Eisenhower in War and Peace

Weather, bad luck, and a series of glaringly inept command decisions contributed to the crisis at Omaha. The sea was choppy, although not so rough as at the British beaches. But there was close-in cloud cover at Omaha that precluded low-level air support. Misfortune intervened to the extent that Allied intelligence failed to notice that the German 352nd Infantry Division, a veteran unit back from the Russian front, had taken up position directly athwart Omaha.^a First Army planners had assumed V Corps would encounter a heavily fortified but lightly manned coastline. Instead they found it both heavily fortified and strongly garrisoned.

Aside from weather and bad luck, faulty command decisions ensured that the landing at Omaha would be difficult. Rather than order a preliminary naval bombardment of at least four hours with the heaviest guns in the fleet, as was customary in the Pacific, Bradley sent the troops ashore at Omaha with a “shoe string bombardment fleet” and allowed the ships only forty minutes to attack German fortifications that had been years in the making.²

Instead of lowering assault craft from their mother ships seven miles offshore, as was common practice in the Royal Navy, Bradley and Major General Gee Gerow, commanding V Corps, ordered the debarkation twelve miles out. While this minimized the possibility that any of the transports would be hit by coastal shelling, the three-hour passage not only increased the danger of swamping and the possibility of navigation errors, but guaranteed that the troops would be thoroughly groggy and seasick when they tumbled onto the beach.^b To compound the problem, Gerow disregarded the lessons of North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno, and launched his attack frontally at German strong points rather than assaulting them from the flank or rear. That was the head-on doctrine preferred by General Marshall and which was taught in the Army’s advanced schools. Gallantry, it was believed, would carry the day. Finally, Gerow made no effort to equip his troops with the latest armored equipment developed by the British to breach minefields, neutralize fortifications, and surmount obstacles.^c As a consequence, those troops who made it to shore found themselves pinned down and unable to move through the elaborate minefields the Germans had laid.³

Gerow’s refusal to bend textbook tactics to the reality of amphibious warfare was a classic example of military hubris. Eisenhower is partially to blame. On December 23, 1943, Ike told Marshall that he wanted only generals with combat experience for OVERLORD. Yet he assigned V Corps to his old friend Gee Gerow despite the fact that Gerow had none. And Gerow proceeded to make the mistakes of a greenhorn.^d Overall, Allied casualties on D-Day, including airborne losses, totaled about ten thousand, of whom six thousand were American, mostly at Omaha.⁷

The Germans were caught flatfooted. German meteorologists had observed the same weather front as Group Captain Stagg, but they did not notice the brief window of opportunity that Stagg discovered. “There can be no invasion within the next fortnight,” chief meteorologist Major Heinz Lettau reported on June 4.⁸ On the strength of Lettau’s forecast, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commanding Army Group B, left Paris in the early morning of June 5 for his home near Ulm to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Before leaving, Rommel reported to Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the commander in chief west, that Allied preparations indicated an invasion would be forthcoming, and that the Schwerpunkt (main focus) would likely be between Dunkirk and Dieppe in the Pas-de-Calais. But in Rommel’s view it was not imminent. “Air reconnaissance showed no great increase of landing craft in Dover area. Other harbours on England’s south coast NOT visited by reconnaissance aircraft.” Rommel requested that reconnaissance planes be dispatched to cover the south coast, but the weather on June 5 kept the Luftwaffe grounded. The Kriegsmarine (German Navy) patrols of the Channel were also suspended on June 5 because of the weather. And on the evening of the fifth, the Allies jammed all German radar sites between Cherbourg and Le Havre. Miraculous as it appears in retrospect, Ramsay’s invasion fleet of more than six thousand ships went undetected by the Germans.

When airborne troops began landing shortly after midnight, both Rommel’s headquarters at Château de La Roche Guyon and von Rundstedt’s in Saint-Germain-en-Laye dismissed the landings as little more than local incursions. No alert was ordered. At 0230 hours, as the size of the airdrops became manifest, von Rundstedt notified the German high command (OKW) in Berlin, and also Hitler, who was at Berchtesgaden, but took no further action, waiting for the situation to develop. The commander in chief west was perplexed that the drops were to the south in Calvados, not the Pas-de-Calais.

By 0430, as the fighting intensified, von Rundstedt became convinced the airdrops were a prelude to a landing at dawn on the Calvados coast. The Germans held five panzer divisions in reserve, waiting for the Allied invasion. But they could not be deployed without Hitler’s express consent. On his own authority, von Rundstedt ordered two of the five divisions to move toward Caen, the midpoint between the American and British drops.⁹ Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, at sixty-eight, was not only the oldest, but the most senior commander in the Wehrmacht.^e Known as the “Black Knight” (Schwarzer Ritter), he had led the invasion of Poland in 1939, the breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940, and the capture of Kiev in 1941. Relieved by Hitler in November 1941 because of his insistence on withdrawing to a defensive line on the Russian front, he was nevertheless recalled four months later and entrusted with overall command in the west. As his former chief of staff Erich von Manstein noted, von Rundstedt never shied from accepting responsibility. In the early morning hours of June 6 he acted to meet the invasion threat, assumed Hitler’s approval, and reported his action to Berchtesgaden.

