Why Eisenhower Stopped the Rhine Crossing That Would Have Ended the War
The map on the table showed the Rine. Not a distant objective, not a line on a planning document months away. The Rine right there, close enough that American patrols had already crossed it in rubber boats and come back with a simple report. Nothing on the other side. The Zigfried Freed line bunkers were empty.
The German 19th Army had been shattered. Six of its eight divisions functionally destroyed and the remnants were running east with nothing behind them but open country. Lieutenant General Alexander Patch looked at his Sixth Army Group commander and said they were ready. Eight battalions, pontoon bridges staged DUKW, amphibious trucks rolling toward the crossing sites near Rastat.
The plan was elegant in its simplicity. Go over the river, establish a bridge head, then turn north along the east bank and unhinge the entire German defensive line from behind the Sief Freed line. That massive belt of concrete and steel that had stalled every other Allied army on the Western Front, would be rolled up from the flank.
Its defenders would find Americans behind them. Jacob Devers agreed. They would cross the next day. Then two jeeps pulled up outside the command post. Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley stepped out. They had just come from visiting George Patton at Nancy, whose third army was stuck in the mud of Lraine, burning fuel and lives for negligible gains. Bradley looked tired.
Eisenhower looked irritated, and what the Supreme Commander told devs in that room would haunt historians for the next 80 years. Stop. Do not cross the Rine. Turn north. Give two of your divisions to Patton. It was November 24th, 1944. The first Allied troops had reached the Rine 5 days earlier.
The crossing was set to launch within 24 hours and the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe killed it with a sentence. Deers wrote in his diary that night, and I want to read his words carefully because they are the words of a man who understood exactly what had just happened. He wrote, “Both Patch and I were set to cross the Rine, and we had a clean breakthrough.
By driving hard, I feel that we could have accomplished our mission. And then, the decision not to cross the Rine was a blow to both Patch and myself. The Germans are certainly disorganized and the German 19th Army is practically destroyed. And then this quietly devastating. I feel as if I do not belong to the same team.
A lot of you in the comments have been asking for this one and I want to do it justice. Because the story of Jacob Devers is not just the story of one general getting sidelined. It is the story of how the American command system in World War II rewarded personal loyalty over battlefield results and how the cost of that system was measured in American lives.
To understand why Eisenhower said no, you have to understand who Jacob Devers was, where he came from, and why the Supreme Commander considered him a threat long before he ever reached the Rine. Devers was born September 8th, 1887 in York, Pennsylvania. His father, Philip, was a watchmaker. His mother, Elicate Locks, was a homemaker. The family was strict evangelical Lutheran.
No smoking, no drinking, no cards. Divers kept those habits his entire life, which sounds like a small detail, but it matters enormously. In the American Officer Corps of the 1940s, not drinking and not playing poker meant you were not part of the club. It meant you were an outsider at every social gathering, every informal meeting, every late night session where real decisions got hashed out over whiskey and cigarettes.
He played quarterback in high school, captained the basketball team, and turned down Lehigh University to attend West Point. He graduated in 1909 39th in a class of 103. His classmates included George Patton, William Simpson, and Robert Eichelberger, all future fourstar generals. Devers actually outranked Patton academically by seven spots.
He chose field artillery and got one of only nine available slots because enough higher ranked cadets preferred other branches. Here is where the story gets interesting. After his initial assignments with pack artillery at Vancouver barracks, Devs returned to West Point in 1912 as a mathematics instructor.
He also coached the basketball team. And among his players were two cadets named Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley. The man who would one day command 350,000 troops in combat, had once been the instructor grading the future Supreme Commander’s homework and teaching the future 12th Army Group commander to dribble.
I think that dynamic, the former teacher, now subordinate to his former students, never fully went away. And I think it nawed at Eisenhower in ways that shaped everything that followed. During World War I, Devers was kept stateside as an artillery instructor at Fort Sil. The army considered his expertise too valuable for the front.
