Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Page 13

  Bradley had to hide his anger when Montgomery went on to argue that ‘all operations north of the Ardennes should be under one command; all south of the Ardennes under another’. This would mean leaving Bradley with just the Third Army. Eisenhower retorted that future operations dictated that the Ruhr in front of them should be the dividing line. Bradley made his feelings clear to Eisenhower soon afterwards. If his 12th Army Group were to be placed under Montgomery, then he would regard himself as relieved of his duties for having failed in his task as a commander.

  Most of the action at that time was taking place on the Third Army front. Patton’s forces were crossing the River Saar in several places, and a few days later the last fortress in the Metz area was taken. ‘I think only Attila [the Hun] and the Third Army have ever taken Metz by assault,’ Patton wrote with satisfaction in his diary. He was also preparing a major offensive to begin on 19 December. Yet it is wrong to suggest that Montgomery was acting through jealousy of Patton, as some have suggested. He was far too self-absorbed to be envious. He also appeared quite incapable of judging the reactions of others to what he said. In fact, one might almost wonder whether Montgomery suffered from what today would be called high-functioning Asperger syndrome.

  Patton was becoming infuriated with the one element he could not control, the relentless rain. On 8 December, he rang the Third Army chaplain, James O’Neill. ‘This is General Patton. Do you have a good prayer for weather?’ The chaplain asked if he could call back. He could not find anything in the prayer books, so he wrote out his own. ‘Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.’ Patton read and firmly approved. ‘Have 250,000 copies printed and see to it that every man in the Third Army gets one.’ He then told O’Neill that they must get everyone praying. ‘We must ask God to stop these rains. These rains are the margin that holds defeat or victory.’ When O’Neill encountered Patton again, the general was in bullish form. ‘Well, Padre,’ said Patton, ‘our prayers worked. I knew they would.’ And he cracked him across the helmet with his riding crop to emphasize the point.

  In the south, the neglected US Seventh Army in Alsace redeployed towards the northern flank of its salient to support Patton’s offensive in Lorraine with its own attack up towards the area of Bitche. This meant that the neighbouring French First Army under General de Lattre de Tassigny felt exposed. Lattre considered his forces undermanned, partly because so many French units were still besieging German garrisons on the Atlantic coast. This, he maintained, was the reason for his army’s inability to crush the Colmar pocket despite the addition of a US infantry division, a failure which prompted many disobliging remarks from American officers. To make matters worse, the bitter cold of the Vosges mountains had badly affected the morale of his troops.

  One of the great debates about the Ardennes offensive has focused on the Allied inability to foresee the attack. There were indeed many fragmented pieces of information which taken together should have indicated German intentions, but as in almost all intelligence failures, senior officers discarded anything which did not match their own assumptions.

  Right from the start, Hitler’s orders for total secrecy cannot have been followed. Word of the forthcoming offensive even circulated among senior German officers in British prisoner-of-war camps. In the second week of November, General der Panzertruppe Eberbach was secretly recorded saying that a Generalmajor Eberding, captured just a few days before, had spoken of a forthcoming offensive in the west with forty-six divisions.* Eberbach believed this was true, and that it was a last try. Even a Leutnant von der Goltz, captured on South Beveland during the clearing of the Scheldt, had heard that ‘the big offensive, for which they were preparing 46 divisions, was to start in November’. These secretly recorded conversations were reported by MI 19a on 28 November to the War Office in London and sent on to SHAEF, but this rather vital information does not appear to have been taken seriously. No doubt it was simply dismissed as a desperately optimistic rumour circulating among captured officers, especially since the figure of forty-six divisions seemed so impossibly high.

  During the first week of November, a German deserter recounted in a debriefing that panzer divisions redeployed to Westphalia were part of the Sixth Panzer Army. This also highlighted the fact that SHAEF intelligence had not heard of the Fifth Panzer Army for several weeks. Both SHAEF and Bradley’s 12th Army Group assumed that the Germans were preparing a strong counter-attack against an American crossing of the Roer. A German spoiling attack before Christmas was also considered to be quite likely, but hardly anybody expected it to come from the Eifel and through the Ardennes, even though the Germans had used this route in 1870, 1914 and 1940.

  The Allies could not believe that the Germans in their weakened state would dare to undertake an ambitious strategic offensive, when they needed to husband their strength before the Red Army launched its own winter onslaught. Such a gamble was definitely not the style of the commander-in-chief west, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt. This was true, but the Allied command had gravely underestimated Hitler’s manic grasp on the levers of military power. Senior officers have always been encouraged to put themselves in their opponents’ boots, but it can often be a mistake to judge your enemy by yourself. In any case, SHAEF believed that the Germans lacked the fuel, the ammunition and the strength to mount a dangerous thrust. And the Allies’ air superiority was such that a German offensive into the open would surely play into their hands. In London, the Joint Intelligence Committee had also concluded that ‘Germany’s crippling shortage of oil continues to be the greatest single weakness in her capacity to resist.’

