Brothers, Rivals, Victors

Bradley viewed George and his many deficiencies in planning in stark contrast to Hodges, who was appropriately aggressive, but prudent and attentive to detail. As Brad later contended, “Whereas Patton could seldom be bothered with details, Hodges studied his problems with infinite care and was thus better qualified to execute the more intricate operations.” On the other hand, as Chet Hansen opined to his diary, “Bradley . . . has had difficulty keeping Patton on the plan. Pat[ton] more interested in fighting for headlines than soundly.” ²

To Brad’s surprise, George quickly fell in line, just like a good old soldier. Or, at least, a soldier who knew he was one step away from being sent back to Palermo. George had always respected the civilities between senior generals, the “gentleman’s code” of the military nobility—the salute and the “sir” and the small honors, like motorcades and honor guards—and these social rules gave way to a comradely informality only when the two men were in private, or accompanied only by their trusted retainers. Another sure sign that George knew who was boss was his ham-handed bootlicking campaign directed at his Group commander; shortly after arriving in Europe, George began to refer to Bradley as “the Eagle,” and he sang loud praises of Brad’s military acumen to Brad’s aides, fully expecting the message to get back to Bradley as a burst of spontaneous sincerity. Just as he did with Eisenhower in Sicily and England.³

Privately, however, George knew that Bradley, like his understudy Hodges, lacked drive and imagination. They lacked a willingness to take risks. Brad didn’t appreciate the need for improvisation, something vital in a fluid battle, especially when the enemy was on the run. With the collapse of German resistance after COBRA, George thought it made sense to chuck the playbook and hound the Kraut all the way to the Rhine. Rather than squeeze his entire army into the Bretagne peninsula, why not cut off Brittany at the neck, clear out the interior with armor, then dispatch bottled-up defenders in the ports with an infantry division while sending the rest of his army toward Paris? To George, who tended to think in great, sweeping movements, throwing off division-size flank protection as he drove into Brittany seemed a huge waste of effort.⁴

Troy Middleton was the first commander caught in the Patton-Bradley cross fire. On his way to executing Bradley’s orders to take St.-Malo, Middleton received a message from General Patton ordering him to bypass the town. “There is nothing there anyway,” George assured him. “There aren’t 500 troops in there.” But when Middleton tried to bypass St.-Malo, the town garrison—estimated by G-2 at three to six thousand strong—showered his men with an artillery serenade that stopped his armor until Middleton sent the 83rd Division in to put a stop to the nuisance. In the end, the 83rd captured some fourteen thousand Germans there; Middleton never knew how many they killed.⁵

As Middleton’s VIII Corps was battering its way toward Brest, Bradley stepped in personally to countermand George’s orders. It was the very sin he had been furious with George for in Sicily, but as Bradley saw it, he had to insert himself into George’s business to stave off disaster. Middleton recalled:

The confusion lasted for several days. For instance, Bradley told me, “When you get out through Avranches to the south, be sure to guard the south flank very heavily because it’s wide open not only to the south but in the direction of Paris. There was a town named Fougères; I was ready to send the Seventy-Ninth Division there to block when Patton came along. “Hell, no,” George said, “we’re going to Brest.”⁶

“I’m wide open here,” Middleton groused in his Mississippi Delta drawl, and he explained to Bradley that his corps front faced west rather than east, where the main enemy force was hunkered down. “I’d hate to attack with enemy at my rear and with my rear exposed the way it is. If he cuts through the hinge, I’d be stuck.”⁷

“Dammit, I’m not interested in making news,” he said, his brow furrowing over his steel-rimmed spectacles. He ordered Middleton to send the 79th Division to shore up the corps rear at Fougères, and he lectured the college president on Patton’s limitations:

[The] Germans could hit us with three divisions there and it’ll make us look very foolish. It would be embarrassing to George. George is used to attacks from a single division. He’s buttoned up well enough for that. But he’s not used to having three or four divisions hit him. He doesn’t know what it means yet.⁸

White hot under his three-starred collar, Bradley had Sergeant Stoute drive him over to Lucky Forward to set the ground rules. “For Christ’s sake, George,” he began, “what are you going to do about this open flank you have; I’ve sent the 79th down there and I hate to have to bypass a commander, it’s your army.” He proceeded to lecture Patton on the need to keep his eastern front secure while Middleton was doing his job in Brittany.⁹

Patton, unbeknownst to Bradley and Middleton, had already sent the 5th Armored Division to Fougères to protect his flank. But he simply grinned at Bradley and told him he would make sure the 79th got there without delay. As Brad later recalled, George put his arm over the Missourian’s shoulder and said with a lop-eared grin, “Fine, fine, Brad. That’s just what I would have done.”¹⁰

