Armageddon - Max Hastings [256]
On the night of 9 February, after days of bitter fighting and some severe setbacks and losses, Hodges’s First Army finally gained possession of the Roer dams, focus of so much anxiety for five months. The Germans had not, as had been feared, demolished the structures. They merely opened the discharge valves to release a torrent which flooded the river valley for a fortnight. This delayed the start of Simpson’s attack, Operation Grenade, until the waters in front of his army’s positions subsided.
All along the Allied front, it was apparent that German resistance was weaker than the attackers had ever seen it. American units met Germans surrendering in substantial numbers without a fight. When the U.S. 90th Division captured six 120mm mortars, some paratrooper PoWs proved perfectly willing to instruct GIs on how best to use the tubes against their own people. Aggressive American formations were rewarded with dramatic rewards, above all on Third Army’s front. Patton himself stood on the road, urging his men forward with his usual theatricality and frequent losses of temper. When two armoured divisions became snarled at an intersection and an MP died in the consequent traffic jam, Patton insisted that the responsible corps commander should spend the next nine hours personally directing vehicles, to learn not to make the same mistake again. Such stories contributed to the Patton legend, and also to suspicions of his derangement. “There was something a bit scary about Patton,” observed Eisenhower’s son John. “To pretend to love war like he did, there had to have been a screw loose somewhere.”
When 4th Armored Division found itself facing little resistance, it raced north-eastwards. In one bound, it covered twenty-five miles, taking 5,000 prisoners and killing several hundred Germans for the loss of 111 of its own men, before reaching the hills above the Rhine. If only others had done likewise. “For a victorious army,” said Lieutenant Glavin, G-3 of 6th Armored Division on 22 February, echoing German opinion, “our divisions are too sensitive to their flanks . . . the result of this timidity is that we do not exploit local weaknesses, and unless the whole army moves forward along a broad front, nobody moves.” If every American formation had shown the same drive and enthusiasm as the best of Patton’s troops, the Allies might have secured their line on the Rhine weeks earlier. A major opportunity was missed on Hodges’s front because of Eisenhower’s commitment to Montgomery. Collins’s VII Corps was making dramatic progress towards Cologne when the order came to halt the drive, because it was time to pass the baton—and the necessary logistic support—to Montgomery, in accordance with Eisenhower’s undertakings to the British. A more flexible and imaginative commander—or one unconstrained by the demands of inter-allied relations—would have allowed Hodges’s forces to keep going to the river and delayed Montgomery for the necessary few days.
As it was, 21st Army Group’s big push south-east from Nijmegen, spearheaded by the Canadians, was launched as scheduled on 8 February. The attack, Operation Veritable, was a characteristic Montgomery setpiece. It began with a five-hour barrage by 1,034 guns, the heaviest of the war in the west. Five infantry divisions supported by three armoured brigades advanced on an eight-mile front with the Rhine on their left flank and the Maas on their right. The Germans had flooded much of the countryside and strongly fortified the area. They now drained their reserves to meet the attack, throwing in five divisions and the remains