Bridge Too Far (8 page)

It was hardly a secret that Monty and his superior, Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, were highly critical of Eisenhower.  Both men considered him ambivalent and indecisive.  In a letter to Montgomery on July 28, Brooke commented that Eisenhower had only “the very vaguest conception of war!”  On another occasion he summarized the Supreme Commander as “a most attractive personality,” but with “a very, very limited brain from a strategic point of view.”

Montgomery, never a man to mince words, saw “right from the beginning

that Ike had simply no experience for the job,” and while history, he

felt, would record Eisenhower “as a very good Supreme Commander, as a

field commander he was very bad, very bad.”  [Author’s interview with

Field Marshal Montgomery.] Angrily, Montgomery began promoting the idea

of an over-all “Land

Forces Commander,” a post sandwiched between the army groups and Eisenhower.  He knew just the man for the job—himself.  Eisenhower was well aware of the underground campaign.  He remained calm.  The Supreme Commander was, in his way, as obstinate as Montgomery.  His orders from General Marshall were clear and he had no intention of entertaining the idea of any over-all ground commander other than himself.

Montgomery had no opportunity to discuss his single-thrust plan or his thoughts about a land-forces commander directly with Eisenhower until August 23, when the Supreme Commander came to lunch at 21/ Army Group headquarters.  Then the fractious Montgomery, with extraordinary tactlessness, insisted on a private conversation with the Supreme Commander.  He demanded that Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Bedell Smith, be excluded from the conference.  Smith left the tent, and for an hour Eisenhower, grimly keeping his temper, was lectured by his subordinate on the need for “a firm and sound plan.”  Montgomery demanded that Eisenhower “decide where the main effort would be” so that “we could be certain of decisive results quickly.”  Again and again he pressed for the “single thrust,” warning that if the Supreme Commander continued the “broad-front strategy with the whole line advancing and everyone fighting all the time, the advance would inevitably peter out.”  If that happened, Montgomery warned, “the Germans would gain time to recover, and the war would go on all through the winter and well into 1945.  If we split the maintenance,” Montgomery said, “and advance on a broad front we shall be so weak everywhere we’ll have no chance of success.”  To his mind there was only one policy: “to halt the right and strike with the left, or halt the left and strike with the right.”  There could only be one thrust and everything should support it.

Eisenhower saw Montgomery’s proposal as a gigantic gamble.  It might produce speedy and decisive victory.  It might instead result in disaster.  He was not prepared to accept the risks involved.

Nevertheless he found himself caught between Montgomery on one side and

Bradley and Patton on the other—each ad-

vocating “the main thrust,” each wanting to be entrusted with it.

Up to this point, Montgomery, notorious for his slow-moving, if successful, tactics, had yet to prove that he could exploit a situation with the speed of Patton; and at this moment Patton’s army, far ahead of everyone else, had crossed the Seine and was racing toward Germany.  Diplomatically, Eisenhower explained to Montgomery that, whatever the merits of a single thrust, he could hardly hold back Patton and stop the U.s. Third Army in its tracks.  “The American people,” said the Supreme Commander, “would never stand for it, and public opinion wins wars.”  Montgomery heatedly disagreed.  “Victories win wars,” he announced.  “Give people victory and they won’t care who won it.”

Eisenhower was not impressed.  Although he did not say so at the time, he thought Montgomery’s view was “much too narrow,” and that the Field Marshal did not “understand the over-all situation.”  Eisenhower explained to Montgomery that he wanted Patton to continue eastward so that a link-up might be effected with the American and French forces advancing from the south.  In short, he made it quite clear that his “broad-front policy” would continue.

Montgomery turned for the moment to the subject of a land commander.  “Someone must run the land battle for you.”  Eisenhower, Montgomery declared, should “sit on a very lofty perch in order to be able to take a detached view of the whole intricate problem, which involves land, sea, air, et cetera.”  He retreated from arrogance to humility.  If the matter of “public opinion in America was involved,” Montgomery declared, he would gladly “let Bradley control the battle and serve under him.”

