Jeffrey Crean
From the execution of the Schlieffen Plan in August 1914 to Douglas MacArthur’s drive to the Yalu River in November 1950, the quest to turn tactical opportunities first into operational breakthroughs and then into strategic triumphs preoccupied 20th century military leaders.[1] The events on the French front in World War II during September 1944, specifically Patton’s inability to progress beyond the Metz fortress complex and, most importantly, the failure of British General Bernard Montgomery’s attempted Rhine crossing in Operation Market Garden, would appear as evidence that such hopes of lightning victories were often illusory. Yet, in his provocative book-length study The Folly of Generals: How Eisenhower’s Broad Front Strategy Lengthened World War II, David Colley argues there were opportunities to end the war by Christmas. However, Eisenhower was too cautious a commander to take advantage of them, and kept too tight a leash on his subordinate commanders. Colley uses the western front in 1944 as a case study to argue for a flexible command structure to encourage aggressiveness and initiative among lower-level officers and greater battlefield success.
Colley’s argument that the war could have been won in 1944 goes back nearly to the events themselves, and usually assumes two forms. The first analyzes what it would have taken for Market Garden to have succeeded, with the assumption that its failure was a close-run matter. The second argues that the resources—particularly the gasoline—devoted to Montgomery’s offensive should have been given to U.S. General George S. Patton so he could have achieved an armored breakthrough. But Colley takes a different approach. Looking southward from Montgomery’s and Patton’s much-discussed forces, the author identifies four other points of potential breakthrough that were far more achievable at lower costs in men and materiel. In the author’s estimation, Eisenhower’s unwillingness to improvise and quickly exploit unexpected opportunities—such as the four Colley analyzes in-depth—unnecessarily prolonged the war by nearly six months.
The descriptive half of Colley’s title condemning the Allied advance through France on a continuous and broad front is slightly misleading, since Allied forces could never have approached the German frontier with six possible points of attack in the fall of 1944 without progressing through northern France along a broad front. The author’s quibble is more with Eisenhower’s methodical approach, which emphasized careful planning and minimized opportunities for improvisation. By comparison, the author repeatedly contrasts this with purportedly superior opportunistic offensive instincts, initiative, and judgment of German generals. With lines like “Rommel or Guderian in Gerow’s position would have smelled blood and driven his troops onward to force a breakthrough,” this book is resplendent with what Dennis Showalter, in his dual biography Patton and Rommel, memorably dubbed “Wehrmacht Penis Envy.”[2] Showalter’s turn of phrase referenced a sense of inferiority felt by U.S. Army officers during and long after they fought the Nazis. It is predicated on the assumption that German commanders won through superior tactical acumen, while American commanders relied upon the effective but uncreative expedient of overwhelming firepower. These assumptions were more common among previous generations of Anglo-American military historians than they are today. While making this work somewhat anachronistic, it does not automatically make its author incorrect in his specific argument that greater audacity could have benefited the Allies.
Colley calls the Americans “too risk averse,” and wedded to “a cautious strategy based largely on the experiences of World War I.”[3] It is thus ironic that the closest analogy to his operational suggestions was what interwar British military thinker B.H. Liddell Hart referred to as French Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s “Strategy of Opportunism” in the autumn offensives of 1918. Foch himself, in a staff meeting, memorably demonstrated his tactical approach with a series of left and right punches punctuated by the occasional kick, indicating that he wanted to strike the German front at so many points the enemy would not know where to concentrate its forces, enabling whichever attacking formation was making the most progress to strike the decisive blow. Though Foch goes unmentioned, the argument of this book seems to be that Eisenhower’s “folly” was lacking the sort of flexibility in the attack displayed by the famed French Marshal.
Two of the four opportunities Colley presents occurred in mid-September 1944, and were therefore foreclosed in large part due to resources having already been allocated for Market Garden, which began on 17 September. Eisenhower could have only fully exploited them had he not authorized Montgomery’s offense. On paper, the combined airborne and armored thrust through the southern Netherlands into Germany’s Ruhr Valley industrial heartland stood a poor chance of success. Involving an immense expenditure in highly-trained personnel and scarce equipment, the risk appeared to outweigh the reward. As a risk-averse commander, Eisenhower should not have authorized it. But, as a politician leading a multinational alliance, it made sense to give the leading British commander a chance to be first across the Rhine.
