Brothers, Rivals, Victors

To Bradley, whether George had a good, bad, or indifferent reputation was not the point. The point was that while Brad was fighting the Germans to the east, he was fighting two other battles, one with SHAEF over supplies, and one to retain control of his First Army, which Montgomery treated as colonial auxiliaries whose chief mission was to protect the British flank.²

In mid-September a glum Omar Bradley, crushed between Monty and Ike to the north, Devers to the south, and an indifferent Com-Z to the rear, paid a visit to Eisenhower to lobby for the lead offensive after the Ruhr was captured. By now, he was worn down from butting his head against Eisenhower’s political convictions, which he understood but could never share. After conferring with Ike and de Guingand at Versailles on September 22, a visibly depressed Brad wrote to George to tell him Third Army would have to give up two divisions to Hodges. Third Army would also have to assume a defensive role, making do on thirty-five hundred tons per day, so First Army, with five thousand daily tons, would have enough supplies to advance on Monty’s right.³

The news brought Patton to Eagle Main like a genie popping out of a bottle, and while George was at Verdun, Bradley unloaded some of his own troubles on his erstwhile ally. Ike, he said, had again instructed him to put First Army in a supporting role, guarding Montgomery’s flank and doing Montgomery’s bidding. He told George supplies in the theater were so short that if George could not get his Third Army across the Moselle within the next two or three days, George would have to settle down for a defensive lull while Montgomery regrouped to the north.⁴

With their tonnage whittled down to the little end of nothing, Brad and George commiserated. As George wrote, “[Bradley] was feeling very low because Montgomery has again put it over on Ike and demands the assistance of the First Army in a push over the Ruhr. . . . Going on the defense and having our limited supplies cut still more is very discouraging. Bradley and I are depressed.” The two generals, moping together, mused how much better life would be in China, or maybe even in the Central Pacific sector run by Admiral Nimitz.⁵

Given Ike’s orders, there was little Brad could do to help Patton. But seeing something to be gained by keeping the stove set to “warm” for the moment, he quietly gave George permission to make small, local attacks to “straighten out his lines.” Although George predictably interpreted this as a prelude to a mass offensive, Brad relayed his instructions to Eisenhower in more guarded terms:

In accordance with instructions I received at your headquarters the other day, I have ordered the Third Army to assume the defensive. At the same time, however, I have authorized George to make some minor adjustments in his present lines. . . . I am doing this in the belief that it complies with the spirit of your directive to assume the defensive in order to save supplies for the First Army.⁶

A week later, Bradley accompanied Ike on a visit to Patton’s headquarters. Eisenhower, knowing full well the grousing that must be going on behind closed tent flaps, outlined in broad terms the coming blow against Hitler. The British, he said, had reached the end of their manpower pool. Any new divisions would be American, and as Americans they would naturally go to Twelfth Army Group. As Antwerp and Marseilles opened up, Twelfth Army Group would receive enough supplies to make the main thrust into Germany. But for now, Twenty-First would lead the pack, and Ike warned Patton’s men that he would not tolerate any grumbling or banter about “who was winning the war.” Save it, he told them, for the boat ride back home.⁷

The roles Ike, Brad, and George had played since those long-ago days in the States had turned and twisted as Allied generals collided on different axes like balls on a billiard table. Ike was firmly in charge of strategy, Patton of execution, and Bradley hovered in the middle. In the fall of 1944, Ike told Brad when to move, though he solicited Bradley’s advice and preferred the informality of discussions over bridge or highballs to conference rooms and tightly worded memoranda. By the same token, Brad called the shots within his group, but he treated George respectfully, solicited Patton’s advice, and never broke his habit of saying “sir” to George in mixed company.⁸

In this old, familiar triangle, the higher man pulled rank, and the complaints sprang from below. Ike, Brad felt, didn’t fully appreciate the capabilities and needs of Twelfth Army Group, while Bradley, in George’s view, didn’t have enough faith in Third Army. It was the time-honored tradition; Patton’s corps commanders felt the same way about Patton, the division commanders griped about corps, and on it went, probably ending with a private somewhere in France bitching about the stupidity of everyone.

Well, things were getting better with George, Brad thought, an unexpected state of affairs given their history in Sicily. When Patton first shipped over to France, he worried that George would be an impossible subordinate, both by temperament and from their stormy relationship in the Mediterranean. But as the threat of Montgomery eclipsed the threat of the Germans, the two men circled their wagons. After the war, Bradley wrote,

George soon caused me to repent these uncharitable reservations, for he not only bore me no ill will but he trooped for 12th Army Group with unbounded loyalty and eagerness. . . . Before many more months had passed, the new Patton had totally obliterated my unwarranted apprehensions; we formed as amiable and contented a team as existed in the senior command. No longer the cocky martinet who had strutted through Sicily, George had now become a judicious, reasonable and likeable commander.⁹

George reciprocated Brad’s public displays of courtesy. He always referred to Brad as “sir” or “General Bradley” in public, and he often kept his ivory-gripped revolvers at the office in favor of a more subdued .38 automatic. He had, evidently, learned something from the slapping and Knutsford incidents, and he spent as much time telling Third Army’s journalists not to quote him as he did telling them about the war. For George, it was as a matter of self-preservation more than any newfound humility, for even cats only have nine lives, and Patton had burned through about seven or eight of his.¹⁰

Bradley’s close companion Chet Hansen, who had loathed Patton since Sicily, found the Third Army commander surprisingly measured. He wrote in his diary:

Patton’s stature has increased immeasurably in this campaign and everyone has a far higher regard for him than they did in Sicily. Combines the aggressive instinct that makes him good with a more realistic moderation. General Bradley acts as the leveler here and figures out the combinations and tactics necessary to make the Armies move with such perfect coordination. Patton, too, is less bombastic—appears to have fitted himself well to General Bradley’s authority. . . .¹¹

He may have been the junior partner now, and perhaps a bit less bombastic, as Hansen thought. But because Patton was the group’s peacock, the three friends followed the unspoken rule that Bradley and Ike would play the straight men when George was “onstage” around guests, so long as he behaved himself. During a luncheon given by Eisenhower and Bradley in honor of King George VI, Ike remembered the king engaging George in casual conversation. Always solicitous to his American allies, His Highness politely asked General Patton how many men he had killed with his ivory-gripped revolvers.

