THE GROUND COMMAND issue that Montgomery persisted in raising was essentially phony. It hardly mattered, except for publicity purposes, if Bradley reported to Eisenhower directly or through Montgomery. As Eisenhower emphasized to Montgomery, nothing happened without his approval, whether or not he had direct control of the land battle. What did matter was logistics, the flow of supplies. Eisenhower allocated supplies, and that was his real power. The way in which Eisenhower distributed the available supplies would determine the direction and the nature of the offensive, no matter who had the title of land commander.
So, where Eisenhower could afford to be generous with Montgomery, he was, while retaining the reality of power. Words of praise cost nothing and gained much, and Eisenhower was free with them. On August 31, Eisenhower called a press conference in London. “Now,” he told the reporters, “the time has come when we have broken out of that initial beachhead and General Bradley is taking over his part of the job, reporting directly to SHAEF headquarters, and anyone that interprets this as a demotion for General Montgomery simply won’t look facts in the face. He is not only my very close and warm friend, but a man with whom I have worked for two years, and for whom I have a tremendous admiration, one of the great soldiers of this or any other war.”
He gave Montgomery credit for the victories in France. As to the American criticism that Montgomery had been too cautious before Caen, Eisenhower said he would not hear of it. “Every foot of ground he [the enemy] lost at Caen was like losing ten miles anywhere else. Every piece of dust there was more than a diamond to him.”1
Churchill, as aware as Eisenhower of the blow to Montgomery’s ego from the command changes, also helped soften the blow. On September 1, Churchill announced that Montgomery had been promoted to field marshal (which created a situation in which Montgomery outranked Eisenhower, five stars to four). The field marshal’s baton, however, led Montgomery to increase, not slacken, his demand that his plan be implemented. Nor did it impress Patton sufficiently to persuade him to give in to Montgomery.
At the beginning of September, Eisenhower declared that Montgomery’s 21st Army Group should have priority in supplies. But he also wanted 12th Army Group under Bradley to “build up” east of Paris and to “prepare to strike rapidly eastwards.” Exactly as Montgomery had feared, Bradley allowed Patton to advance to Reims and beyond. On August 30, Patton crossed the Meuse River, which put him more than a hundred miles east of Paris and not much more than that distance from the Rhine. He was, however, out of gas; that day, he received only 32,000 gallons of the 400,000 gallons of gasoline he needed. Still, he wanted to push on. When one of his corps commanders reported that he had stopped because if he went any farther his tanks would be without fuel, Patton told him “to continue until the tanks stop and then get out and walk.” Patton realized that when his tanks ran dry Eisenhower would have to give him more gasoline, even at the expense of the 21st Army Group.2
On September 2, Eisenhower went to Versailles to see Bradley, Hodges, and Patton to discuss future operations. Before the meeting, Kay noted in the SHAEF office diary that “E. says that he is going to give Patton hell because he is stretching his line too far and therefore making supply difficulties.” But Patton seized the offensive; he gleefully told Eisenhower that he had patrols on the Moselle and—stretching the truth—in Metz. “If you let me retain my regular allotment of tonnage, Ike, we could push on to the German frontier and rupture that Goddamn Siegfried Line [the West Wall]. I’m willing to stake my reputation on that.”
“Careful, George,” Eisenhower responded, thinking of Patton’s recent difficulties, “that reputation of yours hasn’t been worth very much.” Patton, thinking of this recent dash through France, rejoined, “That reputation is pretty good now.”3 Patton then convinced Eisenhower that the opportunities on his front were too good to pass up, and got Eisenhower to agree to allocate additional gasoline to Third Army. Eisenhower also gave Patton permission to attack toward Mannheim and Frankfurt, and agreed to Bradley’s demand that First Army stay on Patton’s left, south of the Ardennes.
When Montgomery learned that Patton was getting more gasoline and that Hodges had been detached from his right flank, he exploded. There were not enough supplies for two offensives, Montgomery thundered, and Eisenhower had to choose one or the other. The one selected “must have all maintenance resources it needs without qualifications.” Time was vital. “If we attempt a compromise solution and split our maintenance resources so that neither thrust is full-blooded we will prolong the war,” he warned. Eisenhower replied that he still gave priority to 21st Army Group and was allocating supplies on that basis.4
Two days later, September 7, Montgomery protested that he was not getting priority in supplies. After reciting the facts and figures of his shortages, Montgomery added, “It is very difficult to explain things in a message like this.” He wondered if it would be possible for Eisenhower to come to see him.5
It was typical of Montgomery that he should make such a request. It never seems to have occurred to him that he, not Eisenhower, was the supplicant. Only once during the entire campaign did he visit Eisenhower at SHAEF, even though he was regularly invited to attend conferences. He always insisted that Eisenhower come to him.
Montgomery’s request of September 7 was particularly untactful, because Eisenhower had hurt his knee and every movement was painful for him. The accident happened on September 2, when Eisenhower was returning to Granville from his meeting with Bradley and Patton at Versailles. Eisenhower’s B-25 broke a muffler and he switched to a small L-5, a one-passenger plane with a limited range, designed for liaison work. A storm came up; the pilot lost his way and could not find the airstrip. The L-5 was about to run out of gasoline, and they made an emergency landing on a beach. Eisenhower hopped out to help the pilot push the plane above the tideline and, in the wet sand, slipped and twisted his knee. The pilot helped him limp across the salt marshes to the road, where a GI passing in a jeep picked them up and drove them to Granville.
