All this fell largely unforeseen on Lee, who was reduced to sending crates of oranges and other delicacies to Beetle Smith in hopes of retaining SHAEF’s confidence. (He regretted not playing bridge as a means of infiltrating Eisenhower’s inner circle.) SHAEF certainly shared culpability, not least because it had abandoned plans for a robust network of supply depots across the Continent and relied instead on scattered ad hoc dumps. The SHAEF chief logistician on September 9 warned that “maintenance of the armies [is] stretched to the limit.… The administration situation remains grim.” Bradley’s top supply officer in 12th Army Group subsequently agreed: “For a period of about one month now the logistical situation has been disorderly and for the past three weeks has been bad.”
* * *
COMZ improvised, with mixed results. Fuel shortages tended to be a problem of distribution rather than supply, and an elaborate nexus of pipelines was built to reduce reliance on tanker ships, gas trucks, and jerricans. A project called PLUTO—Pipeline Underwater Transport of Oil—laid twenty-one lines across the bottom of the English Channel; pumping stations were dubbed “Bambi” and “Dumbo,” in keeping with the Disney motif. The first pipe to Cherbourg was completed in mid-August, but an inconsiderate ship’s anchor ruined it within hours. Two days later another line was wrecked after fouling a propeller; still another failed in late August, when ten tons of barnacles grew on the submerged pipeline drum and kept it from rotating. PLUTO proved disappointing—“a scandalous waste of time and effort,” in one admiral’s view; the Channel lines provided far less than 10 percent of Allied fuel needs on the Continent during the war. Tankers, gas trucks, and jerricans remained indispensable.
A terrestrial innovation was the Red Ball Express, a cargo haulage service begun in late August. Soon seven thousand trucks carried four thousand tons or more each day on one-way highways to First and Third Army dumps, typically a three-day round-trip. MPs posted 25,000 road signs in English and French, and Cub planes monitored the traffic flow. Problems arose immediately. Red Ball burned 300,000 gallons of gasoline a day, as much as three armored divisions in combat. Drivers sometimes loaded six to ten tons of cargo on 2½-ton vehicles; the Red Ball units became known as “truck-destroyer battalions.” Despite a twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, seventy trucks on average were wrecked beyond repair every day. On one stretch marked “steep hill and dangerous curve,” eight gasoline semi-trailers in a single convoy flipped over, followed by eight more the next day. “The gas splashing inside throws you from side to side,” one driver explained. “This affects your steering.” Of fifteen thousand U.S. Army vehicles “deadlined” and useless in Europe in the fall of 1944, nine thousand were trucks littering French byways.
Roads deteriorated in the autumn rains, and a dearth of spark plugs, fan belts, and tools hampered mechanics; one company with forty-one trucks possessed a single pair of pliers and one crescent wrench. The daily ruination of five thousand tires—many shredded by discarded ration cans—led to such a desperate shortage that even threadbare spares were stripped from vehicles throughout the United States and shipped to Europe. Pilferage from trucks and dumps grew so virulent that General Lee requested thirteen infantry battalions as guards; over Bradley’s bitter protest, Eisenhower gave him five, with shoot-to-kill authority. Red Ball moved over 400,000 tons in three months, and eventually was supplemented by other routes with names like White Ball, Red Lion, and Green Diamond. But as one major general in Paris lamented, “It was the greatest killer of trucks that I could imagine.”
A single train could haul the equivalent of four hundred trucks. Eighteen thousand men, including five thousand prisoners of war, labored to rebuild the French rail system, which had been obliterated by years of Allied bombing. Thirty-two trains left Cherbourg over a single, reconditioned track on August 15, creeping across bridges at ten miles per hour, on a two-day trip to Le Mans. A line to Paris opened on September 1, and by the end of the month almost five thousand miles of track had been refurbished. Shortages of skilled train, yard, and rail crews impaired operations; signalmen often were reduced to flagging with lighters and burning cigarettes. Two dozen Army railway battalions eventually arrived from as far away as Persia and Peoria. The Army used 200,000 rail cars in France, of which 31,000 were shipped in pieces from the United States, assembled in Britain, and ferried across the Channel: freight cars, flatcars, tank cars, gondolas, cabooses, and thirteen hundred muscular American engines. By year’s end, eleven thousand miles of French and Belgian track had been rebuilt, along with 241 rail bridges.
