A World at Arms (136 page)

Although the American drive south of the Ardennes moved forward rapidly, eventually it literally ran out of gas. The 3rd Army captured some German stocks of gasoline but not enough to keep moving in the face of stiffening resistance. There was, in fact, not enough to go around. The German strategy of holding the ports was making itself felt; and while some might argue that providing all the available supplies to
either
21st or 12th Army Group could have enabled that one to break through completely and end the war in 1944, it can more easily be argued that the total halt such a strategy would have imposed on the other Army Group would have exposed the one far in advance of the rest of the Allied front to the danger of a major defeat. As it was, with the resources he was given, and the added strength of the Allied airborne army assigned to him, Montgomery made three major errors which assured the halting of further Allied advances for months.

The first two errors were closely related. In early September, British forces racing to liberate Belgium seized Antwerp not only without any serious fighting but before the Germans could dynamite the great unloading cranes or other portions of the extensive harbor facilities. This stroke of enormous good fortune opened up two great opportunities: a quick drive north to cut off the German 15th Army, whose route of retreat was now severed, and a clearing of the Scheldt estuary to open Antwerp for use by the Allies to supply their forces on the continent. Montgomery, who had a few days earlier tried to talk Eisenhower into letting him rush forward with a mass of forty divisions to end the war quickly, now instructed his forces to rest up and thus lost both opportunities. The bulk of the 15th Army escaped–as much of the 7th Army had escaped a month earlier–and the port facilities remained closed until November 27 when a grinding and bloody battle finally made it possible for minesweepers to clear its approaches.

The importance of Antwerp to a successful operation in Western Europe had been stressed in the very earliest plans for an invasion on December 24, 1941, when the invasion project was still code-named “Roundup.” The destruction of facilities at Cherbourg and Brest, the latter still in German hands when Antwerp was freed, only accentuated the significance of opening the port. The liberation, primarily by the Canadians, of several smaller Channel ports, could ease the immediate supply problems of 21st Army Group, but any large-scale drive into Germany would be feasible only once Antwerp had been opened. In this instance Eisenhower’s efforts to prod Montgomery were undoubtedly
warranted, and Montgomery himself in a rare admission conceded that he had made a mistake.
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Having obtained Eisenhower’s agreement to using the Allied airborne divisions, Montgomery decided on an operation in which two American and one British airborne division were to secure a series of river crossings, with the American 82nd and 101st seizing the southern two and the British 1st Airborne, reinforced by the Polish Parachute Brigade, the northernmost at Arnhem. The British 30th Corps would strike forward to cross and join the seized bridges and thereby establish the Allies in one daring move across the lower Rhine. Though warned by intelligence officers of German armor and other units in the vicinity, Montgomery went ahead with the plan with the approval of Eisenhower. While a similar operation further up the Rhine near Wesel would have required fewer major river crossings, Montgomery appears to have picked the Arnhem route in spite of its greater difficulty because it would have provided a river crossing in an exclusively British sector; if that is a correct assessment, it makes even more serious the planning error, Montgomery’s third great mistake, which assigned to the British 1st Airborne Division a drop zone miles away from its bridge. This was designed to avoid excessive casualties in the landing but had the opposite effect. A daring operation cannot be designed to be safe–as the Normandy airborne operations had shown in spite of Leigh-Mallory’s doubts.
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Launched on September 17, parts of the airborne operation (“Market”) and accompanying land drive (“Garden”) appeared to go well. The 101st Division took Eindhoven and its bridge, replacing another one blown by the Germans with an engineer–built substitute; and the 82nd after bitter fighting and a river–crossing assault combined with the advancing British armored ground forces to seize the bridge at Nijmegen. The tanks and soldiers pushing up the narrow corridor from Nijmegen loosely made contact with the Polish Parachute Brigade on the south side of the Rhine on September 23, but the 1st British Airborne Division had been dropped too far from the bridge at Arnhem, on the other side of the town, and could not hold the northern exit from the main road bridge across the river. German resistance, hastily organized but based on two SS armored divisions already in the area, forced the British paratroopers away from the river. At the end of ten days of bitter fighting, as the advance of the thrust from the south had ground to a halt, that thin wedge itself under heavy German attack, and the situation inside the Arnhem perimeter hopeless, the survivors of 1st British Airborne either escaped across the river or surrendered. The attempt to “bounce” the great river barrier had failed by a narrow margin
in the face of a reviving German resistance, but it had failed nonetheless.
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The recovery of German military power, discussed in the next chapter, was obvious not only in the defeat suffered in the operation “Market-Garden” and the bitter fighting endured by the Canadians in their struggle to open the Scheldt in September and October but on the American front in northeast France as well. With Model first in complete command and then limited to Army Group B when von Rundstedt was recalled to take over general command in the West, German reinforcements poured westwards. The staffs of shattered divisions which had escaped from the Falaise pocket and southwest France were put in charge of revived divisions and corps. As Allied supply lines lengthened and became strained, the German ones became shorter. In Lorraine, Patton’s 3rd Army ran into heavy fighting which slowed it to a crawl, while further north the American 1st Army battering its way into Germany and Luxembourg found that the old field fortification of the Westwall, as the Germans called it, or the Siegfried Line, as the Allies referred to it, were being rearmed and remanned. By mid-September, the Allied drive had been halted temporarily by a combination of exhaustion, supply difficulties, and renewed German resistance. Months of campaigning still lay ahead.

