Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Tedder’s reception in Moscow was more than Eisenhower could have hoped for. Stalin discussed the Russian offensive in detail, and inquired about the effect of von Rundstedt’s attack in the Ardennes on Allied plans for crossing the Rhine. Tedder said the Allies “had no intention of letting up,” and then described Ike’s plans for a two-pronged crossing of the river, the principal one under Montgomery near Düsseldorf, the other under Bradley near Frankfurt. The Allies would then advance on a broad front and link up with the Russians somewhere near Leipzig. Tedder did not mention Berlin explicitly, but indicated that Eisenhower was uninterested in prestige objectives and would focus on the defeat of the German Army, wherever it stood.

  Stalin, who was outspoken in his praise for Eisenhower’s policy, was particularly delighted with the two-pronged idea. Red Army doctrine, he said, always emphasized the importance of secondary attacks. “We have no treaty,” Stalin told Tedder when he departed, “but we are comrades. It is proper and also sound policy that we should help each other in times of difficulty.”64 Stalin agreed to maintain direct military exchanges with SHAEF, and shortly afterward wrote Eisenhower that the meeting with Tedder had been very useful. The Soviet offensive was proceeding in a satisfactory manner, he said, and would “ease the positions of the Allied troops and will accelerate preparations for your intended offensives.”65

  Eisenhower planned to cross the Rhine on a wide front. Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group, reinforced by Simpson’s Ninth U.S. Army, would attack in the north toward Düsseldorf, Essen, and the Ruhr’s industrial heartland. In the center, Hodges’s First Army would move on Cologne while Patton continued down the Moselle in the direction of Koblenz and Mainz. In the south, under Devers’s Sixth Army Group, Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army would advance toward Kaiserslautern and Karlsruhe, and the French First Army toward Mulhouse and Freiburg. Montgomery had a preponderance of men and matériel, and initial plans assumed he would push on to Berlin after the Ruhr had been taken. But Eisenhower successfully resisted pressure from London to concentrate his attack solely in the north.

  By the end of February, Ike’s broad-front strategy approached fruition. The largest Allied force ever assembled stood poised to launch the final offensive of the war in western Europe. Almost three million U.S., British, French, and Canadian troops—in three army groups, seven armies, twenty-one corps, and seventy-three divisions—struck that portion of the German Army still west of the Rhine. Hitler had transferred the bulk of his remaining panzer divisions to hold the Russians on the Oder, and German resistance to the Allied assault was spotty.

  On February 24, 1945, Eisenhower met the press at the Hotel Scribe in Paris—his first press conference since November. More than two hundred reporters crammed into the ballroom for what visiting White House press secretary Steve Early called “the most magnificent performance of any man at a press conference that I have ever seen.”66 The Allies were advancing all along the front, and Ike had the facts at his fingertips. Reporters’ probes about relations between Bradley and Montgomery were diplomatically deflected. Merle Miller, who was attending his first press conference as a correspondent for the European edition of Yank, was overwhelmed. “Ike is a master,” Miller recorded in his diary, “though for my taste he smiles too much and says too little. Sometimes, when he chooses, he uses a great many words to say nothing at all, but the boys and girls of the press acted as if they had heard Einstein explain relativity.”67

  On March 2, troops of Simpson’s Ninth Army reached the Rhine at Düsseldorf. The British Second Army and the First Canadian Army closed to the river a day later, and on the fifth, Hodges’s forces arrived at Cologne. SHAEF planners had assumed there would be a fierce battle for Cologne, but on March 7 what was left of the city fell to VII Corps. “We had come well over 600 miles from Utah Beach,” said J. Lawton Collins, “and the day before had captured our 140,000th prisoner.”68

  The day Cologne fell, elements of the 9th Armored Division moving into Remagen, south of Bonn, captured the Ludendorff railroad bridge across the Rhine before German sappers could demolish it. A formidable structure more than a thousand feet long, and wide enough for two railroad tracks with pedestrian walkways on either side, the Ludendorff bridge was one of the last escape routes for the retreating Germans west of the river, and the demolition teams had waited until the last moment to destroy it. News of the capture percolated quickly up the chain of command. “When Bradley reported that we had a permanent bridge across the Rhine I could scarcely believe my ears,” said Ike. “This was completely unforeseen. The final defeat of the enemy, which we had long calculated would be accomplished in the spring and summer of 1945, was suddenly just around the corner.”

