A World at Arms (156 page)

Two secondary topics were also dealt with at the conference. The effort to bring some representatives of the Yugoslav government-in-exile into the new regime being established by Tito proved as unsuccessful as that to create a coalition government for Poland. An agreement with more dramatic repercussions was that designed to assure the return to Britain and the United States of their many soldiers who had been captured by the Germans and kept in prisoner of war camps overrun by the Red Army. There had been endless difficulties in this regard.
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In return for assurances on their prompt repatriation, the Western Powers committed themselves to returning to the Soviet Union all Soviet citizens–prisoners of war, forced laborers, or those who had agreed to serve in or with the German army. There were two bad aspects of this arrangement.
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The Soviet Union made endless difficulties about the return of United States and British prisoners, especially because their desire for the crushing of all opposition in Poland made the Russians unwilling to allow into the camps in Poland any western representatives who might observe developments in that country. The resulting clashes with American diplomats, especially Ambassador Harriman and chief of the military mission General Deane, contributed greatly to their negative attitudes toward the Soviet Union and thus to the development of the Cold War.
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The other result was the forced repatriation of many who feared for their lives. The British had taken the lead in returning such men already in August 1944; they extended the program to pre-1939 Soviet émigrés and to those from the areas annexed by the Soviet Union from 1939 on. On both of these issues the United States followed a different policy, refusing to repatriate émigrés against their will and allowing those who lived outside the pre-war Soviet Union to decline repatriation.
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Even so, tens of thousands were forcibly returned by both countries. Until well after the war, there was little sympathy for those who had fought to help Germany keep Europe in subjection, whatever their motives had been; the episode brought grief and suffering to many and no credit to anyone.

Of more immediate concern to both Britain and the United States was the impact of the Yalta agreements on the Polish corps fighting in Italy and the division in Montgomery’s forces on the Western Front. Would these men, who were very much still needed by the Allies, continue to participate as valiantly as in the past in a cause that must have looked already irretrievably lost to most of them? In anxious talks and soundings between the two parties, it became clear that until victory over Germany the Polish soldiers would indeed continue to fight alongside the Western Allies.
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As for those Poles who fought the Germans inside
Poland, if they did not speedily join the forces of the new Polish Communists regime, they could expect to follow the representatives of the Polish anti-German underground who were arrested by the Soviets at the end of March 1945 when they agreed to appear for negotiations in response to a Soviet invitation.
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In subsequent years, the Yalta Conference came to be denounced as a sell–out to the Soviet Union, especially in the United States where, in the first great wave of revisionist writing on war time relations between the Allies, American leaders were accused of giving away everything to the Russians. Later, when a new group of revisionists asserted that those same leaders had in fact been plotting against the Soviet Union during the same period when earlier critics thought they were plotting
with
her, the emphasis came to be on the concessions made by the Soviet Union. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to take a view which sees the three Allies as trying hard for an accommodation of divergent ideologies and interests, with the great problem being that some of the agreements reached were not afterwards carried out, so that the high water mark of cooperation was followed by new crises rather than more steps toward continued working together.

Certainly at the time American public opinion was highly favorable to the Soviet Union, in spite of earlier frictions, and continued to be so for some time.
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Churchill, who had tried unsuccessfully to arrange a prior meeting with the Americans to coordinate negotiating strategy, was absolutely euphoric at the end of the conference and reported to the British Cabinet in glowing terms on Soviet desire to work with Britain and the United States, and on Stalin’s willingness to make concessions to that end.
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The great reversal came soon after: the February 27, 1945, coup in Bukarest, organized by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vyshinskii, which installed a Communist regime there, the refusal to hold free elections in Poland but instead, on March 27, the arrest of the leaders of the Polish underground when they were supposed to meet Marshal Zhukov, quickly ended the euphoria in London.
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The American reaction took slightly longer, and would be accelerated by Stalin’s extraordinary reaction to the negotiations for a surrender of German troops in Italy, but it came basically over the same issues: the divergence over any degree of real independence for the liberated peoples of eastern and Southeast Europe.

