6

A Bridge Too Far

THE STRUGGLE FOR Aachen merged, somewhat inevitably, into a second battle, to control a nearby stretch of dense woodland to the south, the Hürtgen Forest (Hürtgenwald). Even while Aachen was besieged, the GIs of Major-General Lewis A. Craig’s US 9th Infantry Division first entered the woods on 20 September, determined to prevent their opponents from reinforcing Aachen, less than ten miles to the north. Part of the Westwall ran through the fifty-square-mile forest, and German troops defended this part of their frontier with as much determination and skill as did their comrades the streets of Aachen. American tactics overlooked the difficulties of effective artillery and air support in the dense woodland, with narrow and muddy logging trails slowing any advance to a crawl in appalling autumnal weather.

Technical Sergeant George Morgan of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment of US 4th Division, summed up the Hürtgen: ‘The forest was a helluva eerie place to fight. You can’t get protection. You can’t see. You can’t get fields of fire. Artillery slashes the trees like a scythe. Everything is tangled. You can scarcely walk. Everybody is cold and wet, and the mixture of cold rain and sleet keeps falling. They jump off [i.e. attack] again, and soon there is only a handful of the old men left.’¹ Another soldier wrote of the area in similar vein: ‘Once-proud trees were in ruin; blackened stumps remained where great wooded giants had stood. There were no birds, no sighing winds, no carpeted paths. There was desolation such as one associated with the 1864 Battle of the wilderness. An American general who had fought through one of the battles in the forest offered $5 for every tree his men could find unmarked by shelling and got no takers.’² Both men might have been describing the Ardennes just a few weeks later.

The Hürtgenwald became a mincing machine for several US and German divisions and the campaign was associated with its very cold and damp weather, and an excessively high number of non-battle casualties caused by pneumonia, trench foot and frostbite. German soldiers in possession of the Russian campaign medal (christened the Gefrierfleischordnung, ‘Order of the Frozen Meat’) had already learned how to cope with such conditions, wearing their jackboots one size too large, lining the gap with straw or newspaper and wrapping their feet in foot-rags rather than socks, to keep their feet dry. Consequently trench foot, which often resulted in the loss of toes, and caused more casualties than bullets in the winter months among US forces, was hardly known in the Wehrmacht.³

Leutnant Günther Schmidt of the 272nd Volksgrenadier Division was the only officer left in his battalion after the battles in Normandy, who fought through the Hürtgen before getting sucked into the Ardennes. The experience of his battalion marching to the front for the first time must speak for countless other units of Volksgrenadiers about to engage in their first combat.

Shortly thereafter enemy planes appeared and threatened the whole area. Our companies were marching in a long stretched column … In the distance we could hear the rumbling of the front very clearly. After marching for a while, we recognized the explosion of every single shell. No one knew what was going to come the next day, and the men were in a depressed and quiet mood. Once in a while we met [German] civilians [from the Eifel area] with all their belongings, some with horse-drawn carts, handcarts and even with baby carriages or bags and backpacks for their most important things only. Their faces expressed what they had to live through, having to leave their home and belongings. The ‘front-thunder’ was coming closer; we could hear the bursting menace of the exploding shells. Our tension grew when the front came closer. I marched with our commander, Hauptmann Schneider, at the lead of the battalion. At the crossroads at Brück I stopped a truck to ask for the road to Harscheidt. When the truck drove on, I saw what it had loaded. The legs and boots of about twenty dead soldiers could be seen under the canvas. Some officers’ boots were among them also.⁴

In many ways, the Hürtgen was a dress rehearsal for both sides in the Ardennes, as the impenetrable forest limited the use of tracked weapons and wheeled transport due to the difficult roads and fuel shortages; casualties were magnified by artillery fire showering troops with deadly wood splinters as well as shrapnel, foxholes were difficult to dig in the root-strewn, boggy woodland, while mortars and guns were challenging to deploy, needing stable firing platforms and clearings, of which there were few. After the war, the Seventh Army’s chief of staff, Generalmajor Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff (who had managed to keep secret his involvement with the Stauffenberg plot) was moved to observe, ‘I have engaged in the long campaigns in Russia as well as other fronts and I believe the fighting in the Hürtgen was the heaviest I have ever witnessed.’⁵

The Hürtgen today remains littered with former foxholes, shell craters, even the odd tank track, while rotting military capes and ponchos are commonplace, found underfoot, tangled among the rusting shrapnel and the pine needles.

