The Ardennes: the same region through which Hitler had sent his panzers in 1940, and had defeated France and thrown the British off the Continent in six weeks. The French and British hadn’t thought the blow would come through there in 1940. Perhaps the Americans would be equally blind in 1944.
With this decision, made at the nadir of German fortunes in the west, Adolf Hitler set in motion a campaign that was a stunning surprise to Allied commanders, on a scale beyond their imagination. It was to be the greatest battle ever fought by Americans, involving more than a million men, precipitating a supreme crisis, and demonstrating the most telling failure in history of American military intelligence.
Hitler reasoned that a swift and overwhelming strike at Antwerp, a hundred air miles away, would cut off the British and Canadian armies in the Netherlands. This would compel them to surrender, ending Britain’s participation in the war. The U.S. 1st and 9th Armies, also north of the Ardennes, would be trapped as well. The United States, left with half its army in Europe and fearful of Communist hordes sweeping in from the Soviet Union, might conclude a separate peace. Hitler then could turn all his resources against the Russians, and stop their advance. Hitler and the Nazi regime would survive.
It was a desperation move, betting everything on a single throw of the dice. Yet if Adolf Hitler continued on his present course, he and his regime would perish in short order. He had just enough strength left to make one final effort to alter the balance of power.
Hitler had faith that chance could bring fortuitous circumstances. His greatest hero was Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had held on against impossible odds in the Seven Years War 1757–1763 until the empress of Russia died and the coalition against him evaporated. If Hitler could seize Antwerp and destroy four British, Canadian, and American armies, it could happen again.
Hitler was already planning for the offensive on September 1, when he called Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, stiff, formal and seventy years old, to his headquarters and asked him to return as commander in chief west. Rundstedt, as Charles MacDonald wrote, “was to most Germans the paragon of all that was good and right about the German officers corps.” Hitler disliked him intensely, in part because he represented the class and elegance that Hitler lacked, and in part because, in private, he referred to Hitler as “the Corporal,” the Fuehrer’s rank in World War I.
Hitler needed a figurehead around whom Germans could rally, and Rundstedt, true to his soldier’s creed of loyalty, agreed to serve. Hitler didn’t tell Rundstedt what he had in mind. The field marshal was to defend in front of the West Wall as long as possible, then fall back on it. Everything depended on this defense, Hitler stressed. There was insufficient strength to strike offensively.
Having lied to his commander, Hitler ordered his propaganda chief,
Joseph Goebbels, to find somewhere the manpower to create fifteen new divisions with a new name, Volksgrenadier, and reinforce thirty-five existing ones. Goebbels did so: seventeen-year-olds, men in their mid-forties, transfers from the navy, Luftwaffe, and rear services, drafts from garrisons in Scandinavia. Hitler withdrew four SS panzer divisions from the line in the west to be refitted, and created a new headquarters, 6th Panzer Army, commanded by Josef (Sepp) Dietrich, an old crony, a bullish former butcher and sergeant in the First World War. Dietrich was hard driving, had little education, and relied on a brilliant assistant, Fritz Kraemer, for military advice.
On the Allied side, there was no idea whatsoever of a threat through the Ardennes. Troy Middleton’s 8th Corps was covering an eighty-mile stretch, most of the region. Two of his four divisions were raw and new, two recuperating from heavy losses in battles elsewhere. Talking with Middleton, Omar Bradley said: “Even if the German were to bust through all the way to the Meuse, he wouldn’t find a thing in the Ardennes to make it worth his while.”
Eisenhower and Bradley were more concerned with the failure of an offensive Bradley had undertaken to smash through to the Rhine, then swing north and encircle the Ruhr. Patton’s 3rd Army was to drive through the Saar to Frankfurt, while, north of the Ardennes, Courtney Hodges’s 1st Army and the new 9th Army under William Simpson were to thrust eastward from Aachen to Cologne and Bonn. Patton gained Metz on December 13, but was stopped cold at the Siegfried line short of the Saar. In the effort, Patton’s army lost 27,000 men.
The 1st and 9th Armies tried to cross the Roer River and the Hürtgen Forest a few miles to the east of Aachen. Six American divisions were chewed up (35,000 men lost) in bitter close-in attrition battles in and around those dark woodlands in three months beginning September 12.
