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On September 2, Eisenhower set out from the villa just established as his headquarters in France for an unhappy round of meetings with Bradley and Patton in Chartres about how, with their forces outrunning their plans, fuel shortages were forcing the curtailment of pending offensives. Patton wanted 400,000 gallons of gas a day, but on August 30 he had received just 32,000. (Patton did not disclose to his old friend Eisenhower that one of his units had just captured more than 100,000 gallons of German aviation fuel.) It was an unfortunate irony that the Americans, who had so quickly risen to dominance in the war because of their capability to churn out goods and manpower, were suddenly coming up short in resources. Patton, always far more vigilant of his own feelings than he was of others’, found Eisenhower stuffy at the meeting. “Ike was very pontifical and quoted Clausewitz to us,” he wrote. “Ike did not thank or congratulate any of us for what we have done.”
Eisenhower’s bad day was far from over. On the return flight from the meetings, his B-25’s right engine suffered a muffler malfunction and caught fire. The crew returned to Chartres, where Ike got into his L-5 observer aircraft, a two-seater akin to a Piper Cub, driven by a weak 185-horsepower engine. Back over Normandy, the tiny plane ran into a squall that made it impossible to land at the strip that was its destination. The pilot, Lt. Richard Underwood, running short on fuel, diverted and put it down on a flat ocean beach. The powerful Mont-Saint-Michel tide was flooding in, so to preserve the aircraft from the rising seawater, the general and the lieutenant pushed the plane across the wet sand to higher ground—at which point they realized that they did not know whether the beach had been de-mined. In moving the aircraft, Eisenhower badly wrenched his knee—not the left joint, which he had damaged years earlier, but the right, which until then he had considered the good one. Eisenhower’s body already was strained by supreme command, which had led him to smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, accompanied by as many as fifteen cups of coffee. (Patton, not always a reliable recorder of facts, also had noted in his diary that spring, “Ike is drinking too much.”) Eisenhower hobbled a mile with Underwood along a lightly trafficked back road, “a miserable walk through a driving rain,” until by chance an Army jeep came along. They flagged it down. The sergeant at the wheel was astounded to encounter his top general in Europe sodden and limping along a dirt road. Eisenhower’s aides were equally surprised when the jeep arrived and two GIs lifted Ike out of it and carried him upstairs.
In the following week, Ike had to sit with his leg straight out, the knee first plastered and then clamped in rubber, making him extremely uncomfortable. It was not the best frame of mind in which to deal with Montgomery, very near the British equivalent of MacArthur: a good general undermined by his own egotism yet untouchable for political reasons. Weigley depicts Montgomery as an “arrogant, hawk-like loner.” Montgomery hadn’t been Eisenhower’s first choice for commander of British forces in the D-Day landings. Ike had asked for Gen. Harold Alexander, whom he liked as a man, admired as a soldier, and respected as a strategic thinker. Eisenhower found Churchill’s preference for Montgomery “acceptable,” as he had to. It was the most minimal endorsement possible.
Ike wanted to meet with Montgomery, who responded that he was too busy “just at present” to travel to see him. But, Monty added, Ike was welcome to come see him so that Montgomery could convey his views about the way forward against Germany: “If so delighted to see you at lunch tomorrow.” Ike declined that invitation. When they discussed possibly holding such a meeting five days later, Montgomery set conditions for the encounter, saying that he did not want others to be present, or that at least they be required to remain silent. Such demands were extraordinary, but Eisenhower was bending over backwards in his dealings with Montgomery and other allies in 1944. Indeed, he was mocked by some American officers as “the best general the British have”—a taunt that reached his ears through an Associated Press reporter returning from a tour with Patton’s Third Army. The sarcastic officers could not know it, but this was the highest praise Eisenhower could hear, because it meant that he was rigorously fulfilling Marshall’s mandate to maintain the coalition, and was doing it even during the year in which the Anglo-American relationship was fundamentally changing, with the Americans moving up to dominant status even though they were still largely regarded by the more seasoned British as heavily armed amateurs.
