Supreme Commander

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Eisenhower knew most of his division commanders personally and was able to obtain the information he desired in short chats with them. He told Marshall that he had sent two generals home because they had both lost their only sons in the war, “and this shock and distress, coupled with the abnormal strains always borne by an active Division Commander, are really more than any one man should be called upon to bear.” He had learned, he added, that commanding a division was a much more exacting task than heading a corps, army, or army group. It was also easier to be in Bradley’s or Patton’s position than his own; “they are in that more fortunate middle area where their problems involve tactics and local maintenance, without on the one hand having to burden themselves with politics, priorities, shipping and Maquis, while they are also spared the more direct battle strains of a Division Commander.”5

  Eisenhower did not limit his efforts to improve operating procedure and morale to the front lines. He was also concerned with what was going on Stateside, especially after he discovered that a serious ammunition shortage in the AEF was the result not only of insufficient port capacity but also because of a manufacturing slowdown back home. When General Surles reported to him that public opinion in the United States regarded the war as good as won, Eisenhower did all he could to disabuse the American people of that notion. In a series of letters and cables to manufacturing organizations and labor unions he tried to convince the home front that there was a great deal of hard fighting left and that it was imperative for them to maintain high production.6 When in December a group of manufacturers and another of labor leaders came to Europe, Eisenhower took time to have a long talk with each. He convinced them that ETO’s demands for goods were not excessive and that it was necessary for labor to work overtime and for manufacturers to use their plants to full capacity.7

  In his private letters, as well as in his public pronouncements, Eisenhower emphasized that the war was far from over. To his brothers and to family friends he pointed out that there was no basis for believing that the end was near. “One thing that puzzles me is where anyone finds any factual ground upon which to base a conviction that this battle is over, or nearly over,” he wrote on October 20. “We have chased the Hun out of France, but he is fighting bitterly on his own frontiers and there is a lot of suffering and sacrificing for thousands of Americans and their Allies before the thing is finally over.”8

  He purposely tempered his optimism with realism for the very good reason that it was overwhelmingly obvious that bloody battles remained to be fought. The AEF was still on the general offensive, but its daily gains were measured in yards instead of tens of miles. There were three basic causes for the showdown: the German recovery, weather, and supply shortages. Hitler had scraped up a hundred fortress infantry battalions, formerly used in rear areas, and sent eighty of them to the western front. He had also organized twenty-five new Volks Grenadier divisions, which began to come into the lines at the beginning of October. He ordered every inch of ground held and counterattacks at the slightest opportunity. His generals skillfully moved armored units from one end of the front to the other to patch up holes in the line, and with these and other desperate measures the Germans were able to hold on. They paid a price, as vehicles and men became more worn out with each passing day and new operation, but the only hope the Nazis had left was a falling out between their Eastern and Western enemies, and Hitler would do anything to buy time in case that falling out took place. From SHAEF’s point of view this reinforcement was irritating for the moment but promising for the future. General Strong believed that the Germans were getting themselves into the same dangerous situation that had prevailed in Normandy. “The dwindling fire brigade is switched with increasing rapidity and increasing wear and tear from one fire to another.”9 As had been the case in Normandy, this development increased Eisenhower’s desire to attack all along the line.

  The fanatic German resistance and the foul weather were hard on the men of the AEF. Somehow they managed to advance a little, despite freezing rain, driving snow, record floods, mile after mile of mud, and numbing cold. Trench foot and respiratory diseases took a heavy toll. The situation was not as bad as fighting on the eastern front, but it was bad enough. Needless to say, the weather also prevented the AEF from using its Tactical Air Force effectively.10

  Since Antwerp was not functioning until the end of November, supplies remained inadequate until early 1945. On his visits to the front Eisenhower heard a constant complaint from division commanders—they had neither enough ammunition nor riflemen. In reporting the ammunition shortage to Marshall, Eisenhower said he hoped production of it in the States could be increased, but pointed out that a part of the problem was that the War Department allowances to divisions in combat did not meet minimum requirements.11 In order to persuade Marshall to increase the allowance, he sent a team of staff officers to Washington to present all the facts and figures. “I have tried,” Eisenhower told the Chief, “all through this war, to avoid presenting any problems in such a way as to appear to be whining or weeping, thus adding needlessly to your own burdens,” but he did want to make sure Marshall clearly understood the problem.12 Marshall increased the allowance, and by January 1945 imports through Antwerp had almost set things right.

