Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (46 page)

As in all armies, it was not so much the fear of death as the fear of mutilation which preyed on minds. A German field hospital, or
Feldlazarett
, was little more than an amputation line. American doctors were horrified by the German army’s tendency to cut off limbs without a moment’s thought. A wounded American prisoner from the 401st Glider Infantry was appalled when taken into the operating room.
‘I nearly gagged,’
he wrote. ‘There were half a dozen tables surrounded by doctors in white rubber aprons splattered with blood. All the tables were occupied with German wounded or men with frozen limbs. Buckets on the floor held toes, fingers and other appendages. The men on the tables had been given a local anesthetic, but were still screaming and groaning as the doctors worked.’ When the buckets were left or emptied outside, local dogs soon helped themselves, as Belgians noted. The corpses of those who died under the knife were stacked outside, frozen solid, some with a coating of ice over their faces as if in a glass sarcophagus. Even those lucky enough to be evacuated to Germany had no idea of their destination or fate.
‘The wounded
are sent to wherever the hospital train happens to go,’ a German doctor said. ‘Nobody at the front knows the destination.’

American field hospitals could also be a grisly spectacle. A senior nurse with the Third Army described a ward known as the
‘Chamber of Horrors’
, which stank of ‘gore and sweat and human excretions’. She
recounted a night shift, tending two soldiers who ‘had been dying all day yesterday, and they were dying all night now … One, a private in the infantry, had lost both legs and one hand: he had a deep chest wound and his bowels were perforated by a shell fragment … The other patient was a corporal in a tank outfit. His spinal cord was severed and he was paralyzed from the waist down. His belly was open, and so was his chest.’ Both boys were in a coma, breathing noisily. ‘It’s a good thing their mothers can’t see them when they die,’ she said.

Non-battle casualties were also mounting. In November and December losses to cold amounted to 23,000 men. Almost all were combat infantrymen, and since a division usually had 4,000 of them, this amounted to the equivalent of at least five and a half divisions. Neuro-psychiatric cases, termed combat exhaustion, rose to nearly a quarter of all hospital admissions. The German army, which refused to recognize the condition, apparently suffered far fewer cases.

Combat exhaustion produced recognizable symptoms:
‘nausea, crying
, extreme nervousness and gastric conditions’. Some commanders felt that officer patients were returned to their unit too rapidly, because they often broke down again. The effect could also be infectious.
‘When one man cracks
, others will soon follow.’ Yet isolation was the main problem. It was vital to get men out of their foxholes and mix with the others when not under shellfire.
‘Tank fatigue’
was due more to ‘prolonged periods of continuous combat action’. It differed from the infantry version, even though symptoms were similar with ‘upset stomach, nausea, dysentery, limpness and men crying in some cases in almost a state of hysteria’. The 2nd Armored Division blamed unhealthy eating,
‘long hours of exposure’
in extreme cold, as well as physical exhaustion. ‘Cold C and K rations do not materially increase vitality and resistance, and in some cases cause upset stomachs.’ Attempts to use captured German blowtorches to heat cans of food failed to resolve the problem. American doctors did not of course know then what the Germans had discovered after the battle of Stalingrad. The combination of stress, exhaustion, cold and malnourishment upsets the metabolism, and gravely reduces the body’s capacity to absorb calories and vitamins.

‘Even with hard and experienced
troops, a soldier is only good for so long,’ an officer with the 5th Infantry Division on Patton’s right flank observed. ‘I have seen some marvellous things done by some of my men
and I have seen some of these men crack finally … Tired troops cannot do a job well. They’ll go, but they lack smack. When you lack smack you start losing battles.’

On 8 January, the remnants of the 2nd and 9th Panzer-Divisions received the order to withdraw the next day.
‘It is the coldest weather
I’ve ever experienced,’ a British civil affairs officer noted in his diary. ‘The wind was just like a knife to the face … The roads are full of ditched vehicles with freezing drivers alongside them, waiting for whatever help can come.’ Some people, however, thought it slightly ironic that the atrocious driving conditions greatly reduced the number of traffic accidents and deaths because the drivers were forced to proceed so carefully.

