Eisenhower, according to Boiling, “put his hand on my arm and said, ‘Alex, keep going. I wish you all the luck in the world and don’t let anybody stop you.’” When Eisenhower left Hanover, Bolling believed that he had a “clear verbal acknowledgement from the Supreme Commander that the 84th was going to Berlin.”
On that same Sunday, April 8, the 2nd Armored Division, slightly ahead of the 83rd for the moment, pulled up at the first phase line, Hildesheim. Now the 2nd must await orders for the opening of the second stage of the attack. General White was glad of the pause. With the division traveling at such speed, maintenance had become a problem and White needed at least forty-eight hours for repairs. The temporary halt, he understood, would also enable other units to come abreast. But the majority of soldiers, after the frenzied speed of the last few days, wondered why they were being held. Men chafed at the delay; in the past, such stand-downs had given the enemy a chance to reorganize and consolidate. With the end so close no one wanted to push his luck. First Sergeant George Petcoff, a Normandy veteran, was worried about “the fight for Berlin, because I was beginning to think my number was up.” Chaplain Rose remembers that one tanker was so superstitious about the future that he climbed out of his tank, looked at the words “Fearless Joe” painted on the front and painstakingly proceeded to scratch out the word “Fearless.” “From now on,” he announced, “it’s just plain Joe!”
If the men were anxious and fearful of delay, their commanders —including General White’s immediate superiors at 19th Corps headquarters—were even more concerned. Major General Raymond S. McLain, the Corps Commander, hoped nothing would upset his plans. Despite the speed, he was not worried about supplies. The strength of his corps, totaling well over 120,000 men, was now greater than the Union Army’s at Gettysburg, and he had 1,000 armored vehicles. With all this power, McLain, as he later expressed it, had “absolutely no doubt that six days after crossing the Elbe” the entire 19th Corps would be in Berlin.
McLain had heard from Simpson’s headquarters that the pause was only temporary—and that the reason for the delay was both tactical and political. As it turned out, his information was right on both counts. Ahead lay the future frontier of the Soviet zone of occupation, and the halt gave SHAEF time to consider the situation. No geographic “stop line” had yet been decided upon for either the Anglo-American or the Russian forces. Thus, the danger of head-on collision still existed. In the absence of any concentrated German opposition, higher headquarters had no intention of stopping the attack, yet one serious consideration had to be taken into account: once the Soviet occupation line was crossed, every mile captured would, sooner or later, have to be handed back to the Russians.
At the closest point of advance, Berlin was now only 125 miles away, and all along the Ninth Army front, men waited to go, oblivious of the delicate problem that faced the High Command. They had all sorts of reasons for being eager. P.F.C. Carroll Stewart was looking forward to his first glimpse of the German capital because he had heard that, of all the cities in Europe, Berlin could not be matched for its scenic views.
RAF Warrant Officer James “Dixie” Deans stamped to attention before the desk and smartly saluted the German colonel. Hermann Ostmann, commandant of Stalag 357, the Allied prisoner-of-war camp near Fallingbostel, north of Hanover, returned the salute with equal briskness. It was just one of a series of military formalities that Prisoner-of-War Deans and Captor Ostmann played out whenever they met. Each, as always, was a model of correctness.
Between the two men there existed a grudging and wary respect. Deans regarded the commandant—a middle-aged World War I officer whose palsied arm disqualified him from more active service—as a fair-minded warden, doing a job he disliked. For his part, Ostmann knew that the 29-year-old Deans, elected by the prisoners as their spokesman, was an obstinate, determined bargainer who could, and often did, make Ostmann’s life miserable. The Colonel was always aware that the real control of Stalag 357 lay in the slender Deans’s firm handling of the prisoners, and in their unswerving loyalty to him.
Deans was a legend. A navigator who had been shot down over Berlin in 1940, he had been in POW camps ever since. In each, he had learned something more about how to obtain maximum privileges for himself and his fellow inmates. He had also learned much about dealing with prison commandants. According to Deans, the procedure was basic: “You simply give the blighters hell all the time.”
