The Supreme Commander

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Montgomery had captured the remainder of Caen and some of the plain to the southeast, gained a few square miles, and used up the bulk of the remaining German reserves. He announced he was satisfied with the results.42

  Eisenhower was livid. He thundered that it had taken more than seven thousand tons of bombs to gain seven miles and that the Allies could hardly hope to go through France paying a price of a thousand tons of bombs per mile.43 Tedder discussed “the Army’s failure” with Portal, and they “agreed in regarding Montgomery as the cause.”44 Staff officers wondered whether Montgomery should be made a peer and sent into the House of Lords or given the governorship of Malta.45 When General Dempsey asked what all the fuss was about—there had never been any intention of achieving a breakout, he pointed out—the reaction was even more intense.*

  Montgomery had set the stage for one of the great victories of modern military history, but no one knew that at the time. And meanwhile, he had failed to give Eisenhower the kind of operation the Supreme Commander expected, wanted, and thought he was getting. Had a senior British RAF or Navy officer done anything remotely similar, Eisenhower probably would have sacked him via the device of requesting action from the head of the service. In Montgomery’s case this option was not open. The head of the British Army, Brooke, was a strong Montgomery supporter, had no real confidence in Eisenhower, understood the basic idea in GOODWOOD and agreed with it, and would have used his position and powers to prevent any change in leadership in Twenty-first Army Group.46

  Eisenhower might have turned to Churchill, but the Prime Minister would have been reluctant to take action because of Montgomery’s prestige. El Alamein was far from being one of the great battles in history, but it was the only major victory the British had had in the first three years of the war. The British public had desperately needed a hero and after El Alamein the government deliberately built up Montgomery so much that no other general in the war, including Rommel, enjoyed such high prestige. Churchill would have found it difficult to face the political repercussions of relieving him.

  After the war Eisenhower said he felt the powers of a supreme commander should be greater. He thought the supreme commander of one nationality should be in a position to dismiss an inefficient or recalcitrant subordinate general of another.47 As it was, however, there was nothing Eisenhower could do in 1944, and in any case the factors that prevented Churchill from acting came to bear just as strongly on Eisenhower. Sensitive to the morale factor, Eisenhower was unwilling even to consider asking for Montgomery’s removal. Still, he did have a war to fight and felt he could not allow Montgomery to continue to act so independently. He needed to devise a system that would insure that Montgomery directed his operations toward the objectives SHAEF set for Twenty-first Army Group.

  Tedder also felt this need strongly. Early on July 21 SHAEF learned of the attempt on Hitler’s life the previous day by members of the German high command. Tedder told Eisenhower that “Montgomery’s failure to take action earlier had lost us the opportunity offered by the attempt on Hitler’s life” and asked Eisenhower to act at once. Tedder later recorded that he intended, if Eisenhower did not act firmly, “to put my views in writing to the British Chiefs of Staff. I told Eisenhower that his own people would be thinking that he had sold them to the British if he continued to support Montgomery without protest.” Later, Tedder attended Smith’s regular morning meeting and said it was imperative that the Allies get to Pas de Calais quickly to overrun the enemy’s flying-bomb sites. Smith said the Allies were in fact not going to get there soon. Tedder commented, “Then we must change our leaders for men who will get us there.”48

  Eisenhower, meanwhile, had drafted and sent a letter to Montgomery. “I think that so far as we can foresee we are at this moment relatively stronger than we can probably hope to be at any time in the near future,” the Supreme Commander said. “Time is vital.” The Allies had to hit with all the force they had, and do it quickly. When GOODWOOD began, Eisenhower confessed, “I thought that at last we had him [the enemy] and were going to roll him up. That did not come about.” He thought Montgomery ought to insist that Dempsey keep up the strength of his attack, that he put all his forces into action, since in the long run it would save lives. Eisenhower pointed out that eventually the Americans would have many more troops in Europe than the British, “but while we have equality in size we must go forward shoulder to shoulder, with honors and sacrifices equally shared.”49

  Tedder saw a copy of Eisenhower’s letter that afternoon. He was upset because he had not seen it before dispatch, and told a member of his staff that it was “not strong enough. Montgomery can evade it. It contains no order.”50 For the immediate future, Montgomery’s situation was not crucial, however, since, as Eisenhower had noted in his letter, “now we are pinning our … hopes on Bradley.” More important was that the stalemate in Normandy was coloring the Supreme Commander’s thinking about other problems, most particularly the German V-weapons and landings in southern France.

