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on their main defences. Many men who had fought at the Vistula crossing compared the effects of the Oder artillery preparation very unfavourably with the devastation achieved four months earlier. The Russian assault met accurate German artillery and mortar fire, especially from batteries at Frankfurt-on-Oder. There were violent complaints from the infantry about tanks lagging behind or becoming snarled in massive traffic jams behind the advance. A Sergeant Safronov reported seeing Soviet armour advancing over their own infantry positions, crushing men under the tracks. Captain Shimkov of the 68th Guards Brigade described how a mass of tanks and self-propelled guns became entangled in a gully, from which they shot blindly towards the enemy “because we had no experience of night firing. We were aiming by instinct.” Untrained replacements proved woefully incompetent—one unit reported three machine-guns jammed, because their Moldavian crews had no idea how to clear them. After the battle, political officers compiled an unedifying list of officers deemed to have behaved with cowardice or incompetence.

Worst of all, some Soviet minefields had not been properly cleared by the engineers. Hundreds of men died before they had even advanced beyond their own positions. Eight out of the 89th Regiment’s twenty-two tanks were wrecked on Russian mines. The 347th Infantry Division alone lost thirty men killed. A subsequent report declared furiously: “The divisional engineer Lieutenant- Colonel Lomov, a Party Member, and a brigade commander, Colonel Lebedev, also a Party Member, were too busy drinking before the attack to do their jobs properly. Colonel Lomov was too drunk even to report to the divisional commander.” It was in the light of behaviour such as this that Zhukov issued an order on 17 April cancelling the issue of vodka to several formations until further notice.

As daylight grew on the western bank, a pall of dust and smoke hung over the blasted German defences. Flocks of displaced birds wheeled in the sky. Men strove to save their eardrums amid the relentless thunder of the bombardment, now ranging on targets deeper into the German positions. Zhukov’s initial optimism at the success of the crossing was replaced by dismay, as his forces battered in vain at the enemy’s main line. “The further we got, the tougher the resistance became,” said Vasily Filimonenko. The strongest German defences, on the Seelow Heights, lay well beyond the reach of the Russians’ preliminary bombardment. Even after Zhukov’s men had secured bridgeheads, established their pontoons and pushed the first tanks forward, they found themselves making little progress. They struggled in the German minefields, for the Red Army was chronically short of mine detectors. The ground was miserably soft and treacherous for armoured vehicles, which bogged down in scores. The defenders were resolute. Zhukov found himself engaged in the most bitter fighting his armies had known since 1943.

ON THE AFTERNOON of 16 April, nineteen-year-old Helga Braunschweig, who worked in a Berlin telegraph office, was foraging for potatoes in the countryside east of Berlin with her friend Regina. The S-Bahn proved so badly damaged that they were obliged to abandon the train and walk. They were soon stopped at a military police roadblock, where the Kettenhunden said: “There’s nothing for you up that way, girls.” They wangled a lift in a truck up a side road and found themselves in Wehrmacht positions on a hill. They lingered to chat and flirt with the soldiers, even as they listened to the thunder of the guns and watched the relentless flashes in the distance as the afternoon light faded. The soldiers, summoned to action, hastily clambered into their trucks, gathering up the girls, and drove towards the Seelow Heights. Eventually they stopped, pointed the girls towards a house where they could buy potatoes, and left them in the road. Helga and her friend filled their bags, then lingered watching the horizon flickering with flame, gripped by a sense of disbelief. Berlin had been awaiting