In the last week of September 1944, a gray passenger liner cut through the cold waves of the North Atlantic, carrying Winston Churchill home to England. With every signal that reached the ship, the news from Holland grew darker.
The British First Airborne Division had landed behind German lines to seize the last great bridge over the Rhine at a Dutch town called Arnhem. More than 10,000 soldiers took part in the operation. They were supposed to hold for two days.
They held for nine. When it was over, only about 2,400 of them came back across the river in the rain and darkness.
In those same weeks, far to the south, Patton’s Third Army had been denied fuel so that Montgomery’s northern offensive could have priority. Despite that, Patton’s tanks fought their way through Lorraine, past about a dozen French towns, and defeated a German tank counterattack in open battle. Then, on the same day the last paratroopers crawled out of Arnhem, Patton received an order.
Stop. Dig in. Go over to the defensive.
Churchill knew the numbers. Two days after reaching shore, he stood in the House of Commons, and the whole nation waited to hear his judgment on Montgomery. What he said stunned them.
—
To understand what Churchill said, you must first understand what almost everyone believed in the last days of August 1944. They believed the war was nearly over. In a few weeks, the German army in Normandy had been torn apart.
In the Falaise pocket, the roads were so piled with burning trucks, dead horses, and abandoned weapons that Dwight Eisenhower later wrote he could walk hundreds of yards stepping only on corpses and decaying matter. Tens of thousands of German soldiers were killed or captured. On August 25, Paris was liberated.
The retreat that followed was not a retreat in any real sense. It was a hysterical scramble. German columns fled east in horse-drawn carts, on bicycles, and in stolen civilian cars.
An Allied intelligence summary declared that the battles of August had settled the matter and that the enemy in the west was finished. Across the Allied world, men began saying aloud what no one had dared say since 1939: “We will be home by Christmas.”
At the heart of that confidence stood a thin Englishman in a black beret. Bernard Law Montgomery was 56 years old. He did not drink.
He did not smoke. He went to sleep at the same hour almost every night, even in the midst of battle, and expected the war to wait politely until morning. He lived in a trailer parked near the front, and on its wall he kept a picture of Erwin Rommel, the German general he had beaten in the desert, so he could study his enemy’s face.
The Battle of El Alamein had made him a legend. In the fall of 1942, when Britain had known almost nothing but defeat, Montgomery gave the nation its first great victory over the Germans on land. But the men who worked beside him saw another face.
Montgomery was brilliant at set-piece battles, those carefully prepared blows backed by overwhelming artillery and relentless patience. He was also vain, tactless, and utterly convinced he was right about almost everything. He spoke to American generals the way a headmaster speaks to promising but careless boys.
Many of them never forgave him.
Churchill knew all this. The Prime Minister admired Montgomery but also found him exhausting. Weeks earlier in July, during the bloody fighting around Caen, Montgomery made clear he did not want visitors at his headquarters.
Churchill took it as a personal insult. It took quiet intervention from General Sir Alan Brooke, the professional head of the British Army, to soothe the Prime Minister. Montgomery quickly sent word that Mr.
Churchill was welcome, of course. That was the nature of the relationship. Affection, irritation, and mutual need neither man could escape.
—
On September 1, General Dwight Eisenhower, the 53-year-old American Supreme Commander, took personal command of Allied ground forces in France. Until that day, Montgomery had been running the land battle. From now on, he would command only his 21st Army Group, the British and Canadian armies on the northern flank.
To the British public, it looked like a demotion. So on that same day, Bernard Montgomery was promoted to field marshal. It was the highest rank in the British Army, and it came with Churchill’s full blessing.
On paper, Montgomery now outranked Eisenhower himself.
Montgomery was delighted. He was also more certain than ever that he alone knew how to end the war. His idea was simple, and he pressed it relentlessly.
Stop advancing everywhere at once. Take the fuel, trucks, and ammunition, and concentrate most of it into one great thrust in the north under his command, across the Rhine and into the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heart. “Cut out that heart,” he argued, “and the whole body dies.”
Eisenhower disagreed. He believed in advancing on a broad front, keeping pressure on the Germans everywhere so they could not move their reserves. There was a second reason he rarely said aloud.
Eisenhower commanded an alliance, not just an army. He could not tell the American people, whose sons now made up the majority of soldiers in France, that their generals would stand idle while a British field marshal won the war.
One of those American generals had no intention of standing idle. George Smith Patton Jr. was 58 years old.
He wore two ivory-handled pistols on his hips and polished his helmet until it gleamed. He swore like a mule driver, prayed like a Puritan, and sincerely believed he had fought in past lives as a Roman legionary and as a soldier in Napoleon’s army.