On 10 January, Generalfeldmarschall Model passed on an instruction from Hitler at the Adlerhorst.
‘The Führer has ordered
that I and II Panzer Corps, with the 1st, 2nd, 9th and 12th SS Panzer-Divisions, with immediate effect, are to assemble for rapid refitting behind Army Group B and placed at the disposal of Commander-in-Chief West in such a way that they no longer become involved in combat.’ Army formations would once again feel angry that they would be expected to hold the line while Waffen-SS divisions were withdrawn to be rested and re-equipped.

The bitterness of defeat in the Ardennes was reflected among some German generals held prisoner in England. Having exulted in their material superiority earlier in the war, they now seemed to regard such advantages as unfair. Generalmajor Hans Bruhn, a divisional commander captured by the French in Alsace, was secretly recorded saying to his companions:
‘It’s the greatest mockery
in the history of the world and at the same time the saddest part of it, that the flower of our manhood is being mowed down by the aircraft and the massed tanks of an army which has no real soldiers and which doesn’t really want to fight.’

On Thursday 11 January, there were unmistakable signs that the Germans were pulling back. In the Houffalize–Bastogne area, their corridor was only thirteen kilometres wide and under heavy American artillery fire. The 30th Infantry Division told Ninth Army headquarters that bad visibility was allowing the Germans to escape.
‘The Germans are pulling
all their armor and heavy stuff entirely out of the Bulge in an orderly and leisurely withdrawal.’
Also that day, the BBC announced that the broadcast on Montgomery’s comments had been the product of German propaganda. The news did little to soften Bradley’s feelings about his
bête noire
.

The next morning 12th Army Group received authorization to stockpile gas munitions in case the Germans resorted to chemical weapons in desperation, or on Hitler’s orders. This had been prompted by a report from SHAEF to General Marshall’s intelligence chief in Washington five days earlier. Major General Strong and his staff had been perturbed by five references to ‘gas’ found in Ultra decrypts.
^*

Friday 12 January was eventful in other ways. Göring, apparently forgiven for the disaster of Operation
Bodenplatte
, was summoned to the Führer’s presence at the Adlerhorst
to receive Hitler’s congratulations on his fifty-second birthday. It was hardly an auspicious occasion. The date was far more important for other reasons. At 05.00 Moscow time, Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front attacked out of the Sandomierz bridgehead west of the River Vistula following a massive bombardment, which a panzergrenadier officer said was
‘like the heavens falling down on earth’
. Soviet tank armies advanced with slogans painted on their tank turrets declaring:
‘Forward into the fascist lair!’
and ‘Revenge and death to the German occupiers!’ The next day Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front attacked from south of Warsaw, while two other Fronts assaulted East Prussia.

General Guderian had not exaggerated, but, like Cassandra’s, his warnings had been ignored. The Red Army had deployed 6.7 million men along the whole of the eastern front. He was almost speechless when he heard that Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army, which was being withdrawn from the Ardennes, was to be transferred not to the Vistula or East Prussia but to Hungary to save the oilfields.

As soon as news of the great Soviet offensive reached 12th Army Group, Bradley immediately wanted to spread the impression that his forces’ imminent victory in the Ardennes
‘had enabled the Russian
to attack with far greater numbers and more spectacular success than would otherwise have been possible’. He was right. There can be little doubt that the commitment and then grinding down of German forces in the Ardennes, especially the panzer divisions, had mortally weakened the Wehrmacht’s capacity to defend the eastern front. But as another general in British captivity observed:
‘The fear of Russia
will keep Germany fighting to the bitter end.’

Just as the final battle in the Ardennes commenced, the Germans threw more divisions into Operation
Nordwind
. On 5 January, after the initial attack had failed in its objectives, Himmler’s Army Group
Oberrhein
finally began its supporting thrusts against the southern flank of the American VI Corps. The XIV SS Corps
launched an attack across the Rhine north of Strasbourg, and two days later the Nineteenth Army advanced north from the Colmar pocket either side of the Rhône–Rhine Canal. The very survival of General Patch’s VI Corps was threatened.

