A Patriot's History of the Modern World (72 page)

These traits made him almost universally loathed by American officers, particularly when his treatment of them mirrored how the Germans treated the Italians. Montgomery would stumble badly in Normandy and then excuse himself by saying his actions were not meant to succeed in anything other than holding the Germans. He neglected to clear the approach to Antwerp and thus delayed the opening of the port for a critical two months. In addition, he failed again in Holland with Operation Market Garden (a massive airborne-armor operation to secure a bridgehead into Germany at Arnhem that failed to secure the final, critical bridge); inaccurately claimed credit for holding the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge; was the last to cross the Rhine; and needed to be continually prodded by Eisenhower to
occupy the portion of North Germany assigned to him. Montgomery became a cross for Eisenhower to bear, one that he carried in good humor until the field marshal became nearly intolerable in January of 1945.

When the Allies began D-Day on June 6, 1944, Eisenhower was again in overall command while General Alexander ruled in the Mediterranean, but the ground commander for the Normandy battle was Montgomery. D-Day's history, particularly from the viewpoint of some of the participants, has been exquisitely documented. Rugged fighting occurred everywhere—the paratroops who dropped in the night of June 5 experienced dramatic stories of survival and success, including a horrific drop into St.-Mère-Église on top of a supply company guarding French civilians putting out a fire—but the invasion itself went largely as planned except for Omaha Beach. There, American troops—at least those who made it ashore—found themselves on a narrow sliver of beach—with the Germans entrenched above them. Many officers went down quickly, leaving their troops in the hands of lieutenants and sergeants, whose heroic leadership somehow got the men off the beach. Once Omaha cracked, however, nothing could hold the Allies back.

Yet prior to the invasion, England was drenched in storms that most commanders, Allied and German, thought would prohibit an Allied landing at that time. However, Ike had committed the invasion force to sail largely on the word of a single weather officer on June 5, who discerned a break coming in twenty-four hours. This required a supreme act of faith on Eisenhower's part: the rains poured, and the winds howled. Waves in the Channel would swamp many landing craft if the storm front persisted. Ike was assured that it would let up, and he ordered the paratroops into the skies while the rain still fell. If the officer had erred, most of the 101st and 82nd Airborne, plus numerous British and Polish paratroop units, would have fallen permanently into enemy hands. As the task force pushed off, Eisenhower drafted two notes for the press: in case of defeat, Ike assumed full responsibility, but if successful, he only gave credit to others. The “success” press release immediately became history. But Ike found the “failure” note tucked inside his wallet a month later, which he gave to his naval aide, Captain Harry Butcher. It read, “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops…. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
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Once a beachhead was established, the Allies prepared for a breakout. Even then, Montgomery lagged again. While the Americans took the Cotentin Peninsula and prepared to break out from their lodgment, Montgomery mounted no fewer than eight operations, six to capture Caen at extraordinarily high cost, and two to link up with American forces racing across France and seal off the Falaise pocket. Nonetheless, the Battle of Normandy, and the encirclement of the German 7th Army after the American breakout, resulted in another half million German soldiers taken out of the fight.
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At the same time as Normandy the Soviets completed their destruction of Army Group Center. Attacking on a front of 350 miles, in three weeks they had moved forward 250 miles, killed or captured 300,000 Germans, and caused the German High Command to write off twenty-eight divisions and their troops from the German order of battle. Later in the summer combat in Romania saw another eighteen divisions and six corps headquarters eliminated.
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Romania made peace with the Soviet Union and declared war on Germany.

