Armageddon - Max Hastings [171]
MOPPING UP
FROM THE FIRST days of the Ardennes offensive, the ebullient Patton urged that the panzers should be allowed to drive for Paris if they wanted. He was confident that the further the Germans pushed west, the fewer of them would ever go home. “Provided the two ‘gateposts’ hold,” Alan Brooke wrote in his diary on 21 December, “there may be a chance of annihilating a great many of the sheep that have broken through. If only the Americans are up to it.” Allied strategic superiority was overwhelming. The obvious challenge, once the Germans’ momentum was spent, was to attack their salient at its base, cutting off their retreat. From 29 December onwards, von Manteuffel and his fellow commanders were urgently warning OKW of this peril to their exhausted and exposed formations. Yet Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery showed no enthusiasm for exploiting success. They were content patiently to shepherd the retreating enemy eastwards, hitting him from the air at every turn, destroying large numbers of his tanks and vehicles, but never seriously attempting to deny the Germans an escape route from the battlefield. Patton stood alone in urging a more imaginative stroke, to envelop the flagging enemy.
Third Army’s dramatic drive north to Bastogne had filled the front pages of America’s newspapers. Patton’s Chief of Staff Hobart Gay reflected in his diary for 1 January 1945 on the irony that his chief was once again a national hero, a year to the day since he had been sacked as commander of Seventh Army, following the notorious “slapping incidents” in Sicily: “It’s a fickle world . . . It is a crime that newspaper people, particularly men whose own standards are not very high, can take it upon themselves not only to try to ruin an individual, but also to react very adversely towards the success of the armed effort of a great nation.”
Patton’s pleas to strike at the base of the German salient were rejected. Gay was correct in asserting that his chief had once again become a national hero, for Third Army’s energetic publicity apparatus ensured that Patton’s soldiers were loaded with laurels for their drive north. Yet this stirring tale, which America was eager to hear after the humiliations of earlier days, masked some embarrassing truths about Third Army’s role. Patton had indeed performed a notable feat of command and staffwork by dispatching two corps to support First Army within forty-eight hours of Eisenhower’s initial request. Yet thereafter the piecemeal commitment of formations across a broad front cost his men substantial pain and casualties. On 3 January, Patton commented ruefully to his staff on the German Seventh Army: “They are colder, hungrier and weaker than we, to be sure. But they are still doing a great piece of fighting.” It was argued that the Germans possessed the advantage of holding some formidable natural defensive features, but these had not proved decisive in American hands a fortnight earlier. Third Army’s notoriously poor radio discipline also gave the German interception service generous notice of its movements and intentions.
Once again, Patton had shown himself skilled in driving his forces into action and gaining credit for their successes. But he proved less effective in managing a tough, tight battle on the southern flank. The Americans prevailed, but they did not destroy their enemy as comprehensively as von Rundstedt and Model feared was inevitable. Patton loudly advocated decisive action, but himself contributed to the failure to make it good. “Lightning Joe” Collins, that outstanding American corps commander, remarked with characteristic feistiness as the campaign approached its close: “I’m sure that, 50 years from now, people will think that Georgie Patton won the war . . . but he couldn’t hold a candle to Bradley in the broader sense.” Collins spoke as a loyal subordinate of Bradley’s, and in truth there is little doubt that Patton was a vastly more imaginative warrior. But Collins’s words reflected the view of many able American officers, that Patton talked a better