The Germans managed to contain their opponents, for the Hürtgen lay on the northern flank of the Ardennes start lines and was an assembly area for the attacking troops. American objectives in the forest remained unfulfilled when the Bulge attack began, bringing all offensive action to a close. Essentially both sides had fought each other to a standstill with a combined total of just over 60,000 casualties in this unforgiving battle, the longest fought by US troops in Europe. In the event, whatever lessons were learned in the Hürtgen were not passed on, because the Ardennes followed immediately, and there was no time for any formal, post-battle analysis.

As American troops had been trespassing on German soil since 11 September, the fighting in Aachen prompted Hitler into another move, reflecting the danger to his Reich. On 18 October, he ordered the raising of a national people’s militia, the Volkssturm, requiring all males between sixteen and sixty not already serving in the armed forces to undertake basic weapon handling. Under Himmler’s command while training and Wehrmacht control when in combat, it drew on the traditions of the old Landsturm which had contested Prussian terrain with Napoleonic troops in the early nineteenth century – and was scarcely better equipped. These poor militiamen, who carried a motley assortment of museum exhibits for weapons and an armband for uniform, were gathered into battalions of 300–400 each, and frequently sucked into pointless battles in the last months of the war. The Volkssturm did not feature in the Ardennes, but their relevance was that in this border region, US troops regarded all civilians as potential fifth columnists, spies and Volkssturm loyalists.

It was in late August 1944 that Montgomery had first started to lobby Eisenhower to turn over to him the bulk of matériel and allow his Twenty-First Army Group, with American support, to thrust quickly into the Ruhr, capturing the Reich’s main supply of coal, iron and steel. This, in turn, Monty argued, would open the road to Berlin, and might end the war by Christmas. The RAF had earlier attacked the region’s synthetic oil, coke and steel plants. During March to July 1943, targets like Krupp’s armament works at Essen, Nordstern’s synthetic-oil plant at Gelsenkirchen, and Rheinmetal’s factory in Düsseldorf had all been hit, at a cost of 872 bombers and 5,000 aircrew. The famous Dam Busters raid of 17 May 1943 was part of this wider campaign. In consequence, the Reich had learned to disperse its war-manufacturing capabilities, and Speer’s Organisation Todt had been mobilised to repair buildings and machinery within hours.

Speer’s workforce, often abbreviated to OT, was the Reich’s civil engineering organisation, named after its founder, Fritz Todt. Speer succeeded Todt in February 1942 after the latter’s death in a plane crash, and by 1944 he was administering around 1.4 million labourers, mostly prisoners of war and conscript workers from occupied countries, all of whom were treated as slaves. Under Speer, and despite Allied bombing raids, the production of weapons had risen, not declined. There is no doubt that the Ruhr was still the key manufacturing centre for the Reich in late 1944, though not the only one, and its main population centre. The Allies assessed that its loss would trigger a total collapse within ninety days.

Montgomery’s rival, George S. Patton, who saw himself as waving the banner of US military prowess, was also advocating a thrust into Germany through the Saar, but using his Third Army as the engine of destruction. This was notwithstanding the tough fight he had on his hands at the time, subduing the fortress city of Metz, where of all units the 19th Volksgrenadier Division gave a very good account of themselves. Some of their number were officer cadets who, according to a contemporary Reuters report, ‘fought the way only fresh SS units would … Hardly any prisoners were taken, and the few who were captured would thrash about and bite.’⁶ Nevertheless, this was an incredible waste of tactical leaders, for these were former veteran NCOs promoted to second lieutenant days before and sent into combat as officer-only companies. Their sacrifices bought much-needed time for Hitler, however, as Metz resisted until eventually taken on 22 November.

This forced Eisenhower to acknowledge in his 9 September report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that although the Germans had appeared close to collapse in recent weeks, resistance had become ‘somewhat stiffer’.⁷ Eisenhower was uneasy, favouring a wide front, to engage the Wehrmacht in all places and prevent it from concentrating in a single area. This also dispersed his own forces, but had the merit of keeping each of his various Allies and their armies occupied. He was, after all, fighting a coalition war and had to recognise the necessity of liberating Allied countries like France, Belgium and Holland, and accordingly held to the ‘broad front’ strategy agreed to before the Normandy landings. The Supreme Commander thus rejected Monty’s proposals as often as the latter presented them. To a certain extent, too, Eisenhower was under pressure from Roosevelt to deliver results quickly. The latter was running for a fourth term in office, and though likely to win in the 7 November elections, he knew that any American battlefield successes in Europe would assist his political campaign.⁸

Eisenhower, who turned fifty-four in October 1944, was hesitant about indulging his two army group commanders, Montgomery and Badley, and allowing either to pursue their own agendas. His own Achilles heel was his personal lack of experience in combat, so he tended to lead by consensus and compromise, aware that, almost without exception, his military and political contemporaries from all nations had seen action in both the First World War and the early years of the Second – even the future President Truman, an unlikely military figure, had seen active service in France between 1917 and 1919 with the Missouri National Guard.

