The Supreme Commander

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  But the military situation in late March 1945 was far different from that prevailing in September 1944. In September the Red Army was still outside Warsaw, more than three hundred miles from Berlin; the AEF was about the same distance from the German capital. In March 1945 the AEF remained more than two hundred miles away from Berlin, while the Red Army was thirty-five miles from the capital. At Eisenhower’s press conference on March 27 a reporter asked him, “Who do you think will be into Berlin first, the Russians or us?” “Well,” Eisenhower replied, “I think mileage alone ought to make them do it. After all they are thirty-three miles and we are two hundred and fifty. I wouldn’t want to make any prediction. They have a shorter race to run, although they are faced by the bulk of the German forces.”28

  A second factor in Eisenhower’s decision to forgo initial entry into Berlin was Bradley’s advice. His influence on Eisenhower’s thinking was always great. Sometime during the week before March 28, either at Cannes or while Eisenhower was at his headquarters, Bradley had a long talk with the Supreme Commander about Berlin. Bradley pointed out that, even if Montgomery reached the Elbe River before the Red Army crossed the Oder, fifty miles of lowlands separated the Elbe from Berlin. To get to the capital, Montgomery would have to advance through an area studded with lakes, crisscrossed with streams, and interlaced with occasional canals. Eisenhower asked Bradley for an estimate on the cost of taking Berlin. About 100,000 casualties, Bradley replied. “A pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective, especially when we’ve got to fall back and let the other fellow take over”29 (Berlin was well within the occupation zone assigned to the Russians).

  Marshall’s message of March 27, in which the Chief of Staff suggested Linz or Munich as an objective, helped turn Eisenhower’s thinking away from Berlin. So did the fact that Montgomery would lead the drive to Berlin, while Bradley would be in charge of an offensive directed into central Germany. The fear of a prolonged guerrilla campaign in Germany, directed from an alpine fortress, also played a role.

  Finally, there was the political factor. The critics are right in saying that Eisenhower was still fighting World War II, but the implication involved—that he should have so directed his operations as to forestall the Russians in central Europe—carries with it the idea that soldiers in the field, rather than the President, should make national policy. In March 1945 the Cold War had not started, and Roosevelt appeared to be determined to prevent it. His policy was to defeat Germany, redeploy to the Pacific as soon as possible, and get along with the Russians. Eisenhower did not question the policy; he did do his best to carry it out. Later, writing at the height of the Cold War, Bradley could say, “As soldiers we looked naively on this British inclination to complicate the war with political foresight and non-military objectives,”30 which was in effect a confession that the British had remarkable political skill and that the Americans were hopelessly unsophisticated. But the truth is that at the time Montgomery and the British advocated an attempt to take Berlin as a military move and Eisenhower rejected it on those grounds. The British had a different postwar policy than the Americans, which was just then taking its final form, but they did not urge it on Eisenhower until later. To SHAEF it seemed that the principal British concern was to make a hero out of Montgomery. “Monty wanted to ride into Berlin on a white charger wearing two hats,”31 as Whiteley put it; Eisenhower wanted to finish the war.

  CHAPTER 20

  Controversy with the British

  Eisenhower’s March 28 cable to Stalin, informing him that the AEF would head for Dresden-Leipzig, set off a flurry of activity in the capitals of the Big Three. The Soviets moved first. Stalin replied with “altogether unusual alacrity” to Eisenhower’s message, agreeing that the Allied and Soviet forces should meet as Eisenhower proposed in the Dresden area, and adding that Berlin had lost its former strategic significance. Stalin said the Soviet Supreme Command planned to allot only secondary forces to the capture of the German capital. In fact, however, the Red Army had already begun a major redeployment, carried out “in almost frantic haste,” designed to make Berlin its primary objective.1

  By early April Marshal Zhukov, on the Oder River, had 768,100 men and 11,000 artillery pieces, not counting smaller-caliber mortars. Marshal Koniev, on the Neisse River, had five field and two tank armies with artillery equal to Zhukov’s. The total strength of the Red Army around Berlin was 1,250,000 men and 22,000 guns.2 Zhukov and Koniev had what must be reckoned as the greatest armed force in so small an area in the whole of military history. To oppose them, the Germans had two armies. Clearly the Russians were determined to take Berlin themselves, as the only appropriate climax to their war with Germany. Stalin was delighted to learn of Eisenhower’s plans, to see that the AEF would not engage in a race for Berlin, and to learn that the glory of taking Berlin would go to his armies. To ensure that Eisenhower did not change his mind, Stalin said he agreed about Berlin’s insignificance and added that the Red Army, too, would concentrate on Dresden.