He rose to temporary colonel by October 1918, but the armistice ended his chance at combat. After the war, he studied at the French artillery school at Trier, absorbing Allied and German tactical methods that would prove critical 25 years later. The inter war years are where Devers built his reputation as something the American army badly needed and rarely rewarded. An innovator.
At the Field Artillery School from 1925 to 1929, he directed the gunnery department and became one of the loudest voices for mechanization, pushing to replace horses with tractors against fierce institutional resistance. He graduated from the Command and General Staff School as a distinguished graduate, 42nd out of 258, and later completed the Army War College.
George Marshall noticed him. By 1940, Marshall had selected Devers as one of four generals tasked with preparing the army for war. If you are finding this valuable, subscribing genuinely helps. It tells the algorithm this kind of deep research is worth showing to more people. Now back to devs. Then in August 1941, Marshall made a move that tells you everything about how highly he valued this officer.
He appointed an artilleryman, not a cavalryman, not a tanker, an artillery man to command the armored force at Fort Knox. The dying Adna Chaffy Jr., the father of the American armored force, had personally handpicked Devers as his successor. Marshall wanted, and I am quoting the official rationale here, an expert in firepower and control of the emerging, highly mechanized and mobile tank force.
The results speak for themselves. Devers expanded the armored force from four divisions to 16. He pushed development of the M4 Sherman tank. He championed combined arms doctrine that integrated armor, infantry, and artillery at every level. He demanded 250 M26 Persings for the Normandy invasion, insisting the army needed a tank that could fight German Panthers and Tigers on equal terms.
That request was overruled. When Sherman started burning in Normandy, Devers was proven right. He also helped develop the DUKW amphibious truck, a vehicle that would prove indispensable in every theater of the war. And then it got worse because everything Devers did right made him more threatening to the man who mattered most.
When Lieutenant General Frank Andrews was killed in a plane crash in Iceland in May 1943, Marshall appointed Devers to command EOSA, the European theater of operations, the staging ground for the invasion of France. Divers arrived in England on May 9th and spent eight months building the machine that would execute Overlord.
When he took command, 133,000 American troops were in Britain. By December 1943, that number had grown to 773,753, a nearly six-fold increase. He directed the construction of 66 operational air drums, coordinated the combined bomber offensive, and worked closely with British General Frederick Morgan’s planning staff.
He insisted that American units smaller than core not serve directly under British command, what he called the Persing principle. During this period, Devers built a strong working relationship with the British. Churchill sent him a handwritten letter praising American daylight bombing raids. British commanders found him professional and effective.
Marshall considered him a leading candidate to command an army group for overlord. But when Eisenhower was named Supreme Commander in December 1943, he wanted his own men. According to the official army history, Eisenhower successfully pushed Bradley for the army group command and then persuaded Marshall to move both devs and ear to the Mediterranean theater.
Marshall, the official history notes, felt that Eisenhower was trying to pack aef with his own supporters. Think about what happened here. Devers had built the theater. He had taken it from 133,000 troops to nearly 800,000. He had constructed the infrastructure, coordinated with the British, and laid the groundwork for the invasion.
And Eisenhower had him removed before the invasion could launch. Devers was shipped to the Mediterranean as deputy supreme allied commander under a British general. The exile had begun. Bradley’s role in this deserves attention because it becomes a pattern. Bradley had been Devers’ student at West Point. Now Bradley was the preferred man, the insider, the one Eisenhower trusted because Bradley never challenged him, never pushed back, never made Eisenhower feel threatened.
According to Rick Atkinson, Bradley was cautious, methodical, and supremely loyal to Eisenhower. These were the qualities that got you promoted in sh AeF aggressive competence without political difference which was de’s defining trait got you sent to the Mediterranean. The friction between Eisenhower and Devs had roots stretching back to December 1942 when devs toured North Africa.
Eisenhower was according to multiple accounts defensive and suspicious. Worried that Marshall had sent Devors to replace him. Devers made critical comments about the handling of the first armored division. Eisenhower never forgave it. In 1943, they clashed again over transferring heavy bombers from England to support Mediterranean operations.
