VERSAILLES, France — Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, sat alone in his office at the Trianon Palace, staring at a two-page letter that could have shattered the Grand Alliance and altered the course of the war in Europe.
The clock on the mantle read a few minutes past ten in the evening. Outside, snow fell on the gardens Louis XIV built to impress the world. Inside, the Supreme Commander had not slept in three days.
On his desk, beneath his steady right hand, lay a typewritten letter addressed to General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army in Washington. It was written in the plain military prose Eisenhower used when a decision was final.
Its meaning was simple: Bernard Law Montgomery, the most famous British general of the Second World War, must be removed from command—or Eisenhower himself would resign.
If he signed the letter, and if Marshall carried it to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, one of them would be gone before the week was out. The room smelled of Camel cigarettes and old wood. The war in Europe hung in the balance, and the alliance that was winning it was on the verge of tearing itself apart.
The crisis had been building for months. It reached its breaking point on December 30, 1944, in the frozen aftermath of the Battle of the Bulge. Montgomery, commanding the British 21st Army Group, had sent Eisenhower a memorandum demanding permanent command of all Allied ground forces north of the Ardennes.
It was the latest in a series of such demands, each one more insistent than the last. Eisenhower had reached the end of his patience. He had drafted the letter to Marshall, and he intended to sign it at first light.
A fifth man, a slight, pale, quiet British lieutenant general named Francis “Freddy” de Guingand, lay bedridden 200 miles to the north in a Belgian farmhouse, suffering from a bleeding stomach ulcer. He did not yet know the letter existed. When he found out, he would climb out of that bed, get on an airplane in a snowstorm, and fly through weather no pilot should fly through.
He would spend the next 24 hours trying to save the career of the man he had served for two years and a war and a half—a man who, once saved, would never forgive him for it.
The roots of the conflict ran deep. Eisenhower, born in Denison, Texas, in 1890, was a career staff officer, a planner, a middleman. In 27 years of active service before the war, he had never commanded a unit in combat.
He was the greatest coalition builder the United States Army ever produced, and no one knew it, including him, until the war made him. By December 1944, he commanded almost three million men from a dozen nations. He drank strong coffee before dawn, worked 18 hours a day, and smoked four packs of cigarettes without filters.
His hands shook by evening. His blood pressure alarmed his physician, who warned him that if the war did not end soon, he might not live to see it.
Montgomery was born in London in 1887. His father was an Anglican bishop. His mother beat him regularly with a stick for offenses real and imagined.
He grew up cold, angry, and brilliant. At the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, he took a German bullet through the right lung. The wound should have killed him.
A medical orderly began digging a shallow grave beside him because the ambulance was full. Montgomery survived by refusing to die. He lay there for hours, hearing the shovel bite into the earth of his own grave, and he decided he would not go into that grave that day.
He came out of the First World War convinced that British generals had fed a hundred thousand men into the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele because their commanders were fools. He would never send a soldier into a battle he had not planned to the last detail.
He was slow, methodical, cold. He rehearsed everything. At El Alamein in November 1942, his methodical approach broke the Afrika Korps of Erwin Rommel.
Britain had lost every major land battle of the war until Alamein. It made Winston Churchill weep at his desk in Downing Street. It made Montgomery, at 55, the most famous general in the British Empire.
He wore a black tank beret with two cap badges. He did not drink. He did not smoke.
He went to bed at 9:30 every night. He lived in a caravan captured from an Italian general in Tunisia in 1943 and refused to sleep anywhere else for the rest of the war. He believed he was the finest field commander in the world.
He was probably not entirely wrong. The problem was that he made sure everyone else knew it every day.
The argument between the two men had been simmering since September 1944, when Montgomery sent Eisenhower a memorandum proposing that the Allied armies be placed under a single ground commander—below Eisenhower, but above Omar Bradley and Montgomery himself. Montgomery did not name the man. He did not have to.
The only serious candidate was Bernard Montgomery. Eisenhower declined. Montgomery sent another memo two weeks later, then a third, then a fourth.
Between September and December, he sent six such proposals. Each time, Eisenhower declined politely, firmly, noting in his personal diary that Montgomery seemed unable or unwilling to accept an answer that was not the answer he wanted.
On September 17, Montgomery launched Operation Market Garden. Thirty-five thousand paratroopers dropped into Holland along a 60-mile corridor. The plan was to seize the great bridges of the Netherlands, including the road bridge at Arnhem, and vault the Allied army into the German plain before winter.
It was audacious. It failed. The bridge at Arnhem was, in the words of the British general who commanded the drop, a bridge too far.
Almost 8,000 British and Polish paratroopers were killed, wounded, or captured. Montgomery did not accept responsibility. He blamed the weather, the American paratroopers, the supply system, and Eisenhower for not giving him enough gasoline.
