VERSAILLES, France — A British major general flew through weather that had grounded nearly every Allied aircraft in Europe on Dec. 30, 1944, carrying nothing but a sheet of paper and 24 hours to save the career of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who did not yet know his command was about to be taken from him.
The officer was Major General Francis Wilfred de Guingand, Montgomery’s chief of staff since Alamein. The paper was a letter of apology he had written before boarding. The deadline belonged to Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, whose desk at Versailles held a drafted cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington and London that would have ended Montgomery’s war.
The cable did not accuse anyone. It did not have to. It stated that the alliance could keep Eisenhower or it could keep Montgomery, and that the Combined Chiefs would have to choose.
Two hundred miles east, American soldiers were dying in the snow around Bastogne at a rate of hundreds a day. The two most senior ground commanders in the West had stopped speaking to each other. The crisis that nearly broke the Anglo-American alliance in the final winter of World War II had begun three weeks earlier, under a fog bank over the Ardennes.
On the morning of Dec. 16, 1944, three German armies attacked along an 85-mile front through forest and frozen farmland on the Belgian-German border. Nearly 200,000 men and close to a thousand tanks and assault guns struck a sector the American command had deliberately left thin.
The VIII Corps under Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton held the entire line with four divisions.
Two were exhausted, sent to rest after being shattered in the Hürtgen Forest. One, the 106th Infantry Division, had arrived five days earlier and had never seen combat.
Twenty miles behind them, at the Hotel Alfa in Luxembourg City, Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley read the first reports and did not believe them.
At 51, the farmer’s son from Clark County, Missouri, commanded the 12th Army Group — more American soldiers than any commander in the history of the United States Army.
By Dec. 17, word reached Bradley of roughly 84 American prisoners machine-gunned in a field near Malmedy by an SS armored column. By Dec.
19, two full regiments of the untested 106th — some 7,000 men — had surrendered on the Schnee Eifel Ridge, the largest mass surrender of American troops in the European war.
The German wedge was driving west between Bradley’s headquarters and the northern half of his own command. His 12th Army Group contained three armies: Patton’s Third to the south, Hodges’ First and Simpson’s Ninth to the north. Every hour the wedge grew, the harder it became to reach the northern two.
On Dec. 19, Eisenhower gathered his senior commanders at a cold barracks in Verdun. There was no heat.
Patton said he could disengage three divisions, turn them 90 degrees and drive north into the German flank within days. He meant it, and he did it. But nobody at Verdun solved the problem of the north.
That evening, two British officers on Eisenhower’s own staff — Maj. Gen. Kenneth Strong, his intelligence chief, and Maj.
Gen. John Whiteley, a deputy in operations — studied a map and reached a conclusion neither wanted to say aloud. Bradley could no longer effectively command the First and Ninth Armies from Luxembourg.
Somebody north of the bulge had to take control. The only headquarters positioned to do it was the British 21st Army Group, commanded by Montgomery.
They took it to Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith.
Smith, an American famous for his temper, told them to their faces they were no longer acceptable as staff officers at his headquarters and sent them out. Then he sat with it through the night. The next morning, Dec.
20, he walked into Eisenhower’s office and recommended exactly what they had recommended — in his own name, because he had worked the problem through and reached the same answer.
At about 10:30 that morning, Eisenhower telephoned Bradley and told him the First and Ninth Armies were being transferred to Montgomery’s operational command for the duration of the emergency. Bradley argued. He said the Germans could still be handled from where he sat.
He said giving American armies to a British commander would look to the American public like a judgment on American generalship. Eisenhower told him the decision stood. Bradley put the phone down and said almost nothing.
An officer present remembered his hands were shaking.
What Montgomery found when he arrived at First Army headquarters outside Liège was worse than anything reported to Luxembourg. The command post had already been forced to move once, abandoning Spa in such haste that maps were left on the walls, with more than 2 million gallons of fuel sitting undefended a few miles up the road. Courtney Hodges, who commanded it, had been awake for the better part of four days.
Officers described a man who had stopped talking, who sat at his desk without moving.
