Virtually the entire burden of supplying the Allied invasion lodgement therefore fell upon MULBERRY B. The Falaise breakout morphed the requirement into maintaining a high-speed mechanised advance in excess of 300 miles into eastern France, and efforts to alleviate the situation met with limited success at best. The British 11th Armoured Division had secured the Belgian port of Antwerp, the largest facility of its kind in Europe, on 4 September for example, but the Germans held not only the banks of the River Scheldt leading to the port but also the island of Walcheren in the mouth of the river estuary; as a result, Allied supply vessels were unable to access Antwerp until Walcheren had been secured via an amphibious assault on 8 November 1944. Similarly, the British 49th (West Riding) and 51st (Highland) Divisions, supported by two tank brigades and specialised armour from the 79th Armoured Division, mounted a full-scale assault on the port of Le Havre beginning on 10 September. The port was secured after a two-day battle but as at Cherbourg, the port facilities were so badly damaged that it took until 9 October to make them workable.4 In the meantime, the lack of Allied access to a major port resulted in a shortage of supplies, especially fuel. This was on occasion alleviated to an extent by utilising captured German stocks, including a warehouse full of salt liberated in Belgium, but fuel was more urgently required and the problem increased with every mile the Allied spearheads moved away from Normandy. By 20 August, for example, the US advance alone was consuming well over 800,000 gallons of fuel per day, and before the end of the month the supply trucks ferrying the fuel up to the front were consuming an additional 300,000 gallons daily.5
The supply shortage sparked an intense bout of competition between British and US commanders for what resources were available, which in turn exacerbated already fraught Anglo-American relations. Montgomery had formulated a scheme for a narrow thrust operation through Holland and into the Ruhr and possibly the North German Plain while commanding the Allied invasion lodgement as Commander-in-Chief Allied Ground Forces. The scheme was revealed to Bradley on 17 August in order to elicit support, and then to Lieutenant-Generals Courtney Hodges, Henry Crerar and Sir Miles Dempsey, commanding the US 1st, Canadian 1st and British 2nd Armies respectively, at a specially convened meeting two days later. Montgomery then tried to sell the idea to Eisenhower during a meeting on 23 August, just prior to the latter taking over command of the invasion force in his capacity as Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force on 1 September. The pitch proved to be only a partial success, for Eisenhower refused to allocate all available resources to 21st Army Group and maintained his preference for a broad front advance. He did, however, subsequently agree to give priority to Montgomery’s northern thrust and to that end assigned Hodges’ US 1st Army to protect the British right flank and allocated control of SHAEF’s sole strategic reserve, the 1st Allied Airborne Army, to 21st Army Group control following a subsequent meeting on 4 September. This was done with the caveat that British forces secure the port of Antwerp before the thrust commenced and Montgomery was officially informed of the decision via signal the following day.6 However, the prospect of being side-lined into a subsidiary role did not go down well with Eisenhower’s senior US commanders. By 23 August Bradley appears to have decided to discard his tacit agreement with Montgomery’s scheme in favour of a push along the southern Allied axis by the US 12th Army Group towards the Saar industrial region on the Franco-German border. The idea appears to have been to persuade Eisenhower to reverse his decision to give supply priority to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group by presenting him with a US fait accompli, and to this end Bradley issued a directive to his 12th Army Group on 10 September ordering the US 1st and 3rd Armies to secure bridgeheads across the River Rhine in the areas of Bonn-Cologne-Koblenz and Mainz-Mannheim respectively.7 Bradley’s thinking was greeted with enthusiasm by Patton, who was convinced that his 3rd Army could advance eastward with impunity because there was nothing between it and the unmanned Westwall defences protecting the German border. Patton therefore persuaded Bradley to maintain the 3rd Army advance into Lorraine toward the French garrison city of Metz, which he (Patton) achieved by the simple expedient of intercepting and redirecting ammunition and fuel supplies intended for Hodges’ US 1st Army; Patton himself labelled his behaviour the ‘stone soup method’, analogous to strangers or a tramp wheedling the ingredients for proper soup from unwitting householders.8 As the 1st Army’s supply receipts were running at over a third below minimum at 1,500 tons per day, the impact of Patton’s depredations was exacerbated sharply, and drew vociferous complaints from Montgomery when he learned of them.9