On December 10, Eisenhower wrote Montgomery the sharpest letter of his career. Its central passage read: “You are welcome to submit anything you desire, but you should refrain from suggesting that I do things which either now or in the future you know I cannot do.” Montgomery read the letter.
He did not reply.
Six days later, at 5:30 in the morning on December 16, in the frozen forests of the Belgian Ardennes, 28 German divisions opened fire on the American line. The Battle of the Bulge had begun.
The Ardennes was quiet ground, or so the Allied high command believed. They had placed four American divisions along an 80-mile stretch of that quiet ground. The 28th Infantry Division, exhausted after a month-long meat grinder in the Hürtgen Forest.
The 106th Infantry Division, which had arrived in Europe in late November and reached its positions only five days before the attack—boys who had crossed the Atlantic six weeks earlier, most of them 19 or 20 years old, most of them from Kansas and Oklahoma and West Virginia. The 4th Infantry Division, recovering from casualties. The 9th Armored Division, an untested unit given a quiet sector to cut its teeth.
Four divisions, 75,000 men across 80 miles—roughly one American soldier every 150 feet of front line in a wilderness of snow.
Facing them, hidden in that same forest, Adolf Hitler had assembled the last great offensive of the German war. Twenty-eight divisions, 460,000 men, more than 1,200 tanks and assault guns, including some 50 Tiger IIs—60-ton monsters with 88mm guns. Three German armies.
Their objective was Antwerp, 200 miles from the start line. If they reached it, they would split the Anglo-American armies in half, cut Montgomery off from Bradley, and reopen the possibility of a negotiated peace in the West.
In the first three days of the attack, the German advance carved a bulge into the American line 50 miles deep and 60 miles wide. The bulge cut the telephone cables. Bradley’s 12th Army Group headquarters was in Luxembourg City at the southern edge of the American sector.
Two of his subordinate armies, the First Army under Courtney Hodges and the Ninth Army under William Simpson, were north of the German penetration. Bradley was south of it. By December 19, Bradley could not reliably communicate with his two northern armies.
Every wire the American Signal Corps ran through the Ardennes was cut, blown up, or captured. Someone had to take charge of the northern half of the American front. There was only one Allied general north of the bulge with the seniority and the staff to do it: Bernard Law Montgomery.
On the morning of December 20 at 10:30 a. m. , Eisenhower picked up a telephone.
His chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, had proposed the reorganization 30 minutes earlier. It was a sound military decision. It was the only military decision given the terrain and the state of communications.
Eisenhower knew that giving Montgomery two American armies in the middle of a crisis would be interpreted by Montgomery as a vindication. He knew it would inflame Bradley, his oldest friend, his most trusted subordinate. He made the call anyway because he was a soldier and the ground had decided the question.
Montgomery took command. He arrived at Hodges’s headquarters in the small resort town of Spa without warning. He did not remove his coat.
He did not sit down. He did not offer greetings. In the phrase written that night by Hodges’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel William Sylvan, and quoted ever since: “He strode into Hodges’s headquarters like Christ come to cleanse the temple.”
Montgomery took over the map room, examined the situation for perhaps 10 minutes, and began issuing orders. He told Hodges to shorten his line, to pull back from certain forward positions, to stop trying to counterattack and start trying to survive. Hodges did not argue.
He carried out the orders.
The interesting thing, the difficult thing, the thing history would spend decades arguing about, is that Montgomery was almost entirely right. Hodges was exhausted. His command was in shock.
The American line north of the bulge needed a firm hand and a clear plan. The plan Montgomery gave him was the correct one: pull back, consolidate, build a reserve, let the Germans exhaust themselves on the shoulders of the bulge, then counterattack. Over the next 10 days, Montgomery stabilized the northern shoulder.
The German thrust slowed, ground to a halt, and began to be pushed back. Bernard Montgomery was doing his job, doing it well.
But every night in his caravan at Zonhoven, he was also writing letters. He wrote to Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London, describing the American command as chaotic, describing Bradley as tired and out of his depth. “The Americans,” he wrote, “need to be told that they cannot manage this war on their own.
It is time for one commander to take charge of the whole land battle. Otherwise, we shall lose it.” He wrote similar letters to Winston Churchill.
He was using the crisis of the Ardennes to relitigate the argument he had been losing for four months.
Down in the south, at Verdun on December 19, another meeting had taken place—the meeting that had actually saved the American front. Eisenhower had summoned his senior commanders to a stone barracks room. Around the table sat Bradley, tired and stunned; Devers of the Sixth Army Group; various staff officers; and George Smith Patton, commander of the Third Army, in his tall boots and lacquered helmet, chewing on the end of a cold cigar.
Eisenhower opened the meeting with a sentence for the ages: “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this table.”
Patton grinned. “Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut him off and chew him up.”
Eisenhower asked how quickly Patton could turn his Third Army 90 degrees and drive north into the southern flank of the bulge. Patton said 48 hours, three divisions. The room went silent.
