He Was Just Pondering All His Options

Interesting op-ed on a WW2 blunder by Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was also a cautious, some would say indecisive, commander who favored a “broad front” strategy with all Allied armies moving in tandem on a solid front. His military objective was Germany’s main industrial area to the north, the Ruhr. Devers was operating too far south to help that effort.

True, the Germans knew the Ruhr was vital to them and fiercely defended it. But, as we know from several of their generals’ postwar memoirs, what they really feared was an incursion across the Rhine, which would have been a military catastrophe and a devastating symbolic blow to the German people.

The Rhine wasn’t crossed until March 1945. Had Eisenhower let Devers make his attack, we might now be celebrating the 65th anniversary of a cross-Rhine attack that quickly ended the war in Europe. Instead, we will soon mark the anniversary of the costliest battle in American history, the Battle of the Bulge.

It is obviously silly to Monday Morning Quarterback 65 years after the fact and impossible to know the outcome or Eisenhower's logic. But this author thinks it pretty certain the War in Europe could of ended much sooner with a more aggressive southern campaign. 80,000 American men died in the Battle of the Bulge. Today, we'd have pundits calling Eisenhower a war criminal. I don't see why Americans love to fondly remember WW2 as a good war. It was an awful war. A genocidal war on multiple fronts. Morally offensive beyond our imagination on numerous sides. It was necessary only because it wasn't prevented. The fact that we long for the clear black and white stakes presented in WW2 is somewhat disturbing.