A World at Arms (147 page)

At this time and thereafter, Hitler was especially concerned about protecting the remaining oil fields in southern Hungary, and he appears to have had something of a fixation about Budapest, the Hungarian capital. The puppet government of Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szalasi was trying to operate under German auspices, collaborating in the murdering of Jews with greater enthusiasm than the much more dangerous task of fighting the Red Army. During October and November, Russian forces pushed forward to the outskirts of Budapest, surrounding it in December, but the Germans had succeeded in their holding operation in three important ways. They had built up a new front in the wake of their disaster in Romania and Bulgaria, they had kept Hungary from changing sides in October somewhat on the Finnish model of September,
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and they had contributed to the slowing down of the advancing Red Army.

Hungarian formations contributed only a small part of this effort, as Szalasi admitted when he saw Hitler on December 4. He promised to fight on, but urged Hitler to make no compromise with the Anglo-Saxons, crushing them, but doing everything possible “to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union.”
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While Hitler agreed that no compromise was possible with the Western Powers, he was less definite about one with the Soviet Union; he was “willing to reconsider the whole question and adopt some new line of action” but the Red Army had to be driven back first.
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At the front itself, however, the German effort to relieve Budapest had had no more success than the earlier
attempt of the Red Army to seize the Hungarian capital on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.

On the central portion of the Eastern Front, the Red Army concentrated on building up its bridgeheads across the Vistula and Narev rivers in preparation for future offensives, but the spearheads aimed toward Warsaw had been halted, and the Russians observed the agony of Warsaw from a safe distance. While at Hitler’s orders the city was, in effect, razed to the ground, the Red Army in that sector remained quiet; the key concerns for it were the four bridgeheads across the Vistula, several of which were expanded slightly in heavy fighting after earlier German attempts to eliminate them had failed.
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But, in general, the last three months of 1944 saw the central portion of the Eastern Front from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathians stable, with the Soviets rebuilding the transportation system and destroying the Polish underground army behind their lines and the Germans attempting to create an effective defensive system on their side. Although a Soviet patrol had briefly crossed the pre-war border into East Prussia on August 17, the German defense held until mid-October when the Russians drove onto German territory almost to Gumbinnen, where the front stabilized for several months.
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Further north, the portion of western Latvia held by the cut-off German Army Group North was compressed somewhat by Russian attacks; but the Germans refused to evacuate the region, while the Soviets, in a series of local offensives, proved unable to destroy the garrison.
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The special role of this German-held bridgehead, already referred to in
Chapter 12
, is examined below in connection with the German hopes for a new form of submarine warfare. In the far north, the German troops withdrawing from the Finnish front were pulled back to the Lyngen position, at first under Soviet pressure, but after the end of October without contact. A buffer zone, devastated by the Germans and soon after controlled by a token police force sent by the Norwegian government-in-exile, separated the German and Soviet forces. The Red Army had other priorities; the Germans could continue to hold most of Norway and looked forward to utilizing its naval bases for that resumption of attacks on Allied shipping which they hoped to carry out with the new submarines.

The basic fact was that the military advance of the Soviet Union had run out of steam as German forces fell back and reformed. The transportation system in the huge area liberated by the Red Army since June had to be restored, replacements had to be provided for the heavy casualties suffered during the summer offensive, and the great losses of equipment had also to be made good. Furthermore, any new offensives
required extensive planning, the stockpiling of supplies, especially artillery ammunition, and very extensive regrouping of Soviet forces. This last was a result of geographic factors which created a converse of the problem the Germans had once faced as they headed east. Given the territorial funnel–like opening up of Europe as one moves from Central Europe eastwards, any invader of Russia must deal with the fact that the front–measured from north to south–becomes larger the further east the advance goes. When heading west the opposite is true. The major front in the North European plain between the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea becomes steadily narrower. With the exception of the Soviet units facing the remaining Germans in Courland, the armies which had fought on the northern end of the front from Leningrad through the Baltic States now had to be redeployed. New command arrangements had to be worked out for the final assault on Germany; and if Stalin in the planning for this decided to arrogate to himself the coordination of the central thrust–arole hitherto played by a special Stavka representative–this was a sign as much of the narrower front as of Stalin’s personal interest in a direct role in the final assault on Berlin. But during the interval in which the planning and preparations for that offensive were under way, the Eastern Front was uncharacteristically quiet.
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There is no clear evidence on the subject, but the Russian four months halt at the Vistula may also have had other motives. The railways behind the advancing Red Army in the Balkans were the same gage as those behind the no longer advancing front in Poland, and therefore required as much work in either reloading railway transport or altering to the wider Russian gage. Perhaps the Soviet leadership believed that it was only appropriate for the Western Allies to do some of the heavy fighting; they had certainly done an enormous amount themselves. It was no secret that Germany was trying desperately hard to create new divisions and to equip them with the newest weapons. It would certainly assist the Red Army’s drive into Central Europe if these new units, together with the rebuilt divisions salvaged by the Germans out of their summer defeats, were launched against the armies in the West instead of being fed into the front in the East. As Soviet sources become accessible in the coming years, new light may be shed on this long “quiet on the Eastern Front.”

