The “Red Ball Express” was an attempt to resolve persistent Allied supply problems.
As early as 3 September 1944 the need to clear the Scheldt Estuary was recognized by the Allies. Admiral Sir Bertam Ramsay – Naval Commander-in-Chief under Eisenhower at SHAEF – outlined in a telegram to Eisenhower, Montgomery (21st Army Group), and the Admiralty that “It is essential that if Antwerp and Rotterdam are to be opened quickly…It will be necessary for coastal batteries to be captured before approach channels to the river routes can be established.”
After Normandy, the British 2nd Army made spectacular progress, capturing Amiens on 31 August 1944, crossing the Somme River, and, moving at a rate of 60 miles a day, capturing Antwerp with port facilities intact on 4 September 1944. Unfortunately, the Scheldt Estuary – fifty miles of waterways leading to Antwerp – remained in German hands. At the time of Antwerp’s capture, however, the Germans were disorganized and the estuary defences only lightly held. With Antwerp’s vital port facilities taken (with the major ports on the northern Channel coast still in German hands, supplies were still arriving on the Continent in Normandy, facilitating the need to truck them forward to the now rapidly moving front), the decision not to press on and take the Scheldt Estuary would be controversial.
Nothing was done on the ground, either to block the escape of the 15th German Army, or to secure the banks of the Scheldt from Antwerp to the sea. The explanation for the failure was simple. Montgomery saw a gap developing between the 15th German Army retiring north-eastwards and the survivors of the 7th Army moving east to the Siegfried Line. He ordered Dempsey’s (British) Second Army to drive forward with all strength and speed to seize the bridges over the Rhine between Wesel and Arnhem before the enemy could establish a defensive line. Airborne divisions would open the way over the main rivers which intervened….Crerar’s (First Canadian Army) was to clear the coastal belt, then remain in the area of Bruges-Calais until there were enough supplies for it to be employed further forward. Montgomery gave neither of his army commanders the task of opening Antwerp.
#
From the moment of the liberation of Brussels the sense of urgency and enthusiasm had been held at the peak on all that line of advance. The smell of victory seemed to be in the very air, and in the wake of the Guards Armored Division the three-tonners rumbled over the broken and sprouting cobbles of roads that had endured the traffic of a century without hurt. Through all the glades of Tervu-ren in the greenish-auburn shadow of the beeches the piles of ammunition boxes and the oil dumps were swiftly building. In every spinney, and along all the roads through Louvain to Hasselt, and from Gheel to Beeringen the dumps grew by the wayside.
The 50th Infantry Division, which had arisen again and again from the ashes of its dead since 1940, and at last lacked even a nucleus upon which to build anew, battered at the strong German defenses over the Meuse— Escaut canal at Gheel. The Guards, probing on with tremendous zest, gained bridgeheads over the Albert canal at Beeringen, and turned north to the Meuse—Escaut to fight for crossings from de Groote to Neerpelt, and to gain a foothold on the Dutch frontier. There were no illusions up forward of the stiffening enemy resistance. Along the whole intricate canal line from Antwerp to the extreme eastern flank the evidence was clear that the Germans had somehow stopped the rot. The days of “bouncing” bridges and bursting through an enemy crust and to race on to the limits of supplies, were over. General Dempsey commanding the Second Army had no doubts about the position. Reports were coming in of German troop movements and reinforcements all along the line, and especially was this true of the Arnhem area. But if there were some qualms at Second Army Headquarters they could make no impression on the commander of Twenty-First Army Group. The plan was ready. The vision had set, and the paragraphs in the appreciation relating to the enemy were not to be rewritten. None of these considerations affected the troops or sapped the sense of enthusiasm and tension which in those days pervaded the Headquarters of 30th Corps and spread downwards to infect all battalions. The troops, knowing little or nothing of what might lie ahead, were keyed up with a strange expectancy, feeling that even the end might be in sight. Swiftly the Germans were driven out of all the pockets south of the main canal line, and while the Belgian Brigade fought for their old barracks and training grounds round Bourg-Leopold, 30th Corps moved up into the fields beyond Hechtel. By the time the Canadians were entering Bruges, the Second Army was ready to answer the call of Montgomery, and to make a bid for victory.
