Brothers, Rivals, Victors

It was briefly exciting, this cloak-and-dagger stuff, but after a few days Ike, who downplayed the reports, caught cabin fever. Against the abject pleas of his security detail, he left his office one afternoon for some fresh air. “Hell’s fire, I’m going out for a walk,” he said. “If anyone wants to shoot me, he can go right ahead.”²

When he wasn’t trying to bull past his bodyguards, Eisenhower stifled in the volatile mix that was Bradley, Montgomery, Marshall, and Beetle. Bedell Smith grew testy as his stomach ulcers worsened, Marshall was unhappy with Ike’s command shift, and Bradley was screaming for his armies back. SHAEF, buttoned down at Versailles, was a long way from the front, and even with Patton’s frequent telephone briefings and a battalion of staffers, Ike didn’t have much current information about the battle. Montgomery, always seeing failure in American efforts, had predicted Patton’s counterattack would fail, and on the twenty-sixth, the day 4th Armored first broke into Bastogne, Ike complained to his staff, “I have just been set back thoroughly on my heels by this failure of the attack from the south to join up with the 101st.”³

But the Ardennes episode seemed to bring out the steel in Dwight Eisenhower. His days dealing with soft people in soft quarters had mellowed him in some ways, and it took a violent crisis to bring out the son-of-a-bitch in Ike. The Battle of the Bulge was just such a crisis, and in the heat of battle, he had pulled rank on his classmate and friend. The transfer of two American armies to Montgomery had hurt Brad deeply, of course, and Brad was howling to Bedell Smith about it. But militarily, Ike knew he had made the right move, and to Ike, an officer’s personal feelings were worth little or nothing. It was what you signed up for when you took the oath.

Eisenhower didn’t want the transfer to become a “no confidence” vote against Brad, and on the twenty-first he dictated an “eyes only” cable to General Marshall in which he suggested that “this would be a most opportune time to promote Bradley” to four-star general. He explained to Marshall,

while there was undoubtedly a failure, in the current operation, to evaluate correctly the power that the enemy could thrust through the Ardennes . . . Bradley has kept his head magnificently and has proceeded methodically and energetically to meet the situation. In no quarter is there any tendency to place any blame upon Bradley. I retain all my former confidence in him and believe that his promotion now would be interpreted by all American forces that their calm determination and courage in the face of trials and difficulties is thoroughly appreciated here and at home. It would have a fine effect generally.⁵

By nightfall on the twenty-sixth, as the 4th Armored took up positions in Bastogne, Bradley’s clamor for an offensive in the north seemed less wishful than the day Ike had taken First and Ninth Armies from him. Ike wanted to see some return from all that force invested in Montgomery’s group, and he began calling Lion to urge Montgomery to punch southeast toward Houffalize, at the base of the German salient. To satisfy himself that Montgomery was truly pushing, he made arrangements to meet the field marshal on the twenty-eighth. At Montgomery’s headquarters, of course .⁷

The traveling weather was atrocious, and Montgomery had to content himself with meeting the Supreme Commander at the Hasselt, Belgium, railway station, the closest junction Eisenhower could reach. It was a true summit meeting—just the two commanders, no aides and no note takers, exactly as Monty had demanded. “What makes me so Goddamn mad,” fumed Beetle afterward to Tedder, “is that Monty won’t talk in the presence of anyone else. He gets Ike into a corner alone.”⁸

As their retainers sat in frozen railcars parked alongside the station, Ike received a rude shock. In a thickly condescending accent, Montgomery told Ike that the broad-front approach had been a disaster from the start; that things had gone much better when he was running the ground war; that a single strike from the north was called for, not a broad front; and that he should be given permanent command of Bradley’s armies for the death blow through the Ruhr. As for an immediate offensive, Montgomery assured Eisenhower that von Rundstedt would launch one last attack, which the Allied armies would wait to receive, and only then would Twenty-First Army Group would begin its counterattack.⁹

Ike demurred politely but firmly. He suggested that a counterattack was unlikely, and said he wanted an offensive launched by no later than the third of January. To this Montgomery eventually agreed, though he hedged on an ironclad date. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!” Ike muttered to Tedder afterward in bitter sarcasm.¹⁰

After two hours of wrangling, Eisenhower shook Montgomery’s hand, the locomotive got up steam, and Ike’s train clattered over the frozen tracks back to Versailles. Ike said little to his entourage. He sat there, rubbing his cold, bald forehead, muttering to himself with an air of resignation more than bitterness, “Monty, as usual.”¹¹

Back in the warmth of the Trianon, Eisenhower made a beeline to Bedell Smith’s office. There the two generals talked of how Montgomery had changed since those breezy, blissful Mediterranean days, days when everything wasn’t a negotiation. Or at least, days when it was Alexander who had to deal with Monty, not Ike. Easier times.¹²

Well, no matter, said Ike. Montgomery understood that his orders were to launch an attack without waiting for von Rundstedt’s hypothetical second assault, and orders were orders. Monty was a good soldier, and in the end he would do what he was told. After that, the Allies would go back to the game plan. The broad-front plan. Ike’s plan.¹³

But the day after their meeting at Hasselt, another telex from Montgomery landed on Ike’s desk, one that drove him into the Trianon’s plastered ceiling. “We have had one very definite failure when we tried to produce a formula that would meet this case,” the message began. The broad-front strategy, Monty said, was wrong. Control over the battlefield required a firmer grip on the Allied armies, and he, Field Marshal Montgomery, was the man to do it. Montgomery stressed, “I am so anxious not to have another failure,” and he warned Ike that if SHAEF did not comply with his recommendations, “we will fail again.” To make it easy on Eisenhower, Montgomery included with his letter a draft SHAEF directive to Eisenhower’s other army group commanders, which he suggested Ike sign at once. Monty’s helpful suggestion decreed,

FROM NOW ONWARDS, FULL OPERATIONAL DIRECTION, CONTROL, AND COORDINATION OF THESE OPERATIONS IS VESTED IN THE C-IN-C 21 ARMY GROUP, SUBJECT TO SUCH INSTRUCTIONS AS MAY BE RECEIVED FROM THE SUPREME COMMANDER FROM TIME TO TIME.¹⁴

Monty sure as hell loved that word, “failure,” didn’t he? When Ike didn’t follow his advice, it guaranteed failure. If other generals suffered a setback, it was a failure. Leaving Bradley in charge of the center would result in failure. For a man thwarted at Caen, at Argentan, at Nijmegen, and at Antwerp, Montgomery sure loved to throw around the word “failure” when speaking of others.

He prepared a memorandum to the Combined Chiefs that would settle matters once and for all. It would be Eisenhower or Montgomery, but one of them would have to go. He knew he had Marshall’s backing, and therefore the backing of the American chiefs, and he was reasonably sure the British chiefs would eventually give way.¹⁵

Kay ushered Freddie into Ike’s office, where Ike was conferring with Beetle and his pipe-smoking deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder. The tall, mustachioed de Guingand, normally a smooth diplomat, looked like a nervous royal courier whose neck was feeling long and fragile. Smith had told Freddie what was in the offing, and Freddie was on a one-man mission to rescue his chief.

