But there was still a thirteen-mile gap between Falaise and Argentan, and it was swarming with Germans trying to get out. Montgomery suggested a new place to close the gap: Chambois, eight miles northeast of Argentan, and thirteen miles southeast of Falaise. Montgomery ordered Crerar to turn the Canadians through Trun to Chambois. The only forces Bradley had were in a provisional corps he set up to guard Argentan—90th Division, Leclerc’s French armored division, and the untried 80th Infantry Division. Bradley called Leonard T. Gerow, from 1st Army, to command it.
The Falaise pocket now stretched east-west about forty miles, and was from eleven to fifteen miles wide. About fourteen divisions, at least 100,000 men, were inside. Roads were clogged, Allied aircraft struck at anything that moved, Allied artillery could reach any objective observers could point out. There was a desperate shortage of fuel, units were mixed up, communications erratic.
On the morning of August 15, Field Marshal von Kluge traveled toward the front. Four hours later he vanished. Search parties could not find him. No messages came in. Hitler was suspicious. Kluge had associated with some of the conspirators of the July 20 putsch, and the timing was incriminating. Just that day Americans and French (6th Army Group under Jacob L. Devers) had invaded the French Riviera on the Mediterranean (Operation Dragoon), and were moving quickly north against minuscule opposition. Hitler suspected Kluge was trying to surrender German forces in Normandy, or might be trying to negotiate a deal.
Around 10 P.M., Kluge turned up at the headquarters of Josef (Sepp) Dietrich of the 5th Panzer Army. Where had he been? He had spent the day in a ditch. An Allied plane had struck his auto and knocked out his radio. So many aircraft were about he had to remain where he was. This explanation, though truthful, did not allay Hitler’s suspicions.
At 2 A.M., August 16, Kluge sent a message to Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s operations chief, recommending evacuation at once. Only at 4:40 P.M. did Hitler authorize full withdrawal.
His decision stemmed from the invasion of southern France. Only skeleton German elements were now in this region, and were too weak even to smash French Resistance forces. Hitler decided to abandon southern France and Normandy. He hoped to mass forces in the Vosges Mountains west of the Rhine, and form a new line. The decision meant that 100,000 Germans around the Bay of Biscay in southwestern France had to start moving, mostly on foot, through the French interior toward Dijon. Harassed by Resistance groups and by Allied aircraft, many of these soldiers finally crossed the Loire and surrendered to the Americans.
Kluge sent out instructions for partial withdrawal. Starting that night, westernmost units pulled back to the Orne River (about ten miles west of Falaise). On the following night they were to cross to the eastern bank. Since the Germans had to move through the three-mile space between Le Bourg-St.-Léonard and Chambois, Kluge ordered the Americans driven off the ridge at Le Bourg, which gave observation over the route. After a back-and-forth struggle with 90th Division, the Germans seized the ridge on the morning of August 17.
Meanwhile Bradley met with Hodges and Patton to plan future movements. Bradley removed Patton’s halt order and directed the two American armies to establish a line from Argentan, through Chambois and Dreux to the Seine.
Hodges’s army was to seize Chambois and Trun and make contact with the British and Canadians. As divisions disengaged on the west with the retreat of the Germans, they were to swing around to the east between Argentan and Dreux. Meanwhile Patton’s army was to seize Mantes, thirty miles downstream from Paris, and prevent the Germans from escaping.
Patton wanted to implement his old idea of blocking the German retreat: a broad sweep by three corps down the Seine to the sea. Patton’s plan was by far the best proposed, and it would have eliminated the most capable and experienced German force in the west. Units still in the Pas de Calais, the Low Countries, and the south of France were less powerful altogether than the two German armies in Normandy. With these gone, the Allies could have rolled into Germany against feeble opposition.
But it was not to be. Martin Blumenson wrote: “Although the battle of Normandy remained unfinished, the two leading Allied commanders, Montgomery and Bradley, were already ignoring the main chance of ending the war. Prematurely, they looked ahead to a triumphal march to Germany.”
