CHAPTER 24
AMERICAN and British armies set foot on the mainland of Europe in Italy in September 1943 and in France in the following June. The armies in Italy reached Rome two days before the invasion of France. They had spent over eight months fighting their way up the peninsula against tough German opposition in harsh mountain country and horrible weather.
When they landed in Italy the allies hoped to be in Rome before the end of that year. Hopes in the Italian theatre were apt to be exaggerated. Churchill in particular had got into the habit of regarding anything to do with Italy as soft. The Americans were more sceptical. The opposition was German, not Italian, and it was commanded by Kesselring, who had prepared three defensive positions south of Rome. The allies’ best hope was to strike rapidly northward with Clark’s US Fifth Army, while Montgomery supported his advance on the eastern side of the peninsula. But both Clark and Montgomery made slow progress. Heavy rains helped the defenders. Both armies gained ground but no road to Rome was opened. For the Germans the worst consequence of the landings in Italy was the establishment of the US Fifteenth Air Force on Italian airfields whence it could attack targets in Germany, northern Italy, Austria and Rumania.
At the beginning of 1944 the attack towards Rome was renewed with a frontal attack in the centre and a simultaneous landing at Anzio forty miles south of Rome on the west coast – the place where Nero was born and the Apollo Belvedere found. The Germans, crediting the allies with an adventurousness which they did not display, believed that they would land north of Rome at some place like Leghorn. The Anzio landing was hurriedly planned and timidly directed. The initial landings on 22 January were practically unopposed and a daring commander might have made a dash for Rome and got there, but General Lucas, the commander of the expedition and a man of basically pessimistic temperament, on discovering that there were no Germans in his path behaved as though there were. Kesselring was given time to organize a defence and seized it. He disposed of reserves which his opponents, ignoring intelligence assessments, had underrated. By the end of a week the expedition was in trouble and when the Anglo-American force made a bid to advance from its carefully consolidated beachhead on 30 January, it incurred savage losses (one unit lost 761 men out of 767). The Germans counter-attacked in the first week in February; allied losses mounted, morale and confidence sank; the allies were all but evicted; the German attack was renewed in mid-February and after four days of heavy fighting the allies were again on the brink of total defeat when they saw to their surprise that the Germans, unaware how close they were to victory, were drawing off. The Anzio venture had failed to achieve its purpose but the Germans had failed to eliminate the beachhead.
In the centre of the peninsula the allies were equally frustrated. The two sides were roughly equal in numbers on the ground but the Germans were more easily reinforced, as well as exceptionally well equipped; the allies offsetting these German advantages by superiority in the air, in intelligence and in deception. The main allied thrust was not successful until the middle of May and then only after one of the more questionable actions of the war – the destruction from the air of the abbey of Monte Cassino.
Of Kesselring’s three defensive positions the strongest – the Gustav line – contained the famous Benedictine abbey, founded in 524 by the creator of western monasticism and the repository of one of Europe’s most prized libraries. Although it no longer held the bones of the saint, which had been removed to the banks of the Loire thirteen centuries earlier in order to save them from the Lombards, the abbey had been temporarily enriched with pictures and other works of art removed from Naples to escape the war. The Germans supervised the removal to Rome of the abbey’s treasures and most of its monks in October 1943 when the US Fifth Army, by crossing the Volturno and then the Sangro rivers, threatened the Gustav line. Monte Cassino, although an obstacle to allied progress, was not of prime military importance since it was surrounded by higher peaks and the combatants were understood to have assured the Pope that the abbey would be neither fortified by the one side nor attacked from the air by the other.
At the outset of 1944 the allies were moving arduously towards the town and abbey. A British corps under Clark’s command crossed the Garigliano and French troops under Juin (campaigning with Chateaubriand in his pocket) crossed the Rapido north of Monte Cassino. The abbey, in which the abbot and five monks still remained, was hit for the first time in January but a first allied attack on the town failed after three weeks of heavy losses in foul weather. Although American and French forces got to within striking distance of both town and abbey they could not cover the last thousand yards and a final assault by New Zealand and Indian units was thrown back by superior German numbers and artillery fire.
On the allied side opinions differed about whether this artillery fire came from the abbey. The Germans denied that the abbey was being used for military purposes but their enemies were not prepared to believe anything they said and General Ira C. Eaker, who was one of a number of senior commanders to make a personal air reconnaissance, reported that he had seen German troops in the abbey. The allied command declared that the abbey would no longer be spared and although American, British and French generals opposed its bombardment it was attacked on 15 February by 142 Flying Fortresses and destroyed.
