The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (55 page)

Eisenhower now commanded fifty-eight divisions, including those in southern France, yet a month after crossing the German frontier no Allied soldier stood deeper than twelve miles into Germany. Enemy casualties were accruing at four thousand a day, but Allied losses since June 6 equaled a third of a million. Logistics were “in a bad state,” the supreme commander told Marshall, “reminiscent of the early days in Tunisia.” Half a dozen U.S. divisions remained in the rear because of insufficient means to support them on the battlefront; moreover, SHAEF logisticians calculated that even if the American armies reached the Rhine near the Ruhr, no more than twenty divisions could be sustained in combat.

To further explain his plight, Eisenhower and his logisticians composed a long essay for the Pentagon on combat realities in Europe. Uniforms wore out “at a rate almost incomprehensible to civilians,” twice as fast as U.S. clothing manufacturers could make them. Overcoats, shoes, mess kits, and blankets were also consumed at double the War Department’s estimates. Food demands through the winter—even if the war ended, soldiers still had to eat—would require the shipment of 3.5 billion pounds from the United States, equivalent to 340 loaded Liberty ships. “Beef requirements for European theater will call for the slaughtering of … approximately 4,000 [cattle] every day,” Eisenhower wrote. “Dehydrated egg requirements amount to the equivalent of 2½ billion fresh eggs, or a daily requirement of 6½ million.” Tent canvas was short by 100 million square feet. Just the demand for paper was staggering: the U.S. Army since the liberation of Paris had been forced to print ten million maps on the flip side of captured German maps. (Many depicted southern England, having been produced for Operation
SEA LION
, the aborted 1940 invasion of Britain; sheafs of these had been found in an abandoned enemy depot in Liège.)

The most desperate need was for ammunition, which was expended at a rate exceeding two tons every minute of every hour of every day, despite incessant rationing in the second half of 1944. By late September, fewer than four rounds per day were available for the largest guns, such as the 8-inch howitzer. By early October, ammunition shortfalls were “truly critical” across the front, with many Third Army tubes down to a single shell per day—Patton wanted sixty—and 12th Army Group reported that supplies of artillery ammunition had “reached a state of almost complete collapse.” A “silence policy” in V Corps required guns to stand unused for more than a week.

The shortfall partly reflected an inability of U.S. plants to meet demand: a 155mm shell required forty separate manufacturing procedures. The more common 105mm howitzer ammunition was produced and shipped under twelve hundred different lot numbers, each with minor variations in propellant that affected accuracy. (First Army was to spend 25,000 man-hours in the early fall sorting jumbled ammunition to avoid catastrophic short barrages.) Shortages kept American armies largely on the defensive in October—attacking required more firepower than sitting—and Eisenhower blamed a dearth of heavy ammunition for delays in capturing Aachen. He broadcast an appeal to the home front for greater production, and the War Department dispatched veteran gunners to key plants for pep rallies under a program called “Firepower for Eisenhower.”

One senior American general believed that a one-third increase in artillery ammunition “would have saved many lives and shortened the war.” Yet General Lee’s COMZ insisted there was no shortage on the Continent, and indeed thousands of tons were stacked in Normandy depots and aboard several dozen ammunition ships, most of them waiting to unload. Lee had predicted that 150 ships would be discharged in October, but the actual number was less than 100. On October 20, 246 cargo vessels plied Continental waters; the wait for berths in various anchorages often lasted weeks, sometimes months. Entire fleets now served as floating warehouses for munitions and other matériel.

The War Department, trying to supply a global war with limited shipping, grew exasperated: in October, a cable warned SHAEF that “no further commodity-loaded ships” would be sent to Europe until empty ships began sailing home. Eisenhower was horrified, and more than two dozen Liberty ships were sent back to the United States, some before emptying their holds. To encourage stevedores and boost morale, Bronze Stars were handed out to efficient hatch crews, and band concerts serenaded workers on the docks.

