Peiper’s battle group began to retreat on December 24 on foot, abandoning its tanks and other vehicles.
To the south, the U.S. 3rd and 7th Armored Divisions had barred Manteuffel’s advance westward from St. Vith, where a strong German attack finally drove out the Americans with heavy losses. But a huge traffic jam permitted remnants of the 106th and 7th Armored Divisions to get away, and hindered Manteuffel’s advance toward the Meuse.
Two major factors slowed the German advance: mud and shortage of fuel. Only half the artillery could be brought forward due to fuel lack. Foggy weather had favored the Germans on the opening days by keeping Allied aircraft on the ground. But clear skies came back on December 23, and Allied fighters and bombers commenced a terrible pummeling of the German columns.
On December 20 Eisenhower placed Montgomery in charge of all Allied forces north of the Bulge, including the U.S. 1st and 9th Armies. Montgomery brought the British 30th Corps (four divisions) west of the Meuse to guard the bridges.
Gaining command of two American armies was a great coup for Montgomery and a blow to Bradley, not helped when Montgomery arrived at 1st Army headquarters, as one British officer reported, “like Christ come to cleanse the temple.” He made things worse at a press conference where he implied that his personal “handling” of the battle had saved the Americans from collapse, when actually he had done practically nothing. Montgomery also spoke of employing the “whole available power” of the British armies—a palpable lie heightened by the fact that he insisted he must “tidy up” the position first, and did not strike from the north until January 3. All the while 3rd Army was counterattacking toward Bastogne—spearheaded by the 4th Armored Division, following Patton’s order to “drive like hell.”
The 4th Armored, supported by the 26th and 80th Infantry Divisions, collided with the German 5th Parachute Division on the main north-south road. The paratroops had to be driven out of every village and block of woods. However, reconnaissance found there was less opposition on the Neufchâteau-Bastogne road leading northeast, and on December 25 Patton shifted the main attack to this line.
In Bastogne the situation remained critical. Repeated German attacks forced the Americans back, but never overwhelmed them. When Lüttwitz sent a “white flag” party on December 22 calling on the garrison to surrender, General McAuliffe replied: “Nuts!” Subordinate officers, seeing the baffled looks on the Germans’ faces, translated it as “Go to hell!”
The next day better weather permitted Allied aircraft to drop supplies to the beleaguered troops. On Christmas Day the Germans made an all-out effort, but failed. Meanwhile the 4th Armored Division fought its way into the town at 4:45 P.M. on December 26. The siege was lifted.
A thin finger of Manteuffel’s advance got within four miles of the Meuse, five miles east of Dinant at Celles, on December 24. But that was the high-water mark. The British 30th Corps had moved onto the east bank of the Meuse around Givet and Dinant, and fresh American forces were coming up to help.
Hitler had recognized his hope of capturing Antwerp was an illusion, and had shifted his goal to seizing crossings of the Meuse, releasing the 9th Panzer and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions from reserve to help Manteuffel clear the approaches to Dinant between Celles and Marche. But the panzers were being severely harassed from the air, and after December 26 none could move during the day.
Meanwhile Lawton Collins’s U.S. 7th Corps was converging on the threat. Collins had the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions and the 75th and 84th Infantry Divisions, and they slowly gained ground. On Christmas morning they recaptured Celles. The 9th Panzer Division arrived near the village on Christmas evening but could not shake the 2nd Armored Division in front of it.
Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army to the north tried to assist Manteuffel, but his panzer divisions made little impression on American defenses that now were strongly reinforced, with swarms of fighter-bombers on momentary call to strike anything moving.
Manteuffel wrote that his reserves were at a standstill for lack of fuel just when they were needed.
Hitler wanted to hold the positions in the Bulge, and insisted that Manteuffel capture Bastogne by cutting Patton’s Neufchâteau-Bastogne corridor. But German attacks over three days, beginning December 30, failed.
It was obvious to Manteuffel that he could not hold the Bulge without Bastogne and could do nothing against Collins’s determined advance on the west. He telephoned Jodl and announced he was moving his forces out of the nose of the salient. But Hitler, as usual, forbade any step back. Instead, he ordered another attack on Bastogne.
