The war had become a study in contrasts. On the Western Front, the Allies’ armies were struggling over yards of muddy ground. On the Eastern Front, the Soviet columns in the Baltic campaign were lopping off miles as they gave the German army little chance to settle into defensive positions. As the Soviets pushed toward Riga, Germany’s Army Group North was in danger of complete collapse.3
Breakouts
Eisenhower, tense and troubled, did not have an opportunity to spend much time contemplating the Soviet campaigns. He was focused tightly on the grinding progress Bradley’s army was making and on the weather in northern France. Bad weather periodically took away the Allies’ major advantage in airpower, leaving Germany’s armored units room to counter the offensive. Ike, now a more forceful and focused leader, brushed aside Churchill’s repeated efforts to prevent the invasion of southern France. The war in the west, Eisenhower knew, was not going to be won in the Mediterranean. But it could be lost if the Allies spread themselves too thinly in the hedgerows.4
Suddenly, however, the strategy Ike and Marshall were defending was reaffirmed where it most counted—on the battlefields of France. General Bradley gave the Allied forces the breakthrough they had been struggling to achieve since D-Day.5 Now the Supreme Commander’s plan to bring General Patton—the American master of mobile warfare—into play looked all the more prescient. Ike had held an incredibly impatient Patton in England while the first stages of the landing took place and the war in the hedgerows inched forward. Patton had long been bitter about what he accurately perceived as Ike’s willingness to accept British strategy and tactics in the North African, Sicilian, and Italian campaigns. Mollified to some extent by Eisenhower’s support after the infamous slapping incident, Patton’s critique of the Supreme Commander had blossomed again while he sat stewing in England, away from the action.6 Bradley sometimes echoed these complaints about Ike’s leadership.7
Eisenhower was, however, absolutely certain that in action Bradley as well as Patton would continue to provide the invasion force with strong, effective leadership. That would leave Ike the slack he needed to hold the Allied command tightly together, to ensure that every day the ground forces had the air support and the supplies and ammunition essential to a rapid advance, and to deal as effectively as possible with the brilliant, irrepressible General Charles de Gaulle.8
With a touch of cunning, Eisenhower could handle Patton and Bradley, but he was still not Machiavellian enough to manipulate de Gaulle. Having mastered the intricacies of French indecision in North Africa, Eisenhower was unprepared for the decisive, energetic advances of de Gaulle. Unlike Eisenhower—and, for that matter, President Roosevelt—de Gaulle was fixated on France’s future and his role in shaping that future. His imperious manner and clever maneuvers left Ike longing for an ally who would be less demanding and less aggressive about those demands. Then, Ike thought, he could get on with the central task of winning the war in the west.
How far Eisenhower was from winning in France was emphasized when the Allies created and then botched a good chance to capture a significant number of German troops in the Falaise Gap. Ike was optimistic as Patton pushed forward, outflanking the Nazi forces blocking Montgomery’s army.9 Monty was consistent. He employed the methodical tactics he had used in Sicily.10 Perhaps concerned to hold down British casualties, or perhaps just sticking to the approaches that had won him fame in North Africa, Monty left the gap open for the German retreat. Eisenhower was upset, but he chose not to change the Allied command structure at this crucial point in the campaign. He played by the book and quickly sent Bradley and Patton on a new mission, pushing toward the Seine and Paris.11
