The Generals

by Winston Groom

  But stronger-than-expected German defenses and overstretched supply lines caused the operation to be aborted with 17,000 Allied casualties. In turn, Eisenhower had been compelled to halt the powerful American offensive led by Omar Bradley in order to transfer supplies—principally tank fuel—to the British. This left everyone in a huff, especially George S. Patton, whose Third Army was spearheading the drive.

  To see what could be done, in October, Marshall made another trip to the fighting front. On the seventh, he visited Patton after having his pilot fly low over the World War I battlefields in the Meuse-Argonne sector. Patton was straining at the leash with no fuel, no replacements, and a lack of other supplies; Marshall soothed him, saying these would arrive all in good time, and the meeting was amicable. When Marshall got to the British headquarters, however, Bernard Montgomery was in a snit.

  He complained about Eisenhower’s running of the war, saying Eisenhower had gotten his army “into a real mess.” Marshall later stated to an interviewer that he “came pretty close to blowing off out of turn,” and he condemned the field marshal’s “overwhelming egotism.”

  Marshall couldn’t accomplish the impossible and the war would have to wait until the reinforcements and supplies caught up with it. To a friend, General Frank McCoy, he highlighted his trip: “I went through five armies, army corps, sixteen divisions, and also saw the commanders and staffs of eight other Divisions.” After returning to the United States he informed Beatrice Patton that her husband “looked in splendid health and in fine fettle and full of fight.”14

  MACARTHUR, HAVING JUST INVADED LEYTE, wrote Marshall asking for more supplies for the Pacific, adding, “These frontal attacks by the Navy [marines], as at Tarawa, are tragic and unnecessary massacres of American lives.” Marshall agreed but it was a navy decision. As the two American prongs of the road to Tokyo began to intersect, new dangers arose. Combat planes from Japanese-held islands could reach out farther than the planes from U.S. carriers but, again, it was the navy’s problem to solve.

  In June, the navy nearly annihilated the fast carrier fleet of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, sinking three Japanese aircraft carriers and downing more than five hundred enemy planes. As a consequence, MacArthur wanted to take his invasion force north to attack the big island of Luzon, location of Manila, the Philippine capital, as well as 250,000 Japanese soldiers. He had come this far, so Marshall gave MacArthur the nod.

  In Europe that December the Germans launched a surprise, all-out attack on Eisenhower’s army in the Ardennes Forest on the Belgium-Luxembourg border that threatened to split the Allied armies in two. After a week of ferocious fighting, however, the Germans were forced to withdraw. Three months later, the Americans crossed the Rhine into Germany with astonishing success, capturing more than 350,000 enemy soldiers in the Ruhr. That broke the back of German resistance in the West and, led by the armies of Patton and General Courtney Hodges, the Americans pushed into central and southern Germany with unparalleled speed.

  Meanwhile, the Soviet army was overrunning German forces in Poland and eastern Germany in its advance toward Berlin and Prague, leaving in its wake an orgy of rape, looting, and other unmilitary marauding violence.

  The question of postwar politics now became intense. The British asked Eisenhower for permission to seize Berlin before the Soviets arrived there. Churchill, in particular, was highly suspicious of the motives of Soviet Premier Stalin, believing the Russians were anxious to acquire the formerly Nazi-occupied countries to enhance the spread of international communism. But Eisenhower refused, and Marshall agreed with him on grounds that such operations were political, unjustified, and that the focus of the Allied armies should be first to put the German war manufacturing enterprises out of business. In the meantime, the Soviets were establishing tightly held “zones of occupation” in the conquered countries, leaving no doubt that they intended to grab as much land as possible.

  For Germany, it was only a matter of time. Most of the vast Nazi empire that had stretched from the English Channel to the outskirts of Moscow had been reconquered and the German economy was wrecked. Three and a half million German soldiers had been killed thus far. The principal German cities lay in rubble from the Allied bombing campaign, and a million and a half civilians were dead. Still, Hitler had vowed to fight to the death.

  Even this was becoming nearly impossible after the Allies captured the Romanian oil fields that had fed the Nazi war machine. Allied intelligence noted an increased use of horses and cattle as dray animals by German soldiers at the fighting fronts.

