On the other side of the hill, the Allied armies’ dash across France amid rejoicing crowds infused commanders and soldiers alike with a sense of intoxication. GI Edwin Wood wrote of the exhilaration of pursuit: ‘To be nineteen years old, to be nineteen and an infantryman, to be nineteen and fight for the liberation of France from the Nazis in the summer of 1944! That time of hot and cloudless blue days when the honeybees buzzed about our heads and we shouted strange phrases in words we did not understand to men and women who cheered us as if we were gods … For that glorious moment, the dream of freedom lived and we were ten feet tall.’ Sir Arthur Harris asserted that, thanks to the support of the RAF’s and USAAF’s bombers, the armies in France had enjoyed ‘a walkover’. This was a gross exaggeration, characteristic of the rhetoric of both British and American air chiefs, but it was certainly true that in the autumn of 1944 the Western Allies liberated France and Belgium at much lower human cost than their leaders had anticipated. A flood of Ultra-intercepted signals revealed the despair of Hitler’s generals, the ruin of their forces. This in turn induced in Eisenhower and his subordinates a brief and ill-judged carelessness. With the Germans on their knees, unprecedented rewards seemed available for risk-taking: Montgomery persuaded Eisenhower that in his own northern sector of the front, there was an opportunity to launch a war-winning thrust, to seize a bridge over the Rhine at the Dutch town of Arnhem, across which Allied forces might flood into Germany.
It remains a focus of fierce controversy whether the Western Allied armies should have been able to win the war in 1944, following the Wehrmacht’s collapse in France. It is just plausible that, with a greater display of command energy, Hodges’ US First Army could have broken through the Siegfried Line around Aachen. Patton believed that he could have done great things if his tanks had been granted the necessary fuel, but this is doubtful: the southern sector, where his army stood, was difficult ground; until April 1945 its German defenders exploited a succession of hill positions and rivers to check Patton’s advance. The Allies spent the vital early September days catching their breath after the dash eastward. Patch’s Seventh Army, which had landed in the south of France on 15 August and driven north up the Rhône valley against slight opposition, met Patton’s men at Châtillon-sur-Seine on 12 September. Lt. Gen. Jake Devers became commander of the new Franco-American 6th Army Group, deployed on the Allied right flank. Eisenhower’s forces now held an unbroken front from the Channel to the Swiss border.
The Allied Breakout from Normandy
But they still lacked a usable major port. The French rail system was largely wrecked. Some planners complained that the Allied pre-D-Day bombing had been overdone, but this seems a judgement that could be made only once the Normandy battle was safely won. The movement of fuel, ammunition and supplies for two million men by roads alone posed enormous problems. Almost every ton of supplies had to be trucked hundreds of miles from the beaches to the armies, though Marseilles soon began to make an important contribution. ‘Until we get Antwerp,’ Eisenhower wrote to Marshall, ‘we are always going to be operating on a shoestring.’ Many tanks and vehicles needed maintenance. In much the same fashion that the Wehrmacht allowed the British to escape from the Continent amid German euphoria in 1940, an outbreak of Allied ‘victory disease’ permitted their enemies now to regroup. By the time Montgomery launched Operation Market Garden, his ambitious dash for the Rhine, the Germans had regained their balance. Their strategic predicament remained irrecoverable, but they displayed persistent stubbornness in local defence, matched by aggressive energy in responding to Allied initiatives.
