History of the Second World War (96 page)

Faced with these conflicting arguments, Eisenhower sought an agreeable solution in a compromise. Montgomery’s northward thrust into Belgium should be given priority for the moment, and the American First Army was to advance north along with the British to cover and aid their right flank as Montgomery required, in order to ensure the success of his advance. Meantime the bulk of the available supplies and transport should be used to maintain this northern thrust, at the expense of Patton’s. But once Antwerp was gained, the Allied armies were to revert to the pre-invasion plan of advancing to the Rhine ‘on a broad front both north and south of the Ardennes’.

None of Eisenhower’s executives liked the compromise but their complaints were not so loud at the time as they became in later months, and years, when each felt that he had been deprived of victory in consequence of that decision. Patton called it ‘the most momentous error of the war’.

On Eisenhower’s orders, Patton’s Third Army was restricted to 2,000 tons of supplies a day, while 5,000 tons were given to Hodges’s First Army. Bradley says that Patton came ‘bellowing like a bull’ to his headquarters, and roared ‘To hell with Hodges and Monty. We’ll win your goddam war if you’ll keep Third Army going.’

Unwilling to submit to the limitations of supply, Patton told his leading corps to drive on as long as it had any petrol left, ‘and then get out and walk’. The advance reached the Meuse before the tanks ran dry, on August 31. On the previous day Patton’s army had received only 32,000 gallons of petrol instead of its current daily requirement of 400,000, and was told that it would not get any more until September 3. Meeting Eisenhower at Chartres on the 2nd, Patton burst out: ‘My men can eat their belts, but my tanks have gotta have gas.’

After the capture of Antwerp on September 4, Patton was again given an equal share in supplies with the First Army, for his eastward drive to the Rhine. But he now met much stiffer enemy resistance, and was soon checked on the Moselle. That caused him to complain all the more violently of the way he had been cut short of petrol, for the benefit of Montgomery’s thrust, in the crucial last week of August. He felt that ‘Ike’ had put harmony before strategy and sacrificed the best chance of early victory in his desire to appease ‘Monty’s insatiable appetite’.

On the other hand, Montgomery regarded Eisenhower’s idea of a ‘broad front’ advance to the Rhine as basically wrong, and was opposed to any diversion of supplies to Patton’s diverging eastward thrust while the issue of his own northward thrust hung in the balance. His complaints became stronger, naturally, after his thrust to Arnhem had fallen short, and failed to fulfil his hopes. He felt that Patton’s pull with Bradley, and Bradley’s with Eisenhower, had been decisive in the tug of war and spoilt the prospects of his own plan.

It is easy to understand Montgomery’s disapproval of any effort which made no direct contribution to his own. On the surface there is such obvious justification for his complaint about Eisenhower’s decision to resume a two-prong thrust that most British commentators on the war have come to accept it as the main cause through which victory was forfeited. But in closer examination it becomes evident that the effect was relatively small.

For, in fact, Patton received an average of only 2,500 tons of supplies a day during the first half of September — a mere 500 tons more than during the days when his army
was
halted. That excess was a trifling amount compared with the total daily allotment to the armies engaged in the northern thrust during the crucial period, and barely enough to maintain one additional division. So we must probe deeper for the real causes of failure.

One heavy handicap came from a plan to drop large airborne forces near Tournai, on the Belgian frontier south of Brussels, to aid the northward thrust. The ground forces arrived there before the drop was due to take place, on September 3, and it was accordingly cancelled. But the withdrawal of air transport in preparation for it caused a six-day suspension of air supply to the advancing armies that cost them 5,000 tons of supplies. In petrol that would have been equivalent to one-and-a-half million gallons — enough to have carried two armies to the Rhine without pausing, while the enemy were still in chaos.

