19,000 American boys were already dead in the snow. Their bodies lay frozen in the pine woods of Belgium. In ditches outside a town called Bastogne, in a bloody field near a place called Malmedy, where the SS had shot them down after they surrendered. Farm boys from Ohio, steel workers’ sons from Pittsburgh, kids from Texas who had never seen snow before the week they died in it.
And on the night [snorts] of December 30th, 1944, while their brothers were still bleeding in the Ardennes, a British field marshal sat in a warm trailer in Belgium and put his signature on a letter. That letter demanded that he personally be given command over what was left of the American army in Europe.
300 miles away, in a small office at the Trianon Palace in Versailles, a 54-year-old general from Abilene, Kansas, read that letter. His hands began to shake, not from fear, from anger. For 2 and 1/2 years, he had swallowed every insult this man had thrown at him. For 2 and 1/2 years, he had held the alliance together with nothing but patience and cigarettes and coffee at 4:00 in the morning.
Tonight, Dwight David Eisenhower reached for a pen, and for the first time in the entire war, he began to write the words that would end the career of the most famous soldier in the British Empire. If this cable left the room before dawn, one of these two men would be finished by morning. A knock at the door.
It opened. Snow spilled off the shoulders of a British officer who had flown through a blizzard with pneumonia in his lungs because he knew a secret that Washington did not know. He knew a secret that London did not know. He knew that the American general at the desk in front of him was one signature away from breaking the grand alliance in half.
This is the story of the day Eisenhower finally said enough. To understand how a war-winning alliance came within a single signature of collapse, you must first understand the two men holding the pen. Dwight David Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas in October of 1890, but he grew up in a small clapboard house in Abilene, Kansas.
Six brothers, a mother who read the Bible aloud every night, a father who worked at a creamery, there was no money for luxury. There was no talk of glory, there was only work and church and the quiet plain speech of the American middle plains. He went to West Point because it was free.
He graduated in the middle of his class. In the First World War, he never saw combat. In the 20 years of peace that followed, he shuffled between training camps and staff jobs, watching officers younger than him earn stars while he stayed a major for 16 straight years. Then, in the space of just 15 months after Pearl Harbor, General George Marshall lifted him from colonel to lieutenant general and then to full general, jumping him over hundreds of officers who had once outranked him.
By the summer of 1942, this obscure staff officer from Kansas was standing in London in charge of every American soldier in Europe. And here is the first thing history rarely tells you. Before the war, Dwight Eisenhower had never commanded so much as a battalion in combat. He had spent the 1930s in a Manila office as an assistant to General Douglas MacArthur, writing memos and drafting speeches.
His genius was not tactical, it was human. He could hold a room full of prima donnas together with a smile, a cigarette, and a single well-chosen word. Bernard Montgomery would use this fact against him for the rest of the war. “A nice chap,” Monty called Ike in private letters to London. A nice chap who should stick to logistics.
Bernard Law Montgomery was born in the London district of Kennington in November of 1887. His father was an Anglican bishop, cold, distant, often absent. His mother beat him for the smallest disobedience. He grew up hungry for approval he never received, and he learned early that only one form of victory would satisfy him. Total victory on his own terms, alone.
He entered the British Army at 21. He was wounded through the lung at first Ypres in 1914, and left for dead in a shell hole for hours before stretcher bearers found him. He never forgot what it felt like to bleed while other men were spared. From that moment on, every plan he ever drew would be built around one obsession.
Minimum casualties, maximum preparation, absolute control. At El Alamein in the autumn of 1942, that obsession delivered Britain her first great land victory of the war. Rommel, the Desert Fox, was driven back into Tunisia. Church bells rang across the United Kingdom for the first time since 1939. Overnight, Bernard Montgomery became a household name from Glasgow to Sydney, but something in him twisted under the weight of fame.
He began to believe his own legend. He posed for photographs in his signature double-badged beret. He gave interviews. He lectured senior officers on their inferiority. He drank no alcohol, smoked no tobacco, and slept 9 hours every night. And he judged all other men by the discipline he imposed on himself. And there is a second thing history rarely tells you.
After the war, Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s own chief of staff, admitted to biographers that he had urged Ike to sack Montgomery as early as the Normandy campaign in the summer of 1944. Smith saw it clearly. Every American general saw it, but Eisenhower refused because firing Montgomery meant fracturing the alliance, and fracturing the alliance meant losing the war.
So, Ike swallowed his anger. He wrote patient letters. He absorbed the insults. He built a coalition of men who despised each other and he held it together with nothing but his own endless patience. Until Montgomery pushed him past the last line he had. The road to that moment began in Sicily in July of 1943.
