The Second World War (123 page)

This was also the moment when Allied hubris collided with the shortage of fuel, which still had to brought all the way from Cherbourg by the trucks of the ‘Red Ball Express’. The whole advance depended on tonnage delivered and achieving the right priorities between fuel and ammunition. The First Canadian Army had not yet managed to retake the Channel
ports, which were resolutely defended on Hitler’s orders. So Antwerp was the only solution. Yet, although the British Second Army had taken the city and the port virtually undamaged, Montgomery failed to secure the land and islands along the Scheldt estuary from the North Sea. He had ignored Admiral Ramsay’s warnings that mines and German coastal batteries on the islands, particularly Walcheren, would make it unnavigable and therefore render the vital port useless.

The fault also lay with Eisenhower and SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces) for not having insisted to Montgomery that he should clear the estuary before he attempted to dash on to the Rhine. The Germans had time to reinforce their garrisons on the islands. The result was that long and complex battles, including amphibious landings, were later required by the Canadians to rectify this mistake. They sustained 12,873 casualties in an operation which could have been achieved at little cost if tackled immediately after the capture of Antwerp. The Scheldt passage would not be cleared until 9 November and the first ships did not reach Antwerp until 26 November. This delay was a grave blow to the Allied build-up before winter approached.

Montgomery was still seething over Eisenhower’s decision to advance on a broad front to the Rhine and into Germany. This had always been standard American doctrine, relying on overwhelming force, so Montgomery should not have been surprised. But he also believed passionately that Eisenhower was no field commander, and that he himself should have the role. Montgomery wanted his 21st Army Group and Bradley’s 12th Army Group to advance together north of the Ardennes and surround the Ruhr. But Eisenhower, at their meeting of 23 August, had insisted that he wanted Patton’s Third Army to link up with the US Seventh Army and the French First Army coming up from southern France.

Eisenhower, still irritated with Montgomery after his less than frank communications in Normandy, was not going to change the established plan. His only compromise was to allocate 21st Army Group a higher proportion of resources and hold back Patton’s Third Army on the Moselle. Patton’s reaction was predictable. ‘
Monty does what he pleases
and Ike says “yes, sir”,’ he wrote in his diary. Patton was not the only one to be provoked by Montgomery’s promotion to field marshal, a tribute which Churchill had approved to appease the British press when Eisenhower took over the direction of operations on 1 September. Patton went ahead and crossed the Moselle anyway, but the fortress city of Metz proved much harder than he had imagined.

Although Eisenhower had taken over field command, there was lamentably little direction, or even effective communication, during these crucial days. He had damaged his knee and was trapped back at SHAEF
headquarters, which was still at Granville on the Atlantic coast of Normandy. Montgomery became exasperated at the failure to answer his signals promptly. So when Eisenhower flew to Brussels, Montgomery was in a less than tactful mood when he joined the disabled supreme commander on his aircraft beside the runway. He flourished the copies of the signals exchanged and went into a tirade about what he thought of the strategy proposed. Eisenhower waited for him to draw breath, then leaned forward, put his hand on his knee and said quietly: ‘
Steady, Monty
! You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.’ Montgomery, thoroughly put in his place, mumbled, ‘I’m sorry, Ike.’

Montgomery was determined to be first across the Rhine, so as to open up the way for the major thrust into Germany, which he should command. This led to one of the most famous Allied disasters of the war. Bradley was amazed by Montgomery’s audacious plan to leapfrog forward, with a series of airborne drops, to cross the lower Rhine at Arnhem. It struck him and others as completely out of character. ‘
Had the pious
teetotaling Montgomery wobbled into SHAEF with a hangover,’ he later wrote, ‘I could not have been more astonished than I was by the daring adventure he proposed.’ But Montgomery did have one justification, which Bradley did not acknowledge. V-2 rockets had just started to fall on London, fired from northern Holland, and the War Cabinet wanted to know if anything could be done.

On 17 September Operation Market Garden began. It consisted of an airborne assault by British, American and Polish paratroop formations to capture a series of bridges over two canals, the River Maas, the Waal and then the Rhine. Warnings that SS panzer divisions had been identified in the area of Arnhem were ignored. Dogged by bad luck and bad weather, the airborne operation failed mainly because the drop zones were too far from their objectives, radio communications failed disastrously and the Germans reacted far more rapidly than expected. This was due to prompt action by the energetic Model, as well as to the fact that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions had been close to Arnhem.

