General Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, date unknown
THE CROWDED STAGE in this melodrama grew more congested at 2:15 P.M. with the arrival of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Alan Brooke after a turbulent flight from England. Eisenhower whisked them from the airfield to his house for a quick lunch, and then to a conference room in the Trianon Palace. De Gaulle soon appeared, stiff and unsmiling, with Juin on his heels. The men settled into armchairs arranged in a circle around a situation map spread across the floor, and de Gaulle handed Eisenhower a copy of his letter ordering de Lattre to defend Strasbourg.
Eisenhower gestured to the map of Alsace, which showed three German corps bearing down from the north, as well as half a dozen enemy divisions threatening attack from the Colmar salient. “In Alsace, where the enemy has extended his attack for two days, the Colmar Pocket makes our position a precarious one,” he said. The long front exposed French and American soldiers alike. Moreover, Devers not only had no reserves, he had been told to forfeit two divisions to reinforce the Ardennes, where fighting remained savage.
Prime Minister Churchill and General de Gaulle, January 1944
“Alsace is sacred ground,” de Gaulle replied. Allowing the Germans to regain Strasbourg could bring down the French government, leading to “a state bordering on anarchy in the entire country.”
“All my life,” Churchill said pleasantly, “I have remarked what significance Alsace has for the French.”
Even so, Eisenhower said, he resented being pressured to amend military plans for political reasons. The threat to pull French forces from SHAEF command seemed spiteful, given all that the Allies had done for France; the Combined Chiefs already had agreed to equip sixteen French divisions, and de Gaulle had recently asked for a total of fifty. Should le général choose to fight independently, SHAEF would have no choice but to suspend supplies of fuel and munitions to the French army. This crisis could have been averted, Eisenhower added, had de Lattre’s troops fought well and eradicated the Colmar Pocket, as ordered.
By now the supreme commander’s face had grown beet red. De Gaulle stared down his great nose. General Eisenhower, he said, was at “risk of seeing the outraged French people forbid the use of its railroads and communications.… If you carry out the withdrawal, I will give the order to a French division to barricade itself inside Strasbourg and before the scandalized world you will be obliged to go in and free it.”
Having lost his composure, Eisenhower now regained it. Very well, he conceded, Strasbourg would be defended. Sacred Alsace would remain French, the withdrawal order to Devers canceled.
The conference ended. “I think you’ve done the wise and proper thing,” Churchill told Eisenhower. Buttonholing de Gaulle in a corridor outside, the prime minister said, in his fractured French, that Eisenhower was “not always aware of the political consequences of his decisions” but was nonetheless “an excellent supreme commander.” De Gaulle said nothing, but before Eisenhower bade him adieu at the front door of the Trianon Palace, de Gaulle told him, “Glory has its price. Now you are going to be a conqueror.”
As the happy news of salvation spread through Strasbourg late Wednesday afternoon, jubilant crowds belted out “La Marseillaise.” The French tricolor flag rose again before the police barracks, and a Seventh Army loudspeaker truck rolled through the city, urging calm. Eisenhower authorized Devers to keep the new SHAEF reserve for his own use; Strasbourg was to be defended “as strongly as possible”—primarily by French troops—but without risking “the integrity of your forces, which will not be jeopardized.”
NORTH WIND would drag on, with three more attacks against the Americans by large numbers of German troops, and another against the French up the Rhine–Rhône Canal from Colmar. The Seventh Army’s right wing bent back ten miles and more, particularly along the Rhine near Haguenau, and enemy troops ferried across the river at Gambsheim got to within a few miles of Strasbourg before being cuffed back. But these small territorial gains, which cost twenty-three thousand irreplaceable German casualties, carried little strategic heft; Patch held the Saverne Gap and the Rhine–Marne Canal, and Patton was not diverted from the Ardennes. Hitler denounced as “pessimistic” reports from Alsace that NORTH WIND had failed for want of sufficient infantry. Yet he was reduced to using Volksgrenadiers who had trained together for only a month, among them recruits from eastern Europe who spoke no German and a convalescent unit known as the “Whipped Cream Division” because of its special dietary needs.
Troops on a bridge over the Rhine River.
“We must believe in the ultimate purposes of a merciful God,” Eisenhower had written Mamie after his confrontation with de Gaulle. “These are trying days.” Rarely had the burden of command weighed more heavily on him. Bodyguards still shadowed his every move, he found no time for exercise, and despite his regular letters home, his wife chided him for not writing often enough.