The meeting finally occurred on the sunny but cool afternoon of Sunday, September 10, 1944. It was held aboard Eisenhower’s aircraft on the tarmac in Brussels. Ike had traveled to Montgomery’s headquarters city, but he still managed to hold the encounter on his own turf. Montgomery climbed aboard and began by asking that Eisenhower’s administrative officer leave the meeting while his own remained. “I explained my situation fully,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It was essential for him to know my views.” Montgomery had a difficult time concealing his contempt for Eisenhower, whom he hardly considered a military equal, let alone a superior, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. A few weeks earlier he had written a letter to another British general in which he complained that Eisenhower’s “ignorance as to how to run a war is absolute and complete.” That was basically the same message he had for Ike that day in Brussels.
Montgomery opened the discussion on the tarmac by pulling from his pocket a sheaf of recent memorandums signed by Eisenhower. Holding them aloft, he asked if Ike really had written them. Yes, Eisenhower responded, he had. “Well, they’re balls, sheer balls, rubbish,” Montgomery informed him. Eisenhower sat in silence, taking it in and perhaps knowing that Montgomery, as socially inept as Ike was smooth, eventually would overstep. When the British officer paused in his condescending tirade, Eisenhower reached out, patted him on the knee, and said, softly but clearly, “Steady, Monty! You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.” Montgomery, chastened for once, responded, “I’m sorry, Ike.”
Ike flew away from Brussels willing to test Montgomery’s belief that a narrow, one-front thrust was the way to invade Germany. The trial run would come a week later across southeastern Holland to the German border, beginning with massive paratroop drops and glider landings seventy-five miles behind the front lines. (In addition, Marshall had been pressing Ike to think about more innovative use of airborne forces.) This attack, dubbed Operation Market Garden, would be remembered as “a bridge too far”—one of the worst gambles of the war.
Eisenhower probably was not being so Machiavellian as to give Montgomery enough rope to hang himself operationally, but rather was willing to put the one-front thrust to the battlefield test. “I not only approved Market Garden, I insisted upon it,” he would claim years later. That battle would lay bare many of Montgomery’s weaknesses, most notably his caution in commanding a highly mobile force. As historian John Ellis wrote,
Almost every feature of Operation Market Garden . . . simply reaffirmed what had already become evident in North Africa, that Montgomery was generally incapable of conducting anything but stolid defenses or attacks with generous lead times, massive material superiority and no urgent deadline during the battle itself. One might even go so far as to say that Market Garden showed Montgomery and the army he had created in the worst possible light, revealing serious lapses in planning as well as severe shortcomings in operational and tactical command.
It was indeed a powerful demonstration that Montgomery could not conduct a narrow strike across the Netherlands and into Germany. Eisenhower, still rankled nearly two decades later, having finished with the presidency and retired to his Gettysburg farm, would summarize the outcome of the battle by saying that Montgomery “got driven back and he was still talking, by God, of a thrust. Now, how are you going to make a thrust if you can’t get over the river? I think some damn historian ought to just smack him down on such a thing.” Montgomery, for his part, muttered about how his attack had been undercut by poor logistical support.
Even if Montgomery recogniz
ed how “tiresome” he could be, he rarely seemed to fathom the consequences of such behavior. His view was that Eisenhower, Bradley, and their subordinates simply did not grasp either the military situation or the larger political issues—especially the need of the British, short on manpower and with a struggling economy, to end the war as quickly as possible. “The American generals did not understand,” he would write in his memoirs. “The war had never been brought to their home country.” Montgomery, not apprehending how the partnership had changed, would continue to treat Eisenhower as his junior. Ike believed that Montgomery had put him on notice that if his “exact recommendations” were not followed, the Allied effort would fail. Again, during the height of the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge, at the end of 1944, the sole major German counteroffensive of the northern European campaign, Eisenhower showed both courage and command ability in transferring control of fielded forces from Bradley to Montgomery, a move Bradley bitterly opposed. Yet Montgomery did not see the skill in the decision and instead decided that Ike had been confused and panicky. Even after that battle, Montgomery continued to harass Eisenhower about strategy.