Divers protecting the overlord buildup resisted. The relationship never recovered. Andrew Bakovich, writing in the American Conservative, identified the core problem with devastating clarity. He wrote that Eisenhower viewed devers as a threat, a Marshall favorite, poised to assume the top spot if Eisenhower stumbled.
And Basvich concluded that nothing Devers could do was going to win Eisenhower’s favor. Indeed, the better his performance, the less likely he was to gain Eisenhower’s trust and confidence. Carlo Desta put it just as bluntly in his Eisenhower biography. He wrote that Eisenhower’s low regard for Devers was based on personal dislike and that had de not been an outsider and an unwelcome protege of Marshall, Eisenhower’s attitude might have been quite different.
I believe this is the key to the entire story. And Devers’ personality compounded the problem. He did not drink. He did not smoke. He did not play cards or polo with Eisenhower and Bradley. His preferred beverage was tea. Patton, according to Basvich, was a world-class suckup when it served his purposes. But Devers’ efforts to ingratiate himself came across as clumsy and transparent.
He believed that results would speak for themselves, which proved naively optimistic in the political world of wartime high command. This was not just about divers. The American army in World War II had a structural problem. The men who were best at producing results were often the worst at navigating the command hierarchy, and the hierarchy punished them for it.
We have seen this pattern with Terry Allen, with Robert Eichelberger, with Lucian Truscott. Divers is the most consequential example because the stakes were not just one division or one battle. The stakes were potentially the entire Western Front. Now, let me tell you what Devers did in the Mediterranean because his performance there makes Eisenhower’s later treatment of him even harder to justify.
When the Southern France invasion, originally cenamed Anvil, was canled in April 1944 due to shipping shortages, Devs refused to reallocate the supplies already stockpiled. He protected 64 ships loaded with anvil cargo and ordered patch to continue planning. Anyway, when the operation was revived on June 24th, 75% of required supplies for a two-dision assault were already on hand, entirely because of Devers’ foresight.
The army’s official history stated that the campaign might well not have taken place at all without the efforts of General Devers. Churchill vehemently opposed Dragoon, preferring operations toward the Balkans to counter Soviet influence. He threatened resignation. Eisenhower called his bluff. The combined chiefs authorized the operation on July 14th and it was renamed Dragoon on August 1st.
Churchill claimed he had been draoned into it. Operation Dragoon hit the French Riviera on August 15th, 1944. The assault force included patch’s seventh army with Truscott’s sixth core spearheading three veteran divisions, the 3rd, 36th, and 45th infantry, plus French army B under General Datra de Tasini.
Against them stood the German 19th Army, roughly 85,000 second rate troops, including pressed Eastern European volunteers with only one under strength Panzer Division. The naval task force deployed 887 ships, five battleships, 20 cruisers, and nine escort carriers. Approximately 3,470 aircraft flew from Corsa and Sardinia.
The contrast with Normandy was staggering. D-Day casualties at Dragoon totaled approximately 395, roughly onetenth of Normy’s. Within 48 hours, American units had penetrated 20 mi inland. Then, Brigadier General Frederick Butler’s mechanized task force executed one of the most remarkable dashes of the entire war, advancing 235 miles in 4 days to reach Montar in the Ron Valley, attempting to trap the retreating German 19th Army before it could escape north.
Now, most accounts of Dragoon mention the landings and move on. But the operational execution was more impressive than the initial assault. Tulong and Marseilles declared fortresses by Hitler with orders to hold to the last man fell on August 28th, a full month ahead of Allied planning estimates.
Planners had expected 40 days to capture them. French forces under Dilatra invested both cities simultaneously while American divisions pushed north, a feat of coordination that required devers to manage his multinational force with considerable diplomatic skill. Marseilles’s port was operational within two weeks of capture and eventually handled over two million tons of supplies from September 1944 to January 1945, providing roughly onethird of all Allied supply requirements on the Western Front.
Without Marseilles, the chronic logistical crisis that hamstrung Eisenhower’s armies through the fall of 1944 would have been significantly worse. The port of Antworp, which everyone remembers, was not fully operational until late November. Marseilles was running at capacity weeks earlier. In three weeks, sixth army group forces advanced 400 miles, liberated over 10,000 square miles of French territory, and inflicted approximately 143,250 German casualties, including over 100,000 prisoners.