Patton went along grudgingly with Eisenhower’s “defensive” mandate throughout late September. Even if Ike had given him permission to advance, German resistance had stiffened along the Moselle; with supplies chronically short, George had to content himself with small, local attacks. He allocated most of his supply tonnage to gasoline rather than ammunition—no need for ammo when you can’t reach the enemy—and he shut down all unnecessary rear-echelon traffic with the zeal of his “hat patrol” days in Tunisia.¹³

Besides that, what else could he do? Bridges, railyards, and rolling stock had been bombed into the Stone Age before D-Day, so nothing was going to ride the rails. Air transport, the portion not allocated to Montgomery, could hardly put him over the Rhine, and after October, everyone knew Normandy’s beaches would no longer be usable. The Red Ball Express, a dedicated highway running from St.-Lô to Soissons, made great public relations, but it was even more inefficient than the air drops, since the trucks required tires, spare parts, and tons of gasoline to move the fuel they were supposed to be hauling.¹⁴

In the quiet of his trailer, George wondered whether Ike was cutting his supplies so Third Army’s big attack could not take place before the November elections, but even he dismissed that theory as too fantastical. In the end, he concluded that the problem was just the usual screwed-up Army supply system. “We roll across France in less time than it takes Monty to say ‘Regroup’ and here we are stuck in the mud of Lorraine,” he sounded off to an aide. “Why? Because somewhere up the line some son-of-a-bitch who never heard a shot fired in anger or missed a meal believes in higher priorities for pianos and ping-pong sets than for ammunition and gas.”¹⁵

Despite chronic shortages, George managed to get a toehold over the Moselle River near Metz in mid-September, an achievement he refused to let the press corps overlook. His army was doing the heavy lifting, he insisted, since the wide, meandering Moselle was a “son-of-a-bitch through all history.” So was his next obstacle, the city of Metz.¹⁶

An ancient fortress that had last capitulated to the Huns in 451 A.D., Metz was the anchor of the Franco-German frontier. On the east bank of the Moselle River, the bastion had been improved by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the 1500s, upgraded by the legendary French engineer Vauban a century later, and expanded still further by the French over the next two centuries. After France ceded it to Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the city’s defenses were further refined by the Germans. Metz’s approaches were studded with barbed-wire entanglements, pillboxes, broken ground, river obstacles, and an interlocking network of forts with odd-sounding names like Driant, Kaisersmacker, Saint-Quentin, and Plappeville. Metz survived repeated assaults during two world wars, and if the title “impregnable fortress” could be laid on any place, it would be the city on the Moselle.

Patton originally intended to bypass Metz. It was a hard nut to crack, one that would require huge stockpiles of supplies and three days of good weather if losses were to be kept to a minimum. Having recently told reporters, “I am not going to get soldiers killed, in spite of being a son-of-a-bitch,” George was determined to avoid a slugging match on ground that favored the defender.¹⁷

But Bulldog Walker, commander of Patton’s XX Corps, underestimated the determination of the German garrison. He insisted on reducing the bastion with air and infantry, and managed to hook Patton on his operation, code-named THUNDERBOLT. Brad, having assured Ike that Third Army would soon have substantial forces across the Moselle, encouraged the operation.

On September 29, Ike paid a visit to Patton’s forward command post, a small house in Étain, and the two old colleagues squinted at maps and plotted the Metz campaign, giving encouragement to each other just as they did during their armchair-general days at Camp Meade. It was not long before George, his blue eyes fixed on the “impregnable” fortress, was pursuing the old bastion like it was Captain Ahab’s whale.¹⁸

Despite thorough planning, the late-September assault on Metz soured into a minor disaster. Minor, that is, only in comparison to the larger disasters facing Montgomery at Arnhem and the Scheldt. For a month, Patton and Walker tried to bludgeon Metz into submission, but as a glum George admitted to Jimmy Doolittle, “Those low bastards, the Germans, gave me my first bloody nose.” ¹⁹

As casualty returns trickled in from Étain, Bradley thought it might be time to put a stop to the effort. “For God’s sake, George, lay off,” he eventually told Patton. “I promise you’ll get your chance. When we get going again, you can far more easily pinch out Metz and take it from behind. Why bloody your nose with this pecking campaign?”

Around this time, Patton made another slip that, while trivial, underscored to Ike his lack of good judgment. This time George intruded on rear-area policy, a field in which Eisenhower was the acknowledged master and needed no advice from his old friends. As George wrote in his diary on October 17, “I told [Ike] that some one in his office had told the French to prevent our soldiers from using their whore houses. He had never heard of such an idea which is absurd and will result in a very bad situation.”²¹

Absurd, perhaps; against human nature, certainly. But when George suggested in a letter that Ike unofficially supply French brothels with penicillin, Ike blew his stack. It was just like George, he thought, to say something stupid, to sound off in mixed company just for the hell of it. But it was out of character even for him to put a bad idea into an official letter. Imagine what those mothers and wives back home would be saying—to say nothing of the War Department—if the Army distributed penicillin to French whores while American soldiers died of infection in the field. It was just another instance of George opening his mouth and saying the damndest, most ill-conceived things.