In the event all this availed Patton little, for the US 3rd Army still literally ran out of fuel on the approaches to Metz, and he was subsequently disabused of the notion that the Germans posed no real obstacle to the advance of his Army. By the end of August 1944 OKW had begun implementing measures to seal the approaches to the German frontier, which included bringing in reinforcements from as far afield as Italy; this went some way to explaining the stiff resistance Patton’s men encountered in their various pushes across the River Moselle.10 Furthermore, attempts to force the old fixed defences protecting Metz by attacking Fort Driant from 27 September presented the US Army with its first serious check since the breakout at St. Lô on 25 July and the attempt was finally called off on the night of 12-13 October after bitter fighting; the defences were not finally dealt with until the following month, and then only after a thorough tactical rethink.11 As the US official History points out, the idea that a chance to win the war in short order was lost by failing to provide the US advance and Patton in particular with the supplies he requested, whilst popular at the time and since, was a chimera. The US advance would have run into resistance stiff enough to bring it to a halt on the Rhine, if not the Moselle, and quite possibly with more severe consequences given the inescapable logistical constraints.12
Bradley relayed the content of his 10 September directive to 12th Army Group to Eisenhower on 12 September but he was forty-eight hours too late, for by that time the Supreme Commander had decided to back Montgomery’s scheme for a narrow thrust through Holland and into Germany.13
Montgomery received a further opportunity to sell an updated version of his scheme employing the entire 1st Allied Airborne Army to Eisenhower on Sunday 10 September, with Deputy Supreme Commander Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder in attendance.14 The meeting took place at Brussels and was held in Eisenhower’s aircraft, as he had been rendered almost immobile by a knee injury. The location was also dictated by inadequate communication links with SHAEF Forward HQ, which had relocated from Portsmouth to Granville at the western base of the Cotentin Peninsula on 7 August 1944.15 The French seaside town was off the beaten track by any measure, and the rapid Allied advance post-Falaise placed it over 400 miles from the scene of the action virtually at a stroke. This was compounded by an inexplicable failure to provide the Forward HQ with anything like adequate communications facilities, to the extent that there were no direct links to SHAEF’s subordinate Army Groups, with all the potentially detrimental repercussions that entailed. During the airborne operations in Holland in the latter half of September for example, SHAEF’s Air Commander-in-Chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, was obliged to plead for information via private telephone calls to members of 21st Army Group staff. Similarly, Eisenhower’s 5 September signal allocating supply priority and command of the US 1st Army and 1st Allied Airborne Army to 21st Army Group was not actually despatched in its entirety for several days, with the first half being transmitted 09:00 on 7 September and the remainder at 10:15 two days later.16 The situation was alleviated somewhat when SHAEF HQ relocated to the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles on the outskirts of Paris at the end of September 1944.17
There does not appear to be any official record of what took place at the 10 September meeting, and accounts therefore rely on references to it in subsequent meetings, signals and diary entries. All the signs are that it did not begin well, however. Montgomery w
as still smarting from being superseded as Commander-in-Chief Allied Ground Forces despite the move being a long-standing arrangement, and he appears to have taken the opportunity to vent his spleen over perceived shortcomings in Eisenhower’s performance as Supreme Commander until the latter diplomatically pointed out the inappropriateness of his subordinate’s behaviour by patting him on the knee and remarking ‘Steady Monty. You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.’18 Montgomery then apologised and matters appear to have proceeded on more amicable lines. The scheme Montgomery laid out was essentially a revised version of Operation COMET, rejigged to employ three Airborne divisions rather than one to secure water crossings for a ground advance over the sixty miles between Eindhoven and Arnhem. The operation was codenamed MARKET GARDEN, with the former referring to the Airborne insertion and the latter to the ground relief element. Eisenhower approved the scheme with some enthusiasm, as is apparent from his somewhat verbose comment to Montgomery in a letter the following day: ‘I must say that it [MARKET GARDEN] is not only designed to carry out most effectively my basic conception with respect to this campaign but it is in exact concordance with all the understandings that we now have’.19
