Armageddon - Max Hastings [73]
The advance ground painfully on. It was a familiar story: the enemy’s forces were small, but their fierce energy convinced American units of the need for caution. Corlett’s XIX Corps made slow progress. The 30th Division took nine days to advance the last three miles to link up with 1st Division on 16 October. The entire operation cost the 30th some 3,100 casualties, about 20 per cent of its strength. So irked were Bradley and Hodges by XIX Corps’s sluggishness that they sacked Corlett. The emotional Leland Hobbs, commanding 30th Division, burst into tears on hearing the news. He felt that if his men had been able to move faster on the north axis Corlett would not have lost his job.
When the German garrison of Aachen rejected a demand for its surrender, the Americans launched an intense air and artillery bombardment, then committed infantry and tanks. On the evening of 21 October, resistance ended in the devastated city. The operation had exhausted the men of 1st and 30th Divisions. Bradley acknowledged that they would have to be reinforced and rested before they could do more. Allied intelligence estimated that German strength in the west had trebled in the seven weeks since the beginning of September. It is valid to speculate about what might have happened if 30th Division had pressed on eastwards towards the Roer river after piercing the West Wall, as Corlett had suggested to Hodges, instead of pivoting to encircle Aachen. The German garrison of the city presented no significant threat to the Allied advance. The enemy lacked mobility and could have been mopped up at leisure. Once again, vital momentum had been lost for the dogged and doubtful purpose of seizing a landmark.
Just as Montgomery was surely right to bypass the German garrisons of the Channel ports during his dash east in August, so Patton might have left Metz to rot, and Hodges might have driven on eastwards beyond Aachen. Allied operations reflected an unimaginative commitment to winning ground, tidying lines on the map, eliminating ugly bulges and pockets. Commanders sought to gain terrain yard by yard, rather than focus upon the aim of all great generals throughout history—the concentration of combat power for the breaking of the enemy’s main front. On 22 October, Marshall in Washington urged Eisenhower to examine the chances of launching an all-out offensive to end the war by Christmas. Yet by that date realistic prospects of a swift victory had perished. They slipped away when First Army failed to make good its penetration of the West Wall before the enemy and the weather foreclosed the options. Now, Germans were dug deep into the wooded hills that zig-zagged across their frontier with Belgium and Luxembourg. While the Allies retained superiority, the overwhelming dominance of autumn had been lost. The pain that lay ahead for First Army in its winter battles caused many thoughtful officers to lament the opportunity that might have been seized in September, with more imaginative leadership and without the drain of fuel and supplies to Market Garden, Lorraine and Brest.
One further point is worth making. If Germany’s generals had followed the logic of their own fears about what the Russians would do to Germany, they might have saved their own people untold misery by engineering a surrender or even a tactical collapse in the west, to give passage to the Western allies. Of course, they did not do so, and sustained fierce resistance on both fronts. Only in the last weeks of the war did the Wehrmacht in the west give way, while still fighting fiercely in the east. The autumn failure to break into Germany was a mere disappointment for the Americans and British. For the German people, however, it augured disaster. Their fate in 1945 was to prove infinitely more terrible than it would have been had they lost the war in the west in 1944.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Russians at the Vistula
SOVIET WARLORD
LONG BEFORE Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin