The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (28 page)

On July 1, Eisenhower went to Normandy to see what he could do to galvanize his commanders. He told Bradley he was bringing “nothing but a bedroll, one aide and an orderly” and wanted “nothing but a trench with a piece of canvas over it.” He stayed five days visiting with troops, inspecting the battlefield, talking with Bradley and the American corps and division commanders. None of them liked having Eisenhower around because their various headquarters were all subject to sporadic German artillery fire. Eisenhower’s old friend Lt. Gen. Wade Haislip, commanding the XV Corps, told him flatly to get out. “Don’t think I’m worrying about your possible demise,” he added. “I just don’t want it said that I allowed the Supreme Commander to get killed in my corps area. Now if you want to get killed, go into some other area.”

At one point Eisenhower commandeered a jeep and, accompanied by his British aide, Col. James Gault, and an orderly, with no other escort, personally drove around the countryside, and even managed to wander behind the German lines. No startling events occurred, and he did not know he had been in danger until he reached 90th Division headquarters and was told where he had been. The GIs were delighted to see Eisenhower driving the jeep and shouted and whistled as he drove past.

On July 4, Eisenhower went to a fighter airfield; while there, he learned that a mission was about to be flown. Eisenhower said he wanted to go along in order to see the hedgerow country from the air. Bradley, who was with him, demurred, but Eisenhower insisted. His last words, as he climbed into a Mustang, were, “All right, Brad, I am not going to fly to Berlin.”

When he got back to his headquarters, disappointed at the lack of progress in the hedgerows, despairing of ever breaking out in that awful country, British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder and Chief of Staff Walter Smith both told him that it was all Montgomery’s fault. They insisted that Eisenhower had to force him to act. Tedder complained that Montgomery was unjustly blaming the air forces for his own failure and said that “the Army did not seem prepared to fight its own battles.”

Eisenhower wrote a letter to Montgomery, but it was too weak-more a statement of desired objectives than a firm order-to impel action. On July 12, Patton commented in his diary, “Ike is bound hand and foot by the British and does not know it. Poor fool. We actually have no Supreme Commander-no one who can take hold and say that this shall be done and that shall not be done.” There was a general uneasy feeling around SHAEF that Eisenhower would never take hold of Montgomery. Gossips at SHAEF were speculating on “who would succeed Monty if sacked.” To Eisenhower, this simple solution was out of the question because of Montgomery’s popularity with the British troops, Brooke, and the British public.  Further, Eisenhower had no right to remove the senior British command. The Supreme Commander seems to have been the only man at SHAEF to recognize these obvious truths, and they provide the answer to the nagging question, Why did Eisenhower put up with Montgomery? He had no choice. He had to cooperate with the difficult and exasperating British general, for Montgomery’s place in the command structure was secure.

The real threat to Montgomery’s position was Tedder’s recommendation that Eisenhower move his headquarters to Normandy and take personal control of the land battle. Montgomery knew that he needed to buy time, not so much to protect his position as to keep Eisenhower in England so that he could run the land battle.

On July 18, Montgomery finally launched an attack, code name Goodwood. In its initial stages, assisted by the tremendous air bombardment, it went well. But after Montgomery lost 401 tanks and suffered 2,600 casualties, he called it off.  The British Second Army had taken Caen, gained a few square miles, and inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans, but there had been nothing like a breakthrough.  Montgomery announced that he was satisfied with the results.  Eisenhower was angry. He thundered that it had taken more than seven thousand tons of bombs to gain seven miles and that the Allies could hardly hope to go through France paying a price of a thousand tons of bombs per mile. Tedder blamed Montgomery for “the Army’s failure,” and SHAEF officers wondered aloud whether Montgomery should be made a peer and sent to the House of Lords or given the governorship of Malta.

This was all wild and irresponsible talk. After the war Eisenhower said he felt the powers of a supreme commander should be greater, that he should have the right to dismiss any subordinate, whatever his nationality. But even had Eisenhower had that power in 1944, he would not have exercised it. Sensitive to the morale factor and keenly aware of Montgomery’s great popularity, he would not consider asking for Montgomery’s removal.

