A World at Arms (135 page)

The Allies had indeed won a major land victory in the West, in which their air power had played a highly significant part; they had inflicted well over a quarter of a million casualties on the Germans; and they had wrecked the vast majority of the German divisions in the West. But although they could now race eastward and northward, the Germans, now under the leadership of Field Marshal Model, brought from the East to replace von Kluge, had extricated some 50,000 thousand men, including many experienced officers, from the wreckage of Army Group B.
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The immediate situation in France, however, looked spectacularly good for the Allies. The Canadian and British armies raced north, quickly crossing the lower Seine to attack the Channel ports from the rear and also head into Belgium, in the process seizing many of the launching sites for the V-1 and V-2. In the middle, American troops in late August approached Paris, which the Germans intended to defend and even destroy but could not hold in the face of onrushing Allied troops and the beginnings of insurrection in the city. The original plan to by–pass the city was abandoned by Eisenhower, who allowed a French
armored division the honor of liberating the capital of France and followed that up by marching two American divisions through the city to make sure everyone understood that the Germans were finished in the area.
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De Gaulle entered the city to the cheers of the inhabitants; he had greatly wanted to get there quickly to establish himself both against any possible challenge from the Communists and to assert his role against Britain and the United States.
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Further south, the landing on the French Mediterranean coast, operation “Anvil,” now renamed “Dragoon,” had gone ashore successfully on August 15.
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This landing had been preceded by an exceedingly bitter dispute as the British, with Churchill personally leading the charge, attempted practically until the last moment to have it called off in order to maintain the strength of Allied forces in Italy.
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In the final days of this debate Churchill even proposed rerouting the operation at the last minute into Brittany. The very absurdity of this proposal probably hardened rather than shook the resolve of the American government, especially Roosevelt and Marshall, to uphold Eisenhower’s insistence on going forward as planned.
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Once ashore, the United States 7th Army, consisting of one American and one French corps, quickly took the key ports of Marseilles and Toulon and pushed northwards. The threat of the advancing units of United States 7th and 3rd Armies meeting in central France led to the German decision, reluctantly approved by Hitler, to evacuate most of Army Group G from southwest France. Special blocking units were left to hold as many of the ports as long as possible–a subject reviewed in
Chapter 14
– but the bulk of the German 1st and 19th Army headed northeast. Though harassed by the French resistance, Allied air power, and the advancing American armies, the majority of the soldiers escaped to help build up a new front in the German-French border area and along the Alpine passes into Italy.

Most of France, however, had been liberated by the Allies and Marshal Pétain, Laval, and assorted French collaborators–who in 1940 had found it inadvisable to leave Metropolitan France for French North Africa–now found it expedient or necessary to move back with the retreating Germans, eventually to establish a “government-in-exile” in southwest Germany.
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At first many of them, with memories of French defeat at the hands of the Germans, seriously expected the German armies to return to the offensive and drive the Allies out of France, and Laval now as earlier wanted the Germans to make peace with the Soviet Union so that they could do so more easily,
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but the Germans had other worries and different plans.

NEW CHOICES IN THE WEST

The steady series of defeats had been added to the knowledge of enormous crimes and German responsibilities for the outbreak and extension of the war in opening the eyes of opponents of the Hitler regime to the absolute need for an overthrow of the Nazi government, an overthrow that could come only if Hitler–the central figure of that regime–were removed from the scene. Already reviewed in
Chapter 9
, the internal opposition had made several attempts to kill Hitler and seize power. The bomb attempt of July 20, 1944 had, however, failed narrowly; Hitler survived the explosion. In the choice between opposing orders from Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia and the leaders of the military opposition in Berlin, the overwhelming majority of the military sided with Hitler. In Paris, the military commander was with Hitler’s opponents; because the Nazi regime remained firmly in control, however, he and many others were arrested and executed.

The upheaval of July 20 made Hitler even more suspicious of his military leaders, and as he developed a new strategy for the West in the following days, he would not allow the front commanders to have a clear view of his intentions. These he explained to his chief operational advisor, General Jodl, on July 31 in an important conference of which, by a fortunate coincidence, a full stenographic record survives.
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Hitler hoped to hold the Eastern Front, where the Soviet summer offensive had torn open the central sector, on a new line and wanted to keep the fighting in Italy as far south as possible. In the West, he was now prepared to have a new defensive line reconnoitered and fortified, but the American breakout, which was developing even as the conference took place, would lead to the overrunning of the proposed line before it could be defined. Another portion of his plan for the West would, however, be implemented, and came to have major implications for Allied strategy and the course and duration of the war.

Shocked by the quick fall of Cherbourg to the Allies, Hitler ordered special arrangements for assigning specified units to hold each of the major ports until quite literally the last round of ammunition and the last man. He assumed that these garrisons would not be relieved; their function was to hold the ports and deny them to the Allies as long as possible, thereby keeping the Americans and British from employing, developing, and supplying their human and material resources on the continent. Only the constriction applied by such a procedure could afford the Germans an opportunity to build up new defense lines and first hold and then strike back at the Western Allies with any hope of success.

In accordance with these plans, twelve ports and the Channel Islands continued to be held after they had been cut off. Significant German strength came to be tied up in these holding operations, but while some were crushed in the fall of 1944, several held out until the general surrender of May 1945.
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Although they could not serve the initial purpose of allowing the German army an opportunity to rebuild a firm front in France, they contributed substantially to the halting of Allied offensive operations in the fall of 1944 and the continuation of the war into 1945.

