The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (46 page)

He wants Colville to stay and heed. The secretary sees this. Churchill waits while Colville sets the tray aside and folds to the wooden bench placed in the bathroom for secretaries. Colville is familiar with the telegram Churchill wields, as he is with all the documents curling in the damp above the bathwater. But certain things by their nature deserve to be shouted about. Churchill has served this function publicly in England for fifty years.

“The man’s a braggart and a fool. How he never got himself shot as such is something I do not understand!”

Churchill waves a dripping arm. “He’s got his orders from Eisenhower. Mop up the Ruhr pocket before any attempt to head east. Right! Clear enough. Then his army starts making progress. Good! Bully! The Hun is collapsing. Marvelous! But what does Monty do? Does the good Field Marshal just go about his job and keep his head down? Does he keep his eyes on the prize and his lips tight?”

Colville shakes his head. “No.”

Churchill pulls up short and scowls. His secretary should know better than to assist in the Prime Minister’s storytelling.

“No.” Churchill draws the word out, like a lesson. He pauses, takes another deep drag on the cigar. As punishment, he might not continue the tale.

Too much momentum and aggravation push him past the point of petty silence.

“No! By God, he sends Ike this. This!” Churchill rattles the page once, then shoves it away from his eyes to read without glasses:

i have ordered ninth and second armies armored and mobile forces forward at once to get through to the elbe with utmost speed and drive. the situation looks good and events should begin to move rapidly in a few days.

my tactical headquarters move to northwest op bonninghardt on thursday, march 29. thereafter . . . my hq will move to wese-münster-widenbruck-herford-Hannover, thence by autobahn to berlin, I hope.

Churchill swings his cheroot about as though fighting off a wasp.

“Thence to Berlin. For God’s sake, why not just wave a red flag in front of a bull?”

Colville says, “Eisenhower doesn’t want an Englishman in Berlin.”

“No!” Churchill jerks with the word, water spills over the lip of the tub. Colville stands to avoid getting his pants wet.

“He and Roosevelt want a damn Russian in Berlin, and if this keeps up that’s what we’re all going to get!”

“Quite.” Colville picks up the tray and drained glass. “Excuse me, Prime Minister.” The secretary retreats and closes the door behind him. Churchill champs on the cigar. He leans back against the warm porcelain of the tub. Colville, he thinks; the man keeps his nerve when someone gets blown up next to him but won’t stay in the bathroom with a little temper. Hell with it.

Churchill sets Montgomery’s telegram on the table with the other papers. He sighs and glances down at his bare chest. His skin is blushed from the hot water and his anger. The pocket watch ticks, the water stills and steams.

Monty and Eisenhower.

Things have gotten so rotten between the two, they don’t even talk anymore, just exchange curt cables. Monty completely misjudged the situation with this last little note. Eisenhower paid him back in spades.

Churchill fingers the sheets before him. His head is too low, sunk against the back of the tub, to see which one is which. He shoves his legs under him to push higher. There it is. Not much as turning points go, just a thin sheet. But history’s not always written in the blood of rolling heads. Paper is the equal to steel as the stuff of momentous events.

There. Supreme Commander Allied Forces telegram number 252.

SCAF 252. Sent directly from General Eisenhower to Marshal Stalin.

“How dare he,” mutters Churchill, sliding back into the water with a reptilian malice. “How bloody dare he.”

A direct communication between a military leader and a foreign head of state. Outside the bounds. Beyond the General’s authority. Damned awkward. Even worse, Eisenhower deliberately circumvented all proper channels, neglecting to first contact anyone on the Combined Chiefs of Staff or even a single soul in the U.S. or British governments. London only found out about it secondhand, through copies distributed “for information.” Eisenhower didn’t even consult his own British chief deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Tedder. He just charged ahead and reached out to Joe Stalin.

Churchill chews the nub of his cigar, mulling over the words on Ike’s cable:

my immediate operations are designed to encircle and destroy the enemy defending the ruhr. i estimate this phase will end late in april or even earlier, and my next task will be to divide the enemy forces by joining hands with your forces. the best axis on which to effect this junction would be erfurt-leipzig-dresden. i believe this is the area to which main german government departments are being moved. it is along this axis that i propose to make my main effort.

Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden?

For what?

To head off the mythical Southern Redoubt? Nazis in the Alps? Foolishness, backed by scraps of evidence. These are German government workers on the move, not armed combatants. It’s a wild-goose chase if ever there was one.

Without advising anyone, without a by-your-leave, Eisenhower has changed longstanding, mutually agreed-upon plans. Instead of making for Berlin across Germany’s northern plains with Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army, which has been specially reinforced for the task, Eisenhower has shifted the thrust of the offensive to Bradley through the middle, one hundred miles south of Berlin!

This is a dangerous incursion into global and political policy, domains that are strictly cordoned off for Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. Off-limits to Eisenhower, a military leader.

By gad, there’s going to be dancing in Moscow.

