Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (3 page)

This can only be an approximate guide to equivalent ranks since each army has its own variations. Some ranks have been omitted in the interests of simplicity. In the British and US armies the following ranks command the following sub-units (below a battalion), units (battalion or regiment) and formations (brigade, division or corps).

Early on 27 August 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower left Chartres to see the newly liberated Paris.
‘It’s Sunday,’
the Supreme Allied Commander told General Omar Bradley, whom he took with him. ‘Everyone will be sleeping late. We can do it without any fuss.’ Yet the two generals were hardly inconspicuous as they bowled along towards the French capital on their supposedly
‘informal visit’
. The Supreme Commander’s olive-drab Cadillac was escorted by two armoured cars, and a Jeep with a brigadier general leading the way.

When they reached the Porte d’Orléans, an even larger escort from the 38th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron awaited in review order under the orders of Major General Gerow. Leonard Gerow, an old friend of Eisenhower, still seethed with resentment because General Philippe Leclerc of the French 2nd Armoured Division had consistently disobeyed all his orders during the advance on Paris. The day before, Gerow, who considered himself the military governor of Paris, had forbidden Leclerc and his division to take part in General de Gaulle’s procession from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame. He had told him instead to
‘continue on present mission
of clearing Paris and environs of enemy’. Leclerc had ignored Gerow throughout the liberation of the capital, but that morning he had sent part of his division north out of the city against German positions around Saint-Denis.

The streets of Paris were empty because the retreating Germans had seized almost every vehicle that could move. Even the Métro was unpredictable because of the feeble power supply; in fact the so-called ‘City of
Light’ was reduced to candles bought on the black market. Its beautiful buildings looked faded and tired, although they were mercifully intact. Hitler’s order to reduce it to
‘a field of rubble’
had not been followed. In the immediate aftermath of joy, groups in the street still cheered every time they caught sight of an American soldier or vehicle. Yet it would not be long before the Parisians started muttering
‘Pire que les boches’
– ‘Worse than the Boches’.

Despite Eisenhower’s remark about going to Paris ‘without any fuss’, their visit had a definite purpose. They went to meet General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French provisional government which President Roosevelt refused to recognize. Eisenhower, a pragmatist, was prepared to ignore his President’s firm instruction that United States forces in France were not there to install General de Gaulle in power. The Supreme Commander needed stability behind his front lines, and since de Gaulle was the only man likely to provide it, he was willing to support him.

Neither de Gaulle nor Eisenhower wanted the dangerous chaos of liberation to get out of hand, especially at a time of frenzied rumours, sudden panics, conspiracy theories and the ugly denunciations of alleged collaborators. Together with a comrade, the writer J. D. Salinger, a
Counter Intelligence Corps
staff sergeant with the 4th Infantry Division, had arrested a suspect in an action close to the Hôtel de Ville, only for the crowd to drag him away and beat him to death in front of their eyes. De Gaulle’s triumphal procession the day before from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame had ended in wild fusillades within the cathedral itself. This incident convinced de Gaulle that he must disarm the Resistance and conscript its members into a regular French army. A request for 15,000 uniforms was passed that very afternoon to
SHAEF
– the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.
^*
Unfortunately, there were not enough small sizes because the average French male was distinctly shorter than his American contemporary.

De Gaulle’s meeting with the two American generals took place in the ministry of war in the rue Saint-Dominique. This was where his short-lived ministerial career had begun in the tragic summer of 1940, and he had returned there to emphasize the impression of continuity.
His formula for erasing the shame of the Vichy regime was a majestically simple one: ‘The Republic has never ceased to exist.’ De Gaulle wanted Eisenhower to keep Leclerc’s division in Paris to ensure law and order, but since some of Leclerc’s units had now started to move out, he suggested that perhaps the Americans could impress the population with
‘a show of force’
to reassure them that the Germans would not be coming back. Why not march a whole division or even two through Paris on its way to the front? Eisenhower, thinking it slightly ironic that de Gaulle should be asking for American troops
‘to establish
his position firmly’, turned to Bradley and asked what he thought. Bradley said that it would be perfectly possible to arrange within the next couple of days. So Eisenhower invited de Gaulle to take the salute, accompanied by General Bradley. He himself would stay away.

