Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [197]
It was a time when decisions made in an ostensibly purely military context were foreshadowing the shape of the postwar political settlement. Thwarted in his intuition about Berlin, Churchill directed Montgomery to make sure that British forces crossed the Elbe and got as far as the Baltic coast. They eventually reached Lubeck on May 2, thus effectively sealing off the Danish Peninsula from the Russian advance. Meanwhile, as the American armies dashed on into south-central Germany, their political leadership was thrown into disarray by the death of President Roosevelt on April 12. He left the presidency and its problems to his vice-president, an all but unknown named Harry S Truman, a man whom Roosevelt had taken as vice-president purely for domestic political reasons, and who came to high office deliberately kept ignorant of most of Roosevelt’s plans and problems. Truman was required to learn fast.
Roosevelt’s death was perhaps Hitler’s last surge of joy. In 1762 it had been Elizabeth of Russia’s death that had saved Frederick the Great from being overrun, and by now Hitler, living out his life in a huge underground bunker in the center of Berlin, was convinced of the reality of historical parallels. After the news of the President’s death Hitler and his entourage waited for the immediate change of sides they confidently expected.
Of course none came. The United States was not Germany, where one man’s will could turn the world upside down. By now, too, the Allies were fully aware of the true nature of the Greater Reich. They had started to liberate the first of the concentration camps. They had come across the gas chambers, the crematoriums, the piles of shoes, of extracted gold fillings, the evidence of “scientific” experiments, the trenches filled with starved bodies, the barracks still filled with starvelings who could barely lift their hands to beg for water. The liberators were horrified, sickened—and hardened—by what they encountered. The first soldiers into German concentration camps would never think the bombing of Hamburg or Dresden to be morally reprehensible.
The final Russian drive of the war began on April 16. They reached Berlin on the 22nd and surrounded it on the 25th. The Germans continued to fight, with no hope of ultimate victory or rescue. Hitler remained in his underground bunker, summoning vast armies that lay face down on the Russian steppes, or dead on the slopes of the Apennines. Above ground the Russian artillery blasted away, building by building. The machine guns chattered in the night, and soldiers who had come all the way from Siberia worked their way into the ruined halls from which so much sorrow had emanated. One by one the blocks fell. Civilians huddled in cellars and shrank from the invaders; in the midst of the chaos life went on: the postal service continued to function, and while there was fighting on one side of a block, the mail was still being delivered on the other side. But the end could only be put off, not changed. On May 2 resistance collapsed, and the Russians began mopping up the die-hard survivors.
By then Americans and Russians had met at Torgau on the Elbe, and the Red armies had closed up to Wismar on the Baltic, where the British had just arrived. Germany no longer existed. The meetings that both sides had come so far to achieve went off amicably, even triumphantly, with toasts of vodka and wine, impromptu music, and a great deal of backslapping and fumbling