• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1704 0

’s Third Army to march on the Saar, covered to his south by Lieutenant-General Jacob Devers’ 6th Army Group which had made its way up from the Anvil landings in the south of France. Even though Patton had crossed the Marne by 30 August 1944 and was soon able to threaten Metz and the Siegfried Line, lack of petrol along his 400-mile supply lines to Cherbourg – he had only 32,000 gallons but needed 400,000 for his planned advance – held him back, to his intense frustration. Patton’s personality was immense, but his battlefield achievements matched it. ‘I want you men to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,’ he told his troops. ‘He won it by making the other dumb bastard die for his country… Thank God that, at least, thirty years from now, when you are sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won’t have to say, “I shovelled shit in Louisiana.” ’16 To the widow of Second Lieutenant Neil N. Clothier, who was shot through the heart at Morville on 16 November leading his platoon towards a German machine-gun position, Patton wrote: ‘I know that nothing I can do can assuage your grief except to point out to you that since all of us must die, there is comfort in the fact that your husband died gloriously doing his duty as a man and a soldier.’17

Brussels fell to the Canadians of the 21st Army Group on 3 September and Antwerp the next day, but here Montgomery made a significant error. Antwerp was next to useless to the Allies until the River Scheldt was free of Germans, but clearing its banks was to cost the Allies – mainly Crerar’s Canadian First Army – as many as 13,000 casualties, because it was not concentrated upon immediately. Allied ships did not reach Antwerp until 28 November 1944. Until that point supplies still had to reach the 21st Army Group via Normandy, an absurdly long route. (Dunkirk wasn’t liberated until 9 May 1945.) For Churchill, who had understood the vital importance of Antwerp in the Great War so clearly that he had led a mission there as first lord of the Admiralty in 1914, and for Brooke, Montgomery, Eisenhower and others so to underestimate the inland port’s strategic value is hard to understand even today.

Clearing the estuary was always going to be tough work; this is John Keegan’s description of a day in the life of Peter White’s platoon in the 4th Battalion, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, part of the 52nd Lowland Division whose job it was to open the mouth of the Scheldt in late 1944:

To get up each morning, after a day that had been itself an escape from death, to swallow tinned bacon, hard tack and chlorine-flavoured tea, to plod forward across soaked fields in which every footstep might set off a lethal explosive charge, to lie for hours in freezing water while shells raked the landscape, to rise as darkness fell in the hope of finding a dry spot to shelter for the night after a mouthful of bully beef and hard biscuit.18

By contrast with Antwerp, Churchill’s tardiness over liberating the Channel Islands was understandable – for, as he told the War Cabinet on 26 November, now that it had ‘Come to [the] crunch’ the issue was ‘food’. There were 28,000 Germans stationed there who ‘can’t get away’, whereas ‘if [they came] over here [we would] have to feed them.’19

The food situation in liberated Europe was dire, especially in Holland where the destruction of transport, flooding of several dykes and continued disorganization as a result of continuing operations created fears of mass starvation. As late as 12 March 1945 Churchill had to tell the War Cabinet that ‘Some of the inhabitants will need to take their food intravenously.’ When he had been read a report on how the Americans expected primarily British food reserves to be used in saving Holland, the Prime Minister exploded in anger and launched this (hitherto unpublished) tirade:

The United States are battening on our reserves, accumulated by years of self-denial. I am resisting that: but for an acute emergency we can and should use our