The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (85 page)

Eisenhower chafed at Montgomery’s caution. When he learned on Wednesday that the field marshal was at last ready to consider counterattacking, the supreme commander exclaimed sarcastically, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”

“Monty is a tired little fart,” Patton informed his diary the same day. “War requires the taking of risks and he won’t take them.” Yet others were just as circumspect as Montgomery. Beetle Smith in a staff meeting on Wednesday suggested telling “our masters in Washington that if they want us to win the war over here they must find us another ten divisions.” Bradley also favored pinching the enemy at Houffalize, not least because Eisenhower had promised to return First Army to his command when the town fell. First Army planners agreed that poor roads precluded hitting the base of the Ardennes salient, and Monk Dickson, the intelligence chief, endorsed Montgomery’s view that Rundstedt could strike again; he counted seventeen uncommitted German divisions. Deteriorating weather further encouraged prudence: a five-day spell of clear skies ended on Thursday, December 28, and with it the comfort provided by Allied air fleets.

Montgomery later asserted that he had left selection of the northern attack azimuth to Hodges, who after the high anxiety of
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much preferred the more conservative route toward Houffalize. Perhaps the last straw for Hodges came when another V-1 detonated three hundred yards from the First Army headquarters in Tongres, breaking most of the windows; sixty-five men were wounded by flying glass. In the First Army command diary, an aide wrote, “Hodges has had enough of exposed flanks for the last two weeks.”

*   *   *

Delayed by fog, snowbanks, and further reports of assassins afoot, Eisenhower’s command train on early Thursday afternoon pulled into a rail siding in the Belgian town of Hasselt, five miles south of Zonhoven. Bodyguards bounded through the station, searching for potential malefactors, and machine-gun crews crouched on the platform to lay down a suppressive cross fire, as needed. Montgomery hopped aboard at 2:30
P.M.
to find Eisenhower in his study, eager to discuss a counteroffensive that would turn the tables in the Ardennes once and for all. While Smith and De Guingand, the two chiefs of staff, waited in an unheated corridor, Montgomery sketched the plan: four corps would squeeze the enemy salient from the north and northwest, complementing the three already attacking from the south under Patton. The two wings would plan to meet in Houffalize, halfway down the length of the bulge.

Yet the field marshal was vague about precisely when this cataclysmic counterblow would fall. Building a combat reserve was vital, Montgomery said. His own direct observation and the reports of his “gallopers”—young British liaison officers who reported to him personally from far corners of the battlefield—led him to conclude that First Army still lacked the strength to confront an enemy force that included at least seven panzer divisions, with enough residual power to launch “at least one more full-blooded attack.” Better to let the enemy first impale himself with a final futile lunge toward the Meuse. Then, deflecting Eisenhower’s impatient request for a date certain, Montgomery urged development of a “master plan for the future conduct of war,” one in which “all available offensive power must be allotted to the northern front,” preferably with a single commander who “must have powers of operational control.”

With this ancient theme again resurrected, Eisenhower brought the meeting to a close and showed Montgomery to the platform. Machine-gunners folded their tripods, bodyguards reboarded, and the train chuffed back to Versailles via Brussels. Despite Montgomery’s insistence that the necessary conditions fall in place before an Allied counterblow was launched, the supreme commander believed that he had extracted a commitment for an attack from the north to begin in four days, on Monday, January 1.

That was incorrect. Montgomery returned to his Zonhoven field camp and cabled Brooke that Eisenhower was “definitely in a somewhat humble frame of mind and clearly realizes that the present trouble would not have occurred if he had accepted British advice and not that of American generals.” He further believed, after a recent conference with Bradley, that the later also finally recognized the limitations of his generalship. “Poor chap,” Montgomery had written Brooke, “he is such a decent fellow and the whole thing is a bitter pill for him.” But 21st Army Group had put the cousins back on track. “We have tidied up the mess,” he told the British chief, “and got two American armies properly organized.” Montgomery also wanted the War Office to know that although he cabled London about his operations each night, no such report went to SHAEF. “You are far better informed, and in the picture, than is Ike,” he confided.