Allied losses totaled roughly 15,500. On September 10th, De’s forces linked up with Patton’s third army near Djon. Eisenhower himself conceded that there was no development of that period which added more decisively to Allied advantages than the secondary attack coming up the Ron Valley. Devs wrote that Dragoon would go down as a classic for surprise, exploitation, and results.
He was right. It remains one of the most successful and most overlooked operations of the war. and the man who made it happen, who preserved the supplies when the operation was cancelled, who managed a multinational force, including a politically sensitive French army with a commander who reported simultaneously to devs and to de Gaul, received almost no credit for it in the postwar histories.
What happened next should have ended the debate about devs forever. Through the fall of 1944, while Bradley’s 12 divisions were being chewed up in the Herkin Forest for minimal gains, and Patton’s third army fought mud as much as Germans and Lraine, Devers’s sixth army group was virtually the only Allied force making significant territorial progress.
The advance through the Voge Mountains deserves its own recognition. No army had ever successfully penetrated the high Voge barrier in the history of European warfare. The terrain is brutal, a mass of forested ridgelines, narrow valleys, and roads that become mud tracks in autumn rain. The Germans considered the Vojge impassible in force and allocated their reserves accordingly.
Dvers’s forces proved them wrong. The French first army forced the Belelffort Gap, the historic corridor between the Voj and Jura Mountains that had served as a strategic gateway since the Romans. The Seventh Army simultaneously punched through the Sever Gap to the north in a massive double envelopment that trapped the German forces between them.
Six of the German 19th Army’s eight divisions were nearly destroyed. It was one of the cleanest operational victories of the fall campaign and it received almost no press coverage because the correspondents were all in the north following Bradley and Patton. The breakthrough was spectacular. The French first armored division reached the Rine on November 19th, the first Allied units to touch the river anywhere on the Western Front.
The clerk’s French second armored division liberated Strawborg on November 23rd, fulfilling the oath of Kufra sworn in the Sahara in 1941, a pledge not to lay down their arms until French colors flew over Strawburg Cathedral. By November 24th, 15th Corps had reached the Rhine at Straborg and DUKW amphibious truck companies were already rolling toward the crossing sites.
And here we are back at that command post. Devs, Patch, and Highlip energetically planning the crossing. Patrols reporting empty bunkers on the east bank, eight battalions ready. The official army history confirmed that only a large mishmash of personnel and units, the sweepings from both the Voj Alsatian battlefields and the German Transine military regions were left to defend the borders of the Reich.
German General Seek Freedfall later confirmed from the other side. He wrote in his memoirs that until mid-occtober the enemy could have broken through at any point with ease and crossed the Rine and thrust deep into Germany almost unhindered. Then Eisenhower and Bradley arrived and shut it down. Eisenhower offered three strategic justifications.
First, his broadfront strategy demanded reaching the Rine along its entire length before crossing with the main effort targeting the rurer industrial region in the north, not southern Germany. Second, he feared a bridge head at Rastat could be cut off between the Kmar pocket to the south and German forces in the SAR to the north.
Third, burned by Market Gardens’s failure two months earlier, he was unwilling to risk another exposed salient. I think all three reasons collapse under scrutiny. Keith Bon, a respected military analyst, wrote that the reasons Eisenhower gave were, and I am quoting directly, nonsense. The official Army history chapter covering this episode is titled Lost Opportunities with a subsection called a dubious decision.
For an official institutional history to use those words tells you everything, consider the Market Garden comparison. Eisenhower had approved Montgomery’s massive gamble. 35,000 paratroopers and an armored thrust along a single road through the Netherlands against formidable opposition, including the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions that intelligence had detected in the area.
Rick Atkinson called it an epic failure that produced a 65m salient leading nowhere at a cost of approximately 17,000 Allied casualties. Yet, when devs proposed a far less costly river crossing against virtually non-existent defenses, Eisenhower refused. Even Jeffrey Crane, who reviewed David Collie’s book skeptically for the strategy bridge, conceded that any of Collie’s alternative proposals would have been superior to Market Garden, offering greater reward at less risk and cost.
