Patch phoned at 6:30 P.M. on Saturday, September 16.
Patch: I don’t think that letter of yours was advisable. A less sensitive man than I—and I’m not sensitive at all—would see the lack of confidence shown in your leaders.
Truscott: I wrote the letter only because it was something I believe in.
Patch: When I have something on my chest I just have to say it to that person.
Truscott: You have my complete and wholehearted support, once the decision is made. If you think someone else can do the job better, it’s all right with me. But I don’t think you can find one.
Patch: I know that.
So ended DRAGOON, in bickering frustration.
Truscott’s pluck notwithstanding, his ability to force the Belfort Gap and jump the Rhine was dubious at best. With frayed logistical lines stretching three hundred miles, a senior officer observed, VI Corps was “living with just one day’s supplies ahead of the game.” Blaskowitz on September 19 reported to the German high command that his residual armies were forming a defensive bulwark west of the Vosges, “still able to fight, although much weakened.” His greatest fear—a flanking attack southeast toward Belfort by Patton’s Third Army—had not come to pass. Of the Army Group G troops who decamped from southern France, more than 130,000 had escaped, although Nineteenth Army salvaged only 165 of 1,600 artillery pieces, and 11th Panzer had barely two dozen tanks left. For his troubles, Blaskowitz was sacked that very day; infuriated by the retreat and by reports of German straggling, Hitler summoned a panzer army commander from Russia to replace him. Blaskowitz soon returned to Dresden. “Hans is now home,” his wife wrote her relatives, “planting cabbage.”
On the same Tuesday that Blaskowitz was relieved, Truscott received his third star. He, Patch, De Lattre, and their men had reason for pride: in barely a month, they had hastened the German eviction from France, opened new ports and airfields, started the rehabilitation of French industry and commerce from Bordeaux to Burgundy, and demolished two enemy armies by killing, wounding, capturing, or marooning 158,000 Germans.
But ahead lay the granite and gneiss uplands of the Vosges, a primordial badland of cairns, moors, peat bogs, and hogback ridges rising above four thousand feet. Freezing autumn rains had begun here already, Sevareid noted, causing GIs to recall “the Italian winter and to long again for home.” The VI Corps war diary recorded, “Looking for skis.” In a letter home, Truscott wrote, “I dread the approaching wet and cold and snow and tedious mountain work. The skies weep continuously now.” Patrols creeping along the dark flanks of the Vosges could hear the plink of picks and shovels as German sappers burrowed into the hillsides. “There are indications,” Truscott told Sarah, “that the beast has every intention of continuing the fight right to the bitter end.”
“Harden the Heart and Let Fly”
A WORLD away, although barely two hundred crow-flying miles distant, the Allied cavalcade that had burst from Normandy now spilled across the continental crown, down pilgrim paths and drove roads, through fields of wheat stubble and ripening beets, greeted by pealing church bells and farmers who waved with one hand while tossing buckets of water on their burning crofts with the other.
By the end of August the front stretched from Abbeville on the Somme to Commercy on the Meuse, where a bridge was seized intact on the morning of the thirty-first. A great crescent, extending from Brest nearly to Belgium, was packed with more than two million Allied soldiers and 438,000 vehicles—a two-to-one edge in combat troops over German forces in the west and a twenty-to-one advantage in tanks. The AAF and RAF together massed 7,500 bombers and 4,300 fighters. Montgomery’s fifteen divisions in 21st Army Group filled a fast-moving front sixty miles wide across the hedgeless fields between the Seine and the Somme, overrunning or isolating the Rocket Gun Coast. The last of eight thousand V-1s was fired from France on the night of September 1, as launch battalions fled for Holland or Germany; twelve hundred more would be dropped from Luftwaffe aircraft in coming months, but to small effect. “The battle of London is won,” Britain’s home secretary declared. (Churchill privately proposed that all V-1 equipment and German fortifications along the Channel coast be destroyed to prevent future use by the French, “if they fall out of temper with us.”)
