Brothers, Rivals, Victors

Well, terrain and rain and supplies and men and, of course, the Hun—that was what had gone wrong. But as Bradley donned his teacher’s cap, he saw something else, a flaw in his plan’s basic conception. Something that, by gum, he had taught countless West Point students never to do: He had dispersed his striking power over a broad line, which didn’t leave much punch to ram his armor deep into the German defenses.

By the second week in July, Brad felt the germ of an idea sprouting in the back of his head. If properly executed, the move might get his men out of the Cotentin, where they could snatch up those coastal ports and drive their tanks into open country. But to flesh out that idea, to turn the vague concept into something worthwhile, he needed to retire to his map room.

The map room was Bradley’s inner sanctum, his temple on the mountaintop. It wasn’t really a room, but a long, canvas mess tent where the biggest map of Normandy his G-2 men could find covered an entire wall. The place was his office, his workshop, his monastery, because to Brad maps, like the Good Book, would tell you a lot if you were willing to spend time thinking about them.

Over two nights, Brad’s boots clunked over the tent’s planked floors as he penciled, rubbed out and penciled more lines, an Einstein in olive scribbling and scratching out theoretical formulae. As rags smudged with pencil grease piled up in the corners of his tent floor, Brad traced and retraced road networks and studied the land around them. The black lines took shape, and Brad’s dark eyes brightened as he awoke to possibilities spread along the Cotentin’s old, rutted roads.²

After wrestling the problem down to a workable concept, Brad asked Hodges and Collins for their thoughts. Then, on July 12, he invited Bill Kean, Tubby Thorson, Monk Dickson, and his corps commanders to critique his work. They shuffled into Brad’s office like a panel of drab professors assembled for a master’s thesis, and emerged with a plan.³

Plan COBRA, as Tubby dubbed it, was an American-style solution to the hardening stalemate. Like GOODWOOD, Bradley’s campaign would begin with a saturation bombing in lieu of the conventional artillery barrage. The difference between COBRA and GOODWOOD was that First Army would use infantry divisions, rather than armor, to punch a narrow hole in the enemy lines around St.-Lô. The infantry would hold the shoulders while an entire corps of armor and mechanized infantry rushed through. With luck, the three mobile divisions would blast their way to Coutances, where they could pivot, then encircle the German defenders. If events so dictated, Brad could send his armor toward Avranches, at the base of Brittany’s peninsula. Once in Avranches, he would have enough space to bring Patton’s army into the fray, and Brittany, with its fat, juicy ports, would be his for the taking.⁴

It was a risky plan, Brad acknowledged. Hedgerow country went back another forty miles, and until his tanks reached the fruited plains beyond they would be highly vulnerable to infantry, land mines, and antitank attacks. There was also the matter of fuel, food, and ammunition supply, which First Army would have to channel down two long, fragile arteries running from the beaches to the front. Those roads would be choked with supply trucks bumping up against the attacking army, and something as simple as a stalled truck or a lost convoy could shut down his advance as effectively as a counterattack. “Of course you are going to end up with a hell of a scramble. We will have to unscramble our divisions when we get through [the hole],” Brad admitted to his concerned staff.

He also acknowledged that he would be placing his chips on two relatively untested infantry divisions that would hold open the hole; any screwup by those divisions could bring down the whole show. As he summed up his theory in a soft Missouri drawl, “The whole thing depends on certain assumptions—move boldly and be ready to take stiff losses if necessary.”⁵

Yes, the plan put a lot of people in harm’s way, and it violated many canons he had preached at West Point and Benning. But the alternative—a return to the slugging match of the last two months—was unpalatable, especially with the large, menacing Fifteenth Army posted up around Calais waiting for Patton’s army. He knew they wouldn’t wait forever.

