Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith

31. “The Logistical Bottleneck Now Dictates Strategy”

735  31  “The Logistical Bottleneck Now Dictates Strategy” Three factors explain why the Allies failed in their leap toward the Rhine. Two fall into the category of the imponderables of war: the remarkable German recovery and the weather. The third, the apparent logistical breakdown, was the sole element the Allies, in this case the Americans, exerted any control over. The Allies suddenly faced German forces seemingly conjured out of nowhere. Harking back to German history and the War of Liberation in 1813, when Prussia led a popular national uprising against Napoleon, Hitler called for and received renewed commitment for the defense of the Vaterland. The attempt on Hitler’s life, the mass bombing campaign, the unconditional surrender policy, and Western and Soviet forces closing to the German frontiers all combined to produce an upsurge in patriotic backing for the regime. For ideological reasons, Germany did not go to a total war footing until 1944; despite intensifying Allied bombing, German industrial output of aircraft, tanks, munitions, and heavy and antiaircraft artillery reached maximal levels that year. Too many senior Allied leaders entertained the delusion that Germany would crack in 1944 like it had in 1918, but the Third Reich bore few parallels to the dying days of the Kaiserreich. A totalitarian regime founded on the Führerprinzip , terror, propaganda, and a racialist Volksgemeinshaft ideology would not collapse from within. Westerners never comprehended Hitler as a social revolutionary, and as leader of a revolutionary state, he could summon up amazing levels of popular support and self-sacrifice. The vast majority of Germans followed Hitler not out of fear but out of adulation and faith in his cause. “In my life,” Hitler said in a December 1944 speech, “I have never learned to know the word ‘capitulation.’” 736  BEETLE The regime would survive—and the war would continue—as long as Hitler drew breath. Bad weather dogged Allied ground, air, and supply operations. The weather paralleled Allied fortunes. The unusually wet June and July of the Normandy deadlock gave way to the glorious weather of August and September and the Allied pursuit, only to end in the wettest autumn since 1861 and finally a bitter and premature winter corresponding to the stalemate along the frontiers. Almost everywhere the German defenses enjoyed the advantages of geography—the polders and the river and canal lines in the Netherlands, and the uplands of the Eifel, Ardennes, and Vosges. Terrain and weather conjoined to degrade Allied advantages in mobility, firepower, and especially airpower. The foul weather spiked nonbattle casualties; soldiers suffered from trench foot, respiratory ailments, and a general malaise that was psychological as much as physical when the realization hit that the war would not end in 1944. Indicative of this gloominess, the number of soldiers with selfinflicted wounds soared into the thousands. The biggest self-inflicted wound was the supply fiasco, and the main culprit was Eisenhower. During August and September, Eisenhower made four vital decisions that guaranteed American forces would outrun their supply lines: (1) the decision not to open the Brittany line of communications, (2) the decision not to pause on the Seine, (3) the decision to favor Arnhem over Antwerp, and (4) the decision to accelerate the flow of American divisions into the theater far in advance of schedule and without the necessary port and reception facilities. Each was motivated by his resolution to push the advance as far east and on as broad a front as possible—all in accordance with his preconceived attachment to the strictures of the Overlord plan. The first two decisions effectively scuttled the supply plan; the third ensured the lengthening of the supply crisis; the last greatly added to the supply burden without any concomitant operational benefit. All his judgments reflected the traditional American officer’s subordination of logistical considerations to operational imperatives. Underlying all this was Eisenhower’s obtuse refusal to restructure his American commands. That the logistics plan went out the window need not have been fatal. But his badly organized and internally divided command apparatus ensured that American forces could not reap maximum benefits from the pursuit before the Germans recovered and the frictions of distance, terrain, and weather intervened. On 18 September Marshall made a speech to the American Legion convention in Chicago in which he painted a glowing portrait of the manpower and supply situation in France. “A conspicuous factor in the “The Logistical Bottleneck Now Dictates Strategy” 737...