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Yet Eisenhower was always patient and long-suffering with Montgomery, the most visible representative of British pride, and resisted the temptation to fire him. With support from Roosevelt and Marshall, Eisenhower knew he could force Montgomery's ouster, but he feared such an intramural brawl would severely damage U.S.-British trust. After the war, Montgomery's own chief of staff, De Guingand, looked back at the heavy fighting in Germany during 1945 and decided that the British could not have made it to Berlin, even with U.S. reinforcements. "My conclusion," he wrote, "is that Eisenhower was right."
The Supreme Commander thought a swift, narrow-front drive straight into Germany was a bad strategic idea. He was certain it would be cut off, counterattacked and defeated. He never even considered deviating from his own strategy: an advance to the Rhine along a front stretching from Holland to the Swiss border. That way the Nazi forces would be defeated west of the Rhine, and the Allies would cross into Germany proper with relative ease.
The broad front might be slower, but Eisenhower, the student of logistics, could make no other choice. In their race across the Seine, the Allied units outran their stocks of gasoline, ammunition, spare parts and food. To maintain itself in the field, an infantry division required 650 tons of supplies every day. The supply planners assumed that they would not have to support any U.S. divisions north of the Seine until 120 days after D-day. But within 90 days, 16 divisions were 150 miles beyond the Seine. Both Montgomery and Bradley had to halt to let supplies catch up.
Hitler seized on the Allied hiatus to organize a 24-division counteroffensive through Belgium's Ardennes Forest in December -- and Eisenhower came into his own as a combat general. He issued the orders that cut off the Bulge -- a German penetration westward into Allied lines 45 miles wide and 65 miles deep -- and made certain it would fail. He sent the 101st Airborne to hold the key city of Bastogne, put three other divisions into the battle and ordered Patton to turn his Third Army 90 degrees to the north to cut the advancing Germans' supply lines. The German counteroffensive was, Eisenhower said later, "a dangerous episode." At the time, the Supreme Commander was unruffled. The situation, he told his generals, "is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster."
The destruction of Hitler's last reserves in the Battle of the Bulge flung open the door to the German heartland, just as Eisenhower had planned. "The war was won before the Rhine was crossed," he said later. But his strategic arguments were not over. Churchill was suspicious of the Russians and detected the first signs of the coming cold war. He told Eisenhower it was important to capture Berlin, to symbolize the Allied role in victory over Germany and to counter the strength of the Soviet Union. Eisenhower felt the city no longer held any military significance. He told Montgomery, who was clamoring for the chance to take it, that the German capital was "nothing but a geographical location" and that "my purpose is to destroy the enemy's forces." Churchill disagreed and appealed to Roosevelt, who was ill and about to die. Washington said the decision on how best to destroy the enemy's forces should be left to the Supreme Commander.