VERSAILLES, France — The most patient man in the Allied high command has finally run out of patience.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, drafted a formal ultimatum this afternoon in his requisitioned headquarters outside Paris, demanding that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery cease his repeated challenges to the coalition’s command structure. According to sources with direct knowledge of the document, the message threatens to send the matter to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the highest military authority above Eisenhower, unless the British field marshal halts his public criticisms and demands for total ground control.
The document was shown to Montgomery’s own chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Francis Dwinguinan, who was present at Versailles for consultations.
The 44-year-old British officer reportedly read the text, paled, and requested time before it was transmitted to London. Eisenhower, according to witnesses, agreed to the delay but declined to soften a single word.
The rupture comes in the dead of Europe’s worst winter in decades, with German forces still pressing into the Ardennes forest region that was believed a quiet sector. The battle that began December 16th has entered its third week, with American soldiers fighting in snow that has grounded Allied air support and complicated every avenue for supplies. The freezing conditions, the deepest in living memory, have slowed tank operations and turned the wounded into both armies’ critical priorities.
At stake is the command of more than a million men positioned across the Western Front. The temporary placement of two American armies under Montgomery’s control on December 20th was made for operational survival against the German offensive, known as Watch on the Rhine. The temporary arrangement has now become a permanent source of friction between ally commanders.
The war alliance, forged at considerable cost and now so near what many believed would be its final year, has never before faced a challenge on the inside that threatens to match the ferocity of the attack from outside.
A spokesman for SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, has confirmed only that Eisenhower is monitoring the situation and has direct contact with his field commanders. There is no indication the Commander has issued any formal order to Montgomery, and officials are describing the situation as routine, but only a single ambulance, with all lights, has been seen leaving headquarters.
Montgomery, commander of the 21st Army Group, has been in command of the northern sector of the battle since the German offensive severed communications for the operational command. He arrived at the U. S.
headquarters with little fanfare, but eyewitnesses describe his immediate actions there as those of a man who intended to take full control. He has reorganized the line, ordered withdrawals and repositioned units according to his own tactical scheme, which he has declared will “tidy up” the American mess in the north.
The operational effect has not been negative. The German advance has been blunted, and the line has actually held. It is not his competence fighting the enemy that has brought this crisis to Versailles.
It is his manner toward the Americans, the debacle has moved beyond the operational into the personal. Montgomery has reportedly referred to the American soldiers as “inexperienced” and “lacking in tactical agility.” He has also, dated word, not once visited the battlefield positions of the American units that have paid the highest price in the last two weeks.
Those units have suffered devastating losses. The initial assault was accompanied by snow and fog conditions that allowed the German tanks to advance with nominal complications dismissed by Allied air superiority. The road network in the region has been the scene of every kind of combat, and the initial days have seen reports of massacre and surrender followed by brutal counterattacks.
In one village outside Malmedy, an American artillery battalion was captured and summarily executed in a field, and word of the atrocity has reached every Allied unit in the area, even if absolutions are unverified.
The American determination in this sector has been underscored by one name above all, Baston. A town and road junction of critical importance, surrounded for weeks, defended by a division of airborne troops, refusing to surrender. When under a flag of truce the Germans demanded the crew give in, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the 101st Airborne Division, responded with a one-word answer.
“Nuts.” The term has been repeated in every map and every lineup. It has become the war cry of the American forces in the Ardennes.
Montgomery has, according to reports, called that defense overly fantastical.
The root of the dispute stretches back through a long and turbulent alliance. Montgomery’s success in North Africa in 1942, and his insistence in 1944 that the ordinary one major effort towards Berlin would have ended higher, has been contradicted his judgments. In the spring of 1944, Montgomery’s caution in the British sector of Normandy, and its cost in was deemed “stalemate” by the American command, and the breakout that finally occurred was contrary to Montgomery believe it would have been achieved.
In late September, Montgomery’s plan to capture a series of Rhine bridges was launched, and has largely failed, with the British First Green Division at Arnhem, nearly decimated.
In the immediate aftermath, rather than conceding any failures to an unprecedented extent, Montgomery blamed the lack of resources that he said would have guaranteed victory. Eden county openly stated that the Broad Front strategy of Eisenhower, a political strategy as much as a military one, is the true culprit. That kind of remark has ceased to be a mere strategic disagreement for Eisenhower— for whom remained privately.