And then, with the chronic nescience of a political naïf, he overplayed his hand, again. In a note to Eisenhower on Friday, December 29, Montgomery wrote:

We have had one very definite failure.… One commander must have powers to direct and control the operation; you cannot possibly do it yourself, and so you would have to nominate someone else.

He enclosed a proposed order for Eisenhower to issue to both 12th and 21st Army Groups, decreeing that “from now onwards full operational direction, control, and coordination of these operations is vested in the [commander-in-chief of] 21 Army Group.” In summation, he told the supreme commander, “I put this matter up to you again only because I am so anxious not to have another failure.” However, he added, without “one man directing and controlling … we will fail again.”

By chance, Montgomery’s note arrived just before a personal message to Eisenhower from George Marshall, who noted that “certain London papers” were calling for the field marshal to command “all your ground forces.” The chief added:

Under no circumstances make any concessions of any kind whatsoever. You not only have our complete confidence but there would be a terrific resentment in this country following such action.… Give them hell.

Precisely who should get hell was ambiguous, but Eisenhower settled on Montgomery. “They are all mad at Monty,” Kay Summersby told her diary on Friday, subsequently adding, “Bedell [Smith] and E. agree that Monty has changed considerably since the day in Italy over a year ago when he said he wanted to join the team.”

The supreme commander’s patience finally snapped when the agreeable De Guingand arrived in Versailles on Saturday, December 30, with the disagreeable news that no offensive would be launched from the north until at least January 3, leaving Patton to fight alone in the south against a ferociously reinforced enemy. Convinced that he had been deceived, Eisenhower stormed about his office, ordering staff officers to find the message confirming Montgomery’s commitment to a January 1 attack—a futile search, De Guingand assured him, because “knowing Monty, the last thing he would do is commit himself on paper.”

“All right, Beetle,” Eisenhower said, turning to his chief of staff as the familiar scarlet flush crept up his neck. “I’m going to send a telegram … to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that I’ve had trouble with this man and it’s either they can relieve me if they’d like to—that would be perfectly all right—but one of the two of us has to go.”

Now fully alive to Montgomery’s peril, and aware both of Marshall’s stern note and the thinly concealed American yen to have Harold Alexander command 21st Army Group, De Guingand proposed driving immediately to Zonhoven. “Won’t you please hold up that telegram ’til I get back?” he asked Eisenhower.

“All right, Freddie, I’ll hold this up until tomorrow morning. But I don’t think you ought to try and get up there, not tonight, because the weather is so bad.”

After De Guingand hurried out to begin the treacherous two-hundred-mile drive to Montgomery’s camp, Eisenhower dictated a frosty cable to the field marshal:

I do not agree that one army group commander should fight his own battle and give orders to another army group commander.… You disturb me by predictions of “failure” unless your exact opinions in the matter of giving you command over Bradley are met in detail. I assure you that in this matter I can go no further.… We would have to present our differences to the CC/S [Combined Chiefs of Staff].

Already in fragile health, De Guingand arrived in Zonhoven at midnight, as Alan Moorehead later told Forrest Pogue, “nearly exhausted, a little hysterical, full of whisky.… He said to Monty, ‘I must see you at once.’” As the chief of staff described the surly mood in Versailles, Montgomery paced around his caravan.

“If you keep on, one of you will have to go,” De Guingand said, “and it won’t be Ike.”

Montgomery scoffed. “Who would replace me?”

“That’s already been worked out,” De Guingand said. “They want Alex.”

Montgomery’s bluster abruptly dissolved, precisely as it had when the battle of Mareth turned against him in March 1943. “What shall I do, Freddie?” he asked. “What shall I do?”

