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By Root 1132 0

already under Red control. There began a great flight out of the eastlands; for centuries the Germans had moved east, by sword, by religious conversion, by purchase—the ideas of the Master Race were far older than Adolf Hitler. Now the tide flowed in the other direction, and once-complacent German overlords fled in terror for their lives. In the northern winter women, children, and old men trudged west, or fought for places on the Baltic ships. The millions who had been enslaved and transported as workers for the greater glory of Germany watched them go and hardened their hearts. There was little mercy now for those who in the hour of their triumph had shown none at all.

In Italy the Germans held on the last slopes of the northern Apennines; the Italian theater was definitely second-class now, and everyone there knew it. General Alexander and his army commanders looked at their maps and speculated on what might have been, but they knew that their fleeting moment of glory had passed them by; those hectic, heady weeks in midsummer when Rome had fallen at last and the Allies had streamed northward in pursuit of the battered Germans, only to have their momentum broken by the Allied high command, were the closest the hard-fighting troops in Italy ever came to winning a war. Now they were doomed to fight out the rest of it, and many to give their lives, for mountain peaks that no one but they would ever remember. As the year changed, Alexander went up to command the Mediterranean theater, and Mark Clark took over as the army group commander in Italy; Kesselring too went home, replaced by a subordinate, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff. In the kind of ultimate irony that dogged the whole adventure in Italy, Clark and von Veitinghoff both believed they were fighting to achieve the same objective: Clark said the Allied armies must get to Austria to forestall the Russians; von Vietinghoff said his men must hold at all costs, because only that sort of sacrifice would prevent a Russian takeover of south-central Europe.

In western Europe the great offensive had finally slowed at last. The Allies had not made it across the Rhine. They had cleared France and Belgium, they had taken Antwerp, they had finally managed after costly fighting to clear the seaward approaches to Antwerp, and their supply situation was now satisfactory at least, but they had essentially achieved the Franco-German frontier rather than the Rhine, or the winning of the war, by the advent of winter. Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force had now moved to Paris, and from there he planned his coming moves. He had three army groups under him: Montgomery’s in the north and along the coast; Bradley’s from Luxembourg all the way down to Nancy; and Devers’, up from the southern France invasion, on the upper Rhine to the Swiss frontier. With plenty of air support above them and good supply lines behind them, all the field commanders were keen to press forward. The only thin spot was in the center of Bradley’s 12th Army Group, where General Troy Middleton’s VIIIth Corps of Hodges’ 1st Army was battle-weary and weak; fortunately, it was in a relatively quiet area, around the Ardennes Forest, and there could be no heavy fighting in the Ardennes in the middle of winter.

Elsewhere the situation looked good. Eisenhower decided on a three-phase operation: the Allies would close up to the Rhine, they would then seize bridgeheads across it, and finally, they would drive into Germany. Though they would proceed forward together on a “broad front,” priority for material went to Montgomery in the north, headed for the industries of the Ruhr. Bradley and Devers would get along as best they could. This was more or less acceptable to all but Bradley’s 3rd Army commander, George S. Patton. A complex, driven man, Patton was senior on the army list to his superiors, and difficult to handle. Much of his personality he suppressed in favor of the harder, flamboyant side he thought troops needed in a leader. He and Montgomery had become virtually personal rivals and he resented