Wet, exhausted, bedraggled, Eisenhower had two aides carry him up to his bedroom. The knee swelled; the pain was bad; Eisenhower was immobile. A doctor flew over from London and ordered him to stay in bed for a week; a few days later, as the swelling went down, the doctor put Eisenhower’s knee in a plaster cast.
From his bed, Eisennower had a grand view of Mont St. Michel, but it did little to raise his spirits. He had a ringing in his ears, caused—he supposed—by high blood pressure (he would not allow the doctors to check for fear they might send him home); the pain in his knee drained his energy; he was irritated with all his subordinates, American as well as British. Most of all, he hated having to use crutches or a cane just to get around in his bedroom.
The pain persisted; two weeks later he told Mamie he was taking daily treatments, one and a half hours of baking and rubbing, but it hardly helped. A bit later, he told Mamie that “my leg is improving, but not as rapidly as if I were 30 instead of almost 54. It is OK except for soreness, and I have to be so d---- careful! Annoying.”6 Until the end of the war, the knee continued to bother him, occasionally forcing him to spend a day or two in bed, often requiring the aid of a cane or crutches (but never in public).
Montgomery knew about the injury, but still decided it would be better for Eisenhower to come to Brussels than for him to fly to Granville, despite Eisenhower’s request that he do so. On the afternoon of September 10, Eisenhower therefore flew to Brussels. Getting aboard the plane was painful, getting off out of the question. So Montgomery came aboard. Pulling Eisenhower’s latest directive from his pocket, waving his arms, Montgomery damned the plan in extreme language, accused the Supreme Commander of double-crossing him, implied that Patton, not Eisenhower, was running the war, demanded that control of the land battle be returned to him, and asserted that the double thrust would result in certain failure.
As the tirade gathered in fury Eisenhower sat silent. At the first pause for breath, however, he leaned forward, put his hand on Montgomery’s knee, and said, “Steady, Monty! You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.”7
Montgomery mumbled an apology. He then proposed that 21st Army Group make a single thrust through Arnhem to Berlin. Eisenhower, according to Tedder, who was present, thought “it was fantastic to talk of marching to Berlin with an army which was still drawing the great bulk of its supplies over beaches.” Montgomery insisted that it could be done if he got all the supplies, but Eisenhower refused even to consider the possibility. As Eisenhower put it in his office diary later, “Monty’s suggestion is simple, give him everything, which is crazy.”8
Sitting in Eisenhower’s B-25 on the Brussels airfield, the Supreme Commander and the field marshal argued for another hour. Eisenhower finally agreed to a plan, code name Market-Garden, that Montgomery said promised great results. It called for a crossing of the Lower Rhine in Arnhem, in Holland, with the Airborne Army and British Second Army.
Eisenhower agreed to the plan because, like Montgomery, he wanted to get a bridgehead across the Rhine before the momentum of the offensive was lost. He also liked the idea of using the Airborne Army for a major operation. But Market-Garden had some obvious disadvantages. By moving northward from the Belgian-Dutch border, rather than east, Second Army would open a gap between its right flank and First Army’s left. Hodges would have to slide his divisions to his left to cover the gap, which meant an even broader front than before, with more stretching by everyone. The direction of the attack would carry 21st Army Group away from the Ruhr and give it another river to cross. Worst of all, it would delay the opening of Antwerp.
Antwerp had always been emphasized in SHAEF’s pre-Overlord plan. It was Europe’s biggest port, and the one closest to the German heartland. SHAEF had reckoned that no major operations could be conducted in Germany without Antwerp. Yet Eisenhower allowed Montgomery to ignore Antwerp in favor of a reckless operation, at Arnhem, that promised no great results even if successful. Similarly, Eisenhower had said, “There is no point in getting there [to the West Wall] until we are in a position to do something about it.”9 But, because he allowed Patton to advance willy-nilly, and because he failed to insist on Antwerp, that is exactly what happened. It was his worst error of the war.
Montgomery, with his eyes on Arnhem, diverted supplies from the Canadians to Second Army. Thus although the Canadians took the city of Antwerp in early September, the Germans still held the Scheldt Estuary, making it impossible for the Allies to use the port, and the Canadians were not strong enough to drive them out. On September 11 Eisenhower wrote in his office diary, “Monty seems unimpressed by necessity for taking Antwerp approaches,” but Eisenhower himself was just as guilty.10 By agreeing to Market-Garden, the Supreme Commander had in practice agreed to take supplies from Patton and to ignore Antwerp in order to achieve a tactical, not a strategic, gain. All the AEF was involved in half measures, or less. It would have been impossible to say at this point which the Supreme Commander wanted most, Antwerp, or Arnhem, or a penetration of the West Wall south of the Ardennes.
In his own defense, Eisenhower wrote, long after the war, “I not only approved Market-Garden, I insisted upon it. What we needed was a bridgehead over the Rhine. If that could be accomplished, I was quite willing to wait on all other operations. What this action proved was that the idea of ‘one full-blooded thrust’ to Berlin was silly.”11 But of all the factors that influenced Eisenhower’s decisions—to reinforce success, to leap the Rhine, to bring the highly trained but underutilized paratroopers into action—the one that stands out is his desire to appease Montgomery. At no other point in the war did Eisenhower’s tendency toward compromise and his desire to keep his subordinates happy exact a higher price.
On September 17, Market-Garden began. The first day went badly for Second Army, but well for the paratroopers. By September 21, due to a variety of factors, of which bad weather, German counterattacks, and Montgomery’s strange passivity in prodding Second Army were the most important, Market-Garden was on the verge of failure.