Montgomery arrived on the island certain that Patton, the American, was reckless, undisciplined, and dangerous. Without permission, he expanded his own zone of operations cutting straight across the American axis of advance. Patton, humiliated, raced him to Messina out of pure spite. The Germans escaped across the strait almost intact.
The following summer in Normandy, Montgomery promised to take the city of Caen on the very first day of the invasion. It took him 6 weeks. American newspapers began printing the word slow next to his name. British newspapers printed the word methodical. The same delay, two nations, two versions of the truth.
Then came August, the Falaise Pocket, where an entire German army could have been destroyed if Montgomery had closed the trap faster. Tens of thousands escaped through the gap. Eisenhower said nothing publicly. He simmered privately. By September, Montgomery was demanding one single narrow thrust into Germany led by himself straight to Berlin.
Eisenhower chose a broad advance across the entire front. Monty called the decision the greatest strategic mistake of the war. He said it in memos. He said it in letters to London. He said it to anyone who would listen. And then he asked for one chance to prove his theory. Operation Market Garden, September 17th to 25th, 1944.
British paratroopers dropped at Arnhem would seize a bridge over the lower Rhine and open the door to the Ruhr. 8,000 men of the British 1st Airborne Division dropped from the sky. 2,000 came back. The bridge was lost. The Ruhr stayed closed. The war would not be over by Christmas. And here is the third thing history rarely tells you.
After Market Garden collapsed, Montgomery sat down and wrote a letter to Field Marshal Alan Brooke, his direct superior in London. In that letter, he blamed the failure on Eisenhower. He blamed it on American logistics. He blamed it on the weather, on the Dutch resistance, on radio problems, on everything except his own plan.
He never once mentioned that he had chosen Arnhem instead of finishing the clearance of the port of Antwerp, which was the actual key to winning the war that autumn. The port of Antwerp would not fully open until November 28th. By then, half a million tons of Allied supplies were rotting on the beaches of Normandy because Bernard Montgomery had wanted his bridge.
By December of 1944, the map of the Western Front was drawn in three colors. In the north, Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. In the center, General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, three American armies strong. In the south, the French. Above them all at his headquarters in Versailles, Supreme Commander Eisenhower.
The Ardennes, that wooded stretch of hills straddling Belgium and Luxembourg, was held by a single American Corps under General Troy Middleton. Four divisions, two of them freshly arrived from the United States and never in combat. Two of them shattered veterans sent to the Ardennes to rest. The line was thin. It was quiet.
Both sides called it the ghost front. On the 12th of December, Field Marshal Alan Brooke sat down in London and wrote a private letter to Bernard Montgomery. In that letter, the head of the British Army begged his most famous general to stop antagonizing Eisenhower. Do not push him further, Brooke wrote. He is nearing the end of his patience.
Montgomery read the letter in his tactical trailer at Zonhoven in eastern Belgium. He folded it in half. He set it aside. He smiled at his aide and said quite calmly that Brooke was worrying over nothing. In 4 days, the German army would erupt out of the Ardennes forest in the greatest surprise attack of the Western war.
In 14 days, Bernard Montgomery would walk into an American command post like a lord inspecting a village. In 17 days, he would put his name on a letter that no supreme commander alive could tolerate. And in the small hours of December 30th, 1944, an American from Kansas would sit at a desk in Versailles, pick up a pen, and write the sentence that could have ended the greatest partnership of the 20th century.
He was almost ready to send it. 5:30 in the morning, December 16th, 1944. The Ardennes forest is buried under a shroud of freezing fog so dense that a man cannot see the trees 10 ft in front of him. Then the ground begins to shake. Along an 85-mi front from Montchau in the north to Echternach in the south, nearly 1,600 German artillery pieces, along with rocket launchers and heavy mortars, open fire simultaneously.
The shells screamed through the fog and burst among the sleeping American positions. Log bunkers collapse, radio wires snap, farm boys from Iowa and Alabama, most of them 19 years old, tumble half-dressed into the cold, groping for their rifles in the dark. Behind the barrage come the tanks. 200,000 German soldiers, more than 1,000 tanks and assault guns before the offensive was done.
The elite of what remains of Hitler’s Reich thrown into one last desperate gamble to split the Allied armies, capture the port of Antwerp, and force a separate peace on the Western Allies before the Soviets reach Berlin. The Americans holding the line never had a chance. The 106th Infantry Division had arrived in Belgium only 6 days earlier.
