Bridge Too Far (7 page)

northeast, Von Zangen was ordered to evacuate his remaining troops by

sea, across the waters of the Schelde to the island of Walcheren.  Once

on the northern bank of the estuary, Von Zangen’s troops could march

eastward along the one road running from Walcheren Island, across the

South Beveland peninsula until they reached the Dutch mainland north of

Antwerp.  Because of Allied air power, ferrying operations across the

3-mile mouth of the Schelde, between the ports of Breskens and

Flushing, would have to take place at night.  Nevertheless, with luck,

a good portion of the Fifteenth Army might be safely withdrawn within

two weeks.  Von Rundstedt knew that the plan was hazardous, but he saw

no other course, for, if successful, he would have almost an entire

German army, battered though it might be, at his disposal.  More than

that he would still—unbelievably—control the vital port of

Antwerp.  But the success of the operation would depend entirely on Von Rundstedt’s hunch that Montgomery’s drive had indeed come to a halt.

Von Rundstedt was sure of it.  Further, he was banking on it that Montgomery’s slowdown held a far deeper significance.  Because of overextended communications and supply lines, he was convinced, the Allied breakneck pursuit had reached its limit.  At the close of the conference, as Blumentritt was later to recall, “Von Rundstedt looked at us and suggested the incredible possibility that, for once, Hitler might be right.”

Hitler’s and Von Rundstedt’s estimates of the situation, although only partly correct, were far more accurate than either realized.  The precious time Von Rundstedt needed to stabilize his front was being provided by the Allies themselves.  The truth was that the Germans were losing faster than the Allies could win.

Even as Von Rundstedt gambled desperately to save the trapped Fifteenth Army, Major General George Philip Roberts, commander of the British 11th Armored Division, 150 miles away in Antwerp, was jubilantly informing his superiors of a startling development.  His men had captured not only the city but the huge port as well.

Together with the Guards Armored Division, Roberts’ tanks had made an

extraordinary dash of more than 250 miles in just five days.  The

spearhead of Lieutenant General Miles C. Dempsey’s great British Second

Army had been ordered by Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, XXX Corps

commander, to “keep going like mad.”  Leaving the Guards to capture

Brussels, Roberts’

division bypassed the city and in the early hours of September 4, with the courageous help of the Belgian underground, entered Antwerp.  Now, some thirty-six hours later, after clearing the deep-sea complex of a stunned and panic-stricken enemy, Roberts reported that his men had captured Antwerp’s huge 1,000-acre harbor area intact.  Warehouses, cranes, bridges, 3-1/2 miles of wharves, quays, locks, drydocks, rolling stock—and, unbelievably, even the all-important electrically controlled sluice gates, in full working order—had been seized.

German plans to demolish the port had failed.  Explosives had been placed on major bridges and other key installations, but, overwhelmed by the spectacular speed of the British and resistance groups (among them Belgian engineers who knew exactly where the demolitions were planted), the disorganized German garrison never had a chance to destroy the vast harbor facilities.

The thirty-seven-year-old Roberts had brilliantly executed his orders.  Unfortunately, in one of the greatest miscalculations of the European war, no one had directed him to take advantage of the situation—that is, strike north, grab bridgeheads over the Albert Canal in the northern suburbs, and then make a dash for the base of the South Beveland peninsula only eighteen miles away.  By holding its 2-mile-wide neck, Roberts could have bottled up German forces on the isthmus, preparatory to clearing the vital northern bank.  It was a momentous oversight.  * The port of Antwerp, one of the war’s major prizes, was secured; but its approaches, still held by the Germans, were not.  This great facility, which could have shortened and fed Allied supply lines all * The late B. H. Liddell Hart, the celebrated British historian, in his History of the Second World War wrote: “It was a multiple lapse—by four commanders from Montgomery downwards …”  Charles B. MacDonald, the American historian in The Mighty Endeavor, agrees with Liddell Hart.  He called the failure “one of the greatest tactical mistakes of the war.”  The best and most detailed account on the cost of Antwerp is undoubtedly R. W. Thompson, The 85 Days, and I agree with him that one of the main reasons for the missed opportunity was “weariness.”  Men of the 11th Armored, he wrote, “slept where they sat, stood or lay, drained of emotion, and in utter exhaustion.”  If we accept his theory it is doubtful that Roberts’ 11th could have continued its drive with the same vigor.  Nevertheless, Antwerp and its vital approaches, argues Thompson, might have been taken with ease “had there been a commander following the battle, hour by hour, day by day, and with the flexibility of command to see the prospect.”

along the front, was useless.  Yet nobody, in the heady atmosphere of the moment, saw this oversight as more than a temporary condition.  Indeed, there seemed no need to hurry.  With the Germans reeling, the mop-up could take place at any time.  The 11th Armored, its assignment completed, held its positions awaiting new orders.