In the West, several factors combined to stall the Allied advance in the very weeks when, as we now know, the Germans were preparing their
own offensive. The most important single factor holding back the Allies was the supply situation. As they had advanced rapidly in August, the Allied armies had been unable to seize additional ports. Brest did not fall for months and then turned out to be so badly wrecked that it was not reopened. Other ports continued to be held by German garrisons deliberately left behind with instructions to hold on precisely to prevent use of the port facilities. The great harbor of Marseilles had been wrecked by the Germans almost as much as Cherbourg but soon came to be an essential element in the supply picture.
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The other major port, and the one which the Allies had counted on as the main base for a drive into Germany, had fallen into their hands intact but could not be used because the Germans controlled its approaches-Antwerp. For months Montgomery would not provide the Canadian army with the logistic and other support it needed to drive the Germans from its approaches; and while the Canadians, eventually assisted by other Allied forces, battered their way forward, all the Allied armies had to be supplied to a large extent from Cherbourg and over the beaches, hundreds of miles from the front.
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The supply problem was accentuated by two difficulties inherent in the invasion project but made even worse by the slowness in clearing the ports, especially Antwerp. Since shipping was one of the great bottlenecks, use of the small ports on the Channel coast, the beaches, and the only partially cleared harbor facilities at Cherbourg and later Marseilles tied up ships for inordinate lengths of time. Secondly, the enormous distance from the factories in the United States to the front meant that, in the best of circumstances, it took close to four months for an item ordered in France to reach the battlefield. This long supply route in turn tied up vast quantities en route–usually there were about two thousand tanks in the pipeline from the United States to the front.
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The rapid advance in August combined with the repair needs of the French railway system to force a reliance on motorized transport, primarily thousands of large trucks. These were dispatched over designated one–way routes to forward supply centers. The “Red Ball Express” was both the most famous and the most effective of these; when it ceased operating on November 16, the same day that the Normandy beaches finally closed down, it had carried over 400,000 tons of supplies.
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Although this system of motorized transport together with the railways and some airlift and barge traffic enabled the Allied forces to maintain
their military effectiveness, these measures could not move enough material to the front fast enough to sustain the August rate of advance. The great arguments over a narrow versus a broad front in the West was largely academic–like the dispute over the German advance in the East after late July 1941. Until major ports, especially Antwerp, were operational and the railway system was functioning at a high level of efficiency, there was no prospect of a major advance against the stiffening German resistance on either a broad or a narrow front.
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The difficulties with supply affected not only material but manpower. Although Allied casualties had not been as high in the initial assault as had been anticipated, thereafter first the heavy fighting in Normandy and then the combat after the August rush created a massive need for replacements. In the British army, this meant pressure to break up some divisions to provide replacements for others, a process under way by late August in spite of strenuous objections from Churchill, who saw this process, begun in August and continuing during the winter, as leading to a reduced British weight in Allied discussions of strategy.
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There could certainly be no question of transferring units from the European to the Southeast Asian theater at this time as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff wanted; until victory over Germany had been attained, Great Britain simply had to concentrate its shrinking manpower resources in Europe.
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The American manpower situation was also tight though for entirely different reasons. The American army had concentrated on building divisions for combat and had shipped these to Europe as rapidly as possible. Now that these divisions were in combat, providing an adequate stream of replacements was complicated not only by the tight shipping situation but by what most would consider defective replacement policies. Injured men were not systematically returned to their own units when they recovered from their wounds; divisions were kept in combat far too long instead of being periodically rotated for rest and refitting; and the rear area services were over staffed even if necessarily large because of the enormous distance from the American base to the front. Pouring replacements into front units on an undifferentiated basis as these units were kept in constant combat was excessively costly, as the inexperienced replacements themselves became casualties quickly. The whole system worked poorly and served to accentuate rather than remedy the manpower shortages developing at the battle front. A wide variety of expedients was attempted to remedy this situation, from combing out rear area staffs to retraining men as infantry replacements; but these efforts took effect slowly, certainly precluded effective offensive operations in the
late fall of 1944, and never quite straightened out a situation which ought to have been anticipated.
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The upshot of all this was that the Allied thrust was weakening at the very time that massive German reinforcements built up a new defensive line in the West.
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As Hitler had explained long before, the defensive depth available in the West was not great; here the Allies could reach Germany’s industrial heart. It was, therefore, to this front that most of the new divisions were sent. The American and French armies in the south were able to clear all of Lorraine and, except for a bulge around Colmar, most of Alsace; but American progress in the north was slow around Aachen, held up by German control of dams which could flood their route of advance, while the British made minimal advances in the Venlo area.

The German role in halting the Allied offensive had been the rebuilding of formations, in some cases around cores which had escaped the Falaise battle, in some cases newly organized and equipped by massive manpower mobilization, together with a substitution, in effect, of holding on to the ports as a means of reducing Allied supplies for sinking them with submarines. It was the German hope that new weapons and new formations would now enable them to strike such blows at the Western Powers as to drive them off the continent. There could be no quick renewal of a massive Allied invasion in the West, so that such a German victory could be the prelude to either a compromise peace or a renewed offensive in the East.

Two of the new weapons were already seeing service: the V-1, the pilotless bomber, and the V-2, the ballistic missile. These were now increasingly directed at Antwerp in an effort to destroy the port facilities on which the Allies were correctly believed to depend heavily. But other weapons were already either in service or about to be employed. The Germans had a lead in the design and manufacture of jet airplanes, and it was their hope that the enormous advantage in speed which these planes had over all planes powered by conventional engines would enable them to drive the Allied bombers out of the skies and to regain control of the air over the battlefield. The reality quickly proved otherwise. The new jets did succeed in shooting down some bombers; but they were simply overwhelmed by the great numbers and longer endurance of the American P-51 Mustangs, an outcome also affected by the poor training (because of inadequate fuel) of the German pilots and the greater experience of the American pilots.
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