As Tedder silently puffed clouds of white smoke from his pipe into the air, Eisenhower came straight to the point. He was tired of Monty’s antics, tired of having to fight the same battles with him. The broad front, ground command, supplies, failure. Ike’s plans or Monty’s plans. It was too much of a distraction when Ike and his men should be running the war. Ike decided it was him or Monty, and the time had come for the Combined Chiefs to decide the question once and for all. One voice of Allied strategy, and the loser leaves town .¹⁶

But after a stunned moment, de Guingand rallied. He called up his Old Guard reserves of charm and sincerity, and he waged a brilliant rearguard action. He said he understood Ike’s concern. He promised to fix things with Monty. He could smooth it over with the field marshal, make him see the light, if only Ike would reconsider his decision.

On the last day of the year, another “Dear Ike” letter from Montgomery landed on Eisenhower’s desk. In stark contrast to his past missives, the obviously chastened Monty pledged his wholehearted support for Ike’s broad-front approach, and he ended his letter with a personal message of reassurance:

Whatever your decision may be you can rely on me one hundred per cent to make it work, and I know Brad will do the same. Very distressed that my letter may have upset you and I would ask you to tear it up.

Your very devoted subordinate,

Monty¹⁸

Down in Luxembourg, George Patton was enjoying a hell of a year end. Since the fall of 1943 he had gone from the doghouse to the top of the heap. His army stood at 344,935 men, seventeen divisions in all, and Bradley had just decorated him with a second Oak Leaf Cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal. He had captured Brittany and Lorraine, bridged the Seine, the Moselle, the Saar, and dozens of other smaller rivers, and had liberated hundreds of towns and cities. It had been a long wait in that dark, stinky Sicilian doghouse, but at the moment, George Patton’s horse was the one to back.¹⁹

Then there was his old buddy Eisenhower. The man had gotten awfully big for his brushed-wool trousers. He was swimming in politics and forgetting his friends. As much water as George had carried for him, as hard as he had worked to bring honor to the United States Army—and therefore to its supreme commander—Ike never seemed interested in thanking George. Patton had long preached that a pat on the back is worth ten kicks in the ass, and he spent much of his days back-patting, despite what bastards like Drew Pearson wrote about him in the papers. Would it be too much to ask for a pat on the back from Ike every now and then?

George was morally certain that more aggressive leadership at the top would have put the Allies against the Rhine long ago. After Third Army relieved Bastogne, George, Beetle, Lightning Joe, and even Horrocks, Montgomery’s XXX Corps commander, advocated cutting the Bulge at its base, rather than at Bastogne, which resembled a frontal attack now. But Ike wanted the safe bet, a coordinated “big picture” attack. George fumed, “If Ike will put Bradley back in command of the 1st and 9th Armies, we can bag the whole German army. I wish Ike were more of a gambler. Monty is a tired little fart. War requires the taking of risks and he won’t take them.”²¹

Eisenhower rang in the year 1945 with outward smiles and inward frowns. On the credit side of the ledger, the war against Hitler was an undeniable success. He had driven the Nazis from France and, more or less, cleared the Low Countries. His G-2 bean counters reported that Allied forces had captured 860,000 prisoners since D-Day, and the Wehrmacht probably lost another 400,000 men killed and disabled. Even the Battle of the Bulge was turning into a victory, at least at the attritional level, as the battle had cost Germany some 85,000 casualties that she could no longer replace .²³

But the weight of the New Year also bore down hard on Ike, much harder than when 1944 was young and Eisenhower’s war was a matter of planning, not bloodshed. De Gaulle was threatening to pull the French out of SHAEF. Churchill urged Ike to dump Tedder and replace him with Alexander, and Ike could see Brooke moving behind the scenes to widen Montgomery’s authority—or make Alexander the Allied ground commander, which was much the same thing. Montgomery continued to lobby for a massive thrust north of the Ruhr, this time with Churchill and Brooke joining the chorus, while Marshall just as loudly insisted that Ike’s two-pronged attack to close upon the Rhine was the right approach. As Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs prepared for their next big conference, on the island of Malta, Ike knew that as in Casablanca, the meeting would be a no-holds-barred referendum on his leadership.²⁴

Bradley also concerned him, not just because of Brad’s personal rancor over First and Ninth Armies, but because Ike had to make sure his top U.S. lieutenant didn’t emerge from the Ardennes looking like a Fredendall. The Washington Post was clamoring for an explanation of what went wrong in December, and Time’s cover for the week of December 4 had featured a caricature of Brad’s wrinkled, frowning face set against a muddy, rain-swept Belgian landscape. Brad often looked unhappy, and Eisenhower knew that senior generals could not afford to look unhappy for long. Ike had once counseled him, “You’ve got to be confident and cheerful all the time. Otherwise someone will report that you look discouraged. Soon someone whispers it to the Prime Minister and he tells Roosevelt. The President calls in the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and they listen and pretty soon they’ll ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ ” With the tide of battle swinging against Germany, the last thing Ike needed was a fresh crop of Doubting Thomases back home.²⁵

On January 14, Ike dictated a thoughtful cable to Marshall in which, for a third time, he recommended that the War Department nominate his friend to the rank of four-star general. He pointed out that Bradley was a three-star group commander with three-star subordinates, while his British counterpart, Field Marshal Montgomery, was the equivalent of a five-star general. General Bradley had led the American invasion of France, and he had masterminded the breakout from Normandy, which had changed the course of the war. He had certainly earned his star.²⁶

Of course, the Ardennes was a problem, Ike acknowledged. But it had to be kept in perspective. The Bulge, he said, was “one of those incidents that is to be anticipated along a great line where contending forces are locked up in battle with varying fortunes in particular sections on the front.” Going out on a limb, he argued, “The real answer is the leadership exhibited by the commander in meeting his problems. I consider that throughout this affair Bradley has handled himself admirably.” The unspoken message was that, in Ike’s estimation, Bradley was one of those critical ingredients in Ike’s victory plan, and Eisenhower would do everything possible to keep Brad’s position secure.²⁷

Patton, at least, had been behaving himself, as he always did when there was fighting to keep his mind occupied. He badgered Ike for a longer supply leash, just like everyone else, and he pressed Ike for decorations for his staff—which Bradley forwarded with a private recommendation of disapproval, absent similar awards for First Army. But all things considered, George was doing a swell job. In a private memorandum, Ike rated Patton as his number four general, behind Spaatz, Bradley, and Beetle, and he characterized George as a “dashing fighter, shrewd, courageous.” Ike would have been happy to recommend General Patton for his fourth star, and he told Marshall he would do so when the time was right.²⁸

But George’s obsession with battle made him an awkward figure outside the surprisingly small universe of active combat. George had also proved that, many times, in Sicily, England, and France, and who could know where he would prove the point next. So Ike did not want the man whose indiscretions held up the promotions of senior officers to become another target of frustrated Senate Republicans, especially after the reverses in the Bulge. So he cautioned Marshall, “His promotion now would simply involve you in argument and I do not believe it necessary.” His time would come, but like other mere mortals, George Smith Patton Jr. would have to wait his turn.²⁹

Omar Bradley could not have been more relieved to rip the last page of his 1944 calendar off the wall. He had been mad as a wet tomcat when Ike had given First and Ninth Armies to Montgomery, and he was madder still when Ike told him that once the Bulge was erased and First Army came back to Bradley’s group, the Ninth would stay with Monty until the Allies captured the Ruhr. Brad wanted both armies back, immediately, and he wanted Ike to kick Monty in the butt to get him moving again. He had argued the point with Beetle, he had argued it with Bull and Whiteley, and he had argued it with Ike.