Eisenhower’s military credentials are relevant to the Bulge story. He was commissioned into the infantry from the West Point Class of 1915, famous for producing fifty-nine generals out of 164 graduates, including Omar Bradley, but ‘Ike’, as he was universally known, narrowly missed being posted overseas. His aptitude for staff work was demonstrated in 1926, when he graduated first out of 275 at the US Army’s Command and General Staff School, Fort Leavenworth, and again in 1928, when he attended the Army War College. He drew his own conclusions about the First World War in 1929, when as a major he was attached to the American Battle Monuments Commission, and helped write A Guide to the American Battle Fields in Europe. The Guide was as close to that war as he got, but he was able to make sense of it. He saw particularly the need for a resolute political coalition, overwhelming superiority in men and matériel, and thorough training.

Lieutenant-Colonel Eisenhower’s career changed course when he attracted the patronage of the US Army’s chief of staff, George C. Marshall, in late 1941. After Pearl Harbor, he was appointed brigadier-general to head the Army War Plans Division, and later, as major-general, of the Operations Division in Washington, DC. This concept of a professional staff officer remains anathema to the British, who intersperse staff work with regimental duty – the Germans followed more closely the US model. In June 1942, Marshall promoted him over 366 senior officers to be commander of US troops in Europe, a move which was more than justified but unthinkable in some other armies.

That it worked was due to Eisenhower’s personal charm and tact, where a lesser man would have excited envy or bitterness. This personal quality, his superb inner confidence, as well as Marshall’s patronage, are surely the keys to Ike’s success. He was the ultimate ‘team player’, able to reconcile different national interests, as well as being a first-class staff officer. Promoted lieutenant-general in November 1942 to command the Operation Torch landings in French North Africa, the US defeat at Kasserine Pass, Tunisia, in February 1943 might have destroyed a lesser man and was, effectively, his first command in war. With necessary ruthlessness, Ike sacked his II Corps commander, replacing him with George Patton.

From his experience of overseeing the landings on Sicily and at Salerno, it is not difficult to see why Eisenhower was appointed to lead SHAEF and the Normandy invasion – though still only a substantive lieutenant-colonel.⁹ Crucially, he had the support of military contemporaries and the backing of his political masters.One of Montgomery’s first meetings with Ike came in March 1943, and the former confided to Brooke: ‘Eisenhower came and stayed a night with me on 31 March. He is a very nice chap. I should say he is probably quite good on the political side. But I can also say, quite definitely, that he knows nothing whatever about how to make war or to fight battles; he should be kept away from all that business if we want to win this war. The American Army will never be any good until we can teach the generals their stuff.’¹⁰ Eisenhower reported back to Marshall of the same encounter that Montgomery was ‘excessively cautions’.

Though Ike was never privy to Monty’s letter, it illustrated the fundamental friction between the pair, never resolved, and at times he found himself as much keeping the peace between Montgomery, Patton and Bradley as fighting the Germans, which is precisely why he had been selected as Supreme Commander – to manage his team, all of whom were brilliant in their own ways.

Eisenhower’s equipment losses were rising, not just from combat but from wear and tear. Major-General Maurice Rose on 18 September reported that his US 3rd Armored Division had but seventy Shermans fit for battle (his authorised strength of these handy tanks was 232).¹¹ At the same time, Ike was equally conscious of his own casualties and reluctant to allow subordinates to risk soldiers’ lives for narrow-front, prestige objectives. He had watched his US battle losses per month in Europe climb from 39,367 in June to 51,424 during July, dip slightly between August and October, then reach 62,437 by the end of November. Approximately one in four of these were killed, the rest being wounded, posted missing or captured.¹²

British and Canadian monthly casualties in Twenty-First Army Group had risen dramatically, from 24,464 in June, to 26,075 over July and 26,776 at the close of November, and Monty had already been forced to disband two infantry divisions (50th and 59th), and re-role their anti-artillery and pioneers as infantry, because he had run so short of manpower.¹³ For this reason, Monty kept back eight armoured brigades (1,400 tanks), six artillery brigades (700 guns) and six Royal Engineer groups, to provide a reserve of firepower equivalent to six additional divisions. He knew he was likely to run short of manpower, so was prepared to use firepower to compensate for the lack of men. Monty’s ‘metal not flesh’ approach was also to offset personal fears associated with the 1914–18 casualties he and his British-Canadian contemporaries had witnessed, but it laid him open to accusations of ‘excessive caution’ from US Army leaders, who had experienced fewer months of First World War combat. By November 1944 these various losses, mostly borne by the infantry, had exceeded the estimated casualty bills for these months; both Marshall and Brooke warned Eisenhower there was no infinite pool of manpower, and that Japan would need to be subdued after Germany.

