Inferno - Max Hastings [369]
The 1 November amphibious assault on Walcheren Island was a messy and expensive business, and a week’s hard fighting was required before the Germans surrendered. The first Allied convoy to unload at Antwerp arrived only on 28 November. Given the decisive impact of supply problems on the Allied armies from late August onwards, and the miracle that Antwerp’s docks had been captured intact in September, failure to seize the Scheldt approaches proved the worst single mistake of the campaign. Responsibility stretched all the way down the Allied command chain from Eisenhower. But Montgomery was the man with operational responsibility, the general who considered himself a master of war, and he must bear principal blame. “By the winter Americans had ceased to regard Monty as amusing,” said Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, “and in the cases of [Bedell] Smith and Bradley … contempt had grown into active hatred.”
The Western Allies lost a small chance of breaking into Germany in September—small, because probability suggests that they lacked sufficient combat power to win the war in 1944—because they succumbed to the euphoria of victory in France. They lacked energy and imagination to improvise expedients to overcome their supply problems, as an advancing German army might have done. It is also arguable that the large resources committed to Pacific operations in 1944, in defiance of the “Germany First” strategy, denied Eisenhower the margin of men and shipping which might just have enabled his armies to deliver a war-winning punch. Both the U.S. and British armies were chronically short of infantry, and over-weighted with redundant antiaircraft and antitank units. In Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, these absorbed 47,120 precious men, 7.1 percent of his total strength, while in Normandy only 82,000 of 662,000 British soldiers deployed were riflemen. In the course of the winter some of these units were broken up and their personnel transferred to the infantry, but until the end of the campaign too few British and American soldiers were fighting, too many performing marginal roles. Allied tactics were adversely influenced by the degree to which their armies made themselves prisoners of vehicles.
The Anglo-Americans failed to convert a big victory into a decisive one, and they paid the price in the months of fighting that followed. Wacht, the German Nineteenth Army’s newspaper, wrote on 1 October: “The English, and even more the Americans, have throughout this war sought to avoid a very large sacrifice of lives … They still shrink from total commitment, the true soldierly sacrifice … American infantry only attack with a great armoured spearhead, and only launch an assault after a great hail of shells and bombs. If, then, they still meet German resistance, they break off the attack immediately and try again next day with their heavy firepower.” If this view was self-serving, it was not wholly invalid.
The winter of 1944 proved one of the wettest for decades in western Europe. From October onwards, the weather reinforced the Germans, imposing stagnation across the front. “Dear General,” Eisenhower wrote to Marshall on 11 November, “I am getting exceedingly tired of weather.” If conditions were wretched for all the combatants, they hurt the Allies most, because they were trying to keep moving. Waterlogged ground rendered rapid off-road advances impossible, tanks and vehicles thrashed and flailed in mud up to their track guards and wheel hubs, air operations were drastically constricted, and the Germans exploited every water obstacle. The British had become acutely casualty-conscious as their armies shrank amid the exhaustion of national manpower reserves; they spent the winter advancing slowly through eastern Holland, sometimes making no headway for weeks. Nijmegen stands barely thirty-five miles west of Wesel, but the Reichswald