Charles Donnelly spotted that Dill’s death was ‘a blow’ because his assistance had been ‘immeasurably valuable’ transatlantically ‘in calming bitter arguments which so often arose between Sir Alan Brooke and Marshall’. That job could not really be filled by Jumbo Maitland Wilson, who now replaced Dill in Washington, with Alexander taking over as supreme commander in the Mediterranean, ‘a post for which he is totally unfitted’ in Cunningham’s view, because he was ‘completely stupid’.39
Lord Halifax told Churchill, ‘very much off the record’, that Marshall had suggested Ismay would be the best successor for Dill. ‘The latter’s close contact with you and knowledge of your thought would, in Marshall’s view, be of great value to the partnership between us.’40 Halifax had warned Marshall that Churchill would probably be unwilling to lose Ismay, and he was right. It nevertheless shows the emphasis that Marshall placed on finding someone who was close to Churchill for this most sensitive of posts. Maitland Wilson was not a Churchill confidant; the rows that developed later would not have been avoided had Dill survived or had Ismay succeeded, but their intensity might have been lessened in either case. Certainly Marshall doubted whether Churchill–who had twice turned Dill down for a peerage–and even Brooke ‘fully realize the loss you have suffered’.
At Octagon the Combined Chiefs of Staff had approved Eisenhower’s plan to mount a major northern effort encircling the Ruhr, with secondary attacks towards Bonn and Strasbourg, yet this strategy satisfied neither Montgomery, who wanted to go straight to the Ruhr, nor Patton, who wanted to go to Berlin. Brooke, who was not insensible to Montgomery’s vanity and attention-seeking, nonetheless protected the new field marshal from a prime minister who he believed was jealous of Monty’s popularity with the public, and also from those Americans who had long ago spotted an anti-American prima donna.
‘I first got to know Brooke (“Brookie” as he has always been to me) in 1926 when I went as an instructor to the Staff College, Camberley,’ recalled Montgomery in his memoirs; ‘he was already there, as instructor in artillery. I quickly spotted that he was a man of outstanding character and ability, and my liking and respect for him can be said to have begun then.’ With uncharacteristic modesty, Montgomery also wrote, ‘He was well tuned to my shortcomings and often administered a back-hander, sometimes verbally and sometimes in writing; in neither case could they ever be misunderstood!’ Overall, Montgomery’s ‘feeling was that in strategic matters Brookie was generally right and Marshall wrong’.41
Brooke was in many ways Montgomery’s mentor, and so when on 22 November ‘Monty’ wrote to ‘My dear Brookie’ from 21st Army Group, he was willing to listen sympathetically. Montgomery complained that Eisenhower seemed ‘to have a curious idea that every Army Command must have an equal and fair share of the battle’, and he pointed out that two army groups were involved north of the Ardennes and two south of it, with Omar Bradley’s command split between them. Montgomery proposed that since ‘Ike seems determined to show that he is a great general in the field,’ the theatre should be divided ‘naturally into two fronts–one north of the Ardennes and one south’, with him commanding the northern and Bradley the southern sectors; meanwhile ‘Ike should command the two fronts, from a suitable Tactical HQ.’42
Brooke approved of this. It is not necessary to entertain the belief of Eisenhower’s son John that Brooke’s ‘zealous’ support for Monty against his father was ‘intensified…by his own personal disappointment’ over the post of supreme commander, a serious charge for which he gives no supporting evidence.43 But before Brooke could genuinely help at all, let alone zealously, later that month Montgomery wrote to Eisenhower asking for some of Patton’s troops in 12th Army Group to be moved north of the Ardennes and calling the current campaign a ‘failure’, something to which Ike understandably took great exception. If Patton, Clark and Bradley–not to mention some Britons such as Cunningham–hadn’t existed, then Montgomery would have been his own worst enemy. Since they did, he was spoilt for choice.
‘Monty wants to command a northern group of armies and the Americans are always suspicious of his motives,’ concluded Cunningham after a Chiefs of Staff meeting on 4 December, ‘The fact is we are stuck.’ Three days later Cunningham and Portal and their wives dined at Brooke’s flat; after dinner he showed them his bird films, some made in his garden and one on a trip to the Faroe Islands, which Cunningham claimed to his diary were ‘Most interesting.’
On 29 November Churchill made clear his objections to the early liberation of the Channel Islands, telling the War Cabinet that while the twenty-eight thousand Germans there ‘can’t get away’, if they surrendered Britain would ‘have to feed them’. The islands therefore remained under German occupation for the eleven months between D-Day and V-E Day.44
On 12 December 1944 Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff convened in the Map Room in the Annexe after the 5.30 p.m. Cabinet to meet Eisenhower and Tedder and hear their plans for an attack by simultaneous thrusts across the Rhine, one north of the Ruhr and the other from Mainz–Frankfurt towards Kassel. Brooke ‘vehemently argued’ for Montgomery’s idea of ‘a really strong thrust north of the Ruhr’ eastwards, with the Frankfurt area to be merely subsidiary. ‘Ike was good and kept an even keel,’ thought Cunningham. ‘He was obviously impressed by the CIGS’s arguments but refused to commit himself.’45 At dinner, which went on until 1.30 a.m., Eisenhower said that he had recently rejected an offer of half a million dollars by a newspaper to allow articles that he had not written to be published under his name.
The meeting in the Map Room exposed the disagreement over strategy between Eisenhower and Brooke. As in the past, Eisenhower turned to his own mentor, Marshall, writing the next day to say that ‘Field Marshal Brooke seemed disturbed by what he calls our “dispersion” of the past weeks of this campaign.’ He added that until the floods in the lower Rhine valley he had tried to give everything he could to the northern thrust but these had naturally foiled it. At the War Cabinet on 13 December, Brooke set out Eisenhower’s suggested plan and ‘also gave his reasons for not accepting it and stressed the necessity of making the punch north of the Ruhr strong enough not to be held up at the expense of attacks elsewhere’. Before a full-scale Anglo-American argument could develop between Marshall and Brooke over Eisenhower’s strategy, however, Hitler intervened. Before dawn on Saturday 16 December 1944, the Germans unleashed one of the greatest surprise offensives in the history of modern warfare.
Operation Herbstnebel (Autumn Mist) flung no fewer than twenty-four divisions–the last of Germany’s reserves–into an all-out attempt to split the United States and the British Commonwealth armies and recapture Antwerp. The Führer chose to attack through the same semi-mountainous and wooded Ardennes region on the east Belgian–German–north Luxembourg borders where four-and-a-half years earlier his armour had broken through to deliver him the Fall of France.
20
Autumn Mist: ‘We have been having a bit of a party out here!!’ December 1944–February 1945
The time has now come when the German Army must rise again and strike.
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, 16 December 1944
The Ardennes Offensive, also known as the battle of the Bulge from the 55-mile-deep protuberance that it created in the Allied lines, was Hitler’s final chance to split the Allied armies by taking Antwerp, and then to defeat them in detail. By attempting to cross the River Meuse and strike at the hinge between his foes, Hitler’s last gamble was remarkably similar to that of Napoleon during the Hundred Days. Although the battle lasted forty-four days and was the largest land battle in American history, Hitler had no more success than the Emperor.
As with so many of his coups in the past, Hitler chose a Saturday to unleash his surprise stroke, and like them it met with startling initial success. Eisenhower had left the defences relatively thin in the Ardennes Forest in order to concentrate on seemingly more profitable areas to its north and south, so two hundred thousand Germans, co
mmanded by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, were able to attack eighty-three thousand Americans across a 60-mile front.
Allied intelligence and aerial reconnaissance had not spotted the vast congregation of German armour from Army Group B moving through the dense forests. German security was excellent: radio and telephone transmissions concerning the attack were verboten, only land-lines or messengers were permitted; troop movements took place at night or in bad weather and corps commanders were not given their assignments until days beforehand. On the night of the attack itself, artificial moonlight was created by bouncing searchlight beams off low clouds. Furthermore, a special unit of two thousand men of Panzer Brigade 156–including 150 English-speakers–were dressed in American uniforms to increase the confusion. The German capacity for counter-attack in the Ardennes as late as the winter of 1944–undertaken through deep snow in the worst Belgian winter in living memory–must give pause to those who believe a 1942 or 1943 Overlord would have fared better.
