The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (87 page)

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NORDWIND
would drag on, with three more attacks against the Americans of at least corps size, and another against the French up the Rhine–Rhône Canal from Colmar. Seventh Army’s right wing bent back ten miles and more, particularly along the Rhine near Haguenau, and enemy troops ferried across the river at Gambsheim closed to within a few miles of Strasbourg before being cuffed back. But these paltry territorial gains, which cost 23,000 irreplaceable German casualties, carried little strategic heft; Patch held the Saverne Gap and the Rhine–Marne Canal, and Patton was not diverted from the Ardennes. Hitler denounced as “pessimistic” reports from Alsace that
NORDWIND
had failed for want of sufficient infantry. Yet he was reduced to using Volksgrenadiers who had trained together for barely a month, among them recruits from eastern Europe who spoke no German, and a convalescent unit known as the “Whipped Cream Division” because of its special dietary needs.

“We must believe in the ultimate purposes of a merciful God,” Eisenhower had written Mamie after his confrontation with De Gaulle. “These are trying days.” Rarely had the burden of command weighed more heavily on him. Bodyguards still shadowed his every move, he found no time for exercise, and despite his regular letters home his wife chided him for not writing often enough.

He had new worries, too: recent intelligence suggested the Germans might soon use poison gas, and it was also said that enemy scientists were developing a ray capable of stopping Allied aircraft engines in flight. Further, he suffered yet another significant loss: on January 2, ice on the wings combined with pilot error during takeoff had caused the crash of a twin-engine Hudson at airfield A-46, five miles south of Versailles. The fiery accident killed Admiral Ramsay—among Eisenhower’s staunchest and most valued advisers—who was flying to Brussels for a conference with Montgomery about the defenses at Antwerp. On Sunday, January 7, a French naval band played Chopin’s funeral march as a gun carriage bore Ramsay’s coffin to a hillside grave above the Seine. The supreme commander joined mourners in the shuffling cortège.

Later that afternoon, Eisenhower’s office calendar recorded: “E. leaves office early, 4:30 & goes home. He is very depressed these days.”

The Agony Grapevine

S
HAEF
on January 5 confirmed an American press report that the U.S. First and Ninth Armies now fought under British command. The statement from Versailles claimed that the arrangement had been made “by instant agreement of all concerned,” but failed to explain that the reconfiguration was only temporary. Smug accounts in London newspapers began describing GIs as “Monty’s troops”; privately encouraged by the field marshal, the press clamored for a “proper” chain of command in northwestern Europe, under a single battle captain.

“We have nothing to apologize for,” Bradley told his staff. “We have nothing to explain.” Major Hansen wrote in his diary, “Many of us who were avowed Anglophiles in Great Britain have now been irritated, hurt, and infuriated by the British radio and press. All this good feeling has vanished.”

On Saturday, January 6, Montgomery cabled Churchill that he planned to summon reporters to explain “how [the] Germans were first ‘headed off,’ then ‘seen off,’ and now are being ‘written off.’” He also intended to rebut any suggestion of American failure in the Ardennes. “I shall show how the whole Allied team rallied to the call and how national considerations were thrown overboard.… I shall stress the great friendship between myself and Ike.”

On the same day, he wrote a confidant in London, “The real trouble with the Yanks is that they are completely ignorant as to the rules of the game we are playing with the Germans.” When Brigadier Williams, the intelligence chief, asked why he intended to hold a press conference, Montgomery explained that Eisenhower’s generalship had been impugned, and “I want to put it right.” Williams offered two words of counsel: “Please don’t.” Others in his headquarters, smelling condescension, also sought to dissuade him. Alan Moorehead pleaded with De Guingand to muzzle Montgomery, lest he “make some bloody awful mistake.”

“That’s a funny position for a newsman to take,” De Guingand said.

“I want to win the war,” Moorehead replied.

In a double-badged maroon beret and a parachute harness—“dressed like a clown,” in Moorehead’s description—the field marshal appeared before a gaggle of correspondents in Zonhoven on January 7. No doubt he meant well. Praising the American GI as “a brave fighting man, steady under fire, and with that tenacity in battle which stamps the first-class soldier,” he also saluted Eisenhower as “the captain of our team,” declaring, “I am absolutely devoted to Ike. We are the greatest of friends.” No mention was made of Bradley, and an assertion that British troops were “fighting hard” exaggerated their role as reserves very much on the fringe of the battlefield.

