The Second World War (71 page)

Another deficiency in the plan was lack of fuel. Only a quarter of the minimum requirement was on hand when the offensive opened, much of it held east of the Rhine, while the leading attack elements were expected to capture supplies from the Americans as they advanced. Hitler nevertheless clung to the conviction that Autumn Mist would succeed. Speaking to the generals at Rundstedt’s command post on 12 December, he painted a picture of an alliance of ‘heterogeneous elements with divergent aims, ultra-capitalist states on the one hand, an ultra-Marxist state on the other . . . a dying empire, Britain . . . a colony bent on inheritance, the United States. . . . If now we can deliver a few more heavy blows, then at any moment this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder.’

Thanks partly to the careful security measures observed by Army Group B during the preparations for Autumn Mist, and partly to Supreme Allied Headquarters’ close attention on its own operations at Aachen, in the Saar and Alsace, such warning signs of the offensive as were emitted failed to alert Allied anxieties. On the morning of 16 December, D-Day for Autumn Mist, the front of attack was held by only four American divisions, the 4th, 28th and 106th Divisions supported by the inexperienced 9th Armoured Division, disposed across a space of nearly ninety miles. Two of the three infantry divisions had between them suffered 9000 casualties in the Hürtgen forest battle and had been sent to the Ardennes to rest; the third, 106th, was entirely new to battle.

On to these ill-fitted and unprepared American defenders of the Ardennes, the Sixth and Fifth Panzer Armies fell like a whirlwind on the morning of 16 December. In the centre the American 28th Division was quickly overrun and in the north the 106th Division’s forward elements were surrounded; only in the south, where the 4th Division was supported by the 9th Armoured Division, did the Germans make less progress than anticipated. During this troubled day, moreoever, Bradley’s 12th Army Group headquarters, in which the Ardennes sector lay, failed to appreciate the magnitude of the attack that was developing. Bereft of air reconnaissance because winter weather ‘closed in’ its airfields, and denied intercept intelligence because of strict German radio security, it formed the view that the attack was local and diversionary and did not react with urgency to the developing crisis.

Eisenhower, whom Bradley was by chance visiting during the day, fortunately took a more precautionary view. He decided to bring down two armoured divisions from the neighbouring formations, the 7th from the Ninth Army and the 10th from the Third, to stand on the flanks of the German attack lest it develop into a full-blown offensive. Patton, battling into the Saar and still imbued with the belief that he was on the point of breakthrough, automatically protested; but Eisenhower’s caution was to be justified by events. On the second day of the offensive, 17 December, the 1st SS Panzer Division arrived at the key road junction of Saint Vith, from which a valley route led to the Meuse and so into the plains of Belgium and the approaches to Antwerp. It was to be denied a breakthrough by the appearance of the US 7th Armoured Division’s spearheads and thereafter found itself turned away from access to open country – and to the vast American fuel dumps near Stavelot on which it had counted for resupply – by one American blocking move after another.

While the Sixth Panzer Army was being diverted from the direct north-westward route to Antwerp, and forced progressively due east, the Fifth Panzer Army was making better progress in the southern sector towards Monthermé, where Kleist’s Panzers had crossed the Meuse in 1940. The key to its breakthrough was the road centre of Bastogne, a junction for the sparse network of highways that runs from the Eifel into the Ardennes and onward. The capture of Bastogne was essential to the successful development of Autumn Mist. At dawn on 19 December Panzer Lehr Division was only two miles from the town; but during the night the US 101st Airborne Division had arrived by truck, having driven 100 miles from Reims at breakneck speed, and was positioned to deny the Germans possession. The parachutists were quite unequipped to combat tanks; but by their resolute defence of the small town’s streets they prevented Panzer Lehr’s infantry from gaining entry and so turned Bastogne into an even more effective road block than Saint Vith (which fell on 23 December) on the Sixth Panzer Army’s axis of advance.