Devers, receiving no sympathy from Eisenhower, handed responsibility for the defence of Strasbourg to Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army, which now had to extend its front from the city to the Belfort Gap, a distance of 120 kilometres. But the point of greatest danger was round Gambsheim and Herrlisheim, where the XIV SS Corps had created a bridgehead south-east of Haguenau.

On 7 January, the 25th Panzergrenadier and the 21st Panzer-Division went into the attack. They reached the Haguenau Forest thirty kilometres north of Strasbourg, but were halted by the 14th Armored Division, Devers’s last reserve. To the north in the Low Vosges, the 45th Infantry Division managed to hold back the 6th SS Mountain Division. One of the 45th Division’s battalions was surrounded, and fought on for almost a week. Only two men escaped.

Hitler was still obsessed with Frederick the Great’s dictum that he who throws in his last battalions wins the war. On 16 January, he sent in his final reserves, the 7th Fallschirmjäger-Division and the 10th SS
Panzer-Division
Frundsberg
. Their attack along the Rhine as they tried to reach the Gambsheim bridgehead battered the inexperienced 12th Armored Division at Herrlisheim. This development provided the main subject for discussion at Eisenhower’s morning briefing on 20 January.
‘What gets me
, Honest to God,’ the Supreme Commander exclaimed, ‘is that when two of their divisions are loose, we sit around and get scared.’ Air Marshal Sir James Robb noted in his diary: ‘The discussion which follows reveals a growing wonderment at the failure of our forces, whether divisions or corps, to achieve any real results compared to the immediate success of comparatively small German attacks.’

Faced with this unexpected advance, Devers was forced to retreat to a new line along the Rothbach, Moder and Zorn rivers. This withdrawal was well executed, and the new defensive positions held. The German offensive petered out around 25 January after General de Lattre’s First Army, aided by the US XXI Corps on the northern side, began to crush the Colmar pocket, or what the Germans called Bridgehead Alsace. The American 3rd Infantry Division was supported by Cota’s 28th Division, which one would have thought had suffered enough after the Hürtgen Forest and being crushed east of Bastogne. Fighting in the snow-covered forest of Riedwihr, the 3rd Infantry Division found itself under heavy counter-attacks, and Lieutenant Audie Murphy’s astonishing bravery won him a Congressional Medal of Honor and a future career as a movie star in Hollywood. Once again, the Germans fought so doggedly in retreat, despite Allied superiority in aircraft and artillery, that more units from the Ardennes were diverted south. The Colmar pocket was not finally crushed until 9 February.

The 101st Airborne Division was one of the formations allocated to finish the fighting in Alsace, so its men were relieved to find that this time they were too late to take part. Ten days before, on hearing that the 101st was to move to Alsace, Major Dick Winters had thought:
‘My God, don’t they have
anybody else in this army to plug these gaps?’ The division certainly needed a rest. During its last days at the northern end of the Bastogne pocket, Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry had first been sent in to capture Foy.
‘Every replacement
that came into the platoon got killed in that town,’ said a veteran of the company, ‘and I don’t know why.’ The attack had started as a disaster, until the company commander was rapidly replaced. Then on 14 January, as
temperatures dropped to minus 23 Centigrade and the snow deepened, the 506th advanced across open snowfields towards Noville where many of their comrades had died with Team Desobry at the very start of the battle.

Once Noville had been taken they were given another objective, the village of Rachamps just east of the route to Houffalize. Sergeant Earl Hale and Private Joseph Liebgott cornered six SS officers in a barn. They lined them up and warned them that they would shoot if they tried anything. A shell exploded outside, wounding Hale by the door, and instantly an SS officer whipped out a knife from his boot and slashed Hale’s throat. Liebgott shot him dead, and then gunned down the others. A medic patched up Hale’s throat. He was lucky – the oesophagus had been cut, but not the windpipe. Hale was evacuated by Jeep to Bastogne.
^*

Sergeant Robert Rader noticed an ordinary German soldier taken at Rachamps who looked as if he were grinning. An infuriated Rader raised his rifle to shoot him, but another paratrooper grabbed the barrel, shouting, ‘Sarge, he has no lips or eyelids!’ The German had lost them through frostbite on the eastern front. Rachamps was Easy Company’s very last action in the battle for Bastogne. On 17 January, the 101st was relieved by the 17th Airborne. Packed into open trucks once again instead of aircraft, they were off to Alsace.