On September 20, Eisenhower moved SHAEF headquarters to the Hotel Trianon at Versailles. Eisenhower’s office was too large for his tastes, so he had it partitioned, giving the other half of the room to Kay and the other secretaries. The secretaries lived together in a flat above what had once been the stables of Louis XV, while Eisenhower lived in a handsome mansion that had recently been occupied by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.
His knee continued to hobble him; the ringing in his ears was still there; he had a cold; a cyst on his back added to his discomfort.
But what bothered him most was the German resistance. He told Mamie that people kept asking him what he was going to do when the war was over. “The question makes me angry, because you can be certain this war is not ‘won’ for the man that is shivering, suffering and dying up on the Siegfried Line.” When he had a rare idle moment, his mind went backward rather than forward. “Yesterday I thought so frequently of Icky,” he wrote on September 25. “He would have been 27 years old!”
That thought, plus a letter from Mamie saying that she feared he had changed so much that she would not know him, led to a bit of reflection. “Of course we’ve changed,” he wrote her. “How could two people go through what we have . . . without seeing each other except once in more than two years, and still believe they could be exactly as they were. The rule of nature is constant change. But it seems to me that the thing to do is to retain our sense of humor, and try to make an interesting game of getting acquainted again. After all, there is no ‘problem’ separating us—it is merely distance, and that can some day be eliminated.”12
• •
On the battlefield in northwest Europe, everything had turned out badly. The great offensive of August in France had not led to victory in Europe. Market-Garden had failed and Antwerp was not opened in time to do any good in 1944. The ultimate blame for this situation rested with the man who had the ultimate responsibility, the Supreme Commander himself.
On October 9, Eisenhower finally began to give Montgomery a shaking. The immediate provocation was a report from Admiral Ramsay’s office that the Canadians would be unable to accomplish anything until November 1 because of ammunition shortages. A furious Eisenhower wired Montgomery, “Unless we have Antwerp producing by the middle of November our entire operations will come to a standstill. I must emphasize that, of all our operations on our entire front from Switzerland to the Channel, I consider Antwerp of first importance, and I believe that the operations designed to clear up the entrance require your personal attention.” He took all the sting out of the message, however, by adding, “You know best where the emphasis lies within your Army Group.”13
Montgomery fired back a cable the same day. “Request you will ask Ramsay from me by what authority he makes wild statements to you concerning my operations about which he can know nothing rpt nothing.” The Canadians, Montgomery said, were already attacking. He reminded Eisenhower that there “is no rpt no shortage of ammunition.” He hotly claimed that at the Versailles conference the Supreme Commander had made the attack in Holland the “main effort”; as for Antwerp, he insisted that “the operations [there] are receiving my personal attention.”14
Eisenhower replied that “the possession of the approaches to Antwerp remains . . . an objective of vital importance.” He added, “Let me assure you that nothing I may ever say or write with respect to future plans . . . is meant to indicate any lessening of the need for Antwerp.”15
Shortly thereafter Smith called Montgomery on the telephone and demanded to know when SHAEF could expect some action around Antwerp. Heated words followed. Finally Smith, “purple with rage,” turned to his deputy, General Morgan, and thrust the telephone into his hand. “Here,” Smith said, “you tell your countryman what to do.” Morgan, expecting that Montgomery would be head of the British Army after the war, thought to himself, “Well, that’s the end of my career.” 16 He then told Montgomery that unless Antwerp was opened soon his supplies would be cut off.
Morgan was right about his career. Neither he, nor any other British officer who served at SHAEF, nor for that matter de Guingand, prospered in the postwar Montgomery-run British Army. As Eisenhower once said of Montgomery, “He’s just a little man, he’s just as little inside as he is outside.” 17
Montgomery, incensed by this threat, put down the phone and wrote to Smith. He blamed the failure of Market-Garden on a lack of coordination between his forces and Bradley’s and once again demanded that he be given sole control of the land battle. This was too much. Eisenhower’s patience with the field marshal was almost limitless, but not quite. “The Antwerp operation does not involve the question of command in any slightest degree,” Eisenhower told Montgomery. In any event, as far as command went, he would not, ever, turn 12th Army Group over to Montgomery.
Then Eisenhower used his ultimate threat; he said that if Montgomery, after reading the SHAEF plan of campaign, still characterized that plan as “unsatisfactory, then indeed we have an issue that must be settled soon in the interest of future efficiency.” Eisenhower said he was well aware of his own powers and limitations, “and if you, as the senior Commander in this Theater of one of the great Allies, feel that my conceptions and directives are such as to endanger the success of my operations, it is our duty to refer the matter to higher authority for any action they may choose to take, however drastic.”18
Montgomery knew full well that if Eisenhower told the CCS it was “him or me,” Eisenhower would win. “I have given you my views and you have given your answer,” Montgomery hastened to reply. “I and all of us will weigh in one hundred percent to do what you want and we will pull it through without a doubt.” He said he had given Antwerp top priority and would terminate the discussion on command arrangements. “You will hear no more on the subject of command from me,” he promised, and signed off, “Your very devoted and loyal subordinate, Monty.”19
Montgomery could be as abject as Patton when it had to be done, but like Patton, he still insisted on going his own way. Despite this exchange, he continued to emphasize Second Army’s attack, at the expense of the Canadians. It was October 16 before Montgomery gave up on operations in Holland. Then, the taking of the approaches to Antwerp proved to be a difficult and time-consuming tactical problem; the Allies did not drive the Germans out of the Scheldt Estuary until November 8. After that, the mines had to be cleared; not until November 28 did the first Allied convoy reach Antwerp’s docks.