By Christmas Day Bastogne was completely surrounded by German troops and the Fifth Panzer Army had moved on; Panzer Lehr had worked around a flank to appear beyond Saint-Hubert, only twenty miles from the Meuse. On Christmas Day itself, however, the pace of the German advance across the whole front of attack began to slow and the nose of the salient which the Panzer armies had driven into Allied lines was attenuating. Allied counter-measures had begun to tell. On 20 December, in the face of Bradley’s strident objections, Eisenhower had confided command of operations against Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army, on the northern face of the ‘bulge’ closest to Antwerp, to Montgomery; while the intervention of divisions from Patton’s Third Army against the southern face during 17-21 December matched the effect of the counter-attacks that the British commander set in train. Montgomery, who was copiously informed from 20 December by Ultra decrypts of both Sixth and Fifth Panzer Armies’ intentions, took prompt steps to guard the bridges across the Meuse, towards which Dietrich’s spearheads were advancing, with British troops brought down from northern Belgium. He thereafter took the view that the attackers, now opposed by nineteen American and British divisions, including such seasoned formations as the US 82nd Airborne and 2nd Armoured Divisions, would simply wear themselves out by their effort to make progress.

Montgomery’s analysis proved exactly correct. Indeed, unrecognised though it was at the time, the American divisions, particularly the 28th and 106th, which had stood in the path of the initial attack, had through the dedicated and self-sacrificing resistance of many of their rifle platoons and anti-tank teams done a great deal to wear down the impetus of the German Panzer divisions on the first day of attack. They had inflicted heavy casualties, damaged if not always destroyed equipment, and delayed the timetable on which the success of the offensive too narrowly depended.

On 26 December Eisenhower’s headquarters received the first evidence that Autumn Mist had lost its vital impetus. The weather cleared, allowing the Allied air forces to intervene effectively for the first time. Patton’s 4th Armoured Division broke through the southern face of the ‘bulge’ to bring relief to the 101st Airborne Division surrounded in Bastogne, and the 2nd Armoured Division, from Hodges’s First Army, found the 2nd Panzer Division immobilised for lack of fuel near Celles, five miles from the Meuse at Dinant, and destroyed its leading tanks. Indeed, in the course of its one-sided encounter with the 2nd Armoured Division, the 2nd Panzer Division lost almost all the eighty-eight tanks and twenty-eight assault guns with which it had begun the offensive.

By 28 December Montgomery was sure that Autumn Mist had failed, though he expected the Germans to persist in the offensive and even to launch a further attack. That attack, when it came, fell outside the Ardennes ‘bulge’, in the Saar, where Blaskowitz’s Army Group G struck against Patch’s Seventh Army and managed to take and briefly hold a triangle of territory on the west bank of the Rhine. This brief success reinforced Hitler’s view that his aggressive strategy had been correctly conceived, even though it had been launched at a moment when the Eastern even more than the Western Front cried out for defensive reinforcement. In fact, however, North Wind (as this second offensive was codenamed) caused mild political but little military alarm and contributed to Autumn Mist not at all. On 3 January 1945 Montgomery launched a convergent counter-attack against the northern and western faces of the ‘bulge’, which obliged Hitler on 8 January to order the withdrawal of the four leading Panzer divisions from their exposed situation. On 13 January the American 82nd and British 1st Airborne Divisions made contact in the centre of what had been the Ardennes salient, and by 16 January the front was restored.

Between 16 December and 16 January the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies had inflicted some 19,000 fatal casualties on the US 12th Army Group and taken 15,000 Americans prisoner. In the first days of their offensive they had spread panic throughout the civilian population of Belgium and caused alarm among the military as far away as Paris – where precautions were taken against sabotage raids it was feared would be mounted by the small clandestine units which Otto Skorzeny infiltrated (in practice with little success) behind the Allied lines. The German offensive had also shaken the optimism prevailing in Washington and London over the early conclusion of the war. Hitler spoke to his subordinates of ‘a tremendous easing of the situation . . . the enemy had had to abandon all his plans for attack. He has been obliged to regroup his forces. He has had to throw in again units which were fatigued. He is severely criticised at home. . . . Already he has had to admit that there is no chance of the war being ended before August, perhaps not before the end of next year. This means a transformation of the situation such as nobody would have believed possible a fortnight ago.’