Now, Deans stared down at the aging colonel, waiting to learn the reason for his latest summons to the commandant’s office.
“I have here some orders,” said Ostmann, holding up some forms. “And I am afraid that we must move you and your men.”
Deans was immediately on guard. “Where to, Colonel?” he asked.
“Northeast of here,” said Ostmann. “Exactly where I do not know, but I’ll get instructions along the way.” Then he added, “Of course you understand we are doing this for your own protection.” He paused and smiled weakly. “Your armies are getting a little close.”
Deans had been aware of that for days. “Recreational” activities in the camp had resulted in the production of two highly functional and secret radios. One lay hidden in an old-fashioned, constantly used gramophone. The other, a tiny battery-operated receiver, made the rounds of Stalag 357 broadcasting the latest news from its owner’s mess kit. From these precious sources, Deans knew that Eisenhower’s armies were over the Rhine and fighting in the Ruhr. The extent of the Anglo-American advance was still unknown to the prisoners—but the troops must be near if the Germans were moving the camp.
“How will the transfer be made, Colonel?” Deans asked, knowing full well that the Germans almost always moved POWs one way only—on foot.
“They’ll march in columns,” said Ostmann. Then, with one of his courteous gestures, he offered Deans a special privilege. “You can drive with me if you like.” With equal courtesy, Deans declined.
“How about the sick?” he asked. “There are many men here who can hardly walk.”
“They’ll be left behind with whatever help we can give them. And some of your men can stay with them, too.”
Now Deans wanted to know how soon the prisoners were leaving. There were times when Ostmann suspected that Deans knew almost as much of the war situation as the commandant himself—but there was one thing he was certain Deans could not have heard. According to headquarters information, the British were advancing in the general direction of Fallingbostel and were now only about fifty to sixty miles away, while the Americans, by all reports, were already in Hanover fifty miles to the south.
“You go immediately,” he informed Deans. “Those are my orders.”
As he left the commandant’s office, Deans knew there was little he could do to prepare the men for the march. Food was short and almost all the prisoners were weak and emaciated from malnutrition. A prolonged, arduous journey was almost certain to finish off many of them. But as he returned to barracks to pass the word of the march around camp, he made himself a solemn vow: using every ruse he could think of, from slow-ups to sit-downs to minor mutinies, Dixie Deans somehow intended to reach the Allied lines with all twelve thousand men of Stalag 357.
The whereabouts of the headquarters of the newly organized Twelfth Army had so far eluded the commanding officer, General Walther Wenck. The command post was supposed to be in the area north of the Harz Mountains, about seventy to eighty miles from Berlin, but Wenck had been driving about for hours. The roads were black with refugees and vehicles heading in both directions. Some refugees were milling east, away from the advancing Americans; others, fearful of the Russians, were hurrying to the west. Convoys carrying soldiers seemed equally aimless. Dorn, Wenck’s driver, pressed down the horn again and again as he edged the car along. As they drove deeper, heading south by west, conditions bordered on the chaotic. Wenck was becoming ever more uneasy and restless. What, he wondered, would he find when headquarters was finally reached?
Wenck was taking a
roundabout way to reach his command post. He had decided to make a wide swing which would take him first to the city of Weimar, lying southwest of Leipzig, before he headed up to headquarters somewhere near Bad Blankenburg. Though the diversion was adding almost a hundred miles to his journey, Wenck had a reason for the detour. In a Weimar bank were his life savings, some ten thousand marks, and he intended to withdraw the entire sum. But as his car approached the city, the roads became strangely empty and the crack of gunfire sounded in the distance. A few kilometers further, the car was halted and Wehrmacht military police informed the General that tanks of Patton’s U.S. Third Army were already on the outskirts. Wenck felt both shocked and deceived. The situation was much worse than he had been told at Hitler’s headquarters. He could not believe that the Allies had advanced so fast—or that so much of Germany was already overrun. It was also hard to concede that, in all probability, his ten thousand marks were gone, too.*
From local headquarters Wehrmacht officers told Wenck that the entire Harz region was endangered, troops were retreating and areas were being outflanked. Obviously, his headquarters had already pulled out of the area. Wenck headed back toward Dessau, where some of his army was supposedly gathering. Near Rosslau, about eight miles north of Dessau, he discovered his headquarters in a former Wehrmacht engineering school. There, too, Wenck discovered the truth about the Twelfth Army.