Now Patton’s tanks began to move forward at a pace that resembled Soviet operations on the Eastern Front. Encouraged by their success, Eisenhower did all he could to feed them the fuel and ammunition they needed to remain on the assault across the Seine. He refused Montgomery’s request to stop Patton’s advance and concentrate his attack through Monty’s Army of the North. This was the same type of request Ike had received from Montgomery in North Africa and Sicily. Both men were entirely consistent: Montgomery wanted everything, and Ike gave him a small part of what he wanted. Under pressure and running out of patience with Monty, Eisenhower continued to a remarkable degree to be the conciliator who kept patching the alliance together and pressing toward Germany. None of the commanders was happy and yet none was in open rebellion, which suggests that the compromise was close to optimal.12 And all the while, Ike’s hand was being strengthened by the mounting evidence that the British could no longer replace their losses.13
The New Order
On September 1, 1944, Eisenhower and the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) made a fateful change in the command structure. Monty would no longer be the top ground commander. Eisenhower had finally taken back the role he had lost when he was sandbagged at Casablanca. With Ike leading, Montgomery now headed a strengthened Army Group of the North and Bradley a Central Group, which included Patton’s Third Army. Bradley’s large force would absorb General Jacob L. Devers’s Seventh Army, which was pressing rapidly up from the south. The second invasion through the south of France was working just as Eisenhower and Marshall had planned. “Rapid” became the word of the day. Eisenhower used it five times in his message to his commanders, only once replacing it with “swiftly.” For General Marshall and the other chiefs, he carefully catalogued enemy losses: “The equivalent of five Panzer divisions have been destroyed and a further six severely mauled, including one Panzer Grenadier division. The equivalent of twenty infantry divisions have been eliminated and a further twelve very badly cut up and have suffered severe losses.” The German army had lost more than 200,000 prisoners of war and an equal number of soldiers killed or wounded. It was, Ike said, a “great victory.” There were signs, he suggested, that Germany was “nearing collapse.”14
To take full advantage of this promising situation, Eisenhower wanted to keep control of the air forces that had so far given his troops a decisive edge. He made it clear that those forces should include the Allied Expeditionary Air Force (for close tactical support) and, when needed, the US Strategic Air Force and Bomber Command, whose main task was attacking Germany’s industry and oil supplies. He had fought hard to keep both of those air commands under his supreme authority. He was opposed to any changes, but not to the point of threatening resignation. The CCS responded by shaving one corner off his supremacy. They yielded to the continued pressure from the air commanders by pulling the strategic bombing units out of Eisenhower’s control.15 Ike grumbled. Even Supreme Commanders can get the blues. But he told Marshall, “I have calmed down everybody and I assure you that I can make the system work.”16
By late September 1944, making the system work involved matters more mundane than the debate over strategic bombing. The question of whether the British and American bombers could by themselves force Germany to surrender would be settled in battle, without debate. Meanwhile, however, the Allied advance was running beyond the capacity of its supply lines to provide essential fuel and ammunition to the ground forces. “Our greatest difficulty at the moment,” Ike explained to Marshall, “is maintenance. We have advanced so rapidly that further movement in large parts of the front even against very weak opposition is almost impossible. We are now concentrating on complete destruction of the enemy in Belgium while pushing the siege of Brest and thrusting out our flanks in the Moselle. The closer we get to the Siegfried Line the more we will be stretched administratively and eventually a period of relative inactivity will be imposed upon us.”17
Inactivity was anathema to Patton and General Courtney Hodges (First Army), as well as General Bradley. Like Eisenhower, they were willing to gamble on their ability to squeeze supplies out of the existing network and push ahead to the Siegfried Line, Germany’s last formidable defense.18 Patton and General Hodges drove toward the Rhine but were forced to stop when their supplies ran out.19 Despite serious counterattacks, Patton’s men “capt
ured about 9,000 prisoners and knocked out 270 tanks.”20 They failed, however, to push into Germany, to break the West Wall, and to open the way to Berlin.