The responsibility for this superfluous airborne plan, so costly in effect, is not easy to determine. Curiously, both Eisenhower and Montgomery claim the parentage in their post-war accounts. Eisenhower says: ‘It appeared to me that a fine chance for launching a profitable airborne attack was developing in the Brussels area, and though there was divided opinion on the wisdom of withdrawing planes from supply work. . . . I decided to take the chance.’ But Montgomery says: ‘I had plans ready for an airborne drop in the Tournai area’ and refers to it as ‘my idea’. In contrast Bradley says: ‘I pleaded with Ike to discard the scheme and leave us the aircraft for supply. . . . “We’ll be there before you can pull it, I warned.”’ That proved true.

Another factor was that a large proportion of the supply tonnage for the northward thrust was devoted to the replenishment of ammunition that was not needed, so long as the enemy were in a state of collapse, instead of concentrating on maintaining the supply of petrol needed to keep up the pursuit and allow the enemy no chance of rallying.

A third discovery is that the flow of supplies to Montgomery’s thrust was seriously reduced at the crucial time because 1,400 British-built three-ton lorries, and all the replacements for this model, were found to have faulty pistons. If these lorries could have been used, a further 800 tons of supplies could have been delivered daily to the Second Army — sufficient to maintain two more divisions.

A fourth point, of still wider significance, is the great handicap caused by the lavishness of the British and American scales of supply. The Allied planning was based on the calculation that 700 tons of supplies a day would be consumed by each division, of which about 520 tons a day would be required in the forward area. The Germans were far more economical, their scale of supply being only about 200 tons a day for a division. Yet they had to reckon with constant interference from the air, and from guerrillas — two serious complications from which the Allies were free.

The self-imposed handicap that the Allies suffered from their extravagant scale of supply was increased by the wastefulness of their troops. One glaring example was over jerricans, which were so important in refuelling. Out of 17½ million jerricans which were sent to France since the landing, in June, only 2½ million could be traced that autumn!

Another big factor in the failure of the northern thrust was the way that the U.S. First Army became stuck in the fortified and coal-mining web around Aachen — a strategic ‘entanglement’ which virtually became a vast ‘internment camp’, as Salonika had been for the Allies in World War I. In analysis it becomes evident that the abortiveness of the U.S. First Army’s thrust — to which nearly three-quarters of the American supply tonnage was devoted, at Patton’s cost — arose from Montgomery’s demand that the bulk of this army should be used north of the Ardennes to cover his right flank. The space between his own line of advance and the Ardennes was so narrow that the U.S. First Army had little room for manoeuvre or chance of bypassing Aachen.

That badly entangled army was unable to give Montgomery any help in the next phase, too, when he launched his mid-September drive for Arnhem. But here the British also paid forfeit for an extraordinary oversight. When the 11th Armoured Division raced into Antwerp on September 4 it had captured the docks intact, but made no effort to secure the bridges over the Albert Canal, in the suburbs, and these were blown up by the time a crossing was attempted two days later — the division then being switched eastwards. The divisional commander had not thought of seizing the bridges immediately he occupied the city, and no one above had thought of giving him orders to do so. It was a multiple lapse — by four commanders, from Montgomery downwards, who were usually both vigorous and careful about important detail.

Moreover, barely twenty miles north of Antwerp is the exit from the Beveland Peninsula, a bottleneck only a few hundred yards wide. During the second and third weeks of September the remains of the German 15th Army, which had been cut off on the Channel coast, were allowed to slip away northward. They were then ferried across the mouth of the Scheldt and escaped through the Beveland bottleneck. Three of the divisions arrived in time to strengthen the enemy’s desperately thin front in Holland before Montgomery launched his drive for the Rhine at Arnhem, and helped to check it.

What in the other side’s view would have been the Allies’ best course? When interrogated, Blumentritt endorsed Montgomery’s argument for a concentrated thrust in the north to break through to the Ruhr, and thence to Berlin, saying:

He who holds northern Germany holds Germany. Such a break-through, coupled with air domination, would have torn in pieces the weak German front and ended the war. Berlin and Prague would have been occupied ahead of the Russians.*

Blumentritt considered that the Allied forces had been too widely and evenly spread. He was particularly critical of the attack towards Metz:

A direct attack on Metz was unnecessary. The Metz fortress area could have been masked. In contrast, a swerve northward in the direction of Luxembourg and Bitburg would have met with great success and caused the collapse of the right flank of our 1st Army followed by the collapse of our 7th Army. By such a flank move to the north the entire 7th Army could have been cut off before it could retreat behind the Rhine.*

* Liddell Hart:
The Other Side of the Hill,
p. 428.

