A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Yet, in spite of the critical logistic situation, no one was ready to admit that the armies must soon halt or that the pursuit was over. “Every commander from division upwards,” Eisenhower later wrote, was “obsessed with the idea that with only a few more tons of supply, he could rush right on and win the war…. Each commander, therefore, begged and demanded priority over all others, and it was quite undeniable that in front of each were opportunities for quick exploitation that made the demands completely logical.” Still, the optimism had infected even the Supreme Commander. It was obvious that he believed the impetus of the advance could be maintained long enough for the Allied armies to overrun the Siegfried Line before the Germans had a chance to defend it, for he saw signs of “collapse” on the “entire front.” On September 4 he directed that Bradley’s “12th Army Group will capture the Saar and the Frankfurt area.” Montgomery’s “21st Army Group will capture the Ruhr and Antwerp.”

  Even Patton seemed appeased by the announcement. Now he was sure that, given adequate supplies, his powerful U.S. Third Army could, by itself, reach the industrial Saar and then dash on all the way to the Rhine.* And in the unparalleled atmosphere of victory that prevailed, Montgomery, with his coded message of September 4, once again doggedly pressed his case. This time he went far beyond his proposal of August 17 and his conversation with Eisenhower on August 23. Convinced that the Germans were broken, the commander of the British 21st Army Group believed that he could not only reach the Ruhr but race all the way to Berlin itself.

  In his nine-paragraph message to Eisenhower, Montgomery spelled out again the reasons that convinced him that the moment had come for a “really powerful and full-blooded thrust.” There were two strategic opportunities open to the Allies, “one via the Ruhr and the other via Metz and the Saar.” But, he argued, because “we have not enough resources, two such drives could not be maintained.” There was a chance for only one—his. That thrust, the northern one “via the Ruhr,” was, in Montgomery’s opinion, “likely to give the best and quickest results.” To guarantee its success, Monty’s single thrust would need “all the maintenance resources … without qualification.” He was now clearly impatient of any other considerations. He was going on record both as to the worth of his own plan and his skill and belief in himself as the one man to carry it off. Other operations would have to get along with whatever logistic support remained. There could be no compromise, he warned the Supreme Commander. He dismissed the possibility of two drives, because “it would split our maintenance resources so that neither thrust is full-blooded” and as a result “prolong the war.” As Montgomery saw the problem it was “very simple and clear-cut.” But time was of “such vital importance … that a decision is required at once.”

  Acrid and autocratic, the most popular British commander since Wellington was obsessed by his own beliefs. Considering the acute logistic situation, he reasoned that his single-thrust theory was now more valid than it had been two weeks before. In his intractable way—and indifferent as to how the tone of his message might be received—Montgomery was not merely suggesting a course of action for the Supreme Commander; the Field Marshal was dictating one. Eisenhower must halt all other armies in their tracks—in particular Patton’s—so that all resources could be put behind his single drive. And his Signal No. M-160 closed with a typical example of Montgomery’s arrogance. “If you are coming this way perhaps you would look in and discuss it,” he proposed. “If so, delighted to see you lunch tomorrow. Do not feel I can leave this battle just at present.” That his closing words bordered on the insolent seemed not to occur to Montgomery in his anxiety that this last chance to finish off the Germans must not be lost. Limpetlike, he clung to his single-thrust plan. For now he was sure that even Eisenhower must realize that the time had come to strike the final blow.

  In the bedroom of his villa at Granville on the western side of the Cherbourg peninsula, the Supreme Commander read Montgomery’s Signal No. M-160 with angry disbelief. The fifty-five-year-old Eisenhower thought Montgomery’s proposal “unrealistic” and “fantastic.” Three times Montgomery had nagged him to exasperation about single-thrust schemes. Eisenhower thought he had settled the strategy conflict once and for all on August 23. Yet, now Montgomery was not only advocating his theory once again but was proposing to rush all the way to Berlin. Usually calm and congenial, Eisenhower now lost his temper. “There isn’t a single soul who believes this can be done, except Montgomery,” he exploded to members of his staff. At this moment, to Eisenhower’s mind, the most urgent matter was the opening of the Channel ports, especially Antwerp. Why could Montgomery not understand that? The Supreme Commander was only too well aware of the glittering opportunities that existed. But, as he told the Deputy Supreme Commander, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Tedder, and SHAEF’s assistant chief of staff Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, for Montgomery “to talk of marching to Berlin with an army which is still drawing the great bulk of its supplies over the beaches is fantastic.”

  The Field Marshal’s message could hardly have come at a worse time. The Supreme Commander was propped up in bed, his right knee in a cast, as a consequence of an injury of which Montgomery, at the moment, was unaware. Eisenhower had more cause than this, however, to be edgy. Leaving the main body of SHAEF in London, he had come to the Continent to take personal control on September 1, four days earlier. His small advance command headquarters at Jullouville near Granville was totally inadequate. Because of the phenomenal movement of his armies, Eisenhower was stranded more than four hundred miles from the front—and there were, as yet, no telephone or teletype facilities. Except for radio and a rudimentary courier system, he was unable to communicate immediately with his commanders in the field. The physical injury which added to these tactical discomforts had occurred after one of his routine flying visits to his principal commanders. On September 2, returning from a conference at Chartres with senior American generals, Eisenhower’s plane, because of high winds and bad visibility, had been unable to land at the headquarters’ airfield. Instead, it had put down—safely—on the beach near his villa. But then, trying to help the pilot pull the plane away from the water’s edge, Eisenhower had badly wrenched his right knee. Thus, at this vital juncture in the war, as the Supreme Commander tried to take control of the land battle and with events happening so fast that immediate decisions were necessary, Eisenhower was physically immobilized.

