Supreme Commander (86 page)

“It has been a very exhausting day,” Montgomery wrote Brooke after
the meeting, but he was satisfied. Although he felt Eisenhower should have dismissed from his mind completely the idea of advancing from Paris toward Metz with Third Army, he was pleased at getting “operational control” over First Army.
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Brooke too was satisfied. The CIGS regarded Eisenhower as “essentially a staff officer with little knowledge of the realities of the battlefield,” and had remarked when he heard that Eisenhower intended to take command in Europe that this was “likely to add another three to six months on to the war.”
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If Montgomery would now have First Army under him, however, Eisenhower’s presence would not be so disastrous.

The following day, August 24, Eisenhower outlined his thinking to Marshall. “The decision as to exactly what to do at this moment has taken a lot of anxious thought,” he explained, “because of the fact that we do not have sufficient strength and supply possibilities to do
everything
that we should like to do simultaneously.” He was giving priority to Montgomery’s attack on the left because of the importance of the objectives there—the V-weapon launching sites, the airfields in Belgium, and Antwerp. But he still wanted Bradley to complete the conquest of Brittany and keep enough strength in the Paris area to protect the supply lines originating in Cherbourg. “In addition to all the above,” he added, “I want Bradley to build up quickly, from incoming divisions, a force in the area just east of Paris so as to be ready to advance straight eastward to Metz.”

Eisenhower said he had hoped to be able to carry out both operations (toward Antwerp and Metz) simultaneously, but that the AEF was not strong enough to do it. “I cannot tell you how anxious I am to get the forces accumulated for starting the thrust eastward from Paris,” he added. “I have no slightest doubt that we can quickly get to the former French-German boundary but there is no point in getting there until we are in position to do something about it.”
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Eisenhower had lunched with Montgomery on August 23. On August 29 he issued the new directive. During that time he spent two days with Bradley, who protested vigorously at giving control of First Army to Montgomery. So did Eisenhower’s G-3, Major General Harold R. Bull, and his G-2, the British Major General Kenneth Strong. As a result, when Eisenhower issued the directive, he bowed to this advice and did not give Montgomery operational control of First Army. Instead, Montgomery was “authorized to effect,” through Bradley, “any necessary coordination between his own forces” and First Army.
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The plan that Montgomery thought Eisenhower had agreed to was
further watered down by Bradley’s actions. Eisenhower had made it clear in a letter of August 24 and again in his directive of August 29 that he wanted Bradley to build up his forces east of Paris and to “
prepare
to strike rapidly eastwards towards the Saar Valley.…”
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Bradley nevertheless on August 25 told Patton to advance to Reims and “be prepared to continue the advance rapidly in order to seize crossings of the Rhine river from Mannheim to Koblenz.”
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The next day Patton began the race toward the Meuse, which he crossed on August 30. This put him more than a hundred miles east of Paris and not much more than that distance from the Rhine. He was, however, out of gas. Eisenhower had ordered that priority in supplies for Twelfth Army Group go to Hodges’ First Army so that Hodges could support Montgomery’s advance. On August 30 Patton received only 32,000 gallons of the 400,000 gallons of gasoline he had demanded. Still, he wanted to push on. When Major General Manton S. Eddy reported that his XII Corps had stopped because if it went any farther its tanks would be without fuel, Patton told him “to continue until the tanks stop and then get out and walk.” Patton realized that when his tanks ran dry Bradley and Eisenhower would have to give him more gasoline—even at the expense of Hodges’ First Army.
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On the left, meanwhile, the British were speeding across the old battlegrounds of World War I, covering in hours distances that had taken months and cost tens of thousands of lives to cross in 1915–18. Hodges struck across the Seine on August 27. In less than a week he had taken 25,000 prisoners at Mons. Montgomery, determined to show the Americans that his British and Canadian troops were just as good as they were in the pursuit, drove the Twenty-first Army Group forward in one of the most extraordinary campaigns of the war. Dempsey began his offensive on August 29. He left one corps behind in order to motorize his 30 Corps fully. In two days it captured Amiens and in six days liberated Brussels. On September 4 Dempsey took the city of Antwerp, although the water approaches remained in German hands, which meant that the Allies could not use the port. While the Canadians invested the ports of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk, and prepared to open Antwerp, Twenty-first Army Group made an advance of two hundred miles in less than a week.

