Armageddon - Max Hastings [146]
ON 7 DECEMBER, Eisenhower met Montgomery, Tedder and Bradley for a planning conference at Maastricht. In recent weeks, Montgomery had resumed his familiar written and verbal bombardment about the need to concentrate allied efforts upon a thrust to the Ruhr, “the only worthwhile objective on the western front.” He argued that since Normandy the absence of a single ground commander had caused allied efforts to fail. He now proposed that 21st Army Group, with a U.S. army of at least ten divisions under command, should attack in pursuit of a Rhine crossing between Nijmegen and Wesel. Eisenhower, however, refused to accept the British view that the autumn campaign had been a failure. He suggested that it might be compared to Normandy. German forces had been steadily “written down,” to create the circumstances for a decisive breakthrough. This was fanciful in the extreme. But so was Montgomery’s proposal. The British commander’s credibility as a strategist had been greatly diminished by the events of the autumn. Since June he had rendered himself so obnoxious in American eyes that most senior U.S. officers detested him.
As Supreme Commander, Eisenhower continued to display exemplary patience and discretion in avoiding a breach with the British field-marshal. Because relations between the two were somehow maintained, it is easy to forget that Montgomery provided Eisenhower with plentiful reasons to demand his dismissal. This would have been a disaster. The 21st Army Group’s commander was a British hero. He was also, despite Antwerp and Arnhem, by far the ablest professional the British Army possessed. Later, in the spring of 1945, Montgomery’s excesses caused Brooke seriously to fear that the Americans would insist upon supplanting him with Alexander, the only credible alternative. Alexander was much beloved by Churchill, and by the Americans, as a delightful military gentleman, an authentic hero of the First World War gifted with good looks, charm, courtesy and exquisite sartorial judgement. These merits, however, masked laziness and lack of intellect. Brooke dismissed Alexander as “a very, very, small man [who] cannot see big.”
It was vital to the Allied cause that Montgomery should keep his job. Eisenhower was perhaps the only man with the diplomatic skills to make this possible, despite Montgomery’s relentless provocation of the Americans in general and the Supreme Commander in particular. By December, all possibility of a quick end to the war was gone, under any commander and by any strategy. From Alsace to Holland, the tired soldiers of the Allied armies faced a strongly reinforced German defence. The winter weather made off-road movement almost impossible, and crippled the air forces. At the Maastricht conference, Montgomery secured Eisenhower’s agreement that he should push towards the Rhine early in January, supported by Simpson’s Ninth Army on his right. But this would not be at the expense of other Allied operations further south—the “broad-front strategy.” By this stage, no other policy was credible. An assault on a narrow front merely invited the Germans to move troops from a quiet sector to the threatened one. The relative passivity of the British since September had already enabled the enemy to shift forces southwards from Holland to face the Americans. There was every reason to suppose that they would do the same wherever they were granted a breathing space. In American eyes, since D-Day Montgomery had established a reputation for repeatedly promising more than he and his armies could deliver on the battlefield. Since September, whatever the disappointments and frustrations of U.S. ground operations, it was indisputable that the Americans had borne the brunt of the fighting.
By the standards of the Western allies, if not by those of the Russians or Germans, they had accepted painful