This operation was, however, fruitless. The town and hill were not taken and the battle was resumed a month later with a heavy air and artillery bombardment which reduced the town of Monte Cassino to a shambles. The New Zealanders went in again, only to be checked by German resistance and uncleared rubble. They failed to reach the heart of the town. A complementary attack by the Indians on the monastery likewise failed after getting within 400 yards. A week later both town and monastery were still in German hands and the attack was called off after a final New Zealand attempt to dislodge the defenders. The road to Rome remained blocked. The best that the allies could claim was that they were holding twenty-two German divisions out of some other battle. The strategy of the Italian campaign had postulated the surrender of Italy and the creation of fresh options leading the allies to the Balkans or the Danube or into Germany itself. The collapse of Italian resistance had, however, produced a German resistance stout enough to bar all these routes, and the longer the campaign lasted the more pointless it became. Its object had been to give the allies useful victories in the interval between the reconquest of the Mediterranean and the reconquest of France, but the nearer the French invasion approached the more the Italian campaign became a sideshow producing nothing important which could not be obtained by invasion in the west.
But Kesselring’s position was never more than a defensive one in a theatre of secondary importance. He could expect little in the way of reinforcements and in May he was finally forced to abandon all his positions south of Rome. British and Polish units of the Eighth Army opened a new attack which was at first held but French forces then executed a spectacular turning movement in almost impossibly difficult mountain country and forced the Germans to evacuate Monte Cassino at last on 17 May. On the next day the Poles entered the ruined abbey and the British the town, and the Germans began to retreat all along the line. The forces in the Anzio bridgehead broke out but were too slow to cut off the Germans who retired north of Rome in good order. Kesselring abandoned the Italian capital after declaring it an open city and established a fresh holding line through Lake Trasimene and a stronger one, the Gothic line, in Tuscany.
Clark entered Rome two days before Overlord, not six months as Churchill had hoped. General Sir Harold Alexander, the overall commander of the Fifth and Eighth Armies, was now in a position to exploit their successes, but the timing was wrong. Alexander’s dual purpose was to entice German divisions into the Italian theatre and then keep them there or cut them off. He wanted to maintain both his armies at full strength, force the Gothic line and then move either left into France or right into Austria, sucking more German troops into the theatre as he intensified the threat to Germany itself. Although the soft underbelly of the Axis had proved less soft than Churchill had imagined, it was now pierced and the Italian campaign was on the verge of justification. On the last day of May Churchill promised Alexander his full support for keeping his armies up to strength, but Churchill’s was no longer the deciding voice and Alexander was obliged to relinquish part of his forces for an invasion of southern France (operation Anvil or Dragoon) complementary to Overlord. The Americans, supported at first by Maitland Wilson and believing that Kesselring was more likely to be milked than reinforced, wanted to make a bigger thrust up the Rhône valley than up Italy, and after bitter argument they prevailed. Anvil turned out to be an unnecessary reinforcement of Overlord but Alexander lost seven divisions and part of his air strength and was told to go ahead with this reduced force; Kesselring on the other hand got four extra divisions.
Retreating in his own time, Kesselring reached the Gothic line in August and then held up the allies long enough for the autumn rains and mud to come to his assistance. Churchill and Alexander were still hoping to make for Vienna, but the Americans refused to reinforce a theatre which had become decidedly secondary, and after a limited German counter-attack in the last week of the year operations were suspended and more allied troops were withdrawn from Italy. The last hope of staking a claim to be heard in the post-war settlement of central Europe by effecting a junction with the Russians in Vienna had gone.
It had never been a realistic one. Victory in Italy in 1943 was beyond the allies’ grasp and victory in 1944 was pointless because there was never any thought of making the winning thrust anywhere but in France. By 1944 no other front could hope for the men and material needed for so decisive a role.
In November 1943 Rommel was sent from a semi-active command in northern Italy to inspect the coastal defences of the western front from Dunkirk to Brittany. He found them rusty, uncoordinated and manned by secondor third-rate divisions which were well below strength. By this date the allies had already chosen the general area in which they would land but their decision was not known to the Germans. The alternatives were obvious. Either they might cross the Channel at its narrowest point and make their landings east of the Somme, or they might land in Normandy west of the Somme. The principal argument in favour of this latter plan was the unsuitability of south-east England for the accumulation of the vast quantities of men and stores which were to be put into the invasion and above all the meagre capacity of the Kentish ports compared with the Portsmouth-Southampton area. In addition the latter was less vulnerable to attack and less open to reconnaissance; and on the other side the strongest German defences were in the Pas de Calais. These considerations outweighed the disadvantages of the longer sea passage and the opening of the new front further away from the frontiers of Germany, and the allies settled without much debate on the bay of the Seine.
