On September 4, the Eleventh Armored Division, commanded by Major General G. P. B. “Pip” Roberts (at thirty-seven the youngest major general in the British army), captured Antwerp, with its port, the second largest in Western Europe. Thanks to their quick arrival, and the heroism of the Belgium underground, the giant harbor complex fell into their hands largely undamaged. The excellent Belgian railway network, electrically operated sluice gates, and cranes were ready to receive shipping that day.
Fig. 12.2. Antwerp Harbor. 1944–45. (© Imperial War Museums [A 26597])
The sudden fall of Antwerp caught the Germans completely by surprise. For once the advance of Montgomery's forces surpassed the enemy's expectations. But at this moment of great triumph, Montgomery threw away a great victory by failing to occupy the islands of the Scheldt Estuary. Rundstedt, seeing this mistake, immediately moved sixty thousand men of the German Fifteenth Army to block the mouth of the Port of Antwerp. Monty instead chose to begin Operation MARKET GARDEN, the attempted drive to the Rhine and the Ruhr. (Discussed later in this chapter.)7
An eighty-mile estuary separates the Port of Antwerp from the North Sea. The Scheldt River with its two fortified islands, Walcheren on the north bank and Breken on the south bank, controlled access to the port. (See Map 28.) Monty disregarded the supreme logistical importance to the entire Allied campaign of clearing the Scheldt and thereby opening the port.
Admiral Ramsay, the author of the NEPTUNE plan, noted in his diary on September 4, “British in Brussels and Antwerp. Latter port not badly damaged but of course it is useless until the estuary and its approaches are cleared of the enemy to permit M/S [minesweeping] to be carried out.”8 From the outset of OVERLORD, Ramsay realized that Antwerp had the capacity to handle the bulk of supplies needed to carry the Allied offensive deep into Germany, thus resolving their considerable logistical problems. Therefore his NEPTUNE plan advocated giving priority to its capture and also securing other ports to the east of the beachhead. In September 1944 the Allies were still entirely dependent on the mulberry harbor at Arromanches and the supplies landing by LST on Omaha Beach. The captured ports of Marseille and Toulon in southern France were not yet functioning. With winter approaching, Ramsay was uncomfortably aware of Normandy's vulnerability to bad weather, recalling the loss of the American mulberry following the June gale. (See chapter 7.)
On September 3, the day before Antwerp was taken, Ramsay cabled SHAEF with copies to the Twenty-First Army Group, the Admiralty, and the commander in chief at the Nore (the British naval command based at Chatham) to warn them:
It is essential that if both Antwerp and Rotterdam…are to be opened quickly the enemy must be prevented from: (i). Carrying out demolitions and blocking in ports. (ii). Mining and block Scheldt….
2. Both Antwerp and Rotterdam are highly vulnerable to mining and blocking. If enemy succeeds in these operations the time it will take to open ports cannot be estimated.
3. It will be necessary for coastal batteries to be captured before approach channels to the river routes can be established.9
Yet Montgomery did not brief General Horrocks or General Philip Roberts, commander of the Eleventh Armored Division, on the vital need to immediately secure the Scheldt Estuary when they reached Antwerp. After the war Horrocks wrote, “It never entered my head that the Scheldt would be mined, and that we should not be able to use Antwerp port until the channel had been swept and the Germans cleared from the coastline on either side.”10
Roberts also felt betrayed as he had only vague maps of the port to work from.11 In an interview with Richard Lamb, he said, “Monty's failure at Antwerp is evidence again that he was not a good general at seizing opportunities. My thoughts, like Horrocks’ and Monty's, on 4 September were east to the Rhine. We should have looked west towards Walcheren…. I made mistakes at Antwerp because I was not briefed that the Albert Canal was one of the most formidable obstacles in Europe. We only had small-scale maps, and I only saw it as a thin blue line on my map.”12
But in September 1944, Monty's ruffled vanity led him to demand a “full-blooded thrust” to the Rhine, Ruhr, and Berlin. For him Antwerp was secondary, off his personal command radar. He had declared his thrust was “to keep the enemy on the run straight through to the Rhine, and ‘bounce’ our way across the river before the enemy succeeded in reforming a front to oppose us.”13 This sounds like a lesson from Patton's playbook.