In final form, COBRA looked just like any plan does before the shooting starts: neat and feasible. The operation would commence with a massive air bombardment of a rectangle seven thousand yards wide and twenty-five hundred yards deep, just south of the Périers-St.-Lô highway. On the heels of the air bombardment, three infantry divisions, the 4th, 9th, and newly arrived 30th, would punch a three-mile hole between Marigny and St.-Gilles. The penetrating force, consisting of the Big Red One, the 3rd Armored, and Hell on Wheels, would race toward Coutances and run behind the six weakened German divisions facing Middleton’s VIII Corps. Then the turkey shoot would begin. Middleton would push forward and liquidate the pocket, clearing the base of the Cotentin neck, and Bradley’s armored column would drive south, eating up French real estate as it pushed the Germans back. The Americans would own the coast all the way to Avranches, and then Third Army would come aboard for the dash into port-rich Brittany.⁶

The weather was the wild card, as it always was. When heavy rains began to drench Normandy in the middle of July, roads became muddy troughs and Brad’s timetable became hopelessly deranged. On July 20, Eisenhower came to Bradley’s headquarters to watch the assault commence, only to be told by a sheepish Brad that the big push would be delayed until the next day on account of rain. Bradley’s mood darkened after another day of pluvial weather, which forced him to postpone COBRA one more day, then another, then another.⁷

Rotten weather notwithstanding, the eleven days between COBRA’s conception and jump-off were Omar Bradley’s moment to shine. His staffers prided themselves on meticulous planning, and as the planning phase of COBRA rushed toward its climax, Brad buzzed about his headquarters like a spinning gyroscope, demanding obedience to COBRA’s holy principles while letting his staff and field officers work out the details. It wasn’t the kind of work that made headlines, and it wasn’t something an artist would depict in bold colors for The Saturday Evening Post. But Bradley’s genius burned brightest in the creation of a complex operation, and he poured his heart and soul into the details of this breakout. When his men stepped off, he wanted to rest assured that he had done his best for them.

As COBRA’s D-Day drew near, Bradley’s spirits rose again. One reason for his brimming confidence lay in the corps commander who would throw the first punch, Lightning Joe Collins. With a square jaw and youthful eyes that gave him the self-assured look of a star high school quarterback, Collins had plenty of drive, and Brad could see many of George Patton’s best qualities in the young general. But unlike Patton, Lightning Joe’s enthusiasm was tempered with sound judgment and an ability to play on a team. In assigning him the lead role in COBRA, Brad knew he could give Joe considerable leeway in directing the block-and-run play without fear that VII Corps would send its tanks halfway to Berlin and let them run out of gas.⁹

Bradley’s incoming headquarters, designated Twelfth U.S. Army Group, as well as Patton’s Third Army staff and two new corps headquarters, were all setting up shop by the time COBRA was finally ready to kick off. It was almost time for Bradley take his place as an army group commander, a position that had effectively not existed since the Civil War. Ike gave the Missourian the authority to activate Twelfth Army Group and Third Army at the time of his choosing, and the two men agreed that the first of August would be about the right date. Turning the controls over to his protégé, Eisenhower sent Bradley a valedictory letter on the day the COBRA was to strike: “My high hopes and best wishes ride with you in your attack today. . . . Speaking as the responsible American rather than Allied commander, I assure you that the eyes of our whole country will be following your progress, and I take full personal responsibility for answering to them for the necessary price of victory.” ¹⁰

Brad obviously wanted to keep his men out of harm’s way, but he didn’t want them so far back that the Hun could regroup before his foot soldiers took them at a rush. So he selected a “safety zone” of eight hundred yards, and on June 19 he flew to Allied Expeditionary Air Forces headquarters in Stanmore, north of London, to personally explain COBRA’s requirements to the air lords—Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Quesada, and others. One condition, he told them, was that the bombers must approach the target parallel to the enemy lines, rather than over the heads of the infantry, to avoid the risk that they might accidentally drop their eggs on friendly foxholes.¹¹

On the question of approach, the AEAF barons demurred. They agreed that Bradley had selected a sound target, and they assured him that nothing would be left standing in that rectangle when they were finished. But they were unwilling to risk their bombers by concentrating them along a narrow corridor lined with German AA guns, and they calculated that they could not physically run the number of planes Bradley wanted through a narrow rectangular chute within the one hour the COBRA plan allotted. Given their approach requirements, they pointed out that an eight-hundred-yard gap between Brad’s riflemen and the Germans was too close to guarantee the safety of everyone wearing olive drab. If Bradley wanted a carpet of high-explosive bombs, they insisted that he would need a fifteen-hundred-yard safety zone for his men.¹²

Dissatisfied with the airmen’s reply, Brad refused to pull his troops more than 1,250 yards from the highway that marked the border of the bomb zone. Sure, there was a risk of short drops, he acknowledged, but the greater risk, as he and Collins saw it, was that the Boche would reset their MG-42s and mortars while the Americans were picking their way forward. Blowing a hole in an enemy line was good only if the hole was still there when the foot soldiers arrived. Holding men too far back in 1915 had condemned thousands of Tommies to death at the Somme, and Bradley was not one to repeat the mistakes of the past.¹³

By the end of the meeting, Brad secured a compromise: The more precise Thunderbolt fighter-bombers at Quesada’s Tactical Air Command—“jabos,” the Germans called them—would take care of the closest targets, letting the big Forts and Liberators work on the rectangle’s deeper targets. The question of running parallel to the lines, Brad felt, was also settled in his favor, although Leigh-Mallory, running late for his next meeting, left the conference before it had ended, and they never got back to that point in detail. Brad left Stanmore satisfied that he had gotten his way.¹⁴

It was a dicey proposition. Flying boxcars cruising at high altitudes were notorious for scattering their explosives all over creation, and the bombing runs on D-Day and at Slapton Sands did not make Brad swell with confidence. To cut his margin even closer, he planned to have his infantry move up to the highway at the end of the heavy bomber strike, while fighter-bombers were still bombing and strafing the near zones. “We’re taking a helluva chance—much more than I want to take with only a mile between my front lines and the target,” Bradley said. It was a gut feeling similar to the one that had struck George Patton the night his paratroopers climbed aboard their transports for Sicily. But Bradley was confident in the end result.¹⁵

Threading his way gracefully among the tents and mobile trailers of his new command post, Patton felt he was safe from danger. Not the shooting kind of danger—for he still wanted a piece of that, though he had stopped kidding himself long ago that a three-star general would see much hostile fire. No, the danger he was worried about was the kind a general faces when he opens his mouth to a man holding a pen or a microphone. The kind of danger that becomes obvious only when General Marshall or Bedell Smith picks up the newspaper with his morning coffee.¹⁶

For the time being, George figured he was safe from this occupational hazard. He had kept his word to Ike about no press quotes. He had kept his trademark pistols in the office, mostly, and censors dutifully blacked out newspaper photos of Patton’s Third Army insignia. So a phone call from Bradley’s headquarters on July 17 rattled him. Journalists attached to Third Army were evidently telling their buddies at First Army that they knew all about First Army’s big plan, a secret Brad had withheld from First Army’s press pool.

What the hell was going on? Brad demanded. COBRA was one of the Army’s most jealously guarded operations, and someone, evidently Patton’s Press Relations Officer, Colonel Charles Blakeney, had been speaking out of turn to the bullpen.¹⁷

George was horrified, particularly as the war might be over before his beautiful killing machine got into the thick of it. He quickly called Bradley back, apologized, and promised to cut Blakeney from his team. “For God’s sake, Brad,” Bradley remembered him pleading, “you’ve got to get me into this fight before the war is over. I’m in the doghouse now and I’m apt to die there unless I pull something spectacular to get me out.”¹⁸

George surmised that Third Army correspondents, rivals with their counterparts in First Army, had bragged about some First Army secrets they knew, secrets it took no time for First Army’s reporters to uncover. It was bad enough that George got into trouble when he opened his own mouth to reporters, and he didn’t need his staff to dump him in hot water for their own mistakes. He rounded up his correspondents and gave them a sober lecture on the stakes of this leak. “I haven’t got the words to express the danger which this violation of orders and trust may have on the lives of soldiers,” he told them. “It is perfectly possible that through loose talk by some of you, thousands of your countrymen or Allies may be killed. It is perfectly possible that as a result of what has happened a very great operation may come to nothing.”¹⁹

The clouds were damnably thick and low that Monday, and at the last possible minute, Bradley learned that Leigh-Mallory, who had flown to France to make a firsthand assessment of bombing conditions, had postponed the air attack. Knowing the bombers wouldn’t come, Bradley also issued orders to stand down. But come they did, and as they reached the target, the lead planes unloaded some 685 tons of explosives on the box below the Périers-St. -Lô highway. Those behind them followed suit, and then the earth erupted in a torrent of smoke, dirt, flying debris. Just as planned.²⁰

Not quite as planned, Brad realized. The bombers were supposed to run parallel to the infantry lines, but they were approaching on the perpendicular, from behind Bradley’s infantrymen. It also didn’t appear that the whole complement of bombers was attacking. And the bombs were landing closer than they should have been. Leigh-Mallory had a lot of explaining to do.²¹ Bradley’s staff began frantically calling air headquarters to find out what was going on.

News came in spasmodically to the little stone house Brad had commandeered for his observation post. Leigh-Mallory, who had arrived in Normandy that morning to find the clouds impenetrable, had tried to cancel the air mission. Some air crews got the message, and some didn’t. As a result, half the fighter-bombers stayed home and none of the mediums showed up. The remaining bombers arrived from the north, perpendicular to the line, instead of parallel to the German line as Bradley had requested. To make matters worse, the lead bombardier on a formation of sixteen bombers jammed his bomb release; trying to free the mechanism, he dropped a portion of his load on the 30th Division. The fifteen heavies flying behind him followed suit—that’s how it works with bombers: the lead goose drops its eggs, everyone behind follows—and the unfortunate 30th suffered 156 casualties, including as many as thirty dead.²²

Chaos reigned at VII Corps headquarters. Just before the bombardment, Collins had pulled his men back from the highway to avoid being in the bomb target area. Then General Bradley’s headquarters told him the air and ground missions were canceled. But then the bombers did their work.

Collins called First Army to find out whether COBRA had been postponed: Were both the air and ground portions canceled, or did Bradley want him to go ahead behind the half-baked bombardment? If the game was off, Collins would have to move his infantry up to their regular line before the Germans figured out what they were up to, and the Americans would also lose the priceless element of surprise. On the other hand, if the operation were on, he would be sending infantry across a field only partly saturated, where there would be a lot more defenders left than advertised. Whatever his orders, he insisted, somebody has to tell me what to do.

At his command post, Bradley paced around wildly, purple with rage. The air forces had agreed to run in from the side, not over the heads of his troops. At least, that was what he had thought they had promised when he left Stanmore after the July 19 conference. So, apparently, did Pete Quesada, whose fighter-bombers had run in from the lateral. Now, he learned, that cowardly s.o.b. Leigh-Mallory, the same snob who had tried to scrub his D-Day airborne operation, came running to his command post pleading ignorance over the approach direction. To Brad, it wasn’t negligence or ignorance; it amounted to a serious breach of good faith by the air brass.²³

Well, no time to throw around accusations, Brad thought. He could take the matter up with Ike later. Right now, with one hundred thousand men waiting on him, he had to make a decision, one of those snap decisions portrayed in Hollywood but rarely made in a real-life operation.

Bradley wanted a rapid, blitzing attack, but he wanted it done right. Patton used to say that a good plan now was better than a perfect plan next week, but Brad saw it differently. Given the choice, he’d take perfect execution tomorrow over poor execution today. So he confirmed his postponement order: COBRA would commence the next day, Tuesday, July 25. In the meantime, Collins could move his men back to the Périers-St.-Lô road.²⁴

For a second straight day, Bradley pricked his large ears for the drone of aircraft, this time with the Supreme Commander at his elbow. Because Bomber Command could not formulate and issue orders to change their route without delaying COBRA yet again—something neither Ike nor Brad would countenance—a reluctant Bradley was compelled to let the bombers fly in the same way: perpendicular to his lines.²⁵

This time the full bomber complement, over fifteen hundred Forts and Liberators, waddled over the targets, slow and low, where they dropped more than three thousand tons of high explosive and fragmentation bombs on the unfortunate Panzer Lehr troops who inhabited Brad’s rectangle. Another 380 mediums came in, dropping 650 tons of high-explosive and fragmentation bombs; this wave was followed by a swarm of fighter-bombers, which screamed in with another two hundred tons of HE bombs and a horrifying jellied gasoline that Ordnance was calling “napalm.” The earth shook, flew up, settled, then flew up again as wave after wave of flying killers turned defense positions into freshly plowed fields. The impact was so violent that a mile from the front, the lace curtains hanging from the hut in which Brad and Collins conferred trembled with each concussive thud. Those sticks, they thought, were landing awfully close.

Ike was gratified that Bradley was willing to launch COBRA despite the risks, and he harbored guarded hopes that the payoff would be substantially higher than GOODWOOD. The accidental bombing of the 30th Division the day before had worried him; he had often feared that airmen, flying high over clouds and smoke, jittery about antiaircraft fire, anxious to drop their load so they could return home, might drop their bombs short, into the tightly packed infantry below. When word came of the attempted scrubbing of the bomb runs on the twenty-fourth, followed by the postponement of COBRA and the casualties among the Americans, he began to wonder whether heavy bombers were the wrong animal for ground support. Before leaving First Army headquarters to return to Sharpener, Ike had told Brad he had “lost all faith in bombers acting in support of the ground force. . . . I gave them a green light this time. But I promise you it’s the last.”²⁷

The next day’s bombing, however, seemed to come off splendidly. Early reports of the devastation within Bradley’s rectangle augured swift success for the foot soldiers, at least locally. Then he got the news: The Air Force had done it again. In three separate incidents, bombs had landed on friendly forces, killing 111 and wounding 490. The stunner was that one of the casualties—a death, not an injury—was none other than Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, head of Army Ground Forces and Patton’s replacement as commanding general of the fictitious First U.S. Army Group in England.²⁸

“Whitey” McNair, a close colleague of Marshall’s, had been one of the Army’s all-stars long before the Louisiana maneuvers. That afternoon, he had the honor of becoming America’s highest-ranking fatality, thrown eighty feet from his slit trench and identified by three stars found on the shoulder of a shred of a corpse. To add insult to mortal injury, Ike could not even give McNair, or the little that was left of him, a decent burial, as McNair’s presence in France was a carefully guarded secret, just as Patton’s presence had been earlier in the month. So Whitey went to his grave accompanied only by a few senior officers and former aides, his next of kin blissfully ignorant of his fate.²⁹

Back in Portsmouth, Ike slunk around Sharpener “terribly depressed,” according to Kay. Thunderstruck by the loss of the Army’s most senior general in Europe, Ike told Marshall that he had warned Whitey on several occasions about taking unnecessary risks, since the roving McNair had been wounded in Tunisia, again under Eisenhower’s watch.³⁰

Far worse than the loss of a single general, as COBRA’s D-Day wore on Ike learned that the bombing didn’t seem to have the advertised effects. Follow-up reports indicated that German artillery was still strong, and on the first day of the offensive, VII Corps managed to push only a little beyond its starting point. Commanders and enlisted men had been expecting an afternoon stroll south of the Périers-St.-Lô highway, and their disappointment in finding Germans very much alive threw a wet blanket over American élan.³¹

That evening, Bradley rang up Sharpener to report opening day’s initial progress: The 9th Division had made a twenty-three-hundred-yard gain, and his other two assault divisions, the 4th and 30th, advanced just over half that distance.

The first day being something of a bust, Ike could see another expensive plan grinding to a dispiriting halt. Nevertheless, Ike kept faith with his Missourian. As with other generals, when the chips were down he reassured Brad that, despite the slow progress on his flanks, “I am perfectly certain that you are going to make the grade.” ³²

But beyond a little high-level cheerleading, there was little Ike could do. Back in southern England, he could only hope that Omar would continue to push—and take risks, if need be—until something happened. Bradley assured him he would.³³

Although COBRA’s opening day was a disappointment, Bradley saw a few glints of sunlight among the clouds. The infantry had not fully secured the shoulders of the rectangle, but the prisoners taken from Panzer Lehr sure looked like they’d had their bells rung but good by the bombers. South of the Périers-St.-Lô road, German resistance was light, which could indicate that the Hun was on his heels. Or it could indicate that the “other fellow” had pulled back and was ready to pounce on Brad’s armor the minute it came rolling down the road to Coutances.

Brad didn’t know which was the answer, but late in the afternoon of July 25 a decision was made for him. Although he didn’t fully own the “shoulder” towns of St.-Gilles and Marigny, Collins decided to go for broke: The roads, he reported, were clear enough for his armor, and he was committing his Shermans slightly ahead of schedule, at first light on D-plus-1. As American infantry broke the back of German resistance at the gap, the tanks rolled through, and Omar Bradley was about to collect his payoff.³⁴

The payoff, Brad found, was not as large has he had hoped, at least not immediately. Because Huebner’s 1st Division made slow going due to road congestion and savvy German resistance, the Big Red One was unable to reach Coutances in time to capture the city or bag the Germans lined up between him and Middleton. But over the next two days, Middleton’s corps lunged forward and the armored column Collins had launched slammed into the rear of a retreating enemy. Brad’s 2nd and 3rd Armored tankers put their Shermans into high gear and slashed their way south, deepening the hole in the German left flank and encircling the German LXXXIV Corps. Brad’s haymaker had caught von Kluge square on his left jaw, and now his men were rolling into open country.³⁵

Brad’s blood was up. Within a week of COBRA’s abortive first notes, his men flew past Coutances and drove on toward Avranches with a vengeance. They sent nearly twenty thousand prisoners into Allied POW cages, and as the German line crumbled, Brad threw Corlett and Gerow into the battle to block any further German retreat. He was conquering land he and Ike had been salivating over since D-Day. Around headquarters Bradley began talking of the “unconditional surrender” of German armed forces in France. On the twenty-eighth, three days into the COBRA offensive, Bradley wrote Ike, “To say that the personnel of the First Army Headquarters is riding high tonight is putting it mildly.” ³⁶

The Plan—the OVERLORD plan that had framed Dwight Eisenhower’s life since December 1943—called for the Allies to be in Paris by D-plus-90, or around September 4. It was an assumption that mocked Ike during June and July as Montgomery, then Bradley, then Montgomery, then Bradley again, tried to break out of the corral in which Rommel, von Rundstedt, and von Kluge had penned them.³⁸

But COBRA changed everything. By the end of July, Bradley had captured Avranches. He had almost taken enough French real estate to give Third Army some running room. Once Brittany had fallen—easy pickings, it now seemed—the port of Brest would give the Allies a second major supply artery. German resistance in France was crumbling, and an attempt on Hitler’s life in late July, with its inevitable military purges, underscored Ike’s early prediction that the war in Europe would be over before the end of 1944. Even Montgomery was getting into the act, for on July 28 he informed Eisenhower that he had ordered General Dempsey to take risks, accept casualties, and “step on the gas.”³⁹

So as August opened, a weary but exuberant Eisenhower told Harry Butcher, “If the intercepts are right, we are to hell and gone in Brittany and slicing ’em up in Normandy.” He joked with Bradley that Churchill was so happy he was apt to come down to Twelfth Army Group headquarters and give Brad a kiss on both cheeks. Patton, in turn, wrote Ike, “Bradley has done a wonderful job. My only kick is that he will win the war before I get in.” George hailed Brad’s plan as “a great military conception,” and the self-centered publicity hound told visiting reporters that Bradley “hasn’t gotten the praise he should have for having done it.”⁴⁰

As Sherman tanks roared out of the hedgerow country, Eisenhower began spending more and more time with his favorite subordinate, bumping elbows with Bradley as the two jostled about Brad’s map trailer to get the latest updates from the front. Ike played late-night rubbers of bridge with his old friend and stayed for dinners and overnight visits whenever possible. When not talking business, the two men swapped gossip, reminisced over Army football games, talked over who needed promoting and who needed relieving. When traveling to meetings with “outsiders” like Montgomery and Devers, they often shared a car, working out their ideas together before proposing them to others. They were close, Kay remarked, “almost like brothers,” and Ike commenced a letter-writing campaign to urge General Marshall to promote Bradley to permanent major general.⁴¹

To keep pace with his advancing armies, on August 7 Eisenhower had a small staff of deputies move his advanced command post to the bucolic little village of Tournières, not far from Bayeux, the city for which the famed tapestry was named. His new post, code-named SHELLBURST, was set up in his preferred fashion: simple Army style, with a few rudimentary sleeping trucks and slit trenches ringing a cluster of plank-floored office tents. Ensconced in a tangle of hedgerows and telephone lines, Ike felt he could better appreciate firsthand the terrain over which his men were fighting. From Tournières he would fight one last battle with Winston Churchill, over Operation ANVIL.⁴²

ANVIL, later renamed DRAGOON, was a landing in Southern France under the command of General Devers. It would bring additional divisions onto the Continent, and just as important, it would give General Lee’s SOS people two major ports, Marseilles and Toulon, through which to supply the growing Allied host. Churchill vehemently disagreed with the concept, and on August 5 the English bulldog showed up at Shellburst and spent the next several days badgering General Eisenhower into scrubbing DRAGOON. An exasperated but confident Eisenhower refused to budge, and the DRAGOON landings went forward as planned on August 15. Before long, General Truscott’s VI Corps and the French First Army liberated Toulon, Marseilles, and Grenoble, and Ike was pleased to see his newest legions do the Truscott Trot up the Rhône Valley to join forces, where they would link with Patton’s Third Army.⁴³