Montgomery walked in and began issuing orders within the hour. He ran a network of young liaison officers who drove to forward units every morning and reported to him every evening, bypassing the chain of command. Within 36 hours he had a clearer picture of the German spearheads than anyone in the American chain had assembled in four days.
He found the 7th Armored Division nearly enveloped in a salient around St. Vith, holding a horseshoe of ground with German forces closing behind. Maj.
Gen. Matthew Ridgway wanted them to stay. Montgomery overruled him and authorized the withdrawal on Dec.
22. Every serious study of the battle since has agreed with him. It did not matter, because of how it felt.
On Christmas Day, Montgomery drove to Luxembourg to see Bradley for the first time since the offensive began. Two accounts came out of that room, and they do not describe the same conversation. Bradley remembered being lectured — told the Americans had brought this on themselves by attacking on too broad a front against his advice since September.
He said afterward he had never in his life been so angry.
Montgomery, writing to Field Marshal Alan Brooke that same evening, described something quite different. He wrote that Bradley had looked thin and worn, that he had seemed to agree with everything proposed. He came away believing he had won Bradley over.
He had not come close. The fact that Montgomery genuinely could not tell the difference is the single most important fact about him in this story.
Four days later, he put it in writing. On Dec. 29, Montgomery sent Eisenhower a letter enclosing a draft directive he suggested Eisenhower issue.
It stated that full operational direction and control of the coming offensive should be vested in a single commander, and identified boundaries and forces in a way that left no ambiguity about who that commander would be. At the bottom he added a postscript: he was raising the matter again only because he was so anxious not to have another failure — written by the man responsible for the Scheldt and Arnhem to the man holding a coalition together in the third week of a battle in which Americans were dying by the hundreds daily.
Eisenhower read it and, for the first time in the war, stopped trying to manage Montgomery. He began drafting a cable to the Combined Chiefs instead. While he worked, a message arrived from Washington.
Gen. George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, wired that under no circumstances was Eisenhower to make any concession on the question of a British ground commander. The United States Army would not accept it, and if Eisenhower agreed, he would lose Washington.
Through late December, Churchill and Eisenhower had been discussing bringing Field Marshal Harold Alexander up from Italy as Deputy Supreme Commander. Alexander was Montgomery’s equal in rank, enormously popular with the Americans, and had commanded Montgomery before. Putting him in that chair meant the ground command Montgomery had demanded for four months could be created at any moment and handed to someone else.
Montgomery knew none of this. De Guingand found out on Dec. 30, when Bedell Smith telephoned him and told him what was sitting on Eisenhower’s desk.
De Guingand was not a well man that winter, running on exhaustion, and would be invalided out of the theater before the war ended. He ordered an aircraft anyway and flew from Belgium to Paris through the same low cloud that had grounded Allied air forces for the first week of the German offensive.
At Versailles he found Eisenhower, Bedell Smith and Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder. Nobody in that room was on Montgomery’s side. De Guingand read the draft cable and understood it was not a negotiating document.
He did not defend the letter of Dec. 29. He asked for 24 hours, arguing that Montgomery did not understand what he had done, that removing a British field marshal mid-offensive would hand Berlin a propaganda victory worth more than a division.
Tedder argued against. Bedell Smith argued for. Eisenhower gave him the day.
De Guingand flew back into worsening weather and drove to Zonhoven, where Montgomery’s tactical headquarters sat in a cluster of caravans and tents pulled into a field. He walked into the map caravan and told Montgomery without softening it that the Supreme Allied Commander was preparing to go to the Combined Chiefs, that the matter would be decided in Washington and not in Belgium, and that Montgomery was about to be relieved.
By de Guingand’s own account, written after the war, Montgomery did not argue. He did not object. He went completely silent, and the change was so total that de Guingand, who had worked beside him every day for two and a half years, found it painful to watch.
Then Montgomery asked a question he had almost certainly never asked another human being in his adult life: “What should I do, Freddy?”
De Guingand took from his pocket a sheet of paper he had written before walking in. Montgomery read it, did not change a word, and signed it. It said he had seen de Guingand and understood Eisenhower was greatly worried by many considerations in these difficult days, that he had given his frank views because he felt Eisenhower would want them, and that there were surely many factors beyond anything he himself could see.