What Patton was proposing was effectively impossible. To pivot an entire army by 90 degrees in winter on icy roads and put it into offensive combat in 48 hours was not something modern armies did. What no one in the room knew, except Patton and his chief of staff, was that Patton had already worked out three contingency plans two days earlier.
His staff was already writing movement orders. Patton stepped out of the room, made a phone call, said one word into the receiver, and came back in to drink his coffee. Two days later, the Third Army was turning 90 degrees on a dime, driving north toward Bastogne.
On December 17, the day after the German attack began, an event took place a few miles east of the town of Malmédy that would harden the American war in the West. An SS armored column, Kampfgruppe Peiper, commanded by 29-year-old SS Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Peiper, had punched 20 miles into the American rear. At about 12:30 in the afternoon, at a crossroads called Baugnez, Peiper’s column intercepted a convoy of American trucks belonging to Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion.
The Americans, lightly armed, surrendered. Roughly 113 of them were herded into a snow-covered field beside the road. For reasons no German officer would ever fully explain, SS troopers opened fire on the standing men with machine pistols and rifles.
Eighty-four Americans died in that field. A handful escaped by playing dead and running for the trees when night fell.
The survivors reached American lines within 24 hours. The story spread through the American army faster than any story of the war. By December 20, every American infantryman in the Ardennes knew that if he surrendered to the SS, he would be shot in a field.
That knowledge, more than any speech from any general, put steel into the American defense. Isolated units that had been ready to retreat decided to stand. Bastogne, encircled and surrounded, held not because Patton was coming—he was not yet—but because the men in it had heard about Malmédy and had decided they would rather die fighting than die kneeling.
The bulge held on the shoulders. The Germans could not break through north or south. They lanced deep into the middle toward the town of Bastogne, where the encircled 101st Airborne, under the temporary command of Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, refused to surrender.
On December 22, a German colonel walked forward under a white flag and delivered a formal demand for surrender. McAuliffe, tired and with a headache, dictated a one-word reply: “Nuts.” The German colonel had to have the word translated.
When he understood, he did not know what to say. He returned to his lines. On December 26 at 4:50 in the afternoon, the lead tanks of Combat Command Reserve, 4th Armored Division, under Colonel Wendell Blanchard, punched through the German ring around Bastogne.
The tank that reached the American perimeter first belonged to the 37th Tank Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams—a young officer with a cigar and a bad temper who 28 years later would become Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the Vietnam War.
None of that had anything to do with Bernard Montgomery. Bastogne was in the southern sector under Bradley’s remaining command, spearheaded by Patton’s Third Army. It was an American victory, fought, planned, and executed by American commanders and American soldiers.
It was arguably the single most important tactical success of the whole battle. But when Montgomery wrote to Brooke on December 27, he did not mention Bastogne. He described the situation on his own front.
He described his own reorganization. He then repeated, for the seventh or eighth time, his conviction that the war would be won more quickly if the Allied armies had a single ground commander below Eisenhower—and that this ground commander should be a man of proven battlefield experience.
By December 29, he had decided to formalize the argument one more time. He drafted a memorandum, labeled MC-1, addressed to the Supreme Commander. It ran to eight pages.
Its central demand was that Bradley be relieved of the direction of the northern armies permanently, that Montgomery be given operational command of all forces engaged in the offensive against Germany north of the Ardennes, and that Eisenhower in effect delegate his ground command to Montgomery. Montgomery sent the memorandum to Versailles by courier on December 29. It reached Eisenhower’s desk on the morning of December 30.
Eisenhower read it in silence. He set it down. He read it again.
He set it down. He did not smoke, which was unusual for him. He did not walk, which was also unusual.
He sat in his chair at his desk in the second-floor office of the Trianon Palace and stared at nothing for 40 minutes. His naval aide, Captain Harry Butcher, in the outer office, wrote in his diary that night that he had never seen the general so still.
At about noon, Eisenhower rang for Bedell Smith. “Beetle,” he said when Smith came in, “read this.” Smith read it.
He said one sentence: “I think this is it, Ike.” They sat for perhaps a minute in silence. Then Eisenhower said, “Draft me a letter to Marshall.
Say that either the field marshal goes or I go. I am not going to work with him anymore. Not after this.”
By 6:00 in the evening on December 30, the letter was typed, two clean pages addressed to General George Catlett Marshall, marked “Most Secret,” marked “Personal for the addressee only.” It required Eisenhower’s signature. Eisenhower had it placed on his desk.
He looked at it. He said he would sign it in the morning. He then went to bed and did not sleep.
At about 7:00 that same evening, 200 miles to the north, in a small brick farmhouse outside Zonhoven, a telephone rang on a wooden table beside a narrow iron bed. The farmhouse belonged to a Belgian family named Vanderloo, who had given up two rooms to the British 21st Army Group for the duration. In one of those rooms, in the iron bed, propped up on three pillows, wearing blue and white striped pajamas, lay Lieutenant General Sir Francis de Guingand.