  The shortage in riflemen was a more difficult problem. It stemmed from many factors, but the chief was the decision early in the war to hold down the total size of the U.S. armed forces in order to have labor on hand at home to increase U.S. wartime production. Coupled with this was an attitude in the War Department that the coming conflict was going to be one of specialists. Thus, too many recruits had been put into branches other than the infantry—armored or airborne or mountain divisions, Services of Supply, the AAF, technical corps, and so on. The result was that when operations involved primarily the kind of hard, footslogging war that characterized the battles of October and November 1944 the American Army was not prepared. When the needs for infantrymen were immediate, all SHAEF could do was comb out men from Com Z and the Zone of the Interior and try to hire French civilians to do much of the work that military supply troops had been performing. This procedure was not very satisfactory, but it worked as a stopgap measure.13

  Under the circumstances the battles that took place resulted in little beyond heavy casualties on both sides. On October 1 First Army launched an offensive designed to take Cologne, but it ran into German units brought down from the Arnhem front. Not until October 21 did the Germans, who were encouraged by Hitler’s pleas for a final effort, pull out of Aachen, and even then, Hodges was still far from Cologne. To the south, Third Army tried unsuccessfully to take the fortress town of Metz. Sixth Army Group, meanwhile, made some gains, but General de Lattre’s First French Army, hampered by the task of integrating the FFI into the Regular Army, was unable to drive the Germans out of Colmar.

  The temptation at the end of October was to abandon the offensive, create an easily defended line, wait for the supply situation to improve, and prepare to attack when good weather came in the spring. But Eisenhower gave little serious consideration to such an alternative. There was still a feeling in SHAEF that somewhere the German lines had to crack. The German “Miracle of the West” was hardly believable, especially in view of the pressure on them from the Russians and the Allied forces in Italy, and it was obvious that the German line was thin. By attacking everywhere, Eisenhower hoped to find a weak spot through which he could roll up the German flanks and then send his armies in a dash across Germany that would not be unlike the dash across France. The emphasis in his plans was, therefore, not so much on a probe here or a skirmish there as it was on a general attack, designed to make sure the Germans suffered heavy casualties which in turn would mean a further stretching of their line. “During this period,” he wrote after the war, “we took as a general guide the principle that operations … were profitable to us only where the daily calculations showed that enemy losses were double our own.” It had become a war of attrition. Like Grant in 1864�
�65, Eisenhower could afford to adopt it only because his over-all resources were vastly superior to those available to the enemy and, like Grant, Eisenhower justified what many commentators considered a sterile, cold-blooded strategy on the grounds that in the long run “this policy would result in shortening the war and therefore in the saving of thousands of Allied lives.”14

  The comparison of Eisenhower with Grant can be extended. Among other things, Grant’s Wilderness campaign of 1864 indicated his acceptance of the fact that the Confederates were not going to crack, that they would never surrender as long as they could maintain an army in the field, and that there was no short cut to victory. In the fall of 1944 the German Miracle in the West proved that the Wehrmacht was not going to crack either. Montgomery at times likened his single thrust to the German offensive in 1940 in reverse, but what was obvious, and had been since D-Day, was that the Wehrmacht was not the French Army. The Russians had already recognized this fact, and their campaigns were designed to kill Germans, not force a breakthrough to be followed by a dramatic drive to Berlin. In deciding to engage in a campaign of attrition, Eisenhower may have been cautious and unimaginative, but it appeared to him that the only way to defeat the Wehrmacht was to destroy it. In a general sense, this was the policy Montgomery adopted at Caen, and at that time Eisenhower was the one who grew impatient. But Montgomery’s actions before Caen paid handsome dividends; so would Eisenhower’s policy of attrition. As Eisenhower told Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, “People of the strength and war-like tendencies of the Germans do not give in; they must be beaten to the ground.”15

  Another factor in Eisenhower’s decision to continue the offensive in the fall and winter was internal. MacArthur and Nimitz were on the offensive in the Pacific, and every week they asked for more men, planes, ships, and guns. The resources of the United States were limited. The War Department had taken a deliberate gamble early in the war and decided to raise only ninety combat divisions; almost all of them were already committed, and in the end all but two saw combat. There was, in other words, no strategic reserve available. There were also, as noted earlier, ammunition shortages. Admiral King, one of the most powerful and intelligent of the leaders who believed the Pacific Theater should be the Allies’ primary concern, had gone along with the Europe-first policy only because he expected the war against Germany to end quickly so that he could turn the full fury of the United States against Japan. Had Eisenhower gone over to a defensive strategy, a cry would have gone up from the Pacific Theater to send the excess troops (excess because it takes less men to man a defensive line than to mount an offensive) there, especially the divisions scheduled to go to Europe but not yet sent over. If this had happened, Eisenhower, when spring came, would have found himself with insufficient forces for the final blow.

  One trouble with the strategy of attrition was that Great Britain could no more afford it than Germany could. Another was that, at least in Montgomery’s eyes, it took a lot of time which meant a delay in the end of the war. This bothered the War Department, too, for it meant in turn a delay before redeployment of troops to the Pacific could take place. Marshall, always under great pressure from the Asia-first group in the United States, was especially concerned about this. He did not think the single thrust could bring a quick victory but did feel there might be other more favorable alternatives available. On October 23 he wired Eisenhower to say that the CCS were considering issuing at an early date a directive for an all-out effort to end the war in Europe before 1945. If the CCS did so, it would require extraordinary measures to carry out the directive, including “the use of Strategic Air Forces to get maximum immediate tactical advantage from use of our air power, expedited movement and employment of units and the use of the proximity fuze,” a secret weapon that exploded as a shell reached the vicinity of the target. There was no point, however, in speeding up the flow of replacements to ETO, or in changing once again the targets of the heavy bombers, unless Eisenhower thought that these measures would bring a quicker end to the war. “Be frank with me,” Marshall concluded his message. “I will accept your decision.”

