Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Bradley countered with his own proposal for a single thrust into Germany, except that it would be led by Twelfth Army Group south of the Ardennes, through the Eifel Mountains and Pfälzer Bergland into the Saar. Patton’s Third Army would spearhead the drive along the axis Metz-Saarbrücken-Mannheim and on to Frankfurt. Ike had a choice. He could have adopted Montgomery’s modified Schlieffen Plan or opted for the assault through the Frankfurt gap. Either would have retained the momentum of the Allied advance, although Monty’s plan, given the terrain, was more feasible and would likely have ended the war sooner.

  Eisenhower hesitated. Rather than choose between Montgomery and Bradley, Ike’s penchant for compromise led him to opt for both. Monty was encouraged to press ahead, and Hodges’s First U.S. Army was assigned to protect his right flank. At the same time, Patton was urged to continue his advance. By allowing both attacks to proceed, Eisenhower was adhering to the Marshall-Pershing strategy of maintaining pressure all along the line. That had been Ike’s plan before D-Day, and like everyone else at SHAEF he was mentally unprepared to exploit the German collapse. Montgomery was critical, and so was Patton. As Monty saw it, Ike’s approach of applying pressure all along the line would lead to stalemate all along the line—“just as it had in the First World War.”10 Patton, who was even more critical, called Eisenhower’s decision “the most momentous error of the war.”11

  The first problem Eisenhower encountered was that the strained logistics of SHAEF would not support two simultaneous offensives. The pipelines that had been laid across the Channel (PLUTO) were supplying an abundance of fuel, but there was a shortage of transport to ship it forward. And to supply two fronts made it doubly difficult. Second, neither Bradley nor Montgomery was satisfied with the arrangement. Bradley continued to complain about losing Hodges’s First Army to Montgomery (though it remained under Twelfth Army Group’s command), and Ike soon reversed himself, ordering Hodges south of the Ardennes alongside Patton.

  This was a strategic error pregnant with disaster. Not only was the drive on the Ruhr fatally weakened, but Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group and Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group were now separated by the dense forests and steep-sided valleys of the Ardennes. As Ike saw it, the rugged terrain provided an ideal boundary between Bradley and Montgomery, and could be held with a minimum of force. The best that can be said of Ike’s decision is that he had been in the field on maneuvers in June 1940, and evidently was unaware that General Maurice Gamelin, the French chief of staff, had made a similar calculation. The prevailing view in Western military circles had been that the impenetrable terrain of the Ardennes provided a shield against enemy armor. Von Rundstedt proved that assumption false in 1940 with devastating effect, and he would soon do so again.

  But the most serious defect in Ike’s broad-front strategy was that the Allied momentum was lost and the Germans were given time to recover. General Speidel reports that Army Group B was approaching a total collapse. Namur fell on September 6, and Liège on September 8. The door to the Reich through Belgium was open. “Then something unexpected occurred,” wrote Speidel. “It was a German variation of the ‘miracle on the Marne’ for the French in 1914: the furious advance of the Allies suddenly faded away. There could be no serious supply difficulties with such secure lines of communication. Nor was the ‘decreasing strength of the attack’ the reason, as new or rested formations were being constantly brought up. The method of the Allied Supreme Command was the main reason.” As Speidel saw it, the Allies spread out and refitted rather than pursuing their advantage. “Had the Allies held on grimly to the retreating Germans they could have harried the breath out of every man and beast and ended the war half a year earlier. There were no German forces of any importance that could be thrown in, and next to nothing in the air. The battles in East Prussia and Hungary [on the eastern front] were at their climax and absorbed all available forces.”12

  General Günther Blumentritt, chief of staff of the entire western front until September 5, 1944, agreed with Speidel. A breakthrough northeast to the Ruhr “would have torn in pieces the weak German front and ended the war.”13 General Siegfried Westphal, Blumentritt’s successor, concurred. “Not a single bridge over the Rhine had been prepared for demolition,” wrote Westphal. “Until the middle of October the enemy could have broken through at any point he liked with ease, and would then have been able to cross the Rhine and thrust deep into Germany almost unhindered.”14

  But SHAEF’s window of opportunity was brief. When the Allied advance halted, Hitler asked von Rundstedt to retake control of the western front. Model retained command of Army Group B, and between them they stitched together a defense that would hold the Allies for another six months.