He had been in this bed for 10 days. His ulcer had begun to bleed again on December 20—the very day Montgomery had taken command of the American armies. His doctor had put him to bed with strict orders to remain there until at least the second week of January.
He had not been at Montgomery’s headquarters when the MC-1 memorandum had been drafted, sent, or received.
The telephone was answered by de Guingand’s aide, Major Paul Odgers, who was sitting in the corner reading an old copy of Punch. The caller was Walter Bedell Smith in Versailles. Smith had picked up a personal line, not an official one.
If he had gone through official channels, he would have been informing on his own commander to a foreign general. He had gone around the channels, from friend to friend. He owed no favor to Freddy de Guingand personally, but he owed a very large favor to the Alliance and to the war, and he was calling in that favor.
Odgers took the phone into de Guingand. Smith spoke for perhaps two minutes. What he said was in substance: “Freddy, listen to me.
The boss has drafted a letter to Washington. He is going to sign it at first light tomorrow. It says the field marshal goes or he does.
I have never seen him like this. This is real. I am telling you as a friend.
Do what you can, Freddy. Do it fast.”
De Guingand said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “Thank you, Beetle. I will come to Versailles.”
He put down the phone. He got out of bed. He was 15 pounds underweight, and the room spun when he stood.
He dressed, walking holding the walls to the door. He called for his driver. He did not call Montgomery.
He would deal with Montgomery afterwards. He said, “Get me to Melsbroek.”
By 10:00 that night, de Guingand was standing on a snowy runway at Melsbroek airfield near Brussels in a heavy overcoat, holding a small leather satchel containing nothing but a shaving kit and two clean handkerchiefs, arguing with the pilot of a small Avro Anson aircraft who was refusing to fly. “Sir,” the pilot said, “the visibility is under 100 yards. There is icing at 3,000 feet.
I cannot take off in this.” De Guingand looked at him. He weighed roughly 130 pounds.
He had not eaten a full meal in 10 days. His stomach was bleeding. He said quietly, “You will fly this airplane, flight lieutenant, or I will have you court-martialed in the morning.”
The pilot climbed into the cockpit. The Anson taxied, shuddered down the runway, and lifted at the last possible moment into a wall of snow. De Guingand closed his eyes.
He was going to Versailles.
The Anson landed at Villacoublay airfield, 10 miles south of Paris, at 11:45 that night. The flight had taken an hour and 40 minutes across the frozen dark of northern France. De Guingand did not sleep on the flight.
Every buffet of turbulence, every drop into a snow squall, every silence when the engines missed a beat and then caught themselves kept him awake. When the wheels touched the runway, he unbuckled his harness and vomited quietly into his handkerchief. Then he wiped his mouth and stepped down onto the tarmac.
A staff car from Supreme Headquarters was waiting. The driver was a Sergeant Miller, an American. De Guingand climbed in.
Miller drove him through empty, snow-filled streets, through Sèvres, through Boulogne, into Versailles, and up to the guarded gate of the Trianon Palace.
By 1:00 in the morning on December 31, he was in the outer office of Walter Bedell Smith. Smith was already awake. Smith had not gone to bed.
Smith took de Guingand into his private office, poured him a small brandy, and looked at him. “Beetle,” de Guingand said, “I need to see him now, before he signs.” Smith stared at him for a moment.
Then he said, “He said he would sign at 7. It is 1 now. He is asleep.
I do not think he is going to change his mind.” De Guingand said, “Wake him up.”
Smith looked at him for perhaps 10 seconds. Then he walked to a house telephone on the wall and picked it up. He spoke quietly.
He hung up. He came back. He said, “10 minutes.”
De Guingand sat in a leather chair. He drank the brandy in three swallows. His hands were shaking.
Ten minutes later, a door opened and Dwight Eisenhower stood there in a bathrobe and slippers. He had not shaved. His hair stood up on one side of his head.
He looked at de Guingand with the flat, quiet gaze of a man who had made up his mind and did not welcome interruption. “Freddy,” he said, “what brings you here at this hour?”
De Guingand stood, his knees held. His voice when he spoke was steady. “Sir,” he said, “I have come to ask you not to send that letter tomorrow.
I have come to ask you for 24 hours.” Eisenhower said nothing. De Guingand continued: “I know what is in the letter.
Beetle told me. If you send it, you will win against Monty. He will be recalled.
His career will end. But you will also lose the confidence of the British public at the exact moment they are watching this battle and their sons who are fighting in Holland and their taxes that pay for this war. And if you lose the British public at this moment, sir, you may lose the war.
That is not what any of us want.”
He took a breath. “Give me 24 hours. I will bring you the field marshal’s complete submission in writing in his own hand.
