A World at Arms (157 page)

If Eisenhower had ever meant to leave the American 9th Army under Montgomery’s command, the Rhine crossing at Remagen and the contrast between the rapid moves of Hodges and Patton and the deliberation of “Plunder” combined with resentment among Americans over the British Field Marshal’s press conference at the time of the Ardennes fighting to convince him not to do so. He decided, and so informed the British, that as soon as the American 9th and 1st Armies met on the far side of the Ruhr, enclosing that industrial area and the German Army Group B trapped there, 9th Army would revert to Bradley’s 12th Army Group. Montgomery, like Brooke, thought this a terrible mistake, though it is hard to see how they could have been so surprised. They, and Churchill, were at least as startled, and considerably angrier, to learn that Eisenhower had also decided with the approval of Washington to direct the main thrust eastwards toward Saxony, thus by–passing any opportunity to get to Berlin before the Russians.

Since Eisenhower knew by this time that the Allies had agreed on a zonal division of Germany which placed Berlin deep inside the Soviet zone–a plan developed by the British in the first place–he wanted to
take advantage of the rapid successes of the American armies which had crossed the Rhine in force earlier and were now joined by the American 7th and French 1st Armies further south. With little faith in Montgomery’s ability to exploit a breakthrough rapidly and drive to Berlin as the Field Marshal confidently expected,
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Eisenhower preferred to concentrate on crushing the remaining German forces in the West, letting the Russians pay the price in blood for the zone assigned to them, and having the British get as quickly as possible to the north German ports and the Baltic to seal off Denmark.
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The British leaders were livid but could not budge Eisenhower; the extraordinary delays in Montgomery’s subsequent advance would appear to justify the Supreme Commander’s doubts. In spite of repeated urgings from Churchill as well as Eisenhower, Montgomery found ever new reasons for not advancing rapidly, eventually came to think of crossing the Elbe south of Hamburg in a huge operation similar to a crossing of the Rhine, and asked for and received additional American divisions to reach the Baltic and enter Wismar just ahead of the Russians.
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It may be that his dawdling in this instance was merely a repetition of his sulking at the southern end of Italy in September 1943 because of his dissatisfaction with the role assigned to him in that operation, and that he would have operated very differently had he been left in control of the American 9th Army, but that is pure speculation. The record of his control of that army when he did have it was all to the contrary; he had not allowed them to “bounce” the Rhine and there is nothing to indicate that he had any intention of “bouncing” the Elbe.

In accordance with earlier plans, the Canadian 1st Army on the northern flank drove into northern Holland and the adjacent portion of Germany, in the process cutting off a German garrison in western Holland, where they were left alone militarily because of their threat to flood the whole area. The Dutch population was already starving, and a whole variety of efforts was undertaken to arrange for them to be fed. Since this involved contacts with Germans who had no intention of surrendering, a Soviet representative was involved in the talks. The suffering in the cut-off area was reduced somewhat, but only the final surrender of the German forces in May ended the appalling ordeal of the Dutch.

To the south and east of the Canadians, the 2nd British Army headed for Bremen and Hamburg. As already mentioned, this advance did not go as rapidly as both Churchill and Eisenhower wanted. Churchill wrote on April 3: “When the cease–fire sounds in Germany, I hope Field Marshal Montgomery will be shaking hands with the Russians as far as possible East of the Elbe. Our zone is marked out and after salutations, which may be marked, we shall retire to its limits.”
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Kicked and pushed
from above, Montgomery’s army took the important port city of Bremen, drew up to the Elbe river and then crossed it, dashing to the city of Lubeck while American divisions moved toward the Baltic on the right flank of the advance. Hamburg surrendered on May 3, but by then the war in Europe had already reached its concluding stage.