On the twenty-seventh he had flown to Versailles to pitch a renewed offensive, but instead of concessions, Ike greeted him with a lunch of exquisitely prepared Chesapeake oysters in cream soup, a delicacy intended as a kind of welcoming present. Neither the food nor the discussion did the Missourian any good; the game plan remained unchanged, and to add insult to injury, Ike asked Bradley to move his forward headquarters from Luxembourg to Namur, where he would be closer to Hodges—and Montgomery. Bradley agreed reluctantly and politely choked down his soup, silently reminding himself that oysters gave him hives.³⁰

The year 1945, Brad hoped, would offer him a fresh start. Von Rundstedt’s Ardennes offensive had been halted, Patton had smashed the Bulge from the south, and sooner or later Montgomery would have to attack the salient from the north. Monty had overplayed his hand at Hasselt, and both Ike and Marshall had personally assured Brad he would never again serve under the detested Englishman.³¹

Perhaps the best news was that once First Army reverted to Bradley’s control, Twelfth Army Group would stop playing second fiddle to the British. Sitting in the back of Bradley’s Cadillac during a short visit to Eagle Main, Ike and Brad spread a crinkled map over their laps, chewed caramel candy from a box of K-rations, and discussed their strategy—Ike’s strategy—for the final defeat of Germany. Everyone, Ike assured his friend, would get a shot at crossing the Rhine. After the armies were against the big river, the main effort would temporarily swing north of the Ruhr, as military logic dictated, but the Ninth Army would thereafter come back to Bradley. The route the Allies would take to Berlin was yet to be decided, but Brad figured his central position between Aachen and Saarlautern put his horse in a pretty good slot at the starting gate.³²

But Bradley’s Conestoga wagon rolled into a ditch on January 5, when SHAEF released a press statement disclosing to the public that two of Bradley’s armies had been given to Montgomery during the Ardennes crisis. The reaction was instantaneous. The British press—the Evening Standard, the Sunday Dispatch, the Daily Express and the like—began howling about the American bumblers whom Saint Bernard had rescued at their moment of defeat. The American press jumped on the Monty bandwagon; The New York Times told its readers that “The high tide of German reconquest began to recede the day after Marshal Montgomery took charge on the north,” and Stars and Stripes dryly commented, “It is now presumed that Bradley continues to command 12th Army Group, which now consists of only Third Army.” Even President Roosevelt felt compelled to enter the fray, explaining the awkward shift as a matter of momentary military necessity and not one of waning confidence. Hardly a ringing endorsement from the commander in chief.³³

As the furor reached its crescendo, a wave of indignation washed over Twelfth Army Group. Bradley fumed, “ [I am] goddamn sick and tired of this business. I won’t listen to the BBC anymore; it makes me mad.” Chet Hansen spoke for Bradley and his colleagues when he told his diary,

Many of us who were avowed Anglophiles in Great Britain have now been irritated, hurt and infuriated at the British radio and press. All this good feeling has vanished under these circumstances until today we regarded the people we once looked upon as warm and sympathetic friends, as people whom we must instead distrust for fear of being hoodwinked. . . . Their press is building a well of resentment among our American troops that can never be emptied, a distrust that cannot be erased.³⁴

At a time when Brad saw the British press advancing against him on all fronts, an unlikely ally came to his aid. George Patton, in his own press statement, gave General Bradley full credit for the decision to hold Bastogne, a pivotal struggle Patton likened to the Battle of Gettysburg. Although Patton’s statement was soon contradicted by another from the 101st Airborne’s commander, who claimed the decision was his, it was clear that George, one of the Bulge’s heroes, was marching in step with his boss. To Brad, George’s statement—one that went against George’s instincts to hoard publicity—was a public signal about whom he stood by.³⁵

But Patton’s statement made little difference in the public perception of Bradley’s handling of the attack, and worse was to come. On January 7, Montgomery held a press conference that, as Brad saw it, rubbed American noses into the ashes of the Ardennes. A confident Montgomery, standing before his adoring press in a flaming red beret and matching shirt, recounted his contribution to the battle,

[T]he situation began to deteriorate. But the whole allied team rallied to meet the danger; national considerations were thrown overboard; General Eisenhower placed me in command of the whole Northern front. I employed the whole available power of the British Group of Armies. . . .

[VII Corps] took a knock. I said, “Dear me, this can’t go on. It’s being swallowed up in the battle.” I set to work and managed to form the corps again. Once more pressure was such that it began to disappear in a defensive battle. I said, “Come, come,” and formed it again and it was put in offensively by General Hodges.

Finally it was brought into battle with a bang and today British divisions are fighting hard on the right flank of First U.S. Army. You thus have the picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who have suffered a hard blow. This is a fine allied picture.

The battle has been most interesting; I think possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled, with great issues at stake. . . . The battle has some similarity to the battle that began on 31 August 1942 when Rommel made his last bid to capture Egypt and was “seen off” by the Eighth Army.³⁶

As soon as the statement reached Luxembourg by way of the BBC, Chet Hansen and two staffers burst into Brad’s office with a transcript “Gentle Omar,” one staffer recalled, “got all-out right-down-to-his-toes mad” when he heard the news. Brad began to rant about Montgomery’s self-promotion campaign—a campaign unwarranted by the facts. As he put it in a personal memorandum a few weeks later,

In my opinion, this whole campaign has led to an unsound command setup. In an endeavor to satisfy the British propaganda for putting Monty in command of the whole thing, we have arrived at a command setup which adversely affects our tactical operations. . . . I see no reason why it should be necessary to accede so much to British demands. While we are fighting our own war, we are certainly helping the British very materially, and our own interests should come first. In my opinion, the campaign to set up Monty and, in general, to increase British prestige in this campaign, out of all proportion to the effort they have in it, is definitely harmful to the relations between the British and ourselves; and, more particularly, the campaign carried on recently by those papers backing Monty has caused great resentment among those American officers and men who have seen them.³⁷

In a fury Brad rang up Versailles and gave his commander an ultimatum: “After what has happened,” he told Ike, “I cannot serve under Montgomery. If he is to be put in command of all ground forces, you must send me home, for if Montgomery goes in over me, I will have lost the confidence of my command. . . . This is the one thing I cannot take.”