To demonstrate how determined he was to have Bastogne, Hitler risked what was left of the Luftwaffe to prevent Allied fighter-bombers from intervening in Manteuffel’s efforts. Early on New Year’s Day a thousand Focke-Wulf 190 and Messerschmitt 109 fighters came in at rooftop level over twenty-seven Allied airfields in Holland, Belgium, and northeastern France. The Germans destroyed 156 planes, 36 of them American, most of them on the ground or while trying to take off. These were heavy losses, but the Allies could replace them quickly. The Luftwaffe, however, lost 300 planes and as many irreplaceable pilots, the German air force’s largest single-day loss in the war. It was the Luftwaffe’s death blow.
Having failed to cut the corridor south of Bastogne, Manteuffel now struck from the north astride the Houffalize-Bastogne road, using four depleted and exhausted divisions which, between them, had only fifty-five tanks. The Germans got nowhere, just as Manteuffel had feared. He now pulled the forces off. The threat to Bastogne ended.
At last on January 8, 1945, Hitler agreed to a limited withdrawal from the tip of the Bulge. Inexorably, the retreat continued. By January 28, the German lines were back approximately where they had been when the offensive started.
Among 600,000 Americans eventually involved in the battle of the Bulge, casualties totaled 81,000, of whom 15,000 were captured and 19,000 killed. Among 55,000 British involved, casualties totaled 1,440, of whom 200 were killed. The Germans, employing close to 500,000 men, lost at least 100,000 killed, wounded, or captured. Each side forfeited about 800 tanks, and the Luftwaffe lost a thousand aircraft.
The Americans could make good their losses in short order, the Germans could not replace theirs. All that Adolf Hitler achieved at this terrible cost was to delay the Allied advance in the west by a few weeks. But it actually assured swift success for the Red Army advancing in a renewed drive in the east. In the end, the battle of the Bulge probably speeded up Germany’s collapse.
24 THE LAST DAYS
THE RED ARMY HAD BEEN STALLED ALONG THE VISTULA RIVER IN POLAND SINCE autumn 1944. Its astonishing advances during the summer had come to a standstill because the vastly overextended Russian supply line finally snapped. Red Army commanders held up the final assault on Nazi Germany until the railways behind the front could be repaired and converted to the Russian wider-gauge track.
Once done, the Soviets accumulated abundant supplies along the entire front and reconstituted their armies. By early 1945 they had assembled 225 infantry divisions and twenty-two armored corps between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains. Soviet superiority was eleven to one in infantry, seven to one in tanks, and twenty to one in artillery and aircraft. Most important was the great quantity of American trucks delivered to the Russians by Lend-Lease. Trucks transformed a large part of the Red Army into motorized divisions able to move quickly around the Germans, whose mobility was shrinking by the day due to extreme shortages of fuel.
When Heinz Guderian, army chief of staff, presented the figures of Soviet strength, Hitler exclaimed, “It’s the greatest imposture since Genghis Khan! Who is responsible for producing all this rubbish?”
Hitler had not used the long stalemate in the east to build a powerful defensive line of minefields and antitank traps—such as Erwin Rommel had urged immediately after the battle of Kursk in 1943. His defensive system remained what it had been all along: each soldier was to stand in place and fight to the l
ast round. He refused even a timely step back to avoid the full shock of a Soviet attack. The Russians were well aware of the hopeless weakness of Hitler’s “hold-at-all-costs” policy, and were prepared to exploit it.
On December 24, 1944, Guderian met with Hitler and his staff and pleaded with them to abandon the Ardennes offensive and move every possible soldier eastward to shield against the Soviet attack.
The heart of continued German resistance, Guderian emphasized, was the industrial region of upper Silesia (about fifty miles west of Cracow around Katowice and Gliwice). The German armaments industry had already been moved there, and it was beyond the range of American and British bombers. The Ruhr, on the other hand, was paralyzed by bombing attacks.
“The loss of upper Silesia must lead to our defeat within a very few weeks,” Guderian said.