  The price the Allies paid for their missed opportunity in September was heavy. Of the 750,000 battle casualties the Western Allies suffered in Europe, two-thirds occurred after their autumn slowdown. The collateral costs were even greater. Millions of men and women on both sides died as a result of the continued fighting—to say nothing of the ongoing barbarism of Nazi concentration camps. The Red Army had not yet penetrated into central Europe in September 1944, and the occupation boundaries in Germany had yet to be drawn. The future of Europe hung in the balance.15

  “Eisenhower’s ‘broad front’ plan of advance to the Rhine,” wrote respected military analyst B. H. Liddell Hart, “would have been a good way to strain and crack the resistance of a strong and still unbeaten enemy. But it was far less suited to the actual situation, where the enemy had already collapsed, and the issue depended on exploiting their collapse so deeply and rapidly that they would have no chance to rally. That called for pursuit without pause.”16

  Writing years later, Omar Bradley put Ike’s decision in context. An all-out drive northeast to the Ruhr would have fallen under the control of Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group. “It would give Monty too large a role in the ground command, in effect upstaging and obscuring Ike,” said Bradley. “It was a time of extreme jingoism; the American public demanded its own epic-size war heroes, and it wanted them in command at the kill.”17 Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower’s most assiduous biographer, reached much the same conclusion. “Had Bradley and Patton been on the left, Eisenhower might have given greater consideration to the single-thrust concept, but handling Montgomery was another matter.”18

  The logistical problems Eisenhower encountered after the fall of Paris were by-products of his decision to advance on a broad front. To provide food, fuel, and ammunition for six armies across a front that stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier required significantly more transport than was necessary to supply a single drive. The problem was exacerbated by the distance between Patton’s Third Army and the Channel ports, which in many instances exceeded three hundred miles. Add to that the inevitable problems of waste, pilferage, and leakage to the black market. It required 650 tons of supplies a day to keep an American division in action. A German division of equivalent size managed on 200 tons.19

  Many military commentators have blamed General John C. H. Lee, Ike’s logistics chief, for the supply shortfall, and Lee was not without fault. His ill-advised decision to move his bloated COMZ (Communications Zone) headquarters to Paris in September clearly contributed to the problem. While Patton, Bradley, and Montgomery clamored for ammunition and gasoline, Lee commandeered badly needed fuel and shipping facilities to move 8,000 officers and 20,000 enlisted men to the City of Light, where they lived in sybaritic comfort. (The French subsequently complained that the demands of the American Army in Paris greatly exceeded those made by the Germans.)20 As a consequence, Lee became the scapegoat for the logistics foul-up, and Patton and Bradley demanded his scalp.21

  Eisenhower initially agreed. On September 20, 1944, he asked Marshall for a replacement for Lee. The War Department suggested several names, including Lucius D. Clay, who was then wearing two hats in Washington, as the nation’s deputy director of war mobilization, under James Byrnes, and as the Army’s chief
of procurement. Ike picked Clay, an old friend who had served with him on MacArthur’s staff in the Philippines, and who had earned a well-deserved reputation in Washington for his brisk, efficient management of war production. But when Clay arrived at SHAEF in early October, Ike had changed his mind about relieving Lee. Given time to reflect, Eisenhower concluded that the logistics shortfall was not entirely Lee’s fault. Ike told Clay he was sorry, but since victory was in sight, he had decided to stick with Lee. The supply system might not work perfectly, but it worked, and he did not want to swap horses in the middle of the stream. At Ike’s request, Clay went briefly to Cherbourg, where he unsnarled the port backup, and then returned to Washington.22

  By mid-December, three and a half months after the liberation of Paris, the Allies still had not crossed the Rhine. In the north, Twenty-first Army Group failed at Arnhem; the U.S. First Army ran into a German buzz saw in the Hürtgen Forest; and Patton stubbed his toe at Metz. In the south, Sixth Army Group reached the Rhine near Strasbourg in mid-November and laid on an assault crossing at Rastatt, but Eisenhower ordered Devers to stand down. Ike wanted to wait until Montgomery and Patton had moved up, and then force the river on a broad front, focusing on the Ruhr and the Saar. A crossing on the upper Rhine by Sixth Army Group, which would have outflanked the forces facing Patton, was not in SHAEF’s plans.

