Brothers, Rivals, Victors

Well, he could blame the big storm. That gale had played hell on the engineers and longshoremen who swarmed over the makeshift docks. He could blame the mud and he could blame the hedgerows, those ancient bulwarks that lent their formidable weight to the defender. He could even blame Montgomery for moving too slowly.³

The beleaguered general had two ways to break out of his congealing cement shoes, and both options required additional ports. He could move north, sending Monty toward the Seine ports of Le Havre and Rouen, which would open the Channel and the Low Countries. Or, he could move south toward Brittany, aiming Bradley at St.-Nazaire, Lorient, and Brest. Once those ports were open for business, then ammunition, fuel, and replacements from the United States and England would be plentiful. Patton’s Third Army could take the field, and the frontline forces could turn the rear areas over to General Lee’s supply troops—“one a-shootin’, ten a-lootin’,” as the GI phrase went. Then Ike could begin thinking about Paris, the Rhine, and Berlin. And home, Mamie, and his six-month fishing trip.

After studying the little red rectangles on his G-2 maps, Ike concluded that Bradley, not Montgomery, was in the better position to break out. While the Germans had about 35,000 men opposing either Allied army, the panzer group facing Dempsey’s Second Army fielded more tanks, more flak, thicker artillery, and loads of those “screaming mimi” rocket batteries the Germans called nebelwerfers. As a result, Monty hadn’t managed to seize Caen on D-Day and then “crack around Falaise,” as he had promised at St. Paul’s. It was nearly D-plus-30, and the swastika still fluttered over Caen’s city center; this was not only an embarrassment to Montgomery—it was a worrisome drain on limited British manpower. With greater relative mobility to the south, Ike reckoned, Brad should be able to smash through the weakening German crust and explode southward into Brittany. This approach was, in fact, consistent with Monty’s pre-invasion orders, and it had made the most sense from the beginning.⁴

Not that Brad would have an easy time breaking out. The Cotentin was a devilish place for offensive operations, since the peninsula was hedgerow country, except where it was swamp country. Sluggish, muddy streams and deep drainage ditches crisscrossed the region’s neck, making movement arduous even for foot soldiers.⁵

And then there was the stubborn problem of Cherbourg, which was holding out under an airtight siege by Joe Collins and his VII Corps. The port city had long been a vital OVERLORD objective, a requirement for movement inland, and until that splinter had been extracted from First Army’s backside, the Allies couldn’t turn their attention to the east.

Worse yet, the enemy Bradley’s men would face wouldn’t be those second-rate static divisions of the coast. Instead, Brad’s opponents in the next round would be veteran, well-equipped infantry, grenadier, panzer, and paratroop units, all of which had been baptized in hard fighting on the Russian Front. Though Bradley commanded thirteen full divisions—nine infantry, two armored, and two airborne—most of his incoming regiments hadn’t been blooded yet, and his airborne was due to rotate back to England to refit for its next jump.⁶

But Ike saw no other choice. The north was too heavily guarded, and the Allies had to break out before the entire damned Wehrmacht sealed them off. So, placing his chips on the better of two risky hands, Ike handed the ball to Brad and told him to run with it. The Allies would break out to the south, and Lieutenant General Omar Bradley would be Eisenhower’s new running back.

Since von Rundstedt could not afford to have British Cromwell tanks rolling behind Falaise, Omar Bradley was hopeful that the panzer divisions along Dempsey’s front wouldn’t shift south in time to prevent him from getting through the Cotentin swamps to the open south and west. His fingers crossed, Brad’s breakout plan was a massive twelve-division offensive that would open a giant hole leading to Brittany, the Loire, and the Seine.⁷

It was a good plan, a realistic one, Brad thought. But the timing of his attack, June 30, worried both Bradley and his bosses, as SHAEF and everyone else figured that Rommel and von Rundstedt were bringing up reinforcements from Paris. As June waned, Monty advised Bradley that German heavy panzer divisions—around 200 Mark IVs, 150 Panthers, and 80 Tigers—were assembling west of Paris for a “full blooded counterattack.” A nervous Monk Dickson predicted that the II SS Panzer Corps, formerly homesteaded on the Eastern Front, would arrive by July 3, and those SS panzers, everyone knew, were not to be trifled with. To make matters worse, a corps from Fifteenth Army, around Calais, was spotted moving south, and Brad worried that Hitler’s hotshots might hit First Army’s exposed flank once the breakout began. With jitters spreading through SHAEF, Ike personally asked Brad to rush preparations for the attack “with all possible speed.” Writing Bradley on the twenty-seventh, Ike gave thin encouragement to his friend, telling him, “I feel very sure that a strong attack on your side will go with a bang once it gets started.”⁸

