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full-strength formations backed by overwhelming air power. Hodges’ First Army secured the Ludendorff rail bridge over the river at Remagen on 7 March, and immediately began to establish a perimeter on the eastern bank; Patton seized his own bridgehead at Oppenheim, further south, on 22 March. The last Germans on the western bank of the Rhine were mopped up three days later. On the 24th, Montgomery’s troops staged their huge set-piece Rhine crossing at Wesel, marred only by heavy casualties among airborne units which parachuted onto the far bank: the defenders proved to be lavishly equipped with anti-aircraft artillery, if nothing else.

At the end of the month, Bradley’s spearheads linked with Simpson’s forces at Lippstadt to encircle Model’s Army Group B in the so-called Ruhr pocket; Model shot himself on 17 April, and 317,000 of his men became Allied prisoners. The Americans, rather than the British, now had the best opportunities for a swift final advance. To Montgomery’s fury, his formations were relegated to the secondary task of clearing northern Germany as far as Hamburg and Lübeck. It was thought urgent to push forces across the base of the Danish peninsula, to protect Denmark from any threat of Soviet occupation. Eisenhower formally abandoned Berlin as an objective, and informed Stalin accordingly. He diverted two armies south towards the Austrian border, to forestall any Nazi attempt to create a ‘National Redoubt’ from which to keep the war going after the Russians and Anglo-American forces met in north Germany. The ‘National Redoubt’ was a figment of the imagination of Eisenhower’s intelligence staff; this division of forces decisively weakened his main central thrust, and left the Russians to occupy Czechoslovakia.

It is hard, however, to make a plausible case that any of this changed the post-war political map of Europe, as the Supreme Commander’s detractors claimed. The Allied occupation zones had been agreed many months earlier, and confirmed at the Yalta summit in February. The Russians got to Eastern Europe first. To have frustrated their imperialistic purposes, sparing Central Europe from a Soviet tyranny in succession to that of the Nazis, it would have been necessary for the Western Allies to fight a very different and more ruthless war, at much higher cost in casualties. They would have had to acknowledge the possibility, even the probability, of overcoming the Red Army as well as the Wehrmacht. Such a course was politically and militarily unthinkable, whatever Churchill’s brief delusions that East European freedom might be recovered by force.

Stalin’s obsessive determination that the Soviet Union should accomplish the capture of Berlin accorded with the vision of his people: they saw this symbolic triumph as the only proper end of their struggle, the fulfilment of everything for which they had striven since 1941. Militarily, it might have been feasible for Eisenhower’s forces to reach Hitler’s capital before the Red Army, but such an advance would have precipitated a clash between the Allies. The Russians would have been outraged by any attempt to deprive them of their prize.

Soviet conduct throughout March and April was prompted by paranoia about Western intentions. Stalin lied again and again to Washington and London, professing his own indifference to Berlin as an objective; he could not credit the notion that the Americans and British would spurn a chance to beat the Red Army to the German capital. The Soviet encirclement of Berlin partly addressed the requirement of taking it from Hitler, but partly also that of ensuring its denial to Roosevelt and Churchill. There was a further consideration: the Russians were desperate to secure the Nazis’ nuclear scientists and research material. Knowing from his agents in the West that the Americans were close to perfecting an atomic bomb, Stalin wanted everything that would help to kick-start the rival Soviet project: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Dahlem was identified as a vital objective for the Red Army.

In the final stage of the western