It was no use. Hitler insisted that continued attacks in the west would eventually cripple the western Allies. Furthermore, he rejected Guderian’s request to evacuate by sea the army group (of twenty-six divisions) now isolated in Courland in western Latvia. And while Guderian was en route back to his headquarters near Berlin, Hitler transferred two SS panzer divisions from the Vistula to Hungary with the task of relieving the siege of Budapest. This left Guderian with a mobile reserve of just twelve divisions to back up fifty weak infantry divisions holding a front 750 miles long.
“The eastern front is like a house of cards,” Guderian told Hitler on January 9. “If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.” But Hitler merely responded: “The eastern front must help itself and make do with what it’s got.”
Hitler also turned down requests of field commanders that German civilians be evacuated from East Prussia and other regions likely to be overrun by the Russians. He said evacuation would have a bad effect on public opinion.
When the Soviet offensive burst across the Vistula on January 12, 1945, the Red Army commanders had their eyes set on Berlin, 300 miles west of Warsaw. This was to be the final drive to destroy Nazi Germany.
The first assault came by seventy Soviet divisions of I. S. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front across the Vistula out of a bridgehead near Baranov, 120 miles south of Warsaw. Artillery pulverized the Germans, and in three days the Red soldiers had broken entirely through their defenses, captured Kielce, and were pouring over the Polish plain in an expanding torrent.
Two days later G. K. Zhukov’s 1st White Russian Front burst out of bridgeheads around Magnuszev and Pulawy, 75 miles south of Warsaw, while K. K. Rokossovsky’s 2nd White Russian Front stormed across the Narev north of Warsaw. Zhukov’s divisions wheeled north to surround Warsaw, while Rokossovsky’s troops blew apart the German defenses covering the southern approach to East Prussia, creating a breach 200 miles wide. Altogether 200 Soviet divisions were now rolling westward.
Chaos descended on the Nazi high command. Hitler, more and more ignoring reality, returned to Berlin on January 16 from his Eagle’s Aerie east of the Rhine. The marble halls of the Chancellery were in ruins from bombing, but the underground bunker fifty feet below remained operational. At long last, Hitler decided that the armies in the west had to go over to the defensive to make forces available to stem the Russian tide. He immediately ordered 6th Panzer Army to move eastward.
Guderian was delighted, and planned to use the army to attack the flanks of the Soviet spearheads in Poland to slow their advance. He learned, however, that Hitler was sending 6th Panzer Army to Hungary to assist in relieving the siege of Budapest.
“On hearing this I lost my self-control and expressed my disgust to Jodl in very plain terms,” Guderian wrote. But he could not change Hitler’s mind.
On January 17 the General Staff operations section reported that Soviet forces were about to surround Warsaw, and proposed a new defensive line to the west. Guderian agreed, and ordered the small city garrison to withdraw at once. When informed, Hitler insisted that Warsaw be held at all costs. The garrision commander, however, ignored Hitler’s command and withdrew his battalions. Hitler flew into a rage, and thought of nothing the next few days but how to punish the General Staff.
Guderian protested that he had made the decision, but Hitler replied: “No, it’s not you I’m after, but the General Staff. It is intolerable to me that a group of intellectuals should presume to press their views on their superiors.”
Hitler arrested a colonel and two lieutenant colonels in the operations section. Guderian demanded an inquiry, and two Gestapo agents interrogated him for days. These interrogations squandered Guderian’s time and nervous energy at a time when a battle for life or death was being fought on the eastern front. Guderian got two of the officers released, but the third remained in a concentration camp till the end of the war.
On January 25 Guderian tried to get Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to convince Hitler to seek an armistice on the western front, while continuing to fight the Russians in the east. Ribbentrop replied that he did not dare approach the Fuehrer on the subject. As Guderian departed, Ribbentrop said, “We will keep this conversation to ourselves, won’t we?” Guderian assured him he would do so. But Ribbentrop tattled to Hitler, and that evening the Fuehrer accused Guderian of treason.
