But of course they did! In fact, the Germans were arguably saved from being defeated in 1944 by a colossal logistic crisis that gripped the Allies after the breakout from Normandy!

Following the American breakout from the Normandy beachhead in August 1944, the Allies had outraced their own timetables as the German Army fled back to the frontier: the original plan for Operation Overlord had assumed that the Allies would not reach the River Seine until early September 1944, when in fact they were now 150 miles beyond. U.S. troops first crossed the German border on 11 September 1944, over seven months ahead of schedule. Such a rate of advance provoked “victory fever” in higher headquarters and generated unrealistic expectations. The German Army was not yet a spent force, and the rate of advance was unsustainable: it had completely torn up the logistics concept made before the launch of Overlord, and ground lines of communication could simply not keep up with the advance.

The problems began at the point of disembarkation: despite the capture of Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, and Brest, these ports had either been sabotaged by German defenders or were too small for the kind of supply capacity the Allied advance needed. Even as late as November 1944, 63% of the U.S. Army’s supplies still came through the small Normandy ports or directly over the D-Day beaches. While the beaches well exceeded their planned capacity, the supplies that were landed at Utah and Omaha were deposited directly on to the beach as the Mulberry Harbour that had been built at Omaha had been wrecked in the Great Storm of 19 June. The delivery of supplies was thus easily slowed by bad weather and it was uncertain whether the intact British Mulberry at Gold Beach could survive through the winter. Most other ports on Channel coast were wrecked, were too small, or were still held as fortresses by Germans (some of which would not lay down their arms until the general German surrender in 1945!). The river port of Rouen fell on 31 August and Le Havre on 12 September, and they became the main ports for the British “White Ball Route” transferring supplies to Paris, but Calais required three weeks to put back into operation, and Dunkirk did not surrender until 6 May 1945.

One of the worst Allied failures was the neglect in clearing the Scheldt estuary. The great port of Antwerp had been liberated on 4 September by the British Second Army. However, the German Fifteenth Army was permitted to withdraw over the Scheldt and occupy the island of Walcheren. Here it could dominate the approaches to Antwerp with coastal artillery. After one attempt to clear the approaches by the Canadians, all such attacks were abandoned until after Operation Market Garden. It was not until 28 November, twelve weeks after Antwerp’s liberation, that its port was actually usable. The state of the ports and their transport infrastructure was so bad that Marseilles, hundreds of miles to the south on the Mediterranean coast, became one of the most important ports: it handled an average of half a million tons of cargo a month and accounted for nearly a third of Allied cargo delivered to Europe in 1944-45.

Even when ports could be restored, there remained the problem of distance. Cherbourg and the Brittany ports had been seen as essential to support the planned advance after the breakout from Normandy, but the unexpectedly-rapid German collapse meant that they were now hundreds of miles behind the front line. Ground Lines of Communication extended to over 480 kilometres from the beachheads. By way of comparison, the modern British Army assumes lines of communication by road of 400 kilometres before it is necessary to establish a new rail, sea or air head. All of these would have to be reconstructed: the French railway network, especially in the suburbs around Paris, had been thoroughly bombed by the RAF and USAAF as part of interdiction efforts during the Normandy Campaign.

The average U.S. division required 650 tons of combat supplies per day, translating into 27,750 tons of supply per day for the entire U.S. Army in France. All this had to come by road, and naturally there was not enough transport. British logistics in particular were hobbled by both technical problems and a failure to standardise its vehicles: 1,400 3-ton Austin trucks had to be removed from service owing to faulty pistons, a fault that was soon found to extend to every replacement engine. Furthermore, owing to its contract system with a wide variety of civilian manufacturers, the British Army had to service some 600 different types of vehicle, which ensured a quartermaster’s nightmare of having to stock tens of thousands of incompatible spare parts.

In such circumstances, drastic improvisation was necessary: the Communications Zone (COMZ) combed some 6,000 vehicles out of Allied formations to create a theatre reserve of trucks, which entailed the de-motorisation of all the heavy artillery of the U.S. Twelfth Army Group, and two divisions of the British Twenty-First Army Group. Three divisions newly arrived in France were completely immobilised to supply trucks to the COMZ. Loads were restricted to only the most essential: fuel, rations, and ammunition. Spare parts, clothing, and engineering stores were all deferred. The “Red Ball Express” opened on 25 August. This was a truck convoy system operating on one-way highways entirely closed to civilian traffic, delivering supplies from the Normandy beachheads to depots south of Paris. Manned largely by segregated African American soldiers in the U.S. Army’s Motor Transport Service, at its peak the Red Ball Express delivered 12,500 tons daily, with the average trip taking seventy hours. The similar British “Red Lion Route” was established explicitly for Market Garden and delivered 650 tons a day from Bayeux to Brussels from September-October 1944.

Despite the Red Ball Express’ remarkable success, it was not a sustainable solution. At its best, it delivered 12,500 tons of supplies a day. By contrast, after the restoration of the French railway network, in November 1944 the U.S. Army’s Military Railway Service was able to consistently deliver 23,000 tons east of the River Seine a day. The Red Ball Expressed consumed 300,000 gallons of fuel per day in its own right, approximately five gallons of fuel consumed to deliver one gallon of fuel to the front, while some 9,000 vehicles were written off in road traffic accidents, largely caused by sleep deprivation. In several cases the advance was so swift that transport aircraft and even bombers were used to resupply front-line formations (Patton’s Third Army, advancing through one of France’s finest wine-producing regions, awarded hundreds of cases of champagne to their transport pilots) However, air despatch consumed three gallons of fuel for every two it delivered.

By early September 1944, the advance had faltered: compared to 19,000 tons per day at the start of August, Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Third Army and Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges’ First Army were receiving 3,500 tons per day, approximately half their actual needs. On 2 September, Hodges’ V and XIX Corps were forced to halt for two days for want of supplies. Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group, despite advancing along the “inside track” closer to the Channel ports, was beset by similar problems: General Sir Miles Dempsey was forced to halt VIII Corps on the Seine for two weeks. The shortage of transport was so acute that the tonnage of supplies U.S. XX Corps’ demanded was greater than the tonnage of transport allocated to the entire Third Army! Furthermore, the rate of the advance had been so great, coupled with the COMZ’s decision to restrict deliveries of spare parts in favour of more urgent combat supplies, that by mid-September staggering numbers of vehicles had been lost to maintenance problems: the U.S. 3rd Armored Division disposed of 75 tanks out of an establishment strength of 232, while in a ten-day period the British 11th Armoured Division lost seven tanks to mechanical breakdown for every one lost to enemy action.

By mid September 1944, therefore, the Allies were operating at the end of lines of communication that were so over-extended they could barely support an advance by a single corps, and the shortage of transport was so acute it was necessary to reduce newly-arrived formations to combat ineffectiveness to keep the supply lines running. Many of its formations were badly understrength owing to maintenance problems that had their root cause in the supply crisis. All this should be remembered when contemplating the scale of the operation the Allies were considering in Operation Market Garden that same month...

Sources

Antony Beevor, Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944

Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45

Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton

Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45

Roland G. Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies: September 1944 – May 1945

Steven J. Zaloga, Atlas of the European Campaign, 1944-45