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Eisenhower asked Bradley, who would have to lead an advance on Berlin, for his views. Bradley advised that taking the city might cost an additional 100,000 casualties, which he thought "a pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective" -- especially since the heads of the Allied governments had already agreed on postwar occupation zones at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Eisenhower told the British and American Chiefs of Staff, "I am the first to admit that a war is waged in pursuance of political aims," so if the chiefs decided "that the Allied effort to take Berlin outweighs purely * military considerations," he would revise his plans and carry out the operation. Such an order never came.
Eisenhower really had no choice in the matter. American generals, then and now, are expected to make decisions solely on military grounds and leave politics to their civilian chiefs. Bradley was right about the occupation zones: U.S. forces captured large portions of Czechoslovakia and what later became East Germany but reaped no political advantage from it. They simply had to pull back 125 miles to get inside their occupation boundaries.
The Germans surrendered to Eisenhower on May 7, 1945, but in some ways the war never ended for him. He wrote his memoirs, and so did the other generals. A surprising number claimed they could have done a better job as Supreme Commander. Eisenhower confessed in 1967, "I was annoyed by carping criticism." Not that his actions were above criticism, he said, but "as the postmortems have gone on, it looked as if we had blundered throughout the campaign and had been defeated."
In his old age and retirement, Eisenhower reflected on the fact that when he was planning D-day, most of his colleagues thought the war would last two more years. His own bet -- the end of 1944 -- was four months too optimistic. But he took pride in the fact that only "11 months from the day we landed in Normandy, the surrender took place."
The perspective from 50 years matches Eisenhower's assessment. He may not have handled his crusade in Europe perfectly, because nothing in war goes precisely according to plan. But those who look back and say he could have defeated Hitler sooner are playing games with history and hindsight. In the tumult of battle, with colleagues second-guessing him and comrades dying by the hundreds every day, Dwight Eisenhower made decisions that won the war in Europe and established a peace that prevails today.