Yet after rapidly taking Brussels and Antwerp on September 3, the British sat idle until September 7, ordered by Monty to pause for repairs and replacement. The magnitude of his error was quickly evident as Hitler rushed reinforcements to the Albert Canal (which links Antwerp to Liège). When the British armor attacked on September 7, German defenses were strong. Horrocks's XXX Corps struggled to breach the canal.14
In view of the increasingly serious Allied logistical problems, Ramsay had no doubt that a combined operation to remove the Wehrmacht from the Scheldt should be given top priority. He advocated giving SHAEF's cardinal military priority to seizing the Dutch islands of Walcheren and South Beveland on the north bank of the Scheldt and that part of Belgium known as the Breskens Pocket on the river's south bank, followed by clearing the mines from these waters.
On September 10, Ramsay wrote in his diary, “Had fixed up to go to Brussels with Eisenhower to see Monty but these arrangements were cancelled & he went only with Tedder. I particularly wished to be there to press for Army to clear entrances to the Scheldte [sic] to enable Antwerp to be used.”15 Ramsay's absence from this key meeting was to have disastrous consequences for the Allies. Had he been present he would have vigorously argued the case for giving priority to opening the Scheldt rather than to MARKET GARDEN. It is difficult to believe that Eisenhower would have disregarded the arguments of a trusted colleague who was still chiefly responsible for conveying supplies across the English Channel to keep the Allied armies advancing.
As Robert Love and John Major point out, “Ramsay's absence showed how marginal naval considerations were to the military high command now that the land campaign was moving onto high gear.”16 Unfortunately, once the D-Day invasion had been successfully completed and the Allied navies had secured control of the channel, Ramsay held a somewhat marginal position at SHAEF. The generals had come to believe that the naval phase of the campaign was over, and they did not need to consult him on strategic matters, which they believed were the prerogative of the army and the air force. Given his extensive experience with interservice cooperation and the growing interdependence of the services, they appear to have taken an unnecessarily narrow point of view and one that was not in the best interests of SHAEF as a whole.
A STORMY MEETING
At the September 10 meeting in Brussels, Montgomery presented his uncharacteristically daring plan to push a bridgehead over the Rhine at Arnhem. He next began berating Eisenhower's broad-front strategic plan. He thrust a pile of Ike's SHAEF memos under his nose and then with great disdain picked apart his supreme commander's recent orders, denouncing them as “balls, sheer balls, rubbish!”17
In his career Eisenhower had learned how to deal with the ire of his superiors—Churchill, de Gaulle, MacArthur, and many more. But this was a seriously disrespectful tirade by a nominal subordinate. Ike responded by gently placing his hand on Monty's knee and reminded him, “Steady, Monty. You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.”18
Monty's objective was to bully Eisenhower into making him and the Twenty-First Army Group the sole, knockout Allied offensive to end the war. Incredibly after the war Eisenhower merely states that at this meeting he “authorized to defer the clearing out of the Antwerp approaches in an effort to seize the bridgehead I wanted.”19
The next day, Ramsay saw Eisenhower who commented that Monty was “behaving badly.” “Ike does not trust his loyalty and probably with good reason,” Ramsay concluded.20
THE TAIL WAGS THE DOG
Over the next few weeks, it is difficult to discern what Eisenhower's pr
iorities (if he had any) were. On September 13 after conferring with Ramsay, Montgomery, and Bradley, he issued this directive:
Our port position is such that a stretch of a week or ten days of bad weather in the Channel—a condition that is growing increasingly probable as the summer recedes—would paralyze our activities and so make the maintenance of our forces exceedingly difficult, even in defensive roles…. The object we must now attain, one which has been foreseen as essential from the very inception of the OVERLORD plan, is the gaining of deep water ports to support major forces in an invasion of Germany.21
Yet seventeen days after Monty had captured Antwerp little had been accomplished to open the Scheldt. On September 22, during a conference at SHAEF's main headquarters at Versailles attended by twenty-three admirals, generals, and air marshals (but not Monty), Eisenhower stressed the importance of opening Antwerp to Allied shipping.22 But he did not directly order Monty to clear the estuary before his offensive, instead allotting him the limited supplies then available to advance to the Ruhr!23
On September 30 he told his chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, “I am terribly anxious about Antwerp.”24 But a week later he demanded, “Both Army Groups must retain as first mission the gaining of the line of the Rhine north of Bonn as quickly as humanly possible.”25 In August Eisenhower had told Marshall that “I was always ready to defer capture of ports in favor of bolder and more rapid movement to the front.”26
Eisenhower's command inconsistencies seemed to flow from his conciliatory management style overriding his strategic planning. The supreme commander never seemed to issue prescriptive and unequivocal orders. Although Monty's comments at the September 10 conference were extremely rude, they stemmed from the ambiguity of his broad-front directives.