This was indeed great news. Montgomery’s advance opened seemingly unlimited possibilities. On September 2, Eisenhower went to Versailles to meet with Bradley, Hodges, and Patton to discuss their exploitation. According to the office diary that one of the Supreme Commander’s aides
kept, “E. says that he is going to give Patton hell because he is stretching his line too far and therefore making supply difficulties.”
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But at the meeting Patton convinced Eisenhower that the opportunities on his front were too good to pass up, and the Supreme Commander agreed to allocate gasoline stocks to Third Army. He also gave Patton permission to attack toward Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Koblenz. Eisenhower changed Hodges’ orders, too, shifting the direction of First Army’s advance from northeast to straight east. This meant that Bradley had full control of his armies again, that the Americans (less elements of First Army that were to stay with Montgomery) were gathered together, and that they were advancing south of the Ardennes. It meant, in short, that the broad front advance had been resumed.
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Eisenhower was aware of the risk involved in pursuing this strategy. As he told Marshall on September 4, “… the closer we get to the Siegfried Line [the German West Wall, a prepared defensive position consisting of pillboxes and concrete anti-tank obstacles that ran along the Rhine from Basel to Karlsruhe, then west to Saarbruecken, then north along the Saar through Aachen to the Dutch border] the more we will be stretched administratively and eventually a period of relative inaction will be imposed upon us.” The danger was that “while we are temporarily stalled the enemy will be able to pick up bits and pieces of forces everywhere and reorganize them swiftly for defending the Siegfried Line or the Rhine.” The way to keep the Germans from building a firm defensive line, Eisenhower felt, was to keep them “stretched everywhere,” and the way to do that, in his view, was to advance on a broad front.
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In other words, Eisenhower felt that it was possible for the AEF to go beyond the West Wall before the Germans had a chance to man it. His greatest difficulty, he told Marshall, was maintenance. “We have advanced so rapidly that further movement in large parts of the front even against very weak opposition is almost impossible.” Still, in a directive of September 4 that gave Bradley the mission of seizing Frankfurt, Eisenhower said, “… enemy resistance on the entire front shows signs of collapse.” The only way the Germans could stop the advance would be to withdraw troops from other fronts, and in both Russia and Italy the Germans were hard pressed already.
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The dash across France had been heady. Eisenhower had told Marshall on August 24 that the AEF could not do “
everything
that we should like to do simultaneously,” but by September 4 he was in fact trying to do it all. He had fallen victim to the same virus that had infected so many of his subordinates. The virus, in many ways more dangerous than the
German armies, was the “victory disease,” a malady which caused the patient to believe anything was possible. The Japanese and Germans had suffered from it at various times in the 1940–42 period. It had hit Montgomery hard, causing him to believe that he could break right through the German defenses and march on into Berlin. SHAEF planners, and Eisenhower, suffered too, although their hallucination was different—they thought that all the armies could advance right up to and beyond the West Wall.

It was inevitable however that Eisenhower and his commanders should feel optimistic. The three weeks from August 15 to September 5 were among the most dramatic of the war, with great successes following one another in rapid succession. Rumania surrendered unconditionally to the Soviets, then declared war on Germany. Finland signed a truce with the Russians. Bulgaria tried to surrender. The Germans pulled out of Greece. The Allies landed in the south of France and drove to Lyons and beyond, while Alexander attacked with early success in Italy. The Russian offensive carried the Red Army to Yugoslavia, destroying twelve German divisions, inflicting 700,000 casualties. Both in the east and the west the Germans seemed to have crumbled. Memories of November 1918 were in everyone’s mind.

