The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Short of fuel, tossed by gusty winds, and unable to find an airstrip in the pelting rain, the pilot set down on a narrow beach not far from the supreme commander’s compound. As he helped push the plane toward the dunes to escape the rising tide, Eisenhower slipped in the sand, badly wrenching his right knee. After hobbling across a salt marsh with an arm around the pilot’s neck, anxiously watching for mines, he flagged down a jeep carrying eight astonished GIs, who lifted him into the front seat and drove him to his villa. Two aides carried him to a bedroom.

  Eisenhower had hurt his left knee in the 1912 Army football game against Tufts, a serious injury requiring seven hospitalizations over the years. But no mishap was more inopportune than this damage to his “good” knee, now swollen and acutely painful. A doctor slathered the joint in a plaster cast and prescribed indefinite bed rest; Eisenhower refused to allow his blood pressure to be read for fear that the persistent ringing in his ears marked some debilitating condition that would get him sent home.

  For more than a fortnight the supreme commander was largely immobilized, leaving Granville briefly only three times in eighteen days. The villa was pleasant enough, with a splendid view of Mont-St.-Michel to the south. Two resident cows provided fresh milk and cream for the mess, and for ninety minutes each day a therapist baked and massaged Eisenhower’s aching knee. In scribbled notes to Mamie he apologized for being “always a bit off-key when I try to talk seriously,” and he confessed to thinking of their dead son, Doud Dwight, who would have been twenty-seven. To his living son, John, a newly commissioned lieutenant who had proposed they make “an air tour of the United States” after the war, Eisenhower wrote, “Who is going to buy the plane? I am broke and I suspect you are not far from it.”

  Even for an ambulatory commander, Granville was an ill-chosen headquarters—isolated, remote from the front, and so plagued with signal deficiencies that for three weeks Eisenhower could communicate with his armies only by cable, courier, messages jury-routed through the RAF, or in rare tête-à-tête conferences. His indifference to Seventh Army’s exploits in southern France owed something to his sequestration in Granville, but the forced seclusion also allowed him to mull his plan for the push into Germany. Following the hail-fellow session with Bradley and Patton in Chartres, he came to regret his earlier concessions to Montgomery and to reaffirm his commitment to a multipronged advance on a broad front. In a two-hour lunch with Ramsay, Eisenhower complained that Montgomery seemed to covet Bradley’s motor transport in order to allow 21st Army Group to “advance alone on Berlin. This would entail a complete standstill order on the U.S. armies.” Montgomery’s view certainly was more nuanced—he by no means favored halting the U.S. First Army—but Ramsay denounced the ostensible proposal as “Monty-like” and “tripe.”

  On Monday, September 4, Eisenhower told his lieutenants by cable that “our best opportunity of defeating the enemy in the west lies in striking at the Ruhr and at the Saar.” Patton’s advance, hamstrung by the fuel priority accorded First Army to support Montgomery, was to be reinvigorated; the two American armies would share equally in the paltry gasoline supply, each receiving 3,500 tons a day. “We must now as never before keep the enemy stretched everywhere,” Eisenhower wrote Marshall the same day.

  An exasperated Montgomery privately complained that Eisenhower appeared “to have a curious idea that every army command must have an equal and fair share of the battle.” Given the logistical limitations, he insisted, “the only policy is to halt the left and strike with the right, or halt the right and strike with the left.” The left—his force and First Army—was aimed at the Ruhr and therefore deserved first call on supplies. In a quick, eyes-only rebuttal to Eisenhower on Monday, he wrote:

  We have now reached a stage where one really powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin is likely to get there and thus end the German war. We have not enough maintenance resources for two full-blooded thrusts.… If we attempt a compromise solution and split our maintenance resources so that neither thrust is full-blooded we will prolong the war. I consider the problem viewed as above as very simple and clear-cut.

  Eisenhower replied on Tuesday, affirming his order and further explaining his strategic logic. But so maladroit was the Granville signals operation that the message reached Montgomery in two pieces, backward, and late: the second half arrived on Thursday and the first half on Saturday. A British officer later reported, “Monty walked up and down, waving his arms and saying, ‘The war is lost.’”