It has become a challenge to the very principle, which has its NATO Command decision-making, that of allied unity.
Eisenhower’s role is an immensely more significant role. He is necessary not just as a military coordinate, but as a political diplomat. The coalition under his command is held together by monumental personality, personal persuasion, and trust, not by formal power structures.
The future invasion of the Germany, the occupation of the axis nations, and the shaping of a post-war world are all being built in these final years of the war, and absolutely require that the British and American component commands be able to work together without seeking public vindication. Montgomery’s continuous public opinion has demonstrated that that essential trust cannot hold if one partner persistently treats the other with contempt.
Montgomery believed that he is, above all things, correct. That assurance is not the perspective of the American officers who have seen their own units broken in this sudden offensive. They have seen the death of trusted men in large numbers in a campaign that was never meant to be.
Their frustration therefore has a moral dimension, and that thought is that the time for any kindness, any patience, is near. Said one officer, who declined to be named: “He doesn’t give a single thing. He believes he’s doing us a favor.
That he is descending from on high to save us. It is not the way it is.”
By the time he began this confrontation, a number of American generals have urged Eisenhower to take the position he has now taken. Gen. Eisenhower has not commented, and sources repeatedly had a slim flag to the Supreme Commander’s policy on Marshal Montgomery.
But the opinion within the allied headquarters is consistent and consistent with the document itself. Eisenhower felt that if Montgomery does not back down and relent, the issue will be pushed to a full and public break. stated that the Commander and the Prime Minister went and Churchill to intervene, but given the document has been written, are still high.
There is a final element of the crisis that adds to the urgency. The weather has resulted in no sign of immediate improvement. The German offensive has reached, but the front line is still estimated at some points only er.
The German attackers have been absorbed American divisions, and the ferocity of the defense, the 101st Airborne has led to a defensive performance that is being called extraordinary. The German reach toward the Meuse River has not yet been achieved, and the German forces that the Bastogne has been relieved by the Third Army will never be forgotten. General Patton’s Third Army executed about a march on the, a 90 degree turn, achieved in a near anti-clockwise movement across the front.
This movement is unmanned, uncharted without any air support, and weapon kitchens, been told through a blizzard.
This winter is, according to some, a true “Aethedan,” a first in living memory. The cold alone is known in itself a weapon. A trench foot, pneumonia, frostbite, and ways may be reading.
The soldier who has to move and fight in this ice, with the flow of supplies, directed from the rear echelons, has been forced to do so in deep, unfamiliar territory. The whole is the groundwork of a morale building effort that will have to be done again.
As the winter twilight faded over Versailles, General Eisenhower’s plan. Perhaps the ultimatum issued is the very story that Montgomery Bowers didn’t expect. Perhaps the field commander had overestimated his own indispensability.
The story of the “Big Two” by “God, there has been an open secret” in the high commands, always know that the ultimate probes, like a real meeting, could one day break down. But the blink came, and it has to be resolved. That is existence to the world.
The Allied force is a coalition, not a dictatorship, and the man in charge knows precisely that he cannot allow ANY assumption of independence to create an inter-allied crisis. The expected end of the war in Europe is but months away, and it is coming at a more devastating price than any of the Allies had expected. The Arnold the death fine, still.
Montgomery’s security number remains static. No No corresponding sound. The Allied press on the radio waves about the message of an internal crisis at Paris have not been corrected by the official Censor.
Washington and London will be on wax.
The bigger story leads to this: are still born, and generals still suffer. And the measure of a commander’s legacy is not just the tanks, but the possibilities of command. When a measure of the leadership subordination in the theater turn, the entire alliance itself is on the line.
There is a stay. Tonight this, in a time of war, stands as a demonstration of something very British, and victory has its own discipline.
A threat there can only be and should only be made, and he is aware of the risk. This is the single most serious sign in the entire history of the relationship. If Montgomery does not yield, means the political and military structure of the western alliance, which has been described as “the best team in the world, is by the darkest hour.”
The night has seen. The ying ที่ is the path that leads to the future, and it is named after the event that has to be discussed now. A great war, in his hour of triumph, has been involved in a struggle with certainty, and that dopes out of an exit.
The rifle and the pen.