I will bring you the withdrawal of the MC-1 memorandum. I will bring you a signed statement of full and undivided support for you as Supreme Commander. If I cannot do this in 24 hours, then I will not stand in your way, and I will bring you his resignation myself.”
Eisenhower was quiet for a long moment. He looked past de Guingand at the wall. Then he said, “Freddy, he does not think he needs to submit.
He believes he is right.” De Guingand said, “Yes, sir, he does. That is his tragedy.
But he can be persuaded by me if I go now.” Eisenhower said, “You are ill, Freddy. I can see it.
You have been ill for a month.” De Guingand said, “Yes, sir. That is why I have to leave now, because I do not know how much longer I can stay upright.”
Eisenhower looked at him for another long moment. He said, “24 hours, Freddy. If I do not hear from you by 7 tomorrow evening, the letter goes at 8.
Godspeed.” Then he turned around and went back to bed.
De Guingand walked out. Bedell Smith was standing in the hallway. Smith touched his elbow gently.
“Get some sleep, Freddy. Two hours. Take the guest room upstairs.
There is a bed with clean sheets. You will need every minute of strength you have tomorrow.” De Guingand did not argue.
He climbed the stairs. He lay down on a made bed in a small room with pale green wallpaper. He slept, or something like sleep, for two hours.
At 5:00 in the morning on December 31, he was airborne again from Villacoublay. The weather had cleared slightly. The Anson made better time.
It landed at Melsbroek at 7:30. By 9:00 in the morning, he was in Montgomery’s caravan at Zonhoven. Montgomery was standing at the map.
He turned when de Guingand walked in. He saw the exhaustion, the pallor, the tremor of the hands. He said, “Freddy, what have you done?”
De Guingand said, “I have come from Versailles. Ike has drafted a letter to Marshall. It says you go or he goes.
He was going to sign it this morning. I have persuaded him to hold it for 24 hours. That is what I have done.”
Montgomery went the color of old ivory. He did not speak for perhaps 10 full seconds. Then he said, in a voice de Guingand had never heard from him before, “Freddy, what shall I do?”
De Guingand had prepared the answer on the flight. “You will write him a letter. I will dictate it.
You will sign it. Then I will get in an airplane at noon and fly it back to Versailles, and I will not leave that office until Eisenhower reads it and puts his letter in a drawer.”
Montgomery looked at the floor. Then he said, “Get the typewriter.”
De Guingand dictated the letter over the next 30 minutes. It was three paragraphs long. It acknowledged that Montgomery had at times been persistent past the point of usefulness.
It expressed complete and unconditional loyalty to Eisenhower as Supreme Commander. It withdrew, in unambiguous language, the demands of the MC-1 memorandum. It ended with a signature line: “Your very devoted subordinate, Monty.”
Montgomery read the finished letter twice. He picked up his fountain pen. His hand did not shake, but it hesitated.
He signed. De Guingand folded the letter into an envelope, put it inside his tunic pocket, and walked out of the caravan.
By noon, he was back at Melsbroek. By 2:00 in the afternoon, he was in the air again, southbound, over occupied France. By 4:00, he was on the ground at Villacoublay.
By 5:00, he was in Eisenhower’s office at the Trianon Palace, standing in front of the same oak desk on which the same unsigned letter still lay. He took the envelope from inside his tunic. He set it on the desk in front of Eisenhower.
He said, “Sir, it is done.”
Eisenhower opened the envelope. He read the letter slowly once. He read it again.
He set it down. He did not speak for a long time. Then he said very quietly, “Freddy, you have done a great thing today.”
De Guingand said nothing. He could not. His eyes filled with water, and he did not want Eisenhower to see it.
So he looked at the desk.
Eisenhower picked up his own letter, the one to Marshall. He looked at it. He did not tear it up.
He folded it once along the crease. He set it in a drawer. He closed the drawer.
He said, “I will keep this in case I need it later.” Then he said, “Give Monty my thanks. Tell him we go on together.”
De Guingand stood, came to attention, saluted in the British manner, and said, “Yes, sir.” He walked out of the office. He got back into the staff car.
Sergeant Miller drove him back to Villacoublay. The Anson was refueled. He was airborne by 7:00 that evening.
He was back at Melsbroek by 8:30. He was back at Zonhoven by 10:00.
He walked into Montgomery’s caravan. Montgomery was standing at the map exactly as he had been standing that morning. He turned.
De Guingand said, “It is done. The letter is in a drawer. He sends you his thanks and hopes we go on together.”
Montgomery closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and said, “Thank you, Freddy.”
They did not embrace. They did not shake hands. They stood there in the cold caravan in the winter of 1944, and they looked at each other, and Bernard Montgomery, for what may have been the only time in his life, understood how close he had come to the end.
Then he said, “Now, about this press conference we are giving next week.”
Freddy de Guingand’s heart stopped in his chest.