  If Stalin feared that the British would try to get Eisenhower to alter his plans, he was right. The British did object to Eisenhower’s proposed operation and to his opening direct communications with Stalin, because they were fearful that Stalin would make a dupe of Eisenhower. Their objections, however, were of a military, not a political, nature. The BCOS met on March 29; Brooke recorded their reaction in his diary. “A very long C.O.S. meeting with a series of annoying telegrams. The worst of all was one from Eisenhower direct to Stalin trying to coordinate his offensive with the Russians. To start with, he has no business to address Stalin direct, his communications should be through the Combined Chiefs of Staff; secondly, he produced a telegram which was unintelligible; and finally, what was implied in it appeared to be entirely adrift and a change from all that had been previously agreed on.”3 Montgomery was also unhappy. “I consider we are about to make a terrible mistake,” he wired Brooke. “It seems doctrine that public opinion wins wars is coming to the fore again.”4

  The British made their feelings known to Field Marshal Wilson, the head of the Joint Staff Mission in Washington, who passed them on to Marshall. The message, considering the depth of British emotions upon learning that Montgomery would not lead the last offensive and that Berlin was not the objective, was softly worded. The BCOS said they were concerned at Eisenhower’s “implied change of plan” in taking Ninth Army away from Montgomery and giving it to Bradley, and they objected to Eisenhower’s getting into direct communication with Stalin. On the military side, they said that the original plan should remain in effect because: (1) it would open German ports in the north; (2) it would annul the U-boat war; (3) it would free AEF forces to move into Denmark. Nothing was said about political factors involved in taking Berlin.

  The JCS were just as upset by the British cable as the BCOS had been by Eisenhower’s message to Stalin. The American Chiefs resented the almost casual way their British counterparts called into question the strategy of the most successful field commander of the war, and they thought it unseemly for the British—of all people—to object to Eisenhower’s direct approach to Stalin, since Churchill had always felt free to by-pass the CCS and go directly to Eisenhower. Most important, the JCS—especially Marshall—thought Eisenhower was right. The line from Kassel to Dresden offered the shortest distance to the Russians and thus to the division of Germany into two parts. It was a route that avoided the waterways of the northern plains and it provided a central axis from which the AEF could turn north or south as required. Finally, it led directly to the second greatest industrial area of Germany, the Silesian basin. As John Ehrman points out, “This was a reasoned case. But, as on previous occasions, the Supreme Commander’s first telegram unfortunately failed to cover all of its aspects, and thus suggested that he had not in fact considered it as a whole.”5

  The BCOS had implied that Eisenhower had not thought about what he was doing or given full consideration to the consequences of his plans. Instead of treating him as an e
xperienced commander who had proved his worth, they appeared to regard him as a beginner who needed guidance on every point from his superiors. That after all this time, and after the Rhineland battle, the British should display such a lack of trust in Eisenhower seemed to Marshall incredible. In replying to the British, the JCS got in a dig at British strategical insights by pointing out that Eisenhower’s plan to fight the major battle west of the Rhine had been proved sound. As to the future, the JCS stated flatly that Eisenhower was “the best judge of the measures which offer the earliest prospect of destroying the German Armies or their power to resist,” and added that the Supreme Commander’s ideas were “sound from the overall viewpoint of crushing Germany as expeditiously as possible and should receive full support.” The British had wanted to censure Eisenhower for contacting Stalin; Marshall emphatically rejected the proposal. He also sent the substance of the British objections on to Eisenhower so that Eisenhower would know what was going on.6

  Eisenhower, unaware of how Marshall had responded to the British criticisms, sent a defense of his action to the Chief of Staff. He had Whiteley prepare it; while Whiteley was working, Eisenhower sent a short message of his own to Marshall. He said that “the charge that I have changed plans has no possible basis in fact.” He had always planned, once the Ruhr was isolated, to launch “one main attack calculated to accomplish, in conjunction with the Russians, the destruction of the enemy armed forces. To disperse strong forces along the northern coast before the primary object is accomplished will leave me too weak to launch a powerful thrust straight through the center.”7 What he meant was that the objective of the plan—the German Army—had not changed, and he regarded a change in the direction of the advance as minor. With this the British could not agree.

  Whiteley, meanwhile, had prepared a long justification for Eisenhower to send to Marshall. After reading it over, Eisenhower signed it and sent it off. It was strongly worded. The CCS had instructed Eisenhower to deal directly with the Russians concerning military co-ordination, it began, so the British had no right to object.* “Even cursory examination of the decisive direction” for the final thrust, the cable continued, “shows that the principal effort should … be toward the Leipzig region.…” The area of northern Germany across which Montgomery would have to march, the “so-called ‘good ground,’ ” was “not really good at this time of year,” for it was badly cut up by waterways and the ground was marshy. “Merely following the principle that Field Marshal Brooke has always shouted to me, I am determined to concentrate on one major thrust and all that my plan does is to place the Ninth U. S. Army back under Bradley” for that thrust.

  Brooke wanted concentration; Eisenhower was finally willing to give it to him. It should go for a significant military target, which Berlin was not. “May I point out,” the message continued, “that Berlin itself is no longer a particularly important objective. Its usefulness to the German has been largely destroyed and even his government is preparing to move to another area.” Going straight eastward would send the AEF toward the heart of what remained of German power.