The magnificent drive of Dempsey’s armored forces in the north, equaling that of Patton’s south of the Ardennes, had run its course, though at this moment few realized it.  Roberts’ men were exhausted, short on gasoline and supplies.  The same was true of the remainder of General Brian Horrocks’ XXX Corps.  Thus, on this same afternoon, the relentless pressure that had thrown the Germans back in the north, shattered and demoralized, suddenly relaxed.  The blunder at Antwerp was compounded as the British came to a halt to “refit, refuel, and rest.”

General Horrocks, the XXX Corps’s capable and dynamic commander, was not even thinking about Antwerp.  * Like Field Marshal Montgomery, commander of the British 21/ Army Group, his attention was focused on another target: the crossing of the Rhine and a swift end to the war.  Only a few hours earlier, elated at the verve and dash of his armies, Montgomery had cabled the Supreme Commander, General Dwight D.  Eisenhower: “We have now reached a stage where a really powerful and full-blooded thrust towards Berlin is likely to get there and thus end the war.”  * Horrocks, in his memoirs, gives a very frank explanation.  “My excuse is that my eyes were fixed entirely on the Rhine and everything else seemed of subsidiary importance.  It never entered my head that the Schelde would be mined and that we would not be able to use Antwerp until the channel had been swept and the Germans cleared from the coastlines on either side.  … Napoleon would, no doubt, have realized these things but Horrocks didn’t.”  He also readily admits there was little opposition ahead of him and “we still had 100 miles of petrol per vehicle and one further day’s supply within reach.”  There would have been “considerable risk” but “I believe that if we had taken the chance and carried straight on with our advance, instead of halting in Brussels, the whole course of the war in Europe might have been changed.”

In London, His Royal Highness, the Prince of the Netherlands conferred

with Queen Wilhelmina and then telephoned his wife,

the Princess Juliana, in Canada.  He urged her to fly immediately to England, ready to return to the Netherlands the moment the country was freed.  Their long exile was about to end.  The liberation, when it came, would be swift.  They must be ready.  Yet Bernhard was uneasy.

Over the past seventy-two hours messages reaching him from the resistance had again and again underscored the German panic in Holland and repeated the news that the retreat, begun on September 2, was still in progress.  Now, on the fifth, underground leaders reported that although the Germans were still disorganized, the exodus appeared to be slowing down.  Bernhard had also heard from the Dutch Prime Minister in exile.  Prime Minister Gerbrandy was somewhat embarrassed.  Obviously his September 3 broadcast was premature; Allied troops had most certainly not crossed the Dutch border as yet.  The Prince and the Prime Minister pondered the reason.  Why had the British not moved?  Surely, from the underground messages they received, the situation in Holland was clear.

Bernhard had little military training and was dependent on his own advisers, yet he was puzzled.  * If the Germans were still disorganized and, as his resistance leaders believed, a “thrust by a few tanks” could liberate the country “in a matter of hours”—why, then, didn’t the British proceed?  Perhaps Montgomery disbelieved the reports of the Dutch resistance because he considered them amateurish or unreliable.  Bernhard could find no other explanation.  Why else would the British hesitate, instead of instantly crossing the border?  Although he was in constant touch * The young Prince, although named Commander in Chief of the Netherlands Forces by the Queen, was quite frank in interviews with the author regarding his military background.  “I had no tactical experience,” he told me, “except for a course at the War College before the war.  I followed this up with courses in England, but most of my military knowledge was learned in a practical way by reading and by discussions with my officers.  However, I never considered myself experienced enough to make a tactical decision.  I depended on my staff, who were very well qualified.”  Nevertheless Bernhard took his job very seriously.  In his meticulously kept personal diary for 1944, which he kindly placed at my disposal, he recorded in minuscule handwriting each movement, almost minute by minute, from telephone calls and military conferences to official functions.  During this period, based on his own notations, I would estimate that his average working day was about sixteen hours.

with his ministers, the United States ambassador at large, Anthony Biddle, and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, and as a result was well aware that, at this moment, the advance was so fluid that the situation was changing almost hour by hour, nevertheless Bernhard thought he would like firsthand information.  He made a decision: he would request permission of SHAEF to fly to Belgium and see Field Marshal Montgomery himself as soon as possible.  He had every faith in the Allied high command and, in particular, Montgomery.  Still, if something was wrong, Bernhard had to know.