De Guingand had already drafted an apology to Eisenhower, which he now pulled from his battle dress. “Sign this,” he said. Montgomery scratched his signature and summoned an orderly to have the message delivered, eyes only:

Dear Ike … Whatever your decision may be you can rely on me one hundred percent 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, Monty.

The crisis passed but the scars would linger. Soon after sending his apologetic note to Eisenhower, Montgomery privately cabled Brooke, “The general tendency at SHAEF and among the American command is one of considerable optimism.… I cannot share this optimism.” Eisenhower thanked Montgomery for “your very fine telegram,” but the incessant friction with the field marshal kept him awake at night. “He’s just a little man,” he would say after the war. “He’s just as little inside as he is outside.”

*   *   *

No sooner had Eisenhower suppressed this insurrection on his northern flank than his southern flank erupted, first with insubordination by 6th Army Group, then in a German attack hardly less cheeky than
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.

Although he commanded ten French and eight American divisions, General Devers had accomplished little in Alsace since Eisenhower’s refusal in late November to permit the Rhine crossing near Strasbourg. The U.S. Seventh Army’s combat power had been dissipated by the requirement to move in two opposite directions: north, to shore up Bradley’s flank, and south, to help General de Lattre eradicate the enemy salient around Colmar. Neither gambit yielded conspicuous success. After punching half a dozen holes through the German border to the north, GIs found the Siegfried Line impenetrable; they were reduced to tacking up latrine placards along the West Wall that read, “Shit on Hitler’s Home.”

The Colmar Pocket, as wide as the Bulge in Belgium and about half as deep, also proved unyielding. General Dahlquist’s 36th Division, attached to De Lattre’s First Army, reported that their French brothers-in-arms showed little interest in completing the liberation of Alsace, even as German forces aggressively shored up the salient. “The enemy attacked on three fronts today,” Dahlquist told his diary in mid-December, later adding, “The French left our division holding the bag for almost two weeks.” Squabbling between rival French factions persisted, aggravated by General Leclerc’s declaration that neither he nor his 2nd Armored Division cared to serve under a Vichy traitor like De Lattre. “I have now two problem children, Leclerc and De Lattre,” Devers wrote George Marshall.

At Verdun on December 19, Eisenhower had ordered 6th Army Group to help Bradley in the Bulge by contributing troops and shifting to the defensive. Three days later, Devers halted further attacks against the Colmar Pocket, leaving Hitler still master of 850 square miles of France. But Eisenhower was willing to cede much more: a SHAEF staff officer on December 26 brought Devers a map drawn by the supreme commander personally, which made plain that the Franco-American armies were to fall back nearly forty miles to an ostensibly more defensible line along the Vosges, abandoning Strasbourg and the Alsatian plain. Devers on December 27 flew to Versailles to argue that a retreat from the Rhine would anger the French, embolden the Germans, and bring the hard-won Saverne Gap within range of enemy artillery. Eisenhower stood fast, spooked by intelligence reports of German legions massing across from the U.S. Seventh Army. The 6th Army Group, he told Devers, must move “back to the Vosges line and hang on” until the Ardennes struggle subsided. Supply dumps were to be shifted into the mountains, and Devers was to sequester two U.S. divisions, one armored and one infantry, as a SHAEF reserve west of the Vosges. Devers told his diary:

The Germans undoubtedly will attack me now.… The position I give up is much stronger than the one to which I go.… Giving up the town of Strasbourg is a political disaster to France.

De Gaulle thought so too: on December 28, he sent General Alphonse Juin, now the French military chief of staff, to Versailles to make inquiries about a rumored retreat in Alsace. A gallant Algerian, distinguished by his Basque beret and left-handed salute—his right arm had been maimed in 1915—Juin cornered Beetle Smith, who told him that no firm decision had been made and that SHAEF’s action was “simply the study of a plan.” In truth, Smith had drafted the final order that morning. Juin motored back to Rue St.-Dominique and warned De Gaulle, “They are up to something.”