Hitler was furious. He thought that Kluge had launched the attack prematurely, hastily, and carelessly. In Hitler’s view, he should have waited for the arrival of three more armored divisions, on their way to Mortain, and then made a truly massive effort. From Hitler’s point of view in East Prussia, that made sense; from Kluge’s point of view in Normandy, to wait meant that the units already assembled would be destroyed in place by Allied artillery, air, and naval fire.
But Hitler was in charge, not Kluge, and Hitler gave the orders (they were read by Ike within an hour of Kluge’s reading them). “I command the attack be prosecuted daringly and recklessly to the sea,” Hitler began. “Regardless of risk,” he wanted three panzer divisions withdrawn from the Fifth Army facing the Canadians and committed in the Avranches sector “to bring about the collapse of the Normandy front by a thrust into the deep flank and rear of the enemy facing Seventh Army.” To consummate what to him had become the master stroke of the Western campaign, Hitler concluded, “Greatest daring, determination, imagination must give wings to all echelons of command. Each and every man must believe in victory.”15
Kluge, despondent, told one of his subordinates, “I foresee that the failure of this continued attack can lead to collapse of the entire Normandy front, but the order is so unequivocal that it must be obeyed.”16
The U. S. 30th Division could not by itself withstand an assault from six German armored divisions.* Bradley sent in the U. S. 2d and 3d Armored Divisions to meet the German spearheads, along with two infantry divisions to strengthen the flanks and provide additional artillery fire. Meanwhile other units continued to move through the gap between Avranches and the sea, then drive north toward the German rear or east toward Paris.
By nightfall of August 7, the battle that had begun at midnight was essentially over, despite Hitler’s preemptory orders to Kluge. American artillery batteries set new records for shells fired; they operated on the premise that it was better to waste shells than miss a possible target. The air forces had flown hundreds of sorties. As a result, of the two hundred or so German tanks involved in the initial assault, only twenty-five were left the next morning.17
Although Hitler continued to wallow in his fantasies and order attack after attack, the Battle of Mortain was over. Little remembered today, it was nevertheless a great Allied victory. The elements that made it possible included American mass-production techniques, which provided the fighting men with well-nigh unlimited artillery ammunition and virtually complete air cover, excellent tactical dispositions, the courage and skill of individual American soldiers (especially those in the 30th Division), and calm, cool, firm leadership at the top. But, clearly, the most important element in the victory was ULTRA.
Ironically, August 7 was the last day of the war that ULTRA would be decisive. The main reason for this development was that as Eisenhower went over to an all-out offensive, the Germans had to react to his moves, rather than the other way around, as had been the case during the battle of the buildup and at Mortain. Another reason was Monty’s rather strange disregard of ULTRA information. Winterbotham complains throughout his book, The Ultra Secret, about Montgomery never acknowledging ULTRA, much less thanking all those involved in getting ULTRA’S priceless information to him. That Monty hated to share the credit for a victory is clear enough, but why he frequently ignored ULTRA information (or other forms of intelligence, for that matter) remains mysterious. The best example of this phenomenon is Mortain.
By the morning of August 8, the Allied High Command knew that Hitler had ordered most of the armor in the Fifth Army to leave the Canadian front near Falaise and proceed to Mortain, there to participate in the attack. Although it was true that if this mighty force had managed to break through to the sea beyond Avranches it would have created serious problems for the Allies, especially Patton’s Third Army, it was also true that Bradley had by then gathered together two armored and five infantry divisions to greet the German tanks. There was, in fact, almost no chance at all of a German breakthrough, as Kluge himself knew full well. Under these circumstances, Monty’s most logical move would have been to hold back the Canadians until the panzers had departed from their front, wait for Kluge to commit his tanks at Mortain, and then unleash the Canadians for a drive to and through Falaise, which would completely sever the supply and communications lines of two entire German armies.