Bradley viewed Eisenhower's rapid acquiescence to Monty's MARKET GARDEN plan as another example of how he far too quickly abandoned his prior directives. An angry, disgusted Bradley told General Harold Bull, Eisenhower's G-3, “I won’t have the tail wagging the dog!”27
Patton even tried and failed to enlist Bradley in a “protest” action to stop Monty as outlined in his diary:
Monty does what he pleases and Ike says “yes sir.” Monty wants all supplies sent to him and the First U.S. Army and for me to hold. Brad thinks I can and should push on. Brad told Ike that if Monty takes control of the XIX and VII Corps of the First Army, as he wants to, he, Bradley, will ask to be relieved…. Ike feels that we think he is willing us out but he has to, as Monty will not take orders, so we have to. Bradley said it was time for a showdown. I offered to resign with him, but he backed out.28
After the war in their memoirs, Eisenhower and Smith declared that no military campaign in history came as close as OVERLORD in following its original design. These statements are as fantastic as Montgomery's claim that all of OVERLORD went according to his “plan!”29
THE TIDE OF WAR SHIFTS
On September 4, the day the Allies captured the city of Antwerp, Hitler reinstated Rundstedt as commander in chief in the West. His steady hand would now compound Ramsay's worst fears as Rundstedt immediately sought to deprive the Allies of port facilities in France and Belgium, thus swinging the tide of war in Germany's favor. By securing the north and south shores of the Scheldt, while simultaneously defending the English Channel fortresses of Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk, Rundstedt would starve the Allies of the logistical support needed for the advance into Germany. This would give Rundstedt time to gather forces to reman the Siegfried Line and frustrate a rapid invasion of Germany.
Rundstedt expected Montgomery on September 4 to advance immediately and seal off Walcheren Island and the South Beveland Peninsula from the mainland. If Monty had done so, the German Fifteenth Army would have been trapped and eliminated. (See Map 28.) The Allied halt enabled Rundstedt to rescue the remains of General Hans von Zangen's encircled Fifteenth Army under the cover of darkness. A scratch fleet of two ancient Dutch freighters, Rhine river barges, small craft, and even rafts evacuated over 100,000 troops, artillery, vehicles, and even horses across the three-mile mouth of the Scheldt Estuary into the South Beveland Peninsula. The Germans were surprised that the convoy met with no Allied naval force interference. Stiffened by fresh troops, the Germans regrouped around strong positions along both sides of the river. The causeway on South Beveland connecting it to the mainland could be defended by a small number of troops. Across from Beveland, Walcheren Island was very heavily fortified with nearly thirty batteries of powerful coastal guns, from nine-inch to three-inch in caliber, as well as other strongholds.30
The German navy laid a variety of mines and put other deadly obstacles in place. The ship channel leading to the Port of Antwerp would have to be thoroughly cleared before freighters could use it. As the channel is seventy-three miles long and varies in width from 300 to 1,400 yards, this presented a clearance task of great magnitude and complexity. Port access between Antwerp and the sea was locked up tight.31
The initial Allied response to this German buildup was insufficient. It began on September 13, nine days after Antwerp's capture, and included Crerar's First Canadian Army and the First and Fourth Polish Armored Divisions. Their tanks were largely useless for canal attacks. Canadian infantry support was ineffective. This first attack met with disaster. The Canadians abandoned the initial bridgehead across the Leopold Canal due to heavy German fire. As it was decided that the Canadians needed additional forces, the Scheldt operation was abandoned in favor of clearing French ports. For three additional weeks no opposition was offered to the continued German additional fortification of the estuary.32
During these critical weeks the Allies’ attention was focused elsewhere. It was placed on the rushed planning, execution, and recovery from Montgomery's “full-blooded thrust” to the northeast, Operation MARKET GARDEN.
