The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (69 page)

That fall, a separate controversy had come to dominate the discussion of Germany’s future. The disavowal by the White House of SHAEF’s handbook emboldened the U.S. treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to propose that Germany be dismembered and that the constituent pieces be reduced to neutered agricultural states incapable of armed aggression. Roosevelt waxed enthusiastic at this scheme. As the historian Warren F. Kimball later wrote, the president and Morgenthau, “like the two Jeffersonian gentlemen farmers they pretended to be,” proposed scrubbing stains from the German character by “starting them out again as farmers.” Morgenthau’s explanation of his plan at an Anglo-American strategy conference convened in Quebec in mid-September had drawn baleful stares from Churchill, who called it “unnatural, unchristian, and unnecessary.” But when Morgenthau predicted that to eradicate German competition for coal and steel markets would guarantee British prosperity for twenty years, the prime minister changed his tune virtually overnight, endorsing “the re-creation of an agricultural state as had existed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century” by shuttering the Ruhr and the Saar. As for the Germans, Churchill added, “They brought it on themselves.”

Others in the Anglo-American brain trust were appalled. Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, “flew into a rage,” while his American counterpart, Cordell Hull, called Morgenthau’s proposal “a plan of blind vengeance.” Stimson warned of “enormous general evils” from such a “Carthaginian peace,” not least because the raw materials for Europe’s antebellum livelihood had derived largely from the Ruhr and the Saar. Plans were also afoot to deed a vast swatch of farmland in eastern Germany to Poland, which left unanswered the question of how the Germans could live as farmers if the land became Polish. Even George Marshall bridled at Morgenthau’s vision, particularly his proposal to summarily shoot Nazi leaders upon capture.

Predictably, the scheme soon leaked. “The papers have taken it up violently,” Stimson noted with satisfaction. An editorial in London called Morgenthau’s Germany “a ruined no-man’s land in which no wheels turn,” and the British cabinet denounced the treasury secretary’s “unwisdom,” adding, “A policy which condones or favors chaos is not hard; it is simply inefficient.” Roosevelt deftly disavowed the plan, telling Stimson with a grin, “Henry Morgenthau pulled a boner.” The German newspapers also took it up violently, warning of “a life and death struggle” against Anglo-American “cannibals,” whose “satanic plan of annihilation” was, needless to say, “inspired by the Jews.” Even six billion leaflets could go only so far to persuade Germans that a tolerable peace would follow from surrender.

This contretemps cooled Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for postwar strategizing. “I dislike making detailed plans for a country which we do not yet occupy,” he told Hull in late October, while publicly assuring the Germans that they would not be enslaved. Precisely how the occupation would be configured was put off until another season, along with ancillary questions of military governance. An early proposal had considered carving the Reich into as many as seven disparate states; a more practical agreement drafted by the British Foreign Office in early 1944 posited three occupation zones, with the Soviet Union given the eastern 40 percent of the country except for Berlin, which would be administered jointly by the Allied victors. Roosevelt for months had resisted a proposed American occupation sector contiguous to France; his distrust of De Gaulle ran very deep. But at Quebec the president at last conceded that the concentration of U.S. forces on the right of Eisenhower’s line argued for an American zone in Bavaria and the German southwest, with guarantees of access to North Sea ports in the British sector.

No formal ratification of this plan, or any other, was forthcoming. Eisenhower initially believed postwar Germany should be administered under a single Allied commander, but more recently he had conceded that “the Russians will … take exclusive responsibility for administering the eastern portion of Germany.” Some U.S. strategists continued to advocate occupation zones converging on Berlin like pie slices, rather than placing the German capital deep within the Soviet sector; the U.S. ambassador to Britain, John G. Winant, denounced such a proposal as “not having any faith in Soviet intentions.”

With postwar politics unresolved, military planners could only continue to sketch big arrows across their maps, aimed at Berlin. Roosevelt had shied away from Morgenthau’s draconian solution, but he remained ardently committed to unconditional surrender. As for the rest, the president had told Churchill: “Something ‘big’ will come out of this war: a new heaven and a new earth.”