The press conference Montgomery had scheduled before Christmas. He had intended it as an opportunity to praise the American fighting man, to salute Eisenhower publicly, to end the sniping in the British press about American command failures. It was to be given on January 7, 1945, at his headquarters at Zonhoven, in front of the assembled war correspondents of the Allied nations.
De Guingand had begged him to cancel it. Others had begged him to cancel it. Brigadier Bill Williams, his brilliant chief of intelligence, had said only two words when asked what he thought: “Please don’t.”
The Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead, a personal friend of the field marshal, had gone so far as to plead with de Guingand himself: “Freddy, muzzle him. He will make some bloody awful mistake.” Montgomery had smiled and said he knew what he was doing.
He always knew what he was doing.
On the morning of January 7, in a large tent pitched at the corner of the airfield beside Montgomery’s caravan compound, 70 war correspondents assembled. The wire services, the newspapers of London, the newspapers of New York, the BBC, the Canadian press, newsreel cameras from British Movietone and Pathé. It was cold.
The reporters wore heavy coats and stamped their feet on the frozen ground. Montgomery walked out at 10:00 a. m.
He was wearing his black double-badged beret, plus a parachute smock, which he had put on that morning specifically to look, in his own view, dashing. Alan Moorehead, watching, would later write: “He was dressed like a clown.”
Montgomery took the microphone. He spoke for one hour without notes. He praised the American soldier.
He praised him at length: brave, steady, tenacious, first class. He praised Eisenhower fulsomely, calling him “the captain of our team” and declaring his own devotion to the Supreme Commander. But when he described the battle, he described it as his own.
“As soon as I saw what was happening,” he told the assembled press, “I took certain steps myself to ensure that if the Germans got to the Meuse, they would certainly not get over the river. I employed the whole available power of the British Group of Armies. I brought up my reserves with moved forces to plug gaps.
The battle has been most interesting. I think possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled.”
He did not mention General Omar Bradley, not once. He did not mention General Courtney Hodges, whose army he had walked into like a savior. He did not mention General William Simpson, whose Ninth Army had also passed under his temporary command.
He did not mention George Smith Patton, whose Third Army had lanced up from the south in the middle of winter and cracked the German ring around Bastogne. He did not mention Anthony McAuliffe or the 101st Airborne. He mentioned Eisenhower.
He mentioned himself. In between the two of them, in Bernard Montgomery’s account of the greatest American battle of the Second World War, there were no American commanders at all.
The reporters transcribed everything. They filed it that afternoon. By the following morning, the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph were running headlines that said, in effect, “Monty saved American army.”
The reaction in the American command was volcanic. Omar Bradley read the transcript in his headquarters in Luxembourg. He was quiet for a long time.
Then he picked up the telephone to Versailles. He said to Eisenhower, in words Bradley himself recorded in his memoir a decade later: “I cannot serve under him after this. If he is placed over me again, you will have to relieve me.
This is not an American ultimatum. It is a personal one.”
George Patton went further. Patton, who had been sniping at Montgomery in his own diary for three years, wrote that day in his slashing handwriting: “Monty is a tired little fart. This war would end sooner if I could stop reading his lectures.”
Patton offered to resign. Courtney Hodges wept in front of his aides. His army had bled for three weeks on the northern shoulder of the bulge.
His men had died on frozen ridgelines whose names most Americans would never learn to pronounce. And a British field marshal had just told the world that Hodges’s army had been saved by a caravan 100 miles away.
The Germans, listening on Radio Berlin, could not believe their good fortune. Nazi propaganda seized the transcript and rebroadcast an edited version of it day and night in English, aimed at American troops in the field. The edited version made Montgomery sound as if he had personally driven the tanks that saved Bastogne.
American soldiers who had spent Christmas in a foxhole, listening to their friends bleed to death in the snow, heard on their radios the voice of a British field marshal claiming credit for their survival. Morale in some American units in the second week of January 1945 went into freefall.
At Versailles, Eisenhower did not sign the letter to Marshall. He kept it in his drawer, where he had put it on the afternoon of December 31. But he made in that moment a private decision that he would carry for the rest of the war and the rest of his life.
He would never trust Bernard Montgomery again. He would work with him. He would be polite.
He would maintain the outward forms of an Allied command. But from January of 1945 onward, Dwight David Eisenhower would systematically and coldly reduce Bernard Montgomery’s influence on the shape of the war. He did it quietly.
He did it without a single public word. He did it in the pattern of appointments made and orders given and reserves committed and reinforcements withheld. He did it by shortening the sector of the 21st Army Group.
He did it by lengthening the sector of the American armies. He did it by giving Bradley and Patton the ground on which the decisive blows would be struck.
Ten days later, on January 18, 1945, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons to give a scheduled address on the war. What he was about to say had been requested in writing by Eisenhower himself, communicated through Bedell Smith, through Marshall, through Franklin Roosevelt, and finally to Churchill in London. Churchill looked at the assembled members of Parliament.
