Hitler had other ideas. He was in the mood not for defense but for attack. In his eyes the Allied bottleneck at Avranches presented a golden opportunity. Both of his main commanders in the West were now gone. Rommel had been injured in the crack-up of his staff car trying to elude a strafing Allied plane, and his support of the plot against Hitler subsequently led to his forced suicide. Rundstedt was temporarily under a cloud. When asked what should be done, after the success of the Normandy landings was evident, he had responded, "Make peace, you idiots. What else can you do?"
Hitler gave his new commander, Günther von Kluge, his order to "prepare a counteroffensive aiming to break through to Avranches with the objective of isolating the enemy forces and ensuring their destruction."
Kluge and his subordinates were dismayed by the order. Already extended too far west, they were in danger of having to extricate themselves from a corridor forming between the Allied forces to the north and those now making a U-turn eastward around Avranches. To push still farther west would only make their exposure worse. But orders were orders, and Kluge prepared his attack.
The obvious launching point was the village of Mortain. The plain before it offered the shortest route to Avranches, and the hilly terrain behind it would provide cover for the assembly of his forces. Kluge planned his offensive to begin the night of August 6.
Ultra's part in warning of the attack is in question. Winterbotham claimed that Bradley's armies were informed well in advance, which Bradley vehemently denied, writing in 1983, "Ultra alerted us to the attack only a few hours before it came, and that was too late to make any major defensive preparations." Hinsley supported Bradley, noting that the timing of the intercepts was either very close to or after the launching of the offensive.
There is no question, however, that Patton was warned. From the time of the formation of the Third Army, he had had a British-manned Special Liaison Unit assigned to his headquarters. In addition, an American major, Melvin Heifers, had been in place as the link between the SLU and Patton. However, the general also had a highly protective intelligence officer, Colonel Oscar Koch, who stood between Heifers and Patton. The most Heifers had been able to do thus far was supply summaries of Ultra decrypts to Koch, who then decided what, if anything, would be passed on to the general.
When Heifers saw the decrypts about the Mortain attack, he immediately recognized their importance. This time he was not to be denied. He went to Koch's tent and showed him the Ultra materials as well as a map he had hastily prepared. Koch agreed that Patton should get the news without delay. According to Koch's own memoir, he and Heifers picked up Patton's chief of staff, Brigadier General Hobart "Hap" Gay, en route to Patton's trailer. It was the first time Heifers had been admitted to the general's presence.
The officers spread Helfers's map on the floor and squatted over it as Heifers explained the decrypts. Patton was not one to ignore advantageous information. As he wrote in his diary the next day, "We got a rumor last night from a secret source that Panzer divisions will attack west from . . . Mortain . . . on Avranches. Personally, I think it is a German bluff to cover a withdrawal, but I stopped the 80th, French 2nd Armored, and 35th [Divisions] in the vicinity of St. Hilaire just in case something might happen."
Bradley's Thirtieth Infantry Division was already in place. Its men, with help from Patton's divisions and from intense aerial forays once the weather cleared, checked the German panzers in three days of bloody, desperate fighting.
When it became clear that the Mortain counteroffensive was failing, Bradley told the visiting Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, "This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We are about to destroy an entire hostile army. If the other fellow will only press his attack here at Mortain for another 48 hours, he'll give us time to close at Argentan and there completely destroy him."
Kluge and his fellow generals would not have given the Americans those additional forty-eight hours, but Hitler did. He ordered a new offensive: "I command that the attack be presented daringly and recklessly to the sea." By then decrypts of Kluge's orders were flowing to Allied commanders almost as swiftly as they were to his own generals. In the end the attack never really came off. The most that Hitler's order did was slow the withdrawal and allow the Allies to tighten the noose around the battered German armies.
Patton, now starting each day with a report by Heifers, swung around to the south and raced eastward ahead of the retreating Germans. Colonel Koch had become an Ultra convert as well. His assistant reported, "An army never moved as fast and as far as the Third Army in its drive across France and Ultra was invaluable every mile of the way."
