General Bradley’s 12th Army Group, now with the US Ninth Army numbering nearly one million men, completed the encirclement of the Ruhr on 2 April, trapping Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B, with 325,000 men. Leaving a part of the Ninth and the First to clean up the Ruhr pocket, the rest of Bradley’s Group drove through central Germany, heading toward the Elbe and Leipzig-Dresden. Eisenhower’s instructions to Bradley ordered him to exploit any opportunity to seize a bridgehead on the Elbe, ‘and be prepared to conduct operations beyond the Elbe’. Bradley’s orders to the Ninth Army’s Lieutenant General William Simpson went a step further: ‘and be prepared to continue the advance on BERLIN’. General Simpson, ‘Big Simp’, was elated. ‘My people were keyed up. We’d been the first to the Rhine and now we were going to be the first to Berlin. All along we thought of just one thing – capturing Berlin, going through and meeting the Russians on the other side.’ His plan was to reach Hildesheim, southeast of Hannover, within a few days, and then ‘get an armored and an infantry division set up on the autobahn running just above Magdeburg on the Elbe to Potsdam, where we’ll be ready to close in on Berlin.’

The commander of just about every other unit in the Group had his own ideas. The Second Armored ‘Hell on Wheels’ Division, the ‘Rag-Tag Circus’ of the 83rd Infantry Division, the Fifth Armored ‘Victory’ Division, the British Seventh Armoured ‘Desert Rats’ Division: all wanted the kill for themselves. The competition was so fierce that it sometimes resulted in furious arguments between the various commanders and their subordinates. When units of the 83rd Infantry and the Second Armored Divisions reached the Weser River at the same time on 5 April, a bitter row erupted over which one would cross it first. The two commanders finally reached a compromise: they would cross simultaneously, their units sandwiched together. But the commander of the ‘Hell on Wheels’ division, Major General Isaac White, was still incensed. ‘No damned infantry division is going to beat my outfit to the Elbe!’

Their anticipation was heightened by the speed of the Allied troops’ advance, and by the relatively light resistance. Not that the advance was without risk; some of the engagements were as ferocious as anything these soldiers had encountered since Normandy. But the resistance was very uneven. Some areas surrendered with hardly a fight. Civilian authorities in particular hoped to avoid the destruction of attempts to resist the inevitable capitulation. Other units, especially the SS, put up a tenacious struggle, exacting stiff Allied casualties. The city of Detmold in the Teutoburger Woods, for example, was the scene of some prolonged and very bloody combat before the American infantry units succeeded in pacifying it; to their chagrin they had discovered that Detmold was the home of a large SS training centre. But for much of the campaign, the Allied advance met only very sporadic, unorganised, and dispirited resistance. For most troops of the German 12th Army, which bore the brunt of this central Allied thrust, the war was next to over, and they were only too happy to have the opportunity to surrender to the British and Americans rather than to the Soviets. Captain Ben Rose of the US 113th Mechanized Cavalry Group recalled how during their drive to the east, he witnessed some German officers, in full dress uniform, jogging alongside the column, ‘trying to get someone to notice them long enough to surrender their side arms’. The GIs, however, anxious to keep their momentum, simply waved the Germans to the rear.

The airborne units, too, though increasingly fearful that they would miss the action and be relegated to police duty – or worse, ‘saved’ for a drop on Tokyo – had their own plans for Berlin. On 25 March, the commanders of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the British First Airborne Corps were briefed on a secret contingency operation for a drop on Berlin. The timing was uncertain, dependent on the speed of the ground forces’ advance, but the 101st’s Operations Chief, Colonel Harry Kinnard, thought that they could be in Berlin within five hours of receiving the green light. No one expected it to be easy; initial plans called for 1500 transport planes, 20,000 paratroopers, 3000 support fighters, and more than 1000 gliders.

