Why then did he change his mind? The main reason was that the military situation in March 1945 was far different from that prevailing in September 1944. In September, the Red Army was still outside Warsaw, more than three hundred miles from Berlin; the AEF was about the same distance away. In March 1945, the AEF remained more than two hundred miles from Berlin, while the Red Army was only thirty-five miles away. At a March 27 press conference, a reporter asked Eisenhower, “Who do you think will be into Berlin first, the Russians or us?” “Well,” Eisenhower replied, “I think mileage alone ought to make them do it. After all they are thirty-three miles [away]. They have a shorter race to run.”17
A second factor in Eisenhower’s decision was Bradley’s advice. His influence on Eisenhower’s thinking was always great, and in the last months of the war it grew even stronger. At Cannes, the two generals had a long talk about Berlin. Bradley pointed out that even if Montgomery reached the Elbe River before the Red Army reached the Oder, fifty miles of lowlands separated the Elbe from Berlin. To get to the capital, Montgomery would have to advance through an area studded with lakes, crisscrossed with streams, and interlaced with canals. Eisenhower asked Bradley for an estimate on the cost of taking Berlin. About 100,000 casualties, Bradley replied. “A pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective, especially when we’ve got to fall back and let the other fellow take over” (Berlin was well within the occupation zone already assigned to the Russians at the Yalta Conference.)18
Personality, as always, played a role. “Monty wanted to ride into Berlin on a white charger,” as Whiteley put it. By this stage of the war, however, Eisenhower was barely on speaking terms with Montgomery. As Eisenhower later told Cornelius Ryan, “Montgomery had become so personal in his efforts to make sure that the Americans—and me, in particular—got no credit, that, in fact, we hardly had anything to do with the war, that I finally stopped talking to him.”19
Eisenhower wanted Bradley to lead the last campaign. Had Bradley been on the northern flank, Eisenhower might well have sent him to Berlin. But 12th Army Group was in the center, so Eisenhower decided to make the main thrust there, with Dresden as the objective. This line offered the shortest route to the Red Army and would divide the remaining German forces roughly in half. To provide Bradley with sufficient force, Eisenhower took Ninth Army away from 21st Army Group and gave it to Bradley. To insure cooperation with the Russians, he wired Stalin to inform him of his intentions, to suggest that the Red Army meet the AEF around Dresden, and to ask for information as to Russian intentions.
• •
Eisenhower’s cable to Stalin, dated March 28, set off a flurry of activity in the capitals of the Big Three. The Russians acted first. Stalin agreed that Dresden was the best area for a meeting between the AEF and the Red Army, and added that Berlin had lost its former strategic significance. Stalin said that the Red Army planned to allot only secondary forces to the capture of the German capital. In fact, however, the Red Army had already begun a major redeployment, carried out “in almost frantic haste,” designed to make Berlin its primary objective, assigning to that objective 1.25 million soldiers, supported by twenty-two thousand pieces of artillery.
The British agreed with the Russians about the importance of Berlin; consequently they were decidedly unhappy with Eisenhower’s plan to aim toward Dresden instead, and unhappy too with Eisenhower for opening direct communications with Stalin. They feared that Stalin would make a dupe of Eisenhower. “I consider we are about to make a terrible mistake,” Montgomery wired Brooke. The British Chiefs sent their own strong protest directly to Marshall.20
In the United States, where Roosevelt was sick and Marshall had taken charge of the conduct of the war, the Americans in their turn were upset by the British protests. They resented the way their British allies called into question the strategy of the most successful field commander of the war. After Eisenhower’s success in the Rhineland campaign, Marshall thought that for the British to display such a lack of trust in Eisenhower was incredible, and he told them so.