Its front ran along the Elbe and its tributary, the Mulde, for a distance of about 125 miles—roughly from Wittenberge on the Elbe to the north, then south to a point just below and east of Leipzig on the Mulde. On the northern flank, facing the British, were the forces of Field Marshal Ernst Busch, Commander-in-Chief, North West. On the south were the badly mauled units of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief, West. Wenck had little information about the strength of these forces. In his section, between the two, the Twelfth Army existed mainly on paper. Other than troops holding scattered positions along the Elbe he had little but the scant remains of ghost divisions. Other groups, he found, were not yet operational, and there were even shadow units still to be formed. The bulk of his artillery was immobile, set in fixed positions around such towns as Magdeburg, Wittenberge, and near bridge or crossing sites along the Elbe. There were some self-propelled guns, a group of armored cars, and some forty small jeeplike Volkswagen troop carriers. But Wenck’s Twelfth Army at this moment had at best only about a dozen tanks.
Although presumably the scattered and splinter troops would eventually bring his forces up to about 100,000 men, right now he had nowhere near the ten divisions he had been promised. Amid the remnants of units with impressive names—“Clausewitz,” “Potsdam,” “Scharnhorst,” “Ulrich von Hutten,” “Friedrich Ludwig Jahn,” “Theodor Körner”—there remained at most five and a half divisions, about 55,000 men.
Apart from forces already committed to set positions or in actual combat, the bulk of the new Twelfth Army was made up of eager cadets and training officers. Neither Wenck nor his Chief of Staff, Colonel Günther Reichhelm, had any doubt about the eventual outcome of the battles ahead. But Wenck refused to give in to disillusionment. Young and eager himself, he saw what many an older general might have missed: what the Twelfth lacked in strength it might well make up by the fierceness and dedication of young officers and cadets.
Wenck thought he saw a way to use his green but enthusiastic forces as mobile shock troops, rushing them from area to area as needed—at least until his other forces were regrouped and in position. Wenck believed in this fashion his energetic youngsters might buy Germany precious time. Almost his first move as commander was to order his strongest and best-equipped formations into central positions for use on either the Elbe or Mulde rivers. Looking at his map, Wenck circled the areas of probable action—Bitterfeld, Dessau, Belzig, Wittenberge. There was one other site, he thought, where the Americans would surely try to cross the Elbe. Lying within three arms of the river, devastated during the Thirty Years’ War and almost wholly destroyed, the town of Magdeburg had risen again. Now, the great fortress with its island citadel and 11th-century cathedral stood like a beacon in the path of the American armies. Around this area—particularly south of Magdeburg—Wenck assigned the best-equipped of his “Scharnhorst,” “Potsdam” and “Von Hutten” units to stand off the U.S. assault as well as they could.
His defenses were planned down to the last detail, his tactics committed to memory by his officers. Now, at Army Group Vistula headquarters, approximately 120 miles northeast of Wenck, Gotthard Heinrici was ready for the battle.
Behind his first Hauptkampflinie—the main line of resistance—Heinrici had developed a second line. Just before the expected Russian artillery barrage, Heinrici had told his commanders, he would order the evacuation of the front line. Immediately all troops would retreat to the second Hauptkampflinie. It was Heinrici’s old Moscow trick of letting the Russians “hit an empty bag.” As quickly as the Russian bombardment lifted, the troops were to move forward and take up their front-line positions again. The ruse had worked in the past and Heinrici was counting on its success again. The trick, as always, was to determine the exact moment of attack.
