General Courtney Hodges; A Study in Invisibility; : Hodges, Patton, and the Perception of Greatness by Stephen Wishnevsky

Author:Stephen Wishnevsky [Wishnevsky, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

September 1944

To the West Wall

The month of September opened with the Germans still in a confused state, and the First Army “not many miles from the Belgium border.” Hitler desperately resorted to attacking the Allied armies with V-1 buzz bombs, a task for which they were totally unsuited. Hodges’ staff were awakened on the 2nd of September by the stuttering howl of the pulse jets as the V-1’s bumbled over at an “uncomfortably low attitude” Officers tumbled out of bed in time to see the last of a half dozen V-1s vanish over the horizon.[574]

In the Battle of Mons paper, Hodges mentions that the 1st Division CP was “assaulted by a company of German Infantry in its effort to break through the many American elements in the area. The division commander and his staff were obliged to take battle stations as individual riflemen to beat off the attack.”[575] Ingersoll wrote, “Actually, no more than a few thousand of the 1st Division’s troops were ever engaged at Mons at any one time. They managed to kill or wound approximately six thousand Germans and take twenty-two thousand prisoners in a single forty-eight hours of action on the Belgian frontier.”[576]

Hodges expressed the opinion that he could “lick the gasoline problem and while the Germans are on the run there should be no halt for even a minute.”[577] Sylvan’s next sentence is close to insubordination in an official document. “There have been so many changes in the First Army direction that indeed it seems at times as if those “on top” did not have an altogether clear and complete conception of direction from which they wish to cross the German frontier.”[578]

Bradley wrote, “To make up this British deficit in trucking we were forced to divert vehicles from Hodges. Then to keep Hodges rolling we highjacked gasoline trucks from Patton…George soon found his advance choked off by a shortage in gasoline… Patton worried, then moaned and stormed as the growing shortage of QM trucks caused his gasoline supplies to dwindle.”[579] Patton blamed Montgomery for the gas shortage, railed at the fates, raged at his troops, used captured German petrol and even resorted to hijacking gas from first Army convoys and POL dumps.[580] The real root of the problem was his own failure to follow orders and capture Brest. He had another problem facing him, the fortress city complex of Metz. Metz was shorthand for a chain of thirty-five forts “ringed with artillery, moats and automatic weapons… Patton had originally hoped merely to outflank Metz and leave its defenders to wither for later mopping up. The enforced delay in early September made this impossible.”[581]

The Battle of Mons was so fluid, Hodges remembered, that units moved as “…combat teams with supporting arms decentralized from divisions. Division headquarters and the service units were to close on the forward area by leap-frog movements of small detachments. Radio communications with advanced elements was worked on schedule. Movement was much too fast for any other means of communications except by messengers and constant visits of staff officers.

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