They had never fired a shot in anger. By the third day of the battle, two of their regiments, over 7,000 men, would be surrounded on the Schnee Eifel ridge and forced to surrender. It remains the largest mass surrender of American troops in the European war. 10 miles to the south, the 28th Infantry Division, veterans of the Hurtgen Forest meat grinder just weeks before, held on with the last of their strength while German tanks rolled through their command posts.
Their commander, Major General Norman Cota, watched his division dissolve around him and kept fighting anyway. And on the morning of December 17th, along a snow-covered road near a crossroads village called Bouness, elements of Kampfgruppe Peiper of the 1st SS Panzer Division intercepted a small American convoy.
The Americans belonged to Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. They surrendered without a fight. They were herded into a snowy field. And then the Germans opened fire with machine guns and pistols at point-blank range. 84 American soldiers died in that field. Some of them were finished off with a bullet to the head while they crawled through the snow.
The news of the Malmedy massacre spread through the American lines within hours. From that day forward, in the woods of the Ardennes, a quiet order passed among American infantry, “No prisoners. Not from the SS.” At his headquarters in Luxembourg City, General Omar Nelson Bradley, 51 years old, the calm and bespectacled commander of the American 12th Army Group, stared at his situation maps and understood with a sinking heart that he had a problem far bigger than a German offensive.
The wedge the enemy was driving into his front was cutting him off physically from two of his own field armies. First Army under Courtney Hodges, Ninth Army under William Simpson. Both of them and roughly 200,000 American soldiers were now on the far side of the German breakthrough. He could not reach them by road.
He could barely reach them by radio. On December 19th, Eisenhower called an emergency conference at a cold stone barracks in Verdun. He walked in and looked around the room at the tired faces of his senior commanders and said something that would echo down the decades. “The present situation,” he told them, “is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster.
There will be,” he added, “only cheerful faces at this table.” George Patton spoke first. The commander of the American Third Army, 59 years old, pistol on his hip, snarl in his voice, promised to disengage three divisions from the fighting in the Saar, pivot them 90° north through the snow, and drive on the besieged town of Bastogne within 48 hours.
When staff officers gasped at the impossibility of the maneuver, Patton smiled. “It was already in motion,” he said. He had ordered it the night before. That was the American way of war. Improvise, attack, believe. But Eisenhower still had the problem of the north. And on December 20th, alone in his study at Versailles, he made the hardest decision of his life to that point.
He picked up the telephone. He called Bradley. And he told his old West Point classmate that as of that moment, the American First Army and the American Ninth Army, some 200,000 United States soldiers, were being placed under the temporary command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. There was a long silence on the line.
Then Bradley’s voice, controlled but shaking, came through the receiver. “By God, Ike,” he said, “I cannot be responsible if this is done.” Eisenhower’s reply was quiet. “Brad,” he said, “I, not you am responsible to General Marshall and this is my decision. The call ended. Bradley set down the receiver and stared at the wall.
In the entire war, no American had ever taken a harder blow than the one just delivered by his oldest friend. And here is something history rarely tells you. That decision to place American soldiers under a British field marshal was strategically correct. Bradley could not command what he could not reach. Montgomery could.
It was the right call. Any professional soldier would have made it. Even Bradley, if he’d been honest with himself, knew it. But Bernard Montgomery, sitting in his tactical trailer at Zonhoven, did not receive the news as a burden. He received it as a coronation. His personal aide would later record in a private diary the words Montgomery spoke when the message reached him.
Finally, he said, finally it has come to this. He believed the crisis was his reward. That afternoon, Montgomery ordered his staff car brought around. He was going to visit General Courtney Hodges at the American First Army command post in the town of Chaudfontaine in Eastern Belgium. He had four jeeps for escort.
He had motorcycle outriders. He flew a Union Jack from his own vehicle so large that it snapped in the wind like a battle standard. The American officers who watched him arrive would never forget it. One of them, a Lieutenant Colonel named William Sylvan, later wrote in his diary that Montgomery swept into the operations room like Christ come to cleanse the temple.
He refused the coffee that was offered. He asked for tea. He would not meet the eyes of the American staff officers who had been standing for 72 hours without sleep. He walked to the situation map. He picked up a pointer and he began in a clipped Oxford accent to lecture Courtney Hodges, a 57-year-old career infantryman who had won the Distinguished Service Cross in the last war on the elementary principles of defense.
Hodges said almost nothing. His face went gray. Now, the fair thing to say, the honest thing, is that Montgomery’s tactical instructions that afternoon were sound. He ordered First Army to give up ground it could not hold. He straightened the line. He pulled together the British XXX Corps as a strategic reserve behind the American front.