On the drive back to Army Group headquarters, Brad commented that George would probably call him a son-of-a-bitch behind his back for breaking the chain of command and reaching down to George’s corps. And why shouldn’t he? Bradley had felt the same when George did it to him in Sicily. But Brad also knew he was right in this instance. “Hell, there’s no telling what might happen if we didn’t button up there,” he explained. From his close work with Patton, he knew the Californian needed discipline from above, as George was not the man to see, much less curb, his impulsive excesses. “If George were hit by three divisions, he might lose two of his own and that’d be terribly embarrassing. It’d cost him his job. He should thank me for doing what I did.”¹¹

George never thanked Brad. Instead, he recorded a different version of his talk with Brad in his diary. He wrote that Bradley,

with some embarrassment, stated that he had been waiting for me at the VIII Corps, and as I had not arrived there, he had taken the responsibility of telling Middleton to move the 79th Division to the east. . . . He said he knew that I would concur. I said that I would, but that I did not agree with him and feared that he was getting the British complex of over-caution. It is noteworthy that just about a year ago to the day I had to force him to conduct an attack in Sicily. I do not mean by this that he is avengeful, but he is naturally super-conservative.¹²

“Super-conservative” is, of course, a relative term, and in comparison to George’s philosophy, it must have seemed that way. To Patton, in a war of maneuver the flanks would take care of themselves. “Some goddamn fool once said that flanks have got to be secure,” a reporter quoted George saying. “I don’t agree with that. My flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not me. Before he finds out where my flanks are, I’ll be cutting the bastard’s throat.”¹³

It was Pattonesque overstatement, of course; on the day he assumed command of Third Army, George threw out an infantry division to protect his armor’s flanks, and he often shifted infantry to cover worrisome gaps when he could not get reliable tactical air cover. But George’s comment summed up his basic approach to war, and it reflected the cavalryman’s philosophy that an army’s strategic momentum should always be driven forward. That was where he and Bradley still differed, if only in degree. He had told Brad that he had to do something spectacular to get out of the doghouse; as Brad reflected years later, Patton had little to lose and much to gain by taking spectacular risks in the open country of France.¹⁴

Worried about the pace of his Brittany campaign, which he felt was headed in the wrong direction anyway, George threw his men into the peninsula in piecemeal fashion. He sent the outnumbered 6th Armored Division against Brest, he flung the 4th Armored against unknown defenses at Lorient, and he split the 5th Infantry Division between Angers and Nantes. It was, George knew, the kind of approach that gets students failing grades at Leavenworth. “I am doing this without consulting General Bradley,” he wrote, “as I am sure he would think it too risky. It is slightly risky, but so is war.” ¹⁵

While Middleton’s men were scrambling up the Breton neck, Bradley and Patton were thinking about Paris, the Seine, and beyond. Patton urged Bradley to toss the Third Army portion of the OVERLORD plan and let him move east. He could, he argued, leave Middleton’s corps to clean up Brittany, and send the rest of his army toward Germany, rather than the Atlantic Ocean. Bradley, having reached the same conclusion, agreed; with the Normandy beaches piling high with supplies and Brest a complete wreck, the Breton ports were becoming logistically unimportant. To Bradley, the job in Brittany had become a matter of pride rather than strategy. As he later confided to George, “I would not say this to anyone but you, and have given different excuses to my staff, but we must take Brest for the honor of the U.S. Army.” (At this George quipped, “More emotion than I thought he had.” ¹⁶)

The matter decided, Bradley pressed Ike to let him hold Brittany with as few men as possible and turn the bulk of Patton’s army—the XII, XV, and XX Corps—against the Seine. Ike, elated by the success of COBRA, agreed.¹⁷

Third Army’s spearhead was its three-division XV Corps, commanded by Major General Wade Haislip. Haislip, a fighter whose jolly-looking features concealed a killer instinct, had set up shop on the Continent in mid-July. His tanks primed, a happy George Patton hustled Haislip’s divisions through the Avranches neck and directed them to the open country to the southeast.¹⁸

Before long, Haislip’s XV Corps and the newly arrived XX Corps, under Major General Walton “Bulldog” Walker, were barreling into the belly of the German Seventh Army. By August 7, Patton’s men were driving toward Le Mans and dashing along the Loire River. It was a pace a little too reckless for Bradley, a little too timid for George. But it produced results, and it opened other delicious possibilities from Bradley as the Battle of France entered its critical phase.¹⁹

Eisenhower was finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Patton had been brought into the fight, Hodges was moving east, and the Breton ports looked ripe for the plucking. Confident in his armies, Ike began thinking of the next stage, the war beyond OVERLORD’s boundaries. He joked with Brad that he would enjoy nothing better than to be in Paris for his birthday, October 14. “We’d take over the biggest hotel, close it off to everyone else, and have the biggest party in the world until everyone got tight,” he chortled as Brad’s tanks fought their way into the open.²⁰

