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Montgomery was always slow and cautious in mobile fighting, but this was a set-piece battle of the sort he was expected to win. As he remained at a standstill week after week, Churchill was worried that Normandy would turn into a replay of the ghastly trench warfare of World War I. Many senior officers, including Eisenhower's British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, thought Montgomery should be either forced to attack or fired. Some Americans suspected Montgomery was trying to conserve his strength and let U.S. units take the casualties.
Much of the 50-day battle of Normandy was a reinforcement race: Could the Germans bring in enough armored divisions to destroy the Allied army before it was strong enough to break out of the peninsula? By the beginning of July the Allies had landed more than 1 million troops, 566,000 tons of supplies and 171,000 vehicles. Having failed to drive the Allies back into the sea, Hitler chose to throw all he had into a decisive fight in Normandy rather than withdraw to another defense line along the Seine. But when U.S. forces under Bradley did finally surge out of the peninsula at the end of July and sweep south and east, 21 German divisions were outflanked and almost destroyed. Their retreat over the Seine became a rout, and the victorious Allies reached Paris in a week.
At the end of August, Eisenhower opened a series of discussions on future strategy with Montgomery, the British general's Chief of Staff, Major General Sir Francis de Guingand, and Bradley. The talks turned into a bitter, almost unending debate over whether to carry the attack forward on a broad or narrow front. The Allied Expeditionary Force was about to drive on into Germany right up to the Rhine. After bringing units and equipment back up to strength there, Eisenhower said, he would launch a "sustained and unremitting advance against the heart of the enemy country."
Montgomery argued that the best approach was to send the bulk of the forces north through Belgium and into the Ruhr under one commander -- himself. "This is a whole-time job for one man," he said. He was determined to avoid handing over command of the Allied ground forces to Eisenhower, as planned, on Sept. 1. In a direct challenge, he told Eisenhower that "to change command now would be to prolong the war." He was convinced that "one really full-blooded thrust toward Berlin is likely to get there and end the German war."
Eisenhower said, "Monty's suggestion is simple: give him everything, which is crazy." Roosevelt and Marshall would not have stood for an arrangement that left a British general in charge of the much larger American forces. Eisenhower did not trust Montgomery to carry out the kind of swift, dashing warfare he was promising; the British general had shown no flair for it in his slow but successful tracking of Rommel across North Africa or his long pause in front of Caen. Nor could Eisenhower have shut down the hard-charging U.S. First and Third Armies to let the senior British general on the Continent claim sole credit for taking Berlin.