The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  No sentimentality obtained for enemy soldiers. “We blew up everything that didn’t look right,” a lieutenant in the 60th Infantry told his diary, “especially little haystacks out in the fields, a good place for German snipers.” At Braine, near Reims, Patton’s vanguard caught two trains with seventy railcars carrying troops and loot from Paris; tank and tank destroyer fire slapped the engines, then automatic weapons stitched the carriages, killing fifty before five hundred others surrendered. A witness with Third Army described “the long ecstatic agony of serving machine guns on living targets,” and the pleasure that tank gunners felt in fingering their Sherman triggers, which they called “tits.” “The whole west front has collapsed,” a German regimental commander wrote on August 31, “and the other side is marching about at will.”

  Not quite. Fuel shortages, nettlesome since early August, had become grievous as the Allied armies raced eastward. Daily fuel consumption had tripled from six gallons per vehicle in late July to eighteen; a single armored division now burned 100,000 gallons in each day of cross-country fighting. The five-gallon can remained the primary delivery means, and SHAEF logisticians were so desperate that consideration was given to using battleships to haul jerricans of gas to the French beaches. A Canadian corps was immobilized for several days; two of eight divisions in the British Second Army remained on the Seine to allow the other six to move on. A corps in the U.S. First Army stalled for four days, and corps commanders cadged cans of gasoline to keep their staff cars running. Nowhere did the need pinch more than in Third Army. Of seventeen tanks sent to capture a Meuse bridge in Verdun on August 31, all but three ran out of gas en route. Patton’s fuel dumps the previous day had received 32,000 gallons, less than one-tenth of Third Army’s requirement. His G-4, the army logistician, rated the supply of motor fuel as “extremely critical.” “Damn it, Brad,” Patton told Bradley, “just give me 400,000 gallons of gasoline and I’ll put you inside Germany in two days.”

  Onward they pushed, on foot when necessary, through villages displaying homemade American flags, crayoned on paper or pillowcases with polka-dot stars. “Vote for Dewey,” mischievous GIs yelled, to be answered by cheering, agreeable Frenchmen, “Vote for Dew-ee.” An observant soldier told his parents that the locals numbered their building floors beginning above the ground level. “If that was the only mistake the French ever made,” he added, “we wouldn’t be here today.”

  Giddy rumors swirled, including a Swiss claim that Hitler had fled to Spain. An intercepted German radio report of insurrection in Cologne stirred great excitement until U.S. analysts realized that the news was disinformation from an Allied psychological operations team. Still, optimism ran rife. Bradley on September 1 predicted that he would reach the Rhine by Sunday, September 10, and staff officers selected half a dozen river crossing sites. Bradley’s aide jotted in a diary, “Everything we talk about now is qualified by the phrase, ‘If the war lasts that long.’”

  “End the war in ’44,” soldiers chanted. Time reported that officials from New York to Seattle had begun planning Victory-in-Europe celebrations; a man in Santa Fe had offered $10 “to the first newsboy to reach him with the New Mexican announcing the fall of Germany.” With the European war seemingly winding down, Churchill’s War Office asked Montgomery whether he could spare an extra army headquarters staff for Burma. The Pentagon drafted plans to leave one-fifth of all ordnance stocks in Europe with a postwar occupation force, while one-fifth would be sent to the Pacific and three-fifths shipped home.

  “There is a feeling of elation, expectancy, and almost bewilderment,” the prime minister’s secretary wrote on September 1. Beetle Smith assured reporters, “Militarily the war is won.” Even as Eisenhower tried to tamp down expectations, he told his diary, “Our military forces can advance almost at will.… The defeat of the German armies is complete, and the only thing now needed to realize the whole conception is speed.”

  * * *

  The Allied juggernaut aimed vaguely for Berlin, intent on ripping out Germany’s political heart. But a nearer, interim target was the enemy’s industrial heart in the Ruhr valley, a sooty ellipse that extended east from the Rhine for some sixty miles to include the smokestack cities of Essen, Dortmund, and Duisburg. Two-thirds of German steel and more than half the country’s coal had traditionally come from the Ruhr, and loss of the region would also devastate the chemical and munitions industries, with a projected 40 percent drop in artillery ammunition and explosives production. Hitler would have no choice but to defend this vital region, and a SHAEF study signed by Eisenhower in May posited that “an attack aimed at the Ruhr is likely to give us every chance of bringing to battle and destroying the main German armed forces.”

  Four paths led to the Ruhr from the west, but most planners considered only two of them suitable for big mechanized armies. One route, north of the Ardennes—the rugged forested hills that occupied much of southern Belgium and Luxembourg—aimed directly at the Ruhr; it could be supported by Allied seapower and aircraft based in Britain. The second route angled south of the Ardennes, through the so-called Metz Gap. Even before OVERLORD began, Eisenhower had advocated taking both avenues, a strategy of advance on “two mutually supporting axes” that would stretch enemy defenses across a broad front, exploit Allied mobility, and permit shifts in the weight of attack as needed. The southern route also would menace the Saar valley, second only to the Ruhr as an industrial locus in western Germany. SHAEF in late August estimated that the enemy could muster no more than eleven divisions northwest of the Ardennes and five divisions to the south. Eisenhower’s planners had proposed that 21st Army Group strike northeast toward the Rhine through Amiens and Liège in the main effort, while 12th Army Group lunged toward Metz and beyond in a subsidiary attack.

