Armageddon (9 page)

One of Patton’s biographers has described how Third Army’s commander felt “almost with a physical pain the absence of consistent direction from the top . . . trying to follow a conductor who did not quite know or failed to comprehend the delicate nuances of a score.” Yet it remains debatable whether even the greatest of captains could have steered the citizen soldiers of the Anglo-American alliance into Germany in 1944 faster than the slowest ship in the convoy was capable of steaming. More will be said of this below. Just once in the entire campaign did Eisenhower endorse an imaginative, dramatic initiative to end the war quickly. In September 1944, he astonished his own staff, and deeply irked his American subordinates, by supporting a plan presented by Montgomery for a lightning British dash to the Rhine.

Despite Eisenhower’s dislike for Montgomery, it is reasonable to surmise that somewhere in Ike’s heart in the autumn of 1944 was a recognition that the British general knew more about the battlefield direction of armies than he did himself. Montgomery’s behaviour in Normandy had been abrasive. Yet the British officer had managed that battle with notable competence, without losing his nerve amid savage fighting and some alarming setbacks. “I am no Montgomery-lover,” wrote Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, after the war, “but I give him his full due and believe that for certain types of operation he is without an equal . . . Normandy is such an operation.” If this proverbially cautious British commander now believed that he could achieve a bold stroke against the Germans, it must be worth the gamble to let him try. The rewards of success could be immense.

The decision was made at a meeting on 10 September. Eisenhower accepted the British field-marshal’s plan for a thrust through Holland to seize a bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem, opening a path to the Ruhr. For this purpose, the British would be reinforced by SHAEF’s strategic reserve, the First Airborne Army awaiting orders around airfields in England. The British would also be granted a special allocation of fuel and supplies, diverted from the American armies. Eisenhower and his staff were bemused to hear from Montgomery soon after the 10 September meeting that, if the Rhine crossing at Arnhem could be secured, he now envisaged a northern drive through the Ruhr towards Berlin by some sixteen or eighteen divisions. SHAEF found it difficult to imagine that such a relatively small force could break the German front, any more than Patton’s Third Army could make a war-winning advance on its own. The logisticians also doubted whether even sixteen divisions could be fuelled and supplied in Germany without the use of Antwerp.

Omar Bradley was among those who urged Eisenhower to forget the Arnhem plan and commit Montgomery to clearance of the Antwerp approaches. But SHAEF authorization for the airborne operation had been granted and was not rescinded. As late as 15 September, the Supreme Commander himself remained not merely optimistic but euphoric. He believed that within a week or two at most the Allied armies would have closed up on the Rhine. “The Germans will have stood in defense of the Ruhr and Frankfurt, and will have had a sharp defeat inflicted upon them . . . Clearly Berlin is the main prize,” he wrote in a circular to his commanders. “There is no doubt whatever, in my mind, that we should concentrate all our energies on a rapid thrust.” Bradley’s aide likewise wrote on 15 September: “Brad and Patton agree neither will be too surprised if we are on the Rhine in a week . . . General anxious to slam on through to Berlin.”

T
HE STRUGGLE TO
destroy Hitler brought together in Europe an extraordinary mingling of humanity. World war had displaced tens of millions of people, some by choice and most by compulsion. Everywhere the shadow of conflict extended, there were men, women and sometimes children who had been arbitrarily removed from their natural abodes and relocated upon alien soil, among people they had never known before. Some in consequence found themselves in rags, others in uniform. The war created a host of temporary new loyalties and placed all manner of citizens of many nations in unfamiliar circumstances, united only by the demands of defeating the enemy and, if possible, surviving to go home. Within Eisenhower’s huge command, there were men from every corner of the United States and the British Isles, as well as Frenchmen, Poles, Canadians, Belgians, Dutchmen and a smattering of representatives from scores of other nations. Consider one small unit, the RAF’s 268 Squadron, flying Typhoons on reconnaissance missions for First Canadian Army: in September 1944 this comprised seven Canadians, two Australians, three Trinidadians, one Maltese, one Scot and one Welshman. They were later joined by two Poles and an Indian. It is little wonder that such men emerged from their wartime experience as a very internationally minded generation.