*   *   *

If only Antwerp were free. “We have captured a port which resembles Liverpool in size, but we cannot use it,” Montgomery had written in September. “If we could use it, all our maintenance troubles would disappear.” Eisenhower stressed freeing the Scheldt and opening the port “as an indispensable prerequisite for the final drive into Germany.” Even during
MARKET GARDEN
, the supreme commander had summoned twenty-three general officers to Versailles to discuss strategy—pleading the press of battle, Montgomery sent his chief of staff as a proxy—and to emphasize Antwerp “as a matter of urgency.” Eisenhower told Beetle Smith a week later, “I am terribly anxious about Antwerp.” Yet the supreme commander also insisted that both Montgomery and Bradley “must retain as first mission the gaining of the line of the Rhine north of Bonn as quickly as humanly possible.”

Montgomery had assigned clearing the Scheldt to the Canadian First Army, which included a British corps and the Polish 1st Armored Division, for a total of six divisions. Allied air attacks intensified against enemy targets on diamond-shaped Walcheren Island and the Beveland peninsula, which formed the Scheldt’s north shore. Allied ground troops squeezed the Breskens Pocket on the southern lip of the estuary, held by a formidable force of eleven thousand Germans, including Eastern Front veterans reinforced with both naval guns and seventy field artillery pieces. “The whole energies of the [Canadian] Army will be directed towards … Antwerp,” Montgomery decreed—yet he ordered the Canadians to simultaneously isolate the enemy garrison at Dunkirk and capture the occupied French ports of Boulogne and Calais. The latter ports eventually fell and the Breskens Pocket slowly shrank, but the
MARKET GARDEN
stalemate south of Arnhem allowed the German Fifteenth Army to shift reinforcements to the Scheldt defenses. With enemies still entrenched on both banks of the estuary, no Allied ship dared venture upstream.

Thus the days and weeks rolled by, and big-shouldered Antwerp remained dormant. “We need this place more than we need FDR,” Major General Everett Hughes wrote his wife. Although Montgomery acknowledged the port’s primacy, neither he nor Eisenhower demanded that all other tasks be subordinated to this one. Dempsey’s Second Army continued to look beyond the Rhine toward the Ruhr; control of a large port was a less urgent matter for the smaller British force. Even Field Marshal Brooke had doubts about Montgomery’s priorities. “Antwerp must be captured with the least possible delay,” he told his diary in London. “I feel that Monty’s strategy for once is at fault.” Montgomery would acknowledge as much after the war, conceding “a bad mistake on my part” in demanding too much of the Canadians. “I reckoned that the Canadian Army could do it
while
we were going for the Ruhr,” he added. “I was wrong.”

But in October 1944, the field marshal displayed no indulgence for those who questioned his judgment. Admiral Ramsay warned that to clear the Scheldt of mines would take weeks, even after German defenders were finally flicked from the banks of the waterway. “I think the army is not taking this operation seriously enough,” he told his diary in early October. After another SHAEF meeting, Ramsay wrote, “Monty made the startling announcement that we could take the Ruhr without Antwerp. This afforded me the cue I needed to lambaste him.… I let fly with all my guns at the faulty strategy we had allowed.” Montgomery took such criticism badly, and he accused the admiral of undercutting him. “Request you will ask Ramsay from me,” the field marshal wrote Eisenhower, “by what authority he makes wild statements to you concerning my operations about which he can know nothing.”

No less troublesome than the arcane issues of shipping and logistics were parallel questions of strategy and command. After a brief respite, Montgomery had again hectored Eisenhower over the supreme commander’s preference for the broad, multipronged assault on Germany first adopted in May. Even as
MARKET GARDEN
came unglued, the field marshal had pressed once more for a single axis, preferably that of 21st Army Group, with nine reinforcing divisions from the U.S. First Army also under his command. Montgomery proposed that other Allied forces “stop in place where they are,” donating transport and other war stuffs to his expedition. Eisenhower had tried to paper over the dispute by suggesting that his vision and Montgomery’s could be reconciled, but in late September the field marshal rebuffed him with a tart cable:

I can not agree that our concepts are the same.… If you want to get to the Ruhr you will have to put every single thing into the left hook and stop everything else. It is my opinion that if this is not done you will not get to the Ruhr.

