The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  Allied intelligence first recognized in September that the Germans had created Sixth Panzer Army under a swashbuckling commander, Sepp Dietrich. Also that month, an intercepted message to Tokyo from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin described Hitler as intent on amassing a million new troops for combat in the west, “probably from November onwards.” Ultra decrypts in late October revealed that the Luftwaffe was stockpiling fuel and ammunition at eleven airfields north of Aachen; subsequent intelligence showed German aircraft strength in the west quadrupling, to perhaps 850 planes, reversing a policy of concentrating squadrons defensively in the Fatherland. Prisoner reports and a captured German order indicated that the celebrated enemy commando leader Otto Skorzeny—the man who had freed Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop jail—was collecting soldiers who could “speak the American dialect,” perhaps for an infiltration mission. The U.S. First Army had flown 361 reconnaissance sorties over western Germany since mid-November, spotting unusual processions of hooded lights on both banks of the Rhine, as well as hospital trains west of the river and canvas-covered flatcars apparently carrying tanks or trucks. In early December, Allied intelligence reported nearly two hundred troop trains moving forward.

  None of this suggested an enemy offensive, at least not to the minds of those scrutinizing the evidence. The Sixth Panzer Army and the added Luftwaffe planes were seen as a counterattack force designed to shield the Ruhr but unable to mount “a true counter-offensive”—in SHAEF’s judgment—because of fuel shortages and the German military’s general decrepitude. An intercepted Luftwaffe order for aerial reconnaissance of the Meuse bridges, a site curiously far afield for those only protecting the Ruhr, was deemed a ruse. A rumor of German intentions to recapture Antwerp was dismissed in a 21st Army Group intelligence review on December 3: “The bruited drive on Antwerp … is just not within his potentiality.” After all, hundreds of confirmed reports portrayed a battered, reeling foe.

  Those nearest the front—the tactical units splayed along the Siegfried Line—proved no more prescient. U.S. V Corps officers interviewing German prisoners in early December discounted reports of intensified training in infiltration techniques and assault tactics. Tanks maneuvering west of the Rhine were assumed to be green units undergoing seasoning, much as novice American units were seasoned in the Ardennes. A woman interrogated on December 14 described the forest near Bitburg as jammed with German equipment, and four Wehrmacht soldiers captured on December 15 reported more combat units arriving at the front; but these and various other clues provoked little alarm. None of the seven First Army divisions around the Ardennes foresaw an enemy offensive; the 99th Division instead averred that “the entire German army [is] disintegrating.”

  Several factors fed this disregard, including a failure to recognize that Hitler rather than the prudent Rundstedt was directing German field armies in the west. “The war from the military side would now seem to be in the hands of soldiers,” a 21st Army Group analysis stated, “a change making the enemy easier to understand but harder to defeat.” No sensible field marshal was likely to risk losing the Sixth Panzer Army—the Reich’s last mobile reserve in the west—in a winter offensive. In imagining their German counterparts, Forrest Pogue observed, American commanders believed that because “we would not attack under these conditions, therefore they would not attack under these conditions.” To assume otherwise required the ability “to forecast the intentions of a maniac,” Bradley’s intelligence chief later wrote.

  Top Allied officers also had become overly enchanted with Ultra, as they had before Kasserine Pass in 1943. By late 1944, the cryptologists at Bletchley Park were daily providing about fifty intercepted German messages detailing troop movements and unit strengths. “They had become so dependent on Ultra that if it wasn’t there,” a SHAEF officer said, “then there wasn’t anything there.” Montgomery’s intelligence chief, Brigadier E. T. Williams, agreed. “Instead of being the best, it tended to become the only source,” he wrote soon after the war ended. “We had begun to lean: that was the danger of Ultra.” Intercepts had provided provocative clues—about those Luftwaffe planes on western airfields, for instance—and also raised troubling questions for those inclined to be troubled. Why was the Italian front required to ship one thousand trucks to Rundstedt? Why was Hitler’s personal guard moving toward the Western Front? Why were Sixth Panzer Army troop trains so far forward, if Dietrich’s mission was to protect the Ruhr? But ruthless German security about HERBSTNEBEL and strict radio silence by the units committed kept the inner secret from reaching Allied ears.

