Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Page 12

  Skorzeny was given unlimited powers to prepare his mission. His officers obtained whatever they wanted simply by saying ‘order from the Reichsführer’. Officers and NCOs from the army, Waffen-SS, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe who spoke English were ordered to report to the camp at Schloss Friedenthal outside Oranienburg for ‘interpreter duties’. Around half of them came from the navy. There they were interrogated in English by SS officers. They were told that they would be part of a special unit designated the 150th Panzer-Brigade and were sworn to secrecy. They had to sign a paper which stated: ‘Everything I know about the commitment of 150th Panzer-Brigade is secret. Secrecy will be maintained even after the war. Breach of the order is punishable by death.’ Their commander, the wonderfully named Oberstleutnant Musculus, had blond hair and facial scars from student duels. He promised them that the activities of the 150th Panzer-Brigade would have a ‘decisive effect on the course of the war’.

  A young naval officer, Leutnant zur See Müntz, was sent along with all the others to the heavily guarded camp of Grafenwöhr. He was then given the task of collecting 2,400 American uniforms, including those of ten generals and seventy officers, from prisoner-of-war camps by 21 November. Müntz first went to Berlin to the department of prisoners of war. The officer in charge, Oberst Meurer, was taken aback by the Führer order they presented signed by Hitler himself. He mentioned that such activities were illegal under international law, but provided them with written instructions to all camp commanders. Müntz set off with a truck and various helpers to collect the uniforms as well as identity papers, paybooks and so forth, but they had great difficulty obtaining what they needed from the prisoner-of-war camps. At Fürstenberg-an-der-Oder, the camp commandant refused the order to strip field jackets from eighty American soldiers. Müntz was recalled to Grafenwöhr in case the Red Cross heard of the row and word of it then reach the Allies. His mission partly failed because of the grave shortage of US Army winter clothing, as GIs had already found to their cost in the Hürtgen Forest, Lorraine and Alsace.

  At Grafenwöhr, all ranks had to salute in the American style, they were fed on K-Rations and were kitted out in the few uniforms which Müntz and his group had managed to obtain. Every order was given in English. They were made to watch American movies and newsreels to learn the idiom, such as ‘chow-line’, and to improve their accent. They also spent two hours a day on language and American customs, including how to eat ‘with the fork after laying down the knife’. They were even shown how to tap their cigarette against the pack in an American way. All the usual commando skills were also taught, such as close-quarter combat training, demolition and the use of enemy weapons.

  When given more details of the forthcoming Operation Greif, as it was called, those who expressed doubts about going into action in American uniforms were threatened by SS-Obersturmbannführer Hadick. He ‘emphasized that the Führer’s orders would be obeyed without question, and that anyone who chose to disagree would be sentenced to death’. Morale was also rather shaken when they were issued with ampoules of cyanide ‘concealed in a cheap cigarette-lighter’.

  Men from SS units almost worshipped Skorzeny as a super-hero after his exploits in Italy and Budapest, while he treated them with ‘conspicuous friendship’. One of them wrote later: ‘he was our pirate captain’. Many rumours ran around the camp about what their true mission was likely to be. Some thought that they were to be part of an airborne operation to reoccupy France. Skorzeny himself later claimed that he had encouraged the story that certain groups would be tasked with heading to Paris, to kidnap General Eisenhower.

  Kampfgruppe Skorzeny was split into a commando unit, Einheit Steilau, and the 150th Panzer-Brigade. For the commandos, Skorzeny picked 150 men out of 600 English-speakers. Mounted mostly in Jeeps and wearing American uniforms, they included demolition groups to blow up ammunition and fuel dumps and even bridges; reconnaissance groups to scout routes to the Meuse and observe enemy strength; and other teams to disrupt American communications by cutting wires and issuing false orders. Four men were mounted in each Jeep, which was a mistake since the Americans themselves seldom packed as many on board, and each team had a ‘speaker’, the one with the best grasp of American idiom. The German soldiers in American uniforms waiting to advance in their Jeeps were clearly nervous. In an attempt to reassure them, an officer from brigade headquarters told them that ‘according to the German radio, US soldiers in German uniforms had been captured behind the German lines, and that … a lenient view would be taken, and the US soldiers treated as prisoners of war’.

