Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (42 page)

All around the area of maximum German advance, starving and frozen stragglers were being rounded up. A farmer’s son went to look after the horses near Ychippe. When he returned a German soldier, whom he had seen limping towards their house, knocked at the door. Pointing to his feet, he said: ‘Kaput!’ He had been sleeping in a barn. He sat down by their stove, put down his pistol and removed his boots. An American patrol arrived, and took the German prisoner before he had a chance to seize his pistol. Other German soldiers had been hiding in neighbouring houses and farm buildings. One of them refused to come out of a
barn when they were surrounded. He was wearing American uniform and feared being shot. Eventually he was persuaded to come out when the Americans threatened to burn the barn down. They forced him to strip off the items of American uniform and then took him away in a Jeep. The villagers had no idea what happened to him.

In a number of places, such as Conjoux, villagers watched with sadness as American tank drivers smashed down their little orchards and hedgerows. They were less anxious when they saw American infantry approaching with columns of men on both sides of the road in Indian file. The parsimonious existence of farming folk in the region meant that nothing could be wasted. They took whatever they could from abandoned German vehicles, since this was likely to be the only compensation they could hope for in exchange for the damage to their fields, barns and houses, as well as the loss of fodder, horses and carts seized by the Germans. A caterpillar-tracked motorcycle constituted a great prize. They siphoned fuel from abandoned vehicles and took tool kits, tinned rations, tyres and wheels, and stripped almost anything else which could be disassembled. A few took away grenades in the hope of some productive fishing in the summer.

Several farmers tried removing the wheels from field guns, hoping to make a cart, but they found that they were too heavy for a horse to pull. In a far more successful improvisation, a mechanically expert farmer managed to build his own tractor entirely from parts taken from a range of German armoured vehicles. The engine came from a half-track. One household even removed the front seats from a
Kübelwagen
, the Wehrmacht equivalent of a Jeep, and used them in their parlour for almost thirty years. At Ychippe, a dead German officer was left for many days slumped back in the front seat of another
Kübelwagen
. Seventeen-year-old Theóphile Solot was fascinated by the fact that his beard continued to grow after death.

Women were desperately anxious about the fate of sons and husbands. Those who had escaped across the Meuse were indeed fortunate, because the Germans had rounded up large numbers of the men and boys who had remained. They were made to clear snow from roads and haul supplies. Many did not have the right clothes for the snow and ice. Barely fed, certainly not enough for hard work, they were also ill equipped. Few had gloves or even spades. They were treated as prisoners, and locked
in barns at night. In some cases, their guards fixed grenades to doors and windows so that they could not escape. Many were marched all the way back to Germany to work there and were not liberated until the closing stages of the war. A number were killed by Allied aircraft because the pilots could not distinguish between groups of German soldiers and Belgian civilians. They all looked like little black figures against the snow.

In the last days of December, the British XXX Corps extended its new positions between the Meuse and Hotton. An English civil affairs officer took a rather romantic view of their surroundings.
‘The Ardennes has a pronounced Ruritanian atmosphere,’
he wrote, ‘as one imagines in the story of the Prisoner of Zenda. The chateaus give the added effect, together with the larger woods of fir trees, laden with snow.’

Once the weather closed in, air reconnaissance had become impossible. When the 53rd Welsh Division replaced the Americans at Marche-en-Famenne, the Allies needed to know how the Panzer Lehr and the remnants of the 2nd Panzer were redeploying after their withdrawal from Rochefort. The British 61st Reconnaissance Regiment attached to the 6th Airborne Division, as well as Belgian and French SAS forces, some 350 strong, was sent into the large area of forest and bog south of Rochefort and Marche to find out.

The French squadron headed for Saint-Hubert, and on 31 December a Belgian squadron from the 5th SAS Regiment located part of the Panzer Lehr at Bure ten kilometres south of Rochefort. In their Jeeps, armed only with twin Vickers machine guns, they could do little more than harass the panzergrenadiers. Three of their best men were killed straight off by a German 88mm gun. The Germans were holding on desperately in this area because almost all the remnants from the 2nd and 9th Panzer-Divisions, as well as the Panzer Lehr, had been extricating themselves from Rochefort along this route. After most of the inhabitants had sought shelter in the cellars of the religious college, the Germans seized all their sheets for camouflage. And while the villagers sheltering underground had nothing to eat but potatoes, the panzergrenadiers killed and ate their chickens.