Hitler exaggerated; he also grossly misinterpreted the true significance of the Ardennes campaign. It had, of course, inflicted losses on the enemy, but those losses could be borne and made good. The British army had come to the end of its manpower resources, but the American army had not. Since September it had shipped twenty-one divisions to France including six armoured; between January and February it was to land another seven, including three armoured, all fully equipped and up to strength. The
Westheer
, by contrast, had lost 100,000 men killed, wounded or captured in the Ardennes, 800 tanks and 1000 aircraft – many thrown away in the Luftwaffe’s last offensive,
Bodenplatte
, launched against Allied airfields in Belgium on 1 January 1944. None of these losses, human or material, could be made good. The Wehrmacht’s resources were exhausted, while German war industry’s output could no longer keep pace with everyday attrition, let alone the surges of destruction caused by indulgence in heavy offensive activity. Steel production alone, fundamental to weapons manufacture, had been reduced from 700,000 to 400,000 tons monthly in the Ruhr by bombing between October and December, and it continued to decline; while the disruption of the transport system meant that it was increasingly difficult to move weapon components from point of production to point of assembly.

All that Autumn Mist achieved was to impose a brief delay on the Western Allied armies’ preparations to break into Germany, at the expense of transferring from or denying to the Eastern Front men and equipment needed to stem the continued advance of the Red Army into southern Poland and the Baltic states. During November and December 2299 tanks and assault guns and eighteen new divisions had been committed to the Western Front but only 921 tanks and five divisions to the Eastern, where 225 Soviet infantry divisions, twenty-two tank corps and twenty-nine other armoured formations confronted 133 German divisions, thirty of which were already threatened with encirclement in the Baltic states. Hitler’s ‘last gamble’, as the Ardennes came to be described, was extremely short-sighted. It bought a little time at great cost, failed in its object of destroying Montgomery’s army and won back no ground at all.

Indeed, despite the intervention of Generals January and February, who fought in 1945 on the German side, the Western armies recovered quickly from the shock of Autumn Mist and succeeded in making advances as creditable, given the more defensible nature of the terrain west of the Rhine, as the Red Army was currently achieving in Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. In January the two German salients west of the West Wall, the Roermond triangle north of Aachen and the Colmar pocket south of Strasbourg, were reduced. In February and March Eisenhower’s armies advanced along the whole front, to reach the Rhine between Wesel and Koblenz and to seize the north bank of the Moselle between Koblenz and Trier. By the end of the first week of March it was the Rhine alone which stood between the Allies and the German hinterland.

Hitler’s Decision to commit Germany’s last army to a winter offensive in the west in 1944, rather than to use it as a counter-attack force against the encroachments of the Red Army in the east, might seem with hindsight one of the most perverse of the Second World War. In the east, Germany was defended by neither geography nor man-made fortifications. In the west, both the Siegfried Line (West Wall) and the Rhine stood between the Anglo-American armies and the interior of Germany. Comparatively weak forces committed to hold those obstacles would have sufficed to hold Eisenhower’s troops at bay for months, while the Sixth SS and Fifth Panzer Armies, under which Hitler’s last tank reserve was concentrated, might have won an equal amount of time had they been deployed to fight on the line of the Vistula and the Carpathians instead of being cast away in the Ardennes adventure. Hitler’s rationalisation of his decision is well known: in the west the Allied armies were exposed to a counterstroke towards Antwerp, the success of which would have freed his forces to unleash in the east a subsequent offensive designed to destabilise the Red Army. In short, he chose to strike for the chance of victory rather than settle for postponing the onset of defeat. Events were to rob him of both outcomes. The choice of the Ardennes offensive, though it may have set back a little the launching of the Rhine crossing, actually thereby ensured the unimpeded advance of the Red Army’s offensive in the east whenever Stalin chose to launch it.