A year earlier, his career had nearly ended. In August 1943 in Sicily, Patton slapped two soldiers suffering from battle fatigue in army hospitals and called them cowards. When the story reached the American press, there were loud calls for his dismissal.
Eisenhower saved him, but barely. Patton spent the months before D-Day in England as the face of a phantom army, a fictional force of dummy tanks and fake radio traffic designed to convince the Germans the real invasion would come at Calais. He hated every minute of it.
Then, on August 1, 1944, his Third Army finally entered the battle. What followed was one of the most spectacular advances in American military history. Patton’s armored divisions poured through the Avranches gap, swung east, and raced across France.
They crossed the Seine. They crossed the Marne. By the last days of August, his spearheads had reached the Meuse River.
Ahead lay the Moselle. Beyond the Moselle lay the Saar. Beyond the Saar lay Germany.
The road seemed wide open.
Then, at the end of August, the tanks stopped. Not because of the Germans, but because of gasoline. Almost every gallon of fuel reaching the front came from the Normandy beaches and the damaged port of Cherbourg, hundreds of miles behind the lines.
The famous Red Ball Express, with its endless convoys of trucks driven day and night, could barely keep up. The trucks themselves consumed much of the fuel they carried, and the supplies that did arrive were being directed north toward Montgomery and the advancing American First Army. The Third Army’s fuel allotment dropped to a fraction of what it needed.
Tank crews sat by the roadside with empty tanks while the Germans ahead of them caught their breath.
Patton was furious. He stormed into the headquarters of his immediate commander, General Omar Bradley, and demanded fuel. He reportedly told anyone who would listen that his men could eat their belts, but his tanks had to have gas.
His soldiers collected captured German fuel wherever they found it. It was nowhere near enough. For most of a week, the most aggressive general in the Allied camp sat stuck in place.
—
On September 4, Montgomery’s philosophy seemed vindicated. The British 11th Armoured Division, racing north through Belgium, stormed into the city of Antwerp. With help from the Belgian resistance, the British captured the great port almost intact.
The docks fell into Allied hands before the Germans could destroy them. It was a stunning prize. Antwerp could solve the supply crisis at a stroke.
It could supply every Allied army on the continent, including Patton’s.
There was only one problem, hidden in plain sight on the map. Antwerp lies far inland, at the end of a long estuary called the Scheldt. To reach the port, ships had to sail more than 50 miles up that waterway from the open sea, and the Germans still controlled its banks.
In the flush of victory, the British forces did not push on to seal off the land north of the city. Over the following weeks, the German Fifteenth Army, tens of thousands of men who could have been trapped at the coast, crossed the Scheldt estuary by ferry and barge, night after night, carrying their weapons with them. They dug in along the estuary.
Antwerp, the greatest prize in Western Europe, remained occupied and unusable, its quays empty, its approaches mined and covered by German artillery fire.
Montgomery’s eyes were elsewhere. He was looking north and east, toward the Rhine.
Then, on the evening of September 8, something fell from the sky over London. It gave no warning. It arrived faster than sound, and the explosion came before anyone heard it coming.
In the Chiswick district of west London, a crater opened in a quiet residential street. Three people were killed. It was the first German V-2 rocket to hit the British capital, launched from occupied Holland.
Inside Whitehall, everyone understood. The launch sites were in western Holland, and the War Office soon asked Montgomery whether his armies could overrun them.
Montgomery now had a strategic argument, a political argument, and a personal one, all pointing in the same direction: north into Holland, across the Rhine.
—
On Sunday, September 10, he met Eisenhower at an airfield in Brussels. Eisenhower had injured his knee badly in a crash landing a few days earlier and could not easily leave his plane. So the meeting took place inside the cabin.
Montgomery climbed aboard, pulled a bundle of Eisenhower’s own signals from his pocket, and began criticizing them harshly. He said the broad-front strategy was nonsense. The strategy was muddled.
Supplies were being wasted. His language grew sharper and sharper until Eisenhower leaned forward and put his hand on Montgomery’s knee. “Steady, Monty.
You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.” Montgomery stopped.
“I’m sorry, Ike.”
Then, to the astonishment of many who learned of it later, Eisenhower gave Montgomery much of what he wanted.
Montgomery presented his plan. Three airborne divisions would land behind German lines in Holland to seize a series of bridges over a chain of rivers and canals. The American 101st Airborne would take the bridges around Eindhoven.
The American 82nd would take the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen. At the far end of the chain, 64 miles from the British front line, the British 1st Airborne Division, supported by a Polish parachute brigade, would seize the great road bridge over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem. Then a British armored corps would advance up a single road, cross each captured bridge in turn, link up with each airborne force, and break out beyond the Rhine into the open plains of northern Germany.
The airborne attack was called Market. The ground attack was called Garden. Eisenhower approved the plan.