The deeper reasons were personal and institutional. David Collie argued that Eisenhower would never allow Deverses the accolades that would come at the expense of Bradley and Patton. He chose not to pass to the open man, but instead threw into coverage. Bradley accompanied Eisenhower on November 24th and had a direct interest in receiving DE’s divisions for Patton’s stalled offensive.
The resource allocation pattern was consistent throughout. Eisenhower treated the sixth army group as something of an unloved stepchild. Devs received only one in eight replacements going to the Western Front, a starvation ration for an army group in active combat. Russell Wgley captured it precisely. He wrote that Eisenhower’s relations with Devs had none of the warmth or patience of the Supreme Commander’s dealings with his friends in the 12th Army Group.
Instead, there was a two ready willingness to adopt an accusatory tone at the least hint of anything going wrong. The consequences of the halt order were immediate and catastrophic. This is the part the official histories gloss over, and it is the part that matters most because this is where the cost gets measured in bodies.
Hitler’s directives of November 24 and 27 committed the German 19th Army to holding a bridge head west of the Rine. What became the Kulmar pocket, what had been a shattered army that could have been sealed off by a Rine crossing instead, received massive reinforcement. Nine fresh infantry divisions and two armored brigades poured across the river from Germany into the pocket.
It stretched 65 km along the Rine and 50 km deep, encompassing 850 square miles of the Alsatian plane. A French offensive in mid December failed to reduce it. The terrain was nightmarish for offensive operations. Flat plane cut by innumerable streams and drainage canals dotted with stone villages that German defenders turned into fortresses.
Every farm building became a strong point. Every canal crossing became an ambush site. The winter was the coldest in 50 years. Temperatures dropped to -20° C, roughly -4° F with over 3 ft of snow. Delatra described the conditions as Siberian. Frostbite became as dangerous as enemy fire. French colonial troops from North Africa, men who had fought brilliantly in the mountains of Italy in the hills of the Voj, suffered terribly in the cold.
Their equipment was inadequate and their winter clothing non-existent. German minefields were devastating. One French armored brigade lost 36 of roughly 50 medium tanks to mines in a single engagement. The French asked for American reinforcement. Devors stretched thin across a front that kept expanding as Eisenhower stripped his forces for Bradley had almost nothing to give.
Then on December 31st, 1944, Hitler launched Operation Nordwind, the last major German offensive on the Western Front. Nine divisions attacked along a 68 mile front against Devers’s already weakened forces, forces that had been stripped of divisions to support Patton’s counterattack in the Bulge. The Luftwaffa committed roughly 1,000 aircraft. This was not a sideshow.
It was the second largest German offensive in the West, involving more divisions than the initial Arden’s attack in the sixth Panzer Army sector. But because it happened in Devers’ sector and not Bradley’s, it barely registers in most histories of the war. At the twin villages of Hatton and Ritterhoffen, the fighting reached an intensity that veterans compared to Stalingrad, Germans and Americans occupied parts of the same buildings for two weeks.
Tanks fired at each other from across village streets at ranges of 50 yards. The 14th Armored Division and the 79th Infantry Division fought house to house in conditions so chaotic that friendly fire incidents became almost unavoidable. Hans Funluck, one of the German commanders, later called it one of the hardest and most costly battles that ever raged.
American casualties from Nordwind reached approximately 14,716 for Sixth Corps alone. The broader Elsas campaign encompassing Nordwind, the Culmer Pocket, and the defensive fighting across the entire sixth army group sector cost roughly 29,000 American casualties, including approximately 7,000 killed. Here’s a number that I think puts this in perspective.
The Battle of the Bulge cost approximately 89,000 American casualties. The Elsass campaign cost 29,000. Together, these two winter campaigns, both of which Devers’ forces were involved in defending against, consumed more American lives than the entire Normandy campaign from D-Day through the breakout, and the Elsas fighting gets almost no attention in the standard histories.