  Although Montgomery—or, for that matter, Bradley and Patton—might feel that Eisenhower “was out of touch with the land battle,” only distance made that argument valid. His excellent, integrated Anglo-American staff was much more cognizant of the day-to-day situation in the field than his generals realized. And while he expected combat commanders to display initiative and boldness, only the Supreme Commander and his staff could view the over-all situation and make decisions accordingly. But it was true that, in this transitional period, while Eisenhower was assuming personal control, there appeared to be a lack of clear-cut direction, due in part to the complexity of the Supreme Commander’s role. Coalition command was far from easy. Yet, Eisenhower, maintaining a delicate balance, and following to the letter the plans of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, made the system work. In the interest of Allied amity, he might modify strategy, but Eisenhower had no intention of throwing caution to the winds and allowing Montgomery, as the Supreme Commander later put it, to make a “single, knifelike drive toward Berlin.”*

  He had been more than tolerant with Montgomery, granting him concession after concession, often incurring the anger of his own American generals. Yet, it seemed that Monty “always wanted everything and he never did anything fast in his life.”* Eisenhower said he understood Montgomery’s peculiarities better than the Britisher realized. “Look, people have told me about his boyhood,” Eisenhower recalled, “and when you have a contest between Eton and Harrow on one side and some of the lesser schools on the other, some of these juniors coming into the army felt sort of inferior. The
man, all his life, has been trying to prove that he was somebody.” Clearly, however, the Field Marshal’s views reflected his British superiors’ beliefs on how the Allies should proceed.

  Understandable as this might be, Montgomery’s arrogance in presenting such views invariably set American commanders’ teeth on edge. As Supreme Commander, armed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff with sweeping powers, Eisenhower had one prime concern: to hold the Allies together and win the war swiftly. Although some of SHAEF’s staff, including many Britishers, considered Montgomery insufferable and said so, Eisenhower never commented on him except in private to his chief of staff, Bedell Smith. But, in fact, the Supreme Commander’s exasperation with Montgomery went far deeper than anyone knew. Eisenhower felt that the Field Marshal was “a psychopath … such an egocentric” that everything he had ever done “was perfect … he never made a mistake in his life.” Eisenhower was not going to let him make one now. “Robbing the American Peter who is fed from Cherbourg,” he told Tedder, “will certainly not get the British Paul to Berlin.”

  Nevertheless, Eisenhower was deeply disturbed at the widening rift between him and Britain’s favorite general. Within the next few days, the Supreme Commander decided, he would meet with Montgomery in an effort to clarify what he considered to be a misunderstanding. Once more he would attempt to spell out his strategy and hope for agreement, however grudgingly it might come. In the interim before the meeting, he made one thing clear. He firmly rejected Montgomery’s single-thrust plan and his bid for Berlin. On the evening of September 5, in a coded message to the Field Marshal, he said, “While agreeing with your conception of a powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin, I do not agree that it should be initiated at this moment to the exclusion of all other maneuvers.” As the Supreme Commander saw it, “the bulk of the German army in the west has now been destroyed,” and that success should be exploited “by promptly breaching the Siegfried Line, crossing the Rhine on a wide front and seizing the Saar and the Ruhr. This I intend to do with all possible speed.” These moves, Eisenhower believed, would place a “strangle hold on Germany’s main industrial areas and largely destroy her capacity to wage war….” Opening the ports of Le Havre and Antwerp was essential, Eisenhower went on, before any “powerful thrust” into Germany could be launched. But, at the moment, Eisenhower emphasized, “no relocation of our present resources would be adequate to sustain a thrust to Berlin….”

  Eisenhower’s decision took thirty-six hours to reach Montgomery, and then only the last half of the message arrived. The concluding two paragraphs were received by Montgomery at 9 A.M. on the morning of September 7. The opening section did not arrive until September 9, another forty-eight hours later. As Montgomery saw it, Eisenhower’s communication was one more confirmation that the Supreme Commander was “too far removed from the battle.”

  From the first fragment of the message that Montgomery received, it was abundantly clear that Eisenhower had rejected his plan, for it contained the sentence, “No relocation of our present resources would be adequate to sustain a thrust to Berlin.” Montgomery immediately sent off a message disagreeing heatedly.