German artillery now shelled Rochefort, and the townsfolk remained in the surrounding caves. Only a few ventured out during lulls to fetch
food. All were deeply grateful to Frère Jacques,
‘with his beret and big black rubber gloves’
, who collected corpses to give them a Christian burial.

The Germans also continued to bombard Liège with V-1 bombs. On New Year’s Eve, Lance-Sergeant Walker in the Middlesex Regiment, a veteran of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, was on his way to attend mass in a church at Sur-le-Mont just south of the city. A V-1 flying bomb was passing overhead, and as he looked up, he saw it turn over and start to dive. ‘A Belgian child was standing a few yards from him oblivious of the danger,’ the citation for his medal stated. ‘Lance-Sergeant Walker leaped to the child, pulled him down on the ground and shielded him with his own body. The bomb exploded a few yards from where they lay and severely wounded Lance-Sergeant Walker. The child was unhurt.’ The Royal Army Medical Corps gave up on Walker because his wounds were so severe, but he survived because the Americans scooped him up and conducted pioneering flesh-graft surgery on him which was filmed and sent to other field surgical hospitals for instructional purposes.

American headquarters all organized their own parties for New Year’s Eve. At Simpson’s Ninth Army, they celebrated with highballs and turkey. At Hodges’s First Army, dinners were always formal.
‘In his mess every night,’
one of his officers recorded, ‘we dressed for dinner: jacket, necktie, combat boots.’ Hodges usually had a bourbon and Dubonnet on the rocks with a dash of bitters, but that night he ordered that the case of champagne which Collins had given him after the capture of Cherbourg should be opened to toast the New Year. At midnight there was a panic when soldiers began
‘indiscriminately firing their rifles
. Hasty investigation showed that no attack was going on but that simple exuberance [was] having its day.’

Bradley’s 12th Army Group headquarters also had a party. According to Hansen, Martha Gellhorn
‘talked passionately half the evening
of the war in Spain … she is the original newspaperwoman who believes in the goodness of man, having seen so much of his worst, having seen it abased in the battlefronts of the entire world’. It seems the party atmosphere was slightly spoiled by nervousness that there might be an official inquiry into the intelligence failure to foresee the German offensive. General William Donovan, the founder of the Office of
Strategic Services, had just arrived from Washington, and mentioned that there was ‘talk of a congressional investigation to determine why we were lax’. Bradley was extremely nervous and defensive over his ‘calculated risk’ before the German attack, leaving only four divisions to defend the Ardennes.

In Berlin, the diarist Ursula von Kardorff, who was connected to the July plotters, entertained a few friends on New Year’s Eve.
‘At midnight all was still
. We stood there with raised glasses, hardly daring to clink them together. A single bell tinkled in the distance for the passing of the year, and we heard shots, and heavy boots crunching on the splintered glass [in the street from broken windows]. It was eerie, as though a shadow were passing over us and touching us with its dark wings.’ In the Ardennes, Germans, and also Belgians, braced themselves for the Allied counter-offensive and the fighting still to come.
‘My prayer on the threshold of the new year’
, wrote a young Volksgrenadier officer near St Vith, ‘is with the Führer’s and our strength to end this war victoriously.’ In the next few hours, the Germans struck again, both in the air and in Alsace.

On New Year’s Eve at midnight, American artillery all around the Ardennes fired salvoes to tell the Wehrmacht that the year of its final defeat had begun. But the Germans had New Year messages of their own. A few minutes before the old year was out, Army Group Upper Rhine commanded by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler launched an offensive called Operation
Nordwind
against the left flank of General Devers’s 6th Army Group.