While Truscott’s men were stampeding across the French Riviera, Ike had to deal with a serious uproar in the press. Some jackleg reporter from the AP, it seemed, had managed to slip past the censors a story that Eisenhower was demoting General Montgomery from chief ground commander to mere army group commander. British newspaper editors, sensitive to the patriotism of their subscribers, voiced their indignation in loud, unqualified tones. SHAEF attempted to clarify the situation by announcing that Montgomery would continue in command of all ground forces for the time being, but that announcement created a backlash in the American press and stirred up great concern among both Stimson and Marshall.⁴⁴

Since the early days of OVERLORD, the plan had called for Montgomery to relinquish his role as ground commander to the Supreme Commander and take the reins of Twenty-First Army Group on a full-time basis. The story of Montgomery’s “demotion” was, therefore, hardly newsworthy to Ike and his planners. With six armies operating on the Continent—Second British and First Canadian under Monty, First and Third U.S. under Brad, and First French and Seventh U.S. under Devers—it seemed natural to Ike that he should become his own ground force commander.

But that story, unknown to the British public and press, inspired an outcry that Monty did nothing to check. Eisenhower and Bradley were soon caught in a nasty cross fire between Fleet Street, which called for the retention of Montgomery as Allied ground commander, and the U. S. press, which accused the British of running the show on the backs of the American soldier. “Goddammit,” Ike emoted, “the British have never understood the American system of command.”⁴⁵

That was certainly part of the problem. Commanders in the American army traditionally set the objectives, but defer the how and the when to their subordinates; Bradley’s COBRA directive, for example, was a page and a half of instructions, with one diagram illustrating what he wanted his divisions to do. The rest was a matter of trust, or clarification. If Ike could trust Bradley, Montgomery, and Devers to do their jobs faithfully and efficiently, the Allies would not need a separate ground commander.

The British model, with which Montgomery, Churchill, and the British press were better acquainted, encouraged detailed instructions set out in pages of paragraphs and subparagraphs. Thus, in Montgomery’s army group directives, a large serving of the how and the when was ladled out with the where and the whom. Montgomery referred to this concept as “tight battle grip,” and many British chieftains, both uniformed and civilian, had a hard time understanding Eisenhower’s laissez-faire attitude toward operational details.

It was a hopeless scuffle among journalists and politicians, but with two great democracies as co-belligerents, neither country’s high command could afford to ignore the question. As a sop to the king’s subjects, Churchill promoted General Montgomery to field marshal, equivalent to an American five-star general. Ike, trying desperately to right the boat, sent his warm congratulations to the prickly marshal, but refused to alter the command arrangements to maintain Montgomery’s position as his top lieutenant.⁴⁶

The Battle of the Ground Commander hammered home another wedge between Montgomery and the American generals, and Bradley in particular. Before long, Montgomery began complaining about Bradley to Eisenhower, and he would begin complaining about Eisenhower to Marshall. The Americans didn’t buy it, and the Chief and Ike remained Bradley’s strongest backers. But the inescapable fact was that the Allied command in Europe was rupturing. Brad concluded with the benefit of hindsight, “The unfortunate August split never completely healed.”⁴⁷

Patton, invested on the Continent with four dormant corps headquarters and some thirty thousand French irregulars, squirmed impatiently as Brad’s COBRA Slithered toward Avranches without him. Waiting for his activation orders, he fretted that command politics might get in the way of sound operations. He also worried that Bradley was just a bit reluctant to activate Third Army, since it would bump him up to army group commander and move him farther from the front lines, where the action was. “In this I can sympathize with him,” George remarked.⁴⁸

But on the last day of July, Third Army’s incubation period was over, and the chicken was ready to peck its way out of the egg. Though he would not officially become Third Army’s commanding general—LUCKY SIX—until the following day, Patton proceeded to move his headquarters, LUCKY MAIN, up to the Coutances-St.-Lô road. From his advanced command post at LUCKY FORWARD—which included a van with living quarters, secure phone lines, and a glass-topped desk—he ordered General Middleton to move his stalled VIII Corps over the Selune River and into Brittany.⁴⁹