The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (55 page)

It’s always tempting for Roosevelt to fall in line with Churchill about the Soviets, and Stalin in particular. He even sent Churchill a quick cable, agreeing that a “tougher” stance with the Soviets might be appropriate now in light of their own armies’ lightning progress on the Western Front.

Stalin did not apologize for his accusations, but he did relent. In a cable dated April 7, Joe refuted that he had any intention of “blackening” anyone’s integrity. He even sounded a little wounded:

my messages are personal and strictly confidential. this makes it possible to speak one’s mind clearly and frankly. this is the advantage of confidential communications.

if, however, you are going to regard every frank statement of mine as offensive, it will make this kind of communication very difficult. i can assure you that i had and have no intention of offending anyone.

That telegram confirmed Roosevelt’s initial beliefs about Stalin, Churchill, the war, politics, and people. It’s a matter of style. Just minimize the problems, procrastinate if you have to in order to buy some time, take as few hard stands as you can manage, and obstacles will most often resolve themselves. Dissolve, more like it, just run out of juice and fade away. This one has. This morning Roosevelt dictated to Stalin one of the few telegrams he’s written himself during this stay at Warm Springs, telling the Marshal that vital message word for word:

thank you for your frank explanation of the soviet point of view of the bern incident, which now appears to have faded into the past without having accomplished any useful purpose.

there must not, in any event, be mutual mistrust, and minor misunderstandings of this character should not arise in the future.

Ambassador Harriman asked to take out the word
minor
before presenting the cable to Stalin. He was concerned it might be misinterpreted in Moscow; the incident was, in Harriman’s opinion, a major one. Roosevelt insisted on leaving the message as written, wanting the episode depreciated. After drafting the Stalin message, Roosevelt sent a copy to Churchill, repeating his advice of conciliation: . . .
these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out, as in the case of the Bern meeting.

The incident is over and done because Roosevelt kept a muzzle on Churchill and a firm but friendly face towards Stalin. He didn’t give in to Churchill’s rashness and exhortations to stiff-arm the Soviets, and he’s not going to now. The journey into the postwar period is about to begin. Roosevelt is committed to embark on that journey—in order to continue— peacefully.

The butler enters the room. He begins to set the table for lunch.

Roosevelt wants to end this posing session. He doesn’t like being so stationary. Too much of his life already has been robbed of motion, he doesn’t flourish with discipline and silence. Not when it’s so warm and pleasant. He wants to eat lunch, take a ride in the open car in the sunshine with his women, and have a nap.

It is very warm. He can’t sit like this much longer. He looks at his watch.

“We’ve got just fifteen minutes more.”

It’s not warm, it’s hot. A prickle runs up the back of his neck, it feels like a scuttling centipede with scorching legs. He wants to stop now but he promised fifteen more minutes.

He must be sweating. He lifts his right hand to mop his brow.

The hand will not move smoothly. It seems to flick in and out of his control. It jerks across his brow once, he tries again, another twitchy gesture.

His breath snags in his chest.

He lowers his head, to look down at his legs. You, he thinks. You. And with speeding shock he realizes, This isn’t you.

A woman’s voice. Close to his face.

He doesn’t catch what she says, doesn’t see. A fog has sprung in his head, between his eyes and his understanding. But he lifts his head. The fog is burning hot, steam.

Says, “I have a terrific pain. In the back of my head.”

Lifts his left hand to show the voice, kind concerned voice, where it hurts.

It hurts everywhere. Explosive hurt.

Opens his mouth to speak more, more, get it out, fast. Time! Memory! But the fog becomes blackness, faster than words or regret or hope.

It is horrible; then it is beautiful because everything completed is.

* * * *

NINE

April 13, 1945, 1510 hours

With the Eighty-third Division, Ninth U.S. Army

On the Elbe

Barby, Germany

andy squats to dig into his pack and gets a kick in the
rear.

“Get moving, soldier!”

Bandy whirls to find an officer behind him with hands on hips. A .45 pistol rides just below one of the balled mitts. The man is short and red-faced.

“Whatever it is you’re doing, son, you can do it on the other side of the river!”

Bandy says nothing to the colonel. Without standing he taps a finger to his armband, the one that identifies him as a civilian in the press corps. He finishes reaching into his pack for the Leica and holds it up to the officer.

“That’s great, son. Now get your ass across the river and take some goddam pictures over there!”

The colonel strides on, shouting and boot-prodding anyone he deems sluggardly. The Rag-Tag Circus is on the Elbe. They have a shot at being the first division in the U.S. Army to cross the river. This officer makes sure every man in earshot knows it.”Get going!” he hollers at another bunch of laggards. “Don’t wait to get organized, for Pete’s sake! Get in a boat, get over the river! Come on! You’re on your way to Berlin!”

Four hours ago the Eighty-third’s convoy roared into this town of Barby on the riverbank. The central pavilion was quiet and draped in the required white sheets of surrender. Civilians stayed in their houses. There was no celebration, just as there was no resistance. All the enemy troops and Nazis had withdrawn. Once they’d retreated across the Elbe, they blew the bridge. There’s nothing left but a reef of wooden and metal rubble beneath the green water and a dozen stone stanchions standing over it all without their burden.