In 12th Army Group, Bradley commanded twenty-one divisions, with three more soon to arrive. The First Army zone now spanned sixty-five miles, plated on both flanks by armored divisions, while Patton’s Third Army braced the right wing with two corps abreast. The U.S. Ninth Army was created in early September with orders to finish reducing Brest and to contain the enemy garrisons in other Breton ports; the German commander in Brest soon buckled, emerging from the rubble with his Irish setter, a ton of personal luggage, and his fishing tackle. “I deserve a rest,” he told his captors. Four Allied airborne divisions also had regrouped in England to await another summons of the trumpet.
Under this onslaught the Wehrmacht stumbled eastward in “a planless flight,” as one German general acknowledged. OB West listed eighteen divisions as “completely fit” for combat, while twenty-one others were “totally unfit,” sixteen were “partially fit,” seven had been “dissolved,” and nine were “rebuilding.” Flyers signed by Field Marshal Model and passed out along the retreat routes advised, “We have lost a battle, but I tell you we will still win this war!” A proposed defensive line on the Somme never congealed, however, and German soldiers streamed toward the German frontier through Picardy and Belgium, Lorraine and the Ardennes, bellowing, “The Americans will be here in twenty minutes!” Some jumpy demolitionists misplaced their explosives so that trees to be felled as obstructions instead toppled away from the road. In what the OB West war diary called an “ignominious rout,” Germans unable to find white flags surrendered by waving chickens.
On came the avenging armies—perhaps not twenty minutes behind German heels, but close enough. “Any Boches today?” an ancient Frenchman was asked near the front at Guise. “Ah, yes, the brutes,” he replied, spitting in the road and pointing in all directions. “There, and there, and there, and there.” By truck and by foot the pursuers pursued; a battalion from the 1st Division, which covered 272 miles in the last week of August, rode twenty-two miles on August 29 and walked another eight after the trucks circled back for another load of troops. The British 11th Armored Division drove through the entire rainy night of August 30, drivers snoozing during each brief halt. Gun flashes limned the skyline like heat lightning, and shell craters were edged with the gray lace of burned powder until military traffic pounded them smooth. Fleeing German dray horses were cut down by the thousands; they were among a half-million killed in August, always to the regret of Allied cavalrymen. “There was nothing for it,” a British trooper said, “but to harden the heart and let fly.”
No sentimentality obtained for enemy soldiers. “We blew up everything that didn’t look right,” a lieutenant in the 60th Infantry told his diary, “especially little haystacks out in the fields, a good place for German snipers.” At Braine, near Reims, Patton’s vanguard caught two trains with seventy railcars carrying troops and loot from Paris; tank and tank destroyer fire slapped the engines, then automatic weapons stitched the carriages, killing fifty before five hundred others surrendered. A witness with Third Army described “the long ecstatic agony of serving machine guns on living targets,” and the pleasure that tank gunners felt in fingering their Sherman triggers, which they called “tits.” “The whole west front has collapsed,” a German regimental commander wrote on August 31, “and the other side is marching about at will.”
Not quite. Fuel shortages, nettlesome since early August, had become grievous as the Allied armies raced eastward. Daily fuel consumption had tripled from six gallons per vehicle in late July to eighteen; a single armored division now burned 100,000 gallons in each day of cross-country fighting. The five-gallon can remained the primary delivery means, and SHAEF logisticians were so desperate that consideration was given to using battleships to haul
jerricans of gas to the French beaches. A Canadian corps was immobilized for several days; two of eight divisions in the British Second Army remained on the Seine to allow the other six to move on. A corps in the U.S. First Army stalled for four days, and corps commanders cadged cans of gasoline to keep their staff cars running. Nowhere did the need pinch more than in Third Army. Of seventeen tanks sent to capture a Meuse bridge in Verdun on August 31, all but three ran out of gas en route. Patton’s fuel dumps the previous day had received 32,000 gallons, less than one-tenth of Third Army’s requirement. His G-4, the army logistician, rated the supply of motor fuel as “extremely critical.” “Damn it, Brad,” Patton told Bradley, “just give me 400,000 gallons of gasoline and I’ll put you inside Germany in two days.”