  In one paragraph Whiteley, a British officer, allowed himself to show at least some of the irritation within SHAEF at the BCOS for the constant interference and criticism they had provided from Normandy to the Elbe. “The Prime Minister and his Chiefs of Staff,” the paragraph began, “opposed ‘ANVIL’; they opposed my idea that the German should be destroyed west of the Rhine before we made our major effort across that river; and they insisted that the route leading northeastward from Frankfurt would involve us merely in slow, rough-country fighting. Now they apparently want me to turn aside on operations in which would be involved many thousands of troops before the German forces are fully defeated. I submit that these things are studied daily and hourly by me and my advisors and that we are animated by one single thought which is the early winning of this war.”8 Eisenhower indicated that he shared Whiteley’s irritation by signing the cable. The JCS, with this confirmation of Eisenhower’s views, continued to give him the strongest possible backing. The only concession they made was to agree that hereafter Eisenhower should clear his messages to Stalin with the CCS before sending them on, but that made little difference since it was now perfectly obvious that the Americans dominated the CCS.

  But if the BCOS challenge had been met and overcome, there were still other British sources of power that could challenge Eisenhower’s plans. Both Montgomery and Churchill were angry, and both made their views known. On March 29 Montgomery cabled Eisenhower, “I note that you intend to change the command set up. If you feel this is necessary I pray you do not do so until we reach the Elbe as such action would not help the great movement which is now beginning to develop.” Eisenhower told Whiteley to prepare an answer. It went out on March 31. “My plan is simple and aims at dividing and destroying the German forces and joining hands with the Red Army,” it began. The best way to do that was to drive through central Germany on the Kassel-Leipzig axis. Before this thrust could begin, however, it was necessary to destroy the German forces encircled in the Ruhr (Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Model’s Army Group B), a task that would involve elements of both U. S. First and Ninth Armies. “A mopping task of this nature,” Whiteley explained, “in a densely populated area, should clearly be controlled by one commander.” Thus Bradley had to have Ninth Army under him. “Moreover, it is Bradley who will be straining to release his thrust to the east and it is clearly very desirable that he should be in the position to judge when the situation in the Ruhr warrants it.” Eisenhower therefore would not change his decision, and Ninth Army would go to Bradley.

  “You will note that in none of this do I mention Berlin,” Whiteley’s draft continued. “That place has become, so far as I am concerned, nothing but a geographical location, and I have never been interested in these. My purpose is to destroy the enemy’s forces and his powers to resist.” In conclusion, the message said that after the AEF-Red Army link-up and the division of Germany, Eisenhower intended to push across the Elbe near its mouth, take Luebeck, and seal off the Danish Peninsula. This was the first mention of Lubeck; later, Eisenhower would explain that he wanted to control the land approaches to Denmark in order to prevent the Russians from liberating the area (Denmark, of course, had not been assigned to any of the Big Three for occupation purposes, as presumably it would have its sovereignty restored).9

  Montgomery had objected to Eisenhower’s plan on the narrow basis that it upset his own calculations. Churchill broadened the discussion. A firm believer in civilian control of the military, he did not want his own soldiers raising political issues. He had already called down the BCOS for using a phrase in reference to Berlin that read, “issues which have a wider import than the destruction of the main enemy forces in Germany.” Churchill commented this was “a very odd phrase to be used in a staff communication. I should have thought it laid itself open to a charge of extreme unorthodoxy.”10

  Churchill did not hesitate to take up the theme himself. On March 30 he called Eisenhower on the telephone to ask why SHAEF had changed the plan. Eisenhower had Bull send a brief explanation. The next morning the Prime Minister wired the Supreme Commander. On both military and political grounds, he made clear, he felt serious errors were about to be made. “If the enemy’s resistance should weaken,” Churchill said, “as you evidently expect and which may well be accorded, why should we not cross the Elbe and advance as far eastward as possible? This has an important political bearing, as the Russian Army of the south seems certain to enter Vienna and overrun Austria. If we deliberately leave Berlin to them, even if it should be in our grasp, the double event may strengthen their conviction, already apparent, that they have done everything.” Aside from the effect on the Russians, who to Churchill seemed already to be displaying a bullying attitude with regard to such issues as the German surrender in Italy and the future Polish government and borders, the Prime Minister thought the fall of Berlin would have a “profound psychological effect on German
resistance in every part of the Reich.” He felt that “whilst Berlin remains under the German flag, it cannot in my opinion fail to be the most decisive point in Germany.” The difficulty with this argument was that presumably the effect of the fall of Berlin on the Germans would be the same whatever the nationality of the army that took the city. What really stood out in Churchill’s message was his suggestion that Ninth Army remain under Montgomery, since this “only shifts the weight of one Army to the northernmost flank and this avoids the relegation of His Majesty’s Forces to an unexpected restricted sphere.”11

  Churchill’s message, according to the SHAEF office diary, “upset Eisenhower quite a bit.” He dictated the reply himself. “In the first place,” he began, “I repeat that I have not changed any plan.” The furthest he had ever gone in approving or formulating specific strategic plans, he declared, was to the encirclement of the Ruhr and the elimination of the German armies there. Beyond that, he had always insisted on flexibility. The first phase was almost completed and it created new situations “requiring study and analysis before the next broad pattern of effort could be accurately sketched.” The problem was to “determine the direction of the blow that would create maximum disorganization of the remaining German forces and the German power to resist.”