His airborne army had been sitting in England without action for weeks. This was finally a bold stroke, a chance to cross the Rhine before the Germans could recover their balance.
Two days later, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, came to Montgomery with a promise. Nearly a thousand tons of supplies a day would be trucked to the British. To provide the trucks, American divisions would be stripped of their transport and left without work.
When Omar Bradley heard the terms, he was deeply resentful. When George Patton heard them, he was enraged. But the decision had been made.
The drop was set for Sunday, September 17, 1944.
—
At British airborne headquarters in England, a young intelligence officer was about to hold in his hands a set of photographs that should have stopped everything. If only anyone had been willing to look at them.
His name was Brian Urquhart. He was 25 years old, a major in the intelligence staff of the British Airborne Corps, and he was worried. For days, fragmentary information had been coming into his office.
Reports from the Dutch resistance spoke of German armor in the woods around Arnhem. Other intelligence indicated that two depleted SS Panzer divisions, the 9th and 10th, had pulled back from Normandy to rest and refit somewhere in that corner of Holland. They were understrength, far below full capacity, but they were veterans.
They knew how to fight, and they were positioned almost exactly where the British 1st Airborne was about to land.
Urquhart asked the Royal Air Force to fly low over the area and take photographs. When the pictures came back, he studied them under a magnifying lens. There, under the trees near Arnhem, were the unmistakable shapes of German tanks.
He took the photographs to his commander, Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, the immaculate officer who led the airborne corps. Browning dismissed the evidence, suggesting the tanks might not even be serviceable. Shortly afterward, the corps medical officer came to see the young major.
Urquhart was told he was suffering from nervous strain and exhaustion. He was sent home on sick leave. The man who found the tanks was removed from the room.
He was not the only one raising the alarm. At Eisenhower’s own headquarters, the intelligence staff was worried about the same SS divisions. The concern was serious enough that General Walter Bedell Smith went to see Montgomery personally to warn him.
According to Smith’s later account, Montgomery brushed aside the concerns and refused to change the plan.
The machine was already moving. Hundreds of transport planes were being fueled. Hundreds of gliders lined the English airfields.
There were other quieter problems buried in the fine print. There were not enough planes to carry all three divisions in one lift. The drops would have to be spread over three days.
The British landing zones were chosen in open ground and farmland six to eight miles west of the Arnhem bridge because the planners feared heavy anti-aircraft fire near the city. That meant the paratroopers would land, then have to march for hours through unfamiliar terrain to reach their objective while the element of surprise faded with every step.
—
On the morning of Sunday, September 17, 1944, the sky over southern England began to fill. It was a sight no one who saw it ever forgot. Wave after wave of transport planes and tugs pulling gliders rose from the airfields and formed into tracks that stretched for miles.
People came out of village churches and stood in the lanes, shading their eyes, watching the aircraft pass overhead for hours. It was the largest airborne operation the world had ever seen.
Inside the transport planes, the paratroopers sat in facing rows, knees almost touching, loaded down with weapons, ammunition, and rations for a battle they had been told would last two days. The roar of the engines was so loud that men had to shout to be heard, so most simply stopped talking. Some slept, some smoked, others stared at the floor and thought of home.
Below them passed the flat green fields of Holland, cut by silver canals, dotted with windmills and red roofs. In the villages, Dutch families ran out of their houses and waved anything orange they could find at the planes overhead.
Across the Atlantic, Winston Churchill had just finished the Quebec Conference. That weekend, he traveled with Franklin Roosevelt to the president’s family home at Hyde Park on the Hudson River for a few quiet days among the trees. The first signals coming from Holland were encouraging.
The landings were going well, on target. German resistance was lighter than feared. For a few hours, it seemed Montgomery had pulled off the boldest gamble of the war.
In the woods west of Arnhem, a German officer was sitting down to lunch at a hotel in the village of Oosterbeek. His name was Field Marshal Walter Model, commander of German Army Group B, one of Hitler’s most trusted and ruthless defensive generals. When he saw the British parachutes opening in the sky, he assumed the enemy had come to capture him personally.
He fled so quickly that he reportedly left his belongings behind. Soon enough, Model realized the truth. The British were not after him.
They were aiming for the bridges. Within hours, he was on the phone, calling up every unit he could reach. Orders went out to the SS Panzer troops refitting nearby to move immediately.
The British paratroopers landed almost perfectly. But from that moment on, nothing went according to plan. Their radios failed.
The sets could not communicate with each other across the wooded, built-up terrain, and the division headquarters soon lost contact with its battalions. Two of the three parachute battalions marching toward the bridge ran into German defensive positions in the streets and woods west of the city. They fought fiercely but could not break through.