But Monty had been under extreme pressure from Ike for weeks to get going. He knew that Ike’s impatience with his performance was shared by all the staff at SHAEF, British and American alike, and that even Churchill was beginning to growl. After all, Monty had promised to take Caen on D-Day, but he had not gotten it until nearly the end of July, and since then had hardly advanced beyond Caen. Tedder had urged Eisenhower to demand of Churchill that Monty be relieved of his command. He would not go that far, but as Butcher recorded, “Ike keeps continually after Montgomery to destroy the enemy now.”18
So Montgomery, the general who usually waited until the last button on the last private was in place before attacking, attacked too soon. On the morning of August 8 he sent the Canadians forward again, toward Falaise. The attack came just after the 10th ss Panzer Division had started its move to Mortain, and just as the 9th and 12th SS Panzer Divisions were starting to follow along the same route. The Canadian attack gave Kluge the excuse he needed to cancel the whole movement; he kept the tanks in place to fight the Canadians. If Monty had only waited twenty-four hours, he could have had Falaise the next day. As it was, the Canadians ran into the massed fire of two German armored divisions and made little headway.19
Eisenhower and Bradley, meanwhile, were looking forward to the prospect of devouring two entire German armies whole. After hearing the latest intelligence reports on the morning of August 8, and after studying the map, Eisenhower decided that Patton ought to turn north in order to link up with the Canadians behind the German lines, thus encircling the enemy’s Seventh Army and Fifth Army. He went to Bradley with the idea, only to find that “Brad had already acted on it,” a typical example of the similarity of strategic thought between the two generals.
Bradley told Patton to drive on to Argentan, concentrate his forces there, and wait for the Canadians to come to him through Falaise. Eisenhower drove to Monty’s headquarters “to make certain that Monty would continue to press on the British-Canadian front.”20
Kluge, meanwhile, in accordance with his orders, continued to attack on the Mortain front. The men of the 30th Division who were encircled on Hill 317 continued to call in devastating artillery fire from the massed batteries of the division’s artillery. By day’s end there were one hundred wrecked tanks around the hill. The Germans had attacked again and again in an effort to take the high ground, and although they killed or wounded more than half the seven hundred men on Hill 317, the rest held out. The 30th Division as a whole lost almost two thousand men during the battle. German losses were much greater. As the closest student of the battle, Martin Blumenson, observes, “What the Mortain counterattack might have accomplished seemed in retrospect to have been its only merit.”21
By continuing to attack, Kluge was doing exactly what Eisenhower and Bradley hoped that he would do—sticking his head farther into a noose that would be drawn tight when the Canadians and the U. S. Third Army linked up at Argentan. Patton was making spectacular progress toward that link-up; the Canadian offensive, however, was going slowly. By August 10, Kluge realized that his only hope for escape lay in an immediate withdrawal behind the Seine, but Hitler insisted that he continue the offensive at Mortain. Finally, after an exchange of messages and a telephone conversation, Hitler consented to allow Kluge to suspend the westward attack, shorten his lines, and then strike Patton’s leading corps in order to keep the supply lines open. It seemed already to be too late. The German Seventh Army had lost its rear installations and was depending on the Fifth Army for supplies. The Germans were on the verge of an incredible debacle.
On August 12, Patton’s Third A
rmy spearhead, the XV Corps, reached Argentan. The Canadians were still eighteen miles to the north and making only slight progress. Patton, impatient, wanted to cross the boundary line Bradley had established in order to close the gap. He pleaded with Bradley on the telephone, “Let me go on to Falaise and we’ll drive the British back into the sea for another Dunkirk.”
Bradley refused to change the boundary, and Ike backed him up. Not until August 19 did the link-up occur, too late to do much good, according to Patton, who blamed Monty, and beyond him Ike. At times Patton could be almost idolatrous of Eisenhower; at other times he could be heard to complain, “Ike’s the best damn general the British have got,” meaning that Eisenhower was too much under Monty’s and Churchill’s influence.