Montgomery, like many British officers, did not seem to understand that the British and American militaries, though superficially seeming to become more similar as they worked together in Africa and southern Europe in 1943 and in northern Europe in 1944, in fact were growing apart. There were two major reasons for this separation. First was the rapid increase in American mobility and firepower. “The speed of our movements is amazing, even to me,” Patton would write in his diary at the height of the Battle of the Bulge. At almost the same moment, J. Lawton Collins, the fast-rising young American general, was arguing with his temporary commander, Montgomery, about a plan to provision a corps, or multidivision formation. “Joe, you can’t supply a corps over a single road,” the British field marshal said, chiding his American subordinate. Exasperated, and a bit disrespectfully, Collins responded with a hard truth: “Well, Monty, maybe you British can’t, but we can.”
The second big difference was that the American Army had learned much in the preceding years in Africa and Italy about how to use its advantages. It was, in fact, outstripping the British not just in numbers and mobility but also in military capability and effectiveness. It was more willing to take risks, which meant losing men.
Bernard Lewis, the influential historian of the Middle East, would remember that he took away from his time as an intelligence officer in the British army two dominant impressions of the Americans:
One was that they were unteachable. When America entered the war, we in Britain had been at war for more than two years. We had made many mistakes, and had learned something from them. We tried to pass these lessons on to our new allies and save them from paying again the price that we had paid in blood and toil. But they wouldn’t listen—their ways were not our ways, and they would do things their way, not ours. And so they went ahead and made mistakes—some repeating ours, some new and original. What was really new and original—and this is my second lasting impression—was the speed with which they recognized these mistakes, and devised and applied the means to correct them. This was beyond anything in our experience.
George Marshall would come to a similar conclusion—as did the German enemy. When British Gen. Harold Alexander made a crack late in the war to Marshall about American troops being “basically trained,” Marshall sharply responded, “Yes, American troops start out and make every possible mistake. But after the first time, they do not repeat these mistakes. The British troops start out in the same way and continue making the same mistakes over and over, for a year.” Churchill, monitoring this exchange, stepped in and quickly changed the subject. Perhaps even more significantly, German commanders came to similar conclusions about American adaptability. “What was astonishing was the speed with which the Americans adapted themselves to modern warfare,” the most famous German general of the war, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commented. “The Americans, it is fair to say, profited far more than the British from their experience in Africa, thus confirming the axiom that education is easier than re-education.” Another German officer, Maj. Gen. Friedrich von Mellenthin, wrote, even more explicitly, “I don’t think the British ever solved the problem of mobile warfare in open desert. In general the British method of making war is slow, rigid and methodical.” The disparity between the allies intensified as the mobility of American forces became more evident during the summer and fall of 1944. In a series of battlefield studies that year, the German High Command recognized the quickness with which American forces adapted tactically. In a recent analysis, Meir Finkel, a modern Israeli armored brigade commander turned historian, concluded that the British army suffered in World War II from “low levels of cognitive command and organizational flexibility.” In sum, American generals were becoming increasingly different from their British counterparts.
