Appomattox, 1944

On D-plus-85 General Dwight D. Eisenhower drew up an interim report on the Battle of France:

P: Twenty German infantry divisions and five armored divisions destroyed; twelve infantry and six Panzer divisions "badly cut up"; four more divisions hopelessly isolated in Brittany and the Channel Islands. The 47 dead and battered divisions included some of the Wehrmacht's prized paratroop and tank units.

P: Enemy dead and wounded--200,000; prisoners taken--200,000 (and more thousands coming in).

P: Enemy aircraft destroyed--2,378 aloft, 1,167 aground. Enemy tanks destroyed or captured--1,300; transport vehicles knocked out--20,000; guns seized or destroyed--2,000 (there would be many more of each at final counting).

Up Bradley, Up Monty. "Ike" Eisenhower had a tremendous victory, fashioned of British tenacity and U.S. audacity. It had been accomplished, as much as any military campaign ever could be, as he had planned it, in four major phases. And it was five days ahead of schedule.

Now General Eisenhower could look ahead to a rapidly developing Phase V. Report was that in preparation for it he had taken over command of Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch's Seventh Army, driving north up the Rhone Valley. Eisenhower took another step he had planned (with British assent) from the beginning: he separated his Allied command into distinct U.S. and British entities, each of them still responsible to him as supreme commander.

The British Armies (Dempsey's Second and Crerar's Canadian First) stayed under the command of General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. The boss of the American Twelfth Army Group: lean, spectacled Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley, who thus became responsible directly to Eisenhower for the operations of the First Army of Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges, the fleet-footed Third Army of Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr.

General Eisenhower made it clear that from now on Bradley would have equal status with Montgomery. But Monty, Eisenhower's friend and one of the British Empire's great generals, was not being demoted (as some English newspapers huffily suggested). The command was only developing according to plan.

Monty got new honors the same day: the rank of Field Marshal, conferred by King George VI. The award set up a new cacophony of confusion: did Monty's crown and laurel wreath outrank Ike

Eisenhower's four stars? Actually, only Monty's brass trimmings had been changed. Monty had a rank that, in his Army, was the highest going. So did Eisenhower, in the active service of his Army. Ike would still give the orders, as he had in Africa when (for a time) Monty had outranked him.

One thing Eisenhower might well have asked last week was a fourth star for Omar Bradley's helmet. Bradley's new command rated it; Ike Eisenhower knew it had been earned. The victory had been, in great part, a triumph of Bradley's bold tactics. The Eisenhower report did not touch upon anything so touchy as individual credits. Allied teamwork was its theme; and the victory had been, in sum, one of Allied strategy. But the jewel had facets which reflected historic brilliance upon U.S. arms and U.S. generalship.

Phase I had looked far. beyond the landing of large forces, the securing of beaches and the conquest of Cherbourg as a supply port. The invasion now came into perspective not alone as a complex operation of getting a foothold but also as a part of the general strategy of putting the Germans off balance at the start. It had succeeded in both factors by deception which played heavily upon the Germans' nervous expectation that invasion would come along the Pas-de-Calais robomb coast. The Germans had failed at first to distinguish feint from punch; when the punch came, their communications were too badly cut up by Allied air power to give them a chance to ward it off.

Phase II. By D-plus-48, the spring to catapult U.S. armor through a breakout was coiled. Again the enemy was to be feinted with a left, clipped hard with a right. The Germans had felt the slugging might of Monty's armor and guns in the loss of Caen, but had recovered from the blow to prevent a breakout there. In terrain that favored their defense, the Germans concentrated on keeping Monty pinned down (but their strength all along the Allied line was enough to make each U.S. offensive move expensive). So long as the Allies could be held in the tight Norman space, where tank maneuver on a grand scale was impossible, the enemy could keep his anxious eye on the still expected Calais invasion.

In this situation, behind a 2,000-plane air bombardment, Omar Bradley executed the breakout below Saint-Lo. On D-plus-49, Georgie Patton's tanks, bivouacked for nearly a month in Norman hideaways, rocketed out behind elements of the First Army.

Phase III. Eisenhower and Bradley had set up a flanking maneuver, as classic in speed and daring as the cavalry movements which had made the U.S. Civil War a textbook for Europe's as well as America's tacticians. In analogy, Eisenhower was General Grant in the decisive days of late March and early April, 1865. Patton was his obstreperous, wide-sweeping General Phil Sheridan.* In essence the problem was the same: bash the enemy frontally, give him no resting moment, get in on his flank, starve him of supplies, make him retreat. In retreat, skillfully exploited, was victory.

The plan carried great risks. While the U.S. First set up and held a narrow corridor from Normandy into Brittany, Bradley sent Patton's Third plunging through.

A heavy German counterthrust might have frustrated the plan. But again the Germans caught on too late. The First's line bent, but did not break. Had it broken, the Norman-Breton front would have been severed.

Patton's units spiraled into Brittany to assault the ports, to seal off a possible German attack from that direction. Other units, in parallel columns, turned east ward. Speed was the only order. They got into sharp fights, left remnants to be cleaned up later, sped on.

At Le Mans came another Sheridan, task: to turn north and hit the flanks. There were greater risks here : the columns that stabbed north were in almost constant danger of being sandwiched between the German units they were attempting to entrap and reserve units to the east. But the trap was set when Patton's men reached Argentan. To the west Monty's British and Canadians and the American First had pressed the Germans eastward.

Before he knew of its formation, the enemy was in a pocket, his only escape through a 25-mile gap.

Phase IV. Too late, the Germans hurried reinforcements down from the Calais area to hold a line at the Seine.

Eisenhower had seen the larger opportunity: to destroy the entire enemy force in western France. He allowed the pocket to remain unclosed, sent more American tanks looping eastward, then northward again. The enemy was being squeezed into retreat; his reinforcements were meeting his routed troops. In confused retreat the enemy could be cut to pieces in the larger trap, as Lee's armies had been lacerated in their successive retreats to Petersburg, Richmond, finally Appomattox.

Some U.S. tank columns zigzagged to set up the final trap against the Seine, but that and the original Argentan-Falaise pocket were now of lesser importance. The 1944 versions of Sheridan's cavalry crunched over the Seine, ground around Paris. They could now prevent formation of any line short of the Rhine.

Last week the Germans had reached their Appomattox in France; they were no longer capable of full battle. Phase IV had become pursuit, exploited to the point of the next major assault: Germany itself. How completely the enemy had been outgeneraled was evident in the positions of Eisenhower's armies. His main U.S. forces, which the Germans had expected in a second invasion on the Calais coast, were deep into Belgium, were knocking at the gates to the Rhineland. Monty's main force, against which the Germans had guarded the most direct route to Paris, was invading the robomb coast--by land.

*Among the Confederate dead in Sheridan's victory at Winchester, Va., (in 1864) was Colonel George S. Patton, V.M.I, man and grandfather of the U.S. Army's No. 1 expert in tank warfare.

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