Greatest army ever assembled, US Third Army. If Ike didn’t handcuff him, there would be a US flag over the Reichstag vs the commie red star.
My parents always thought that our govt murdered him...this is interesting...
“Greatest army ever assembled, US Third Army. If Ike didn’t handcuff him, there would be a US flag over the Reichstag vs the commie red star.”
Ike made a pretty reasonable decision. Berlin, along with much of eastern & central Germany was inside the zone set forth for Soviet Occupation. If he had let US/Brit/Canadian/French forced go for it, we would have paid a huge price in casualties for territory that FDR would have handed over to the Russians anyway.
It really wasn’t until the Berlin Airlift (1948) that the honeymoon with the Soviets was completely over politically.
If I remember, Berlin was going to be in and part of the RUSSIAN zone of occupation upon the death of Nazi Germany.
Check out the casualties the Russian willingly accepted to destroy and occupy Berlin.
Ike avoided tens of thousands of additional AMERICAN deaths caused by the advance to a Berlin that would have been handed over to the Russians.
During WWII the USA had to suffer thousands of casualties on land, sea and air, but went to great efforts to avoid unneeded suffering of OUR TROOPS.
The same reasoning prompted Truman’s order to use the BOMB at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war ended and the killing stopped. Only after did the perils of radiation be learned.
Yeah, and then the US flag would have been taken down and the hammer and sickle replaced it because that's what FDR agreed to at Yalta. The Russians lost 80,000 dead and a quarter million wounded in the Battle of Berlin. What would the point of US casualties like that have been just to raise a flag that the politicians had already decided wouldn't stay?