  The 150th Panzer-Brigade was much stronger with nearly 2,000 men, including support units. There was a paratroop battalion, two tank companies with a mixture of M-4 Shermans and badly disguised Panthers, panzergrenadier companies, heavy mortars and anti-tank guns in the event of their securing one of the Meuse bridges at Andenne, Huy or Amay. The plan was to get ahead of the panzer spearheads once they reached the Hohes Venn plateau on a line with Spa, by taking side roads and tracks. They would hide up by day, then race forward in the dark to seize the three bridges.

  Skorzeny also had plans to blow up the five bridges over the upper Rhine at Basle, in case the Allies entered Switzerland to outflank German defences in the south. In fact on 5 December SHAEF studied the possibility of outflanking German forces in the south by going through Switzerland, but Eisenhower turned this idea down. (Stalin, who clearly hated the Swiss, had urged the Allies at the Teheran conference a year before to attack southern Germany through Switzerland.)

  As X-Day for the Ardennes offensive approached, the defensive covername was changed from Wacht am Rhein to Herbstnebel, or ‘Autumn Mist’. The delays in the delivery of fuel and ammunition became worse and the attack had to be pushed back to dawn on 16 December. Altogether some 1,050 trains were needed to bring the divisions to their concentration areas. Each panzer division needed seventy trains alone.

  So far, nobody below the level of corps command had been informed. But SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper of the 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler guessed what was afoot on 11 December when Krämer, the Sixth Panzer Army’s chief of staff, wanted to discuss a hypothetical offensive in the Eifel region. He asked Peiper how long it would take a panzer regiment to move eighty kilometres at night. To be sure of his answer, Peiper himself took out a Panther for a test run over that distance in darkness. He realized that moving a whole division was a much more complicated matter, but what he and his superiors had underestimated was the state of the roads and the saturated ground in the Ardennes.

  Hitler reached his western headquarters at the Adlerhorst that day in a long motorcade of huge black Mercedes. His main concern was maintaining secrecy. He had become nervous when Allied bombers flattened the town of Düren, the main communications centre just behind the start-line for the operation. His mood swings were highly erratic, from total dejection to groundless optimism. According to his Luftwaffe adjutant Oberst von Below, he ‘was already seeing in his mind’s eye the German spearhead rolling into Antwerp’. The next morning, Sepp Dietrich was summoned to his bunker concealed under fake farm buildings.

  ‘Is your army ready?’ Hitler asked straight out.

  ‘Not for an offensive,’ Dietrich claimed to have replied.

  ‘You are never satisfied,’ the Führer answered.

  Late that afternoon, buses brought divisional commanders to the Adlerhorst to be addressed by Hitler. Each officer was searched by SS guards and had to surrender his pistol and briefcase. At 18.00 hours, Hitler limped on to the stage. Generals who had not seen him for some time were shocked by his physical deterioration, with pallid face, drooping shoulders and one arm which shook. Flanked by Keitel and Jodl, he sat behind a table.

  He began with a long self-justification of why Germany was in the state it was at that stage of the war. A ‘preventative war’ had been necessary to unify the German peoples and because ‘life without Lebensraum is unthinkable’. Never for a moment did he consid
er how other nations might react. Any objection was part of a conspiracy against Germany. ‘Wars are finally decided by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can’t be won any more. Thus, the most important task is to bring the enemy to this realization. The fastest way to do this is to destroy his strength by occupying territory. If we ourselves are forced on to the defensive, our task is to teach the enemy by ruthless strikes that he hasn’t yet won, and that the war will continue without interruption.’

  Hitler reminded the assembled generals that some of them had feared taking the offensive against France in 1940. He claimed that the Americans had ‘lost about 240,000 men in just three weeks’ and ‘the enemy might have more tanks, but with our newest types, ours are better’. Germany was facing a fight that had been inevitable, which had to come sooner or later. The attack had to be carried through with the greatest brutality. No ‘human inhibitions’ must be allowed. ‘A wave of fright and terror must precede the troops.’ The purpose was to convince the enemy that Germany would never surrender. ‘Never! Never!’

