HOW BERLIN GOT BEHIND THE CURTAIN

A Political Decision Which the Soldiers Did Not Reverse

Compressing a momentous year of wartime history into a few sentences, a new State Department pamphlet titled Background--Berlin, 1961 has drawn strong complaints from Republican Congressmen because it seemed to blame Dwight Eisenhower for allowing the Russians to capture Berlin. Last week the State Department announced that the questioned passage would be rewritten. The Department's backtracking was appropriate--for in fact the cold-war history of Berlin is one that keeps getting added to, but has seldom been added up right.

IN the cold, wet spring of 1945, the Allied Expeditionary Force under General Dwight Eisenhower crossed the Rhine and began the great sweep across the German plain toward juncture with Soviet armies advancing through Poland (see map). On April 12 armored units of Lieut. General William H. Simpson's Ninth U.S. Army reached the Elbe River near Magdeburg and Tangermuende, and thus came within 60 miles of Berlin. At that moment, Marshal Georgy Zhukov's Russian troops were bogged down 35 miles east of the German capital; they had been struggling for two months against the savage opposition of Hitler's Eastern Front armies to gain a foothold across the Oder River. Simpson asked if he should push on to liberate Berlin. Instead, he was told by Eisenhower to consolidate his position while spreading troop units north and south along the Elbe's west bank. As Simpson did so, the Soviet army swarmed across the Oder in force; Berlin fell to Zhukov on May 2.

The Main Prize. The decision to hold back the Ninth Army was made by Ike for military reasons that seemed plausible at the time--and still do. Before Dday, Ike had listed Berlin as his primary military target, a priority made on the assumption that the Wehrmacht would concentrate about the city and defend it to the death. In September 1944, Britain's Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery urged "one really powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin" through northern Germany. "Clearly, Berlin is the main prize," Ike answered. He added that a slower, "broad front" advance would better accomplish the Allies' main object: destroying Germany's military strength. By moving en masse, the AEF would thus be able to seize the industrial heart of Germany (the Ruhr) before striking at its political heart (Berlin).

After the Allied armies crossed the Rhine in March 1945, Monty renewed his request for a northern drive on Berlin. This time he was championed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who felt that political considerations should heavily influence military strategy as the war in Europe drew near an end. "If the Russians also take Berlin," he wrote to F.D.R. on April 1, "will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted on their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future? We should march as far east into Germany as possible, and that should Berlin be in our grasp we should take it."

In a sharp exchange of memos with his British allies, Ike argued that military targets were paramount, and Berlin was no longer important: the Wehrmacht had not, as expected, fallen back about the city. "The place has become nothing but a geographical location," he wrote Monty, "and I have never been interested in these. My purpose is to destroy the enemy's forces and his powers to resist." Eisenhower proposed to wait for the Russians along the Elbe while Monty moved north toward Denmark and the Baltic seaports and Lieut. General Omar Bradley's central group of armies fanned out across Southern Germany.*

Full Support. Since Churchill seemed so "greatly disappointed and disturbed" about his strategy, Ike wrote to Washington that if political estimates were to outweigh military factors, "I would cheerfully readjust my plans." But Ike had the full support of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff, who told the British that "the commander in the field was the best judge" of the army's mission. Washington also shared his judgment on the relative importance of political and military factors. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall wrote to Ike: "Personally, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes."

To the end, Ike agreed that "if I get an opportunity to capture Berlin cheaply, I will take it." But the price did not seem right, especially since there was a war with Japan still to be won. Before his armies reached the Elbe, Ike had asked Bradley for an estimate of what it would cost to take Berlin. Pointing out that U.S. troops would have to cross miles of easily defendable rivers, lakes and canals, Bradley guessed that an attack would cost 100,000 casualties. Thus, when Simpson's spearheads reached Magdeburg, Ike and Bradley saw no point in risking the Ninth Army (whose supply lines were already extended to the danger point) in a possibly disastrous attack on Berlin. So much bloodshed, Bradley told Ike, "was 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."

The "other fellow" was the Soviet Union. By agreement of the Allies, the land in what is now East Germany was to be occupied by Soviet troops after the cessation of hostilities, even though much of it was actually to be conquered by Western troops.

The decision to create occupation zones was a political one, over which Supreme Commander Eisenhower had little control.

In September 1944 the European Advisory Commission--composed of British, U.S. and Russian representatives--signed a protocol that laid out three (a fourth, for the French, was added at Yalta) separate occupation zones for postwar Germany, plus a special Allied joint authority for greater Berlin. At the suggestion of the British--who were eager to control the industrial cities in West Germany--the Soviet Union was granted the largest but least populous zone, including all territory surrounding Berlin itself. Barring a presidential decision to break the agreement--and Harry Truman refused to do that--Ike had no choice but to withdraw his troops from the Soviet zone when hostilities ceased.

Critical Commitment. Then and now, the EAC and Yalta agreements have been severely criticized because they provided for no Allied access to Berlin through Soviet territory. The U.S. delegate to the commission, the late John G. Winant, strongly urged the State Department to demand some guarantee of access; his proposal was ignored, apparently because Washington felt that to insist on specific routes would limit the Allies only to those agreed-on roads or airlanes. At the time, Ike had no particular worries about access to Berlin, but on several occasions he strongly opposed the idea of separate occupation zones. In his last talk with F.D.R. in January 1944, Eisenhower urged the President to consider a joint four-power authority for all Germany. As Ike told TIME'S Editor in Chief Henry R. Luce in an interview published by LIFE recently, Roosevelt answered: "Impossible. I'm already committed." Weeks later, Ike made one last try; his personal Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, futilely raised the question with Roosevelt and Churchill at a strategy conference in Malta, when the two leaders stopped there en route to Yalta.

In retrospect, Eisenhower--and more especially his civilian superiors--might have paid greater heed to British plans for countering Soviet ambitions in Germany. But it is difficult to fault Ike on his resolution of the strategic choices before him. Sums up authoritative Military Historian Forrest (The Supreme Command) Pogue, in Command Decisions: "When considered from the purely military viewpoint, his decision was certainly the proper one." In the war against Hitler, mistakes were made; but the key errors were the political agreements to divide Germany after the battle, not the military decisions on how to conquer it.

* Impressed by a classic miscalculation of U.S. intelligence, both Ike and Bradley feared that German armies would form a "National Redoubt" in the all-but-impenetrable Alpine massif, and hoped to wipe out resistance in the area before the stronghold could be manned. "Not until after the campaign ended," Bradley wrote later, "were we to learn that this Redoubt existed largely in the imaginations of a few fanatic Nazis."

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