On 17 September, three Allied airborne divisions landed in Holland: the US 82nd and 101st were tasked to seize river and canal crossings between the Allied front line and Arnhem; the British 1st Airborne to capture the Rhine bridge and hold a perimeter beyond it. The entire formation was dispatched to a drop zone north of the great river. The American operations were largely successful, though German demolitions at Zon enforced delay while a replacement Bailey bridge was brought forward. The British, however, furthest from Montgomery’s relieving force, ran into immediate difficulties. Ultra had revealed that the remains of 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions were refitting at Arnhem. Allied commanders discounted their presence, because the formations had been so ravaged in Normandy, but the Germans responded to the sudden British descent with their usual impressive violence. Scratch local forces, many of them made up of rear-area administrative and support personnel, improvised blocking positions that drastically delayed the paratroopers’ march to the bridge. Model, Hitler’s favourite ‘fireman’ of the Eastern Front, was on hand to direct the German response. Some elements of 1st Airborne Division displayed a notable lack of verve and tactical skill: they were broken up and destroyed piecemeal while attempting to advance into Arnhem. Even the small number of German armoured vehicles within reach of the town were able to maul airborne units which had few anti-tank weapons and no tanks.
The lone battalion that reached the bridge could hold positions only at its northern end, separated from the relieving armoured force by the Rhine and a rapidly growing number of Germans. The British decision to drop 1st Airborne outside Arnhem imposed a four-hour pause between the opening of the first parachute canopies and Lt. Col. John Frost’s arrival on foot at the bridge; this provided the Germans in their vehicles with far too generous a margin of time to respond. The British might have seized the Rhine crossing by dropping glider-borne coup de main parties directly onto the objective, as the Germans had done in Holland in 1940, and the British at the Caen Canal on D-Day. Such an initiative would have certainly cost lives, but far fewer than were lost battering a path into Arnhem. As it was, from the afternoon of the 17th onwards, the British in and around the town were merely struggling for survival, having already forfeited any realistic prospect of fulfilling their objectives.
There was, however, an even more fundamental flaw in Montgomery’s plan, which would probably have scotched his ambitions even if British paratroopers had secured both sides of the bridge. The relieving force needed to cover the fifty-nine miles from the Meuse–Escaut Canal to Arnhem in three days, with access to only a single Dutch road – a cross-country advance was impossible, because the ground was too soft for armour. Within minutes of crossing the start-line, Guards Armoured Division was in trouble as its leading tanks were knocked out by German anti-tank weapons, and supporting British infantry became bogged down in local firefights. The American airborne formations did all that could have been expected of them in securing key crossings, but the Allied advance was soon behind schedule. The Germans were able to make their own deployments in full knowledge of Allied intentions, because they found the operational plan for Market Garden on the body of a US staff officer who had recklessly carried it into battle; within hours, the document was on the desk of Model, who exploited his insight to the full.
On 20 September, when XXX Corps belatedly reached Nijmegen, paratroopers of Gavin’s 82nd Airborne made a heroic crossing of the Waal in assault boats under devastating fire. They secured a perimeter on the far bank which enabled Guards Armoured’s tanks to cross the bridge, miraculously intact. There was then another twenty-four-hour delay, incomprehensible to the Americans, before the British felt ready to resume their advance on Arnhem. In truth the time loss was unimportant. The battle was already lost: the Germans were committed in strength to defend the southern approaches to Arnhem. Residual resistance by the British paratroopers on the far bank was irrelevant, and Montgomery acknowledged failure. On the night of 25 September, 2,000 men of 1st Airborne Division were ferried to safety across the Rhine downstream from Arnhem, while almost 2,000 others escaped by other means, leaving behind 6,000 who became prisoners. Some 1,485 British paratroopers were killed, around 16 per cent of each unit engaged, and 1st Airborne Division was disbanded; 474 airmen were also killed during the operation. Meanwhile the US 82nd Airborne suffered 1,432 casualties and the 101st 2,118. The Germans lost 1,300 dead and 453 Dutc
h civilians were killed, many of them by Allied bombing.
Apologists for Market Garden, notably including Montgomery, asserted that it achieved substantial success, by leaving the Allies in possession of a deep salient into Holland. This was nonsense, for it was a cul-de-sac which took the Allies nowhere until February 1945. For eight weeks after the Arnhem battle, the two US airborne divisions were obliged to fight hard to hold the ground they won in September, though it had become strategically worthless. The Arnhem assault was a flawed concept for which the chances of success were negligible. The British commanders charged with executing it, notably Lt. Gen. Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, displayed shameful incompetence, and merited dismissal with ignominy rather than the honours they received, in a classic British propaganda operation intended to dignify disaster.
