The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [287]
The great offensive petered out by 8 January 1945, with the US First and Third Armies linking up on the 16th and the German order to retreat finally being given on the 22nd. By 28 January there was no longer a bulge in the Allied line, but instead a large one developing in the Germans’. ‘I strongly object to the fact that this stupid operation in the Ardennes is sometimes called the “Rundstedt Offensive”,’ Rundstedt complained after the war. ‘This is a complete misnomer. I had nothing to do with it. It came to me as an order complete to the last detail. Hitler had even written on the plan in his own handwriting “Not to be Altered”.’38 Rundstedt said he felt it should instead be called ‘the Hitler Offensive’.39 In fact, neither man’s name was to be appended.
‘I salute the brave fighting man of America; I never want to fight alongside better soldiers,’ Montgomery told a press conference at his Zonhoven headquarters on 7 January. ‘I have tried to feel I am almost an American soldier myself so that I might take no unsuitable action to offend them in any way.’40 This encomium made no mention of his fellow generals, however, and his press conference served to inflame tensions among the Anglo-American High Command. Patton and Montgomery had long mutually loathed one another – Patton called Monty ‘that cocky little limey fart’, Monty thought Patton a ‘foulmouthed lover of war’ – and as the United States overhauled Great Britain in almost every aspect of the war effort, Montgomery found himself unable to face the new situation, and became progressively more anti-American as the United States’ preponderance became more evident. So when on 7 January SHAEF lifted the censorship restrictions it had imposed nearly three weeks before, Montgomery gave his extensive press briefing to a select group of war correspondents. It was a disgraceful performance by anyone’s estimation, including that of his personal staff who were shocked by his ineptitude, or some thought his malice. ‘General Eisenhower placed me in command of the whole northern front,’ boasted Monty. ‘I employed the whole available power of the British group of armies. You have this picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who had suffered a hard blow. This is a fine Allied picture.’ Although he spoke of the average GIs being ‘jolly brave’ in what with studied insouciance he called ‘an interesting little battle’, he claimed he had entered the engagement ‘with a bang’, and left the impression that he had effectively rescued the American generals from defeat.
Saying that Montgomery was ‘all-out, right-down-to-the-toes mad’, Bradley told Eisenhower that he could not serve with him, but would prefer to transfer back to the United States. Patton immediately made the same declaration. Then Bradley started courting the press himself, and he and Patton subsequently leaked to the American press information damaging to Montgomery. In the words of one of Bradley’s (many) press officers, the ex-editor Ralph Ingersoll, Bradley, Hodges and Lieutenant-General William Simpson of Ninth Army began ‘to make and carry out plans without the assistance of the official channels, on a new basis openly discussed only among themselves. In order to do this they had to conceal their plans from the British and almost literally outwit Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters, half of which was British.’41 The British and American generals in the west from 1943 to 1945 did indeed have a special relationship: it was especially dreadful.
Montgomery certainly ought to have paid