Overlapping with the fighting came the Strabore crisis, which I think reveals more about Eisenhower’s relationship with Devs than almost any other episode. On December 26th, with the Battle of the Bulge still raging in Bradley’s sector, Eisenhower personally drew a map, ordering devils to fall back nearly 40 miles to the Voge Mountains, abandoning Strawburg and the entire Alsatian plane.
The military logic was simple. Shortening the line would free divisions for the Arden’s counterattack. But the political and moral implications were catastrophic. Strawber had been liberated barely a month earlier. Its population had greeted the French troops with celebrations in the streets. abandoning the city would hand it back to the Nazis who had already drawn up lists of Alsatians to be deported or executed for collaborating with the liberation forces.
Divers flew to Versailles to argue against it. He delayed execution claiming the orders were discretionary, but El Smith called him and snapped, “Eisenhower thinks you have been disloyal.” De Gaulle exploded. He threatened to pull the French first army out of the alliance entirely. Eisenhower counter threatened to cut off all American logistical support to French forces.
De Gaul then threatened to forbid Allied use of French railroads and communications, a potentially crippling logistical blow. General called Churchill directly on January 2nd, 1945. At a tense summit at the train and palace in Versailles, Churchill pleaded for the city. Eisenhower relented. The final offensive to reduce the Culmer pocket ran from January 20th to February 9th, 1945.
It required the commitment of the American 21st corps, the third infantry division, the 12th armored division, elements of the 28th, 75th, and 63rd infantry divisions, and the full strength of the French First Army. Audi Murphy earned his Medal of Honor during this fighting. His famous lone stand on a burning M10 tank destroyer at Holtz on January 26th, holding off an entire German infantry company.
Total Allied casualties in the final pocket reduction reached approximately 21,8,000 American and 13,000 French. German losses exceeded 22,000 permanent casualties plus 16,438 prisoners. And here is the bitter irony that sits at the heart of this story. Eisenhower ordered the halt. The halt created the pocket. And then Eisenhower blamed devers for the pocket’s existence.
In crusade in Europe, he wrote that the pocket had always irritated him with no mention of his own role in creating it. He blamed Devers and Delatra’s timmerousness while constantly diverting their resources to Bradley and Patton. He considered sacking devers and giving the army group to patch. In my view, this is the most damning part of the entire affair.
Eisenhower made the decision. The consequences followed directly. And then he blamed the man who had warned him. On February 1st, 1945, Eisenhower produced a confidential ranking of his senior commanders. He described Devers as enthusiastic but often inaccurate in statements and evaluations and placed him 24th out of 38 generals.
24th for an army group commander. To put this in perspective, only three officers in the entire Allied command structure held the rank of army group commander. Montgomery commanded 21st Army Group. Bradley commanded 12th Army Group. Devs commanded sixth army group. And Eisenhower ranked Devers below division commanders.
Devers’s own subordinates ranked higher. Truscott was in the top six. Patch was in the top 15. Bradley’s separate ranking placed devs at 21 out of 24. The man commanding one of only three Allied army groups in Europe was ranked below his own core in army commanders. The contradiction was glaring. If Eisenhower truly believed Devers was that incompetent, he had the authority and the obligation to relieve him.
He relieved other generals for less. But Devers was Marshall’s man and Marshall would have demanded an explanation. Eisenhower could not provide one based on results because Dev’s results were better than most of his peers. So instead, he gave him a bad ranking and hoped the paperwork would do the damage the battlefield record could not justify.
I think this tells you everything about how the system worked. Marshall’s response was to ignore Eisenhower’s assessment completely. On March 8th, 1945, Marshall promoted Devers to full general four stars ahead of Spots, Bradley, and Patton, making Devers the second highest ranking American officer in Europe. It was a direct rebuke, but Marshall could not protect Dever’s legacy in the long run.
After the war, Eisenhower and Bradley wrote their memoirs, and those memoirs became the received wisdom. Devors never wrote his. Eisenhower’s official report gave the Seventh Army eight pages out of 180. The official Army history of Dever’s campaign, Riviera to the Rine, was not published until 1993.
