The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (46 page)

The Allied fear was that Hitler would be able to encourage these armed bands over the radio to continue the struggle. His voice was his weapon. If he could get to the Austrian Alps he might be able to surround himself with SS troops and use the radio to put that voice into action.

Exactly that was happening, according to American agents in Switzerland. SHAEF G-2 agreed. As early as March 11, G-2 had declared, “The main trend of German defence policy does seem directed primarily to the safeguarding of the Alpine Zone. This area is practically impenetrable. . . . Evidence indicates that considerable numbers of SS and specially chosen units are being systematically withdrawn to Austria. . . . Here, defended by nature the powers that have hitherto guided Germany will survive to reorganize her resurrection. . . . Here a specially selected corps of young men will be trained in guerrilla warfare, so that a whole underground army can be fitted and directed to liberate Germany.” In September 1944, SHAEF intelligence had declared the German army dead. In mid-December 1944, SHAEF intelligence had missed altogether the gathering of the largest army the Germans ever put together on the Western Front. Having paid so heavily for its complacency in December, SHAEF intelligence went the other direction in March 1945 when it gave Eisenhower a report that was grossly exaggerated (“armaments will be manufactured in bomb-proof factories, food and equipment will be stored in vast underground caverns, with the most efficient secret weapons yet invented”) and alarmist. Yet there was a core of truth to it.  If the factories and underground storage facilities were imaginative, the threat of Hitler and a radio was not. He could ask his fanatics to hold on and hold out, until the Western Allies and the Soviet Union went to war.  There was a receptive audience to that line. Capt. John Cobb of the 82nd Airborne remembered an incident on the day of the surrender of the Ruhr pocket.  He was in charge of a temporary prisoner compound. “The German who was the ranking officer made a request to see me. I received him, expecting some complaint about living conditions or treatment. Instead, he requested that he be allowed to join us with German volunteers when we began our attack against the Russians. He was incredulous when I informed him that we had no intentions of fighting the Russians.”

Cpl. Friedrich Bertenrath recalled how the war ended for him: “There were still about 150 of us, and forty vehicles. The Americans came up. They searched us but we did not hold up our hands. After a bit, a bottle of schnapps was passed around. Each took a sip. An American said, ‘You are all prisoners.’ Someone from our side said, ‘Forget about taking us prisoners, let us join you to go fight the Russians.’

“ ‘Forget that,’ one of the Americans replied. They were decent men. We were allowed to get into our vehicles-they gave us some gas-and we drove with them through the area as if it were peacetime. There was an American jeep in front and one behind us, and in between twenty German tanks and APCs [armored personnel carriers]. It was a beautiful spring day. There were no more planes, no more Jabos above us.”

Sgt. Bruce Egger remembered a lieutenant who surrendered to him. The lieutenant spoke perfect English “and was as blond, sharp, and arrogant as a Hollywood version of a Nazi officer. He gave us a lecture about why the Americans should not have waged war on Germany; we should have joined them fighting the true enemy, which was Russia, and that it was not too late. We laughed at him, but as the Cold War developed, I often thought of his words.” Eisenhower’s mission was to get a sharp, clean, quick end to the war. The Russians were going to take Berlin anyway. There were more German divisions in southern Germany than to the north. The best way to carry out the mission was to overrun Bavaria and Austria before the Germans could set up their Alpine Redoubt. Eisenhower ordered Ninth Army to halt at the Elbe, First Army to push on to Dresden on the Elbe and then halt, and Third Army and Seventh Army, plus the French army, to overrun Bavaria and Austria.

Put another way, he refused to race the Russians to Berlin. He was much

criticized for this. It remains his most controversial decision of the war. It

has been much written about, including by me. I have nothing to add to the

debate, except this: In thirty years of interviewing GIs, reading their books

and unpublished memoirs, corresponding with them, I have not yet heard one of

them say that he wanted to charge into Berlin. For the GIs, what stood out about

Eisenhower’s decision was that he put them first. If the Russians wanted to get

into the ultimate street fight, that was their business.*

Gregori Arbatov was a rifle company commander in the Red Army in the Battle of Berlin. He took terrible casualties. Some of them were men he had led in the Battle of Moscow, and so many others. Fifty years later he still shook with fury at the thought of Stalin’s insistence on taking the city. Arbatov said any sane man would have surrounded Berlin, pounded it with artillery, and waited for the inevitable capitulation. “But not that son of a bitch Stalin. He sent us into the city, with all those crazy Nazi kids, and we bled.” The estimated casualty cost was 100,000.