  * In an interview on October 27, 1967, Bradley said he expected to fight in the hedgerows but did not visualize the difficulties involved. The lack of information on the hedgerows seems to be decisive in determining the question, Did Montgomery change his plans? If he had really expected to fight the major battle on his right he would have ordered intensive studies of the terrain. Of course, the change in plans only showed how flexible he could be, a usually unnoticed virtue in Montgomery.

  * In his memoirs, Bradley emphasizes that Montgomery’s condescension, which caused so much irritation later, did not appear during the Normandy campaign, where Montgomery “exercised his Allied authority with wisdom, forbearance, and restraint.” Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (New York, 1951), pp. 319–20. Bradley also emphasized that he understood and agreed with Montgomery’s over-all plan. Ibid., p. 325.

  * Major Ellis’ conclusions need to be considered here. He points out that Montgomery and Bradley regarded GOODWOOD as a preliminary to COBRA (Bradley’s late July breakout), with the two operations so closely connected in fact that they could be considered one. Had Bradley been able to mount COBRA the day after GOODWOOD ended, Ellis feels, there would have been no confusion or displeasure with Montgomery. But bad weather held up COBRA, and it therefore seemed that the mighty expenditure of effort for GOODWOOD had been wasted. “The truth is that at this time the unaccommodating behaviour of the weather provided the only real grounds for complaint.” The Battle of Normandy (London, 1962), p. 358. The trouble with this analysis is that no one at SHAEF suspected that GOODWOOD and COBRA were related.

  CHAPTER 8

  CROSSBOW and ANVIL Again

  On June 13 four flying bombs (V-1s) landed in southeast England. On June 15 the German attack began in earnest. It had an immediate effect. “Most of the people I know,” Butcher declared four days after the attack started, “are semidazed from loss of sleep and have the jitters, which they show when a door bangs or the sounds of motors, from motorcycles to aircraft, are heard.”1

  The Allies had long known of the German experiments with flying bombs and their successors, rockets. In August 1943 COSSAC and Bomber Command had directed an attack on the German research station at Peenemuende on the Baltic Sea, and in December Bomber Command carried out a series of raids against the German launching sites in the Pas de Calais area. The results seemed impressive, and by March 1944 SHAEF felt that the direct effects of enemy V-weapons were among the “smaller hazards of war to which OVERLORD is liable.” In April the air forces reported that of the 96 sites attacked, 65 were so badly damaged as to be unusable. By D-Day the number of neutralized sites was up to 86 (of a total of 97). Seemingly, CROSSBOW, code name for the operation, was a success and the challenge of the V-weapons had apparently been met and overcome.2

  But unfortunately this was not to be the case. In the next two months the V-1s killed more than 5000 people, injured 35,000 more, and destroyed some 30,000 buildings.3 For the war-weary English, this was a major disaster.
The attacks were not especially damaging to actual military capabilities, but it was the moral effect that mattered. At first Churchill hoped to ignore them. On June 16 he talked with Tedder and said he would refuse to allow the flying bombs to upset Allied concentration on the battle in Normandy. Two days later he had changed his mind. On June 18 he came to Widewing to meet with Eisenhower and Tedder. He had had to order a halt to all anti-aircraft fire in the London area and try to knock the V-1s down over non-populated areas, for when a flying bomb was hit it plummeted to earth and exploded. The program was not working well, however, and it was increasingly obvious that the only way to nullify the threat was to get the weapons at their source, either by bombing the sites or by actually overrunning them on the ground. Since the armies were still bottled up in Normandy, the latter policy was not feasible. Churchill therefore turned to Eisenhower, who controlled the air forces, and asked him to make the launching sites the first priority for Eighth Air Force and Bomber Command. Eisenhower agreed and told Tedder to see that it was done. That afternoon the Supreme Commander put the order in writing, instructing Tedder to keep CROSSBOW targets at the top of the priority list (except for the urgent requirements of the battle in Normandy), “until we can be certain that we have definitely gotten the upper hand of this particular menace.”4