Only one battalion found its way. Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, 31 years old, a veteran of North Africa who carried a hunting horn to rally his men, led his 2nd Parachute Battalion all the way down the lower road beside the river. By dusk, Frost and about 700 men from his battalion and remnants of other units reached the northern end of the great road bridge at Arnhem.
They seized the houses and buildings overlooking the bridge approach and turned them into strongpoints. They tried to rush across the bridge and take the southern end. They were driven back.
The Germans held the far side.
The next morning, a column of German armored cars and half-tracks rushed north across the bridge, trying to break into the city. Frost’s men waited until the vehicles were on the slope below them, then opened fire from every window. The column was torn apart.
Burning wreckage piled up on the bridge. For a few hours, the men on the bridge thought they were winning. They listened for the sound of British tanks coming from the south.
Every hour someone swore he could hear them. Every hour it turned out to be German armor or the echo of guns or nothing at all.
—
Sixty-four miles to the south, the ground forces had begun their attack on the afternoon of the 17th. The spearhead was the Guards Armoured Division, part of XXX Corps under Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, with the Irish Guards tanks in the lead. Behind them stretched a column of thousands of vehicles, all confined to a single road.
That road was the whole problem. Across most of Holland, the ground is low and soft, cut by ditches and drainage canals. Tanks that left the road could sink into the fields.
The highway was raised above the surrounding countryside on an embankment, a perfect target for German anti-tank guns hidden in the trees. Every burning tank blocked the road for everything behind it. Any German counterattack on the flanks could cut the road completely.
On the first afternoon, German guns destroyed a string of tanks at the head of the column. The advance fell hours behind schedule before it really began.
The American paratroopers along the road fought superbly. The 101st Airborne captured most of its bridges around Eindhoven, but at the village of Son, the Germans blew the canal bridge just as the Americans reached it. British engineers had to build a new bridge through the night.
The tanks did not cross until the morning of the 19th.
At Nijmegen, the American 82nd Airborne captured the Grave bridge and the heights around Groesbeek, but the great road bridge over the Waal River remained in German hands. On the afternoon of the 20th, American paratroopers from the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment climbed into flimsy canvas assault boats and paddled across the Waal in broad daylight, straight into machine-gun and artillery fire. Many were killed in the water.
The survivors stormed the far bank. That evening, British tanks crossed the Nijmegen bridge. Arnhem was now only about 11 miles away, but it was too late for the men on the bridge.
Frost’s force had been fighting without rest for three days and three nights. The Germans brought up tanks, heavy guns, and flame-throwers. They bombarded the houses held by the British one by one, then set them on fire.
Frost’s men fought from cellars and among the rubble. They ran out of anti-tank ammunition. They ran out of food.
The wounded lay in the cellars in growing numbers, with almost no medical supplies. Frost himself was badly wounded. As the buildings burned over the heads of the wounded, a truce was arranged so the Germans could take them out.
The fighting men continued in smaller and smaller groups until the early hours of Thursday, September 21. Then the last resistance at the northern end of the bridge was overcome.
They had been asked to hold for two days. They held that bridge for three and a half days alone.
—
Hundreds of miles to the south, a different kind of battle was being fought in those same days, by a general who had been told he would receive almost nothing.
At the beginning of September, Patton’s Third Army began moving forward again slowly, using whatever fuel it could scrape together. Patton had a phrase for it. He called his method “stone soup,” after the old tale of the tramp who borrows a pot to boil a stone in, then asks for a few vegetables and a bit of meat until he has a full meal.
Patton would send out a reconnaissance force, then report it was heavily engaged and needed support, then reinforce it until he found himself launching an attack no one had officially approved. It was a clever trick. It was also dangerous.
Along the Moselle, the Germans had recovered enough to launch a violent counterattack. On September 12 and 13, American infantry forced a crossing of the Moselle at Dielouard, between Nancy and Metz. Within hours, a fierce German counterattack nearly threw them back into the river.
Then American tanks crossed. The 4th Armored Division, under Major General John Wood, one of the finest armored commanders in the American army, drove through the bridgehead and penetrated deep behind German lines. The Germans defending Nancy were encircled.
On September 15, two days before the first British parachutes opened over Holland, American troops entered Nancy, the historic capital of Lorraine. All across the region, town after town changed hands. Toul, Pont-à-Mousson, Lunéville, crossroads villages and market towns whose names meant nothing to Americans back home but meant everything to the French families who poured into the streets with wine and flowers.
By the end of September, Patton’s army had fought its way through about a dozen towns and cities across Lorraine.
Then Hitler struck back. He ordered a counterattack in Lorraine, and the Fifth Panzer Army, under General Hasso von Manteuffel, one of Germany’s most talented tank commanders, was pushed against Patton’s flank. The Germans had new panzer brigades equipped with modern Panther tanks.
On paper, the Panther outclassed the American Sherman. Its long gun could penetrate Sherman armor at ranges where Sherman shells simply bounced off.