By then, bad weather had long since set in, and any chance of ending the war in 1944 was gone. As Brooke declared, “I feel that Monty’s strategy for once is at fault. Instead of carrying out the advance on Arnhem he ought to have made certain of Antwerp in the first place. Ike nobly took all the blame on himself as he had approved Monty’s suggestion to operate on Arnhem.”20
The Germans had pulled off “the miracle of the West.” They had established a firm defensive line from the North Sea to the Swiss border, a defensive line that was based on the West Wall, which was proving to be much more formidable than Allied intelligence had anticipated. The Germans had rebuilt their once-shattered divisions, brought new ones into the fight, and were superior in numbers (although not in tanks or artillery) to the AEF. Worst of all, they were fighting in defense of their homeland just as hard as Eisenhower had feared they would. The rosy Allied expectations of August and September were gone.
• •
Fall was never Eisenhower’s best season. In 1942 he had been stuck in the mud of Tunisia, in 1943 bogged down on the Italian peninsula, and in 1944 the rains came again to turn the fields of northwest Europe into quagmires. As Eisenhower told Marshall, “I am getting exceedingly tired of weather.”21 His airplanes could not fly, his tanks were unable to maneuver, and his soldiers marched only with difficulty. He was still short on supplies and was beginning to have replacement problems. Under these circumstances, the fall battles resulted in little beyond heavy casualties on both sides.
Throughout the fall, Eisenhower traveled incessantly. “Weather is so miserable that all my travel is by auto,” he told Mamie, “which takes lots of time.” He usually traveled with only his driver, Sergeant Dry, and Jimmy Gault (who read the maps), while he sat alone in the back seat. “I have hours to think,” he wrote Mamie, “and since the staff is not there to plague me, I think of you a lot. Some of the roads I travel are the ones we rode over 15 years ago, and I always wish you were along to see them, with me, again.”22
It was a discouraging period all around. “Well sweet, I’d like to think that this mess would be over soon, so I could come home,” Ike wrote his wife on November 22. “But the fighting and the dying go on—and the end is not yet. ‘Civilization’ is not pretty when it resorts to war. Anyway, some day victory will be ours, and I’ll come a running!”
“It’s all so terrible, so awful,” he said in another letter, “that I constantly wonder how ‘civilization’ can stand war at all.” The strain of the long separation on his marriage was getting worse, Mamie’s complaints about her loneliness and his indifference harder to bear. “It’s true we’ve now been apart for 21/2 years,” he wrote in November, and he recognized how “painful” this was for her. “Because you don’t have a specific war job that absorbs your time and thoughts I understand also that this distress is harder for you to bear. But you should not forget that I do miss you and do love you, and that the load of responsibility I carry would be intolerable unless I could have the belief that there is someone who wants me to come home—for good.” In a heartfelt plea for understanding, he added, “Don’t forget that I take a beating, every day.”
In mid-December, he told her he prayed that this would be their last Christmas apart, and promised her endless hours of talking when the war was over. “We’ll have to take a three month vacation on some lonely beach—and oh lordy, lordy, let it be sunny!!”23
Almost as vexing to Eisenhower as his problems with the British field marshals were his problems with Second Lieutenant John Eisenhower, or, more precisely, with John’s mother. John had been assigned to the 71st Division, which was scheduled to leave Fort Benning for France in the near future. Mamie found out about this development before Ike did and complained, “You didn’t tell me what you had cooked up.”
Ike protested, “I’ve cooked up nothing, and I don’t know where he is or what he is going to do. I did make sure that if he wanted to go to a division coming to this theater, the W.D. would not object merely because I was in command here.” Five days later he learned of John’s assignment to the 71st, and commented, “I will have a hard time keeping from ‘interfering.’ I’m so wrapped up in that boy—but I keep reminding myself that he is a man, with a man’s job to do and his own career to make. How I wish I dared go and stay with him.”24
To John, Ike offered an old infantryman’s advice on how to train his platoon. “Go around and see every man, see that he gets into warm, dry clothing . . . that he gets a good hot meal and that his weapons are in tiptop shape. Shoes, socks and feet are of tremendous importance, and you should try to wear exactly the same kind of materials as your men do when in field training or in combat. By pursuing these methods you will not only have a splendidly trained platoon, but one that will follow you anywhere.”
When the moment for John’s departure came, Mamie felt hurt, angry, deserted. Despite her husband’s disclaimers, she was sure he had arranged the assignment. “I fully understand your distress . . . ,” Ike reassured her, “but it always depresses me when you talk about ‘dirty tricks’ I’ve played and what a beating you’ve taken, apparently because of me. You’ve always put your own interpretation on every act, look or word of mine, and when you’ve made yourself unhappy, that has, in turn, made me the same. . . .
“So far as John is concerned,” he continued, “we can do nothing but pray. If I interfered even slightly or indirectly he would be so resentful for the remainder of his life that neither I (nor you, if he thought you had anything to do with it) could be comfortable with him. . . . But, God, how I do hope and pray that all will be well with him.” Eisenhower assured Mamie, “I’m not ‘fussing’ at you. But please try to see me in something besides a despicable light and at least let me be certain of my welcome home when this mess is finished.