Eisenhower spent D-Day nervously awaiting news, but reports from Normandy were slow to trickle in. “I have as yet no information concerning the actual landings nor of our progress through beach obstacles,” Ike cabled Marshall that morning. “All preliminary reports are satisfactory. Airborne formations apparently landed in good order. Preliminary bombings by air went off as scheduled. Navy reports sweeping some mines, but so far as is known channels are clear and operation proceeding as planned. I will keep you informed.”¹²

News of the crisis at Omaha reached Eisenhower at 1:30 p.m. through the Navy, which had observers at the scene. There was little Ike could do other than authorize Leigh-Mallory to deploy his tactical bombers to drop their payloads through the cloud cover, risking the possibility of short rounds falling on American positions.¹³ By evening it was clear the landings were a success. Eisenhower, Tedder, Leigh-Mallory, and Ramsay met again at Ramsay’s fleet headquarters in Portsmouth to review the day’s action (Montgomery had departed for Normandy). In Tedder’s view the Allies had achieved tactical surprise, but needed to link up the beachheads quickly. The next ninety-six hours would be crucial. Omaha, in the center of the invasion front, was still perilous. V Corps held but a sliver of territory, and was separated by ten miles from the British at Gold beach, and by seven miles from VII Corps at Utah. Montgomery was on the scene and in command, but Ike was restless and decided to cross the Channel himself for a look-see the following morning.

After breakfast on June 7, Eisenhower boarded the British minelayer Apollo to visit the beachheads. He arrived off Omaha shortly after eleven, and by that time Montgomery and Bradley had already moved to consolidate the landings. Collins was ordered to turn VII Corps away from Cherbourg and link up with Gerow’s forces as soon as possible, and the British 50th Division at Gold was instructed to do the same. The change of plans would delay the capture of the port of Cherbourg, but would deny Rommel and von Rundstedt the opportunity to exploit the separation between Allied lodgments. “I briefed Ike as fully as I was able,” Bradley recalled. “I also told him of the modification in the battle plan Monty and I had agreed to earlier in the day. Ike had little to say. On the whole, Ike’s visit had been perhaps necessary for his own personal satisfaction, but from my point of view it was a pointless interruption and annoyance.”¹⁴

Eisenhower’s mood improved the following week when his son John, newly commissioned at West Point, arrived to spend his postgraduation leave with his father. “John will be in soon,” Ike wrote Mamie on June 13. “I’m really as excited as a bride—but luckily I have so much to do I haven’t time to get nervous.”¹⁶

Like Summersby, John noted that his father was unusually fretful, “like a football player sitting on the bench, anxious to get in the game.”¹⁷ Despite their obvious affection, John was always conscious of their respective positions—as was Ike. “There existed a certain military wall between us,” said John.

Summersby, who had the opportunity to observe father and son at close range, thought “Ike was not a particularly doting father. He loved John very much and he was proud of him, but he was also critical. John took it all very good naturedly. No matter how sharply Ike criticized him, it was obvious he adored this son of his.”²⁰

In Normandy, the Allies profited from Hitler’s assumption that the D-Day landings were a diversion and that the principal attack was still to come in the Pas-de-Calais. As a consequence, the German Fifteenth Army, some nineteen divisions with eight hundred tanks, remained idle north of the Seine awaiting an invasion that would never come.^f To meet the threat in Calvados, Rommel was forced to rely on the seven infantry divisions available to Seventh Army, plus the panzer reserve Hitler had belatedly released.²¹ And his troops were stretched too thin. By the night of June 7 (D-Day plus one), the British Second Army held a solid lodgment twenty-two miles wide and five to ten miles deep; the U.S. VII Corps held a zone eight miles deep and nine miles wide; and the U.S. V Corps, now solidly ashore, moved inland rapidly against light opposition. British commandos linked up with Gerow’s forces on D-Day plus two, and four days later VII Corps joined, giving the Allies a continuous beachhead across the whole front.

Both sides were plagued by a shortage of supplies. The Allies had an abundance of shipping but found it difficult to off-load matériel across the beaches, and the two MULBERRYs, while ingenious, could not accommodate the thousands of tons of food and ammunition that were required daily. At the end of the first week, less than 50 percent of the scheduled supplies had been landed; and at Omaha, less than 25 percent. The Germans, for their part, were hampered by Allied air supremacy, which prevented their use of the roads during daylight, plus the fact that the strategic bombing campaign conducted by Harris and Spaatz had effectively isolated the Normandy battlefields, rendering rail traffic impossible. In addition, the Resistance, now organized under the French Forces of the Interior, proved effective in hindering the transport of supplies forward. As early as June 10, the German Seventh Army found itself in serious straits for both fuel and ammunition.

But Bradley understood Montgomery’s concept, Patton understood it as well, and so did Rommel and von Rundstedt. The British Second Army sat astride the direct route to Paris and the Ruhr beyond, and Dempsey’s troops had to be contained at all costs. By mid-June, the British Second Army confronted seven of the eight panzer divisions available to Rommel, all deployed in a defensive posture. Monty had tied the German armor down and deprived Rommel of the ability to mount a large-scale counterattack. As a consequence, Bradley would not necessarily have clear sailing, but he would have few panzer formations to contend with.

“Was up forward again yesterday,” Rommel wrote his wife on June 14. “The situation does not improve. We must be prepared for grave events. The troops are fighting with the utmost courage, but the balance of strength tips more heavily against us every day. It appears dubious whether the gravity of the situation is realized up above, and whether the proper conclusions are being drawn.”²⁴

After the war, Eisenhower and Smith muddied the historical account of the Normandy breakout by asserting that Montgomery’s failure to capture Caen caused them to change plans and order Bradley to break out on the right instead.²⁵ It is another example of Ike’s ability to spin the record, similar to his reshaping of his role under MacArthur at the time of the Bonus Army marchers in 1932. Bradley is harsh in his criticism. “I have never been able to understand why Ike and Bedell made those statements,” he wrote. “They were both intimately acquainted with the OVERLORD ground strategy formulated months before. That called for Monty not to ‘break out’ but to hold and draw the Germans to his sector, while I ‘broke out’ in my sector and wheeled east. We adhered to that basic concept throughout the Normandy campaign with no major changes in strategy or tactics.”²⁶ In effect, by adopting Montgomery’s breakout strategy and attacking on a narrow front, Bradley was disregarding classic American military doctrine.

