Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

In the first five days of the war, back in August, in the rapidly converging pincers of Russian armor that encircled Berlin, over two hundred thousand fleeing West Germans had been trapped, then ignored. Of no great strategic interest to the invading Russian generals, the fall of post-Gorbachev Berlin, or rather its instant collapse, as Kiril Marchenko knew, was of enormous psychological and political importance to Moscow. The holy words of John F. Kennedy, though ridiculously ungrammatical, as Marchenko happily pointed out, the phrase meaning “I am a beer” the way the U.S. president had used the words, had once electrified the West. It had been a statement of unrelenting determination by the West, before and after Gorbachev, to maintain its presence in Germany in the hope that one day the two Germanys would be united. Now, playing on Kennedy’s misuse of the phrase, the Russian political officers were reaping a propaganda windfall.

One of the refugees was Leonhard Meir. He had been in West Berlin only a few hours when war broke out. The fifty-seven-year-old shoe salesman from Frankfurt had been sitting at a sidewalk cafe’ off the Kurfürstendamm, sipping a “Berliner” Motte, savoring the taste of the cool, frothy beer, when the first shots of the war in Europe were fired.

An hour later in a rented “Golf” and with two elderly couples who’d waved him down, Leonhard Meir was on the autobahn fleeing the city. The famed air of Berlin, said one of his four passengers, was a “trifle unhealthy” this evening. They were all silent for a second, but the famed Berlin wit, never far from the surface, suddenly exploded and the car was rocked with laughter tinged with hysteria as they headed west with the thousands of other cars, having no option but to go as fast as possible along the 120-mile autobahn through what in the old days West Berliners called the Ozean, the ocean of what used to be East Germany.

One of the women kept talking about the wonderful follies she had been watching at the Europa-Center Ice Rink and how just as a beautiful butterfly number “suspended in the air” was about to begin, all the lights had gone out. She told the story three times in as many minutes, and in the darkness of the car, her husband finally took her hand, pointing out at the ethereal moonlit countryside. “Deep in my heart,” he said, “there has always been only one Germany.” He turned to the others. “Is that not so?”

“Of course,” they all agreed, though Meir didn’t quite know what the hell he meant.

“Some of the fools have turned off their lights,” Meir said. “They think the Russian pilots don’t know where the road is.” He told them he was worried, too, about his son in the army.

“Where is he stationed?” one of the older men asked.

“At Fulda.”

“Mulda?” said the man’s wife. “Oh — I have a friend—”

“Nein,” said her husband, “he said Fulda.”

“Oh—” It was the furthest extension of what had been East Germany into the West.

No one spoke until Leonhard himself broke the silence. “They’ll probably leave the autobahn alone.”

“They have other roads,” said one of the women, but Leonhard didn’t know what she meant. Did she mean that because there were other roads westwards, the Russians wouldn’t bother bombing the autobahn, or did she mean that because there were other roads to carry the Soviet supplies to the west, they could afford to bomb the autobahn and cut off the main escape route from Berlin to western Germany?

“It really was a wonderful show,” the other woman started up again. “So fluid, so graceful, when all of a sudden—”

“ Ja, ja! “ cut in her husband.

“Shh!” said the other woman, looking out the window into the moonlit sky. “Aircraft?”

“Tempelhof is closed,” said her husband irritably.

“That’s what I mean.”

The traffic began to slow despite the strictly enforced German law, enacted after several shootings years ago on the autobahn, that forbade anyone to stop or get out of a vehicle. Finally all traffic stopped and drivers were getting out, doors slamming, horns beeping.

“Such language,” the ice rink lady said.

“The Havel,” said the other man. “Mein Gott! They have bombed the Havel crossing!”

“We don’t know that yet,” said his wife.

“Then you tell me,” said the man. “Why do they stop us?” Over sixty years ago, when he was just a boy, he’d been in Berlin when the Russians had entered and he had seen his mother and sisters raped. “My God, they have broken the Havel Bridge,” he repeated.

“Of course they haven’t,” said his wife sternly. “There have been no bombs.”

“Zurückgehen!”— “Go back!” ordered the motorcycle police, their blue and white pinion lights illuminating their crash helmets as their motorcycles came up the line.

One by one the cars were pulling out and making their U-turns, and when Meir’s turn came, he could hear people calling out, “They’ve closed the Corridor.”

Who had? wondered Meir — the German police or Soviet bombers?

“One by one, please,” said the policeman. “No rush. Orderly now. Go back!”

“I told you,” said the man in the backseat. “It’s just like them, you see. First they give you hope, then they close the road. The bastards. I’m not going. Stop, mister. I’m not going back.”

“Fritz, don’t — please.” They had difficulty holding him back from opening the door, and as Meir swung the wheel about, his headlights picking up the high wire fences either side of the road, he could hear the old man weeping — his wife making clucking sounds like a grandmother comforting a baby. “Shush now. Everything will be all right,” she said.

“Of course it won’t be!” shouted the old man. “We are finished.”

The Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket was faced with either surrender or “elimination,” as spelled out in the propaganda sheets dropped all along the forty-mile front: “The French are not coming, Englanders,” proclaimed the pamphlets. “You have now been fighting for two weeks and they are not here.”

“There will be no convoys,” they were telling the Americans, the messages printed on poor-quality unpolished paper, which the GIs and Tommies found useful as toilet paper, having been out of it for a week already. It had gone up in flames with other NATO supplies in one of the explosions that destroyed over ten thousand tons in prepo sites all over Germany. So many of the supply depots had been hit by the SPETS teams that their smoke, together with the smoke of the battlefields, turned sunsets into the most beautiful reds and oranges over Western Europe, some of the palls so dense, however, that at times it seemed like an eclipse.

Had it not been for the American Thunderbolts, the Wunderzeug— “wonder planes”—as the Germans were calling the remarkably maneuverable planes, the situation would have been hopeless. Time and again the Thunderbolts’ tank-killing nose cannon and antitank bombs had been thrown into the breach where the Soviet armor found holes in the precarious dyke of the Allied defense.

There was another cause, seen by most NATO commanders as fortuitously accidental, that might yet help the Allies to stiffen their resistance enough to slow the Russian colossus. As well as blowing bridges and rail crossings on the borders between France, the low countries, and Germany to further impede any British reinforcements that might get across the Channel, the SPETS teams, unintentionally or otherwise, had cut off the evacuation of several hundred thousand American and British dependents.