On paper, it was competent generalship. In some ways, it was excellent generalship. But, the men doing the actual killing of Germans in the northern shoulder of the bulge were not British. They were Americans, and they were commanded by two Americans whose names history has largely forgotten. The first was Major General J.
Lawton Collins, 48 years old, called Lightning Joe by the men who loved him, commander of the Seventh Corps. Collins had learned his trade in the jungles of Guadalcanal, and refined it on the beaches of Normandy. In the last week of December, it was Collins who took the Second Armored Division and hurled it against the Second SS Panzer Division near the village of Selles, and stopped the German drive cold, only 4 miles short of the Meuse River.
The second was Major General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, 49 years old, hard-eyed, hand grenade taped to his harness, commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps. Ridgway held the northern shoulder together with a mixture of paratroopers, glider infantry, and stragglers scraped up from broken units. It was Ridgway’s men who stood in front of Peiper at Stoumont.
It was Ridgway’s men who held the crossroads at Manhay when everything around them was burning. Montgomery did not stop these attacks. Collins and Ridgway did. Montgomery presided over their victory. He did not create it. And here is a fact so telling it deserves to be spoken aloud. In Bernard Montgomery’s own personal diary, in his own handwriting, he described Joseph Lawton Collins as a very good general.
He knew. He knew exactly who was winning the battle in front of him, but in the press conference he would give in 15 days, the name Collins would never once be spoken. The name Ridgeway would never once be spoken. Only one name would be spoken again and again, his own. While the shooting continued, another battle was quietly beginning behind the lines.
The battle for the town of Bastogne. Bastogne was a road junction. Seven paved highways met inside it, running like the spokes of a wheel through the frozen Ardennes. Whoever held Bastogne controlled the movement of armor across the entire southern half of the battlefield. And on December 19th, as German Panzer divisions closed in from three directions, the American 101st Airborne Division rushed north from a rest camp in France, arrived in the town in commandeered trucks with no winter coats, no rations, and in some cases no
helmets. Their commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was in Washington attending a conference. Command fell to a stocky artilleryman named Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, 46 years old, who had never expected to lead a division and now found himself surrounded by the German 5th Panzer Army. On the morning of December 22nd, a small German delegation approached the American lines under a white flag.
They carried a formal ultimatum typed on Wehrmacht letterhead. “Surrender the town within 2 hours,” it said, “or face annihilation from massed artillery.” McAuliffe read the letter. He looked up at his staff. He said aloud only one word, “Nuts.” His staff officers laughed. Then someone said, “Well, General, that would be as good a reply as any.
” McAuliffe had the word typed onto a clean sheet of paper, sealed in an envelope, and handed to the German emissaries. The Germans stood in the road staring at the paper. They did not understand the slang and American colonel had to translate. “It means,” he said, “go to hell.” The 101st Airborne would hold Bastogne for another 5 days surrounded on every side in temperatures that dropped to 20 below zero.
On the day after Christmas, the lead elements of Patton’s Third Army, spearheaded by the Fourth Armored Division under Major General Hugh Gaffey, punched a corridor through to the town from the south. The lead tank battalion of that relief force, the 37th, was commanded by a hard-jawed young lieutenant colonel named Creighton Abrams, whose name would one day be carved on the side of every American main battle tank for the next 50 years.
Bastogne was saved, saved by Americans, ordered by an American, reinforced by Americans, commanded at every level of the chain by Americans. Not one soldier in Bastogne had ever been under the command of Bernard Montgomery. Not one bullet fired in the defense of that town had passed through his chain of command.
This is a fact you must hold on to. It matters for what comes next. On Christmas Day 1944, Omar Bradley flew north through low cloud to visit Montgomery at his headquarters in Zonhoven. He hoped, as any professional soldier would, to find a working partnership. What he received instead was a 30-minute lecture.
Montgomery, standing in front of a map with a pointer in his hand, informed Bradley that the American command structure was fundamentally flawed. He said the Americans had spread themselves too thin. He said Patton was reckless. He said Bradley himself had failed to concentrate his forces. He said all of this in a calm professorial voice, as if instructing a slow student, and then he suggested that Bradley now accept the reality that the northern half of the American front should remain permanently under British
command. Bradley left the meeting white-faced. That night in his quarters, he wrote a letter to his wife, Mary. “If I have to go on serving under this man,” he wrote, “I will have to ask to be relieved.” And Montgomery, oblivious, sat down that same evening and wrote a letter of his own.
It went to Field Marshal Alan Brooke in London. In it, Montgomery reported that the Americans had received a great shock and that they were finally learning to listen. “From this point forward,” he wrote, “they will do as they are told.” He genuinely believed it. Four days later, on December 29th, Bernard Montgomery drafted the document that would nearly destroy him.