Montgomery’s cardinal error was that he succumbed to the lust for glory which often deflected Allied commanders from their cause’s best strategic interests. General Jake Devers, one of the ablest though least celebrated American army group commanders of the war, wrote afterwards about the inevitability of differences between nations on ways and means, even if they were united in the goal of defeating the enemy: ‘This is not only true of men at the highest political level … it is a natural trait of professional military men … It is unreasonable to expect that the military representatives of nations who are serving under unified command will subordinate promptly and freely their own views to those of a commander of another nationality, unless the commander … has convinced them that it is to their national interests individually and collectively.’ Because Eisenhower lacked a coherent vision, his subordinates were often left to compete for and pursue their own. Montgomery’s ambition personally to deliver a war-winning thrust, fortified by conceit, caused him to undertake the only big operation for which the Allied armies could generate logistic support that autumn across the terrain least suited to its success. He failed to recognise that the clearing of the Scheldt approaches, to enable Antwerp to operate as an Allied supply base, was a much more important and plausible objective for his army. To use a nursery analogy, in thrusting for a Rhine bridge the Allied leadership’s eyes were bigger than their stomachs.
British land worker Muriel Green revealed to her diary a surge of depression such as infected every Allied nation on hearing news of the Arnhem failure. ‘We all thought the war was so nearly over and now we hear of such sacrifice of lives it makes me miserable. I suppose we are taking victory so much for granted it makes such disasters seem worse.’ As the war entered its final phase, it became ever harder for families to endure the loss of loved ones with whom they yearned to share the fruits of peace. Ivor Rowberry, a twenty-two-year-old trainee accountant killed while serving as a signaller with the South Staffordshires, left behind words for his parents which reflected the sentiments of many fighting men of many nations:
This … is a letter I hoped you would never receive … Tomorrow we go into action. As yet we do not know exactly what our job will be, but no doubt it will be a dangerous one in which many lives will be lost – mine may be one of those lives. Well, Mom, I am not afraid to die. I like this life, yes – for the past two years I have planned and dreamed and mapped out a perfect future for myself. I would have liked that future to materialize, but it is not what I will but what God wills, and if by sacrificing all this I leave the world slightly better than I found it I am perfectly willing to make that sacrifice. Don’t get me wrong though, Mom, I am no flag-waving patriot … England’s a great little country – the best there is – but I cannot honestly say that it is ‘worth fighting for’. Nor can I fancy myself in the role of a gallant crusader fighting for the liberation of Europe. It would be a nice thought but I would only be kidding myself. No, Mom, my little world is centred around you and including Dad, everyone at home, and my friends at W[olverhamp]ton – That is worth fighting for – and if by doing so it strengthens your security and improves your lot in any way, then it is worth dying for too.
Allied hopes of breaking into Germany – even of winning the war in 1944 – did not immediately collapse at the end of September, with the failure of Market Garden. Instead, they shrank progressively during the weeks that followed, as their soldiers floundered into a sea of mud and local disappointments. Too much historical attention has focused on the drama of the dash for Arnhem; even had Montgomery secured a Rhine bridge, it is implausible that he could have exploited this to break through into Germany. More promising possibilities lay in the path of Hodges’ First US Army, around Aachen just inside the German frontier; in early and mid-September, this nearest sector of Hitler’s West Wall was scarcely defended, yet between the 12th and 15th the Americans failed in a succession of unconvincing attempts to break through. Hodges was the least impressive US Army commander, and his autumn operations were conducted with notable clumsiness. Five more weeks elapsed before First Army occupied the ruins of Aachen. If Patton had commanded there, it is just possible that a quick breach in the West Wall might have been achieved. As it was, his Third Army battered at Metz through September, cursing the incessant rain, to no consequence except that of a mounting casualty list.
