Stop One: Banks of the Elbe River, Torgau, Germany
On April 25, 1945, in what would become known as “Elbe Day,” American forces, arriving from the west, met Ukrainian forces, arriving from the east, at Torgau, Germany, on the banks of the River Elbe, effectively concluding the invasion of Germany at the close of World War II. Although a celebratory occasion, the meeting was fraught with tension. Following the first meeting on April 25, commanders of the 69th Infantry Division of the US Army and the 58th Guards Rifle Division of the Soviet Army arranged a formal handshake, which took place in front of photographers on April 27. The photo-op was designed to coincide with simultaneous statements by leaders in London, Moscow, and Washington, DC, reaffirming the Allied commitment to the complete defeat of the Germany military and the fall of the Third Reich.
Primary Source: Jackson, Allan, US & Russian Troops, 1945, Hulton Archive/Getty Images, International News, 26 Apr 1945.
Primary Source: Jackson, Allan, US & Russian Troops, 1945, Hulton Archive/Getty Images, International News, 26 Apr 1945.
Secondary Source: Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History, New York: Penguin Books (2005) pg 1.
“We waited for them to come ashore. We could see their faces. They looked like ordinary people. We had imagined something different. Well, they were Americans!”
– Liubva Kozinchenka, Red Army, 58th Guards Division
“I guess we didn’t know what to expect from the Russians, but when you looked at them and examined them, you couldn’t tell whether, you know? If you put an American uniform on them, they could have been American!
– Al Aronson, US Army, 69th Infantry Division
THIS WAS THE WAY the war was supposed to end: with cheers, handshakes, dancing, drinking, and hope. The date was April 25, 1945, the place the eastern German city of Torgau on the Elbe, the event the first meeting of the armies, converging from opposite ends of the earth, that had cut Nazi Germany in two. Five days later Adolf Hitler blew his brains out beneath the rubble that was all that was left of Berlin. Just over a week after that, the Germans surrendered unconditionally. The leaders of the victorious Grand Alliance, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin, had already exchanged their own handshakes, toasts, and hopes for a better world at two wartime summits— Teheran in November, 1943, and Yalta in February, 1945. These gestures would have meant little, though, had the troops they commanded not been able to stage their own more boisterous celebration where it really counted: on the front lines of a battlefield from which the enemy was now disappearing.
Why, then, did the armies at Torgau approach one another warily, as if they’d been expecting interplanetary visitors? Why did the resemblances they saw seem so surprising—and so reassuring? Why, despite these, did their commanders insist on separate surrender ceremonies, one for the western front at Reims, in France, on May 7th, another for the eastern front in Berlin on May 8th? Why did the Soviet authorities try to break up spontaneous pro-American demonstrations that erupted in Moscow following the official announcement of the German capitulation? Why did the American authorities, during the week that followed, abruptly suspend critical shipments of Lend-Lease aid to the U.S.S.R., and then resume them? Why did Roosevelt’s key aide Harry Hopkins, who had played a decisive role in crafting the Grand Alliance in 1941, have to rush to Moscow six weeks after his boss’s death to try to save it? Why for that matter, years later, would Churchill title his memoir of these events Triumph and Tragedy?
The answer to all of these questions is much the same: that the war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war—ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily— with one another. Whatever the Grand Alliance’s triumphs in the spring of 1945, its success had always depended upon the pursuit of compatible objectives by incompatible systems. The tragedy was this: that victory would require the victors either to cease to be who they were, or to give up much of what they had hoped, by fighting the war, to attain.
Why, then, did the armies at Torgau approach one another warily, as if they’d been expecting interplanetary visitors? Why did the resemblances they saw seem so surprising—and so reassuring? Why, despite these, did their commanders insist on separate surrender ceremonies, one for the western front at Reims, in France, on May 7th, another for the eastern front in Berlin on May 8th? Why did the Soviet authorities try to break up spontaneous pro-American demonstrations that erupted in Moscow following the official announcement of the German capitulation? Why did the American authorities, during the week that followed, abruptly suspend critical shipments of Lend-Lease aid to the U.S.S.R., and then resume them? Why did Roosevelt’s key aide Harry Hopkins, who had played a decisive role in crafting the Grand Alliance in 1941, have to rush to Moscow six weeks after his boss’s death to try to save it? Why for that matter, years later, would Churchill title his memoir of these events Triumph and Tragedy?
The answer to all of these questions is much the same: that the war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war—ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily— with one another. Whatever the Grand Alliance’s triumphs in the spring of 1945, its success had always depended upon the pursuit of compatible objectives by incompatible systems. The tragedy was this: that victory would require the victors either to cease to be who they were, or to give up much of what they had hoped, by fighting the war, to attain.
Analysis Questions
- Why do you think the staged photo op and simultaneous release of statements was necessary?
- Gaddis states that the Soviet and American militaries approached one another warily at Torgau because the allies, in many ways, were already at war with one another. What, from your study of World War II, may have led to this lack of trust and division of allies before the war even ended?