The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (43 page)

The British drive soon was stymied. An artillery major directed fire to the north from the top floor of an Antwerp office building while a Belgian secretary brought trays of coffee with cognac and played American blues on the office phonograph. But none of the bridges across the imposing Albert Canal north and east of the city had been captured—fifteen of seventeen still stood as late as September 5—and now they were all blown. An effort to seize a bridgehead across the canal came a cropper when army storm boats were found to have holes in the bottom. “German reaction was swift and most unpleasant,” a brigadier reported, and included panzer fire that addled sappers trying to lay a bridge. Enemy battle groups rushed to reinforce the canals, but with other British corps to move forward, Montgomery had already ordered Horrocks to halt for regrouping.

An evacuation of German troops by ferry promptly began across the Scheldt from Breskens, west of Antwerp. In little more than a fortnight, 86,000 men, 600 artillery pieces, 5,000 vehicles, and 4,000 horses, mostly from the Fifteenth Army, escaped to fight another day. The estuary’s north-bank fortifications on Walcheren Island and Beveland, already formidable, grew stouter, while a stubborn rear guard of eleven thousand troops showed no sign of abandoning the pocket around Breskens.

Montgomery told London on September 7 that he hoped to be in Berlin in three weeks. But that was unlikely without the fuel, ammunition, food, and other war stuffs that could arrive in bulk only through a big-shoulders port. For now, as the U.S. Army official history later concluded, “Antwerp was a jewel that could not be worn for want of a setting.” A British officer in Antwerp offered his own judgment: “Success can be most bewildering.”

5.
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“Five Barley Loaves and Three Small Fishes”

V
ERSAILLES
had long proved irresistible to empire builders. A modest seventeenth-century hunting lodge, built above a fenny country village twelve miles southwest of Paris, had quickly grown into the world’s most celebrated château, an emblem of both the ancien régime and French regal indulgence. More than twenty thousand nobles, courtiers, merchants, and servants eventually basked in the radiance of the Sun King and his dimmer heirs, crowding together in what one traveler described as “a state of unhygienic squalor.” Later, the palace had served as a headquarters for the Prussian army besieging Paris in the starving winter of 1870, when 65,000 Parisians perished despite eating the city’s cats, crows, and rats. Here, in January 1871, the German Empire had been proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors, that exquisite gallery of seventeen reflecting arches facing seventeen arcaded windows. Here too, with a grim and vengeful echo, the treaty to end the First World War was signed in June 1919, as celebratory guns boomed, fountains spurted, and blue-coated Republican Guardsmen held their sabers aloft to salute the Hun’s subjugation. Two decades later the Hun was back, for a four-year stay.

It was here that Eisenhower chose to locate his new command post. Even as he recuperated from his bum knee in distant Granville, SHAEF staff officers swarmed into Versailles and made it their own. Headquarters offices filled the plush Trianon Palace Hotel, where a room with a bath that went for 175 francs a night before the war now could not be had at any price except by holders of a SHAEF master pass, a stiff piece of paper the size of a playing card emblazoned with a blue border and a red cross. Waiters in black tie served K-ration lunches on white linen with crystal stemware and plates trimmed in gold. The Clemenceau Ballroom, used by the Allied powers to negotiate the 1919 treaty and more recently by the Germans to decorate Luftwaffe pilots during the Battle of Britain, now served as a map room. Thickets of antennae sprouted in the royal gardens, and latrines lined the stately château trees near the faux farm that had allowed Marie Antoinette to live a Rousseauian fantasy of pastoral simplicity. Staff sections and signal offices filled the great stables built by Louis XIV, each said by one visitor to be “larger than some of our state capitols.”

Eisenhower’s office occupied a white stone annex behind the hotel; a bronze bust of Hermann Göring found in the foyer was turned to the wall because, as an officer explained, “he has been a bad boy.” Eleven paintings, including a Van Dyck, were plucked from the château to appoint the supreme commander’s suite, apparently without his knowledge, along with an eighteenth-century desk and other furnishings from the Mobilier National. An incensed lieutenant who in civilian life had been a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art managed to have most of the loot put back.

