By late January 1945, the Red Army had swept across German-occupied Poland and reached the frozen line of the Oder River. Army Group Vistula, the last major German formation in the east, dug in along the western bank roughly fifty miles from Berlin, throwing every available unit into guarding the river’s many bridges. On January 31, Soviet troops crossed the ice near Küstrin and established a bridgehead, but the weakened ice could not support their tanks and heavy artillery, so the advance stalled. Moscow’s generals argued over what to do next.
Some wanted to strike straight for Berlin, which was barely defended at that moment. Others warned that strong German forces still threatened their flanks. In the end, the decision was made to pause, secure the flanks, and launch a massive offensive against Berlin in mid-April. The Oder itself was protected only by light German screening forces, since the main defensive line lay further back on the Seelow Heights, eleven miles west of the river.
The Soviets built several bridgeheads and controlled a number of vital road and rail crossings. As the weather warmed and the ice melted, they began constructing pontoon bridges for the coming attack. The German plan was simple: delay the Soviet buildup by destroying as many of those bridges as possible. That mission fell to the Luftwaffe.
On March 1, 1945, Hitler appointed Lieutenant Colonel Werner Baumbach, commander of the special operations wing KG 200, to prevent Allied crossings of the Oder and Neisse rivers. Baumbach had three weapons at his disposal: the composite Mistel aircraft, the Henschel Hs 293 guided missile, and a desperate new volunteer force of German suicide pilots. On March 6, Baumbach launched the first attacks using the Hs 293. This weapon, the world’s first operational anti-ship guided missile, had entered service in 1943.
It was a standard 500-kilogram SC500 bomb fitted with a rocket engine underneath, a pair of wings with control surfaces, and a radio guidance system. The rocket motor fired for only a few seconds after release, giving the weapon an initial burst of speed, after which it glided toward the target, steered by an operator aboard the mother aircraft using a joystick. The bomber crew could track the missile in daylight by colored flares in its tail, or at night by small lights. Its range reached up to 8.
5 kilometers, depending on the altitude of the launching aircraft. The higher the release, the further it could glide. The British and Americans developed electronic jamming to interfere with the guidance signal, yet Hs 293 attacks were often successful. The weapon had first been used against ships in the Bay of Biscay and during the Italian campaign.
Its first confirmed hit came on August 25, 1943, when a ship was struck but the bomb failed to detonate. Two days later, eighteen Dornier Do 217s launched Hs 293s and sank the Royal Navy sloop HMS Egret. On November 26, an Hs 293 sank the British troopship HMT Rohna, killing more than a thousand men aboard. Around twenty British and American warships and merchant vessels were sunk, written off, or severely damaged by Hs 293s, most of them during operations in Italy.
The idea of using the Hs 293 against bridges had first been tried during the Normandy campaign. In early August 1944, bridges over the Seine and Saône were targeted. One bridge was damaged at the cost of six Do 217s. On August 7, a bridge at Pontoise was attacked again by aircraft from Squadron 100.
On March 6, 1945, Do 217s from KG 200 launched Hs 293s at the Oder bridge at Göritz, scoring a hit but failing to destroy it. Two days later, Baumbach deployed his next weapon against the same bridge. The Mistel, named after the parasitic mistletoe plant, consisted of an unmanned twin-engine bomber with a single-engine fighter mounted on top, which controlled both aircraft during flight. The drone bomber was usually a modified Junkers Ju 88, often fitted with a specially designed nose packed with a massive two-ton explosive charge, shaped as a hollow charge for maximum penetration.
The fighter pilot guided the entire formation toward the target, then released the drone using explosive bolts and turned back for base. The drone flew on and detonated on impact. The problem was that the combination was heavy, slow, and highly vulnerable to Allied fighters. But when it worked, the two-ton warhead was devastating.
Around 250 Mistels were built in the final months of the war, and they had first seen combat in 1944 during the Normandy battle, attempting to attack the port of Cuxhaven, which was under British control. On March 8, 1945, a force of five Mistels was sent against the bridges over the Oder and Neisse. A large formation of Ju 188 bombers flew diversionary sorties, drawing off the Soviet fighters and allowing the Mistels to get through. They succeeded in destroying two bridges, one at Steinau and one at Göritz.
On April 12, the Mistels were used again in an operation codenamed Freiheit. Attacks were launched against bridges over the Oder, Neisse, and Warta rivers with some success. Mistel bombers struck the pontoon bridges at Küstrin, damaging them, though the delay they caused the Red Army was probably no more than a day or two. On the same day, Hs 293s were also launched against the Küstrin bridges, and the railway bridge there was damaged.
Then came the most desperate German weapon of all. On April 17, the Luftwaffe tested its ultimate gamble: suicide attacks, which the Germans called total missions. Hitler had initially opposed the idea, but approval was eventually granted for kamikaze-style strikes. Around seventy pilots volunteered, most of them very young men, and each signed a document stating exactly what was expected of them.
The original plan, conceived in 1944, had been to use a new type of manned V-1 flying bomb, the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg. But in the end, Focke-Wulf Fw 190s were used instead. The unit was called Squadron Leonidas, part of Special Operations Group 200, named after the Spartan king whose 1,400 warriors had fought to the death against 100,000 Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Under the command of First Lieutenant Haya Lange, thirty-five pilots were sent up in Fw 190s to attack the Oder bridges between April 17 and 20, 1945.
By then, the massive Soviet offensive against Berlin had already begun on April 16. Each aircraft carried a heavy bomb and only enough fuel for a one-way mission. All thirty-five aircraft were lost, but they succeeded in destroying the railway bridge at Küstrin. Further Leonidas missions were cancelled when Soviet forces threatened the squadron’s base at Otop.
After the Battle of the Seelow Heights ended on April 19, the first Soviet troops reached the outskirts of Berlin the very next day, April 20, Hitler’s fifty-sixth and final birthday. The bridges over the Oder no longer mattered. The great battle for the capital of the Third Reich had begun, and the river that had seemed so vital just weeks before was suddenly nothing more than a line on a map far behind the front.