Free Armageddon by Max Hastings

commanders. Again and again, U.S. Army inspectors uncovered scandalous lapses and snarl-ups in the supply system. Bradley urged irritably: “Many of our ground forces have done the impossible; let [ComZ] try the impossible for a while. I am not convinced they are doing all they could.” Likewise Patton: “Hell, have ’em get off their asses and work the way our troops have.”
    An energetic and imaginative officer occupying the post so indolently filled by Lee might have found ways to move fuel and supplies to the Allied spearheads in eastern France, to maintain the pace of their advance. This could have been decisive, in enabling Eisenhower’s armies to exploit their summer successes before the Germans regrouped. In the event, the momentum triumphantly achieved in August was tragically lost in September. Hitler’s armies used every day of grace they were granted, to create defensive lines on the borders of Germany against the Allied host.
    MONTGOMERY TRIUMPHANT
    I N THE EARLY days of September, there occurred one of the most notorious of many confrontations between Eisenhower and Montgomery. The fact that these did not end in a disastrous fracture of Allied relations reflected the self-control and political discipline of the Supreme Commander. For all Eisenhower’s limitations as a strategist, his wisdom and generosity of spirit in the management of the Anglo-American alliance were worthy of the highest respect. He recognized the need to defer whenever possible to the sensitivities of the British, battered and wearied by five years of war, bleakly conscious of their shrinking power. Eisenhower would never jeopardize the vital interests of the United States, but he would go far to avoid trampling upon the fragile self-esteem of the British nation. As far as possible, he humoured the conceit of its most famous soldier.
    The British commander was a highly gifted professional, “an efficient little shit,” as one of his own generals confided to the Canadian Harry Crerar. Montgomery considered clearly and planned meticulously. “The difference between him and other commanders I had known was that he actually thought, as a scientist or a scholar thinks,” wrote Goronwy Rees, an academic who served on Montgomery’s wartime staff. Montgomery was acknowledged as a master of the setpiece operation. Whereas Eisenhower called for options from his planners, then made a choice, the British soldier believed that it was the business of generals to determine courses of action, and then invite staffs to execute them. If his vanity was a crippling weakness, it was balanced by a remarkable ability to inspire the confidence of his subordinates from top to bottom of the British Army. “We had total faith in Monty,” said Lieutenant Roy Dixon of the South Staffordshire Yeomanry. “He achieved results, and he kept a lot of us alive.” Montgomery retained the trust of his own soldiers until the end of the war, assisted by the fact that only a handful of British and American officers were aware of the depth of his egomania and the gravity of his wrangles with the Supreme Commander. Doubts persisted, however, about Montgomery’s capacity for flexible thinking, for making a rapid response to evolving opportunities. He had battered several smaller German armies into defeat, but he had never managed a wholly successful envelopment, cutting off a retreating enemy. He possessed a shrewd understanding of what could, and could not, realistically be demanded of a British citizen army. But he had done nothing on the battlefield to suggest that his talents, or indeed those of his troops, deserved eulogy. The British had fought workmanlike campaigns in North Africa, Italy and France since their victory at El Alamein in November 1942. But their generals had nowhere shown the genius displayed by Germany’s commanders in France in 1940, and in many battles since.
    Montgomery himself was a strange man, respected by his subordinates yet often causing