Armageddon - Max Hastings [310]
Eisenhower’s next action roused the fury of Churchill and has provoked controversy for sixty years. Without further reference to his political and military superiors, on his own initiative he sent a personal message to Stalin stating that his armies had no intention of advancing to Berlin. SHAEF hoped, he said, that the Anglo-Americans would meet the Russians on an axis Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden—which meant around the Elbe, at least forty miles west of Berlin. He copied his cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
Churchill personally telephoned Eisenhower on 29 March to express his dismay that a field commander should have communicated so vital a decision direct to Stalin, without prior reference to the Anglo-American leadership. The British prime minister asserted his strong belief in the importance of Berlin as the final destination of the Anglo-American armies. Yet the American Supreme Commander no longer felt obliged to display the deference to the British prime minister which had seemed appropriate a year or two earlier. Churchill was visibly weary and audibly testy. Eisenhower was well aware that the wishes of the British government no longer exercised decisive influence where it mattered—in Washington. “The PM is increasingly vexatious,” Eisenhower told Bradley. “He imagines himself to be a military tactician.” Churchill said to Brooke: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”
One line in Eisenhower’s signal to the combined Chiefs of Staff has remained the focus of fierce debate since 1945. He asserted blandly that “Berlin has lost much of its former military importance.” He made plain that he had no intention of assaulting Germany’s capital, unless he was instructed to do so. “I am the first to admit that a war is waged in pursuance of political aims,” he wrote on 7 April, “and if the chiefs of staff should decide that the Allied effort to take Berlin outweighs purely military considerations, I would cheerfully readjust my plans and my thinking so as to carry out such an operation.” No such decision was forthcoming. Marshall endorsed Eisenhower’s decision, overriding the remonstrations of the British. The dying Roosevelt did not intervene.
Back in November 1943, the president had asserted that “there would definitely be a race for Berlin. We may have to put United States divisions into Berlin as soon as possible.” The president sketched a plan for the post-war occupation of Germany, in which the capital stood in the American zone. By April 1945, Roosevelt’s 1943 Berlin vision had evaporated. This was a reflection of the president’s unwillingness to intervene in issues of military strategy, save on the largest questions; his failing health; circumstances on the German battlefield which had been quite unforeseeable sixteen months earlier, with the Russians further forward than anyone had envisioned; the reluctance of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff to make military decisions for political purposes; and the desire of the U.S. State Department to conciliate Moscow.
At the time of Eisenhower’s exchanges with London and Washington, however, Bradley had no more knowledge than Montgomery of Eisenhower’s decision—and it was overwhelmingly a personal one—to forswear any attempt to reach Hitler’s capital. On 3 April, 12th Army Group’s commander was still telling his own generals that for the last big advance of the war Ninth Army would head for Berlin, while First Army struck south-east for Leipzig. On 4 April, Simpson was ordered to “exploit any opportunity for seizing a bridgehead over the Elbe and be prepared to continue to advance on Berlin or to the north-east.” As late as 8 April, Eisenhower visited Major-General Alexander Bolling, commanding the 84th Division in Hanover, and asked him where he was headed next. “General