A CALL TO ARMS

‘We can still lose this war,’

General George Patton, 4 January, 1945

On Tuesday, 19 December, 1944, the Top Brass converged on the town of Verdun – Verdun, an ominously evocative name, where in the First World War hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and Germans had been slaughtered. Adolf Hitler had been wounded on those barren ridges which overlooked the town. De Gaulle had been captured there. In 1916 the fate of France had hung in the balance as Germany seemed set on breaking through at Verdun and winning the war.

Now on this cold grey morning, as the Top Brass filed into the squad room at the eighteenth-century barracks, Maginot Caserne, the situation appeared little different. Three days before, the Germans had launched another great attack in the Belgian Ardennes which had caught the Western Allies completely by surprise. Just as at Verdun twenty-eight years before, it had smashed through the American lines in the Ardennes, sending the divisions holding the front there reeling back in disarray. Now, as the clock in the Vauban citadel down in the town began to strike eleven, the Germans fifty miles away were racing for the River Meuse. Beyond that lay their key objectives, the great Allied supply port of Antwerp and Brussels itself.

Shivering in the squalid room, heated by a single pot-bellied stove, the Top Brass took their places, their staffs behind them. All were important men who commanded the destinies of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of soldiers, British, American, Canadian, French, and a dozen other nationalities. But this morning, as the bad news from the front mounted, they seemed powerless to act. Everything now rested in the hands of the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower.

His Chief-of-Intelligence, General Strong, recalled many years later, ‘The meeting was crowded and the atmosphere tense. The British were worried by events. As so often before, their confidence in the ability of Americans to deal with the situation was not great. Reports had been reaching them of disorganization behind the American lines, of American headquarters abandoned without notice, and of documents and weapons falling intact into enemy hands. Stories of great bravery on the part of individuals and units did not change their opinion.’1

The Verdun Conference, as it became known, was perhaps the high point of Eisenhower’s career as Supreme Commander in Europe. His front had been virtually torn in half. Against all the confident predictions of his top intelligence men, who had maintained for the last month that the Germans were beaten – ‘vying with each other for the honor of devastating the German war machine with words’, as Robert E. Merriam of the US 9th Army put it2 – the enemy had launched a major counterattack.

Even if the Germans only succeeded in crossing the River Meuse, would this not mean the end of the confidence the public had placed in the Supreme Commander since the triumphant D-Day landings? Although Eisenhower knew he enjoyed the powerful protection of General Marshall back in Washington, he was too much of a realist not to realize that he had mighty enemies in the Allied camp, especially in Britain. Would they not be only too eager to accuse him of slackness, inefficiency, lack of foresight and worse?

It was not surprising, therefore, that when he entered that icy room, chain-smoking as always, his usual happy grin was absent. Instead, his broad face was pale and set. But, after he had looked around at Generals Bradley, Devers, Patton and the rest, he announced, ‘The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not one of disaster.’ He paused and forced a smile. ‘There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table!’ As always Patton, Commander of the US Third Army, was first off the mark. The