On the morning of September 19, near the village of Arracourt, German tanks advanced through thick autumn fog. Inside a Sherman tank in that fog, the world shrank to a narrow slit of gray glass, the smell of gunpowder and engine oil, and the commander’s crackling voice over the intercom. The crews could hear the German engines before they could see anything.
Then a dark shape would loom out of the mist a few hundred yards away, and everything depended on who fired first.
The fog should have favored the Germans. Instead, it became their graveyard. In that gray murk, the Panther’s long-range gun was worthless.
The American tank crews of the 4th Armored Division, mostly veterans of the dash across France, knew the terrain. They maneuvered in small groups, slipping around the flanks and firing at the thinner side armor of the Panthers at close range. American tank destroyers waited in ambush along the ridges.
One of the tank battalion commanders in that battle was a young lieutenant colonel named Creighton Abrams, whose name would one day be given to America’s main battle tank.
The battles around Arracourt raged, off and on, for more than a week. When the fog lifted, American fighter-bombers swooped down on the German columns with devastating speed. In the end, the Germans had lost dozens of tanks, far more than the Americans.
The counterattack Hitler had demanded shattered against the rock of the Lorraine fields. It was one of the largest tank battles the American army had fought in Europe up to that time, and it was won by an army that had been told to make do with what it had.
—
Back in Holland, the Arnhem bridge was lost. But the rest of the British 1st Airborne Division was still alive, barely, and surrounded. After failing to reach Frost, the survivors of the other battalions fell back to the village of Oosterbeek, just west of Arnhem.
There, with their backs to the Lower Rhine, they formed a tight defensive pocket, perhaps a mile wide.
Major General Roy Urquhart, who had spent a day and a half cut off from his headquarters hiding in the attic of a Dutch house while German troops moved in the street below, finally made it back and took command of what remained. Headquarters was established in the Hartenstein Hotel, a white building surrounded by lawns and trees. Within days, the lawns were torn up by shell craters and the trees were shattered stumps.
The Germans had surrounded the pocket on three sides. They bombarded it day and night with mortars, artillery, and tanks, and slowly, house by house, squeezed it tighter. The paratroopers called the place “the Cauldron.”
The noise never stopped. The crump of mortars, the crack of snipers from the trees, the rumble of German tank tracks in the next street. Men stopped flinching at explosions because there was no silence left to compare them to.
The air smelled of smoke, wet earth, burning wood, and death.
The wounded were everywhere. They lay in cellars, in hotel rooms, in the homes of Dutch families who had welcomed the British as liberators only days before. In one house near the river, a Dutch mother of five named Kate ter Horst turned her home over to the wounded.
Hundreds of injured men filled every room, every hallway, even the space under the stairs. Amid the explosions, she moved among them, reading to them from the Bible, from Psalm 91, which promises that a thousand shall fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, but it shall not come near you. Many of those men never forgot her voice.
Food ran out. Water ran out faster. The pumps failed, and men crawled under fire to collect rainwater.
Ammunition dwindled. The RAF tried again and again to drop supplies, but the drop zones were designated for ground the division no longer controlled. Parachutes carrying food and ammunition drifted into German hands while the hungry paratroopers watched.
On September 19, an RAF Dakota piloted by Flight Lieutenant David Lord was hit by anti-aircraft fire and caught fire approaching the drop zone. Lord could have ordered his crew to bail out. Instead, he held his burning plane steady, completed his run, then turned back with two containers still on board and made a second pass through the fire.
Moments later, the wing collapsed and the plane fell. Only the navigator survived. David Lord was awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for bravery.
The men on the ground watched it all. Some of them wept.
The Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, under Major General Stanisław Sosabowski, a brave and outspoken 52-year-old officer, was supposed to drop on the second day. Bad weather in England kept them on the ground again and again. When the Poles finally jumped on the afternoon of the 21st, they landed near the village of Driel on the south bank of the Rhine.
The ferry they had planned to use was gone. They could see the fighting in Oosterbeek across the water. They could not reach it.
Over the following nights, small groups of Poles tried to cross in rubber boats and makeshift rafts under a hail of fire. Only about 200 of them made it across. Many were killed in the river.
Meanwhile, the road behind the British tanks was burning. The Germans attacked the long narrow corridor again and again from both sides. At one point, they cut the highway completely near the town of Veghel, and for more than a day nothing could move north.
The American paratroopers of the 101st, who fought to reopen it again and again, gave that stretch of road a name that stuck. Hell’s Highway.
—
Now imagine Winston Churchill in the middle of all this. He had boarded the Queen Mary for the long voyage home. The ship, stripped of its luxuries for war and painted dull gray, was designed to carry thousands, yet the Prime Minister lived in his own world aboard her.
