The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (66 page)

Churchill pushes the cart away. He has eaten quickly, absentmindedly. He feels disloyal to the memory of Roosevelt and all they shared, because he views the coming of Truman as a godsend. A firmer American hand has been needed for some time now. A well-read man in the White House, a fellow who understands world military history, this cannot be a bad thing at this juncture. The President is dead. Long live the President.

What concerns Churchill is the reports that Truman is starting from scratch. It has surfaced that Roosevelt treated his Vice President—the man who was one bound away from the country’s highest office—as a minor official in his government. Truman has been left uninformed on the most vital domestic and international issues. He’s inherited a jury-rigged government, one that bears the stamp of informality of the great personality that was at its helm for thirteen years. Truman must familiarize himself with Roosevelt’s positions and policies across the board. Though he may be a man of great abilities, the new President will be hampered in bringing his best traits to the fore until he can get up to speed. All this takes place at a climactic time when the world needs an able American leader, not a promising student.

Churchill finishes the cup of champagne. He grabs the folder of overnight papers from the second shelf of the cart. He kicks off the slippers and rolls his bare feet back under the comforter.

How could Roosevelt allow this to happen? Especially in these last few months, when the tides of war were turning, when Roosevelt’s health was so obviously deteriorating? If anything happens to Churchill, Anthony Eden knows everything about England’s business and could at a moment’s notice take over the entire direction of affairs. But Harry Truman of Missouri has leaped from a role of little information and less power into a position of supreme authority.

Churchill had his disagreements with Roosevelt during the man’s life. Now that he’s gone, Churchill wants to be charitable and think well of him. But by leaving his deputy so utterly in the dark, Roosevelt has done a disservice to the war effort, and to his own precious cause of lasting world peace. Were Roosevelt’s ghost to visit, Churchill would scold him for this.

Stalin has undone Yalta in Yugoslavia; he’s days away from doing the same in Poland. In weeks or months, the rest of eastern Europe will become Soviet puppets as well. Tens of millions of people are to be subjugated to the communist will, against their own.

Roosevelt was willing to allow this to happen, and so it shall and cannot be stopped.

But there is one final city and nation, not yet defeated by the Bear.

Churchill considers picking up the phone and holding his first conversation with Truman over the fate of Berlin. There’s still time to mobilize and take it. The Russians are facing the bulk of German defense; the U.S. Ninth is across the Elbe, with token resistance in front of them. Berlin can be captured by the West, then traded to save how many other cities from the Soviets?

General Eisenhower listened to Roosevelt. Now he’ll have to listen to Truman.

But will Truman listen to Churchill?
Can
he, with all the man has to do just now?

No. It’s too late.

This time, it’s really too late.

But we’re not done with Berlin, Churchill thinks. Not by a long shot. Stalin will take the city and Stalin will break his word, like he’s done over every territory he occupies. The situation surrounding Berlin will worsen in the years to follow. Churchill can only wait to see how the new President will respond.

Churchill studies the brightening fields. He looks at his watch, open on the bedside table. The American bombers are in the air.

Today, they fly for the birthday. Tomorrow, for the last time.

~ * ~

April 21, 1945, 10:40
a.m.

Hardenberg Strasse U-bahn station

Charlottenburg, Berlin

for a minute, there has not been an explosion.

Lottie hugs her knees to her chest, waiting for the next deep rumble. She sits shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of several hundred on the floor of the underground chamber. The only light and fresh air tumble in from the passageways up to the street. The floor is tiled and cold; smells of urine and unwashed bodies creep along it.

The people are packed tight around a radio. Its owner has cut it off during the bombing to save the battery. This morning the sirens wailed promptly at 9:00; the raid began at 9:25. Lottie was heading toward the Kurfürstendamm to stand in line for rations. At the klaxons she flocked down the steps with these others. For the past hour the city has boomed overhead. The hammershot blows enter the station from both directions through the tunnel, traveling with dark breezes along the empty tracks, sounding like trains coming and going.

Two more minutes pass without a detonation. The radio’s owner clicks a knob. The seated crowd leans in.

The tinny speaker declares the all-clear. The American Flying Fortresses have left the skies over Berlin. Minor damage was done in the eastern and southern portions of the city. The radio voice speculates this raid was to assist the Russian advances from those directions.

Lottie starts to stand. Her buttocks are numbed by the hardness and chill of the floor. Others begin to straighten, then the crowd nearest the radio makes shushing noises. Lottie settles with the others, there is more news.

“What?” Lottie asks a woman in front of her. “I missed it. What did they say?”

“That was the last American attack,” the woman replies. “The English finished up last night. They won’t be back.”

“That’s it!” some old man shouts. “That’s it! We outlasted them!”

The old voice is shushed down. The radio report is not done. The crowd holds very still.

The radio explains that, from now on, the bombardment of Berlin will be the responsibility of the Soviet air force.

The woman who owns the radio is the first to speak out.

“Oh, to hell with the Soviet air force.”

Others take up this call. It’s true, Lottie thinks. The Americans and British have come with such terrible numbers and efficiency. It’s been four years of living through them. Now they’re leaving their duties to the Reds, who are so scattershot. Russian air raids are no match for what the
Amis
have mounted. Their bombs are much smaller, their raids less frequent. This is happy news.

Applause starts and Lottie joins in. The radio is snapped off and lifted away. The crowd rises. Hands reach down to assist the weak and the elder ones. Moving up the steps into fresh air, the talk is a reprise of the old man’s boast, We outlasted them!