The day after Christmas, Seventh Army intelligence had warned that the Germans might attack in northern Alsace during the first few days of January. General Devers had flown to Versailles to see General Eisenhower. Their relationship had not improved since Eisenhower rebuffed his plan to seize a bridgehead across the Rhine. And because the struggle in the Ardennes was approaching its climax, SHAEF simply wanted the American and French divisions in the south to go on the defensive. With most of Patton’s Third Army deployed on the southern side of the salient, Devers’s forces, stripped to the bone to strengthen the Ardennes, had been forced to extend their frontage to more than 300 kilometres.

Eisenhower wanted to shorten the line in Alsace by withdrawing to the Vosges mountains, and probably giving up Strasbourg in the process. Tedder warned him strongly against such a move. (Ironically, it was now the British who opposed giving up territory.) This was to lead to a major confrontation with the French, for whom Strasbourg had powerful significance.

The other attack was much more unexpected. Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring, stung by the bitter criticism of his Luftwaffe, had decided on his own lightning strike. His plan for a major surprise against the Allied air forces had first been mentioned on 6 November, when Generalmajor Christian told Hitler that
‘The Reichsmarschall has
ordered that all these new groups now standing by should be deployed in a single day – a day when the weather doesn’t pose a problem – all together, in one strike.’

Hitler was dubious. ‘I am just afraid that, when this day comes, the groups won’t co-ordinate and that they won’t find the enemy … The hope of decimating the enemy with a mass deployment is not realistic.’ He was also very sceptical of Luftwaffe claims and figures of aircraft ratios, and was exasperated that his pilots had shot down so few Allied planes. He exclaimed: ‘There are still tons of [Luftwaffe aircraft] being produced. They’re only eating up labor and material.’

The Luftwaffe faced many problems, but also created its own. Few veteran pilots remained because of the wasteful system of failing to give them sufficient breaks from front-line duty, and of not using them to pass on their expertise to trainees.
‘They are all young pilots now with no experience,’
a Messerschmitt 109 pilot said. ‘All the experienced ones have gone.’
‘What sort of training have the newcomers had to-day?’
said another. ‘It’s pitiful, appalling.’ Mainly because of fuel shortages, they arrived at operational units after only a few hours of flying solo. No wonder American fighter pilots said that they would far prefer to take on four new pilots than one veteran.

Morale was bad. One captured officer detailed the number of excuses pilots used to avoid flying or engaging in combat. They included
‘engine trouble’
, and ‘undercarriage not retracting’. One pilot who went up, flew around and shot at nothing was arrested when he landed. More senior officers
‘used to fly’
, said another veteran pilot, ‘but all that is over now. They don’t do a thing. They don’t fancy a hero’s death any longer, those days are past.’ A profound cynicism spread to all ranks.
‘In our Staffel
[squadron] you were looked at in amazement if you hadn’t got venereal disease,’ a Feldwebel reported. ‘At least 70% had gonorrhoea.’

The greatest cynicism was reserved for their commander-in-chief, the Reichsmarschall. He
‘seems to have run the Luftwaffe
with much the same methods as those used by the Queen of Hearts in
Alice in Wonderland
’,
a senior officer with the Oberkommando Luftwaffe remarked, ‘and with much the same effectiveness … For him the Luftwaffe was just another toy.’ One of the few senior officers who took part in the great New Year’s Day attack recalled asking a superior,
‘Well, what’s our Reichsmarschall doing now, Herr General?’
The general replied: ‘The Reichsmarschall is dealing in diamonds at the moment. He hasn’t any time for us.’ On the other hand, General der Flieger Karl Koller, the chief of staff, blamed Hitler more than anyone.
‘He had no understanding of the needs
of the Luftwaffe, remaining an infantryman in outlook throughout his life.’

In any case, Göring felt that he had no option but to go all out. He
‘practically cried’
about the state of the Luftwaffe, according to an Oberstleutnant, and said that
‘unless we gained mastery in the air quickly, then we have lost the war’
. Göring’s final gamble, a shadow of Hitler’s whole Ardennes offensive, was to be called
Unternehmen Bodenplatte
– Operation Baseplate. Practically every fighter that could fly would take off to attack Allied airfields and shoot up their aircraft on the ground.