With the capture of Cherbourg, the Allies gained a port that could sustain the invasion force until Marseilles was liberated in August. Cherbourg had been badly damaged by the Germans, but was soon operating full tilt. By the first week in July, the Allies had landed more than a million men in Normandy, almost 200,000 vehicles, and a half-million tons of supplies. By the end of the month, there were 1,566,000 troops ashore, 333,000 vehicles, and 1.6 million tons of food, equipment, and ammunition.²⁸

Eisenhower may not have been fully cognizant of the ground strategy Montgomery was pursuing, but no one could have handled the political pressures that rained down on the supreme commander better than he. On June 13, the first V-1 rockets landed in Britain. The V-1,^g developed under Wernher von Braun at the German research station at Peenemünde on the Baltic, was an unguided, jet-powered, flying bomb that flew at 420 miles per hour and delivered a payload of 1,875 pounds of high explosives that exploded upon impact. Between June 13 and the end of September 1944, the Germans launched more than 8,000 V-1s against Britain, killing more than 6,000 persons and injuring another 20,000. Its successor, the V-2, was a guided ballistic missile with a larger payload that reached an altitude of sixty miles traveling at a speed of 2,500 miles per hour. The V-1 had a maximum range of 125 miles; the V-2, which was far more deadly, could reach targets 200 miles away.²⁹

Dealing with de Gaulle brought out the best in Eisenhower. FDR and Secretary of State Hull, buttressed by Admiral Leahy and Robert Murphy, insisted that contact with de Gaulle be restricted to military matters. For Eisenhower, who was soon to be saddled with the problem of civil affairs in France, that was patently foolish. Fortunately Ike could count on the sympathy of the War Department—particularly Secretary Stimson and John McCloy, both of whom recognized his problem, and who were ably supported by Jean Monnet, the representative of the FCNL in Washington. The upshot was that Eisenhower paid lip service to the nonrecognition policy Roosevelt insisted upon, but for all practical purposes dealt with de Gaulle as France’s legitimate head of state.

On June 14, little more than a week after the Allies had landed, de Gaulle returned to French soil with a lightning visit to the ancient Norman city of Bayeux, site of a majestic thirteenth-century cathedral and home of the world-famous Bayeux Tapestry.^h Bayeux was the first French town liberated by the Allies. The British war cabinet, with Eisenhower’s approval, authorized de Gaulle’s visit, and Admiral Ramsay placed the Free French destroyer La Combattante at his disposal for the Channel crossing. June 14, as fate would have it, was the day the Germans had marched into Paris in 1940. “That was a mistake,” quipped de Gaulle when reminded of the fact.³⁴

At the entrance to Bayeux, de Gaulle dismounted from his vehicle and proceeded on foot to the town hall. He was immediately surrounded by vast cheering crowds. “We walked on together,” de Gaulle remembered, “all overwhelmed by comradeship, feeling of national joy, pride and hope rise again from the depths of the abyss.”³⁵ At the town hall, where the portrait of Marshal Pétain had been removed moments before, the Vichy-appointed prefect pledged his support, as did all civil officials, as well as the bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux, who was the first caller to pay his respects. That symbolic union of the church and the republic, which had eluded France since 1789, was a vital component of the Gaullist appeal. De Gaulle later visited two nearby towns, received similar receptions, and departed that evening firmly in control. Whatever doubts Washington may have harbored about de Gaulle’s support had been crisply dispelled. SHAEF civil affairs officers threw their occupation manuals in the wastebasket and commenced working with de Gaulle’s appointees. For all practical purposes, Bayeux had become the temporary capital of Free France.³⁶

When he returned to Algiers on June 16, de Gaulle addressed the French Consultative Assembly (the temporary stand-in for the National Assembly); informed them of what had been achieved; and paid tribute to Eisenhower, “in whom the French Government has complete confidence for the victorious conduct of the common military operations.”³⁷ As de Gaulle recognized, Ike was largely responsible for the swift transition de Gaulle had made from being a controversial pretender to the unquestioned leader of France. Eisenhower had ignored Washington’s wishes and relied on his own judgment. As a recent biographer has written,

Because of Ike’s unstinting support for de Gaulle, liberated France was spared the civil war Washington feared. And although de Gaulle did not always march in step with Allied policy, he could be relied on to keep France united. That was no small blessing.

For the British chiefs of staff, Roosevelt’s final paragraph tipped the balance. If it was a matter of FDR’s reelection, they had no alternative. “Just back from a meeting with Winston,” Brooke recorded in his diary on June 30. “I thought at first we might have trouble with him, he looked like he wanted to fight the President. However, in the end we got him to agree to our outlook which is: ‘All right, if you insist on being damned fools, sooner than falling out with you, which would be fatal, we shall be damned fools with you, and we shall see that we perform the role of damned fools damned well.’ ”⁴³

Pressed by his chiefs, Churchill yielded grudgingly. “I need scarcely say that we shall do our best to make a success of anything that is undertaken,” he cabled Roosevelt.⁴⁴

“I honestly believe that God will be with us,” FDR replied. “I always think of my early geometry, ‘A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.’ ”⁴⁵

The following day Eisenhower cabled Marshall that he would “not repeat not under any conditions agree at this moment to a cancellation of DRAGOON.”⁴⁷ FDR never wavered in his support. On August 8 he told Churchill that it was his considered opinion that DRAGOON “should be launched as planned at the earliest practicable date and I have full confidence that it will be successful and of great assistance to Eisenhower in driving the Huns from France.”⁴⁸

“I pray God you may be right,” Churchill replied. “We shall, of course, do everything in our power to help you achieve success.”⁴⁹

Presumably that should have ended the matter. But when Ike dined with Churchill at No. 10 Downing Street the following day, he was subjected to another harangue in which the prime minister pulled out all the stops, including the threat that he might have to go to the King and “lay down the mantle of my high office.”⁵⁰ Churchill accused the Americans of bullying the British and refusing to listen to their strategic ideas. Eisenhower later called the meeting with Churchill one of the most difficult sessions he’d had in the entire war. “I have never seen him so obviously stirred, upset, and even despondent,” he cabled Marshall.⁵¹