When Rommel arrived in France he found that the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, inclined to the view that the invasion would come in the Pas de Calais. OKW took the same view. Rommel, however, queried it and as the months went by the pattern of allied air activities and the absence of mining in the bay of the Seine strongly supported him. By the spring the Germans were nine tenths convinced that the main attack would be delivered in Normandy but some of them, Hitler in particular, expected either diversionary or follow-up operations in the Pas de Calais: they were deceived by spoof radio activity simulating the presence of large forces in south-east England and their inferiority in the air was by now so marked that they could not survey even Kent accurately enough to establish that there were no armies there.
More important than this initial divergence about where the invasion was to be expected was the dispute about how to meet it. Rundstedt saw no hope of preventing a landing. His strategy was to accept it and then throw the enemy back into the sea by a counter-attack. Rommel on the other hand believed that, in France as in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, once the allies had gained a foothold they could not be forced off it again. He proposed therefore to deny rather than repel the invasion, by mining the shore and the beaches and by engaging the enemy before he could cross the vital hundreds of yards between the water’s edge and the first natural cover beyond the open sands and rocks. Hitler decided in favour of Rommel and appointed him to command, under Rundstedt, the group of armies deployed from Holland to Brittany, but insisted with characteristic caution on retaining large forces east of the Somme after as well as before the invasion and with characteristic indecision on holding much of the armour in reserve outside Rommel’s immediate command and immediate operational area. These prevarications proved specially perilous because allied air supremacy, and the extensive destruction of communications in the weeks before the battle began, immobilized German forces caught in the wrong place. On the eve of the invasion Rundstedt had sixty divisions, of which forty-three were available to Rommel (the remaining seventeen were south of the Loire), but of these forty-three only eighteen were in Normandy; five were in Holland, one in the Channel Islands and no fewer than nineteen in Belgium and France east of the Somme.
The preparations on the allied side were of the utmost thoroughness and ingenuity. There had been disputes about the timing of this operation but none about whether or not to launch it. Preliminary planning had been put formally in hand after the Casablanca conference of January 1943 and before that raids on the continent – at St Nazaire, for example, in March 1942 and at Dieppe in August – had been undertaken with an eye to gaining information and experience which would be valuable for a full scale invasion. Detailed and daring reconnaissances of the landing beaches were carried out in order to establish the lie of the land, the obstacles below and above the water line, the state of the going for tracked and other vehicles and a thousand and one other pieces of information. Elaborate feints were devised to keep the defenders guessing and dispersed. Entirely new accessories of war were designed and constructed, from the two artificial harbours (Mulberries) as large as medium-sized ports which were towed across the Channel in sections (beginning on D-day) and the oil pipelines (Pluto – eventually twenty came into use) which were laid under it, to a variety of strange adaptations of tracked vehicles for carrying prefabricated bridges, laying carpets on the sand and destroying land mines.
The principal commanders had been designated in 1943 and had been working together and training their subordinates for much longer than is usually possible in war: General Dwight D. Eisenhower in supreme command with Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as his deputy and General Walter Bedell Smith as Chief of Staff; Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, General Bernard Montgomery and Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory in command of the three services in the assault phase; Generals Omar N. Bradley and Miles Dempsey commanding the two invading armies, the former destined to command an Army Group after the buildup. One and a half million Americans were transported across the Atlantic with all their own equipment and food and crammed into southern England. Unprecedented and often very irritating new security measures were introduced, affecting even the embassies of neutrals and allies. A fleet of over 5,000 vessels was assembled for the initial phase: 1,200 naval vessels, including seven battleships, to bombard the coastal defences, sweep mines, escort the invaders and tackle enemy sea-and aircraft; and 4,000 transports, barges, tugs and other sea-going and amphibious craft for the conveyance of the armies with their tanks, armoured cars, guns, vehicles, ammunition and the lavish variety of modern fighting gear. In the air the allies mustered 7,500 aircraft in direct support of the invasion and 3,500 bombers which could be and were used in this battle as well as for the continued strategic bombing of Germany. Eisenhower failed to get the heavy bombers included in his command but succeeded in getting them used for the destruction of German communications to the battle area (in accordance with a plan worked out in great detail by a civilian professor of anatomy). Naval and air supremacy ensured the passage of the thirty-seven divisions assembled to strike the decisive blow in the west.
