Yalta To Berlin

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31316, 11 March 1967, Page 4

Yalta To Berlin

The Last Hundred Days. By John Toland. Arthur Barker. 622 pp. Index. Illustrated.

The sheer quantity of material for this book gathered by the author and his wife on a 100,000-mile journey, during which they visited twenty-one countries, would have daunted many

writers. Mr Toland interviewed over six hundred people in an effort to reconstruct the events of the hundred days between Yalta and the fall of Berlin and has listed his sources of information chapter by chapter at the end of the book. The historic conference at Yalta is reported, not with the knowledge of hindsight, but as far as possible in the atmosphere in which it actually took place. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were supremely aware that not only had they to consider the balance of power in Europe which would result from decisions taken then (a situation of less importance to Roosevelt at 3500 miles distance from Europe) and Churchill and Roosevelt, at least had to consider public opinion in their own countries when these decisions were made known. For Stalin decisions were simpler—he had no partner in the east to mollify, no public opinion to consider. For the Western Powers, decisions had to be taken that would not conflict with either British or American interests. Eisenhower, for instance, as Supreme Allied Commander, found himself constantly approached by his own and British senior officers, each group seeking superiority in the forward movement across Germany. A military statesman, rather than a field commander, he handled their demands as he was later to handle political problems—with an amiable compromise that did not satisfy either group. As the Allied armies moved closer together across Germany it was decided that Dresden should be heavily bombed to break German morale more quickly and the story of these raids in which the number of dead has been variously estimated as 30,000 and 135,000 is told with horrifying detail. Because of the quantity of material now available to him, the author has been able to build up a picture of simultaneous events among the Allies and the Germans. He describes the conflicts in the German High Command as Hitler continued in his fana-

tical belief of ultimate victory even while Himmler was clandestinely negotiating with Count Bernadotte for a separate peace with the Wert. Thinking Germans realised that the future danger to Europe was Russia and were prepared to unite with Britain and America against a common foe. But nothing less than a complete and unconditional surrender was acceptable, and still Hitler ordered his generals to perform impossible tasks with divisions which existed only on paper. Surprisingly, it is to Goebbels, also aware of the Russian menace, that we owe the now familiar phrase “iron curtain.” He had written prophetically that if Germany surrended “the Soviets will occupy . . . the whole east and south-east of Europe in addition to the larger part Of Germany. In front of this enormous territory, including the Soviet Union, an iron curtain will go d0wn....” The author is an American and it is, therefore, not surprising that, in spite of objectivity to reporting events, most of these events involve Americans. To Sidney Olson of “Time” magazine, the American tank advance across the Cologne Plain was “one of the War’s grandest single pictures of united and perfectly functioning military machines in a supreme moment of pure fighting motion.” For most readers, however, the stories of Russian rape and pillage as they sought revenge for German atrocities on Russian soil, the destruction of the cities, exploding tanks vomiting their crews and the horrors of the concentration camps are the other and more frequently observed side of war and man’s inhumanity to man.

The author has reconstructed with painstaking care this momentous period of history to which even the deaths of three of the world’s leaders, Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini, within nineteen days, merely became part of the general maelstrom. By frequent use of excerpts of dialogue, which he points out are not fictional—“they come from transcripts, stenographic notes and the memory of the participants”—Mr Toland has raised the book to a point of interest far beyond the accounts of troop movements and other military data usually associated with conventional war histories. Interest is also maintained by the interweaving of military and political events of which the author has a keen appreciation.