Supreme Commander by Stephen E. Ambrose Read Free Book Online Page A

beyond the Rhine, even if Eisenhower followed Montgomery’s advice and immobilized everyone outside of Twenty-first Army Group. Further, despite Montgomery’s spectacular advance beyond the Seine, Eisenhower had doubts about his abilities. The failure of GOODWOOD still lingered in his mind. Had Bradley and Patton been on the left, Eisenhower might have given greater consideration to the single-thrust concept, but handling Montgomery was another matter. Eisenhower’s thinking was reinforced because of the people around him, the officers he saw every day and to whom he looked for information and advice; none had confidence in Montgomery.
    Even Montgomery’s chief of staff disliked the single thrust concept. De Guingand saw Eisenhower on a number of occasions in late August and early September, and he made it clear he did not think the plan would work. As a competent staff officer, he had thought about some of the problems that would arise if it were used and he thought they werenumerous. When (and if) Twenty-first Army Group reached the Rhine, for example, the bridges would almost surely be blown. To bring forward the necessary bridging material would have been a large and lengthy task and would have meant going short on other needed supplies. Also, there was no guarantee that the Germans would surrender once Montgomery was over the Rhine, and they would have been fighting there close to their supply bases with their homes at stake. De Guingand did not know that the Germans would fight to the bitter end, but he suspected they would, and we now know that it took 160 Russian divisions, seven armies from the west, plus eight additional months of devastating air attack, to force the Germans to capitulate. After the war De Guingand said he found it hard to believe that Montgomery could have brought about the same result with Twenty-first Army Group alone, even if reinforced by First Army, especially since it would have been fighting during a period of increasingly bad weather, which would have meant fewer supporting air sorties and less air lift support. “My conclusion is, therefore,” De Guingand wrote, “that Eisenhower was right.” 3
    If the disadvantages of Montgomery’s proposal were obvious, so were the advantages. Montgomery believed, both at the time and afterward, that he could get to Berlin before winter. In a way, he could turn around De Guingand’s argument about fanatical German resistance to fit his own. If De Guingand was right, Eisenhower’s policy made no sense at all, since even Eisenhower admitted that, once he had reached the German border (or the West Wall, or some point slightly beyond there), his armies would be forced to pause and wait for Antwerp to become operational. The Germans meanwhile, if they were really determined to fight to the bitter end, would recover and patch up a defensive line. What Eisenhower was unconsciously counting on was a repetition of November 1918, when the Germans signed the armistice while their armies were still well west of the border. Eisenhower had chosen the safe, cautious route. Under his directives no army would take heavy casualties, no general would lose his reputation, credit for the victory could be shared by all, and there was no chance of the Germans reversing the situation by surrounding and destroying an advanced force. Eisenhower’s policy would surely lead to victory. The only trouble was that if the Germans decided to fight on it would take time.
    Time was what Montgomery wanted to save. The British economy and manpower situation were stretched to the limit. Every day that the war continued meant it would take Great Britain that much longer to recover from victory. The only chance of winning the war in 1944 was to take risks, and to take them right away, in the first week of September.The AEF would never again have such an opportunity. The only problem was logistical, and the way to solve it was to immobilize Patton and those elements of First Army not