Unaware of Marshall’s response to the British, Eisenhower sent a justification of his own to the Chief of Staff. He denied that he had made any changes in plans—which was simply not true—and then turned British criticism of his strategy on its head. “Merely following the principle that Field Marshal Brooke had always shouted to me,” he said, “I am determined to concentrate on one major thrust and all that my plan does is to place the Ninth U.S. Army back under Bradley” for that thrust. He showed some of his long-suppressed irritation with the British in his concluding paragraph: “The Prime Minister and his Chiefs of Staff opposed my idea that the Germans should be destroyed west of the Rhine. Now they apparently want me to turn aside on operations in which would be involved many thousands of troops before the German forces are fully defeated. I submit that these things are studied daily and hourly by me and my advisors and that we are animated by one single thought which is the early winning of this war.”21
The next day, March 31, Churchill tried again. He wired Eisenhower, “Why should we not cross the Elbe and advance as far eastward as possible? This has an important political bearing, as the Russian Army of the south seems certain to enter Vienna . . . If we deliberately leave Berlin to them, even if it should be in our grasp, the double event may strengthen their conviction, already apparent, that they have done everything.” He wanted the British to get to Berlin first, and he wanted Ninth Army given to 21st Army Group to make it possible. Such a solution, Churchill said, “avoids the relegation of His Majesty’s Forces to an unexpected restricted sphere.”22
Churchill’s plea, according to the SHAEF office diary, “upset E quite a bit.” He immediately dictated a reply. He repeated that he had not changed his plan. He said he still intended to send Montgomery over the Elbe River, but toward Lübeck, not Berlin. By going to Lübeck, 21st Army Group would seal off the Danish Peninsula and keep the Russians out of Denmark. This was an important objective, Eisenhower insisted, and he confessed that “I am disturbed, if not hurt, that you should suggest any thought on my part to ‘relegate His Majesty’s Forces to an unexpected restricted sphere.’ Nothing is further from my mind and I think my record over two and a half years of commanding Allied forces should eliminate any such idea.”23
The British, realizing that nothing they could say or do would change Eisenhower’s mind, made the best of it. The storm began to subside, as neither side wanted a split. The British agreed in practice to the relegation of Montgomery to a secondary role. Churchill, keenly aware of the need for Anglo-American solidarity in the postwar world, took the lead in calming the waters. In a message to Roosevelt he said, “I wish to place on record the complete confidence felt by His Majesty’s Government in General Eisenhower, our pleasure that our armies are serving under his command and our admiration of his great and shining quality, character and personality.” Churchill sent a copy to Eisenhower, saying in addition that it would “be a grief to me” if anything he had said “pains you.” The Prime Minister could not resist the opportunity, however, to add that he still felt the AEF should take Berlin. “I deem it highly important that we should shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible.”24
Thus, although the British had accepted the transfer of Ninth Army from Montgomery to Bradley, and resigned themselves to seeing the major thrust in central Germany, they still wanted the question of Berlin left open. Montgomery pushed that position on April 6, when he told Eisenhower that although he realized Eisenhower did not feel Berlin had much value, “I personally would not agree with this; I consider that Berlin has definite value as an objective and I have no doubt whatever that the Russians think the same; but they may well pretend that this is not the case!!”25
Meanwhile, however, Marshall was telling the British Chiefs, “Only Eisenhower is in a position to know how to fight his battle, and to exploit to the full the changing situation.” As to Berlin, the JCS felt that such “psychological and political advantages as would result from the possible capture of Berlin ahead of the Russians should not override the imperative military consideration, which in our opinion is the destruction and dismemberment of the German armed forces.”26
The next day, Eisenhower set the controversy in perspective while making his own position in the structure of the high command clear. He said he was making his decisions on military grounds and that he would require a new directive from his superiors on the CCS if the CCS wished him to operate on political grounds. He said a drive to Berlin was militarily unsound, then added, “I am the first to admit that a war is waged in pursuance of political aims, and if the Combined Chiefs of Staff should decide that the Allied effort to take Berlin outweighs purely military considerations in this theater, I would cheerfully readjust my plans and my thinking so as to carry out such an operation.”27 The British, knowing that they could not change Marshall’s mind, did not even try. The CCS made no change in Eisenhower’s directive. He therefore continued to operate under orders that required him to aim at the destruction of the German armed forces.
