The operational planners in the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) considered it feasible that the Allies would cross the Rhine between October 20 and 25, 1944. Another attack around November 25 would move through the Saarland, cross the Rhine at Mainz, and then speed northward toward the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. Hitler would have to defend that with a concentration of troops, and they would be encircled.5 Thereafter the road to Berlin would be open; all of Germany would not have to be destroyed before the Third Reich came to an end. The demarcation lines for the armies of occupation were already drawn up. Troops would move in to keep the peace, relatively few personnel would be needed, and the defeated country would be administered by “indirect rule.”6
Hitler disrupted this line of thinking with a surprise counterattack that began on December 16. He kept telling his generals that there were political contradictions in the Allied camp and that a shock attack might cause it to collapse.
The Germans assembled 200,000 soldiers and scraped together 600 tanks, some of them taken from the eastern front. They would face 80,000 U.S. troops who had only 400 tanks. As expected, the Wehrmacht pushed the Americans back, creating a bulge in the lines, albeit one that did not break (hence the Battle of the Bulge). Barely a week into the fighting, German forces began running into stiffer resistance and out of supplies. The weather cleared on Christmas Eve, and the Allies then used their superior airpower. The next day Hitler’s commander in chief in the west, General Hasso von Manteuffel, wanted to break off the action.7
Hitler sensed that this was his last chance and tried to restart the counterattack. On December 28 he raised the specter of Communism, telling his commanders that “a victory for our enemies must undoubtedly lead to Bolshevism in Europe.”8
Shortly thereafter, he launched another attack to the south in Alsace, but it failed quickly. Churchill wrote to Stalin on January 6 and wondered if the Western Allies “could count on” an offensive during the month. Stalin replied that his forces had accelerated preparations and, in spite of continuing bad weather, would be ready not later than the second half of the month.9 In fact, the Soviet offensive opened on January 12.10
As it happened, by January 16 the Allied armies in the west that had been pinching together around the “bulge” in the American lines finally came together. It was not possible to trap all enemy forces inside the pocket, as Eisenhower hoped, but the Battle of the Bulge was won.11 Even so, the war was going to take longer to win than anyone had expected, and its end became entangled in politics.
On January 12 the Red Army’s Vistula-Oder offensive was launched in timed sequence using nine army groups. Marshal Zhukov of the First Byelorussian Army Group was deployed in the center, with orders to take what was left of Warsaw and to head straight on for Posnań, thereafter to Berlin. Farther south, Marshal Ivan Konev commanded the First Ukrainian Army Group, and he took aim at Breslau (Wrocław). Between them they had more than 2.25 million men for what was the largest single Soviet operation in the war.
Stavka recognized that because this Warsaw-Berlin corridor was the shortest way to the German capital, it would be heavily defended. In order to stretch out Wehrmacht resources along a wider front, Marshal Rokossovsky led the Second Byelorussian Army Group north in the direction of Danzig, and General Chernyakhovski, in charge of the Third Byelorussian Army Group, set out for Königsberg in East Prussia.
Konev began, Rokossovsky went next, and one day later Zhukov and his troops roared off, with his tank armies making almost one hundred miles in the next twenty-four hours. By January 26, Zhukov was seeking Stalin’s permission to continue to Berlin and soon got the go-ahead. Shortly thereafter Marshal Konev also obtained approval to strike out for Berlin. The first units of Zhukov’s forces reached the Oder River by the end of the month. Troops were able to cross the frozen river, though without their artillery and tanks. On February 4 he ordered those in forward positions to dig in and seek protection from menacing aircraft attacks and sixteen days later, with Stalin in agreement, instructed them to halt.
General Vasily Chuikov, a hero in Stalingrad and one of Zhukov’s best, later said that Zhukov and Stalin were too concerned about being vulnerable, that they should not have called a halt on February 20. Chuikov thought that going right for Berlin would have been feasible and would have saved weeks of war and countless lives. But Stalin, Zhukov, and Konev were more cautious, so victory would have to wait. Some of Konev’s troops fought on for another week and linked up with Zhukov where the Oder and Neisse rivers meet. Then Konev also opted to dig in.12
The Red Army had bypassed Hitler’s “fortress cities,” but they continued to disrupt communication. The heavily defended strongholds like Posnań, Budapest, Danzig, Breslau, Königsberg, and Küstrin tied up the Red Army and slowed its progress. Konev agreed with Zhukov that their armies needed a “quiet period” before storming onward. They had been fighting since January 12, which was forty days and more for some of them, over distances of between 190 and 270 miles. The lines of communication were long, the ranks in the army were depleted, supplies (especially fuel) were far behind, and tanks were in need of maintenance.13
The decision to hold back may have been influenced by Hitler, who ordered the Stargard (Szczeciński) counterattack on February 15, to relieve Soviet pressure on Küstrin at the Oder River. Red Army leaders were surprised, though the German offensive ended after less than three days of inconclusive fighting. That SS leader Heinrich Himmler was in charge of the German side made no difference whatsoever.14
Marshal Zhukov recalled that on March 7 or 8 he was ordered to fly to Moscow, where Stalin told him about Yalta, his suspicions about the Allies’ intentions, and his distrust of Churchill, who preferred to have a “bourgeois” (that is, a liberal democratic) government in Poland.15 In his memoirs, General Sergei Shtemenko, deputy chief of the Red Army’s general staff, writes that Germany was trying at that time to find a separate peace with the United States and Great Britain “behind the back of the Soviet Union.” Given that “special historical situation we could not risk any ill-considered actions.” Stavka and the general staff decided to secure the flanks because, he said, “the political and military consequences of failure in the last stage of the war might turn out to be serious or unrecoverable.” What he meant was that the Western Allies were steadily advancing, and if the Red Army were to take chances and be unable to capture Berlin, then all the sacrifices would have been in vain.16
The Western Allies crossed the Rhine in strength only on March 7, when forces of the U.S. 9th Armored Division under General John Leonard reached the bridge at Remagen and found it largely intact. Four divisions then surged across. Eisenhower could hardly believe the good fortune, for his troops captured 300,000 prisoners, averaging 10,000 per day in the month from the end of February to the end of March.17 The vaunted Siegfried Line of defenses was breached, and by April 1 the Rhine-Ruhr region was encircled in a pincer movement that trapped twenty-one divisions, or another 320,000 troops. That was a greater loss than the Germans had suffered at Stalingrad.18