One obvious tie between the Western and Eastern Fronts had been encountered in Normandy by the British and Americans. As their intelligence had already informed them, the German army in France included large numbers of soldiers recruited from among prisoners of war captured from the Red Army and from people in occupied Soviet territory, and organized into so-called Eastern Battalions incorporated into the regiments of German divisions. Many of these were captured by the Allied armies in Normandy, and, on July 17, 1944, Eden raised the question of what to do with some 1500 or so already in Allied hands. Churchill suggested that Stalin be told about them, and that if he asked for their repatriation the Western Allies would have to agree to send them, though for a while they might be used for agricultural labor. The Cabinet consented to this proposal;
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and when the subject came up again in early September as more soldiers surrendered, they agreed with Eden that, willing or unwilling, all would be repatriated to the Soviet Union.
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This issue was to be discussed again at Yalta and lead to considerable controversy after the war, but at the time no one saw any reason to spare those who fought to keep Western Europe under German control. The main concern of the Western Allies was the promised Soviet summer offensive designed to make it impossible for the Germans to shift large reinforcements to the new front in the West.

OFFENSIVES IN THE EAST

As a preliminary to the planned Soviet major offensive, the Leningrad and Karelian Fronts opened an attack against Finland on June 10. The Finns were both surprised and overwhelmed as the Red Army battered in the westernmost section of the Finnish front facing Leningrad. In a few days the Red Army forced the Finns back on the Karelian isthmus, breaking their intermediate defensive position and pushing them back to their last line of defense on the Soviet side of the 1940 border. The Finns appealed for help to the Germans, who sent supplies and weapons withheld earlier when it looked as if Finland might leave the war.
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The assistance of the Germans, an evacuation under Soviet pressure of almost all of the eastern Karelian territory occupied by the Finnish army in 1941, the exhaustion of the Red Army offensive, and the transfer of Soviet units from the Leningrad Front to the south enabled the Finns to hold on during July. Their situation was, however, most precarious. They could not replace the casualties suffered. They had promised the Germans, in effect in exchange for the aid received, that they would stay in the war; but there was no real prospect of halting any new major Soviet attack.
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As the big Soviet offensives of June and July collapsed first Army Group Center, then threatened to cut off Army Group North, and in August forced Romania to sue for peace on the southern end of the front, the Finnish government realized that there was no choice but to accept whatever terms the Soviet Union offered. The President who had promised the Germans to stay in the war resigned and was replaced by Marshal Mannerheim, who persuaded the Finnish parliament to agree to the demands placed before them and sign an armistice on September 4, 1944. Finland had to go back to the 1940 border, give up the Petsamo area, agree to a lease at Porkkala instead of Hangö, pay substantial reparations, break relations with Germany and intern any German troops left in the country after a two-weeks grace period.
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The Germans, who had not been able to send the reinforcements they had promised, were greatly upset but by that time not too surprised. In a badly mishandled operation which had been strongly pushed by Admiral Dönitz, they attempted to seize the key island Suursaari in the Gulf of Finland in order to help keep the Red navy bottled up, but Finland was neither Italy nor Hungary and drove the Germans off.
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In the north, the German 20th Army began a slow withdrawal, at first trying to hold on to the Petsamo nickel mines but then pulling back into Norway as the need for the nickel turned out to be less than anticipated and the Red Army joined the Finnish in pressuring the German retreat. In the