Under this sort of pressure, Brad really, really wanted to kick off his attack by the end of the month. But during the last week of June, his staff convinced him that everyone would have to hold their horses for a few more days. Artillery ammunition and infantry were simply in too short a supply to support a simultaneous breakout to the south and the reduction of Cherbourg to the north. His divisions were in the process of absorbing replacements, Middleton’s VIII Corps artillery was stranded in England due to the storm, and reserve ammunition had to be dragged forward from the beaches. Adding to the rear-echelon chaos, Lee’s SOS people had neglected to send First Army the ship manifests that would allow Brad’s quartermasters to identify artillery ammunition among of the cityscape of crates piling up on Omaha’s sands.⁹

On this last count, Brad complained bitterly to Ike, who broke open the bureaucratic logjam within a few days and assured Bradley that heads would roll if improvements weren’t forthcoming. But for the other appalling problems confronting Bradley, there was little either man could do for the moment. First Army was in no shape to launch an attack by the end of the month, and on the twenty-ninth, Brad swallowed his pride and set his pen to letters to generals Eisenhower and Montgomery:

Shaking his head, Ike told Everett Hughes, “Sometimes I wish I had George Patton here.” But Patton was in England, not France, and by now disappointment had become Ike’s long-term houseguest. He resigned himself to another few days squirming at his headquarters desk, anxiously reviewing weather reports, and waiting for those panzers to come rolling in from Paris.¹²

With his armies immobilized, Eisenhower took on the old, familiar role of football coach, moving up and down the sidelines, exhorting his backs to give it their best shot. On the first of July, he flew to Normandy for a four-day visit to Brad’s headquarters. Promising himself to rough it—no four-star treatment this time—he wrote Bradley, “I am counting on going over with nothing but a bedroll. . . . I want nothing but a slit trench with a piece of canvas over it. If you attempt to move out of your caravan I won’t stay.” Brad courteously interpreted Ike’s stipulation as a preference for a tent, rather than a trailer, and he was happy to accommodate his old friend.¹³

Ike came ashore at Omaha Beach with Mickey and Jimmy Gault, and stowed his traveling gear in a tent at Bradley’s campsite. His four-night stay at First Army’s rude headquarters was a fine trip for a man who loved the invigoration of field life. He slept on a cot (red pajama bottoms, no top), washed himself in cold water, used the latrine behind a hedgerow, and dined on beans ’n’ weenies and Army coffee, just like the enlisted men.¹⁴

His orderly later remarked that Ike went to a lot of trouble to live in a tent. But the man who devoured Western novels by the bushel couldn’t shake his romanticized image of camp life. “Where the buffalo roam,” as it were. Ike loved being around fighting men, and he understood that while he did not face the hardships of his GIs, he could share some of their travails, even if it was but a token gesture. Bradley’s aide later wrote, “There’s something about the guy, the way he brushes along, the way he breaks out in a big grin, the way his voice, harsh and loud, cracks out, that disarms all within his vicinity. Stand at attention if you wish, let your heart thump if it must, but there’s no getting away from the feeling of ‘easiness’ that pervades his presence. . . . That’s the way he is, gay, loud, democratic, dynamic, thinking fast, acting fast, spreading confidence.” In some ways, his sideline visits brought out the Middle American best in Dwight Eisenhower.¹⁵

Bradley, slightly closer to the men on the scrimmage line, had no such romanticized illusions about either outdoor life or the slit trench. For all the “GI’s General” press Ernie Pyle dished out to his readers, Brad never attained the “common touch” Ike exuded when he visited soldiers in the field. While Brad was universally regarded as friendly and unassuming—“plain as an old shoe,” his aides used to quip—he had little capacity for humor. Ike believed papers like Stars and Stripes performed an important service to a citizen army, by allowing citizen soldiers to air their gripes. Bradley, “top brass” by any standard, retained the high command’s traditional distrust of the press, whether Army-sponsored or private. He had no time for the human-interest stories of the everyman soldier, and he refused to pose for photographs with soldiers the way Ike did, at least when those photos were intended for publication. “Goddammit, I’ll stand here for your pix but I will not pose,” he once bluntly told photojournalists who asked for a picture of the commanding general shaking hands with his soldiers. To Bradley, public relations were someone else’s problem. He was a military commander; political officers like Ike could handle the politics.¹⁶

