Armageddon - Max Hastings [172]
The Allies opted for slow, steady pressure to squeeze out the Bulge, in an unglamorous series of operations which lasted until mid-January. It was a familiar story, resembling the failure to close the Falaise Gap in August 1944: the Allies were content with success. Until the last weeks of the war, they neither seriously sought nor successfully accomplished a triumph on a heroic scale. Even when Bradley belatedly achieved an envelopment in the Ruhr three months after the Bulge, it was of debatable significance. The allies knew how hard the German soldier could fight, especially to break out of an encirclement. The piecemeal destruction of the enemy sufficed. They declined the risks of pursuing the wounded tiger into the thicket.
The world was told only on 5 January that Montgomery had assumed temporary command of American forces north of the Bulge during the battle. On 7 January, the field-marshal held a press conference at his headquarters which proved one of the most lamentable episodes of his career. It was plain to every thoughtful British officer that the Americans felt chastened, even humiliated by the mauling the Germans had given them in the first days of the battle. Indeed, some U.S. officers overdid this sentiment and forgot that what matters on a battlefield is which combatant remains upstanding after the tenth round. In this case, it was certainly not the Germans. American soldiers and airmen had inflicted a major defeat on von Rundstedt’s forces. It had been the function of the British merely to hold the ring. Yet for days British newspapers—which reached many Americans in Belgium—proclaimed with shameless relish that the British Army had been called upon to pick American chestnuts out of the fire. Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen wrote on 1 January: “Their [the British] press is building up a well of resentment among our American troops that can never be emptied, a distrust that cannot be erased.”
Yet on 7 January Montgomery emptied a petrol can on to Anglo-American tensions, then used the personal pronoun to ignite it: “As soon as I saw what was happening in the Ardennes, I took certain steps myself to ensure that if the Germans got to the Meuse, they certainly would not get over that river,” he told assembled correspondents at his headquarters. “. . . You have thus a picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who have suffered a hard blow . . . The battle has been most interesting; I think possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled . . .”
Even after sixty years, it remains astonishing that a highly intelligent man who had reached the summit of command could be capable of such vainglorious folly. From Eisenhower downwards, every American who read Montgomery’s words reacted with disgust. Beyond the absurdity of making such exaggerated claims for British participation in the battle, it was baffling that Montgomery felt able to regard the Bulge as a great feat of generalship. In reality, it was a battle fought by men in tanks, planes and foxholes with few imaginative interventions from their commanders. The defeated enemy was allowed to make a measured retreat—just as Rommel had been able to do after the Battle of Alamein in November 1942. A British intelligence officer recorded with rueful admiration on 10 January: “Without haste and without any trace of disorder, the enemy has today carried his withdrawal a stage further, and has left the snow and minefields to check Allied efforts to follow up.” Zhukov would never have allowed to the Germans the licence which Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery accorded them when they were plainly whipped in the Ardennes.
“Monty did a good job, but I think it could have been done quicker,” conceded Major Tom Bigland, one of his staff officers. “Monty privately admitted later that he underestimated American powers of recovery. The Americans, it must be remembered, had good equipment and fresh troops, whereas we had been at war for five long years, and were very tired.” Montgomery