the Champs-Elysees on August 29—and keep right on going eastward into action. Bradley remembered it a bit differently. He had refused to let Leclerc’s division take part, he wrote, because Leclerc’s men “had disappeared into the back alleys, brothels, and bistros.”
The senior Allied commanders had been talking about how to defeat Germany as fast as possible. Montgomery wanted both army groups to advance northeast in a “solid mass” of forty divisions toward Antwerp, Brussels, Aachen, and the Ruhr—with himself in command.
Bradley favored a twofold advance, Montgomery’s army group northward and his army group northeastward through Nancy and Metz toward the Saar industrial region and central Germany. This was better tank country than Montgomery’s route, which led over many rivers and canals. However, Montgomery’s route lay through the Pas de Calais, where the V-1s were being fired on London, and the rumor was that the V-2s were about to be launched from there. Much of Allied airpower was challenging the V-1s instead of striking at German synthetic oil production, which was a major factor in Hitler’s ability to continue the war. Also, Antwerp and Rotterdam, two great ports, were in this direction, and the Allies badly needed ship berths.
As a consequence, Eisenhower decided—over Patton’s bitter opposition—that Hodges’s 1st Army with nine divisions, plus a new airborne corps of three divisions under Matthew Ridgway, be allocated to Montgomery, giving him twenty-five divisions, leaving Patton with fifteen divisions to advance toward the Saar.
Divisions were not the whole issue. A severe shortage of supplies was developing, since few ports were open, and, as the armies rushed toward Germany, distances increased by the day. Eisenhower allocated the lion’s share to Montgomery. Hodges, for example, got 5,000 tons of supplies a day, Patton 2,000 tons.
Both the northern and the eastern thrusts commenced at once. By August 31 spearheads of Patton’s army crossed the Meuse River at Verdun, and the next day patrols pushed unopposed to the Moselle River near Metz, thirty-five miles farther east. They were barely thirty miles from the Saar on the German frontier, and fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine River. But Patton’s main body had run out of gasoline, and did not move up to the Moselle till September 5. By that time the Germans had scraped together five weak divisions to hold the river line. Patton became stuck in an attack on the fortified city of Metz and nearby points, and got no farther.
Meantime the spearhead of Montgomery’s British 2nd Army swept into Brussels on September 3, and the next day another armored force raced on to Antwerp and captured the docks undamaged. Antwerp also was fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine and entry into the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.
At this moment, the Germans had nothing to oppose Montgomery. As Basil H. Liddell Hart wrote: “Rarely in any war has there been such an opportunity.” But here Montgomery failed. His spearhead paused to “refit, refuel, and rest,” resumed its advance on September 7, but pushed only eighteen miles farther, to the Meuse-Escaut Canal, where the desperate defense of a few German parachute troops halted it.
By mid-September the Germans had thickened their defenses all along the front but were not strong anywhere. Montgomery, instead of intensifying a direct drive eastward through Belgium and southern Holland, now mounted a huge fourteen-division thrust northward (Operation Market-Garden) on September 17 to get over the Rhine at Arnhem, Holland, using the recently formed 1st Allied Airborne Army to clear the path. His aim, not approved by Eisenhower, was an end run around the Ruhr and a direct strike at Berlin.
But the massive rivers running through Holland imposed severe barriers, and British tanks had to follow a single causeway from Antwerp to Arnhem. The Germans checked the thrust before it reached its goal. A large part of the British 1st Airborne Division dropped at Arnhem—“a bridge too far” for the rest of the Allies to reach, as described in Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same name. Here the British paras were cut off and forced to surrender, a struggle that became legendary for its heroism.
The failure of both Montgomery and Patton to breach the West Wall and get into the heart of Germany in September 1944 has been the center of a controversy that has raged ever since. Both sides claimed they could have won the war if only the other had not got the necessary gasoline.
Patton, when his fuel supplies were petering out, rushed into Bradley’s headquarters “bellowing like a bull” and roared: “To hell with Hodges and Monty. We’ll win your goddam war if you’ll keep 3rd Army moving.” Montgomery opposed any diversion of supplies to Patton, and his complaints became stronger after his thrust at Arnhem miscarried.
The truth is messier. German General Siegfried Westphal, who took over as chief of staff for the western front on September 5, wrote that the entire German line “was so full of gaps that it did not deserve this name. 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.”
A number of mistakes occurred. Patton attacked Metz and Nancy, when they should have been bypassed, and his forces should have swung north to Luxembourg and Bitburg, where there were few Germans. This, General Gunther Blumentritt reported, would have resulted in the collapse of German forces on the front.
Montgomery’s greatest single failure was his pause from September 4 to 7 after reaching Brussels and Antwerp, giving German paratroopers just enough time to organize a defense. The fault, wrote John North, official historian of the 21st Army Group, was a “war-is-won” attitude. Little sense of urgency prevailed among commanders during a vital two-week period in mid-September, and among the troops there was a strong inclination to go slow and avoid being killed.
Montgomery’s lack of drive at this critical point illustrates that the best chance to finish the war quickly was lost when Patton’s gasoline was shut off at the end of August, and he was a hundred miles closer to the Rhine than the British. He, far more than Montgomery, was capable of exploiting opportunity. Yet, as Westphal pointed out, a breakthrough almost anywhere still could have succeeded till mid-October, and neither Patton, Bradley, nor Montgomery saw it.
Meanwhile on the eastern front, the Germans had experienced nothing but disaster. By January 1944, the Red Army had twice the men and tanks as the German army. The only possibility for Germany to avoid total defeat was immediate withdrawal to the 1941 frontier and construction of a deep mine-strewn defensive line studded with antitank guns, advocated by Erwin Rommel. Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein recommended a similar approach, but Adolf Hitler rejected any retreat not actually forced on him by the Red Army, and on March 30 ousted Manstein. Consequently, throughout 1944, German forces in the east conducted one pointless defensive stand and one retreat after another.
By the end of the year, the Soviets were on the Vistula River opposite Warsaw, had surrounded Budapest, driven the Germans out of southeastern Europe and all but a small part of the Baltic states, and forced Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary out of the war. The Germans had lost a million men. As 1945 began, the Soviets were poised for the final assault on the Third Reich.
23 THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1944, AS WESTERN ALLIED FORCES WERE CLOSING AGAINST the West Wall or Siegfried line, Adolf Hitler met with his closest military advisers at his
Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s operations chief, reported that German troops withdrawing from southern France were forming a new line in the Vosges Mountains and on old forts in northeastern France. Other Germans were building new lines in Holland or falling back from Belgium into the West Wall.
There was one place of special concern: the mountainous, heavily forested Ardennes of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. Here Americans were attacking, and the Germans had almost nothing to deter them.
Hitler sat erect and ordered Jodl to stop. After a long pause, Hitler announced: “I have made a momentous decision. I shall go over to the offensive, that is to say here, out of the Ardennes, with the objective Antwerp.”
The Ardennes: the same region through which Hitler had sent his panzers in 1940, and had defeated France and thrown the British off the Continent in six weeks. The French and British hadn’t thought the blow would come