Patton fumed over the stalemate, while Montgomery continued to badger Ike over authority in the ground war. Over and over Monty demanded all of the supplies and insisted that all of the other attacks had to be stopped to ensure that his 21st Army could launch a fierce attack straight through the Ruhr and on to Berlin. He also wanted the command structure returned to the one that had existed on D-Day. He would then depose Ike and take hold of all the ground forces. This was a fantasy—even more so because his army had failed to open the port at Antwerp that offered the only realistic chance to improve the supply situation. Nothing that Ike said or did mollified the British general; Monty was certain that his strategy was correct. But Eisenhower was now convinced that Montgomery’s progress to the Rhine would be slow regardless of how much support he received.21
At this point in the campaign Ike’s optimism faltered a bit as German resistance stiffened. The attempt in the north to use an airborne operation, Market Garden, to gain a bridgehead across the Rhine failed.22 Insofar as Market Garden was also a cunning attempt to get Montgomery moving faster, it was a double failure. “From the outset,” historian Carlo D’Este writes, “Market Garden was a prescription for trouble that was plagued by mistakes, oversights, false assumptions, and outright arrogance.”23 The airborne divisions landed successfully. But they encountered German forces that were more effective than they had anticipated. When the British armored units failed to link up with the troops landed by parachute and gliders, the Allied effort to force their way across the Rhine collapsed. All of the principals and a host of historians would argue over the responsibility for the failure, but the issue was actually very simple. By his own choice and the decision of his bosses, military and political, Ike was now the top ground commander. Whether he acknowledged it or not, he accrued every victory and every defeat—large or small. This included Market Garden.24
It was apparent by the end of September that there would probably be some more defeats and disappointments. Nazi Germany was not collapsing and the German army was still a well-trained, disciplined force. “We have a long ways to go here,” Eisenhower wrote, “because of the intention of the enemy … to continue the most bitter kind of resistance up to the point of practical extermination of the last of his armed forces.”25 He worried about “a nasty little ‘Kasserine’ if the enemy chooses at any place to concentrate a bit of strength.”26 But his major concern was getting supplies moving so his forces in the north, center, and south could push ahead into Germany. He thought about the port at Antwerp constantly. Without supplies, the Allies were not ready for “the deep drive into Germany.”27
When Eisenhower was not worrying about supplies or Monty’s endless suggestions, he had a deskful of other problems to consider. He was forced to take note of the internal politics in France, including the role of the communists—subjects on which he had very little to say.28 After the Quebec Conference (September 12–16, 1944), he also had to start thinking about the problems of the impending occupation, and he noted nervously that the proposed settlement had chipped away for the second time at some of his authority as Supreme Commander.29 He began as well to think about actually meeting the Russian forces and avoiding problems.30 And he worried that if Soviet pressure in the east was reduced, it might complicate his campaign.31
Stalin’s Strategy
On August 17, a Soviet soldier planted a red battle flag on the German frontier in East Prussia, and Stalin’s forces continued to chop at German strength all along the front.32 Stalin never lost sight of his main goal: to envelop and grind down the Wehrmacht’s divisions. Rail centers were important, as were roads and waterways. But the Soviet general staff and its sole leader focused throughout on the destruction of Germany’s military forces in the east. By the fall of 1944, the Soviets calculated that they had eliminated ninety-six German divisions and twenty-four brigades. They had killed or captured 1.5 million enemy soldiers. Rumania and Finland had been forced out of the war, and the Soviets were steadily pressing in on Budapest.33 Between August and October, German casualties exceeded their replacements by nearly half a million. Like Britain—but more critically—Germany was simply running out of men.34
Still, there were 3 million troops and 4,000 tanks resisting the Soviet advance. Germany could bring at least 2,000 planes into combat in the east.35 The Soviets recognized that the resistance in the northern wing of their advance through East Prussia would be especially fierce, so they looked to the south for a softer target. But here, too, the German army fought skillfully in retreat, and the front stabilized as the Soviet drive lost momentum. Stalin was impatient to reach the Nazi capital, but Marshal Georgy Zhukov convinced him that further attacks would yield only casualties.36 Stalin had twice as many men and three times as many tanks as the Wehrmacht, but he nevertheless put his forces temporarily on the defensive. Along the entire front, the Red Army paused to rearm and regroup for what its leaders and certainly its soldiers hoped would be the final thrust into Germany.37
A Deadly Interlude
Ike, too, was regrouping and rearming in the West. The approaches to the vital port of Antwerp had finally been cleared of German defenders, and supplies of fuel and ammunition were beginning to be restored.38 His November campaign had, however, ground along more slowly than he planned, and even General Patton, the master of mobility, was only creeping ahead—that is, when his Third Army was moving at all. Germany’s West Wall held up as the weather worsened and tied down Allied air support. In early November 1944, Eisenhower’s armies and the Soviets were an equal distance from Berlin, but it was already clear that neither would be able to defeat Germany that year. Their armies were at rest. The situation was so quiet that General Montgomery returned to England in mid-December to spend Christmas with his son.39
What neither Montgomery, Ike, Bradley, nor their intelligence officers knew was that Hitler had made a crucial decision that would shortly change their Christmas plans and the lives of many of their soldiers. Threatened in both the east and the west, Hitler and his generals had been forced to decide which front most needed support. The generals made the decision that Eisenhower and the CCS anticipated: Germany was most threatened from the east, and additional divisions were needed there to counter the next great Soviet offensive. The German staff anticipated an attack all across the front in December, and Colonel-General Heinz Guderian recommended an immediate move to counter the Soviet offensive.
