GOtterdammerung
The Last Battle. By Cornelius Ryan. (Collins, 45s.)
A RECENT issue of The Times Literary Supple- ment, devoted entirely to the writing of history, made a number of very scathing com- ments on the development of the historical `best-seller,' especially in the United States. Mr Ryan has already one of this genre to his credit, an immensely successful study of D-Day, The Longest Day. The Last Battle is the second
of a planned series of studies of five of the major battles of this century. It is certainly
destined for the same kind of success as its pre- decessor; and it will no doubt earn from academic historians the same mixture of sneer and patronising comment that the TLS dis- tributed on the genre as a whole.
Such an attitude would be distinctly out of place. Mr Ryan's latest book does have, it is true, some of the faults of the genre to which it belongs. But it deserves to be treated with all the respect due to the major work of research it is. This is no exercise in 'instant history,' thrown together from a few interviews and ill- digested official histories. The basis of Mr Ryan's work is personal testimony rather than docu- mentation. But the witnesses he has interviewed, over 2,000 or so, include virtually every major actor in his story, including the principal Soviet commanders. For the last battle Mr Ryan de- scribes is the battle for Berlin in March and April 1945; and his theme is the sequence of events and misunderstandings which led to its being captured by Russians rather than by British or American forces, the efforts of the victors and the sufferings of the defeated in the storm and rape (the word is judiciously chosen) of Berlin.
The origins of the present status of Berlin inevitably provide Mr Ryan with one theme for his early chapters, reflected in the dedication of the whole work to Peter Fechter, the young East Berliner shot and left to bleed to death in full sight of West Berliners by the Berlin Wall.
Mr Ryan's main new evidence here bears on the process by which the separate occupation zones were settled; he shows Roosevelt deter- mined at one stage on an American zone in North-West Germany which should stretch as far as Berlin. The proposal got lost in his own failure to get his soldiers and the State Depart- ment to work together and foundered on the total inability of the American military to under- stand the interrelationship of military and politi- cal considerations. As a result, the British draft, which gave Britain her present area of occupa- tion of Germany, and advanced the boundary of the Soviet zone of occupation to the Elbe, mon general acceptance.
The decision operated in its turn on the con- tinuing anti-political stand of the American mili- tary to dictate the area in which the battle for Berlin was to be fought. Eisenhower, as Supreme Commander, scotched Montgomery's plan for a single all-out drive for Berlin and halted his own troops when they were already across the Elbe and only the rag-tag and bobtail of Hitler Youth enthusiasts, training cadres and camp followers of General Wenck's Twelfth Army stood in their way. The bitterest of Churchill's protests failed to reach or influence the dying Roosevelt; and Eisenhower's own men and generals even were left bitter and incredulous by the orders which denied them a final triumph to crown their efforts and ended their war, not with a bang, but a series of whimpers.
As a further irony of history, Stalin did not believe that Eisenhower did not propose to make the capture of Berlin a primary objective. His own false assurances, that Berlin was regarded as only a 'secondary objective' by the Soviet authorities, were, however, believed by the SHAEF commanders, in their obsession with the dangers of a mythological Nazi redoubt in the Alps. There was, however, nothing secondary about the final Soviet drive for Berlin, the race between the army groups of Marshals Koniev and Zhukov whose rivalry Stalin deliberately incited, though in the end he gave Zhukov the prize.
If Mr Ryan's book has a hero, however, it is neither Zhukov nor Koniev, nor the thwarted and frustrated Americans, halted in their head- long drive for Berlin by Eisenhower's myopia and Roosevelt's death. It is Colonel General Heinrici, the devout professional soldier who fought the Russians on the one side and Hitler and his fantasy-crazed entourage with his dreams of a GOtterdiirmnerung, a final destruction of the German people which had failed him, on the other. It was Heinrici who fought both Koniev and Zhukov to a temporary standstill outside Berlin; who refused to turn Berlin itself into a Stalingrad, to be fought street by street for a cause which was totally lost and a Fiihrer he despised; and who risked his life and earned disgrace and dismissal by ordering his troops to retreat and not to die, as Hitler desired them to, at their posts, to buy him one more day of fantasy. Heinrici's detailed notes and his memoirs, together with the Russian evidence, make the core of this book. And when the stage is given to him, the book is alive with a fascination which puts it among the best writings the Second World War has engendered.
But this, we used to be told, is the century of the common man. And there is an unfortu- nate literary convention for books like Mr Ryan's, that the common people must be allowed to speak. As a device it can be effective only in the hands of a genius—which Mr Ryan is not. Instead we have eye-witness reports of what the battle meant to a random collection of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people, spatch- cocked together and thrown raw and undigested into the middle of a narrative whose success de- pends-en its scale, its pace and its staggering immensity and the uniqueness of the author's vision. The effect is to reduce history to the level of mere second-hand reportage, to debase the best kind of journalism to the level of the small- town gazette. A comparison between Professor Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler, which is history, or the late Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe, which is one of the greatest journalistic works on the period, and Mr Ryan's works, shows the depths of banality into which this unfortunate literary convention has, in places, betrayed him.
The pity is that Mr Ryan's witnesses are intelli- gently chosen and often interesting in their own right. There is intentional irony in the choice of the two convinced Communists, the woman whose first contact with the Soviet troops whose advent she had so eagerly awaited led to her rape, and the man whose 'fascist-inspired' ulcers returned worse than ever on his first encounter with the new Soviet administrators of his town. The Jew whom the Russians were about to im- prison after he had survived two years of hiding in Berlin, saving himself by recital of the oldest Hebrew prayer, the Sh'mah Yisroil, provides only lise most dramatic of Mr Ryan's many vignettes. ita some places their use is effective; but the general effect is to slow down the movement and dissipate the tension.
Mr Ryan's book, despite its trappings and stale conventions, deserves to be taken seriously, not only by the mass audience at which it is lamed, but by everyone interested in the writing Of recent history and the course of our recent past. He makes Hitler's death clear beyond doubt —the corpse's teeth were identified by the dentists assistant who had so recently taken part in the removal of an infected wisdom tooth. He has amassed some excellent photographs of the men and the battleground he describes.-He has produced evidence which other historians have failed to uncover; and he has persuaded the Russians to talk to him and to let them- selves be quoted in a way no one has before. His book should be a well-deserved success.
D. C. WATT
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