Onward they pushed, on foot when necessary, through villages displaying homemade American flags, crayoned on paper or pillowcases with polka-dot stars. “Vote for Dewey,” mischievous GIs yelled, to be answered by cheering, agreeable Frenchmen, “Vote for Dew-ee.” An observant soldier told his parents that the locals numbered their building floors beginning above the ground level. “If that was the only mistake the French ever made,” he added, “we wouldn’t be here today.”
Giddy rumors swirled, including a Swiss claim that Hitler had fled to Spain. An intercepted German radio report of insurrection in Cologne stirred great excitement until U.S. analysts realized that the news was disinformation from an Allied psychological operations team. Still, optimism ran rife. Bradley on September 1 predicted that he would reach the Rhine by Sunday, September 10, and staff officers selected half a dozen river crossing sites. Bradley’s aide jotted in a diary, “Everything we talk about now is qualified by the phrase, ‘If the war lasts that long.’”
“End the war in ’44,” soldiers chanted. Time reported that officials from New York to Seattle had begun planning Victory-in-Europe celebrations; a man in Santa Fe had offered $10 “to the first newsboy to reach him with the New Mexican announcing the fall of Germany.” With the European war seemingly winding down, Churchill’s War Office asked Montgomery whether he could spare an extra army headquarters staff for Burma. The Pentagon drafted plans to leave one-fifth of all ordnance stocks in Europe with a postwar occupation force, while one-fifth would be sent to the Pacific and three-fifths shipped home.
“There is a feeling of elation, expectancy, and almost bewilderment,” the prime minister’s secretary wrote on September 1. Beetle Smith assured reporters, “Militarily the war is won.” Even as Eisenhower tried to tamp down expectations, he told his diary, “Our military forces can advance almost at will.… The defeat of the German armies is complete, and the only thing now needed to realize the whole conception is speed.”
* * *
The Allied juggernaut aimed vaguely for Berlin, intent on ripping out Germany’s political heart. But a nearer, interim target was the enemy’s industrial heart in the Ruhr valley, a sooty ellipse that extended east from the Rhine for some sixty miles to include the smokestack cities of Essen, Dortmund, and Duisburg. Two-thirds of German steel and more than half the country’s coal had traditionally come from the Ruhr, and loss of the region would also devastate the chemical and munitions industries, with a projected 40 percent drop in artillery ammunition and explosives production. Hitler would have no choice but to defend this vital region, and a SHAEF study signed by Eisenhower in May posited that “an attack aimed at the Ruhr is likely to give us every chance of bringing to battle and destroying the main German armed forces.”
Four paths led to the Ruhr from the west, but most planners considered only two of them suitable for big mechanized armies. One route, north of the Ardennes—the rugged forested hills that occupied much of southern Belgium and Luxembourg—aimed directly at the Ruhr; it could be supported by Allied seapower and aircraft based in Britain. The second route angled south of the Ardennes, through the so-called Metz Gap. Even before OVERLORD began, Eisenhower had advocated taking both avenues, a strategy of advance on “two mutually supporting axes” that would stretch enemy defenses across a broad front, exploit Allied mobility, and permit shifts in the weight of attack as needed. The southern route also would menace the Saar valley, second only to the Ruhr as an industrial locus in western Germany. SHAEF in late August estimated that the enemy could muster no more than eleven divisions northwest of the Ardennes and five divisions to the south. Eisenhower’s planners had proposed that 21st Army Group strike northeast toward the Rhine through Amiens and Liège in the main effort, while 12th Army Group lunged toward Metz and beyond in a subsidiary attack.
Montgomery would have none of it. In a message to Brooke in London on August 18, he had urged channeling both army groups north of the Ardennes “as a solid mass of some forty divisions which would be so strong that it need fear nothing.” Concentration of Anglo-American power in the north would utilize the Allied preponderance in armor and bring the war to a quicker close, an issue of particular urgency as Britain ran out of men. Montgomery also argued that a single commander was needed to oversee Allied ground forces driving toward Germany from the Seine—“This is a whole time job for one man”—and he claimed that Bradley agreed with this strategic assessment.