  The misdirected signal was entirely apt for two men talking past each other. Soldiers and historians were to argue the merits of each case for decades. Eisenhower later caricatured Montgomery’s scheme as a “preposterous proposal to drive on a single pencil-line thrust straight on to Berlin,” and Smith called it “the most fantastic bit of balderdash ever proposed by a competent general.” Bradley, who had been victimized in Sicily by what he called Montgomery’s “arrogant and egotistical” demand that U.S. forces give way to the British, asserted that “if you try to fight the German on one front only, you’re playing right into his hands.”

  Montgomery’s vision had the military virtue of mass—the concentration of combat power—but it ran counter to SHAEF calculations of what was possible for an Allied force still drawing supplies across beaches several hundred miles away. One study estimated that a single-axis thrust to Berlin by three British and two American corps would need nearly 500 truck companies, of which only 347 existed. Even with supplies augmented by airlift and through the docks at Antwerp, a long lunge across Germany would require the “wholesale grounding” of many Allied corps, including twenty-two U.S. divisions relegated to “hibernation.” Moreover, the need to protect long open flanks in the enemy heartland meant that a solitary Allied spearhead would be no stronger than six or eight divisions with little air support—“easy prey for the German mobile reserves,” as one logistician warned. A British intelligence brigadier at SHAEF concluded that simply encircling and holding the Ruhr would prove impossible without more robust combat forces than now available on the Western Front. “Monty,” he added, “was overbidding his hand.” Even De Guingand cited fatal shortages of transport and bridging equipment; after the war, he observed that Hitler’s eventual defeat required a Soviet offensive of 160 divisions complemented by a massive attack from the west and another eight months of savage air bombardment.

  Most strategists would come to similar conclusions. Britain’s youngest brigadier in 1944, the future field marshal Lord Carver, wrote:

  In both world wars there were countless examples of single thrusts … attracting the enemy’s reserves and thus being brought to a halt.… The strategy which had been generally successful was one of alternating thrusts, delivering a blow in an unexpected area when the enemy’s reserves had been attracted elsewhere.

  Two-fisted punching had in fact won through for Montgomery at Alamein, Mareth, and Normandy. Likewise, the American historian Russell F. Weigley observed that, for the side playing a strong hand, “the whole history of American strategy since U. S. Grant confirmed that the enemy can be hit with advantage at several places and thus forced to accentuate his weakness through dissipation.” As the historian Gerhard L. Weinberg noted, “Whatever Montgomery’s talents, mounting rapid thrusts was not one of them.”

  Nor was the field marshal inclined “to appreciate that in higher strategy political factors can sometimes have the same weight as purely military considerations,” as Montgomery’s biographer Ronald Lewin later acknowledged. Eisenhower believed that triumph in Europe must be shared, especially given the expanding American dominance in men and matériel. But this equitable recognition cut no ice with Montgomery: Eisenhower’s “ignorance as to how to run a war is absolute and complete,” he told Brooke, who made this condemnation his own. “Ike knows nothing about strategy and is quite unsuited to the post of supreme commander,” Brooke confided to his diary. Eisenhower’s decision to personally oversee the ground campaign, he wrote, “is likely
to add another 3 to 6 months on to the war.”

  Eisenhower’s generalship was without doubt vulnerable to criticism. Montgomery’s complaint that “he was extremely susceptible to the personality of the last commander he saw before he made his decision” had a whiff of truth, as did Patton’s diary entry on September 2: “Ike is all for caution, since he had never been at the front and has no feel of actual fighting.” Beguiled by the pursuit of a battered enemy, he repeatedly gave short shrift to logistical needs and failed to ensure that his directives were heeded. Smith groused that “the trouble with Ike” was that “instead of giving direct and clear orders, [he] dresses them up in polite language.” He was a conciliator, Smith added, who rarely issued unequivocal orders and never decreed: Do as I command and be silent. If consistent in his views supporting a broad, multipronged assault on Germany, he was “hardly decisive in the way he communicated them to Montgomery,” Stephen E. Ambrose later wrote. “He allowed Montgomery to carry every argument to its bitter end.”

  This bitter argument indeed was far from over. “There is never a moment that doesn’t have its strain or particular problem,” Eisenhower had written Mamie, and he would confess to her, “God, how wearying and wearing it all gets.” Yet Allied unity remained the central principle of his command and he would go to great lengths to preserve it, including self-delusion. “The team is working well,” he wrote Marshall in September. “Without exception all concerned have now fully accepted my conception of our problem and are carrying it out intelligently and with energy.”