Finally, in late December 1944, Eisenhower threatened to ask for the relief of his nettlesome British subordinate. Montgomery’s genial chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Sir Francis de Guingand, sensing trouble, flew to Paris to see Eisenhower, whom he found looking “really tired and worried.” Eisenhower told de Guingand that he was weary of the friction with Montgomery and had concluded that he was going to ask the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the military overlords of the war, to choose between the two. Early in 1944, Churchill had pledged to Eisenhower that the British government would not object to any request Ike made for the removal of a British officer. Now Ike was contemplating playing that card. He showed de Guingand the draft of a cable he had prepared to send to Marshall, laying out the situation. The message, Ike said decades later, was “He is going to do what I order or, by God, . . . the Joint Chiefs of Staff are going to throw one of us out and, by God, I don’t think it will be me.” De Guingand agreed with that assessment: “Since the Americans were the stronger ally, it really meant that Monty would be the one to go.” Ike suggested in the cable that Alexander, whom he knew and admired from their days in North Africa, could replace Montgomery. De Guingand pleaded with Ike to hold off on sending the cable for twenty-four hours, during which he would return to Montgomery’s headquarters in Belgium and make him understand how much his relationship with the Americans had deteriorated.
De Guingand flew through a snowstorm back to Montgomery’s headquarters. “It’s on the cards that you might have to go,” he informed his commander, who was flabbergasted, “genuinely and completely taken by surprise.” Eventually coming to comprehend his tenuous situation, Montgomery agreed to sign and send a careful note of apology that de Guingand had drafted for him while in flight.
Yet those words were not Montgomery’s, and he did not seem to take the lesson to heart. Like Patton, he was set in his ways and repeated his mistakes. Barely a week later, Montgomery would again step on Eisenhower’s toes, seeming to take credit at a press conference for the Allied victory in the Battle of the Bulge. It had been an American fight—indeed the biggest battle ever fought by American forces—leaving about nineteen thousand American dead and sixty thousand other casualties, compared with British dead of just two hundred, plus twelve hundred other wounded, missing, or taken prisoner. But Montgomery seemed to be taking credit for getting his allies out of a jam. When the Germans attacked, he preened, “I was thinking ahead.” Then, he explained, as
the situation began to deteriorate . . . I employed the whole available power of the British Group of Armies. . . . Finally it was put in with a bang, and today British divisions are fighting hard on the right flank of the First U.S. Army. You have thus a picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who have suffered a hard blow. This is a fine Allied picture.
His comments caused a political storm with the Americans, which, of course, surprised Montgomery. In his obtuse way, he really did seem to think he had been putting the best face on a bad situation. In his memoirs, he concluded that the Americans should have been grateful t
hat he had not revealed what he really thought—that the battle was unnecessary and had been caused by Eisenhower’s bumbling. “What I did not say was that, in the Battle of the Ardennes, the Allies got a real ‘bloody nose,’ the Americans had nearly 80,000 casualties, and that it would never have happened if we had fought the campaign properly after the great victory in Normandy, or had even ensured proper tactical balance in the dispositions of the land forces as the winter campaign developed.”
Not all American commanders were as critical of Montgomery. Bruce Clarke, one of the heroes of the Ardennes fighting, later stated, “I think probably the great generalship I saw in the Battle of the Bulge, was the generalship of Marshal Montgomery. He took command of the north half of the Bulge, as you know, and I was under his command in the Battle of St. Vith. The thing that I was impressed about Montgomery was that he was calm and collected. He was not emotional.” Likewise, Matthew Ridgway, another aggressive commander, reported that his time under Montgomery’s command was “most satisfying.” Ridgway explained, “He gave me [the] general outline of what he wanted and let me completely free.” However, Lt. Gen. William Simpson, who served under Montgomery for part of the war, told Forrest Pogue, one of Marshall’s biographers, that he thought Montgomery could have cut off the German salient, or “bulge,” and that Eisenhower made an error by not directing Montgomery to do so.
Eisenhower understood Montgomery perhaps better than the British officer understood himself. “The incident caused me more distress and worry than did any similar one of the war,” Ike later wrote. “It was a pity that such an incident had to mar the universal satisfaction in final success.” Even Simpson, after Eisenhower probably the most determinedly cooperative of senior American commanders, would come to protest the treatment he received from Montgomery, feeling that his troops were being shunted aside as the fight moved into Germany. Montgomery eventually relented and gave Simpson’s Ninth Army a share in the planned crossings of the Rhine.
The Generals Page 9