At Smith’s and Tedder’s urging, Eisenhower sent a letter to Montgomery.”Time is vital,” he said, and he urged Montgomery to resume the attack. Many American officers thought that Montgomery hesitated because of the critical British manpower situation. The United Kingdom could no longer make good the losses in the Second Army, so it could not afford the cost in casualties of an all-out attack. Eisenhower argued that an attack now would save lives in the long run.  Everyone was depressed and irritable. After seven weeks of fighting, the deepest Allied penetrations were some twenty-five to thirty miles inland, on a front of only eighty miles, hardly enough room to maneuver or to bring in the American forces waiting in England for deployment. The Americans were still struggling in the hedgerow country, measuring their advance in yards rather than miles.  Goodwood had failed and Montgomery refused to mount another attack. The newspapers were full of the ugly word “stalemate.” There were two bright spots. Ultra radio intercepts revealed that the Germans were stretched to the limit, and Bradley was working on a plan, code name Cobra, to break out on the right. As Eisenhower noted in his letter to Montgomery, “Now we are pinning our hopes on Bradley.”

By July 23, the Americans had landed a total of 770,000 troops in Normandy.  First Army had suffered 73,000 casualties. The British and Canadians had landed 591,000 troops and suffered 49,000 casualties. There was a large, immediately available reserve of American divisions in England waiting to enter the battle.  The Germans in Normandy, meanwhile, had twenty-six divisions in place, six of them armored, to face the AEF’s thirty-four divisions. As the Allies were on the offensive, their superiority on the ground was only marginal; in addition, the German Fifteenth Army was still intact in the Pas de Calais, which meant that the German ability to reinforce was greater than that of the Allies.  Eisenhower’s great advantage continued to be control of the air. Bradley planned to use it in Operation Cobra to break through the German lines; once he was through, Eisenhower intended to rush divisions over from England, activate Patton’s Third Army, and send it racing for Brittany to open the ports there.  The problem with air power was weather; it was a weapon that could be used only under suitable conditions. Cobra was scheduled to begin on July 21. That day Eisenhower flew over to Normandy to witness the beginning. The sky was overcast and his B-25 was the only plane in the air. By the time he arrived it was raining hard. Bradley told him the attack had been called off and dressed him down for flying in such weather. Eisenhower tossed away his soggy cigarette, smiled, and said his only pleasure in being Supreme Commander was that nobody could ground him.

“When I die,” he added, looking at the steady rain, “they ought to hold my body for a rainy day and then bury me out in the middle of a storm. This damned weather is going to be the death of me yet.”

The next day, as the rains continued, he flew back to London; on the twenty-fourth, still waiting for a clear day, he wired Bradley, urging him to an all-out effort when the weather permitted. “A break through at this juncture will minimize the total cost,” he said, and added that he wanted First Army to “pursue every advantage with an ardor verging on recklessness.” If it broke through, “the results will be incalculable.”

Bradley hardly needed urging, but Montgomery did. Eisenhower wanted Second Army to attack when Cobra began-indeed he had promised Bradley he would see to it-so after sending his message to Bradley, Eisenhower flew to Montgomery’s headquarters. What he wanted, as Smith noted, was “an all-out co-ordinated attack by the entire Allied line, which would at last put our forces in decisive motion. He was up and down the line like a football coach, exhorting everyone to aggressive action.”

All this was highly irritating to Montgomery and Brooke. “It is quite clear that Ike considers that [General Miles] Dempsey [commanding Second Army] should be doing more than he does,” Brooke wrote to Montgomery. “It is equally clear that Ike has the very vaguest conception of war.” The British officers agreed that Eisenhower had no notion of balance. If everybody was to attack, Montgomery argued, nobody would have the strength to make a decisive breakthrough or to exploit it. Eisenhower “evidently . . . has some conception of attacking on the whole front,” Brooke complained, “which must be an American doctrine.” Tedder too was unhappy with Eisenhower, but as usual he disagreed with Montgomery and Brooke. Cobra got started on the morning of July 25; that day Tedder called Eisenhower on the telephone, demanding to know why Montgomery was not doing more and what Eisenhower was doing about it. Eisenhower said he had talked with Churchill and that they were satisfied that this time Montgomery’s attack would be in earnest. Tedder “rather uhhuhed, being not at all satisfied, and implying the PM must have sold Ike a bill of goods.” Eisenhower told his aide Capt. Harry Butcher of the conversation and said he thought he could work things out satisfactorily, for “there’s nothing so wrong a good victory won’t cure.”