How can the Americans be so muddleheaded? If Berlin is left to the Russians, there’ll be absolutely no dealing with them after the war. The Soviets are poised to enter Vienna next and overrun Austria. Stalin is already beginning to feel the Red Army has done everything to win the war, that the Western Allies have accomplished little but divert some German divisions away from the Eastern Front. With Eisenhower’s telegram, a difficult postwar situation in Europe has become almost untenable. At this late juncture the choice of military targets may well determine the political future of European democracy Why can’t Roosevelt see this? Is he so taken by his desire to be gentle with the Reds that he’s forgone any possibility of ever being firm with them?

There’s no document to prove it, but Churchill does not question that Eisenhower’s cable to Stalin is just one more expression of Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin. More of Uncle Sam’s unsightly and dangerous courtship of Uncle Joe. Of course Eisenhower knows Roosevelt’s political agenda as well as anyone. George Marshall, Roosevelt, Ike. They’re all on the same bloody page. And that page says, Go ahead, Stalin. Take Berlin. Take whatever you like.

Churchill sinks lower into the water until his chin is just above it. He blows smoke across the surface, watching it shove the steam out of the way.

This couldn’t come at a worse time. In the nastiest sort of language Stalin is accusing the West of negotiating behind his back with the Germans in Switzerland. Molotov is being withheld from the UN’s first assembly in San Francisco. Poland is being dismembered right before our eyes, the rest of eastern Europe is being suffocated. Never before in the history of mankind have two strong nations needed more to present a concerted and solid front to a third.

And Eisenhower picks this critical time—when the war is in its final stages, when historic opportunity and chaos are at their peak—to cause the deepest rupture between England and the U.S. since the American Revolution.

Despite the warmth lapping at him, Churchill feels a chill at the magnitude of Eisenhower’s misstep. The General is wrong. Berlin remains of the utmost military and political importance to the West.

Another telegram on the table—this one from Eisenhower to Montgomery—is the last straw. It strips the Ninth U.S. Army from Monty’s control. Ike is returning General Simpson’s powerful force to Bradley in the center, the new site of Ike’s
main effort.
Whatever happened to the agreement at Malta, when that main effort was clearly stated as Berlin?

How perfect, thinks Churchill. Everything falls in place for Eisenhower. Keep the glory for the Yanks. Exploit the breakthrough at Remagen in the center, give fair-haired-boy Bradley the priority. Claim to be cutting the Nazis off from a retreat to the mountains. Stick it to Montgomery. And the whole time, Ike’s telling the world he’s making purely military decisions. Poppycock! The political mollycoddling and personal one-upmanship behind this decision to abandon Berlin are so thick they foam.

With SCAF 252 Eisenhower has preempted every possibility, cut off any decision but his own. Monty’s been hamstrung to the point where he can’t take Berlin even if it becomes available. He’s stuck in the north, “mopping up.”

Churchill lifts a hand out of the water. He makes a small, useless splash against the tub wall.

The Grand Alliance—so hopeful and interwoven in the beginning, so laden with possibilities—is in bitter decline.

~ * ~

March 30, 1945, 5:40
p.m.

Stalin’s office,

the Kremlin

Moscow

before the meeting stalin has his desk cleared of all documents
and maps. This is not to protect state secrets; his purpose is to impress upon the coming American and British officials that he has no need of papers, he remembers everything. Stalin rules not with edicts but with a word.

He waits with his pipe lit, pacing through haze along the bank of high windows. The shades are pulled, always. Stalin is not one to gaze onto dusky courtyards for inspiration or rest. In his life he has done his work in prison cells and fugitive caves. Darkness and close quarters have kept him alive more than a few times.

When his aide knocks, Stalin moves to the chair behind his desk. He leans back.

“Yes.”

The door opens, the pipsqueak secretary announces the delegation.

“Show them in.”

Stalin changes his mind. He will stand when the visitors enter.

The first through the door is Major General John Deane, Chief of the U.S. Military Mission in Moscow. At Deane’s elbow is his British counterpart Admiral Ernest Archer. Behind them are the two ambassadors of Stalin’s allies, Averell Harriman and Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr. The ambassadors are in the rear, Stalin notes.

“Gentlemen.” Stalin says this in English and rises while they cross to him. There is no carpet in his office, little comfort, the chairs he offers the Western dignitaries are like his own, plain and hard-backed. The true Soviet citizen is a Spartan.

All the men take their seats. Stalin’s interpreter enters and moves behind Stalin with little noise, padding like a geisha, bent and humble. Harriman speaks passable Russian, but Stalin wants to know after the meeting what these men say among themselves in English.

Stalin begins.

“You have a telegram from General Eisenhower for me.”

General Deane holds across his lap a red leather pouch. He does not react to Stalin’s invocation, doesn’t scramble to open the pouch and hand the cable over. He seems to want something.

Stalin sets his pipe aside. “I’m told it was warm today. Is that so?”

Deane makes a sound, a little burst through his nose. This is a tiny laugh.

“Quite nice, Marshal.”

“Spring is coming. May I offer you gentlemen something to drink?”

“No, thank you, Marshal Stalin.” Ambassador Harriman speaks. “We won’t take too much of your time. Yes, we do have a personal message from General Eisenhower for you. General Deane?”