Eisenhower’s forces were now formed into three army groups, containing twenty-eight American divisions, eighteen British and Canadian, one Polish, and eight makeshift French formations, manned chiefly by undisciplined
maquisards
. The latter were included in the order of battle for their political rather than military value. The Germans in the west mustered forty-eight infantry and fifteen panzer and panzergrenadier divisions, but these possessed only 25 per cent of their proper strength and equipment. The Allies outnumbered the Germans by twenty to one in tanks. Against the Luftwaffe’s western strength of 573 serviceable combat aircraft, the Allies could deploy some 14,000.

Yet the Allies’ exhilaration about the inroads they had made upon their enemy’s strength in Normandy might have been moderated had they paused to consider that Hitler still disposed of more than ten million uniformed men. The Wehrmacht’s strength had peaked at 6.5 million in 1943, and now stood at 3.4 million, but that of the Waffen SS was still increasing, towards a summit of 830,000 at the beginning of 1945. Millions of foreigners from Hitler’s empire had been armed and garbed in German uniform, and some fought with the desperation of the damned. It was true that many of the Germans being mobilized were untrained, poorly armed and not yet embodied in coherent formations. A million men wasted rations in the uniform of Göring’s Luftwaffe, which in the air was almost moribund. A large proportion of German recruits would have been rejected for service in the American or British armies on grounds of age or physical infirmity. The Russians discovered that among their vast summer haul of captives was a Wehrmacht soldier who had spent two years in a British prison camp before being repatriated as unfit for military service. The Volkssturm, Germany’s Home Guard, was a minimal asset. Yet granted the German genius for transforming the most unpromising human material into serviceable fighting units, the sheer mass of Germany’s surviving men at arms demanded more respect than it received from Allied commanders in early September 1944. Even in the sixth year of the Second World War, some senior commanders experienced difficulty in grasping the titanic scale of the conflict, and the resources available to a ruthless and boundlessly ingenious enemy.

The Allies possessed overwhelming material advantages, above all in the might of the Red Army. But fighting soldiers were quicker to perceive the gravity of the task they still faced than those at rear headquarters. The optimism of Allied commanders was fed by a daily diet of intercepted signals between Germany’s generals, proclaiming their desperation. At the sharp end, however, renewed fighting along the Allied front cooled optimism. On 14 September, Colonel Turner-Cain wrote in his diary: “The national press is at last more sober in its estimate of when the war would end. They now talk of three months instead of next week. Their idiotic optimism had a peculiar effect on men’s morale, and one could feel them saying to themselves: ‘Why should I put myself at risk of being killed or wounded if the war is to end next week?’ Hence they were a bit sticky about doing anything aggressive.” The British forces’ shortage of manpower, which was to dog their operations from Normandy to the Elbe, was already exercising its baleful influence. Most companies in Turner-Cain’s battalion were reduced to two officers, and some to two platoons. Replacements proved to be a ragbag of men unwillingly transferred from the Service Corps, military police and disbanded units.

Eisenhower sustained hope in Montgomery’s breast about a British charge into Germany by writing to him: “My own choice of routes for making the all-out offensive . . . is from the Ruhr to Berlin.” Perhaps, after all, the Supreme Commander would grant 21st Army Group’s commander his triumphal march on Hitler’s capital. It would be time enough to review grand strategy, however, when it was seen whether Eisenhower’s “choice” was attainable by way of a British bridge across the Rhine. While the commanders of America’s armies fumed and fretted about the gasoline famine which Montgomery’s grand play had forced upon them, in the third week of September 1944 Western Allied leaders’ eyes focused upon a single road to the prim, neat Dutch town of Arnhem.

CHAPTER TWO

The Bridges to Arnhem

THE DROP

W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
sent a note to the British Chiefs of Staff in August 1943, cautioning them against giving frivolous codenames to actions involving deadly peril. No wife or mother, he said, wanted to remember that her husband or son had died in an operation christened “Bunnyhug” or “Ballyhoo.” Yet the planners of the assault on the Dutch bridges came close to breaching Churchill’s injunction, by giving a codename of such notable banality as “Market Garden” to a battle that would have tragic consequences for many people of five nationalities.