The Germans were closed into a narrow corridor on three sides and had to run a gauntlet of fierce artillery fire and air attacks. The only way out was via a gap at the town of Falaise. With Patton pressing up from the south and Montgomery's Canadians pushing down from the north, it appeared that the gap would be closed and most of Kluge's Fifth and Seventh Panzer Armies trapped inside.
Kluge himself was no longer in charge. When he set off on a tour of the pocket in which his armies were confined, his staff car was strafed by fighter planes just as Rommel's had been earlier, and he was unable to reach his headquarters until midnight. By then Hitler had become convinced that Kluge was planning "to lead the whole of the Western Army into capitulation." He had replaced Kluge with Walther Model. Ordered to return to Germany, Kluge, surmising correctly that he would be met by the Gestapo, took poison instead.
Sadly for the Allies, the Falaise gap was not closed in time to capture the whole of the German armies. With two major Allied forces now heading directly toward each other, it was Montgomery's duty to define the limits of advance to avoid a collision. He set the town of Argentan as the point beyond which neither of the approaching armies was to go. Units of Pat-ton's army reached Argentan while Monty's Canadian troops were still miles away and making painfully slow progress. Patton pleaded with Bradley to be allowed to advance farther; in fact he ordered his field commander there to push on slowly until meeting up with the Canadians. Bradley, knowing that Patton had exposed himself to a flank attack, was adamant that Patton stay at Argentan. Stay he did, while German troops poured through the gap to fight again. There are conflicting accounts of why the Allied armies failed to close the Falaise gap. Bradley blamed it in part on faulty intelligence that told him the main German divisions had already escaped when, in actuality, they were still in the trap. Many place the blame on Montgomery, claiming that because the rapid American advances were grabbing the headlines while his own troops were stalled, he was determined not to allow the Americans to gain still more, credit and so delayed giving the orders that would have allowed Patton to move northward. Whatever the cause, Montgomery's own intelligence officer later admitted, "Monty missed closing the sack."
Even so, Falaise was a German disaster. Ten thousand men were killed and fifty thousand captured, and huge quantities of tanks, artillery and other equipment were lost. The Germans were deprived of the strength to stop Patton from making his slashing drives to the east and south. The Battle of Normandy had, at last, ended in triumph.
Up from the South: The Riviera Invasion
When most of Italy was in Allied hands and Rome captured, the question became, where next? Churchill, ever weighing the political aspects, looked past the war at hand and contemplated the potential war to come. He wanted the Allies to push northeastward, up through Trieste, then into Austria, Czechoslovakia and southern Germany, so as to deny these areas to Russian Communism. Eisenhower, though, had a one-track mind: the first order of business was to whip the Germans, and the best way to do that was to concentrate Allied strength in the west. He stood steadfast, with FDR behind him, to follow the plan agreed on earlier: to carry out Operation Dragoon, the invasion of the south of France. Dragoon's goal was to drive out the Germans there and link up with the Allies breaking free in Normandy. Muttering in discontent, Churchill eventually gave
in.
On August 15 another great collation of ships, this one nine hundred strong, converged on the Riviera and began unloading warriors onto the beaches and the playgrounds once reserved for the wealthy. The invasion was an enormous feat of planning and organization that came off with few fumbles. This was no narrow Channel crossing. The ships that arrived together on the fifteenth had come, on varying schedules, from Italian ports such as Naples and Taranto, from Oran on the north coast of Africa, from the islands of Malta, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily. Plans for the landings were based on an intelligence file that, according to William Breuer in his book Operation Dragoon, exceeded that for the Normandy invasion. This "mountainous pile of information" on every detail of the German defenses had been obtained from photoreconnaissance, the French underground and Ultra decrypts. Despite an early morning fog that caused some units to be landed well away from their drop zones, the parachute and glider operations were unusually successful. The beach landings met with little opposition, bringing ashore ninety-four thousand men and eleven thousand vehicles in a single day. The drive inland held to its schedule.