SHAEF by midsummer had already tripled in size from the 1,500 Allied officers and men originally envisioned for the headquarters. Now the roster tripled again, to 16,000; they would fill 750,000 square feet of office space. Eventually 1,800 properties around Versailles were commandeered to house 24,000 Allied garrison troops. A French magazine mocked SHAEF as the Societé des Hôteliers Américains en France, while military wits claimed the acronym stood for Should Have Army Experience First. One officer likened the organization to a sea serpent: “Some had seen its head, some its middle, some its tail. No one had seen all of the sprawling mass.”

Another sea serpent had wrapped its tentacles around Paris proper, with even greater speed and adhesion. Created in Britain in May 1942 to succor the logistical needs of the U.S. Army in Europe, the Services of Supply had been renamed the Communications Zone, or COMZ, on June 7 and now comprised half a million troops, or one in every four GIs on the Continent. A vast headquarters near Cherbourg, with five thousand prefabricated buildings and tentage for eleven thousand, was abruptly abandoned when the liberation of Paris triggered a stampede for the capital. COMZ convoys rolled into the City of Light hauling, as an Army major recounted, “tons of files and thousands upon thousands of clerks, typists, guards—its statistical departments, its coding and decoding rooms, its huge telephone exchange, and all the other complicated paraphernalia of big business.” COMZ immediately requisitioned 315 hotels and put 48 others on notice of indenture; more than three thousand additional Parisian properties were claimed for the cause, including fourteen million square feet of depot space, 29,000 hospital beds, and “apartments of proper elegance and swank for the brass,” in one officer’s description. Only after abject pleadings were Parisian children permitted to keep their schools. French officials complained that the Americans’ demands exceeded even those of the Germans’.

All this and more was the handiwork of the COMZ commander, Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, known as John Court House Lee, Jesus Christ Himself Lee, and God A’Mighty Lee. Son of an Iowa insurance agent and given his mother’s improbable Christian name, John, Lee had graduated from West Point with Patton in 1909, then made a career as an Army engineer doing river, dam, and harbor duty in places like Detroit, Guam, and Rock Island.
Time
magazine in mid-September called him “a man of exceptionally friendly and attractive personality,” an encomium affirmed by almost no one who knew him. A fussy martinet who wore rank stars on both the front and back of his helmet, Lee was said to have a supply sergeant’s parsimony in doling out Army kit “as if it were a personal gift,” rewarding friends, of whom he had few, and punishing enemies, of whom he had many. He had a knack for risible self-delusion, once standing in a London theater to acknowledge an ovation in fact intended for Eisenhower, sitting in the box above him; he also claimed that Marshall had chosen him for his current job because of “my ability to get along with people.” The Army’s official history, rarely astringent in describing senior generals, in this case captured the man: “Heavy on ceremony, somewhat forbidding in manner and appearance, and occasionally tactless … General Lee often aroused suspicions and created opposition.” The Army’s chief surgeon in Europe admitted that “he’s nobody I’d ever want to go fishing with for a week.” Classmate Patton was less circumspect, calling him “a glib liar” and “a pompous little son-of-a-bitch only interested in self-advertisement.” Yet field commanders rarely crossed him, fearing reprisal in the supply shed; when Lee visited Third Army, Patton welcomed him with an honor guard, a band, and a banquet.

Booted and bedizened, wearing spurs and clutching a riding crop, Lee kept Bibles in his desk and in his briefcase. He preferred, by his own account, “to start each morning at His altar whereon we lay our problems.” He often press-ganged his personal retinue of forty—including a chiropractor, eight correspondence secretaries, and a publicist who had once worked for the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn—into escorting him to church, which he attended daily and twice if not thrice on Sundays. Then he was off to inspect his vast dominion, either in a black, red-cushioned limousine driven by a Baptist lay preacher, or in a special railcar, which one minion described as Lee’s private “instrument of torture.” Regardless of conveyance, he liked to read scripture aloud. Any approaching subordinate was to tender a salute at precisely ten paces, and woe to the soldier whose helmet was cockeyed. A hospital staff’s preparations for a Lee visitation included three simple injunctions: “Dress up. Stop all operations. Liquor down the toilet.” Even the bedridden, one surgeon recorded, “had to lie at attention, [and] the ambulatory had to get out of their chairs and stand at attention all the time he was on that ward until he called at ease.” Excess slop in a mess-hall garbage pail sent him into a pale fury. Whipping out a spoon, he would sample the waste himself, declaring, “You see, I can eat it and you’re throwing this away.”

