Armageddon - Max Hastings [165]
The British XXX Corps at Dinant was shifted to block the last miles to the Meuse. It was scarcely called upon to fight, for the Bulge was an American battle. But Montgomery displayed the quality most vital to a commander in a crisis—grip. Many even among those Americans who detested him applauded his contribution to the defence against Germany’s winter offensive. When Brigadier William Harrison of the 30th Division met 21st Army Group’s commander, he thought: “Here is a guy who really knows what he is doing.” Von Manteuffel asserted afterwards that the Allied response to the Ardennes offensive was very much better co-ordinated than the original German attack.
Yet even in this crisis Montgomery could not bring himself to behave gracefully. At a meeting with Hodges of First Army and Simpson of Ninth, instead of inviting the Americans to brief him on the battle situation as they huddled over maps on the bonnet of his Humber staff car, the British commander turned to his young British liaison officer, Major Carol Mather. “What’s the form?” demanded Monty, inviting Mather to explain the battle situation. The British officer wrote: “Our American friends . . . looked severely discomfited. It was a slight uncalled for.” Montgomery’s official biographer, Nigel Hamilton, said of his treatment of Hodges: “He humiliated the shyest . . . of American generals in his hour of shame.” Bill Simpson, fortunately, seemed impervious to Montgomery’s discourtesies. The gaunt, lanky, unassuming Ninth Army commander was a West Point classmate of Patton, and passed out of the Academy second from bottom. A rancher’s son from Texas, much decorated in the First World War, Simpson proved himself one of the most sympathetic as well as most competent American officers in Europe. Not least among his virtues was a patience and good nature towards the British in general and Montgomery in particular, which deserved a more generous response than it received.
From the beginning of the battle, it became evident that Montgomery intended to exploit the crisis to pursue his familiar demand that an overall Allied ground commander should be appointed. On the very day Eisenhower gave the field-marshal command of the northern flank of the Bulge, Brooke felt obliged to send Montgomery a weary, strongly worded letter urging him to abandon his delusions about taking over the Anglo-American armies: “I think you should be careful about what you say to Eisenhower himself on the subject . . . especially as he is now probably very worried over the whole situation.” The next day, Brooke reinforced his message: “I would like to give you a word of warning. Events and enemy action have forced on Eisenhower the setting-up of a more satisfactory system of command . . . It is important that you should not even in the slightest degree appear to rub this unfortunate fact into anyone at SHAEF. Any remarks you make are bound to come to Eisenhower’s ears sooner or later.”
The Bulge battle began at a time when American enthusiasm for the British was at a low ebb. James Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization and sometimes known as Roosevelt’s “assistant president,” noted that even before the events of mid-December U.S. generals in France had been complaining about the “passivity” of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. There was ferocious U.S. criticism of British military intervention against the communists in Greece, which was considered to reflect not only Churchillian imperialism but a willingness to enforce this by diverting British troops from the west European battlefield, thus increasing the burden upon the Americans. Roosevelt told Stimson that he was frankly “fed up” with the British. “Something very like a crisis