Meanwhile Jake Devers’s 6th Army Group (U.S. 7th and French 1st Armies) reached Strasbourg and the Rhine on the east by December 15. But across the Rhine lay the Black Forest, no acceptable route to the heart of German power.
The key to Hitler’s plan was to strike at a time when bad weather would endure for a week, keeping Allied aircraft out of the sky for that period. He figured it would take his panzers that long to reach Antwerp.
The major obstacle was the Meuse River, just beyond the Ardennes. The first wave of tanks had to seize bridgeheads over it quickly. Then a second wave of panzers was to strike off for Antwerp, while infantry divisions fanned off north and south to protect the flanks of the salient.
The final plan was for the offensive (code-named Herbstnebel, or Autumn Mist) to be launched by twenty divisions, seven of them panzers, along a sixty-mile front from Monschau, twenty miles southeast of Aachen, to Echternach. Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army was to deliver the main effort—or Schwerpunkt—from Monschau to Losheim, fifteen miles south, exactly the place Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division had driven through in the 1940 campaign. Dietrich was to cross the Meuse south of Liège, then head for Antwerp, while anchoring his northern flank on the east-west Albert Canal.
On Dietrich’s left or south, Hasso von Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army was to attack through and south of St. Vith, cross the Meuse at Namur, then wheel northwest, bypassing Brussels, and guard Dietrich’s flank.
South of Manteuffel, Erich Brandenberger’s 7th Army, primarily infantry, was to attack on either side of Echternach, move west, and peel off divisions to block movement from the south.
A plan for a converging attack by 15th Army around Aachen had to be dropped, since troops had to be sent east to meet Soviet pressure. Consequently, Hitler could not block the Allies from bringing down reserves from the north.
Nevertheless, if all went well, more than a million Allied troops would be surrounded. But how such a huge army was to be defeated, even if encircled, no one really knew.
Secrecy was mandatory. Hitler prohibited transmission by telephone, telegraph, or radio. The few let in on the plan signed a pledge of secrecy on the pain of death. Rundstedt was not brought into the picture until the late stages.
On October 21, Hitler called in Otto Skorzeny, the officer who had rescued Benito Mussolini from his captors in 1943. Hitler promoted him to SS lieutenant colonel and told him to form a special force to go in advance of the offensive. In the first wave, a company of English-speaking commandos, wearing American field jackets over their German uniforms and riding in American jeeps, was to rush ahead, cut telephone lines, turn signposts to misdirect reserves, and hang red ribbons to imply roads were mined. Second, a panzer brigade of 2,000 men in American dress was to drive through and seize the bridges over the Meuse.
The second wave never materialized. Army command failed to provide the American equipment needed. But the first wave had astonishing success. Forty jeeps got through, and all but eight returned. The few Germans who were captured created the impression that many sabotage bands were roving behind the front. MPs and other soldiers stopped every vehicle, questioning drivers to see if they were German. Traffic tie-ups created chaos, and hundreds of innocent Americans were arrested.
General Bradley himself had to prove his identity three times: “The first time by identifying Springfield as the capital of Illinois (
my questioner held out for Chicago); the second time by locating the guard between the center and tackle on a line of scrimmage; the third time by naming the then current spouse of a blonde named Betty Grable. Grable stopped me but the sentry did not. Pleased at having stumped me, he nevertheless passed me on.”
Rundstedt was appalled when he learned of the offensive. “Available forces were far too small for such an extremely ambitious plan,” he said. “No soldier believed that the aim of reaching Antwerp was really practicable.”
If the Germans crossed the Meuse, both flanks would be vulnerable to a major counterstrike. All that would happen, Rundstedt predicted, would be a deep salient or bulge into the line, costly and indecisive. Field Marshal Walther Model, commander of Army Group B, shared Rundstedt’s pessimism, but neither could get Hitler to change his plans.
To direct the offensive personally, Hitler moved his headquarters from East Prussia to his Adlerhorst—Eagle’s Aerie—in the Taunus hills east of the Rhine near Bad Nauheim.