• •
Through the first weeks of April the AEF rolled forward. Superiority in quality of troops, mobility, air power, material, and morale was enormous. Regiments, companies, squads, sometimes even three men in a jeep dashed on ahead, leaving their supply bases far behind, ignoring wide gaps on the flanks and enemy units in their rear, roaming far and wide with only sketchy knowledge of the enemy’s positions, all the time certain that there was little or nothing the Germans could do about it. The German high command was, for all practical purposes, nonexistent; most German units were immobilized because of lack of fuel. There was no coherent defense.
On April 11, the leading units of Simpson’s Ninth Army reached the Elbe River at Magdeburg. Simpson got two bridgeheads over the river, one north of Magdeburg on April 12, another to the south on April 13. The one to the north was driven back by a German counterattack on April 14, but the one to the south held.
Suddenly it seemed that the Americans had an opportunity to take Berlin. The Russian drive for the capital had not yet begun and Simpson was within fifty miles of the city. He felt he could get to Berlin before the Red Army got there and asked Bradley’s permission to try. Bradley checked with Eisenhower. Eisenhower said no. Simpson was stopped where he was.
Patton was appalled. His romanticism, his strong sense of the dramatic, and his deep knowledge of military history all led him to believe that Eisenhower was passing up an a historic opportunity. “Ike, I don’t see how you figure that one,” Patton told his boss. “We had better take Berlin and quick.”28
Eisenhower disagreed. He felt that taking Lübeck in the north and occupying the Alpine redoubt area to the south were tasks “vastly more important than the capture of Berlin.” He also thought that Simpson could not get to the capital before the Russians and so it was foolish to try. “We’d get all coiled up for something that in all probability would never come off.” While it was true that Simpson had a bridgehead over the Elbe, “it must be remembered that only our spearheads are up to that river; our center of gravity is well back of there.”29
The British nevertheless urged Eisenhower to send Simpson to Berlin. On April 17, Eisenhower flew to London to confer with Churchill on the subject. He convinced the Prime Minister of the soundness of his views; Churchill admitted that the immense strength of the Red Army on the eastern edges of Berlin, in comparison with Simpson’s force (Simpson had fewer than fifty thousand men over the Elbe, and had gone beyond the range of fighter support), inevitably meant that it would be the Russians who first battered their way into the ruins.
• •
By 1952 Eisenhower was embarrassed by his failure to take Berlin. In various ways he tried to rewrite the historical record, asserting in his memoirs references to this or that warning he gave to this or that politician about the Russians. In At Ease, written in 1967, he claimed that he told FDR in January 1944 that he anticipated trouble with the Russians, but that Roosevelt would not listen. He further claimed that he warned Brooke, in 1943, that if the Allies did not get to Europe soon, the Red Army would overrun it, and that the Russians would then be impossible to deal with. He may well have uttered such warnings, but he did not mention them in Crusade in Europe, written almost two decades before At Ease, nor did he ever write anything during the war to indicate that he was fearful of Russian intentions. When he claimed to have done so, it was noticeable that in both cases he said he made his point in private, and in both cases the man he made it to was dead.
Eisenhower also became highly defensive about the Berlin decision, especially after the 1948 Russian blockade of the city, and explained again and again—mainly to Republicans who feared that Stalin had made a fool of him—that he made the decision solely on military grounds, that he really was already aware of the Russian threat, and that he was warning others about the Soviets. The truth was that he may have wished by 1952 that he had taken a hard line with the Russians in 1945, but he had not. Instead, he was scrupulously fair in upholding their interests in the surrender negotiations and in the movements of his armies in the last weeks of the war.
• •
In the spring of 1945 the Germans were eager to join the Americans in an anti-Soviet alliance. Hitler’s suicide, on April 30, seemed to the remaining German leaders to eliminate the major obstacle to such an alliance. They felt that with Hitler gone, the West would be more inclined to see Germany as a bulwark against Communism in Europe.