Churchill departed for the Mediterranean the following day. After visiting British troops in Italy, he embraced the inevitable, donned a flak jacket, and watched the troops of Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army clamber ashore east of Toulon from the deck of the destroyer HMS Kimberly. “I watched this landing yesterday from afar,” the prime minister cabled Ike afterward. “All I have seen there makes me admire the perfect precision with which the landing was arranged and the intimate collaboration of British-American forces.”⁵²

Eisenhower replied with equal generosity. “I am delighted that you have personally and legally adopted the DRAGOON. I am sure that he will grow fat and prosperous under your watchfulness.”⁵³ To Marshall, Ike confessed that after “all the fighting and mental anguish I went through in order to preserve that operation, I don’t know whether to sit down and laugh or to cry.”⁵⁴

On the other side of the hill, Rommel and von Rundstedt were at their wits’ end trying to defeat the invasion under the limitations Hitler imposed. Not only had the Führer refused to move Fifteenth Army south of the Seine, but he insisted on defending every inch of French soil.⁵⁵ Both field marshals considered that absurd.

On June 17 Hitler paid a whirlwind visit to France to buttress his commanders’ resolve. He met with von Rundstedt and Rommel near Soissons at a heavily bunkered command post that had been constructed in 1940 for his use during the planned invasion of Britain (SEA LION). The Führer appeared uninterested in what the field marshals had to report and ranted about the V-1 superweapons, which he assured them would bring Britain to its knees. When von Rundstedt suggested the weapons be directed against the embarkation ports in England or against the Allied bridgehead, Hitler declared that the bombardment of London was more important and would make the English “eager for peace.”⁵⁶ Both von Rundstedt and Rommel stressed the need for air support. When von Rundstedt asked for the infantry divisions in Fifteenth Army so that Rommel’s panzer divisions could be relieved from their defensive posture, Hitler refused, just as he dismissed the field marshals’ request to pull back beyond the range of Allied naval gunfire. Cherbourg, he insisted, was to be defended at all costs, and Rommel was instructed to retake Bayeux with whatever forces were available.

On June 22, 1944, the third anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Russia (BARBAROSSA), Stalin fulfilled the pledge he made at Teheran and launched the Red Army in what would prove to be the greatest Allied offensive of the war. From Leningrad to the Crimea, along a front of eight hundred miles, Russian forces moved against the overextended German line. The principal assault (code-named BAGRATION, for the great Czarist general killed at Borodino in 1812) was directed at Army Group Center, some 700,000 troops who held the midsection of the German front. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who coordinated the attack, committed 166 Red Army divisions—2.4 million troops, 5,300 aircraft, and 5,200 tanks—twice that of any previous offensive, to overrunning the German position. Army Group Center was no match for the oncoming Russians. By July 5, the front had collapsed. Hitler lost 28 divisions and 350,000 men, almost double the number at Stalingrad. Finland sued for peace, Romania surrendered, the Baltic states were overrun, and the Red Army was on the Vistula, a hair’s breadth from the German frontier.

The collapse of Army Group Center in the summer of 1944 marked the beginning of the end of the war on the eastern front. Eisenhower makes no mention of the great Russian offensive in Crusade in Europe, but the scope and extent of the Russian victory in less than two weeks dwarfs the narrow front on which the Western Allies were advancing. At the very least it denied Hitler the opportunity to reinforce his armies in France with veteran formations from the eastern front. Crusade in Europe was published in 1948 at the height of the Cold War, and Ike evidently thought it best to ignore Russia’s contribution to victory in the west.

On June 30, 1944, back at Saint-Germain, von Rundstedt received orders from OKW in Berlin instructing him to counterattack the British position at Caen. At the same time, Rommel called and recommended a withdrawal at Caen, lest his troops be encircled. Von Rundstedt agreed, told Rommel to prepare to withdraw, and informed Berlin what he had done. That triggered an immediate reply from OKW ordering him to tell Rommel to hold fast. There could be no withdrawal.⁶²

For von Rundstedt that was the last straw. He immediately telephoned Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who was with Hitler at Berchtesgaden.

“Make peace, you idiots,” von Rundstedt replied. “What else can you do? If you doubt what we are doing, get up here and take over this shambles yourself.”⁶³

When Keitel reported the conversation to Hitler, the Führer chose to take von Rundstedt at his word. He wrote a personal letter by hand relieving him of command because of his health, awarded von Rundstedt Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross, and appointed Field Marshal Günther von Kluge to replace him. Within a week, von Kluge had come to the same conclusion as Rommel and von Rundstedt. The situation was untenable.

Unlike Montgomery and Bradley, who were on the scene and confident of the strategy they were pursuing, Eisenhower was sitting in Britain looking at lines on a map that were not moving. In some respects it was the mirror image of what Hitler saw at Berchtesgaden, and it suggested stalemate. The situation was analogous to the first week in November 1918. Then as now the Germans were deep inside France and their lines were holding firm. But Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew it was only a matter of time until the Allies broke through, and that when they did they could not be contained. And so out of the blue, as it were, Hindenburg and Ludendorff requested the government to ask for an armistice. In July 1944, Rommel, von Rundstedt, and von Kluge realized they were caught in a similar situation, and Monty and Bradley suspected as much.

But Ike wanted movement. Bedell Smith said, “Ike was up and down the line like a football coach, exhorting everyone to aggressive action.”⁶⁵ Butcher said, “Ike is like a blind dog in a meathouse—he can smell it, but he can’t find it.”⁶⁶ The problem was exacerbated by a growing impatience in Washington, where Marshall and Stimson were also looking at lines on a map. American press coverage, to which Eisenhower was painfully sensitive, also chimed in, suggesting the Allies had dropped the ball.

