As support for the opening stage of the offensive, a nighttime parachute drop behind Allied lines was prepared, as was the deployment of an undercover SS commando unit—Panzerbrigade 150—led by Otto Skorzeny. In Panzerbrigade 150, English-speaking German soldiers were selected from the SS and Wehrmacht, fitted out with American and British uniforms, and provided with captured Allied vehicles. Their role was to slip through the American defenses and cause confusion and disruption by misdirecting traffic, issuing false orders, and changing signposts, as well as capturing key bridges over the River Meuse, the first objective in the German offensive.
By mid-December the SS divisions had managed to secure levels of manpower that were only a little below establishment strength. The numbers of tanks allotted to the armored divisions was reasonable, although there was a shortage of other vehicles, so that, for example, a battalion in each of Das Reich’s two panzergrenadier regiments relied on bicycles for transport. Ammunition was also limited, but the overriding factor that compromised the Germans’ chance of success was an acute shortage of fuel. The armored units were issued with just a few days’ supply at best and were instructed to secure gasoline and oil from captured American stocks.
Under Hitler’s direct order, the offensive was to start only when bad weather was forecast, so that low cloud cover would minimize the effect of Anglo-American air superiority. But a meteorological forecast could be reliable for only a few days, and if the weather improved, then the German armored formations would be at the mercy of Allied fighter-bombers. To minimize this danger, German field commanders were ordered to advance with the utmost speed, so that Antwerp would be in German hands in a matter of days. A further intangible was the Wehrmacht’s arrogant belief that the Americans facing the assault would break with ease.
As a result of the Wehrmacht’s strict security measures and some reprehensible complacency within the Allied high command, the German attack on 16 December achieved total surprise.8 The winter of 1944–1945 was especially severe: the Ardennes was snowbound, and during mid-December fog and low clouds kept Allied aircraft on their runways. And, as in 1940, the Allies did not expect an armored attack through the tank-unfriendly Ardennes.
But those advantages enjoyed by the Germans also worked against them. The difficult terrain forced armored vehicles to advance along the country roads that wound their way through the region; any obstacle brought German columns to an immediate standstill, with traffic jams stretching back for miles. Temperatures that were rising and dipping around freezing—occasionally far below—not only caused hardship for the troops but also led to vehicles being constantly stuck in snow and mud. And whereas in May 1940 the Mark IIIs and IVs of the German panzer divisions weighed no more than twenty-five tons, in 1944 the offensive was spearheaded by the seventy-five-ton King Tiger (Tiger II). A formidable tank developed for the Eastern Front, it was too large and too heavy for the narrow roads and weak bridges encountered in the Ardennes.
At the end of a short, sustained artillery bombardment, the infantry of Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army were sent ahead to clear the way for the advance of the SS armor, Priess’s I SS Panzer Corps taking the lead with Hitlerjugend on the right and Leibstandarte on the left. Bittrich’s II Panzer Corps also moved forward, ready to exploit any success by the forward units.
The vastly outnumbered American front line was unable to hold the initial attack, and as the Germans emerged out of the early-morning mist, units were overrun or broke and ran. There was enormous confusion within the U.S. command, especially at higher levels, so that a coordinated response was slow in coming. But at key points, individual units of the U.S. Army held firm and blunted the German advance. Nowhere was this more important than on the Elsenborn ridge, where the Americans refused to give way in an attack launched by the Hitlerjugend and two Volksgrenadier divisions.
