Terrible Victory Read online

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  The Jewel

  ON SEPTEMBER 4, less than twenty-four hours after the Dieppe Memorial ceremony, the tanks of 11th British Armoured Division growled into the outskirts of Antwerp. This was the crowning moment in the division’s spectacular dash ordered by XXX Corps commander Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks on August 30, to capitalize on that day’s winning of a crossing over the Seine. “A tall, lithe figure, with white hair, angular features, penetrating eyes and eloquent hands, [who] moved among his troops more like a prophet than a general,” the forty-nine-year-old Horrocks had distinguished himself at El Alamein, only to be critically wounded a short time later. Despite being warned that his injuries were so severe he would never again hold field command, Horrocks had responded to a call in early August from Montgomery to take over XXX Corps.1

  Both Horrocks and Montgomery had recognized the opportunity presented as XXX Corps—and indeed all Twenty-First Army Group—moved north of the river hot on the heels of a thoroughly disorganized adversary. “All risks are justified,” Montgomery had told Horrocks. “I intend to get a bridgehead over the Rhine before they have time to recover.”2 In the specially modified Sherman from which the gun had been removed to make room for additional radios and a small table that served as his mobile command post, Horrocks had rushed to 11th Armoured Division’s headquarters and personally briefed Major General G.P.B. “Pip” Roberts. The tank division commander happily reported that the day before his division had advanced twenty-one miles, a gain Horrocks brushed aside as insufficient. Countermanding orders for the division to harbour for the night, he instructed Roberts to keep moving by moonlight to seize Amiens and the Somme River bridge crossings before the Germans could destroy them.3 Once across the Somme, it would push through to Antwerp.

  Horrocks assured Roberts that his division would not be driving into the blue alone. Close behind, 50th Infantry Division would clear out German pockets of resistance that the tankers should bypass rather than fight. On its left, 7th Armoured Division would push towards Ghent, while to the right the Guards Armoured Division headed for Brussels.4 In one hard strike, XXX Corps would end the battle for Belgium before the Germans could organize a defence.

  Despite the fact that the division’s tankers had been on the move for thirty-six hours and fought a sharp engagement for the Seine crossing, the tanks had plowed into the gathering darkness. There was no moon, only a torrent of rain that reduced the roads to muddy lanes that crumbled into ruin under the great weight of the tanks and their chewing tracks. Despite the harsh weather, the lead tanks— having driven fifty-five miles during the night—reached Amiens shortly after dawn and found three of the four bridges in the hands of French resistance fighters who had seized them just hours before to prevent their destruction. Barely pausing, the tanks crossed over. “The race for the Rhine was now on,” Horrocks later recalled, “and the next few days were the most exhilarating of my military career.”5

  On September 2, the British tankers entered Belgium southeast of Lille. The same day, two American corps—XIX and VII—also broke into Belgium to the east of the British. When the Guards Armoured Division entered Brussels the following afternoon, it bogged down in the face of a euphoric citizenry that clogged the streets and showered the tankers with flowers. There was no thought of pausing. Antwerp lay within easy grasp of 11th Armoured Division, prompting Roberts to ask Horrocks for a “definite objective” because the entire city was far too large to be secured by tanks only lightly supported by infantry. “Go straight for the docks and prevent the Germans destroying the port installations,” the corps commander responded.6

  Accordingly, at noon on September 4, 11th Armoured Division rolled into Antwerp and was met by elements of the Belgian resistance who already controlled or were fighting to secure many of the port facilities, city services, and, most importantly, several key bridges that spanned the Albert Canal directly to the south of Merksem. From radio reports, the Belgians had known the British tanks were coming and had raised 3,500 fighters the day before. Although lightly armed, the Belgians had surprised the German occupation force.