*   *   *

Montgomery’s promise to Eisenhower that “you will hear
no
more on the subject of command from me” had hardly been made before it was broken. Those big arrows on war room maps may have pointed toward the Ruhr and beyond, but his sharpest darts were aimed at the supreme commander. In private rants to his British colleagues, the field marshal continued to disparage Eisenhower, his plan, and his generalship. “He has never commanded anything before in his whole career,” Montgomery wrote Brooke in mid-November. “Now, for the first time, he has elected to take command of very large-scale operations and he does not know how to do it.” In another note, on November 21, he added, “There is a feeling of optimism at SHAEF. There are no grounds for such optimism.” Brooke, who should have known better, fed these disloyal tantrums, replying to Montgomery on November 24, “You have always told me, and I have agreed with you, that Ike was no commander, that he had no strategic vision, was incapable of making a plan or of running operations when started.” On a visit to London two days later, Montgomery added, “Eisenhower is quite useless.… He is completely and utterly useless.”

On Tuesday afternoon, November 28, the blind, callow, useless Eisenhower arrived for an overnight visit at the 21st Army Group headquarters in the Belgian town of Zonhoven, east of Antwerp. Here he heard more of the same from Montgomery directly, albeit in more diplomatic language. Strutting and frowning amid the wall maps in his office trailer, pinching his cheek between thumb and forefinger, the field marshal for several hours railed about lack of progress on the Western Front and urged that a single commander oversee the Allied main effort against the Ruhr. As Eisenhower, exhausted, prepared for bed, Montgomery’s aide Lieutenant Colonel Christopher C. “Kit” Dawnay brought the supreme commander a whiskey and soda, then repaired to Montgomery’s office, where the field marshal dictated a note to Brooke. “We talked for three hours,” Montgomery reported. “He admitted a grave mistake has been made” and agreed that “I should be in full operational command north of the Ardennes with Bradley under me.”

An astonished Dawnay interjected, “Ike does
not
agree, sir.”

“Send that message,” Montgomery snapped. The next morning, following more tedious palaver before Eisenhower pressed on to inspect British, Canadian, and Polish troops, Montgomery told Brooke in a postscript, “He thinks Bradley has failed him as an architect of land operations. There is no doubt he is now very anxious to go back to the old set-up we had in Normandy … and to put Bradley under my operational command.”

Montgomery evidently had second thoughts about his interpretation of Eisenhower’s comments, because on Thursday, November 30, he sent him a “personal and confidential” cable “to confirm the main points that were agreed on during the conversations.” Earlier in the fall, he wrote, Eisenhower had consented to place the main Allied weight in the north, to eradicate the enemy west of the Rhine, and to seize bridgeheads across the river.

We have achieved none of this; and we have no hope of doing so. We have therefore failed; and we have suffered a strategic reverse.… We must get away from the doctrine of attacking in so many places that nowhere are we strong enough to get decisive results.

The Belgian Ardennes naturally divided the Western Front, he added; the two sectors, north and south, should each have separate commanding generals.

Bradley and I together are a good team. We worked together in Normandy, under you, and we won a great victory. Things have not been so good since you separated us. I believe [that] to be certain of success you want to bring us together again; and one of us should have the full operational control north of the Ardennes; and if you decide that I should do that work—that is O.K. by me.

On Friday, December 1, Eisenhower’s Cadillac circled south across the Pétrusse River in Luxembourg City, where he found Bradley bedridden with the flu in the Hôtel Alfa, his face badly swollen with hives. Clutching Montgomery’s message in his fist, a scarlet flush creeping up his neck, “Ike was as angry as I had ever seen him,” Bradley later recorded. This missive from the field marshal could only be interpreted as a condemnation of his leadership; Montgomery even had the temerity to propose another strategy session from which all others would be excluded except the two chiefs of staff, Smith and De Guingand, “who must not speak.”

After a splenetic diatribe to which the disfigured Bradley could do little more than sniffle, Eisenhower calmed himself long enough to dictate a fifteen-paragraph reply, again demonstrating his remarkable ability to turn the other cheek with composure and equanimity. “There are certain things in your letter [with] which I do not concur,” he began.

I am not quite sure I know exactly what you mean by strategic reverse.… I do not agree that things have gone badly since Normandy, merely because we have not gained all we had hoped to gain. In fact, the situation is somewhat analogous to that which existed in Normandy for so long.

He reminded Montgomery that British logistics in the north had been so stretched that merely providing five hundred extra tons of supplies each day “cost Bradley three divisions,” by stripping them of motor transport in order to feed and arm 21st Army Group. “Had we not advanced on a relatively broad front we would now have the spectacle of a long narrow line of communication, constantly threatened on the right flank.”