Bradley most certainly did not agree, nor did most of the other senior Allied generals, including Montgomery’s own chief of staff, Major General Francis W. “Freddie” de Guingand. When told that Montgomery proposed to “put everything in one punch,” Air Marshal Tedder retorted, “I always thought in a fight it was better to use both hands.” Eisenhower on August 23 drove to the 21st Army Group command post in Condé, near Falaise, for a long, tedious conference from which Beetle Smith was excluded at Montgomery’s churlish insistence although De Guingand was allowed to remain. When Montgomery proposed halting Patton’s Third Army to divert more fuel to the other spearheads, Eisenhower told him, “The American public would never stand for it, and public opinion wins wars.” Standing before a map with his hands clasped behind his back, Montgomery replied, “Victories win wars. Give people victory and they won’t care who won it.”
Montgomery emerged from the caravan at Condé having extracted certain concessions to strengthen his attack, including priority in using the airborne reserve and in drawing supplies. Moreover, the U.S. First Army would swing largely north of the Ardennes rather than south; this would shore up 21st Army Group’s right flank, a reinforcement that some SHAEF planners had long considered.
Eisenhower also agreed that a single commander would oversee the assault on Germany, but that generalissimo would not be B. L. Montgomery. Rather, Eisenhower would take the job himself, and before leaving Condé he told Montgomery that at George Marshall’s insistence this rearrangement would take effect in another week. In truth, Eisenhower had dictated a secret memo to his staff in mid-May laying out his eventual role as ground commander, while specifying that “nothing must be said … to indicate there would ever be any diminution of General M’s command or responsibility.… The less said the better.”
Churchill, “as a solace,” promoted Montgomery to the rank of field marshal on September 1, giving him the equivalent of five stars to Eisenhower’s four. This, as the prime minister said with no little spite, “will put the changes in command in their proper perspective.” Although Eisenhower praised Montgomery to reporters as “not only my very close and warm friend, but … one of the great soldiers of this or any other war,” the promotion went down badly at SHAEF.
“Damn stupid & I warrant most offensive to Eisenhower & the Americans,” Admiral Ramsay told his diary. Patton wrote Bea on September 1 that “the Field Marshal thing made us sick, that is Bradley and me.” Even Brooke felt uneasy, telling a colleague that Montgomery “is probably the finest tactical general we have had since Wellington. But on some of his strategy, and especially his relations with the Americans, he is almost a disaster.” Militarily the war might be won, as Beetle Smith had averred, but close combat within the Allied high command was just starting.
* * *
; Late in the morning of Saturday, September 2, Eisenhower flew in his B-25 to Bradley’s command post in Chartres. In the middle distance the twin spires of the magnificent cathedral poked the heavens. Patton also arrived, “bumptious and noisy,” in a staff officer’s description, accoutred with a revolver and his bull terrier, Willie, whom he occasionally introduced as “a sodomy son of a bitch.” An aide made drinks with ice from a refrigerator that Eisenhower had given Bradley after complaining, “Goddamn it, I’m tired of drinking warm whiskey every time I come to your headquarters.”
On a huge wall map of Europe, a bull’s-eye encircled Berlin. Dressed in his combat jacket and jump boots, Bradley argued for crossing the German frontier immediately, thus preventing enemy defenders from shoring up the border fortifications known as the Siegfried Line. He also wanted a bulletproof car and armored jeeps for travel in Germany. “Each town in our path” should be bombed, he believed, to “teach them the lesson of death and destruction they have carried to the rest of the world.”
Patton offered to “stake my reputation” on Third Army’s ability to fight to the Rhine despite crippling supply shortages. “That reputation of yours hasn’t been worth very much,” Eisenhower said, smiling broadly. Patton barked with laughter. “Pretty good now,” he said.
A message from Beetle Smith warning of approaching storms cut short the conference. No sooner had the B-25 lifted off than flames licked from the right engine. After an emergency landing, Eisenhower folded himself into the rear seat of a tiny L-5 Sentinel for a turbulent 120-mile flight west to the Cotentin Peninsula, where his new headquarters had just opened near Granville, another of those French coastal towns that Englishmen over the centuries had captured, fortified, lost, burned, bombarded, and enjoyed on holiday.
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 245
