Supreme Commander (104 page)

That was the plan. It was a staff product, but throughout it bore Eisenhower’s personal touch. Marshall and the JCS agreed with it, but Brooke was opposed and most of Eisenhower’s field subordinates had objections—Bradley did not want to go on the defensive while Montgomery closed to the Rhine; Montgomery did not want to wait for Bradley before crossing the river himself, nor did he think Bradley should drive on Frankfurt, much less Kassel. But Eisenhower held firm. He would see to it that all aspects of his plan were implemented. Smith in an April press conference, when the operation had been successfully completed, said “Of all the campaigns I have known this one has followed most exactly the pattern of the commander who planned it. With but one small exception, it proceeded exactly as General Eisenhower originally worked it out.”
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The first phase of the Rhineland campaign was Operation VERITABLE, an attack southeast from the Nijmegen area by the Canadian First Army along the east bank of the Rhine. While this operation was progressing Bradley’s First Army was to seize the Roer River dams in order to stop the Germans from flooding the region. Next would come Operation GRENADE, an attack to the northeast by U. S. Ninth Army, designed to link up with the Canadians near Wesel and cut off the Germans facing the British Second Army. The second phase would be Operation LUMBERJACK, an advance to the Rhine north and south of Cologne by First Army, and farther south by Patton’s Third Army in the Koblenz area. Finally, Sixth Army Group would begin Operation UNDERTONE, advancing to the Rhine south of the Moselle. When Devers’ mission was accomplished, Montgomery would launch Operation PLUNDER, the main crossing of the Rhine.

Eisenhower had assigned Simpson’s Ninth Army to Twenty-first Army Group for the campaign, but he made careful preparations to insure that the kind of bitterness that broke out during the Bulge because of command arrangements would not emerge again. Bradley kept pestering him to return Ninth Army to Twelfth Army Group; Eisenhower continued to
point out that Montgomery would need help and turned down the request. Bradley was also upset because Eisenhower ordered him to cease his attacks in the Ardennes and to concentrate on getting the Roer dams. To make sure that Montgomery did not anger Bradley even further by making public statements about how well the G.I.s fought when given British leadership, on January 31 Eisenhower had Whiteley call Montgomery (who was in London on a short leave) and tell him that if any member of the Twenty-first Army Group talked to the press Ninth Army would return to Bradley’s control.
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On February 2 Bradley began the attack toward the Roer dams. Progress, against determined German resistance, was slow but steady. By February 10, V Corps of Hodges’ army had control of the dams, but the Germans had wrecked the discharge valves the previous evening, thereby creating a steady flooding that left the ground in front of Ninth Army, to the north, covered with water. It would take two weeks for the water to recede enough to allow Simpson to attack. The Canadians, meanwhile, began VERITABLE on February 8. The previous evening, Bomber Command had pounded the area in front of the Canadians, and at dawn British artillery put down a five-and-a-half-hour bombardment. The attack moved forward until late on February 9, when the Canadians got to Cleves. There they found that Bomber Command had used high-explosive bombs against the town, rather than the incendiaries requested, and a wilderness of craters and debris halted their progress. To make matters worse, the next two days the Germans, relying on the floods to hold up Simpson, shifted reinforcements into the area. Fanatical young Nazis in parachute units fought literally to the last man. Continuous rains poured down; the Canadians were forced to use amphibious vehicles to resupply the troops and evacuate the wounded. Still they pressed on; by February 23 they had overrun the first two of the three prepared German defensive positions.
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For Eisenhower, things were looking up. He was moving his Forward Headquarters to Reims in order to keep a closer watch on the battle. On February 20 he told Marshall, “… all our preparations are made, the troops are in fine fettle and there is no question in my mind that if we get off to a good start … the operations will be a complete success.” Simpson was using the enforced delay on his movements to complete his preparations for crossing the Roer River and had reported that he would be able to start Operation GRENADE in three days. This would bring pressure to bear on the rear of the Germans facing the Canadian First Army and would eventually clear or destroy all German forces west
of the Rhine on Twenty-first Army Group’s front. “If the weather improves with the advancing spring,” Eisenhower told Marshall, “I feel that matters will work out almost exactly as projected.” Eisenhower confessed that the weather made him “terribly impatient … but I never forget the situation of the German and consequently never lose my basic optimism.”
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The optimism was justified. Simpson’s attack got across the Roer on the morning of February 23, and his armored units drove rapidly eastward. By March 2 Simpson had reached the Rhine, and three days later had cleared the river from Duesseldorf to Moers. He wanted then to make a surprise crossing of the Rhine, but Montgomery told him to stay where he was—Montgomery wished to avoid a battle in the industrial jungle of the Ruhr. More important, Ninth Army had already achieved Eisenhower’s basic purpose in the Rhineland battle, for it had killed 6000 Germans and had taken 30,000 prisoners. General Henry Crerar, commanding the Canadian First Army, later declared that Simpson’s “attack led to the strategic defeat of the enemy.”
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Patton, meanwhile, was growing impatient. Bradley had told him to undertake an “active defense.” He interpreted the orders liberally and fought his way through the West Wall, then began a drive east along the north bank of the Moselle to open a path to the Rhine. Patton wanted to repeat his August 1944 breakout. On February 20 he asked Bradley for additional divisions so that he could broaden his attack. Patton pointed out that the great proportion of U.S. troops in Europe were not fighting and warned that “all of us in high position will surely be held accountable for the failure to take offensive action when offensive action is possible.” Bradley told him to remain calm. Eisenhower had decided to concentrate north of the Ruhr, and “regardless of what you and I think of this decision, we are good enough soldiers to carry out these orders.” Bradley added that Eisenhower had given First and Third Armies the mission of crossing the Rhine in the Frankfurt area and suggested that Patton should refit and retrain his troops so that they could deliver a decisive blow when the proper moment came.
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Patton was a problem, but Eisenhower had Bradley to control him and did not need to worry too much about what Third Army would do next. The situation with De Gaulle was different. In mid-February, just when Eisenhower was beginning to make progress in building up a strong reserve, the French President told the Supreme Commander he wanted to pull three French divisions back into the interior of France. De Gaulle felt that since the Colmar pocket was gone and the French First Army
had a defensive mission in Alsace, this could safely be done. He said he wanted to use the troops to help train the new units the French were raising, and confessed that an additional reason for pulling back into France was the need “to assure contact between certain regions of the country and its organized Army.” He was, in other words, having trouble with the Communists in the FFI again.

