memoir, Prejudice and Judgment. The publication of Montgomery Memoirs in
1958 and Sir Arthur Bryant's second volume in his edition of Field Marshal
Alanbrooke diaries, Triumph in the West, marked the completion of the British
counterattack on Eisenhower's command and strategy and led to the break between
Eisenhower and Montgomery. ¹¹

Prime Minister Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill published the sixth volume
of his memoirs of World War II, Triumph and Tragedy, in 1953. Churchill omitted
his wartime reservations regarding Eisenhower's command from Triumph and
Tragedy because each man currently held his country's highest political office. ¹²
The American official historian, Forrest C. Pogue, published in 1954 The Supreme
Command in the official history of the United States Army in World War II.
Pogue's measured treatment of Montgomery's single thrust varied widely from the
opinions voiced by staff officers at SHAEF, but Pogue considered he was writing
a history of an Anglo-American undertaking and had to be fair to both sides. ¹³

The present study seeks to approach the sources chronologically as much as
possible. Therefore, the American official histories on logistics by Roland G.
Ruppenthal are grouped with the Canadian official history by Colonel Charles P.
Stacey and the British official history by Major Lionel F. Ellis. Also in the chapter
dealing with the final works produced by participants in the debate are the memoirs
of General Hastings Lionel Lord Ismay, Churchill's chief of staff during the war,
and the memoirs of Eisenhower's deputy supreme commander, Marshal of the
Royal Air Force Lord Arthur Tedder. ¹⁴

A distinct ethnocentrism attached to the writing of both British and Americans
on the last eleven months of the Second World War on the western front. ¹⁵ It was
as if nothing else in the war against Hitler mattered but the disposition of forty
Anglo-American divisions. For example, the British official history Grand Strategy,
Volume 5, August 1943-September 1944, by John Ehrman, described the German
army's defeat in Normandy as "its worst defeat since Stalingrad." ¹⁶ It has become
a matter of faith that in August-September 1944 a concentrated single thrust in
northwest Europe alone would have ended the entire war against Nazi Germany.
When Montgomery in mid-August 1944 made his first call for forty divisions to
advance on the Rhine, Eisenhower did not yet have that many divisions under his
command and would not until sometime in September, so Montgomery's forty-
division request rings false as to timing. This ethnocentric notion was based on
proximity to the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany, without which Germany's
war effort would collapse. Geographic proximity to the Ruhr would determine the
strategic compromises of coalition warfare, which suffered from a shortage of
transportation. The shortest route to the Ruhr nearly always received priority from
SHAEF.

Revisionists came to regard September 1944 as marking the moment that
Eisenhower failed to win the war in northwest Europe by failing to concentrate his
attack along only one axis of advance upon the Rhine, that is, Montgomery through
Holland or Patton through Lorraine. By choosing to advance to the Rhine on two
separate avenues of approach, that is, a broad front, critics argued that Eisenhower
lost the chance to end the war. This belief was reflected in the headquarters of the

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