He put on his spectacles. He read from his notes: “The United States troops have done almost all the fighting and have suffered almost all the losses. They have lost 60 to 80 men for everyone we have lost.
Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British armies an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory.”
He set down the notes. He had, in a single paragraph, taken every claim Bernard Montgomery had made on January 7 and put it into the dustbin of history. Bradley read the transcript of Churchill’s speech in Luxembourg the next morning.
He wept.
The alliance was saved. Not by Eisenhower. Not by Montgomery.
By an ulcer patient in a caravan, an old warrior in the House of Commons, and a prime minister who understood exactly what needed to be said.
The war went on. On March 7, 1945, at a small town on the middle Rhine called Remagen, a company of American armored infantry, moving forward through cold rain, came around a bend in the road and saw something that stopped their hearts: the Ludendorff Bridge, still intact, still standing. Every other bridge across the Rhine had been dropped by the Germans days or weeks before.
This one had been prepared for demolition, but the charges had failed. Lieutenant Karl Timmermann was ordered to lead his company across. Timmermann was 22 years old.
He had been born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1922. His father was an American soldier of the occupation army that had followed the First World War, who had met a German girl in the years after the armistice, married her, and brought her home with his son to a small town in Nebraska. Karl Timmermann had grown up bilingual in West Point, Nebraska, speaking German at his mother’s dinner table and English at school.
He was on March 7, 1945, an American infantry lieutenant standing on the west bank of the Rhine, and the country of his birth was on the far side of that bridge. He looked at the bridge. He looked at his men.
He said, in words many of them remembered later: “Well, somebody’s got to.” He walked out onto the Ludendorff Bridge. His men followed him.
By nightfall, four American divisions had crossed the Rhine.
Eisenhower was on the telephone within 20 minutes of hearing the news. He gave the order to reinforce the bridgehead with everything within reach. Every division that could be turned in that direction was turned.
Every truck, every barge, every engineer battalion, every gallon of gasoline. He was not going to lose this bridge. He was not going to lose this chance.
Sixteen days later, on March 23, Montgomery launched Operation Plunder, his long-planned crossing of the lower Rhine at Wesel. More than 3,000 pieces of artillery. Over a million shells fired in the preparation.
Two airborne divisions dropped the following morning in Operation Varsity, the largest single-day airborne drop in the history of warfare. It was the most meticulously planned river crossing in the history of warfare. It was also 16 days late.
The Americans were already on the other side of the Rhine and driving east, and had been for more than two weeks.
Bernard Montgomery watched from his caravan at Wesel as the world moved past him. He turned to Freddy de Guingand, who was standing beside him, and he said quietly: “Ike has learned to fight without me.” De Guingand did not answer.
There was nothing to answer.
The war in Europe ended six weeks later. Montgomery was given the honor of accepting the surrender of German forces in northern Germany at Lüneburg Heath on May 4, 1945. It was a small ceremony, arranged by Eisenhower, who understood the importance of giving Montgomery a moment of visible triumph.
Photographs from that day show Montgomery in his beret, seated at a small folding table, with a German delegation opposite him signing a paper that ended the war for a million German soldiers.
On May 7, at a red schoolhouse in Reims, France, the unconditional surrender of all German forces was accepted for the Supreme Commander by his chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith. Eisenhower did not personally sign the document. He waited in a nearby room.
The Germans were brought in to see him only afterwards, briefly, for a formal acknowledgement. Eisenhower had insisted on this. He said to his own staff that a general who had never met a German enemy in the field should not accept his surrender face to face across a table.
That honor belonged to the men who had fought them.
Eisenhower went home a hero. He became President of the United States in 1953. He served two terms.
He wrote a book about the war in 1948 called Crusade in Europe. In it, he spoke of Montgomery with restraint. He did not settle scores.
He did not need to. He died on March 28, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D. C.
, of congestive heart failure. He was 78 years old. His last coherent words, spoken to his son John, were reported to have been: “I want to go.
God take me.”
Montgomery lived on. He became Chief of the Imperial General Staff. He served as Deputy Supreme Commander of NATO from 1951 to 1958.
He wrote his memoirs in 1958, and in them he attacked Eisenhower with a personal viciousness that shocked even his admirers. He suggested that Eisenhower had prolonged the war by refusing to accept Montgomery’s advice. Eisenhower read the book at Gettysburg, on his farm in Pennsylvania.
He wrote to a friend in Kansas: “This is a man who cannot be helped. He has decided that he was right and that no evidence will ever change his mind. So be it.”
Eisenhower never spoke to Montgomery again.
Montgomery died on March 24, 1976, at his home in Isington, Hampshire, at the age of 88. His funeral was held at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.
