Dwight D. Eisenhower came within a single signature of ending the career of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in the early hours of December 30, 1944, as 19,000 American soldiers lay dead in the frozen Ardennes and the grand alliance that had won the war in the West teetered on the edge of collapse.
The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe had swallowed insults, slights, and public humiliations from the British field marshal for two and a half years. On that night, in a small office at the Trianon Palace in Versailles, he reached for a pen and began to write the cable that would have offered Washington and London an impossible choice: keep Montgomery or keep Eisenhower.
The crisis had been building for months, but it detonated on December 16, 1944, when nearly 1,600 German artillery pieces opened fire along an 85-mile front in the Ardennes forest. The surprise offensive, later known as the Battle of the Bulge, shattered the quiet of what both sides had called the ghost front.
American boys from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas, many of them 19 years old and never before in combat, tumbled half-dressed into the snow. Within three days, more than 7,000 men of the 106th Infantry Division were surrounded and forced to surrender on the Schnee Eifel ridge, the largest mass capitulation of American troops in the European war.
Near the crossroads village of Malmedy, soldiers of the 1st SS Panzer Division opened fire on 84 unarmed American prisoners in a frozen field. The massacre spread through American lines within hours. From that day forward, a quiet order passed among infantrymen in the Ardennes: no prisoners, not from the SS.
On December 19, Eisenhower convened his senior commanders at a cold stone barracks in Verdun. The situation, he told them, was to be regarded as an opportunity, not a disaster. There would be only cheerful faces at this table.
George Patton promised to pivot three divisions 90 degrees north through the snow and reach Bastogne within 48 hours. He had already ordered the maneuver the night before.
But the northern shoulder of the German breakthrough remained the problem. On December 20, Eisenhower telephoned Omar Bradley and told his old West Point classmate that the American First and Ninth Armies, some 200,000 soldiers, were being placed under Montgomery’s temporary command. Bradley’s voice, controlled but shaking, came through the receiver: By God, Ike, I cannot be responsible if this is done.
Eisenhower’s reply was quiet. Brad, I, not you, am responsible to General Marshall, and this is my decision.
The decision was strategically correct. Bradley could not command what he could not reach. Montgomery could.
But the British field marshal did not receive the news as a burden. He received it as a coronation. Finally, he told his aide, finally it has come to this.
On Christmas Day, Bradley flew north to Montgomery’s headquarters at Zonhoven hoping to find a working partnership. What he received was a 30-minute lecture. Montgomery informed Bradley that the American command structure was fundamentally flawed, that Patton was reckless, and that the northern half of the American front should remain permanently under British command.
Bradley left white-faced and wrote to his wife that night that if he had to go on serving under this man, he would ask to be relieved.
Montgomery, oblivious, wrote his own letter to Field Marshal Alan Brooke in London, reporting that the Americans had received a great shock and were finally learning to listen. From this point forward, he wrote, they will do as they are told.
Four days later, on December 29, Montgomery drafted Signal M408. It demanded in writing that Eisenhower place all Allied ground forces north of the Ardennes under a single ground commander, and that commander must be himself. Then came the sentence that stopped Eisenhower’s heart: any future directive from the Supreme Commander must include the phrase that the Supreme Commander will not intervene in the operational actions of the ground commander in the north.
Montgomery was demanding that Eisenhower sign an order stripping himself of his own authority. It was not a request. It was a coup, delivered in the polite, dry language of a British staff officer.
The message reached Versailles on the morning of December 30. Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, read it first and set it on the desk without a word. For the first and only time in the war, Eisenhower slammed his hand down with such force that the papers jumped.
He pulled a blank sheet toward him and began to compose a message to the Combined Chiefs of Staff offering them a choice: keep Montgomery or keep their supreme commander. They could not keep both.
Bedell Smith read the draft and said only one thing: If you send this, you will win. Eisenhower nodded and set it aside. He said he would send it in the morning.