“I truly love you and I do know that when you blow off steam you don’t really think of me as such a black hearted creature as your language implies. I’d rather you didn’t mention any of this again.”25
• •
Through the fall, the great offensive continued. The only place the Allies were not on the attack was in the Ardennes itself, which was thinly held by Troy Middleton’s corps. On his way to Maastricht on December 7 Eisenhower had noted how spread out the troops in the Ardennes were, and he questioned Bradley about the vulnerability of this sector of the front. Bradley said he could not strengthen the Ardennes area without weakening Patton’s and Hodges’ offensives, and that if the Germans counterattacked in the Ardennes they could be hit on either flank and stopped long before they reached the Meuse River. Although he did not expect a German counterattack, he said he had taken the precaution of not placing any major supply installations in the Ardennes. Eisenhower was satisfied by Bradley’s explanation.
• •
December 16 was a day of celebration at SHAEF Main in Versailles, featuring a wedding, a promotion, and a medal. In the morning, Mickey McKeogh married one of the WAC sergeants. Eisenhower hosted a champagne reception in his house in Saint-Germain. He had something else to celebrate; the Senate had just announced his promotion to the newly created rank of General of the Army, which made him equal in rank to Marshall, MacArthur,—and Montgomery.
Late in the afternoon, Bradley arrived, to complain about the replacement situation. The United States now had all but one of its divisions committed, the flow of replacements was not keeping pace with the casualty rate, and because of the general offensive that Eisenhower insisted on conducting, SHAEF had few men in reserve.
While they talked in Eisenhower’s office, British General Kenneth Strong interrupted to inform them that a German attack had been launched that morning in the Ardennes. Bradley’s initial reaction was to dismiss it as a mere spoiling attack, designed to draw Patton’s forces out of the Saar offensive. But Eisenhower immediately sensed something bigger. “That’s no spoiling attack,” he said, explaining that since the Ardennes itself offered no worthwhile objective, the Germans must be after some strategic gain. “I think you had better send Middleton some help,” he told Bradley. Studying the operations map with Strong, Eisenhower noticed that the 7th Armored Division was out of the line, in First Army sector, and that the 10th Armored Division, a part of Third Army, was currently uncommitted. He told Bradley to send the two divisions to Middleton, in the Ardennes. Bradley hesitated; he knew that both Hodges and Patton would be upset at losing the divisions, Patton especially, as the 10th Armored was one of his favorites. With a touch of impatience, Eisenhower overruled Bradley.
Having made these arrangements, Eisenhower and Bradley, joined by Everett Hughes, settled down to enjoy what was left of the champagne, open a bottle of Highland Piper Scotch that Hughes had brought, and play five rubbers of bridge. They would make another assessment of the situation in the morning, when Strong would have more information for them.26
The news Strong brought, based on identification of German divisions in the Ardennes and on captured documents, was about as bad as it could have been. Eisenhower’s rapid and intuitive judgment had been right—the Germans were engaged in a counteroffensive, not just a counterattack. Two German panzer armies of twenty-four divisions had struck Middleton’s corps of three divisions. The Germans had managed to achieve both complete surprise and overwhelming local superiority, an eight-to-one advantage in infantrymen and a four-to-one advantage in tanks.
Eisenhower accepted the blame for the surprise, and he was right to do so, as he had failed to read correctly the mind of the enemy. Eisenhower failed to see that Hitler would take desperate chances, and Eisenhower was the man responsible for the weakness of Middleton’s line in the Ardennes, because he was the one who had insisted on maintaining a general offensive.
But despite his mistakes, Eisenhower was the first to grasp the full import of the offensive, the first to be able to readjust his thinking, the first to realize that, although the surprise and the initial Allied losses were painful, in fact Hitler had given the Allies a great opportunity. On the morning of December 17, Eisenhower showed that he saw the opportunity immediately, when he wrote the War Department that “if things go well we should not only stop the thrust but should be able to profit from it.”27
After dictating that letter, Eisenhower held a conference with Smith, Whiteley, and Strong. SHAEF now had only two divisions in reserve, the 82d and 101st Airborne, which were refitting from the battles around Arnhem. The SHAEF generals anticipated that the Germans would attempt to cross the Meuse River, thus splitting 21st and 12th Army Groups, and take the huge Allied supply dumps at Liege. The dumps were crucial to the Germans, as they contained the fuel Hitler counted on to sustain a drive to Antwerp.
Whiteley put his finger on the small Belgian town of Bastogne and declared that the crossroads there was the key to the battle. Bastogne was surrounded by rolling countryside, unusually gentle in the rough Ardennes country, and had an excellent road network. Without it the Germans would not be able to cross the Ardennes to the Meuse. Eisenhower decided to concentrate his reserves at Bastogne. He ordered a combat command of the 10th Airborne to proceed immediately to the town, and told the 101st to get there as soon as possible. He also sent the 82d Airborne to the northern edge of the penetration, where it could lead a counterattack against the German right flank. Finally the Supreme Commander ordered the cessation of all offensives by the AEF “and the gathering up of every possible reserve to strike the penetration in both flanks.”28
The following morning, December 18, Ike called Smith, Bradley, and Patton to a conference. The generals met in a cold, damp squad room in a Verdun barracks, on the site of the greatest battle ever fought. There was only one lone potbellied stove to ease the bitter cold. Eisenhower’s subordinates entered the room glum, depressed, embarrassed. Noting this, he opened by saying, “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.” Patton quickly picked up on the theme. “Hell, let’s have the guts to let the ——— ——— ——— go all the way to Paris,” he said. “Then we’ll really cut ’em off and chew ’em up.”29
Eisenhower said he was not that optimistic: the line of the Meuse had to be held. But he was not thinking defensively. He informed his commanders that he was not going to let the Germans get away with emerging from the West Wall without punishing them. He asked Patton how long it would take him to change the direction of his offensive, from east to north, to counterattack the Germans’ left, or southern, flank.