  Fully realizing their importance to the Allied cause, the Belgians concentrated on seizing key transportation links and isolating or securing as much of the vital dockyard infrastructure as possible. Only three miles of the docks fronted the Scheldt proper, the remaining twenty-seven miles snaking into and around a complex network of inlets to the north. Behind this maze, a community and industrial complex existed that was largely separate physically, socially, and economically from Antwerp. In its midst, thousands of seamen and dockyard workers lived in tightly clustered villages complete with bars and churches. Large warehouses, sheds, machine shops, and ship repair plants were strung along the quays, behind which sprawling railroad marshalling yards teemed with trains waiting for cargo to carry throughout Europe. The docks had grown so rapidly that areas of flat, scrubby grassland lay just beyond the industrial complexes and villages.

  Running east from the port area was the eighty-mile-long Albert Canal, dug between 1930 and 1939 to provide a transportation link for heavy shipping to travel inland from Antwerp to Liège. From there, the canal tied into a spiderlike rail and waterway hub that extended its threads into the heartlands of Germany and France. With a minimum bottom width of eighty feet, it could be navigated by two-thousand-ton vessels.

  A series of lift bridges at Merksem provided vital canal crossing points. The resistance commanders had long appreciated the strategic importance of these bridges to enabling the Allied advance to pass quickly into Holland. Equally important was the electrical plant on the Merksem side of the canal that supplied power to the cranes and other dockyard machinery. To the north of the Scheldt were two locks the Belgians considered strategic keys to securing the port intact. The Kruisschanssluis controlled the Scheldt tidal flows in and out of the port, while No. 12 Sluiskens, about a mile north of Kruisschanssluis, prevented flooding of the low ground to the north and east of the port.

  Through the night of September 3–4, hundreds of Belgian fighters led by sea captain Eugene Colson had gone into action to wrest these vital objectives from German hands. Colson had been born in Merksem, so he was intimately familiar with every nook and cranny. Striking quickly, the Belgians won two of the bridges. A well-placed 88-millimetre gun prevented their capturing the larger Groenendaallaan crossing. Unable to defeat the gun with their light weapons, the Belgians were pinned down on the bridge’s south side. But their fire prevented the Germans detonating explosives to destroy the span. To ensure they were ready for immediate use by the British, the other bridges were lowered and fixed in position. By dawn, the tanks had not appeared and the Germans had used the time to reorganize. They launched a series of relentless counterattacks against the outnumbered and outgunned Belgian fighters. Throughout that day and on into the morning of September 5, the Belgians clung to their gains while looking over their shoulder in hopes that the tankers would appear.

  At the Merksem power plant, the fighters were driven off with heavy casualties. Then the two captured bridges fell and were blown by the Germans. That left only the unsecured Groenendaallaan Bridge. No. 12 Sluiskens was also overrun, and the Germans opened its floodgates to inundate large areas of low ground in the northern suburbs. Although reportedly in Antwerp, still the tanks did not come.

  Colson was frantic and angered at seeing his brave fighters slowly butchered. If all the bridges were lost, there would be no rapid advance into Holland. Not twenty miles north of Antwerp were the Zeeland islands of North Beveland and Walcheren and the South Beveland peninsula. The latter, which had also once been an island, was connected to the Dutch mainland via a mile-wide isthmus. If the Allies crossed the Albert Canal and gained control of the isthmus near the town of Woensdrecht, the German Fifteenth Army’s escape route from Breskens through Walcheren and South Beveland to the mainland would be capped. Colson believed the entire army could be eliminated in one coup de grâce. Yet with every pa
ssing minute, this priceless opportunity was slipping away.7

  Meanwhile, the tanks had begun pushing through Antwerp shortly after noon on September 4 and met solid opposition in the form of thousands of Belgians who thronged the streets in welcome. One of the division’s battalion commanders later described the scene in a letter to his wife. “The difficulties… amongst this mass of populace crowding round still cheering, still flag waving, still thrusting plums at you, still kissing you, asking you to post a letter to America, to give them some petrol, some more arms for the White Brigade [part of the Belgian resistance], holding baby under your nose to be kissed, trying to give you a drink, inviting you into their house, trying to carry you away, offering information about the enemy… had to be seen to be understood.”8