It was cataloged as Signal M408. In its language, it was carefully diplomatic. In its substance, it was an act of professional suicide. Montgomery demanded in writing that Eisenhower place all Allied ground forces north of the Ardennes under one single ground commander. That commander, Montgomery made clear, must be himself.
And then came the sentence that stopped Eisenhower’s heart when he read it. “Any future directive from the Supreme Commander,” Montgomery wrote, “must include the phrase that the Supreme Commander will not intervene in the operational actions of the ground commander in the north.” Read that sentence again, because it is important.
Montgomery was demanding that Eisenhower sign an order stripping himself of his own authority. That Eisenhower himself declare in his own signature that his hands were tied, that he would not, could not interfere with Montgomery’s decisions on the battlefield. It was not a request. It was a coup, delivered on official stationery in the polite, dry language of a British staff officer.
The message reached Versailles on the morning of December 30th. Walter Bedell Smith read it first. He walked to Eisenhower’s office. He set it down on the desk without a word. He watched his commander’s face. For the first and only time in the war, Dwight Eisenhower slammed his hand down on the desk with such force that the papers jumped.
His face went pale, then it went red, then it went the color of ash. He picked up a pen. He pulled a blank sheet of paper toward him and he began, in cold and level handwriting, to compose a message to the combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington and London. The message set out the entire history of the disagreement.
It described the impossibility of continued cooperation and it ended with a single choice offered to the men who had put Eisenhower in his position. They could keep Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery or they could keep their supreme commander. They could not keep both. Bedell Smith read the draft. He looked at Eisenhower.
He said only one thing. “If you send this, you will win.” Eisenhower nodded. He set the draft aside. He said he would send it in the morning, but an ocean away from Versailles, along a wire that ran from Paris to the Belgian countryside, a British officer had already been warned. Not through official channels, through friendship, through the quiet loyalty of men who had watched the war too long to let it end in a suicide of pride.
Two of Eisenhower’s own staff officers, both of them British, had made a decision. Major Sir Kenneth Strong, the intelligence chief of SHAEF, and Major General John Whitely, the deputy operations chief, had watched signal M408 land on Eisenhower’s desk. They understood what Montgomery had done.
They understood what Eisenhower was about to do in return. And they understood something else. They understood that if the ultimatum went out and Marshall and Roosevelt sided with Ike, which they surely would, then the alliance itself would be torn along its seam. Strong and Whiteley went together quietly to Walter Bedell Smith. They laid out the truth.
If this cable went to Washington, they said, the alliance would tear. There was only one man in the world who could stop it, and they knew where to find him. Bedell Smith listened. Then Smith himself, chief of staff to the supreme commander, gave the order. Call Zonhoven. Get de Guingand on the line. Get him to I tonight.
Kenneth Strong and John Whiteley were both British officers. Their loyalty technically ran to London, to Brooke, to Churchill, to the king. What they did that night was, in a strict military sense, a betrayal of their own field marshal. They chose the coalition over the flag. They chose the war over the man, and there is a bitter irony in this.
Only weeks earlier, Eisenhower had considered sending both Strong and Whiteley home to England precisely because he suspected them of being too loyal to British interests. Now those same two officers, on their own initiative, were about to save the career of a British field marshal by warning his own chief of staff that the American general was one signature away from destroying him.
The phone rang in Belgium. On the other end of the line, in a farmhouse near Zonhoven, a 44-year-old British major general listened to the news with the receiver pressed hard against his ear. Francis Wilfred de Guingand had a chest full of pneumonia. He had a fever so high he had stopped bothering to measure it.
He had been ordered by his doctors that very morning to remain in bed for a full week. He set down the phone. He called for his aide. He asked for his aircraft to be readied. The aide protested. The weather over the channel was closing. Every trained pilot in Belgium was refusing to fly. De Guingand did not raise his voice.
He simply said, “Then find one who will.” Outside the snow was falling in blinding sheets across the airfield. Somewhere in the sky above northern France, a lone Royal Air Force Dakota transport was already warming its engines. The most important flight of the Western war was about to leave the ground. The Dakota lifted off from a snow-blown airstrip in Belgium a little after 10:00 at night on December 30th, 1944.
Inside its cold aluminum belly sat a single passenger, wrapped in a heavy greatcoat, coughing hard into a handkerchief, his lungs burning with pneumonia. Francis de Guingand did not sleep on that flight. He stared through the small oval window at nothing but darkness and driving snow. The pilot flew almost entirely on instruments. The wings iced over.