Bandy rode into Barby in the lead on the outrageous green fire truck. The Rag-Tag Circus likes publicity and it doesn’t get any better than Charles Bandy,
life special correspondent.
For the past two weeks he’s chronicled the Circus’s race eastward, neck-and-neck with their stiffest competition in the U.S. Ninth, the Hell on Wheels division, the Second Armored. The folks back in New York at
Life
are giving the race big play. Bandy’s photos are getting picked up by the news syndicates as well, everyone at home is on the trail with him, even with a lag time of two or three days. The hope is that one of these divisions will hit the Elbe, find a bridge across the river, and re-create the magic of the Remagen miracle, which back in March changed Allied strategy overnight. Every American and British vehicle within a hundred miles will divert and flow across, compliments of whatever division makes the discovery. According to reports, the U.S. Army now is only ten miles farther from Berlin than the Reds. The race with the Russians has turned into a dead heat.

The lumbering Second Armored actually beat the Circus to the Elbe, arriving in Magdeburg yesterday, after traveling two hundred miles through enemy territory in fourteen days. The Circus has stayed one day behind the Hell on Wheels boys, never able to catch up. Neither division found an intact bridge waiting for them. There would be no Remagen. But officers in both divisions decided they’d force the river anyway, establish beachheads on the east bank and bring up the engineers to construct all the pontoon bridges they’d need. There’s too much momentum now to be slowed down by the lack of a lousy bridge. They’ll make their own.

The Second had a day’s head start on the Eighty-third.

Last night, three battalions of the Second Armored’s infantry were ferried across the Elbe at the town of Westerhüsen, just south of Magdeburg, without opposition. On reaching the eastern bank, the soldiers dug defensive positions in a semicircle. At dawn, everything looked good and quiet.

Engineers rushed pontoon sections forward and floated them onto the Elbe. Once the morning sun rose enough, German shells came pouring in from the east side of the river. The barrage tore up the span, wounded several men, and convinced the Second to abandon this site for the crossing. They had only seventy-five more yards to go to the other side.

This morning while the Rag-Tag Circus pulled into Barby, the Second found another crossing site, just a few miles north of here. But the Circus has all the momentum now, and with shouts and officers’ boot-tips they’ve got the motors revved.

Already this afternoon one battalion has been put over in assault boats, another crosses right now. Artillery pieces float across on pontoons. A tread-way bridge is under feverish construction and should be finished by nightfall. All over the town of Barby the Rag-Tag Circus’s odd collection of green vehicles is parked haphazardly, crammed in to watch the engineers span the river, which will carry them on to the
Autobahn
and Berlin. So far, there hasn’t been a peep from the other side. And with the big guns floating over to help the defenders maintain their position, this bridgehead is going to hold. Bandy hears the officer patrolling the riverbank, convincing soldiers one way or another to climb into a boat and get across. Even with his butt smarting a little from the kick in the shorts, Bandy is jazzed that his gamble of joining this weird division might soon pay off.

He loads a fresh roll of film into the Leica. His left shoulder has stopped throbbing and reduced itself to snagging his attention only when he makes a rapid move with the arm. The stitches came out of his right thigh last week; he gave the cane away. A thick gauze bandage and a lot of tape keep him aware that he’s been shot. He hasn’t mentioned the bullet to Victoria in any letters. He’ll let her wait for that one. Judging from the look of the progress on the river in front of him, all the crazy vehicles rammed into Barby, the determination on the men’s faces, the competition between divisions hitting the river, the power of those combined forces, and that sign still hanging on the Circus’s fire truck claiming
berlin
as the last stop, Vic won’t have to wait long.

Bandy stands. The leg feels fine and he consigns it with the shoulder to his subconscious. All healed. Good as new. He straps the ready Leica around his neck, grabs his pack, and heads to the bank to find a spot in a boat, to cross the Elbe with the Eighty-third Infantry. This sort of thing makes not a caption but a headline: “Bandy Across the Elbe.”

He walks down to the bank. There he squeezes off a dozen shots of eight-man boats plying the last natural barrier between the Americans and Berlin. The water and the afternoon are churned by the motors shuttling to and fro. On the far bank, men are shoved out of the boats even before they hit the shore so the skiffs can turn and run hard to fetch another load of passengers. Two big guns are floating on pontoon platforms, being towed against the current by three straining assault boats each. Twenty or more engineers—the most inventive and resilient of soldiers, Bandy has observed—have got the footbridge a fifth of the way across. The mood of the Rag-Tag Circus is merry, actually a carnival-like atmosphere befitting their nickname, a three-ring jubilee of activity to cross the Elbe. The men really want to get to Berlin. At the moment nothing, not Germans or nature or orders, is stopping them.

Today is Friday the thirteenth. Bandy wonders what’s going to go wrong.

He stows his camera, jots a few caption ideas on a notepad. He raises a hand like hailing a taxi and in seconds one of the boats has a place for him. Bandy has to get his boots wet climbing in, there’s no time for the boat to come up on shore. He sloshes over the side and the skipper whirls in a tight turn even before Bandy is seated.

The ride over is smooth and quick. The day around them is pleasant, there’s no trace of threat, the river wake is frothy and clean, this could be an excursion with friends were it not for the guns and helmets. Bandy crosses the Elbe and when the boat slows he steps into the shallows with the rest. The boat pivots on its engine and is gone, as though this is one big river relay race.