The next day, July 2, Ike and Brad drove over to Montgomery’s command post, an apple orchard some fifteen miles from St.-Lô. Under a mottled sky of camouflage netting, the two men found the British general in fine spirits. Monty claimed he was pleased with his army group’s progress, and to the astonishment of his American guests, he suggested abandoning the southern breakout and making an all-out drive for heavily defended Calais. Such a move would, of course, liberate the largest Channel port and eliminate the launching sites for the V1 “doodlebug” rockets that were raining down on London with frightening regularity—this last consideration being one of particular importance to Winston Churchill, the principal object of said doodlebugs.¹⁷

Ike was diplomatic, and he nodded in agreement with most of what Monty said. But Monty’s suggestion about Calais, Ike knew, was preposterous, and when he returned to his tent at Chez Bradley, Ike told Brad he was disappointed with Monty’s general preoccupation with avoiding defeat, even at the expense of victory. This was war, after all, and there was a place for unreasonable, brutal drive. Montgomery didn’t seem to understand that. All Monty wanted was a “tidy” logistical tail and a set-piece play, which naturally gave the Krauts as much time as they needed to move up panzer divisions for a counterattack. He was, he told Brad, particularly unsettled over Monty’s habit of blaming the Air Force, an interservice criticism Ike somehow had kept below the boiling point ever since the row between Patton and Coningham back in Tunisia.¹⁸

Ike, who had been looking for an offbeat adventure for some time, was delighted to get a break from the war—sort of—when Major General Elwood “Pete” Quesada, commander of the IX Tactical Air Command, offered him a flight over the Allied beachhead in a special two-seater P-51 Mustang. Other than the press, nobody was happy about it, because no local commander wants the top dog killed, accidentally or otherwise, in his sector. But Ike liked to tell his staffers that the Supreme Commander was the one man whom no one could ground, and he ignored Bradley’s pleas to stay away from the front lines. “All right, Brad,” he assured his lieutenant, “I’m not going to fly to Berlin.”¹⁹

With Quesada at the controls, Ike took a short flight over the battlefields, banking sharply so as to view the terrain over which his trucks and jeeps were rolling. As the Mustang returned and rolled to a stop, he and Pete climbed out of the cramped quarters into a battery of flashbulbs, looking, to Bradley like “sheepish schoolboys caught in a watermelon patch.” For that stunt, Ike knew he’d catch a little hell from Marshall, and from Mamie, too. But the Mustang flight, like his tent trip to Brad’s headquarters, was one of those small risks Ike yearned for after weeks behind desks, on telephones, and in conferences. They were a way he could share a fraction of the risks his soldiers were taking every day, and they were a sorely needed antidote to the sterile atmosphere at SHAEF Main.²⁰

As he had been in Tunisia, Brad was growing more than a little annoyed with his old friend’s Anglophilia. On the afternoon before Brad’s big July offensive, Ike, lounging around headquarters, began to wax enthusiastically about FORTITUDE, a plan designed and largely implemented by his beloved allies. The plan was working wonders, Ike said, and the Americans could learn something from the British about diversionary and counterintelligence operations.²¹

Even more galling to Bradley was Ike’s delight that, through FORTITUDE, George Patton had pinned the Fifteenth Army all by himself, all by his reputation—a fact that, Ike claimed, hadn’t escaped the rank and file of First Army. Word on the beaches, Ike said, was that Patton’s army had captured Norway in a couple of days; Patton, so they said, had offered Ike a thousand dollars for each week that Eisenhower would push up the date of his army’s move into France.