  The German forces facing Devers were stretched thin, and there were few reserves that could have been thrown in. But for the second time in 1944, Ike rejected the possibility of breaking the German line. Once again, personalities intervened. Just as the animus between Ike and Montgomery had precluded the September breakout toward the Ruhr, so the disdain Eisenhower felt for Devers contributed to the supreme commander’s decision to halt Sixth Army Group west of the Rhine.c

  As a result of Ike’s insistence on a broad-front approach, the Allies inched forward along a 450-mile front from Basel to Antwerp. The days grew shorter, the cold became bitter, and whenever the ground thawed, men and vehicles were swamped in a sea of mud. Eisenhower described it as

  the dirtiest kind of infantry slugging. Advances were slow and laborious. Gains were ordinarily measured in terms of yards rather than miles. Operations became mainly a matter of artillery and ammunition, and, on the part of the infantry, endurance, stamina, and courage. Infantry losses were high, particularly in rifle platoons. Frostbite, trench foot, and respiratory diseases also took a toll. Because of depletion of their infantry strength, divisions quickly exhausted themselves in action.23

  Between September and mid-December 1944, Patton’s Third Army advanced less than twenty-five miles and suffered 53,182 casualties. The U.S. First Army lost 47,034 men, killed, wounded, and missing during the same period. The U.S. Ninth Army, under General William H. Simpson, which was thrown into the line between Hodges and Montgomery in late October, suffered 10,056 combat losses. The three armies of Twelfth Army Group sustained an additional 113,742 nonbattle casualties, mostly trench foot and combat fatigue, and lost almost a thousand tanks.24 “To put it candidly,” wrote Omar Bradley, “we were mired in a ghastly war of attrition.”25

  Montgomery remained critical of Eisenhower’s strategy. “I personally regard the whole thing as dreadful,” Monty confided to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke. “I think now that if we want the war to end within any reasonable period you will have to get Eisenhower’s hand taken off the land battle. He has never commanded anything in his whole career; now, for the first time, he has elected to take direct command of very large-scale operations and he does not know how to do it.”26 Bradley, Devers, and Patton shared Monty’s doubts, but kept their opinions to themselves. Brooke, on the other hand, tackled the issue head-on.

  Meeting with the British chiefs of staff (BCOS) on November 24, Brooke called for Ike’s replacement.

  I put before the Committee my views on the very unsatisfactory state of affairs in France, with no one running the land battle. Eisenhower, though supposed to be doing so, is on the golf links at Reims—entirely detached and taking practically no part in the running of the war. Matters got so bad lately that a deputation of [Major General J. F. M. “Jock”] Whiteley [SHAEF’s deputy chief of staff], Bedell Smith and a few others went up to tell him that he must get down to it and RUN the war, which he said he would. Personally, I think he is incapable of running the war even if he tries.27

  The BCOS agreed that Brooke should take the matter to Churchill and, since there were now twice as many American forces under SHAEF as British and Canadian, suggest that Bradley be named overall ground commander; that Patton succeed Bradley at Twelfth Army Group; and that Ike return to his duties as supreme commander. “It is one of the most difficult problems I have had to tackle,” Brooke confided to his diary.28

  Brooke met with the prime minister on November 28. “The American conception of attacking all along the front, irrespective of the strength available, was sheer madness,” he told Churchill. SHAEF was attacking on six army fronts without any reserves anywhere. “We are bogged down and reduced to the trench warfare it has always been our object to avoid.”29 When Brooke suggested that Bradley assume command of the ground war, Churchill said he would prefer Alexander. Since Brooke had little confidence in Alexander, the matter was left in abeyance.