Hodges’ next serious error was to launch his army into a desperate, bloody two-month struggle to clear the Huertgen forest, which was thought to threaten his right flank and rear. Four American divisions in turn suffered misery, heavy losses and soaring combat-fatigue rates in the dense woodland. The Germans doggedly held their ground, imposing a price for each small advance, and by the time First Army emerged onto the Roer plain in early December, all hopes of an early victory had perished. Montgomery’s armies, meanwhile, were obliged to spend the autumn clearing the Scheldt estuary to open Antwerp. This was a task that might have been fulfilled in days in mid-September, when the enemy was in disarray; in October and November, however, it required months of hard fighting in waterlogged terrain. Again and again, units launched attacks along narrow open causeways exposed to withering German fire.
The Scheldt estuary was defended not by SS panzers or elite infantry formations, but by the 70th ‘White Bread’ Division, formed from medical cases, which a German naval officer described as ‘an apathetic, undisciplined mob’. Yet it required no great skill to fire machine-guns and mortars at attackers exposed in plain view: for weeks, these ailing Germans frustrated the best of the Canadian Army. The CO of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada wrote of ‘the utter misery of the conditions and the great courage required to do the simplest things. Attacks had to go on along dykes swept by enemy fire. To go through the polder meant wading, without possibility of concealment, in water that at times came up to the chest. Mortar fire, at which the Germans were masters, crashed at every rallying point … It was peculiarly a rifleman’s fight in that there were no great decisive battles, just a steady continuous struggle.’ Most attacks had to be conducted by platoon-sized forces, advancing on a one-man front. So deadly was German automatic fire that the proportion of fatalities to wounded men was 50 per cent higher than usual.
After a week fighting in the Breskens pocket, a single Canadian brigade had lost 533 men, including 111 killed. By the end of November, one division committed had suffered 2,077 casualties including 544 killed or missing, and the other lost 3,650 casualties in thirty-three days, 405 men from each of its rifle battalions. This represented a rate of loss almost as heavy as that the Canadian troops suffered in the November 1917 Passchendaele battle, generally regarded as one of the worst experiences of World War I. Even low-grade German defenders could a hold a line in country where armour could not operate, bunkers provided protection against all but direct hits, and the treeless landscape offered no scope for tactical subtlety.
The 1 November amphibious assault on Walcheren island was a messy and expensive business, and a week’s hard fighting was required before the Germans surrendered. The first Allied convoy to unload at Antwerp arrived only on 28 November. Given the decisive impact of supply problems on the Allied armies from late August onwards, and t
he miracle that Antwerp’s docks had been captured intact in September, failure to seize the Scheldt approaches proved the worst single mistake of the campaign. Responsibility stretched all the way down the Allied command chain from Eisenhower. But Montgomery was the man with operational responsibility, the general who considered himself a master of war, and he must bear principal blame. ‘By the winter Americans had ceased to regard Monty as amusing,’ said Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, ‘and in the cases of [Bedell] Smith and Bradley … contempt had grown into active hatred.’
The Western Allies lost a small chance of breaking into Germany in September – small, because probability suggests that they lacked sufficient combat power to win the war in 1944 – because they succumbed to the euphoria of victory in France. They lacked energy and imagination to improvise expedients to overcome their supply problems, as an advancing German army might have done. It is also arguable that the large resources committed to Pacific operations in 1944, in defiance of the ‘Germany First’ strategy, denied Eisenhower the margin of men and shipping which might just have enabled his armies to deliver a war-winning punch. Both the US and British armies were chronically short of infantry, and over-weighted with redundant anti-aircraft and anti-tank units. In Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, these absorbed 47,120 precious men, 7.1 per cent of total strength, while in Normandy only 82,000 of 662,000 British soldiers deployed were riflemen. In the course of the winter some AA and AT units were broken up and their personnel transferred to the infantry, but until the end of the campaign too few British and American soldiers were fighting, too many performing marginal roles. Allied tactics were adversely influenced by the degree to which their armies made themselves prisoners of vehicles.
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