Twice the aircraft dropped several hundred feet in sudden downdrafts, and the passenger’s stomach lifted into his throat, and still he did not sleep. He was rehearsing, over and over again, the words he would say when he arrived. He knew that he was the last man on Earth who could save Bernard Montgomery from Bernard Montgomery.
The Dakota came in low over Orly airfield outside Paris just before midnight, guided down by nothing more than a radio beacon and the nerve of an exhausted pilot. A staff car was waiting on the tarmac. De Guingand climbed in without a word. The car rolled through blackout streets, past the frozen fountains of Versailles, past sentries who stamped their feet against the cold, and pulled up at last outside the Trianon Palace.
It was nearly 1:00 in the morning on December 31st. Walter Bedell Smith met him at the door. The two chiefs of staff, one American, one British, looked at each other for a long moment without speaking. Then Smith took him upstairs. Eisenhower was still at his desk. His tunic was unbuttoned.
There was an ashtray full of cigarette ends beside his right hand. The draft cable to the combined Chiefs of Staff lay in front of him, weighted down by a brass paperweight, as if he was afraid the wind might blow it away before he could send it. De Guingand walked to the desk. He said good evening. He asked very quietly if he might read the message.
Eisenhower did not answer. He simply slid the paper across the desk. De Guingand read it. His face gave nothing away. His hands, holding the paper, did not shake. When he had finished, he set the message back down between them, exactly where it had been. Then he spoke. And what he said next was not a plea.
It was not a defense of Montgomery. It was the reasoned professional voice of a man who had spent his entire war holding the alliance together. “General,” he said, “give me 24 hours. I will bring you back a different letter.” Eisenhower looked at Bedell Smith. Bedell Smith gave the smallest of nods. Eisenhower picked up the draft cable.
He folded it in half. He placed it in the drawer of his desk. He said, “24 hours, Freddy. Not 1 minute more.” De Guingand did not thank him. There was nothing to thank him for yet. He turned and walked back out into the freezing Versailles night, and the fever that had been burning in him for a week began to burn a little hotter.
The Dakota lifted off from Orly at first light on December 31st. The weather was worse now than it had been the night before. The pilot cursed under his breath the entire way north. De Guingand sat in the same seat he had left, holding the same handkerchief, staring at the same darkness. He was carrying nothing back to Belgium but a piece of paper he had drafted himself in his own hand on the return flight.
It was [snorts] the letter he intended to make Bernard Montgomery sign. The Dakota landed at Brussels late in the morning. A staff car took him east to Zonhoven. He walked into Montgomery’s tactical trailer just after 2:00 in the afternoon. Montgomery was finishing his lunch, cold chicken, weak tea.
He looked up and smiled. “Freddy,” he said cheerfully, “you look terrible. Why aren’t you in bed?” De Guingand did not smile back. He closed the door behind him. He walked to the little table where Montgomery was sitting. He remained standing. “Sir,” he said, “Ike is going to sack you.” Montgomery laughed.
It was a small, almost polite laugh. The laugh of a man who has been told something so absurd it does not deserve a serious reply. “Nonsense, Freddy,” he said. “Ike needs me.” And then Francis de Guingand, 44 years old, sick with pneumonia, exhausted from two flights through winter storms, did the hardest thing he had ever done in a lifetime of soldiering.
He looked his commanding officer in the eye, and he told him the truth. He told Montgomery that Marshall in Washington had already decided. He told him that Roosevelt would back Marshall. He told him that Churchill, this time, would not be able to help him because Churchill could not afford to break the alliance over one man.
He told him that the cable was written, that it lay in a drawer at Versailles, that it would be transmitted in less than 24 hours. He told him that there was no lobbying to be done, no friend to call, no general to appeal to. He told him that his career was over. Montgomery’s face did something strange as he listened. The smile faded first.
Then the color, then the certainty behind the eyes, and then at the very last, the posture. His shoulders came down. His hands, which had been holding a teacup, set the cup down on the saucer with a soft porcelain click that seemed very loud in the small trailer. For a long moment, he did not speak. Then he asked a question that Francis de Guingand would remember for the rest [clears throat] of his life.
According to the memoir de Guingand would publish two years later, Montgomery looked up from the table and asked very softly, “Freddy, what should I do?” For the first time in nearly 40 years of soldiering, Bernard Law Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein, the darling of the British Empire, the man who had lectured Eisenhower, lectured Bradley, lectured Patton, lectured all of them, asked for help.