Bradley’s ultimatum did not really address the press conference so much as the nebulous possibility of Montgomery’s promotion to ground commander, a matter Ike knew in his heart had been settled. But he tried to assuage Brad’s wounded pride. He promised Bradley that he would reverse the damage where it counted most, in Washington. He also promised to call Winston Churchill and explain the damage Fleet Street’s campaign was doing within the Allied high command.⁴⁰

Ike was trying re-stitch the torn fabric of his friendship, but the Ardennes episode had permanently scarred the implicit trust between the Supreme Allied Commander and his Twelfth Army Group leader. They might still be old friends, dear friends even. But trusting friends . . . well, Brad wasn’t so sure. As one of his G-3 men saw it:

Until the Ardennes, Bradley and his officers had made an honest attempt to deal fairly and frankly with the British, to work together in open covenants openly arrived at. After the Ardennes, no one was ever frank with anyone. . . . Bradley—and Patton, Hodges and Simpson under Bradley’s direction—proceeded to make and carry out their plans without the assistance of official command channels, on a new basis openly discussed only among themselves. This basis squarely faced the facts that in order to defeat the enemy, by direct attack and in the shortest possible time, they had (1) to conceal their plans from the British, and (2) almost literally to outwit Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters, half of which was British and the other half of which was beyond their power to influence by argument.⁴¹

For all his bluster, Brad thought he understood Ike’s predicament. The Supreme Allied Commander could not wave the Stars and Stripes too openly in the presence of his British, French, Canadian, and Polish allies. Eisenhower was an American, but he could not act too American if he wished to hold an effective team together.

But, Brad asked his confidants, who would speak for the American GI in the Allied councils of war? Who would speak for the man from Cleveland or Bloomington or Trenton who would one day tell his grandchildren that he had sat out the war on a quiet sector while the British captured Berlin? Montgomery was unabashedly British, and Devers was too far from the real action to take an effective role as the GI’s advocate. That left only one senior commander.

On January 9, two days after Monty’s press conference, Brad issued his own press release, one he refused to clear with Ike. He recounted the four days in December when he ran the defense of the Ardennes, and he tried to place what was perceived as a disaster into its proper perspective. His dispositions had been a calculated risk, he contended. The risk was taken to facilitate advances in other sectors, and he pointed out that, had the American command been unwilling to take risks, “we would still be fighting west of Paris.”⁴²

Brad took a second calculated risk by announcing that SHAEF would be returning both First and Ninth Armies to his command shortly. This was only half true, as Ike had made clear to him that Simpson’s Ninth would remain under Montgomery’s command until everyone had crossed the Rhine. But Brad hoped the announcement would pressure SHAEF to return Simpson to his command. Even if Simpson remained with him for only a day, symbolically, Brad argued, giving Ninth Army back to Bradley would blunt any impression that Brad was being permanently stripped of an army due to the Bulge setback.⁴³

The gambit failed. Ike was tired of the infighting between Bradley and Montgomery, and he was far too seasoned a politician to react to a bushleague play like Bradley’s press announcement. Simpson would stay where he was. As Kay wrote in her desk diary on January 11, “E. is afraid that Bradley will not like this arrangement, but after all it is not always possible in war to give way to personal feelings and ambitions.”⁴⁴

The press war had been an awful time for Omar Bradley, but it had taught him one valuable lesson: pay attention to the press. That was how Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Patton were building their reputations, and correspondents, he was learning, could be as partisan as headquarters staffs. He had been naive to think he could leave his mark without allies among the news media.

The problem here was Brad’s background and priorities. His religion had been the power of intellect and massed firepower, not public relations; the media was a game entirely foreign to him. Among political creatures, therefore, Bradley was frightfully, almost uncomprehendingly vulnerable, like a great auk on some isolated island who had never grown up around danger—and thus never evolved the instincts to perceive that an approaching man with a wooden club might not have benevolent intentions. If Brad didn’t want to go the way of the great auk, he needed a cadre of reliable journalists who would see things from his point of view.⁴⁵

Painfully aware of his mistakes, Bradley began having photographers accompany him on official trips into the field, and began courting major journalists who came to visit. But his real problem was the lack of a press corps accredited to Twelfth Army Group headquarters. Armies had them, and SHAEF had one, but as an army group, Brad’s headquarters had only visiting journalists and long-distance relationships with the scribblers and warblers covering the war. He therefore requested from SHAEF authority to establish a press box at Namur, Twelfth Army Group’s new command post.⁴⁶

Brad knew exactly where Ike’s question was heading. Montgomery had been using his pressmen for a ground command campaign against his American rivals, and a whispering campaign had run through SHAEF about the motives behind Twelfth’s request. The last thing Ike wanted was Twelfth Army Group mobilizing its own troops for a war over headlines.⁴⁸

Not to worry, Brad assured him. The problem, brought out by misleading reports of the Bulge, was that the press assigned to Bradley’s armies didn’t have any real conception of where those armies fit into the Army Group’s strategy. A press corps at Eagle Main, he said, would help the public understand the bigger picture, or at least the picture between the Saar and the Roer. He promised his briefings would be short, factual, and certainly not used as a weapon. In other words, not Montgomery-like.

Bradley’s flash of anger over the army transfer simmered, but did not entirely burn out that winter, and Eisenhower made a special point of mollifying him. He awarded the Missourian the Bronze Star, and after a word from Eisenhower, Churchill (who had privately called Bradley a “sour-faced blighter”) made a gracious speech to the House of Commons in which he praised the skill of Bradley in handling his forces, and painted the Bulge as a great American victory.

Ike’s efforts fell short, in Brad’s mind. Like Patton two months earlier, a suspicious Bradley saw new threats converging from north and south. Above the Ardennes, Eisenhower planned to let Montgomery take the lead against the Ruhr with two operations, code-named VERITABLE and GRENADE. The first, Operation VERITABLE, was a rush to the Rhine’s west bank by Second British Army, while the second, Operation GRENADE, was a Ninth Army crossing of the Roer River, with a follow-up push to the Rhine. If successful, these moves would put Montgomery’s group up against the Rhine opposite the coveted Ruhr.

First Army’s role would be rather minimal; it’s job was to capture the Roer’s “damn dams,” as Bradley called them, to ensure the safety of the flood zone for Ninth Army’s crossing. Third Army would, once again, sit on its hands. With Montgomery calling the plays against the Ruhr, Twelfth Army Group would be the campaign’s tired, overworked bridesmaid.⁵¹

To the south, Bradley sniffed out another threat. Jacob Devers, he learned, had left some fifty thousand Germans holding a pocket around Colmar, a city near the Swiss border. When Ike ordered the pocket reduced, it became painfully clear that the force Devers had assigned to the task, General Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army, was not up to the job. Ike wanted that pocket cleared before sending his men over the Rhine, and he decided to give Devers a five-division corps to reduce the pocket.⁵²

