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3rd’s tanks swung up to Frankfort, to Folda, Kassel
and Gotha. The 7th, to the south, dashed to Wuerz
berg along the road to the Nazis’ sacred Nuernberg.
The 1st French, now also across the Rhine, curved
still farther south to Stuttgart.
The Remagen bridge by now had collapsed, but
endless streams of six-wheeled trucks and 46-ton
trailers, laden with shells, gasoline and food, sped
across speedily erected pontoon bridges.
The huge offensive rolled on almost unimpeded,
past cities reduced to rubble by the Allied bomb
ings. In some places Nazis still tried to resist. In
most, the once arrogant disciples of Hitler pulled
the sheets from their beds and waved them from
windows in a frantic gesture of surrender.
Enemy soldiers rushed from hiding places in the
fields to throw up their hands as the Allies ap
proached. By April 11, the prisoners in the west
Rhine offensive totaled more than 500,000 and were
piling up at a rate of more than 30,000 a day.
By April 15, the Yanks were at the Elbe; the
Canadians had sliced the Netherlands in two; Pat
ton was lunging into Czechoslovakia; hundreds of
thousands ot Nazis were overflowing the prison
cages in the Ruhr.
Germany was dying fast. Die-hard Nazis gulped
poison or shot themselves. Civilians looted shops,
railroad cars, even homes. Scores of generals were
being captured. Freed slave laborers cluttered the
roads, waving tiny flags, and setting upon their
oppressors.
The Russians, meanwhile, had driven through
Hungary, had captured Koenigsberg in east Prussia
and had liberated Vienna. Marshal Zhukov ordered
his massed artillery and tanks to start pounding
across the Oder in the north.
In Italy, the British 5th and U. S. 8th Armies
broke out of their mountain shackles and smashed
into the Po valley. A force of Brazilians now was
fighting with them.
Tito’s Partisans clung to the heels of the fleeing
foe in Yugoslavia.
The final, furious squeeze was on.
THE END OF THE NAZIS
' 'THE Anglo-Americans raced in from the west and
the south, and the Russians frcm the east.
Zhukov, with 99 generals under his command,
blasted his way across the Oder with screaming
artillery, from guns placed hub to hub, and with
rockets and dive bombers. The 1st White Russians
jumped across north of Berlin; the 1st Ukrainians
moved on the city from the south.
Eisenhower’s tanks rolled along, with supply
trucks in pursuit, to northern Germany and southern
Germany, to Czechoslovakia, to the once-feared
mountains of Austria. The Allies found dead cities.
They found high Nazis sniveling.
They also came upon the atrocity camps—death
holes such as Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen,
where bodies were lying in stacks like cordwood
and the emaciated prisoners still alive bore scars
of torture, fire, poison, starvation and disease. At
Dachau, Americans liberated 32,000 inmates and
found 39 freight cars filled with hundreds of Polish
prisoners starved to death on a railroad siding out
side the ,cgmp. They discovered incinerators at
Buchenwald with a capacity of 400 bodies a day.
They found strangling chambers and the hooks on
which the strangled bodies were hung.
The Soviets swung around the suburbs of Berlin
and pushed into the city from the east, northeast
and southeast. Goebbels at his microphone ordered
a “fight to the death.” The heart of the city flamed
with shell fire.
On April 25 two Russian forces met within the
city. Their rocket-firing trucks rumbled down the
streets as Berlin’s housewives looted food, and
boys of 13 and men of 70 had guns shoved in their
hands. The Germans went to their rooftops, into
their cellars and into their subways with tommy
guns and rifles.
The war in Europe was spinning to a tumultuous
climax. Germany was being repaid for the Poland
of 1939, the France of 1940, the Stalingrad of 1942.
On April 27 Americans and Russians met at
Torgau on the Elbe River. Patton’s 3rd Army raced
into Austria while other Russians moved in from
the.east; Clark’s forces in Italy entered Genoa.
On April 28th Reds pounded into Potsdam. Ber
lin’s defenses cracked wide open and the Russians
closed the city in an armored ring.
On April 29 Italian partisans captured and killed
Benito Mussolini and his mistress as they tried to
flee north Italy for Switzerland. Then the parti
sans took the bodies to the public square of Milan
and exposed them to a spitting, kicking mob.