For Eisenhower, the culprit was Montgomery, and he took his complaint to Churchill. Lunching with the prime minister on July 26, Ike asked Churchill “to persuade Monty to get off his bicycle and start moving.”⁶⁷ While Churchill was fond of Ike and sympathized with his impatience, he trusted Montgomery’s strategy and supported it fully. To mollify Eisenhower, and perhaps smooth Ike’s relations with Montgomery, Churchill arranged a dinner the following evening with Eisenhower, Smith, and Alan Brooke, the British chief of staff. “It did a lot of good,” Brooke wrote afterward. “There is no doubt that Ike is all out to do all he can to maintain the best relations between British and Americans, but it is equally clear that he knows nothing about strategy.”⁶⁸ To Montgomery, Brooke wrote,

Patton raced into Brittany virtually unchecked. VII Corps captured the vital town of Mortain, on which Third Army then pivoted and swung east into the plain of southern Normandy, driving on Le Mans and Alençon and the German supply depots behind the battlefield.

“Once a gap appears in the enemy front,” Montgomery instructed Bradley, “we must pass into it and through it and beyond it into the enemy rear areas. Everyone must go all out. The broad strategy of the Allied armies is to swing the right flank towards Paris and to force the enemy back to the Seine.”⁷¹ In the next three days, Patton advanced one hundred miles, cutting deep into the rear of von Kluge’s forces, which now faced encirclement as the Canadian First Army came on from the north.

On August 7, Eisenhower moved his advance command post from Portsmouth across the Channel to the Norman village of Tournières, about twelve miles southwest of Bayeux. Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group headquarters was activated, and General Courtney Hodges replaced Bradley at the head of First Army. There were now four Allied armies in France: the First and Third U.S. armies (Hodges and Patton) under Bradley’s operational control; and the Second British (Dempsey) and First Canadian (Crerar) reporting to Twenty-first Army Group. But Montgomery, not Ike, retained overall command of the ground war.

The site of Eisenhower’s headquarters (SHELLBURST) was a bucolic apple orchard surrounded by hedgerows—a rustic, pastoral retreat where, according to Summersby, “we had our first good nights of sleep in weeks, free of the [German] buzz bombs.”⁷² A few days after Ike moved in, local farmers presented him with a cow so that he might have fresh milk. “The first morning we had it,” said his mess sergeant Marty Snyder, “Moaney, Hunt, and I gathered around the cow and tried to solve how to get milk out of it. Each of us tried, pulling, squeezing, massaging, but we couldn’t get a drop.”

Eisenhower’s spirits soared. Patton had broken out, the British and Canadians were moving ahead, and it would only be a matter of time until the ports of Brittany were under Allied control. “I am extremely hopeful about the outcome of our current operations,” he cabled Marshall on August 11. “If we can destroy a good portion of the enemy’s army now in front of us we will have a greater freedom of movement in northern France and I would expect things to move very rapidly.”⁷⁴

Once again, Hitler came to the aid of the Allies. Von Kluge and his commanders planned to fall back to a shorter line roughly along the Seine and the Yonne to the Swiss frontier. But Hitler, ever more irrational since the July 20, 1944, attempt on his life, rejected the plan and ordered an all-out counterattack at Mortain, the shoulder of Third Army’s breakout. If successful, Patton’s armored columns would be cut off. For twenty-four hours, the German attack wedge of four panzer divisions moved forward. But the heroic stand of the U.S. 30th Division outside Mortain, which Collins called “one of the outstanding small-unit actions of World War II”⁷⁵—combined with the round-the-clock bombardment from the air—forced the Germans to fall back. Hitler ordered the attack renewed and forbade any retreat. After a week of some of the most desperate fighting of the war, the remnants of the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army were almost completely encircled in the Falaise pocket. Von Kluge ordered a retreat without Hitler’s permission, and some forty thousand soldiers made their escape before the Allies closed the gap. On August 19, the tanks of the French 2nd Armored Division, under General Jacques Leclerc,^l serving with Patton’s Third Army, met the oncoming units of the Canadian First Army, trapping more than fifty thousand German troops and ending the battle for Normandy.

The battlefield at Falaise was one of the greatest killing grounds of the war in the West. “Forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap,” Eisenhower wrote, “I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could only be described by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”⁷⁶ A veteran officer who had fought in the battles of the Aisne-Marne, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne in World War I, said,

The fighting in Normandy had raged for seventy-five days. The German Army Group B, commanded initially by Rommel, then by von Kluge,^m had committed two veteran armies, the Seventh and Fifth Panzer, some forty divisions (600,000 men), and 1,500 tanks to the battle. The Allies deployed four armies, also totaling about forty divisions, 600,000 men, and 3,000 tanks. The vital difference was in the air. The Allies brought more than 12,000 aircraft to the battle; the Germans had almost none. When the fighting ended, the Germans had lost almost 500,000 men, killed, wounded, or captured, and virtually all of their equipment. Allied losses totaled almost 200,000, two-thirds of whom were American.⁷⁸ The Allied losses were quickly replenished; the German losses were irreplaceable.

As the battle for Normandy wound down, von Kluge was recalled to Berlin, and having been implicated in the July 20 plot on Hitler’s life, committed suicide on a side road near Valmy, France, on August 17, 1944. He was succeeded by Field Marshal Walther Model (sometimes known as “Hitler’s fireman”), who had successfully restored the German battle line on the eastern front after Operation BAGRATION.

As Model attempted to reestablish a defensive position, Alexander Patch’s Seventh U.S. Army and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army landed on the Riviera (DRAGOON) and began to move quickly up the Rhône Valley. Both armies were controlled by Sixth Army Group, commanded by General Jacob Devers. The port of Marseilles was captured by the French in undamaged condition, easing the Allies’ supply problem, while Patch’s Seventh Army, advancing up the Route Napoléon, reached Grenoble on August 20, 1944, aided substantially by the work of the Resistance (FFI), which was at its strongest in the region.