On the sidewalk Lottie turns again for the Ku’damm. Many of the old folks head that direction as well. A cap of gray clouds nestles over Berlin. The last of the
Amis’
air raids did nothing here in the west end of town. It was a small barrage, not like yesterday’s birthday bashing. Why drop the bombs one more time? To Lottie it just seems spiteful.

Yesterday was enough, a grand finale for the raids. The Americans started at ten o’clock in the morning. For a full two hours, the sky was full of them, unhounded by any German defense. Throughout the rest of the day, the English appeared, dropped their loads, disappeared, and arrived again, maddeningly random for them. Berliners were forced to spend the entire day hiding in shelters. At night, the English came back in big numbers. By midnight, every part of the city had felt the blows.

For the first time in twelve years, Hitler’s birthday passed without banners or speeches. April twentieth was also the last day of water and gas in Berlin. The toilets no longer flush. Garbage is not going to be picked up. Electricity comes on for seconds at a time. All telephones are down. Subways and trains have stopped running. Berlin is no longer a living city. It’s a shell; the three million frightened occupants live in it now like crabs.

Lottie walks east, an empty canvas bag dangling from her wrist. The shops on the Ku’damm will be giving out extra allocations of food today. Whether the bonus is in celebration of Hitler’s birth or a nod to the coming siege, she doesn’t care. But today, on government decree, Lottie will be able to take home one pound of bacon or sausage, one-half pound of rice or oatmeal, two hundred fifty dried lentils, peas, or beans, one can of vegetables, a tin of fruit, two pounds of sugar, one ounce of coffee, three and a half ounces of the
ersatz
malt coffee, and a bag of fats. Also, it was announced that the next two weeks’ supplies will be made available in advance. After today, there will be no more foodstuffs issued for the next eight days. Already the Berliners’ black humor has named this extra food “Ascension Day rations.” With these final morsels in their mouths, they say, they will ascend to heaven.

In his many radio tirades, Minister Goebbels calls the city a
Festung,
a fortress. He claims Berlin has been transformed into a death trap for the invaders. Walking to the streets of shops, with the Russians only a handful of miles from the city limits, Lottie sees little trace of Fortress Berlin.
Volkssturm
units in civilian garb shuffle through the ruins with old rifles over their shoulders. The last time these guns were fired they and the men were both young. Hitler boys on bicycles make a big show of their one-shot
Panzerfausts
held across their handlebars. Foreign workers are made to stack stones and bricks to build little bastions but there are no soldiers to man them. Brigades of shovel-toting women head east out of town, presumably to dig tank traps. There are no firemen or police, they’ve all been called into fighting units. The occasional SS and Gestapo men stomp to and fro with some purpose in mind, shining and angry. The amount of activity dedicated to the defense of Berlin is small; it pales beside the greater performance of the streets, people searching for food.

Lottie reaches the main thoroughfare. Everywhere women stand in long lines in front of the shops. Knowing this might be their last chance to secure provisions before the Russians reach the city center, thousands have come out to use their final food coupons. They’ve been emboldened too by the news that this morning was the last of the
Amis’
air raids. Lottie catches snippets of talk. The rumor flies that there will be peace now, that’s why the West quit bombing. There’ll be no Russian assault, no
Schlacht um Berlin.
The broad Ku’damm is swamped by queues, even snaking down into the craters in the boulevard where broken water pipes leak their last drops into waiting Berliners’ buckets. She heads several blocks east on the avenue, toward the Tiergarten, hoping to find shorter lines nearer the park.

Lottie surveys the damage along the Ku’damm and the many side streets and alleys. The wreckage follows no pattern; some blocks have a house blasted out of the middle like a broken tooth, some streets are untouched. Other rows are shorn down to brick mounds and twisted steel bars. Rust, dust, and rubble pile up next to proud and pock-free buildings. Lottie thinks she could line up Berliners along the street just like these buildings and find their fates no different. Some have survived unscathed, many have been deeply hurt but remain standing, others are gone, vacant places where humans were.

Lottie cannot form a picture of herself as a building. Her story isn’t played out yet. Nor is Berlin’s. In this way, she’s not like a single house but the whole city. Waiting, undetermined, in jeopardy.

In the five days since the final BPO concert, Lottie has drifted between despair and hope. The Nazis’ news organs fan fear of the Red Army, with constant reports of rapes, murders, horrors upon horrors. Suicides in Berlin have multiplied. No one in the bunkers is without a tale of his own to tell: the family sitting down to their evening meal and never getting up, poisoned by the parents; the German officer who slit his wrists and walked toward the advancing Russians, blood dripping from all ten fingertips, pleading, “There, I’ve killed myself. Now will you leave my wife alone?”; nuns violated in their chapel. The stories are so dreadful as to be numbing, almost unbelievable. In that backward way, Lottie has lapsed into hope. These tales can’t be true, she figures, they must be made up to scare us, to make Berliners fight harder. Freya says this too. The Russians are human beings, she says, but these are tales of animals. Don’t believe them. Besides, Mutti adds, even if true, nothing in these stories of Russian cruelty compares to what the Nazis have done to the Jews. The real animals are among us, Mutti says. Lottie does not weigh crimes the way her mother can, this is worse than that. Lottie wants to be freed from all of it. She hopes, because her hands are not busy with music and because there is nothing else she can do. She goes to bed every night, she walks through the ruins for scraps of food, she will sit in the parlor this afternoon and stare out the window, and hope, somehow, still to be protected.