Patton replied, “Two days.” The others chuckled at this typical Patton bravado; Eisenhower advised him to take an extra day and make the attack stronger. He told Patton to cancel his offensive in the Saar, change directions, and organize a major counterblow toward Bastogne by December 23. He was going to have Montgomery organize an attack in the north, against the German right flank.30 In short, by December 18, on the third day of the Bulge, well before the issue was settled at Bastogne or on the Meuse, Eisenhower had already put in motion a counterattack designed to destroy the German panzer armies in the Ardennes.
• •
The Germans would soon have a wedge driven between Bradley’s forces, making it difficult for Bradley to communicate with First Army. Strong thought that under the circumstances, Eisenhower should give Montgomery command of all forces north of the Ardennes. This would mean that Bradley would keep Third Army, while Montgomery got First and Ninth Armies. Such a command arrangement was what Montgomery had all along been proposing and Eisenhower refusing, and a transfer of command at this point would look as if the Americans had to turn to the British to rescue them from the crisis. But the communications problem was so serious that the step had to be taken.
Smith called Bradley on the telephone. Bradley insisted that it was not necessary, but Smith told Bradley, “It seems the logical thing to do. Monty can take care of everything north of the Bulge and you’ll have everything south.” Bradley protested that such a shift would discredit the American command. “Bedell,” he added, “it’s hard for me to object. Certainly if Monty’s were an American command, I would agree with you entirely.”31
Then Eisenhower telephoned Bradley. By now, Bradley was set against any such change. Strong could hear him shouting at Eisenhower: “By God, Ike, I cannot be responsible to the American people if you do this. I resign.” Eisenhower, flushed with shock and anger, drew a deep breath, then said, “Brad, I—not you—am responsible to the American people. Your resignation therefore means absolutely nothing.” There was a pause, then another protest from Bradley, but this time without any threats. Eisenhower declared, “Well, Brad, those are my orders.” He then turned the conversation to Patton’s counterattack, which he declared he wanted mounted in the greatest possible strength.32
After hanging up, Eisenhower placed a call to Montgomery to inform him of the command switch. The telephone connection was unfortunately indistinct. Montgomery heard what he wanted to hear and attached his own meaning to the garbled conversation. He told Brooke that Eisenhower had called. “He was very excited,” Montgomery said, “and it was difficult to understand what he was talking about; he roared into the telephone, speaking very fast.” The only thing Montgomery understood was that Eisenhower was giving him command of First and Ninth Armies. “This was all I wanted to know. He then went on talking wildly about other things.”33
Within two hours of his conversation with Eisenhower, Montgomery had visited with Hodges and General William Simpson, commander of the Ninth Army. A British officer who accompanied him said he strode into Hodges’ headquarters “like Christ come to cleanse the temple.” Montgomery reported to Brooke that Simpson and Hodges “seemed delighted to have someone to give them firm orders.”34
In his efforts to find infantry replacements, Eisenhower ordered the entire Services of Supply combed out for men who could fight. He also ordered service units organized for the defense of the Meuse bridges, stressing “the vital importance of insuring that no repeat no Meuse bridges fall into enemy hands intact.”35 To Bradley, the order seemed to indicate that Eisenhower was getting “an acute case of the shakes,” while Bradley’s chief of staff, after reading the message, asked, “What the devil do they think we’re doing, starting back for the beaches?”36
Adding to the impression of panic at SHAEF were the elaborate security precautions instituted at Versailles. SHAEF intelligence had learned that the Germans had organized a special group of English-speaking German soldiers, dressed them in American uniforms, given them captured American jeeps to drive, and spread them behind the American lines. Their mission was to issue false orders, spread defeatism, and capture bridges and road junctions. Rumor quickly spread, however, that their main intention was to assassinate the Supreme Commander. Thus everyone at SHAEF became super security-conscious. Eisenhower was sealed into the Trianon Palace. Guards with machine guns were placed all around the palace, and when Eisenhower went to Verdun or elsewhere for a meeting, he was led and followed by armed guards in jeeps.
Despite the security flap, Eisenhower and SHAEF were quietly confident, and eagerly anticipating the AEF counterattack. On December 22, while waiting for the skies to clear, so that the air forces could get into action, and for Patton to shift directions, so that he could attack toward Bastogne, Eisenhower issued an Order of the Day. “We cannot be content with his mere repulse,” he said of the enemy. “By rushing out from his fixed defenses the enemy may give us the chance to turn his great gamble into his worst defeat. . . . Let everyone hold before him a single thought—to destroy the enemy on the ground, in the air, everywhere—destroy him!”37
Inside the Bulge, at Bastogne, the encircled 101st Airborne was doing just that. At noon on December 22, the Germans paused in their attacks to demand a surrender; Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe made his famous “Nuts” reply. The Germans attacked again; again the 101st beat them back with heavy losses.
The best news came on December 23, when day broke clear and cold, with virtually unlimited visibility. From the first, Hitler had counted on a sustained period of bad weather to neutralize the Allied air forces. With the sunrise on the twenty-third, every Allied plane that could fly got into the air. Lumbering C-47s dropped tons of supplies to the 101st inside Bastogne; fighter planes strafed the Germans in the Bastogne ring; P-47s hit them with fragmentation bombs, napalm, and machine-gun fire. Patton began his thrust, which by the day after Christmas had carried him into Bastogne and lifted the siege.