Two hazards remained: the weather and the issue of the first engagements. The invasion was once postponed by twenty-four hours and Eisenhower seriously pondered a second postponement which would not only have been a much longer one but by ill chance would have re-timed the operation to coincide with a serious and unseasonable storm which blew up on 19 June. In the event the first invaders crossed the Channel by air at two o’clock in the morning of 6 June to be dropped some miles behind the five landing beaches, and at dawn five separate groups approached these beaches from the sea. These men – 20,000 airborne and 70,000 seaborne – were the advance guard of a force of two million drawn from a dozen nations which was to be set ashore in France within the next two months. Their first objectives lay along a line which stretched for forty miles from the eastern base of the Cotentin peninsula eastward to the mouth of the river Orne which flows into the sea eight miles north-east of the town of Caen. The task of the first invaders was to get onto the beaches and then get off them again as quickly as possible.
The first day’s objectives included Caen. Fortunes were mixed. At the westernmost beach the Americans secured their first objectives with the loss of only twelve men before the end of the day. At the next beach, however, the second American landing was an almost complete disaster and, after suffering 3,000 casualties, was saved only by the successes in neighbouring sectors. At the remaining three beaches British and Canadian troops fought their way onto and beyond the shore against German opposition which stiffened uncomfortably after noon. At the end of the day the fate of the paratroopers was still uncertain and some of the Americans were in serious trouble, but the seaborne invaders had made their lodgements.
Montgomery, who was in overall command of all land operations, aimed to take Caen with his British-Canadian left, but although his forces came within four miles of it they did not enter it until 10 July or gain complete possession of it for another week. This was a serious setback since Montgomery’s first plan was to drive through Caen to Paris. It was compounded by bad luck. By 18 June 629,000 men had been put ashore and the Mulberries, although not yet completed, were handling 6,000 tons a day. But on the next day a strong and unseasonable gale blew up and lasted for five days. It wrecked one Mulberry, damaged the other and blew about 800 craft onto the shore. Supplies directed onto the beaches and through the Mulberries, which had reached an average of 22,570 tons a day, were drastically cut and when the gale abated the armies had 20,000 vehicles and over 100,000 tons of stores less than they had been counting on. This shortfall was not made good for a month. Moreover Cherbourg, at the tip of the Cotentin, was only belatedly captured on 26 June with its port facilities wrecked and the harbour blocked; it could not be used at all for weeks, not fully for months. Nevertheless a million men were in France at the end of the first week in July and over a million and a half before the end of the month.
Once they had got ashore the allies’ principal fears were stalemate in Normandy and the imminent threat of Hitler’s V weapons. Their principal uncovenanted advantage was the persistent success of their deception plan which kept Hitler from reinforcing his armies in Normandy from his substantial forces east of the Seine. Combined, a stalemate and the arrival of the V weapons might give Hitler, not victory, but a negotiated peace; but stalemate became impossible as the German armies in Normandy remained unsupported from outside. Nevertheless the failure to take Caen and so open the short and direct route to the Seine and Paris kept the issue in doubt from mid-June to mid-August. A series of costly attacks on Caen failed. In mid-June a British corps suffered defeat at Villers-Bocage, a battle which coincided with the release of the first V 1s. An attempt at the end of the month to outflank Caen to the west also failed. A direct attack, preceded by heavy air bombardment, in the second week of July caused terrible casualties on both sides but gave the allies only half the city. A renewal of these tactics a few days later had to be called off on the third day but forced the Germans out of the city. Meanwhile Montgomery and Bradley (who was still subordinated to Montgomery and not directly to Eisenhower) planned to end the battle for Normandy by breaking westward into Brittany and then encircling the Germans to the south. Although still plagued by the tardy capture of Cherbourg and by continuing bad weather, Bradley launched his forces out of the Cotentin peninsula on 25 July and, having defeated a German spoiling attack across the base of the peninsula, sent Patton’s US Third Army into Brittany and so round to Argentan, which it reached the day after the Canadians, coming south from Caen, reached Falaise (16 August), thus trapping the Germans in a bag with an escape route only fifteen miles wide. This gap was closed on the 19th when American and Polish units joined hands. About 60,000 Germans were killed or captured and huge quantities of arms and vehicles lost in the Normandy pocket.
On the German side these battles were fought by Field Marshal von Kluge who succeeded both Rundstedt, dismissed by Hitler on 1 July, and Rommel, accidentally put out of action when his car was hit by an aircraft on 17 July. Kluge was in turn dismissed on 17 August. He committed suicide, probably because he knew that Hitler knew that he had been cognizant of the plot to kill Hitler on 20 July. For the same reason the convalescent Rommel was forced by the S D, acting on Hitler’s orders, to kill himself.