  “How much have you got in that vicinity that you can throw across the river?” Eisenhower asked Bradley.

  “Four divisions,” Bradley replied.

  “Well, Brad, we expected to have that many divisions tied up around Cologne and now those are free. Go ahead and shove over at least five divisions and anything else that is necessary to make certain of our hold.”69

  Over the next two weeks, nine divisions crossed the Rhine at Remagen. The rugged terrain on the east bank was ill-suited to major offensive action, and did not affect SHAEF’s plans for the upcoming crossings by Montgomery and Patton. Nevertheless, the bridgehead constituted a threat to the entire German front on the Rhine. (After the capture of the bridge, Hitler relieved von Rundstedt for the last time and replaced him with Albert Kesselring.) By the time the big railroad bridge finally collapsed on March 17, First Army had constructed six pontoon bridges across the river and the bridgehead was twenty miles long and eight miles deep.70

  Münster, April 1945. (illustration credit 15.2)

  As German resistance crumbled, Eisenhower elected to take a well-earned respite from the daily grind at SHAEF. On March 19, at the urging of Kay and Bedell, Eisenhower accepted the invitation of the Dillon family (founders of the Wall Street investment firm Dillon, Reed) to spend a few days at their sumptuous villa on the Riviera. “Today I leave for a five day trip,” Ike wrote Mamie. “And I hope to make three days of them my first ‘rest period’ of the war.”71 Eisenhower was accompanied by Kay, Bedell, Bedell’s friend Ethel Westermann, Ike’s aide Tex Lee, and WACs Ruth Briggs and Nana Rae. Bradley joined the group in Cannes the following day. It was four men and four women taking time off from the war to enjoy what Kay described as “the most luxurious place I have ever seen. Nothing that contributed to comfort was lacking. For the first couple of days, all [Ike] did was sleep. He woke up long enough to eat and move from his bedroom to the terrace. He would eat lunch on the terrace, with two or three glasses of wine, and shuffle back to bed again. After forty-eight hours of this he began to look somewhat human.

  British troops move through Stadtlohn, April 1945. (illustration credit 15.3)

  “As he started to feel better, we would sit on the terrace all day long, looking out over the Mediterranean, chatting lazily, drinking white wine and sunbathing. By the end of the week, he was so much better it was hard to believe what a wreck he had been.”72 On the final day at Cannes, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Smith reviewed the strategy for bringing the war to a close. With German resistance collapsing, Ike wanted to take a fresh look at the plans for Montgomery to press on to Berlin from the Ruhr.

  Since the liquidation of the Bulge, and especially after establishing the bridgehead at Remagen, Eisenhower’s inclination had been to keep increasing the strength of the attack on Bradley’s front. At first the attack by Twelfth Army Group had been intended as a diversion, then as a secondary effort to help Montgomery, then as a possible alternative should Monty bog down. By the time Ike and Bradley conferred on March 21, Bradley’s attack had become, in Eisenhower’s mind, the main thrust for the Allies’ final offensive.73 Patton would cross the Rhine near Frankfurt, Hodges would push out from Remagen, and the two armies would advance abreast toward Kassel. At that point Simpson’s Ninth Army would revert to Bradley’s c
ommand, and Twelfth Army Group would turn east, meeting the Russians on the Elbe. Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group (less the U.S. Ninth Army), would move northeast toward Hamburg and Lübeck on the Baltic.

