Armageddon (7 page)

Over the days that followed 11th Armoured’s arrival at the port, the Germans used boats and ferries, chiefly by night, to carry out an operation as skilful and as important as their withdrawal from Sicily into Italy across the Straits of Messina a year before. In sixteen days, they moved 65,000 men, 225 guns, 750 trucks and 1,000 horses across the waterway north-west of Antwerp. While some men were left to hold the Scheldt approaches, the remainder escaped across the base of the Beveland Isthmus into Holland, to play a critical role in thwarting the British through the battles that followed. The German evacuation was comprehensively monitored by British decoders at Bletchley Park. Every enemy movement was reported to SHAEF and 21st Army Group. Yet no effective action was taken to interdict the Scheldt. The area was heavily mined by the Germans, and thus Allied warships could not intervene from the North Sea. RAF aircraft of 84 Group repeatedly attacked the enemy’s ferry crossings, and sank some ships. But the Germans were able to maintain an effective shuttle through the hours of darkness, when fighter-bombers could not interfere.

Only on 13 September, nine leisurely days after Antwerp was seized, was belated action begun to clear the Scheldt approaches. First Canadian Army was given the task. Its infantry divisions, however, were still committed to securing the French Channel ports. The only available formations were the Canadian 4th and 1st Polish Armoured Divisions. Tanks were wholly unsuitable for canal country, and the Canadians’ infantry support was very weak. When the Algonquin Regiment set out in assault boats to cross the Leopold Canal and clear its north bank in advance of an armoured thrust, the unit met disaster. German counter-attacks battered its frail bridgehead into submission. On 14 September the survivors retired, having lost twenty-nine men killed, fifty-eight wounded and sixty-six taken prisoner—42 per cent of the battalion’s already depleted strength. The retreating Canadians were ferried back across the canal under heavy fire by volunteers among their German prisoners, who seemed eager not to be deprived of the privilege of captivity.

Tactical responsibility for this débâcle was divided. General Harry Crerar, commander of First Canadian Army, was poorly regarded by his British colleagues—“quite unfit to command troops,” in Montgomery’s withering words. Montgomery lambasted Crerar on the evening of 3 September for having missed an army commanders’ meeting earlier that day, because the Canadian was attending a memorial service for the victims of the disastrous 1942 raid on Dieppe. “The C-in-C intimated that . . . the Canadian aspect of the Dieppe ceremonial was of no importance compared to getting on with the war.” Crerar’s deputy, Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, Canada’s outstanding soldier of the campaign, from the outset identified the importance of seizing the Scheldt approaches. He urged this on Crerar, suggesting that the French ports were a far less urgent priority. But after the Canadian general’s bruising encounter on 3 September he showed no appetite for renewed debate with his army-group commander: “Crerar refused to raise the issue with Monty.” The consequence was that most of the Canadians persisted with the marginal task of clearing encircled French ports of Germans, while the Scheldt approaches received nothing like the urgent commitment they needed.

It was acknowledged that the Canadians’ mission would require stronger forces. The operation was abandoned until men became available. Amazingly, for three weeks the Germans were left in peace to fortify their positions. This was the first of many instances of lethargy that would dog the Allied campaign. In the happy hangover that followed victory in France, 21st Army Group acted ineffectually. The contrast is extraordinary between the sluggishness of the victorious Allies and the energy of the shattered Wehrmacht. Whatever the requirements of rest and resupply, again and again the Allies paid with the lives of their men for an insouciant attitude to time. The Germans used each day of delay to reinforce their positions, and thus to increase their capacity to resist when an attack belatedly came.

Montgomery, never eager to acknowledge error, nonetheless admitted afterwards that the Antwerp–Scheldt disaster—and it was indeed a strategic disaster—was among his most serious blunders of the war: “a bad mistake—I underestimated the difficulties of opening up the approaches to Antwerp . . . I reckoned that the Canadian Army could do it
while
we were going for the Ruhr. I was wrong.” The field-marshal’s Chief of Staff, the highly respected Freddie de Guingand, was exhausted and in poor health. De Guingand “blamed himself specifically for the delay in gaining early use of . . . Antwerp.” Yet Brigadier Charles Richardson, who was also serving on Montgomery’s staff, detected in the field-marshal at this time a diminishing receptiveness to counsel, as he “grew steadily more aloof and remote.” The fumbled handling of Antwerp was among the principal causes of Allied failure to break into Germany in 1944. It was not merely that the port was unavailable for the shipment of supplies; through two months that followed, a large part of Montgomery’s forces had to be employed upon a task that could have been accomplished in days if the necessary energy and “grip” been exercised at the beginning of September, when the enemy was incapable of resistance.