Wherever Churchill traveled, his map room traveled with him. His staff laid out the charts, pins, and colored markers, and signals flowed by wireless from London to be decoded and presented to him, often in the small hours of the night.
At first, the pins on the map of Holland moved forward. Then they stopped moving. Then the language of the signals began to change.
Heavy fighting, heavy losses, situation obscure. The most dreaded words in the vocabulary of war.
Churchill was 69 years old. He had led Britain through the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, the fall of Singapore and Tobruk. He knew exactly what those phrases meant.
They meant young men were dying faster than anyone at headquarters could count them. Churchill also knew, perhaps better than any man alive, what it meant to gamble everything on a bold stroke and watch it fail. Nearly 30 years earlier, in the First World War, he had championed the Gallipoli offensive, a bold plan to knock Turkey out of the war.
It had ended in bloody stalemate and humiliating withdrawal. It cost him his post at the Admiralty, and for years afterward his enemies threw the name Gallipoli at him like a stone.
Those signals meant something else, something Churchill understood better than any general. They meant that soon, he would have to stand in Parliament and explain it.
On Friday, September 22, Eisenhower called his senior commanders to his headquarters at Versailles for a conference on future strategy. It was one of the most important meetings of the autumn. Montgomery did not attend.
He sent his chief of staff, Major General Francis de Guingand, a tactful and well-liked officer who had spent much of the war repairing the damage caused by his commander. The conference confirmed the priority of the northern effort. Montgomery’s front, including the urgent task of opening the approaches to Antwerp, would continue to receive priority in supplies.
The American First Army would support him, and the forces in the south would have to wait.
For Patton, the consequences appeared within days. He had just smashed the German counterattack at Arracourt. His forces were in Nancy and across the Moselle.
He believed that with fuel and ammunition he could reach the Rhine. Instead, on Monday, September 25, 1944, the Third Army went over to the defensive. Patton was ordered to halt major offensive operations and hold his positions.
He could make limited attacks to improve his positions, but the great drive toward Germany was over for the time being. The supplies he needed would continue flowing north to support the front where Operation Market Garden was dying.
Patton raged at the decision in private. He had always believed that speed was everything, that every day of rest gave the Germans another day to dig in, bring up reinforcements, and pour concrete. Now the Germans in front of him would have weeks.
He knew exactly what it would cost when the offensive finally resumed.
—
On that same Monday night, at the northern end of that bloody road, the British 1st Airborne Division began to collapse as a fighting force. Earlier that day, high command had approved what Roy Urquhart recognized as the only remaining possibility. The survivors would be withdrawn from Oosterbeek across the Rhine under cover of darkness.
The plan was called Operation Berlin.
The paratroopers were not told until the last moment. They muffled their boots by wrapping them in strips of blanket and cloth so the Germans could not hear them on the roads. Glider pilots, who had fought all week as infantry, laid out lines of white tape through the trees to guide the men toward the river.
British artillery on the south bank opened fire on German positions around the pocket to cover the sound of movement and keep German heads down. Then the rain began, cold, heavy, blessed rain that hid the columns of soldiers from German eyes.
In long silent lines, each man holding the tail of the coat of the man in front, the survivors crept toward the water. Canadian and British engineers waited on the riverbank with small assault boats and a few motorboats. They ferried the men back and forth under machine-gun fire while German flares burst overhead, turning the rain silver.
Some boats were hit and sank. Some men, out of patience or despair, stripped off their uniforms and tried to swim across the cold, fast current. Not all of them made it to the other side.
The wounded who could not walk were left behind. So were the doctors and medics who volunteered to stay with them, knowing they would be captured. A small rearguard stayed behind firing from the edge of the perimeter to make the Germans think the pocket was still fully manned.
At dawn on Tuesday, September 26, the last boats pulled away from the north bank. On the south bank, wet, filthy, hungry men stood in the mud and looked across the water at where so many of their comrades lay. Of the more than 10,000 men who went into the Battle of Arnhem, about 2,400 returned.
Around 1,500 were killed or died of their wounds. More than 6,000 were prisoners, many of them wounded. The British 1st Airborne Division, one of the finest formations in the history of the British army, had effectively ceased to exist.
The Arnhem bridge, the prize for which all those sacrifices had been made, remained intact and was already being crossed by German troops.
—
On that same Tuesday, September 26, the Queen Mary reached the Firth of Clyde and anchored off Greenock on the west coast of Scotland. Winston Churchill came ashore to a country about to learn the full extent of what had happened in Holland. He had 48 hours before he had to face the House of Commons.
Forty-eight hours to decide what to say about the operation, about the ten thousand soldiers, about the field marshal whose name was written on every page of the plan.