“I most emphatically do not agree with the idea of furnishing penicillin to any of these places,” he wrote George in late October. “To run the risk of being short in this important drug merely in order that brothels in France may be supplied with it is absolutely unacceptable to me.”²²

Statements like this one reminded Ike that he would have to keep a close eye on his prodigy and problem child. While George was a magnificent fighter, the man obviously lacked sound discretion when idle. Ike would have to be very careful whenever George was behind the lines and away from combat.

In early October, George devised an ambitious plan to cross the Moselle north and south of Metz, push his army over the Saar, and drive through the Siegfried Line. His two attacking corps would move out under heavy air and artillery cover. Engineers would bridge the river, infantry would open the hole, and those fast, tough Shermans would exploit the rupture. If all went well, George would be flush against the Rhine before any commander, Allied or German, knew what was happening.²³

On October 7, Patton briefed Bradley and a visiting General Marshall on his plans for Metz, and ten days later he made a similar presentation to Ike and Devers. He fired off a “My dear General Bradley” letter to push the Missourian into letting him also move against the Saar River, then sent his deputy G-3, Colonel Paul Harkins, to Bradley’s new headquarters at Luxembourg to carry a personal plea for the deeper drive on George’s behalf. To succeed, George stressed, Third Army wouldn’t have to empty SHAEF’s limbers. His only requirement, he said, was twenty-one hundred tons of ammunition, and a like amount of fuel each day.²⁴

Three days later, George had his reply. Stopping at Nancy for lunch with his chief of staff, Lev Allen, Bradley remarked that there was enough ammunition available for only one of his three armies to attack. Patton would have to hold his fire for now. But before long, he assured George, the Allies expected to have enough for a big push, all armies abreast; then Patton could move forward.

Nope, said Brad. Twelfth Army Group didn’t have the supplies or manpower yet, and neither did SHAEF. When the time was right—sometime in early November, most likely—Twelfth Army Group would launch another big offensive, pushing the British and First, Ninth, and Third Armies simultaneously. But not yet.²⁵

Patton wasn’t sure why a younger man like Bradley would be more conservative than an old codger like himself. Perhaps it was lack of confidence, or maybe Brad’s uncomfortable status as the junior leader among Monty and Ike. One difference, undoubtedly, was their background, for George’s training as a cavalryman had taught him that speed was everything. Horses were big, heavy targets, easy to bring down if they didn’t keep running; to Patton, armies and corps were not all that different from horses. You had to feed them, you had to keep them shod, and they wouldn’t last long in battle if you sat on them without moving.

With MARKET-GARDEN a bust and the airborne divisions out of the picture, Omar Bradley thought the time had come to ask Ike for his chance at a breakthrough, another roundhouse punch like COBRA that would dovetail nicely with Ike’s “broad-front” strategy. He had been the American advocate of a broad-front approach to the Ruhr, and U.S. successes in Normandy and eastern France, he figured, had earned the GI a place at Ike’s table. With Hodges closing in on Aachen, the first German city within Allied reach, Brad figured the moment to push his classmate for an American show had arrived.²⁷

At a major strategy conference in Brussels on October 18, Eisenhower approved a late autumn campaign plan that called for a double envelopment of the Ruhr. Because Montgomery’s Job Number One was the clearing of the Scheldt, the main effort for November, he decreed, would be led by the First and Ninth Armies, with Patton’s Third Army in support. While the Ruhr, Monty’s show, would be the focal point of Allied strategy initially, Ike’s long-term plan also called for the capture of Frankfurt farther south, which implied that Third Army was still in the game. This was anathema to Montgomery’s conception.²⁸

To implement Ike’s strategy, Brad proposed that his two northern armies, the First and Ninth, would advance north of the Ardennes, through the Huertgen Forest, over the Roer River, and into the German cities of Cologne and Bonn. Farther south, Patton’s two Third Army Corps would cross the Moselle, push past Metz, and move into the Saar River valley. Given supply schedules, Brad figured the northern assault could push off around November 5, and George’s supporting force would go forward about November 10.²⁹

It would be a magnificent advance, Brad thought, aggressive yet nicely balanced. And it might be his last chance to clear the Rhine by year’s end. Ike’s invitation to fight naturally pleased Bradley, and after the conference he spent the weekend with Ike and Beetle hunting pheasant, playing bridge late into the night, sleeping well into the morning as Ike’s houseguest.³⁰

What disconcerted Bradley was Eisenhower’s Faustian bargain with the British that neither friendship nor an appeal to Ike’s American sentiments could alter. Because the Brussels strategy departed from Ike’s earlier policy of letting Twenty-First take the lead against the Ruhr, Eisenhower planned to give Montgomery another shot at the Rhine if Brad couldn’t score a touchdown on the next play. To this effort Monty would have the use of one American army.³¹

Brad dearly wanted to hang onto all three armies under his command. But if he had to give up one of his children, he preferred that it would be Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s newly arrived Ninth Army. Bradley had planned to wedge Ninth Army in between Hodges and Patton along the quiet Ardennes sector, but since it was the least experienced outfit at the army level, it would be the smallest loss to him if Montgomery poached a U.S. Army. So, with Ike’s blessing, Brad began shifting Ninth Army from its central position in Luxembourg to the northern end of the American line, so that it rubbed shoulders with Montgomery’s Second British Army. To man the Ardennes, he assigned Middleton’s VIII Corps. The move into the Ardennes stretched Middleton’s four divisions over a ninety-mile front, clearly too thin a screen to withstand any serious attack. But it was adequate, Bradley thought, and it substituted an unlikely German threat for one very real British threat; if Monty poached any of his men, he would get the green Ninth, and Bradley could keep his First and Third.³²

Patton had been itching to put on a big show since early September, and had been badgering Bradley for permission to drive to the Rhine since early October. Back then he got nowhere, because Bradley wanted to bring up more supplies to the First and Ninth, so that the offensive would employ three supported armies rather than one. To Brad, a larger offensive made perfect sense in the big picture.

