The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [283]
In September 1944 – two months after his sacking – Rundstedt was recalled as commander-in-chief west, a post he was to hold until March 1945 when his urging of Hitler to make peace earned him his third dismissal. Nicknamed der alte Herr (the old gentleman), he was sixty-eight at the time of his final appointment. Watching the Hitler Youth Division retreating over the River Meuse near Yvoir on 4 September, Rundstedt said what many German officers were thinking, but few dared state: ‘It is a pity that this faithful youth is sacrificed in a hopeless situation.’21 A week later, on 11 September, the Allies set foot on German soil for the first time, when American troops crossed the frontier near Trier, yet Hitler still had armies numbering several million men, albeit far too widely dispersed. His West Wall – also known as the Siegfried Line – seemed formidable, and his reappointment of Rundstedt as commander-in-chief west was good for the Wehrmacht’s morale, with Field Marshal Model remaining in charge of Army Group B, Rommel and Kluge both having committed suicide after being tangentially implicated in the Bomb Plot. Later that month, Churchill, by now convinced that Hitler was a hopeless strategist, ridiculed him in the House of Commons:
We must not forget that we owe a great debt to the blunders – the extraordinary blunders – of the Germans. I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler, as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to connect him in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher. But there is one respect in which I must draw a parallel. Both these men were temperamentally unable to give up the tiniest scrap of any territory to which the high-water mark of their hectic fortunes had carried them.22
He went on to liken Napoleon’s strategy of 1813–14 to that of Hitler, who ‘has successfully scattered the German armies all over Europe, and by obstination at every point from Stalingrad and Tunis down to the present moment, he has stripped himself of the power to concentrate in main strength for the final struggle’. Yet even while the House of Commons was laughing at the Führer’s strategic blunderings, Hitler was planning for a concentration of German force in the Ardennes such as would once again astonish the world – but for the last time.
Montgomery’s bold scheme to use the British 1st and the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to try to capture the bridges over the great rivers of the Maas (Meuse), Waal (Rhine) and Neder Rijn (Lower Rhine), and thereby help the land forces to encircle the Ruhr to the north, came to grief in mid-September 1944 in and around the Dutch towns of Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem. Despite heroism of the highest order, mistakes were made in the planning stages – principally by Lieutenant-General F. A. M. ‘Boy’ Browning, on the intelligence side – which meant it was doomed before it began. It was the largest airborne assault in history, but intelligence that should have warned the 1st Airborne Division of two Panzer divisions that were refitting near Arnhem was given insufficient weight, and it therefore did not take enough anti-tank weaponry to the drop-zones.23 Operation Market, the airborne assault of Friday, 17 September, was initially successful, but the simultaneous ground attack by General Dempsey’s British Second Army and XXX Corps, codenamed Operation Garden, reached Eindhoven on the 18th and Nijmegen on the 19th but could not break through determined German resistance in time to relieve the paratroopers at Arnhem. Montgomery’s orders to Dempsey to be ‘rapid and violent, without regard to what is happening on the flanks’, seems not to have been taken sufficiently to heart.24 XXX Corps suffered 1,500 casualties compared with five times that number of Britons and Poles at Arnhem, who were massacred on the Lower Rhine