Eisenhower quickly dismissed the suggestion.  Placing Bradley over

Montgomery would be as unacceptable to the British people as the

reverse would be to the Americans.  As for his own role he could not,

he explained, deviate from the plan to take personal control of the

battle.  But, in seeking a solution to some of the immediate problems,

he was ready to make some concessions to Montgomery.  He needed the

Channel ports and Antwerp.  They were vital to the entire Allied supply

problem.  Thus, for the

moment, Eisenhower said, priority would be given to the 21/ Army Group’s northern thrust.  Montgomery could use the Allied First Airborne Army in England—at the time SHAEF’S only reserve.  Additionally, he could have the support of the U.s. First Army moving on his right.

Montgomery had, in the words of General Bradley, “won the initial skirmish,” but the Britisher was far from satisfied.  It was his firm conviction that Eisenhower had missed the “great opportunity.”  Patton shared that view—for different reasons—when the news reached him.  Not only had Eisenhower given supply priority to Montgomery at the expense of the U.s. Third Army, but he had also rejected Patton’s proposed drive to the Saar.  To Patton, it was “the most momentous error of the war.”

In the two weeks since this clash of personalities and conflicting military philosophies had taken place, much had happened.  Montgomery’s 21/ Army Group now rivaled Patton’s in speed.  By September 5, with his advance units already in Antwerp, Montgomery was more convinced than ever that his single-thrust concept was right.  He was determined to reverse the Supreme Commander’s decision.  A crucial turning point in the conflict had been reached.  The Germans, Montgomery was convinced, were teetering on the verge of collapse.

He was not alone in this view.  On nearly every level of command, intelligence officers were forecasting the imminent end of the war.

The most optimistic estimate came from the Combined Allied Intelligence

Committee in London.  The German situation had deteriorated to such an

extent that the group believed the enemy incapable of recovery.  There

was every indication, their estimate said, that “organized resistance

under the control of the German high command is unlikely to continue

beyond December 1, 1944, and … may end even sooner.”  Supreme

Headquarters shared this optimism.  At the end of August, SHAEF’S

intelligence summary declared that “the August battles have done it and

the enemy in the west has had it.  Two and one half months of bitter

fighting have brought the end of the war in Europe in sight, almost

within reach.”  Now, one week later, they considered the

German army “no longer a cohesive force but a number of fugitive battle groups, disorganized and even demoralized, short of equipment and arms.”  Even the conservative director of military operations at the British War Office, Major General John Kennedy, noted on September 6 that “If we go at the same pace as of late, we should be in Berlin by the 28th.  …”

In this chorus of optimistic predictions there seemed only one dissenting voice.  The U.s. Third Army’s intelligence chief, Colonel Oscar W. Koch, believed the enemy still capable of waging a last-ditch struggle and warned that “barring internal upheaval in the homeland and the remote possibility of insurrection within the Wehrmacht … the German armies will continue to fight until destroyed or captured.”  * But his own intelligence officer’s cautious appraisal meant little to the Third Army’s ebullient commander, Lieutenant General George S.  Patton.  Like Montgomery in the north, Patton in the south was now only one hundred miles from the Rhine.  He too believed the time had come, as Montgomery had put it, “to stick our neck out in a single deep thrust into enemy territory,” and finish off the war.  The only difference lay in their views of who was to stick out his neck.  Both commanders, flushed with victory and bidding for glory, now vied for that opportunity.  In his zeal, Montgomery had narrowed his rivalry down to Patton alone: a British field marshal in charge of an entire army group was trying to outrace an American lieutenant general in charge of a single army.  * For a more detailed version of Allied intelligence estimates see Dr.  Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command, pp.  244-45.

But all along the front the fever of success gripped battle commanders.

After the spectacular sweep across France and Belgium and with

evidence of German defeat all around, men now confidently believed that

nothing could stop the victorious surge from continuing through the

Siegfried Line and beyond, into the heart of Germany.  Yet, keeping the

enemy off balance and disorganized demanded constant, unremitting

Allied pressure.  Supporting that pressure had now produced a crisis

that few seemed aware of.  The heady optimism bordered on

self-deception

for, at this moment, Eisenhower’s great armies, after a hectic dash of more than two hundred miles from the Seine, were caught up in a gigantic maintenance and supply problem.  After six weeks of almost nonstop advance against little opposition, few noted the sudden loss of momentum.  But as the first tanks approached Germany’s threshold and at places began probing the Westwall itself, the advance began to slow.  The Allied pursuit was over, strangled by its own success.