  The tankers, exhausted from a drive that had carried them 230 miles from the Seine to Antwerp in just six days, failed to exploit the opportunity that lay within easy grasp. Their orders had been to capture the docks at Antwerp intact and that job appeared done. “Had any indication been given that a further advance north was envisaged,” the regimental historian later wrote, the bridges “might have been seized within a few hours of our entry into the city.”9 But Major General Roberts believed any further advance of “secondary importance” to securing the dockyards fronting Antwerp proper. “No one mentioned the canal,” the division’s diarist noted. “All that Army and Army Group kept saying was, ‘You must get the docks, you must get the docks.”10

  Consequently, on September 5, when British tankers approached Groenendaallaan Bridge and Colson urged them to take on the 88-millimetre gun to win the crossing, he was rebuffed with the simple explanation that the tankers had no orders to advance. Colson stormed to Roberts’s headquarters, four miles to the south at Lier, and pressed his case, only to have the British officer politely thank him for his concern before dismissing him like some errant schoolboy. Returning to the docks, Colson watched the British tankers withdrawing. “Goddamn you Britishers,” he shouted. “Goddamn you.” He vowed to continue the bitter contest for control of the bridge until the British came to their senses.11

  The British decision to allow the initiative the Belgians had handed them on a platter to pass by was largely the result of a failure of Twenty-First Army Group to provide the corps commanders with vital intelligence. “If I had ordered Roberts to bypass Antwerp and advance only fifteen miles north-west,” Horrocks later wrote, “in order to cut off the Beveland isthmus, [Fifteenth Army] might have been destroyed or forced to surrender.”12 But Horrocks had not been informed that the Germans were conducting a desperate withdrawal to the north bank of the Scheldt that left them vulnerable to being bottled up on Walcheren and South Beveland if he corked the isthmus. And so, having accomplished the amazing feat of breaking through to Antwerp, and considering the port largely secure, he ordered the corps to stand down for a rest and equipment maintenance. Despite intelligence from the Belgian resistance that the Germans were building their strength there, Horrocks “did not anticipate at that time any serious resistance on the Albert Canal. It seemed to us that the Germans were seriously disorganized.”13 There would be no effort to renew the advance until September 7.

  Horrocks soon realized his mistake, later declaring September 4 as “the key day in the battle for the Rhine. Had we been able to advance that day we could have smashed through and advanced northward with little or nothing to stop us… but we halted and even by that same evening the situation was worsening.”14 The short, heady days of “The Pursuit” were at an end.

  ALTHOUGH HORROCKS assumed responsibility for failing to continue the advance on September 4, the decision was understandable in light of the lack of direction from his superiors. Fixated on reaching Germany by the fastest possible means, the Allied army commanders and Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force head General Dwight G. Eisenhower entirely overlooked the strategic and tactical opportunity that had developed in western Belgium. On the very day Antwerp fell, Eisenhower sent Montgomery a dispatch that directed Twenty-First Army Group and First U.S. Army, both operating northwest of the Ardennes, “to secure Antwerp, breach the Siegfried Line covering the Ruhr and seize the Ruhr.” This, he said, would be part of a “broad front” extending from the coast virtually to the Swiss border that assumed the “best opportunity for defeating the enemy in the West is to strike at the Ruhr and Saar.” These two regions provided the industrial backbone for Germany’s war effort.

