Faust's Metropolis by Alexandra Richie

Author:Alexandra Richie [Richie, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1998-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

XIII

The Fall of Berlin

The entrance they are free

to choose, but not the exit.

(Faust, Part I)

THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE reached its nadir in the terrible Battle of Berlin. It was fought in the spring of 1945, but the crucial decisions which helped to determine its final form were taken much earlier in Washington, London and Moscow and at the Allied conferences at Tehran and Yalta. Allied armies had started to squeeze Europe by early 1944, with the vast Red Army moving towards Berlin from the east, and the Anglo-American forces closing in from the west. The race to defeat Germany had begun.

The western offensive began with the Normandy landings in the summer of 1944. General Eisenhower had moved to England on 16 January to take up the post of Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force for Operation Overlord, and on 6 June 9,500 aircraft and 600 warships crossed the Channel on their way to France in the greatest amphibious operation in military history.1 Within twenty-four hours 176,000 troops were ashore and advancing into German-held territory but Hitler refused to heed the danger. When Avranches fell to the US Eighth Army Corps on 31 July General von Kluge told him it was ‘questionable if the enemy can still be stopped’; he was stripped of his rank and forced to commit suicide. On 25 August, amidst great celebration, General Jacques Leclerc led the French Second Armoured Division into Paris along with the US Fourth Armoured Division. The Canadian First and British Second Armies under Montgomery advanced into Belgium and liberated Brussels on 3 September. In the south the US First Army under General Courtney H. Hodges went into Liège; Patton’s Third Army went east to the river Mosel to meet with General Patch’s French-American Seventh Army, which had fought north from the Riviera. By September the western Allies were only 400 miles from Berlin. But behind the spectacular military success there was a growing rift between the two western powers. The controversy raged over the ultimate question: who should take Berlin.

Churchill saw the city as the ultimate Allied target – to be reached as quickly as possible.2 By 1944, however, Roosevelt and Eisenhower disagreed over this issue. The situation was made more complex by changes in the chain of command. General Montgomery, ‘Monty’, had been forced to relinquish overall command to Eisenhower on 1 September during the Normandy campaign because the Americans were now contributing the bulk of the forces and they did not want an Englishman commanding their troops. Monty deeply resented this and treated Eisenhower with barely concealed disdain. The rift was not caused by a mere clash of personalities; it mirrored the profound shift which had taken place in world power since the American entry into the war. Britain was already being eclipsed by the young and vital great power, which in 1945 would become the first superpower, but the feud between Montgomery and Eisenhower soon began to affect the conduct of the war.3

Montgomery shared Churchill’s view that if Berlin could be taken quickly the ‘knock-out blow’ would win the war.

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