Without ports, all the roads, rails, and truck-destroyer battalions in Europe had limited utility. A parody by exasperated SHAEF officers held that “the number of divisions required to capture the number of ports required to maintain those divisions is always greater than the number of divisions those ports can maintain.” Fifty-four ports had been studied by OVERLORD planners for possible use; Lee narrowed the number under consideration to three dozen, of which half eventually played a role for the Allies. Marseille and other harbors in southern France proved a boon, handling more than one-third of all Allied supplies sent to France in the fall of 1944. Cherbourg tripled its expected cargo capacity, to 22,000 tons a day; it was said that unloaded rations were piled “as high as Napoléon’s hand” around the famous statue of l’empereur pointing toward England. But SHAEF calculated that combat supply requirements in the coming month would sharply outpace the Allied ability to unload and distribute cargo; the number of ships anchored in Continental waters awaiting berths would exceed two hundred by mid-October.
Clearly the solution was to be found in Antwerp: using rail and road networks, Cherbourg could support a maximum of twenty-one divisions, while Antwerp using rails alone could sustain fifty-four. Cherbourg lay almost four hundred miles from the huge forward depots now under construction at Liège, in eastern Belgium; from Antwerp, the distance was sixty-five miles. Although the Allied port predicament was deemed “grave,” the opening of Antwerp would have “the effect of a blood transfusion,” Eisenhower promised Marshall. Meanwhile the armies would make do with brute-force logistics, another American specialty. Stevedores manhandling cargo off an old Hog Islander freighter in Rouen were surprised when the Norwegian captain’s caged parrot abruptly sang the opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—voice cracking on the high notes—then squawked, “What a life! Misery! Misery!”
Every Village a Fortress
A STUBBY C-47 transport plane banked east of Brussels on Sunday afternoon, September 10, before leveling off to touch down on the airdrome at Melsbroek, previously used by the Germans but now occupied by the Royal Air Force and code-named B-58. Wearing the rank insignia of a new field marshal, Montgomery strode across the runway as the propellers twirled to a stop, then bounded up the ramp and into the cabin with a pugnacious glint.
There he found Eisenhower, his knee bandaged and throbbing. Only with help had he managed to hobble aboard the plane; Montgomery had insisted on a personal meeting but protested that he was too busy to leave Brussels, so the supreme commander had come to him. After a perfunctory greeting, Montgomery asked that Eisenhower’s chief administrative officer, Lieutenant General Sir Humfrey M. Gale, be ejected from the plane, although his own logistician, Major General Sir Miles Graham, would remain. Air Marshal Tedder, the SHAEF deputy commander, could also stay. No sooner had Eisenhower meekly complied than the field marshal pulled a crumpled sheaf of top secret cables from his pocket, including the first half of the bifurcated message of September 5 that had arrived Saturday morning, four days late.
“Did you send me these?”
“Yes, of course,” Eisenhower replied. “Why?”
“Well, they’re nothing but balls,” Montgomery said, “sheer balls, rubbish.” In a seething tirade, his reedy voice trilling, he claimed to have been betrayed and insisted that the broad, double-thrust advance on Germany would fail. Was George Patton actually running the war for SHAEF?
A scarlet flush cre
pt up Eisenhower’s neck, but his voice was level as he leaned forward, tapped Montgomery’s knee, and said, “Monty, you can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.”
The field marshal settled in his seat with a weak smile. “I’m sorry, Ike,” he said.
For a long hour they bickered, “a complete dogfight,” in Graham’s description. Montgomery restated his case for a single thrust; if given transport and fuel from the Canadians and Third Army, plus the four airborne divisions, he was certain he could capture the Ruhr with twenty divisions from the British Second and American First Armies, opening the road to Berlin. Patton’s strike toward Metz in the south would weaken the Allied center, he said, leaving none of the armies with sufficient strength to burst ahead.