De Guingand reached into the inside pocket of his coat. He took out a folded piece of paper. He set it on the table in front of Montgomery. “Sir,” he said, “you will sign this.” The letter was addressed to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. It began with the words, “Dear Ike.” It was written in the voice of Bernard Montgomery, but it was not composed by Bernard Montgomery.
It was composed by Francis de Guingand on an unheated aircraft at 10,000 ft somewhere over the frozen fields of northern France. The letter said, in effect, that Montgomery had been mistaken, that the previous message had been badly worded, that whatever decision the Supreme Commander made on any matter, Montgomery would support it 100% and would do everything in his power to make it succeed.
It was signed with a single word, Monty. And there is one detail here that must be spoken aloud because it changes the meaning of everything that came before. That letter of surrender, the letter that saved the most famous soldier in the British Empire, was not written by him. It was written by his chief of staff and put in front of him to sign.
The career of Bernard Law Montgomery from that moment forward existed only because a subordinate had the courage to draft the words his general could not bring himself to speak. Montgomery read the letter. He read it a second time. He picked up his pen. His hand hesitated over the paper. De Guingand said, “Only, sir, there is no other way.” Montgomery signed.
The letter went out that same afternoon by dispatch rider. It reached Eisenhower at Versailles on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1945. Eisenhower read it in silence. He did not smile. He did not celebrate. He did not call for coffee or open a bottle. He simply nodded once and turned to Bedell Smith and asked him to fetch the draft cable from the drawer of his desk.
Bedell Smith brought it. He assumed his commander was going to destroy it. Eisenhower did not destroy it. He read it through one more time, folded it carefully, and placed it in his personal file. Where it would remain for the rest of his life and where today in the archives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, it still rests on paper yellowed by 80 years in the handwriting of the man who almost sent it.
He forgave. He did not forget. The crisis on the morning of January 1st, 1945 was over. The alliance had held. The war would go on. Six days later, Bernard Montgomery walked into a press tent at Zonhoven and destroyed the mercy he had been given. It was the afternoon of January 7th. The war correspondents of the British press had been invited to hear the field marshal explain the recent battle.
Montgomery arrived in full uniform wearing his signature beret with its two cap badges, which he had designed himself. He stood before the microphones. He smiled, and then he began to speak. The battle in the Ardennes, he told the reporters, had been most interesting. Possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles he had ever handled.
As soon as he had seen what was happening, he said, he had taken certain steps himself. He had employed the whole available power of the British group of armies. He had positioned the core in strategic reserve. He had visited the American troops. He had heartened them. He had rallied them. He had, in effect, saved them.
He did not use the name Anthony McAuliffe. He did not use the name George Patton. He did not use the name Courtney Hodges or Joseph Collins or Matthew Ridgway. He mentioned the 19,000 American dead only in passing. He described the desperate defense of Bastogne, one of the great feats of American arms in the 20th century, as one small element in his own larger design.
The British reporters wrote it all down. They rushed the copy back to London. The morning papers led with the headline that would enter infamy. Monty saves the Yanks. In Luxembourg City, Omar Bradley was handed a translation of the press conference. He read it standing in his command post. When he was finished, he threw the paper into the fire.
He picked up the telephone. He called Eisenhower at Versailles. He said, “If this man commands one more American soldier, I resign my commission today.” In his headquarters further south, George Patton read the same translation. He was quieter than usual. That night he opened his diary and wrote, in his sharp, forward-slanting hand, that he would rather resign his commission and go home to America than serve one more day under Bernard Montgomery.
And in Berlin, the propaganda ministry of Dr. Joseph Goebbels seized on Montgomery’s words with the delight of a starving man handed a feast. They rewrote his statements. They amplified them. They broadcast them over and over in English from loudspeakers along the front at American positions in the snow. “Listen,” the German announcers said, “listen to how the British field marshal describes you, children, amateurs, boys who had to be saved.
This is what your allies think of you.” American soldiers in frozen foxholes, who had watched their friends die in the woods of the Arden, heard the broadcasts. Some of them wept. Some of them cursed. Some of them, in later years, would say that they had never hated any enemy so much as they hated Bernard Montgomery in the winter of 1945.
The damage was so severe, so immediate, so nearly fatal to the coalition that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was forced to walk into the House of Commons on the afternoon of January 18th and personally clean up what his own field marshal had done. Winston Churchill, 70 years old, stood at the dispatch box.
He wore a black frock coat. His voice was slow, heavy, deliberate. He told the members of Parliament, and through them the world, that the Battle of the Bulge had been overwhelmingly an American engagement. He said that United States troops had done almost all of the fighting and had suffered almost all of the losses. He said that the American casualties had been more than 60 times, and perhaps more than 80 times, the British casualties in the same battle.
