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By Root 990 0

had insisted on it as a means of relieving supply congestion and logistical strain, and also as a potential lower jaw to trap the German forces in southwestern France. But these pulled out anyway, squeezed by what was happening to the north of them, and leaving only last-ditch garrisons to hang on to the Biscay coast ports as long as possible. All of these were eventually rounded up and overrun by the French Forces of the Interior. The Mediterranean ports did prove useful, but only to the troops who landed there; they did little for the northern invaders. In fact, so fast was the northern campaign developing that the Allies decided they did not even need to supply through the Brittany harbors, but instead tried to set up their supply bases farther east along the coast, thus reducing the distance goods had to be moved up to the front. In early September the forces in southern France, now 6th Army Group under General Jacob Devers, linked up with patrols from Patton’s troops and thus became the right flank of the drive to the German border. Whether they might have achieved more had they been used in Italy remains one of the great tantalizing strategic questions of the war.

By the beginning of the last week of August, the Allies were along the Seine from Troyes, a hundred miles above Paris, all the way to the sea. Four armies—Crerar, Dempsey, Hodges, and Patton—were champing at the bit. The Germans had lost more than half a million men in Normandy and they had gotten few more than a hundred tanks back over the Seine. The Allied problem was now more one of supply than of the enemy. In the great leap out of Normandy they had outrun their supply capacity. Now, all the field generals wanted to drive on into the Low Countries and even Germany, but there was not sufficient support for all of them to do it. They had originally agreed to a steady advance all along the front, the “broad front” strategy, with everyone going forward in step, and supplies keeping pace. Now, all of the generals clamored instead for a single deep drive, but Bradley wanted it done on his front by Hodges or Patton, and Montgomery wanted it done on his front by Dempsey. Crerar and the Canadians on the coast were out of the running; they were handed the unhappy task of clearing the Channel ports as the Allies pushed north, a job that cost them such high casualties as to cause a crisis at home in Canada over the issue of conscription for overseas service.

Eisenhower eventually compromised and allowed Montgomery to push Dempsey forward, with Hodges supporting on his right. Patton was told he could move as far as possible on whatever supplies were left over. The disgusted but ebullient Patton scrounged what he could, and leaped forward a hundred miles to the Meuse, where he ran out of fuel temporarily, and where the Germans, scared by the threat his advance represented, shored up their defenses to slow him down.

Dempsey and Hodges went straight up the road to Brussels, their tanks grinding over the old World War I battlefields of the Marne and the Somme, where thousands had been slaughtered taking yards in the days before tanks and aircraft came of age. Within a week the Americans were in Mons and the British in Brussels—another capital where they were joyously welcomed back—and then by a stroke of luck Dempsey got the great port of Antwerp before the Germans could destroy the docking facilities. The Germans still held on the lower reaches of the Scheldt, the river that was Antwerp’s heart, but it looked as if the whole defense were breaking down. Hitler responded by recalling von Rundstedt yet again and putting him back in command of the Western Front, with orders to stop the Allied advance, no matter how he did it.

The terrain and the lack of supplies were more successful than the Germans. The British bogged in the watery maze of the lowlands; the Americans, as they came into Luxembourg and the Ardennes and up against the outer reaches of the German “West Wall,” simply lacked the material to sustain their momentum.

In the face of the growing logistical