As delighted as he was with Bradley, Ike was also elated to watch Patton’s progress as the cavalryman busted out of Brittany and into central France. His thrust toward Le Mans was going so fast, Butcher noted, that “communications simply can’t keep pace. Even the correspondents are writing in ecstasy about the speed.” The velocity of Patton’s attack forced Ike to cancel a paratroop drop west of the Seine, and Ike was more amused than angered by reports from a hot General Lee that George’s men had commandeered supply trucks to move their soldiers forward.²¹

George’s Tour de France boosted Ike’s spirits, and he was happy to give George a fat slice of the credit. But he didn’t want to lift the press blackout on Third Army just yet, no matter how much George would have loved the publicity. When Butcher brought up the subject, Ike asked, “Why should I tell the enemy?” To Bradley, though, he explained his reasons for keeping George quiet in terms the Missourian could appreciate: “I won’t save his scalp. [I] only have gray hairs left on this poor head of mine after the hard time I had when he started and I mean to get him for it!”²²

Bradley’s clenched jaw began to loosen that summer as George plowed through Brittany and drove his remaining corps east. Ten days after COBRA, he was finally reaping the fruits of his labors since Bristol, and the thought of what he had accomplished since the day he heard the church bells ring exhilarated him.

Filled with confidence and excitement, Brad lay awake in his bunk night after night, unable to sleep soundly as his mind spun within the solitude of his trailer. As his tanks drove through Avranches, he told Chet Hansen, “When I go to bed I find myself thinking on this thing, and I cannot get to sleep without planning in my mind through half the night.” Bleary-eyed from sunup to sundown, Brad eventually asked his aide to requisition him some sleeping pills from the infirmary.²³

During August, Bradley crisscrossed western Normandy in a converted truck half the size of a Pullman car, which had an attachment to hook up his old deuce-and-a-half living quarters. At Ike’s suggestion, he soon had an even larger trailer rigged up with Plexiglas skylights, long fluorescent lamps, mahogany wall paneling, thick carpeting, and of course, more maps. Inside, a cherry-stained wooden bar resembling a Communion rail separated Bradley’s inner sanctum from the visitors’ antechamber, and on his desk lay a red leather folder containing photographs of Mary and his daughter, Elizabeth. Scattered around his office like crystalline candles were empty Coca-Cola bottles, legacies of Bradley’s favorite drink, which orderlies would clean periodically during the long, hot August days. Outside the trailer, until they wandered off with passing soldiers, were two stray headquarters pups named Omaha and Utah, who passed their free time scampering up and down the camouflage netting that veiled Brad’s headquarters trucks.²⁴

As he looked at the progress neatly summarized on his maps, Bradley saw mixed results. First Army, under Hodges, confronted heavy resistance from four panzer, one panzergrenadier, and two infantry divisions, and Courtney’s men found the going slow on the roads near Mortain and Vire. Patton, by contrast, seemed to be making better progress, owing to fewer German defenders spread out over a wider area. He was in his element, driving recklessly, afraid of nothing. And that was the problem, for Brad was acutely aware of things George should have been afraid of. Things like vulnerable flanks and panzer movements from the east. Things like the uncomfortable fact that Third Army’s thin supply lines ran around a narrow pass between Mortain and the sea.²⁵

The real danger, however, lay in front of Hodges, not Patton. First Army’s front erupted into flames in the early morning hours of August 7, when von Kluge launched Operation LÜTTICH, a two-army counterattack toward Mortain and Avranches. Von Kluge’s intention was to smash VII Corps and cut Third Army’s supply lines, forcing Third Army to withdraw to the Cotentin. If successful, von Kluge would stuff the cork back into the Cotentin neck, reversing the losses in territory since the American offensive of July 25 and trapping the Americans in the bocage again.²⁶

LÜTTICH fell with unaccustomed ferocity. Beset by four panzer divisions, Lightning Joe ground to a halt as German reinforcements shot their way to within a dozen miles of the Allied hinge at Avranches. Behind them were several infantry divisions, as well as a scratch collection of battle groups from the remnants of the bombed-out Panzer Lehr division. It was the first serious counterattack against the Americans since D-Day.²⁷

With Third Army’s carotid artery running through Avranches, Bradley worried that Patton’s army would be cut off from the main Allied body. If the “other fellow” reached salt water, the American force would be split, Patton would run out of gas, and Third Army would take a walloping.

But reflecting further, Bradley recognized the boon Hitler had just handed the Allies. The Mortain counterattack, he soon realized, was piling irreplaceable German tank divisions into the pocket of a giant Allied baseball glove, between the British to the north, and Patton to the south. All that remained was for Brad to close the glove.

Bradley grew excited about the prospect of a double envelopment, the holy grail of military tactics. His mind scratching out possibilities on a giant mental map, Brad jumped back into the First Army driver’s seat and attached neighboring divisions to VII Corps, to allow Collins to run the defense plays. That, he figured, would hold von Kluge’s panzers for now. Having attended to Avranches, he then rode over to Lucky Forward, Patton’s tactical headquarters, to discuss where to halt Patton’s drive east.²⁸

After discussing the problem with Patton, he ratified the general’s order to hold back three divisions close to Mortain as insurance against a widening German offensive. With the rest of Patton’s men rushing east, parallel to the Loire River, Bradley was faced with two risky, and therefore unpleasant, choices: He could keep Patton moving ahead, which would expose his troops to the risk of isolation and destruction if Avranches fell, or he could order George to pull everyone back to Avranches, which would reverse the progress of the last seven days and probably expose him to criticism from SHAEF. His inclination was to take the bolder approach, but given the stakes, it was not a decision he wished to make alone.²⁹

After conferring briefly with Montgomery, Brad arranged to meet Ike, who was touring the front, on the road near Group headquarters. He drove out to find Ike’s big Packard Clipper sitting on the roadside, Kay at her usual place behind the wheel. Brad climbed into the Packard, and the two men rode to Coutances, where they conferred on the German penetration. After discussing the balance of forces and the reinforcement situation in detail, they arrived at the same general conclusion: A Boche breakthrough to Avranches was possible, though it looked probable that Collins would hold the line west of Mortain. No guarantees there, but if the Germans reached the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, Ike promised Bradley that Air Transport would fly in two thousand tons of supplies per day, enough to keep Patton in business. Given those probabilities, the two bridge players made an aggressive bid. They would call von Kluge’s bluff, and Patton would keep moving east.³⁰

Having decided to keep George in the game, the two generals tossed around the “how” and “where” of the encirclement. Patton’s preference, not surprisingly, was for a “long hook” dash—a run to the Seine, then hang a left until hitting the English Channel. George claimed the maneuver would bag every Kraut west of Paris. That was the “cavalry way” to do it.

Ike and Brad liked this concept, but it invited some rather obvious risks. George could run out of gas, and even if he didn’t, his lines would be weak everywhere, inviting a breakout and considerable loss of life. If Hitler were shifting divisions from the Eastern Front, there would be hell to pay.³¹

On the other hand, Ike and Brad figured Patton might try a “short hook” toward Argentan and Falaise, the natural escape route for those German divisions piling into the baseball glove. This play would require Patton to leave only his three divisions behind to hold the Avranches corridor. He could turn Haislip north from Le Mans toward Falaise, link up with the British, and presto! some twenty German divisions, give or take, would be bumming smokes from PW guards before week’s end.³²

Military protocol required Bradley to call Montgomery, the lame-duck ground commander, and ask permission to move Haislip north. For the plan to work, Monty would also need to push his men south from Falaise, where they would link up with Haislip to close the bag south of Argentan. Brad rang up Monty’s headquarters.³³

It was not so much a request for permission as a polite notification of American intentions. Bradley told Montgomery that General Eisenhower was in the room with him, and that the two of them had agreed on a plan to block the German retreat around Argentan and Falaise. With little choice in the matter, Montgomery authorized Bradley to hit the flanks and rear of the enemy and assured him that General Crerar’s Canadians would press from the north. Together, they would close the jaws of a great vise between Falaise and Argentan and shut down the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies.³⁴

With a steady hand to keep Patton focused on the team’s goal, Brad knew the encirclement would be a brilliant end to a brilliant operation. As he told one distinguished visitor, the Allies had “an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We’re about to destroy an entire hostile army. . . . We’ll go all the way from here to the German border.”³⁵

On Brad’s orders, Patton moved Haislip forward, ready to pivot around the enemy flank and rear toward Argentan. Glad to see the Allies “hold’em by the nose and kick ’em in the pants”—with Third Army doing the kicking—Patton quietly ordered XV Corps to halt at Le Mans and swing north to make contact with the Canadians at Argentan.³⁶

It was a sound maneuver, Patton knew, but inwardly he was more than a little disappointed with Brad’s caution. The “short hook” was the safe play, hardly a grand envelopment worthy of a Marshal Murat. A deep envelopment along the Seine was perfectly feasible, George thought, given the desperate state of the enemy to his front. Better, he thought, to move east toward Orléans, then down the Seine to Paris, then from Paris to the sea. He complained to Ev Hughes about the “doughboy fashion” tactics Bradley had ordered and how plodding they were, knowing the message would get back to Ike.³⁷

Still, bagging two German armies was a pretty fat score, one no general who wore a battle helmet could turn down. So having complained, cajoled, and sounded off to his friends, Patton ordered Haislip to make the short hook.

The question left open by Bradley’s short-hook order was where, precisely, the Americans and Canadians would close the pocket. Falaise and Argentan, the north and south shoulders of the German exit, lay within Twenty-First Army Group territory. At the time Brad and Monty agreed to close the bag, they concluded that it would be easier for Crerar’s Canadians to reach Argentan from the north than for Patton’s troops to get there from the more distant Le Mans. Montgomery ordered General Crerar to drive through Falaise into Argentan and link up with the Yanks somewhere to the south.³⁸

But as Crerar’s Canadians pushed south toward Falaise, they ran into determined German opposition, resistance far stiffer than that facing their American cousins to the south. By August 13, First Canadian Army was still several miles north of Falaise, while Patton’s tankers were almost to Argentan. As a result, the bag Bradley was desperate to close had a twenty-mile open mouth—the German-held ground between Haislip’s XV Corps at Argentan and the Canadians, just north of Falaise. George, whose tanks were ready to advance north, had a fist wrapped around the drawstring. The question was whether Monty and Brad should order George to yank the bag shut.³⁹

Bradley discussed the matter with Monty that afternoon. The two men pored over a map spread across the back of a jeep, much as Monty had done with Patton before the race to Messina. The two generals agreed that as long as Haislip’s corps met little or no opposition, Patton should let Haislip push forward slowly, regardless of the formal army group boundaries .⁴⁰

He had been given license to close the bag, but something dark stirred in the back of Brad’s searching mind. The Germans, he thought, must have known they were surrounded on three sides. By now, they also knew they couldn’t punch through at Avranches. Even as Haislip was threatening to cut off their retreat, still they hammered at Mortain. It made no sense. What was their game?⁴¹

Patton fancied himself a high-stakes risk taker, but even he had to pause when he looked at the map. He had Haislip’s corps driving east, with its right flank in the air and its left flank twenty-five miles from the nearest M-1 rifle. A first-year cadet could see the danger.⁴³

It was no surprise, then, that on the night of August 12 General Haislip, fighting his way through Alençon toward Argentan, called Patton and pleaded for a halt. His corps was extended from Le Mans to Alençon to Argentan to Falaise, and he warned Patton that his men might not hold if the Boches hit him hard in the flank. At the very least, he said, he needed additional troops to help block the east–west roads north of Argentan.⁴⁴

In a nod to Haislip’s concerns, Patton moved an infantry division forward to shelter Haislip’s left. But the whole point of the short hook was to bag the two armies inside the pocket, which would not happen if he waited until the everyone had moved into position; by then the Krauts would be unrolling their sleeping bags on the other side of the Seine. So, in the early minutes of August 13, he ordered Haislip to keep pushing tanks to the front. Take Alençon; take Argentan.

As August 12 became August 13, the phones rang off the hooks at Eagle TAC and Lucky Forward. Bradley, deciding he had been somewhat ambiguous the night before, had his chief of staff, Lev Allen, call his opposite number at Third Army, General Gaffey, to make sure Patton understood Twelfth Army Group’s intentions. Allen told Gaffey unequivocally that XV Corps was to halt on the army group boundary, just below Argentan. Patton was not to attempt to close the Falaise Gap.

Patton couldn’t believe it when he heard the news. Stumped, he called Allen back and pleaded his case like a jailhouse lawyer. The Germans, he argued, had to man a long perimeter against four Allied armies; they did not have enough forces to stop him. Pushing Haislip forward was the surest way to close the bag, which was what Bradley wanted in the first place—a double envelopment. Otherwise, he said, the Germans would run out the back door. Would Bradley reconsider?⁴⁶

Allen phoned back later. Neither Montgomery nor Bradley, he said, was interested in having Haislip drive against Falaise. The army group boundaries would remain where they were, and there would be no appeals. Haislip’s XV Corps would halt and consolidate its position.⁴⁷

The announcement was premature, since as Patton spoke, a scratch collection from two panzer divisions was driving Haislip’s advance parties from Argentan’s outskirts. But Haislip had fought his way through Alençon, a short hop south of Argentan, and the mighty Third Army was ready to snap the trap shut. With Bradley’s blessing, George promised, those two German armies were as good as gone.⁴⁹

Bradley had been worried about friendly fire between the converging ranks of Canadians and Americans, and he told George that Twelfth Army Group’s G-2 had forecast a big German attack toward Haislip, which would make any further advance a lethal mistake. It wasn’t hard to foresee a violent lunge at the XV Corps flank if Haislip pushed himself between one hundred thousand soldiers and their freedom. How could one overstretched corps hold off two desperate German armies?⁵⁰

“You’re not to go beyond Argentan,” Brad said, settling the argument once and for all. “Just stop where you are and build up that shoulder. Sibert tells me the German is beginning to pull out. You’d better button up and get ready for him.”⁵¹

As Bradley later put it, “I much preferred a solid shoulder at Argentan to the possibility of a broken neck at Falaise.” Besides, Brad thought to himself, that arrogant Montgomery said he would take Argentan. Brad was not about to capture one of Montgomery’s objectives just to help the Englishman reach his goal. “If Montgomery wants help in closing the gap,” he resolved, “let him ask us for it.”⁵²

