Armageddon - Max Hastings [249]
The bombing of the cities and industrial centres of the Reich continued to the very end, destroying some targets useful to the Nazi war effort, and many that were not. On Monday 12 March 1945, a massive USAAF raid on Vienna destroyed its great Opera House. Some 160,000 costumes, together with sets for 120 productions, were consumed in the pyre. Two hundred and seventy people died merely in the cellar of the Jockey Club, which received a direct hit. It took rescuers a fortnight to burrow through the rubble and recover the bodies. “The smell is nauseating and clings to one’s nostrils for days,” wrote “Missie” Vassiltchikov, who had left Berlin to work in a Viennese hospital. The last perfor-mance to be staged at the Opera House was that of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Marching on the Rhine
ROADS TO THE RIVER
IT WAS LATE January 1945 before the Americans and British were done with the Bulge battle, and ready to address operations of their own creation. Hitler’s offensive and its aftermath had already imposed six weeks’ delay upon the advance into Germany. Long before the Ardennes actions were over, however, Montgomery was once more urging upon Eisenhower the case for a concentrated punch at the Ruhr from the north, by his own 21st Army Group with Simpson’s Ninth U.S. Army under command. Bradley was disgusted. At a conference at SHAEF on 31 January, he told Eisenhower that since the Ardennes offensive and the publicity Montgomery had generated, “friendly and intimate co-operation between him and the Field-Marshal was out of the question. He stressed strongly the political importance in the United States of giving the big thrust to an American commander. At present his troops, and to some extent their families, were either indignantly loyal to him, or had had their confidence in the leadership severely shaken. Neither reaction, he said, was healthy.”
Russell Weigley has observed that, while Eisenhower never wholeheartedly committed himself to Montgomery’s cherished northern axis, he showed himself far more sympathetic towards it than the British commander allowed or than American generals thought reasonable. “If the field-marshal had not been too deficient in understanding and tolerance towards Ike to recognize this fact, he might have been able to exploit it to his advantage.” In the aftermath of the Bulge, Eisenhower accepted that Montgomery should be given the chance to make a big push. To Bradley’s fury, he agreed to place Ninth Army under British command until the Rhine was crossed. But he insisted that Montgomery’s offensive should be delayed until the second week of February, to give Bradley’s 12th Army Group the opportunity to recover ground in the Ardennes before the British moved.
Montgomery chafed at this. On the old Bulge battlefield, where First Army stood, the Germans were no longer in any position to go anywhere except backwards. “So far as I can see,” Montgomery wrote contemptuously to Brooke on 22 January, “the Ardennes battle is being continued for the sole reason of keeping Bradley employed offensively . . . I am not consulted in any way about plans for centre or south, or about plans for the front as a whole, and I have no idea what is the long-term plan . . . The real trouble is that there is no control and the three Army Groups are each intent on their own affairs.” The British Chiefs of Staff supported Montgomery’s view that Eisenhower’s armies possessed supplies sufficient only for one immediate big push, which should take place in 21st Army Group’s sector, on the Dutch–German border. In the spring of 1945, shortfalls in supply were still causing immense difficulties. Each month from December 1944 onwards, discharges from all the ports in Allied hands fell short of estimated capacity by 15 to 20 per cent. The British argued once more for giving priority to the northern axis.
At the Malta meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff which preceded the Yalta conference at the