Day after day over the last couple of weeks, more concentration camps were discovered. On April 15 the British got into Belsen. That day Edward R. Murrow went to Buchenwald, just north of Weimar. Like Eisenhower and every GI who saw one of the camps, Murrow feared that no one could believe what he saw. He gave a description on his CBS radio program. In his conclusion he said, “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. . . . If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry. I was there.” Martha Gellhorn of theNew York Times visited the main camp at Dachau. Then she flew out on a C-47 carrying liberated POWs to France. She talked to them about Dachau, which they had just seen.

“No one will believe us,” one soldier said. They all agreed. “We got to talk about it, see? We got to talk about it if anyone believes us or not.” Marguerite Higgins of the rivalNew York Herald Tribune was also there. She reported, “The liberation was a frenzied scene. Inmates of the camp hugged and embraced the American troops, kissed the ground before them and carried them shoulder high around the place.”

On April 27 the 12th Armored Division approached Landsberg-am-Lech, west of Munich. There were a Wehrmacht unit and a Waffen SS unit in the town. The Wehrmacht commander decided to withdraw across the Lech River. The SS commander wanted to fight. The regular officer told him to do as he wished, but the Wehrmacht troops were getting out of there. When the civilians saw the soldiers leaving, they hung out white sheets. The sight infuriated the SS. “In their rage,” Lt. Julius Bernstein related, “they went from house to house and dragged outside whomever they found and hanged them from the nearest tree or lamp post.  As we rode into Landsberg, we found German civilians hanging from trees like ripe fruit.”

Later that day an awful black, acrid smoke appeared. It came from one of the outlying camps of the Dachau system. When the Americans approached, the SS officer in charge had ordered the remaining four thousand slave laborers destroyed. The guards had nailed shut the doors and windows of the wooden barracks, hosed down the buildings with gasoline, and set them on fire. The prisoners had been cremated alive. Later, Bernstein helped load civilians from Landsberg into trucks to take them to see the atrocity. “Would you believe that no one admitted any knowledge of the camp?” he later wrote. “They told us they thought it was a secret war factory, so they didn’t ask questions. They all defended Hitler, saying, ‘The Fuhrer knew nothing of this!’ They blamed Goering, Goebbels and Himmler, but not their dear Führer.” Their dear Führer, meanwhile, declared that “the German people have not shown themselves worthy of their Fuhrer,” and on April 30 killed himself. He named Adm. Karl Doenitz as his successor. Doenitz’s task was to surrender-hopefully to the Western Allies only. He therefore sent Gen. Alfred Jodl, the German Chief of Staff, to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims to accomplish that goal. Jodl arrived on Sunday evening, May 6. He conferred with his aides Gens. Smith and Strong, emphasizing that the Germans were willing, indeed anxious, to surrender to the West, but not to the Red Army. Doenitz, he said, would order all German troops remaining on the Western Front to cease firing no matter what SHAEF did about the offer to surrender. Smith replied that the surrender had to be a general one to all the Allies. Jodl then asked for forty-eight hours “in order to get the necessary instructions to all their outlying units.” Smith said that was impossible. After the talks dragged on for over an hour, Smith put the problem to Eisenhower.

Eisenhower felt that Jodl was trying to gain time so that more German soldiers and civilians could get across the Elbe and escape the Russians. He told Smith to inform Jodl that “he would break off all negotiations and seal the western front preventing by force any further westward movement of German soldiers and civilians” unless Jodl signed the surrender document. But he also decided to grant the forty-eight-hour delay before announcing the surrender, as Jodl requested.

Smith took Eisenhower’s reply to Jodl, who thereupon sent a cable to Doenitz, explaining the situation and asking permission to sign. Doenitz was enraged; he characterized Eisenhower’s demands as “sheer extortion.” He nevertheless felt impelled to accept them, and was consoled somewhat by the thought that the Germans could still save many troops from the Russians during the forty-eight-hour delay. Just past midnight, therefore, he cabled Jodl: “Full power to sign in accordance with conditions as given has been granted by Grand Admiral Doenitz.”