Much of the recitation, however, was devoted to describing the field marshal’s own brilliance upon taking command almost three weeks earlier. “The first thing I did,” Montgomery said, “was busy myself in getting the battle area tidy—getting it sorted out”:

As soon as I saw what was happening I took certain steps myself to ensure that if the Germans got to the Meuse they would certainly not get over that river. And I carried out certain movements so as to provide balanced dispositions.… I was thinking ahead.… The battle has been most interesting. I think possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled.

Montgomery likened “seeing off” the enemy to his repulse of Rommel in Egypt in 1942. He closed by declaring, without a scintilla of irony, “Let us have done with the destructive criticism that aims a blow at Allied solidarity.”

“Oh, God, why didn’t you stop him?” Moorehead asked Williams as reporters scattered to file their stories. “It was so awful.” Many British officers agreed. The field marshal had been “indecently exultant,” as one put it, displaying “what a good boy am I” self-regard, in De Guingand’s phrase, and conveying what another general called his “cock on a dunghill mood.” A headline in the
Daily Mail
—“Montgomery Foresaw Attack, Acted ‘On Own’ to Save Day”—captured the prevailing Fleet Street sentiment, although Churchill’s private secretary told his diary, “Monty’s triumphant, jingoistic, and exceedingly self-satisfied talk to the press on Sunday has given wide offense.” A mischievous German radio broadcast mimicked the BBC with a phony news flash that quoted Montgomery as describing the Americans as “‘somewhat bewildered.’ … The battle of the Ardennes can now be written off, thanks to Field Marshal Montgomery.”

“He sees fit to assume all the glory and scarcely permits the mention of an army commander’s name,” the Ninth Army war diary complained. “Bitterness and real resentment is [
sic
] creeping in.” No one was more bitter or resentful than Bradley, whose “contempt had grown into active hatred” for Montgomery, reported one British general at SHAEF. Air Marshal Tedder informed his diary that cooperation between Bradley and the field marshal was now “out of the question.”

Bradley twice called Versailles on Tuesday, January 9, “very much upset over the big play up Monty is getting in the British press,” Kay Summersby noted. He, too, summoned reporters, using a map and a pointer to render his own version of events, which included the dubious assertion that American commanders had consciously taken “a calculated risk” in thinning out defenses in the Ardennes. Privately he denounced Montgomery’s “attempt to discredit me so he could get control of the whole operation.” The field marshal, he asserted, wanted to “be in on the kill, and no one else.”

In another call to Eisenhower, Bradley warned, “I cannot serve under Montgomery. If he is to be put in command of all ground forces, you must send me home.”

Eisenhower assured him that he had no plans to expand the field marshal’s authority, then added, “I thought you were the one person I could count on for doing anything I asked you to do.”

“This is one thing I cannot take,” Bradley replied.

Once again Eisenhower sought to mollify, to mediate, and to keep his temperamental subordinates concentrated on the task at hand: evicting Rundstedt from the Bulge and resuming the march on Germany. But in a note to Brooke he admitted, “No single incident that I have encountered throughout my experience as an Allied commander has been so difficult.”

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Heading off, seeing off, and writing off the Germans proved more problematic than Montgomery’s facile catchphrases implied. Rundstedt in late December had reported that both panzer armies in
HERBSTNEBEL
“are forced completely into the defensive.” Some German strategists urged Hitler to shift his armor to the Eastern Front—the Soviets had encircled Budapest in late December—but the Führer replied that the east “must take care of itself.” Twenty infantry and eight panzer divisions remained committed to the Bulge in early January. Such a host would not be easily expelled, even though German infantry regiments were half the size of their American counterparts and U.S. armored divisions on average mustered more than twice as many tanks as their German equivalents. The “German soldier is fighting with great determination and bravery,” a SHAEF assessment concluded. “Desertions few.”

Yet many enemy commanders had been killed or wounded, and some Volksgrenadier companies near Bastogne had fewer than thirty men. Mortars and antitank guns were muscled to the rear for want of ammunition. German rations would be cut twice in January, to eleven ounces of bread and an ounce of fat per day. Potatoes and vegetables ran short. Motorcycle scouts combed the countryside for gasoline, which OB West allocated virtually drop by drop. One division traveled by bicycle for more than a week. In a schoolhouse hospital, a German doctor asked a shrieking, wounded
Landser,
“Are you a soldier or a pants-crapper?”