The new Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Model, managed to extract a not negligible number of the encircled troops in Normandy, but two days before his appointment fresh American and French armies under General Devers landed in the south of France (15 August) and two days after it Patton reached the Seine north-west and south-east of Paris. On the 19th Paris rose. Within the Paris Liberation Committee there were differences about whether to wait for the nearer approach of the regular armies or not, the communists being for action now, the non-communists for delay. The pressures for action became irresistible and the order was given for the liberation of the capital by its own people. There was fighting in the streets between the Germans and the Resistance. A truce was arranged but Hitler would have none of it and ordered the destruction of the city, if necessary by bombing. The truce degenerated into confusion and fighting started again. At one time the bells were ringing for victory while the guns were still firing as the last of the SS and their French accomplices defended all that remained to them: their lives. De Gaulle urged that General Jacques Leclercq’s Second French Division be sent forward since, left to themselves, the Parisians could be overwhelmed by the Germans and their city destroyed: 1,500 of them were killed in the rising and twice as many were wounded. After some hesitation de Gaulle’s request was granted and Leclercq entered Paris on 25 August (the British tactfully declining an American suggestion that a token British contingent with a Union Jack should accompany Leclercq). The German military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz, who had disregarded and defeated Hitler’s orders, surrendered to Leclercq and to Colonel Rol, alias Tanguy, one of the military leaders of the Resistance and a communist veteran of the Spanish civil war. Choltitz surrendered to the French Republic and not to the allied command, an action which the Americans, though riled, took in good part. The allies had already discovered that they could not get away with their facile assumption that upon the defeat of the Germans France would be provisionally administered by them. (They had prepared an occupation currency but de Gaulle’s indignation on learning of its existence had blown it away.) De Gaulle arrived in Paris and proclaimed a provisional government of France at the Hôtel de Ville on 30 August.
After the end of August the allied advance slowed down. Hitler had ordered the German garrisons, which still held a string of ports, to resist to the last man in the hope that the allies would divert forces to invest these places and so be delayed. For the most part the allies ignored the garrisons which were therefore simply isolated and kept out of battles farther east until they were obliged by events to surrender, but in one or two cases German stubbornness paid off, notably at Brest which did not surrender until 18 September and so could not be used to supply the increasingly large and increasingly distant allied armies. On 1 September, the initial phase being completed, Eisenhower assumed command in the field in northern France and thenceforward exercised it to the end through his two Army Group Commanders, Bradley and Montgomery. Eisenhower’s principal concern was the supply of his large and rapidly moving armies. He himself, underrating the Germans’ capacity to pull themselves together for a last round, seems to have thought that he could keep up the pace along his whole front with the resources available to him. Montgomery was the most eloquent of those who said that this was impossible. He argued that the logistical problems produced by the unexpectedly swift advances after the break-out at Caen had made it essential to concentrate a punch either on the left or the right, and he naturally made the most of the case in favour of the left. He wanted all the support that the Supreme Commander could give him for a drive across the Somme, through Belgium, into the Ruhr and on to Berlin. This way, he believed, he could finish the war before the end of the year.
Montgomery may have been right but neither then nor in retrospect was he obviously so and he pressed his point of view regardless of the political pressures on Eisenhower and even beyond the limits prescribed to a loyal or considerate subordinate. Eisenhower was sceptical of Montgomery’s strategy and, although an exceptionally honest and fair man, he could not avoid giving weight to a political problem. He was an American general in command of a preponderantly American force, and giving preference to Montgomery meant favouring a British general whom the American public and many American senior officers disliked. Not only Eisenhower himself but also Marshall felt that the voice of Congress and the voice of the American press had to have some weight in these strategic decisions. Their sensitivity on this score was the more acute because the commanders on the American side included in Patton a soldier who was no less colourful than Montgomery and readier to resort to insubordination if he did not get the orders he wanted. Holding back Patton’s drive from the Seine to the Saar in order to enable Montgomery to knock out the German army somewhere else was something that Eisenhower was not prepared to attempt.
On the last day of August Montgomery took Amiens, due north of Paris, and crossed the Somme and less than a week later he had taken Brussels and Antwerp and developed a bold plan for a further advance. The obstacles to continuing eastward into the Ruhr, apart from his difficulty in getting the undivided support of the Supreme Commander, were stiffening German resistance and the prepared defences of the Siegfried line (the West Wall) which guarded the German frontier from Switzerland up to and including Belgium – but excluding Holland. Montgomery proposed to strike north instead of east, advancing from Belgium into Holland instead of the Ruhr. By doing this he would cut across the German supply lines in Holland, isolate and surround the remaining German forces in Belgium and western Holland by extending his own lines to the coast at the Zuider Zee, get beyond the northern end of the Siegfried line and then turn east into the north German plain. He might also catch the Germans where they would least expect a major blow.