Then the sentence that saved him: “Whatever your decision may be, you can rely on me 100% to make it work. And I know Brad will do the same.” He asked Eisenhower to tear up the earlier letter.
He signed it, “Your very devoted subordinate, Monty.”
Eisenhower received it. The cable to the Combined Chiefs was never sent. It went into a drawer.
The crisis had lasted about 48 hours, and almost nobody outside a handful of officers knew it had happened at all.
Eight days later, Montgomery destroyed everything de Guingand had bought him. On Jan. 7, 1945, at Zonhoven, he held a press conference, persuaded partly to demonstrate that the Allied command was united.
He described the American soldier as a very brave fighting man. He said the team must rally round the captain of the team, and the captain was Eisenhower.
But those were not the sentences that traveled. What traveled was the rest: how he had been called in, how he had busied himself getting the battle area tidy, how correspondents should picture British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who had suffered a hard blow, and how it had been “possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled.” Handled — a battle in which more than 19,000 Americans were killed and some 80,000 killed, wounded, captured or lost to the cold, while British losses across the month amounted to a few hundred.
Montgomery’s staff insisted afterward that a German propaganda station had rebroadcast a doctored version deliberately rewritten to inflame the Americans. The claim was never fully verified. It also did not matter.
The genuine transcript was sufficient, and it was in every American newspaper within days.
In Luxembourg, Bradley read it. Officers with him that week remembered the quality of the silence more than anything he said. He read, set the paper down, and looked at the wall for a long time.
By his own account, written six years later, he telephoned Eisenhower and said the one thing he had never said to a superior officer: that this was the one thing he could not take, that if Montgomery were placed in command of all Allied ground forces, Eisenhower would have to send him home, because he could not serve under him. When Patton heard, he told Bradley that if Bradley quit, he would quit with him.
On Jan. 18, 1945, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and ended the argument. He told the House the Americans had engaged 30 or 40 men for every one Britain engaged and had lost 60 or 80 for every British loss.
Then he said the sentence that closed it: this was undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and would be regarded as an ever-famous American victory. The prime minister of the United Kingdom had publicly corrected his own field marshal.
On Jan. 17, the First Army returned to Bradley’s 12th Army Group. The Ninth did not.
On March 7, 17 days before Montgomery’s planned Rhine crossing, a lieutenant in the 9th Armored Division looked down through the haze at the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen — still standing, when every other Rhine bridge had been dropped. Within 24 hours there were 8,000 Americans on the eastern bank. Within a week, more than 25,000.
On March 12, Bradley was promoted to full general. On the night of March 22, Patton put the Third Army across the Rhine at Oppenheim without an airborne drop, without a smoke screen, and without telling anyone until it was done.
On March 28, Eisenhower cabled Joseph Stalin directly, without consulting the British chiefs or Churchill, outlining the final campaign: the main Allied thrust would be made in the center by Bradley’s 12th Army Group, toward Leipzig and Dresden. Berlin was not mentioned as an objective at all. On April 4, the Ninth Army was returned to Bradley, who now commanded four field armies — roughly 1.
3 million men, the largest force ever placed under a single American officer.
On May 4, 1945, on a windswept heath south of Hamburg called Lüneburg Heath, Montgomery accepted the unconditional surrender of all German forces in northwest Germany, Holland, Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein and the Frisian Islands. More than a million men laid down their arms on his signature. It was the single greatest moment of his career, and it came exactly four months after he had lost every argument that mattered.
He never saw the contradiction. In his memoirs, published in 1958, he wrote that he should never have held that press conference, that feeling against him among the American generals had become so strong that whatever he said was bound to be wrong — an apology of a kind, and also, read carefully, an explanation of why the fault lay with everybody else.
Bradley published his own account in 1951 and a second, less restrained volume from his papers after his death in 1983. The two men lived another 25 years and never repaired any of it. For a stretch of the early 1950s they sat at the same NATO conference tables, planning the defense of the same continent.
They were civil. They were never anything more than civil. Somewhere in the background of every one of those meetings, a staff officer had the quiet, unwritten job of making sure the two of them were not put next to each other.