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

by Rick Atkinson

  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 bo
ttles 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.”

  Alas, yes. An Ultra intercept of a Führer order on September 3, stressing the “decisive importance” of holding the Scheldt, was disregarded by Allied commanders; so were subsequent orders from Hitler, including an intercepted message reminding Fifteenth Army that “it must be insured that the Allies cannot use the harbor for a long time.” This “incomprehensible” error, the historian Ralph Bennett later concluded, was “a strategic mistake of such magnitude that its repercussions were felt almost until the end of the war.” Eisenhower’s messages to his top commanders about Antwerp had not specified capturing the Scheldt, and neither Montgomery nor Dempsey, the Second Army commander, attended the issue. Montgomery believed the enemy army’s position was hopeless. “The bottle is now corked,” he declared, “and they will not be able to get out.”

  A Royal Marine Commando unit trained for amphibious assault had instead been diverted to besiege Dunkirk from a landward vantage. The 11th Armored Division commander, Major General G. P. B. “Pip” Roberts, had been told little more than to seize the docks and port in Antwerp. His corps commander, Lieutenant General Brian G. Horrocks, later confessed to “suffering from liberation euphoria” that entailed dining with the Belgian queen mother and her lady-in-waiting rather than studying a map. “If I had ordered Roberts not to liberate Antwerp but to bypass the town and advance only fifteen miles northwest … we should have blocked the Beveland isthmus” and potentially trapped the Fifteenth Army near the Dutch border, Horrocks wrote in his memoir. “My eyes were fixed on the Rhine.”

  The British drive soon was stymied. An artillery major directed fire to the north from the top floor of an Antwerp office building while a Belgian secretary brought trays of coffee with cognac and played American blues on the office phonograph. But none of the bridges across the imposing Albert Canal north and east of the city had been captured—fifteen of seventeen still stood as late as September 5—and now they were all blown. An effort to seize a bridgehead across the canal came a cropper when army storm boats were found to have holes in the bottom. “German reaction was swift and most unpleasant,” a brigadier reported, and included panzer fire that addled sappers trying to lay a bridge. Enemy battle groups rushed to reinforce the canals, but with other British corps to move forward, Montgomery had already ordered Horrocks to halt for regrouping.

  An evacuation of German troops by ferry promptly began across the Scheldt from Breskens, west of Antwerp. In little more than a fortnight, 86,000 men, 600 artillery pieces, 5,000 vehicles, and 4,000 horses, mostly from the Fifteenth Army, escaped to fight another day. The estuary’s north-bank fortifications on Walcheren Island and Beveland, already formidable, grew stouter, while a stubborn rear guard of eleven thousand troops showed no sign of abandoning the pocket around Breskens.

  Montgomery told London on September 7 that he hoped to be in Berlin in three weeks. But that was unlikely without the fuel, ammunition, food, and other war stuffs that could arrive in bulk only through a big-shoulders port. For now, as the U.S. Army official history later concluded, “Antwerp was a jewel that could not be worn for want of a setting.” A British officer in Antwerp offered his own judgment: “Success can be most bewildering.”

  5. AGAINST THE WEST WALL

  “Five Barley Loaves and Three Small Fishes”

  VERSAILLES had long proved irresistible to empire builders. A modest seventeenth-century hunting lodge, built above a fenny country village twelve miles southwest of Paris, had quickly grown into the world’s most celebrated château, an emblem of both the ancien régime and French regal indulgence. More than twenty thousand nobles, courtiers, merchants, and servants eventually basked in the radiance of the Sun King and his dimmer heirs, crowding together in what one traveler described as “a state of unhygienic squalor.” Later, the palace had served as a headquarters for the Prussian army besieging Paris in the starv
ing winter of 1870, when 65,000 Parisians perished despite eating the city’s cats, crows, and rats. Here, in January 1871, the German Empire had been proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors, that exquisite gallery of seventeen reflecting arches facing seventeen arcaded windows. Here too, with a grim and vengeful echo, the treaty to end the First World War was signed in June 1919, as celebratory guns boomed, fountains spurted, and blue-coated Republican Guardsmen held their sabers aloft to salute the Hun’s subjugation. Two decades later the Hun was back, for a four-year stay.

  It was here that Eisenhower chose to locate his new command post. Even as he recuperated from his bum knee in distant Granville, SHAEF staff officers swarmed into Versailles and made it their own. Headquarters offices filled the plush Trianon Palace Hotel, where a room with a bath that went for 175 francs a night before the war now could not be had at any price except by holders of a SHAEF master pass, a stiff piece of paper the size of a playing card emblazoned with a blue border and a red cross. Waiters in black tie served K-ration lunches on white linen with crystal stemware and plates trimmed in gold. The Clemenceau Ballroom, used by the Allied powers to negotiate the 1919 treaty and more recently by the Germans to decorate Luftwaffe pilots during the Battle of Britain, now served as a map room. Thickets of antennae sprouted in the royal gardens, and latrines lined the stately château trees near the faux farm that had allowed Marie Antoinette to live a Rousseauian fantasy of pastoral simplicity. Staff sections and signal offices filled the great stables built by Louis XIV, each said by one visitor to be “larger than some of our state capitols.”

  Eisenhower’s office occupied a white stone annex behind the hotel; a bronze bust of Hermann Göring found in the foyer was turned to the wall because, as an officer explained, “he has been a bad boy.” Eleven paintings, including a Van Dyck, were plucked from the château to appoint the supreme commander’s suite, apparently without his knowledge, along with an eighteenth-century desk and other furnishings from the Mobilier National. An incensed lieutenant who in civilian life had been a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art managed to have most of the loot put back.