All along the front, the Germans now began to improvise a defence with the energy and ingenuity which they invariably displayed in such circumstances. At the heart of Germany’s extraordinary fighting performance in the last year of the Second World War was the
Kampfgruppe,
the “battle group,” an ad-hoc assembly of infantry and armour, army and Luftwaffe, flak and service personnel, cooks and laundrymen, placed under the command of the most senior available officer. “Transport, signals and heavy equipment were almost non-existent,” observed a British Second Army intelligence report. “. . . Battle groups were formed from regiments or from stragglers and were named after their commanding officers; they varied in strength from 100 to 3,000. Many went into battle so quickly that the men did not know the name of their battle group. Food and ammunition were short, but some of these groups fought with great and at times fanatical determination.” No one pretended that such formations were satisfactory substitutes for the balanced divisions deployed by the Allies. Yet the achievements of the
Kampfgruppen
were considerable. Battle groups lacked the coherence, transport and artillery support to mount major attacks. But in defence—and defence was now the business of the German Army—their contribution was critical to Hitler’s survival through the months ahead.

T
HE DASH ACROSS
France and Belgium created a crisis for the supply of the Allied armies. In Patton’s legendary phrase: “My men can eat their belts, but my tanks gotta have gas.” An American heavy armoured division embraced 4,200 vehicles of all kinds, and required a combat load of 300,000 gallons of fuel, equivalent to 300 GMC trucks each carrying 1,000 gallons in five-gallon cans. By early September, American spearheads were operating more than 300 miles from their only source of supply, the beaches and small ports of Brittany and Normandy. Allied pre-invasion bombing had systematically devastated the French rail system. The British had passionately opposed the Americans’ August landing in the South of France. Yet Marseilles was to prove an invaluable asset, because the rail links of southern France were much less heavily damaged than those of the north. Supplies were soon moving more easily to the American armies from the Mediterranean than through the Channel ports.

In the short term, however, almost every shell, gallon of fuel and ration pack had to be shipped by road or—in dire circumstances and at huge cost—by air. The U.S. Transportation Corps in 1943 had demanded 240 truck companies for the campaign in Europe. Only 160 companies were allocated, of which most were equipped with light trucks, rather than the heavy vehicles the truckers had wanted. The British found themselves handicapped by an inexcusable technical failure. In September, 1,400 three-ton Austin trucks had to be withdrawn from service with Montgomery’s armies because of faulty pistons. This deficiency was found to extend to every available replacement engine. Unlike the Americans, who equipped their armies with standard vehicle types using readily interchangeable spare parts, the British Army was dependent on contracts with a wide variety of civilian vehicle manufacturers. In consequence, the armed forces were obliged to service some 600 different models, which created chronic difficulties. Around Antwerp, Montgomery’s armies were obliged for a time to commandeer thousands of horse-drawn wagons abandoned by the Wehrmacht, to make good its shortage of vehicles for the haulage of supplies.

Waste was prodigious, and contributed mightily to Allied logistical difficulties. Everywhere the armies went, in their wake lay great trails of discarded equipment and supplies. After coming upon a heap of 650 abandoned overcoats and 200 gas cans, the commanding general of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division lamented men’s “utter disregard of property responsibility.” Each day of the campaign, the U.S. Army lost 1,200 small arms and 5,000 tyres. The roads and fields of Europe were strewn with discarded American ration packs, and especially the detested powdered lemon juice. Of twenty-two million fuel jerrycans shipped to France since D-Day, half had vanished by September.