At 2A.M. on May 7, Generals Smith, Frederick Morgan, Bull, Spaatz, Tedder, a French representative, and Gen. Ivan Susloparoff, the Russian liaison officer at SHAEF, gathered in the second-floor recreation room of the Ecole Professionelle et Technique de Garçons, Reims. Strong was there to serve as translator. The war room was L-shaped, with only one small window; otherwise, the walls were covered with maps. Pins, arrows, and other symbols showed how completely Germany had been overrun. It was a relatively small room; the Allied officers had to squeeze past one another to get to their assigned chairs, gathered around a heavy oak table. When they had all sat down, Jodl, accompanied by an aide, was led into the room. Tall, perfectly erect, immaculately dressed, his monocle in place, Jodl looked the personification of Prussian militarism. He bowed stiffly. Strong found himself, to his own surprise, feeling a bit sorry for him.  While the somewhat elaborate procedures for the signing went on, Eisenhower waited in his adjacent office, pacing and smoking. The signing took a half hour.  In the war room Jodl was delivering the German nation into the hands of the Allies and officially acknowledging that Nazi Germany was dead; outside, spring was bursting forth, promising new life.

Eisenhower knew that he should feel elated, triumphant, joyful, but all he really felt was dead beat. He had hardly slept in three days; it was the middle of the night; he just wanted to get it over with. At 2:41A.M. , Strong led Jodl into Eisenhower’s office. Eisenhower sat down behind his desk. Jodl bowed, then stood at attention. Eisenhower asked Jodl if he understood the terms and was ready to execute them. Jodl said yes. Eisenhower then warned him that he would be held personally accountable if the terms were violated. Jodl bowed again and left.

Eisenhower went out into the war room, gathered the SHAEF officers around him (aides Kay Summersby and Capt. Harry Butcher managed to sneak in too), and photographers were called in to record the event for posterity. Eisenhower then made a short newsreel and radio recording. When the newsmen left, Smith said it was time to send a message to the CCS. Everyone had a try at drafting an appropriate document. “I tried one myself,” Smith later recalled, “and like all my associates, groped for resounding phrases as fitting accolades to the Great Crusade and indicative of our dedication to the great task just completed.” Eisenhower quietly watched and listened. Each draft was more grandiloquent than the last. The Supreme Commander finally thanked everyone for his efforts, rejected all the proposals, and dictated the message himself. “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.” He had managed to grin while the newsreel cameras were on, to hold up the pens in a V-for-Victory sign, to walk without a limp. After signing the last message he slumped visibly. “I suppose this calls for a bottle of champagne,” he sighed.  Someone brought one in; it was opened to feeble cheers; it was flat. Utter weariness now descended; everyone went to bed.

It was not at all like the image Eisenhower had held before him for three years.  From the time he left Mamie in June 1942, he had sustained himself with the thought of this moment. “When the war ends”-the image of that magic moment had kept him going. When the Germans surrendered, then all would be right again. The world would be secure, he could go home, his responsibilities would be over, his duty done. He could sit beside a lazy stream with nothing but a cane pole and a bobber, and Mamie there with him, so that he could tell her about all the funny things that had happened that he had not had time to write about.  By early 1945, he had been forced to modify the fantasy somewhat, as he realized that he would have to remain in Germany for some months at least, as head of the American occupying forces. Still, he clung to the thought that Mamie could be with him immediately after the shooting stopped. Now he had the sinking feeling that even that was not going to be possible.

As to escaping responsibility, decision-making, and the burden of command, he had already had to face the fact that such a release was impossible. Worst of all, he already feared that world security was threatened. There had been too many of his own officers who listened with approval to the German whisperings about an anti-communist alliance; on the other side, the Russian suspicions about Western motives struck Eisenhower as bordering on paranoia (even before he went to bed, Eisenhower received a message that said the Russians would not accept the surrender signed in Reims and insisted on another signing, in Berlin). It made him wonder if it would be possible after all to cooperate with them in rebuilding Europe. Going to bed on that morning of May 7, Eisenhower felt as flat as the champagne.