Savage Fighting on Berlin's Outskirts The Soviet drive into the German Reich was a strange and unlikely success story. The main thrust was stalled at Breslau, where the Silesian capital held out until Berlin capitulated, tying up several Red Army divisions that would have been free to assist in the drive on Berlin. Without these units, Marshal Georgi Zhukov had no choice but to dispatch Marshal Ivan Konev to the Seelow Heights. This would provide a secure left flank for Zhukov's effort and place the Red Army in a strategically advantageous position. Konev, should the situation dictate, would be able to drive on Berlin as a relief element or shift to the south should assistance be needed in the attacks into Czechoslovakia. Stalin, already livid at the failure to subdue Breslau, would hear no excuse from Zhukov about his progress toward Berlin. The diversion in the Kurland, where 300,000 men were bottled up with their backs to the Baltic, had been time-consuming. Those German forces continued to fight, remaining a very real threat to Zhukov's rear. The two problem areas created a logistical nightmare, and later battles were no doubt influenced by those hold-ups. Seelow was to become an obscure battle, with the attention instead going to Breslau, Kurland and the Berlin struggle. However, to the men who fought there on both sides, it was some of the most savage fighting many of the hardened veterans had ever seen. For the Soviets it was do or die, literally. They had unyielding orders, and many Red Army soldiers were in fact shot for not showing proper enthusiasm. For the Germans, the Battle of Seelow Heights was their death knell. Konev, for his failure to dislodge the German defenders in a timely manner, would fall into obscurity after the war. Many would blame him for the delay in helping Zhukov. Most of the charges against Konev were no doubt fomented in Zhukov's camp, just as Konev had accused the commanding general at Breslau of malingering there. Probably the most heart-wrenching part of the bitter struggle was the suffering of the civilians at the hands of the Soviets. During the advance into Prussia, word of the rape and murder of women, the destruction of homes and the killing of children in retribution for Nazi atrocities terrified the Germans. This in itself explains much of the "fanaticism" encountered by the Soviets as they approached each stronghold. The men at the Seelow Heights were fighting not for the preservation of Germany, or even to save their own lives. In their minds, they knew that their actions might save a few more civilians, most of whom became refugees whose only hope of survival was the delaying actions of their fighting men. Historians can only wonder how the pages of history would have been rewritten if the Anglo-American forces had continued on to Berlin, forgetting the Yalta Conference. Many Germans believe that there would have been virtually no strong-armed resistance to a Western invasion, given the unpalatable alternative. It would have most probably changed the map of Europe and the course of human history.

When the German front on the Vistula broke, Soviet forces poured westwards and some units reached the Oder - the last natural obstacle before Berlin - within three weeks. But it was not until 16 April, well over two months later, that Zhukov launched his gigantic offensive across the river and into the Seelow Heights beyond. Some of the Soviet commanders thought in early February that there was nothing much to stop them driving across the Oder and on to Berlin, less than sixty miles away. Given the chaos of the German retreat, they were probably right. But Stalin did not want just to reach Berlin. He wanted to encircle it, which meant getting his main forces across the river and deep into central Germany. No doubt he hoped to be the captor of Hitler and his cronies; no doubt - as Beevor says - he was after the uranium oxide stocks at the nuclear research institute in western Berlin. But above all he understood that Berlin, conquered in battle by the Red Army, would be the keystone in the triumphal arch of Soviet power over Central Europe. The other Allies would have to take over their Berlin sectors in due course, but Stalin wanted to be massively and invincibly in possession of the city before the Americans and the British could get there. This is why he lied, so often and so shamelessly, to Allied emissaries about the goal of the Oder offensive. Berlin no longer had military significance, he said, and his thrust would head south-west towards Dresden.

Eisenhower believed him, or at least had no time for the implications of not believing him. Montgomery and Churchill knew well what Stalin was up to, but the decision was not theirs. On 15 April, General William H. Simpson of the US 9th Army was flown back from the Elbe front to meet General Omar Bradley at Wiesbaden. The Russians were still on the wrong side of the Oder; the Seelow Heights offensive did not begin until the next day. Simpson, on the other hand, had actually got across the Elbe and saw nothing much but sixty miles of autobahn between his lead tanks and Berlin. Bradley passed on 'Ike's order': he was to halt. Simpson was 'dazed'.

