The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (31 page)

Now there was opposition. German artillery boomed. Panzerfaust shells disabled a couple of Shermans. The other Shermans could still fire, but not move. Their fuel tanks were empty. And the Germans had gotten into the Siegfried Line. They had fuel problems, too, but as they were on the defensive they could dig their tanks in and use them as fortified batteries. Their supply lines had grown shorter-Aachen was just to the south, Dusseldorf and Cologne were just to the east.

They had reached home. Men who saw no point to fighting to retain Hitler’s conquests in France were ready to fight to defend the homeland. The German officer corps began taking the terrified survivors of the rout in France and organizing them into squads, platoons, companies, battalions, divisions-and suddenly what had been a chaotic mob became an army again. Slave labor, meanwhile, worked on improving the neglected Siegfried Line. The Germans later called the transformation in their army and in the defensive works the Miracle of the West.

On August 19 Eisenhower told Montgomery and Bradley that it was his intention to take personal control of the land battle as soon as SHAEF could set up in France a forward command post with adequate communication facilities. He also outlined a plan of campaign that would send 21st Army Group northeast, toward Antwerp and the Ruhr, with 12th Army Group heading straight east from Paris toward Metz.  Now it was Montgomery’s turn for anger. On August 22 he sent his chief of staff, Freddie de Guingand, to see Eisenhower and protest against both decisions.  Montgomery argued that the quickest way to end the war was to hold Patton in Paris, give control of U.S. First Army and all incoming supplies to 21st Army Group, and send it to Antwerp and beyond to the Ruhr.  This force had to operate as a single unit under single control, which was “a WHOLE TIME job for one man.” Montgomery warned that “to change the system of command now, after having won a great victory, would be to prolong the war.” De Guingand pressed these points in a two-hour meeting with Eisenhower, but Eisenhower refused to change his mind. Montgomery then invited Eisenhower to come to his tactical headquarters at Conde for lunch the next day, August 23, to discuss future operations.

Eisenhower drove to Conde for the meeting. His chief of staff, Walter Smith, was with him, but when they arrived Montgomery abruptly announced that he wanted to see Eisenhower alone and thus Smith would have to stay outside. Eisenhower meekly accepted Montgomery’s really quite insulting demand that Smith be locked out, even though de Guingand was with Montgomery.  Once inside the trailer, Montgomery tried his best to be tactful, but his idea of tact was to deliver a patronizing lecture on elementary strategy that a Sandhurst or West Point cadet would have found insulting. Standing before the map, his feet spread, hands behind his back, head up, eyes darting about, Montgomery outlined the situation, said the immediate need was for a firm plan, discussed logistics, told Eisenhower what the plans should be (a single thrust to the Ruhr by 21st Army Group, with First Army in support), declared that if Eisenhower’s plan was followed the result would be failure, and told Eisenhower that he “should not descend into the land battle and become a ground C-in-C.” He said that the Supreme Commander “must sit on a very lofty perch in order to be able to take a detached view of the whole intricate problem” and that someone must run the land battle for him. Eisenhower replied that he would not change his mind and intended to take control on September 1.  Unable to move Eisenhower on the question of command, Montgomery shifted to the real issue, the nature of the advance into Germany. He wanted Patton stopped where he was; he wanted the Airborne Army and First Army assigned to him; he wanted all available supplies; he wanted a directive that would send him through the Pas de Calais, on to Antwerp and Brussels, and beyond to the Ruhr.  Eisenhower, after an hour’s argument, made some concessions, of which the most important were to give Montgomery control of the Airborne Army and the “authority to effect the necessary operational coordination” between the right flank of 21st Army Group and Bradley’s left (i.e., First Army). In addition, 21st Army Group would have “priority” in supplies. Still, Eisenhower insisted, to Montgomery’s dissatisfaction, “on building up . . . the necessary strength to advance eastward from Paris toward Metz.” After the meeting Montgomery reported to Brooke that “it has been a very exhausting day,” but overall he was pleased, as he felt he had won the main points, “operational control” over the Airborne and the First Armies, plus priority in supplies.  Eisenhower’s attempt to appease Montgomery made both Bradley and Patton furious.  The two American generals met; Patton recorded in his diary that Bradley “feels that Ike won’t go against Monty . . . Bradley was madder than I have ever seen him and wondered aloud ‘what the Supreme Commander amounted to.’ “ Patton felt that the southern advance offered much better tank terrain than the water-logged country to the north, but noted in disgust that Montgomery “has some way of talking Ike into his own way of thinking.” He suggested to Bradley that they threaten to resign. “I feel that in such a showdown we would win, as Ike would not dare to relieve us.”