But two of Eisenhower’s own staff officers, both British, had already understood what was about to happen. Major General Kenneth Strong, the intelligence chief, and Major General John Whiteley, the deputy operations chief, went quietly to Bedell Smith. If this cable went to Washington, they said, the alliance would tear.
There was only one man who could stop it, and they knew where to find him.
That man was Francis de Guingand, Montgomery’s chief of staff, who lay in a farmhouse near Zonhoven with pneumonia and a fever so high he had stopped measuring it. His doctors had ordered him to remain in bed for a week. When the phone rang, he set it down, called for his aide, and asked for his aircraft to be readied.
The aide protested that the weather was closing and every trained pilot was refusing to fly. De Guingand did not raise his voice. Then find one who will, he said.
The Dakota lifted off from a snow-blown airstrip a little after 10 p. m. on December 30.
Inside sat a single passenger wrapped in a heavy greatcoat, coughing into a handkerchief. The pilot flew almost entirely on instruments. The wings iced over.
Twice the aircraft dropped several hundred feet in sudden downdrafts. De Guingand did not sleep. He was rehearsing the words he would say when he arrived.
The Dakota came in low over Orly airfield outside Paris just before midnight. A staff car carried him through blackout streets to the Trianon Palace. It was nearly 1 a.
m. on December 31. Bedell Smith met him at the door, and the two chiefs of staff looked at each other for a long moment without speaking.
Eisenhower was still at his desk. His tunic was unbuttoned. An ashtray full of cigarette ends sat beside his right hand.
The draft cable lay in front of him, weighted down by a brass paperweight. De Guingand asked quietly if he might read the message. Eisenhower slid the paper across the desk without a word.
De Guingand read it. His hands did not shake. When he had finished, he set the message back down exactly where it had been.
General, he said, give me 24 hours. I will bring you back a different letter. Eisenhower looked at Bedell Smith, who gave the smallest of nods.
Eisenhower folded the draft cable in half and placed it in the drawer of his desk. Twenty-four hours, Freddy, he said. Not one minute more.
De Guingand flew back through worse weather than before, carrying nothing but a piece of paper he had drafted himself in his own hand on the return flight. It was the letter he intended to make Bernard Montgomery sign.
He walked into Montgomery’s tactical trailer just after 2 p. m. on December 31.
Montgomery was finishing his lunch and looked up with a smile. Freddy, he said cheerfully, you look terrible. Why aren’t you in bed?
De Guingand did not smile back. He closed the door. He remained standing.
Sir, he said, Ike is going to sack you.
Montgomery laughed, a small, almost polite laugh. Nonsense, Freddy, he said. Ike needs me.
Then de Guingand told him the truth. Marshall had already decided. Roosevelt would back Marshall.
Churchill could not afford to break the alliance over one man. The cable was written, it lay in a drawer at Versailles, and it would be transmitted in less than 24 hours. There was no lobbying to be done, no friend to call, no general to appeal to.
His career was over.
Montgomery’s face changed as he listened. The smile faded first, then the color, then the certainty behind the eyes, and finally the posture. His shoulders came down.
He set his teacup on the saucer with a soft porcelain click that seemed very loud in the small trailer. For a long moment he did not speak. Then he looked up and asked very softly, Freddy, what should I do?
For the first time in nearly 40 years of soldiering, the victor of El Alamein asked for help. De Guingand reached into his coat and set a folded piece of paper on the table. Sir, he said, you will sign this.
The letter was addressed to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and began with the words Dear Ike. It said that Montgomery had been mistaken, that the previous message had been badly worded, and that whatever decision the Supreme Commander made, Montgomery would support it 100 percent.
It was signed with a single word: Monty.
Montgomery read it twice. His hand hesitated over the paper. De Guingand said, Only, sir, there is no other way.
Montgomery signed.
The letter reached Eisenhower on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1945. He read it in silence. He did not smile.