  That suited the U.S. Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. just fine. For his part, Morgenthau was recommending to Roosevelt that Germany be turned into a permanent agrarian enterprise policed by the Allied powers, with no significant manufacturing of any sort—a land of grain farmers and goatherds—the better to ensure there would be no repeat of Nazi-style rule.

  BACK IN THE PACIFIC, MacArthur was charging into the Philippine Islands to establish bases from which U.S. planes could attack Japan directly. At the same time, navy task forces were driving westward across the ocean, closing in on Japan, expelling enemy military forces from the islands that would also be used by the Allies as permanent, unsinkable aircraft carriers.

  Like the Germans, the Japanese were severely handicapped by a lack of oil after the Allies had cut off the petroleum supply from the East Indies. And like the Germans, all major Japanese cities were in ruins from Allied bombing. Trade was nonexistent and the Japanese economy was exhausted. Two million soldiers were dead as were several hundred thousand civilians. But again, like the Germans, the Japanese leaders refused to surrender and vowed to be wiped out to the last man—and woman—as a matter of national honor.

  The Allies had come a long, hard way since the early 1940s. George Marshall, as U.S. Army chief of staff, had shepherded the tremendous effort with what would later be regarded as a calculated ease, although it was anything but.

  Now he was on the crest of a great victory, with the Allied armies on the outskirts of the enemies’ homeland. The two predator nations lay like wounded, exhausted beasts in their lairs—panting, furious, ferocious, and on their own terrain, their sacred soil. The trick now, Marshall knew, was a final conquest without the terrific bloodbath that both Axis nations had vowed in spades.

  * Some high officers in both the U.S. and British air forces believed that Germany could be brought to its knees by heavy bombing of its cities and industrial sites.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LET’S WIN IT ALL

  D-day was, as the British were fond of saying, “a near run thing.” Horrid weather caused a day’s cancellation with 160,000 soldiers waiting in the holds aboard troopships. But the next day Eisenhower gave the word and the invasion armada of 5,000 ships completely surprised the Germans, which, considering the number of people involved, must go down as a miracle in itself. The British and American infantrymen of Omar Bradley’s First Army and Bernard Montgomery’s Second Army* stormed the Normandy beaches just after daybreak on June 6, 1944, and fought their way inland, in some cases—particularly in the American sector at Utah Beach—up steep cliffs in the face of murderous machine-gun fire.

  At day’s end they had effected a tenuous lodgment all along the fifty-mile stretch at a cost of about 10,000 casualties—nearly half of them KIA. Also killed were approximately 10,000 French civilians caught in the preinvasion aerial and naval bombardment. Operation Fortitude had worked as planned, with the Germans expecting Patton to land a vast army group at the Pas-de-Calais. If the enemy had utilized the forces he was keeping in Calais the result of Operation Overlord might have been very different.

  The fighting in Normandy continued with pitiless intensity as the Allies pushed out from their beachhead into bocage country, where the land was divided into farm fields separated by dense hedgerows designed to resist soil erosion and sunken roads. These were particularly dreaded by the Allied troops because they invariably contained German machine-gun nests t
hat had to be cleared out, often by hand-to-hand combat. Luckily for the Allies, a furious Adolf Hitler persisted in making all the big decisions about the battle himself from his aerie perch high in the mountains of Bavaria. After learning of the invasion he had relieved his senior army commander Gerd von Rundstedt and appointed Field Marshal Günther von Kluge to hurl the Allies into the sea, unaware that von Kluge had been involved in a recent plot to kill him with a bomb.

  Meanwhile, Patton was feverishly training the Third Army for its role in Operation Cobra, the big Allied breakout from Normandy. Cobra was hatched between Bradley and Montgomery about a month after the Allied advance began to stall in the terrifying bocage country. Eisenhower feared the Germans might conclude they’d been tricked by Fortitude and unleash their 15th Army languishing in the Pas-de-Calais to assault the Allied pocket with overwhelming force.