George was furious. He scribbled in his diary that day, “I am sure that this halt is a great mistake, as I am certain that the British will not close on Falaise.” He privately attributed the halt order to “the 21st Army Group,” claiming it was “either due to jealousy of the Americans or to utter ignorance of the situation, or to a combination of the two.” He fumed to Gaffey that the decision to stop Haislip would be condemned by history, and he ordered Gaffey to put the stenographic record of his conversation with Allen into the Third Army’s historical files, so the world would know that the charge of timidity could not be laid at George Patton’s doorstep.⁵³

The gap was closed on August 21. By then von Kluge’s replacement, Field Marshal Walter Model, had used his few remaining tanks to hold open a door for some twenty to forty thousand soldiers, who escaped and took refuge beyond the Seine. But in turning back the Mortain offensive, the Allies captured around 50,000 enemy soldiers, while another 10,000 of Hitler’s Übermenschen lay in tangled heaps in ditches flanking the roads east.⁵⁴

It was an incomplete victory, or a partial failure, depending on how one looked at it, and Bradley immediately blamed Montgomery. As ground commander, Montgomery hadn’t asked or even suggested that he would alter army group boundaries to allow Bradley to move Haislip north. Moreover, instead of running his Canadians behind the Boche and trapping them in the pocket, Monty had pushed his main force up the middle, squeezing the Germans out of the pocket like toothpaste from a tube. As Bradley wrote afterward, “General Eisenhower, Patton and I were all disgusted with the way Montgomery made his attack.”⁵⁵

But afterward Brad wondered whether he had made the right decision. Should he have called Montgomery personally and asked permission to push forward to Falaise? Should he have pressed his views upon Ike or Monty? Was he really using Monty as a scapegoat for his failure to make a decision, or to propose a solution? Brad would spend the rest of his days looking for a satisfying answer to these troubling questions. But for now, he had a war to run.⁵⁶

When Brad learned that German units were pulling out of the Falaise pocket, he ordered Patton to send Haislip’s corps east to the Seine, then turn left, facing Le Havre on the Channel coast. Having rejected the “long hook” approach the week before, he was now placing his chips on the same strategy, hoping he could race east fast enough to bag the Germans as the Commonwealth flushed them out like hounds on quail.⁵⁷

To give impetus to his movement east of Argentan, Patton flew to Eagle TAC. There, under the camouflage netting, he talked Bradley into sending the XX Corps, under the pugnacious “Bulldog” Walker, toward Chartres, southeast of Paris. They agreed that XII Corps, under Major General Gilbert Cook, would push toward Orléans, almost due south of the French capital, while the rest of Haislip’s corps would advance upon Dreux, west of Paris. Having spread his army in this fashion, he cut across virtually the entire American front lines west of Paris, pushing Hodges into the second row.⁵⁸

“It is really a great plan, wholly my own, and I made Bradley think he thought of it,” George wrote after leaving Bradley’s headquarters. “ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive.’”⁵⁹

Though he had hailed Bradley as the war’s greatest general, much as he hailed Eisenhower as history’s greatest general, Patton’s hidden disaffection for both deepened. To George, the failure to close the Falaise pocket was another classic example of high-command gutlessness.

As if to confirm Doc Patton’s diagnosis of a failure of the stomach, on August 15 Bradley ordered George to pull Haislip’s eastbound divisions back to Argentan, to reinforce the gap’s shoulders against an expected breakout attempt. Dipping his pen into a well of contempt, George scribbled in his diary,

Bradley came down to see me, suffering from nerves. There is a rumor, which I doubt, that there are five Panzer Divisions at Argentan, so Bradley wants me to halt my move to the East. . . . His motto seems to be “In case of doubt, halt.” I am complying with the order, and by tomorrow I can probably persuade him to let me advance. I wish I were Supreme Commander.⁶⁰

Well, George wasn’t Supreme Commander, and he would follow orders handed down to him, whether shrewd or stupid. But his displeasure with Ike softened in mid-August, when SHAEF finally released the names of Third Army and its commanding general to the public. The next day, as if on cue, the Senate confirmed George S. Patton Jr. to the permanent rank of major general, bumping him two grades in the same day and erasing, sort of, the shame of the Knutsford and slapping incidents.⁶¹

Whatever the flaws with the Falaise campaign, Ike hadn’t exactly rung lemons. His armies had killed or captured some 60,000 German soldiers, and while small elements of seven panzer divisions had escaped, the Heer had written off thousands of irreplaceable vehicles and artillery pieces. Captured officers were telling Monk Dickson that the Seventh Army was effectively destroyed, and prisoner interrogations suggested that Hitler lacked sufficient troops to man Germany’s “West Wall” defenses along the Franco-German border.⁶³

To see the battlefield himself, Ike toured roads littered with charred corpses, the detritus of the Fifth Panzer and Seventh Armies. Bloated, blackened carcasses of horse and human lay thick as far as the eye could see, strings of corpses punctuated by burned and abandoned equipment. As one officer attached to Bradley’s group described the scene:

