If Eisenhower hadn’t held back our troops, we would have won the Battle of Berlin—and it might not have been much of a battle because the Germans would likely have quickly given up.
And then there would have been no Berlin Wall.
If the dog hadn’t stopped to take a crap, he would have caught the rabbit.
The Red Army was only 40 miles from Berlin when the Yalta Conference convened in early February 1945. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to a division of Germany that left Berlin in the Soviet sector.
Eisenhower could have let Patton and Montgomery drive for Berlin ahead of the Red Army, but Yalta had already set the postwar division. Omar Bradley, Patton’s immediate superior, estimated that capturing Berlin could run as high as 100,000 casualties.