  Eisenhower assured Marshall that he was just as anxious to “wind this thing up quickly” as anyone else, but he did have serious problems. For example, he could use more infantry replacements but until Antwerp was operating he could not support additional full divisions in the line. “This … is another of those gambles that we are forever faced with in war,” he explained, for if he took the riflemen only, he could keep his front-line units fresh and might “produce the desired break,” but when Antwerp was open he would want more full divisions in the line. He thought the best compromise was to send the infantry directly to northwest Europe, with the heavy elements of the divisions coming through Marseilles.

  The problem of how to make proper use of air power was even more complicated. Ground force leaders felt strategic bombing took too long to have an effect and were pressing the air forces to undertake in Germany something similar to the Transportation Plan that had been so successful in France. Marshall’s message indicated that he shared this sentiment. Eisenhower talked to Tedder about it and found that this time Tedder disagreed with the U. S. Army Chief of Staff. “As you are aware,” Tedder told Portal on October 25, “the British Army have for months now been allowed to feel that they can, at any time, call on heavy bomber effort, and it will be laid on practically without question.… I am doing my best to get things straight, but I am sure you will realize that, the Army having been drugged with bombs, it is going to be a difficult process to cure the drug addicts.…” To Eisenhower, Tedder explained that, while the Transportation Plan had certainly been a success in France, the lesson could not literally be applied to Germany. He thought that the bombers should concentrate against the Ruhr and its rail centers, oil targets, canal system, and centers of population. The oil targets would be especially important, for the German stocks were low, but if the enemy had an opportunity to recover he could do so quickly.

  Eisenhower told Marshall that using the bombers in direct tactical support work to help achieve another COBRA was out of the question. Such an operation was difficult enough in balmy July weather; with the overcast sky and almost constant rain of the autumn it was impossible. He felt that the only thing to do was keep the bombers on strategic targets inside Germany, with perhaps a slight increase in effort on the rail centers in the Ruhr.

  The whole idea of ending the war in 1944 was, in fact, wishful thinking. Marshall’s proposal came too late. As Eisenhower explained to him, “… our logistical problem has become so acute that all our plans have made Antwerp a sine qua non to the waging of our final all-out battle.…” Until Antwerp was open, using new weapons and shifting bombing priorities would be of little use.16

  In November 16 Marshall tried again to restate his position. He said he had been talking to a scientist employed by the AAF who “has pictured to me a concept of aerial war this winter, which seems to me to have very great possibilities. He firmly believes that if the effort were put into it, fighter bombers almost unaided could win the war in Germany this winter.” The idea was to move Eighth Fighter Command forward to Belgium or Holland, then fly fighter-bomber missions in all weather. The planes could fly low under the overcast, because of their speed and ability they could take care of themselves in combat, and they could drop their bombs on the first target of consequence that they saw. Fighter-bombers might attack 2500 targets a day “rather than the few which we now hit.”17 Eisenhower replied that the fighter-bombers were already carrying out low-flying attacks on their way back from escorting heavy bomber penetrations, and that he did not think it would be wise to stop the strategic air campaign for an unproven panacea.18

  The search for some cheap method to end the war, one that would make the gruesome battles on the ground unnecessary, continued. Eisenhower himself, willing to try anything, took part in it. By November 20 he was becoming discouraged, as attrition had brought no noticeable decline in the strengt
h of the German defense. German morale, he confessed, showed no sign of cracking, and the “enemy’s continued solid resistance is a main factor postponing final victory.…” The average German soldier continued to fight because of the iron discipline of the Wehrmacht and because of successful Nazi propaganda, “which is convincing every German that unconditional surrender means the complete devastation of Germany and her elimination as a nation.” Eisenhower thought something should be done to lower the German resistance, and one obvious method was to announce that unconditional surrender would not in fact lead to national destruction.19

  Marshall agreed, and he reported to Eisenhower that Roosevelt had sent a message to Churchill asking him to join in a statement to the German people, one that stressed that the Allies did not seek to punish the people or to devastate Germany, but only to eliminate the Nazi Party. Churchill refused. He “thought it would be wrong at this juncture to show that we were anxious for them to ease off their desperate opposition. Goebbels would certainly be able to point to the alteration of our tone as an encouragement for further resistance, and the morale of the German fighting troops would be proportionately raised.”20 Churchill thus convinced Eisenhower that a propaganda statement would achieve just the opposite of its desired result. The Supreme Commander then told Marshall he had decided that “a statement at this moment would probably be interpreted as a sign of weakness rather than of an honest statement of intention,” and said the Allies should wait for a major victory to make one.21