This was one of those times, as in Tunisia, when Eisenhower seemed to Bradley a bit pontifical for someone who had never commanded fighting troops in battle. When Ike suggested to Brad that it might be a good idea to second promising division commanders as deputy corps commanders, to speed their development into corps commanders, he added: “You learned things with II Corps that you never would have learned in a division.” The implication that Bradley had something to learn from George during the horseman’s five weeks in Tunisia must have stuck in his craw. “Brad, to my mind, never needed to learn,” snorted Bradley’s aide Chet Hansen.²²

Bradley’s great breakout offensive finally pushed off on July 3. The plan was a basic echelon attack, with Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps leading the advance by moving south along the Cotentin coast toward Coutances. The next day, Lightning Joe would drive on a parallel route, Corlett’s IX Corps would move against St.-Lô, and Gee Gerow would maintain the link with the British right flank. After breaking through the shell of the “other fellow’s” lines, Brad’s men would wheel counterclockwise, threaten the rear of the Germans facing General Dempsey, and open enough real estate to bring over Patton’s Third Army.²³

From the opening barrage, Brad’s offensive fell apart like a wet biscuit. Although he had assured Middleton that VIII Corps would get all the tactical air support it wanted, heavy rains had scrubbed ground-support missions for the first two days of the attack. Struggling through mud, thick hedgerows of what the French called the bocage country, and well-sited German observation posts, Middleton made only a thousand yards a day for the ensuing two weeks. Brad’s other corps commanders did little better.²⁴

Bradley brought in more troops, shuffled divisions, fired generals, and changed corps boundaries, but nothing worked; Middleton’s corps alone paid for seven miles of useless hedgerow country with ten thousand casualties. On July 14, a disappointed Bradley called Middleton and Collins and told them to sit tight for the moment; over the next five days, Corlett achieved only modest success in capturing the city of St.-Lô, a D-Day objective, at a cost of five thousand men. All told, Brad had advanced the Allied line about seven miles, but he had paid for it with forty thousand battle casualties—not including cases of combat fatigue, which weren’t officially reported but probably accounted for another ten thousand ineffectives. Other than a memorable photo opportunity of himself pulling the lanyard on an artillery piece to celebrate the Fourth of July, a superficially pleased General Eisenhower looking on, the great July offensive was a bust.²⁵

For Omar Bradley, Marshall’s protégé and one of the Army’s top performers, it was a crushing setback, and it kicked around his gullet like a lump of old chipped beef. He had been checked before—Troina, for instance, and at Cherbourg—but then only briefly. Now he was well and truly stalemated, and the price in blood was becoming intolerable. He could bemoan the lack of replacements and underpowered tank guns, and he could blame the weather, which had scrubbed 50 percent of his air support. He could stare blankly at those impenetrable hedgerows, every one of which seemed to conceal a Kraut machine gun and mortar team. But in the end he knew the blame would only rebound upon one man: himself.²⁶

His spirits, sagging under the weight of his failed offensive, received a nudge from a sympathetic General Marshall, who had read a report from Eisenhower blaming Brad’s rough start on factors beyond his control. The Chief wrote Bradley: “The weather has treated you badly, particularly considering the character of the terrain you have been trying to break through. However, it seems to me that things have gone extraordinarily well and that the German dilemma must be a nightmare for them.” Montgomery, still stuck at Caen, was also a good sport and a supportive teammate. When, at Montgomery’s headquarters, Bradley admitted that his initial progress had not been as rapid as he had hoped, Montgomery reassured him that the British would keep the Jerries pinned down until the Americans could get clear of the Cotentin. They’d be fine, he said.²⁷

It was a nice assurance, but Bradley didn’t need cheerful words from Monty, or even from Marshall. He needed victory. He needed his men to push more intelligently. Relieving colonels, brigadiers, and major generals sent a strong message to his division commanders, but the past two weeks had taught him that the Allies had not yet derived the formula for a break-out. They needed to learn to fight smarter; after all, combat is a notoriously unforgiving teacher.