Meanwhile Russian forces continued to advance on all fronts, reaching the German frontier in Silesia on January 19, and soon overrunning upper Silesia. Zhukov’s troops captured Lodz, bypassed Posen (Poznan), crossed the German frontier, and on January 31 reached the lower Oder River near Küstrin (now Kostryzh)—forty miles from Berlin. Only 380 miles separated the Russians from the advanced positions of the western Allies.
At the same time, Rokossovsky gained the southern gateway to East Prussia at Mlawa and drove on to the Gulf of Danzig, isolating German forces in East Prussia. These fell back into Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), where Russians besieged them.
The virtually unchecked advance of the Red Army set off the frantic flight of most German civilians toward the west. The flood of refugees jammed roads, created chaos, and made troop movements all the more difficult.
Hitler’s final divorce from reality came now. With the Ruhr bombed into rubble and upper Silesia occupied, Albert Speer, Nazi armaments chief, sent a memorandum to Hitler that began: “The war is lost.” Hitler read the first sentence and locked the memo in his safe. Speer requested a private interview to explain Germany’s desperate straits. But the Fuehrer declined, telling Guderian: “I refuse to see anyone alone anymore. Any man who asks to talk to me alone always does so because he has something unpleasant to say to me. I can’t bear that.”
The Red Army was outrunning its supplies, and a thaw in the first week of February braked supplies further by turning roads into quagmires, while the ice broke up on the Oder, increasing its effect as an obstacle. Guderian scraped up what troops he could find. These stopped the Russians with only shallow bridgeheads over the Oder near Küstrin and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder.
Meantime Konev in Silesia extended bridgeheads north of Breslau (now Wroclaw), swept north down the left or western bank of the Oder, and on February 13 reached Sommerfeld (now Lubsko). This same day Budapest fell at last; Hitler’s attempt to relieve it had failed. The surrender yielded 110,000 prisoners to the Russians. On February 15, Konev’s troops advanced to the Neisse River, near its junction with the Oder, and came level with Zhukov’s forces.
By the third week of February the front in the east was stabilized, with the aid of reinforcements brought from the west and the interior. The crisis posed by the Russian menace led to Hitler’s decision that defense of the Rhine had to be sacrificed to holding the Oder.
Hitler diverted the major part of his remaining forces to the east, still believing that the western Allies were unable to resume the offensive because of losses in the Ardennes. He turned his V-1s and V-2s on Antwerp, in hopes of stopping the arrival of Allied supplies. In all, the Germans hurled 8,000 V-weapons at Antwerp and other targets, but the damage they did was negligible.
Eisenhower’s armies, now eig
hty-five divisions strong, prepared to close in on the Rhine. Hitler refused to withdraw forces behind this river barrier. Consequently, the Allies had only to break through the thin crust of front-line defenses to open wide avenues of advance into the German rear.
Eisenhower, to the disgust of American senior commanders, assigned the main striking force to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in the north, adding the U.S. 9th Army to Montgomery’s British 2nd and Canadian 1st Armies. Montgomery planned another of his meticulously slow, overwhelming assaults—this time over the Rhine in the vicinity of Wesel, opposite Holland.
Even so, Bradley’s U.S. 1st and 3rd Armies were far stronger than the German forces facing them, and on March 7, 1945, George Patton’s 3rd Army broke through the Schnee Eifel Mountains east of the Ardennes and, in three days, reached the Rhine near Coblenz. The same day farther north the 9th Armored Division of 1st Army found a gap and raced through to the Rhine so quickly that the Germans did not have time to blow the railroad bridge at Remagen, near Bonn.
American engineers frantically cut every demolition wire they could find, while a platoon of infantry raced across the bridge. As they neared the east bank, two charges went off. The bridge shook, but stood. Tanks rushed over the span, and by nightfall the Americans had a strong bridgehead on the east bank.
When Hodges called Bradley with the news, Bradley responded: “Hot dog, Courtney, this will bust him wide open!”
Bradley told Hodges to pour every man and weapon possible across the bridge and strike for the heart of Germany. But Harold R. (Pink) Bull, Eisenhower’s chief of operations, said no. “You’re not going anywhere down there at Remagen,” he announced. “You’ve got a bridge, but it’s in the wrong place. It just doesn’t fit the plan.”
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 32