Resistance did not lessen in the salient, as the Fifth Panzer Army started to withdraw on 14 January towards Houffalize, which was still being bombed by the Allied air forces. The 2nd Panzer-Division and the Panzer Lehr covered the retreat in the usual German way of using assault guns and tanks with infantry to cover the withdrawal of their artillery regiments. Whenever American howitzers fired white phosphorus shells, it brought a
‘violent enemy
artillery reaction’.

Just as on the southern front, artillery pounded villages, setting houses and farms on fire. Often the shelling was so intense that German soldiers would seek shelter in the cellars, forcing the civilians aside.
Pigs, horses and cows trapped in burning barns and byres stood little chance. In one village eleven people died from a single shell, which hit a stable in which twenty civilians were sheltering. Sometimes the old men, women and children could not stand the relentless shelling any longer, and would try to escape out into the snow. Mistaken for combatants, several were shot down. If those wounded were lucky, American ambulances or trucks would evacuate them to hospitals in the rear. Little, however, could be done for all those suffering from dysentery, pneumonia, diphtheria and a host of other serious ailments brought on by the filthy and freezing conditions of the last few weeks.

Moved by the fate of the luckless Belgians, American troops handed out rations, cigarettes, candy and chocolate. Only a few, brutalized by the war, went about looting and molesting women. To tell the compassionate from the brutal by outward appearances was impossible. Troops of all three nations by that stage looked like brigands, filthy, dishevelled and bearded. Villagers who had benefited earlier from American largesse were struck by the comparative poverty of British troops, who still shared what little they had. The Belgians did not much like the taste of either bully beef or British army-issue cigarettes, but were too polite to say so.

‘Having visited villages
recently cleared of the German Offensive,’ a British civil affairs officer noted, ‘it’s good to see the joy of the people and their expressions of relief.’ But in some places both British and American troops appalled their hosts by smashing up furniture for firewood. An officer in the 53rd Welsh Division noted that to escape the terrible cold,
‘the troops have been over-enthusiastic
in building up a roaring blaze in the old stone hearth, and consequently the chimney overheated, setting fire to part of the roof’. Almost every house occupied by Allied soldiers was left a squalid mess, with substantial damage. The British 6th Airborne Division appears to have provoked the greatest number of complaints.

The British XXX Corps pursued the Germans from the direction of La Roche-en-Ardenne, on the southern flank of Collins’s VII Corps.
‘The right wing
of the 2nd Panzer-Division in the area of Nisramont had to face west,’ wrote Generalmajor Lauchert. ‘During this redeployment, a gap opened into which a British battalion advanced as far as Engreux. The British attack behind the back of the defence line could
only be halted by a feint attack. The divisional command post had to pull out back to Mont.’ Like the American infantry, the British struggled badly in the deep snow. They were not helped by their sodden ammunition boots freezing rock hard. German jackboots were known to be more weather-resistant. The commanding officer of the 1st Gordons in the 51st Highland Division came across one of his sergeants in a wood, where he had strung up the corpse of a German soldier from a branch and had lit a fire under him.
‘He was trying to thaw him out,’
he wrote, ‘in order to take off his boots.’

A Kampfgruppe
of the 2nd Panzer-Division, with engineers, infantry, assault guns and tanks, set up a defence line in front of Houffalize. Hidden by the dark, its Panthers were able to take on American tanks at a range of 400–500 metres as they emerged from the woods because they showed up so clearly against the snow.
‘Very soon an American
tank burst into flames and provided such brightness that the American tanks were well lit and were easy to shoot. After a fire-fight lasting at most fifteen minutes, twenty-four American tanks went up in flames and a further ten were captured undamaged. The Germans lost only two tanks destroyed out of twenty-four.’ As with most of these encounters, this account was probably both optimistic and boastful, but there can be little doubt that the Germans inflicted a number of bloody noses in the final stages of the battle.

