World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY: When?

As General Eisenhower’s armies ate deeper & deeper into the Reich, approaching Berlin and Dresden, and the Russian steam roller began clanking westward from the Oder River, the hottest question in the Allied world was: when will V-E day come? Behind that was another, subtler question: at what stage of German disintegration would a victory proclamation be justified? The second question was answered this week by Eisenhower in characteristically straightforward and sensible fashion: “There will be no V-E day until Germany is completely occupied, including all pockets of resistance, and the German Army is completely destroyed.”

And that put an end to speculation, in both Britain and the U.S., that a V-E day proclamation might follow immediately after a Russian-U.S. junction.

The Germans admitted that such a linking of the Allies could take place any day; they prepared for it by setting up two autonomous defense zones in the two-fifths of Germany they have left. For the southern zone, including the Nazi “redoubt,” or Alpine bastion, command was vested in a triumvirate: Field Marshal Albert Kesselring; Gestapo boss Heinrich Himmler; Nazi party boss Martin Bormann. Adolf Hitler was not mentioned. Military operations in the northern zone were handed to Field Marshal Ernst Busch, but he will be kept in line by a trusted Nazi, Helmuth Friedrichs, holding direct command of all Elite Guard units.

The Final Phase. The linking of the Allies will eliminate the eastern and western fronts, and usher in the final phase of the battle of Germany: the destruction of the German pockets. These would include the north German zone and Baltic coastal pockets; the Denmark-Norway pocket; five French ports and the Channel Islands; the Latvian pocket; Bohemia; a group of islands in the eastern Mediterranean; northern Italy, which is in fact a forefield of the great Alpine bastion; and finally the bastion itself.