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Critical Commitment. Then and now, the EAC and Yalta agreements have been severely criticized because they provided for no Allied access to Berlin through Soviet territory. The U.S. delegate to the commission, the late John G. Winant, strongly urged the State Department to demand some guarantee of access; his proposal was ignored, apparently because Washington felt that to insist on specific routes would limit the Allies only to those agreed-on roads or airlanes. At the time, Ike had no particular worries about access to Berlin, but on several occasions he strongly opposed the idea of separate occupation zones. In his last talk with F.D.R. in January 1944, Eisenhower urged the President to consider a joint four-power authority for all Germany. As Ike told TIME'S Editor in Chief Henry R. Luce in an interview published by LIFE recently, Roosevelt answered: "Impossible. I'm already committed." Weeks later, Ike made one last try; his personal Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, futilely raised the question with Roosevelt and Churchill at a strategy conference in Malta, when the two leaders stopped there en route to Yalta.
In retrospect, Eisenhower—and more especially his civilian superiors—might have paid greater heed to British plans for countering Soviet ambitions in Germany. But it is difficult to fault Ike on his resolution of the strategic choices before him. Sums up authoritative Military Historian Forrest (The Supreme Command) Pogue, in Command Decisions: "When considered from the purely military viewpoint, his decision was certainly the proper one." In the war against Hitler, mistakes were made; but the key errors were the political agreements to divide Germany after the battle, not the military decisions on how to conquer it.
* Impressed by a classic miscalculation of U.S. intelligence, both Ike and Bradley feared that German armies would form a "National Redoubt" in the all-but-impenetrable Alpine massif, and hoped to wipe out resistance in the area before the stronghold could be manned. "Not until after the campaign ended," Bradley wrote later, "were we to learn that this Redoubt existed largely in the imaginations of a few fanatic Nazis."