Since Gerow decided he couldn’t move on Chambois till August 18, Montgomery told Crerar it was essential to take Trun and go on four miles to Chambois. Both of Crerar’s armored divisions, Canadian and Polish, jumped off on the afternoon of August 17, but met bitter resistance. By day’s end they were still two miles from Trun.
Field Marshal Walther Model, who had achieved much success in Russia, arrived in Normandy early on August 17 to replace Kluge. That night the Germans in the pocket withdrew across the Orne. The operation went smoothly. During the early morning of August 18, forty-five cargo aircraft delivered gasoline to the forces in the pocket. The Germans planned to move the night of August 18 from the Orne across the Argentan-Falaise highway.
When Gerow’s advance on Chambois commenced, he asked little of the French 2nd Armored Division, only using its artillery to help 80th Division seize the town of Argentan. Leclerc had already loudly signified to anyone who would listen that he wanted to liberate Paris, little else. The 80th, in its first fight, made no progress. The 90th Division and the Canadians both got within a couple miles of Chambois against desperate German resistance to keep the exit open.
That night the Germans renewed their withdrawal. Allied artillery fire rained down, but most got away to high ground just east of the Argentan-Falaise highway. The German pocket now occupied an area six by seven miles. A bolt hole about three or four miles wide remained open.
At midnight August 18 Model took command of the theater. Kluge, returning to Germany by automobile and, afraid he had been implicated in the July 20 murder plot, swallowed poison and died. Meanwhile the Germans in the pocket strained all their efforts to get out.
At last at 7:20 P.M., August 19, a company of the 90th Division met a Polish detachment in the midst of the burning village of Chambois. The gap had finally been closed. But the barrier was porous, and the Germans continued to flow through for two more days. Most got out.
On August 20, 5th Armored Division from Haislip’s 15th Corps commenced a slow push through fog and rain from Mantes down the left or near bank of the Seine, assisted on the west by two divisions of 19th Corps. This was not Patton’s sweep to the sea, but a laborious process aimed at clearing the river of the enemy. The Americans hit solid resistance and made little progress.
The next day, Montgomery and RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, in charge of Allied air support of the invasion, came to an astonishing conclusion: the Seine bridges had all been destroyed, the Germans were unable to cross, so the Allies didn’t need to make any more aerial attacks on the river—despite the fact that the Germans had been moving back and forth across the Seine throughout the Normandy campaign. Thus, as the Germans streamed toward the Seine crossings, they were not harassed by Allied aircraft. Virtually all the Germans got across the river—it was not impassable after all. Using back roads and traveling at night, most of the Germans reached the frontier and began preparing a new defensive line.
Meanwhile on August 20, George Patton, aggravated at Bradley and Montgomery for letting the Germans slip through their fingers, turned his sights eastward—toward the final liberation of France and the invasion of Germany. He ordered an immediate, open-throttled advance on Melun, Montereau, and Sens, all towns a few miles southeast of Paris, using 20th Corps under Walton Walker, and 12th Corps, now under Manton Eddy (Gilbert Cook had high blood pressure). He told Eddy to forget about his flanks and advance fifty miles a day.
Walker’s tanks got to Melun, Montereau, and Fontainebleau on the upper Seine on August 21, and kept going. Eddy liberated Sens and quickly moved on forty miles and captured Troyes. Everywhere the bridges were still intact, opposition nil.
In his diary, Patton wrote
: “We have, at this time, the greatest chance to win the war ever presented. If they will let me move on with three corps, two up and one back, on the line of Metz-Nancy-Épinal, we can be in Germany in ten days…. It is such a sure thing that I fear these blind moles [Montgomery, Bradley] don’t see it.”
Actually, Bradley did accept Patton’s plan, on August 25, and told him he could go east toward Metz and Strasbourg. The problem was not Bradley but availability of gasoline.
