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Brereton jumped his men — more thousands who soon fluttered in as reinforcements — with a reminder: "On the success of your mission . . . rests the difference between a quick decision in the west and a long-drawn-out battle."
Open to his army were opportunities: 1) to trap the Germans left in The Netherlands; 2) to flank the West Wall at Cleve, and lead a drive to occupy the Ruhr and cut the communications of the Germans in the Siegfried Line.
Tied to the Ground. As the air army landed, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery sent his British Army crunching into Holland from the south. In 24 hours the British and the Airborne had joined at one wide point.
This northeast drive took the enemy off guard, but there was ample doubt that he could have done much about it, even with advance notice. He had committed the bulk of his dwindling forces to keeping the war from the Rhineland.
There the enemy's plight was serious, but he was dying hard. He did panicky things, but where he had the troops he fought fiercely. At points the going was worse for the Americans than it had been back on the Norman beaches. At one point the Germans used a "psychological tactic" borrowed from the eastern front—a shoulder-to-shoulder frontal assault by screaming, yelling infantrymen. The Indian-silent G.I. reaction: mow 'em down.
After penetration of the Siegfried Line near Aachen, a combination of such fanatical defense and bad weather held the Allies along most of the line to small gains. The week's action demonstrated that: 1) properly manned, the West Wall would have held the Allies; 2) the Allies had prevented proper manning by the speed of their advance.
Bonanza. Far, far back of the Siegfried Line, back on the Loire near Orleans, the Americans collected still another dividend from their bold strokes. It was a bonanza for a storybook. There 20,000 Germans were handed over to U.S. troops as stubby Major General Erich Elster, bemedaled and sticking to the Prussian amenities, flourished his pistol in surrender. His big force was the remainder of a German army that had held the Bordeaux-Biscay area. Cut off hundreds of miles behind the Allied lines, harried by Maquis, raked by aircraft on the roads, they had laboriously marched to the safety of U.S. custody.
The troops to whom Elster surrendered belonged to the U.S. Ninth Army headed by tall, hell-for-leather Lieut. General William H. Simpson. Newly arrived in France, this is the seventh army* to appear under Eisenhower's command. It swelled the U.S. ranks in western Europe to far more than the 2,000,000 men whom General John J. Pershing commanded in 1918.
As he heard the Allied guns pounding 25 miles away, the editor of the Kölnische (Cologne) Zeitung wrote an editorial: "The steam roller of the Allied air force, supported by tank divisions, has driven back our Wehrmacht. If only we had three additional air fleets and ten additional Panzer divisions! . . ."
* The others: the U.S. First, Third and Seventh, the Canandian First, the British Second, the Allied Airborne.