He did not celebrate. He nodded once and asked Bedell Smith to fetch the draft cable from the drawer. Smith assumed his commander was going to destroy it.
Eisenhower did not destroy it. He read it through one more time, folded it carefully, and placed it in his personal file, where it remains today in the archives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, on paper yellowed by 80 years. He forgave.
He did not forget.
Six days later, Montgomery destroyed the mercy he had been given. On January 7, he walked into a press tent at Zonhoven in full uniform and told British war correspondents that the Ardennes battle had been most interesting, possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles he had ever handled. He said he had taken certain steps himself, employed the whole available power of the British group of armies, visited the American troops, heartened them, and rallied them.
He did not mention McAuliffe, Patton, Hodges, Collins, or Ridgway. He described the desperate defense of Bastogne as one small element in his own larger design.
The morning papers led with the headline that would enter infamy: Monty saves the Yanks. In Luxembourg City, Bradley threw the paper into the fire and telephoned Eisenhower. If this man commands one more American soldier, he said, I resign my commission today.
Patton wrote in his diary that he would rather resign and go home than serve one more day under Montgomery.
In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels seized on the words with delight. German loudspeakers along the front broadcast them over and over in English to American positions in the snow. Listen, the announcers said, listen to how the British field marshal describes you.
Children. Amateurs. Boys who had to be saved.
This is what your allies think of you. American soldiers in frozen foxholes who had watched their friends die in the Ardennes heard the broadcasts. Some wept.
Some cursed. Some would say in later years that they never hated any enemy so much as they hated Bernard Montgomery in the winter of 1945.
The damage was so severe that Winston Churchill was forced to walk into the House of Commons on January 18 and personally clean up what his own field marshal had done. The Battle of the Bulge, Churchill told Parliament, had been overwhelmingly an American engagement. American casualties had been more than 60 times, perhaps more than 80 times, the British casualties in the same battle.
Care must be taken, he said, in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war. This battle, he said, will be regarded as an ever famous American victory.
Alan Brooke wrote in his diary that night with exhausted resignation: Monty has made a mess of things. From that day forward, the war in the West belonged to the Americans. When the crossing of the Rhine came in March, Patton crossed at Oppenheim on the night of March 22 without artillery preparation or airborne support, in cheap assault boats, and telephoned Bradley to say he wanted the world to know that Third Army made it across before Monty starts.
Only the following night did Montgomery launch his enormous set-piece crossing, Operation Plunder, complete with paratroopers, naval bombardment, searchlights, cameras, and a personal visit from Churchill. It was magnificent, and it was strategically an afterthought.
When the decision was made about who would take Berlin, Eisenhower gave the city to the Soviets rather than let the British field marshal have it. It was framed publicly as a decision to preserve American lives. Privately, the men in the room understood.
Montgomery received his viscountcy after the war and became Chief of the Imperial General Staff. He lived to be 88, dying in England in 1976, his public reputation in Britain that of a national hero. His private reputation among the men who had actually run the war never recovered.
Eisenhower became president in 1953 and served two terms. During those eight years, Montgomery requested private meetings at the White House on more than one occasion. On more than one occasion, the president found reasons to be unavailable.
De Guingand retired from the army in 1946, in part because Montgomery, upon becoming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, did not offer him the senior position he had been promised. The man who had drafted the letter of surrender was discarded by the man he had saved. He died in Cannes, France, in 1979.
The most dangerous battle of the Western war was not fought in the snow of the Ardennes. It was not fought at Bastogne or Malmedy or on the Elsenborn Ridge. It was fought in a small warm office in Versailles between one man’s pride and another man’s patience, and it was decided by a piece of paper that stayed in a drawer.
Eisenhower did not win it with a rifle. He won it with restraint. The alliance held.
The war was won. Hitler died in a bunker in Berlin four months later. But the sheet of paper is still there in Abilene, Kansas, in a temperature-controlled vault, kept safe for the historians and the students and the quiet visitors who come year after year to look at it and to understand.