thus preventing any further damage to a beautiful country.

The Soviet Advance to Berlin

To reinforce Eisenhower's known disposition not to advance on Berlin, and to allow the Soviet armies to handle the assault on the German capital, Stalin had sent him a telegram assuring him that only "secondary forces" were being sent against the capital. Those secondary forces proved to consist of 20 armies, 6,300 tanks, 41,000 mortars and almost 8,500 aircraft. The Russian leaders were clearly determined that their final assault on Hitler's citadel, which began early in the morning of April 16th 1945, should succeed.

The southernmost of the three Fronts of Army Groups attacking the German defenders was Marshal Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front, with seven armies plus an Air Army. He was to advance across the Neisse and towards Dresden, wheeling towards Berlin if Marshal Zhukov's 1st Belorussian proved to need his support. Zhukov's Front was in the centre, facing the German 9th Army, and had ten armies and an Air Army. His task was to encircle and capture Berlin. To Zhukov's North was the 2nd Belorussian Front of Marshal Rokossovsky, with five armies and an Air Army. The Russians had on the Eastern front, as the British, French and Americans had on the Western, total air superiority, and used it to the full.

Initially, the attacks along the Oder were repelled by the German defenders, although Marshal Konev's forces made some slow progress. Counterattacks followed every attack, and, had the Germans had the reinforcements to match their losses, which the Russians clearly did, the battle would have gone on for far longer. There was no lack of determination or morale on the German side in this last great defence against the hated Bolshevik invader. But in a war of attrition, the Soviet armies could not fail to win, and the beginning of the end for the Germans came on April 19th, when the German 9th Army collapsed. Suddenly, Zhukov was through a breach in the line and in Strausberg, only 22 miles from Hitler's bunker. Konev, meanwhile had crossed the Spree at Spremberg and was in Saxony, receiving orders to turn North to support Zhukov.

On April 22nd, the two Soviet armies met at Konigs Wusterhausen, to the South-East of Berlin, and the German 9th Army was encircled. Two days later, Berlin itself was totally surrounded. Hitler, personally in charge of the defence of the city, but by now living in a world of fantasy, had despatched Field-Marshal Keitel and Colonel-General Jodl to command the counterattacks that were totally to annihilate the Soviet invaders. Meanwhile he and Dr Josef Goebbels, in the latter's capacity as Gauleiter of Berlin, would organise the 90,000 boys and old men of the Volkssturm and hold off the Russian armies indefinitely.

In response to an extraordinary order requiring him to come to the defence of Berlin, General Wenck and the 12th Army gave way to the Western Allies on the Elbe, and headed for Berlin. At Potsdam, it acquired the remains of the 9th Army that had escaped the Russians, and, on 29th April, approached the city as Zhukov's armies began the last great push to break the city's defenders. Some 25,000 guns rained over 25,000 tons of shells on the besieged capital in one week. Wenck and the 12th Army could do nothing, and were soundly defeated. The Russians had Berlin.

The End of Hitler

Adolf Hitler, now a prematurely aged sick man whose appearance shocked all who saw him, had no intention of allowing himself to be captured by the Soviet troops whom he loathed, and to whose nation he had brought such dreadful suffering and losses. He had come in six years from a zenith of conquest, the equal of which Europe had never before seen, to total disaster and the destruction of his adopted land. His Thousand Year Reich, born of the Germanic myths, of the injustices of Versailles, of the desires of the German people for the greatness that they believed themselves heir to, had been grossly perverted to the service of hideously inhuman ideas and practices. Hitler's philosophy, so clearly set out in Mein Kampf in 1924 and 1927, and yet totally ignored by those who had allowed his rise to European power to go unchecked, had been directly responsible for the deaths of six million Jews, 20 million Russians, and millions more Allied civilians and soldiers. To Adolf Hitler must go the distinction of having caused more human deaths and suffering than any other man in history.

Now, after marrying his mistress and confidante Eva Braun on April 29th, the one time ruler of Europe and his wife of a few hours mutually committed suicide on April 30th, 1945. Their bodies were taken to the garden of the Chancellery by those still loyal to them in the bunker and burned. Josef Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister and his wife Magda, who were also in the Fuehrer's bunker, poisoned their children and then committed suicide, he by the bullet, she by poison. Martin Bormann, Hitler's secretary and aide, disappeared, believed killed by a Soviet tank attempting to escape from Berlin. Grand Admiral Doenitz, in Flensburg, learned that he had been named in Hitler's will as the new Fuehrer of Germany. Goering, Keitel, Jodl, Kesselring, Speer and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy were progressively over the following few weeks captured and sent to await either trial for war crimes, or their interrogation and appearance as witnesses at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.

The Surrender

But, before the leaders passed into captivity, the very last act of the war that the German Reich had begun with such bravura and style, and which had changed permanently the face of Europe, remained to be played out. On May 3rd, a deputation led by General E. Kinzel, Chief of Staff to Field-Marshal Busch, and Admiral von Friedeburg, the new head of the Kriegsmarine following Doenitz' elevation to his role as Head of State, presented themselves at the caravan that had been Field-Marshal Montgomery's travelling headquarters since 1943, and which was now on Luneburg Heath on the North German plain. They offered Montgomery the surrender of the German forces in the North of Germany, including those in retreat from Marshal Rokossovsky on the Eastern front. Rather disconcertingly, Montgomery dismissed them as he might have done an application for compassionate leave from his batman.

The next day, they were invited back, and were obliged to accede to terms of total and abject surrender, but only in respect of the forces facing Montgomery's 21st Army Group. The Allied Command in the West was resolved not to provide refuge from the advancing Soviet armies, something that Doenitz was anxious to achieve for as many as possible of his countrymen.

The final surrender ending the European war totally was signed on May 7th 1945 in a schoolroom at Rheims. Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith of the US Army, deputising for General Eisenhower, read to the German representatives, Colonel-General Jodl, Admiral von Friedeburg and Major-General Oxenius of the Luftwaffe the full document, which ordered the simultaneous cessation of hostilities on all fronts on May 8th at 11.01pm. The surrender document, confirmed the total defeat of the armed forces of the Third Reich, and settled the terms of their yielding their arms and accepting Allied orders.

Colonel-General Jodl and his colleagues each signed on behalf of Germany, then General Bedell Smith added his signature. Next was Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan for Great Britain, General Sevez for France, and Major-General Susloporov for the USSR. Next day, a further act of surrender took place in Berlin, when Field-Marshal Keitel, Admiral von Friedeburg and Colonel-General Stumpf signed a further document of unconditional surrender in the presence of Marshal Zhukov, General de Lattre de Tassigny, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder and General Spaatz.

The war in Europe was at last really over. To rejoicing not only in Britain, where the population of London danced in the streets all night on "VE night", May 8th 1945, but also in the USA and in France was added total joy in tens of countries around the world. But there was another war to finish. Hardly had the excitement of the surrender passed before the Allies' near-total attention was focused on the Far East, where the war still raged on. This book will look at the immediate post-war events in Germany in the last chapter. Let us now return to the defeat of Japan.