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“The Sketch had a big write-up for the Yanks about their attack at Overloon,” George Turner-Cain wrote on 19 October. “We had to clear part of the wood for them. Rex took in a couple of platoons, killed about 20 Huns and brought back 17 prisoners. The Yanks had sat looking at the place with a battalion of infantry plus tanks. They appear to sit down opposite the enemy and wait for them to retire, rather than pushing continually. They use an abundance of artillery and air bombardment to break the enemy will to defend, then follow up on the ground.” Yet throughout this period Montgomery continued to press for a reinforcement of U.S. divisions to strengthen the British axis of advance. It is hard to overstate the scepticism which these demands provoked among the Americans. “When you analyse how difficult it would have been for the British to accomplish anything, even in the beachhead or coming across France, except where we were pulling them along,” said Bradley scathingly after the war, “why would he [Montgomery] think the British would step out and win the war while the Americans stood still? He wanted to take a bunch of Americans to do it with.” Bradley’s aide Hansen observed not without satisfaction: “The British have had tough going in attempting to clear out Antwerp. They have grabbed a tiger by the tail in attempting to flank the Siegfried line . . . they know now it cannot be done.”

To put the matter bluntly, and in a fashion that would deeply dismay those British and Canadian soldiers who suffered so much “at the sharp end,” 21st Army Group’s only substantial strategic achievement since the great dash across France and Belgium in August was the clearance of the Antwerp approaches, a task that should have been accomplished at negligible cost early in September. Even if some American commanders such as Patton and Gavin expressed doubts about the determination and skill of their own soldiers, they saw nothing about the British performance in Holland in the winter of 1944 to persuade them that their allies possessed grit or military gifts greater than those of the U.S. Army. The Australian Chester Wilmot, generally an admirer of British rather than American military conduct in north-west Europe, nonetheless observed brutally “what was at this stage the gravest shortcoming of the British army: the reluctance of commanders at all levels to call upon their troops to press on regardless of losses, even in operations which were likely to shorten the war and thus save casualties in the long run.”

Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, confided to Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay on 28 November (according to the admiral’s diary) that he was “rather depressed at the state of the war in the west . . . the SHAEF plan had achieved nothing beyond killing and capturing a lot of Germans, and that we were no nearer to knocking out Germany . . . The higher direction of the war had been bad in the last 2 months . . . Ike’s policy was only skin-deep and anyone could deflect it.” Between the beginning of November and mid-December 1944, British Second Army advanced just ten miles.

LIVING AND DYING

THE WEATHER INFLICTED much misery upon the combatants before the compound of enemy action was added. It was the wettest winter in Holland since 1864. “Some people begin to believe that Our Dear Lord has become pro-Nazi,” wrote a Dutch doctor. Incessant rain reduced the battlefield to a quagmire, on which the movement of men and supplies was a Sisyphean task. The concentration of millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of trucks and armoured vehicles among the waterlogged fields and woods of north-west Europe made a mockery of mobility. The simplest military operation became a movie translated into slow motion. The living conditions of infantry in the forward positions resembled those of Flanders thirty years earlier. British boots and serge battledress were notoriously pervious to damp. Sodden canvas web equipment stiffened. Mould and rust became endemic. Men snivelled relentlessly, with common colds and ’flu, even without more