A BRIDGE TO NOWHERE
Montgomery's recent rapid advances culminating in the capture of Brussels and Antwerp had created considerable optimism in the Second Army. This lightning drive showed that British armor could match Patton's tanks. Monty was fixated on bypassing what was left of the German Fifteenth Army and dashing nonstop over the Rhine to the Ruhr and beyond. If he had continued his push on September 4 for about thirty-six hours, the British armor could have raced through almost undefended country between Antwerp and the Rhine.33
Montgomery's Operation MARKET GARDEN called for a quick thrust to the Reich through a sixty-mile corridor. The “MARKET” component of the operation would involve the use of the First Airborne Corps comprising the American Eighty-Second and 101st and the British First Airborne Divisions, commanded by the British lieutenant general Frederick Browning. These forces would land at three drop zones running from west to east: Eindhoven (101st US), Nijmegen (Eighty-Second US), and Arnhem (First British). (See Map 29.) This airborne operation was monumental in scope, deploying about five thousand fighters, bombers, transports, and over 2,500 gliders. This huge air army was deployed in an unprecedented daylight attack complete with their equipment and vehicles. Owing to a shortage of aircraft to carry paratroops, these landings would be conducted over a three-day period, thus giving German defenders advance warning that a major offensive was in progress. These divisions would then link up with the “GARDEN” component, the ground force, the British XXX Corps, and part of Montgomery's Second Army, led by Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, which would advance from their present positions into Holland. (See Map 30.)
MARKET GARDEN had two major objectives. First, the British Twenty-First Army with the airborne army was to cross the two branches of the Rhine at Nijmegen and Arnhem. Second, Hodges's American First Army was to drive on Aachen and reach the Rhine at Cologne.
The aim of MARKET GARDEN was an advance beyond the Rhine to surround the Ruhr industrial region. This advance would clear the west bank of the Rhine and outflank the German forces on the Siegfried Line, rendering it useless. Finally, the British could advance from Arnhem and capture the port of Rotterdam.34
/> Due to recent Allied successes, optimism was running high. Eisenhower was both intrigued and impressed with Montgomery's bold, imaginative plan. This was the kind of innovative mass attack he had been looking for. In a September 14 letter to Marshall, Eisenhower was extremely optimistic that MARKET GARDEN would carry the Allies up to and across the Rhine.35
The daring nature of the MARKET GARDEN operation was strangely out of character for Montgomery. Indeed he was later to admit that MARKET GARDEN was his greatest mistake as a commander.36 He was well-known for his detailed planning of future operations and was quite successful in staging set-piece battles. However, he had been criticized for unnecessary caution due to his failure to deploy armored divisions in situations where they had the potential to strike rapidly and effectively. Uncharacteristically Montgomery conceived and rushed through the planning of MARKET GARDEN in a matter of weeks.
Critically, Montgomery ignored vital intelligence on the feasibility of this operation. Ultra decrypts and reports from the local Dutch resistance forces indicated that two SS panzer divisions had been sent to Arnhem to refit. Also the Fifteenth Panzer Army had been moved into Holland and was well positioned to attack the left of the advancing Allied land forces. The Ninth and Tenth SS Panzer Divisions were fanned out to the north, east, and south of Arnhem. Also deployed around Eindhoven were the thirty thousand paratroops and Luftwaffe troops that formed the core of General Kurt Student's First Parachute Army.37
Montgomery's plan produced a shock wave at his Twenty-First Army Group headquarters. After he received the go-ahead for MARKET GARDEN from Eisenhower on September 10, he outlined the operation on a map for one of Britain's pioneer airborne experts, Lieutenant General Frederick Browning who would command the operation. The paratroops and glider-borne forces were to secure five major bridges along a sixty-four-mile invasion corridor. They would hold the corridor open until they were relieved by British armored forces. This unsettled Browning. Pointing to Arnhem, he asked Montgomery, “How long will it take the armor to reach us?” Monty answered, “Two days.” Still studying the map, Browning responded, “We can hold it for four. But sir, I think we might be going a bridge too far.”38 Montgomery did not want to hear it.
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