George Patton arrived in France on July 6, with Stiller, Codman, Willie, and his jeep in tow. He kept his trip under deep cover, as the Germans still believed he commanded the First U.S. Army Group, a mighty host poised to cross the Pas de Calais and battle the German Fifteenth Army. As his staffers scouted ahead for Third Army’s headquarters site, Patton called on Brad and Troy Middleton, whose VIII Corps would move over to Third Army when Patton’s command was “hatched.”²⁸

George was still highly unpopular within Bradley’s clique. In his diary Hansen, unimpressed as ever, growled,

Shortly before noon Patton came in with Codman and a medico. Jaunty and well dressed in green jacket with the bright buttons and in ice cream pants with the fancy leather belt though I did not notice the pearl handled revolver which has been put under bans it was so highly publicized. Chastened as a result of this experience with the newspapers but he is still basically the same showman.²⁹

After listening to Brad and his corps commanders for a day, George came away unimpressed with American performance to date. He saw few sound tactics at the army level; Brad was scattering his divisions like seeds in a stiff wind, not concentrating his force. To George, Brad was doing it all wrong, trying to bust through the German lines everywhere. And En échelon, no less. How the hell did he think he would put one over on Rommel that way?³¹

Musing over what he had learned about the campaign, George thought he discerned another problem. Collins, he concluded, was quick to bust his division and regimental commanders, and Bradley was too quick to support him. He told his diary, “Collins and Bradley are too prone to cut off heads. This will make division commanders lose their confidence. A man should not be damned for an initial failure with a new division. Had I done this with General Eddy of the 9th in Africa, the army would have lost a potential corps commander.” While George was ready to give at least one corps commander the boot because of his inexperience in combat, he commented, “One should never penalize a commander for making mistakes that were due to audacity, even where it was carried to the point of rashness, but only for failing to take risks—so often in war the apparently rash move came off.”³²

As Bradley’s July offensive ground to a halt about seven miles from its starting point, George’s opinions grew more venomous. As he muttered in his diary in mid-July, “Brad and Hodges are such nothings. Their one virtue is that they get along by doing nothing. I could break through in three days if I commanded.” As the stalemate hardened, Patton’s opinion of the high command did not improve. On the twelfth, he wrote that confusion on the beaches and Allied disorganization were “the result of lack of one responsible commander. Neither Ike nor Brad has the right stuff. Ike is bound hand and foot by the British and does not know it. Poor fool. We actually have no Supreme Commander.”³³

For all their scathing missives and grousing to their staff, Brad and George respected each other. They had come up through the Old Army together, and neither man felt the other one had risen to his rank on favoritism or politics. Though different, they were each the genuine article. But the vast gulf that separated their personalities, their outlook, their styles, meant they would fail to appreciate each other’s talents unless they were working closely enough to appreciate each other’s strengths. Or saw a common enemy.

What brought the two men close in the spring of 1944 was the dominating presence of General Montgomery, a man they could both abhor with beautiful sincerity. The day after Patton’s “ice cream pants” arrival at Brad’s headquarters, Patton and Hugh Gaffey came upon Monty as he was decorating U.S. soldiers under a field battery of movie cameras commanded by a former Hollywood director. “There were at least twenty-five camera men of various types,” George noted in his diary with contempt. “Also a loudspeaker on a pole was held over Montgomery’s head so his priceless words would not be lost.” As the lights snapped off and the cameramen began packing up their equipment, Brad, George, and Monty retired to Brad’s “war tent,” where Montgomery and his staff, in George’s words, “put in several hours Explaining why they had not yet taken Caen, their D-Day objective.” When Montgomery sidled up to the topic of Third Army’s activation, he left George with the distinct impression that he didn’t want Third Army in France until sometime in the future, say, when Middleton’s VIII Corps took Avranches. Bradley, said George, “refused to bite because he is using me as a means of getting out from under the 21st Army Group. I hope he succeeds.” A few days later, George penned a personal explanation for why Third Army was still sidelined:

Brad says he will put me in as soon as he can. He could do it now with much benefit to himself, if he had any backbone. Of course, Monty does not want me as he fears I will steal the show, which I will.³⁴

With Brad’s offensive a bust, Eisenhower looked to Montgomery’s front with the longing eyes of a sick man waiting for the doctor. Daily G-2 reports showed panzers and infantry piling up along an Allied line that had hardly moved since June, and Ike foresaw a hardening stalemate that might require a McNair or an Alexander, maybe even a Jake Devers, to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. So on July 7, after conferring with Beetle and Tedder, Ike wrote Montgomery again to urge him to use “all possible energy in a determined effort to prevent a stalemate” on the Continent. He promised Montgomery the full support of SHAEF, Air Force, and First Army as needed.³⁵