  Eisenhower believed their capture would cripple the country’s ability to continue. German forces facing the Allies were thought to be no more than twenty weak and disorganized divisions. Hit hard, before reinforcements could be brought from the Eastern Front, the Germans would be unable to prevent a “quick crossing of the Rhine and a rapid conquest of one (or both) of the enemy’s all-important industrial areas.” Eisenhower was fixated on the Rhine, his mention of Antwerp seemingly nothing more than a casual aside. And he gave no attention to securing the Scheldt estuary or closing the trap on Fifteenth Army.15

  Vehemently opposed to Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy, which he believed the Allies were incapable of supplying from the existing port facilities, Montgomery was no less focused on getting to the Rhine. Everything else was secondary. He argued that all Allied resources should be dedicated to crossing the Rhine “at the expense of any other undertaking.”16 Rather than continuing to hit the Germans everywhere at once, though, Montgomery sought to launch a single “full-blooded” thrust, with British Second Army serving as the rapier that would pierce the Rhine at Arnhem.17 Three airborne divisions would be dropped to seize vital bridges at Grave, Nijmegen, and Arnhem so that the armoured divisions spearheading the offensive could gain the north bank of the Rhine before the Germans organized a coherent defence.

  On September 7, in order to prepare for this operation—soon codenamed Market Garden—Montgomery ordered Second Army to begin concentrating northeast of Antwerp. Three days later, while arguing that Market Garden should be adopted as the sole offensive to the Rhine, Montgomery explained to Eisenhower that this concentration of force on the Allied left flank was the “quickest way to open up Antwerp… which… would not only help our logistic and maintenance situation but would also keep up the pressure on the stricken Germans in the area of greatest importance, thus helping to end the war quickly.” Antwerp, he declared, would then be “behind the thrust.” As for the “approaches to the port, which we had not yet got,” Montgomery seemed to consider that they would fall automatically to the Allies once Second Army broke through to the Rhine.18

  Only one voice in the Allied high command warned that failing to open Antwerp before all else was a grave mistake. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Supreme Commander’s Naval Commander-in-Chief, had advised Eisenhower and Montgomery by telegraph on September 4 that opening Antwerp and Rotterdam to Allied shipping should be their highest priority. Both ports, he said, were “highly vulnerable to mining and blocking. If enemy succeeds in these operations the time it will take to open ports cannot be estimated.” He also warned that it “will be necessary for coastal batteries to be captured before approach channels to the river routes can be established.”19 Antwerp, Ramsay emphasized, was “useless” unless the Scheldt estuary was freed. It was plain that, until the harbour was opened, the Allies would be hobbled by their inability to adequately supply the advancing armies.

  Supplying such a huge force from the ports of Great Britain constituted a titanic logistical challenge. Initially, all supplies, except for fuel, had been unloaded from ships onto the beaches at Normandy, and two large artificial harbours—called Mulberries—had been constructed to speed the process. For fuel supply, the Allies had laid a “pipeline under the ocean” (PLUTO) that ran from Britain to Normandy. No sooner had the two Mulberries been set in place, however, than a massive storm that began on June 19 and raged for two days extensively damaged the American Mulberry off Omaha Beach. The Americans were forced back to relying on over-the-beach supply. Once the Allies
broke out of Normandy, the supplies landed outpaced the availability of transport to keep the advancing armies adequately supplied. The French railroad system south of the Seine had been heavily damaged by aerial bombardment, so the majority of supplies had to be moved by road, a slow, cumbersome process.

  Eisenhower sought to address the problem by assigning most of the supplies coming in to Market Garden, but his subordinate American generals gave only lip service to this instruction—hoarding supplies for their own forces at every opportunity. Only about 650 tons of supplies daily were redirected by them to Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group.20

  Montgomery was left to rely on his own resources to supply Market Garden. It soon became apparent that trying to move both troops and stores from Normandy would not be possible if the offensive was to begin as scheduled on September 17. So British Second Army’s VIII Corps, which was to have come forward to attack on the right of XXX Corps to protect that flank of the advance, was grounded west of the Seine and its trucks given over to the movement of supplies.21

  To increase the daily tonnage of supplies reaching British Second Army, Montgomery’s staff reduced the normal allotment for First Canadian Army.22 As I Corps was engaged in a relatively static operation at Le Havre, the majority of its transport was also stripped off to move supplies up for Market Garden. When 3rd Canadian Infantry Division concentrated on Boulogne, much of its transport was appropriated by the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps to move supplies forward to the rest of First Canadian Army.23