  Wehrmacht troop movements into the Eifel around Bitburg were observed, but other divisions seemed to move on so it was assumed the area was just a staging post, or a sector for preparing new formations. Unfortunately, the Ardennes sector was deemed a low priority for air reconnaissance, and as a result of bad weather very few missions were flown in the region. Just six days before the great attack in the Ardennes, Troy H. Middleton’s VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne concluded: ‘the enemy’s present practice of bringing new divisions to this sector to receive front line experience and then relieving them out for commitment elsewhere indicates his desire to have this sector of the front remain quiet and inactive’. In fact the Germans were playing a clever form of ‘Find the Lady’, shuffling their formations to confuse Allied intelligence.

  Patton’s Third Army headquarters noted the withdrawal of panzer formations, and his chief intelligence officer, Brigadier General Oscar W. Koch, feared that VIII Corps in the Ardennes was very vulnerable. The conclusion of many, including General Bradley, was that the Germans might well be planning a spoiling attack to disrupt Patton’s major offensive due to begin on 19 December. A number of other intelligence officers became wise after the event and tried to claim that they had predicted the great offensive, but nobody had listened. Several within SHAEF and Bradley’s 12th Army Group did indeed predict an attack, and a couple were very close to getting the date right, but none of them specifically identified the Ardennes as the threatened sector in time.

  Eisenhower’s senior intelligence officer Major General Kenneth Strong included an offensive in the Ardennes as one of several options. This had made a marked impression on Eisenhower’s chief of staff Bedell Smith in the first week of December. Bedell Smith told Strong to go to Luxembourg and warn Bradley, which he did. In their conversation, Bradley said that he was ‘aware of the danger’, but that he had earmarked certain divisions to move into the Ardennes area should the enemy attack there.

  The most controversial Cassandra was Colonel B. A. Dickson, the G-2 (or senior intelligence officer) at
US First Army. A colourful character, Dickson was not always trusted by his peers because he had an unfortunate knack of identifying German divisions in the west when their position had been confirmed on the eastern front. In his report of 10 December, he commented on the high morale of German prisoners, which indicated a renewed confidence. Yet even though he noted a panzer concentration in the Eifel, he predicted that the attack would come further north in the Aachen area on 17 December. Several prisoners of war had spoken of an attack to recapture Aachen ‘as a Christmas present for the Führer’. Then, on 14 December, Dickson received the debriefing of a German-speaking woman who had reported troop concentrations and bridging equipment behind enemy lines in the Eifel. Dickson was now convinced that the attack was definitely coming in the Ardennes between Monschau and Echternach. Brigadier General Sibert at Bradley’s 12th Army Group, irritated by Dickson who loathed him in return, rejected his report as no more than a hunch. Dickson was told on 15 December to take some leave in Paris.

  Hitler’s order for total radio silence among the attack formations had been followed, thus depriving Bletchley Park analysts of a clear picture through Ultra material. Regrettably, SHAEF relied far too much on Ultra intelligence, and tended to think that it was the fount of all knowledge. On 26 October, however, it had alighted upon ‘Hitler’s orders for setting up a special force for special undertaking in west. Knowledge of English and American idiom essential for volunteers.’ And on 10 December, it worked out that radio silence had been imposed on all SS formations, which should have rung an alarm bell at SHAEF.

  Unlike the German army the Luftwaffe had once again been incredibly lax, but SHAEF does not appear to have reacted to Bletchley transcripts. Already on 4 September, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin had reported after interviews with Ribbentrop and Hitler that the Germans were planning an offensive in the west in November ‘as soon as replenishing of air force was concluded’. The subsequent inquiry into the intelligence failure stated, ‘The GAF [Luftwaffe] evidence shows that ever since the last week in October, preparations have been in train to bring the bulk of the Luftwaffe on to airfields in the West.’

  On 31 October, ‘J[agd]G[eschwader] 26 quoted Goering order that re-equipment of all fighter aircraft as fighter bombers must be possible within 24 hours.’ This was significant because it could certainly indicate preparations for an attack in support of ground troops. And on 14 November, Bletchley noted: ‘Fighter units in West not to use Geschwader badges or unit markings’. On 1 December, they read that courses for National Socialist Leadership Officers had been cancelled owing to ‘impending special operation’. The Nazi over-use of the word ‘special’ was probably the reason why this was not seized on. And on 3 December, a report was called for by Luftflotte Reich ‘on measures taken for technical supply of units that had arrived for operations in the west’. The next day fighter commanders were summoned to a conference at the headquarters of Jagdkorps II. Soon after, the whole of SG 4, a specialized ground-attack Geschwader, was transferred to the west from the eastern front. That should have raised some eyebrows.

  The head of the Secret Intelligence Service considered it ‘a little startling to find that the Germans had a better knowledge of the US order of battle from their signals intelligence than we had of the German order of battle from Source [Ultra]’. The reason was clear in his view. ‘Ever since D-Day, US signals have been of great assistance to the enemy. It has been emphasized that, out of thirty odd US divisions in the west, the Germans have constantly known the locations, and often the intentions, of all but two or three. They knew that the southern wing of US First Army, on a front of about eighty miles, was mostly held either by new or by tired divisions.’

