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By Root 1269 0

days of 1945, when the war was going very badly indeed for Germany, a panzer company commander, Lt. Tony Saurma, sought to divert his men’s leisure hours with lectures: he once addressed them for an hour about the United States, its cornbelt, industrial areas and great cities. He knew, as did his audience, that the country would soon loom large in their lives, if they were fortunate enough to survive. What was remarkable was not that hundreds of thousands of Germans abandoned the war in its last months, but that others continued to resist—a few even professing to find their predicament acceptable. An SS panzer platoon commander, posted to Hungary, wrote of a lull behind the battlefield in mid-February: “Rations were excellent. We learned from the civilian population the various uses of paprika. The people were very friendly. During the evenings we drove to see films in Nové Zámky.”

The 1 February Western Allied combined chiefs of staff meeting, held on Malta before the Yalta summit, endorsed Eisenhower’s plan to entrust his main effort, in this last phase of the campaign, to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in northern Germany, reinforced by Gen. William Simpson’s U.S. Ninth Army. The heavy bomber forces were directed to assault Germany’s transport infrastructure, including such rail centres as Dresden1 and Leipzig in the path of the Russian advance. But the ground advance proved slow: Montgomery’s next big attack, Operation Veritable, ran into trouble in the Reichwald forest; Simpson’s formations were held back until 23 February by German flooding of large areas of their front. Only after painful fighting did Montgomery’s forces close up to the Rhine between the Dutch border and Koblenz on 10 March.

In Germany’s desperate circumstances, Hitler adopted a familiar panacea: changing generals. Kesselring, who had conducted the brilliant defence of Italy, succeeded von Rundstedt as commander in the west. Yet Kesselring was no more capable than his predecessor of sustaining a coherent campaign with fifty-five enfeebled divisions against Eisenhower’s eighty-five full-strength formations backed by overwhelming air power. Hodges’s First Army secured the Ludendorff rail bridge over the river at Remagen on 7 March, and immediately began to establish a perimeter on the eastern bank; Patton seized his own bridgehead at Oppenheim, farther south, on 22 March. The last Germans on the western bank of the Rhine were mopped up three days later. On the twenty-fourth, Montgomery’s troops staged their huge set-piece Rhine crossing at Wesel, marred only by heavy casualties among airborne units which parachuted onto the far bank: the defenders proved to be lavishly equipped with antiaircraft artillery, if nothing else.

At the end of the month, Bradley’s spearheads linked with Simpson’s forces at Lippstadt to encircle Model’s Army Group B in the so-called Ruhr pocket; Model shot himself on 17 April, and 317,000 of his men became Allied prisoners. The Americans, rather than the British, now had the best opportunities for a swift final advance. To Montgomery’s fury, his formations were relegated to the secondary task of clearing northern Germany as far as Hamburg and Lübeck. It was thought urgent to push forces across the base of the Danish peninsula, to protect Denmark from any threat of Soviet occupation. Eisenhower formally abandoned Berlin as an objective and informed Stalin accordingly. He diverted two armies south towards the Austrian border, to forestall any Nazi attempt to create a “National Redoubt” from which to keep the war going after the Russians and Anglo-American forces met in northern Germany. The “National Redoubt” was a figment of the imagination of Eisenhower’s intelligence staff; this division of forces decisively weakened his main central thrust and left the Russians to occupy Czechoslovakia.

It is hard, however, to make a plausible case that any of this changed the postwar political map of Europe, as the supreme commander’s detractors claimed. The Allied occupation zones had been agreed many months earlier, and confirmed at