Eisenhower agreed that the Ruhr remained their main objective, but any lunge toward Berlin—still four hundred miles away—would risk lethal attacks on both flanks. “You can’t do that,” he told Montgomery. “What the hell?” The broad-front strategy made better strategic sense, he added. It was safer and surer and would keep the enemy off balance.
Eisenhower was intrigued, however, by Montgomery’s description of a new plan to drop several parachute divisions into Holland, clearing a corridor for Dempsey’s Second Army and other forces to seize a bridgehead over the Rhine. Similar proposals had been advanced before, but this scheme was bigger, stronger, more ambitious, and Eisenhower was willing to try it. The operation would be given a two-word code name: MARKET GARDEN.
At length Montgomery rose, saluted, and trotted down the stairs to the tarmac, a pinched, elfin figure in a beret. “Our fight must be with both hands at present,” Tedder wrote shortly after the conference. “Montgomery will of course dislike not getting a blank check.”
The aircraft engines coughed and caught. Eisenhower flew off in pain.
* * *
For all that had been said, much remained unsaid. The two had barely mentioned Antwerp and MARKET GARDEN got short shrift. Following the meeting, Montgomery sent a carping, thirty-three paragraph note to Brooke. The supreme commander, he complained,
is completely out of touch with what is going on; he tries to run the war by issuing long telegraphic directives. Eisenhower himself does not really know anything about the business of fighting the Germans.… Just when a really firm grip was needed, there was no grip.
Regardless of American requirements, Montgomery had privately concluded that 21st Army Group did not need Antwerp to drive halfway across Germany. Graham, his logistics chief, posited that a fighting division could get by with 350 to 400 tons of daily sustenance, barely half the SHAEF estimate. British units had done so in Africa, albeit under very different combat conditions. If two Allied corps reached Berlin, Montgomery believed, German defenses would be in such “disorder” that the Third Reich would disintegrate. Lesser ports, such as Dieppe and Le Havre, could sustain an advance on the enemy capital; just “one good Pas de Calais port,” Montgomery added, would suffice to reach Münster, fifty miles beyond the Rhine, if augmented with daily airlift and more trucks. Unfortunately, the first Pas de Calais port—Boulogne—would not open until mid-October; the same was true of battered Le Havre. Until then only Mulberry B, far from the front, could handle sizable British cargo ships, and autumn weather made that ever riskier. Worse yet, fourteen hundred three-ton British trucks had just been found to have faulty pistons, and the same defect plagued all the replacement engines. Nevertheless, according to the Canadian official history, Montgomery’s staff had assigned the prying open of the Scheldt as a “last priority” for the Canadian First Army.
Another grim battlefield development also had come into play. Montgomery on Saturday had received a secret War Office cable informing him that two explosions in England the previous evening heralded a new German assault against the home island. Without warning, at 6:34 P.M. on September 8, an explosion carved out a crater twenty feet deep in Stavely Road near the Thames, killing three, demolishing eleven houses, and wrecking fifteen more; the blast had been audible in Westminster, seven miles distant. A second explosion rocked Epping sixteen seconds later. Just days earlier, Churchill’s government had declared victory against the V-1 in the battle of London; Whitehall now refused to publicly acknowledge a new German threat. Suggestions from the government that natural-gas accidents were responsible inspired caustic jokes about “flying gas mains” and applications by the credulous for damages from local utility companies.
The true culprit, the V-2 rocket, was forty-six feet long, weighed almost thirteen tons, and carried a one-ton warhead. Reaching 3,600 miles per hour and an apogee of sixty miles, it had an impact velocity comparable to fifty big train engines slamming into a neighborhood. The V-2 was the handiwork of a young Prussian Junker named Wernher von Braun, who belonged to the Nazi Party and the SS, and who since 1937 had been working on a liquid-fuel rocket at Peenemünde, a bucolic Baltic fishing village recommended by his mother.