It was a remarkable feat to move some 89,939 tons of supplies by road to the armies between 25 August and 6 September, but the achievements of the “Red Ball Express” trucking columns have been much exaggerated. They consumed 300,000 gallons of gasoline a day on their own account, and reckless abuse of vehicles disabled them at a frightening pace—700 fifty-hundredweight trucks were written off for every week of the Red Ball’s operation. Each “division slice” of the U.S. Army required 650 tons of supply a day—more than three times the German allocation—to keep it eating and fighting, which translated into a total of 18,600 tons of supply a day for the U.S. armies in the first half of October, rising to 20,750 by that month’s end. An armoured division required 25,000 gallons of fuel a day to keep rolling, never mind fighting. Even an infantry division consumed 6,500 gallons. There were serious maintenance problems. By mid-September, the U.S. 3rd Armored Division possessed only some seventy-five “runners” out of its established tank strength of 232, a shortfall matched in most other formations. In the ten days ending 7 September, the British 7th Armoured Division lost twelve tanks to enemy action, and thirty-eight to mechanical breakdown; 11th Armoured Division lost six to the enemy and forty-four to breakdown.

Patton’s tanks reached the Moselle after staging the longest and fastest drive across France made by Allied forces. On 2 September, however, their fuel supplies dried up. Third Army received just 25,390 gallons, when its divisions needed at least 450,000 gallons to resume their advance. Eisenhower’s planners examined Patton’s case for giving his formations overriding priority for fuel. If they did so, it seemed possible that he could get some ten or twelve divisions to the Rhine. But all the most vital strategic objectives were in northern Germany, rather than the south where Patton’s path lay. A drive by Third Army would leave its flanks open across 300 miles of hostile territory. Even when Germany’s forces were so desperately reduced, given the Wehrmacht’s genius for counter-attack, there seemed an overwhelming likelihood that American hubris would be punished.

Third Army received sufficient fuel through mid-September to establish precarious bridgeheads across the Moselle. It was denied licence, however, to attempt any substantial strategic advance for the rest of that month. Patton fumed: “I am being attacked on both fronts, but not by the Germans.” Here was weakness in the Allied Supreme Command. If Eisenhower did not intend Patton to drive on into Germany, he should have halted Third Army at the Meuse, and diverted its fuel supplies to Hodges’s First Army, much of which was immobilized, yet which possessed a vastly better prospect of penetrating Hitler’s West Wall. Patton was delighted when one of his formations hijacked a load of fuel destined for First Army, yet in truth such action was recklessly irresponsible. Patton said to Bradley on 14 September, “Don’t call me till after dark,” as he strove to entangle his Third Army so deeply on the Moselle front that Eisenhower would feel obliged to support its operations. Far from being matter for laughter, this was a grotesque way to allow any subordinate commander to drive strategy from the bottom. Montgomery was wrong about many things, but he was surely right that grip and discipline were essential at the summit of the Allied armies. Patton’s crossings of the Moselle in early September were a waste of resources unless they conformed to a coherent SHAEF strategy. Third Army was allowed to parade the eagerness and egotism of its commander, at great cost to the interests of the other American armies. Likewise, Eisenhower allocated a million gallons of fuel to forces besieging Brest on the French Atlantic coast, a further dispersal of vital resources in favour of a marginal objective.

It has become a cliché of the north-west Europe campaign that the Allies’ difficulties of supply were insuperable, given their lack of an operational big port in France. Yet for most of the war the United States displayed a genius for overcoming logistical obstacles, surmounting shortages that seemed intractable to the weary and impoverished British. Why did that genius fail in September 1944? The officer in overall charge of supply for the Allied armies was among the least impressive senior soldiers America sent to Europe in the Second World War. General John C. H. Lee was regarded even by his colleagues as vain, self-important, self-indulgent and undisciplined. Patton dismissed him as “a glib liar.” Lee was colloquially known as “Jesus Christ,” the only American general to wear stars on both the front and back of his helmet. There was immense anger within the fighting army when it was learned that Lee had descended upon Paris following its liberation and established himself and his sprawling empire of bureaucrats in sybaritic comfort, occupying no fewer than 167 of the French capital’s hotels. There was a disease among the service units of the Allied armies, from which Lee was the most notorious sufferer, known as “Paris fever.” At the most critical period of the Allied supply crisis, Lee allocated transport to ship to the city 11,000 men and 560,000 square feet of hutted accommodation for his own headquarters. “The movement naturally produced strong criticism from combat commanders,” the U.S. official historian comments drily.