Hitler designated twenty-eight divisions for the offensive, twenty in the first wave with 250,000 men, a remarkable figure given Germany’s defeats. The new soldiers were green, of course, without the thorough training of the splendid troops who had swept through the Ardennes in 1940. But there was a hard core of combat veterans and tough noncommissioned officers to stiffen the recruits, plus a number of officers seasoned in battle. The most serious problem was motor transport. No division had more than 80 percent of the vehicles it needed. Fuel was in short supply, and most stockpiles were east of the Rhine.
Even so, Hitler had assembled a thousand tanks for the opening wave in seven panzer divisions, and 450 for the follow-up force. Tactical aircraft were the weakest element: Hermann Göring found only 900, half the number the Luftwaffe deployed in 1940, and a fifth the number of bombers the Allies could throw into the battle. Göring delivered this quantity only on one day—after the ground battle had been decided.
There were many signs of a German buildup opposite the Ardennes in the German Schnee Eifel Mountains, duly reported by air reconnaissance and by Ultra intercepts. But American intelligence (G-2) officers at all levels failed to draw the correct conclusion. They detected German armor but thought it would be used to counterattack the Allied drive toward the Rhine and Ruhr. G-2 saw troop movements in the Eifels as efforts to meet American offensives north and south of the Ardennes. Finally, they believed fuel was so short and troop losses were so great that the German army was in no condition to mount an offensive.
When the attack opened, Bradley was utterly confounded. “Just where in hell has this sonuvabitch gotten all his strength?” he asked his chief of staff, Leven Allen, at 12th Army Group’s tactical headquarters at Luxembourg City. And Eisenhower, who wrote that “I was immediately convinced that this was no local attack,” nevertheless waited till the evening of the second day to alert the two divisions he held in reserve, the 82nd and 101st Airborne. Only then did they start moving to the scene.
Hitler set the attack date for December 16, 1944. Bad weather was predicted for days ahead, keeping Allied aircraft from flying. Snow covered the ground. Hitler originally ordered a three-hour preliminary bombardment, but Manteuffel argued that a short, concentrated preparation would achieve the same effect while lessening the Americans’ alert. And rather than attack at 10 A.M., which Hitler planned, leaving fewer than seven hours of daylight, Manteuffel wanted the artillery concentrations to begin at 5:30 A.M., well before dawn. Half an hour later the ground assault would start, assisted by “artificial moonlight” created by bouncing searchlight beams off the clouds. Hitler accepted all the changes.
On the American side, the 5th Corps’s 99th Infantry Division, a new but reliable force, covered the region from Monshau south to Losheim. There the 14th Cavalry Group, equipped mainly with light weapons, protected the “Losheim Gap” itself—one of the few fairly open regions of the Ardennes, and thus the main avenue of approach.
To the south facing the West Wall and emplaced in the Schnee Eifel Mountains some five miles east of the Our River (the German-Luxembourg frontier) was the 8th Corps’s green 106th Infantry Division, filled with ill-trained replacements assigned just before leaving the States.
Next came the 28th Infantry Division, a veteran outfit refitting after losing 5,000 men in the Hürtgen Forest. It held a twenty-five-mile sector along the Our to the Sûre River, about fifteen miles north of Luxembourg City.
Below the 28th Division, the 4th Infantry Division held twenty miles along the river (now called the Sauer) from Echternach to the Moselle River, then along the Moselle to a point twelve miles southeast of Luxembourg City. The 4th Division had suffered in the Hürtgen Forest almost as much as the 28th Division, and likewise was resting and refitting.
In 8th Corps reserve, Troy Middleton held the new 9th Armored Division, except Combat Command B, attached to 5th Corps’s 2nd Infantry Division. In the whole corps area, Middleton had 242 medium Sherman tanks and 182 self-propelled (SP) guns or tank destroyers.
Much depended upon the advance of Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army with four SS panzer divisions. It was nearest the Meuse in the decisive sector.
When the attack burst across the front lines early on December 16, the U.S. 99th Infantry Division below Monschau successfully blocked Dietrich’s right-hand or northern punch around Udenbrath—and thus stopped his shortest route to Antwerp. Dietrich’s left-hand or southern punch broke through around Losheim, and was able to push westward over the next two days against tough American resistance around Butgenbach and Elsenborn. But the 99th Division’s resistance denied the Germans the northern shoulder they had planned to seize, and provided a base to press against them later.
