Inferno - Max Hastings [385]
Stalin’s obsessive determination that the Soviet Union should accomplish the capture of Berlin accorded with the vision of his people: they saw this symbolic triumph as the only proper end of their struggle, the fulfilment of everything for which they had striven since 1941. Militarily, it might have been feasible for Eisenhower’s forces to reach Hitler’s capital before the Red Army, but such an advance would have precipitated a clash between the Allies. The Russians would have been outraged by any attempt to deprive them of their prize.
Soviet conduct throughout March and April was prompted by paranoia about Western intentions. Stalin lied again and again to Washington and London, professing his own indifference to Berlin as an objective; he could not credit the notion that the Americans and British would spurn a chance to beat the Red Army to the German capital. The Soviet encirclement of Berlin partly addressed the requirement of taking it from Hitler, but partly also that of ensuring its denial to Roosevelt and Churchill. There was a further consideration: the Russians were desperate to secure the Nazis’ nuclear scientists and research material. Knowing from his agents in the West that the Americans were close to perfecting an atomic bomb, Stalin wanted everything that might help to kick-start the rival Soviet project: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Dahlem was identified as a vital objective for the Red Army.
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In the final stage of the western war, the Anglo-American armies advanced in the face of sporadic and ill-coordinated opposition. As always, the infantry bore most of the pain of clearing pockets of resistance. Service in a tank crew was never a sinecure, but in the last six weeks of the northwest Europe campaign, the Scots Guards tank battalion—for instance—lost only 1 officer and 7 other ranks killed, along with a handful of men wounded. Meanwhile in the same period, the infantry of the 2nd Scots Guards lost 9 officers and 76 other ranks killed, 17 officers and 248 other ranks wounded. Some Allied units encountered groups of fanatics, stubbornly defending river crossings and key junctions. One by one these were overcome, until the victors approached the Elbe. On 12 April, the First Army was ordered to stop short of Dresden and wait for the Soviets. Russian and American patrols met at the little Saxon town of Strehla on the Elbe on the morning of 24 April, followed later that day by the celebrated encounter upstream at Torgau, amid exuberant Anglo-American enthusiasm and wary and stilted Russian formality. The British reached the Baltic port of Lübeck on 2 May, allaying Allied fears that the Soviets would attempt to occupy Denmark. Fortunately for the Danish people, Russian attention was overwhelmingly focused elsewhere: upon Berlin, the capital and last bastion of Nazism.
3. Berlin: The Last Battle
STALIN ASSUMED personal responsibility for the final great operations of the war, chiefly in order to deny the personal glory to Zhukov, who was relegated to command of the 1st Belorussian Front. On 12 January the Soviets launched a general offensive out of their Vistula bridgeheads. Outnumbering the defenders by ten to one, their tanks and infantry streamed westward, crushing everything in their path. In an almost hysterical bulletin broadcast on 20 January, Berlin Radio described the Soviet offensive as “a mass invasion, to be compared