  * * *

  The armies fought on, largely unaware of the generals’ quarrels at echelons above reason. All but immobilized for the first five days of September, Third Army at last saw fuel stocks begin to improve. New orders listed Metz and two misspelled German cities, “Maintz” and “Frankfort,” as objectives. B-24s were pressed into service as flying gas stations, each carrying two hundred five-gallon cans; Patton encouraged air resupply by awarding bounties of confiscated cognac and champagne to helpful pilots. With almost 300,000 troops, Third Army remained short of everything from grenades and binoculars to radios and wristwatches; army shortages for the week of September 2 included 270,000 pairs of combat boots, 540,000 wool blankets, 6,000 radio tubes, and 48 surgical bullet probes. Patton had given up cigars in a gesture of solidarity with his strapped army—he often smoked twenty a day—but captured German commissaries yielded three million pounds of beef, fifty thousand cases of champagne, and huge stocks of sardines and the Italian silk used for parachutes.

  In a breezy session with reporters, Patton first complained that “a goddamn army commander doesn’t do anything but sit around and curse,” then explained, “I never worried about flanks. That was probably due to my long-felt masculine virility.” After lamenting that “when you slow anything down, you waste human lives,” he told the scribes, “I hope to go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose.”

  To his northwest, Courtney Hodges’s First Army crossed the Belgian border and liberated the Walloon city of Mons early on September 3. “Once again,” the 3rd Armored Division reported, “cognac, champagne, and pretty girls.” And once again, tens of thousands of retreating Germans faced annihilation. Even with two-thirds of its worn tanks now unfit for combat, the 3rd Armored took 2,500 prisoners, and this on a day when the division was grounded for want of fuel. What one U.S. Army unit described as “a confused, blinded, heterogeneous mass” from twenty or more dismembered Wehrmacht divisions now crawled through southwest Belgium with stolen French cars and Belgian farm wagons, canalized by American roadblocks.

  Bounding from the south, the 1st Division fell on the German flank. Shermans churned across the loamy fields trailed by olive-drab clouds of riflemen. Four-barrel .50-caliber antiaircraft guns, depressed as infantry weapons, peppered enemy ranks, and P-47s peeled from the perfect sky to rake the German columns, nose to tail. “Those are magnificent Belgian horses, and I hate to pot them,” one pilot radioed. “Well, here goes.” Long Tom 155mm field guns, accustomed to pounding targets a dozen miles away, now served as sniper rifles, shattering half-tracks and haystacks until the air reeked of burning fodder and flesh, both equine and human. “You only want to slaughter us,” a captured officer complained.

  In addition to some 3,500 enemy dead, another 25,000 would be bagged alive in three days. In batches of fifty they trudged to the cages, booed by passing Belgian Boy Scouts whose mothers were carving steaks from the horse carcasses. Three thousand prisoners temporarily penned in the slag yard of an old redbrick sugar refinery emptied their pockets as ordered, and GIs sifted through the little piles of nail clippers and clasp knives; an American lieutenant held up a discarded condom wrapped in foil and told a chubby Landser, “You will not love for a while.” With Falaise and the capitulation at Brest, the Mons Pocket was among Germany’s worst drubbings in northwestern Europe in 1944.

  Thirty miles to the north, the British Second Army also swept into Belgium, after streaking 250 miles in six days. Hitler ordered Boulogne and Dunkirk held as bitter-end fortresses, but the Canadians had taken Rouen and pressed toward Bruges. General Eberbach was caught fleeing in a Volkswagen outside Amiens—“I commanded what used to be the Seventh Army,” he told his captors—and the garrison commander at Le Havre would soon surrender in his pajamas, bemedaled nonetheless, along with eleven thousand others.

  At eight P.M. on Sunday, September 3, the Welsh Guards rolled into Brussels and ignited a tumultuous celebration. “The joy of Paris was a pallid thing compared to this extravaganza,” Moorehead reported. The Guards Armored Division clattered down the Chaussée de Ninove, tank tracks chewing at the cobbles. The great dome of the Palais de Justice, set afire as a parting gesture by the retreating Germans, was likened by a reporter to “a flambeau in the night.” Ecstatic Belgians shouted the only English they knew—“Goodbye, Tommy, goodbye!”—and lobbed hydrangeas, apples, and bottles of Lion d’Or beer into the passing vehicles.