On 15 January, the 30th Infantry Division attacking the village of Thirimont found that
‘brick houses
had been turned into veritable pill boxes, and heavy machineguns and other automatic weapons emplaced in them’. It required two battalions from the 120th Infantry Regiment, a tank battalion and a tank-destroyer battalion, as well as ‘over 11,000 rounds of 105mm and 155mm ammunition’, to take the place. The regiment suffered more than 450 casualties at the hands of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division. Because of the deep snow and ice, ‘ambulances couldn’t get anywhere near the wounded’, so the medical battalion borrowed horses and sledges from farmers to bring them back. Most of the Germans taken prisoner were suffering from frostbitten feet and could hardly walk.

Patton drove out in his Jeep to see the troops attacking Houffalize.
‘At one point’
, he wrote, ‘we came across a German machinegunner who had been killed and apparently instantly frozen as he was in a half-sitting
position with his arms extended, holding a loaded belt of ammunition. I saw a lot of black objects sticking out of the snow and, on investigating, found that they were the toes of dead men.’ He too was struck by the way the faces of men frozen rapidly on death turned ‘a sort of claret color’. Patton regretted not having his camera with him to record this.

On 15 January, Hitler returned by train to Berlin, as Zhukov’s and Konev’s tank armies raced towards the line of the rivers Oder and Neisse. The industrial region of Silesia was about to be overrun. Apart from one sortie to an army headquarters on the Oder front, the Führer would never leave the capital again.

By nightfall on 15 January, both combat commands of the 2nd Armored Division had advanced to within a kilometre or so of Houffalize and consolidated for the night. Patrols were sent into the ruins of the town to discover enemy dispositions. They entered the town at 01.00 on 16 January but found little sign of the enemy. Patrols were also sent east to the River Ourthe where enemy positions had also been abandoned.
‘Contact was established
with Third Army patrols at 09.30 that day, marking the juncture of the First and Third Armies in the Ardennes offensive.’

The Ardennes offensive was almost at an end. A British regiment discovered that the Wehrmacht had run out of decorations for valour. Signed photographs of Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt were being offered in lieu. But a captured German communication to a corps headquarters stated:
‘The Division does not
consider that this type of reward has any effect in encouraging the infantry to fight.’

As Eisenhower had decided, the US First Army reverted to the control of Bradley’s 12th Army Group after the First and Third Armies had joined hands. This became official at midnight on 17 January.
‘The situation is now restored,’
Hansen recorded triumphantly. But Montgomery was not finished yet. Determined to retain control of the Ninth Army, he came up with a plan to give it priority over the proud First Army.

‘At 10.30’, General Simpson’s diarist recorded on 15 January, ‘the Field Marshal
Monty [sic] arrived at our office for a conference with the C[ommanding] G[eneral] re the Ninth’s taking over an additional sector. The FM tossed a bombshell. He requested the CG to prepare plans for the Ninth Army, of four Corps and 16 Divisions, to advance on Cologne and the Rhine river at the earliest practicable date … This would mean that the Ninth was to carry the ball for the western front drive – be the main effort, while the First Army would assume a holding mission on our south and, after the breakthru, protect the Ninth’s south flank … 21st Army Group is now apparently considering such an operation quite seriously, and will submit our plan to SHAEF for approval.’

This was clearly a ploy by Montgomery, going behind the back of Bradley. But getting the Ninth Army to formulate its plans first was a clever move, especially since Simpson and his officers were thrilled with the idea of being given priority over the First Army, which would be forced into a subordinate role. ‘That
“protect the Ninth’s
flank” would be the greatest and most satisfying crack at the Grand Old Armie possible!’ Simpson’s diary recorded. ‘How all here would love to see that in print!’