Although Luftwaffe officers had known of the plan for several weeks, the operational order caused astonishment and horror when they were called for briefing on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. Pilots were forbidden to drink any alcohol that evening or stay up to celebrate the New Year. Many dreaded the prospect of the morrow, and what looked like a suicidal Japanese
banzai
charge. Flying personnel were at least allocated
‘take-off’
rations, with extra butter, eggs and white bread. They were promised that on return from the operation they would receive a slab of chocolate, real coffee and a full ‘operations’ meal.

Almost 1,000 German aircraft on thirty-eight airfields started their engines soon after dawn. Oberstleutnant Johann Kogler, due to lead Jagdgeschwader 6 against Volkel airfield in Holland, sat in the cockpit of his Focke-Wulf 190. Kogler had few illusions. General der Flieger Adolf Galland had
‘poured out his troubles to me; it was pretty grim’
. Kogler’s chief was the useless General der Flieger Beppo Schmidt, who had so misled Göring as his intelligence chief in 1940 that Generaloberst Franz Halder remarked that Göring was
‘the worst-informed officer in the whole Luftwaffe’
. Schmidt, appalled by the loss of fighter commanders, had tried to keep them on the ground. Kogler objected to such an idea on
principle.
‘Herr General, if we must fly to give the enemy
some fun, so that they have something to shoot at; and if we are just being put into the air for the sake of doing something, then I do request that I should be allowed to accompany [my pilots] every time.’

The commander of a Focke-Wulf 190 Staffel, in Jagdgeschwader 26, found the choice of their targets bitterly ironic.
‘We had been stationed on these airfields ourselves
. I had to take my own Staffel to shoot up the very airfield where I used to be based.’ Far more depressing was Göring’s order.
‘Whoever [returns after failing]
to attack the airfield properly, or fails to find it, must immediately take off again afterwards and attack it again.’ This was to prove a disastrous idea. Each group was to be accompanied by an Me 262 jet whose pilot’s role was to identify anyone who showed a lack of determination in the attack.

Some pilots at least seemed to revel in their mission, reminiscing about their exploits earlier in the war.
‘What a smashing we gave them at the beginning!’
remembered one who was due to attack the airfield near Ghent. ‘Sixty aircraft took off in each Gruppe.’ He was clearly exultant even at this stage at the impression of power which
Bodenplatte
gave. ‘Now in our sortie on the 1st [January] – Oh my goodness! What there was up in the air. I myself was amazed. I no longer knew which Geschwader I belonged to. They flew about all over the place. The civilians stared at us. Afterwards we flew over the front [and] the soldiers stood and gazed. We all flew low.’

This very optimistic impression omitted another aspect of the chaos. Following Hitler’s security precautions before the Ardennes offensive, Göring had refused to allow German flak defences to be warned of Operation
Bodenplatte
in advance. As a result the flak batteries assumed that these large formations, which they suddenly saw overhead, must be enemy. They opened fire. Apparently sixteen of their own aircraft fell victim to friendly fire on the way to their objectives.

Their simultaneous attacks at 09.20 hours had targeted twelve British airfields in Belgium and southern Holland, and four American bases in France. But due mainly to navigational errors, they hit thirteen British bases and only three American. The Germans achieved surprise, but not in every case. The Geschwader attacking the Sint-Denijs-Westrem airfield at Ghent bounced a Polish squadron of Spitfires just as it was landing, and very short of fuel. The attackers destroyed nine of them and another six on the ground. But they in turn were caught by the other two Polish squadrons of 131 Wing, which shot down eighteen of
them and damaged another five for the loss of only one Spitfire. Among the captured Focke-Wulf pilots was the one who had rejoiced at the number of German aircraft in the air.

The Americans fared better than the British, because one group of attackers became totally lost and failed to find their target, and a patrol of P-47 Thunderbolts dived into the force aiming for Metz; but the Germans still managed to destroy twenty out of forty fighter-bombers on the ground there. The heaviest British losses were at Eindhoven, where the Germans were lucky enough to hit the first squadron of Typhoons just as they were taking off. The crashed aircraft blocked the runway, trapping the other squadrons behind.
‘One frustrated Typhoon
pilot stood on his brakes and applied power to lift his aircraft’s tail, so he could shoot at the low-flying attackers from the ground.’