On 18 December north Burma was finally cleared of Japanese, and two days later Roosevelt bestowed the ultimate commission of general of the Army on Marshall, raising him to the same rank as his former commander, ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, and awarding him a fifth star. It was a fitting recognition of the way that Marshall had overseen the creation of a vast army virtually from scratch, even if the promotion unfortunately fell on the day before that Army’s worst humiliation of the war against Germany: on 19 December, nearly eight thousand men of the US 106th Infantry Division surrendered to the Fifth Panzer Army in the Ardennes. Elsewhere, however, and especially at Bastogne and Saint-Vith, fierce American resistance slowed the German juggernaut and threw its well-laid plans–which depended on capturing US fuel dumps by specific dates–badly out of kilter. That day Churchill told Cunningham that he ‘preferred a tortoise with its head out even if it looked like biting him’.1
Eisenhower’s reactions were commendably fast, and by midnight on the second day of the offensive the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were on the move; in all a quarter of a million men and fifty thousand vehicles were detailed to destroy it. Patton was ordered to wheel virtually his whole army of six divisions sharply to the left and hit the offensive from the south. Because the Germans had split the 12th Army Group north and south of the Bulge, destroying much of their communications, Eisenhower temporarily transferred the US First and Ninth Armies to the north under Montgomery’s command, something for which Omar Bradley never really forgave him.2 ‘Brad was absolutely livid,’ recalled Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. ‘Walked up and down and cursed Monty. Was startling to see Brad like this. Because of his personal loyalty to Ike, Brad stuck out the show.’3 A jingoistic and misinformed British press portrayed the move as the heroic Monty being called upon to save the day from a hapless American, an interpretation which Montgomery ought to have done more to dispel the moment he could. Instead he gave a press interview at his headquarters in which, although he praised the ordinary GI, he failed to give proper credit to the American High Command and seemed to hog the glory for closing the Bulge.
Operation Herbstnebel ran out of momentum and especially petrol by Christmas Eve, and on 3 January 1945 the First Army counter-attacked from the north, linking up with the Third Army two weeks later. ‘We have been having a bit of a party out here!!’ Montgomery wrote to Portal.4 (As if misunderstanding such gung-ho spirit, the published diaries of General Hap Arnold attribute to Colonel Frederick W. Casfie, the son of one of Arnold’s West Point classmates killed in combat that Christmas Eve, the posthumous award of ‘the Medal of Humor’.) To put the Ardennes Offensive in context, however, the Joint Intelligence Committee estimated that the Germans had 105 divisions on the Western and Italian fronts at the time, but 149 on the Eastern. The battle of the Bulge, for all the potential danger it posed in the west, was only half the size of the battle of Kursk, for example.
Early in January, Churchill and Brooke visited Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles. Cunningham later flew over to attend the funeral of his friend Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay–the mastermind behind the naval side of Dunkirk and D-Day who had died in a plane crash on 2 January–and also visited SHAEF. He found that ‘Montgomery’s patronising talk to the Press had done little to improve matters. Ike and the American generals were all up in arms and the tone of the British Press was making it quite impossible to put American troops under Montgomery’s command.’5 That night, Brooke and Bracken made ‘unfavourable comment’ about Montgomery’s interview, even though he had extravagantly praised the courage of the American fighting man.
The battle was not finally won until Sunday 28 January, when the last of the Germans were cleared from the Bulge. They had got tantalizingly close to the Meuse but never quite reached it. They incurred one hundred thousand casualties, the Americans eighty-one thousand, including nineteen thousand killed and fifteen thousand captured. The British, who fought only at the tip of the Bulge, suffered 1,400 casualties. Both sides lost around eight hundred tanks, which by that stage in the war the Germans could no longer afford. ‘Any army can go through your force if they are willing to risk losses or if they are willing to weaken their own front so that they can’t prevent a counter-attack,’ explained Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, to Pogue after the war. ‘Germany did both those things. The result was that the Germans used up most of their armor and had practically nothing to oppose us later on.’6 Bedell Smith provided Cunningham with some of the Wehrmacht’s champagne to toast the New Year, with no one enquiring too closely where it had originally come from.