For Eisenhower, victory in the defensive phase of the battle brought with it more problems from his two chief subordinates. Montgomery made no effort to conceal his pleasure and delight at the Americans’ discomfort, nor any attempt to soothe Bradley’s injured pride. At a Christmas Day meeting, he told Bradley that the Americans deserved the German counteroffensive, saying that if there had been a single thrust none of this would have happened. “Now we are in a proper muddle.”
Montgomery reported that Bradley “looked thin, and worn and ill at ease” and claimed that the American general agreed with everything he said. Montgomery noted of Bradley: “Poor chap; he is such a decent fellow and the whole thing is a bitter pill for him.”38 Then the field marshal expressed his view that Patton’s attack would not be strong enough to “do what is needed [and] I will have to deal unaided with both Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies.” He therefore demanded that Eisenhower give him more American troops. Bradley, meanwhile, came away from his meeting with Montgomery in a furious state of mind. He demanded that Eisenhower return First and Ninth Armies to his command.39
Eisenhower resisted the pushing and pulling on him from both sides and rejected both Montgomery’s and Bradley’s demands. He did agree that troops should be taken from the southern end of his line, but not that they should then be assigned to 21st Army Group. Instead he started to build a strategic reserve. Nor would he restore First and Ninth Armies to Bradley, not yet anyway, because he felt it was still logical for Montgomery to control the forces on the northern flank of the Bulge.
On December 26, Eisenhower met with his staff in the Trianon. Standing before a huge operations map, he told his G-3, General Harold “Pinky” Bull, “ ‘Pink,’ you’d better go and see [General Jacob] Devers [commanding the 6th Army Group on the southern flank] today. I think the best line is this.” Eisenhower outlined a withdrawal in the Strasbourg area. “I’ll tell you, boys,” he continued, “what should be done. See Devers and give this line. It will be a disappointment giving up ground, but this area is not where I told Devers to put his weight.”40
Eisenhower’s confidence in himself had grown tremendously during the crisis. His initial intuitive judgment had been proved right; his decision to rush the 7th and 10th Armored, and the 82d and the 101st Airborne, into the battle had been proved right; he still felt that his handing over the northern flank to Montgomery was right; his decision to have Patton attack toward Bastogne was right. Now he was laying down the line, telling the boys how it should be done. Whatever Brooke and Montgomery might say about his lack of experience, he had taken control of this battle and made it his.
But Eisenhower still had the supreme test to face. Giving firm orders to Bradley, Patton, and Devers was one thing, giving them to Field Marshal Montgomery quite another.
Eisenhower was beginning to worry that, as at Kasserine, the Allies would be too late in their counterattack. Montgomery, it appeared, was going to insist that every condition was optimum before he moved forward. Two days after Christmas, at the regular SHAEF 8 A.M. meeting, the discussion centered upon the need to begin soon. Tedder emphasized that the good weather would not last much longer and that it was important to hit the Germans while the airplanes could still fly. At this point word arrived that Montgomery had a new plan for attack, one that involved two corps. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” Eisenhower remarked.41
The tension that had characterized the Eisenhower-Montgomery relationship since mid-June 1944 now reached its height. As before Caen, it centered around differing perceptions of the Germans’ intentions and the timing and strength of the Allied attack. Eisenhower believed the German divisions in the Bulge were understrength and badly battered, with their supply lines in poor shape. He wanted to hit them, hard and quickly.
Montgomery hesitated. He told Eisenhower, at a December 28 meeting at his headquarters, that the Germans would make one last big attack on the northern shoulder of the Bulge. He thought the best thing to do would be to receive that attack, then launch his counterattack with First Army after the Germans had been stopped. To add to Eisenhower’s dismay, Montgomery wanted to strike against the tip of the Bulge, driving the Germans back to the West Wall, rather than attacking on the flank in an attempt to cut them off.
Eisenhower told him that if he waited, Rundstedt would either withdraw from the Bulge or put infantry divisions into the line, pulling out his tanks and putting them in reserve. The latter, Eisenhower said, “we must not allow to happen,” and he again urged Montgomery to attack quickly. Montgomery repeated that first he had to receive and stop the expected German attack. Eisenhower grumbled that there would be no attack, and finally got Montgomery to agree that if one did not come that day or the next, First Army would counterattack against the German flank on January 1. Or at least Eisenhower thought Montgomery agreed.42
On December 30, however, de Guingand came to SHAEF with the bad news that Montgomery would not attack until January 3 or later. The blow to their hopes was more than any of the SHAEF officers could take. “What makes me so Goddam mad,” Smith exploded, “is that Monty won’t talk in the presence of anyone else.” Speaking for Montgomery, de Guingand claimed that Eisenhower had misunderstood—there had been no agreement on a January 1 attack. “Damn it, there was!” Eisenhower responded. He felt that he had been lied to, that Montgomery was trying to lead him by the nose, that a great opportunity was about to be lost, and that therefore the time had come to make a break with Montgomery.
Eisenhower dictated a blistering letter to Montgomery, demanding that Montgomery live up to his promises. If he did not, Eisenhower continued, he would be sacked. De Guingand, shown a copy of the letter, begged Eisenhower to hold it. He said he would talk to Montgomery and straighten things out. Eisenhower liked de Guingand, as did everyone at SHAEF; his affable personality, common sense, and reasonableness stood in sharp contrast to his boss and made him the perfect broker between Montgomery and SHAEF. Eisenhower agreed to hold the letter until de Guingand could consult with Montgomery.43
On New Year’s Eve de Guingand conferred with Montgomery, then flew back to Versailles, where he reported that Montgomery held firm to his view that the proper strategy was to let the Germans exhaust themselves with one last attack before taking up the offensive. Eisenhower, angry, said that Montgomery had definitely promised him an attack on January 1. De Guingand repeated that Eisenhower must have misunderstood.