Eisenhower’s comment, and particularly the ending, suggests that he considered agreement to have been reached across the board. This view was shared to an extent by Tedder, who commented that the meeting had ‘cleared the air’ when relaying details of it to the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. However, Tedder also referred to Montgomery ‘…making great play over the word “priority”…[and insisting that in]…his interpretation the word implies absolute priority, to the exclusion of all other operations if necessary.’ He also pointed out that Montgomery would ‘dislike not getting a blank cheque’.20 The latter observation was forensically accurate, for Montgomery began badgering Eisenhower about his dissatisfaction with the supply priorities the day after the meeting, claiming that under existing arrangements MARKET GARDEN could not be launched until at least 23 and probably 26 September, and that the delay would permit the Germans to organise and implement defensive measures. Eisenhower responded on 12 September by despatching his Chief-of-Staff, Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith, to Brussels to clarify 21st Army Group’s supply requirements and on 13 September pointed out to Montgomery via telegram that his demands for a daily delivery of 1,000 tons by air to the Brussels area were unrealistic and could only be achieved by diverting aircraft from Operation MARKET. He did, however agree to divert US road transport temporarily to delivering materiel to 21st Army Group at the rate of 500 tons per day as a temporary emergency measure, even though it meant diverting virtually all US transport assets and thus immobilising US divisions and other tactical units until 1 October; Montgomery was to expedite the remainder of the supply effort via emergency measures of his own.21 Eisenhower’s decision was both fair-minded and courageous, given that he was already fighting the perception among US commanders in Europe and the US public alike that he was overly sympathetic to British interests.22 Although the evidence shows that Eisenhower still intended to maintain his broad front strategy and permit US forces to continue the advance into the Saar region as soon as the supply situation permitted,23 Montgomery appears to have decided that Eisenhower’s compromise equated to capitulation to his narrow northern thrust strategy. This is clear from a subsequent communication to the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Nye, in which Montgomery claimed to have personally ensured the advance into the Saar had been permanently curtailed, set a firm date for launching his narrow front attack and explicitly referred to gaining approval for his scheme as ‘a great victory’.24 On that basis he also issued a Directive to the British 2nd Army on 14 September instructing it to begin planning for an immediate post-MARKET GARDEN advance east into Germany to secure Hamm as a springboard to isolate and capture the Ruhr, even though Eisenhower had authorised no such future operations.25
Montgomery’s self-serving interpretations aside, the key point here is that Eisenhower had approved MARKET GARDEN, and D-Day had been set for Sunday 17 September 1944. However, before moving on to examine the airborne planning and preparation for the Operation, it might be illuminating to clarify the thinking behind Montgomery’s choice of Holland as a venue for his narrow-thrust strategy. Montgomery was criticised in a television interview decades after the event for not moving north-east to cross the Rhine at Wesel instead, by then Brigadier R. F. K. Belchem, who served as Brigadier General Staff (Operations) at 21st Army Group HQ in 1944-45; Belchem appears to have based his appreciation on post-war discussion with former Heer officers who claimed that the Germans would have been unable to oppose such an attack.26 Following such a course would certainly have been beneficial, as it would have improved contact between the divergent British and US lines of advance. However, it was simply not feasible to execute a large-scale Airborne operation in the area of Wesel in September 1944 because doing so would have exposed the transport aircraft and gliders to the Ruhr’s formidable, and at that point undisrupted, anti-aircraft defences with the very real prospect of losing a significant proportion of the Airborne troops before they even reached the ground. In addition, the ground route to Wesel involved forcing a crossing of the River Maas and then fighting through the twenty-mile-deep Reichswald section of the Westwall defence line in the region of Cleve, Goch and Xanten. That process took 21st Army Group just over a month in early 1945 with a significant amount of preparation and while the same could be said of the Germans on that occasion, the speed with which the German defences crystallised from scratch in the face of the Guards Armoured Division’s advance across the Albert Canal on 7 September 1944 strongly suggests that the extravagant claims of Belchem’s German confidants should be treated with utmost caution. It can therefore be argued that given the prevailing operational situation, there