“I am, myself, quite happy about the situation,” Monty airily replied the next day. The Germans were, after all, hurting far worse than the Allies were. As the Allies had recently learned, an enraged Hitler had fired von Rundstedt at the end of June, replacing him with another field marshal named Günther von Kluge. Montgomery assured Ike and his critics at SHAEF that he had “a very definite plan” for breaking out of the hedgerow country, and he wrote to Eisenhower, “Of one thing you can be quite sure, there will be no stalemate.”³⁶

Monty’s very definite plan, Operation GOODWOOD, envisioned a three-division armored thrust from Caen over the Orne River. He would seize the German-held Caen suburbs and move south toward Falaise, isolating the frontline Germans in a pocket from which they would not escape. The innovative part of the plan, Monty told Ike, was the use of heavy bombers as flying artillery to smash the outer German defenses. He promised Eisenhower the “whole eastern flank” would soon “burst into flames” under the weight of his assault. GOODWOOD, Monty predicted, would give the Allies the “decisive” victory they so desperately needed.³⁷

As Ike read Montgomery’s letter, he became electrified at the possibilities. Words like “decisive” held special meaning for men steeped in the quest for the fabled “decisive battle.” A decisive blow would give his tankers space to maneuver, give his airmen bases, and, most important, give him room to field two more armies. After telling Montgomery how “pepped up” he was about GOODWOOD, he gushed that the British triumph “will make some of the ‘old classics’ look like a skirmish between patrols.” Ike needed Brittany and the rest of Normandy, and GOODWOOD Seemed his best hope.³⁸

Montgomery launched GOODWOOD on July 18 with an air bombardment that opened the vomiting mouth of hell, or the nearest facsimile Bomber Harris could arrange. Nearly seventeen hundred planes from RAF Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth Air Force, plus another four hundred mediums and fighter-bombers from Ninth Air Force, sailed over the German lines and dropped seven thousand tons of high explosives on the huddled men below. The British moved out behind the smoldering plowline of death, and Ike was delighted to receive a report that Montgomery was “very well satisfied” with his men’s progress. Later that day Monty predicted his three armored divisions would soon be “threatening Falaise.” These were just the words Ike wanted to hear.³⁹

But Montgomery’s satisfaction proved premature. German defenders, fully conscious that an attack was in the works around Caen, quickly recovered from the shock of the bombing and threw in eight battalions from the 1st SS and 21st Panzer Divisions, blunting the British thrust. Antitank crews rushed in to halt the British Shermans, and by July 20, when a heavy storm halted further advance, Dempsey’s Second Army had moved little over six miles forward at a cost of some four hundred tanks—nearly a third of all British tanks in France—and some six thousand Tommies and Canadians. A German counterattack the next day sealed off the advance, and the exhausted Commonwealth soldiers fortified their positions, to await the next big idea from the brass.⁴⁰

If Montgomery’s true object was to break out of the confining beachhead, then GOODWOOD was a failure. The press thought so, RAF thought so, and so did Ike. Although the operation had drawn more panzers onto Caen, and away from Bradley’s sector, Monty had promised a “decisive” breakthrough. When Ike reflected that the Allies had dropped over seven thousand tons of bombs to move less than seven miles, he wondered how long they could afford to spend a thousand tons of bombs per mile. The current pace was unacceptable.⁴¹

In the wake of GOODWOOD, Monty’s critics drew their daggers. A groundswell had been building against him at SHAEF, 10 Downing, and elsewhere since late June, and SHAEF office gossip turned to who would replace the condescending little snit when Churchill and Brooke sacked him. Tedder, whose favorite topic of conversation seemed to be Montgomery’s relief, claimed the British Chiefs of Staff would support any recommendation that Ike might care to make with respect to the aloof general’s reassignment. He urged Ike to displace Monty and assume direct command of the ground war, now.⁴²

For Eisenhower, the situation at home was also getting dicey. The public was reading of a titanic offensive by the Red Army that was liberating thousands of square miles and chewing up German divisions by the dozen. In Italy, the capture of Rome had been followed by a hasty German retreat to the Gothic Line, and in the Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz was announcing landings in Guam, another stab into the Japanese defensive perimeter. What, the public would ask, was General Eisenhower doing about France? Every day Caen’s road net remained in German hands, every day they failed to bust out of Normandy, was seen by Ike’s bosses as a failure, a failure to be laid at Ike’s door. Ike, Butch remarked, was “blue as indigo over Monty’s slowdown.”⁴³