  Local worthies appeared in sashes and other badges of office to declaim, proclaim, acclaim. The Royal Hampshires found that no sooner did they post a sentry than a happy throng would “bear the man away … to regale him.” Bistros sent waiters into the streets to fill soldiers’ mess tins with champagne and ice cream; the bulging larders caused one Guardsman to grumble that “Belgians felt they had done their bit by eating their way through the war.” Undimmed, the celebration would continue for more than a week, fueled by the capture of a German wine dump containing “eighty thousand bottles of a remarkable claret,” Moorehead wrote. Countless drunken verses of “Tipperary” could be heard day and night, and effigies of Hitler were paraded through the streets to be beaten, burned, and cursed in Flemish, French, Dutch, and various other liberated tongues.

  * * *

  On Monday at noon British tanks nosed through the outskirts of Antwerp, past houses put to the torch by Belgian resistance fighters for belonging to alleged collaborators. Jubilant crowds reluctantly parted, allowing the 11th Armored Division to race downtown, where nonplussed German soldiers were still sipping beer in sidewalk cafés. By two that afternoon, a tank squadron had reached the docks. Thanks to the Belgian “White Resistance,” which had attacked and delayed German demolitionists, the port, sluice gates, and underground oil storage tanks with their capacity of two million barrels remained intact. A sharp firefight around pillboxes in a city park petered out by 9:30 P.M., and surviving defenders surrendered or melted away. After a fruitless search for a cinema to use as a jail, British officers instead converted the local zoo into a prison compound—hungry citizens, it was said, had devoured most of the menagerie. Six thousand captives soon crowded the pens, sorted into separate cages in the lion house for officers, Belgian fascists, and German mistresses. Other ranks filled the bear pits, the tiger pens, the monkey house. “The captives sat on the straw,” wrote Martha Gellhorn, “staring through the bars.”

  With Brittany’s ports soon to be forsaken, no liberated city in Europe was
more important to the Allied cause than Antwerp. By the mid-sixteenth century it had become the richest town on the Continent, surpassing even Venice and Genoa, with a hundred or more ships at anchor every day, carrying spices from Portugal, grain from the Baltic, silk embroideries from Italy. The Inquisition, a Spanish pillage, and the rise of Holland cost the city its prosperity; not until the nineteenth century did Antwerp ascend again to become a bustling hive of diamond-cutting, cigar-rolling, sugar-refining, and beer-brewing. By the 1930s it ranked with Hamburg, New York, and Rotterdam among the world’s finest ports, handling a thousand ships each month, with twenty-nine miles of quays, more than six hundred cranes, nine hundred warehouses, and a vast rail yard. All this was recovered whole on September 4. One early-twentieth-century estimate had calculated that the city’s defenses “would require an army of 260,000 men to besiege it effectually, and at least a year to reduce it by starvation.” The British had needed but a few hours.

  The capture of Antwerp and the exploitation of its port had been stressed since the earliest Allied invasion plans in December 1941. Eisenhower in a message to Montgomery on August 24 reiterated the need “to get a secure base at Antwerp,” an order repeated in a formal directive to top commanders on August 29 and September 4. Montgomery echoed the supreme commander, stating his intent “to capture Antwerp,” as well as “to destroy all enemy forces in the Pas de Calais and Flanders.” But Antwerp had a topographical quirk that required more than simply seizing the docks and the monkey house. Communication with the North Sea from the port required control of the eighty-mile estuary at the mouth of the river Scheldt, including fortified Walcheren Island on the north side of the Scheldt, and the polders around Breskens on the southern bank.

  Having sailed these waters in war and in peace for centuries, the Royal Navy was intimately familiar with the estuary. Four thousand British troops had died of fever on Walcheren during a campaign in 1809, with the survivors evacuated ignominiously to England. Churchill himself, as first lord of the Admiralty, had rushed to Antwerp in October 1914 to rally the Belgian government in defense of the port. Admiral Ramsay on September 3 sent a telegram to SHAEF, with a copy to Montgomery, reminding all that “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.” The first sea lord, Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, told his diary on September 7: “Again impressed on the [Combined Chiefs of Staff] that Antwerp, though completely undamaged, was as much use as Timbuctoo unless the entrance and other forts were silenced and the banks of the Scheldt occupied. I fear this is being overlooked by the generals.”