With the Germans withdrawing from the lower Seine and Manton Eddy’s corps already eighty-five miles southeast of Paris at Troyes, the French capital was ripe for the picking. However important the liberation of the City of Light was to the world, it was virtually empty of German combat troops, and Bradley wanted to bypass it. But on August 19 the Resistance rose in Paris, and challenged the German commander, Dietrich von Choltitz, who had received orders from Hitler to defend the city to the end, then destroy it. Immense pressure developed to get Allied troops into the city, and Bradley succumbed, sending in Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division, followed by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. When Hitler learned that Allied troops were entering the capital, he asked his staff: “Brennt Paris?” Is Paris burning? Choltitz did not burn Paris but signed an armistice with the Resistance.
The movement of the Frenchmen to the city set off wild celebrations, and, as Bradley remembered it, “Leclerc’s men, nearly overwhelmed with wine and women, rolled and reeled into Paris on August 25.” Two days later, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Gerow met Charles de Gaulle at Paris police headquarters, where de Gaulle had already set up his base. Eisenhower allowed Leclerc’s division to remain in Paris to give de Gaulle a show of political strength, but when de Gaulle demanded a victory parade, Eisenhower resolved to make it clear that de Gaulle had received Paris by the force of Allied arms. He ordered the U.S. 28th Infantry Division to parade down the Champs-Elysées on August 29—and keep right on going eastward into action. Bradley remembered it a bit differently. He had refused to let Leclerc’s division take part, he wrote, because Leclerc’s men “had disappeared into the back alleys, brothels, and bistros.”
The senior Allied commanders had been talking about how to defeat Germany as fast as possible. Montgomery wanted both army groups to advance northeast in a “solid mass” of forty divisions toward Antwerp, Brussels, Aachen, and the Ruhr—with himself in command.
Bradley favored a twofold advance, Montgomery’s army group northward and his army group northeastward through Nancy and Metz toward the Saar industrial region and central Germany. This was better tank country than Montgomery’s route, which led over many rivers and canals. However, Montgomery’s route lay through the Pas de Calais, where the V-1s were being fired on London, and the rumor was that the V-2s were about to be launched from there. Much of Allied airpower was challenging the V-1s instead of striking at German synthetic oil production, which was a major factor in Hitler’s ability to continue the war. Also, Antwerp and Rotterdam, two great ports, were in this direction, and the Allies badly needed ship berths.
As a consequence, Eisenhower decided—over Patton’s bitter opposition—that Hodges’s 1st Army with nine divisions, plus a new airborne corps of three divisions under Matthew Ridgway, be allocated to Montgomery, giving him twenty-five divisions, leaving Patton with fifteen divisions to advance toward the Saar.
Divisions were not the whole issue. A severe shortage of supplies was developing, since few ports were open, and, as the armies rushed toward Germany, distances increased by the day. Eisenhower allocated the lion’s share to Montgomery. Hodges, for example, got 5,000 tons of supplies a day, Patton 2,000 tons.
Both the northern and the eastern thrusts commenced at once. By August 31 spearheads of Patton’s army crossed the Meuse River at Verdun, and the next day patrols pushed unopposed to the Moselle River near Metz, thirty-five miles farther east. They were barely thirty miles from the Saar on the German frontier, and fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine River. But Patton’s main body had run out of gasoline, and did not move up to the Moselle till September 5. By that time the Germans had scraped together five weak divisions to hold the river line. Patton became stuck in an attack on the fortified city of Metz and nearby points, and got no farther.
Meantime the spearhead of Montgomery’s British 2nd Army swept into Brussels on September 3, and the next day another armored force raced on to Antwerp and captured the docks undamaged. Antwerp also was fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine and entry into the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.
At this moment, the Germans had nothing to oppose Montgomery. As Basil H. Liddell Hart wrote: “Rarely in any war has there been such an opportunity.” But here Montgomery failed. His spearhead paused to “refit, refuel, and rest,” resumed its advance on September 7, but pushed only eighteen miles farther, to the Meuse-Escaut Canal, where the desperate defense of a few German parachute troops halted it.
By mid-September the Germans had thickened their defenses all along the front but were not strong anywhere. Montgomery, instead of intensifying a direct drive eastward through Belgium and southern Holland, now mounted a huge fourteen-division thrust northward (Operation Market-Garden) on September 17 to get over the Rhine at Arnhem, Holland, using the recently formed 1st Allied Airborne Army to clear the path. His aim, not approved by Eisenhower, was an end run around the Ruhr and a direct strike at Berlin.