To get that victory, to get through the hedgerows, junior officers in the tank units had been experimenting with various techniques and methods. One idea that worked was to bring to the front the specially equipped dozer tanks (tanks with a blade mounted on the front similar to those on commercial bulldozers) used on the beaches on D-Day. They could cut through a hedgerow well enough, but there were too few of them-four per division-to have much impact. A rush order back to the States for 278 bulldozer blades was put in, but it would take weeks to fill.  In the 747th Tank Battalion, attached to the 29th Division, someone-name unknown-suggested using demolitions to blow gaps in the hedgerows. After some experimenting the tankers discovered that two fifty-pound explosive charges laid against the bank would blow a hole in a hedgerow big enough for a Sherman tank to drive through. Once on the other side, the tank could fire its cannon into the far corners, using white phosphorous shells, guaranteed to burn out the Germans at the machine-gun pits, and hose down the hedgerow itself with its .50-caliber machine gun. Infantry could follow the tank into the field and mop up what remained when the tanker got done firing.  Good enough, excellent even. But when the planners turned to the logistics of getting the necessary explosives to the tanks, they discovered that each tank company would need seventeen tons of explosives to advance a mile and a half.  The explosives were not available in such quantities, and even had they been the transport problems involved in getting them to the front were too great.  An engineer suggested drilling holes in the embankment and placing smaller charges in them. That worked, too-except that it took forever to dig holes large enough and deep enough in the bank because of the vines and roots, and the men doing the digging were exposed to German mortar fire.  A tanker in the 747th suggested welding two pipes of four feet in length and six inches in diameter to the front of a tank, reinforced by angle irons. The tank could ram into the hedgerow and back off leaving two sizable holes for explosives. The engineers learned to pack their explosives into expended 105mm artillery shell casings, which greatly increased the efficiency of the charges and made transport and handling much easier. Some tankers discovered that if the pipes were bigger, sometimes that was enough to allow a Sherman to plow right on through, at least with the smaller hedgerows. Other experiments were going on all across Normandy. The U.S. First Army was starting to get a grip on the problem.

One major part of the problem, as the tankers saw it, was the Sherman tank. It was universally denounced by anyone who had to fight in one against a German Panther or Tiger. The Sherman was a thirty-two-ton tank; the Panther was forty-three tons; the Tiger was fifty-six tons. The Sherman’s 75mm cannon could not penetrate the heavy armor of the German tanks, while the Panther’s 75, and of course the Tiger’s 88, easily penetrated the Sherman. But one thing about the Shermans-there were a lot more of them than there were Panthers or Tigers. In 1944, German industry produced 24,630 tanks, only a handful of them Tigers. The British built 24,843. But the Americans turned out the staggering total of 88,410, mainly Shermans, and then managed to ship most of them to Europe, a few thousand to the Pacific.

For all their shortcomings, the Shermans were a triumph of American mass-production techniques. First of all, they were wonderfully reliable, in sharp contrast to the Panthers and Tigers. In addition, GIs were far more experienced in the workings of the internal combustion engine than were their opposite numbers. The Americans were also infinitely better at recovering damaged tanks and patching them up to go back into action; the Germans had nothing like the American maintenance battalions.  Indeed no army in the world had such a capability. Within two days of being put out of action by German shells, about half the damaged Shermans had been repaired by maintenance battalions and were back on the line. Kids who had been working at gas stations and body shops two years earlier had brought their mechanical skills to Normandy, where they replaced damaged tank tracks, welded patches on the armor, and repaired engines. Even the tanks beyond repair were dragged back to the maintenance depot by the Americans and stripped for parts.  The Germans just left theirs where they were.

The Red Army had its own tanks, the T-34s (American-designed, and perhaps the best tank of the war). What it needed was trucks. The American Lend-Lease program supplied thousands of Studebaker trucks (surely a capitalist plot!).  When the spark plugs clogged, as they quickly did on the dirt roads, the Russians just walked away from the trucks. The American armored division maintenance crews had men who worked day and night sand-blasting plugs. When they ran out of blasting sand they sent men to the beach to get more. It had to be dried and sifted before it could be used, but it did the job.  Nearly all this work was done as if the crews were back in the States, rebuilding damaged cars and trucks-that is, the men on the shop floor made their own decisions, got out their tools, and got after the job. One of their officers, Capt. Belton Cooper, commented, “I began to realize something about the American Army I had never thought possible before. Although it is highly regimented and bureaucratic under garrison conditions, when the Army gets in the field, it relaxes and the individual initiative comes forward and does what has to be done. This type of flexibility was one of the great strengths of the American Army in World War II.”