Armageddon - Max Hastings [311]
More than one major historian of the campaign has voiced the suspicion that, if American rather than British troops had occupied the Allied left flank, natural focus of a push for Berlin, Eisenhower would have unleashed them towards Hitler’s capital. As it was, so deep had become his loathing of Montgomery, so determined was he to frustrate the field-marshal’s “efforts to make sure that the Americans—and me in particular—got no credit” for the campaign, that he set his face against any course that would enable Montgomery to lead a triumphal march on Berlin. Stephen Ambrose, the Supreme Commander’s biographer, has suggested that if Bradley had commanded in the north “Eisenhower might well have sent him to Berlin.” Yet it seems implausible to suppose that Eisenhower’s last big decision of the war was founded upon personal animosity, real though this was. He was still much troubled about the possibility that the enemy would make a last stand in south Germany, at the mythical “Alpine Redoubt” which preoccupied SHAEF intelligence.
There was a much more substantial issue. If the Germans defended Berlin with the desperation they had displayed in other last-ditch actions, Allied casualties would be enormous. When Eisenhower asked Bradley for his estimate of American losses in a drive for Berlin, 12th Army Group’s commander suggested a figure of 100,000. This estimate does not seem unrealistic—it amounts to barely one-third of the casualties actually sustained by the Russians. It is true that in early April the Americans overestimated Germany’s residual capacity to sustain the campaign. Yet it is striking that U.S. casualties in April 1945 declined only slightly against those of February, as the Germans maintained disorganized but often fanatical resistance. It is plausible that Germany’s soldiers would have resisted an Anglo-American assault on Berlin much less vigorously than the Soviet one. But it would have been rash for Eisenhower to make any such assumption while Hitler lived, or indeed for history to do so.
When Russian forces were already within thirty miles of the city, while the nearest Americans were still four times that distance away, wherein lay the virtue of a commitment to conclude the Western allied campaign with a bloodbath? Berlin stood more than a hundred miles inside the designated, unalterable Soviet occupation zone of Germany. What would Eisenhower have said to the mother or husband of an American or British soldier killed in a battle for Hitler’s capital, which at best would have yielded only a symbolic triumph for the Western allies? Was any symbol worth tens of thousands of American and British lives? “I decided,” he wrote in his post-war memoirs, “that [Berlin] was not the most logical nor the most desirable objective for the forces of Western Allies.”
Eisenhower’s decision provoked the wrath of his subordinate commanders at the time, and the censure of posterity informed by the Cold War. Robert E. Murphy, the influential American diplomat acting as political adviser to Eisenhower and the German Control Commission, expressed his dismay in a letter to Washington on 14 April. “Apparently,” Murphy wrote, “there is on the part of some of our officers no particular eagerness to occupy Berlin first . . . One thing seems to be that what is left of Berlin may be tenaciously defended house by house, brick by brick. I have suggested the modest opinion that there should