Ike was cautious too. Although Berlin had been listed as the military goal of the Western Powers in a pre-D-Day plan of May 1944, by mid-September, when Soviet forces had reached Warsaw, he no longer saw the capital city of the Reich as a vital western target. He knew that Roosevelt and Churchill had already agreed (to be confirmed at Yalta) that areas of eastern Germany, including Berlin, would fall under Russian influence, and saw no point in spilling blood to win territory, only to hand it over to the Soviets at the war’s end. To him, it was more important to capture the industrial heartlands of the Ruhr and Saar, than Germany’s capital city. The Western Allies’ advance needed to be coordinated with Russia, he felt, and, possibly reluctant to provoke Stalin, Eisenhower wisely insisted on sticking to his broad-front concept.

Monty not only wanted to lead a spearhead towards Berlin, but felt that someone, preferably himself, should be appointed as overall land commander. On the latter issue, Monty was doctrinally correct. Eisenhower reigned over the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), enacting Anglo-US policy given to him by Roosevelt and Churchill via Marshall and Brooke. He had a British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, and under them were the three army group commanders: Monty of the Twenty-First, the Twelfth under Bradley and Jacob L. Devers’ Sixth Army Group, which was activated on 15 September.

By the time of the Bulge, the manpower involved was phenomenal – nearly three million men. At the end of August, Eisenhower had some 1,017,817 US Army personnel in Europe, which had increased to 1,353,079 a month later, and risen to 1,921,481 at the close of November. In the same month, British and Canadian forces in Europe had reached 925,664.¹⁴ Monty was right in advocating that all the land forces, together with the air and maritime components, needed further coordination under a single operational commander. He was wrong in suggesting it should be him. Apart from his abrasive personality, an overall commander would have to represent the nation fielding the most troops and resources, and incurring the most casualties.

If such an appointment was to be made, it could not, therefore, be the British Bernard Law Montgomery, inconveniently appointed to the five-star rank of field marshal on 1 September 1944, when Eisenhower, his boss, remained a four-star general. (There was actually no American five-star rank until Congress created one in December 1944 for Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Arnold.) Without doubt, strategy suffered, and land operations were not sufficiently coordinated – because Eisenhower and Tedder spent their time talking up to their political masters, not down to their operational subordinates. Because prime ministers and presidents will always require extensive attention and mollification, there existed in 1944 a theoretical gap in the Allied command chain, which we would recognise today in the lack of a Combined Joint Task Force Commander, meaning an individual and his staff directing multinational, tri-service military operations below Eisenhower’s quasi-political level. However, the need was not understood or identified in 1944–5.

Ironically, in their Oberbefehlshaber West (OB West), the Germans created exactly the kind of appointment after which Montgomery was hankering. Although the title Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces in the West implied the sort of power about which Monty dreamed, as we’ve seen earlier inter-service rivalries and Hitler had systematically stripped the position of whatever effective power it may ever have possessed, so that Rundstedt, who held the post at the time of the Ardennes, used to joke that the only troops over whom he had authority were those who mounted guard outside his gates.

Notwithstanding the strategy and doctrine debates, the Allies had also run out of steam by late August. Reaching the German frontier so fast meant they had outrun their supplies: for example, units had no adequate maps of the terrain ahead as map-printing trucks, run by army engineers, were too far behind, working to a timetable devised before Normandy and long since overtaken by events. According to the original plan, twelve US divisions were expected to have reached the Seine by 4 September, but on that date sixteen US divisions had already raced 150 miles beyond.¹⁵ By the end of August, Eisenhower’s advance had begun to slow for lack of fuel, ammunition, and in fact – everything. On 2 September, two of Hodges’ corps, V Corps and XIX Corps, were forced to halt, the latter over four days, for want of a range of supplies. Precisely the same reason forced Second British Army’s commander, General Sir Miles Dempsey, to immobilise his VIII Corps on the Seine for two weeks.

All logistical needs to Montgomery, Patton’s Third Army on the Moselle and Hodges’ First at Aachen had to be relayed from the artificial harbour at Arromanches and beaches of Normandy, there being no other large port and docking facilities captured and operable. Patton and Hodges at this time were receiving around 3,500 tons each daily, about half their actual needs.¹⁶ This was a self-inflicted problem, as neither Eisenhower nor Montgomery had focused serious attention on developing the port of Antwerp, captured intact on 4 September, as a new logistical hub for the advance. This would have acted as a radical transfusion to the Allies’ ability to pursue the Wehrmacht into and through Germany in September 1944. Although the southern French ports of Marseilles and Toulon surrendered on 28 August, both had been sabotaged and the former was only able to receive shipping on 15 September. Accordingly, as each of his divisions required 700–750 tons of supplies every day, Eisenhower had to shift focus to the unglamorous world of logistics and concentrate much of the available American trucking capacity.

