Armageddon - Max Hastings [312]
There is no doubt that the Anglo-Americans could have reached the Ber-lin area swiftly, whatever uncertainties persist about what might have happened once they had done so. Eisenhower’s decision seemed to his critics to mark the nadir of an advance dominated by cautious and unimaginative strategic leadership since he had assumed command of the Allied ground forces on 1 September 1944. For the Americans and British, the new policy ensured an anticlimactic end to the greatest military campaign in the history of the world. The occupation of Bremen and Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart scarcely offered the peerless drama of a march through the streets of Hitler’s conquered capital.
Churchill’s anger that Berlin was to be forsaken as a prize reflected the deeper grief which haunted the last months of his war, that Hitler’s dominance of eastern Europe was now to be supplanted by that of Stalin. Yet the Washington administration refused to share the British prime minister’s fear of the Russians. Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger said, half a century later:
If you look at the world geopolitically, the mistakes were avoidable. But if you look at them as Americans did in 1945, when they were trying to escape history, they were understandable. America was determined not to do what other nations had always done after winning wars—grab as much as they could. There was no excuse for the way Roosevelt treated Churchill. FDR was naive. But one must make allowances for the spirit of the time. If Roosevelt had resisted Soviet demands, a big slice of the U.S. intellectual community would have accused him of provoking Stalin.
If the Allies had identified seizure of Berlin and Anglo-American liberation of large tracts of eastern Europe as vital war aims early in 1944, it would have been necessary for the U.S. and British governments to order Eisenhower to pursue his advance across north-west Europe in a wholly different spirit, with vastly greater urgency. Washington and London would have needed to assert a political agenda for the last months of the conflict. Instead, from beginning to end, the SHAEF Supreme Commander’s orders were explicitly military in character, directed towards the destruction of the Nazi regime. Stalin’s suspicion, indeed paranoia, about American intentions was prompted by disbelief that any great nation could conduct a war without political ambitions, when those of the Soviet Union now dominated its military strategy.
Yet even before Roosevelt’s health failed, America’s conduct of the war was overwhelmingly determined by her Chiefs of Staff, military men. It was impossible, in the last weeks of war, abruptly to invite the army commanders in the field to adopt different priorities. And who in Washington was going to do this, in the last weeks of a dying president, or the first days of a novice one? No military action undertaken by the Anglo-Americans in the spring of 1945 could have undone the decisions of the Teheran and Yalta conferences about the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, to which Churchill had acceded. No belated Anglo-American military success could snatch the east European nations from communist tyranny, because the Russians already occupied them. It is true that geographical limits had not been agreed at Yalta for Allied military operations, because no one could guess in February where the armies’ respective advances might end. This was why Eisenhower felt obliged to signal Stalin at the