  Some would later claim clairvoyance. Colonel Monk Dickson, the tempestuous First Army intelligence chief, wrote in Estimate No. 37, issued on December 10, that “the continual buildup of forces west of the Rhine points consistently to his staking all on the counteroffensive.” But Dickson placed the expected German blow in the wrong place—north of the Ardennes, “between the Roer and the Erft”—and at the wrong time, “when our major ground forces have crossed the Roer River.” Further, his fractious relations with SHAEF and 12th Army Group intelligence officers, who considered him a windy alarmist, undermined Dickson’s vague warning, as did his subsequent departure from Spa for a four-day holiday in Paris.

  A suggestion in early December by Eisenhower’s intelligence chief, Major General Kenneth W. D. Strong, that the Sixth Panzer Army could possibly attack through the Ardennes sufficiently aroused Beetle Smith that he bundled off Strong to see Bradley. In a forty-five-minute meeting in Luxembourg City, either Strong failed to convey a sense of alarm or Bradley refused to take counsel of his fears. The U.S. Army’s VIII Corps was spread thin along the border highlands, Bradley acknowledged, but ample reinforcements had been positioned behind the front if needed. Bradley had apparently persuaded himself that the enemy here lacked fangs: during a recent drive through the Ardennes he had mused, “I don’t think they will come through here. At least they can’t do much here. Don’t believe they will try.” Back in Versailles, Strong recounted the conversation to Smith, who chose not to trouble Eisenhower with the matter.

  Perhaps the only genuine prescience could be found farther south, where Patton and his Third Army intelligence officer, Brigadier General Oscar W. Koch, sensed what others did not: that a dangerous, desperate enemy remained capable of wreaking havoc. Koch insisted that the German reversal in recent months “has not been a rout or a mass collapse.” Hitler, he believed, was “playing for time.” On December 7, he noted a “large panzer concentration west of the Rhine in the northern portion of Twelfth Army Group’s zone of advance”; two days later, he pointed out the vulnerability of VIII Corps in the Ardennes. On December 14, Koch cited the persistent mystery over the location of at least fourteen German divisions, most of them armored, which together could spearhead a counteroffensive. An attack near Aachen might be more likely than one through the Ardennes, he added; but Patton’s intuition suggested otherwise. “The First Army is making a terrible mistake in leaving the VIII Corps static,” he had told his diary, “as it is highly probable that the Germans are building up east of them.”

  Yet in other Allied high councils a confident swagger prevailed, a conviction that no German reserves would be committed west of the Siegfried Line. A “sudden attack in the West may with some certainty be said to have lapsed,” British air intelligence concluded on December 6. Chagrined that so few officers seemed to be reading his turgid reports, Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert, Bradley’s intelligence chief, dragooned the New Yorker’s former managing editor, now in uniform, to punch up the prose in his December 12 assessment. Full voice was given 12th Army Group’s optimism. “Attrition is steadily sapping the strength of German forces on the Western Front,” the analysis declared, “and the crust of [German] defense is thinner, more brittle and more vulnerable.” An abrupt enemy collapse seemed quite possible, and “given time and fair weather we can make progress against him anywhere.”

  Montgomery needed no ghostwriter to affirm his views. On Decem
ber 15, he wrote that Hitler’s plight was so dire “that he cannot stage major offensive operations.” That same day, the field marshal scribbled Eisenhower a note requesting leave to return to Britain for Christmas. Montgomery included an invoice for a five-pound bet wagered in October 1943, when he had challenged Eisenhower’s prediction that the war would end by Christmas 1944.

  “I still have nine days,” the supreme commander replied, “and while it seems almost certain that you will have an extra five pounds for Christmas, you will not get it until that day.”

  * * *

  Marlene Dietrich cut a wide swath through the Ardennes in mid-December. Dressed in a tailored wool uniform with drop-seat long underwear, blond tresses peeking out beneath her helmet brim, she bounced in a truck from encampment to encampment with her USO troupe, changing three or four times a day into the nylons and sequined gown suitable for crooning “Falling in Love with Love” and “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.” Sipping calvados to ward off the cold, she handed out postcard photos of herself affixed with lipstick autographs and collected weapons given her by smitten soldiers; her baggage eventually included eleven pistols. Sometimes she told jokes about Hitler, whom she called “an embittered vegetarian.” She blamed the war on “his thwarted love life,” explaining that “unfortunately for the world, the first girl laughed.” It was said that at the Ritz in Paris earlier that fall she had paraded down a corridor wearing a chic chapeau and nothing else, asking, “Don’t I look cute?” It was also said, by her, that she had slept with Patton, who gave her the code name LEGS. When the film director Billy Wilder asked about rumors of an affair with Eisenhower, she replied, “But, darling, how could it have been Eisenhower? He wasn’t even at the front!”