The chief problem crippling the advance was the lack of ports.  There was no shortage of supplies, but these were stockpiled in Normandy, still being brought in across the beaches or through the only workable port, Cherbourg—some 450 miles behind the forward elements.  Supplying four great armies in full pursuit from that far back was a nightmarish task.  A lack of transportation added to the creeping paralysis.  Rail networks, bombed in preinvasion days or destroyed by the French underground, could not be repaired fast enough.  Gasoline pipelines were only now being laid and extended.  As a result, everything from rations to gasoline was being hauled by road, and there was a frustrating shortage of trucks.

To keep abreast of the pursuit which, day by day, pushed farther east, every kind of vehicle was being pressed into service.  Artillery, antiaircraft guns and spare tanks had been unloaded from their conveyors and left behind so that the conveyors could be used to carry supplies.  Divisions had been stripped of their transport companies.  The British had left one entire corps west of the Seine so that its transport could service the rest of the speeding army.  Montgomery’s difficulties mounted with the discovery that 1,400 British three-ton trucks were useless because of faulty pistons.

Now, in herculean efforts to keep the pursuit going without pause, a

ceaseless belt of trucks—the “Red Ball Express”—hammered east,

delivered their supplies and then swung back to the west for more, some

convoys often making a grueling round trip of between six and eight

hundred miles.  Even with all available transport moving around the

clock and with commanders in the

field applying the most stringent economies, the supply demands of the armies could not be met.  Taxed beyond its capabilities, the makeshift supply structure had almost reached the breaking point.

Besides the acute transportation problem, men were tired, equipment worn out after the catapultlike advance from Normandy.  Tanks, half-tracks and vehicles of every description had been driven so long without proper maintenance that they were breaking down.  Overshadowing everything was a critical shortage of gasoline.  Eisenhower’s armies, needing one million gallons per day, were receiving only a fraction of that amount.

The effect was critical.  In Belgium, as the enemy fled before it, an entire corps of the U.s. First Army was halted for four days, its tanks dry.  Patton’s U.s. Third Army, more than a hundred miles ahead of everyone else, and meeting little opposition, was forced to halt for five days on the Meuse, because armored columns were out of gas.  Patton was furious when he discovered that of the 400,000 gallons of gasoline ordered, he had received only 32,000 due to priority cutbacks.  He promptly ordered his leading corps commander: “Get off your fanny as fast as you can and move on until your engines run dry, then get out and walk, goddammit!”  To his headquarters staff, Patton raged that he was “up against two enemies—the Germans and our own high command.  I can take care of the Germans, but I’m not sure I can win against Montgomery and Eisenhower.”  He tried.  Convinced that he could bludgeon his way into Germany in a matter of days, Patton furiously appealed to Bradley and Eisenhower.  “My men can eat their belts,” he stormed, “but my tanks have gotta have gas.”

The crushing defeat of the Germans in Normandy and the systematic and

speedy annihilation of their forces following the breakout had caused

the logistic crisis.  On the assumption that the enemy would hold and

fight on the various historic river lines, invasion planners had

anticipated a more conservative advance.  A pause for regrouping and

massing of supplies, it was assumed, would take place after the

Normandy beachhead had been secured and Channel ports captured.  The

lodgment area was expected to lie west of the river Seine which,

according to the

projected timetable, would not be reached until September 4 (D plus 90 days).  The sudden disintegration of the enemy’s forces and their headlong flight eastward had made the Allied timetable meaningless.  Who could have foreseen that by September 4 Allied tanks would be two hundred miles east of the Seine and in Antwerp?  Eisenhower’s staff had estimated that it would take approximately eleven months to reach the German frontier at Aachen.  Now, as tank columns approached the Reich, the Allies were almost seven months ahead of their advance schedule.  That the supply and transportation system, designed for a much slower rate of progress, had stood up to the strain of the hectic pursuit at all was close to miraculous.