Meanwhile 1st SS Panzer Division drove forward in an effort to outflank Liège from the south. The leading column, a battle group under SS Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Peiper with a hundred tanks, pressed forward, aiming for the Meuse crossing at Huy. At Malmédy on the way, it gained ignominy by massacring eighty-six American prisoners, as well as a number of Belgian civilians.
Peiper’s group halted just east of Stavelot on December 18, but didn’t grab the bridges over the Amblève there. Peiper also didn’t go for a huge supply dump just to the north with 2.5 million gallons of fuel, or for Spa, a few miles farther on, where Hodges’s 1st Army headquarters was located. American reinforcements reached Stavelot during the night and blew the bridges over the Amblève in Peiper’s face the next day.
Peiper tried to detour down the river valley but Americans checked him at Stoumont, about six miles farther on. Peiper now learned that he was well ahead of the rest of 6th Panzer Army.
On Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army front the attack got a good start. Storm battalions infiltrated into the American front, opening the way for the tanks, which advanced at 4 P.M. on December 16 and pressed forward in the dark with the help of “artificial moonlight.”
Manteuffel’s forces broke through in the Schnee Eifel against the 106th Infantry Division and 14th Cavalry Group. These forces covered the important road junction of St. Vith, some ten miles to the west. Two infantry divisions and a regiment of tanks of Walter Lucht’s 66th Corps surrounded two regiments of the 106th and forced at least 8,000 men to surrender.
Farther south two panzer corps, Walter Krüger’s 58th and Heinrich von Lüttwitz’s 47th, attacked westward. The 58th crossed the Our River and drove to Houffalize, aiming at a crossing of the Meuse between Ardenne and Namur. The 47th was to capture the key road center of Bastogne— where six roads came together—and drive on to the Meuse south of Namur.
Outposts of the U.S. 28th Division delayed but could not halt the Germans crossing the Our, and by the night of December 17 they were approaching Houffalize and Bastogne—and the north-south road between them, which the Germans needed to develop their westward sweep.
In the extreme south, the 5th Parachute Division of Brandenberger’s 7th Army got to Wiltz, a dozen miles west of the Our, but the 28th Division’s right
wing gave ground slowly, and 9th Armored and 4th Infantry Divisions checked the advance after it had gone four miles. By December 19, the southern shoulder of the German attack was being held firmly—and Patton’s 3rd Army to the south would shortly be reinforcing it.
Meanwhile Manteuffel’s pressure on St. Vith and Bastogne increased. The Germans made their first small attack on St. Vith on December 17. The next day the bulk of the U.S. 7th Armored Division arrived. Outlying villages fell to German assaults, while panzers outflanked St. Vith north and south.
By December 18, Lüttwitz’s 47th Corps was closing on Bastogne with two armored divisions (2nd and Panzer Lehr), plus the 26th Volksgrenadier Division. But a combat command of the U.S. 9th Armored Division, plus engineers, had arrived to help defend the crossroads, and the 101st Airborne Division under Anthony C. McAuliffe reached Bastogne on the morning of December 19.
After the Germans were unable to rush the town against fierce defenses, the two panzer divisions swung around both sides of Bastogne, leaving the 26th Division with a tank group to reduce it. Thus Bastogne was cut off on December 20.
After finally realizing this was not just a small spoiling attack, Bradley ordered 10th Armored Division north and sent 7th Armored and 30th Infantry Divisions south. Thus, more than 60,000 fresh troops were moving, while 180,000 more were to be diverted over the next eight days.
The 30th Division struck Peiper’s battle group, grabbed part of Stavelot, and, with the help of powerful blows by fighter-bombers, broke Peiper’s links with the remainder of 6th Panzer Army. By December 19, Peiper, desperately short of fuel, found that the 82nd Airborne Division, plus some tanks, had arrived, turning the balance against him. The remainder of Dietrich’s SS panzer forces were still stuck in the rear, with too few roads—and these interdicted by Allied aircraft—to get forward.
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 31