It was attended by the Queen. It was attended by the Prime Minister. It was attended by an official American delegation.
But of the generals with whom he had actually fought the war, none of the important ones were still alive to attend. Eisenhower had been gone seven years. Bradley was too ill to travel.
Patton had been dead since December 1945, killed in a road accident in Germany, 12 days after the accident that broke his neck outside Mannheim.
Omar Bradley died on April 8, 1981, at the age of 88. He was the last of the five American five-star generals of the Second World War. He had lived long enough to see and to shape the American military of a very different age.
And Freddy de Guingand did not receive a promotion after the war. The acting rank of lieutenant general he had held during the war reverted in peacetime to substantive major general. He was allowed to retire quietly in 1946, at 46 years old.
He was told informally that the reduction was due to reorganization, budget constraints, the return of the peacetime army. He knew better. Bernard Montgomery, by then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had ensured that Freddy de Guingand—the man who had heard him ask, in a caravan on a snowy morning in December of 1944, “Freddy, what shall I do?”
—would not be promoted to any position where he would have any authority over any part of the postwar British Army. Because Freddy de Guingand knew too much.
He left the army. He moved to Southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. He went into business as an executive with the Tube Investments group and then with several other firms.
He was moderately successful. He never became rich. He raised a daughter.
He fished. He wrote two books of memoir. The first, Operation Victory, appeared in 1947.
In it, he described the night of December 30, 1944, and the morning of December 31 in careful, deliberate, understated prose. He did not attack Montgomery. He simply reported what had happened.
Montgomery read the book. Montgomery never spoke to Freddy de Guingand again, not once in 32 years. They had had lunch together in London once or twice a year for most of the war and the year that followed.
After Operation Victory appeared, Montgomery cut the correspondence off. He did not answer letters. He did not return calls.
He did not send a Christmas card. Freddy de Guingand, who had known Montgomery better than any other living man, ceased in the mind of his old commander to exist.
The second memoir, From Brass Hat to Bowler Hat, was published in 1979. It was a quieter book. It looked back across the whole of a life.
It did not lay out the story of the caravan night in full. It hinted, it suggested, it let the reader understand what had passed between them. The book contains a single sentence near the end that has often been quoted.
He wrote: “There are debts in this life which the man who owes them cannot bring himself to pay. That is not always to his shame. Sometimes it is simply how a certain kind of man is made.”
He was writing about Montgomery. Everyone who knew the story understood.
Freddy de Guingand died in Kfar Saba on June 29, 1979. He was 79 years old. His obituary in the London Times ran to about six inches of column.
It called him one of the finest staff officers of the Second World War. It mentioned Montgomery. It did not mention the letter that had lain unsigned on Eisenhower’s desk on the morning of December 31, 1944.
Most people who read the obituary had never heard of him. Most people who fought the Battle of the Bulge had never heard of him. Most Americans still have not.
But every time you have read in some old book that the Anglo-American alliance held together through the crisis of the Ardennes, and that Eisenhower and Montgomery were able to work with each other to the end of the war, you have been reading, without knowing it, the aftermath of one man’s decision in a snowstorm to climb out of a sick bed and get in an airplane. Freddy de Guingand saved his boss. His boss never thanked him.
His country barely remembered him. He did it anyway. That is what a certain kind of man does.
There is a photograph taken in 1973 at a small reunion in Salisbury, in what was still Rhodesia. Two old men are sitting on a veranda in white linen suits, drinking gin and tonics as the sun goes down over the plateau. One of them is Freddy de Guingand.
The other is a former staff officer of the 21st Army Group, a brigadier who had also immigrated to Africa after the war and had prospered there. The photograph shows de Guingand laughing at something the other man has said. He does not look like a man carrying regrets.
He looks like a man who did his duty a long time ago and made peace, in his own quiet way, with what it had cost him.
You knew a man who fought in that war. Perhaps he was your father. Perhaps he was your uncle.
Perhaps he was the old man who sat on the porch of the house down the street when you were a boy and who never spoke of what he had seen. He may have flown a bomber over Germany. He may have driven a tank through France.
He may have been a rifleman in the Ardennes, freezing in a foxhole on Christmas Eve 1944, hearing the German artillery in the distance, and wondering, in the way that men in foxholes wonder, whether he would see another sunrise. If he did, and if he came home, he came home in part because of the men whose names you know—Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Montgomery too, in his own difficult way. But he came home also because of the men whose names you do not know.
The staff officers, the planners, the chiefs of staff, the signals officers, the supply captains, and the pilot who took an Anson up in a snowstorm because a lieutenant general told him he had no choice.
He came home because of Freddy de Guingand, who at 4:00 in the morning, in an office at Versailles, in a bathrobe and slippers, persuaded a Supreme Commander to keep a letter in a drawer for 24 hours. The war was won on many battlefields. Some of them had no names.
That is the story. The names have not been changed. The events have not either.
