The Germans hung on in Amsterdam, in Breslau, and in the south, defying the Allied advances. They fought harder on the eastern front, preferring to surrender to what they knew had to be gentler mercies of the Western Allies.
They were right to dread Russian retribution.
Once Konigsberg fell, the Soviets concentrated three entire army “Fronts,” or groups of armies, in an arc for the final assault on Berlin. The Soviets had 2,500,000 men, 6,000 tanks, 7,500 aircraft, 41,000 artillery pieces and more than 3,200 Katyusha multi-rocket launchers. The defenders of Berlin faced them with 100,000 men, including aged veterans in the Volksturrm and teenagers in the Hitler Youth, fewer than 600 tanks, 2,600 artillery pieces, under 700 anti-aircraft guns, and almost no remaining airplanes.
In the early morning of April 16, the Soviet Red Army launched a massive bombardment of the Seelow Heights, east of the city. Miles away, Maurice heard the shells exploding. He and the men in his unit could see the glow from searchlights meant to blind the defenders.
As the sun rose and burned off the mist, they saw black smoke hanging over the city. Though they didn’t know it, to the west the Americans and British were bombing Berlin from the sky.
Despite the overwhelming superiority of men and machines, the Red Army got mired in the flooded ground below the Seelow Heights. The Germans responded with a barrage of their own that tore apart the front Soviet ranks. They advanced only six kilometres the first day, losing thousands of men.
The Germans held on for two days. On April 18, 1945, the Fourth Panzer Army fled when the First Belorussian Front broke through their final defences.
The First Ukrainian Front to the south made better progress, taking the city of Forst the first day. It drove west and encircled Berlin, and then turned to attack the capital itself.
On April 20, the captain of Maurice’s new unit—whose name he had not learned, yet—passed on the order for the company to move west. Sometime in the dark predawn, the bombers roared across the Oder, and Maurice watched the flashes and fires in the distance. Once the bombers were gone, “Stalin’s Organs,” the Katyusha rocket launchers, sent volleys of death across the river.
As the sun rose behind them, the Red Army got the orders to move across the river. With rifles ready, Maurice’s unit marched over the bridge behind a group of tanks. He tried not to think about charges under the bridge blowing when they were halfway across, spilling them into the freezing black water below.
But they made it across the river to find, beyond the Soviet positions at the edge of their bridgehead, the torn remnants of the German defences. They passed smoking trucks and tanks, twisted metal, craters of concrete and brick, the remains of bunkers. As the sun rose higher, Maurice saw that the ground appeared to undulate from the river and the roads, and realized the waves were all that was left of trenches and defences made by the Germans. The Soviet shells and rockets had torn up the ground, leaving a scarred, dead landscape. Broken tree stumps poked out of mounds of ash.
Maurice kept his eyes on the back of the man in front of him, away from the body parts in his peripheral vision and his imagination.
The shelling had wrecked the road, as well. Tanks and men had to pick their way around gigantic holes. Men fell down the crumbling sides of bomb craters, to be pulled up by their comrades. Tanks slid down and sent up billowing clouds of dust as they struggled to climb out. Worse were the horses that fell in, pulled by the wagons that toppled over the edge, breaking legs and necks. Corporals and sergeants put them out of their misery as men transferred the contents of their wagons.
Overhead, Soviet fighters buzzed, prowling for a decimated Luftwaffe.
The Germans answered the early morning bombardment with shells bursting behind the leading edge of the Soviet advance, landing with pinpoint accuracy, blasting apart trucks and shredding men.
“Take cover,” the corporal called. The men threw themselves into a shell crater, aiming rifles and submachine guns over the lip. To the west they could see Panzers, Tigers and Stugs sheltering behind broken walls of buildings in the skeleton of a town. A muzzle flashed. A few seconds later and a hundred metres away, debris and dust erupted.
The men in Maurice’s unit hunched low. Somewhere behind him, others readied mortars. A cannon barked, officers yelled commands, and within a minute the Soviet and German armies were engaged in a full artillery duel.
The Germans’ position was hopeless. The Soviets outnumbered the defenders more than ten to one. Maurice watched multiple parallel fiery streaks of Katyushas silence the German artillery in a matter of minutes.
Heavy Soviet KV tanks rumbled past Maurice’s position. A shell hit one, stopping it dead and tearing a hole in its front deck. The tank next to it fired its cannon and accelerated.
More tanks came, diving into the craters and up the other side. “Come on, boys,” the sergeant shouted, and five men jumped onto the deck of a T-34.
Maurice and three other men scrambled onto another tank. Maurice clung to the handlebar on the side. His feet, on the plating over the treads, vibrated as the tank crushed obstacles on the ground.
A man Maurice only knew by his nickname, Hound, clung to the same bar, but his legs dangled over the side, swinging close to the tank treads. Maurice braced his feet as well as he could, tucked his rifle under his left arm and reached for Hound’s arm. The tank jolted at that moment and Maurice’s foot slid close to the edge of the plating. Hound’s right hand let go of the bar. Maurice leaned farther, grabbing the other man’s greatcoat. The tank lurched again and Maurice nearly fell off along with Hound. He tightened his grip on the handlebar and hauled the man up beside him.
Hound’s brown eyes were wide with fear. He stared at Maurice for a long moment, then nodded as he re-established his grip on the handlebar. “Spasivo,” he shouted over the roar of the engine. “Thank you.”
A shell erupted twenty metres behind them, showering them with dust. Maurice nodded as the tank fired its cannon. The explosion shook the whole machine, threatening to knock them off again, and Maurice held onto Hound’s coat with one hand and to the handlebar with the other.
A corporal on the other side of the deck fired his submachine gun forward, joined by the tank’s forward machine gun. The tank accelerated into a cloud of smoke and dust. When it cleared, the men on the deck ducked behind the turret seconds before the tank smashed through a crumbling brick wall.
They were in what may have once been a factory. The corporal on the deck fired a short burst of his submachine gun, and then the rest of the men were shooting at grey-clad soldiers who had been hiding in the shell of the building. Maurice fired at a man in a dark grey uniform when he raised a rifle. The SS man lurched backward as four bullets from different directions hit him at once.
The tank braked hard, sending Maurice tumbling to the ground. He rolled as he hit the ground to absorb the impact and stopped where he was looking into a pair of blue eyes under a flared helmet. Only when he jumped back did he realize that the man who stopped his fall was dead. Maurice grabbed the Luger from the body’s right hand and ran back to the tank.
It cleared the far side of whatever the brick building had been and roared down a street. Maurice wondered for a moment what the name of the town was, but then he heard more gunfire. He ran forward, joining a small group of soldiers looking for cover in the bomb-blasted town. Fires burned on piles of rubble that had once been houses and shops. A grenade detonated to his left and a Soviet soldier fell.
Maurice and three other men threw themselves behind a pile of bricks and broken masonry as a machine gun drew a path in the dust around them. “Snipers,” said one man.