Bradley, meanwhile, was already attacking, believing that Montgomery would begin his offensive on January 1. But Montgomery did not, and the Germans switched panzer divisions from the north to the south to stop Bradley.
Eisenhower thought Montgomery’s sense of timing in military operations was seriously deficient. That point may be open to question, but there can be none about Montgomery’s total lack of a sense of timing in personal relations, or his complete inability to see things from someone else’s point of view. At the height of the debate over what Montgomery had or had not promised, Montgomery sent a letter to Eisenhower, damning the Supreme Commander’s policies and demanding that he, Montgomery, be given full control of the land battle. And, of course, there must be a single thrust, in the north, with Patton held where he was. Montgomery even wrote out a directive to those ends for Eisenhower’s signature.
Instead of doing as told, Eisenhower issued his own directive, which ran counter to Montgomery’s draft on every point. He returned First Army to Bradley’s control and insisted on a double thrust into Germany. “The one thing that must now be prevented,” he emphasized, “is the stabilization of the enemy salient with infantry, permitting him opportunity to use his Panzers at will on any part of the front. We must regain the initiative, and speed and energy are essential.”44
In a covering note to Montgomery accompanying the directive, Eisenhower was simple, direct, and forceful. “I do not agree,” Eisenhower said, referring to Montgomery’s contention that there should be a single ground commander. He said he had done all he could for Montgomery and did not want to hear again about placing Bradley under Montgomery’s command. “I assure you that in this matter I can go no further.” He added, “I have planned an advance” to the Rhine on a broad front, and ordered Montgomery to read his directive carefully. All the vagueness of earlier letters and directives to Montgomery was now gone.
In conclusion, Eisenhower told Montgomery that he would no longer tolerate any debate on these subjects. “I would deplore the development of such an unbridgeable gulf of convictions between us that we would have to present our differences to the CCS,” he said, but if Montgomery went any further that was exactly what he would do. “The confusion and debate that would follow would certainly damage the good will and devotion to a common cause that have made this Allied Force unique in history,” Eisenhower admitted, but he could do nothing else if Montgomery persisted.45
De Guingand, meanwhile, was working on Montgomery. He told his boss that the depth of feeling against him at SHAEF was very great. Smith “was more worried than I had ever seen him.” The general sentiment was that Montgomery had to go. Montgomery scoffed at this. “Who would replace me?” he demanded.
“That’s already been worked out,” de Guingand replied. “They want Alex.”
Montgomery paled. He had forgotten about Alexander. He began pacing his trailer, finally turning to de Guingand to ask, “What shall I do, Freddie? What shall I do?”
De Guingand pulled out the draft of a message he had already prepared for Montgomery’s signature. “Sign this,” he said. Montgomery read it, and did.46 The cable said that Montgomery knew there were many factors Eisenhower had to consider “beyond anything I realize.” It asked Eisenhower to tear up the letter demanding sole command of the ground forces.47
Montgomery followed up the cable with a handwritten letter. “Dear Ike,” he began, “you can rely on me and all under my command to go all out one hundred percent to implement your plan.”48 On January 3 he began his attack. It was not all that Eisenhower wanted, but much better than Montgomery had originally proposed. For the next month the Allies battered away at the Bulge. The Germans, schooled in winter warfare from the Russian front, waged a fighting retreat, and not until February 7 had the original line been restored. Eisenhower had hoped for better results, but these were satisfactory, for most of the German armor was destroyed in the process. The enemy had practically no mobility left, and once Eisenhower’s forces broke through the West Wall they would be able to dash through Germany almost at will. In that dash, in fact as well as in name, their commanding general would be Eisenhower.
• •
Meanwhile, Montgomery held a press conference to explain how he had won the Battle of the Bulge. It was a quite incredible manifestation of Montgomery’s insensitivity. He told the press that on the very first day, “as soon as I saw what was happening I took certain steps myself to ensure that if the Germans got to the Meuse they would certainly not get over the river. And I carried out certain movements so as to provide balanced dispositions to meet the threatened danger . . . i.e., I was thinking ahead.” Soon Eisenhower put him in command of the northern flank, and he then brought the British into the fight, and thus saved the Americans. “You have thus the picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who have suffered a hard blow. This is a fine Allied picture.” It had been an “interesting” battle, he said, rather like El Alamein; indeed, “I think possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled.” What came next nearly destroyed Allied unity. Montgomery said the GIs made great fighting men, when given proper leadership.49
Bradley, Patton, and nearly every American officer in Europe were furious. As they saw the battle, they had stopped the Germans before Montgomery came onto the scene. Almost no British forces were even engaged in the Bulge. Far from directing the victory, Montgomery had gotten in everyone’s way and botched the counterattack.
But what was especially galling about Montgomery’s version of the Battle of the Bulge was his immense satisfaction with the outcome. Patton ranted and raved to every reporter who would listen, telling them publicly what he had already written privately in his diary—that had it not been for Montgomery, “we [could have bagged] the whole German army. I wish Ike were more of a gambler, but he is certainly a lion compared to Montgomery, and Bradley is better than Ike as far as nerve is concerned. . . . Monty is a tired little fart. War requires the taking of risks and he won’t take them.”50