Bradley would not go so far, but he did spend two days with Eisenhower, arguing against giving First Army to Montgomery. Tedder agreed with Bradley, as did Eisenhower’s operations officer (G-3), Maj. Gen. Harold Bull, and his G-2, Gen.  Kenneth Strong. Eisenhower yielded to their pressure. When he issued his directive, on August 29, he did not give operational control of First Army to Montgomery; instead, Montgomery was only “authorized to effect”-through Bradley-“any necessary coordination between his own forces” and First Army. That decision, and its sequel, strengthened Montgomery’s and Brooke’s-and Bradley’s and Patton’s-conviction that Eisenhower always agreed with the last man he talked to.

It was a most serious charge, but a bit off the mark. Montgomery tended to hear what he wanted to hear, read what he wanted to read; Eisenhower tended to seek out words or phrases that would appease. There was, consequently, a consistent misunderstanding between the two men. Nevertheless, Eisenhower never yielded on the two main points, command and single thrust, not in August and September 1944, nor again when they were raised in January and March 1945. He took-and kept-control of the land battle, just as he said he would. And he never wavered, from the moment he first saw the SHAEF plans for a two-front advance into Germany to the last month of the war, on the question of the so-called broad front.

He did waver, sometimes badly, on some important issues, primarily the relative importance of Arnhem and Antwerp, and the meaning of the word “priority.” But he never told Montgomery anything that a reasonable man could have construed as a promise that Patton would be stopped in Paris and 21st Army Group be sent on to Berlin. Nor did he ever encourage Patton to believe that he would be sent to Berlin alone. He always insisted on invading Germany from both north and south of the Ardennes.

His reasons were manifold. His analysis of German morale and geography played a large role. Even after the Allies got through the West Wall, there was still a major barrier between them and the German heartland, the Rhine River. A single thrust, especially beyond the Rhine, would be subject to counterattacks on the flanks. Eisenhower believed that the counterattacks might be powerful enough to sever the supply lines and then destroy the leading armies. Currently, with the Allies’ limited port capacity, the Allies could not bring forward adequate supplies to sustain an army beyond the Rhine. Every mile that the advancing troops moved away from the Normandy ports added to the problems. For example, forward airfields had to be constructed to provide fighter support for the troops. But to construct them it was necessary to move engineers and building materials forward at the expense of weapons and gasoline. One senior engineer involved pointed out that if Patton had gone across the Rhine in September, he would have done so without any logistical or air support at all. “A good task force of panzerfaust, manned by Hitler Youth, could have finished them off before they reached Kassel.”

As for 21st Army Group, de Guingand pointed out that when (and if ) it reached the Rhine, bridging material would have to be brought forward, at the expense of other supplies. Like Eisenhower, de Guingand doubted that there would be a collapse of German morale; he expected the enemy to fight to the bitter end.  As, of course, the Germans did; it took the combined efforts of 160 Russian divisionsand the entire AEFand Gen. Harold Alexander’s Italian offensiveand eight additional months of devastating air attack to force a German capitulation. After the war de Guingand remarked, a bit dryly, that he had to doubt that Montgomery could have brought about the same result with 21st Army Group alone. “My conclusion, is, therefore,” de Guingand wrote, “that Eisenhower was right.”