At his spartan, tented headquarters in the Royal Palace Gardens at Laeken, a few miles from the center of Brussels, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery impatiently waited for an answer to his coded “Personal for Eisenhower Eyes Only” message.  Its urgent demand for a powerful and full-blooded thrust to Berlin was sent in the late hours of September 4. Now, by midday on September 5, the brusque, wiry fifty-eight-year-old hero of El Alamein waited for a reply and impatiently fretted about the future course of the war.  Two months before the invasion of Normandy he had said, “If we do our stuff properly and no mistakes are made, then I believe that Germany will be out of the war this year.”  In Montgomery’s unalterable opinion, a momentous strategic mistake had been made just before the Allies captured Paris and crossed the Seine.  Eisenhower’s “broad-front policy”—moving his armies steadily forward to the borders of the Reich, then up to the Rhine—may have been valid when planned before the invasion, but with the sudden disorderly collapse of the Germans, the Britisher believed, it was now obsolete.  As Montgomery put it, that strategy had become “unstitched.”  And all his military training told him “we could not get away with it and … would be faced with a long winter campaign with all that that entailed for the British people.”

On August 17 he had proposed to General Omar N. Bradley,

the U.s. 12th Army Group commander, a single-thrust plan.  Both his own and Bradley’s army group should stay “together as a solid mass of forty divisions, which would be so strong that it need fear nothing.  This force should advance northeastward.”  Montgomery’s 21/ Army Group would clear the Channel coast, and secure Antwerp and southern Holland.  Bradley’s U.s. 12th Army Group, its right flank on the Ardennes, would head for Aachen and Cologne.  The basic objective of Montgomery’s proposed drive was to “secure bridgeheads over the Rhine before the winter began and to seize the Ruhr quickly.”  In all probability, he theorized, it would also end the war.  Montgomery’s plan called for three of Eisenhower’s four armies—the British Second, the U.s. First and the Canadian First.  The fourth, Patton’s U.s. Third Army, at this moment making headlines around the world for its spectacular advances, Montgomery dismissed.  He calmly suggested it should be brought to a halt.

Some forty-eight hours later Montgomery learned that Bradley, who he had believed was responsive to his own idea, actually favored an American thrust, a Patton drive toward the Rhine and Frankfurt.  Eisenhower rejected both plans; he was not prepared to change his strategic concept.  The Supreme Commander wanted to remain flexible enough to thrust both to the Ruhr and the Saar as the occasion permitted.  To Montgomery, this was no longer the “broad-front policy” but a double-thrust plan.  Everybody now, he felt, was “going his own way”—especially Patton, who seemed to be allowed enormous latitude.  Eisenhower’s determination to persist in his original concept revealed quite clearly, in Montgomery’s opinion, that the Supreme Commander was “in fact, completely out of touch with the land battle.”

Montgomery’s view was based on a recent development which angered him and, he felt, demeaned his own role.  He was no longer the over-all coordinator of the land battle.  On September 1 Eisenhower had personally taken over command.  Because the Supreme Commander believed Montgomery “a master of the set battle piece,” he had given the British general operational control of the D-Day assault and the initial period of fighting thereafter.

Thus, General Omar N. Bradley’s 12th Army Group was under Montgomery.  Press stories appearing in the United States at the end of August revealing that Bradley’s army group still operated under Montgomery created such a public furor that Eisenhower was promptly ordered by General George C. Marshall, U.s. Chief of Staff, to “immediately assume direct command” of all ground forces.  American armies reverted back to their own command.  The move caught Montgomery off base.  As his chief of staff, General Francis de Guingand, later put it: “Montgomery never, I believe, thought that the day would come so soon.  Possibly he hoped that the initial command set up was there to stay for a long time.  He was, I think, apt to give insufficient weight to the dictates of prestige and national feelings, or to the increasing contribution of America, in both men and arms … it was obvious, however, to most of us that it would have been an impossible situation for a British general and a British headquarters to retain command of these more numerous American formations indefinitely.”  *1 It may have been obvious to his staff but not to Montgomery.  He felt publicly humiliated.  *2 *1 Major General Francis de Guingand, Generals at War, pp.  100-101.  *2 Montgomery and the British public, as outraged as he, were somewhat mollified when George VI, at Churchill’s strong urging, made Montgomery a field marshal on September 1.