Whatever the long-term implications of Germany’s holding on to as many ports for as long as possible, the sweep of the Allied armies through France liberated most of the country and thereby had two immediate and significant implications for the subsequent course of hostilities. First, the German navy lost the most convenient of the bases on the Atlantic gained in 1940. The isolated garrisons could deny ports to the Allies but they could not support a continued U-Boat war from French Atlantic ports. If the new submarines, with which the Germans still hoped to turn the Battle of the Atlantic in their favor, became operational in substantial numbers in time, they would, therefore, have to go out into the Atlantic and return the long way from German or Norwegian port S.
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Secondly, the land connection to Spain and across Spain to Portugal was now severed. This meant that, regardless of German efforts, critical raw materials, especially wolfram and chrome, could no longer be imported or smuggled out of the area;
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the countries of the Iberian peninsula were now effectively cut off from the Third Reich.

As Allied soldiers swept across France and into Belgium, and small parties of German soldiers were still trying to find their way across France back to the main lines being reformed to defend the Third Reich’s borders, major issues of command and strategy faced the American and British governments and military. The command issue was in essence quite simple. As the size of the American forces on the continent increased, a new structure was required. The introduction of 3rd Army alongside 1st had led to the creation of 12th Army Group under Bradley; the newly formed 1st Canadian Army alongside the British 2nd Army now constituted Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. As of September 1, however, the general supervisory role of Montgomery over all land forces would end as Eisenhower took command of the land battle himself. This was obviously necessary for two reasons, political and personal. The political reason was simple. The American forces were growing while the British were shrinking. A third American army, the 9th, under General William Simpson, was about to be formed at the Army Group border
between 21st and 12th Army Group at a time when the American and French forces in the south, organized into 6th Army Group, were being integrated into Eisenhower’s command.

Simultaneously with the massive American buildup reflected in these new headquarters, the British army was necessarily shrinking. On August 14 Montgomery had written to Brooke for permission to break up the 59th Division so that other divisions could be kept effective; there were simply not enough replacements available to make up for the casualties being incurred. The request was granted, and even before the liberation of Paris, the 59th became the first British division to disappear from the Allied order of battle.
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If the increasing predominance of American soldiers in the Allied armies made an American commander–in this case obviously Eisenhower himself–a political necessity, the personal factor only reinforced it. Montgomery had had great difficulties in working with American military leaders in Sicily and Italy; he had gone out of his way to antagonize Eisenhower in the weeks before the formal change of command on September 1. Instead of participating in regular meetings with Eisenhower and Bradley, he had kept to himself and at times rudely insisted that others should come to him. It is theoretically barely conceivable that Field Marshal Alexander might have been acceptable to the Americans; there was no prospect that Montgomery would be. If there had ever been a possibility, he had himself removed it by his own behavior; and Brooke and British War Minister P.). Grigg were singularly foolish in encouraging him to hope for a reversal of the decision to implement the new command arrangement. The popular general could be and was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal by the British government, thus recognizing his services in the invasion, but he would have done better to make some effort to cooperate with the American commanders. Since he could not do so with his Canadian and Polish subordinates, that was perhaps asking too much.
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There should have been no argument over the command structure, which had been agreed upon before D-Day, but its being agitated by the British, and specially by Montgomery, served to exacerbate the dispute over strategy after the successful breakout. This issue, often phrased in terms of a narrow versus a broad front approach into Germany, had not been worked out in pre-D-Day planning, where the emphasis had been first on getting ashore and, to a far lesser extent, on how to seize a major port and then break out into France during the first ninety days. By late August, the rough target line for those three months had in fact been reached–even if more slowly in the first and
more rapidly in the last weeks than originally anticipated. The question now was how to proceed next.

This question was complicated by two factors, supply limitations and the command issue just mentioned. Because the Germans had demolished the harbor of Cherbourg, held onto many of the other ports for a long time, and wrecked the facilities at Brest so effectively that they were never used after the capture of the city, the problem of nourishing any further operations was exceedingly difficult. The further the Allies advanced, the longer the supply route inland; and the later the season, the greater the risks of continuing to bring in supplies over the Normandy beaches. Some supplies were brought forward by air drops, and the Americans organized a special one–way truck delivery procedure called the “Red Ball Express,” but these expedients were not a substitute for an effective supply system. That would await the repair of Cherbourg, the capture and opening of Antwerp, and the construction of proper new supply channels in liberated France. Until that stage could be reached, the available supplies could be allocated to either a northern thrust by Britain’s 21st Army Group, an eastward thrust by the American 12th Army Group supported by the United States-French 6th Army Group, or provided on a limited scale to both.

It was Montgomery’s opinion that if his Army Group were greatly increased by the effective subordination of the American 12th Army Group to it, and provided the full allocation of available logistic support, he could drive northwards across the Rhine into the north German plain, occupy Berlin, and end the war quickly in 1944. Like many in the British command structure in London, Montgomery considered the war practically over and himself the man to end it. The project was impractical for a number of reasons, not the least of them being that it called for crossing the largest river–the Rhine-at its widest and where it had the most branches. Furthermore, it required halting all other offensive operations at a time when Patton was much closer to the Rhine than Montgomery, and assumed that it was safe to send a single spearhead far in advance of the Allied front against a German army which was reforming its units. The only conceivable advantage was the possible earlier seizure of some sites from which V-1s and especially the more dangerous V-2s were being launched against England; but this was off-set by the prior experience of the Americans with Montgomery as a commander who had troubles leading the armies of two nations in harmony, to say nothing of the three-British, Canadian, and United States-that this project would require. Eisenhower turned the project down and preferred to move toward the Rhine on a broad front, but,
influenced by the need to seize the great harbor at Antwerp and the sites from which the troublesome V-2s were launched, did give considerable support to Montgomery’s drive.
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