Overconfident Allied journalists boasted that the troops would be home for Christmas, but the war was not yet over, and reporters failed to notice that the British Army was shrinking swiftly due to England's inability to provide replacements. As in Germany, units were being consolidated to retain a formation's fighting strength. And this was not only a problem for the British; Eisenhower was having trouble maintaining a sufficient flow of replacements as few new troops were being sent from the States. Merely supplying the Allied forces from French ports was taxing in the extreme. The enormous logistics “tail” of the American Army seemed to be a ravenous monster, at one point supplied by the famous “Red Ball Express” of trucks until even that grew so long as to become unworkable. As historian John Keegan pointed out, “Of the 11 million men in the United States Army…less than 2 million belonged to the [89] combat divisions of the land forces, and of those 2 million less than 700,000 represented tank crews or infantrymen.”
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With eastern Europe and the Balkans rapidly being occupied by Soviet troops, Churchill and his foreign secretary Anthony Eden flew to Moscow in October to hold talks with Stalin. At stake was hegemony in Europe and the continuance of the British Empire (in part), and the matter needed to be resolved. They did not bother to involve the Americans. In Moscow, spheres of influence were created, and the percentage of influence in countries was split between the Soviet Union and Britain. Churchill wrote proposed percentages
on a half sheet of paper and pushed it to Stalin, who quickly placed a blue tick on it. Churchill then said, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.” Stalin replied, “No, you keep it.”
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Greece was 90–10 in favor of Britain, Romania 90–10 in favor of the USSR, Bulgaria 75–25 USSR, Yugoslavia and Hungary 50–50. With respect to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, only a delusional mind could fail to comprehend that these states were going to end up, sooner or later, with Communist governments under the heel of a Soviet boot. Churchill sought to sugarcoat the prospects for those countries in messages to Roosevelt, without mentioning what he had agreed to, but Stalin insisted that his puppet Lublin group would control a postwar government in Poland.

Euphoria over the pending victory in Europe obscured MacArthur's advances in the Pacific. Finally, however, he prepared for an invasion of the Philippines in October of 1944. The Marianas were captured in the Central Pacific, and the Battle of the Philippine Sea had effectively eliminated the Imperial Navy's carrier-based aviation capability. At the “Marianas Turkey Shoot,” as the battle was known, more than three hundred Japanese planes were shot down, many operated by pilots fresh out of training. American forces began landing on Leyte Island in the Philippines on October 20, and MacArthur's promise was fulfilled. He strode ashore, amid combat photographers filming him reenacting the arrival, replete with sunglasses and corncob pipe.

But the Japanese Navy struck back. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a series of disjointed battles which resulted in the destruction of the Japanese Navy as a threat to future U.S. naval operations, the last hope of Japan to protect itself from an invasion of its home islands disappeared. Like the Germans in Ukraine, the Japanese had alienated the Filipinos to the extreme.

Perhaps no better indication of the follies of a modern occupying force applying draconian repression policies exists than the success story of Wendell W. Fertig in the Philippines. In 1941, Fertig, a middle-aged mining engineer who failed to graduate after five years at the Colorado School of Mines in the 1920s, had nonetheless become a mining engineer and consultant. But he had managed to complete the ROTC course while in college, becoming an officer in the Army Reserve, U.S. Corps of Engineers, and attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1941. Having lived in the Philippines since 1936, Fertig sent his wife and daughters back to the States when
war broke out, whereupon he supervised construction projects on Luzon and Bataan. On his way to Mindanao, his Navy aircraft crashed during landing, cutting Fertig off from the main U.S. command when the Japanese forces slashed in behind him. When he heard the Americans had surrendered, Fertig refused to join the POWs and instead built the largest guerrilla organization ever commanded by an American, reaching over 35,000 men, Americans and Filipinos, tying down up to 60,000 Japanese until finally reinforced by MacArthur's troops in March of 1945.

Respected and feared by the Japanese as “Chief in the Philippines,” Fertig was denigrated and dismissed as competition for the affections of Filipinos by General MacArthur. The tall, lanky, red-haired Fertig became widely loved and respected throughout Mindanao: he was considered a hero, and a Filipino. (When he returned to Mindanao in 1958, he was greeted by thousands of cheering Filipinos and a banner that read “
WELCOME THE PATRIOT WHO LESSENED HUMAN SUFFERING ON MINDANAO.
”)
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Yet in Europe and Asia the anticipation of a quick resolution in both theaters turned dark rapidly. Hitler, despite the astounding collapse on the Eastern Front, continued to obsess about America and the Western Front, hoarding his finest new tanks and moving fresh divisions into hidden reserve positions to launch a counteroffensive in December. With Allied aircraft denied the skies by poor weather and American lines in particular overstretched and thin, the Germans smashed through the American lines in the Ardennes and threatened to march to the coast. Eisenhower rushed the 101st Airborne to the defense of Bastogne, where it became encircled and a potential disaster loomed. As the northern American flank stiffened, Patton swiftly struck the southern in an awe-inspiring 90-degree turn, moving northward to attack with two full divisions on the third day after the German offensive began, and following with another division and a combat command a day later. While General Courtney Hodges and Patton did all the work, and Ike handled the planning, as usual Montgomery boasted to the press that his efforts had saved the day.