General Westphal, who on September 5 replaced Blumentritt as Chief of Staff on the Western Front, took the view that the choice of the thrust-point was, in the circumstances, less important than a concentrated effort to drive home any thrust.

The over-all situation in the West was serious in the extreme. A heavy defeat anywhere along the front, which was so full of gaps that it did not deserve this name, might lead to a catastrophe, if the enemy were to exploit his opportunity skilfully. A particular source of danger was that not a single bridge over the Rhine had been prepared for demolition, an omission which took weeks to repair. . . . Until the middle of October the enemy could have broken through at any point he liked with ease, and would then have been able to cross the Rhine and thrust deep into Germany almost unhindered.*

* Westphal:
The German Army in the West,
pp. 172 and 174.

Westphal said that in September the most vulnerable part of the whole Western Front was the Luxembourg sector, leading to the Rhine at Coblenz. His evidence confirmed what Blumentritt had said about the effects of a thrust in that part — the long, and thinly defended, stretch of the Ardennes country between Metz and Aachen.

What are the main conclusions that emerge in the light that has since been thrown on this crucial period?

Eisenhower’s ‘broad front’ plan of advance on the Rhine, designed before the invasion of Normandy, would have been a good way to strain and crack the resistance of a strong and still unbeaten enemy. But it was far less suited to the actual situation, where the enemy had already collapsed, and the issue depended on exploiting their collapse so deeply and rapidly that they would have no chance to rally. That called for a pursuit without pause.

In these circumstances, Montgomery’s argument for a single and concentrated thrust was far better in principle. But it becomes evident, when the facts are explored, that the frustration of his thrust in the north was not really due to the diversion of supplies to Patton, as is commonly assumed. A much greater, and compound, handicap came from a series of impediments within his own orbit — the delay in opening up the port of Antwerp, the six-day stoppage of supply by air for a superfluous object; the excessive provision of ammunition and other supplies that subtracted from the transport available for bringing up petrol; the 1,400 defective British lorries; the ‘blind-alley’ employment of the U.S. First Army on his flank; the neglect to seize the bridges over the Albert Canal before they were blown up, and the crossings manned, by the enemy.

Most fatal of all to the prospect of reaching the Rhine was the pause from September 4 to 7 after reaching Brussels and Antwerp. That is hard to reconcile with Montgomery’s declared aim, in his drive from the Seine, ‘to keep the enemy on the run straight through to the Rhine, and “bounce” our way across that river before the enemy succeeded in reforming a front to oppose us’. Persistent pace and pressure is the key to success in any deep penetration or pursuit, and even a day’s pause may forfeit it.

But throughout the Allied forces there was a general tendency to relax after they drove into Belgium. It was fostered from the top. Eisenhower’s inter-Allied Intelligence Staff told him that the Germans could not possibly produce sufficient forces to hold their frontier defence line — and also assured the press ‘we’ll go right through it’. Eisenhower conveyed these assurances to his subordinate commanders — even as late as September 15 he wrote to Montgomery: ‘We shall soon have captured the Ruhr and the Saar and the Frankfurt area, and I would like your views as to what we should do next’. A similar optimism reigned in all quarters. Explaining the omission to seize the bridges over the Albert Canal, the commander of the spearhead corps, General Horrocks, frankly said: ‘I did not anticipate at that time any serious resistance on the Albert Canal. It seemed to us that the Germans were totally disorganised.’

John North in his history of the 21st Army Group, based on official sources, has aptly summed up the situation: ‘a “war is won” attitude of mind . . . prevailed among all ranks.’* In consequence, there was little sense of urgency among commanders during the vital fortnight in September and a very natural inclination among the troops to abstain from pushing hard, and avoid getting killed, when everyone assumed that ‘the war is over’.