Behind all this great and sustained effort was a new driving force in the person of Lt. Gen. Horrocks, commanding 30th Corps. Severely wounded in the desert, and at an age when such wounds normally put an end to active command, Lt. Gen. Horrocks had disregarded the somber reports and exhortations of the doctors, and had regained his strength aided mainly by his own invincible spirit. At the call of Montgomery in August he had risen from a hospital bed, and had almost at once given esprit de corps an exact meaning. At his coming all the troops under his command became inspired, and the impossible of yesterday became the target of today. In Brussels on September 3rd, Horrocks had made it clear that the capital city of Belgium was neither a terminus nor a stopping-place, and with his driving force behind them 30th Corps went on without pause.
Horrocks was a remarkable figure, tall and scholarly in appearance, gentle, yet generating enthusiasm and confidence. He was also a “front-line” general, and men in their weapon slits often looked up to see his austere figure standing above them at times when they would not have thought it wise to stand themselves. He had many of the qualities men expect in their battalion commanders, and with them he wore also the unmistakable mantle of a general.
“Supplies, supplies, supplies!” was his invariable song. “Everything depends on supplies.”
It should have made Antwerp unforgettable, but that was not the affair of Lt. Gen. Horrocks. It was his affair to forge such a weapon out of the material of 30th Corps that would enable it to rise above its difficulties and cut through to the heart of the enemy. Even in early September, when it might have been presumed that his name would have been unknown and of little interest to those outside his Headquarters, and the headquarters of the divisions under his command, his presence and his Inspiration reached back from the forward positions north of Hechtel to the supply dumps south of the Seine. Lorry drivers, bringing up the sinews of war, became aware of themselves as vital parts of this machine, and those who wore the sign of 30th Corps on their sleeves developed a “Regimental” pride in it. The Wild Boar of 30th Corps swiftly became famous. Follow this sign, men said, and you are on the right road. It blazed the trail that would lead on to victory.
It was not merely by chance that Horrocks and Patton attracted all available supplies to their efforts and commanded the spearheads of attack. No two men could have been more different in aspect and in the outward manifestations of personality, yet both generated a sense of excitement, the one representing all that is best in the old English character, and the other all that is best in the flamboyant character of new America.
The personality of Lt. Gen. Horrocks is of the greatest importance in considering this whole period, and it may be true to say that the presence of Patton and Horrocks changed the shape of the war in Northwest Europe. Without such a man to serve him Montgomery might well have found his vision a sheer impossibility, and would then have been forced to turn his whole attention to Antwerp. As it was, the mighty leap of his spearheads along a single narrow corridor to the north to bestride the great rivers Maas and Waal and Neder Rhine, and a score of lesser streams and canals, almost came true.
It was surprising in those days how few seemed to understand the undoubted plain truth that the price of the Arnhem gamble, win, lose or draw, must be Antwerp. It meant, too, that the price of Arnhem, short of total victory, and the isolation of the whole of Western Holland, must be to make victory impossible in 1944. Yet it was undertaken for the reverse reasons. It is true that de Guingand, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, understood this clearly, but de Guingand was ill, and away from the front at the important times, and free from the “infection” that seemed to possess all those present.
But the decision had been made. Incredibly the man of caution, the master of the set-piece battle, threw caution to the winds and embraced the ideas of a Patton. It is the more remarkable that Montgomery had achieved this state of mind even before Patton had shown his paces. The brain child was his own. And in the second and third weeks of September, while the left flank of the battle was forgotten, it remained only for all concerned to strive for success. Through all the second week of September the tension grew, and each man slept with the sense that the dawn might bring an experience that would be the peak of a lifetime. Day after day those at the top knew of the postponements of the great air drop, and masked all their doubts and fears from the troops under them. The U.S. First Army, turning due east, was opening up a dangerous gap on the right flank of the British, and the 11th Armored Division was still involved on the canal crossings east of Antwerp. By September 13th the 15th Scottish of 12th Corps had taken over in the Gheel bridgehead from 50th Division, and had established a small bridgehead at Rethy. The going was very hard indeed, and the enemy pressure was as tight as a vise. That open country of canals, and the death-traps of straight roads like causeways, was a foretaste of Holland, and the very thought of water began to make men shudder.