It was as if an avenging angel had swept the area bent on destroying all things German. . . . I saw no foxholes or any other type of shelter or field fortifications. The Germans were trying to run and had no place to run. They were probably too exhausted to dig. . . . They were probably too tired even to surrender. I left this area regretting I’d seen it. . . . Under such conditions there are no supermen—all men become rabbits looking for a hole.⁶⁴

Credit for much of the slaughter, Ike felt, belonged to his Twelfth Army Group commander. Bradley was doing a magnificent job driving Hodges toward the Seine and sending Patton’s flying columns toward Orléans, Chartres, and Dreux. He was a remarkably stable general, and Bradley’s recent successes confirmed in Ike’s mind the value of Brad as a group commander, strategist, and tactician of the highest order. Ike knew he had been right to lobby Marshall for Brad’s promotion to major general on the permanent list.⁶⁵

While Bradley was Eisenhower’s man at the top, he was by no means Ike’s only success story. Capping off a remarkably successful August, on the twenty-sixth Eisenhower received a delightfully Pattonesque missive that read, “Dear Ike: To-day I spat in the Seine,” a reflection of the astonishing pace of George’s advance through enemy country. Once Patton’s name was released to the press in mid-August, the public had an opportunity to appreciate Ike’s foresight in keeping the abrasive fighter on the team. Looking back on Ike’s loyalty to George, the New York Herald Tribune editorialized, “To say that ‘Old Blood-and-Guts,’ or the ‘Son-of-a-Gun General,’ whichever popular designation one prefers, has justified his classmate’s faith in him is to put it mildly.”⁶⁶

The Seine, that fabled, dirty, broad river which meanders through France’s breast, posed fresh problems for Ike. It was a natural defensive line for the enemy to take up, and on its banks stood Paris, the center of French hopes and the symbol of liberation.

To Eisenhower, Paris was just another large city, a road and rail juncture that could be driven through or bypassed on the way to Berlin. He was perfectly aware of the city’s symbolic value to forty million Frenchmen, to say nothing of Allied soldiers who considered Paris second only to Berlin in their quest to liberate Europe. But Ike was running a war, not running for office, and he prided himself on placing military strategy over symbolic or political considerations. The Germans were in headlong retreat to the Siegfried Line, and Ike’s first job was to destroy Hitler’s fleeing supermen while their Mauser rifles were pointed in the wrong direction. As his troops blew through France with the August winds, Ike had neither the time nor the spare soldiers to parade through Paris on a victory tour.⁶⁷

What also worried Ike, as the man in charge of everything behind the advancing front lines, was the two million civilians living in and around the City of Light. His supply lines were stretched to the breaking point; he could not afford the four thousand tons of supplies per day Bradley estimated it would take to feed the hungry Parisians—a commitment nearly large enough to keep a full Allied army on the move.⁶⁸

But Charles De Gaulle, the de facto French head of state, had other ideas. Showing up at Shellburst on August 20, he dispensed that insistent French insolence Ike had found so wearisome in November of ’42. After listening patiently to De Gaulle’s fervent warnings of Vichyite and communist saboteurs—as well as the Frenchman’s threat to order French forces under Bradley to break away from the fighting and march on Paris—a reluctant Eisenhower concluded that the politics of coalition warfare required him to take the French capital. While it meant diverting huge amounts of food, coal, and medical supplies from desperate troops to desperate civilians, this Gallic peacock wielded a great deal of influence over many of the forces he needed to keep within the Allied fold. Ike didn’t feel he had much choice.⁶⁹

On August 22, Ike had Bradley come over to Shellburst to discuss the thorny question. Brad claimed the Germans had nothing to stop them out front, and he had recently joked to newspaper correspondents that they had enough manpower to walk in and take the place whenever they felt like it.⁷⁰

Although it complicated Bradley’s lines of advance, the honor of liberating the city would go to Major General Jacques Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division, which Bradley had transferred from Patton to Hodges. After a bumbling start, the city fell on August 25. The Tricolor again flew over Paris, and the French capital, for better and for worse, was in Ike’s hands .⁷¹

Although he had promised the Combined Chiefs he would not visit Paris unless military exigencies compelled him to go, Ike, Kay, and Jimmy motored over to Eagle TAC at Chartres on August 26 to arrange a trip to the newly liberated capital. Learning that the master of the house out at Brest was expected to return before long, Ike and his troupe settled comfortably into a trio of chairs outside Brad’s trailer until he returned. If Brad was surprised at finding his boss ensconced in camp, he was perplexed by Ike’s invitation to join him in Paris the next day, ostensibly to meet with De Gaulle and General Gerow, who was setting up his V Corps headquarters at Les Invalides.⁷²

Bradley was unenthused about the visit, as it was a detour from business east of the Seine, and one to which they’d have to invite Montgomery. But Ike pressed him. “It’s Sunday,” he pointed out, with the tone of a boy playing hooky at the fishing hole. “Everyone will be sleeping late. We can do it without any fuss.”⁷³

