SHORTLY BEFORE six P.M. on Tuesday, December 12, at roughly the hour that Hitler was repeating the previous night’s oration for a second group of generals at the Adlerhorst, General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, rode in a limousine through the dim streets of London toward the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Winston Churchill and his military brain trust. Eisenhower had flown across the English Channel from his headquarters in Versailles, France, outside Paris, the previous day.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, on February 1, 1945.
As his car sped to the meeting, Eisenhower could see that London showed the devastation of war; all around were blown-out windows and crushed buildings. German V2 bombs continued to fall on the city, though none fell during Eisenhower’s Tuesday night visit. At six P.M., Churchill welcomed the supreme commander to his map room, where they were joined by Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, and several other senior British officers.
Eisenhower now commanded sixty-nine divisions on the Western Front, a force he expected to expand to eighty-one divisions by February. These soldiers, about fifteen thousand to a division, were from more than a dozen Allied nations. Using the prime minister’s huge wall maps, upon which various battlefronts were outlined with pushpins and colored yarn, the supreme commander once again reviewed his campaign scheme for the ultimate defeat of Germany: how British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, bolstered by the U.S. Ninth Army under the command of Lieutenant General William Simpson, would angle north of the Ruhr Valley, while U.S. General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group swung farther south, shielded on the right flank by U.S. Lieutenant General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group. The two-sided threat would make the most of Allied mobility and force the enemy to burn his dwindling fuel stocks by defending a wide, perilous front.
From September 1940 until May 1941, the German Blitz targeted sixteen British cities. London was hit seventy-one times.
In the face of some skepticism, Eisenhower explained his rationale with patience and coherence. Closing to the Rhine River from Holland to the Alsace region of France would give Allied forces the “capability of concentration” for an eventual double thrust. The fighting along the border in October and November had been grim—Allied troops still occupied only five hundred square miles of Germany—but German divisions were bleeding to death, and with them, the country.
The debate continued over cocktails and dinner, and the evening ended in stilted silences and muzzy talk about postwar Allied unity, to which the supreme commander pledged to devote “the afternoon and evening of my life.” Churchill chimed in to endorse Eisenhower’s broad-front concept. A day later, the prime minister asserted that he had simply been acting the gracious host in refusing to gang up on the only American at the table.
Eisenhower flew back to Versailles on Wednesday morning, weary and dispirited. In a letter to his wife, Mamie, he admitted craving a three-month vacation on a remote beach. “And oh, Lordy, Lordy,” he added, “let it be sunny.”
Eisenhower knew that every additional day of war left Britain weaker and less capable of preserving its empire or shaping the postwar world. “I greatly fear the dwindling of the British Army is a factor in France as it will affect our right to express our opinion upon strategic and other matters,” Churchill had cabled Montgomery. German intelligence believed that fourteen British divisions still awaited deployment to the Continent, but the prime minister and Field Marshal Alan Brooke knew otherwise. Indeed, Britain was so hard-pressed that even after cannibalizing two existing divisions to fill the diminished ranks in other units, commanders faced “an acute problem in the next six months to keep the army up to strength,” as one staff officer in London warned. Deaths and injuries among infantry riflemen especially were running at a rate higher than the War Office could replace: a British rifle-company officer who landed in France on June 6, 1944, had nearly a 70 percent probability of being wounded by the end of the war less than a year later, and a 20 percent chance of being killed.
Nor was Britain’s plight unique. “All of us are now faced with an unanticipated shortage of manpower,” Roosevelt had written Churchill in October. The American shortage was even more problematic because U.S. troops provided the majority of the Allies’ troop strength. In December, the American armed forces comprised twelve million, compared with five million for the British. One million of those U.S. troops were now fighting the war on the Pacific front, while the Army Air Forces had requested 130,000 men to fly and maintain the new Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber—beyond the 300,000 workers already building these heavy bombers at home.
American soldiers practice winter maneuvers at a training base in Fort Myers in 1940. Training time was shortened because of increased demand for men at the front lines.
The need for more soldiers—fit or unfit, willing or unwilling, whole or maimed—had grown ever more urgent as the fall months passed. Of more than eight million soldiers in the army as the year ended, barely two million were serving in ground units. That was simply not enough.
Now the army’s ability to replenish its ranks was in jeopardy. On December 8, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, known as SHAEF, predicted a shortage of twenty-three thousand riflemen by year’s end, enough to preclude any attack into Germany. On December 15, after returning from London, Eisenhower ordered units in the rear to send forward more combat troops, and an eight-week course to convert mortar crews and other infantrymen into riflemen was shortened to two weeks. At least a few officers wondered whether the time had come to allow black GIs to serve in white rifle companies, but even under these circumstances that radical notion found few champions in the high command.
Scouts wearing bedsheet camouflage patrol a snow-covered field in Luxembourg.