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Books: The Final Agony

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TIME

THE LAST BATTLE by Cornelius Ryan. 571 pages. Simon and Schuster. $7.50.

Everyone who saw him still remembers how calm Soviet Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov appeared. In a hillside bunker overlooking the Kustrin bridgehead, less than 38 miles from the stricken city, he rested both elbows on the concrete ledge and took a last look into the predawn darkness through his field glasses. Finally, he glanced at his watch and allowed a few more seconds to tick by before he said, “Now, comrades. Now.”

Three red signal flares soared upward, bathing the Oder River in a garish crimson. Seconds later, 140 huge antiaircraft searchlights and the lights of hundreds of tanks, trucks and other vehicles flashed on and illuminated the German lines brighter than a midday sun. Then three green flares soared into the heavens, and more than 20,000 guns of all calibers erupted with an earsplitting, earth-shaking roar. The German countryside beyond the Kustrin bridgehead seemed to explode. Entire villages disintegrated. Earth, concrete, steel, bits of trees spewed into the air. The concussion from the thundering guns was so tremendous that troops and equipment alike shook uncontrollably. A hot wind suddenly sprang up and howled through the forests, bending saplings and whipping dust and debris into the air.

This mighty bombardment, never before equaled on the eastern front, began at precisely 4 a.m., Monday, April 16, 1945. History records it as the beginning of the battle for Berlin, the final assault against the capital of Hitler’s Reich. As this thoroughly researched and often exciting book makes clear, Berlin was a fortress only in Hitler’s fevered imagination. Incredibly, there was no plan to protect Berlin against attack, no defenses worth mentioning, and very few troops.

Run on Poison. Berlin had become virtually a city without men. Out of a civilian population of about 2,700,000—less than two-thirds of what it had been when the war began—roughly 2,000,000 were women. Small wonder that the fear of sexual attack raced through the city like a plague. Nazi propaganda had long painted Soviet troops as slant-eyed Mongols who butchered women and children on sight, raped nuns and burned clergymen to death with flamethrowers. As a result, doctors were besieged by patients seeking information about the quickest way to commit suicide, and poison was in great demand.

After the first Soviet troops fought their way into the city, however, the terrified populace began to relax somewhat. The soldiers sometimes seized watches and jewelry, and they dealt ruthlessly with any kind of resistance, but in general they ignored civilians. One fighting unit, bivouacking in Schwarze Grund Park, shared food and candy with neighborhood children. Other soldiers took it as a great joke when they saw how their presence petrified some Berliners. Still, more than a little prophetic was the comment of a polite young Soviet lieutenant who told a Roman Catholic mother superior: “These are good, disciplined and decent soldiers. But I must tell you. The men who are following us, the ones coming up behind, are pigs.”

And so they were, writes Ryan. The later waves of Soviet soldiers went wild.

Rape, plunder and suicide became commonplace. Soldiers entered the Haus Dahlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital and foundling home, and repeatedly raped pregnant women and those who had recently given birth. All told, the number of rape victims in Berlin—ranging from women of 70 to little girls of ten—will never be known, although Ryan reports estimates from doctors that run from 20,000 to 100,000.

Stalin’s Scheme. Before the Soviet troops entered the city, most Berliners had been sustained by the hope that the Americans and British would not allow the city to fall into Russian hands; under daily attack by U.S. and British bombers, they still spoke of the Americans and British as liberators rather than conquerors. Ryan’s account of the incredible blunders and political naivete that destroyed the hope is one of the most engrossing portions of the book.

Whatever the catastrophic political results, Ryan argues that Eisenhower made an eminently sound military decision when he ordered back the advanc ing units of the U.S. Ninth Army and refused to consider Berlin a worthwhile military objective. That is an argument that is still debatable. What cannot be disputed is the Allies’ great mistake in accepting Stalin’s word that he also considered Berlin to have no strategic importance. Actually, Stalin always considered the city a prime prize. Through interviews with surviving Soviet military people, Ryan provides a fresh account of how Stalin called his marshals to Moscow and craftily hatched his scheme for the massive offensive to snatch Ber lin before the Allies did.

Britain’s Plan. Ryan also draws on long-forgotten documents to demolish the notion that Franklin Roosevelt drew up the zones of occupation for Germany. Actually, the plan was Britain’s. F.D.R. was first shown the occupation plans in 1943, when he was aboard the U.S.S. Iowa on his way to the Cairo and Teheran conferences. He was both ir ritated and troubled, says Ryan, because the British plan, called Operation Rankin, placed the U.S. zone in the southern German provinces. “We should go as far as Berlin,” Roosevelt said. “The U.S. should have Berlin. The Soviets can take the territory to the east.”

Roosevelt even drew the zones he favored on a National Geographic map, placing Berlin on the boundary line between the U.S. and Soviet zones. He held stubbornly to his position throughout the war, but his wishes were never made known or they went unheeded. At Yalta, when the Big Three formally accepted the British plan, Roosevelt was too ill and dispirited to continue the fight. No one protested that provision had not been made for Anglo-American access to ruined Berlin. Stalin didn’t complain, either.

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