  For von Rundstedt, the Allied slowdown was a godsend. The breathing space permitted the old field marshal to restore an element of cohesion to the German front. With a steady professional hand he arrested the disintegration of frontline combat units, placed new formations in position, and withdrew his panzers into a mobile reserve. “I realized when I took over again in September that the situation was very serious,” said von Rundstedt.

  I told those about me that if I was not interfered with I believed I could hold the enemy outside the frontier of the Reich for a while. I knew that a war of position was impossible for any length of time, and that [the Allies] could affect a breakthrough at any point they chose to concentrate their forces. I knew there was not a chance of winning the war, but I hoped that if I held out as long as possible some political turn of events might have prevented a complete collapse. A military victory was out of the question. As far as I was concerned the war was ended in September.30

  Von Rundstedt recognized that the only feasible defensive line was the Rhine. “Stiff resistance should have been offered as long, and as far to the west, as possible in an effort to gain time. The withdrawal of the front behind the Rhine should then have followed voluntarily and at the right moment and not after the almost complete annihilation of all available forward units, merely in order ‘to hold every foot of ground.’ ”31

  The elderly von Rundstedt was revered by the Army, and in contrast to 1918, the discipline of the Wehrmacht held firm as the troops retreated. “It was a miracle that these brave, battered troops showed little deterioration in their conduct or morale,” wrote General Blumentritt. “It is true that the troops were tired, often exhausted, and in many cases apathetic—but they all retained the will to fight.”32 One of the reasons was that German commanders habitually led their troops from the front. In September, von Rundstedt and his deputy, General Siegfried Westphal, were almost captured by tanks of the 5th Armored Division as they witnessed the defense of Trier on the Moselle.33

  With the notable exception of Patton, Matthew Ridgway, and J. Lawton Collins, most American generals led from the rear. Eisenhower established an advance command post at Reims, but his principal headquarters was at the luxurious Trianon Palace Hotel, set in eight acres of beautiful gardens adjacent to the palace at Versailles.34 For his residence, he chose the same landmark eighteenth-century villa in nearby Saint-Germain that von Rundstedt had occupied. During his two years in France, von Rundstedt never carried a weapon, had no bodyguards, and regularly took a two-hour stroll through Saint-Germain and the city park. An avid gardener, he refused to allow the villa’s lawns to be disturbed to build an air-raid shelter. “One can be killed just as comfortably in bed as in the cellar,” he told his aides.35 Unde
r Ike, the villa and the Trianon Palace Hotel became an armed camp. Von Rundstedt, who before the war had resided in an elegant twelve-room apartment on Berlin’s fashionable Hardenbergstrasse near the Tiergarten, took pleasure in the villa’s antique furnishings. Ike seemed uncomfortable with them, although he relished the privacy the villa provided.36

  Eisenhower’s office was in a ballroom annex of the hotel. The room was roughly divided by blankets suspended from the ceiling. Summersby, who was now a fixture in Ike’s life, occupied the portion nearest the door; Eisenhower, the larger section near the fireplace. “This gave me the shameless opportunity to hear as much as a whisper in his sanctum,” Kay recalled. “I thoroughly enjoyed the luxury of eavesdropping on conversations in the Throne Room.”37 On October 14, 1944, thanks to FDR, Summersby was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps. T. J. Davis, the theater adjutant general, swore her in, and Ike pinned on her gold bars. “It was the highlight of my wartime career,” said Summersby. “I could no longer drive the General. As it turned out, I still traveled with Ike almost everywhere he went. I continued to breakfast with him and we still drove to the office together. The only difference was that I now sat in the back seat with him instead of in the front behind the wheel.”38 Shortly afterward, at Eisenhower’s request, Churchill awarded Kay the Medal of the British Empire (MBE). When Summersby expressed surprise, Ike reassured her. “I don’t think you realize how valuable your services have been. I do. And so does the P.M.”39