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By Root 1396 0

war, the Anglo-American armies advanced in the face of sporadic and ill-coordinated opposition. As always, the infantry bore most of the pain of clearing pockets of resistance. Service in a tank crew was never a sinecure, but in the last six weeks of the northwest Europe campaign, the Scots Guards tank battalion – for instance – lost only one officer and seven other ranks killed, along with a handful of men wounded. Meanwhile in the same period, the infantry of 2nd Scots Guards lost nine officers and seventy-six other ranks killed, seventeen officers and 248 other ranks wounded. Some Allied units encountered groups of fanatics, stubbornly defending river crossings and key junctions. One by one these were overcome, until the victors approached the Elbe. On 12 April, First Army was ordered to stop short of Dresden, and wait for the Soviets. Russian and American patrols met at the little Saxon town of Strehla on the Elbe on the morning of 24 April, followed later that day by the celebrated encounter upstream at Torgau, amid exuberant Anglo-American enthusiasm, wary and stilted Russian formality. The British reached the Baltic port of Lübeck on 2 May, allaying Allied fears that the Soviets would attempt to occupy Denmark. Fortunately for the Danish people, Russian attention was overwhelmingly focused elsewhere: upon Berlin, the capital and last bastion of Nazism.

3 BERLIN: THE LAST BATTLE

Stalin assumed personal responsibility for the final great operations of the war, chiefly in order to deny the personal glory to Zhukov, who was relegated to command of 1st Belorussian Front. On 12 January the Soviets launched a general offensive out of their Vistula bridgeheads. Outnumbering the defenders by ten to one, their tanks and infantry streamed westward, crushing everything in their path. In an almost hysterical bulletin broadcast on the 20th, Berlin Radio described the Soviet offensive as ‘a mass invasion, to be compared in scale and significance with the past comings of the Mongol hordes, the Huns and Tatars’.

Commentator Hans Fritsche asserted that the enemy’s objective was ‘total destruction’, and that defeat ‘would signal the end of civilisation’. He claimed that Germans now had the advantages of short lines of communication and their ‘impassioned determination to defend their homeland’. Germany, he said, had become ‘Europe’s bulwark against the barbarian hordes descending from the eastern steppes’. He expressed dismay at the failure of the British to align themselves with the German people against the Bolsheviks; far from dismissing the threat of defeat, as so often in the past, the Nazis called on their people for a desperate resistance in an admittedly desperate situation. ‘Germany’s leadership is now faced with the most serious crisis of the war,’ declared Berlin Radio on 22 January. ‘Withdrawals and disengagements are no longer possible, because our armies are disputing territory of vital importance to German war industry … The utmost effort is required from every German. The German people are responding willingly to this call, because they know that our leadership has always in the past been able to restore situations in spite of all difficulties.’

If Hitler’s people were gripped by despair, those of Stalin were exultant: war correspondent Vasily Grossman expressed a sense of ‘fierce joy’ as he, who had seen so many battles since 1941, witnessed the crossing of the Vistula. He wrote a little later: ‘I wanted to shout, to call to all our brothers, our soldiers, who are lying in the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Polish earth, who sleep forever on our battlefields, “Comrades, can you hear us? We’ve done it.”’ The casualties of the Vistula offensive were staggering, even by the standards of the Eastern Front: the Russians inflicted slaughter on every formation in their path. In January alone, 450,000 Germans died; in each of the ensuing three months, more than 280,000, a figure that included victims of the Anglo-American bombings of Dresden, Leipzig and other eastern cities. During the last four months of the