Anti-tank defences, well disposed in depth, and in a highly favourable electronic environment, could do a great deal to offset a heavy numerical inferiority on the ground, particularly when the Allied tactical air forces were proving more effective than those of their opponents. It could hardly be a complete substitute for adequate strength in guns and armour on the battlefield, however. The commander of II British Corps had not lost all tactical control within his area of responsibility. His corps was still an operational entity, but it was split and penetrated, and between groups now no longer able to support each other the enemy’s advance went on. Though anti-tank defence detachments took a very heavy toll, missile re-supply to the launchers was proving more and more difficult. One by one ATGW crews were pinned down and overrun by motorized infantry in BMP, now for the most part, in a development of high significance, attacking mounted. By the late afternoon of 14 August leading elements of a Soviet tank division were approaching Julich.
During the preceding night, however, a French armoured division had been moving into the area around Maastricht. This was part of a French corps previously intended for the Southern Army Group, but switched by SACEUR to this location at the urgent instance of AFCENT (after hasty discussion with the French government and swift intervention from Washington) late on the 13th. By first light on the 15th, though not yet in contact, this French division was in a useful and well-balanced position. Still rather thin on the ground as its units moved up, it was nevertheless in touch on its right with the left flank of a force of two US brigades, with which German Territorial units were operating in support, deployed and largely dug-in east and west of Duren.
The peacetime location of HQ AFCENT at Brunssum, not far away, had now been finally abandoned, command having been long exercised from a field headquarters whose present location was near Liege. It was into the area of Aachen that the advanced parties of the newly arrived US Corps, the disembarkation of their heavy equipment in French ports now virtually complete, began to arrive just before dawn on the 15th.
To the east of what was now becoming known as the Krefeld Salient two British divisions and one German were fighting with their backs to the Rhine. Their fire on the enemy’s flank, exploited by the timely manoeuvre of armoured squadron groups, could not stop his southward advance but did much to slow it down. On the other side of the Rhine, on the east bank, 14 August was a critical day. NORTHAG was at all costs determined to hold firm in the area south of the Lippe, to get the offensive now in preparation for the following morning off to a fair start. Against the weight of opposition pressing down from the north this was far from easy, but the battle that was now being fought, in great part by German troops both of the regular army and of the reserve, on German soil, was everywhere recognized to be of critical importance to the whole future of a free Germany. The Battle of the Lippe was above all a stand by Germans, to give the best chance of success in the counter-offensive for which Allied formations of six nations were now advancing to their assembly and dispersal areas in preparation for the attack. At nightfall the lines of approach for Allied units were still clear. They were kept clear till dawn.
During the night the boundary between the Northern and Central Army Groups was moved northwards. It now ran from Koblenz to Hannover.
We have treated the operations during these few days in mid-August 1985 with a degree of detail which might seem out of place in a book so limited in scope. The reason is quite simple: 15 August was a critical day, a major turning point in the whole battle for Europe.
What would have happened if the Alliance had done as little for its defences in the past quinquennium as in the wasted years before is, as we look back today, painfully evident. The Russians would by this time have been secure on their stop-line on the Rhine, the Western Alliance would have lain in ruins, and the brutal obliteration of the Federal Republic of Germany would already have begun. The hopes of freedom in the subject peoples of the Soviet Union, both within the USSR and outside it, beginning once more to stir when war broke out, would have withered and died under a suffocating blanket of despair.