Unchastened by the destruction of the 1st Airborne Division and the larger misadventure in Holland, Montgomery now overplayed his hand. During a private conference with George Marshall in Montgomery’s tidy caravan in Eindhoven on Sunday, October 8, the field marshal complained about a “lack of grip” since Eisenhower had taken field command of the campaign, with battles that were “ragged and disjointed.… We [have] now got ourselves into a real mess.” The chief of staff’s icy blue stare implied demurral. “Marshall listened but said little,” Montgomery subsequently wrote. “It was clear that he entirely disagreed.” Marshall later confessed to nearly losing his famous temper at what he termed Montgomery’s “overwhelming egotism.”

Eisenhower’s patience, too, finally wore thin. On the same Sunday that Marshall visited Eindhoven, SHAEF planners at Versailles warned that in failing to uncork the Scheldt “fifteen divisions are held impotent for lack of success in this relatively small operation.… Our advance into Germany may be delayed into spring.” As it happened, high winds that very day ripped up Cherbourg’s port and Mulberry B.

“This reemphasizes the supreme importance of Antwerp,” Eisenhower cabled Montgomery in an “eyes only” message on Monday:

Unless we have Antwerp producing by the middle of November our entire operations will come to a standstill. I must emphasize that, of all our operations on the entire front from Switzerland to the Channel, I consider Antwerp of the first importance.

Montgomery would assert that this was the first time Eisenhower had issued clear instructions on the matter, a claim the British official history subsequently judged “hardly justified.” More likely, given Eisenhower’s reluctance to issue unequivocal orders, it was the first time the field marshal had detected a tone of exasperation or even disapproval. “You can rely on me to do every single thing possible to get Antwerp opened,” Montgomery replied promptly, and on the same day he instructed the Canadians in his firmest directive yet that “the opening of this port will take priority over all other offensive operations.” Yet a week would pass before the Canadian army, clearly overmatched by the task at hand, was substantially reinforced, even though Eisenhower drove home his point with another testy cable on Tuesday:

Nothing that I may ever say or write with respect to future plans in our advance eastward is meant to indicate any lessening of the need for Antwerp, which I have always held as vital, and which has grown more pressing as we enter the bad weather period.

Instead of replying directly, Montgomery that day sent Beetle Smith a caustic sixteen-paragraph memorandum titled “Notes on Command in Western Europe.” Beginning with an assertion that “the present organization for command within the Allied forces in Western Europe is not satisfactory,” the paper lambasted Eisenhower’s generalship and proposed that he either move his headquarters forward to “take direct command of the operations against the Ruhr” or delegate field command in Europe to either Montgomery or Bradley. “I do not believe we have a good and sound organization for command and control,” the field marshal wrote.

It may be that political and national considerations prevent us having a sound organization. If this is the case I would suggest that we say so. Do not let us pretend we are all right, whereas actually we are very far from being all right.

Eisenhower waited three days to reply with his own thirteen-paragraph letter, carefully vetted by Marshall before the chief flew back to Washington on Friday. “The questions you raise are serious ones,” Eisenhower wrote. “However, they do not constitute the real issue now at hand. That issue is Antwerp.… The Antwerp operation does not involve the question of command in any slightest degree.” After pointing out the “woeful state” of American and French supply, and noting that “by comparison you are rich,” Eisenhower again reviewed the reasoning behind his preference for a broad attack arranged by army groups under his command.

Then the master bridge player laid down his trump card:

If you, as the senior commander in this theater of one of the great Allies, feel that my conceptions and directives are such as to endanger the success of operations, it is our duty to refer the matter to higher authority for any action they may choose to take, however drastic.

The threat could hardly be misconstrued: if a general was to be cashiered, it would not be Eisenhower. Montgomery promptly amended his battle plan so that “the whole of the available offensive power of Second Army will now be brought to bear” in scouring the approaches to Antwerp. To subordinates he cabled, “I must impress on army commanders that the early use of Antwerp is absolutely vital.… We must accept heavy casualties to get quick success.” The field marshal directed Second Army’s XII Corps to pivot toward the Scheldt from the western flank of the Nijmegen corridor, permitting the Canadians—whose advance had covered hardly a mile a day—to concentrate on the Breskens Pocket and the eastern avenues to Walcheren Island. Montgomery now had the weight of two armies squeezing the seven German divisions that had neutralized Antwerp.