  Montgomery would have none of it. In a message to Brooke in London on August 18, he had urged channeling both army groups north of the Ardennes “as a solid mass of some forty divisions which would be so strong that it need fear nothing.” Concentration of Anglo-American power in the north would utilize the Allied preponderance in armor and bring the war to a quicker close, an issue of particular urgency as Britain ran out of men. Montgomery also argued that a single commander was needed to oversee Allied ground forces driving toward Germany from the Seine—“This is a whole time job for one man”—and he claimed that Bradley agreed with this strategic assessment.

  Bradley most certainly did not agree, nor did most of the other senior Allied generals, including Montgomery’s own chief of staff, Major General Francis W. “Freddie” de Guingand. When told that Montgomery proposed to “put everything in one punch,” Air Marshal Tedder retorted, “I always thought in a fight it was better to use both hands.” Eisenhower on August 23 drove to the 21st Army Group command post in Condé, near Falaise, for a long, tedious conference from which Beetle Smith was excluded at Montgomery’s churlish insistence although De Guingand was allowed to remain. When Montgomery proposed halting Patton’s Third Army to divert more fuel to the other spearheads, Eisenhower told him, “The American public would never stand for it, and public opinion wins wars.” Standing before a map with his hands clasped behind his back, Montgomery replied, “Victories win wars. Give people victory and they won’t care who won it.”

  Montgomery emerged from the caravan at Condé having extracted certain concessions to strengthen his attack, including priority in using the airborne reserve and in drawing supplies. Moreover, the U.S. First Army would swing largely north of the Ardennes rather than south; this would shore up 21st Army Group’s right flank, a reinforcement that some SHAEF planners had long considered.

  Eisenhower also agreed that a single commander would oversee the assault on Germany, but that generalissimo would not be B. L. Montgomery. Rather, Eisenhower would take the job himself, and before leaving Condé he told Montgomery that at George Marshall’s insistence this rearrangement would take effect in another week. In truth, Eisenhower had dictated a secret memo to his staff in mid-May laying
out his eventual role as ground commander, while specifying that “nothing must be said … to indicate there would ever be any diminution of General M’s command or responsibility.… The less said the better.”

  Churchill, “as a solace,” promoted Montgomery to the rank of field marshal on September 1, giving him the equivalent of five stars to Eisenhower’s four. This, as the prime minister said with no little spite, “will put the changes in command in their proper perspective.” Although Eisenhower praised Montgomery to reporters as “not only my very close and warm friend, but … one of the great soldiers of this or any other war,” the promotion went down badly at SHAEF.

  “Damn stupid & I warrant most offensive to Eisenhower & the Americans,” Admiral Ramsay told his diary. Patton wrote Bea on September 1 that “the Field Marshal thing made us sick, that is Bradley and me.” Even Brooke felt uneasy, telling a colleague that Montgomery “is probably the finest tactical general we have had since Wellington. But on some of his strategy, and especially his relations with the Americans, he is almost a disaster.” Militarily the war might be won, as Beetle Smith had averred, but close combat within the Allied high command was just starting.

  * * *

  Late in the morning of Saturday, September 2, Eisenhower flew in his B-25 to Bradley’s command post in Chartres. In the middle distance the twin spires of the magnificent cathedral poked the heavens. Patton also arrived, “bumptious and noisy,” in a staff officer’s description, accoutred with a revolver and his bull terrier, Willie, whom he occasionally introduced as “a sodomy son of a bitch.” An aide made drinks with ice from a refrigerator that Eisenhower had given Bradley after complaining, “Goddamn it, I’m tired of drinking warm whiskey every time I come to your headquarters.”

  On a huge wall map of Europe, a bull’s-eye encircled Berlin. Dressed in his combat jacket and jump boots, Bradley argued for crossing the German frontier immediately, thus preventing enemy defenders from shoring up the border fortifications known as the Siegfried Line. He also wanted a bulletproof car and armored jeeps for travel in Germany. “Each town in our path” should be bombed, he believed, to “teach them the lesson of death and destruction they have carried to the rest of the world.”

  Patton offered to “stake my reputation” on Third Army’s ability to fight to the Rhine despite crippling supply shortages. “That reputation of yours hasn’t been worth very much,” Eisenhower said, smiling broadly. Patton barked with laughter. “Pretty good now,” he said.

  A message from Beetle Smith warning of approaching storms cut short the conference. No sooner had the B-25 lifted off than flames licked from the right engine. After an emergency landing, Eisenhower folded himself into the rear seat of a tiny L-5 Sentinel for a turbulent 120-mile flight west to the Cotentin Peninsula, where his new headquarters had just opened near Granville, another of those French coastal towns that Englishmen over the centuries had captured, fortified, lost, burned, bombarded, and enjoyed on holiday.

  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 fi
ght 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: