Armageddon - Max Hastings [358]
But the Czechs might have been spared their immediate misfortunes by a modest military effort. Bradley believed that Patton’s formations could have reached Prague in twenty-four hours, in time to save the Czechs from the tragedy in their capital. Twelfth Army Group’s commander was probably right. Yet it was Marshall who told Eisenhower to ignore British urging for a push on Prague. “Personally,” said the U.S. Chief of Staff, “and aside from all logistic, tactical or strategical implications, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.”
On 10 May Schörner surrendered his forces, before himself discarding uniform in favour of Bavarian national costume and escaping westwards in a Storch. He was later captured and imprisoned as a war criminal. Some of his men continued to resist the Russians, even after the formal capitulation. In the fighting around Prague, between 6 and 11 May alone the Russian 1st, 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts reported casualties of 23,383, 14,436 and 11,529 respectively.
Though the struggle persisted in the east for days longer, the formal end of the war between Germany and the Allies came on 8 May 1945. Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, former Chief of Staff of OKW and Hitler’s principal military lackey, was brought to a technical school in Karlhorst, one of the few surviving buildings in Russian-occupied Berlin, just before midnight to confirm the surrenders already made to Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath and to Eisenhower at Rheims. Indeed, the ceremony at Karlhorst was rendered necessary by Soviet rage that Keitel had already performed a submission at SHAEF. On 8 May, twenty-four hours later, Allied commanders led by Zhukov were waiting. Tedder, as Eisenhower’s deputy, demanded: “Have you received the document of unconditional surrender? Are you ready to execute its provisions?” Keitel fixed his monocle into his left eye and held up the document agreed at Rheims the previous day: “Ja. In Ordnung.” In addition to his medals, Hitler’s chief soldier still wore his National Socialist Party golden emblem. His aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Karl Brehm, was in tears. Keitel removed a glove, signed the surrender and said drily to Brehm: “You can make your fortune after the war writing a book about this—‘With Keitel in the Russian camp.’ ” The Germans departed back to their cells. The Russians spread the table for one of their prodigious banquets, which lasted until 0400. “When those men left this room,” said Andrei Vyshinsky, Soviet deputy commissar for foreign affairs, “Germany was torn from the pages of history. We shall never forgive and never forget.” When General Johannes von Blaskowitz surrendered the German forces in Holland to First Canadian Army, an onlooker wrote that the German delegation “looked like men in a dream, dazed, stupefied and unable to realise that their world was utterly finished.” As a result of Soviet refusal to recognize the validity of the earlier Rheims surrender, the Russians celebrated “Victory Europe,” VE-Day, twenty-four hours after the rest of the world.
SHAEF’s Supreme Commander dispatched a wonderfully succinct cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff: “The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th 1945//signed//Eisenhower.” The leader of the Western allied forces had staked no claims to greatness as a field commander during the campaign in north-west Europe, but he earned the gratitude of history by the forbearance, wisdom and generosity of spirit with