Montgomery’s plan had depended on the rapid advance of Horrocks’s XXX Corps up a single road to relieve the paratroop forces, but German resistance at key points made it impossible to maintain the momentum. Despite truly heroic bravery by all the airbone formations, above all the American 82nd Airborne crossing the River Waal under fire in daylight, XXX Corps never managed to link up with the 1st Airborne Division. On 27 September, the paratroopers holding the Arnhem bridgehead, short of water, rations and above all ammunition, were forced to surrender. The battered remnants of the 1st Airborne Division had to be evacuated across the lower Rhine by night. The Germans took nearly 6,000 prisoners,
half of whom were wounded. Total Allied losses came to nearly 15,000 men.

On the eastern front, the Red Army had extended their massive gains from Operation Bagration with another offensive further south, which had begun on 20 August. General Guderian, the new army chief of staff, appointed by Hitler in the wake of the July plot, had taken five German panzer and six infantry divisions from Army Group South Ukraine in an attempt to shore up Army Group Centre. Generaloberst Ferdinand Schörner was left with just one panzer and one panzergrenadier division to stiffen his German infantry and Romanian formations. They were stretched out from the Black Sea along the River Dnestr and east of the Carpathian Mountains.

The Stavka briefed Marshals Malinovsky and Tolbukhin. Their 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were to drive Romania out of the war and seize the Ploesti oilfields. Romanian formations began to disintegrate and desert from the first day. The German Sixth Army, Hitler’s attempt to resurrect the one lost at Stalingrad, was also surrounded and destroyed. Army Group South Ukraine lost more than 350,000 men killed or captured. Romania abandoned Germany to make terms with the Soviet Union, and Bulgaria followed suit two weeks later. The collapse came far more rapidly than either the Germans or the Soviets had expected.

For Germany, the most damaging blow was the loss of the Ploesti oilfields. In addition all their occupation forces in the Balkans, especially those in Yugoslavia and Greece, were at risk of being cut off. And with Soviet armies spilling across the Carpathian Mountains and Slovakia, Hitler’s last oil supplies near Lake Balaton in Hungary lay open to the Red Army.

On 2 September, the same day as Soviet forces secured both Bucharest and the Ploesti oilfields, Finland also agreed terms with the Soviet Union as Stalin had expected. The Soviet leader was still trying to cut off Army Group North on the Baltic coast, now commanded by the conspicuously brutal Schörner, a devoted Nazi who exulted in hanging deserters and defeatists. A German counter-attack ordered by Guderian had broken the Soviet corridor to the Gulf of Riga at tremendous cost. Schörner conducted a fighting retreat through Riga with the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies. But a Soviet strike due west towards Memel left Army Group North completely isolated on the Kurland Peninsula.

‘
We are mentally and morally
at the end of our strength,’ wrote a soldier with a flak battery guarding the headquarters of the Sixteenth Army. ‘I can only mourn the many, many comrades who have fallen without knowing what they were fighting for.’ Some of Army Group North’s troops were evacuated by sea, but a quarter of a million men would remain besieged
there, unable to defend the Reich because Hitler refused to give up what was by now useless territory.

At this time of momentous events, Churchill, accompanied by Field Marshal Brooke, Admiral Cunningham, now chief of the naval staff, and Air Chief Marshal Portal, crossed the Atlantic in the
Queen Mary
. Another Allied conference in Quebec began on 13 September. Brooke despaired of Churchill. He considered him a sick man, since he had still not fully recovered from his pneumonia. The prime minister could not let go of distracting ideas which would only irritate the Americans. He still wanted landings in Sumatra to seize back the oilfields from the Japanese, and to capture Singapore. He had lost all interest in the Burma campaign.