On August 19, the day the gap closed on the Falaise pocket, the 79th Division of Third Army reached the Seine, thirty-five miles west of Paris. There they found an undamaged hydroelectric dam with a footbridge on top, and quickly established a bridgehead on the other side of the river. Patton paid a flying visit and proudly told Bradley, “I pissed in the Seine this morning.”⁸¹

Eisenhower and Montgomery planned to bypass Paris and accelerate the pursuit of the retreating Germans. Patton’s Third Army would swing south of the city, cross the Seine at Melum, near Fontainebleau, and move east toward Metz and the German border. Hodges’s First Army would pass north of the city heading for Reims, the Ardennes, and Luxembourg. Meanwhile, Twenty-first Army Group would assault the V-1 and V-2 launching sites in the Pas-de-Calais, move into Belgium, and take the port of Antwerp. Eisenhower feared that if the Germans defended Paris, the street fighting would consume the Allies for a month. Casualties would be high and the collateral damage would be unacceptable. Paris was still undamaged. The bridges across the Seine had been spared in the bombing campaign Harris and Spaatz waged to isolate the Normandy battlefield, and the rail yards likewise had not been struck. There was also a serious logistical problem of providing food and fuel for a city of four million people. The primary Allied supply line stretched 250 miles to Cherbourg, and was already overburdened. Until the linkups to Marseilles and Antwerp were achieved, Eisenhower thought it best to leave the Germans saddled with supplying Paris. Fearing a repeat of the premature popular uprising that had just taken place in Warsaw, General Pierre Koenig, commanding the French Forces of the Interior, issued firm instructions to the Resistance to stand down until notified.

At the War Department, Eisenhower’s query was fielded by John McCloy, who raised no objection. Neither the White House nor the State Department was consulted.⁸³ The British were more than eager for de Gaulle to return, and had already begun to worry about a possible Communist insurrection in Paris.⁸⁴ With the way cleared, de Gaulle arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Tournières on August 20. Ike greeted him warmly.

Eisenhower briefed de Gaulle quickly on the military situation, and explained that he intended to bypass Paris for the moment. De Gaulle expressed concern. “Why cross the Seine everywhere but Paris?” he asked. It was a matter of national importance. The population of Paris was already in revolt, and it was essential to send troops into the city as soon as possible. De Gaulle’s concern was twofold: the danger of a Communist takeover (the French Communists constituted the most active element of the Resistance in Paris), and the necessity to preclude a Darlan-type deal that elements of the American government appeared to be negotiating with Pierre Laval, the premier of the Vichy regime.ⁿ De Gaulle suggested that Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division be ordered to Paris immediately, and gently hinted that if Ike delayed too long, he would order Leclerc to Paris himself. According to de Gaulle, Eisenhower was visibly embarrassed at the delay and agreed that when the time came, he would send Leclerc to Paris to lead the liberation. But he could not set a date.⁸⁵

If the Germans defended Paris, Eisenhower’s strategy had merit. Hitler had ordered his new commanders, Field Marshal Model, now the commander in chief west, and General der Infanterie Dietrich von Choltitz, the military governor of Paris, to hold the city at all costs. “The loss of Paris always means the loss of France,” the Führer told Model. “Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy except as a field of ruins.”⁸⁶ Model was ordered to form his battle line on the Seine, with Paris as the Schwerpunkt. Von Choltitz was told “the fighting in and around Paris will be conducted without regard to the destruction of the city.” The bridges and monuments were to be wired for demolition, the waterworks and power plants to be destroyed, and the principal industrial sites leveled to the ground.⁸⁷

There was nothing in the military backgrounds of Model or von Choltitz to suggest that Hitler’s orders would not be obeyed. Both were hard-bitten combat commanders—muddy boots generals with well-earned reputations for faithfully discharging their duty. If Rommel was Germany’s offensive beau ideal, Model had won acclaim as a defensive virtuoso in three years on the Russian front. Choltitz, for his part, had dropped with the first paratroop battalion on Rotterdam in 1940, and led the regiment that stormed the fortress at Sevastopol in 1942. He was appointed military governor of Paris on August 7, 1944, precisely because the OKW told Hitler that Choltitz was “an officer who had never questioned an order no matter how harsh it was.”⁸⁸

With no battle to be fought in front of Paris, von Choltitz faced a difficult choice. He could carry out his orders and destroy the city, or he could surrender it. For a fourth-generation Prussian officer, married to the daughter of a general of William II, the choice was not easy. “I try always to do my duty,” he wrote his wife on August 21, 1944. “I must often ask God to help me find the path on which it lies.”⁹⁰ To gain time, and to maintain a modicum of order in the city, von Choltitz struck a seventy-two-hour truce with the Resistance. Von Choltitz agreed to recognize the FFI as military combatants, and the Resistance agreed to allow the retreating columns of Army Group B to move through the city without being fired upon. Of one thing von Choltitz could be certain: Although the bridges and monuments of Paris were being wired for demolition, the discipline of the Wehrmacht was such that no one would set them off until he gave the order.

De Gaulle, who was triumphantly touring liberated France, increased his pressure on Eisenhower. On August 21 he wrote Ike from Brittany that serious trouble could arise in Paris at any moment. “I believe it is necessary to have Paris occupied by the French and Allied forces as soon as possible even if it means a certain amount of fighting and a certain amount of damage within the city.” If disorder broke out, said de Gaulle, it would be difficult to contain “and might even hinder subsequent military operations.”⁹¹

Eisenhower’s decision was political and moral, but not military. Every West Point cadet is taught time and again that General George Meade erred in 1863 when he did not pursue Lee after Gettysburg. And by not devoting all of his resources to chasing the broken German Army, Ike was inevitably prolonging the war. His cable to the Combined Chiefs informing them of his decision is one of the most important he ever wrote: a masterpiece of subtlety and insinuation.