The question that troubled Bradley was, “Whose troops would be drafted?” Brad certainly did not want to lose another corps. He was about to launch a counteroffensive in the Schnee Eifel, to unhinge the German line near Montgomery, and he could ill afford to lose five more divisions. But on January 22, less than a week after Ike gave back First Army, SHAEF directed Bradley to send Devers one of George’s infantry divisions, and a SHAEF staffer called to ask Bradley how many additional divisions his army group could send south to Colmar. Brad blew up over the request, furious that SHAEF would ask for divisions whose absence would cripple his new offensive—the only offensive that was moving the Allies east at the moment. He placed a call to Ike the next morning, where he talked the Supreme Commander out of doing something so tactically insane.⁵³

Brad gripped the phone and gritted his artificial teeth. Then he roared back into the receiver:

The reputation and the good will of the American soldiers and the American Army and its Commanders are at stake. If you feel that way about it, then as far as I am concerned, you can take any goddam divisions and/or corps in the Twelfth Army Group, do with them as you see fit, and those of us that you leave back will sit on our ass until hell freezes over. I trust you do not think I am angry, but I want to impress upon you that I am goddam well incensed!⁵⁴

Brad’s office suite, always a buzz of bureaucratic activity, froze in silence. His officers stared at him for a second, stunned. Then someone began clapping, and the whole room burst into applause. Men in khaki, sick of the favoritism SHAEF had shown others, cheered the general who was giving it to the chumps who had dished out misery to them for the past six weeks. And over the applause flew a squeaky, faintly Southern voice: “Tell them to go to hell and the three of us will resign. I will lead the procession! ”⁵⁵

George Patton spent the first half of January locked in a tough, set-piece struggle, the kind he hated and the kind he wasn’t better at winning than anyone else. The Germans were fighting savagely, and to push them back Patton had no choice but to attack in the sort of cadenced, methodical fashion he belittled when made by others. But on the sixteenth, George’s 11th Armored Division shook hands with First Army’s 2nd Armored Division at Houffalize. They had cut the Bulge off at the waist, and in accordance with Eisenhower’s stipulation, George had bought Omar Bradley a second army.⁵⁶

Patton paid a quick visit to the town his men had fought so hard to capture, and even he was shocked by the unsparing destruction. In his diary that evening, he jotted down a few lines from a rude parody of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” couplets he apparently picked up from GIs he passed along the way:

O little town of Houffalize, how still we see thee lie
Above thy step and battered streets the aeroplanes sail by.
Yet in thy dark street shineth not any Goddamned light
The hopes and fears of all thy years were blown to hell last night.⁵⁷

Two days after First and Third Armies reunited, a friendly face turned up in the theater. Everett Hughes, George’s old confidant, dropped in on Third Army headquarters and reported, unofficially, that he might be taking over Beetle’s job as chief of staff. George, who counted Ev as one of his best friends in the Army, welcomed the news, for he despised Beetle, whom he knew to be an unscrupulous, cowardly Iago around whom a man needed a sentry to watch his back.

Not long afterward, Ike spoke candidly with George about the subject of promotions. Bradley’s promotion to full general was beginning its salmon-like journey across Marshall’s desk, to Stimson’s desk, to Roosevelt’s desk, and eventually to the Senate. George accepted that the Army’s policy of merit-based promotions had its limits, and regardless of his qualities as a combat leader, George knew he could not be promoted until Bradley, and probably Devers, too, had been bumped to full generals. So when the subject later came up, Ike, George wrote, “was quite apologetic about the 4-star business, but has, however, good reasons—that is, you must maintain the hierarchy of command or else relieve them, and he had no reason for relieving them.” He promised George that he would be the first army commander promoted on the next list, and George feigned disinterest. “I am having so much fun fighting that I don’t care what the rank is. ” ⁵⁹

Whatever Ike’s future intentions may have been, George Patton had a more immediate concern than tactical matters. At the end of January, he received orders directing him to send more troops to Montgomery, which meant canceling another big attack, this one by Manton Eddy’s XII Corps. A sympathetic Bradley told George that Ike, in conformance with a plan approved by the Combined Chiefs, had ordered him to transfer the 95th Division and five or six artillery battalions to Ninth Army for Montgomery’s great Ruhr offensive. “Hell and Damn,” George smoked when he heard the news. “This is another case of giving up a going attack in order to start one that has no promise of success except to exalt Monty, who has never won a battle since he left Africa and only El Alemene there.” ⁶⁰

Since the dawn of organized warfare, fighting men have been expected to follow orders without necessarily knowing why. Patton and Hodges were no different. But one of Brad’s duties as army group commander was, from time to time, to make his army commanders understand where they fit into the grand scheme, to act as a kind of conciliator between SHAEF and the armies. So after a lunch meeting at Spa with Hodges, Simpson, and Patton on February 2, Brad took Patton and Hodges aside and gave them the inside story of the transfers that had depleted their armies. The Combined Chiefs, he explained, had ordered Ike to make the main thrust to the Rhine with the Twenty-First Army Group. Devers and his Sixth Army Group, he reported, would remain on the defensive. In the meantime, Patton would be permitted to launch his planned attack against Bitburg and Prüm in the south, “provided the casualties and the ammunition expenditures are not excessive.”⁶¹

Patton had long ago mastered the art of interpreting orders, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized Bradley’s limits on casualties and ammunition were, in fact, no limits at all. Patton expected to move so quickly that casualties would be minimal, and he reasoned that if the attack worked, he’d be in a fine position to turn his armored divisions loose on the enemy rear, perhaps unhinging the entire Siegfried Line. If not, he’d still be advancing the overall goal of putting Monty to the Rhine, since the Germans he would be fighting in the south would be unable to move north to fight Montgomery. Either way, Ike should be happy.⁶²

George’s reasoning certainly convinced George, and he decided to push through Bitburg with Eddy’s corps. But while he was personally convinced of his logic, he was circumspect enough to know Ike and Brad might not see it the same way. Recognizing that his attack might violate the spirit of the Combined Chiefs’ order, and probably the letter, too, he concluded, “If Bradley knew I was starting a new attack with the XII Corps he might stop it, so I shall not tell him.” ⁶³

Since his plan was, more or less, a movement of a hundred thousand men on the sly, Patton’s warning bells clanged when Brad called him on February 5, two days before the attack, to ask if George could meet him and Ike in Bastogne that afternoon. “I am going to Bastogne to meet with Destiny and the tent maker,” he told Bea, and he fretted to himself, “I am trying to keep the impending Bitburg offensive secret so that the powers that be will not order it stopped.” ⁶⁴

A few hours later George, clad in battle helmet, tall boots, and a thick GI parka cinched with his gun belt, rolled into Bastogne to meet Ike and Bradley. The place, they noticed, looked a damned sight different than the last time Ike, Brad, and George had been there, back in early November, back before the disaster of the Ardennes, back before George had been the man of the hour.⁶⁵

It turned out to be a simple Signal Corps photo session staged amid a carefully selected pile of rubble. Ike and Bradley wore their pressed general’s uniforms and neckties, while Patton, in his heavy, rain-spotted parka, looked like he had just stepped off the front lines. Photographers snapped away as George shook hands warmly with Ike as Omar Bradley hovered in the background, beaming at Ike as if to gauge the Supreme Commander’s approval.