  With the slackening of the pursuit, Montgomery’s worst fears were being realized. German opposition was stiffening. In his message, focusing in particular on the shortage of supplies, Montgomery claimed that he was getting only half his requirements, and “I cannot go on for long like this.” He refused to be diverted from his plan to drive to Berlin. The obvious necessity of immediately opening up the vital port of Antwerp was not even mentioned in his dispatch, yet he stressed that “as soon as I have a Pas de Calais port working, I would then require about 2,500 additional three-ton lorries, plus an assured airlift averaging about 1,000 tons a day to enable me to get to the Ruhr and finally Berlin.” Because it was all “very difficult to explain,” the Field Marshal “wondered if it was possible” for Eisenhower to come and see him. Unshaken in his conviction that the Supreme Commander’s decision was a grave error and confident that his own plan would work, Montgomery refused to accept Eisenhower’s rejection as final. Yet he had no intention of flying to Jullouville in an attempt to change Eisenhower’s mind. Such diplomacy was not part of his makeup, although he was fully aware that the only hope of selling his proposal was via a face-to-face meeting with the Supreme Commander. Outraged and seething, Montgomery awaited a reply from Eisenhower. The British Field Marshal was in near-seclusion, impatient and irritable, at the moment when Prince Bernhard arrived at the headquarters to pay his respects.

  Bernhard had arrived in France on the evening of the sixth. With a small staff, three jeeps, his Sealyham terrier Martin and a bulging briefcase containing Dutch underground reports, he and his party flew to the Continent, guarded by two fighter planes, in three Dakotas with Bernhard at the controls of one. From the airfield at Amiens they drove to Douai, fifty miles north, and early on the seventh set out for Belgium and Brussels. At the Laeken headquarters the Prince was met by General Horrocks, introduced to Montgomery’s staff and ushered into the presence of the Field Marshal. “He was in a bad humor and obviously not happy to see me,” Bernhard recalled. “He had a lot on his mind, and the presence of royalty in his area was understandably a responsibility that he could easily do without.”

  The Field Marshal’s renown as the greatest British soldier of the war had made him, in Bernhard’s words, “the idol of millions of Britishers.” And the thirty-three-year-old Prince was in awe of Montgomery. Unlike Eisenhower’s relaxed, almost casual manner, Montgomery’s demeanor made it difficult for Bernhard to converse easily with him. Sharp and blunt from the outset, Montgomery made it clear that Bernhard’s presence in his area “worried” him. With justification untempered by tact or explanation, Montgomery told the Prince that it would be unwise for Bernhard to visit the headquarters of the Dutch unit—the Princess Irene Brigade—attached to the British Second Army, quartered in the area around Diest, barely ten miles from the front line. Bern-hard, who, as Commander in Chief of the Netherlands Forces, had every intention of visiting Diest, for the moment did not respond. Instead, he began to discuss the Dutch resistance reports. Montgomery overrode him. Returning to the matter, he told the Prince, “You must not live in Diest. I cannot allow it.” Irked, Bernhard felt compelled to point out that he was “serving directly under Eisenhower and did not come under the Field Marshal’s command.” Thus, from the start, as Bernhard remembers the meeting, “rightly or wrongly, we got off on the wrong foot.” (Later, in fact, Eisenhower backed Montgomery regarding Diest, but he did say that Bernhard could stay in Brussels “close to 21st Army Group headquarters, where your presence may be needed.”)

  Bernhard went on to review the situation in Holland as reflected in the underground reports. Montgomery was told of the retreat and disorganization of the Germans, which had been going on since September 2, and of the makeup of the resistance groups. To the best of his knowledge, Bernhard said, the reports were accurate. Montgomery, according to the Prince, retorted, “I don’t think your resistance people can be of much use to us. Therefore, I believe all this is quite unnecessary.” Startled by the Field Marshal’s bluntness, Bernhard “began to realize that Montgomery apparently did not believe any of the messages coming from my agents in Holland. In a way, I could hardly blame him. I gathered he was a bit fed up with misleading information that he had received from the French and Belgian resistance during his advance. But, in this instance, I knew the Dutch groups involved, the people who were running them and I knew the information was, indeed, correct.” He persisted. Showing the Field Marshal the message file and quoting from report after report, Bernhard posed a question: “In view of this, why can’t you attack right away?”

  “We can’t depend on these reports,” Montgomery told him. “Just because the Dutch resistance claim the Germans have been retreating from September 2 doesn’t necessarily mean they are still retreating.” Bernhard had to admit the retreat “was slowing down,” and there were “signs of reorga
nization.” Still, in his opinion, there was valid reason for an immediate attack.

  Montgomery remained adamant. “Anyway,” he said, “much as I would like to attack and liberate Holland, I can’t do it because of supplies. We are short of ammunition. We are short of petrol for the tanks and if we did attack, in all probability they would become stranded.” Bernhard was astounded. The information he received in England from both SHAEF and his own advisers had convinced him that the liberation of Holland would be accomplished in a matter of days. “Naturally I automatically assumed that Montgomery, commander on the spot, knew the situation better than anyone else,” Bernhard later said. “Yet we had absolutely every detail on the Germans—troop strength, the number of tanks and armored vehicles, the position of antiaircraft guns—and I knew, apart from immediate front-line opposition, that there was little strength behind it. I was sick at heart, because I knew that German strength would grow with each passing day. I was unable to persuade Montgomery. In fact, nothing I said seemed to matter.”