Captain Cyril Falls, the military correspondent of The Times, had written to Churchill on 21 December 1944–‘Now Rundstedt has shown us how an offensive should be conducted’–a letter critical of both Alexander and Eisenhower, and which suggested that political considerations had governed the senior Anglo-American military appointments. In his reply, Churchill praised Alexander’s command in the Western Desert and said that Rundstedt’s offensive would probably shorten the war. ‘All these Commands have been made on their merits,’ he assured Falls, ‘but the British and Americans have to be represented to a very large extent in accordance with the forces employed in the different theatres,’ and ‘in all these questions the United States forces are already between two and three times as numerous as ours.’ Churchill concurred in Falls’ praise for Brooke, saying that ‘had the Command in North-West Europe fallen to the British instead of the United States, he was already chosen as its commander. However in his present great situation he is able to exert an immense influence over all the theatres of war.’7 Of course Churchill had in effect admitted that Brooke could not have had the command whatever his merits, because of political considerations, thereby substantially confirming what Falls had alleged.
Leo Amery recalled that in late January 1945 Churchill asked Brooke how many divisions the Russians had, and ‘when he said five hundred one could feel the shudder going through the Cabinet.’8 Russian divisions tended to be smaller and many were under-strength and under-equipped at that time, but nonetheless the USSR mobilized more troops in the war than Germany, Britain and Italy combined. It was in order to keep this vast Russian strength within certain European confines, and to prevent chaos during the death-throes of the Third Reich, that a second Big Three conference was slated to take place at Yalta, 345 miles south-east of Sevastopol in the Crimea in mid-February. Stalin had claimed to Roosevelt and Churchill that his doctors had advised him not to leave the Soviet Union, even though Roosevelt was far more ill than he. With a sublime disregard for historians’ convenience, this gathering was also codenamed Argonaut, the same name as the Second Washington Conference of June 1942. Churchill wanted to see Roosevelt and Marshall before Yalta, in order–rather as at Cairo–to try to agree common ground before meeting the Soviets. The place he chose was the brave little Mediterranean island of Malta. ‘If you do not wish to spend more than one night at
Malta,’ he wrote to an evidently reluctant president, ‘it could surely be arranged that both our Chiefs of Staffs should arrive there say a couple of days before us and have their preliminary discussions.’ So little did Roosevelt want to collude with the British that Harriman even asked Stalin not to tell Churchill about the conference arrangements for Yalta until the last moment.9
In his answer to Churchill’s request about Malta, Roosevelt said that ‘in view of the time available to me for this journey it will not be possible for us to meet your suggestion and have a British–American staff meeting at Malta before proceeding to Argonaut. I do not think that by not having a meeting any time will be lost at Argonaut.’ A correspondence that had begun as mutually affectionate billets-doux and jokes had progressed to cold notes of mutual suspicion. In the event, another, very short conference was scheduled to take place on Malta, codenamed Cricket.
At the War Cabinet of 8 January 1945, Churchill asked of the celebrations for soldiers who were returning on leave from the Middle East: ‘Why not brass bands?’10 That was to be the last time that the War Cabinet met at Downing Street for some weeks. The V-2 campaign meant that the next day it convened underground in the Cabinet War Rooms, then in the Map Room in the No. 10 Annexe, then back in Downing Street for one meeting only, but not there again until 3 April. ‘The Angel of Death is abroad in the land,’ said Churchill of the V-2s, slightly misquoting John Bright’s philippic against the Crimean War, ‘only you can’t hear the flutter of his wings.’ The atmosphere returned to that of the 1940 Blitz, with decisions taken in emergency conditions underground. ‘It got pretty stale down there sometimes,’ recalled Paul Caraway, ‘but that was bearable.’
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