Ultra codebreakers began quickly to decrypt messages with an astonishing import: Hitler was ordering a withdrawal to a defense line well back from the coast. He did want troops left at the fortresses such as Toulon and Marseilles, and these defenders were of course to hold out to the last man. Otherwise, concerned that the breakout in Normandy was threatening to cut off his Nineteenth Army in southern France, he ordered his commanders to move quickly to the north.
Aided by decrypts that covered the Germans' every move, General Lucian Truscott, commanding the invading Seventh Army, foresaw that most of the retreating enemy would follow the Rhone River northward. At Montélimar, eighty miles north, was a gorge that could be turned into a deadly bottleneck. Truscott sent a task force racing ahead to close off the gorge and trap the Germans trying to pass through it. Too cautious action by the task force's commander allowed two German divisions to escape, but other retreating units were encircled. Ultra warned when two German divisions were to combine their forces in a desperate breakout effort. Some German units did fight their way through but with heavy losses.
The codebreakers enabled the Allied generals to direct their forces with certainty and efficiency. In just two weeks' time they had driven the Germans out of southern France. The Riviera invasion ended up not unlike the Battle of the Falaise Gap. Many Nazi troops succeeded in making it through to help firm up the home defenses. Thousands of others, however, were killed, thousands more captured and tons of materiel were left behind in the rout.
With both the northern and southern invasions now rapidly contracting the Germans' defenses and in the process destroying legions of soldiers and masses of equipment, the situation in Europe bred relief for the Allies. But it also fed a spirit of inflated hope and cocksure confidence that presaged trouble ahead.
16
CBI: Winning the "Forgotten War"
In the broad sweep of World War II history, the battles of the China-Burma-India theater can seem in retrospect to be an aside, a series of viciously lethal struggles that were only a back eddy to the main conflict. Those who fought there ruefully regarded it as "the forgotten war," the front with the lowest priorities, the arena whose demands of men and materiel were most begrudged.
Yet it seemed inarguable at the time that the Japanese had to be stopped there. The Allies could not assume, early on in the Pacific war, that either Nimitz's island-hopping or MacArthur's climb from New Guinea would succeed. The CBI theater offered an alternative: it could serve as a launching base for the aerial bombardment and ultimate invasion of the Japanese homeland. It was even more essential to deny the Japanese their continuing exploitation of Southeast Asia's boundless natural resources and endless ranks of manpower that could have built them into an unbeatable foe. The farther reaches of the Indian subcontinent must not be opened to them. The glimmering vision of an Asia-Middle East linkup that would put the Axis powers on their way to ruling the world could not be allowed to come to pass. Allied leaders would have seemed irresponsible if they had not believed the CBI war had to be fought—and won.
Nor can the role of CBI's codebreakers* vital in turning defeat into victory, be overlooked. Their contributions, though, were late in coming. Before the war and during its early stages, the British had established an extensive network of intercept stations, direction-finding units and cryptanalytic teams to keep tabs on Japan. But the onslaught of Japanese advances kept the Sigint forces on the run. Some hopped from Hong Kong to Singapore to Ceylon and even to eastern Africa. Others fled to Australia. The British, Australian and Indian intercept and cryptographic teams tried valiantly to regroup in their new locations and did reestablish linkages with Bletchley Park, Cast, Hypo and Op-20-G. However, months passed before Sigint could begin to have much of an impact.
In the meantime, the entire Southeast Asia theater had been a sequence of disasters for the Allies. Before the war, the Japanese had begun their expansion by conquest with the annexing of Manchuria in 1931, the capture of eastern China's major cities and the occupation of the Chinese coast. When the war came, and the Allies wished to support Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army, the only supply line was through China's western back door. Chiang's needs were met by landing supplies at Rangoon, Burma's capital and major seaport, transporting them by rail through Burma and completing the journey to his Kunming wartime capital by truck on the Burma Road, built in 1936-37.