As usual, George didn’t give a damn about the big picture. After poring over maps and staff studies at his headquarters, he concluded that Third Army could get across the Moselle with just one reinforced corps, regardless of what Bradley’s other armies could or couldn’t do. He would send Eddy’s beefed-up XII Corps over the Moselle, past Metz, and drive it toward the Rhine. Walker’s XX Corps, meanwhile, would envelop and reduce Metz, then bridge the Saar River behind the city. All told, seven infantry divisions, three armored divisions, fifty-two battalions of artillery, tanks, and tank destroyers, three cavalry groups, and fifteen battalions of combat engineers—a quarter million men—would move on Patton’s command.³³

It would be a hell of a battle, and when he broached the plan to Bradley, he argued that it fit into Brad’s big picture, dovetailed with Ike’s bigger plan. Brad approved George’s proposal on October 21, the two men agreeing that Third Army would cross the Moselle and Saar and drive toward Frankfurt, or cross the Rhine between Mainz and Worms, as the situation dictated.³⁴

But as D-Day approached, a hitch developed. Second British Army, Brad told George, would not be ready to jump off in a peripheral supporting role on time, and First Army would be delayed until Monty returned two U.S. divisions that had been on loan to him since October. That meant any movement by Third Army would not have the benefit of Allied flank support, a dangerous move given fierce resistance along the German frontier. His dark eyes flashing with utter seriousness, Brad asked Patton if his men would be willing to start the offensive alone.³⁵

George knew an uncoordinated kickoff would pose serious and perhaps grave risks, for if the other armies didn’t move out soon after he stepped off, the Boche would converge upon him like a pack of wolves. But George was an inveterate optimist, and he knew a solo attack would garner magnificent laurels for Third Army and its commanding general. So he promised Bradley the offensive would go off by November 8, rain or shine, air cover or no, flank support or no. Brad nodded his assent, and George left feeling forty years younger.³⁶

George reminded himself that this was normal for him. When the time came, he knew that he, like everyone else, would do his job. During November’s opening days he indulged himself in a few distractions—church, the Bible, Rommel’s Infantry Attacks, a USO show starring Marlene Dietrich (“very low comedy, almost an insult to human intelligence,” he remarked). But whatever the distraction, no matter how many battles he fought, he always felt the same queasy presence as the time for killing drew near. Nerves.³⁷

George’s stomach tightened every time he looked out the window at the black clouds descending on the Moselle line. The rains began on the fifth of November and pounded the lush region day after day, turning paths into quagmires and puddles into ponds. Rain fell in buckets, the Lorraine sky swirled, and the Moselle rose to a fifty-year high.³⁸

Air support was out. A quick river crossing was out. Tank movement was questionable. All the elements of George’s plan were thrown into uncertainty. What was certain was that an attack under these conditions would be difficult, perhaps impossible—facts stressed by two of Patton’s most trusted lieutenants, General Eddy and Major General Robert Grow, commander of the 6th Armored Division. Both men asked Patton to delay the planned assault until the weather cleared.³⁹

At five in the morning of November 8, George awoke with a start as thunder from four hundred artillery tubes shattered the dawn, taking the 46,000 soldaten manning the Moselle line by surprise. Despite the rain, despite the mud, he knew that within minutes, assault boats and DUKWs loaded with men huddled below the gunwales would be motoring over the river. They would climb out on the opposite bank, spread out, and move into a forbidding enemy country. As bullets whined and mortar shells crashed, the men of the Third Army would bite off another bloody piece of the Third Reich.⁴¹

As so often happened, George’s moment of triumph was marred by a small, disconsonant note. This time, it was an irate Omar Bradley, who called to dress him down for committing one division that Twelfth Army Group had ordered to be held in reserve. After casually inquiring how Third Army’s attack was going, Bradley expressed his displeasure about Walker’s commitment of the division. George, who later found out that the division was not used as a spearhead, but as a follow-up force as directed, protested that Bradley was misinformed. But Brad persisted, and Patton finally remarked, “If you are going to personally command the division, it had best not be used.”⁴⁴

While this jibe at Brad’s micromanagement put an end to the argument, Bradley nevertheless yanked the division from Walker and transferred it to First Army. George, who gave little thought to long-term reserves, sneered in the privacy of his diary, “I suppose that Hodges and Middleton have been working on Brad for a week and this, added to his natural and frequently demonstrated timidity made him make a fool of him self.”⁴⁵

Reserves, in general, were virtual strangers to Patton. His army was customarily stretched so thin that “strategic comfort” was a luxury he had learned to live without. After a subsequent phone call with Major General Lowell Rooks, a favorite of Ike’s, George outlined his views on the subject in his diary. “Rooks has an unfortunate academic mind,” he wrote. “Among other gems of thought he gave me was that an Army should always have a corps in reserve. I told him that in all my fighting I never had more than a platoon, and that while it is desireable to have a reserve, battles are fought with what one has and not with what one hopes to have.”