The American 9th Army, in addition to providing the northern pincer to cut off the Ruhr, also advanced across the Weser toward the Elbe, now in 12th instead of 21st Army Group. Those of its forces assigned to the containment and then the splitting and destruction of the Ruhr pocket combined with that portion of 1st Army assigned to the task from the south in one of the great encirclements of history. Over 300,000 German prisoners were taken during April as Field Marshal Model, their commander, committed suicide.
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Even before the Ruhr had been surrounded, Hitler had issued strict orders that all industrial, transportation and other facilities inside Germany should be destroyed lest they fall into Allied hands. Such orders had automatically accompanied all other retreats forced on the Germans, and in most cases German commanders had carried them out ruthlessly to the greatest extent possible, with no thought to the future survival of people who had already suffered enormously. In a few instances there had been reluctance to leave only ruins–Florence and Paris being examples–but in general, the speed of some German retreats rather than humanitarian inhibitions had caused some facilities, structures, and supplies to fall into Allied hands undestroyed. That attitude started to change once the fighting moved
inside
Germany. Speer began to sabotage the sabotage orders, and many German commanders filed rather than implemented the orders to destroy everything that might support life in territory occupied by the Allies.

As Allied forces advanced rapidly, they even encountered cases where the local German population tried to discourage the military from defending a particular community in order to keep it from being destroyed. Soldiers, for obvious reasons, do not want to die, but they particularly do not want to be the last person killed in a war. A common pattern, therefore, was that when an American unit came to a seriously defended island of resistance, it would simply draw back slightly, call for the artillery and air force to pound it to bits, and then move through. Many Germans, now losing confidence in the possibility of victory or even stalemate, preferred to spare their communities the fate which the war Germany began had brought to so many other towns. The white–or more likely grey–sheets of surrender appeared more and more frequently even as in some locations fierce resistance still flared up. In addition, vast numbers of German refugees from the East, fleeing before
the Soviet advance, poured westwards; and increasing numbers of German soldiers found ways to absent themselves from units fighting on the Eastern Front in hopes of substituting American for Russian prisoner of war camps.

This was only a portion of what the 9th Army and to its south the 1st Army ran into on the Elbe river and in the Harz mountains of central Germany. Of the first two bridgeheads quickly thrown across the Elbe near Magdeburg by Simpson’s 9th Army, one was driven back by the Germans even as other American divisions battled fanatical German resistance in the Harz mountains.
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What had happened was that miscellaneous units, put together by the Germans at Hitler’s orders into the new 12th Army under General Walther Wenck, were forming up for a counter-offensive westwards to open up a corridor to Model’s Army Group B, of which remnants were still fighting in the Ruhr pocket. In the Fuhrer’s imagination, this bold move with an army made up of fanatical youngsters and battle-wise veterans would split the whole American front open in the middle. What it really did was to slow the Americans down for a few days and convince them that it was silly to try to drive for Berlin in the face of real resistance at a time when the Russians, who were just breaking open the German defenses on the Oder, were far closer. By the time Hitler turned most of Wenck’s recoiling army around to head east instead of west and to halt the Russians rather than the Americans, the offensive power of that German force had already been spent.

Eisenhower ordered 1st Army with 3rd Army on its right flank into Saxony deep into what had been agreed upon as the Soviet zone of occupation, both to close down the industrial production of arms there and to engage the German forces which could otherwise interfere with the big push into southern Germany. He had notified the Russians of his intention to do so, much to the annoyance of the British government and Chiefs of Staff but with full support from Washington.

The big issue on this portion of the front was the land equivalent of the earlier debates over the air force aspect of coordination with the Soviet Union in practical day-to-day operations to preclude, or at least minimize, possible mistakes. As the forces of the Allies rushed toward each other in Central Europe, there was the great danger of incidents and clashes. A whole series of efforts was made by the Western Allies in order to try to cope with this, but the Russians were most reluctant to cooperate.
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The Red Army, like the Red Air Force, would give out practically no information so that operations could be coordinated, and in the end the arrangement generally applied was notification by the British and Americans of their intentions, followed by implementation
if the Russians did not make a fuss. Eisenhower for good geographic reasons picked the Mulde as the most likely tributary of the Elbe at which to stop; patrols across this smaller stream met advance formations of the Red Army at Torgau on April 25, the same day on which Berlin was completely surrounded by the Red Army and the United Nations Conference opened in San Francisco.

