Armageddon - Max Hastings [21]
It was acknowledged that the Canadians’ mission would require stronger forces. The operation was abandoned until men became available. Amazingly, for three weeks the Germans were left in peace to fortify their positions. This was the first of many instances of lethargy that would dog the Allied campaign. In the happy hangover that followed victory in France, 21st Army Group acted ineffectually. The contrast is extraordinary between the sluggishness of the victorious Allies and the energy of the shattered Wehrmacht. Whatever the requirements of rest and resupply, again and again the Allies paid with the lives of their men for an insouciant attitude to time. The Germans used each day of delay to reinforce their positions, and thus to increase their capacity to resist when an attack belatedly came.
Montgomery, never eager to acknowledge error, nonetheless admitted afterwards that the Antwerp–Scheldt disaster—and it was indeed a strategic disaster—was among his most serious blunders of the war: “a bad mistake—I underestimated the difficulties of opening up the approaches to Antwerp . . . I reckoned that the Canadian Army could do it while we were going for the Ruhr. I was wrong.” The field-marshal’s Chief of Staff, the highly respected Freddie de Guingand, was exhausted and in poor health. De Guingand “blamed himself specifically for the delay in gaining early use of . . . Antwerp.” Yet Brigadier Charles Richardson, who was also serving on Montgomery’s staff, detected in the field-marshal at this time a diminishing receptiveness to counsel, as he “grew steadily more aloof and remote.” The fumbled handling of Antwerp was among the principal causes of Allied failure to break into Germany in 1944. It was not merely that the port was unavailable for the shipment of supplies; through two months that followed, a large part of Montgomery’s forces had to be employed upon a task that could have been accomplished in days if the necessary energy and “grip” been exercised at the beginning of September, when the enemy was incapable of resistance.
All along the front, the Germans now began to improvise a defence with the energy and ingenuity which they invariably displayed in such circumstances. At the heart of Germany’s extraordinary fighting performance in the last year of the Second World War was the Kampfgruppe, the “battle group,” an ad-hoc assembly of infantry and armour, army and Luftwaffe, flak and service personnel, cooks and laundrymen, placed under the command of the most senior available officer. “Transport, signals and heavy equipment were almost non-existent,” observed a British Second Army intelligence report. “. . . Battle groups were formed from regiments or from stragglers and were named after their commanding officers; they varied in strength from 100 to 3,000. Many went into battle so quickly that the men did not know the name of their battle group. Food and ammunition were short, but some of these groups fought with great and at times fanatical determination.” No one pretended that such formations were satisfactory substitutes for the balanced divisions deployed by the Allies. Yet the achievements of the Kampfgruppen were considerable. Battle groups lacked the coherence, transport and artillery support to mount major attacks. But in defence—and defence was now the business of the German Army—their contribution was critical to Hitler’s survival through the months ahead.
THE DASH ACROSS