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By Root 1388 0

vehicles, supported by 7,500 aircraft. In darkness in the early hours of 16 April, Zhukov launched a frontal assault against the Seelow Heights, east of the city. The operation was among the most brutish and unimaginative of Russia’s war. Its commander was so impressed by watching his bombardment devastating the defences that after thirty minutes he gave the order to start the attack. A Russian engineer wrote home that night: “Along the whole length of the horizon it was bright as daylight. On the German side, everything was covered with smoke and thick fountains of earth in clumps flying up. There were huge flocks of scared birds flying around in the sky, a constant humming, thunder, explosions. We had to cover our ears to prevent our eardrums breaking. Then tanks began roaring, searchlights were lit along all of the front line in order to blind the Germans. Then people started shouting everywhere, ‘Na Berlin!’ ”

Russian infantry ran forward into the German minefields, while the first tanks clattered towards the heights. Briefly, it seemed that the artillery had silenced the defences. But then the Germans opened fire. They had pulled back from their forward positions, so that Zhukov’s bombardment fell on empty trenches. As Soviet tanks thrashed in deep mud on the slopes in their path, the attackers began to suffer terrible casualties. “We moved across terrain cratered from shellfire,” wrote Soviet sapper Pyotr Sebelev. “Everywhere lay smashed German guns, vehicles, burning tanks and many corpses … Many of the Germans surrender. They don’t want to fight and give their life for Hitler.” But many more continued to shoot. “Why drag out the misery?” mused one despairing member of the Wehrmacht, whose wife and three children had drowned when the Wilhelm Gustloff refugee ship was torpedoed in the Baltic on 15 April. “But then, there’s still the other blokes. Many of them I’ve known for years. Am I going to leave them in the lurch?”

Gen. Gottfried Heinrici’s defenders inflicted three Russian casualties for each of their own. There was no display of inspired Soviet generalship: Zhukov’s hordes merely threw themselves forward again and again. The Germans poured fire into the attackers, destroying tanks in the hundreds and killing men in the thousands. For two days, six Soviet armies battered at the Seelow line without achieving a breakthrough. Konev, in the south, was ordered to push forward two tank armies, while Rokossovsky, in the north, diverted forces to support Zhukov. On 18 April, the Wehrmacht corporal Helmut Fromm wrote from Konev’s sector: “Now we’re in front of Forst. The Russians have got a bridgehead across the Neisse, and attacked this morning at eleven. We had to pull back. I was left with a machine-gun and two men. I’m the only one who knows how to use a Faust—most of the others have only done office work. Then we rode very fast on bicycles up the Breslau–Berlin autobahn … Ivan’s guns are firing. Ten minutes ago Bohmer and Bucksbraun were wounded—Bohmer’s very badly cut up. We carried him back on a plank, screaming. Whose turn is it next? Gunfire from the road. To our left a flak 88 is under fire. I’m trying to dig as deep as I can. In the sky above us a Russian tank-buster is circling … If I survive, I shall give thanks to God.”

Hitler declined to send reinforcements to Heinrici, leaving the Ninth Army to hold the Oder positions as best it could. Mass, not manoeuvre, at last enabled Zhukov to swamp the defences and push forward to reach Hitler’s outer Berlin line on 21 April; the capture of the Seelow Heights had cost the Russians 30,000 dead, the Germans 12,000. The attackers hastened on towards the city along the main road, Reichstrasse 1, as fugitives and deserters scurried and stumbled to stay ahead of them. “They all seem so miserable, so little like men any more,” wrote a Berlin woman watching German soldiers shuffle past her apartment building on 22 April. “The only thing they inspire is pity, no hope or expectations. They already look defeated, captured. They stare past us blindly, impassively … They’re