I reckoned that the Canadian Army could do it while we were going for the Ruhr. I was wrong.” The field-marshal’s Chief of Staff, the highly respected Freddie de Guingand, was exhausted and in poor health. De Guingand “blamed himself specifically for the delay in gaining early use of . . . Antwerp.” Yet Brigadier Charles Richardson, who was also serving on Montgomery’s staff, detected in the field-marshal at this time a diminishing receptiveness to counsel, as he “grew steadily more aloof and remote.” The fumbled handling of Antwerp was among the principal causes of Allied failure to break into Germany in 1944. It was not merely that the port was unavailable for the shipment of supplies; through two months that followed, a large part of Montgomery’s forces had to be employed upon a task that could have been accomplished in days if the necessary energy and “grip” been exercised at the beginning of September, when the enemy was incapable of resistance.
All along the front, the Germans now began to improvise a defence with the energy and ingenuity which they invariably displayed in such circumstances. At the heart of Germany’s extraordinary fighting performance in the last year of the Second World War was the Kampfgruppe, the “battle group,” an ad-hoc assembly of infantry and armour, army and Luftwaffe, flak and service personnel, cooks and laundrymen, placed under the command of the most senior available officer. “Transport, signals and heavy equipment were almost non-existent,” observed a British Second Army intelligence report. “. . . Battle groups were formed from regiments or from stragglers and were named after their commanding officers; they varied in strength from 100 to 3,000. Many went into battle so quickly that the men did not know the name of their battle group. Food and ammunition were short, but some of these groups fought with great and at times fanatical determination.” No one pretended that such formations were satisfactory substitutes for the balanced divisions deployed by the Allies. Yet the achievements of the Kampfgruppen were considerable. Battle groups lacked the coherence, transport and artillery support to mount major attacks. But in defence—and defence was now the business of the German Army—their contribution was critical to Hitler’s survival through the months ahead.
T HE DASH ACROSS France and Belgium created a crisis for the supply of the Allied armies. In Patton’s legendary phrase: “My men can eat their belts, but my tanks gotta have gas.” An American heavy armoured division embraced 4,200 vehicles of all kinds, and required a combat load of 300,000 gallons of fuel, equivalent to 300 GMC trucks each carrying 1,000 gallons in five-gallon cans. By early September, American spearheads were operating more than 300 miles from their only source of supply, the beaches and small ports of Brittany and Normandy. Allied pre-invasion bombing had systematically devastated the French rail system. The British had passionately opposed the Americans’ August landing in the South of France. Yet Marseilles was to prove an invaluable asset, because the rail links of southern France were much less heavily damaged than those of the north. Supplies were soon moving more easily to the American armies from the Mediterranean than through the Channel ports.
In the short term, however, almost every shell, gallon of fuel and ration pack had to be shipped by road or—in dire circumstances and at huge cost—by air. The U.S. Transportation Corps in 1943 had demanded 240 truck companies for the campaign in Europe. Only 160 companies were allocated, of which most were equipped with light trucks, rather than the heavy vehicles the truckers had wanted. The British found themselves handicapped by an inexcusable technical failure. In September, 1,400 three-ton Austin trucks had to be withdrawn from service with Montgomery’s armies because of faulty pistons. This deficiency was found
All along the front, the Germans now began to improvise a defence with the energy and ingenuity which they invariably displayed in such circumstances. At the heart of Germany’s extraordinary fighting performance in the last year of the Second World War was the Kampfgruppe, the “battle group,” an ad-hoc assembly of infantry and armour, army and Luftwaffe, flak and service personnel, cooks and laundrymen, placed under the command of the most senior available officer. “Transport, signals and heavy equipment were almost non-existent,” observed a British Second Army intelligence report. “. . . Battle groups were formed from regiments or from stragglers and were named after their commanding officers; they varied in strength from 100 to 3,000. Many went into battle so quickly that the men did not know the name of their battle group. Food and ammunition were short, but some of these groups fought with great and at times fanatical determination.” No one pretended that such formations were satisfactory substitutes for the balanced divisions deployed by the Allies. Yet the achievements of the Kampfgruppen were considerable. Battle groups lacked the coherence, transport and artillery support to mount major attacks. But in defence—and defence was now the business of the German Army—their contribution was critical to Hitler’s survival through the months ahead.
T HE DASH ACROSS France and Belgium created a crisis for the supply of the Allied armies. In Patton’s legendary phrase: “My men can eat their belts, but my tanks gotta have gas.” An American heavy armoured division embraced 4,200 vehicles of all kinds, and required a combat load of 300,000 gallons of fuel, equivalent to 300 GMC trucks each carrying 1,000 gallons in five-gallon cans. By early September, American spearheads were operating more than 300 miles from their only source of supply, the beaches and small ports of Brittany and Normandy. Allied pre-invasion bombing had systematically devastated the French rail system. The British had passionately opposed the Americans’ August landing in the South of France. Yet Marseilles was to prove an invaluable asset, because the rail links of southern France were much less heavily damaged than those of the north. Supplies were soon moving more easily to the American armies from the Mediterranean than through the Channel ports.
In the short term, however, almost every shell, gallon of fuel and ration pack had to be shipped by road or—in dire circumstances and at huge cost—by air. The U.S. Transportation Corps in 1943 had demanded 240 truck companies for the campaign in Europe. Only 160 companies were allocated, of which most were equipped with light trucks, rather than the heavy vehicles the truckers had wanted. The British found themselves handicapped by an inexcusable technical failure. In September, 1,400 three-ton Austin trucks had to be withdrawn from service with Montgomery’s armies because of faulty pistons. This deficiency was found
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