Twenty-three years later, in 1967, when he was reviewing a summary of the criticisms of his generalship at Falaise, prepared as part of the annotation for his official papers, Ike wrote by hand, “Some of these writers forget that grand tactics and strategy must be decided upon by people who are in possession of the overall situation in such matters as relative strength, mobility and logistic possibilities. Patton was an operational officer—not an overall commander.”22
What Eisenhower meant was that Patton seemed to think that all he had to do was send the XV Corps forward until it linked up with the Canadians, at which point the encirclement would be complete and the Germans would surrender. But as Eisenhower and Bradley knew, from all their intelligence sources, capped by ULTRA, there were two complete German armies inside the trap. Although they were short on supplies, they still could maintain a tremendous rate of fire, from heavy artillery through tank to small arms. To encircle is not to destroy. Already ULTRA indicated that the Germans would be fighting their way out. Hitler had relieved Kluge, but gave his successor, General Model, a free hand. Model started a full-scale retreat.
Beyond ULTRA revelations, Eisenhower was relying on intelligence estimates of the enemy’s intentions that were, basically, his own. At its highest level, intelligence is more a hunch than a scientific matter. It has to be felt rather than studied, sensed rather than calculated. At this level, intelligence is an art form, a prediction about what the enemy will do before the enemy knows himself. Eisenhower was a master of it. One of his most notable traits as a human being was his sensitivity, his keen awareness of the other man’s point of view. Those who worked with Ike have told of his concern for the well-being of his subordinates, of acts of kindness or awareness. One of the secrets of his success was his hardworking staff; his staff slaved for him precisely because he was concerned about them, as people. This tremendous concern gave him unmatched insights into other people’s minds, and thus paid off with the most important kind of intelligence. From Hitler in 1945 to Khrushchev in 1959, Ike seldom misjudged his opponents.
As at Falaise, where Patton, and many others, assumed that the Germans in the West had had it, that their defeat was as obvious to them as to the Allies, and that surrender was imminent. Eisenhower held a press conference on August 15 and the reporters kept asking him how many weeks it would take to end the war. Furious, “Ike vehemently castigated those who think they can measure the end of the war ‘in a matter of weeks.’ He went on to say that ‘such people are crazy.’ ” He reminded the press that Hitler could continue the war effort through the Gestapo and pointed out that the German leader knew he would hang when the war ended so he had nothing to lose in continuing it. Ike said that he expected Hitler would end up hanging himself, but before he did he would “fight to the bitter end” and most of his troops would fight with him.23
He was almost exactly right. All he missed was the method Hitler would use to kill himself.
Eisenhower was right in the short run, too, at Falaise. The Germans rejected the easy way out, surrender, and fought to hold open the jaws of the trap that were slowly closing on them. They, not Patton, made it a Dunkirk in reverse. Despite Eisenhower’s plea, in an order of the day, for every man in his command “to make it his direct responsibility that the enemy is blasted unceasingly by day and by night, and is denied safety either in fight or flight,” it was the Germans, not the Allies, who made the supreme effort at Falaise.24
Lewin puts the last phase of the battle that began at Mortain into its proper perspective. No one, he writes, “who has not faced a German panzer army fighting for its life has the right to criticize those who have done so and apparently failed.” The Germans were “struggling for survival.” The failure at Falaise, if it can be called a failure, “was due to … a simple inability, on the Allies’ part, to destroy the German will to survive.”25
The truth is that Mortain/Falaise was a great victory, thanks in largest part to the superb defense at Mortain, which was itself based in equal measures on the courage and fighting ability of the men of the 30th Division and on ULTRA. Together with the Allied air forces and the Canadians, they gave the Germans a hell of a licking. Some 50,000 German troops were captured, another 10,000 killed, while about 40,000 got away.