  On a rainy Thursday evening, December 14, Dietrich performed in the tidy Belgian town of Bastogne, headquarters of VIII Corps. She tried not to scratch at the lice as she sang “Lili Marlene.” A night later she was in northern Luxembourg, at Diekirch, hardly six miles from her native Germany, singing in a smoky, crowded hall for hundreds of GIs in General Dutch Cota’s 28th Division, still recuperating after their trial in the Hürtgen Forest. The troops stamped and whistled and could have listened all night, but reveille would come early, and on Saturday she was booked to entertain the 99th Division back in Belgium. Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate, the soldiers sang to themselves as they crawled into their bedrolls. Darling, I remember the way you used to wait.

  The U.S. Army’s Guide to the Cities of Belgium assured soldiers that the Ardennes was a fine place to “practice your favorite winter sport”; the region was said to have become a “quiet paradise for weary troops.” “Dear Mom and Dad,” a GI had recently written. “It is a wonderfully crisp and sunny day—much like you’d see this time of year in the Adirondacks. Plenty of snow.” A soldier who dined on fried chicken and French fries in a warm bivouac wrote his mother, “I’ll be getting fat if this deal lasts.” In Honsfeld, a few miles from the Losheim Gap, soldiers waiting for La Marlene’s appearance on Saturday watched a movie with a defective sound track, shouting their own invented dialogue. Farther west, GIs in Vielsalm received another USO troupe, including a comedian who sang while eating crackers. For $10, a soldier at the front could wire home Christmas flowers, but the bouquets and accompanying telegrams terrified more than a few mothers who mistook the gifts for death notifications.

  Among visitors to the First Army headquarters in Spa on Friday, December 15, was a delegation of professional baseball players, including Mel Ott and Bucky Walters. They found few senior officers in the command post: most were on leave either in Paris, like Colonel Dickson, the G-2, or in London, like the G-3 operations officer, the G-4 logistician, and the top artillery, ordnance, and antiaircraft officers. General Hodges, the army commander, politely chatted up the guests for half an hour, then excused himself and returned to his billet, worn down by fatigue and a bad cold. Visiting the 106th Division at the same hour was a soldier named Theodore Geisel, known professionally as Dr. Seuss. Geisel, who was making a propaganda film with director Frank Capra, later composed a bit of doggerel to commemorate his experience of the next couple days: “The retreat we beat was accomplished with a speed that will never be beaten.”

  Ten thousand Belgian civilians had been evacuated from the border areas north of the Losheim Gap, not least because many were ethnic Germans of whom Hitler claimed, “Inwardly they have always remained connected with Germany.” A few farmers were permitted to harvest late potatoes and tend the dairy herds, but the unmilked cows made such a racket with their lowing that butchers set up ten slaughter pens; Army trucks then hauled the beef to quartermaster depots in Brussels and Antwerp. Another roundup was scheduled for Saturday morning in Bütgenbach, command post for the 99th Division. Along the front, where conifers grew in such precise rows that they were described as a “cornfield forest,” company radios tuned into Axis Sally, the propagandist whose signature line GIs loved to mimic: “Go easy, boys. There’s danger ahead.”

  Of the 341,000 soldiers in the U.S. First Army, 68,822 were in VIII Corps, anchoring the army’s right flank with three divisions in the line. They held an eighty-five-mile front—three times the length advised for a force of such strength under Army tactical doctrine—that snaked down the Belgian border through Luxembourg to Third Army’s sector. At two spots, the corps line extended across the border into Germany’s Schnee Eifel, a snowy hogback that was a topographical extension of the Belgian Ardennes. Intelligence officers calculated that 24,000 enemy soldiers currently faced VIII Corps, so few that First Army in recent days had ordered a deception program to feign an American buildup in the Ardennes; the intent was to lure more Germans, weakening Rundstedt’s lines to the north and south. Some VIII Corps troops wore phony shoulder flashes, drove trucks with bogus unit markings, broadcast counterfeit radio traffic, and played recordings of congregating tanks—all to suggest a preponderance that did not exist. In reality, some infantry regiments that typically should have held a 3,500-yard front in such broken country—two miles—now were required to hold frontages of six miles or more.