The personality and political factors in Eisenhower’s decision are obvious:

Patton pulling one way, Montgomery the other; each man insistent; each certain of his own military genius; each accustomed to having his own way. Behind them, there were the adulating publics, who had made Patton and Montgomery into symbols of their nation’s military prowess. In Eisenhower’s view, to give one or the other the glory would have serious repercussions, not just the howls of agony from the press and public of the nation left behind, but in the very fabric of the Alliance itself. Eisenhower feared it could not survive the resulting uproar. It was too big a chance to take, especially on such a risky operation. Eisenhower never considered taking it.  Montgomery and Patton showed no appreciation of the pressures on Eisenhower when they argued so persistently for their plans, but then Eisenhower’s worries were not their responsibility. Montgomery wanted a quick end to the war, he wanted the British to bring it about, and he wanted to lead the charge into Berlin personally. Patton would have given anything to beat him to it. Had Eisenhower been in their positions, he almost surely would have felt as they did, and he wanted his subordinates to be aggressive and to believe in themselves and their troops.

Eisenhower’s great weakness in this situation was not that he wavered on the broad-front question, but rather his eagerness to be well liked, coupled with his desire to keep everyone happy. Because of these characteristics, he would not end a meeting until at least verbal agreement had been found. Thus he appeared to be always shifting, “inclining first one way, then the other,” according to the views and wishes of the last man with whom he had talked.  Eisenhower, as Brooke put it, seemed to be “an arbiter balancing the requirements of competing allies and subordinates rather than a master of the field making a decisive choice.” Everyone who talked to him left the meeting feeling that Eisenhower had agreed with him, only to find out later that he had not. Thus Montgomery, Bradley, and Patton filled their diaries and letters and conversations with denunciations of Eisenhower (Bradley less so than the others).

The real price that had to be paid for Eisenhower’s desire to be well liked was not, however, animosity toward him from Montgomery and Patton. It was, rather, on the battlefield. In his attempts to appease Montgomery and Patton, Eisenhower gave them great tactical leeway, to the point of allowing them to choose their own objectives. The result was one of the great mistakes of the war, the failure to take and open Antwerp promptly, which represented the only real chance the Allies had to end the war in 1944. The man both immediately and ultimately responsible for that failure was Eisenhower.

From the Rhône to the Channel, the armies of the AEF were coming to a halt. On September 2, Third Army requested 750,000 gallons of gasoline and got 25,390.  The next day, it was 590,000 with 49,930 received. For the following two days Patton got about half the quantity he demanded; after September 7 he got a trickle only. A handful of advance patrols had gotten across the Moselle River north and south of Nancy, but Third Army was caught up in a terrible battle for the ancient fortresses of Metz, which were practically impervious to artillery shells or bombs. Patton’s men were still far short of the Rhine River and the Siegfried Line protecting it.

On September 12 the 4th Division, First Army, to the north, managed to get through the Siegfried Line. Lt. George Wilson led a reconnaissance platoon into the defenses. He saw a German soldier emerge from a mound of earth not a hundred meters away. “I got a slight chill as I realized I might well be the first American to set eyes on a pillbox in the famous Siegfried Line.” He was east of St.-Vith in the Ardennes.

13 -    At the German Border

CAPT. JOSEPH DAWSON, G Company, 16th Infantry, 1st Division, had been the first company commander to get his men up the bluff at Omaha on D-Day. By mid-September he had been in battle for a hundred days. He had learned to fight in the hedgerows, how to work with tanks and planes in the attack on St.-Lo, how to pursue a defeated enemy in the dash across France. He was thirty-one years old, son of a Waco, Texas, Baptist preacher. He had lost twenty-five pounds off his already thin six-foot-two-inch frame.

On September 14 Dawson led his company into the border town of Eilendorf, southeast of Aachen. Although it was inside the Siegfried Line, the town was deserted, the fortifications unoccupied. The town was on a ridge, 300 meters high, 130 meters long, which gave it excellent observation to the east and north. Dawson’s company was on the far side of a railroad embankment that divided the town, with access only through a tunnel under the railroad. Dawson had his men dig in and mount outposts. The expected German counterattack came after midnight and was repulsed.

In the morning Dawson looked east. He could see Germans moving up in the woods in one direction, in an orchard in another, and digging in. In the afternoon a shelling from artillery and mortars hit G Company, followed by a two-company attack. “The intensity of the attack carried the enemy into my positions,” Dawson later told reporter W. C. Heinz of the New York Sun . “I lost men. They weren’t wounded. They weren’t taken prisoners. They were killed. But we piled up the Krauts.”