A Political Decision Which the Soldiers Did Not Reverse
Compressing a momentous year of wartime history into a few sentences, a new State Department pamphlet titled Background—Berlin, 1961 has drawn strong complaints from Republican Congressmen because it seemed to blame Dwight Eisenhower for allowing the Russians to capture Berlin. Last week the State Department announced that the questioned passage would be rewritten. The Department's backtracking was appropriate—for in fact the cold-war history of Berlin is one that keeps getting added to, but has seldom been added up right.
IN the cold, wet spring of 1945, the Allied Expeditionary Force under General Dwight Eisenhower crossed the Rhine and began the great sweep across the German plain toward juncture with Soviet armies advancing through Poland (see map). On April 12 armored units of Lieut. General William H. Simpson's Ninth U.S. Army reached the Elbe River near Magdeburg and Tangermünde, and thus came within 60 miles of Berlin. At that moment, Marshal Georgy Zhukov's Russian troops were bogged down 35 miles east of the German capital; they had been struggling for two months against the savage opposition of Hitler's Eastern Front armies to gain a foothold across the Oder River. Simpson asked if he should push on to liberate Berlin. Instead, he was told by Eisenhower to consolidate his position while spreading troop units north and south along the Elbe's west bank. As Simpson did so, the Soviet army swarmed across the Oder in force; Berlin fell to Zhukov on May 2.
The Main Prize. The decision to hold back the Ninth Army was made by Ike for military reasons that seemed plausible at the time—and still do. Before Dday, Ike had listed Berlin as his primary military target, a priority made on the assumption that the Wehrmacht would concentrate about the city and defend it to the death. In September 1944, Britain's Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery urged "one really powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin" through northern Germany. "Clearly, Berlin is the main prize," Ike answered. He added that a slower, "broad front" advance would better accomplish the Allies' main object: destroying Germany's military strength. By moving en masse, the AEF would thus be able to seize the industrial heart of Germany (the Ruhr) before striking at its political heart (Berlin).
After the Allied armies crossed the Rhine in March 1945, Monty renewed his request for a northern drive on Berlin. This time he was championed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who felt that political considerations should heavily influence military strategy as the war in Europe drew near an end. "If the Russians also take Berlin," he wrote to F.D.R. on April 1, "will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted on their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future? We should march as far east into Germany as possible, and that should Berlin be in our grasp we should take it."