  Thousands of German POWs marching into captivity after the Allies crossed the Rhine. Note the total absence of any guards. (illustration credit 15.4)

  There were sound military reasons for Eisenhower to reconsider taking Berlin. Allied bombing had virtually destroyed the city from the air, and there was nothing of strategic value that could be gained. As he later phrased it, Berlin had become a prestige objective, devoid of military significance. More important, Zhukov’s First Belorussian Army Group, almost a million men, stood poised a mere thirty miles east of Berlin, having already established a bridgehead across the Oder analogous to Hodges’s at Remagen. Konev’s First Ukrainian Army Group, another 750,000 men, was moving on the city from the south. The zones of occupation had been given final approval by the Big Three at Yalta, and Berlin (though it was to be occupied by all four powers)h was well within the Soviet zone. With the zonal boundaries fixed, neither Eisenhower nor Bradley was inclined to engage the Soviets in a race for the city.

  Kay, Ike, and Ethel Westermann at Sous le Vent on the Riviera, March 1945. (illustration credit 15.5)

  “What would it take?” Ike asked Bradley.

  “Probably a hundred thousand casualties,” Bradley replied. “A pretty steep price for a prestige objective, especially when you’ve got to fall back and let the other fellow take over.”74 i

  Eisenhower, Bradley, and Smith were also concerned about intelligence reports that die-hard Nazis planned to continue a guerrilla war from a national redoubt in the Bavarian Alps. “The evidence was clear that the Nazis intended to make the attempt and I decided to give them no opportunity to carry it out,” said Eisenhower.75 The best way to prevent that was to link up with the Russians as soon as possible and sever the connections between Berlin and Bavaria. The fact that the national redoubt turned out to be a hoax in no way diminishes the seriousness with which SHAEF treated it.

  Finally, Model’s Army Group B, battered but still formidable, stood directly in Montgomery’s path. By contrast, a drive by the First, Third, and Ninth armies into central Germany would face mostly home-guard units recently mustered into service.

  These were valid military considerations. But there were other reasons perhaps even more important. U.S. troops now outnumbered British and Canadian three to one, and after the rapid advance to the Rhine, public opinion in the United States clamored for additional manifestations of American success. Personalities intervened as well. Bradley had come to loathe Montgomery, and Ike’s relations with Brooke had soured. After the Battle of the Bulge, Brooke and the British chiefs of staff resurrected the idea that Alexander should be named overall ground commander at SHAEF and that Ike should revert to his position as supreme commander. Alexander would replace Tedder as Ike’s deputy, and Tedder would assume command in the Mediterranean. Eisenhower met the threat with his customary adroitness. He would be delighted to have his “great friend” Alexander as his deputy, he told Brooke, but Alex would have to understand that he would be deputy without portfolio, and would likely be responsible for ensuring the quality of life for people in liberated areas. “There can be no question whatsoever of placing between me and my Army Group Commanders any intermediate headquarters, either official or unofficial in character.” Also, if Tedder were reassigned, Ike said he would make Tooey Spaatz his overall air commander.76 If there was anything the British did not want, it was to place their air forces under Spaatz’s command. Churchill, who had signed on to the scheme, recognized they had been outmaneuvered and instructed Brooke to drop the matter. “It would be a waste of Field Marshal Alexander’s military gifts and experience,” said Churchill.77 Nothing further was said, but Eisenhower still smoldered over the episode. Montgomery, in this instance, was blameless, but if given the choice, Ike preferred the final drive of the campaign to be under Bradley’s command.j

  Unfortunately, Eisenhower neglected to tell Montgomery of his change of plans, and Monty, uncharacteristically, now had the bit between his teeth. On March 27 he informed Eisenhower that Twenty-first Army Group was driving hard for the Elbe. Montgomery said he was moving his headquarters forward, first to Münster, then Hannover—“thence via the AUTOBAHN to Berlin, I hope.”78

  Eisenhower, who had been in Paris for a press conference, did not receive Montgomery’s message until his return to Reims on the twenty-eighth.79 Ike had assumed that Monty would move with his customary deliberateness, and was caught off guard to learn that he was heading for the Elbe and Berlin. Forced with the sudden necessity to bring Montgomery to a halt, Eisenhower elected to play his Moscow trump card once again. Without consulting the Combined Chiefs of Staff, he immediately wrote what David Eisenhower has described as “an unprecedented ‘personal’ letter to Marshal Stalin.”80 k Ike told Stalin that after eliminating German resistance in the Ruhr, he would concentrate on linking up with Soviet forces in the Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden area. “I regard it as essential that we coordinate our action and make every effort to perfect the liaison between our advancing forces.” By implication, the Western Allies would ignore Berlin, which would relegate Montgomery and Twenty-first Army Group to a secondary role.81