The plans for a hostile drop were never put into operation. But the air forces were not left without any role to play in the defeat of Berlin. For over a year and a half, the city had been subjected to probably the most punishing continuous bombing campaign of the war. For the Royal Air Force, the ‘Battle for Berlin’ began on 23 August 1943, when 719 Lancaster bombers took off from airfields all over central England, flew to Berlin and dumped 1800 tons of bombs on the city. By the spring of 1944, the RAF alone had flown over 10,000 sorties over Berlin, dropping more than 30,000 tons of bombs on or near it. By that time, the US Army Air Force had joined in the attacks with daytime raids, while the British continued to bomb the city at night. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, head of the RAF’s Bomber Command, firmly believed that an intensive bombing of the Reich’s nerve centre and largest city could by itself bring about Germany’s surrender, precluding the need for a prolonged land campaign. ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost between us 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war,’ he had written to Churchill in November 1943. To his superior, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, he wrote: ‘It appears that the Lancaster force alone should be sufficient, but only just sufficient, to produce in Germany, by 1 April 1944, a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable.’ Harris was somewhat overly optimistic, and found virtually no agreement. In line with the Casablanca Directive of January 1943, the real goal in the bombing campaign was to destroy as much of Germany’s military forces as possible and to demoralise the civilian population.

Even from the air, in any event, it was not an easy campaign. The sheer size of the city struck fear into every bomber crew that flew over her. Nicknamed simply ‘the Big City’ by flight crews, this was the third largest city in the world at the time, covering over 1400 km2 (540 square miles). As Germany’s capital and largest city, Berlin was naturally heavily defended; as the showcase for Hitler’s grandiose ‘Thousand-Year Reich’, those defences were built on an equally grandiose, monumental scale. In 1940, Albert Speer, the state’s chief architect and one of Hitler’s closest personal advisors, had designed three massive, fortress-like buildings which became the centrepiece of the city’s air defences. Each building covered an area of roughly a city block and was approximately 13 stories high, topped with gun platforms containing four pairs of 128mm (Sin) guns capable of firing a salvo every 90 seconds to a ceiling of 14,800m (48,556ft), with a kill zone of 240m (260yds) across. The three Flakturme (Flak Towers), located in the Tiergarten, Friedrichshain and Humboldthain districts, all had separate floors for ammunition stores, a hospital, and an air-raid shelter; the Tiergarten tower also had a floor for Berlin’s most valuable art treasures. The Humboldthain tower was connected to the U-Bahn (subway) system; together, the tower and the subway station could hold up to 21,000 people during air-raids. So well-stocked were the towers, and so impregnable the 2.6m (8ft) thick, reinforced concrete walls with their steel-shuttered windows, that the 100-man Wehrmacht garrisons stationed in each one thought they could hold out for a year, whatever happened to the rest of Berlin. Indeed, after the war the Allies found the towers very difficult to destroy; the French tried, and failed, three times to blow up the tower in their sector. These towers and the other anti-aircraft systems organised in two rings around the city produced a flak area over the city measuring nearly 65km (40 miles) across, and the searchlight ring around it was over 95km (60 miles) wide. Martin Middlebrook quotes Flight Lieutenant R.B. Leigh from the 156th Squadron in his authoritative history of the British Bomber Command’s Berlin campaign:

‘Lying in the nose of a Lancaster on a visual bomb run over Berlin was probably the most frightening experience of my lifetime. Approaching the target, the city appeared to be surrounded by rings of searchlights, and the Flak was always intense. The run-up seemed endless, the minutes of flying ‘straight and level’ seemed like hours and every second I expected to be blown to pieces. I sweated with fear, and the perspiration seemed to freeze on my body.’

By the eve of the land battle, tens of thousands of bombing sorties, and the loss of hundreds of bombers and their crews later, Berlin was a badly pummelled city. Over 15km2 (6 square miles) of the city lay in rubble; at least 52,000 Berliners had been killed. But the city’s many factories continued to operate at 65 per cent capacity and, in the words of Cornelius Ryan, life in the city went on with ‘a kind of lunatic normalcy’. However, with their government displaying an increasing level of lunacy, and with millions of enemy troops surging towards their city, for the Berliners, no amount of ‘normal’ daily routine could obscure that the end of the world as they knew it was at hand.