  The attacks began in earnest, but results were not satisfactory. It developed that it was fairly easy for the Germans to repair damaged launching sites, so efforts were transferred over to hitting supply sites and storage dumps, which in turn meant that it would take some time before the effectiveness of the bombing could be judged.5 Whatever the results, the pressure to do something, anything, was great, and Eisenhower continued to emphasize CROSSBOW. On June 23 he reminded Smith that the air forces had two, possibly three, months of good flying weather left in 1944, so “we should strive in every possible way to make the maximum use of our air” during that period. Spaatz and Harris had been complaining about ignoring strategic targets in Germany, but Eisenhower insisted that there were five operations that came before the strategic campaign—close support of ground forces, the Transportation Plan, airborne operations, supply of troops by air, and now most of all CROSSBOW.6

  Spaatz and Harris had co-operated handsomely in CROSSBOW, putting forty per cent of the bomber effort into the program, but both were, in Tedder’s words, “not unnaturally anxious to return to the kind of operation which seemed to them to offer the prospect of decisive, early triumph.”7 On June 28 Spaatz urged Eisenhower to make a basic policy decision. He thought that, on days when the weather made visual bombings over Germany possible, the bombers should concentrate on operations “designed to deny the German Armies the means to continue resistance.” Spaatz agreed to two exceptions to strategic bombing: (1) a major emergency involving ground forces and (2) CROSSBOW. But on those few days when weather over Germany was suitable, Spaatz still felt the most useful operations were attacks on the Reich itself, for operations by bombers against CROSSBOW targets or for tactical ground support just were not as relatively effective. The bombers, in short, were, he felt, being misused, although Spaatz was willing to continue CROSSBOW for its moral effect—it did give the British public the feeling that something was being done.8

  Spaatz’ arguments brought to the fore the disagreement and even bitterness latent in the question of the proper use of air power. The airmen remained committed to the belief that their primary role was to destroy Germany’s potential to make war. Ground commanders, while often agreeing with this view at least for conversational purposes, tended to call on the bombers for close-in support nearly every day. This was especially true during the discouraging period when the armies were penned up in Normandy. Eventually the air commanders began to mutter that the ground commanders were “too hesitant in spirit and too reluctant to take advantage of favorable situations which air effort had brought about.”9 The political need for CROSSBOW was obvious to all, and the airmen complained less about that program, but they still were not very pleased about the priority it received.

  Eisenhower rejected Spaatz’ arguments. The Supreme Commander told Tedder, “Instructions for continuing to make CROSSBOW targets our first priority must stand,” and adding that CROSSBOW, the Transportation Plan, oil, and everything else “must give way … to emergencies in the land battle.…”10

  Still the flying bombs came. By early July, with Montgomery as far from breaking out as ever, the Prime Minister began to grow desperate. He began to toy with the idea of reprisal, of warning the Germans that unless the V-weapons attacks ceased the Allies would wipe out certain named towns in Germany. Portal was opposed, for he felt it would be a mistake to enter into what amounted to negotiations with the enemy, since this would provide them with proof of the success of the flying-bomb campaign. He also thought that retaliation would not alter the German plan. In any case, for the Allies to bomb civilian population centers would merely divert effort from attacking targets directly connected with Germany’s power to carry on the war. Cunningham felt the threat of retaliation might have some effect and that “we should not lightly discard anything which offered a chance of stopping the flying-bomb attacks.” But Brooke agreed with Portal.11