And then he said the words that were meant, publicly and unmistakably, to bury Montgomery’s claim forever. “Care must be taken,” Churchill told the Commons, “in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war.” “This battle,” he said, “will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory, an American victory, not a British one.
Not a Montgomery one, an American one.” Spoken aloud by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from the floor of the mother of parliaments, cuz the most famous soldier in the British Empire had lied about it in a press tent in Belgium. Alan Brooke, the head of the British Army, wrote in his private diary that night with the exhausted resignation of a man whose warnings had all come true.
“Monty has made a mess of things.” From that day forward, the war in the west belonged to the Americans. When the great crossing of the Rhine came in March, Eisenhower quietly allowed the Americans to steal the moment out from under Montgomery. On March 7th, elements of the American 9th Armored Division discovered the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen unblown standing across the Rhine and seized it in an act of pure improvisation.
15 days later, on the night of March 22nd, George Patton crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim without artillery preparation, without air born support, in cheap assault boats, and telephoned Bradley to say, “I want the world to know that third army made it across before Monty starts.” Only on the following night, after Patton and Bradley had both crossed, did Montgomery launch his enormous set piece crossing, Operation Plunder, with paratroopers and air born divisions, and a naval bombardment and searchlights and cameras, and a personal visit from
Winston Churchill. It was magnificent, and it was strategically an afterthought. When the final race across Germany came, Eisenhower kept Montgomery penned in the north. When the decision was made about who would take Berlin, Eisenhower gave the city to the Soviets rather than let the British field marshal have it.
It was framed publicly as a strategic decision to preserve American lives. Privately, in his own memoirs, Eisenhower would never fully explain the choice. He did not need to. The men in the room understood. After the war, Montgomery would receive his viscountcy. He would become chief of the Imperial General Staff.
He would live to be 88 years old, dying in England in 1976. His public reputation in Britain would remain that of a national hero. His private reputation among the men who had actually run the war would never recover. Eisenhower became president of the United States in 1953. He served two terms.
During those eight years, Bernard Montgomery visited the United States several times. On more than one occasion, he requested a private meeting at the White House. On more than one occasion, according to the recollection of senior aides, the president found reasons to be unavailable. In his 1948 memoir, Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower wrote about Montgomery with a cold formal correctness that concealed a great deal.
He did not attack. He did not settle scores. He simply and with a certain American plainness declined to praise. Every reader who mattered understood exactly what was being said in the spaces between the sentences. Francis de Guingand, the man who had flown through a blizzard with pneumonia in his lungs to save his commander from himself, retired from the army in 1946.
He did so in part because Montgomery, upon becoming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, did not offer him the senior position he had been promised. The man who had drafted the letter of surrender was, in the end, discarded by the man he had saved. De Guingand died in Cannes, France in 1979.
He is buried in the country where he had spent his last years, far from the tactical trailer at Zonhoven, far from the Dakota on the tarmac at Orly, far from the desk at Versailles where a folded cable once sat under a brass paperweight. If you drive to Abilene, Kansas today, and you walk through the quiet halls of the Eisenhower Presidential Library, and you ask politely to see the personal papers of the 34th President of the United States, an archivist will bring you a folder.
Inside that folder, among many others, is a single sheet of paper written in a careful and level hand, dated the 30th of December, 1944. It is addressed to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. It was never sent. The most dangerous battle of the Western War was not fought in the snow of the Ardennes. It was not fought at Bastogne or at Malmedy or on the Elsenborn Ridge or in the Losheim Gap.
It was fought in a small warm office in Versailles between one man’s pride and another man’s patience and it was decided by a piece of paper that stayed in a drawer. Eisenhower did not win it with a rifle. He won it with restraint. Montgomery did not lose his career that winter. He lost something else. He lost the trust of the men who mattered.
He lost the respect of the coalition he had helped to build. He lost the private regard of the American general who had again and again chosen to shield him and in coalition war that is a wound that never closes. The alliance held. The war was won. Hitler died in a bunker in Berlin four months later. The world moved on.
But the sheet of paper is still there in Abilene, Kansas in a temperature-controlled vault kept safe for the historians and the students and the quiet visitors who come year after year to look at it and to understand. It is not much to look at. Blue ink, yellowed paper, a few crossed out words, the signature of a Kansas farm boy who had risen to command 4 million men and who had once on a cold night in a French palace come within a single dispatch rider of ending the career of the most famous soldier in the British Empire.
He held his hand. He waited. He forgave. He did not, however, ever forget.
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