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From Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light

The supreme commander’s patience finally snapped when the agreeable De Guingand arrived in Versailles on Saturday, December 30, with the disagreeable news that no offensive would be launched from the north until at least January 3, leaving Patton to fight alone in the south against a ferociously reinforced enemy. Convinced that he had been deceived, Eisenhower stormed about his office, ordering staff to find the message confirming Montgomery’s commitment to a January 1 attack – a futile search, De Guingand assured him, because “knowing Montgomery, the last thing he would do is commit himself on paper.”

“All right Beetle,” Eisenhower said, turning to his chief of staff as the familiar scarlet flush crept up on his neck. “I’m going to send a telegram…to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that I’ve had trouble with this man and it’s either the can relieve me if they’d like to – that would be perfectly all right – but one of us has to go.”

Now fully alive to Montgomery’s peril, and aware both of Marshall’s stern note and the thinly concealed American yen to have Harold Alexander command 21st Army Group, De Guingand proposed driving immediately to Zonhoven. “Won’t you please hold up that telegram ‘til I get back? He asked Eisenhower.

“All right, Freddie, I’ll hold this up until tomorrow morning. But I don’t think you ought to try and get up there, not tonight, because the weather is so bad.”

After De Guingand hurried out to begin the treacherous two-hundred-mile drive to Montgomery’s camp, Eisenhower dictated a frosty cable to the field marshal:

“I do not agree that one army group commander should fight his own battle and give orders to another army group commander…. You disturb me by predictions of ‘failure’ unless your exact opinion in the matter of giving you command over Bradley are met in detail. I assure you that in this matter I can go no further…. We would have to present our differences to the CC/S [Combined Chiefs of Staff].

Already in fragile health, De Guingand arrived in Zonhoven at midnight, as Alan Moorehead later told Forrest Pogue, “nearly exhausted, a little hysterical, full of whiskey….He said to Monty, ‘I must see you at once.” As the chief of staff described the surly mood in Versailles, Montgomery paced around his caravan.

“If you keep on, one of you will have to go,” De Guingand said, “and it won’t be Ike.”

Montgomery scoffed. “Who would replace me?”

“That’s already been worked out,” De Guingand said. “They want Alex.”

Montgomery’s bluster abruptly dissolved, precisely as it had when the battle of Mareth turned against him in March 1943. “What shall I do Freddie?” he asked. “What shall I do?”

De Guingand had already drafted an apology to Eisenhower, which he now pulled from his battle dress. “Sign this,” he said. Montgomery scratched his signature and summoned an orderly to have the message delivered, eye only:

Dear Ike….Whatever you decision may be you can rely on me one hundred percent to make it work and I know Bradley will do the same. Very distressed that my letter may have upset you and I would ask you to tear it up. Your very devoted subordinate, Monty.

The crisis past but the scars would linger. Soon after sending his apologetic note to Eisenhower, Montgomery privately cabled Brooke, “The general tendency at SHAEF and among the American command is one of considerable optimism….I cannot share this optimism.” Eisenhower thanked for “your very fine telegram,” but the incessant friction with the field marshal kept him awake at night. “He’s a little man,” he would say after the war. “He’s as little inside as he is outside.”