Armageddon - Max Hastings [51]
The principal American command in the west was held by the fifty-one-year-old Missourian Omar Bradley of 12th Army Group. This was already larger than Montgomery’s 21st, and was destined to keep growing fast through the months that followed. Bradley was responsible for two armies, which would eventually become four, the greatest American force in history to be led by a single officer. It was a myth created by the correspondent Ernie Pyle that Bradley was beloved of his men as the “soldiers’ general.” Patton and Montgomery were the only two senior commanders familiar to their own men, because both took great pains to see that it was so. Bradley had risen to his role not because of any conspicuous feat of generalship, but because he inspired confidence among his peers and possessed a well-deserved reputation for efficiency and grasp of logistics—a science which Patton, for one, neglected. During their time together in the Mediterranean, Eisenhower had grown implicitly to trust and respect Bradley, who had commanded first a corps and then an army there: “the best rounded combat leader I have yet met in our service,” Ike wrote to Marshall. “While he probably lacks some of the extraordinary and ruthless driving power that Patton can exercise at critical moments, he still has . . . force and determination . . . a jewel to have around.” Amid the stresses to which Eisenhower was subjected by Montgomery and in some degree by Patton, it was a relief for him to turn instead to the plainspoken, reliable 12th Army Group commander, a keen bridge-player and expert rifle shot since his rural childhood.
In recent years, Bradley has incurred harsh censure from some critics, notably the American historian Carlo d’Este, who dismisses him as a plodder. In north-west Europe, to his own detriment the Missourian allowed exasperation with Montgomery to become an obsession. For all his customary steadiness, Bradley was prone to outbursts of savage temper. He showed himself far more ruthless than Montgomery in sacking corps and divisional commanders, while he was no more successful than the British commander in persuading his armies to hurry on the battlefield. In one important respect, however, Ernie Pyle’s judgement on Bradley was correct: 12th Army Group’s commander wanted to do the business of defeating the Germans with the maximum application of American firepower and industrial might, and the least possible expenditure of American lives. He had not come to Europe to prove himself a Rommel or von Manstein. He intended to take every possible American under his command home with him again. For this, indeed, he deserved the gratitude of his soldiers.
ON 13 SEPTEMBER, Bradley’s forces—men of Hodges’s First Army—were close to Aachen, and barely sixty miles from Cologne, on the Rhine. Yet it would be almost six months before they took the latter city and closed up to the greatest of Germany’s rivers, a mere hour’s road drive from their autumn front line. In August and early September, Patton’s Third Army had pushed some 500 miles across France in twenty-six days. America’s other armies had likewise advanced far and fast. From September until the early spring of 1945, however, most of