Armageddon - Max Hastings [27]
Montgomery was a superb planner and trainer, but he was always most comfortable directing a static battle, of the kind with which he had become familiar a world war earlier. He failed repeatedly in exploitation. Bradley was a steady, likeable officer who possessed solid virtues as commander of 12th Army Group, but showed no greater gifts than Eisenhower in the creation of grand strategy. In the last stages of the war, he became prey to jealousies and frustrations which caused him not infrequently, and almost literally, to sulk in his tent. Only Patton showed himself at ease in the imaginative direction of large forces. Had he not been disgraced for the notorious “slapping incidents” in Sicily* 3—behaviour curiously characteristic of a German or Soviet general rather than an American one—he might have commanded 12th Army Group in north-west Europe. Patton’s critics point out that he suffered as many difficulties as other American generals, in persuading Third Army’s infantry to show the determination against tough German opposition to match their commander’s vaulting ambition. Patton’s streak of recklessness and absolute lack of diplomatic skills disqualified him from the highest commands. Yet at 12th Army Group or at First Army, he might have provided an impetus that was to prove sorely lacking between September 1944 and May 1945.
The management of alliances is very hard. Battlefield decisions must be constantly subordinated to national sensitivities. Marlborough suffered huge frustrations alongside the Dutch in the eighteenth century, echoed a hundred years later by those of Wellington among the Spanish, yet they were responsible for forces scarcely larger than a corps in the armies of the Second World War. It has sometimes been suggested that, if MacArthur had been transferred from the Pacific to north-west Europe in 1944, he could have provided the strategic vision which Eisenhower lacked. Yet MacArthur’s ignorance of Europe and his loathing for the British rendered him an implausible candidate for alliance command. Some historians of the Second World War have underrated the animosity, jealousy and mistrust between senior American and British officers, which it required Eisenhower’s rare diplomatic gifts to overcome. The cautious Kansan regarded the avoidance of disaster as his most vital responsibility. He sought to defeat the German armies in north-west Europe by a measured series of advances. He saw no virtue in excessive haste, and certainly none in excessive casualties. He had been given a mandate to accomplish the defeat of Germany which took no heed of political matters, foremost among these the shape of post-war Europe. Eisenhower handled himself throughout as a corporate chairman rather than a director of armies.
One of Patton’s biographers has described how Third Army’s commander felt “almost with a physical pain the absence of consistent direction from the top . . . trying to follow a conductor who did not quite know or failed to comprehend the delicate nuances of a score.” Yet it remains debatable whether even the greatest of captains could have steered the citizen soldiers of the Anglo-American alliance into Germany in 1944 faster than the slowest ship in the convoy was capable of steaming. More will be said of this below. Just once in the entire campaign did Eisenhower endorse an imaginative, dramatic initiative to end the war quickly. In September 1944, he astonished his own staff, and deeply irked his American subordinates, by supporting a plan presented by Montgomery for a lightning British dash to the Rhine.
Despite Eisenhower’s dislike for Montgomery, it is reasonable to surmise that somewhere in Ike’s heart in the autumn of 1944 was a recognition that the British general knew more about the battlefield direction of armies than he did himself. Montgomery’s behaviour in Normandy had been abrasive. Yet the British officer had managed that battle with notable competence, without losing his nerve amid savage fighting and some alarming setbacks. “I am no Montgomery-lover,” wrote Bedell-Smith,