At Evere a Spitfire squadron was also caught taxiing to the runway and destroyed, but one pilot managed to get airborne. He shot up one of the ‘bandits’, but was brought down himself. The Americans became convinced that the aircraft of the British 2nd Tactical Air Force had all been caught out
‘closely parked in formation’
. This was true only at Eindhoven, a photo-reconnaissance base, where Spitfires were lined up on an old Luftwaffe runway because there was nowhere else to put them. Bases were certainly over-full because many squadrons had had to concentrate on the airfields with hard runways, which could be cleared of snow more easily. The news that Field Marshal Montgomery’s personal aircraft had also been destroyed on the ground prompted a distinct atmosphere of schadenfreude in American circles.
‘They caught the British with their pants down so badly’
, wrote the First Army diarist the next day, ‘that General Montgomery’s G-2 [intelligence chief] sent a pair of suspenders [braces] as [a] present to the G-2 of their Tac[tical] Air Force.’ Eisenhower, with great generosity, immediately gave Montgomery his own aircraft.

Staff officers at Ninth Army headquarters went out to watch the air battles.
‘Mid-morning saw many dogfights
in the Maastricht area, with ack-ack shooting wildly at unseen planes in the low hanging clouds.’ Altogether the Allies lost 150 combat aircraft destroyed and 111 damaged, as well as 17 non-combat aircraft. Pilot losses were mercifully light, but more than a hundred ground personnel were killed.

Many German fighters were brought down by anti-aircraft fire, including Oberstleutnant Kogler who was captured. Near Brussels,
bizarrely, one low-flying German pilot in a Focke-Wulf was brought down by a partridge
‘which tore a large hole
in his radiator so the coolant drained out stopping the engine’. But as Ninth Army headquarters recognized,
‘Jerry made one big error
in this surprise attack, which proved very costly. He stayed too long. Enjoying the fun of shooting the place up, he delayed so long that our fighters from rear bases had time to get into the air and caught him as he turned for home. He suffered extremely heavy losses as a result.’

Those pilots who, under Göring’s order, were made to refuel, rearm and attack again, flew back to find Allied squadrons in overwhelming strength, determined to wipe them from the skies. Worst of all, German air defences were still kept in total ignorance, even after the attack.
‘A catastrophe overtook the Luftwaffe’s great operation on 1 January,’
Hitler’s adjutant Nicolaus von Below noted. ‘On their return our aircraft flew into heavy and accurate fire from our own flak defences, which had never been informed of the operation on security grounds. Our formations suffered heavy losses which could never be made good. This was the last major effort of the Luftwaffe.’

It was not even a partial victory. The Luftwaffe lost 271 fighters destroyed and 65 damaged. Their air-crew casualties were disastrous. Altogether 143 pilots were dead or missing, another 70 were taken prisoner and a further 21 were wounded. The losses included three Kommodore, five Gruppenkommodore, or wing commanders, and fourteen Staffelkapitäne, or squadron leaders. They would be very hard to replace.

Germans could do little about their fate, so they just plodded on, stumbling through ruins after Allied bombing raids had knocked out tram and rail tracks, on their way to factories and offices, usually without windows or electricity. Hitler did not mention the Ardennes offensive in his New Year speech that day. As he rambled on, most of his audience realized that he had nothing new to offer.

Hitler also made no mention of
Unternehmen Nordwind
– Operation North Wind. He had thought up the idea of
Nordwind
on 21 December and gave the operation its name on Christmas Day. Although the official intent was to destroy the American VI Corps in northern Alsace by linking up with the Nineteenth Army holding the Colmar pocket, his real intentions were to upset Patton’s advance in the Ardennes and to give the impression that he still retained the initiative. On 28 December, Hitler had summoned the divisional commanders to the Adlerhorst
so that he could address them personally, as he had done before the Ardennes offensive.