To George, the key to this war was to attack with everything, everywhere, as hard as humanly possible. Not as far as comfortably possible. General Bradley’s order to hold a division in reserve was not only an encroachment on Patton’s jurisdiction as an army commander—it was an encroachment on his way of war.⁴⁶

Like Bradley’s COBRA, Patton’s Moselle attack opened slowly. His riflemen paddled their assault boats and slogged through the mud. His engineers bridged the swollen river, and his cannon cockers blasted the eastern slopes. It was hard going, but in the offensive’s first three days, his troops captured one of the Metz forts and had liberated a dozen towns. As men wearing steel-pot helmets poured over the river, George Patton, a man in his element, began to relax.⁴⁷

He remained at Nancy on the eleventh, and his section chiefs threw him a birthday party at Colonel Koch’s quarters. Bradley called to wish George many happy returns, and Ike wired his congratulations. Bradley’s aide Chet Hansen whimsically noted the day’s dual significance:

November 11, 1944. Armistice Day and Georgie Patton’s birthday. The two are incompatible.⁴⁸

On the fifteenth Eisenhower and his retinue, which included Kay and little Telek, visited Patton’s end of the long, bloody line. Ike, a fanatic about troop welfare, nodded approvingly when he saw Patton’s officers combating trench foot with liberal supplies of dry socks, in large part due to a rush shipment of socks George had asked Ike to send him before trench-foot weather set in. Trudging around with his overcoat buttoned to the top, the Supreme Commander, George told Beatrice, “seemed well pleased and got copiously photographed standing in the mud talking to soldiers.”⁴⁹

George, outwardly charming as always, hosted lunch for the group back at his headquarters, and he even banished his bull terrier, Willie, from the mess room in deference to Telek. As the group dined, however, a loud, animal racket broke out under the table as the Third Army pit bull and the SHAEF Scottie banged and tumbled against legs and chairs. Willie had launched a surprise counterattack, and the two dogs were going at it, heedless of the high-ranking company.

Startled guests kicked their chairs back from the table and dived below to see what on earth was going on. A few emptied water glasses at the snarling animals to separate them, and George, jumping from his chair, ordered his aides to break up the dogfight, using language more familiar to himself, his aides, and his dog.

In spite of the battle of the mascots and a mishap at Eisenhower’s hotel—Sergeant McKeogh attempted to light a wood fire in the hotel’s fake fireplace—the visit was reminiscent of old times. The two balding, aged men stayed up until two thirty in the morning discussing Army gossip, their old antics, and a little bit of Army business. The friendship born in 1919 had weathered the repeated assaults of time, distance, politics, a reversal of seniority, and the fortunes of war. Yet it had survived, and each of these late-night visits breathed a little more life into their kinship. Ike left Nancy the next morning with one of his “George Patton hangovers,” that grumpy, exhausted fog that stunted his brain a morning after staying up way too late talking with his old comrade.⁵¹

Ten days later, Ike and Bradley showed up at Lucky Forward, where Ike decorated Patton with the Bronze Star. He quipped, “George, I seem to have spent most of this war pinning things on your chest.” Ike’s remark pleased George to no end, as Ike knew it would. Patton had earned a pat on the back, Ike figured, as he had done what he was supposed to do—attack relentlessly, and keep his mouth shut. Ike was happy to oblige.⁵²

Patton kept up the fight for orders to push beyond the Moselle, phoning Bradley on November 19 that Metz was finally in Allied hands—another exaggeration, for the fortress would not fall for three more days. With the bleeding sore of Metz stanched, he began making plans to use Haislip’s XV Corps, which he expected Ike to transfer from Seventh Army, to establish Third Army’s beachhead over the Saar River.⁵³

George amiably told Ike and Brad, “I’ll ask for everything I can get and be perfectly satisfied with what you give me,” but he was not perfectly satisfied the next day when Bradley called to tell him that Devers had talked Ike out of letting Third Army use the XV Corps. A slice of Third Army territory, as well as the XV Corps, would go to Devers, just as Bradley had suggested the day before. George argued his point vehemently to Brad, but it was no use. He fumed to himself,

Evidently Devers talked Eisenhower out of letting me have the XV Corps. Well, it can’t be helped, but I hate it, and from a military standpoint it is stupid. I called Bradley and protested but got nowhere. . . . Bradley is without inspiration and all for equality—he may also be jealous.⁵⁵

A few days later, as his army pressed against the Siegfried Line, George met with Devers to discuss coordination between Third Army and its southern neighbor, Seventh Army, which would be keeping Haislip’s corps for the immediate future. Coming away from the meeting, George remarked that Devers had “promised complete cooperation, and so far seems to have given it. I am not sure that as the lesser of two Evils it might not be better to be in his Army Group. He interferes less and is not as timid as Bradley. It would perhaps be a mercy if the latter were ‘gathered’—a fine man but not great.”⁵⁶

While George was slogging through the Moselle mud, the fine man’s Cadillac rumbled beneath dark, forbidding skies to Spa, a French resort town a dozen miles from the German border. He was going to visit Hodges, who had taken over the town and had recently set up his headquarters in the Hôtel Britannique. It was November 14, six days since Patton had launched his attack and three since First Army was supposed to jump off. The weather was atrocious, and under low clouds Brad’s massive air support—heavy bombers and plump jabos—sat on their runways, their engines cold, their bomb shackles empty.⁵⁷

Omar’s mood was as foul as the weather that gray day. His armies were behind schedule, he had slept little, and his face was swollen and red, the accidental product of one of his many food allergies. The weather ruled his life. The skies told him when he could attack, when he had to lie still, when he could fly, when he could not. And right now it was telling him he could do none of those things. He spat to an aide, “This is a goddamn shame. Here the German is moving his stuff around just as we are and there is nothing we can do about it.”⁵⁸

Two days later, the clouds retreated, the big orange ball showed itself, and First Army attacked. Army Air Force and RAF bombers pounded the ground ahead of Hodges’s men, and, as in COBRA, Lightning Joe’s VII Corps stepped off to tear a gash into the German lines. First Army’s other corps followed suit, and Hodges was off to the races.