  For much of the fall, four veteran U.S. divisions had occupied this region, mastering the terrain and rehearsing both withdrawal and counterattack plans. But in recent weeks they had been supplanted by two bloodied divisions from the Hürtgen—those weary troops seeking a quiet paradise—and the newly arrived 106th Infantry Division, which was not only the greenest Army unit in Europe but also the youngest. The first division into combat with substantial numbers of eighteen-year-old draftees, the 106th was plunked onto the Schnee Eifel and across the Losheim Gap, echeloned a mile or so west of the Siegfried Line like an ill-fitting stopper in a bottle.

  As with so many newer divisions, the 106th had trained diligently for months at home only to be ripped apart by levies from other units shipping overseas first. By August 1944, more than seven thousand men had been transferred out of the division, including many aggressive infantrymen who were replaced by rear-echelon converts with suspect combat skills. After arriving at Le Havre on December 6, the 106th had been trucked across France to reach the Ardennes front at seven P.M. on December 11, “numb, soaked, and frozen,” as the military historian R. Ernest Dupuy later wrote. Man for man, foxhole for foxhole, across a twenty-eight-mile sector, they replaced troops of the 2nd Infantry Division, who bolted for showers and hot food in the rear.

  Few soldiers of the 106th had ever heard a shot fired in anger, and some failed to zero their rifles to ensure accurate marksmanship. Radio silence precluded the testing and calibration of new sets. Battalions reported shortages of winter clothing, maps, machine-gun tripods, and mortar, antitank, and bazooka ammunition. Trench foot soon spiked when green troops neglected to dry their socks properly. Despite orders to mount an “aggressive defense,” few patrols ventured forward, and German war dogs terrorized those that did.

  Go easy, boys. There’s danger ahead.

  “The woods are of tall pines, dark and gl
oomy inside. After a snow it is all in black and white,” an artilleryman wrote his wife from an outpost near Losheim. “This was the Forest of Arden from Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” In the bard’s comedy, the forest is a pastoral refuge for characters who choose to devote themselves to love. Few soldiers trying to stay warm in an Ardennes copse in mid-December found such lyricism in the landscape. V-1 flying bombs launched from western Germany rattled overhead day and night, angling toward Antwerp. Forward strongpoints—a few dozen men consigned to the low ground of crossroads villages—were sardonically dubbed “sugar bowls” because of their topographic vulnerability.

  A departing 2nd Division colonel told his 106th replacement, “It has been very quiet up here and your men will learn the easy way.”

  * * *

  Straw and rags muffled gun wheels and horses’ hooves as twenty German divisions lumbered into their final assembly areas on Friday night, December 15. Breakdown crews with tow trucks stood ready along roads that now carried only one-way traffic, and military policemen were authorized to shoot out the tires of any vehicle violating march discipline. For the last kilometer leading to the line of departure, soldiers portaged ammunition by hand or on their backs. Quartermasters issued ration packets of “special vitalizing and strengthening foods,” including fifty grams of genuine coffee, grape-sugar tablets, chocolate, fruit bars, and milk powder. “Some believe in living but life is not everything!” a soldier from the 12th SS Panzer Division wrote his sister. “It is enough to know that we attack and will throw the enemy from our homeland. It is a holy task.”

  Two hundred thousand assault troops packed into an assembly area three miles deep. The initial blow by seven panzer divisions and thirteen of infantry, bolstered by almost two thousand artillery tubes and a thousand tanks and assault guns, would fall on a front sixty-one miles wide. Five more divisions and two heavy brigades waited in the second wave, giving the Germans roughly a five-to-one advantage over the opposing U.S. forces in artillery and a three-to-one edge in armor. The best of Rundstedt’s divisions had 80 percent of their full complement of equipment, others but half. Panzer columns carried enough fuel to travel one hundred miles under normal cruising conditions, which existed nowhere in the steep, icy Ardennes. Few spare parts or antitank guns were to be had, but for a holy task perhaps none were needed.