The Hitlerjugend made some initial gains, although casualties among officers were high. Obersturmbannführer Richard Schulze explained: “Since the men were largely without combat experience, only the deployment of the officers on the front lines could help. In the first hours all the company chiefs were lost, either killed or wounded. Oberscharführers [sergeants] took over the companies. The continuation of the attack, swinging further south, then led to success.”9 But this was only short-lived, as an accurate U.S. artillery bombardment forced the Germans to go to ground, with some panzergrenadiers, including Hans Postenberg, taking refuge in recently captured U.S. dugouts:
The barrage lasted a long time, but then our NCOs took us out of the comfortable dugouts and we advanced again. The respite had allowed the Amis [Americans] to get more organized and although our tanks had advanced we had lost contact with them, as a result some of them were ambushed and lost. Others were stranded for lack of fuel, so all in all the grand offensive was not going too well. The American artillery was very active all this time and hindered us, but it was really the nature of the country which caused us problems as the tanks were confined to one road of advance, and this alone hindered us too as we were supposed to protect them from infantry attack.10
The German failure to gain the Elsenborn ridge had a crucial knock-on effect, squeezing the main advance by Sixth Panzer Army into increasingly confined terrain, with attendant traffic confusion.
Leibstandarte was divided into battle groups, spearheaded by Kampfgruppe Peiper. This was a mixed armor and mechanized-infantry force of around 3,000 men and 100 Mark IV and V (Panther) tanks, plus the King Tigers of the 501st SS Heavy Tank Battalion and part of Skorzeny’s Panzerbrigade 150.11 As he led his troops forward, Peiper also briefly corralled a battalion of parachute infantry into his Kampfgruppe.
Peiper’s hopes of a swift advance were immediately stymied by the inability of the Volksgrenadier infantry ahead of him to break into the enemy lines on the morning of 16 December. Most of the day was spent held in traffic, and it was only on the seventeenth that Peiper managed to fight his way through the U.S. frontline defenses. As Leibstandarte troops drove forward, they discovered a U.S. fuel dump at Büllingen and refueled their vehicles with 50,000 gallons of gasoline. They continued their advance westward, urged on by an increasingly frantic Peiper, determined to achieve his goal of crossing the Meuse with minimal delay.
As they churned through mud and snow, Peiper’s frustrated and increasingly angry troops shot groups of surrendered Americans, culminating in the killing of eighty-six prisoners at the Baugnez crossroads on the seventeenth. Better known as the Malmédy Massacre, news of the atrocity quickly reached the U.S. high command, producing a dramatic hardening of attitudes within the American armed forces.12 Waffen-SS rage had also extended to Belgian civilians caught up in the drive, with men, women, and children shot in revenge for the attacks on their own troops by Belgian partisans during the withdrawal from Normandy in September 1944.13
On 18 December Peiper’s tanks reached Stavelot but were held there by the crack U.S. 30th Infantry Division (victors of the battle for Mortain in August). Further attempts to circumvent American positions at Stoumont and Trois Ponts also came to nothing, especially after the arrival of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. Peiper’s Kampfgruppe had been the only Leibstandarte unit to make any headway through the Ardennes, and by 20 December it was cut off from the rest of division. Radio communication with Standartenführer Mohnke at divisional HQ was patchy at best; on the twenty-third, with fuel and ammunition running out, Peiper was ordered to break out and return to German lines.
By now the Kampfgruppe was reduced to around 770 effectives, plus the badly wounded and a number of U.S. prisoners, whom Peiper treated with the greatest care. Abandoning their vehicles and heavy weapons (plus the badly wounded and prisoners), Peiper led his remaining troops on foot through enemy lines to successfully reach Leibstandarte positions around Stavelot on the morning of 25 December. Peiper’s action was indicative of his fighting spirit, but it also signaled the end of I SS Panzer Corps’ hopes of achieving a breakthrough. Further German setbacks included the d
isastrous failure of the Luftwaffe paratroop drop and the inability of Skorzeny’s unit to cause any meaningful confusion behind enemy lines.
The II SS Panzer Corps—Hohenstaufen (to the right) and Das Reich (to the left)—had slowly moved forward to the south of I SS Panzer Corps. The southward squeeze on the Hitlerjugend and Leibstandarte impacted on II SS Panzer Corps, forcing it into Fifth Panzer Army’s routes of advance, with the usual traffic confusion and shortened tempers among the opposing staff officers.