The vehicles (nearly 6,000 of them), impounded swiftly from any and every US unit, constituted the ‘Red Ball Express’, which in three months delivered over 412,000 tons of ammunition, food and fuel along a series of one-way major roads from which all other traffic was barred. The whole logistics scheme was a superb improvisation, conceived in a thirty-six-hour brainstorming session. Initially, there were not enough drivers and provisional truck companies were formed of rear-echelon troops who were asked, or ordered, to crew them. Vehicles were identified by painted twelve-inch red discs, hence the name, and operated from 25 August until 16 November. At its peak 132 US transportation companies were operating 24/7, averaging 12,500 tons of supplies ferried by 900 lorries with two-wheeled trailers every day.

This took a heavy toll on men (75 per cent of whom were African Americans) and vehicles, with many accidents caused by poorly maintained trucks and exhausted drivers: Patton’s Third Army was 350 miles away and Hodges’ First nearly 400, necessitating a round trip of about fifty-four hours, regardless of weather. Master Sergeant David Malachowsky remembered that the ability to drive was secondary. ‘All of us assigned on the Red Ball detail had been in some kind of hassle with the officers … I had an argument with the Major two days before the list was posted. We saw the list on the bulletin board, moved out in a truck within one hour and were at Omaha Beach by 02:00–03:00 a.m. We divided up by twos, and mounted up … directions were posted on the dashboard … Only 5 of the 15 men on the detail list were from the Motor Pool. The rest were litter bearers, corpsmen, even a dental technician.’

Operating between 25 August and 16 November 1944, the Red Ball Express eased the Allies’ embarrassing logistics shortages and provided a useful rehearsal for moving huge quantities of supplies at very short notice. In December this expertise was used to send everything needed to repel the Germans from the Bulge. Immediately the Ardennes sector was attacked, semi-trailers and these GMC 2½. ton 6 × 6 trucks were filled with men, who were conveyed, standing up, to the front. (NARA)

In October, Eisenhower wrote them a grateful Order of the Day, concluding, ‘To you drivers and mechanics and your officers, who keep the Red Ball vehicles constantly moving, I wish to express my deep appreciation. You are doing an excellent job, but the struggle is not yet won. So the Red Ball Line must continue the battle it is waging so well, with the knowledge that each truckload which goes through to the combat forces cannot help but bring victory closer.’¹⁷

The Red Ball was possible only because of America’s stupendous manufacturing capability. In 1939 the US Quartermaster Corps had standardised its design for a medium 2½-ton 6 × 6 medium truck and by 1940 had tested and approved the prototype submitted by General Motors Corporation (GMC). Civilian vehicle manufacture was banned in the US from June 1942, enabling the production of more than 800,000 2½-ton 6 × 6 trucks during the war, some by Studebaker and International Harvester – who in peacetime made cars and agricultural tractors – but a staggering total of 562,750 by GMC, in Pontiac, Michigan, leading to their inevitable nicknames of ‘Jimmies’.¹⁸ By contrast, the Germans never standardised, relying on a huge variety of captured vehicle stocks (a maintenance nightmare) and the Opel Blitz 2½-ton truck, of which perhaps 90,000 examples were produced – but hampered, of course, by their lack of fuel.

Major efforts to reopen the French rail network were also begun, and by the end of August 18,000 men, including 5,000 German prisoners, were engaged in railway repair, the first trains reaching Third Army’s rail depot at Le Mans on 17 August. Yet everything still needed to be trucked forward from this railhead, and, to free up transport, Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group took a calculated risk in unhitching much of their heavy artillery, freeing additional vehicles and drivers for logistical use. Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group likewise stripped two divisions of their lorries, loaning four British truck companies to US forces. A lack of spare parts such as vehicle tyres and tank tracks, of which there were almost none left in France by October, further threatened to halt Eisenhower’s forces.¹⁹

Fuel was the chief bugbear and pipelines under the Channel and overland in France were constructed to shorten supply distances, but these took time to build and commission, and could not solve the short-term issue. To keep rolling, infantry divisions – reflecting their generous allocation of vehicles – needed a daily assignment of 150 tons of gasoline, but the thirstier armoured divisions required 350 tons per day. Fuel was supplied for use in five-gallon jerrycans, named after its German original, of which twenty-one million had been issued in Europe alone by 1945. Thus, of all supplies landed in France, fuel comprised around 25 per cent. This did not alleviate the sudden shortage, which became so acute that on 28 August both the US First and Third Armies reported less than a day’s worth of fuel in hand for their needs. These two formations had each consumed around 400,000 gallons of fuel per day in their race across France to the German frontier, while the Red Ball Express itself used another 300,000 gallons a day, just trucking supplies to the front.