On the other hand, more of the neutrals, after Yalta, decided to join in the war in order to obtain admission to the United Nations Organization, a step for which the conference had set a deadline. Turkey had broken diplomatic relations with Japan at American insistence on January 5 and at about the same time had opened the Straits to Allied shipping;
on February 25 the country declared war on Germany and Japan.
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Those countries of Latin America which had remained neutral, in some cases at American urging, in the case of Argentina very much against United States preference, now hastened to join in. Sweden cut back on its deliveries to Germany, feeling increasingly secure from German retaliation.
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As if the isolation of the Axis were not sufficiently advanced, the savagery of Japanese soldiers on the rampage in Manila, where they burned down the Spanish consulate after butchering the officials and refugees in it, led Spain to renounce its representation of Japanese interests with the Allies and to break relations with Japan on April 12.
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The Germans, like the Japanese, would have to stand alone on the funeral pyre they had insisted on building for themselves, while others rushed to join the Allies as quickly as they could and the Allies would let them.

But in the meantime, the war ground on. Just as the Red Army’s offensive was coming to a halt on the Oder, and the Germans were getting ready for still another counter–attack in Hungary, the Allies in the West, having eliminated the bulge caused by the German December offensive, were getting ready to attack again. As a preliminary, Eisenhower insisted on the clearing of the Colmar bulge west of the Rhine by the French and American troops of General Devers’s 6th Army Group. Here, as elsewhere, the Germans would expend their defensive effort on the left bank of the Rhine and then have little strength remaining to defend the line of the river itself. In bitter fighting, the Allies drove to the upper Rhine by February 9.
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The plan was to follow up on this by a series of operations, starting in the north with a British–Canadian attack southeastward toward Wesel, code-named “Veritable,” which would meet an American offensive northeastward called “Grenade.” These operations would close the lower Rhine and prepare the way for the great follow-up: a major assault crossing of the Rhine under Montgomery’s command into the German plain north of the industrial area of the Ruhr. Following on Veritable-Grenade, Bradley’s forces would strike to the Rhine and Mosel rivers farther south (operation “Lumberjack”) and, if all went well, could then strike southeast across the Mosel into the rear of German forces in the Westwall along the old Franco-German border from Luxembourg to the Rhine (operation “Undertone”). The possibility of early crossings of the Rhine in these operations was left open, but it was assumed that subsidiary cross-Rhine operations would eventually be launched south of the Ruhr to envelop that region, and in the direction beyond Frankfürt. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group was being
reinforced by three Canadian and two British divisions from Italy, and the Americans sent the last available division from the United States. Over 400,000 British and Canadian, 1.5 million American, and more than 100,000 French soldiers were poised for the assault on Germany.

The Canadian 1st Army launched “Veritable” on February 8 and drove forward slowly against bitter German resistance.
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Flooding due to snow melt and the opening of floodgates by the Germans combined with the determined German defenders to slow both the Canadian advance and the American 9th Army attack launched subsequently in operation “Grenade” to meet them. On March 3 the Canadian and American spearheads met, and in the following days what was left of the German defenders withdrew across the Rhine, blowing up the Rhine bridges as they retreated. Although the fighting had been bitter, there were signs that some German units were becoming demoralized: over 50,000 prisoners fell into Allied hands. Montgomery now began enormous preparations for a crossing of the Rhine barrier, but even as he was engaged in this vast endeavor, the Americans further south were busy cutting through the German defenses west of the Rhine and crossing that river on the run.