A tactical breakthrough by Das Reich on 20 December was brought to an immediate halt by lack of fuel on the following day. Apart from the overall fuel shortage, poor roads also prevented the movement of fuel tankers to forward units when most needed. Despite this, the divisions of II SS Panzer Corps made reasonable progress, pushing slightly farther ahead than their comrades in I SS Panzer Corps. But once again, difficult terrain slowed the advance, as confirmed in the history of II SS Panzer Corps: “The serpentine lines of vehicles jammed up behind any delays in the valleys. Thus it came about that almost always it was only the spearheads of the divisions that were in contact with the enemy.”14 In these tactical situations, American resistance could hold off superior numbers, as occurred at the U.S. strongpoints of St. Vith and Bastogne.
On 23 December Das Reich captured the crossroads at Baraque de Fraiture, knocking out fifteen U.S. tanks in the process. Exploiting this success, the SS pressed on to the line stretching between Vaux Chavanne–Freineux. But there the German advance was halted by the arrival of U.S. reinforcements; throughout the Christmas period (24–26 December) Hohenstaufen and Das Reich fought vainly to break through the enemy line.
A standoff between the two opponents followed, with devastating U.S. artillery bombardments amid several tank actions. The Americans’ material advantage became painfully evident to the SS troops, now increasingly short of ammunition. The village of Freineux was fiercely contested, with the panzergrenadiers of “Deutschland” fighting off superior numbers of U.S. tanks and infantry. During one action, Untersturmführer Heller eventually decided that he must retire and with three other grenadiers set up a defensive screen to allow his men to get back to their lines. A German account described the resultant fight and, despite the Malmédy atrocities, the generosity of Heller’s captors: “The house was hit by a shell. Heller was rendered unconscious for a time by falling debris. When he came to, he found himself under burning timber. Men from an American scouting team who showed up soon after pulled him out with great difficulty, some of them suffering burns themselves, and moved him to a dressing station. The dead men of the SS ‘Deutschland’ were also removed by the Americans.”15
MANTEUFFEL’S FIFTH PANZER Army had pushed forward farther than Dietrich’s SS force, taking advantage of more level terrain for its three panzer divisions to advance toward the Meuse. As a result, Model began to redirect the Waffen-SS to support the army offensive, beginning with units from the Hitlerjugend Division that had been brought to a halt on the Elsenborn ridge. On 26 December troops from Leibstandarte were similarly redeployed. Fifth Panzer Army’s main problem was the continuing resistance of well-supplied American troops at the key road junction of Bastogne. The original American garrison had been reinforced by the 101st Airborne Division, and although surrounded, its commander contemptuously rejected German demands to surrender.
On 30 December units from both divisions of II SS Panzer Corps were transferred south to help their SS and army comrades eliminate Bastogne. The redeployment was too late, however, as the Allies began to draw upon their substantial reserves to squeeze the German “Bulge.” Patton’s Third Army advanced from the south and broke through German lines on the twenty-sixth to establish a corridor to Bastogne. A slight but continuing improvement in the weather from 23 December onward permitted increasing numbers of Allied aircraft to take to the air, strafing German forward units and interdicting their resupply from the rear.
The new year confirmed the turn of the tide in the Allies’ favor. A battalion commander in the Hohenstaufen Division described the difficult conditions he faced in a letter of 5 January:
Through unfavorable circumstances (inadequate training of the men and very serious shortages of supplies, in particular clothing and shoes) I have very high casualties; mostly due to artillery and, whenever the weather clears, from Jabos. Yesterday I received 200 replacements, unfortunately almost all men from the Ukraine, some of whom neither speak nor understand German. Everything is lacking; here a man really has to prove himself. I have already experienced what it means to attack without any heavy weapons, since the Pak, IG [infantry guns] and artillery could not be brought forward due to a lack of prime movers, or had to be left stuck in frozen ground as practice-targets for the enemy and the Jabos.16
By 8 January 1945 the German Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies were in full retreat, closely harried by the advancing Americans. It was a difficult withdrawal for the Germans, repeatedly forced to abandon precious vehicles through fuel shortages, but it was conducted in good order so that from the seventeenth onward they were able to retire behind the relative safety of the Westwall. The Germans had inflicted substantial casualties on the U.S. Army—especially in destroyed armored vehicles—but their own losses had been heavy and now were almost impossible to replace. The minimum German casualty figures were listed as 67,675, with 23,451 coming from the Waffen-SS Sixth Panzer Army.17 The SS panzer divisions would need time, reinforcements, new weapons, and fuel to return to a sound combat footing, but all of these were now in desperately short supply.