The operation was to be a dual one. Airborne troops would seize a series of bridges over the principal waterways in Holland and so gain control of key points along the north-south line Arnhem–Nijmegen–Eindhoven. At the same time ground troops would advance from the south to Eindhoven, thence to Nijmegen and finally – the crucial link – to Arnhem. Eisenhower approved the plan and gave Montgomery the Hundred-and-first and the Eighty-second US Airborne Divisions for the Eindhoven and Nijmegen drops. The bridge over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem was to be captured by the British Airborne Division. But there remained some misunderstanding about how far Eisenhower had decided to give Montgomery all the material support he needed, even at the cost of staying Patton’s advance.
This operation, which was launched on 17 September, was intended to revitalize the allied advance which had been petering out since the beginning of the month. It came to grief after a week’s bitter fighting, one of those failures which nearly succeed but are turned into disaster by the chances of war and by muddle but not, as has sometimes been supposed, by betrayal. The two American divisions accomplished their tasks, the Hundred-and-first Division comparatively smoothly and the Eighty-second Division on the fourth day after one of the most dashing exploits of the war in the west. The British ground forces (XXX Corps under General Horrocks) made punctual contact with the Hundred-and-first Division and then sent forward armoured units in time to follow up and consolidate the Eighty-second Division’s successful capture of the bridge over the Waal at Nijmegen. But XXX Corps’ further advance towards Arnhem was impeded by mines and the skilful and vigorous recovery of the Germans, and meanwhile the British Airborne Division had got into trouble.
The airborne drops were spread over three days and the defences of the bridge at Arnhem were reputedly so fierce that it had been decided to drop the British division about eight miles from the bridge. In this way the division could expect to find itself on Dutch soil more or less intact and would then proceed to attack the bridge like an ordinary ground formation. In other words the defences at the bridge had persuaded the British, before a shot was fired, not to attempt a direct airborne coup de main but to mount a hybrid attack which was part airborne and, in the second and decisive part, a straight fight through fields and villages. Given these tactics it was peculiarly unfortunate that German strength in the area had been seriously underestimated. Ultra intelligence pointed with some but not complete certainty to the presence within striking distance of the German II SS Panzer Corps comprising the Ninth and Tenth Panzer Divisions, but this intelligence was poorly evaluated. These divisions were in the area for refitting, had been excellently equipped and were ably commanded. Moreover, by a piece of grave misfortune, the British orders for the entire operation were captured on the first day off an American soldier whose glider crashed.
Nevertheless the first day’s operations were everywhere successful and on the Arnhem sector the British units began their advance towards the town through a friendly population anxious to show their delight by hospitality of every kind. On the second day, however, German opposition surprised the British and the situation began to get confused. Poor weather intervened and airborne supplies to the units which had already been dropped miscarried to such an extent that most of them were collected by the Germans. Aircraft losses were heavy. From the third day the British were being forced to make local withdrawals and it soon became clear that the fate of the Airborne Division depended on what speed XXX Corps could make to its relief. As hope faded, the story became one of endurance, heroism and the gradual strangulation of the perimeter, while the prematurely exuberant Dutch awaited the return of the Germans in the cellars of houses where they had been dispensing good cheer to the British but which were now being wrecked above their heads. The attackers’ losses were 1,200 dead and over 3,000 taken prisoner. The Arnhem bridge remained in German hands until the middle of April 1945. The Arnhem operation, the last major parachute operation of the war, summed up the experiences of four years which had begun with the successful German operation which opened the campaign in the Low Countries in May 1940. These experiences showed that parachutists could play an important role as the advance guard of a main force which was not too far away and was advancing rapidly, but that they could not yet take an independent giant stride ahead on their own.
The failure at Arnhem gave the Germans a last chance to consolidate a line beyond Germany’s own borders. On 5 September – the day after Antwerp had fallen in the north and Lyons to the Americans advancing from Toulon in the south, and two weeks before the Arnhem operation – Hitler had recalled Rundstedt once more and had given him the task of holding what was left of Belgium, Holland and the Siegfried line. But Hitler also intended Rundstedt to do more than that. He would take advantage of a lull on the eastern front to switch troops to the west for an offensive in the Ardennes at the end of November from the Meuse to the sea. His main target was Antwerp, captured by the allies on 4 September. For it he assembled twenty-five divisions grouped in three Armies, including the newly created Sixth SS Panzer Army commanded by General Sepp Dietrich. Hitler did not, however, tell his principal commanders in the west of the plans which they were to execute and it was not until the end of October that they were informed. Rundstedt, Model and their senior commanders and staff officers immediately objected that the plans were too ambitious. They proposed a watered-down version designed to encircle a part of the American forces west of Aachen with the option, in the event of speedy success, of going on to Antwerp at a second stage, but Hitler refused to consider any alterations to the plans which his own staff had already worked out in detail. All he would grant, under pressure of circumstances, was the postponement of D-day to 16 December.