It took until 2015 for a definitive scholarly biography to appear. Bradley became chief of staff, first chairman of the Joint Chiefs, received a fifth star. Devs never got one despite commanding at the same echelon. The revisionist reassessment has built considerable force. Rick Atkinson told the Chicago Tribune that if you asked the average American who DeS was, you would get a blank stare.
And yet, he was a fantastically interesting and quite accomplished officer. Atkinson stated directly to the National World War II Museum that he believed Eisenhower’s refusal to allow the Rine crossing was probably a mistake. David Collie’s decision at Strawborg made the counterfactual case most forcefully. The Times literary supplement reviewer concluded that had Deuced, Hitler would have had to move thousands of the troops then massing behind the Ardens.
So, no battle of the Bulge. Brigadier General Garrison Davidson, the Seventh Army’s chief engineer, who personally prepared the crossing sites, wrote decades later that perhaps success would have eliminated the possibility of the Bulge entirely. 40,000 casualties there could have been avoided and the war shortened by a number of months.
James Scott Wheeler’s biography established the full scholarly case. Carlo Deeste called it the best account of the controversy he had read. Wheeler described Devers as a general whose contributions to victory in Europe are topped only by Eisenhower’s. I want to be fair, not everyone agrees. Jeffrey Crane argued that simply breaching a defensive line does not pre-ordain its collapse.
There were real supply concerns and real risks to Devers’s flanks. I think the honest assessment is this. We cannot know with certainty that a Rine crossing in November 1944 would have ended the war, but we can say with considerable confidence that it would have prevented or dramatically altered the Culmer Pocket fighting, Nordwind, and the entire Alsas winter campaign.
That alone represents tens of thousands of casualties that might never have happened. And I think there’s a broader lesson here that goes beyond the dev story. The American command system in World War II was not a meritocracy. It was a network. Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Hajes, these men had served together, socialized together, built relationships over decades of peaceime service. Devs was outside that network.
So was Eichelberger in the Pacific. So was Terry Allen. The men who actually produce the best results on the battlefield were often the men with the fewest friends at headquarters. One commenter on this channel put it well. It is like any corporate workplace. The person who does the work gets sidelined and the person who takes credit gets the promotion.
The only difference here is that the cost was measured in American lives. The meeting on November 24th was never formally recorded. Eisenhower’s memoir mentioned only the orders he gave. Bradley did not mention the meeting at all. As Charles Whiting concluded, it appears that Eisenhower and Bradley did not want the public to know after the war that the Rine could have been crossed in 1944.
The only reason we know the details is De’s diary. The Sixth Army Group’s record over 265 days of combat tells the story the memoirs tried to bury. Devers’s forces advanced over 900 miles. They captured nearly a million Axis prisoners. They freed 71,400 Allied prisoners of war. They executed one of the war’s most successful amphibious operations.
They opened the port that supplied a third of the Allied armies. They reached the Rine before anyone else. They defended against the last German offensive in the west and they never suffered a catastrophic reverse comparable to the Bulge, Market Garden, or the Herkin Forest. Des was not a perfect general. He admitted underestimating German determination to hold the Coar pocket.
He overestimated French capability to reduce it alone. His political instincts were poor in a war where politics mattered enormously. But the record shows a commander of exceptional energy, organizational brilliance, and tactical aggressiveness. One whom Marshall trusted above almost any other general whom the British and French respected and whose subordinates admired.
He retired on his 62nd birthday in September 1949. He spent his later years ranching in West Virginia and serving as chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission. He died on October 15th, 1979 at the age of 92. No fifth star, no bestselling memoir, no statue on the National Mall. The tragedy is not just that Devs was sidelined.
It is that the sidelining had consequences measured in lives. The Culmer Pocket, Nordwind, the winter fighting in Alsace. These campaigns caused tens of thousands of casualties in battles that a November Rine crossing might have prevented. The war in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945. Whether it might have ended months earlier had Eisenhower trusted results over relationships is a question that haunted devers and now haunts the historians who have finally turned their attention to the general the army forgot.