While George was happy to paste another historic photograph into his scrapbook, one he’d tell his grandchildren about before they went to West Point someday, he was mostly grateful that Ike and Brad didn’t press him for details about his upcoming plans for XII Corps. When Bradley asked about the “probing attacks” he had been told Eddy’s corps would make, Patton vaguely replied that Eddy would make a “determined probe” to see what was in front of him. He didn’t tell Bradley, much less Eisenhower, that the “determined probe” would be a full-scale attack, and the next day he told General Eddy that he didn’t want to be anywhere near a telephone when SHAEF found out about the advance. His operating principle, he told his brother-in-law, was, “if I win, no one will say anything, and I am sure I will win.”⁶⁷

Unfortunately for Patton and his men, unseasonably warm temperatures sent snowmelt rushing into the Moselle and Saar rivers, stalling Eddy’s advance. Patton, worried that another Metz would prompt Ike to freeze him in his tracks, decided to ram Eddy’s attack home with reinforcements, and he called Bradley to ask if he could hang on to the 17th Airborne Division, which he had been ordered to ship north to Simpson’s Ninth Army.⁶⁸

What bothered George about Bradley was that, now that they were out of the Ardennes, now that Bradley had First Army back, the Missourian didn’t seem willing to stand up to SHAEF. If anything, Brad seemed more determined than Ike to keep the Third Army from advancing. “HE was no help,” George complained to his diary on February 8. “His success is due to his lack of back bone and servile deference to those above him. I will manage without him. In fact, I always have; even in Sicily he had to be carried.” ⁶⁹

Patton’s anger toward Brad flared into the open the next day, when Brad told him that in keeping with SHAEF’s plans, Third Army would have to return to the defensive. “I said I was the oldest leader both in age and in days of combat in the Army and that if I had to go on the defensive, I would ask to be relieved,” he wrote. Bradley tried to calm his oldest leader, in age and days of combat, reminding Patton of his duty as a soldier; George, he counseled, owed it to his Third Army troops to protect their interests by staying in the fight.

Well, what the hell, George figured, after calming down. He had done what he could, and there would be other offensives soon. He canceled his plans, and that night a frustrated Third Army headquarters threw a late-night party, where the hostess, Patton’s “niece” Jean Gordon, plied staff and generals with bourbon until they all got roaring drunk. “Everybody was pretty high when I got there,” a confused General Eddy wrote in his diary. “Frankly I didn’t know what was going on.”⁷¹

As Ninth Army was about to kick off Operation GRENADE, its lunge over the Roer River, George had reason to think his time in the shadows would soon be over. Bradley hinted that First and Third Armies might be back in business if Simpson’s Ninth Army stalled, and that looked quite likely due to a fiasco on the Roer. First Army’s February 2 attack against the Roer River dams had floundered, and seven days later German engineers jammed the gates of one of the dams, effusing a moderate but steady stream of water that turned river bends into lakes and stopped Ninth Army in its tracks.

Brad had snorted at the VERITABLE-GRENADE operation as “the biggest mistake SHAEF had yet made,” to which George privately remarked, “It is, or at least it is one of the biggest. The biggest was when Ike decided to turn the First Army north to help Monty at the end of August, cut off my gas. But for that we would have beat the Russians to Berlin.”⁷³

To Patton, Brad sure didn’t seem happy about Ike’s orders forcing Third Army to give up, for a second time, the 10th Armored Division, which SHAEF wanted to hold as a strategic reserve. He blamed Bradley for not standing up to Ike, and he wrote Beatrice, “There is much Envy, hatred, and malice, and all unchareatableness. To hell with them.”⁷⁴

On February 20, frustrated with inactivity, he penned a “My dear General Bradley” letter, pointing out places along Third Army’s front where offensive operations could take place. George’s letter was clearly for the historical record, as he concluded, “We must squarely face the fact that all of us in high position will surely be held accountable for this failure to take offensive action when offensive action is possible.”

Bradley, tired of George’s histrionics, sat down at his desk and drafted a return letter. “As you know,” he told George, “the decision has already been made by higher authority that the main effort be made elsewhere. Regardless of what you and I think of this decision, we are good Enough soldiers to carry out those orders.” ⁷⁵

He may have been stuck along the Saar, but George Patton had enough ammunition for at least a couple of moves, and while he could not take the offensive, he had enough elasticity in his orders to use the same “aggressive defense” that had kept his army moving in September. “Can’t you, Walton,” he asked at a meeting of his corps commanders, “sort of sidle ahead about ten kilometers and capture Trier? And Manton, what’s to keep you from Edging forward and capturing Bitburg?” He turned to Middleton. “Troy, don’t you think you could maneuver about eight kilometers and take Gerolstein? ”

Middleton, one of the Army’s more intellectual generals, was dubious. This was, after all, the same George Patton who had sworn there weren’t more than five hundred Germans in St.-Malo, the same General Patton whose nose had been pulped at Metz. And Bradley had seemed pretty emphatic about no attacks. If Third Army got into a jam while going beyond Army Group orders, Bradley might have George’s head.

But to hedge that risk, Patton staged a group sales pitch during an impromptu meeting with his commander. On February 25, as George was meeting with his corps commanders and Opie Weyland, commander of the reliable XIX Tactical Air Force, Twelfth Army Group aides called to ask if Generals Bradley and Allen could stop by Lucky Forward for lunch. Patton was happy to oblige, and as Brad and Lev were making their way toward Luxembourg, George began rehearsing themes his lieutenants would push on their leader and his chief of staff.⁷⁷

When Brad arrived for lunch, the table talk gravitated to the need for Walker to keep the 10th Armored Division with his XX Corps until he had taken Trier. The officers also seemed to agree, with odd unanimity, that VIII and XII Corps should be allowed to move as far northeast as the Kyll River, which would straighten out Third Army’s lines. Even Opie joined in, pointing out that with the Trier airfields in Allied hands, his wing commanders could shorten the distance of their bases to targets, effectively giving Weyland the equivalent of two more air groups.⁷⁸

Patton’s pitch won the day, and Bradley gave his tentative assent to the proposed maneuver. The men passed the rest of the lunch with friendly banter and shop talk, and George, anxious as a Fuller brush salesman to close the deal, summarized their agreement by telling Bradley, “It is my understanding that I have the authority to push the attack of the Third Army east to secure the line of the Kyll River . . . and furthermore, if opportunity presents itself for a quick breakthrough by armor supported by motorized infantry to the Rhine River, that I have the authority to take advantage of the situation.”

Staring at maps in the baroque château that was now home to Eagle TAC, Brad saw a military picture no brighter than the political one. First Army’s failure to take the Roer dams before they were blown was an “American boner,” as one of his staffers admitted, and that boner had dramatically stalled Ninth Army’s Operation GRENADE.⁸¹

“Aggressive defense” was not a precisely defined term in any officers’ manual or West Point schoolbook; the term—comprised of two contradictory terms—invited a lot of subjectivity, which was just what Brad and George intended. They agreed that an aggressive defense authorized them to send out patrols—battalion-size patrols, it turned out—beyond Third Army’s frontline positions. Of course, it was only natural that when these battalions patrolled forward, they had to ensure their own safety by consolidating their positions. Those positions were, in turn, inevitably threatened by enemy positions flanking them to the north and east, so those flanks had to be aggressively defended by other battalions in a similar manner. Before long, hills, rivers, and forests also had to be cleared of enemy forces, creating a new front line that was ripe for more aggressive defense.