Specifically, the way Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s successor, tried to speed up the East-West split and salvage something for Germany was through piecemeal surrender to the Western Allies only. President Truman replied that the only term acceptable was unconditional surrender of all German armies to the Big Three. Churchill supported Truman. Eisenhower too was in complete agreement with Truman’s policy. “In every move we make these days,” Eisenhower assured Marshall, “we are trying to be meticulously careful in this regard.”30
Meticulous care was essential, as by both word and act the Germans continued their effort to split the Alliance. Their soldiers on the Eastern Front, rightfully fearing above all else capture by the Red Army, fought desperately. On the Western Front, they surrendered at the first sight of an AEF unit. German civilians tried to flee to the West so that they would be inside the Anglo-American lines when the end came. And on May 1, Doenitz, in a radio address to the nation, said the Wehrmacht would “continue the struggle against Bolshevism until the fighting troops and the hundreds of thousands of families in Eastern Germany have been preserved from destruction.”31 But by May 2 or 3, Doenitz realized that Eisenhower would not accept a general surrender in the West only; he therefore tried to achieve the same end by surrendering armies and army groups to SHAEF while fighting on in the East.
Eisenhower rebuffed him and continued to insist on a general, unconditional surrender. Nevertheless, Doenitz kept hoping. On May 4, he sent Admiral Hans von Friedeburg to SHAEF with instructions to arrange for the surrender of the remaining German forces in the West. Eisenhower insisted that a general surrender had to take place on the Eastern and Western Fronts simultaneously. Smith and Strong (Strong had been military attaché in Berlin before the war and spoke perfect German) carried on the discussion with Friedeburg, for Eisenhower refused to see any German officers until the document of unconditional surrender had been signed. Smith told Friedeburg that there would be no bargaining and ordered him to sign the surrender document; Friedeburg replied that he had no power to sign. Smith insisted. He showed Friedeburg some SHAEF operational maps, which were quite convincing of the overpowering might of the AEF and the hopelessness of the German position. Friedeburg cabled Doenitz, asking for permission to sign an unconditional surrender.
Late on the evening of May 5, Strong informed Eisenhower of these developments. Eisenhower grunted, then lay down on the cot in his office. The next morning he wrote Mamie, “Last night I really expected some definite developments and went to bed early in anticipation of being waked up at 1, 2, 3, or 4A.M. Nothing happened and as a result I was wide awake, very early—with nothing decent to read. The Wild Wests I have just now are terrible—I could write better ones, left-handed.”32
Doenitz did not give Friedeburg permission to sign. Instead, he made one last effort to split the Alliance, sending Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, the German Chief of Staff, to Reims to arrange for a surrender in the West only. Jodl arrived on Sunday evening, May 6. He conferred with Smith and Strong, emphasizing that the Germans were willing, indeed anxious, to surrender to the West, but not to the Red Army. Doenitz, he said, would order all German troops remaining on the Western Front to cease firing no matter what SHAEF did about the offer to surrender. Smith replied that the surrender had to be a general one to all the Allies. Jodl then asked for forty-eight hours “in order to get the necessary instructions to all their outlying units.” Smith said that was impossible. After the talks dragged on for over an hour, Smith put the problem to Eisenhower.
Eisenhower felt that Jodl was trying to gain time so that more German soldiers and civilians could get across the Elbe and escape the Russians. He told Smith to inform Jodl that “he would break off all negotiations and seal the western front preventing by force any further westward movement of German soldiers and civilians” unless Jodl signed the surrender document. But he also decided to grant the forty-eight-hour delay before announcing the surrender, as Jodl requested.