  After dispatching his letter to Stalin, Eisenhower then replied to Montgomery. Ike told Monty that he was coordinating Allied movements with Stalin, and that as soon as the Germans in the Ruhr had been encircled, he was transferring Simpson’s Ninth Army back to Bradley’s command. Bradley would then move to link up with the Russians in the Erfurt-Leipzig area. “The mission of your army group will be to protect Bradley’s northern flank.… Devers will protect Bradley’s right [southern] flank.”82 By invoking Stalin, Ike kept Monty and the Combined Chiefs out of the decision. Berlin would be left to the Russians.

  Montgomery was stunned. As his most recent biographer reports, “For Monty it was perhaps the biggest shock of the war.”83 Montgomery had been with Churchill, Eisenhower, Brooke, and Bradley three days before when Twenty-first Army Group crossed the Rhine, and no mention had been made of transferring Ninth Army to Bradley or consulting with Stalin. Not only had Eisenhower abandoned Berlin as an objective, but Twenty-first Army Group had been reduced to a supporting role. “All very dirty work, I fear,” Monty informed Brooke.84

  In London, Eisenhower’s message to Stalin ignited a firestorm. The British chiefs of staff were enraged that Ike had usurped the authority of the Combined Chiefs to communicate directly with Stalin. They were also concerned that the message was badly written (Brooke called it “unintelligible”), and most important that it represented “a change from all that had been agreed upon.”85 The BCOS registered an immediate protest with Washington “against this procedure and change of plans without any consultation with Combined Chiefs of Staff.”86

  Churchill was even more concerned. Relations between London and Moscow were strained to the breaking point over the Kremlin’s refusal to permit free elections in Poland, and by writing to Stalin, Churchill feared Eisenhower was undercutting the Allies’ negotiating position. But the prime minister’s principal worry was that Ike failed to understand the political significance of Berlin. “The idea of neglecting Berlin and leaving it to the Russians to take at a later stage does not appear to me to be correct,” Churchill told the British chiefs. Not only would German resistance be stimulated, but when the city fell, the Soviets would be regarded as the real victors in the war and the liberators of central Europe.87 To clarify the situation, Churchill cabled Eisenhower at SHAEF to ask for an explanation.

  Eisenhower replied on March 30, 1945, restating his intention to advance in the direction of Leipzig with Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group “to join hands with the Russians or to attain the general line of the Elbe.” Ike added that he had no intention of crossing the Elbe.88 Insofar as Eisenhower was concerned, he was acting consistent with his authority as supreme commander. As h
e saw it, he had made a decision based on military considerations.

  After Ike replied to Churchill, a message arrived from Marshall that indicated how serious the issue had become. SHAEF was again taken by surprise. Marshall said the British chiefs were concerned about Eisenhower’s change of plans and particularly about his moving on Leipzig instead of Berlin.89 Eisenhower replied testily (and disingenuously) that he had not changed plans. He was concentrating on the destruction of the German armed forces, and the quick linkup with the Russians in the area of Leipzig was the most effective way to accomplish that. Ike said he was “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 US Army back under Bradley for that phase of operations involving the advance from Kassel to Leipzig.”90

  At this point in the war, with German resistance collapsing, Eisenhower’s standing with the Joint Chiefs could not have been better. They endorsed his decision unreservedly, and briskly informed the British of their support for Ike. “The battle for Germany,” said Marshall, “is now at a point when it is up to the Field Commander to judge the measures which should be taken. The single objective should be quick and complete victory.”91 Churchill remained unconvinced. “I do not know why it would be an advantage not to cross the Elbe,” he cabled Eisenhower on March 31.