Eisenhower rejected making an overt political announcement about Paris because he knew it would carry little weight with the chiefs. And so he couched his decision in purely military terms. On the evening of August 22, Ike cabled Washington that from a logistics standpoint it would be wise to defer the capture of Paris. “I do not believe this is possible. If the enemy tries to hold Paris with any real strength he would be a constant menace to our flank. If he largely evacuates the place, it falls into our hands whether we like it or not.” Ike did not explicitly tell the Combined Chiefs he was going to take Paris, but the implication was clear.

The French 2nd Armored Division had just closed the door on the Germans in the Falaise pocket and was 122 miles west of Paris when Leclerc received Bradley’s order to move out. With sixteen thousand troops and four thousand vehicles, Leclerc advanced in three columns, overcame scattered German resistance, and arrived at the suburbs of Paris on the evening of August 24, 1944.⁹⁴ The church bells of the city tolled his arrival. The next day, August 25, the 2nd Armored, supported by the U.S. 4th Division, entered Paris. For reasons of military honor, the German garrison mounted a token resistance, and von Choltitz surrendered the city to Leclerc in the early afternoon.⁹⁵ ^p De Gaulle appointed General Pierre Koenig military governor of Paris, and took up residence at the home of the president of France, the Palais de l’Élysée.

On Saturday, August 26, de Gaulle relit the flame at the tomb of the unknown at the Arc de Triomphe, and then on foot, followed by Generals Juin, Koenig, Leclerc, and the notables of the Resistance, led the 2nd Armored Division down the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde. Two million Parisians lined the route—“a miracle of national consciousness,” in de Gaulle’s words, “one of those gestures which sometimes, in the course of centuries, illuminate the history of France.”⁹⁶ From the Place de la Concorde, de Gaulle went to Notre Dame for the traditional Te Deum. Again, the route was lined with an exuberant tide of spectators, and the cathedral was jammed. At de Gaulle’s request, Monsignor Jacques Suhard, the cardinal-archbishop of Paris, a buttress of the Vichy regime, remained in his residence and the service was conducted by Monsignor Paul Brot, the next senior prelate.

Eisenhower stayed away from Paris that day to avoid stealing the limelight from de Gaulle. “I desired that he, as the symbol of French resistance, should make an entrance before I had to go in.”⁹⁷ But on Sunday, August 27, Ike and Bradley took a whirlwind tour of the city, after which Eisenhower paid a formal call on de Gaulle at the Palais de l’Élysée: the supreme commander of Allied forces paying tribute to the president of France. “I did this very deliberately as a kind of de facto recognition of him as the provisional President of France,” Eisenhower explained years later. “He was very grateful—he never forgot it—looked upon it as a very definite recognition of his high position. That was of course what he wanted and what Roosevelt had never given him.”⁹⁸

In the end, Paris was saved by the actions of five men: Model, who ignored Hitler’s order to defend the city and moved Army Group B north to the Marne and the Somme; von Choltitz, who reached out to the Resistance and disobeyed the Führer’s instruction to demolish the city; Leclerc, who moved more than a hundred miles in two days and provided a massive show of force that snuffed out any potential Communist insurrection; de Gaulle, who steadfastly exerted every ounce of influence as president of the provisional government to save Paris; and Eisenhower, who rejected textbook military doctrine and let common sense prevail. Ike may not have understood Montgomery’s strategy in Normandy, but when confronted with the most important decision of his career to that point, he made it without flinching.¹⁰²

^a The failure of Allied intelligence to properly locate the 352nd Infantry Division, and the subsequent cover-up, is treated as a case study in historiography by Professors Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff in The Modern Researcher 140–41, 6th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2004).

^b American GIs were grotesquely overloaded. In addition to his weapon, each soldier carried 68 pounds of military impedimenta, whereas the British and Canadian troops going ashore at Sword, Juno, and Gold carried between 15 and 20 pounds. Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy 90 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).

^c During the run‑up to OVERLORD, Britain’s Major General Sir Percy Hobart developed a veritable menagerie of tanks to assist the landing. One variety, labeled “Crabs,” flailed steel chains in front and alongside to clear minefields. Another, called “Crocodiles,” were simply armored flamethrowers that could approach an enemy pillbox undamaged and then destroy the occupants. Duplex drive (DD) tanks were amphibious vehicles. AVREs (armored vehicle, Royal Engineers) were tanks with a blade mounted in front, in effect armored bulldozers for demolishing fortifications. Bradley and Gerow were given demonstrations of the vehicles, but Bradley took only the DDs, and when they were launched so far offshore by V Corps, virtually all sank to the floor of the Bay of the Seine. Wilmot, Struggle for Europe 265–66; David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War 269.

^d VII Corps, which landed on Utah beach, was commanded by J. Lawton “Lightning Joe” Collins, who had commanded the 25th “Tropic Lightning” Division on Guadalcanal, and who was well versed in amphibious assault. VII Corps quickly surmounted the beach defenses and lost only 197 men on D-Day even though the spearhead 4th Division had never seen combat. Omar Bradley and Clay Blair, A General’s Life: An Autobiography 224, 249 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).

^e Gerd von Rundstedt, the son of a military officer, was born in Aschersleben on December 12, 1875. That made him five years older than Marshall and MacArthur, and fifteen years older than Eisenhower. He joined the Army as an officer cadet at the age of sixteen, fought with the German contingent of the international force that suppressed the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, served in the infantry during World War I, was decorated for gallantry (Iron Cross, first class) in 1914, and was a major when the war ended. Selected as one of four thousand officers for the 100,000-man Reichswehr, he rose steadily through the ranks and was promoted to general officer in 1927.