I have no intention of stopping Devers and Patton’s operations as long as they are cleaning up our right flank and giving us capability of concentration.… It is going to be important to us later on to have two strings to our bow.

Only in reply to the suggestion of muzzling the chiefs of staff did Eisenhower offer the back of his hand. “It makes no difference to me whether your chief of staff attends or whether Bradley’s does. Mine will be there unless some unforeseen circumstance prevents.… I will not by any means insult him by telling him that he should remain mute.”

He finished by subtly suggesting that only one of them could see the horizon.

I most definitely appreciate the frankness of your statements, and [the] usual friendly way in which they are stated, but I beg of you not to continue to look upon the past performances of this great fighting force as a failure merely because we have not achieved all that we could have hoped.… We must look at this whole great affair stretching from Marseille to the lower Rhine as one great theater.

As was now amply evident, Montgomery simply could not play the loyal, stalwart lieutenant. Subordination held little appeal for a solipsist. Even the king’s equerry had noted in his diary that “such canalized egotism, though maybe necessary to a successful general … makes a man an exacting companion.… Sometimes I wonder whether Monty’s undoubted genius does not occasionally bring him to the verge of mental unstability.” If that was overdrawn—self-involvement need not imply imbalance—nevertheless Eisenhower’s biographer Stephen E. Ambrose later wrote of Montgomery: “He had no competence in the fine art of persuasion. He was accustomed to working on a problem alone, then handing down a solution.… He could not get his ideas across without appearing either patronizing or offensive, or both.”

A British official who watched Montgomery in a meeting described how he “sat up like a little bird with his head on one side, sharp as a needle, and with very bright eyes.… A most striking man with his bright eyes and long beaky nose [but] a bit
naif
in political matters.” Brooke confided to his diary that Montgomery “goes on harping over the system of command in France. He has got this on the brain.… He cannot put up with not being the sole controller of land operations.”

But others in the highest British circles took up his twin themes of abject failure in the west and Eisenhower’s manifest deficiencies. “We have of course sustained a strategic reverse on the Western Front,” Churchill told the South African soldier and statesman Jan Smuts on December 3. To Roosevelt, the prime minister cabled three days later, “We have definitely failed to achieve the strategic object which we gave to our armies five weeks ago. We have not yet reached the Rhine in the northern part.” The president replied with sanguine assurances—“a decisive break in our favor is bound to come”—but even Admiral Ramsay, who was among Eisenhower’s staunchest allies, told De Guingand that he saw “no prospect of Ike getting any wiser.”

Some of Montgomery’s partisans were more savage. Brooke noted that during a luncheon at SHAEF’s new forward headquarters in Reims, Kay Summersby had been “promoted to hostess, and sat at the head of the table.… Ike produced a lot of undesirable gossip that did him no good.” In subsequent diary entries, Brooke added, Eisenhower “is detached and by himself with his lady chauffeur on the golf links at Reims.… I think he is incapable of running the war even if he tries.”

The fairways at Reims were in fact carpeted with SHAEF tents, rendering them unfit for sport, and Eisenhower’s British military assistant, Lieutenant Colonel James F. Gault, later attested that during their long wartime association the supreme commander never swung a golf club. Yet the calumny continued. “Eisenhower completely fails as supreme commander.… The war is drifting in a rudderless condition,” Brooke wrote. “We must take the control out of Eisenhower’s hands.”

*   *   *

At Montgomery’s request, another high-command conclave was scheduled for Thursday morning, December 7, in Maastricht, the first Dutch city to be liberated in September and, it was asserted, the oldest town in the Netherlands, a claim bitterly disputed by Nijmegen. Here the Romans had quarried limestone and bridged the Maas, and here blessed Saint Servatius had placed his bishopric in the fourth century. Here too a four-month siege by Spanish brigands in 1579 ended in plunder and eight thousand locals put to the sword; another siege a century later, under Louis XIV, ended when that ubiquitous French military engineer, Vauban, reduced the Maastricht citadel by digging parallel trenches ever closer to the fortifications, a technique embraced by besiegers for the next two centuries. The Dutch could take solace only in having killed the celebrated French captain of musketeers Charles d’Artagnan, who was felled by a musket ball to the throat and subsequently immortalized in the novels of Alexandre Dumas.