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By Root 986 0

supplies and ammunition, V Corps’ commander, Gerow, decided that he must consolidate, which meant pulling back his frail bridgeheads across the Sauer river. On Sunday 17 September, attacking American troops of VII Corps likewise encountered counter-attacking Germans head on, and stopped. At the time, this seemed a mere momentary check rather than a momentous issue. Yet just as the champions of tennis tournaments are those who play every point as if it was a match-decider, so the commanders who achieve greatness are those who fight every battle as if their nation’s fate hinged upon it. General Courtney Hodges, commander of First Army, to whom Collins and Gerow reported, was a weak, nervous and indecisive officer. At this moment, had Hodges gripped the battle, thrown everything into pushing Gerow’s corps forward, great things might have been achieved. Supply difficulties were real enough. These could be blamed partly upon Montgomery’s activities on the road to Arnhem, and partly upon Patton’s impetuous advance further south, which deprived Hodges of the opportunity to commit XIX Corps to support the advance on the West Wall in the vital days of mid-September. First Army was obliged to send too many men to cover Patton’s left flank, instead of throwing weight on its own left, towards the Ruhr. Yet, even with all these difficulties, American strength in the Aachen sector was vastly greater than that of the Germans in men, tanks, guns. On 10 September, Eisenhower was still sublimely confident that the Germans could not hold the West Wall, and that Hodges’s forces should be able to get to the Ruhr without serious delay. Instead small groups of Germans, using their weapons aggressively, pinned down much larger American forces, a recurring condition castigated by such able U.S. generals as Gavin. A fatal absence of boldness and determination robbed First Army of a breakthrough. Ground which could have been easily seized in September had to be fought across yard by bloody yard through the months that followed.

Meanwhile, further south, along a front of almost sixty miles through the Ardennes along the Luxembourg border, no significant attempt was made to move forward throughout the next three months, until Hitler launched his great offensive in the forests. The region was almost undefended by the Germans for most of September. The Ardennes had been ruled out of contention by SHAEF, leaving tens of thousands of Americans to fight the terrible battles of Aachen, the Roer dams and Hürtgen Forest, in the narrow sector further north which, the planners had decided, offered the only plausible path east into Germany.

The American battles around the Siegfried Line in September and early October have attracted nothing like the historic attention lavished upon Normandy, Arnhem, the Bulge. Yet in those days, and in that area, perished the last realistic prospect that the Allies might achieve a breakthrough to the heart of Germany in 1944. Thereafter, while it may be suggested that the Allied armies could have performed better in the November battles, it is impossible to argue that a stronger showing would have altered the timetable of the war. The decisive delays were those suffered by Montgomery at Antwerp, and by Bradley and Hodges in cracking the Siegfried Line around Aachen. Once the Germans had been granted a respite to rebuild their forces, the combination of winter weather, supply difficulties and strengthening resistance was bound to be fatal to swift progress.

It is fascinating to speculate what might have happened had Patton and not Hodges commanded First Army, or even 12th Army Group. For all that has been said about the failures of Third Army in Alsace-Lorraine, Patton was the best driver and motivator of formation commanders in north-west Europe. It was his misfortune, and that of the Allies, that in consequence of his disgrace in Sicily he now commanded forces in a sector which could not plausibly be decisive. For all Patton’s fame, his forces were doomed to play a subordinate strategic role. Many of Patton’s actions, and much