  The decision rested with Eisenhower, and at the bottom of the minutes of the BCOS meeting where the issue had been discussed, the Supreme Commander wrote a memorandum to Tedder. “As I have before indicated,” Eisenhower declared, “I am opposed to retaliation as a method of stopping this business—at least until every other thing has been tried and failed. Please continue to oppose.” On July 5th BCOS discussed the possibility of using gas against CROSSBOW installations. Eisenhower told Tedder that he would refuse to be a party to the use of gas: “Let’s, for God’s sake, keep our eyes on the ball and use some sense.”12

  That gas could even be considered revealed how badly Britain was being hurt and how poorly CROSSBOW was doing in eliminating the threat. It had become clear that the only way to stop the attacks was to overrun the V-l launching sites. This in turn added to the pressure, already great, to break out of the beachhead. The problem, as SHAEF saw it, was Montgomery. Tedder complained that Montgomery could be “neither removed nor moved” to action.13

  Intimately connected with CROSSBOW and the stalemate was the question of what to do in the Mediterranean. On June 5 Wilson’s forces in Italy had liberated Rome, and it had long been assumed by the JCS that when the capital had been reached operations in Italy would shut down. This in turn meant that the Allies would have, potentially, a large strategic reserve in the Mediterranean. The proper use of this reserve now became a matter of hot dispute, forcing Eisenhower into “one of the longest-sustained arguments that I had with Prime Minister Churchill throughout … the war.”14

  When ANVIL was canceled in the spring, the Americans had thought of it as only being delayed and felt it would go ahead when the needed landing craft were available. Not so the British, who had never liked ANVIL. Consequently the CCS had considered four possibilities for the use of reserve forces in the Mediterranean, without reaching a decision: a descent on Bordeaux, for a thrust into central France; a landing near Séte in the Gulf of Lion, for a thrust northwest; a landing in the Marseilles-Toulon area, followed by a thrust northward up the Rhône Valley (ANVIL); and a landing at the head of the Adriatic, to turn the German flank in Italy and to aid the Yugoslav partisans. Alexander added another possibility. He proposed to keep all his forces in Italy, drive overland up the peninsula to the Lombard plain, and then a thrust either eastward into northern Yugoslavia and toward Austria, or westward into southern France.15 A landing north of the Seine River was never considered, probably because the German defenses in the Pas de Calais were too strong.

  Wilson’s resources were limited, so only one of the proposed plans could be carried out. Each had something to recommend it. A landing at Bordeaux or Sète would set central France aflame, open a port through which U.S. divisions could enter the Continent, and improve the supply situation. ANVIL would a
ccomplish the same objectives, although at higher cost, provide a better port, and threaten the German flank between Burgundy and Switzerland. An Allied force at the head of the Adriatic would help to contain and disrupt the German forces already pinned in Yugoslavia and threaten the southern flank of the German homeland. Driving north to the Lombard plain would hold German troops in the Italian Peninsula and give the Allies options when the goal was reached.

  Much has been written, and much claimed, about the arguments that ensued. A great deal of what has been said has been colored by the Cold War that followed so quickly on the heels of the hot one. To generalize, the British have accused the Americans of being shortsighted, of having only one objective—to defeat Germany—and of having no idea at all as to what kind of Europe they wanted in place of one dominated by the Nazis. The British claim they recognized the threat of the Red Army and the dangers inherent in the vacuum that would be created upon the unconditional surrender of Germany. Some power had to flow into the Balkans, southern Germany and Austria, and even central Europe when the Wehrmacht retreated; better that it be the British and Americans than the Russians.16

  Mark Clark agreed with the British position. In his memoirs he declared, “The weakening of the campaign in Italy in order to invade Southern France, instead of pushing on into the Balkans, was one of the outstanding political mistakes of the War.” What Stalin wanted most, Clark felt, was to keep the Western Allies out of the Balkans, which was the reason he had been so enthusiastic about ANVIL. Had the Allied Mediterranean forces gone on to the Lombard plain and then into Austria, Clark later claimed, it would “have changed the whole history of relations between the Western world and the Soviet Union,” drastically reducing the postwar influence of the Soviets.17