By late February, the skies began to brighten for Bradley as Montgomery’s Ninth Army paddled its way over the flooded Roer. When Montgomery went back to the drawing table to plot his big-budget, all-star Rhine crossing, Operation PLUNDER, Brad had a few days of maneuvering room with Ike. By the end of February, Patton’s men had crossed the Saar-Moselle juncture, captured Trier, and had bitten off a portion of the Siegfried Line. Then, on the first of March, Eisenhower approved Operation LUMBERJACK, an offensive to put Hodges against the Rhine at Cologne. LUMBERJACK came off beautifully, and by March 10, Bradley had his soldiers covering the meandering stretch of river that lay north of the Moselle.⁸³

The Rhine River had stood as a forbidding barrier to invasion since long before the days of Caesar. In modern times, the German heartland belonged to the one who controlled the river’s bridges, and Hitler was careful not to let any of those bridges fall into Allied hands. One by one the great arches over the Rhine crashed into the river as German engineers turned their detonators on stone and steel supports.

All except one. As First Army closed on the Rhine, the imposing Ludendorff railroad bridge at Remagen, square in the middle of Bradley’s sector, became caught in a bureaucratic tug-of-war between the German army, the Waffen-SS, the local military commandant, and the Luftwaffe, all of whom laid claims to jurisdiction over the bridge. When the 9th Armored Division approached the city, engineers assigned to blow the bridge were frustrated by faulty explosives and a dispute over authority to order the bridge’s destruction. Taking the bridge at a rush, the Americans fanned out onto the Rhine’s east bank and fought off the few locals who resisted. The prize every Allied commander prayed for had fallen into Bradley’s hands.⁸⁴

That evening, Bradley found himself at his command post, red-faced and furious with Pink Bull, Ike’s G-3 chief. Bull had just communicated orders from SHAEF putting most of First Army’s divisions into “reserve,” and transferring the balance to Jake Devers for use in the far south. Bull, whose stern face resembled that of an officious high school principal, was one of those stereotypical staff officers who thought in terms of settled plans rather than fluid events. Thinking outside the parameters of an approved playbook was not part of Bull’s job description, and that didn’t trouble him in the slightest.⁸⁵

It was one of the most exhilarating moments of Bradley’s life. The prize since D-Day, the mythical Rhine River, had been the holy grail of the Allied effort ever since they reached the Seine. After the capture of Paris, the taming of the Rhine was the most coveted objective in the west, for it was the last major physical barrier to Berlin.

The capture of the Remagen bridge was all the sweeter because it had come two weeks before Montgomery was to make his leap over the Rhine, an operation Monty was planning with airborne, naval, and artillery forces, the kind of massive orchestration that smacked of the last war. So Ludendorff Bridge was not just a victory for the Americans. It was a factory for

Although he was elated by the news of the Remagen bridge capture, the early weeks of 1945 had been hard on the Supreme Commander. Aside from the weather, the French, and the recurring question of ground commander, the campaign to promote Montgomery stood out as his biggest recurring problem. As Ike told Field Marshal Brooke the following month, “No single incident that I have ever encountered throughout my experience as an Allied commander has been so difficult to combat as this particular outburst in the papers.”⁹⁷

Ike could see both sides of the emotionally charged dynamic. On one hand, Bradley was still bitter over British press comments, and Ike and his inner circle privately didn’t blame him. American officers, as junior partners in the war, long groused over boasts that the British Eighth Army had won the war in Tunisia, that Bradley’s GIs “ate grapes” in Sicily while Monty’s army did the heavy fighting, and that American bumbling in the Ardennes had cost the Allies an early end to the war. Back home, papers were running headlines that read, “Monty Gets the Glory, Yanks Get the Brushoff,” and Ike knew Marshall read every one of those articles. Montgomery had done little to tamp down British criticism of Bradley, and this naturally led many Americans—and many Britons—to assume the worst possible motives on Montgomery’s part. Beetle, himself a backroom deal broker, later said he “did not see how it would be possible to give a correct portrayal of Montgomery without showing him to be a SOB,” and Brad’s animosity, stoked by Patton, was so deeply ingrained by 1945 that there was little Montgomery could say, honestly and sincerely, that would satisfy the American camp.⁹⁸

On the other hand, while Montgomery may have been the most egotistical showman this side of MacArthur, Ike saw that Monty sincerely believed he knew how to win the war. The Briton was often right, was deferential to a point, and while he argued until unequivocally told to shut up, he never refused a peremptory order on those occasions when a firm, clear decision was made. He was a decent man and an undeniably good soldier whose great failing was his inability to consider the human element. His press conference, however unfortunate its interpretation by the American camp, was sincerely intended as a tribute to the American soldier. In his remarks, Monty had devoted much of his emphasis to a call for Allied unity, and Monty’s statements, in Ike’s opinion, were “eminently correct.”⁹⁹

The camaraderie of early June had faded, and Bradley’s frustration with Monty reached another fever pitch as they drove into Germany. Brad sought no personal or national aggrandizement, and that made it difficult for him to identify what made Monty tick. As Montgomery told a postwar interviewer, “I’ve often thought that things might have been different [in Europe] if Patton had been on my right flank. Then they might have understood me better.”¹⁰⁰

Ike knew there was no general order capable of changing the attitudes of middle-aged men with old-age prejudices. He could lead by example, he could preach, and he could eliminate a few—a very few—troublemakers in his own house. But the lingering problem of nationalism, like the lingering problems of supply, the weather, the French, and the Germans, was one Ike had to content himself with minimizing, but not eliminating.

Other problems, Ike found, could be just as intractable as the rivalries. Ike’s health, a chronic source of misery, was giving him nearly as many fits as his subordinates did. A doctor was flown in from London to tend to Ike’s bad knee, he spent an unhappy thirty-six hours confined to his bed in February, and he had a growth removed from his back that, he lamely joked, left him “in stitches.” He smoked more than ever, the barracks bags under his eyes grew thick and dark, and he weakly complained there was not a single part of his body that didn’t ache. To make matters worse, he sorely missed the stabilizing presence of his naval aide, Harry Butcher, who had moved into SHAEF’s Public Relations Division and was spending less time with Ike.¹⁰¹

The fatigue of dealing with the political leaders, his poor diet, lack of sleep, and the carbon monoxide in his lungs left Ike in a habitually foul mood that he took out, with growing frequency, on his subordinates. The peaks and valleys he had hiked for so long had caught up with him once again, and curses and threats began spewing from his mouth at a rate that alarmed his old friends. “Ike shouts and rants,” Everett Hughes scribbled in his diary after one particularly vicious outburst. “He acted like a crazy man.”¹⁰²