  On July 25 the British attacked the Germans near the town of Caen. When von Kluge rushed reinforcements to that front, Bradley attacked with his First Army toward the port of Cherbourg with the notion of liberating it for use by the Allies, who presently had only the artificial “Mulberry harbors” on the Normandy beaches to unload men, equipment, and provisions for what was rapidly building to a two-million-man army.

  Patton had arrived in France on July 7, full of pep and ideas about how the Allies could break out of the Normandy-Cotentin Peninsula front and into Brittany, where he could employ his tanks in the mobile warfare for which they were designed. “I fear the war will be over before I get loose—but who can say?” he had told his diary. “Fate and the Hand of God still run most shows.”

  At the new U.S. airstrip on Omaha Beach he was mobbed by personnel from all services who had heard of his arrival, which was technically still supposed to be secret. Never one to shun an audience, Patton mounted his jeep and addressed the throng: “I’m proud to be here to fight beside you. Now let’s cut the guts out of those Krauts and get on to Berlin. And when we get to Berlin,” he added, “I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son of a bitch [Hitler] just like I would a snake.”†,1

  Patton’s advance party was in the Cotentin Peninsula where everything shook constantly from the firing of the large artillery guns emplaced along the line. The day he landed, Patton lunched with Omar Bradley, now his boss, Montgomery, and the commander of French forces General de Guingand. He was told that when the Third Army had arrived and become operational, it was to clear the Brest region of Germans, then push east toward Paris.

  Until then there was nothing to do but wait and take care of recent troop arrivals. Patton had hurt his toe in England when a window blackout sash had fallen on it. Now it became infected and he had the nail pulled off after breakfast on July 10. “It hurt like hell and I can’t wear a shoe,” he wrote Beatrice. Three days later he told her, “[General] Teddy R[oosevelt Jr.] died in his sleep last night. He had made three landings with the leading wave—such is fate. I am going to his funeral tomorrow night. He was one of the bravest men I ever met.”

  NEITHER THE BRITISH NOR THE AMERICANS seemed able to break out of their beachhead. In a full month since the landing, they had gained a mere eleven miles of ground, and Patton, who had been in France for a week, was chomping at the bit. He blamed Montgomery and Eisenhower for doing little or nothing to end the stalemate. Patton’s plan would have been to put an armored division in the lead and, covered by heavy air bombardments, burst right through the German defenses. Ike, however, thought it was still too risky.

  Then the Cobra plan was decided upon, but before it could be implemented Patton’s Third Army public relations officer made the drastic mistake of briefing the press corps on Cobra, which at the time was a top-secret operation. It was a serious breach and Patton was mortified; he relieved the officer and told the war correspondents they must not print the story. “A terrible crime has been committed,” was the way he put it to them.

  The reporters kept mum, but rain held up Cobra because the bombers could not be precise in bad weather. In fact they couldn’t be precise even in good weather, a fact stressed by General Jimmy Doolittle, who now commanded the U.S. Eighth Air Force. But Eisenhower insisted that the bombers attack the German front lines, which they did, often with tragic results.

  By July 24 the skies had cleared and Bradley gave the order to attack. The 2,400 American bombers that preceded the breakout on the first day killed twenty-five U.S. soldiers and wounded more than one hundred. One of Patton’s close friends, Colonel Harry “Paddy” Flint, was shot dead leading his regiment in the attack. Earlier, Patton had remarked of him in a letter to Beatrice, “He expects to be killed and probably will be.”

  The next day Lieutenant General Lesley McNair was also killed, along with 111 of his men, in another aerial misdrop by the bombers. McNair became the highest-ranked military man to be killed in the war and had come to France as a stand-in for Patton in the fake American army group of Fortitude. Appalled, Doolittle again argued to Ike that his big four-engine B-17s were unsuitable for close air support, but again he was overruled because Ike wanted the firepower.

  FIRST ARMY HAD BROKEN THROUGH the German lines by the second day of Cobra. Bradley told Patton to take over VIII Corps while waiting for the Third Army to become operational in four days. Patton immediately ordered two armored divisions through the break in the enemy lines and then, unable to stay away from a potential fight, went forward to see for himself.