The shortage was so dire in September that the US 492nd Bomb Group, based at Harrington, a secluded airbase in rural Northamptonshire, was also tasked to airlift fuel forward to Third Army. A Special Operations force nicknamed the ‘Carpetbaggers’, the Group specialised in the delivery of supplies, agents and propaganda leaflets over occupied Europe, using highly modified, black-painted, B-24 Liberators. After working non-stop to convert their B-24s into flying fuel bowsers, between 21 and 30 September 1944, up to sixty aircraft a day, each carrying 2,000 gallons of fuel, lumbered into the air at Harrington to make the five-hour trip. In ten days they shifted nearly a million gallons of gasoline to three separate airfields in France and Belgium.²⁰ This illustrated that the Allies controlled the skies sufficiently to risk sending aircraft laden with fuel close to the combat zone, and also how far air transport had come of age by 1944.

By tonnage, artillery ammunition comprised the largest percentage of trucked logistics: in operations around Aachen, US First Army fired 300,000 rounds of 105mm shells (or two Liberty shiploads), and this in a month when their activities were constrained by a shortfall of ammunition. Firepower grew to First World War proportions, with six million shells and two million mortar rounds fired in October. Some historians have alleged that ‘winter clothing was sacrificed to make more room for gas and ammunition’, but this is nonsense – winter clothing was not ordered or requested from the US because the Allies expected a victory before the winter of 1944–5 arrived. The general supply famine was no one’s fault, just a symptom of the original pre-Normandy plan which envisaged a different rate of advance. Unfortunately for the Allies it coincided precisely with the three-week period of late August to early September when Germany was open for the taking.

In September, as increasing numbers of tanks, trucks and aircraft were laid up for maintenance, Eisenhower’s chief logistician, Major-General John C. H. Lee, estimated that 100,000 tons of replacement equipment were needed to re-equip the Allied armies and create a small reserve. The Bible-punching Lee was a vital figure to the sustainment of the battle through France and beyond, as chief logistician and commander of the Communications Zone (known as COM-Z, the area behind the combat zone stretching to the coast), but was his own worst enemy. His imperious manner, ‘heavy on ceremony, somewhat forbidding in manner and appearance, and occasionally tactless’, set him against many of the front-line commanders he was meant to assist, who referred to him, after his initials, as ‘Jesus Christ Himself’ Lee.

Even the US Official Historian was forced to admit that the fifty-seven-year-old general ‘often aroused suspicions and created opposition’. However, Lee was perceptive enough to realise that US segregation policy against African American troops fighting in combat arms deprived the army of much-needed personnel. In December 1944 he appealed to these troops, hitherto confined to driving the Red Ball trucks, to volunteer for assignment ‘without regard to color or race to the units where assistance is most needed, [to] give you the opportunity of fighting shoulder to shoulder to bring about victory’. Eventually, 2,253 black Americans fought in thirty-seven rifle platoons at the front.

Having overcome these supply challenges and learned from them, no Anglo-American force had ever been as well equipped and sustained as was Eisenhower’s by the time of the Ardennes. This diversion into the world of logistics meant that the Allies were unusually well resourced to contain an attack when it emerged, while their opponents remained critically short of everything. It also meant that, in the coming months, were the Allies suddenly to require men and matériel rounded up at very short notice and driven to an obscure part of the front, without plan or rehearsal, to deal with an unexpected German attack, the Red Ball had taught them how to do it.²¹

Other one-way vehicle arteries, meanwhile, had sprung up to emulate the success of the Red Ball, including the Le Havre–Rheims ‘White Ball Highway’, and the British ‘Red Lions Express’, which ran from Bayeux to Brussels. All these routes tended to be tree-lined and potholed, twin nightmares for tired drivers of heavily laden trucks at night. The American Red Cross supplied mobile canteens to provide hot coffee and sandwiches to drivers, medics operated aid stations along the route, while massive military police, recovery, repair and rest facilities were set up. Driver John R. Houston recalled, ‘We lugged an awful lot of stuff to the front, particularly to Third Army. We ran through summer, fall and winter, through snow, ice and rain. Guys were falling asleep all the time. You couldn’t get enough rest. I remember falling asleep on top of a jeep hood when it was raining like hell.’²² Houston’s daughter, the singer Whitney, remained inordinately proud of her father’s wartime service. There being no other way to sustain the advance, this amounted to war by internal combustion engine.