On Thursday, September 28, 1944, the House of Commons was packed. They were not even meeting in their own chamber. In May 1941, German bombs had reduced the Commons to a burned-out shell.
Since then, members had borrowed the House of Lords chamber. Members crowded the benches and stood in the aisles. The galleries were full.
Everyone knew the Prime Minister would review the progress of the war, and everyone knew that somewhere in his speech he would have to talk about Arnhem.
Families all over Britain were already receiving telegrams. The newspapers were publishing the first accounts of the withdrawal across the Rhine. In homes stretching from Glasgow to Cornwall, mothers were waiting to learn whether their sons had been killed, wounded, or captured.
They wanted to know whether their sons had died for something worthwhile.
Churchill spent the two days after his arrival preparing his words. It was his habit to dictate his great speeches aloud, pacing the room with a cigar in his hand while his secretary typed as fast as she could, then revising again and again until the rhythm was right. He knew this speech would be read by every family in Britain, by every soldier in Holland, and by the Americans too.
Many in that chamber expected him to be angry. The largest airborne operation in history had failed to achieve its ultimate objective. A famous British division had been destroyed.
And in the south, an American general had spent the same weeks winning victories on a starvation ration of fuel. If Churchill had wanted to turn on Montgomery, this was the moment.
He did not.
Churchill spoke at length about the great course of the war, the liberation of France and Belgium, the advance toward the German frontier. When he came to Arnhem, he did not speak of failure. He spoke of what had been achieved, the ground gained, the bridges captured along the way.
He spoke of the courage of the paratroopers. Then he gave the men of Arnhem a phrase that would be remembered for generations. “It was not in vain,” he said.
“Let it be the pride of the survivors and the epitaph of the fallen.”
There was no attack on the field marshal, no comparison with Patton, no hint of blame.
In private, Churchill went further. In early October, his old friend and ally Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa, sent him a letter expressing disappointment over Arnhem. Churchill’s reply was blunt and firm.
He told Smuts his view was not quite accurate. Churchill insisted the battle had been a decisive victory, but that the leading division, which had asked for more, had received a sharp blow. He said he had noticed no disappointment in Britain, and that he was glad British commanders were capable of taking such risks.
A sharp blow. Those were Churchill’s words for the destruction of the British 1st Airborne Division.
Why? Why would the most eloquent man in the empire, a man who knew exactly what had happened, defend the operation so completely?
Part of the answer was loyalty. Churchill had backed Montgomery since the desert days. Turning on him now would have been an admission of failure in his own judgment.
Part of the answer was morale. Britain was exhausted. She had been at war for five years.
The V-2 rockets were falling on London. The country had few young men left to send into battle, and the army was already breaking up units to find replacements. The British people needed to believe their sacrifices were bringing victory closer, not that they had been in vain.
But the largest part of the answer was power. By the autumn of 1944, the Americans had far more soldiers in Europe than the British, and the gap was widening every month. Montgomery was the last great symbol of British command on the battlefield.
If he were humiliated, Britain’s voice in the alliance would shrink with him. Churchill was not defending a general. He was defending his nation’s place at the table where the future of Europe would be decided.
—
Not everyone in Churchill’s circle agreed. On October 5, General Sir Alan Brooke, the head of the British Army and one of Montgomery’s strongest supporters, sat down at the end of a long day and wrote in his private diary. He had just listened to Montgomery speak at a conference, and something had troubled him.
Brooke wrote that he felt Montgomery’s strategy, this time, had been wrong. Instead of carrying out the advance toward Arnhem, he should have ensured the capture of Antwerp in the first place. It was the harshest possible judgment from Montgomery’s greatest patron, locked away in a diary not published until years later.
Brooke had put his finger on the real wound: Antwerp. While the paratroopers bled at Arnhem, the Germans spent weeks fortifying the banks of the Scheldt estuary. Now the task of clearing them fell largely to the First Canadian Army.
Throughout October and into November, Canadian, British, and Polish soldiers fought through waterlogged fields and dykes, waist-deep in freezing mud, against Germans dug in on every height. Men slept in their wet clothes, if they could sleep at all. Their feet swelled and rotted inside their boots.
Every dyke was a fortress. Every flooded field was a killing ground swept by German machine guns. Tanks were almost useless in that waterlogged landscape, so infantry advanced on foot along narrow causeways with nowhere to hide.
The Battle of the Scheldt cost the First Canadian Army nearly 13,000 casualties. The first Allied supply ship did not sail into Antwerp until November 28, almost three months after the city was captured.
For the Dutch, the price was even greater. When Operation Market Garden began, Dutch railway workers went on strike to help the Allies. The Germans retaliated by cutting food shipments to western Holland.
What followed became known as the Hunger Winter. Families subsisted on tulip bulbs and sugar beets. Around 20,000 Dutch civilians died of starvation and cold before liberation finally came in the spring of 1945.
