1
THE ROAD TO BERLIN
Col. Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley was a living legend to the men serving under him, a blunt-spoken Yankee with a dangerous smile and a disarmingly sharp brain. He commanded an outfit named “A1A1,” splendid shorthand for a group led by such a high-spirited adventurer. The task of this unit was to sweep into newly liberated territories and impose order on chaos, repairing shattered infrastructure and feeding starving civilians.
Colonel Howley had won his spurs in the chaotic aftermath of the D-day landings of June 1944. Appointed to run the wrecked port of Cherbourg, he swung into town like a benevolent dictator, abolishing the kangaroo courts that were dealing out rough justice to collaborators and ruling over his new fiefdom with a rod of iron. His second big job had been to organize the feeding of five million hungry Parisians after the city’s liberation in August 1944. He knew how to get things done: no bureaucracy, no red tape, no rules—unless they were his own. His success earned him plaudits from far and wide, not to mention the Legion of Merit, Croix de Guerre, and Légion d’honneur. Howley may have played the cowboy, but he cared deeply about people’s welfare.
His team was still running food supplies into the French capital in the autumn of 1944 when he was paid a visit by the American commander Brig.-Gen. Julius Holmes at his offices at 7 Place Vendôme in Paris. Their conversation was perfunctory but purposeful.
“Frank,” Holmes asked, “how would you like to go to Berlin?”
“Fine,” Howley said. “The job is done here[,] and I’d like to stay on the main line east. Berlin sounds good to me.”1 This brief exchange was all it took for him to land one of the biggest jobs in the postwar world.
He certainly had the required levels of dynamism. He was a curious mixture of firebrand and intellectual, a man always on the alert like “a very large, trim eagle, ready to swoop if necessary.”2 In the years before the war, he had excelled as an All-American football player (he was known as “Golden Toe”). His sporting prowess had come to an untimely end when he crashed his motorcycle at reckless speed and broke his back and pelvis. He was fortunate to make a full recovery.
Sportsmen do not always make intellectuals, but Howley was invariably the exception to the rule. He taught himself five languages, studied fine art at the Sorbonne, and went on to establish a successful advertising company in the midst of the Great Depression. “He has the knack of being able to do anything he tries, a bit better than anyone else,”3 said one of his classmates at New York University.
Now he was to lead the American contingent of the joint British-American Military Government for Berlin, whose task was to run the western sectors of the divided German capital. He would also serve on the three-power Kommandatura, which was to deal with issues that concerned the city as a whole. As such, he would be frequently dealing with his Soviet partners.
Howley swiftly recruited his team: his chief aide, Lt.-Col. John Maginnis, had been the first of his A1A1 recruits to land in Normandy, while his principal marksman (hired as a precaution) was Capt. Charles Leonetti, a former FBI sharpshooter with a formidable record. Within weeks, Howley had employed scores of experts and specialists with the necessary skills to run a city in ruins.
His Berlin team was not a combat unit; nor was it intended to fight its way into the city: it would be supported by the British and American armies. But Howley was expecting trouble en route and instructed everyone in pistol shooting using his own system of shoot-to-kill. He also insisted that the men be at the peak of physical fitness. To this end, he established a grueling muscle-training program.
“I had three or four judo experts, and every officer and enlisted man learned all the dirty tricks of close-in fighting.” The older members were spared “the rough tumbling acts,”4 but even they had to learn how to protect themselves in hand-to-hand combat.
To his great delight, Howley “picked up” a young French linguist, Helen-Antoinette Woods, who was both sharp and talented. “I had some misgivings about bringing a girl along,” he confessed, “but decided if she was willing to take the chance, I couldn’t be so ungallant as to refuse a lady.” Besides, it made him feel good. “My prestige was upped by having this chic, capable French girl in my office.”5
Woods herself was desperate to go to Berlin. “There were all kinds of complications, of course, because Allied women were not allowed to go into Germany.”6 Howley brushed these complications aside. He gave her a steel helmet, a pistol, and a bodyguard and told her she would be the first Allied woman to enter Berlin.
Howley knew that carving up one of the great European capitals into three separate sectors would prove a logistical nightmare, for the city’s gas, water, sewage, and electricity networks did not respect the sector boundaries. If supplies were to be restored, it would require the British and Americans to work closely with their Soviet allies. Food was an even greater problem. Berlin was dependent for fresh meat and vegetables on the rich farmland in Brandenburg and Pomerania, provinces that lay to the east of the city. These were already in the hands of the Red Army, meaning that the Western allies would be dependent on Stalin’s continual goodwill if they were to feed the population.
Howley’s greatest concern was the fact that Berlin lay 110 miles inside the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, turning it into an island surrounded by a sea of red. The only land route into the city was by road or rail, passing through territory controlled by the Red Army. Frank Howley thought it so vital for his team to reach the city in advance of the Soviets that he proposed a mass parachute drop into Berlin, just as the Americans and British had done in Normandy, with his A1A1 adventurers landing alongside the First Airborne Division. But it was such a bold proposition, and so fraught with risk, that Allied commanders dismissed it as unworkable.
* * *
The British contingent of Berlin’s Military Government was led by Brig. Robert “Looney” Hinde, a precision-dressed cavalry officer whose outlook and deportment had been shaped by his years in British India. Hinde had learned Urdu and Pashto in Kashmir, fought border skirmishes on the North-West Frontier, and played polo with his fellow cavalry officers in Rawalpindi, whacking the ball with such chutzpah that he was selected to represent Great Britain in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
His sporting rivalry against the Germans had taken a more serious turn with the outbreak of war. Posted to North Africa with the Fifteenth/Nineteenth King’s Royal Hussars, he found himself playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Always in the vanguard, he led his scout car on crazed dashes through enemy lines, churning clouds of hot sand into the desert skies. “Don’t shoot,” he would signal back to his men. “It’s me!”7
Hinde was offered the Berlin appointment in the aftermath of the battle for Normandy in the belief that he had all the necessary qualities: “Dash, decisiveness, wisdom, supreme courage and deep responsibility.”8 He also had a deliciously whimsical streak that had earned him his nickname, “Looney,” along with an insatiable passion for butterflies. “Anyone got a matchbox?” he asked during a battlefield briefing in Normandy, having just spied a rare species of caterpillar. His stressed junior officer snapped that it was no time to be studying nature. “Don’t be such a bloody fool, Mike,” said Looney. “You can fight a battle everyday of your life, but you might not see a caterpillar like that in fifteen years.”9
Brigadier Hinde was initially based in Wimbledon, from where he began hiring recruits for his contingent of Military Government. Some were civilians—intelligence operatives, linguists, lawyers, and engineers with years of expertise in their respective fields. Others were soldiers hardened by five years of war. The recruitment process itself was undertaken by young ladies from the Auxiliary Territorial Service.
Brigadier Hinde’s overriding priority was to forge a close working relationship with his Soviet allies. This was government policy, and it was his duty to ensure it was followed to the letter. He put out feelers to his Soviet partners in the first weeks of 1945, eager to make contact in advance of their meeting in Berlin, but he received no answer. He was disappointed—a reply would have been courteous—but he brushed it off as an unfortunate oversight on their part.
Copyright © 2021 by Giles Milton All rights reserved.