On his own front, Eisenhower had seen his armies advance from Falaise to Antwerp, Namur, and Verdun, destroying eight German divisions and freeing two European capitals in the process. The AEF had had only sporadic contact with the retreating Germans, who had been unable to mount a coherent defense. Panic infected rear areas. Supply installations had been destroyed, fuel depots demolished, ammunition dumps abandoned, ration and supply installations looted by troops and civilians. Model told Hitler he needed twenty-five fresh infantry and six Panzer divisions to restore the line; Hitler replaced Model with Von Rundstedt.
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The optimism that Eisenhower felt because of these events extended back to Washington. On September 13 Marshall sent a message to all his commanders on the subject of redeployment of U. S. Army forces to the Pacific. The Chief began, “While cessation of hostilities in the war against Germany may occur at any time, it is assumed that in fact it will extend over a period commencing any time between September 1 and November 1, 1944.”
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Under these circumstances then, Eisenhower felt that by carefully allocating supplies among his advancing armies he could indeed go forward everywhere into Germany.

Like Eisenhower, Montgomery believed that the Germans in the west
were on the verge of total collapse, but he disagreed sharply on how to deliver the final blow. Since the only limiting factor of Allied power was logistics, and since the AEF would be able to deliver only one more blow before it would have to stop and wait for supplies from Antwerp to resume the offensive, he wanted the last effort to be a strong one, strong enough to finish the war. “I consider we have now reached a stage where one really powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin is likely to get there and thus end the German war,” he told Eisenhower on September 4. Since there were not enough supplies for two offensives, the one selected “must have all the maintenance resources it needs without any qualifications.” Eisenhower could choose to advance against either the Ruhr or the Saar; Montgomery said the Ruhr was “likely to give the best and quickest results.” In any event, time was vital and a decision had to be made at once. “If we attempt a compromise solution and split our maintenance resources so that neither thrust is full-blooded we will prolong the war,” he warned.

Eisenhower answered the next day, September 5. He said his policy was settled. “The bulk of the German Army that was in the west has now been destroyed,” he pointed out, and the AEF had to exploit its success by “promptly breaching the Siegfried Line, crossing the Rhine on a wide front and seizing the Saar and the Ruhr.” A broad advance would cut off forces currently retreating from southwest France and give the AEF freedom of action to strike in any direction while forcing the enemy to disperse. It would also allow the Allies to open Antwerp. Eisenhower felt that if the troops went all the way and took the Saar and the Ruhr, they would destroy Germany’s capacity to wage war. He told Montgomery he still gave priority to the drive to the Ruhr, and was allocating supplies on this basis.
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On August 24 Montgomery had complained to Brooke that Eisenhower had decided against sending the two army groups north into Belgium and then east into the Ruhr, and was going to send the Americans directly east from Paris into Germany via the Saar. “I do not (repeat not) myself agree what he proposes to do and have said so quite plainly,” Montgomery had said, but “I consider that directive which is being issued by Ike is the best that I can do myself in matter and I do not (repeat not) propose to continue argument with Ike.”
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Despite his declaration of intentions, Montgomery was by his nature incapable of remaining silent when he was sure a mistake was being made. It was in addition his responsibility to present his views,
as he was the senior British officer on the Continent, the executive agent for His Majesty’s Government and the man to whom all Britain looked for a proper use of the forces the Empire had raised at such sacrifice.

Some officers and politicians were awe-struck by Eisenhower’s grant of power from the CCS and at the title he carried. Montgomery was not. Montgomery felt somewhat the same way about Eisenhower as Haig had about Foch twenty-six years earlier. Certainly in his mind their relative positions had nothing to do with ability. Eisenhower was not the Supreme Commander because he was an abler general than anyone else in the AEF, but rather because in view of the relative contribution of the two nations to the alliance the Americans were entitled to have the top position. Montgomery was sure that on strictly military grounds he was a much better general than Eisenhower. Brooke felt the same way. Montgomery therefore felt it necessary to keep Eisenhower “on the rails,” to guide him to the proper course of action.

Montgomery, however, could never get Eisenhower to accept his policy, partly because he had no competence in the fine art of persuasion. He was accustomed to working on a problem alone, then handing down a solution. While Eisenhower talked things over at length with Bradley and other commanders, as well as his own staff, before reaching a decision, Montgomery brooded in voluntary, solitary confinement. He met with Dempsey, De Guingand, and his other subordinates only to tell them what to do. He had made a great study of how to command and how to break down the command problems to their essentials, but he never understood human relationships. He did not get along well with people, nor did he try to, and he could not get his ideas across without appearing either patronizing or offensive, or both.
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