Von Rundstedt exuded the courtly demeanor of old Prussian nobility, spoke French and English fluently, and was one of Germany’s five representatives at the state funeral of George V in 1936. When Hitler sought to appoint Walther von Reichenau, an outspoken pro-Nazi officer, to be the Army’s commander in chief, von Rundstedt stepped in to block the appointment. When General Werner von Fritsch, the Army’s chief of staff from 1934 to 1938, was falsely accused of homosexual behavior by the Gestapo, von Rundstedt intervened with Hitler and demanded a court-martial on Fritsch’s behalf at which he was acquitted. (Hitler had asked von Rundstedt to come to the back door of the Chancellery in the evening wearing civilian clothes.) Shortly after the Fritsch verdict, von Rundstedt was placed on the retired list. He was recalled to active duty in 1939 to command Army Group South in the invasion of Poland. Charles Messenger, The Last Prussian: A Biography of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, 1875–1953 (London: Brassey’s, 1991); Günther Blumentritt, Von Rundstedt: The Soldier and the Man (London: Odhams Press, 1952).

^f By the evening of June 7, 1944, both von Rundstedt and Rommel were convinced that the landings in Normandy represented an all-out effort by the Allies but were unable to convince either Hitler or OKW in Berlin to deploy Fifteenth Army south of the Seine. According to ULTRA code intercepts, this brought both von Rundstedt and Rommel to the brink of tendering their resignations. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Jürgen Rohwer, eds., Decisive Battles of World War II: The German View 337 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965); Frederick William Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret 137 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

^g Short for Vergeltungswaffe-1—Retaliation Weapon 1.

^h The Bayeux Tapestry, eighty-four square yards of fabric, was embroidered by the ladies of the court of William the Conqueror to commemorate the conquest in 1066.

ⁱ General Alfred Jodl testified before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal that “no Field Marshal other than von Rundstedt could have told Hitler this.” 21 The Trial of German Major War Criminals: Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany 129 (London: HMSO, 1949).

^j “I told Ike that if he had any feelings that you were not running operations as he wished, he should most certainly tell you. That it was far better to put his cards on the table. He evidently is a little shy about doing so.” Brooke to Montgomery, July 28, 1944, quoted in Arthur Bryant, Triumph in the West: A History of the War Years Based on the Diaries of Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff 192 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).

^k General Lesley McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces, was visiting the front and was one of 111 American servicemen killed by bombs falling short of the intended impact area.

^l Unlike the Free French forces that were fighting in Italy, and the First French Army that would land on the Riviera (DRAGOON), which were primarily African troops, the French 2nd Armored Division was composed of native Frenchmen, a smattering of white legionnaires (Spanish, Italian, Czech, and Polish), plus the Régiment de Marche du Tchad and a battalion of Moroccan Spahis. It was formed especially for OVERLORD and to represent France at the liberation of Paris. The division was transferred from North Africa to Yorkshire in April 1944, and landed in France as part of Patton’s Third Army on July 29.

General Jacques Leclerc (raised posthumously to the rank of marshal of France) was the nom de guerre of the Viscount Jacques-Philippe de Hauteclocque, a career French Army officer who had joined de Gaulle in 1940 and had assumed the pseudonym “Leclerc” to protect his family in France. A legendary battlefield commander, Leclerc was most famous for fighting his way north with a Free French force 420 miles from Fort Lamy in Chad to join the British Eighth Army in the Sahara in February 1941. John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, June 6th–August 25th, 1944 300–301 (New York: Viking Press, 1982).

^m On July 17, 1944, Rommel was seriously injured in an automobile accident after his car had been strafed by Allied aircraft. He returned to Germany to convalesce, and was succeeded by von Kluge, who assumed the command of Army Group B as well as continuing as commander in chief west.

ⁿ Laval proposed to reconvene the French National Assembly, which had not met since 1940, and officially welcome the Allies to Paris, instituting direct Allied military rule through local Vichy officials and undercutting de Gaulle and the French Committee of National Liberation. Allen Dulles, heading OSS efforts in Bern, Switzerland, was allegedly in contact with Laval’s agents. The plot imploded when Laval could find no French notables to cooperate. See de Gaulle, 2 War Memoirs 324–33; David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War 415.

^o The day after von Choltitz dispatched Nordling, he was visited at his office in the Hotel Meurice by four SS officers from Berlin. Von Choltitz assumed they had found out about Nordling’s mission and had come to arrest him. Instead, they said they had been sent by Heinrich Himmler to take possession of the Bayeux Tapestry and bring it to Germany. The tapestry had been evacuated from Bayeux and for safekeeping was stored in the Louvre.

“Ach, Kinder,” said a visibly relieved von Choltitz. “How wonderful of you to help save these valuable objects from destruction. While you are at it, why not take the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory as well?”

“No, no,” the senior SS officer replied. The only thing Himmler and the Führer wanted was the Bayeux Tapestry.

Von Choltitz led the four men to the balcony and showed them the Louvre across the Tuileries Gardens. It was occupied by the Resistance, but if they wished, von Choltitz said he would put an armored car and a squad of soldiers at their disposal. The SS officers saluted and withdrew. They would radio Berlin for instructions. Von Choltitz never saw them again. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? 197–99 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965).

^p Dietrich von Choltitz was released from Allied captivity in 1947, and died at Baden-Baden in 1966. In his later years, von Choltitz was shunned by his fellow Wehrmacht officers, but became warm friends with General Pierre Koenig, who attended his funeral together with the ranking military officers of the Fifth Republic in full regalia.

Walther Model commanded Army Group B for the remainder of the war. As the curtain came down in April 1945, he discharged the oldest and youngest soldiers under his command so they could return to their homes. Model then walked into the woods near Duisburg and committed suicide.

Army Group B had three wartime commanders: Rommel, von Kluge, and Model. All three committed suicide.

FOURTEEN

The Liberation of France