Colley chalks up many of what he sees as Eisenhower’s poor decisions to both international and interpersonal intrigue. After elements of Leonard Gerow’s V Corps from Courtney Hodges’s 1st Army penetrated the Siegfried Line defenses along Germany’s western border on 12 September, Hodges prevented a Rhine crossing, allegedly because “triumph had to be shared” and “the Brits needed a victory led by one of their own.”[4] A day earlier, the VII Corps under Lawton Collins had a similar chance for a bold advance from Aachen, but ultimately saw his forces chewed up piecemeal in the Hurtgen Forest. In both cases, reinforcements—especially airborne divisions—could have been used, were it not for Market Garden. Echoing Foch’s opportunistic approach, the author argues “they went for the home run rather than the single to chip away at the enemy,” ignoring “tactical opportunities all along the front.”[5]
The other pair of missed opportunities would not have been hampered by Market Garden, since they involved soldiers who landed not in the north at Normandy as part of Operation Overlord, but in the south as part of Operation Dragoon, initially known as Anvil. In contrast to the Channel landings, or for that matter the Italian landings at Salerno and Anzio, the front from which the Dragoon units were drawn, the Germans on the French Riviera put up little resistance, and quickly took flight. This catastrophic success threatened to turn a sideshow of a sideshow—Italy already being the sideshow to the fighting in northern France—into the main event. Colley focuses first on the inability to use VI Corps to trap the German 19th Army at the Belfort Gap in the Rhone Valley between Burgundy and Alsace. Corps commander Lucian Truscott also had the chance to trap the German 10th Army south of Rome after the breaching of the Gustav Line, and took command in Anzio after the failure to exploit that landing. Yet Truscott was far from the only U.S. General to narrowly miss cutting off large numbers of retreating Germans, a subject to which I shall return shortly.
Colley then moves forward to late November and the last—and in Colley’s estimation the best—chance for success, at the city of Strasbourg. Jacques Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division arrived there on 23 November, reaching perhaps the most important southern Rhine crossing. The division was part of Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group. Unlike Truscott, Hodge, or Gerow, Devers pressed for permission to cross, believing he could establish a large enough bridgehead to get a corps-sized force across. At this point, the Germans were still organizing their western defenses, and focused—as Eisenhower had—on the northern industrial regions, leaving Devers’s section lightly defended. Devers believed he could roll up the entire German line from the south and then reach Berlin with ease. Eisenhower disagreed, according to the author, because Devers was one his least favorite generals, meaning he “would never allow Devers the accolades that would come at the expense of Bradley and Patton” were he to cross the river before them. The author cites the memoirs of German General Friedrich von Mellenthin in support of Devers’s chances for success.[6] While recognizing Devers very well might not have achieved what he promised with such a relatively small force, Colley assumes this surprise eruption into Bavaria would at least have acted as a spoiling attack for Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive planned for the next month, perhaps preventing the Battle of the Bulge.
The author concludes with a recitation of other missed opportunities to trap large German forces, from Sicily to southern Italy to central Italy to the Falaise Gap. None of these examples will be news to even casual students of World War II. In all these examples, the working assumption is that even a small force standing athwart an enemy’s line of retreat would be enough to compel surrender. In his panoramic history of the war’s sprawling Mediterranean theater The Path to Victory, Douglas Porch discusses many of these examples, and concludes that it was impossible to trap large, well-equipped retreating German forces still motivated to fight, since they possessed the firepower to blast their way through any thinly-screened trap. This directly conflicts with a central assumption throughout Colley’s book. A related point I would make is that simply breaching an enemy’s defensive line in no way preordains its collapse, especially when the force doing so is the size of a division or corps, and the front’s forces are measured in army groups. To be fair, this also applies to the logic behind Market Garden, which was planned and supported by the best minds in the Anglo-American military community. At both Arnhem, in Market Garden, and Strasbourg, in Devers’s theoretical attack, even a completely successful operation would probably have amounted to a large-scale raid into enemy territory, no doubt deeply embarrassing to the Nazi command, but by no means immediately fatal.
Colley’s major scholarly error is relying almost exclusively on the post-hoc theorizing of former German commanders such as Mellenthin and Model and their memoirs. Today, such works are regarded as self-serving to the point of historical inaccuracy. In addition, former Nazis had an obvious agenda to ingratiate themselves to their new Anglo-American masters. In this endeavor, they fought a two-front campaign, burnishing their communist-killing credentials on the Eastern Front—this was now the Cold War, after all—while stroking the egos of their British and American adversaries on the Western and Southern Fronts. Those who told the Americans “if only you’d known you had us licked by September” were perhaps unreliable narrators.
All that having been said, writing counterfactual history is always of tremendous difficulty, reminding me of astronomer Carl Sagan’s quip that history could only be a science if one possessed a time machine with which to run hypothesis-testing experiments. One can neither prove nor falsify the claims on offer here, but only guess at their plausibility. Such analytical exercises are welcome, and occasionally fruitful. The Folly of Generals will and should be welcomed by military enthusiasts, and is worthy of debate in staff colleges and other institutions of military education. Clearly any of his suggestions would have been superior to Market Garden, offering greater reward at less risk and cost. Yet one must remember that the siren call of quick and decisive victory is usually just that. Furthermore, given the plethora of Allied failures to trap large German units in Western Europe, one might question how near these near-misses actually were. There may be a reason it never happened, beyond the lack of de l'audace among so many commanders from Eisenhower on down. Call it The Folly of Armchair Generals.
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