With no immediate need to remain at headquarters for the moment, early the next morning the two classmates piled into Ike’s olive drab Cadillac, a behemoth with British, French, and American flags sprouting like a bouquet from its radiator cap. Ike’s motorcade—armed scout cars sandwiching a line of sedans—merged into a nondescript convoy heading into the city. At Brad’s suggestion, they took a southern route into the city, since snipers were still hot to the south, and Bradley, like most infantrymen, loathed snipers. Kay Summersby, the Caddy’s enthusiastic pilot, honked the car past pedestrian and bicycle traffic as the motorcade wove toward the Prefecture of Police, De Gaulle’s makeshift headquarters.⁷⁴

Pulling away from Les Invalides, Ike and Bradley rode down the Champs-Elysées for an informal tour of the city center. The crowd of resistance fighters, gendarmerie, churchgoers, merchants, and ordinary citizens that had gathered to watch the motorcade grew enthralled when they learned that one of the occupants was the famous liberator of Europe. As the throng’s emotion grew proportionate to its size, the rippling chant of “Eisenhower! Eisenhower!” filled the Place de la Concorde. Needing little prompting, Ike obliged the Parisians with a broad grin and the V-for-Victory sign from his sedan. Then, joined by a bevy of French, British, and American generals, Ike and Brad rode toward the Arc de Triomphe, where a giant Tricolor rippled in the summer breeze amid a collage of British, French, and American flag bunting hanging from what seemed like every window in Paris.⁷⁵

Against this dazzling impressionist backdrop, a battalion of military policemen strained to hold back the sea of bodies as Generals Eisenhower and Bradley and their retinue dismounted to salute the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The crowd went wild. As Ike and Brad threaded their way back to the Cadillac, the helmeted cordon broke and the crowd spilled forward, cheering, shouting, laughing as hands spilled forth to touch the famous American liberator. Perspiring MPs forced open a winding, undulating escape route for the commander in chief, but Bradley, marooned in the crowd, broke off and shoved his way to the anonymity of an escort jeep, his only battle scar being a smear of dark red lipstick across his face. Ike was less fortunate; before he could dive into the open Caddy door, a huge Frenchman managed to encircle his neck with burly arms and plant Saint Bernard–like kisses across Ike’s reddening cheeks.⁷⁶

If Ike was unnerved by the barrage of smooches he received in Paris, he knew he’d face no such danger at Montgomery’s headquarters, where he planned to speak with Monty about strategic aims. Since July, SHAEF logistics analysts had predicted a fuel and supply shortage east of the Seine, and Ike knew that shortfall was about to force a hard choice upon the Allied command: Either all groups must slow their pace of advance, or one group could charge ahead at the expense of all others. The Nazi collapse in western France had given Bradley and Montgomery a sterling opportunity to knock the enemy around east of the big river. But beyond that point SHAEF could not hope to supply both groups adequately over the bombed-out French rail network and old, winding roads barely wide enough for American deuce-and-a-halfs. That reality would put Eisenhower on a collision course with Montgomery.⁷⁷

It was a complex problem, for it wasn’t just distance and terrain that fouled up Ike’s logistics. Part of the problem in “Com-Z,” as the Communications Zone was known, lay at the top, with a Services of Supply general whom Ike could neither fire up nor fire. Lieutenant General J. C. H. Lee, or “Jesus Christ Himself ” Lee, as some officers called him, seemed more interested in indulging his own vanity and lodging his men in the finest Parisian hotels than moving supplies to the fighting man at the front. When word of SOS men driving luxury-size cars and hoarding consumer goods reached an infuriated General Eisenhower, he ordered Lee to move his men out of their posh quarters, as soon as comparable supply facilities could be found elsewhere.⁷⁸

This last part of Ike’s order was the rub. Paris, with its road and rail networks, boasted the best supply facilities in Western Europe. There were no “comparable facilities” for Lee’s logistics men, so a besieged Lee and his Com-Z staff held their 167-hotel battle line with grim determination. In the face of withering telegraphic barrages from Ike and Beetle, and verbal flank assaults from Allied field commanders, Lee’s troops defended their posts at the King George V and Astoria hotels to the bitter end.⁷⁹

Eisenhower lamented the effects of Lee’s drain on the supply system. It was SHAEF’s bleeding ulcer. But since he knew Lee to be a favorite of Marshall and Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, chief of Services of Supply, he didn’t take the advice of Beetle and Ev Hughes to kick Lee to the curb. When Hughes told Ike in no uncertain terms that SOS was falling apart and that Lee was to blame, Ike threatened Lee, he cursed, he pounded his desk. But he did nothing.⁸⁰

This was the cohort of foes the Supreme Commander faced every morning when he rolled his legs off the bed. The pressure from these and other wellsprings of irritation, of uncertainty, pressed down upon Ike relentlessly as he came upon a fork in the road, a fork created by a shortage of gas and ammunition.