To the south of 1st Army, the 3rd Army, which had crossed the Rhine near Oppenheim, first headed east and then northeast into Thuringia, then southeast into Bavaria and Czechoslovakia. Its rapid advance was designed to preclude a new development of resistance in the south. There was some concern that in the mountains of south Germany and adjacent parts of Austria the Germans would try to hold out in an Alpine redoubt. Although intelligence reports on this project varied, the extent to which the Germans held on fanatically in Italy and even tried to launch new offensives in Hungary in the last months of the war suggested that there could be more nasty surprises awaiting the Allies in the mountains.
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The American 7th Army on Patton’s right flank also turned southeast after crossing the Rhine and battered its way into Nürnberg, the old site of Nazi Party rallies, on April 20, Hitler’s birthday, in the face of last-ditch resistance. While Patton’s army continued into Austria in order to meet the Red Army there, Patch’s 7th headed south with the aim of meeting Allied forces striking north in Italy. In Munich a local uprising on April 28, one of the very few in those months, tried to topple Nazi control of the city but was suppressed; soon after, on April 30, the Americans came in and then headed for the Brenner Pass to join advance units of the American 5th Army near the Austrian-Italian border on May 4.

These shifts in direction from heading east to heading southeast had implications for inter-Allied relations in the final campaign. On the eastern flank of the advance, the halt line vis-à-vis the Red Army which was pushing into Czechoslovakia from the east had to be worked out. This was done in a series of contacts between Eisenhower’s headquarters and the Red Army General Staff and left the interior of Bohemia, with its capital of Prague–already in the hands of insurgents–to the Red Army. It has been suggested that this was a silent quid pro quo for Soviet restraint to facilitate Western liberation of Denmark.
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On the right flank, the turn cut off the route of the French 1st Army and headed it south into the southeast corner of Germany and the mountainous western end of Austria. This process led to friction with de Gaulle, who insisted on his forces holding the German city of Stuttgart until the borders of the French zone of occupation were settled, a maneuver which further
soured his relations with the Americans, which had hardly been improved by his refusal to meet with President Roosevelt on the latter’s return from the Yalta conference shortly before.

The meeting of the American 7th and 5th Armies at the Brenner Pass in the Alps marked an extraordinary conclusion of the long campaign in Italy. There a sustained air campaign against the transportation system through the Alps had so reduced the ammunition and fuel supplies of the German Army Group C that its two armies, though fighting fiercely against the Allied forces trying to break into the Po valley, were in a very difficult situation. Any breakthrough anywhere in the front was sure to lead to a disaster, and under these circumstances a few German leaders began to try for a negotiated surrender of the Army Group by establishing contact with the OSS in Switzerland in March, 1945.
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The SS chief in Italy, Karl Wolff, and a few German military were involved in this effort; the military appear to have been primarily interested in a quick and less bloody end of the fighting while Wolff and other SS officers were primarily concerned about immunity for themselves from prosecution for war crimes. The military, partly because of changes in command, partly because of opposition to what many considered “too early” a surrender, lest a new stab-in-the-back legend blame them for Germany’s defeat,
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delayed actually surrendering until April 29, effective on May 2; as for the hopes of SS leaders, President Roosevelt had denied the December 1944 request of the OSS’s Chief Donovan for authority to grant immunity to individual Germans.
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The final Allied offensive on the Italian front began on April 9, broke into the valley of the Po river in mid-April and across that river on April 23. It led the German commander in Italy, General von Vietinghoff (who had replaced the great Hitler admirer Kesselring when the latter was sent to the Western Front) to move the surrender negotiations forward a bit. Even while Vietinghoff was trying to end hostilities in Italy by a local surrender, Mussolini attempted to escape to Switzerland but was caught and shot, along with his mistress, by partisans on April 28. The surrender speeded the end by a few days and had the effect of facilitating an early junction of the Allied armies fighting in Italy with the 7th Army at the Brenner as well as the forward rush of British troops on the Adriatic coast to Trieste simultaneously with the arrival of Tito’s partisans.
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The main impact of the surrender negotiations however, was to be on relations between the Allies.