Armageddon - Max Hastings [28]
The decision was made at a meeting on 10 September. Eisenhower accepted the British field-marshal’s plan for a thrust through Holland to seize a bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem, opening a path to the Ruhr. For this purpose, the British would be reinforced by SHAEF’s strategic reserve, the First Airborne Army awaiting orders around airfields in England. The British would also be granted a special allocation of fuel and supplies, diverted from the American armies. Eisenhower and his staff were bemused to hear from Montgomery soon after the 10 September meeting that, if the Rhine crossing at Arnhem could be secured, he now envisaged a northern drive through the Ruhr towards Berlin by some sixteen or eighteen divisions. SHAEF found it difficult to imagine that such a relatively small force could break the German front, any more than Patton’s Third Army could make a war-winning advance on its own. The logisticians also doubted whether even sixteen divisions could be fuelled and supplied in Germany without the use of Antwerp.
Omar Bradley was among those who urged Eisenhower to forget the Arnhem plan and commit Montgomery to clearance of the Antwerp approaches. But SHAEF authorization for the airborne operation had been granted and was not rescinded. As late as 15 September, the Supreme Commander himself remained not merely optimistic but euphoric. He believed that within a week or two at most the Allied armies would have closed up on the Rhine. “The Germans will have stood in defense of the Ruhr and Frankfurt, and will have had a sharp defeat inflicted upon them . . . Clearly Berlin is the main prize,” he wrote in a circular to his commanders. “There is no doubt whatever, in my mind, that we should concentrate all our energies on a rapid thrust.” Bradley’s aide likewise wrote on 15 September: “Brad and Patton agree neither will be too surprised if we are on the Rhine in a week . . . General anxious to slam on through to Berlin.”
THE STRUGGLE TO destroy Hitler brought together in Europe an extraordinary mingling of humanity. World war had displaced tens of millions of people, some by choice and most by compulsion. Everywhere the shadow of conflict extended, there were men, women and sometimes children who had been arbitrarily removed from their natural abodes and relocated upon alien soil, among people they had never known before. Some in consequence found themselves in rags, others in uniform. The war created a host of temporary new loyalties and placed all manner of citizens of many nations in unfamiliar circumstances, united only by the demands of defeating the enemy and, if possible, surviving to go home. Within Eisenhower’s huge command, there were men from every corner of the United States and the British Isles, as well as Frenchmen, Poles, Canadians, Belgians, Dutchmen and a smattering of representatives from scores of other nations. Consider one small unit, the RAF’s 268 Squadron, flying Typhoons on reconnaissance missions for First Canadian Army: in September 1944 this comprised seven Canadians, two Australians, three Trinidadians, one Maltese, one Scot and one Welshman. They were later joined by two Poles and an Indian. It is little wonder that such men emerged from their wartime experience as a very internationally minded generation.
Eisenhower’s forces were now formed into three army groups, containing twenty-eight American divisions, eighteen British and Canadian, one Polish, and eight makeshift French formations, manned chiefly by undisciplined maquisards. The latter were included in the order of battle for their political rather than military value. The Germans in the west mustered forty-eight infantry and fifteen panzer and panzergrenadier