As he considered the interests of his commanding generals, Eisenhower believed that Patton had earned some kind of reward. In a private memorandum evaluating his American lieutenants, Ike’s cavalryman ranked fourth, after Brad, Tooey Spaatz, and Bedell Smith, but ahead of Clark, Truscott, Doolittle, and Gerow. In February Ike cashed in some of his chits with Marshall to promote four staffers in Third Army—compared to one for Twelfth Army Group and none for First Army—and he sent a memo to Bradley and Devers praising the work of George’s 4th Armored and 35th Divisions in breaking the siege of Bastogne. Before long, Eisenhower would be telling Marshall, “Patton is a particularly warm friend of mine and has been so over a period of 25 years. Moreover, I think I can claim almost a proprietary interest in him because of the stand I took in several instances, well known to you, in this war. In certain situations he has no equal.”¹⁰⁵

Of course, Ike’s number four general was not exactly worry-free. A correspondent told Butcher that the War Department had instructed General Patton to tone down his official reports, which were too colorful to make good military prose, a claim that, for George, seemed plausible. Ike was also embarrassed to learn that George had threatened to jail Bill Mauldin, the popular Stars and Stripes cartoonist of the “Willie & Joe” series, for encouraging unkempt appearance and poor discipline through his depictions of the two slouching, unshaven foxhole neighbors.

That time would not be right for a while, not so long as Bradley and Devers were three-star generals, and Ike kept a firm grip on George’s promotion prospects, to prevent his fans in Washington from disrupting the logical pattern of advancement. “I trust the Secretary of War will wait for my recommendation before putting in Patton’s name for promotion,” he told Marshall. “There is no one better acquainted than I with Patton’s good qualities and likewise with his limitations. In the past I have demonstrated my high opinion of him when it was not easy to do. In certain situations Bradley and I would select Patton to command above any other general we have, but in other situations we would prefer Hodges. . . . I think he should wait to be considered by the War Department with his own appropriate group.” Ike felt strongly enough about the subject that he followed his letter to Marshall with another one that same day, adding,

I can see why Patton’s color and publicity appeal so mightily to the Secretary of War, but as long as I have absorbed Devers and he is doing his job satisfactorily, the appointments should be made in the order I have already given. Both Bradley and I believe that our successful Army commanders should eventually be promoted to four star rank, but I would consider it unwise at this time to imply a comparison to the discredit of Hodges, Patch and Simpson by making Patton on a separate list ahead of them.¹⁰⁷

Bradley and Devers, the two Army Group commanders, were the key to future promotions, now that the December round of five-star promotions had justified a number of four-star bumps. Ike continued to press Marshall for Bradley’s promotion to full general, even though he and Marshall recognized that promoting Bradley would create a thornbush of problems with more senior generals like McNarney, Devers, Clark, and eventually, George Patton.¹⁰⁸

The Remagen bridgehead made it easier for Ike to move Bradley up another rung, however, and in mid-March, President Roosevelt sent Bradley’s name, along with Devers and Clark, to the Senate. Ike, relieved that Secretary Stimson did not push Patton at this time, was glad he could do something concrete for his faithful friend. He wrote Brad on March 14, “As you know, I have long felt that such action was overdue, and it is almost needless for me to say, ‘Congratulations.’ I am truly happy, the more so because I believe that this action on the part of the President and the War Department will do much to reestablish a proper understanding at home of the effectiveness of American leadership in this Theater.”¹⁰⁹

By mid-March, fortune had begun to smile again on Ike. Bradley had redeemed the American reputation by throwing his men over the Rhine at Remagen, the U.S. chiefs had driven a stake through the heart of Brooke’s “ground commander” schemes, and the Allies were now focused on the campaigns for the Ruhr and Berlin. With Montgomery’s huge Rhine crossing, Operation PLUNDER, set to launch on March 24, it was only a matter of time before Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich crumpled into history’s ash can.¹¹⁰

With the end of his mission in sight, Ike tried to relax a bit. He didn’t want to become the war’s last casualty, and he recognized that high blood pressure could kill him as dead as an eighty-eight shell. Occasionally, General Spaatz would bring his guitar over to Eisenhower’s quarters, and the two West Pointers—sometimes accompanied by aides, WACs, Red Cross girls, or correspondents—would belt out off-key renditions of Old Army favorites like “The Artillery Song” or “Beer-Barrel Polka.” Ike welcomed Brad’s visits to Versailles, and while the first order with Bradley was always business, after hours Ike enjoyed sitting around with Brad swapping off-color jokes, talking about the hunting dogs they would buy when the war was over, and sipping drinks. Ike sat in on bridge games a little more often, and he even planned to take a few days off, a long-overdue vacation arranged for him at an opulent villa on the French Riviera.¹¹¹

The Riviera of 1945 bore only a vague resemblance to the prewar playground of Europe’s nobility. It had been the target of Operation DRAGOON the previous August, and the slug trails of bulldozers, DUKWs, and cargo craft still scarred its fabled beaches. But Sous le Vent, an overpowering Cannes mansion reputed to have cost three million dollars, lay just outside the DRAGOON landing zone, and it seemed the perfect place to find solace from the strains of Versailles. On March 19 a mentally and physically drained Dwight Eisenhower left for Cannes with Kay, Beetle, Beetle’s secretary, Mickey, Brad, and a few others in tow.¹¹²

If the idea of the Supreme Commander, his close friends, and an attractive secretary retreating to a villa on the Riviera seems like a recipe for a licentious junket, it was anything but that for Ike. With the iron levers of war safely in the hands of others for a few days, his depleted mind permitted his body to lapse into the unconsciousness it had been begging for; when he reached his bedroom, he slept for nearly two solid days. As Kay recalled, he stared vacantly, barely ate, and for some time he could muster the mental energy to do very little. When Kay suggested a round of bridge, he refused. “I can’t keep my mind on cards,” he told her, the monosyllables slurring their way past his lips. “All I want to do is sit here and not think.”¹¹³

By the third day on the Riviera, Ike seemed “somewhat human” to Kay, and when he left Cannes on March 23, the day before Monty was to launch PLUNDER, he was something of his old self—smiling, smoking, joking, playing bridge, itching to get back to the eye of the hurricane. The return of his energy brought renewed confidence, confidence that had eroded during the fights with Brooke and Monty in January, during the aftermath of the Ardennes. His spirits were high enough that he even felt able to congratulate himself—and Bradley—on his insistence on a broad-front strategy. As he wrote Marshall shortly afterward:

Naturally I am pleased that the campaign west of the Rhine that Bradley and I planned last summer and insisted upon as a necessary preliminary to a deep penetration east of the Rhine, has been carried out so closely in accordance with conception. You possibly know that at one time the C.I.G.S. [Brooke] thought I was wrong in what I was trying to do and argued heatedly upon the matter. Yesterday I saw him on the banks of the Rhine and he was gracious enough to say that I was right, and that my current plans and operations are well calculated to meet the current situation. . . . I hope this does not sound boastful, but I must admit to a great satisfaction that the things that Bradley and I have believed in from the beginning and have been carried out in the face of some opposition within and without, have matured so splendidly.¹¹⁴