  On the outskirts of Coutances, Patton encountered General Robert W. Grow, commander of his Sixth Armored Division, sitting beside the road with several other officers, reading a map. The unit was being held up “by some German fire” at a small stream. Patton asked Grow if he had been down to look. The answer was negative. Patton replied that if Grow didn’t “do something, he would be out of a job” and went himself to look at the stream, which was less than a foot deep. He saw no Germans. The Sixth Armored Division thus got itself moving toward Brittany, where it could fight in open territory.2

  Patton was becoming frustrated by Omar Bradley’s cautiousness. Bradley wanted the attack to be meticulous, steady, irresistible; Patton wanted speed and audacity. “I think we can clear the peninsula very fast,” he told his diary. “The thing to do is to rush them off their feet before they get set.”

  By July 30, less than a week into Cobra, the town of Avranches, gateway to Brittany, was taken by Cobra forces. Patton ordered his VIII Corps to cross the Selune River and make for the Seine and Paris. The U.S. Fourth Armored Division captured a series of dams that it was feared the Germans might blow up and flood much of the countryside.

  Patton continued his habit of writing poetry at night and penned this last of five stanzas of a piece called “Absolute War” that exuded his penchant for aggressiveness.

  So let us do real fighting, boring in and gouging, biting.

  Let’s take a chance now that we have the ball.

  Let’s forget those fine firm bases in the dreary, shell raked spaces,

  Let’s shoot the works and win! Yes win it all!

  Patton’s army was now moving so quickly that it kept running off maps—so quickly that the Germans could not organize a counterattack. As usual Patton was at or near the front lines. “It always scares me and lures me like steeplechasing,” he told Beatrice.

  On August 6 Patton took time out to write a letter to a Mrs. T. Taylor of Pasadena accepting her request to become godfather to her son. “I am sure he could never find a more God-fearing, God-damning Godfather than myself,” he wrote her.

  Finally, in the early hours of August 7, the Germans launched their long-expected counterattack. Patton had gotten wind of it the day before through a secret source (probably ULTRA) and told his diary that he thought it was a German rumor to cover a withdrawal. To be on the safe side, however, he stopped two infantry divisions and one armored division “just in case something might happen.”

  The Germans attacked with three panzer divisions before Allied air attacks and a ferocious defensive effort by t
he 30th Infantry Division halted the enemy thrust, and Patton continued his end-run sweep around the German left flank. Eventually, by moving so swiftly, Patton’s army wound up conducting a huge envelopment of not only the Germans’ attacking force but most of the Germans in Normandy. This created what came to be called the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. Elements of ten enemy panzer divisions plus infantry and supporting troops—most of the German Army Group B, as many as 150,000 in all—were trapped in the pocket that was sealed by Patton, Bradley’s First Army, and Montgomery’s British and Canadian armies.

  On August 16, 1944, the aforementioned Field Marshal Günther von Kluge declined, from his headquarters in the Falaise Pocket, to waste his command in yet another useless counterattack that Hitler had ordered. By late afternoon, von Kluge thought Hitler had come around to accepting his plea to withdraw the army, but Hitler instead changed his mind after it had occurred to him that von Kluge might instead surrender to the Allies. The next day, Hitler relieved von Kluge and ordered him to Berlin, whereupon von Kluge committed suicide by taking cyanide, fearful that the Gestapo had uncovered his involvement in the July plot against Hitler.‡

  The Führer then sent Field Marshal Walter Model to replace von Kluge, but his report to Berlin was immediate and dismal—withdraw or lose the army. Hitler agreed and the Germans began a long retreat.

  As many as 100,000 Germans managed to escape the Falaise Pocket due to its not being quickly and completely sealed off by the Allies. Patton blamed Bradley for ordering him to abandon territory he held that was in the British sector and instead concentrate near Argentan, and of course he blamed Montgomery for complaining about it. Bradley, however, later wrote that he was worried about Patton overextending himself and becoming vulnerable to counterattack. “I preferred a strong shoulder at Argentan to the possibility of a broken neck at Falaise,” was how he put it.3