A World at Arms (154 page)

Roosevelt clearly believed that Morgenthau’s proposal fitted in with his own view of Germany’s future.
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Its emphasis on dismemberment, its shift from the post-World War I idea of reparations to a transfer of industrial machinery, its assumption that the Germans would have to work hard and build democratic institutions for themselves over a long period of time, and the view that American troops could be withdrawn relatively quickly, all would have appealed to him.
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Initially, Secretary of State Cordell Hull also agreed with this proposal while Secretary of War Henry Stimson opposed it.

When Stalin would not participate in a three–power meeting in the summer of 1944, Roosevelt and Churchill decided to meet with their advisors at Quebec in September. Hull decided against attending, so Roosevelt invited Morgenthau.
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Churchill himself dictated the terminology of the Morgenthau plan that Germany be “primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character,” which Roosevelt and the Prime Minister then initialled.
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Both were strongly in favor of the concept at the time, but soon thereafter both modified their views. The two countries moved
in the direction symbolized by the American directive for occupation policy sent to Eisenhower known as JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) 1067, which embodied the generally harsh attitude Roosevelt, Churchill and Morgenthau had favored but without the major emphasis on the elimination of heavy industry.
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The level of German industry was to be kept low–and many plants dismantled and shipped to Germany’s World War II victims–but the country would not be stripped of heavy industry entirely.

Commentators have pointed to the political objections raised against the original Morgenthau plan as a major factor in Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s change of heart, but this overlooks a major point already alluded to: the increasing likelihood, known to Roosevelt and Churchill, that there would be a massive transfer of agricultural territory from Germany to Poland. However great the advantages of diminishing Germany’s war-making capacity, and whatever the blessings to Britain’s export trade from the removal of German heavy industry, there was no way to shift millions of Germans from industry into agriculture if one simultaneously took away a huge portion of the country’s agricultural land and agreed to the expulsion of the German population living there.
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If the British and Americans were developing–and in the case of the Americans in the Aachen area applying–occupation policies as well as territorial plans, the French were as yet excluded from an immediate role. This, however, in no way kept them from making plans.
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On the territorial side, there were several concepts, all based on the great concern that France had to be protected from any renewed German threat. In the broadest sense, de Gaulle in particular believed passionately that only a recovered great power status for France was both appropriate and safe. It was a subject on which he clashed most directly with his allies, and especially with the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which thought that the defeat of 1940 had in fact ended such a position for France, while the British, though sharing this view for the present, looked more hopefully to a revived France in the future.

By the fall of 1944, however, the success of de Gaulle in establishing himself as de–facto leader of a liberated France, assisted by the American policy of building up a new French army,
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made the three major Allies increasingly willing to think of France as a power which could play a key role in the future of Europe. If they would not as yet, and for years, take the great power pretensions of de Gaulle as seriously as he wished, there can be no doubt that the signs pointed in a new direction.

From the perspective of Paris, once again the seat of the French government, the key immediate issue was policy toward Germany. There were two concurrent priorities. First, there should be no new German
central government, and in the immediate post-war years the French would use the position of importance restored to them by the Allies to block any and all central administrative structures for Germany which those same Allies preferred to establish.

On the more direct and immediate issue of territorial change, the French government had its second main objective. It wanted to detach the left bank of the Rhine from Germany and either incorporate all of it or much of it–most certainly the Saar area–into France. In the 1919 peace negotiations, the French had given up their plan to detach the left bank of the Rhine under pressure from the United States and Great Britain and in exchange for the promise of a defensive alliance against Germany. After making their concession, the French had been cheated out of the promised alliance. They were not about to get trapped into such a bargain again if they could help it. As it turned out, the Russians would not support the larger territorial ambitions and the Americans and British only agreed to the cession of the Saar area. Washington and London would, however, in late 1944 shift their view on the participation of France in the occupation and began to argue for a French zone of occupation, one of the issues that would have to be resolved at the next Allied meeting at Yalta.

When seen as a whole, the plans the Allies were developing for Germany were quite harsh, but given German behavior, hardly surprisingly so. Putting them in front of the Germans instead of simply calling for unconditional surrender was not likely to make ending the war on Allied terms particularly attractive. The Germans could give in or be pounded to bits; unlike all their allies and satellites, they evidently preferred the latter.

Even before the new major Soviet offensive in the East began in January, the situation in Hungary was altering slowly but steadily in favor of the Russians. The capital of Budapest had been cut off on December 26 after Hitler refused permission for the German Army to withdraw in time. The huge city was now besieged, but the Red Army halted in the face of German and Hungarian resistance and the exhaustion of its own offensive power on December 28.
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The Germans planned a major relief offensive, partly for the political reason of breaking the siege and partly as a means of protecting the Hungarian oil fields, which were especially important for the Germans after the loss of the Romanian oil fields and the success of the Allied air attacks on the synthetic oil industry. Here the German army launched its last great offensive of the war. During
January, a series of German attacks drove toward the Hungarian capital, but, as in the case of the attempted relief of Stalingrad two years earlier, failed to break through and reach the isolated garrison.
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Ironically it was into this battle that Hitler directed the 6th SS Panzer Army as it was pulled out of the Battle of the Bulge. Instead of sending it or other reinforcements to the central portion of the Eastern Front, where the Red Army was poised to plunge into Germany, Hitler insisted on still another offensive in Hungary. It would in any case come too late to save the crumbling garrison of Budapest, where the remaining German and Hungarian units were crushed in February with only a few hundred men out of over thirty thousand escaping to the German lines.
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The main German attack, launched on March 5 primarily to protect the oil fields and the approaches of Vienna–the next obvious Soviet target–provedan enormous and costly fiasco. Although the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts (fighting north and south of the Budapest area respectively) had to give some ground, they soon crushed the attacking German forces. By the end of the month they had pushed the Germans out of most of the rest of Hungary, though not yet the oil fields, and were poised to strike for Vienna. Hitler’s hysterical reproaches could not move even his armed SS anymore; there were signs of demoralization appearing in the German units, signs which may well have reflected the fact that, even as the German soldiers were supposed to push the Red Army out of Hungary, the fronts had moved ever deeper into Germany both from the East and from the West.