Chiang looked primarily to the U.S. for aid. In 1937 he enlisted Clare Chennault, a flamboyant Great War pilot, to develop an effective Chinese air force. Chennault did so by retraining Chinese fliers, hiring mercenaries wherever he could find them and welding his polyglot band into what was officially called the American Volunteer Group (AVG). The group became far better known as the Flying Tigers from the fact that its U.S.-built planes had winged tigers painted on their tails. Toothy shark faces on the aircrafts' noses also contributed to their lethal appearance. For the first seven months in 1942, at a time when the American public hungered for success stories, Chennault's Tigers racked up impressive headline-grabbing scores against Japan's planes. Because the AVG was a private air force functioning outside official channels, the U.S. reorganized it in July 1942 as the Chinese Air Task Force, still under General Chennault. With an influx of regular U.S. Air Force fliers who volunteered for duty and the arrival of a U.S. bomber squadron, Chennault's Tigers continued to harass the Japanese throughout the war. Eric Sevareid, transferring to China for his CBS reports, wrote that Chennault became "the great American hero to the Chinese" and that his "very face in its grim, scarred belligerence had come to be a symbol of China's resistance."
To help Chiang develop a more professional army, the U.S. sent him an able field commander and trainer who had spent fifteen years in China and spoke the language fluently, General Joseph W. Stilwell. His nickname was "Vinegar Joe," an appropriate label for his no-nonsense, to-hell-with-tact personality. General William Slim, Stilwell's British counterpart in the Burmese command, said of him that "he could be as obstinate as a whole team of mules," but Slim added that when Stilwell "said he would do a thing, he did it," and while others found him impossibly abrasive, "I liked him."
Stilwell faced a tough task in trying to shape an effective Chinese army. Chiang's understrength divisions were ridden with corruption and incompetent leadership. The soldiers were low paid, malnourished and ill equipped. American supplies meant for them often ended up on the black market and were likely to be traded to the Japanese. In addition, Chiang himself was never sure which war took precedence, the one against Japan or that against the Chinese Communist armies under Mao Tse-tung, which Chiang's forces had driven into a comer in China's northern mountains. Despite signing an agreement with Mao to fight together against the Japanese, Chiang kept a quarter of his army standing guard against a possible move by the Communists. Stilwell quickly came to have a low regard for the devious Chiang,
referring to him privately, and too often publicly, as "Peanut."
In the triumphant takeover of Southeast Asia, the Japanese viewed the capture of Burma as the means to shut off aid to China. Neighboring Siam put up only a five-hour fight before allowing passage to Japanese troops and becoming Japan's ally. The invasion of Burma began on January 31, 1942. Thousands of British, Australian, Dutch and Asian prisoners the Japanese had captured in their conquest of Southeast Asia were condemned to slave labor building the Siam-to-Burma railroad, which was to be Japan's invasion route into India. When the Japanese attacked Rangoon, the British, knowing the port's importance, fought them off for the first two and a half months of 1942. Then the sheer numbers of the Japanese and their dominance in the air forced the British-led troops to retreat northward.
At this point Slim was called in from his previous post in Iraq to take charge of the defense of Burma. Commanding the British, Burmese and Indian divisions of the Fourteenth Army, he joined with Stilwell and his Chinese troops to form a defensive line in central Burma 150 miles north of Rangoon. The Allies' numbers were too few, the Japanese attackers were too well versed in jungle fighting, and their air superiority was too overpowering for the line to hold. In what CBI veteran Louis Allen, in his comprehensive history Burma: The Longest War, has called "the longest retreat in the history of the British Army," Slim's forces withdrew for 900 miles, all the way back into India. The whole of Burma fell under Japanese control. Stilwell, too, escaped to India, arriving with the remains of his command only after a harrowing 140-mile jungle trek. The Burma Road was no longer usable. Supplies to China had to be transported from India by indomitable American fliers ferrying cargo planes over the southern spurs of the Himalayas, which they called "the Hump." So many of their planes went down that the pilots claimed they could plot their course to China by the line of smoking wrecks on the mountainsides.
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