The rocket had long been expected by British intelligence. “Existence of V-2 is established beyond doubt,” a secret report on July 11 confirmed. Some analysts feared a warhead of up to six tons, carrying gas or “bacteriological germs” and capable of destroying all buildings within a mile or more of impact. Saturation bombing of Peenemünde killed many German scientists and engineers, delaying the rocket program for two months. But the ruthless use of slave laborers by the thousands and the construction of simple mobile launch equipment had permitted Hitler in early September to authorize the start of Operation PENGUIN. Fourteen V-2s would be fired on average every day in coming months, although they had an annoying tendency to break up in flight. Unlike the V-1, the V-2 could not be defended against—at Mach 5, it was simply too fast. Already 1.5 million Londoners had left the city because of the recent V-1 onslaught, and now the British government also considered evacuating.
The initial volley had been fired from western Holland, and the SS general overseeing PENGUIN had placed his headquarters outside Nijmegen, a Dutch town only ten miles south of Arnhem on the Rhine, a prime objective of Operation MARKET GARDEN. The message from London advising Montgomery of the first rocket attacks also pleaded, “Will you please report most urgently by what approximate date you consider you can rope off the coastal area contained by Antwerp-Utrecht-Rotterdam?” While General Dempsey and others favored a more easterly advance toward the Rhine at Wesel, this new German onslaught further persuaded Montgomery to drive north, deep into Holland. “It must be towards Arnhem,” he said.
Tedder was right: Montgomery disliked not getting a blank check. On Monday he cabled Eisenhower that without greater logistical support no offensive toward the Rhine would be possible for almost two weeks, perhaps longer. “This delay,” he added in a thinly veiled threat, “will give the enemy time to organize better defensive arrangements and we must expect heavier resistance and slower progress.”
* * *
Eisenhower had returned from Brussels bruised in spirit and sore of body. “E. is spending a few days in bed on account of his leg,” Kay Summersby told her diary on September 11. The supreme commander began dictating notes for a future memoir, “to put down some of the things that might be appropriate for me to say in a personal acc[ount] of the war,” as he wrote in his office journal. Regarding the field marshal, he added, “Monty seems unimpressed by necessity for taking Antwerp approaches.… Monty’s suggestion is simple—give him everything. This is crazy.”
Ramsay arrived for a visit on the eleventh to find Eisenhower in pajamas. The admiral noted in his diary:
He let himself go on subject of Monty, command, his difficulties, future strategy, etc. He is clearly worried & the cause is undoubtedly Monty who is behaving badly. Ike does not trust his loyalty & probably with good reason. He has never let himself go to me like this before.
At a moment when strategic harmony was needed in the Allied high command, dissonance and puerile backbiting obtained. Eisenhower was sympathetic to the British impulse to scourge the V-2 launch sites, and he saw MARKET GAR
DEN as a bold stroke that could hasten Germany’s defeat. Despite the risk of a delay in opening Antwerp, he believed that these disparate objectives could be achieved without crippling the American drive toward the Saar. “There is no reason,” he wrote Bradley, “why Patton should not keep acting offensively if the conditions for offensive action are right.” As for the field marshal, Eisenhower’s private comments had become ever more scathing. “He called him ‘a clever son of a bitch,’ which was very encouraging,” Patton confided to his diary. After the war Eisenhower would be far harsher, telling the author Cornelius Ryan, “He’s a psychopath, don’t forget that. He is such an egocentric.… Essentially he’s not an honest man.”
That assessment was absurd. Even if solipsistic and at times careless with the truth, Montgomery—who was as responsible as any man for victory in Normandy—was hardly a psychopath. Fortunately for the Allied cause, Eisenhower bit his tongue and soldiered on, game if gimpy. In reply to Montgomery’s warning of a fortnight’s delay, he sent Beetle Smith to Brussels for more palaver, then agreed to bolster 21st Army Group with an extra thousand daily tons of supplies, by truck and by plane. He also authorized Montgomery to communicate directly with Hodges’s First Army on his right flank, rather than routing all messages through Bradley. Montgomery sent thanks, then privately gloated. “Ike has given way,” he told a confidant in London. “The Saar thrust is to be stopped.… We have gained a great victory.”
He was deluded. Eisenhower had offered concessions without conceding. The Saar thrust would continue. And the only victory that concerned three million Allied soldiers in harm’s way was the one their commanders were supposed to effect on the battlefield. To Marshall, Eisenhower wrote a petulant note that again distorted Montgomery’s argument:
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 248