Churchill also wanted landings at the head of the Adriatic on the Istrian coast to seize Trieste, and to further his pet project of getting to Vienna before the Red Army. In accordance with this dream, Churchill, like Alexander and General Mark Clark, advocated that the Italian campaign should continue way beyond the Gothic Line between Pisa and Rimini. When his chiefs of staff argued that the Italian theatre was now of secondary importance, the prime minister believed that they were secretly ganging up against him. He could not accept the idea that, even if Alexander’s forces broke into the Po Valley, an advance north-east through the Ljubljana Gap in the Alps towards Vienna would be virtually impossible against a determined German defence in the mountains.

In the end, the Octagon conference in Quebec did not go nearly as badly as Brooke had feared. Surprisingly, Brooke himself swung round to support Churchill’s Vienna strategy, although he was later embarrassed by this lapse of judgement. Perhaps even more surprisingly, General Marshall offered landing craft for the Istrian plan, although the Americans refused to have anything to do with a campaign in south central Europe.

Tensions arose, however, when Admiral King revealed that he did not want the Royal Navy, now under-employed in western waters, to take on a major role in the Pacific. He suspected, with justification, that Churchill was keen for it to play a conspicuous part in the Far East so that Britain could re-establish its colonial possessions. Yet King behaved so aggressively in a meeting of the combined chiefs of staff–he even called the Royal Navy a ‘
liability
’–that he forfeited the support of General Marshall and Admiral Leahy.

On 15 September, Roosevelt and Churchill, in one of the most ill-considered decisions of the war, agreed the plan of Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the Treasury, to split Germany up and turn it ‘
into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral
in character’. Churchill had in fact expressed his revulsion at the plan when he first heard of it, but when the
question of a $6.5 billion Lend–Lease agreement came up, he pledged his support.

Anthony Eden was firmly opposed to the Morgenthau Plan. Brooke also was horrified. He foresaw that a democratic west would need Germany as a rampart against a Soviet threat in the future. Fortunately, Roosevelt came to his senses later, although only after a savaging from the American press. But the damage was done. Goebbels had been presented with a propaganda gift to help him persuade the German people that they could expect no mercy from the western Allies, any more than from the Soviet Union. When the Allied occupation authorities later pasted up proclam ations from General Eisenhower declaring, ‘We come as conquerors, but not oppressors,’ German civilians read them ‘
open-mouthed
’ in astonishment.

Very little was said in Quebec about relations with the Soviet Union, where Churchill was soon bound for the second Moscow conference, and astonishingly little about Poland and the Warsaw uprising, which still continued. Roosevelt and Churchill were far apart in their views on Stalin and his regime. Roosevelt was unconcerned about any post-war threat. He was sure that he could charm Stalin, and he said that in any case the Soviet Union was made up of so many different nationalities that it would fall apart once the common enemy of Germany had been defeated. Churchill, on the other hand, although wildly inconsistent in many ways, still saw the Red Army’s occupation of central and southern Europe as the major threat to peace in the post-war era. Now that he realised that there was little chance of pre-empting it through an advance north-eastwards out of Italy, he attempted one of the most scandalous and inept moves in the history of realpolitik diplomacy.

On the evening of 9 October in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, the prime minister and the Soviet leader met with only interpreters present. Churchill opened the discussion by suggesting that they begin with ‘
the most tiresome question
–Poland’. The prime minister’s attempt to cosy up to the tyrant was neither subtle not attractive. It seems that Stalin began to enjoy himself immediately, sensing what was to come. Churchill then said that the post-war eastern frontier of Poland was ‘settled’, even though the Polish government-in-exile had still not been consulted over the decision made behind its back at Teheran. This was because Roosevelt had not wanted his Polish voters to be upset before the presidential elections. When Prime Minister Miko
ajczyk discovered this during another meeting insisted on by Churchill, he was shaken to the core by the deception. He rejected all Churchill’s arguments and even threats to force him to accept the Curzon Line border in the east. He resigned not long afterwards. Stalin ignored the protests of the government-in-exile. As far as he was concerned, his puppet
government of ‘Lublin Poles’ was now the true government. It was backed by General Zygmunt Berling’s 1st Polish Army, although many of its Red Army officers felt it a farce to pretend that they were Polish. The point was that, unlike the army corps of General Anders, they were on Polish territory. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, as Stalin knew only too well. So did Churchill, but he proceeded to play a weak hand very badly indeed.