Then things went sour. Despite the war’s heaviest ground-support bombing, Hodges’s divisions bogged down in the fields commanded by minefields, gun emplacements, mortar pits, and machine gun positions. Casualties mounted. Trench foot, which struck frontline infantrymen disproportionately because they lived in foxholes, added another twelve thousand names to the casualty lists. There would be no COBRA breakthrough this time.⁵⁹

Brad had known it would be a hard fight into the Rhineland. The “other fellow” was still largely a foot-and-hoof force, and COBRA had shown the world what would happen when Brad’s Shermans broke into open country. Brad worried that the enemy would hole up in their pillboxes and trenches, and his men would have to dig them out, just like they did in the Pacific. He longed for a fresh German offensive, like the fight at Mortain, so he could smash the German’s teeth in and run him back over the Rhine in a battle of tank versus horse. When Beetle and Ken Strong, Ike’s G-2, raised the possibility of a German counteroffensive, Bradley replied, “Let them come.” He wished the other fellow would come out from his defenses, for his men could kill more of the enemy if they could see them.⁶⁰

The open country between the Roer and Rhine rivers, about thirty miles deep, was beautiful tank country, well suited to Allied mobile warfare. But as Hodges advanced to the Roer, one terrain feature bothered Bradley: a cluster of dams that, if destroyed at the right moment, could top riverbanks and unleash a mile-wide flood that would destroy every bridge, vehicle, and man in its path. The Egyptians at the Red Sea, on a grander if less biblical scale.⁶²

To capture those dams and protect First Army’s right flank, Bradley and Hodges concluded that Joe Collins would have to clear out the nearby Huertgen Forest, a dense, primeval thicket south of Aachen that looked like a haunted woods from a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. The Huertgenwald lacked any inherent significance, but Bradley and Hodges were loath to leave the forest in enemy hands, for they knew it would become an open sore that might conceal a lethal host. The mission of the VII Corps, they decided, would be to clean out the forest before moving against Cologne, on the Rhine.⁶³

The battle for the Huertgenwald, if the ill-defined tangle of skirmishes, consolidations, and renewed attacks could be called that, ran almost continuously from mid-September until early December. It was a defender’s dream, and the Germans, smelling an opportunity to bleed First Army without risk to a critical sector, showered the attackers from high, concealed positions as the Americans struggled through a second Anzio. Hodges, never one to engage in fancy maneuvers like George, committed successive divisions to the meat grinder; having made the decision to capture the forest, he would not call off the operation while the Germans held the high ground. As Tubby Thorson later put it, “We had the bear by the tail, and we just couldn’t turn loose.”⁶⁴

Before it was over, Hodges and Collins would throw four infantry divisions, an armored division, a regiment of tanks, a Ranger battalion, and an armored infantry battalion into the ghastly woods. By mid-December, Hodges had lost some 31,000 men. He won the battle, but after paying the butcher’s bill, he could boast no road network, no industrial zone, no Roer dams. Hodges owned a dark, deathly quiet stretch of dying trees and blood-soaked undergrowth.⁶⁵

The weather, the battles, and the constant infighting were taking their toll on the Missourian. He looked tired; the furrows that snaked across his brow and jowls deepened, and his eyelids drooped. By the end of November, he simply couldn’t function properly. Stumbling back to his bed at Luxembourg, he secluded himself in his room for nearly six days, a victim of a cold, hives, sinus infection, and physical and mental fatigue. As the winter storms gathered outside his frosted windows, Brad spent his days wrapped in a West Point robe, slippers and a kerosene heater at his feet, a glass of grapefruit juice perched precariously on the edge of a small table. Unable to focus on his work, he wrote letters home and admitted few visitors until December 6, when he emerged unsteadily, tired and irritable, to face a new round of political and logistical prizefights.⁶⁶

The bloodletting at Huertgen, Bradley knew, would simply bolster Montgomery’s case for land battle commander, notwithstanding the relative sizes of their army groups. From his sickbed Brad wrote to Monty that he would not reduce Patton’s army to reinforce the north. Despite his threats to resign if placed under Montgomery—“it would be an indication that I have failed as a separate Army Group Commander,” he declared—Brad worried about how the endgame played out. He worried that Ike would abandon him at a key strategy conference with the Army Group leaders, scheduled for December 7 in Maastricht, as he seemed to have done in earlier stages of the campaign.⁶⁷

But from under the pall of sickness and low spirits, Bradley thought he saw a ray of light when Ike called to say he’d like to visit with Bradley at Eagle TAC the day before the Maastricht meeting. When a frowning Eisenhower showed up in Luxembourg with Tedder in tow, Brad knew he had a fighting chance, for Tedder loathed Montgomery almost as much as Bradley did. Brad’s hopes rose again when Ike told him that the bomber barons had agreed to support a southern push into Germany; while their main job was, always had been, to bomb the hell out of German industry, they said they would be happy to lay out another bomb carpet if it would get Bradley to the Rhine.⁶⁸