Years later, it was said that Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands delivered the harshest epitaph of all, remarking that his country could not afford another success by Montgomery.
Montgomery himself never accepted that he had failed. In his memoirs, he insisted that Operation Market Garden had been 90 percent successful. He admitted he had made mistakes, including underestimating the difficulty of opening the port of Antwerp.
But he maintained that if the operation had received proper support from the start, it would have succeeded. He described himself as the unrepentant defender of Market Garden.
—
And George Patton? The weeks of waiting at the Moselle cost him exactly what he had feared. The Germans used the pause to fortify Metz, a fortress city surrounded by ancient steel-and-concrete forts.
In early October, American troops attacked one of them, Fort Driant. They fought for days in the tunnels and bunkers and were eventually forced to withdraw. When the Third Army launched its full offensive in November, it had to fight through rain, mud, and fortifications yard by yard.
Metz did not fall until November 22. The cost in lives and time was enormous.
Patton was no miracle worker. He was a brilliant maneuver commander, but like any general, he could be stopped by concrete, mud, and lack of supplies. The difference was that he never stopped trying to advance.
Then came December. On December 16, 1944, Hitler launched his last great gamble in the west, a massive surprise attack through the snowy Ardennes forest. The American lines buckled under the pressure.
At the Belgian town of Bastogne, the American 101st Airborne Division, the same men who had fought along Hell’s Highway, was surrounded.
On December 19, at a conference in Verdun, Eisenhower asked how quickly Patton could attack north. Patton replied that he could attack with three divisions within about two days. Some officers in the room thought he was joking.
He was not. His staff had already prepared the plans.
In the depths of winter, the Third Army turned north over icy roads, through snow and freezing fog. The cold was brutal. Soldiers wrapped their feet in rags and blankets.
Tank crews lit fires under their engines to get them started in the morning. Inside the Bastogne perimeter, the wounded lay in cellars with severe shortages of medical supplies, and the paratroopers watched the southern horizon, waiting just as the men of Oosterbeek had once waited for rescue from the south.
On December 26, tanks of the 4th Armored Division, the same division that had fought at Arracourt, broke through the encirclement and reached Bastogne.
Meanwhile, because the German attack had split the American front, Eisenhower placed the American armies on the northern side of the bulge under Montgomery’s temporary command. Montgomery handled the northern flank with caution and firmness, but on January 7, 1945, he held a press conference. He later insisted he had meant to praise the American soldier, but his tone suggested he had personally stepped in to save a situation the Americans had mishandled.
The American generals were furious. Bradley and Patton were deeply resentful. The alliance came close to breaking point.
—
Which brings us back to Winston Churchill and the essential question of this story.
On January 18, 1945, Churchill stood again in the House of Commons. This time, he spoke about the Battle of the Bulge, and every word was aimed, without naming him, at the field marshal he had defended so fiercely in September.
He told the House that the United States troops had fought almost all the battles and sustained almost all the losses. He warned that care should be taken in telling the proud story of Britain so that no undue share of credit was assigned to the British army for what he described as unquestionably the greatest American battle of the war, which he believed would be regarded as an ever-famous American victory.
The greatest American battle of the war. An ever-famous American victory.
Churchill was at the height of his powers. He had protected Montgomery when protecting him preserved British morale and influence. And when Montgomery’s pride threatened the alliance itself, Churchill stood up and gave the glory to the Americans, openly, without hesitation, before the world.
So what did Churchill say when Montgomery lost 10,000 men while Patton fought his way through a dozen towns on a trickle of fuel?
He said, “It was not in vain.” He said the battle was a decisive victory. He said the leading division had received a sharp blow.
It was not the truth, and not the whole truth. It was the truth of a statesman, the version a nation at war needed to hear. And four months later, when the balance had tipped too far, he revealed the other half of the truth.
Perhaps that was what leadership in a great alliance required. Not honesty at every moment, but the wisdom to know which truth to tell, and when.
Churchill understood, better than any of his generals, that the war was not fought only on maps. It was fought in the minds of two great nations who needed each other to win, and each of whom needed to believe that their sons had not died in vain.
Today, at the Airborne Cemetery in Oosterbeek, more than 1,700 men lie in neat rows under the pine trees, not far from the river they could not hold. Every September, Dutch children place flowers on their graves. Those children know nothing of generals’ arguments.
They know nothing of fuel allocations, or Versailles conferences, or speeches in the House of Commons. They only know that these men came, and that they did not go home.
Montgomery kept his reputation. Patton kept his legend. Churchill kept the alliance together until victory.
But the men in those rows paid the full price for a bridge too far and a port that stayed closed behind them.
Was Churchill right to defend Montgomery? Or did the men who fell at Arnhem deserve a harsher truth?