Posted on 12/26/2010 6:31:05 AM PST by Saije
Man of God? Holy Spirit? By my lights, Patton was more of a self-enamored Deist, along the lines of Jefferson or McClellan, giving lip service to God and Country but primarily a driven achiever and acquirer.
Yep, just like a whole lot of us sinners.
Except that (with God’s help) Patton got a whole lot more done than the rest of us.
God bless and keep Gen. Patton.
Aside from diverting supplies to Monty there was a real supply problem for the armies as a whole. Monty did not grasp the importance of Antwerp until after his Market Garden failure. Most allied supplies were still being brought in from Normandy by the Red Ball Express, a constantly moving column of 2 1/2 ton trucks. By the time the armies reached the German border their size and distance from Normandy made if very difficult for the efficiently run Express to keep up. Monty finally opened the Scheldt to shipping at the end of November 1944, greatly shortening the supply lines and using a much bigger port. Of course, one of the objective of the German Bulge offensive was to take Antwerp back.
One would think that the previous offensives by the Germans (both WWs) would have tipped off the western allies that just maybe another one was coming. Patton had to pick up the broken pieces, had to fend off Monty’s efforts to strip him of supplies, and for that matter, Monty’s insistence on having part of the US army put under his command, then grandstanding in a press conference about the transfer.
As I’ve said a number of times, Monty should have been assassinated not long after D-Day, and the assassination pinned on the Germans. The war of liberation would have gone much smoother.
The British approach during the war was to let the USSR take the brunt for as long as possible, and to let the Germans wear themselves out fighting on that front. Churchill’s other annoying crap, such as his “soft underbelly of Europe” BS, all grew out of that strategy. The Italian campaign was some of the hardest fighting of the war, strictly because of the highly defensible terrain. Thanks, Winston.
Operation Market Garden was a fiasco, and probably couldn’t have been otherwise with Monty running it — and it was intended to succeed, but was launched in the first place to let the Germans keep busy fighting the Red Army advance. Stalin was continuously furious in those wartime conferences because he wanted a second front, and wasn’t getting it. North Africa wasn’t it, Italy wasn’t it, and D-Day came a full year after the Battle of Kursk.
Very true.
“The British approach during the war was to let the USSR take the brunt for as long as possible,”
And that proved wise. The Dieppe Raid of August 1942 took over 50% casualties. Grabbing a beachhead on continental Europe wasn’t going to be easy.
For one thing we needed thousands of Higgins Boats and they weren’t ready until 1944. And as fruitless as the hard fighting in Italy might appear, it taught the American army a great deal about fighting the Germans while tying German divisions down away from the French coast. The Normandy Invasion took place one day after the liberation of Rome.
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