TOWARD THE END of December Hitler decided to extend the range of his offensive with a subsidiary assault farther south on the Western Front. As well as being an attempt to recapture Strasbourg and Alsace, the offensive—code-named Nordwind—was also intended to prevent the movement of U.S. reserves to the Ardennes sector. The troops assembled for Nordwind came from Army Group G and, to a lesser degree, from Army Group Upper Rhine, now under the command of Heinrich Himmler. Ever since the failed assassination plot of July 1944, Hitler had allowed Himmler to take over areas formerly under exclusive Wehrmacht control, which at the end of 1944 included leadership of an army group, albeit stationed in a quiet sector.
The offensive opened on 31 December 1944 with an attack by Gruppenführer Max Simon’s XIII SS Corps, which despite its title contained just a single Waffen-SS formation—17th SS Panzergrenadier Division—with the remaining two divisions supplied by the army. Simon’s attack was made against a well-defended section of the U.S. line and was easily contained. A little farther to the east the main German drive was more successful, breaking through the American front line.
Among the attacking German formations was 6th SS Mountain Division Nord, only recently recovered from its fighting retreat through Finland. The men had been away from Germany in a military backwater for more than two years. They were surprised to be reequipped with MG42 machine guns and Panzerfaust antitank launchers, and they were shocked to see the devastation of their homeland wrought by Allied bombers as they traveled along the Rhine Valley.
Nord had never been envisaged as an elite SS division, but its extended deployment in Finland had provided it with sound combat experience. And the weather conditions encountered in the winter of 1944–1945 were nothing new to the SS troops, in contrast to their opponents. As a result, Nord made useful inroads into the American front line.
On 16 January Nord’s 11th Gebirgsjäger Regiment managed to surround a substantial part of the U.S. 157th Regiment. The Americans fought on, but on 20 January, with no hope of relief, they surrendered to the SS troops, who, impressed by the Americans’ bravery, invited them to share their rations. Johann Voss, a soldier in the 11th Regiment, a short distance from the action, commented, “Rumor had it that all the [U.S.] men were handed a box of Schoka-Kola each, a fine gesture by our commander, although I heard some grumbling that there weren’t any boxes left for us.”18
After this success, the SS troops pushed forward, but the arrival of U
.S. reinforcements and increasingly heavy, well-directed artillery fire brought the German offensive to a halt. By 25 January Nord had lost around half of its infantry to a combination of U.S. fire, illness, and frostbite. While unable to advance farther, Nord continued to hold position against repeated attacks, a performance that won praise from their American opponents. A battalion commander in the 157th Infantry later wrote, “They were the best men we ever ran into, extremely aggressive, and impossible to capture. There was no driving them out, for they fought till they were killed.”19
Heinz Harmel’s 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg—held in reserve during the Ardennes offensive—was redirected to support Nordwind. After a hazardous march to the battle zone, it was ready for action early on 16 January. While it was still dark a combined tank-panzergrenadier force broke through the American defenses at Drusenheim. On the seventeenth American resistance hardened, although it was on this day that Frundsberg’s panzer regiment achieved one of its greatest individual successes. Obersturmführer Erwin Bachmann was an adjutant to the panzer regiment’s CO, and while admitting that he “had never been a really aggressive officer . . . more the staff type,” he asked to go forward to take over the 3rd Company, which had just lost its commander in the battle for the town of Herrlisheim.20 Bachmann jumped into the sidecar of a motorcycle combination and drove into the town, which apart from the odd crackle of rifle fire seemed ominously quiet.
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