The Soviet capture of Berlin led to decades of Cold War tension and near-hostilities. Did our political and military decisions make that inevitable?
In the climactic act of the European phase of World War II, Soviet troops captured the shattered remnants of Berlin on May 2, 1945. For the next four decades, the former Nazi capital was a tense flashpoint for Soviet-American Cold War hostilities, almost leading to hot war on at least three occasions. Did our failure to take Berlin contribute to the prolonged danger of war between nuclear-armed foes?
The German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made unlikely allies of the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union. By late 1943, these nations, along with Great Britiain, had made sufficient progress to begin planning the post-war world. At a Big Three conference in Tehran, plans were made for Germany to be divided into occupation zones after its defeat. The maps subsequently drawn up provided for a Soviet zone extending to the Elbe River. Since that would place Berlin well within the Soviet zone, provision was made for corresponding occupation zones within the former capital as well.
Tensions between the Soviets and the western allies began shortly after their victory. By 1948, sharp disagreements prompted the Soviets to prohibit traffic from the western zones to Berlin. This attempt to isolate all of Berlin from the west was overcome by an unprecedented airlift of food, medical, and fuelsupplies until the Soviets called off the blockade almost 11 months later. Flying around the clock whenever weather permitted, the U.S. Air Force prevailed against difficult conditions, including occasional enemy harassment, to save the city at the cost of 30 airmen's lives. In 1958 and 1961, the Soviets threatened to cut off western access to Berlin again, leading to troop movements, activation of reserves, and dusting off of war plans.
Could all this danger have been averted if the U.S. had beaten the Russians to Berlin in 1945? Critics of our failure to do so first sought to blame the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. With the Soviets in firm control of post-war eastern Europe and attempting to subvert the rest of the continent, a number of political figures and commentators cited FDR's wartime agreements with Stalin and Churchill as having allowed the Red Army to proceed to Berlin as part of his suposed appeasement of the Russians.
Subsequent scholarship has indicated that, despite the location of the future occupation zone borders, decisions on how far our troops could advance were left to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower. The latter concluded on a purely military basis that there was no value in pushing the Allied lines as far east as Berlin when there were more important military targets in the west. Ike's forces did in fact advance well beyond the Elbe River to take military objectives in April and May, but withdrew in July to the predetermined zone boundaries, just as the Red Army did where it had passed beyond its designated zone.
Using that very point to defend Ike's decision, World War II historian Stephen Ambrose argued that even if American and British troops had raced ahead to take Berlin before the Russians, they would have withdrawn 60 days later from the territory slated for Soviet occupation while establishing the presence in the former capital that they were entitled to and did actually maintain throughout the Cold War. In "Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945," Ambrose notes that the Red Army lost 70,000 men in crushing the final defense of Berlin and sees no justification for significant American casualties in the absence of a lasting impact on the post-war situation.
One may speculate if a race for Berlin might have preempted the Cold War with a hot one.