The two classmates retired to Bradley’s office, where they sat before his giant map and reviewed their battle strategy for the next day. Eisenhower, his wrinkled head jutting from a fur-lined flying jacket, slumped on Bradley’s low office couch, speaking in low, conspiratorial tones to the bespectacled Omar, who leaned forward, gesturing to the map with a long pointer. When they were finished, they knew exactly what they needed to get from Monty.⁶⁹

Ike slogged, slipped, and slid through months of October and November, sometimes more literally than he would have liked. His weak knees took a pounding during visits to frontline troops, and the stress of dealing with massive problems of black marketeering, port tonnage, desertion, trench foot, Com-Z, brothels, rape trials, the French, captured liquor, concentration camps, politics—and yes, even war strategy—piled atop a diet of cigarettes and rations that bludgeoned his heart, lungs, and limbs. Adding personal sorrow to Ike’s official burdens, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, his sincere if pessimistic air chief, was lost when his plane disappeared over the French Alps.⁷⁰

Even one of his few perks of office, Kay Summersby, was becoming a problem again. Her commission as a WAC lieutenant, her status as Ike’s secretary—no longer a mere driver—and her prominent role as one of his three constant traveling companions continued to raise eyebrows. Once, after a formal luncheon at Reims that found Second Lieutenant Kay Summersby sitting near the head of a table that included the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and the Allied Supreme Commander, Marshal Brooke noted privately, “I was interested to see that Kay his chauffeur, had been promoted to hostess. . . . In doing so Ike produced a lot of undesireable gossip that did him no good.”⁷¹

Ike’s separation from Mamie, and Mamie’s natural concern for the integrity of their marriage and the safety of their only child, were other back currents of anxiety in Ike’s sea of troubles. In mid-November, a lonely, frustrated Mamie lashed out at Ike by letter, accusing him of doing nothing to keep their only son away from combat hazards. The charge stung him deeply. From his command post at Greux, Ike shot back,

. . . it always depresses me when you talk about “dirty tricks” I’ve played and what a beating you’ve taken apparently because of me. . . . It’s true we’ve now been apart for 2½ years, and at a time under conditions that make separations painful and hard to bear. . . . Don’t forget I take a beating every day. Entirely aside from my own problems, I constantly receive letters from bereaved mothers, sisters, and wives, and from others that are begging me to send their men home or, at least outside the battle zone, to a place of comparative safety. So far as John is concerned, we can do nothing but pray. If I interfered even slightly or indirectly he would be so resentful for the remainder of his life that neither I (nor you, if he thought you had anything to do with it) could be comfortable with him . . . please try to see me in something besides a despicable light and at least let me be certain of my welcome home when this mess is finished.⁷²

On the last day of November, a fidgeting Montgomery, emboldened by cautious support from Brooke, tore the still-congealing scab off the fundamental question of the broad-front approach. In a letter to Ike, he declared that the Allies had “failed badly” in their quest for the Rhine and Ruhr; that “we have no hope” of invading Germany through the north; and that the Allies had “suffered a strategic reverse” because the Allies—meaning Ike—had insisted on attacking in too many places. He told Ike that he and Bradley had been a good team when Bradley was under Montgomery’s command until September, and that “Things have not been so good since you separated us.” To straighten out the ground strategy, Montgomery suggested a follow-up meeting, adding, “I suggest that we want no one else at the meeting, except Chiefs of Staff: who must not speak.”⁷³

The month before, Montgomery had made another attempt to rewrite the Allied command structure to place himself in command of the land battle. After a tiresome exchange of letters, Eisenhower put down the insurrection by threatening to take the matter to the Combined Chiefs. But the situation kept rearing its head over and over again like some bad Boris Karloff monster, and Ike was furious. He hated Monty’s arrogance, and he hated the way Monty insisted on his own infallibility. “He’s a psychopath,” Ike sputtered to a postwar interviewer, his anger burning brightly after many years. “He is such an egocentric that the man—everything he has ever done is perfect—he has never made a mistake in his life. . . .”⁷⁴

In his letter, Ike firmly refuted any notion of changing either tactics or command. He told Montgomery that persuasive information from Kenneth Strong, his G-2 chief, showed Germany was about to crack. He argued that the September stalemate was little different from the situation in Normandy prior to Bradley’s “brilliant break through” in July—a mild slap at Monty—and while he agreed that the Allies should not push their southern attacks senselessly, he declared, “I have no intention of stopping Devers and Patton’s operations so long as they are cleaning up our right flank and giving us the capability of concentration.” Ike agreed that a personal meeting was warranted, but he flatly declared that his chief of staff would say anything he felt compelled to add. “Bedell is my Chief of Staff because I trust him and respect his judgement,” he wrote. “I will not by any means insult him by telling him that he should remain mute at any conference both he and I attend.”⁷⁵

Ike’s letter jarred loose another conciliatory response from Montgomery, who quickly backtracked on his characterization of the last few months. Ike was satisfied by the reply, though his office diary, kept by Kay, noted, “Monty is most anxious to have Bradley under his command, keeps on saying that there would be a lot of advantages, etc., of course he is completely crazy to even think of such a thing.”⁷⁶

After a long talk with Beetle about Montgomery’s reply, he carefully welcomed Monty back into the fold with a face-saving letter. He gave Monty his “prompt and abject apologies for misreading your letter of 30th November,” and assured him, “I’m sorry if my letter gave offense.”⁷⁷