In the last year of the war, Allied commanders often found themselves constrained by decisions made long before, in very different strategic circumstances. Ships and tanks were designed and committed to mass production before it became plain that other types of war machine could better serve navies and armies. Likewise, back in 1940 and 1941 the Germans had achieved spectacular successes with parachute troops. The imaginations of even such austere officers as Marshall and Brooke were seized by the possibilities of airborne assault. Both the British and Americans hastened to create parachute units, for which some of their boldest and best soldiers volunteered. British paratroopers carried out several notable small-scale raids. One British and two American airborne divisions achieved great success on D-Day in disorganizing the German defences. But sceptics drew attention to the fact that, wherever lightly armed, air-landed forces encountered serious opposition, they suffered heavily. The cost of paratroops in personnel and resources was enormous. U.S. and British airborne divisions showed outstanding fighting skills in Normandy. Critics asked why they could not simply be used as elite infantry rather than reserved for a parachute role, the relevance of which seemed increasingly doubtful. The Germans, indeed, never again deployed their
Fallschirmjäger
for massed drops after suffering terrible losses in Crete.

But the Allied Airborne Army had been created, and the apostles of the new art of envelopment from the sky were determined that it should be used. “Brereton [U.S. commander of First Airborne Army] seems determined to use paratroops, as is Browning,” wrote Bradley’s aide Colonel Chester Hansen on 1 September. “They have had any numbers of schemes . . . [Brad] had to remind [Brereton] of the parallel here with Patton’s envelopment by sea [in Sicily], when it was not necessary.” Major-General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, a passionate advocate of parachute war, voiced the impatience of many comrades about the failure to find them a role in what looked like the last act of the north-west Europe campaign. The brilliant thirty-seven-year-old “Slim Jim” Gavin, a former ranker who had reached West Point by way of a Brooklyn orphanage, wanted his division either thrown into action or transferred to Asia: “I am for the latter. This affair is practically wound up.”

Although the Airborne were considered crack troops, they could not carry into battle the heavy weapons essential for sustained survival on the battlefield against enemy armour and artillery. Lacking significant transport, they could only occupy and hold ground below or close to their dropping points. But when the plan to seize the bridges to the Rhine was conceived in the first days of September, just a fortnight after the German Army in the west had suffered catastrophe in the Falaise Gap, it seemed unlikely that the airborne invaders would face much opposition. Many men felt as assured as Major Bill Deedes that “This is the end, this is it, we’ve beaten them.” Deedes’s unit took Lille with a squadron of tanks and a company of riflemen: “There seemed no limit to what we could achieve.”

Release of the files of German signals intercepted by Bletchley Park has conclusively demonstrated Allied knowledge that 9th SS and 10th SS Panzer Divisions were refitting in the Arnhem area. Commanders had no need of the aerial photographs which were the focus of thirty-five years’ post-war controversy. The German formations were, however, shadows of their old selves. They still possessed their reconnaissance battalions, together with a regiment apiece of armoured infantry, and an assortment of weak support elements. But they mustered only around twenty tanks between them, along with some 150 armoured cars and half-tracks. Allied commanders should have paused to consider that, while the latter posed no great threat to Allied armoured divisions, they still posed a formidable challenge to paratroopers, chiefly dependent on small arms. Yet when Bedell-Smith raised with Montgomery the issue of the panzers, the field-marshal ridiculed his doubts.

Lieutenant-General Frederick “Boy” Browning, the corps commander who would lead the airborne landing, was a forty-one-year-old Guardsman who aroused mixed feelings. His aristocratic mien received more respect than it deserved from some British colleagues. Although a junior officer of proven courage in the First World War, he had never seen action in Hitler’s war. He possessed a certain celebrity as husband of the novelist Daphne du Maurier, yet Americans found him the sort of mannered Englishman they liked least. Gavin wrote in his diary on 6 September: “[Browning] unquestionably lacks the standing, influence and judgment that comes with a proper troop experience . . . His staff was superficial . . . Why the British units fumble along, ‘flub the dub’ as the boys say, becomes more and more apparent. Their tops lack the knowhow, never do they get down into the dirt and learn the hard way.” But Browning’s eagerness for Market Garden was plain. “We called it Operation KCB,” a 1st Airborne Division intelligence officer, Captain John Killick, said sardonically, noting a belief among his comrades that its principal objective was to win Browning a knighthood. Killick described the airborne commander as “that popinjay,” referring to the general’s preoccupation with his own turn-out. Many even among the British would have been happier to see command of Market Garden in the hands of the able and combat-experienced American airborne commander Matthew Ridgway.