Too much shouldn't be made of this. The notion that the Allies could have reached Berlin first and changed the history of Europe is fantasy; the zones and sectors of occupied Germany and Berlin had already been demarcated and agreed. The next morning, Zhukov unleashed his huge offensive across the Oder against the main surviving formations of the Wehrmacht and SS, supported by a pathetic rabble of Hitler Youth children and Volkssturm civilian conscripts. But the Germans fought cleverly and stubbornly.

Zhukov made shocking tactical mistakes which cost thousands of lives, and the Seelow Heights battle, supposed to take one day, lasted three. As the three Fronts converged on Berlin, from north, east and south, rivalry between marshals and sheer muddle slowed the advance. In a secret intelligence despatch to Stalin, Serov of the NKVD reported on 25 April that Berlin no longer had 'serious permanent defences' and that the Volkssturm would not fight. But it was another fortnight before Soviet troops hoisted the red flag over the Reichstag and over the Reich Chancellery - a woman did that, Major Anna Nikulina of the 9th Rifle Corps.

Confusion and bad staff work may have held the Red Army back. But so did the enemy. Reading Beevor's account of the German command structure, one of so many which record a hysterical Führer squalling nonsensical orders at his generals, it is hard to explain how armies under such leadership resisted at all. But in fact the forces up against the Red Army in those final months fought bitterly and skilfully to the very end. While Heinrich Himmler posed as commander of the Vistula Army Group in a luxurious special train parked well away from the front, some of his colonels knocked whole armies off balance with expertly delivered flank attacks. The Nazi commissars screamed for 'fanatical resistance' and then ran away; the old sergeants and junior officers stuck with their men until there was nothing left but surrender. When there was no fuel left and no cover against Allied aircraft, a handful of heavy tanks were still giving Zhukov grief in central Berlin on the war's last day.

How these men kept up something like an effective defence under such conditions remains a puzzle. Sometimes they were just fighting for their lives, as in the frightful forest battles south of Berlin as the 9th Army tried to break through to the West and surrender to the Americans. But sometimes they must have been outstandingly well led. Just possibly, a book will one day be written in which Hitler gives some shrewd orders and his overruled generals are not always in the right. This is certainly not Beevor's line. The first part of Berlin, especially, follows the account left by General Guderian, who features as the personification of courage and common sense as he stands up to the mad Führer. Probably he was, though all Nazi generals' memoirs play this number, and one grows suspicious. But Stalin was certainly a far better supremo by this stage of the war. Beevor's archive hauls show him well aware of strategic reality, well able to balance risk against opportunity and - here he becomes almost likeable - expertly making best use of Zhukov's doggedness and Konev's dash without losing the confidence of either.

This book is a narrative, but also an enormous collage of well-selected detail. Some of it is truly startling. I had not realised before that the defenders of the last Nazi perimeter in Berlin, around the ruined chancellery and Hitler's bunker, were Frenchmen. They were survivors from the Waffen-SS Charlemagne Division, a handful of battle-hardened French Fascists who now took on the full strength of two converging tank armies in a blatantly hopeless struggle. With them, in the remnants of the Nordland Division - also Waffen-SS - were young Danes and Norwegians, still with a few heavy tanks. Hitler and Göbbels were dead, and most remaining German troops had wisely melted away, but the Frenchmen fought on in the wreckage of Gestapo headquarters. They were last seen fighting and dying in a vain attempt to cover the escape of Martin Bormann.

The triumph of Beevor's collage is his sources. He has used printed memoirs, but he has also come up with quantities of manuscript material - soldiers' letters home, security reports, officers' private diaries - from the Russian archives. Two personal narratives stand out. The first is the notebooks of the novelist Vasily Grossman, found by Beevor in the Russian State Archive for Literature. A great writer moving forward with the armies put down unsparingly what he saw and heard: burning towns collapsing on drunken soldiery, raped girls with battered faces, a mighty general joking as he plans the storm of a city, a thousand men beginning the walk into Siberian captivity as their wives, 'beautiful young women, some of whom are laughing and trying to cheer up their husbands', walk beside them.