While the Germans fully expected the main threat to come from the Soviets in the east, they were aware as well of the Anglo-American troops driving towards them from the West. Although many of them nursed a clandestine hope that the Western Allies would beat the Soviets to Berlin, they weren’t going to leave the capital’s western approach undefended. In early April, General Walther Wenck, formerly Chief of Staff to General Guderian at the OKH and then briefly Himmler’s Chief of Staff at Army Group Vistula, was called back from convalescent leave for wounds sustained in a February automobile accident to take command of the newly organised 12th Army. He was given a two-part mission. His primary task was to shore up the rapidly receding western front between the armies of Field Marshals Ernst Busch and Albrecht Kesselring, Commanders in Chief North-west and West respectively, now taking a severe beating from the British and North American forces racing eastwards with barely a pause since the landings at Normandy in June 1944. But Hitler had also envisioned a plan whereby Wenck’s 12th Army would launch a/’ massive counter-attack against General Bradley’s 12th Army Group, now making rapid progress toward the Elbe. The idea was to slice a 320km (200 mile) swath straight through General William Simpson’s Ninth Army to the Ruhr pocket, thereby releasing the 300,000 men of Model’s Army Group B and splitting the armies of Montgomery and Bradley. Hitler wanted to achieve this improbable feat by appropriating a Soviet trick. He instructed the officers of the new 12th Army to round up 200 nondescript Volkswagen automobiles and use them to infiltrate the enemy lines and disrupt the rear to effect the breakthrough.

Even if the plan had been realistic when formulated, it never got the chance to be tested: the front was moving too rapidly eastwards. Indeed, Wenck had some trouble catching up with his new headquarters as it continually retreated to the East. He received a rude shock, and a quick education in the reality of the military situation when, on his way to assuming his new command, he attempted to stop in his hometown of Weimar to withdraw his family’s savings from the bank: American tanks from General George S. Patton’s Third Army were already there. Within two days of Hitler’s elaboration of his plan, on 13 April, the Allies succeeded in cutting Model’s forces in the Ruhr pocket in two and capturing the eastern half. Model had already told his troops that he was dissolving Army Group B on his own authority to save them the humiliation of surrender; it was left to each man whether to surrender individually, continue fighting, or attempt to make his way home through the Allied lines.

Wenck finally caught up with his headquarters near Rosslau, some 75km (46 miles) south-west of Berlin. Positioned along a 200km (125 miles) front from Wittenberge down the River Elbe to Leipzig, the 12th Army was supposed to have been made up of 10 divisions, some 200,000 soldiers, composed of Panzer Training Corps officers, cadets, Volkssturmer, and the remains of 11th Army, which had been involved in some ferocious fighting in the Harz Mountains. But much of Wenck’s army, he quickly discovered, existed only on paper. Some of the units were still in the process of being organised but, at most, he had at his disposal roughly five and a half divisions, with 55,000 men. These were equipped with a few self-propelled guns, about 40 personnel carriers, and a number of fixed artillery positions at bridges and around cities like Magdeburg. The outlook was not encouraging. But the situation throughout what remained of the Reich was bleak, and Wenck, the Wehrmacht’s youngest general, faced it with surprising vigour and imagination. Determined to hold the Western Allies at the Elbe for as long as possible, while at the same time freeing up as many men as possible to help shield Berlin from the Soviets, he intended to use the most experienced of the 12th’s few and green forces as a sort of mobile shock troop, shuttling them from crisis to crisis. To this end he positioned his best forces in Magdeburg and other centrally located urban centres.

While the Soviets prepared for their Berlin offensive, the Anglo-American forces continued to race eastwards across north-central Germany. By 11 April the US Second Armored Division had reached the River Elbe at Magdeburg. The advance had been so swift that the forward reconnaissance units, reaching the western suburbs, had careened right into crowds of terrified shoppers. To the north of Magdeburg, the US Fifth Armored Division was poised to seize Tangermunde, just over 60km (38 miles) from the western edge of Berlin. To the south, American forces had succeeded in crossing the Elbe at two points. The Second Armored Division had gained Schonebeck, although not before the Germans blew the bridge. Taking Combat Command D, Brigadier General Sidney Hinds managed to force a crossing at nearby Westerhusen, putting three battalions across by the evening of the 12th and attempting to reinforce the bridgehead via an improvised cable ferry. On the morning of the 14th, however, armoured units of General Wenck’s 12th Army suddenly attacked with ferocious intensity. Wenck’s idea for mobile shock forces proved to be very effective, as his inexperienced but eager soldiers wreaked havoc on the Americans’ newly won positions. With the cable ferry knocked out in one of the first salvoes, the desperate GIs radioed for air support. Few planes were forthcoming, however, as the advance had been so swift that the airstrips had been left too far behind for effective support. By midday, General Hinds ordered a full retreat from the Elbe’s eastern bank, though it took days for all of the survivors to trickle back to the western bank. In the end, 304 men had been lost.