  Afterwards the generals went to a party to toast Rundstedt’s sixty-ninth birthday at his headquarters in the nearby Schloss Ziegenberg, a gloomy building rebuilt in neo-Gothic style. Nobody felt much like celebrating. According to Dietrich, they did not dare discuss the offensive because of the death penalty threatened against anyone who mentioned it.

  On 13 December, Dietrich visited the headquarters of Army Group B. Model said to him that this was ‘the worst prepared German offensive of this war’. Rundstedt noted that out of the thirty-two divisions promised, four divisions were withdrawn just before the attack, including the 11th Panzer-Division and the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division. Only twenty-two were assigned to take part in the opening of the offensive. The rest were held back as an OKW reserve. While most generals were deeply sceptical of the operation’s chances of success, younger officers and NCOs, especially those in the Waffen-SS, were desperate for it to succeed.

  Peiper’s regiment received its march order from east of Düren to its assembly area behind the front. It set off after dark following the plain yellow arrows which marked the route. No divisional insignia or numbers were shown. The night and the following morning were foggy, which allowed the men to slip into their assembly areas without being spotted by air reconnaissance. Other divisions also removed their divisional insignia from vehicles just before the advance.

  Joachim, or ‘Jochen’, Peiper was twenty-nine years old and good looking with his brown hair slicked back. In the Waffen-SS he was seen as the beau idéal of a panzer leader, a convinced Nazi and utterly ruthless. In the Soviet Union he was well known for torching villages and killing all the inhabitants. On 14 December, shortly before noon, he reported to the headquarters of the 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler where Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke issued its orders for X-Day on 16 December. The division had been reinforced with an anti-aircraft regiment with 88mm guns, a battalion of heavy howitzers and an extra engineer battalion for repairing bridges. Each Kampfgruppe was to be accompanied by one of the Skorzeny units, with captured Shermans, trucks and Jeeps, but the division had no control over them. On his return Peiper briefed his battalion commanders in a forester’s hut.

  Only on the evening of 15 December were officers allowed to brief their troops. Hauptmann Bär, a company commander in the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division, told his men: ‘In twelve or fourteen days we will be in Antwerp – or we have lost the war.’ He then went on to say: ‘Whatever equipment you may be lacking, we will take from American prisoners.’ Yet, in SS formations especially, the mood was one of fierce exultation at the prospect of revenge. NCOs appear to have been among the most embittered. Paris was about to be recaptured, they told each other. Many regretted that the French capital should have been spared from destruction while Berlin was bombed to ruins. In the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg, the briefing on the offensive produced ‘an extraordinary optimism’ because the Führer had ‘ordered the great blow in the West’. They believed that the shock of an unexpected attack would represent a massive blow to Allied morale. And according to an officer in the highly experienced 2nd Panzer-Division, ‘the fighting spirit was better than in the early days of the war’. Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army alone had more than 120,000 men, with nearly 500 tanks and assault guns and a thousand artillery pieces. Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army had another 400 tanks and assault guns. The Allied command had no idea of what was about to hit them on their weakest sector.

  Intelligence Failure

  Hitler’s prediction of tensions in the Allied camp did come about, but certainly not to the degree he had hoped. Both Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, and Montgomery had again become concerned with the slowness of the Allied advance, which they ascribed to Eisenhower’s incapacity as a military leader. Both wanted a single ground force commander, ideally in the shape of Bernard Law Montgomery. Yet Brooke thought Montgomery harped on about it too much. He was awake to the political reality that everything had changed. The war in north-west Europe had become an American show, as Britain struggled to maintain its armies around the world. So if there were to be a single ground commander, in Brooke’s view, it would have to be Bradley and not Montgomery. But the diminutive field marshal had clearly learned nothing and forgotten nothing, except his promise to Eisenhower that he would hear no more on the subject of command from him.