Those who escaped left their equipment behind. An officer who had observed the destruction of the World War I battlefields found that “none of these compared in the effect upon the imagination with what I saw near Falaise. As far as my eye could reach on every line of sight, there were vehicles, wagons, tanks, guns, prime movers, sedans, rolling kitchens, etc., in various stages of destruction. I stepped over hundreds of rifles in the mud and saw hundreds more stacked along sheds. I saw probably three hundred field pieces and tanks, mounting large-caliber guns, that were apparently undamaged.”26
The full extent of the destruction is best measured in the August 28 strength report of the Fifth Army. It had only 1,300 men, twenty-four tanks, and sixty pieces of artillery.27 The full magnitude of the victory is best seen in the events that followed, as described by Adolph Rosengarten, the SLU with the U. S. First Army: “Many German Seventh Army formations escaped from the pocket and fled, although not in good order, to the German frontier. As it was three hundred odd miles away, following them was fun. We drove through the lovely French countryside in the August sun and pitched our tents for stands of two or three nights in the kitchen gardens of some beautiful chateaux.”28
IN THAT DASH THROUGH FRANCE, ULTRA played little role, mainly because the Germans were so disorganized it was almost a case of every man for himself, which in turn meant there was little in the way of direction or control being exercised by radio. When the Germans did not use the radio, ULTRA was useless. The French people, however, provided an alternative source of information that was as accurate and trustworthy as ULTRA. In every village between the Seine and the German border, GIs and Tommies could count on the local inhabitants telling them exactly when the last German formation went through the village square, in what direction, with what equipment, and in what numbers. This priceless information made the pursuit effective and continuous. The Germans never got a chance to catch their breath.
Until they reached the German border. Suddenly the Allies, who had seen all and known all, were blind. Local inhabitants were sullen and noncommunicative instead of friendly and informative. Inside their own country, the Germans had secure telephone lines, and ULTRA could consequently hear nothing. Eisenhower, who until now had been well informed about his enemies’ strengths and dispositions, was suddenly shut off from such information as completely as he would have been had a steel wall descended between the contending sides. He needed to prove himself as a commander who did not need virtually a complete set of the enemy battle plans in order to win. But if he was now in the inferior position with regard to intelligence, he commanded the superior force, not only in air power, but in tanks, men, artillery, and fighting formations.
His biggest problem was overconfidence. After the dash through France, his officers and men felt that the Germans in the West were finished, done, kaput. All that was left was the formality of occupying Berlin. The heady success of the liberation of France had its effect everywhere, even in the mind of the supreme commander. He
was quite confident he could wrap the whole thing up by Christmas. He even made a bet with Monty about it.
* * *
* The 30th continued to fight magnificently, even though surrounded, in an action that ranks with that of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne in December; unfortunately the 30th Division has never received the credit it should have for this heroic stand.
CHAPTER NINE
Ike, Strong, Monty, and the Bridge Too Far
SEPTEMBER 15, 1944. The 9th and 10th Panzer Divisions are missing from the SHAEF order of battle for the Wehrmacht. It is Ken Strong’s job to find them.
IKE’S CHIEF SPY in World War II, and one of the best ever in the art of gathering intelligence, Major General Sir Kenneth Strong was a blunt, hardy Scot who got on famously with Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, not so well with Monty. Strong had an explosive laugh, an appreciation of the wisecrack, and an easy acceptance of the West Pointers’ rough language and casual manner rare in British officers. In his memoirs, he endeared himself to all those from the New World side of the Atlantic Ocean who had been put off by British stuffiness and snobbery when he remarked, “The best time in a man’s life is when he gets to like Americans.”1
Strong had been Eisenhower’s intelligence officer in North Africa. When Eisenhower moved to SHAEF in January of 1944, and asked Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to transfer Strong to London so that he could be G-2 at SHAEF, Brooke refused. He charged that Eisenhower and his chief of staff, Bedell “Beetle” Smith, had already robbed Allied headquarters in Algiers of its best officers and he insisted that Strong had to stay there to help fight the war in Italy.