Then Monty went one step further: he sent Eisenhower what amounted to an ultimatum that “[o]ne commander must have powers to direct and control the operations! You cannot possibly do it yourself, and so you would have to nominate someone else.” Of course, the “someone else” was Monty.
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Eisenhower fumed. Either Montgomery or he would have to go. Ike drafted a message to be sent to the Combined Chiefs of Staff through General Marshall to choose between himself and Montgomery. Allied
unity was threatened to the core by one egomaniacal individual, and Hitler's ill-fated offensive on the battlefield came close to succeeding at the strategic level in breaking the Allies apart. Montgomery, alerted by his chief of staff that his job was in peril, quickly wrote a pacifying note to Eisenhower: “Whatever your decision may be you can rely on me one hundred per cent to make it work, and I know Brad [Omar Bradley] will do the same. Very distressed that my letter may have upset you.”
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Of course, Eisenhower got nearly as much static from his own subordinates, particularly Patton (whose performance, nevertheless, earned him the right to carp). Patton begged for more gas and supplies to launch a single-column advance into Germany, and especially (in his view) to beat the Russians to Berlin. Already sensing the postwar strategic implications, Patton hated Communists as much as he did Nazis, fearing Soviet control of much of Germany would prove a disaster—and he was right. Of course, Patton was spared Ike's strategic alliance concerns, and the single-thrust approach was fraught with dangers of being cut off and surrounded, as exemplified by the Ardennes offensive. That failed to stop Patton's incessant calls for more gas, or his unending complaining to his friend (and now superior) General Omar Bradley. Still, true to his word, Patton's forces crossed the Rhine without stopping and he ceremoniously urinated in that symbolic river before heading toward Berlin.

Before the fall of Berlin, Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, at Warm Springs, Georgia. His death momentarily convinced Hitler the Allies might fracture, but der Fuehrer's fantasies disappeared as Harry Truman—a much less malleable and progressive leader than his predecessor—assumed the presidency. While Roosevelt was mourned, his death was not unexpected by those who knew him closely. He had been in poor health for some time. But it had little effect on the men at the front, especially as they stood on the threshold of victory in Europe.

By agreement, the Russians got to take Berlin, which fell on May 2. Hitler, who had been in his Berlin bunker since January 16, and nearly mad, had taken to moving phantom units around on maps and haranguing his remaining subordinates hourly. The failed July 1944 “Wolf's Lair” assassination plot (“Valkyrie”), orchestrated by top Wehrmacht officers, including Generals Henning von Tresckow and Friedrich Olbricht, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, had left him more paranoid than ever. As the Soviets closed in, on April 29 he married Eva Braun, then after midnight, on April 30, gave her poison. He chomped down on poison while simultaneously
shooting himself to ensure he did not fall into the hands of the Red Army. On May 8, General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the high command, offered the unconditional surrender of all German forces to the Allies.

Little was left of the once-dominant Nazi Germany that had devastated Europe. Out of 84 million ethnic Germans, 7 to 9 million were dead, 4 to 6 million were prisoners, and another 3 million would disappear in the convulsions still taking place as national boundaries were realigned. But other nations paid an even higher price, particularly the USSR, which lost nearly 27 million people; while another 3 to 4 million were in the gulag or would shortly disappear as Soviet prisoners. Other countries in Europe suffered greatly as well: Poland (5.7 million dead), Yugoslavia (1 million), the Baltic States (931,000), Romania (833,000), Greece (800,000), Hungary (580,000), France (568,000), Italy (457,000), Czechoslovakia (345,000), and Holland (301,000). Great Britain lost a comparatively low 451,000, while the United States, in both Europe and the Pacific, suffered 419,000 deaths. Vast numbers of young men had been drawn into wars—with much of the combat in Russia—that had no ideological meaning to them, no higher purpose. Hungarians, Romanians, and even Belgians froze to death or were gunned down in unnamed hamlets in the Soviet Union merely because their nations had fallen into Hitler's grasp. When combined with the six million Jews and four million others that the Nazis deliberately exterminated, the horrific cost of appeasement from 1935 to 1939 stood out as starkly as a gravestone with the inscription “Do Not Repeat!”