Smith took Eisenhower’s reply to Jodl, who thereupon sent a cable to Doenitz, explaining the situation and asking permission to sign. Doenitz was enraged; he characterized Eisenhower’s demands as “sheer extortion.” He nevertheless felt impelled to accept them, and was consoled somewhat by the thought that the Germans could still save many troops from the Russians during the forty-eight-hour delay. Just past midnight, therefore, he cabled Jodl: “Full power to sign in accordance with conditions as given has been granted by Grand Admiral Doenitz.”33
At 2 A.M on May 7, Generals Smith, Morgan, Bull, Spaatz, Tedder, a French representative, and General Susloparoff, the Russian liaison officer at SHAEF, gathered in the second-floor recreation room of the École Professionelle et Technique de Garçons, Reims. Strong was there to serve as translator. The war room was L-shaped, with only one small window; otherwise, the walls were covered with maps. Pins, arrows, and other symbols showed how completely Germany had been overrun. It was a relatively small room; the Allied officers had to squeeze past one another to get to their assigned chairs, gathered around a heavy oak table. When they had all sat down, Jodl, accompanied by Friedeburg and an aide, was led into the room. Tall, perfectly erect, immaculately dressed, his monocle in place, Jodl looked the personification of Prussian militarism. He bowed stiffly. Strong found himself, to his own surprise, feeling a bit sorry for him.
While the somewhat elaborate procedures for the signing went on, Eisenhower waited in his adjacent office, pacing and smoking. The signing took a half hour. In the war room, Jodl was delivering the German nation into the hands of the Allies and officially acknowledging that Nazi Germany was dead; outside, spring was bursting forth, promising new life.
Eisenhower knew that he should feel elated, triumphant, joyful, but all he really felt was dead beat. He had hardly slept in three days; it was the middle of the night; he just wanted to get it over with. At 2:41 A.M., Strong led Jodl into Eisenhower’s office. Eisenhower sat down behind his desk. Jodl bowed, then stood at attention. Eisenhower asked Jodl if he understood the terms and was ready to execute them. Jodl said yes. Eisenhower then warned him that he would be held personally accountable if the terms were violated. Jodl bowed again and left.
Eisenhower went out into the war room, gathered the SHAEF officers around him (Kay and Butcher managed to sneak in too), and photographers were called in to record the event for posterity. Eisenhower then made a short newsreel and radio recording. When the newsmen left, Smith said it was time to send a message to the CCS. Everyone had a try at drafting an appropriate document. “I tried one myself,” Smith later recalled, “and like all my associates, groped for resounding phrases as fitting accolades to the Great Crusade and indicative of our dedication to the great task just completed.”34
Eisenhower quietly watched and listened. Each draft was more grandiloquent than the last. The Supreme Commander finally thanked everyone for his efforts, rejected all the proposals, and dictated the message himself. “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.”35
He had managed to grin while the newsreel cameras were on, to hold up the pens in a V-for-Victory sign, to walk without a limp. After signing the last message, he slumped visibly. “I suppose this calls for a bottle of champagne,” he sighed. Someone brought one in; it was opened to feeble cheers; it was flat. Utter weariness now descended; everyone went to bed.
• •
It was not at all like the image Eisenhower had held before him for three years. From the time he left Mamie in June 1942, he had sustained himself with the thought of this moment. “When the war ends”—the image of that magic moment had kept him going. When the Germans surrendered, then all would right again. The world would be secure, he could go home, his responsibilities would be over, his duty done. He could sit beside a lazy stream with nothing but a cane pole and a bobber, and Mamie there with him, so that he could tell her about all the funny things that had happened that he had not had time to write about.
By early 1945, he had been forced to modify the fantasy somewhat, as he realized that he would have to remain in Germany for some months at least, as head of the American occupying forces. Still, he clung to the thought that Mamie could be with him immediately after the shooting stopped. Now he had the sinking feeling that even that was not going to be possible.
As to escaping responsibility, decision making, and the burden of command, he had already had to face the fact that such a release was impossible. Worst of all, he already feared that world security was threatened. There had been too many of his own officers who listened with approval to the German whisperings about an anti-Communist alliance; on the other side, the Russian suspicions about Western motives struck Eisenhower as bordering on paranoia (even before he went to bed, Eisenhower received a message that said the Russians would not accept the surrender signed in Reims and insisted on another signing, in Berlin). It made him wonder if it would be possible after all to cooperate with them in rebuilding Europe. Going to bed on that morning of May 7, Eisenhower felt as flat as the champagne.
