Allied troops leave Berlin in 1994 - 2 September 1994

We're coming, I hope, to the end of the parade of memories and recreation of great events that have marked the 50th anniversary of D-Day and its tremendous consequences. I talked a few weeks ago about the coming departure from Berlin of the British, American, French and Russian troops after 49 years of occupation, something I believe most of us who hadn't visited Berlin had forgotten all about. It was assumed by people who'd anticipated this event that the four armies would leave on the same day. Of course, they reckoned without the Germans. The Russian occupation has left bitter memories and Chancellor Kohl was only doing what was expected of him when he decreed that the Russians should have a day to themselves and tactfully not appear in the grand farewell parade of the British, American and French soldiers that will take place next week.

This divided ceremony is a hangover from the famous conflict, 50 years ago this past spring, between Prime Minister Churchill and the allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower. Simply put this was what it was all about, why the American and British Armies made a sudden big lunge east to get to Berlin and occupy it before the Russians got there. It's a question that's been debated ever since that will be argued about till the end of time.

Churchill believed before any other allied leader that once Hitler's armies were defeated, the necessarily friendly relations between Soviet Russia and the Anglo-American allies would change drastically, he believed that the Soviets would become, as he put it, and soon, a mortal danger to the free world. To Churchill, the swift occupation of Berlin by our side was to be the chief political objective of the victory, to hold it, to be seen to hold it and to give notice to the old Russian allies that we would stay there and if not preside, at least be an equal partner in the administration of the defeated enemy.

I interviewed Eisenhower about this in the late '60s, about a year before he died and this is what he said, "my plan never did make Berlin in itself an objective, my plan was to destroy the armed forces of the enemy". My own feeling was this: political decisions had already divided Germany for occupational purposes.

There was no possibility of the Western allies capturing Berlin and staying there and, in fact, after the fighting stopped we had to retreat from Leipzig 125 miles to get back to our own zone. The Russians, ready to attack, were only 30 miles off Berlin eastward, but with a bridgehead already west of the Oder river, it didn't seem to be good sense to try both of us to throw forces in towards Berlin and get mixed up. Two armies that couldn't talk the same language, couldn't even communicate, it would have been a terrible mess. Today, people have said, "well, we'd have acquired prestige". I want to know whether this matter of prestige was worth let's say 10,000 American and British lives. General Bradley put it much higher.

Churchill argued that the Russian armies would anyway overrun all of Austria and enter Vienna, which they did. If they also took Berlin, quote, "would it not leave the impression that they'd been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory, for the capture of Berlin will be the supreme signal of defeat to the German people" and so on and so forth.

Eisenhower was unmoved, "all my training in war," he said, "is the geographical objectives are not the proper objectives. The enemy is, that's what you go after," but considering how often in the wake of numerable great wars, geography – who will keep what – becomes the main squabbling point of the peace conferences. Mr Churchill kept his doubts till the day he died; he lost, of course, and the Russians established in Europe anyway and for the longest time the general belief that they were the successors to Hitler as the conquerors of the continent until only the other day, all Soviet histories said so.

And so last Wednesday, stirring memories of this great feud and reviving arguments about the wisdom of the outcome, we saw the elaborate ceremony of the last day of August, Chancellor Kohl and President Yeltsin bowing to, congratulating, each other publicly declaring what is surely true in Mr Kohl's words, "10 years ago or even six years ago, the division of Germany of Europe seemed to be fixed in concrete".

Since 1991, the Russians have removed from Germany more than half a million troops. It was remarked at one solemn moment of the day, a remark that can't help but recall Eisenhower's warning that tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers fell in Berlin – 2,500 in the final day battle for the Reichstag – as a tart memory of Churchill's warning there's the fact that once the Soviet troops occupied Eastern Germany, it soon emerged as a separate communist nation.

Three years later in 1948, the Russians to make their occupation neat and complete tried to strangle West Berlin by cutting off all access to it. And as many of us will vividly remember, it took just under a year of food and supplies and the necessities of life being flown in by allied aircraft before the Soviet gave up on that one. 1948-49 was probably the worst, the most bitter period of Western-Soviet distrust and enmity.

These things and many more harsh memories must have stirred again in the crowds that watched the stiff, late departure of the Russian soldiers. There was of course the more palpable grievance, Chancellor Kohl's decision to have the Soviet troops leave first and separately and take no part in the big farewell parade of the other occupying powers the British, American and French troops. Mr Yeltsin, referred to this coming and grander ceremony and said he wished it well despite the fact that we have not been invited.

Well as I say, I believe next week's Anglo-American-Franco ceremony will be the last of the anniversaries we've been so lavishly celebrating and I may say in one or two incidences so sentimentally celebrating. The culprit in America in a way was the celebration of the liberation of Paris, which was taken as a symbol of the certain triumph of the Normandy invasion, quite right. Paris 1944, as composed for its television celebration, was the perfect Hollywood stereotype. I have expected Gene Kelly and Lesley Caron to come tripping and holding hands through these shuttered side-streets gazing at the bateaux mouches gliding along the Seine, going up the Eiffel Tower, lolling at a cafe on the Champs-Élysées watching the girls go by and listening to the inevitable soundtrack, the inevitable accordion.

However, this though hackneyed, there's a forgivable triviality. It was in the general trend of the commentaries not only from anchormen or routine news reporters but from some distinguished writers that it seemed to me a dangerous sentimentality was broadcast, the idea that finally in France there came together the shock of two great armies, one trained by totalitarian fanaticism and discipline, the other a product of democratic liberalism. I'm quoting from a distinguished author: Hitler gambled that his Nazi trained armies would show themselves as fighting men superior to the Western allied armies because they represented democratic liberalism and softness. Then comes the final and apparently logical comment, and Hitler lost.

Well in a film, a television documentary recalling the emotions as well as the facts of battle, this commentary is surely an acceptable passing judgement. I think not. I think it spawns a dangerously false theory, namely that the courage of soldiers drafted from a democracy are pretty well bound to triumph over the courage of soldiers bred by a dictatorship. A very pointed examination of this theory has been made by an American journalist in a commentary on the Normandy invasion and the tone of its anniversary celebration, here I quote, "the invasion's success was not an aspect of the democratic background of our military".

If Rommel had been on the scene 12 hours earlier, the invasion might have been repelled. The forces against, which we contended included Nazi veterans, but also German kids and conscripts from various parts of Europe, notwithstanding they held back a mighty juggernaut for six weeks. Hitler's rockets matured at just about D-Day and if they'd been trained on the beaches rather than on London suburbs, Hitler might have won the day. And now he comes to the, at first glance persuasive, nub of the theory, the 20-year-old German soldier directed by Hitler's lieutenant, the 20-year-old Russian soldier directed by Stalin's lieutenants, the 20-year-old Japanese soldier directed by Tojo's lieutenants is going to cross stretches of sand, scale escarpments and knock out machine-gun nests even as 20-year-old Americans did. It is our confidence in enduring truths that tells us that the soldiers in Normandy who attacked were serving great ends while the soldiers who defended were serving ignoble ends, but the evidence is not there that the machinery of injustice yields to the machinery of justice.

I've left the name of the author of this piece to the end, because down the years I've found that even the most neutral fair-minded people immediately wake-up their prejudices when an author is announced ahead of his text. This shrewd and telling refutation of a fairly general sentimentality was written then by the American journalist Mr William F Buckley.

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