The Soviet Union had been building up its forces on the central portion of the Eastern Front during the time when the Germans were using up their reserves of manpower and equipment elsewhere, first in the offensives in the West and thereafter in futile efforts to relieve the siege of Budapest. A third Red Army offensive against the Germans in Courland failed to break that front; but until more is known about Soviet plans and operations in western Latvia from October 1944 to May 1945, we will not be able to determine whether these were intended to drive the Germans into the Baltic Sea or to pin them down there and preclude evacuation until their eventual surrender. The major emphasis of Soviet military planning for their January 1945 offensive was on the Central front looking toward a crushing of the German armies from East Prussia to the Carpathians with a rapid follow-up drive to Berlin which, as Stalin well knew, was inside the occupation zone allocated to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet plan contemplated accomplishing this victory drive to the Elbe river in a first phase of fifteen days, in which the major thrust would be out of the bridgeheads over the Vistula south of Warsaw, and a secondary push out of the bridgeheads over the Narev river north of
Warsaw. The southern offensive by First Belorussian and First Ukrainian Fronts would drive through southern Poland into the key German industrial area of Silesia, while in the north the Second and Third Belorussian Fronts would isolate the German troops in the area around East Prussia by driving to the Baltic Sea behind them and subsequently crushing the cut-off remnants. In both cases, it was assumed that Soviet superiority in manpower, artillery, tanks and mobility would break open the relatively thin crust of German defenders quickly and that mobile Red Army spearheads could then strike deep into the rear of an enemy without substantial reserves. In a second phase of thirty days, which was to follow the first without a pause, the Red Army command would send the southern forces, that is First Belorussian and First Ukrainian Fronts, straight forward through Berlin and to the Elbe river. The assumption was that a drive of about six weeks would end the war in Europe in February or March and release forces for a campaign into Manchuria against Japan.
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The first portion of the Soviet plan to end the European war in forty five days succeeded completely; the second did not. Originally scheduled for about January 15–20,
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the offensive was moved up a week, in part in response to requests from the Western Allies to relieve pressure, after months of quiet on the main sector of the front in the East had enabled the Germans to concentrate elsewhere. The early attack had the advantage, on the other hand, of surprising many of the German headquarters, which had expected the Red Army to await better weather. The German reserves had largely been sent to Hungary; on the main front practically everything the Germans had was within Red Army artillery range. The great assaults, launched on January 12,13, and 14 out of the Vistula and Narev bridgeheads, quite literally crushed the German forces before them, shoved aside both the remnants of the German front formations and what few reserves were available behind the German lines, and had broken into the open by January 17. Portions of the German front were surrounded as Red Army armored formations cut in behind them while elsewhere the disorganized remnants of German divisions–preceded by rear area services and administrations–flooded back toward the Reich. As the weather cleared, the Red Air Force held effective control of the skies.

The Soviet victory was of immense proportions, and it caused all the more confusion because the Russians gained in confidence and morale as the Germans, chased over areas hitherto hardly touched by the war and in fact the goal of many evacuated from the West because of bombing there, fled before what looked increasingly like an unstoppable onrush.
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The Germans moved some reinforcements from the Western Front eastwards and scraped together others, but the main effort to shore up the collapsing front was of a different sort. Hitler sent two of his experts at holding fast by having lots of Germans shot, Schörner and Rendulic, to take over critical sectors and then Himmler to head up a new, largely fictional, Army Group named “Vistula.” None of this substantially slowed down the Red Army; by the end of January Soviet forces had drawn to the Baltic just east of Danzig (Gdansk) and cut off the remnants of the German 3rd Panzer and 4th Armies, were on and across the Oder river in the center of the front, and had captured almost all of Silesia east of that stream. Practically all of pre-war Poland had been liberated from Germany and was now under Soviet control, a large portion of the Silesian industrial and mining area had fallen to Konev’s First Ukrainian Front practically intact, and hundreds of thousands of German civilians were now crowding the roads as refugees. Here and there surrounded islands of resistance held out–the city of Breslau (Wroclaw) until May-but it was obvious that these were all certain to fall.
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The area through which the Red Army had moved included Auschwitz (Oswiecim) with its branch camps, its vast factories and its murder centers. The Germans had not had time to cart off seven tons of women’s hair.

It can, however, be argued that the determination–or desperation–with which the German garrisons fought at the northern and southern flanks of the front, combined with last minute reinforcements on the Oder, contributed to the halting of the Soviet offensive during February. Zhukov’s bulge to the Oder river east of Berlin included some bridgeheads across that river but was not wide enough to provide a basis for the second phase of the planned Soviet offensive; and most of February, as the winter weather allowed, was a time when the Red Army pushed forward in East Prussia, Pomerania, and northern Silesia on the flanks of the line reached at the end of January:
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A small German counter-offensive at Stargard on February 16 appears to have shaken the self-confidence of the Soviet high command; and, as a result, the decision was made that the second phase of the great offensive into central Germany would require a full preparation. Occupying Berlin and the assigned zone in Germany would not be easy or quick for the Russians, but this also meant that it would be even more bloody and devastating for the Germans.
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In between the
two now separated phases of the Soviet offensive there occurred the previously planned Allied conference at Yalta in the Crimea.