But what to do about it? The Washington establishment, including Roosevelt, Stimson, and Marshall, felt Eisenhower needed to move his headquarters across the Channel and exercise personal control over the ground campaign. There was also a rumbling on the American side that Ike was wasn’t being firm enough with the plodding Montgomery. As Harry Butcher quipped, “Monty has issued directives as lofty as the Ten Commandments but has so far not carried through on them except as performed by Bradley and then only by Ike ‘pushing the reins’ with Bradley, for whom Ike feels not only responsibility but authority to press.”⁴⁴

As in the early days of the North African campaign—or for that matter, his early days at the War Department, or his nights fretting over TORCH and CORKSCREW and HUSKY and BAYTOWN and AVALANCHE and OVER-LORD—Ike’s health suffered. Late-night conferences, incessant smoking, a haphazard diet, pacing, cursing, worrying, physical and mental wounds—these demons drove his blood pressure to life-threatening levels, which, he learned, explained the ringing in his ears. As the rush of D-Day settled into a slog of attrition, the pressure squeezed Ike like a famished python. The pressure was consuming him, making his head spin, driving him into an early grave.⁴⁵

“It ain’t good,” Butch said of Ike’s health, recalling sadly how General Teddy Roosevelt, who had survived North Africa, Sicily, Utah beach, and the hedgerow fighting, died of a heart attack one month into the Normandy campaign. “[Ike’s] troubles are not from physical exertion, but they are from the mental strain and worry,” he wrote. “What a blow it would be to the world, not mentioning that to his personal followers, if he should pull a Teddy Roosevelt!” The key to avoiding Ike’s becoming a high-ranking casualty of the war lay in the best way to get Montgomery’s forces moving south, toward Brittany, then east to the Seine.⁴⁶

Ike’s relationship with Bernard Montgomery remained distressingly awkward. On one hand, something of the same intimidated major general, whom Monty had dressed down for smoking in his regal presence back in 1942, still lingered. Ike treaded lightly with the man, as Monty was not only a highly popular figure in America and Britain, but he was a favorite of Brooke, and, from time to time, of Churchill. Ike also knew Monty could show true military brilliance, as he had amply demonstrated at El Alamein and in the planning phase of OVERLORD. The trick with Monty was waiting patiently through the uncomfortably slow intervals of deliberation that separated his penetrating flashes of genius.

Montgomery, for his part, sensed that SHAEF was a lions’ den, with the lions—Ike’s air marshals, admirals, and American generals—licking their chops for a bite at the Hero of El Alamein. Reasoning that his chief of staff, Major General Francis de Guingand, was better liked and less of a lightning rod than he, Monty usually sent “Freddie” to SHAEF whenever he had to deal with Eisenhower & Company. Before long, though, his modus operandi backfired. While De Guingand was an undeniably talented diplomat, well liked by everyone, Monty lacked the foresight to see that a personal engagement of the Allied board of directors would be indispensible if he were to remain in the tactical driver’s seat. Either that, or a great victory, which he didn’t have at the moment. ⁴⁷

Notwithstanding the indecision at Caen, Ike was not about to succumb to calls for Montgomery’s head, at least not at the moment. He had stuck by George, who had gotten him into hotter and deeper water than Monty ever would. As Brooke liked to remind him, Montgomery did have the heavier weight of German armor covering his front, as Eisenhower had intended, and it would not be realistic to believe that a Red Army–like offensive could be launched around Caen in the face of this much enemy armor. More to the point, Ike knew it would be unpalatable for an American general to relieve a British general, especially as the British censorship policy restricted the pool of generals known, and therefore acceptable, to the British public.⁴⁸

He understood why Bradley was stuck in the hedgerows, and he understood why Dempsey was stuck around Caen. There were reasons, perhaps compelling reasons. But knowing why his soldiers were stuck didn’t bring him much comfort. After all, the word “why” came up often when generals, historians, and politicians discussed failed campaigns. And failed generals.⁵⁰

Well, that was the nature of the beast, and there was little Ike could do about it now. Napoleon had Borodino, Grant the Wilderness, and Ike had the endless line of Norman hedgerows and swamps in which his troops were now stuck. It was a leafy green cross, one of many that Ike, Brad, and their men would have to bear a little longer.