*

Meanwhile, Eisenhower, relentlessly badgered by Montgomery, for once lowered his guard and agreed to an ambitious plan to seize a bridgehead over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem and thus outflank the Siegfried Line from the north, which he confirmed in his 13 September 1944 Directive. The objective was not quite Monty’s dream of a deep thrust into the industrial heartland of the Ruhr and beyond, but retained the Allied initiative and promised a big psychological leap, with the ability to ‘bounce’ at will Germany’s traditional geographical frontier, the majestic River Rhine. A secondary aim, which originated in Whitehall, was to rid the area of its V-2 rocket launch sites, from which the Luftwaffe had been bombarding London since the previous week. The operation’s name, Market Garden, betrayed one of its weaknesses. It was not one plan, but two: ‘Market’ – the airborne assault – being pulled ‘off the shelf’ by the RAF and adapted to circumstances, while ‘Garden’ was conceived hurriedly by planners in Monty’s Twenty-First Army Group and XXX Corps. The result was an untidy and hasty marriage.

Thus, while the 16 September conference was taking place in East Prussia, with Hitler exclaiming ‘objective Antwerp’ and jabbing his map, Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, popular commander of British XXX Corps, was briefing his officers on a daring Allied venture to do something similar: drive armoured forces down a sixty-mile corridor deep into the German lines over two days – ‘objective Arnhem’. There would be no pause in the advance; ‘keep going like hell,’ Horrocks told his officers, which was almost certainly what the Führer was saying at a similar hour in the Wolfsschanze of his Ardennes plan.

Eisenhower and Monty, in their different ways, were suffering from ‘victory fever’. In a 13 September 1944 exchange of letters between Ike and his boss, George C. Marshall, the latter reflected the prevailing mood in writing that ‘the termination of the war in Europe might be expected by the end of November 1944’.²³ Marshall was then attending the Quebec Conference (which would produce the Morgenthau Plan with its Carthaginian peace proposal) and this mutual optimism, though unfounded, goes some way to explaining the decision to indulge Monty.

The expectancy was reflected throughout the chain of command; at this time US First Army’s Courtney Hodges sent his boss, Bradley, a bronze bust of Hitler his men had just liberated from a house in the Belgian border town of Eupen. It was accompanied by the message that ‘given ample ammunition and an extra division, First Army would deliver the original in thirty days’.²⁴ With his logistics still not secure, so buoyant was Eisenhower that he expected to execute his Market Garden airborne drop, cross the Rhine and only after that to pause, regroup and re-engineer his supply lines. As he wrote to Montgomery on 5 September, once the Saar and Ruhr had been seized, only then would he turn his attention to ‘Le Havre and Antwerp’.²⁵

Le Havre would fall shortly (though sabotaged), but Eisenhower in this display of unguarded optimism seemed to regard Antwerp as a secondary objective. Likewise, in expecting the Saar and Ruhr to fall into his lap, he was six months ahead of himself. Ike perhaps felt that the German army might be in a state of ‘melt-down’ similar to that of autumn 1918, and that the shock of a huge airborne assault might accelerate this process, hence his lack of attention towards Antwerp. To be fair to Ike, when Market Garden was first contemplated around 10 September, the Wehrmacht was in serious disarray in the Arnhem area; however, the situation changed rapidly in the days before the ambitious operation was implemented, illustrating the need for frequent and ongoing intelligence assessments.

Operation Market Garden was to give the Germans great hope. On 17 September, this massive drop of the British First and US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, the latter both veterans of Normandy who would return to the Ardennes, began landing on a chain of locations leading to the road bridge at Arnhem. The relevant Ultra intelligence, confirmed by the Dutch resistance, definitely alerted Allied planners beforehand to the presence of Oberführer Walter Harzer’s 9th SS Hohenstaufen Panzer Division (another unit that would soon reappear in the Bulge) and its sister, the 10th SS, both refitting in the area after being massacred in Normandy.

However, the timing was crucial: this was a mere three weeks after German Fifth and Seventh Armies had been annihilated at Falaise, and to Monty’s staff it seemed inconceivable that either SS division, known to be at less than half-strength and possessing few serviceable armoured vehicles, was in any position to pose a significant threat. The Ultra analysts at Bletchley Park in rural Buckinghamshire had provided much important strategic and operational intelligence (such as warning of the impending Operation Lüttich against Mortain), and were good at reporting trends and movements of formations. However, they were less accurate in reporting tactical information. Once the fighting moved into Germany itself, wireless orders previously intercepted by Ultra were more usually given in person, sent between German headquarters by trusted officer courier or relayed by secure telephone link. From August, Ultra intelligence was given less weight by all Allied commanders and by September, in the instance of Market Garden, Bletchley’s reports were deliberately disregarded.

