Free Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan

was dependent on his own advisers, yet he was puzzled.  * If the Germans were still disorganized and, as his resistance leaders believed, a “thrust by a few tanks” could liberate the country “in a matter of hours”—why, then, didn’t the British proceed?  Perhaps Montgomery disbelieved the reports of the Dutch resistance because he considered them amateurish or unreliable.  Bernhard could find no other explanation.  Why else would the British hesitate, instead of instantly crossing the border?  Although he was in constant touch * The young Prince, although named Commander in Chief of the Netherlands Forces by the Queen, was quite frank in interviews with the author regarding his military background.  “I had no tactical experience,” he told me, “except for a course at the War College before the war.  I followed this up with courses in England, but most of my military knowledge was learned in a practical way by reading and by discussions with my officers.  However, I never considered myself experienced enough to make a tactical decision.  I depended on my staff, who were very well qualified.”  Nevertheless Bernhard took his job very seriously.  In his meticulously kept personal diary for 1944, which he kindly placed at my disposal, he recorded in minuscule handwriting each movement, almost minute by minute, from telephone calls and military conferences to official functions.  During this period, based on his own notations, I would estimate that his average working day was about sixteen hours.
    with his ministers, the United States ambassador at large, Anthony Biddle, and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, and as a result was well aware that, at this moment, the advance was so fluid that the situation was changing almost hour by hour, nevertheless Bernhard thought he would like firsthand information.  He made a decision: he would request permission of SHAEF to fly to Belgium and see Field Marshal Montgomery himself as soon as possible.  He had every faith in the Allied high command and, in particular, Montgomery.  Still, if something was wrong, Bernhard had to know.
    At his spartan, tented headquarters in the Royal Palace Gardens at Laeken, a few miles from the center of Brussels, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery impatiently waited for an answer to his coded “Personal for Eisenhower Eyes Only” message.  Its urgent demand for a powerful and full-blooded thrust to Berlin was sent in the late hours of September 4. Now, by midday on September 5, the brusque, wiry fifty-eight-year-old hero of El Alamein waited for a reply and impatiently fretted about the future course of the war.  Two months before the invasion of Normandy he had said, “If we do our stuff properly and no mistakes are made, then I believe that Germany will be out of the war this year.”  In Montgomery’s unalterable opinion, a momentous strategic mistake had been made just before the Allies captured Paris and crossed the Seine.  Eisenhower’s “broad-front policy”—moving his armies steadily forward to the borders of the Reich, then up to the Rhine—may have been valid when planned before the invasion, but with the sudden disorderly collapse of the Germans, the Britisher believed, it was now obsolete.  As Montgomery put it, that strategy had become “unstitched.”  And all his military training told him “we could not get away with it and … would be faced with a long winter campaign with all that that entailed for the British people.”
    On August 17 he had proposed to General Omar N. Bradley,
    the U.s. 12th Army Group commander, a single-thrust plan.  Both his own and Bradley’s army group should stay “together as a solid mass of forty divisions, which would be so strong that it need fear nothing.  This force should advance northeastward.”  Montgomery’s 21/ Army Group would clear the Channel coast, and secure Antwerp and southern Holland.  Bradley’s U.s. 12th Army Group, its right