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7th Grade Civics class was awesome. We had a great teacher, Mr. Zeigler, who was funny, taught us about Plessy vs. Ferguson, and made us write sentences if we talked out of turn. On Mondays, it was 100 sentences, 200 on Tuesdays, and so on. And because my good friends Kenny Kise and Paul Simmons were in the same class, I had to write a lot of sentences…a LOT of sentences. One Friday, after already writing 100 sentences on Monday and 400 on Thursday, Paul was horsing around and I got sucked in…my penalty was “Silence is Golden”…500 times. Everytime I hear that phrase, I think of Mr. Zeigler and my inability to keep quiet.
But I would imagine that the sound of silence was never more gilded than it was in the heart of Berlin on May 2, 1945. For nearly a month, Russian guns had rained steel and fire on the city in an incessant storm of fury. With little care for casualties and a great store of vengeance to expend, the vanguard from the East bludgeoned the German army, the German civilians, and the German capital without respite.
But with the death of Adolf Hitler on the afternoon of April 30th, German pragmatism and clairvoyance made a sudden comeback. Just before midnight, the Germans opened negotiations with Russian General Vasily Chuikov. Talks dragged into the middle of the next day and the impatient Chuikov, as Chris Bellamy states in his recently-published book Absolute War, “ordered every single Russian gun, mortar, and rocket launcher within range to blast the Reichstag, where SS men were still skulking in the basement, the Chancellery, and government office buildings. Then, after further equivocation, an even bigger bombardment ensued.”
On the morning of May 2, the commander of the Berlin garrison sat down with pen and paper and wrote the instrument of surrender. At 3:00pm, the Russian guns (by that time, many German guns had already stopped firing due to lack of ammunition) fell silent…and the fight for Berlin was over. After nearly four years of brutal battle, the Russian army had taken the victory all the way to the heart of National Socialism.
The cost had been incredibly high. The three-week operation to take Berlin had cost the Russians more than 15,000 casualties (including more than 3,000 dead)…per day. But the eerie sound that was heard that afternoon was cause for Allied celebration. The sound of no guns, no bombs, and no whining bullets overhead…the silence of victory, was sweet music to all within earshot.
Recommended Reading: Absolute War – Soviet Russia in the Second World War – A grandiose work by Chris Bellamy and one of my most recent purchases.