By mid-September 12th Corps had moved into position on the left flank of 30th Corps, and the British 1st Corps was coming up as fast as possible to take over on the Canadian right. It seemed unbearably slow to those who waited tensed and ready in the fields north of Hechtel and held the bridgeheads almost on the Dutch frontier. In all truth the whole performance had been magnificent, and the Canadians received far less than their due. At last, as the 11th Armored Division moved east through Herenthals to the dim region of Bree, three divisions of the First Allied Airborne Army were committed to the most daring operation of the campaign in Europe, and the Guards burst out of their bridgehead to cross the Dutch frontier within twenty miles on a straight road of the industrial town of Eindhoven, and with nearly eighty miles to go. It was the morning of September 17th.
There would be no time for normal military precautions. There was time only to race over a single narrow road regardless of the existence of an enemy, through Eindhoven, Son, Veghel, Grave, Nijmegen, and on to Arnhem. There would be more than twenty rivers and canals to cross, including the giant bridges at Grave, Nijmegen and Arnhem. The flanks would be wide open; the supply line would be a vulnerable thread. On the left flank 12th Corps would make all possible speed, but whatever speed it might make it could not be fast enough. No hold-ups were possible, and at the outset hold-ups there were. It was, in fact, a plan that presumed the absence of an enemy even capable of blowing a bridge.
September 17th was the first possible moment for 30th Corps to move, and it was at least a week too late. By September 17th the German formations re-organizing in the area Arnhem-Apeldoorn were perfectly placed for counterattack, and with a strong force of Tiger tanks available.
[These activities were known to British Intelligence. See N. W. Europe, 1944-45.]
Nevertheless there was no room for even a doubt of success in the mind of any man on the ground. Nearly every man knew that the British 1st Airborne Division was dropping at Arnhem, and that the U.S. 82nd and 101st Divisions were seizing the bridges at Nijmegen and Grave and opening up the route through from Eindhoven. The link-up must be made all along the line.
In the last forty-eight hours no sign of a qualm clouded the face of Lt. Gen. Horrocks, and on the night of Saturday the 16th the tension in the fields north of Hechtel and in the bridgehead was so strong that it was like a tangible force in the darkness, a kind of dynamism generated by thousands of men poised for battle.
At the outset, enemy self-propelled guns supporting troops well dug in on the flanks harried the advance of the Guards driving up the ribbon of the concrete road through a flat landscape of heather and pine, and with no room to maneuver or deploy off the road. The first bound carried them to the village of Valkenswaard, a bare six miles from their take-off. Ahead of them, they now knew, the airborne troops were fighting on the road from Eindhoven to Grave. Beyond that they knew very little.
The next day, the 18th, was September at its best. While the Irish Guards, carrying infantry on their tanks, pressed on to the relief of the 101st Airborne in Eindhoven, the armored column was too often at rest by the roadside behind them. The young Guardsmen, climbing from their tanks, had time to shave, taking advantage of the hold-up to preserve the appearance for which they were famous. But these were ominous signs. The flat lands of Holland from Eindhoven to Arnhem billowed with discarded parachutes, and still the gliders were flying in, and the troop-carriers were dropping their burdens of men and supplies to drift gently down to earth. On that afternoon of the 18th the Guards were in Eindhoven to relieve the paratroops and the tanks were wedged nose to tail through all the narrow ways, hemmed in the midst of the cheering crowds. For more than twenty-four hours they had listened to the dangerous sounds of war closing round them. They had watched the last of the Germans, sullen and menacing and “draped with grenades,” leaving in their trucks, and for some hours there had been a vacuum.
On that night of the 18th, while the Germans counterattacked the 101st Airborne on the road through Son, St. Oadenrode and Veghel, young and old walked in there parks, marvelling at the bearing of the young soldiers bivouacked there. Those young men, whose role it was to ride the tanks, and to leap off to attack the enemy threatening the road, behaved with an extraordinary gentleness towards the quiet people of this Dutch town. There like was seldom seen again. They will never be forgotten.