But the massive rivers running through Holland imposed severe barriers, and British tanks had to follow a single causeway from Antwerp to Arnhem. The Germans checked the thrust before it reached its goal. A large part of the British 1st Airborne Division dropped at Arnhem—“a bridge too far” for the rest of the Allies to reach, as described in Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same name. Here the British paras were cut off and forced to surrender, a struggle that became legendary for its heroism.
The failure of both Montgomery and Patton to breach the West Wall and get into the heart of Germany in September 1944 has been the center of a controversy that has raged ever since. Both sides claimed they could have won the war if only the other had not got the necessary gasoline.
Patton, when his fuel supplies were petering out, rushed into Bradley’s headquarters “bellowing like a bull” and roared: “To hell with Hodges and Monty. We’ll win your goddam war if you’ll keep 3rd Army moving.” Montgomery opposed any diversion of supplies to Patton, and his complaints became stronger after his thrust at Arnhem miscarried.
The truth is messier. German General Siegfried Westphal, who took over as chief of staff for the western front on September 5, wrote that the entire German line “was so full of gaps that it did not deserve this name. Until the middle of October, the enemy could have broken through at any point he liked with ease, and would then have been able to cross the Rhine and thrust deep into Germany almost unhindered.”
A number of mistakes occurred. Patton attacked Metz and Nancy, when they should have been bypassed, and his forces should have swung north to Luxembourg and Bitburg, where there were few Germans. This, General Günther Blumentritt reported, would have resulted in the collapse of German forces on the front.
Montgomery’s greatest single failure was his pause from September 4 to 7 after reaching Brussels and Antwerp, giving German paratroopers just enough time to organize a defense. The fault, wrote John North, official historian of the 21st Army Group, was a “war-is-won” attitude. Little sense of urgency prevailed among commanders during a vital two-week period in mid-September, and among the troops there was a strong inclination to go slow and avoid being killed.
Montgomery’s lack of drive at this critical point illustrates that the best chance to finish the war quickly was lost when Patton’s gasoline was shut off at the end of August, and he was a hundred miles closer to the Rhine than the British. He, far more than Montgomery, was capable of exploiting opportunity. Yet, as Westphal pointed out, a breakthrough almost anywhere still could have succeeded till mid-October, and neither Patton, Bradley, nor Montgomery saw it.
Meanwhile on the eastern front, the Germans had experienced nothing but disaster. By January 1944, the Red Army had twice the men and tanks as the German army. The only possibility for Germany to avoid total defeat was immediate withdrawal to the 1941 frontier and construction of a deep mine-strewn defensive line studded with antitank guns, advocated by Erwin Rommel. Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein recommended a similar approach, but Adolf Hitler rejected any retreat not actually forced on him by the Red Army, and on March 30 ousted Manstein. Consequently, throughout 1944, German forces in the east conducted one pointless defensive stand and one retreat after another.
By the end of the year, the Soviets were on the Vistula River opposite Warsaw, had surrounded Budapest, driven the Germans out of southeastern Europe and all but a small part of the Baltic states, and forced Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary out of the war. The Germans had lost a million men. As 1945 began, the Soviets were poised for the final assault on the Third Reich.
23 THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1944, AS WESTERN ALLIED FORCES WERE CLOSING AGAINST the West Wall or Siegfried line, Adolf Hitler met with his closest military advisers at his Wolfsschanze—Wolf’s Lair—in East Prussia.
Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s operations chief, reported that German troops withdrawing from southern France were forming a new line in the Vosges Mountains and on old forts in northeastern France. Other Germans were building new lines in Holland or falling back from Belgium into the West Wall.
There was one place of special concern: the mountainous, heavily forested Ardennes of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. Here Americans were attacking, and the Germans had almost nothing to deter them.
Hitler sat erect and ordered Jodl to stop. After a long pause, Hitler announced: “I have made a momentous decision. I shall go over to the offensive, that is to say here, out of the Ardennes, with the objective Antwerp.”
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 30