By the 1st of May there was little left of the Nazi
Reich that was to last a thousand years. The Russian
flag of victory was flying on the Reichstag and the
prisoners in Allied pens were beyond count
On Tuesday, May 1, the German radio at Ham
burg broadcast three rolls on a drum and a solemn
voice announcing that Adolf Hitler, “fighting to the
last breath against bolshevism,” had died that day
in the Reich chahcellory. Admiral Karl Doenitz took
New Weapons Helped
The Allies Win
SSlSSgft
SUPERFORTRESS
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AIRCRAFT CARRIER
ROCKETS
over as his successor
Then the mass surrenders began. A million in
Italy and part of Austria put down their arms;
70,000 in Berlin surrendered to the Russians; 500,
000 in northern Germany, Holland and Denmark
surrendered to Montgomery; another 300,000 quit
in western Austria and Bavaria.
On Monday morning, May 7, 1945, Colonel Gen
era] Gustav Jodi, new chief of staff of the now
non-existent German army, sat down at a long
table in a room at a little red .schoolhouse at Reims,
France, and signed a typewritten sheet of paper.
Germany had unconditionally surrendered. The
war in Europe whidh had cost somewhere between
20 and 50 million lives was over.
All that remained was another war in the Pacific.
OKINAWA
/''VNE of the war’s strangest surprises came to the
Yanks on the island of Okinawa, only 325 mile;
from the Japanese mainland.
The enemy let the invaders in without opposition.
Okinawa had been thoroughly pounded by war
ships and carrier planes before the invasion. The
Japanese knew a landing was coming. They knew,
too, that from bases on Okinawa the Americans
could send Superfortresses, Liberators, Flying For
tresses and even lower-range bombers and fighters
over their home islands on the tremendous scale
that had paralyzed Germany.
On April 1, 1945, while Eisenhower was still in
the early stages of his east-of-the-Rhine sweep,
the veteran amphibious admiral, Richmond Kelly
Turner, put the troops of General Simon Bolivar
Buckner’s, new 10th Army ashore on the west coast
of Okinawa. They were prepared for a beachhead
fight on the Iwo Jima scale. None came.
The force made up of soldiers and Marines,
jumped ashore standing up. In one day they had
split the island; in five days they had one-fifth of
it. Then came another surprise. The most moun
tainous part was the north where the enemy
could set a price for every foot. But Marines sped
north with incredibly little opposition. They reached
the northern tip on April 19. The Yanks now had
four-fifths of the island as a virtual gift.
Then opposition stiffened. The free ride was over.
By May 1 two Army and two Marine divisions were
pushing down against the major enemy’s major
defense line along the hills from the cities of Naha
and Shuri on the west to Yonabaru on the east.
In that month the Yanks gained only five miles,
against a system of defenses studded with tunnels,
caves and artillery and mortar positions that they
called the “Pacific Siegfried Line.” They slogged
on, with hand grenades and flame and oil throwers,
over terrain littered with the bodies of the enemy
dead. One objective — Sugar Loaf Hill —, changed
ownership ten times in the bitterest kind of hand
to-hand fighting.
General Buckner issued an ultimatum to surren
der on June 11, and most of the Japanese ignored
it. But surrender leaflets, dropped behind the lines,
began to have an effect. The prisoner curve shot up
to 10,000—the greatest number taken up to that time
in any Pacific campaign of similar size in this war.
But the bulk of the enemy troops fought on—or
committed suicide. General Buckner was killed by
a shell fragment at a forward observation post.
On June 21 organized resistance on Okinawa was
announced as over. There were more than 46,000
U. S. casualties, including some 1,200. killed or miss
ing. The Japanese had lost»more than 110^000 men.
What had started out as an easy invasion had become
one of the bloodiest in the whole Pacific.
THE KAMIKAZE REACHES ITS PEAK
OKINAWA’S land battles were grim enough. The
sea ones were even worse.
In the naval battle off the Philippines in October,
1944, American sailors had seen Japanese aircraft
diving down on ships with the apparent intention
of crash-landing on top of them. At first the Navy
thought these suicide crashes were merely on-the
moment ideas of Japanese pilots. But with the land
ing at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon the attacks became
too frequent to be anything but the studied policy
of the enemy air force.
Already a long list of Allied warships had been
damaged in this offensive—the Australian cruiser
Shropshire had taken one dive bomber crash off
Leyte that left its bridge hidden in a mass of flames
and smoke and its forward mast leaning drunkenly
over the stacks. The U. S. cruiser Nashville had
taken it at Mindoro. The cruiser Australia had been
struck at Lingayen.
The Japanese called their suicide pilots the Kami
kaze corps, in memory of the Kamikaze or “divine
wind” that had swamped a Chinese invasion fleet
in August, 1280. Off Okinawa the Kamikazers
reached their peak.
The Yanks threw up hundreds of fighter planes
and tons of ack-ack to beat off the air attacks. They
knocked out 98 of every 100 planes in the suicide
fleet_but the two of every 100 that got through