On their return to Chartres, Eisenhower invited General Sir Bernard Montgomery to join de Gaulle and Bradley for the parade, but he refused to come to Paris. Such a small but pertinent detail did not deter certain British newspapers from accusing the Americans of trying to hog all the glory for themselves. Inter-Allied relations were to be severely damaged by the compulsion in Fleet Street to see almost every decision by SHAEF as a slight to Montgomery and thus the British. This reflected the more widespread resentment that Britain was being sidelined. The Americans were now running the show and would claim the victory for themselves. Eisenhower’s British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, was alarmed by the prejudice of the English press:
‘From what I heard at SHAEF
, I could not help fearing that this process was sowing the seeds of a grave split between the Allies.’

The following evening the 28th Infantry Division, under its commander, Major General Norman D. Cota, moved from Versailles towards Paris in heavy rain. ‘Dutch’ Cota, who had shown extraordinary bravery and leadership on Omaha beach, had taken over command less than two weeks before, after a German sniper had killed his predecessor. The fighting in the heavy hedgerow country of Normandy had been slow and deadly during June and July, but the breakout led by General George S. Patton’s Third Army at the beginning of August had produced a surge of optimism during the charge to the River Seine and Paris itself.

Showers had been set up for Cota’s men in the Bois de Boulogne so
that they could scrub themselves before the parade. The next morning, 29 August, the division set off up the Avenue Foch to the Arc de Triomphe, and then down the long vista of the Champs-Elysées. Helmeted infantry, with rifles slung and bayonets fixed, marched in full battle order. The mass of olive-drab, rank after rank twenty-four men abreast, stretched right across the broad avenue. Each man on his shoulder wore the divisional badge, the red ‘Keystone’ symbol of Pennsylvania, which the Germans had dubbed the ‘bloody bucket’ from its shape.

The French were amazed, both by the informality of American uniforms and by their seemingly limitless quantities of machinery.
‘Une armée de mécanos,’
the diarist Jean Galtier-Boissière remarked. On the Champs-Elysées that morning, the French crowds could not believe that a single infantry division could have so many vehicles: countless Jeeps, some with .50 machine guns mounted behind; scout-cars; the artillery, with their 155mm ‘Long Tom’ howitzers towed by tracked prime-movers; engineers; service units with small trucks and ten-tonners; M-4 Sherman tanks, and tank destroyers. This display made the Wehrmacht, the apparently invincible conqueror of France in 1940, appear bizarrely old-fashioned with its horse-drawn transport.

The saluting dais was on the Place de la Concorde. Army engineers had created it out of assault boats turned upside down and concealed by a long
tricolore
valance, while numerous Stars and Stripes fluttered in the breeze. In front the fifty-six-piece band, which had led the parade, played the division’s march, ‘Khaki Bill’. The French crowds watching the show may not have guessed, but all the soldiers knew that the 28th Division was headed against the German positions on the northern edge of the city.
‘It was one of the most
remarkable attack orders ever issued,’ Bradley remarked later to his aide. ‘I don’t think many people realized the men were marching from parade into battle.’

On the Channel coast, the Canadian First Army had to capture the great port of Le Havre, while the Second British Army pushed north-east into the Pas de Calais towards some of the German V-weapon sites. Despite the exhaustion of tank drivers and a terrible storm on the night of 30–31 August, the Guards Armoured Division seized Amiens and the bridges over the Somme with the help of the French Resistance. General der Panzertruppe Heinrich Eberbach, the commander of the Fifth
Panzer Army, was taken unawares the next morning. The British advance then managed to drive a wedge between the remains of the Fifth Panzer Army and the Fifteenth Army, which had held the Pas de Calais. The Canadians, led by the Royal Regiment of Canada, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and the Essex Scottish, headed for Dieppe where they had suffered so grievously in the disastrous raid two years before.

Allied victory euphoria could not have been greater. The July bomb plot that summer against Hitler had encouraged the idea that disintegration had started, rather like in 1918, but in fact the failure of the assassination attempt had strengthened Nazi domination immeasurably. The
G-2
intelligence department at SHAEF blithely claimed,
‘The August battles
have done it, and the enemy in the west has had it.’ In London, the war cabinet believed it would all be over by Christmas, and set 31 December as the end of hostilities for planning purposes. Only Churchill remained wary of the German determination to fight on. In Washington a similar assumption allowed attention to turn increasingly to the still desperate fight against the Japanese in the Pacific. The US War Production Board began cancelling military contracts, including those for artillery shells.