The Allied intelligence failure over Arnhem would precede the much more serious one before the Ardennes, both shortcomings made for exactly the same reason. Due to the prevailing victory fever, which affected all levels of the Allied governments and military chains of command, Montgomery (and Lieutenant-General ‘Boy’ Browning of the First Airborne Army) displayed a worrying tendency to disregard unwelcome intelligence. Few significant individuals questioned the Market Garden planning, and those who did, including the exiled Crown Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, Major-General Stanisław Sosabowski of the Polish Parachute Brigade and Major Brian Urquhart, Browning’s intelligence officer (and later Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations), were ignored or rebuked, and in Urquhart’s case, relieved for alleged battle fatigue, but in reality simply for bearing unpleasant news. This problem would arise again in December, when few questioned the Allied planning and intelligence assumptions.

German intelligence, by contrast, was excellent and respected. Model’s Army Group ‘B’ headquarters had already concluded that an offensive was likely by Monty’s formations along an axis of Eindhoven–Nijmegen–Arnhem–Wesel, while at the 16 September conference in the Wolfsschanze, Jodl stated an ‘expectation of parachute landings in Holland, Denmark and Northern Germany’.²⁶ On 11 September all units in Holland, including II SS Panzer Corps, were told to expect airborne landings and put on Alert Level II – indicating an enemy attack was considered imminent. This demolishes Montgomery’s argument, advanced then – and for long after the war – that ‘the enemy was expecting our attack at that point last of all’.²⁷

Field Marshal Model was himself staying in the De Tafelberg Hotel, Oosterbeek, a suburb of Arnhem, when gliders and paratroopers descended in the early morning of Sunday, 17 September, to interrupt his breakfast. He decamped immediately to Doetinchem, fifteen miles due east and the HQ of Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps. From there, Model was able to direct personally the initial countermeasures, possessing enviable and precise situational awareness. (Arnhem would amount to his last victory in the field.) Bittrich’s understrength Waffen-SS units and other garrisons in the vicinity subsequently reacted with speed and cunning to surround the British troops at Arnhem, who were hampered by poor communications. The American airborne divisions, however, managed to secure their locations and link up with Horrocks’ advancing armour from XXX Corps. With reinforcements delayed by poor weather, after ten days of savage fighting the Allies abandoned their attempt to reach Arnhem, the British First Airborne Division losing all but 2,163 of its 9,000 men; Bittrich paid tribute to his adversaries ‘who fought bitterly to the very last’, his men generally treating their prisoners with a respect they reserved usually for their own.²⁸ II SS Panzer Corps and Horrocks’ formation would find themselves fighting later in the Bulge.

The effect of repelling this daring Allied assault and incapacitating such large numbers of elite troops (airborne troops were considered as such by all nations) cannot have been lost on Hitler, especially when Market Garden began the day after his formal decision to attack from the Ardennes. Here is the origin of the Führer’s decision to mount a large-scale parachute drop in support of the Ardennes attack, something he had eschewed from doing since his Fallschirmjäger suffered huge losses at Crete in 1941. Since Crete, he had insisted his parachute arm be used as a land-based ‘fire brigade’, an emergency counter-attack force to be rushed to critical spots on the Russian Front, and later in Italy at Cassino. Market Garden revived in Hitler’s mind the efficacy of parachute forces, and he determined to use them in their traditional role for the forthcoming assault.

Field Marshal Model, who had personally witnessed the airborne forces’ arrival, was less jubilant about the German triumph at Arnhem than worried about the evidence of Allied superiority in men and matériel, which allowed Eisenhower to undertake such a risky venture. Therein lay the difference between these two late-1944 operations, dominated by tight timetables, armoured corridors, narrow roads, rivers and bridges as they were. Montgomery’s Market Garden was a calculated risk; Hitler’s Ardennes undertaking was a high-stakes gamble.

Both sides should have analysed Market Garden more than they did. The ability of scantily trained Luftwaffe, army and Kriegsmarine battlegroups, hastily summoned to the Market Garden area to prevail alongside the Waffen-SS, should have warned the Allies what they might expect in the future, for it was precisely this mix of veteran and green, multi-service troops that would emerge out of the Ardennes three months later. For the Germans, if Horrocks’ XXX Corps was unable to manage the sixty miles to Arnhem in good weather with air superiority, what hope had the Ardennes venture of reaching Antwerp, 120 miles distant, in poor weather without air cover?