But Hitler refused once again to accept the advice of his experienced generals. Instead, he wanted extra divisions in the west to mount an attack in force that could catch the Allies off guard, cut off Montgomery’s army in the north, and stop the Allied offensive along Germany’s West Wall. The Führer and Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS and the Replacement Army, predicted that the Soviets would not attack in force. Germany had time, they thought, and could move troops back after their anticipated success against the Allies. For the present, Hitler decided to pull twenty-five divisions into his latest and wildest plan to save the Third Reich.40
On December 16, the German army struck in the Ardennes and set out to split the Allies, retake Antwerp, and deal a deadly blow to Eisenhower’s forces. Ike, the ground commander, was surprised by the size of the attack. There had been an inkling of evidence when German divisions moved to the west from the Hungarian and East Prussian fronts. But Eisenhower was optimistic about the strength of his Allied force—as many as eighty-seven divisions and 6,000 tanks—and was convinced that the “enemy is badly stretched on this front.”41 He might as well have been talking about his own forces, which were aligned across a broad front and spread very thinly across the Ardennes.42
When the Nazi forces struck, Eisenhower tried to set in motion flanking attacks from both sides of the German salient. What he first saw as a “rather ambitious counterattack” had become by December 18 “a major thrust thr
ough the Ardennes.”43 Ike brought Patton, master of the unplanned battle, into play from the south, driving his Third Army toward the vital crossroads at Bastogne. There the 101st Airborne Division and a scattering of other units held their ground, surrounded by the enemy. Moving with unusual speed, Patton swung into an attack on the German flank with three divisions. When the skies cleared on December 23–24, air raids on the German armor weakened their advance, and Patton’s 4th Armored Division reached Bastogne on the twenty-sixth.44
Eisenhower’s original concept of the Allied response in the Ardennes involved an envelopment of the Nazi forces, with Montgomery’s 21st Army pressing down from the north of the salient. To facilitate that part of the campaign, he gave Monty authority over the American forces operating on his side of the German offensive. Once again, however, Ike was disappointed with the outcome. As in Sicily, as at Caen and the Falaise Gap, Monty was slow to move, always preparing but never pressing with the urgency that Eisenhower sought.45 If the Supreme Commander needed further evidence to support his decision to mount two major drives against Germany instead of concentrating only on Montgomery’s northern offensive, the battles of December 1945 provided Ike with everything he needed to know. He could not, of course, frame the issue in public in those personal terms. Monty was Britain’s national hero. Ike still had to do everything he could to hold the alliance together, as he had from the beginning of his service as Supreme Commander. He continued to nudge Montgomery, as he had before, about taking the port at Antwerp.46 But the British field marshal was not a man to be eased out of his deeply planted habits of mind and command.
Ike’s smooth exterior and conciliatory approach to leadership were now about to crack. The Supreme Commander’s patience had limits, and he had grown tougher about those limits as the war progressed. Neither Bradley nor Montgomery was able to deliver the crushing blow Ike had hoped for. As the front stabilized, the “Bulge” was still there. So was Monty’s constant badgering. Unable to let go of the issue, Monty sent yet another message to Eisenhower proposing that he command both his 21st Army Group and Bradley’s 12th Army Group. The tone of the message was almost as infuriating as the content, and Ike finally exploded. He prepared to take the issue to the CCS and, in effect, give his bosses the choice between Montgomery and himself. Only the intervention of Montgomery’s talented chief of staff kept the two leaders in their respective positions.47 Montgomery apologized and backed down. But the issue did not evaporate. It would hang over the campaign and the histories of the war like a deadly industrial smog. British arguments in the CCS kept the question alive, but Ike remained securely in control of a campaign that would shortly continue on a broad front.48
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