  On 28 November, Eisenhower came to 21st Army Group headquarters at Zonhoven in Belgium. Montgomery always pretended to be far too busy to visit his Supreme Commander even when little was happening on his front. Eisenhower should not have put up with his behaviour. He sat in Monty’s map trailer while Montgomery strode up and down, lecturing him for three hours on what had gone wrong, and why a single ground commander was needed. Montgomery felt that the natural dividing line was the Ardennes, and that he should command all the Allied forces north of that sector, which would have given him most of the First US Army and all of Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s Ninth Army. Unfortunately, Eisenhower’s silence – he was speechless from exhaustion and boredom – gave Montgomery the idea that it indicated tacit consent with his argument that the Allies had suffered a strategic reverse by failing to reach the Rhine and by the fruitless bloodbath in the Hürtgen Forest. Afterwards, to the astonishment of his own military aide, the field marshal sent a signal to Brooke in London indicating that Eisenhower had agreed with everything he said. And in a cable to Eisenhower on 30 November, Montgomery outlined what he thought had been agreed.

  The next day Eisenhower visited Bradley at his headquarters in the Hôtel Alfa in the city of Luxembourg. Bradley was a pitiful sight in bed, suffering from flu and hives. Although Eisenhower was furious with Montgomery over his allegation of a strategic reverse, the letter which he dictated in reply was not pointed enough to penetrate Montgomery’s armoured complacency. A meeting on 7 December was agreed in Maastricht.

  On Wednesday 6 December, Eisenhower returned to Bradley’s headquarters, bringing his deputy Air Chief Marshal Tedder to discuss tactics before meeting Montgomery. Major Chester B. Hansen, Bradley’s aide, feared that his general was ‘pathetically alone’. ‘It is his knowledge of the critical times facing him that has caused the nervousness now evident in him for the first time. He is not irritable but he is more brusque than usual, he looks tired and the slight physical irritations have combined to wear him down physically as well as mentally.’ Eisenhower listened to him, ‘with his face heavily wrinkled as he frowned, his neck stuck deeply into the fur collar of the flying jacket he wears’.

  Bradley was also exasperated with the Allies’ lack of progress. ‘If we were fighting a reasonable people they would have surrendered a long time ago,’ he said. ‘But these people are not reasonable.’ Hansen then added in his diary: ‘The German has proved unexpectedly resistant, however, and he dies only with great difficulty … He has been told by Goebbels that this is a fight to the finish, that
the weak shall be exterminated in the labor camps of Siberia. It is little wonder, therefore, that we find them fighting our advance savagely, causing us to kill them in great numbers.’ Goebbels, in an attempt to stop German soldiers surrendering in the west, had indeed put out a story that the Americans had agreed to hand over all their prisoners of war to the Soviets for reconstruction work. He came up with the slogan ‘Sieg oder Sibirien!’ – ‘Victory or Siberia!’

  The next day at Maastricht, with Montgomery, Hodges and Simpson, Eisenhower discussed the next stage. He spoke of ‘sledgehammer blows that will carry them across the Roer and up to the banks of the Rhine’. Eisenhower then expressed his concerns about crossing the Rhine. He was afraid of mines or ice floes destroying pontoon bridges, thus cutting off any troops in the bridgehead. Field Marshal Brooke had been horrified when Eisenhower told him in mid-November that the Allies probably would not be across the Rhine until May 1945. This remark, coming at the end of Brooke’s tour of the front, strongly influenced his view that Eisenhower was not up to the task of Supreme Commander.

  Montgomery once again put forward his arguments for a heavy attack across the Rhine north of the Ruhr industrial region while all the other American armies were virtually halted. Eisenhower, no doubt gritting his teeth, once again repeated his position that a thrust towards Frankfurt was also important and he had no intention of stopping Patton. ‘Field Marshal Montgomery’, the notes of the meeting recorded, ‘could not agree that a thrust from Frankfurt offered any prospect of success. In his view, if it were undertaken, neither it nor the thrust north of the Ruhr would be strong enough … Field Marshal Montgomery said that the difference of view about the Frankfurt–Cassel thrust was fundamental.’ To avoid a clash, Eisenhower tried to convince him that the difference was not very great. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group would have the major role with Simpson’s Ninth Army under his command.