Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

On July 20, 1944, however, success seemed near when Colonel Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of the Home Army, made his daily report to Hitler, and left the conference without picking up his briefcase, which rested against the leg of Der Führer’s chair. In the briefcase was an English-made bomb with a ten-minute fuse. When the bomb exploded, Stauffenberg gave the signal for the military units in Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere to seize control of these areas from the fanatical Nazi SS units.

Unfortunately, Hitler’s conference on July 20th, because of the heat, was held in a wooden shed instead of the usual concrete bunker. This allowed the explosion to dissipate itself. Moreover, a few seconds before the bomb went off, Hitler left his chair to go to a map on the most distant wall of the conference room. As a result, some in the room were killed or badly injured, but Hitler escaped relatively unscathed. This was broadcast on the radio at once by the Nazis, and, by contradicting Stauffenberg’s signal, threw the conspirators into sufficient confusion and irresolution to enable the SS and loyal Nazis to disrupt the plot.

About 7,000 suspects were arrested and about 5,000 were killed, usually after weeks or even months of horrible tortures. A few, like Field Marshal Rommel, were allowed to commit suicide, as a special reward for their past services to the Nazis. As a consequence of this fiasco, the anti-Hitler opposition was destroyed, the most fanatical and least sane Nazis increased their power within Germany, any chance of negotiating peace—admittedly a remote possibility at all times—became impossible, and the inner administration of the Nazi regime became a complete madhouse.

In the meantime, in the west, the main strength of the German forces was concentrated against the British near Caen. As the latter slowly inched southward toward Calais, a newly formed American Third Army, mostly armored, under General George S. Patton, drove southward from Saint-Lǒ to Avranches (July 18-August 1). While some units turned westward from Avranches into Brittany in an effort to capture additional seaports at Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire, the armored units swung eastward to Le Mans (August nth) and then northward to Ar-gentan, leaving only a narrow gap (Calais-Argentan) between American and British forces, as an escape route through which eight shattered German divisions might escape eastward (August 19-12, 1944). Many broke through, but 25,000 men were captured in this pocket, and the German defensive forces in France were completely disrupted. From Le Mans units of the American Third Army, moving at speeds up to forty miles a day, drove eastward south of Paris, passing the city to reach the Seine at Fontainebleau. On their left, the American First Army reached the river below Paris on the same day, while farther west British and Canadian armies swung left toward the lower Seine.

In the midst of this excitement the American Seventh Army, with strong French forces, landed on the Mediterranean coast of France (August 15th) and began to drive northward up the Rhône Valley. The landings, made between Toulon and Cannes against negligible resistance, quickly captured Marseille. At the end of two days, the German High Command ordered all German forces to withdraw from the French Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts except from seaports and fortresses. At the end of eight days, the Seventh Army had advanced 140 miles up the Rhône and had taken 57,000 prisoners. Both Lyon and Dijon were taken without a fight, and contact was made with the United States Third Army near Chatillon-sur-Seine on September 12th.

In the meantime, on August 19, 1944, the citizens of Paris rose in revolt, led by 50,000 armed members of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), as the underground resistance armies were called. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, these forces were dominated by Communists. General Jean Leclerc, with the French 2nd Armored Division, burst into the city on August 24th and accepted the surrender of the German garrison of 10,000 men eager to escape from the FFI. By this time the resistance forces were rising in much of France, attacking German forces and wreaking vengeance on Frenchmen who had collaborated with the Germans. On August 26th De Gaulle entered Paris and immediately was made president of a provisional government formed by a coalition of returning exiles and underground leaders. General Eisenhower reviewed a triumphal march of Allied forces down the Champs Elysees, but the main Allied armies swept by both sides of Paris toward the German frontiers.

During the autumn of 1944, the Allied advance in the west was slowed up, as much by its own problems of transport and supply as it was by German opposition. This advance had to cross a series of famous rivers, the Seine, the Somme, the Aisne, and the Meuse. All were crossed without difficulty because of weak German resistance. But the big problem looming ahead was the Rhine, where German resistance would inevitably be tenacious. On an Allied front over two hundred miles wide, the American Third Army, on the right, captured Verdun as early as August 3rd; the American First Army, in the center, took Sedan and entered Belgium (August 31st); on the left the British Second Army passed Amiens heading for Lille (August 31st), while on the extreme left the Canadian First Army had the unrewarding task of sealing off the entrenched German garrisons in the Channel ports. These were taken, one by one, after very bitter fighting, but in most cases the harbors could not be used at once because of damage or other causes. Antwerp, taken on September 4th, could not be used for two months because the Germans continued to hold the river banks nearer the sea.

On September 11th the United States First Army crossed the German frontier near Trier and headed for the Rhine. When Aachen, the first German city to be reached, refused to surrender, it was almost completely destroyed by bombardment and taken by bitter street fighting. Most German cities subsequently preferred to surrender.

At this point, a sharp difference of opinion arose between Eisenhower and Montgomery. The former wished to continue the broad-front assault on Germany, while the latter wished to put every hope on a single lightning thrust across the lower Rhine and into the essential industrial area of the Ruhr. The lower Rhine splits into a number of small rivers as it approaches the sea; in order to pass several of these in one rush Montgomery offered a daring plan: three airborne divisions were to be dropped at step-intervals ahead of the British Second Army to capture the river crossings and open the way for a sixty-mile advance by the Second Army. On August 15th, this attempt was made. The American 82nd Airborne Division dropped at Eindhoven to cover the Meuse River; the American 101st Airborne Division dropped near Nijmegen to cover the Waal crossing; and the British 1st Airborne Division was dropped near Arnhem to cover the northernmost branch of the Rhine, the Neder Rijn, above Rotterdam. German resistance to the advance of the Second

Army was so great that it was unable to reach Arnhem, and after a week of furious fighting, the remnants of this heroic group, less than a quarter of those dropped, were evacuated. This failure doomed the hopes for one vital thrust across the Rhine to the Ruhr.

By mid-December the Allied armies were struggling eastward toward the Rhine, in fog and rain, with short days and long nights. Conditions were particularly bad in the thick forests of the Ardennes. There the Germans determined to make their last counteroffensive. Secretly concentrating 25 divisions in weather too bad for air reconnaissance, the Germans struck westward, chiefly with armored forces, into General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group, splitting it wide open and threatening to break through over the Meuse. Although the First and Third American armies were separated by a German advance of over 60 miles, no vital points were reached largely because of the stubborn American resistance, even when surrounded, as at Bastogne. By December 26th the German drive had stopped, and three weeks later most of the lost ground had been recovered. In the attack the Germans inflicted casualties of about 76,000 on the Americans, but suffered casualties of about 90,000 themselves and used up irreplaceable supplies and equipment. Before this Battle of the Bulge could be finished, Hitler had to withdraw from it many of the forces which had made the original attack, in order to send them hurriedly to the east in a vain attempt to slow down the Soviet winter offensive which began on January 12, 1945.