But Eisenhower’s flatness should not preclude a glance at what he had accomplished and what he had to celebrate, had he had the energy to do so. The problem is that, like Smith, one searches in vain for the fitting accolades to acknowledge the accomplishments of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Second World War—of what he had endured, of what he had contributed to the final victory, of his place in military history.
Fortunately, George C. Marshall, next to Eisenhower himself the man most responsible for Eisenhower’s success, spoke for the nation and its allies, as well as the U. S. Army, when he replied to Eisenhower’s last wartime message, “You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare,” Marshall began. “You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. You have met and successfully disposed of every conceivable difficulty incident to varied national interests and international political problems of unprecedented complications.” Eisenhower, Marshall said, had triumphed over inconceivable logistical problems and military obstacles. “Through all of this, since the day of your arrival in England three years ago, you have been selfless in your actions, always sound and tolerant in your judgments and altogether admirable in the courage and wisdom of your military decisions.
“You have made history, great history for the good of mankind and you have stood for all we hope and admire in an officer of the United States Army. These are my tributes and my personal thanks.”36
It was the highest possible praise from the best possible source. It had been earned.
• •
Eisenhower earned the praise through a total commitment of his time, energy, and emotion, of course, but even more through his brains, talents, and leadership. He had also been lucky—in his assignments, in his aides and subordinates and superiors, in his opponents, in the weather on D-Day—so many good breaks, in fact, that “Eisenhower luck” became a byword. But much more than luck was involved in his success.
One leadership attribute was his attention to detail, complemented by his intuitive knowledge of which detail to pay attention to. His decisions on the weather on D-Day, for example, were not just pure dumb luck. For a month before June 6, he had made time in his overcrowded schedule to spend fifteen minutes every day with Group Captain Stagg. He would hear Stagg’s prediction for the next couple of days, then query him on the basis of the judgment. He wanted to know how good Stagg was, so as to be able to make his own evaluation when he had to make the decision he was born to make.
As a soldier, his chief characteristic was his flexibility. He often said that in preparing for battle, plans were essential, but that once the battle was joined, plans were useless. Nowhere did this characteristic show more clearly or effectively than in his response to the capture of the bridge at Remagen.
He was outstanding at the art of mentally leaping over the front lines to get into the mind-set of the enemy. He alone understood, in September 1944, that the Germans would fight furiously until they had no bullets left, just as he understood, on December 17, that the Germans were launching a counteroffensive in Ardennes, not just a counterattack.
In the Mediterranean, he had been excessively cautious in his generalship, but in the campaign in northwest Europe, he showed boldness and a willingness to take risks. The best example was his decision to go ahead with the D-Day drops of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions in the face of Leigh-Mallory’s strongly worded recommendation that they be called off. In view of the contributions of the paratroopers to the success of D-Day, for that decision alone Eisenhower earned his fame.
He made many mistakes, although fewer than he had in the Mediterranean. Some came about because of greater goals—appeasing Montgomery meant the failure to take Caen in mid-June 1944; it meant failure to totally destroy the German Army at Falaise in mid-August; it meant failure to take Antwerp in mid-September. It also cost the Allies dearly in early January 1945, when Monty failed to bag the Germans in the Bulge. Ike’s emphasis on the offensive in the late fall of 1944 was the principal cause of the intelligence failure at the Bulge. That failure led to the heaviest losses of the war for the American Army.
To Eisenhower’s critics, his biggest mistake was the failure to take Berlin (this author would hotly dispute that judgment). On an even larger scale, he was certainly wrong in 1945 to have such faith (hope) in the future of U.S.-Soviet relations. He should have recognized that the issues that divided the reluctant Allies were too great to be overcome.
But as a strategist, the highest art of command, he was far more often right than wrong. He was right in his selection of Normandy as the invasion site, right in his selection of Bradley rather than Patton as First Army commander, right in his insistence on using the bombers against the French railway system, right to insist on a broad-front approach to Germany, right to see the Bulge as opportunity rather than disaster, right to fight the major battle west of the Rhine. He was right on the big decisions.
He was the most successful general of the greatest war ever fought.