The last German offensive of the war of any note was accordingly launched on that day. It caused immense perturbation because it came as a complete surprise to allied commanders. This should not have been so. Ultra intelligence, which was copious from start to finish of the campaigns of 1944–5, gave numerous indications of a substantial offensive in the offing and in the general area of the Ardennes (but, as usual, no date). It had reported in September the creation of Sixth SS Panzer Army and, early in November, the reinforcement of the Luftwaffe in the relevant sector by units switched from further north and from the Russian fronts. German railway ciphers, which were being read at Bletchley Park, gave detailed information of movements of men and material, and orders to Luftwaffe reconnaissance units showed that the Germans were specially anxious to conceal something that was going on to the east of the Ardennes. In addition signals intelligence, monitoring German army traffic, noted the appearance of new formations which had been ordered to keep radio silence – itself a significant order but one that could not be completely obeyed since the units had to break it once or twice a day in order to make sure that they were still in proper touch with one another. Why these pointers were missed is still unclear but it has been surmised that allied staffs were so convinced (and in fact correctly) that Hitler could no longer launch such a venture successfully that they overlooked the fact that he might nevertheless try. With their minds concentrated on how best to cross the Rhine they had become immune to the notion that the Germans might re-cross the Meuse.
But not even the element of surprise could give Hitler’s gamble any chance of success. After four days it had failed. Eisenhower placed all troops north of the German thrust – including two American armies – under Montgomery’s command, a redisposition of some courage in view of the prevalent American animus against Montgomery and the contrary advice of Bradley who underrated the gravity of the situation. The Germans were lucky with the weather at the outset, for fog in England for the first three days, followed by fog on the continent, prevented the allied air force from taking part in the battle. Yet the German advances were not as great as had been planned and an order by Patton (who feared that the Germans might break left rather than right and so cut across his rear) to withdraw was not executed, so that the town of Bastogne was held and became an American strongpoint, brilliantly defended by the US Tenth Armoured and the Hundred-and-first Airborne Divisions and supplied by air. By the 22nd Rundstedt, under pressure on both flanks, was counselling the abandonment of the attack. The Fifth Panzer Division under General Hasso von Manteuffel continued to advance until Christmas Eve but was then diverted to Bastogne. From this point the Germans were forced onto the defensive and began to suffer increasing casualties. The battle of the Ardennes was substantially an American victory under a British commander. The German thrust failed, but it was a nasty shock to the allied commanders and publics because of the surprise which cast doubt on allied intelligence, its initial successes, and Eisenhower’s alteration in the command which stirred up national animosities.
In January Hitler abandoned his offensive in the west. He had hoped for a quick victory, to be followed by a massive counter-attack on the Russians in the east. He had been defeated by allied air superiority, by the defenders of Bastogne, by poor cooperation among his own forces (especially between the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Divisions) and by a new weapon, the proximity fuse. This fuse contained a tiny radar which, in conjunction with radio waves and their echoes, made a shell go off at a distance from its target. It was estimated to increase the effectiveness of artillery tenfold. Although used against Japanese aircraft in 1943 it was not used in the European theatre before the emergencies of the V1 and Ardennes offensives.
The end of the attack on the Ardennes coincided with a lesser attack in Alsace begun on the last day of the year, although originally conceived as a move to cover the left flank of the Ardennes offensive. This operation gave rise to a major row between Eisenhower and de Gaulle, about which there are many accounts, including accounts by Eisenhower, de Gaulle and Churchill. These accounts cannot be reconciled and so it is still impossible to produce an unassailable version. By the time the attack in Alsace came it was – whatever the original German plan – distinct from the flagging Ardennes offensive and a comparatively minor affair. But Eisenhower may not have seen it that way. Rundstedt’s attack had forced him to contemplate a major switch of Patton’s forces northward and a consequent re-deployment of his southern Army Group which, under Devers, had come up into the line from the south of France: Devers’s forces might have to take over part of Patton’s front and perhaps even withdraw from the Rhine to the Vosges. Such a withdrawal meant abandoning Strasbourg.