On December 7, Eisenhower convened a strategy discussion with Tedder, Bradley, and Montgomery in Maastricht, Montgomery’s turf. Montgomery, arriving in his trademark beret, a long scarf, and a fur-lined bomber jacket, championed the northern, “narrow thrust” approach. He wanted airborne and land reinforcements, he said, as well as the direct support of a tendivision American army. He wanted Bradley’s group shifted north. He vehemently objected to any drive by Patton toward Frankfurt or Kassel—or any other place south of the Ardennes—and he opined that any effort in that sector could never be “decisive.” During the meeting, Ike made a number of big concessions. He ceded the Ninth U.S. Army temporarily to Montgomery’s group, and he promised Montgomery that the northern effort would command the highest priority. But, as before, Ike refused to shut down operations in the south. Patton and Devers, he said, would keep pushing toward the Saarland.⁷⁸

An unimpressed Montgomery didn’t see Ninth Army as much of a concession, and he insisted that Ike split command so that Twenty-First Army Group controlled all forces north of the Ardennes. This would require Ike to give him First Army as well as Ninth, and leave Brad covering a region he had just characterized as irrelevant. So Eisenhower refused to budge further.⁷⁹

Ike framed his arguments in military terms. The Ruhr, he contended, was not the final objective, and he would not make the Ruhr the basis of an army group dividing line. But the underlying reasoning behind his refusal was precisely what Ike had told Montgomery he wouldn’t accept as a basis for strategy: nationalism. Whatever the flaws or merits in Monty’s claims to First and Ninth U.S. Armies, the fact was, neither Marshall nor Bradley—to say nothing of Patton, Devers, the U.S. press, or the Roosevelt Administration—would stomach Montgomery commanding American troops for long.⁸⁰

After the meeting, Ike knew Montgomery would be out for his scalp, or at least the part of his scalp that lay north of the Ardennes. To ensure the ground beneath his feet didn’t turn into quicksand, on December 12 Ike launched a spoiling attack against Monty’s natural base of support. Taking Tedder with him, Ike flew to London for a briefing with Prime Minister Churchill and his senior staff, where he laid out his case for a two-pronged offensive against the Ruhr. Brooke, a Montgomery partisan, naturally gave Ike hell during the meeting, but Ike put the case to Churchill in his straightforward Kansas manner, laying out the military side with just enough hints of the political so that Churchill could easily grasp the need to do it Ike’s way. By the time he returned to Versailles, Ike had accomplished what he set out to do: win over the English bulldog.⁸¹

Aside from Montgomery, Ike found December to be a welcome relief from the wet, dreary fall of 1944. Hodges and Collins were just about through the Huertgen. George told Ike the enemy would soon crack along his line. Ammunition and fuel stocks were growing, Monty finally cleared the Scheldt, and SHAEF was planning a big lunge into Germany come mid-January. The German was beaten, according to Ken Strong; Hitler was losing twenty divisions a month, and he could muster only a dozen new ones to replace them. Things were so quiet in Montgomery’s sector that Freddie de Guingand took a short leave in England on December 15, and Montgomery asked if Ike would object to his spending Christmas in England with his son. The war’s end was at last in sight.⁸²

After the Maastricht conference, Ike drove down to Luxembourg to stay overnight with Brad at Twelfth Army Group, where the two men looked over the American lines with relative satisfaction. Patton was beyond the Moselle, Simpson was sitting pretty along the Roer, and Hodges, licking his Huertgen wounds in the center, still had two corps ready to strike beyond Aachen. Middleton’s corps in the Ardennes looked thin, to be sure, but Bradley assured Ike he could pull troops from elsewhere if that sector were attacked, and there was nothing west of the Ardennes worth attacking. To the south, George, with plenty of action along the Siegfried Line, was behaving himself, and in a recent list of officers whom Bradley considered the top contributors to the war effort, George ranked sixth, behind Beetle, Tooey, Hodges, Quesada, and Truscott. (Brad, always in step with his commander, ranked Devers twenty-first, behind nearly every army and corps commander.) ⁸³

On the sixteenth of December, Ike learned that President Roosevelt had formally nominated him to the rank of General of the Army, a new five-star status he would share with Generals Marshall, Arnold, and MacArthur. While he took pains to keep his correspondence on the matter proper, the promotion thrilled the soldier who had warned his family years earlier that he would probably not get “made” beyond colonel. Three years, three months, and sixteen days from lieutenant colonel to five-star general. “God, I just want to see the first time I sign my name as General of the Army,” he admitted to Chet Hansen.⁸⁴

Mickey, the cheerful Irish face among Ike’s inner family, had fallen head over heels for a WAC driver from Minnesota named Pearlie Hargrave, and the couple obtained Ike’s permission to wed in Marie Antoinette’s beautiful Royal Chapel in the Versailles Palace. On the sixteenth of December, Ike’s entourage turned out in force for the event. Those present in dress uniform smiled broadly, shivered in the chapel’s frosty air, and sniffed back a few tears as the beaming couple took their vows. The bride and groom kissed, to the applause of the audience, and the wedding party retired to Ike’s spacious villa for a reception with cake, music, champagne, and, most treasured of all, a blissful respite from a world at war.⁸⁵

Ike, Supreme Commander of the celebrants, pumped Mickey’s hand in the reception line, kissed the bride, and presented the newlyweds with a hundred-dollar war bond as a wedding present. He wished them well on their Paris honeymoon—Butcher had loaned them his hotel suite—and basked in the glow of a day not entirely dominated by what the Germans were doing, or what the French were doing, or what Monty or Lee or Devers were trying to pull over on him. To the east the skies were dark, but the few hours of celebration brightened Ike’s afternoon with the warm rays of hope.⁸⁶