In Paris, Lee kept a huge war room in the Hôtel Majestic basement, and three suites upstairs for his own use. (His personal baggage included a piano.) The adjacent Avenue Kléber became known as the “Avenue de Salute,” and Lee dispatched officers to patrol the sidewalk and take the names of soldiers who failed to render the proper courtesy. Additional suites were reserved for him in other grand hostels; denizens at one were advised, “The Hôtel George V is considered General Lee’s personal residence, and assignments of accommodations carry the understanding that such persons are his guests.” The front curb was to be kept clear for his own entourage; other cars “will be required to park around the corner or down on the next block.”

“Why didn’t somebody tell me some of those things?” Eisenhower later asked after hearing of Lee’s idiosyncrasies. The complaint said more about the supreme commander’s inattention than about Lee. Not for two weeks did Eisenhower learn of the COMZ land rush in Paris, which he had intended to keep mostly free of Allied soldiers. On September 16, he personally wrote a blistering rebuke to the man he had deemed “a modern Cromwell”:

Due to the heavy shipments of your personnel and supplies to that area before I was aware of it, it is impossible to shift your headquarters at this moment without interfering with your first priority duties. Nevertheless you will immediately stop the entry into Paris of every individual who is not needed at that spot for an essential duty.… I regard the influx into Paris of American personnel, including your headquarters, as extremely unwise.… I am informed that the dress, discipline and conduct of American personnel in Paris is little short of disgraceful.

Lee was an unrepentant sinner. “I have no regrets,” he said. “One should be as far forward as possible.”

*   *   *

Lee’s “first priority duties” required provisioning a huge fighting force four thousand miles from home with 800,000 separate supply items, eightfold more than even Sears, Roebuck stocked. The task might well have overmatched the most gifted administrator, and certainly it taxed Jesus Christ Himself. Allied invasion architects had assumed that by D
+
90—September 4—only a dozen U.S. divisions would have reached the Seine, whereupon a pause of one to three months would be imposed to consolidate the lodgment area before resuming the attack across France. No logistician expected to reach the German border until May 1945. In the event, sixteen divisions were 150 miles beyond the Seine on September 4, and barely a week later the Allied line had reached a point not anticipated until D
+
350.

Battlefield exigencies disrupted and then demolished a supply plan two years in the making. The need for more combat troops to fight through the bocage had been met at the expense of service units—mechanics, fuelers, railroaders, sutlers of all sorts—and the subsequent breakout from Normandy caused Eisenhower in mid-August to pursue the fleeing enemy without pausing to shore up his logistics. The thrill of the chase held sway. Marshall and Eisenhower further accelerated the flow of divisions to the theater, advancing the schedule by two months at a severe cost in cargo shipments. Other afflictions impaired the supply system: the loss of Mulberry A; the demolitions at Cherbourg, Marseille, and Le Havre; the abandonment of ports in Brittany; the Allied bombardment of French rails and roads; the quick advance up the Rhône; and Hitler’s stubborn retention of Dunkirk and other coastal enclaves. Liberated Paris pleaded for an air delivery of 2,400 tons in emergency food, medicines, and other goods each day, of which Bradley conceded 1,500—the equivalent of the daily needs of 2.5 combat divisions.

Truck convoys that in July had required just hours for a round-trip to the front now took up to five days to reach the battlefield and return to the beaches. The First Army quartermaster depot moved six times in six weeks while trying to keep pace with the advance, even transforming eighteen artillery battalions into truck units. Moreover, the distance from American factories meant that items ordered in eastern France typically took almost four months to reach the front from home; at any given moment, two thousand tanks were in the pipeline. As Patton told reporters in September, “We cannot make five barley loaves and three small fishes expand like they used to.”

Much more than bread and seafood was needed, of course. Purchasing agents roamed across neutral Europe buying Swedish paper, Spanish apricots, Portuguese figs, and bananas from the Canary Islands. Thirty-three woodcutting camps opened in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg to split a million cords of firewood. Nineteen thousand tons of wood pulp shipped from the United States to local factories became fifty million rolls of toilet paper. But efforts to buy military uniforms from French clothiers were undone by language hurdles and the need to convert U.S. measurements into metric equivalents; SHAEF reported that “one-sixteenth of an inch on each of twelve measurements for the seams in a uniform would mean throwing off completely the proper size.”