winter, the 20th Army joined the other forces stationed in Norway and except for some units transferred to the main fronts on the continent remained there until the 1945 surrender. In northern Finland and the northernmost province of Norway, they had laid waste everything and burned every building to prevent any pursuit. The general who had replaced their commander Edward Dietl after his death in an airplane crash on June 23, General Lothar Rendulic, proved as efficient in burning buildings and destroying bridges in the far north as the former Austrian officer had been at having Italian officers shot and civilians slaughtered in occupied Yugoslavia the year before. The Red Army, however, had no plans to follow up on the offensive in the far north by working its way along the Norwegian coast and instead pulled back a short distance. The road into central Europe was much shorter further south.
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The offensive against Finland began right after D-Day but was clearly
not
to be the major Soviet summer offensive. That was the comprehensively prepared concentric attack designed to rip open the German Eastern Front by destroying its Army Group Center and freeing the Soviet territory still under German occupation on the main route between Warsaw and Moscow. The operation, code-named “Bagration,” had been planned with great care and was accompanied by a major deception plan which, like that designed to fool the Germans in the West, succeeded extremely well. German army intelligence fell for every Soviet ploy, and Reinhard Gehlen, the chief of army eastern military intelligence, maintained his record of invariably erroneous predictions.
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The Commander-in-Chief of the German Army Group about to be annihilated, Field Marshal Ernst Busch, was away from his post; the major reserves of his segment of the front had been transferred to the adjacent Army Group on the south, Field Marshal Model’s Army Group North Ukraine, where it was assumed the Red Army would strike. Even the planting of thousands of mines on the railways and roads behind Army Group Center in the largest partisan operation of the war beginning in the night of June 19–20 did not alert the determined sleepers in Army Group Center and higher German headquarters.

Delayed a few days by problems in assembling the needed one and a quarter million troops and massive supplies, the main Soviet summer offensive began on the northern sector, where Marshal Vasilevskiy: coordinated the 1st Baltic and the Third Belorussian Fronts in a massive assault on June 22 which broke through the surprised German 3rd Panzer Army right away; the next day it had five divisions surrounded in Vitebsk.
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That day, the Second and First Belorussian Fronts coordinated by Marshal Zhukov struck toward Orsha, Mogilev, and Bobruisk,
quickly breaking open the lines held by the German 4th and 9th Armies. In a series of carefully directed and brilliantly implemented thrusts, the Red Army cut off most of the German 9th Army, drove the defeated German 4th Army back over a single congested and heavily bombed bridge across the Berezina river, and threw the whole rear area of Army Group Center into a panic.

Hitler’s appointing Model to take over the latter Army Group in addition to Army Group North Ukraine facilitated the transfer of reserves but did not halt the Red Army’s forward momentum. By July 3, the Russians had liberated Minsk; a few German stragglers made it back to new lines Model was desperately trying to put together out of minimal reserves, remnants of Army Group Center which had been pulled back, and rounded up stragglers streaming back terrified and broken. In twelve days, twenty–five divisions with at least 300,000 men had vanished from the German order of battle. The Red Army had shown that conducting Blitzkrieg was no German monopoly and that, in spite of the horrendous losses in the earlier fighting, it had both the means and the ability to drive successfully into a German front that had been held and fortified for many months.