On February 23 General Hodges’s 1st Army attacked south eastwards and pushed toward Cologne. They rapidly drove into the outskirts of the great city and headed south into the rear of German troops still on the German-Belgian border. As they reached the heights overlooking the railway bridge at Remagen on March 7, the 9th Armored Division advance guards saw the bridge still standing and rushed it while the Germans desperately tried to blow it up. Ironically, the October 1944 explosion caused by an American air raid, which had dropped the suspension bridge into the Rhine, had led the Germans to rewire the explosives on the other bridges lest a similar accident befall them; and the greater difficulty of blowing up the re–wired bridge now kept them from destroying the Remagen bridge in the rush of the American advance. With the approval of Bradley and Eisenhower, Hodges quickly pushed American forces across the river, built up a perimeter on the other side against desperate German efforts, and had other bridges in place by the time German artillery and bombs caused the structure, weakened by the original demolition effort, to collapse. The last barrier into Germany from the west had been broken.
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By this time, Patton’s 3rd Army had driven the Germans back to the Mosel on 1st Army’s right flank and, in the fashion Patton knew best, now drove across the Mosel into the rear of the German forces facing an attack by the American 7th Army of 6th Army Group. When the German commander in the West, von Rundstedt, wanted to withdraw these units across the Rhine, Hitler replaced him with Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had been so successful in stalling the Allies in Italy. This made no difference to the American 3rd Army, which cut the German Army Group G into shreds, captured huge numbers of prisoners, reached the Rhine near Oppenheim on March 21 and late on the following day crossed the river. Before the great assault in the north, not only had the Americans put troops on the east bank of the Rhine at two places, but the French 1st Army had crossed a barrier of its own: on March 19 they had planted the Tricolor on German soi1.
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The Allied operations had been assisted both by the massive deployment of tactical air support and by continued heavy attacks on German oil, transportation, and industrial targets. At the Yalta Conference, the Russians had asked for major attacks by the air forces of the Western Allies on cities behind the Eastern Front. This request coincided with British plans for massive bombing raids to disrupt German defenses in the East, to aid the next Soviet offensive. As a result, February and March of 1945 saw very large attacks on such German cities as Berlin and Dresden, with massive fires and destruction in the former and a firestorm in the latter.
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By the end of March, Churchill, who had been a strong advocate of area bombing, began to change his views on this subject,
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but by then enormous destruction had been caused by the fleets of British and American bombers which were now at their most numerous and, with their fighter escorts, simply overwhelmed any remaining defenders.

In the meantime, Montgomery’s preparations for the Rhine crossing (operation “Plunder”), which he had ordered to begin in October 1944, when the failure to seize the last bridge in the Arnhem operation had become obvious, were nearing completion.
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Montgomery had forbidden General Simpson, the commander of the American 9th Army which was temporarily assigned to his command, to attempt a surprise assault across the Rhine early in March; after the failure of the daring attempt at Arnhem, the Field Marshal had become extraordinarily cautious. Having underestimated German resistance to “Veritable” and “Grenade,” he appears not to have realized that the Germans had used up the bulk of their defensive resources in the West
before
the Allies reached the Rhine;
since early February the Allies had captured almost 300,000 men and had inflicted another 60,000 casualties.
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Furthermore, as the date set for the crossing approached–and Montgomery was still thinking of possible postponements if the weather were not right–most of what few Germans reserves were left had been sent south to contain the American divisions that had been across the Rhine for two weeks at Remagen. But with enormous artillery preparatory fire, great naval support, a huge aerial bombardment, and a two-division airborne drop, the great operation went forward as planned on March 23–24 with both Churchill and Brooke (as well as Eisenhower) watching in person.

The assault succeeded quickly and, except for the heavy casualties suffered by the British and American airborne divisions,
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fairly easily. German resistance was spotty: heavy at a few points but almost non-existent at others. Pontoon bridges were built quickly, and within days the British 2nd and the American 9th Armies were across the river in great strength. As Montgomery put it in his March 28 order for 21 Army Group, the enemy was effectively finished: “there are no fresh and complete divisions in rear and all the enemy will be able to do is to block roads and approaches from schools, bath units, pigeon lofts, and so on.”
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Although 21st Army Group headed northeast at a fast clip, there were two problems which affected Montgomery’s advance, and they were in important ways related to each other and his own personal qualities. One concerned command and strategy, the other the actual progress of his own armies.