was no practical alternative to a northward attack into Holland toward Arnhem for 21st Army Group. The idea did have some merit in its own right. Securing Arnhem and the corridor leading to it would not only provide a springboard for a subsequent attack toward the Ruhr, it would also provide a means of bypassing the German Westwall border defences, which ended in the Reichswald forest just east of Nijmegen, and thus open the way for a thrust into the North German Plain toward Berlin. Indeed, this was the precise slant put on Montgomery’s gaining approval for MARKET GARDEN by Lieutenant-General Nye when he passed on the news to his superior, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field-Marshal Sir Alan Brooke. The CIGS was accompanying Churchill at the OCTAGON Conference in Quebec, and Nye’s communication specifically referred to the area of Münster as the ultimate objective of the thrust into Holland, in preparation for a further advance on Berlin.27
The rationale behind Montgomery’s choice of line of advance is clear, but the same cannot be said of the thought process that underlay it. This is an important point, not least because it has become fashionable to place all responsibility for the failure of MARKET GARDEN squarely upon Montgomery’s shoulders,28 a process facilitated greatly by his reticence; unlike the other battles he fought, Montgomery refrained from commenting about MARKET GARDEN after the event.29 Montgomery’s battlefield reputation was based on meticulous preparation and methodical execution of carefully prepared plans, the object of which was to minimise friendly casualties. This was a legacy of his service on the Western Front during the First World War, and is clearly discernible in virtually every action he fought from El Alamein in October-November 1942 through the various actions he commanded in Sicily, on the eastern flank of the Normandy invasion area and onto the operations to clear the Reichswald and force a crossing of the River Rhine in February-March 1945. Indeed, Montgomery’s reputation for tactical prudence was well known to foe as well as friend; the commander of the reconstituted Heeresgruppe B in Holland, Generalfeldmarschall Walther Model and his chief-of-staff General Hans Krebs discounted the possibility of an Allied airborne operation in Holland precisely because Montgomery was in
charge.30 Embarking on a risky venture like MARKET GARDEN was thus demonstrably out of character for Montgomery, and none of the background factors really provide a satisfactory explanation for his abandonment of past practice. The fact that he had to persuade Eisenhower to accept his scheme for an advance toward Arnhem rules out imposition from above, and the precarious supply situation was an argument against launching such a potentially risky venture, not in favour of it. Perhaps the most obvious factor would have been a desire to capitalise upon German disorganisation and weakness resulting from their flight across France and Belgium following Falaise. However, as mentioned earlier, this peaked in Holland on 5 September, which the locals who witnessed the chaos and confusion of the German retreat dubbed Mad Tuesday,31 the same time briefings for Operation COMET and preparatory supporting ground actions were being prepared or delivered. Thus that particular window of opportunity had closed by the time Montgomery finally succeeded in obtaining permission from Eisenhower to proceed with his scheme on 10 September, and it is highly unlikely Montgomery was unaware of the fact, given the degree of resistance encountered by the Guards Armoured Division in its push across the Albert Canal at Beeringen between 6 and 9 September. Another possible driver was political pressure, but this does not appear to have been the case either. Admittedly, Montgomery did show Eisenhower a British government communication on 10 September urging haste in securing western Holland in order to neutralise launch sites for German V2 missiles, the first of which had hit London two days previously. However, Montgomery’s behaviour during the meeting strongly suggests that the communication was merely introduced as an additional means of exerting pressure on the Supreme Commander rather than a significant factor in its own right. Even if that were the case, it is doubtful whether this equated to the kind of political pressure Montgomery was exposed to during his stint in North Africa, or indeed during his repeated and unsuccessful attempts to break through the German lines near Caen after the Normandy landings. On those occasions he refused to be diverted from his methodical approach, and he continued to do so at the beginning of the Falaise breakout when the justification for changing tack was arguably greater. Although the 43rd Division was across the River Seine at Vernon by dawn on 26 August, Montgomery imposed a two-day pause to allow the British 2nd Army to regroup and reorient before loosing the 11th Armoured Division across northern France toward the Belgian border at dawn on 28 August.
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