Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [85]
Chapter Thirty-six
THE MOMENT OF DECISION is the loneliest in human life. It must be come upon in stillness and darkness and brooding thoughts and doubts torn out from the deep reaches of the soul.
Sean O’Sullivan was a political scientist. He knew that if Hansen had spoken the truth on the Polish affair then his fears about Berlin were not only reasonable but valid. Now he labored over stacks of supporting documents, weeding truth from fiction.
We have ordered that Berlin’s main radio transmitter, namely the Funkturm, be spared from bombing. Allied liaison with the Russians is so poor that we often times have to find out where the front lines are in the East from the transmission of German newscasts.
Legendary Russian secrecy and suspicion.... Only Churchill seemed to understand it all. In the very beginning he understood Hitler, but his warnings fell on the ears of the appeasers. And, in the end, he understood Stalin. America was suddenly without leadership. Churchill wanted us to make a physical presence in the Balkans and he wanted us to hold fast in Czechoslovakia. Churchill understood the meaning of having our forces reach Berlin first. We, in a sense, had committed the same blunder Hitler committed when he failed to recognize the importance of Moscow in the beginning of the war and turned his armies on the oil fields in southern Russia. One could now speculate seriously if Russia could have recovered from the capture of Moscow.
In our case we turned to the southern German provinces and to hacking up an already beaten German Army in the Ruhr with the fateful pronouncement that “Berlin ceases to have strategic value.”
Yes, human beings make human errors. However, other human sweat and human blood must pay for those errors. As yet, no one would admit an error had been committed; and few, unlike Hansen, understood the dimensions of the error or the gravity of the situation.
In the classroom Sean would have argued that the Russian is a decent human being, peaceful by nature, gifted with scientific genius, driven by normal desires. Sean, in a classroom, might have questioned the Purge Trial statistics or whether the Kulaks were truly liquidated or deserved to be broken up. Such things as Katyn massacres, the deliberate butchery of Warsaw simply did not exist in a civilized world. Yes, a teacher would question and he would theorize.
But Sean’s ability to theorize had been impaired by the months of study in Queen Mother’s Gate. He learned not to hold CIC reports as fantasy. For the most part they were cold-blooded, nonpolitical in viewpoint, nontheoretical, and filled with facts which had to be accurate by the very nature and function of CIC.
Any former ideas or ideals of humanism among peoples had been destroyed the moment Sean O’Sullivan walked through the gates of the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp.
The death of Poland and the fears about Russia were truth:
Warsaw is eighty-five per cent destroyed. A quarter of a million people, mostly civilians were killed. It is positive beyond doubt that a Russian crossing of the Vistula River could have been made and prevented the entire carnage. The destruction of Warsaw and particularly the Home Army was a deliberate, calculated political move on the part of the Russians.
Was General Andrew Jackson Hansen a ranting Red baiter? For ten solid years Hansen had pleaded with the Army to form a large and effective Russian study section. He wanted to train men to speak Russian, to understand the people and the motives and the methods of dealing with them. But, like so many of Hansen’s ideas, this one also hit a brass wall. The time was not fashionable. An American Army with such a department in the days before World War II would have brought the instant wrath of the liberals on their heads. Well, A. J. Hansen would have his Russian study section now, in the flesh, in Berlin.
Sean found himself hypnotized by the summations on Russian characteristics and behavior during the war.
“In the beginning,” Sean read, “the Red Army had been