Many Germans also thought the end had come. Oberstleutnant Fritz Fullriede in Utrecht wrote in his diary:
‘The West Front is finished
, the enemy is already in Belgium and on the German frontier; Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Finland are pleading for peace. It is exactly like 1918.’ In a Berlin railway station protesters had dared to put up a banner which read:
‘We want peace
at any price.’ On the eastern front the Red Army had crushed Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, which had taken them 500 kilometres forward to the gates of Warsaw and the River Vistula. In three months the Wehrmacht had lost 589,425 men on the eastern front and 156,726 in the west.

The dash to the Vistula had encouraged the brave but doomed Warsaw uprising of the Armia Krajowa. Stalin, not wanting an independent Poland, callously allowed the insurgents to be crushed by the Germans. East Prussia, with Hitler’s headquarters at the Wolfsschanze
near Rastenburg, was also threatened, and German armies were collapsing in the Balkans. Just two days before the liberation of Paris, Romania defected from the Axis as Soviet armies surged across its borders. On 30 August, the Red Army entered Bucharest and occupied the vital oilfields of
Ploeşti. The way lay open to the Hungarian plain and the River Danube stretched ahead into Austria and Germany itself.

In mid-August, General George Patton’s Third Army charged from Normandy to the Seine. This coincided with the successful Operation Dragoon landings between Cannes and Toulon on the Mediterranean coast. The threat of being cut off prompted a massive German withdrawal right across the country. Members of the Vichy Milice who knew what awaited them at the hands of the Resistance also set out across hostile territory, in some cases for up to a thousand kilometres, to seek safety in Germany. Improvised ‘march groups’, a mixture of army, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine and non-combatant personnel from the Atlantic coast were ordered to escape east, while attempting to evade the French Resistance along the way. The Wehrmacht began to reinforce a salient around Dijon to receive almost a quarter of a million Germans. Another 51,000 soldiers were left trapped on the Atlantic coast and Mediterranean. Major ports were designated as ‘fortresses’ by the Führer even though there was no hope of ever relieving them. This denial of reality was described by one German general as being like a Catholic priest on Good Friday who sprinkles his plate of pork with holy water and says:
‘You are fish.’

Hitler’s paranoia had reached new heights in the wake of the 20 July bomb plot. In the Wolfsschanze
in East Prussia, he went far beyond his earlier jibes that the German general staff was just
‘a club of intellectuals’
.
‘Now I know why
all my great plans in Russia had to fail in recent years,’ he said. ‘It was all treason! But for those traitors, we would have won long ago.’ Hitler hated the July plotters, not just because of their treachery, but because of the damage they had done to the impression of German unity, and the effect this had on the Third Reich’s allies and neutral states.

At the situation conference
on 31 August, Hitler declared:
‘There will be moments
in which the tension between the Allies will become so great that the break will happen. Coalitions in world history have always been ruined at some point.’ The propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels rapidly picked up on the Führer’s line of thinking at a conference of ministers in Berlin soon afterwards.
‘It is certain that the political conflicts
will increase with the apparent approach of an Allied victory, and some day will cause cracks in the house of our enemies which no longer can be repaired.’

The chief of the general staff of the Luftwaffe, General der Flieger Werner Kreipe, noted in his diary on that last day of August:
‘In the evening
reports arrive of the collapse in the west.’ A frenzy of activity continued through most of the night with ‘orders, instructions, telephone conversations’. The next morning, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), asked the Luftwaffe to transfer another 50,000 men to ground forces. On 2 September, Kreipe noted: ‘Apparently disintegration has set in in the west, Jodl [chief of the Wehrmacht planning staff] surprisingly calm. The Finns detach themselves.’ During that day’s conference
Hitler began insulting the Finnish leader, Marshal Mannerheim. He also became angry that Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring did not bother to turn up at such a critical moment and even suggested disbanding the Luftwaffe’s squadrons and transferring flight crews to flak units.