Devers’s Army Group included a French army under General de Lattre de Tassigny, but Devers did not tell de Lattre, and Eisenhower did not tell de Gaulle, that a withdrawal was anything but a hypothetical contingency. Their reticence was no doubt due to their knowledge that a withdrawal, exposing Strasbourg to recapture and reprisals by the Germans, would be strenuously resisted by the French. De Gaulle meanwhile had instructed de Lattre to defend Strasbourg, the arch-symbol of Franco-German rivalry ever since 1870. In doing so he was ignorant of Eisenhower’s instructions to Devers and convinced, correctly as it happened, that a withdrawal was unnecessary. The upshot was that Eisenhower and Devers got themselves into a position where they were trying to outwit de Gaulle and de Lattre by putting into execution a plan which had been represented as something less than a plan, while the French commanders were taking decisions into their own hands to the extent of denying the superior command powers of the American commanders. Upon discovering what was afoot de Gaulle sent Juin to Eisenhower’s headquarters where a battle of threats developed between him and Bedell Smith, and sent a signal to Churchill who flew at once to France to smooth over the controversy. Strasbourg was not evacuated.
On 12 January a new Russian offensive opened. Hitler had already begun to switch part of his armour in the west back to the east in order to meet it. Since 6 June the Germans had lost three quarters of a million men in France. They were now defending the Rhine.
The imminence of victory cast a number of shadows before. The anti-German alliance was a military combination created by, and unlikely to survive without, German aggressiveness. So long as the war lasted the allies’ reciprocal needs overbore their mutual distrust but the evaporation of the German threat twitched aside this cloak of common concern. Months before the end of the war both the Anglo-Americans and the Russians were preparing to forestall one another in a dash to seize secret German installations and valuable German scientists. Both sides had been manoeuvring to set battle lines, which might later become political lines, separating their respective zones of operations and occupation in Germany. And both were uneasy about the fate of their citizens in German captivity or German employ who would be found in areas which they did not control.
Some of these persons were prisoners of war taken by the Germans on their western or eastern fronts. But prisoners of war were a relatively small category; prisoners from the west were not very numerous, while prisoners from the east had been comprehensively murdered. Much the largest number of non-Germans in Germany were Russian and other citizens of the USSR who had been overrun by the German victories of 1941–2 or had defected to the German side. When the war ended over two and a half million of them were sent back to the USSR from the American, British and French zones of occupation in Germany and Italy and years later it was alleged that they had been forcibly returned in defiance of the most basic rules of humanity. The great majority – about nine out of ten – were Displaced Persons who returned voluntarily; probably it never occurred to them to do otherwise. The bulk of them were back in the USSR within three months of the end of the war. They may have been hideously disillusioned when they got there but nobody forced them to return.
Of the remaining quarter million about 200,000 were Soviet citizens who had been captured in German uniforms which they had donned for a variety of reasons. Some did so in order to survive, others because they hated the USSR. They had given aid to the enemy, although mostly in humble capacities and simply to save their skins. They too expected to be able to return to their homes unnoticed and unpunished, even if technically they were deserters or traitors. They went back of their own accord. But a residue of about 50,000 did not. They were forcibly repatriated and paid, presumably atrociously, for what they had done. They comprised three main groups: some 10,000 survivors of the Ukrainian SS Division; some 5,000 survivors of the two Vlasov divisions; and about 25,000 Cossacks, including 5,000 women and children. There were also, in Italy, remnants of the Turkestan Division, central Asian and Azerbaijani Muslims who had served in the Wehrmacht and had exhibited appalling ferocity to men, women and children. All these groups consisted of Soviet citizens who had fought for the Germans against the USSR and had committed dreadful atrocities which made them war criminals as well as deserters and traitors. They were liable to forcible repatriation under agreements made in 1944 (and confirmed at Yalta) – agreements which applied to citizens of all the anti-German allies and were in line with commonly accepted rules of international law. Given the large numbers involved, and given post-war chaos, it is impossible to show or even to suppose that no mistakes were made. In particular a number of Ukrainians not covered by the agreements because they were not Soviet citizens at the prescribed date were nevertheless delivered to the Russian authorities and barbarously treated. Chaos also worked the other way. Guards of camps and convoys allowed or encouraged their charges to disappear into the woods to escape a fate which they expected to be worse than death, and the most culpable groups evaded retribution in substantial numbers: many members of the Ukrainian SS Division claimed, successfully if falsely, that they were not Soviet but Polish citizens, and more than half the Vlasov survivors did the same, thus escaping not only the net prepared for deserters and traitors but also arraignment for war crimes. In Italy, where a first trawl through the Displaced Persons camps had yielded 2,000 Soviet citizens taken in German uniforms, further investigations carried out by special tribunals with painstaking thoroughness condemned to forcible repatriation only 264 men out of a much larger number of grave suspects whom the tribunals exonerated, since by this time (1947) they were looking for any excuse to save the accused from Russian vengeance. The tragedy of the 264 was not that they were innocent victims but that they encountered a fate out of proportion to their offences.