Slightly further south, at Barby, roughly 24km (15 miles) south-east of Magdeburg, another American unit had a good deal more success. On 13 April, soldiers of the 83rd Infantry Division threw a battalion across the river on pontoons and, virtually unopposed, hurriedly began construction of a treadway bridge. It was completed by the end of the day and a painted sign honouring the new American president, sworn in the night before, graced its western approach: ‘Truman Bridge. Gateway to Berlin. Courtesy of the 83rd Infantry Division’. Word of Eisenhower’s determination not to use AEF (Allied Expeditionary Force) troops in the capture of Berlin had not yet been given to the commanders on the ground, and the men of the 83rd, like all Allied units closing in on the Elbe, were pumped up for the drive to the ‘Jerry’ capital. Although Eisenhower believed that Berlin’s value as a military objective had diminished significantly, he had told Montgomery and Churchill that if an opportunity presented itself to take the capital ahead of the Soviets without excessive costs, it would be taken. The 83rd’s new bridgehead on the Elbe seemed to present just such a possibility. General Simpson’s Ninth Army was now barely 100km (60 miles) from Berlin; somewhat further than the Red Army, but facing unexpectedly light resistance. When he was apprised of the 83rd’s success by General Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, Eisenhower asked, ‘Brad, what do you think it might cost us to break through from the Elbe and take Berlin?’ Bradley was sure that the drive from the bridgehead to the outskirts of Berlin would not be too costly, but he was convinced that the battle for the city itself would be brutal. And, like the SCAF, he was concerned about penetrating too deeply into the future Soviet zone of occupation and committing men to gain positions from which they would have to withdraw. ‘I estimate that it might cost us 100,000 men,’ he told Eisenhower, adding, ‘It would be a pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective, especially when we know that we’ve got to pull back and let the other fellow take over.’

Eisenhower was also disinclined to order a drive on Berlin because of his forces’ rapid advance. Their supply lines were stretched dangerously thin. Land transport was practically non-existent; all but one railroad line across the Rhine were destroyed. To supply the advancing armies by air, the Troop Carrier Command had to keep hundreds of C-47s flying round the clock. Furthermore, it wasn’t only the Allied military forces that SHAEF now had to concern itself with. As they pushed deeper and deeper into German territory, the Allies found themselves faced with the new role of occupation government: hundreds of thousands of German PoWs and civilians had to be fed and cared for medically; policing duties had to be arranged for; the repair and maintenance of roads, housing, and water supply had to be organised; and, most unexpectedly, hundreds of thousands of newly liberated, emaciated concentration camp inmates had to be cared for. All of these considerations convinced Eisenhower that his initial decision to leave Berlin to the Red Army was correct. Convinced that the most likely spots for a German last stand were in the alpine ‘National Redoubt’ and Norway, and that the Soviets could best handle Berlin, the Supreme Commander issued a three-part order: to ‘hold a firm front in the central area on the Elbe’; to dispatch Montgomery’s forces north from Hamburg to Lubeck and Denmark; and to ‘initiate a powerful thrust’ by the Sixth Army Group south to meet Soviet forces in the Danube valley and destroy the Nazis’ Bavarian redoubt. ‘Since the thrust on Berlin must await the outcome of the first three above, I do not include it as a part of my plan.’

On 15 April Eisenhower’s orders were transmitted by Bradley to the commander of the Ninth Army, Lieutenant General William Simpson. ‘You must stop on the Elbe. You are not to advance any farther in the direction of Berlin. I’m sorry, Simp, but there it is.’ Simpson was stunned, and, as he later recalled, ‘heartbroken’. He passed the orders down to his Second Armored Division commander, General Hinds, who already had troops back on the eastern side of the Elbe, this time thanks to the 83rd’s ‘Truman Bridge’. Hinds was reportedly so flummoxed that he momentarily forgot his military discipline. ‘No sir,’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s not right. We’re going to Berlin.’ Simpson was deeply pained to have to throw water on his officer’s enthusiasm. He told Hinds that he could keep some of his men in their eastern bank positions, but added that they were not to go any farther. ‘This is the end of the war for us,’ he said.