Eisenhower scribbled by hand at the bottom of De Gaulle’s written request, “Does this mean French are ready to assume full responsibility for Alsace with only 5 divisions?” Smith discussed the matter with General Juin and worked out a compromise—only two divisions were pulled back, and they did not go as far into the interior as De Gaulle had wanted.
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Still Eisenhower was angered by De Gaulle’s action. His own analysis was that the French President was showing a bit of pique at not having been invited to attend the Big Three conference at Yalta. Eisenhower told Marshall that “as usual we will work out something,” but he noted that the most popular theme in the French press was an expression of dissatisfaction with the Allies, especially SHAEF, for failing to bring more food into France “and lack of political deference to their government.” Remembering all the way back to TORCH, Eisenhower summarized the frustration and irritation to which he had been subjected in dealings with the French for nearly two and a half years. “The French continue to be difficult,” he declared. “I must say that next to the weather I think they have caused me more trouble in this war than any other single factor.” To emphasize the point, he added, “They even rank above landing craft.”
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But with the AEF rolling forward, even the French could not break Eisenhower’s spirits. During the first week in March the men of Twelfth and Sixth Army Groups took up the attack. Elements of Hodges’ First Army reached the Rhine on March 5, his armored units roaring into Cologne, which they cleared of the enemy by March 7. From Cologne northward the Allies had closed to the Rhine; by March 10, as Patton pushed forward, they were up to the Rhine from Koblenz northward. The Germans had taken a terrible beating. In the Rhineland campaign (which in the south continued through March), they lost 250,000 prisoners and untold killed and wounded. More than twenty full divisions had been destroyed, and the total German strength in the West was no more than twenty-six complete divisions. Spaatz’s oil campaign, now going at full force, had virtually eliminated the German fuel reserves. The Allied
air forces were blasting virtually every German who moved during daylight hours, flying as many as 11,000 sorties in one day.
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Eisenhower’s plan had worked. Late in March he met Brooke on the banks of the Rhine. The CIGS had come to observe Montgomery’s crossing. “He was gracious enough,” Eisenhower reported to Marshall the next day, “to say that I was right, and that my current plans and operations are well calculated to meet the current situation.”
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Eisenhower added that he did not want to sound boastful, “but I must admit to a great satisfaction that the things that Bradley and I have believed in from the beginning and have carried out in face of some opposition from within and without, have matured so splendidly.”
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The situation that Eisenhower’s plan had brought about was not dissimilar from that Montgomery had created in Normandy. By attacking on the left, with Twenty-first Army Group, Eisenhower had forced the Germans to concentrate in that area. As he explained to Churchill, this increased “the vulnerability of the enemy to the devastating later attacks of the 9th, 1st and 3rd Armies. With perfect teamplay every allied unit of every service has performed its part to its own further distinction and to the dismay of the enemy.”
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On the eve of an attack by Seventh Army, Eisenhower told Marshall, “… so far as we can determine there is not a single reserve division in this whole area. If we can get a quick breakthrough, the advance should go very rapidly.” He realized that breaking through would be difficult, “but once this is accomplished losses should not be great and we should capture another big bag of prisoners.”
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At the conclusion of the Rhineland campaign Eisenhower held a press conference. A reporter asked him if he thought it was Hitler or the German General Staff that had made the decision to fight west of the Rhine. Eisenhower answered, “I think it was Hitler. I am guessing because I must confess that many times in this war I have been wrong in trying to evaluate that German mind, if it is a mind. When it looks logical for him to do something he does something else.” Later in the conference the Supreme Commander added, “When we once demonstrated with the attack of 21st Army Group and the Ninth Army that we could break through the defense west of the Rhine and he was exposed, any sensible soldier would have gone back to the Rhine and given us the Saar and
stood there and said, ‘Now try to come across.’ They simply seem to want to stand and fight where they are. Starting on March 1, if they had gotten out the bulk of their force they would have been better off.”
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Eisenhower spent most of the first week in March visiting his commanders in the field. He did not interfere with their conduct of operations but he was anxious to see how operations were proceeding and wanted to be where the action was. He usually contented himself with giving Simpson or Hodges or Patton a pat on the back and telling him to keep up the good work. On March 7 he was back at Reims and caught up on his work. After reviewing all the reports and attending a conference in the War Room, he dictated some personal letters. That evening he planned to relax and asked a few of his corps commanders to dinner. They had just sat down to eat when the telephone rang. Bradley wanted to talk to Eisenhower. When the Supreme Commander got on the phone Bradley said that one of Hodges’ divisions had taken intact a bridge over the Rhine at Remagen.
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