There had been several feints already. In Von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army sector north of Berlin, General Martin Gareis, commanding the weak 46th Panzer Corps, was convinced that the attack would take place on April 8. The heavy forward movement of vehicles and the deepening concentration of artillery directly in front of Gareis’ area seemed to indicate an imminent assault—and captured Russian soldiers had even boasted of the date. Heinrici did not believe the reports. His own intelligence, plus his old habit of trusting his instinct, told him the date was too early. As it turned out, he was right. All along the Oder front, April 8 was quiet and uneventful.
Yet Heinrici’s vigilance was now unceasing. Each day he flew over the Russian lines in a small reconnaissance plane, observing troop and artillery dispositions. Each night he painstakingly studied late intelligence reports and prisoner interrogations, searching always for the clue that might pinpoint the time of attack.
It was during this tense and critical period that Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering summoned Heinrici to his castle for lunch. Though Heinrici was desperately weary and loath to be gone from his headquarters even for a few hours, he could not refuse. Karinhall, the Reichsmarschall’s huge estate, lay only a few miles from the Vistula headquarters at Birkenhain. The grounds were so vast that Goering even had his own private zoo. As they approached, Heinrici and his aide, Captain von Bila, were amazed by the magnificence of Goering’s parklike holdings, with the vistas of lakes, gardens, landscaped terraces and tree-lined drives. Lining the road from the main gates to the castle itself were units of sprucely uniformed Luftwaffe paratroopers—Goering’s personal defense force.
The castle, like Goering himself, was both massive and opulent. The reception hall reminded Heinrici of “a church so large, so huge, that one’s eye automatically traveled up to the roof beams.̶ Goering, resplendent in a white hunting jacket, greeted Heinrici coolly. His attitude was a portent of what was to come, for the luncheon was a disaster.
The Reichsmarschall and the General disliked each other intensely. Heinrici had always blamed Goering for the loss of Stalingrad where, despite all his promises, the Luftwaffe had been unable to supply the cut-off troops of Von Paulus’ Sixth Army. But Heinrici would have disliked the Reichsmarschall in any case for his arrogance and pomposity. For his part, Goering found Heinrici dangerously insubordinate. He had never forgiven the General for leaving Smolensk unscorched, and in the past few days, his distaste for Heinrici had greatly increased. Heinrici’s remarks about the 9th Paratroopers at the Führer’s conference had rankled deeply. The day following that meeting, Goering had telephoned Vistula headquarters and had spoken to Colonel Eismann. “It is inconceivable to me,” said the Reichsmarschall angrily, “that Heinrici would talk about my paratroopers the way he did. It was a personal insult! I still have the 2nd Parachute Divisio
n and you can tell your commander from me that he’s not getting them. No! I’m giving them to Schörner. There’s a real soldier! A true soldier!”
Now, at the luncheon, Goering turned his attack directly on Heinrici. He began by sharply criticizing the troops he had seen during recent trips along the Vistula front. Sitting back in a huge thronelike chair and waving a large silver beaker of beer, Goering accused Heinrici of poor discipline throughout his command. “I’ve driven all over your armies,” he said, “and in one sector after another I found men doing nothing! I saw some in foxholes playing cards! I found men from the labor organization who didn’t even have spades to do their jobs. In some places, I found men without field kitchens! In other sections almost nothing has been done to build defenses. Everywhere I found your people loafing, doing nothing.” Taking a great swallow of beer, Goering said menacingly, “I intend to bring all this to the attention of the Führer.”
Heinrici saw no point in arguing. All he wanted to do was get away. Keeping his temper in check, Heinrici somehow got through the meal. But, as Goering saw his two visitors to the door, Heinrici paused, looking slowly around the magnificent grounds and the impressive castle with its turrets and wings. “I can only hope,” he said, “that my loafers can save this beautiful place of yours from the battles that lie ahead.” Goering stared icily for a moment, then turned on his heel and walked back inside.