Armageddon - Max Hastings [346]
Rokossovsky’s men of 2nd Belorussian Front were now pushing towards Berlin from the north. In the south, Konev lashed his own men on. “Third Guards Tank Army is conducting itself like a tape worm,” he signalled on 20 April: “one brigade is fighting and all the rest are creeping along behind.” Its commander was ordered to attack on a broader front. “Your formation has systematically disobeyed orders,” he told the leader of XXXVIII Corps on 21 April. “You seem afraid to attack. You overestimate the power of the enemy, and underrate your own. You treat every patch of woodland as a major obstacle. If you cannot do better than this, I shall have you sacked.” Zhukov echoed this brutal refrain: “I keep being told that operations are appallingly badly organized, that units are not properly deployed for street fighting,” he told his spearhead leaders on 22 April. “Fight around the clock—use searchlights!”
There was now a serious risk that Konev’s and Zhukov’s men would find themselves killing each other. Tanks of 1st Ukrainian Front were fighting their way into the southern suburbs of Berlin, after advancing more than a hundred miles from the Neisse in six days. To avert a collision, on 22 April Stalin imposed demarcation lines. Konev was ordered to advance towards the Anhalter railway station, halting some 150 yards short of the Reichstag and Hitler’s bunker. It would, after all, become Zhukov’s privilege, dearly bought by his soldiers, to seize the symbolic bastions of the Third Reich. This was bitterly resented by Konev’s officers. When one of them at last met Chuikov, Zhukov’s man, he protested that Chuikov was encroaching on 1st Ukrainian Front’s patch: “We’re advancing here!” Chuikov shrugged indifferently: “Sorry, I’ve got my own orders.” Thus did the cacophony of clashing egos compete with that of gunfire on the streets of Berlin.
The filth, stench and gloom in the shelters grew worse by the hour, as water supplies collapsed. Generators provided power only for a few hours, if at all. One of the largest shelters, the Anhalter Bahnhof next to the main station, housed 12,000 people in conditions so hideously cramped that they were unable to move, even to relieve themselves, for days on end. Even fetching water was a deadly business, when the station was among the principal targets for Soviet guns. At a local street shelter in a residential area, in one corner a woman fortunate enough to possess supplies brewed coffee or “stretched the soup,” as she called it. In another, people were urinating or defecating, because it was unthinkable to face the hell in the streets above to address the demands of nature. One of those tending the wounded in a Red Cross shelter was the British wife of a Berliner. On the evening of 27 April, an SS major arrived at the head of several hundred men, demanding to take over the shelter, evict its wretched occupants and create a defensive position. She argued desperately with him, all the time terrified that someone would cry out: “She’s English!” At last, he went away. Soon afterwards one of her charges, a Ukrainian girl, went into labour amid the relentless shelling above. The baby was born at five past eight on the morning of 28 April, It was christened Piotr, and laid in an office filing tray. Then an elderly local gardener came in, with six holes in his back, “one as big as your hand.” As they strove to dress his wounds, he told his story. He and his wife had sheltered from the barrage in the garden shed on their allotment, until a near-miss blew the entire structure away, tore his