“Ten shells for their one,” a U.S. Third Army soldier told the journalist Osmar White. “That’s the secret of it.” Work details of German prisoners were forced to break stone for road repairs, with a GI guard yelling, “Get along there, you cocksucking sonofabitch.” They were the fortunate ones: to his diary, Patton disclosed “some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners. (I hope we can conceal this.)” Others were executed legally, among them eighteen of Skorzeny’s saboteurs, convicted by military commissions within days of their apprehension and sentenced to be “shot to death with musketry.” Three of the condemned requested that captured German nurses in an adjacent cell serenade them with Christmas carols. “We had to stop them after a while,” an Army captain reported. “They were disturbing our troops.” The reporter W. C. Heinz witnessed the firing-squad execution of the trio. “I looked at the ground, frost-white, the grass tufts frozen, the soil hard and uneven,” Heinz wrote. “This view I see now, I told myself, will be the last thing their eyes will ever see.” Trussed and then blindfolded, with paper circles pinned over their hearts, “the three stood rigid against the posts like woodcuts of men facing execution” until the fatal volley left them limp and leaking blood.

A final German lunge at Bastogne lingered into the second week of January, with fighting as fierce as any seen in the Ardennes. The number of German divisions battling Third Army increased from three to nine. Dreadful weather again grounded much of the Allied air force and forced American gunners to use blowtorches and pinch bars to free frozen gun carriages. Patton had hoped to seize Houffalize in a one-day bound of seventeen miles; instead, his drive north with III and VIII Corps averaged barely a mile a day. First Army’s attack from the north, finally launched by Montgomery on January 3, moved no faster. Fog, snow, mines, rugged terrain, blown bridges, and a stubborn enemy reduced Collins’s VII Corps to a crawl and cost five thousand casualties in the plodding advance on Houffalize. On January 8, Hitler authorized Model to at last abandon the western half of the Bulge, but not for three days did GIs see signs of a general withdrawal, yard by grudging yard. The Führer on January 14 rejected a plea from Rundstedt and Model to pull back to the Rhine; the retreat instead must halt at the West Wall, whence the offensive had begun.

At 11:40
A.M.
on Tuesday, January 16, a cavalry patrol from the north met an armored infantry patrol from the south outside Houffalize to link the First and Third Armies. One thousand tons of Allied bombs and countless pozit shells had “completely removed” the Walloon market town, Patton wrote. “I have never seen anything like it in this war.” Waiting for bulldozers to plow a path through the rubble, he composed a snatch of doggerel:

Little town of Houffalize,

Here you sit on bended knees.

God bless your people and keep them safe,

Especially from the RAF.

A day later, Eisenhower returned First Army to Bradley. Hodges sent Montgomery five pounds of coffee as thanks for his ministrations, and on January 18 moved the army headquarters back to the Hôtel Britannique in Spa. The place was largely intact except that the furniture had been upended and a Christmas tree, denuded of ornaments, was “tilting drunkenly in one corner.” Ninth Army for now would remain under British command, despite carping from Bradley, who finally took SHAEF’s hint by shifting his command post from isolated Luxembourg City to Namur, a riverine city once famed for fine knives. There in ducal splendor he and his staff occupied a baroque château with marble floors, velvet drapes, and full-length oils of Belgian nobility. A crystal chandelier dangled above his desk, and smirking cherubs looked down on the twenty-foot map board, propped against the wall frescoes. Bradley was billeted in the posh Hôtel d’Harscamp—“Whore’s Camp” to GIs—from which a magnificent vista gave onto Namur’s cathedral and the Meuse valley beyond. Once again was he sovereign of all he surveyed.

Village by village, croft by croft, American soldiers reclaimed what they had lost. Middleton deployed his VIII Corps headquarters back to Bastogne, where 101st Airborne paratroopers gave him a receipt certifying that the town was “used but serviceable” and “Kraut disinfected.” The 7th Armored Division reentered ruined St.-Vith on January 23, capturing a German artillery officer whose latest diary entry read, “The battle noises come closer to the town.… I’m sending back all my personal belongings. One never knows.”