  The understandably tired 4th and 28th Infantry Divisions were licking their wounds after the horrors of the Hürtgen Forest. They had been sent to rest in the southern Ardennes, a steeply sloped area known as the ‘Luxembourg Switzerland’, and described as a ‘quiet paradise for weary troops’. It seemed to be the least likely sector for an attack. The men were billeted in houses, to make a change from the extreme discomforts of foxholes in the Hürtgen Forest.

  In the rear areas, soldiers and mechanics settled down with local families, and the shops were stocked with US Army produce. ‘The steady traffic and the slush soon gave nearly every village the same drab, mud-splashed touch. In most of the drinking and eating places the atmosphere was that of some far western town of the movies where the men gathered at night to spice their lives with liquor. These soldiers, for the most part, had made their deal with the army. They didn’t care for the life, but they proposed to make the best of it.’

  The Germans, despite all orders forbidding reconnaissance, had a very clear picture of certain sectors of the front, especially those which were lightly held, such as the 4th Infantry Division frontage in the south. German civilians could move back and forth, slipping between outposts along the River Sauer. The Germans were thus able to identify observation posts and gun positions. Counter-battery fire was an essential part of their plan to protect their pontoon bridges over the Sauer in the first vital hours of the attack. Some of the more experienced agents even mingled with off-duty American soldiers in villages behind the lines. After a few beers, many soldiers were happy to chat with Luxembourgers and Belgians who spoke a little English.

  Locals ready to converse were rather fewer than before. The joy of liberation in September and initial American generosity had turned sour later in the autumn as collaborators were denounced and suspicions increased between Walloon and German-speaking communities. Resistance groups made increasingly unjustifiable demands for food and supplies from farmers. But, for the eastern cantons closest to the fighting along the Siegfried Line, the greatest dismay was caused by the decision of the American civil affairs administration to evacuate the majority of civilians between 5 and 9 October. Only a small picked number would be allowed to remain in each village to look after livestock. In one way, this would prove to be a mercy because even more farming families would have been killed otherwise.

  Over the previous 150 years, the border areas of Eupen and St Vith had moved back and forth between France, Prussia, Belgium and Germany, depending on the fortunes of war. In the Belgian elections of April 1939, more than 45 per cent of those in the mainly German-speaking ‘eastern cantons’ voted for the Heimattreue Front which wanted the area reincorporated into the Reich. But by 1944 the privilege of belonging to the Reich had turned bitter. The German-speakers of the eastern cantons had found themselves treated as second-class citizens, jokingly known as Rucksackdeutsche who had been gathered up and carried along after the Ardennes invasion of 1940. And so many of their young men had been killed or crippled on the eastern front that now most German-speakers longed for liberation by the Reich’s enemies. Yet there were enough left still loyal to the Third Reich to constitute a considerable pool of potential informers and spies for German intelligence, known as Frontläufer.

  Parties from the divisions in the Ardennes were allowed back to the VIII Corps rest camp at Arlon or to Bastogne, where Marlene Dietrich went to perform for the GIs, crooning huskily in her long sequinned gown which was so close-fitting that she wore no underwear. She nearly always sang ‘Lili Marlene’. Its lilting refrain had gripped the hearts of Allied troops, despite its German provenance. ‘The bloody Heinies!’ wrote one American soldier. ‘When they weren’t killing you they were making you cry.’

  Dietrich loved the response of the soldiers, but she was much less enamoured of the staff officers she had to deal with. ‘La Dietrich was bitching,’ Hansen wrote in his diary. ‘Her trip among the corps of the First Army had been a rigorous one. She didn’t like the First Army. She didn’t like the competition between corps, armies and divisions. Most of all she disliked the colonels and generals of Eagle Main [12th Army Group rear headquarters] at Verdun where she lived on salmon because her meal times did not correspond to the chow periods and no one took an interest in her.’ She also claimed that she cau
ght lice, but that did not stop her from accepting General Bradley’s invitation to cocktails, dinner ‘and a bad movie’ at the Hôtel Alfa in Luxembourg. General Patton, whom she claimed to have slept with, was clearly much more her sort of general. ‘Patton believes earnestly in a warrior’s Valhalla,’ Hansen also observed that day.

  On the evening of Sunday 10 December, there was a heavy fall of snow. The next morning, Bradley, now partially recovered, went to Spa to see Hodges and Simpson. It would be their last meeting for some time. He returned in the afternoon after a long drive past Bastogne. Snow covered the whole area and the roads were thick with slush as a result of the blizzard the previous night. A pair of shotguns which he had ordered were waiting for him. General Hodges seemed to have had the same idea. Three days later, he spent ‘a good part of the afternoon’ with Monsieur Francotte, a renowned gunmaker in Liège, ordering a shotgun to be made to his specifications.

  Bradley’s headquarters remained quietly optimistic about the immediate future. That week staff officers concluded: ‘It is now certain that attrition is steadily sapping the strength of German forces on the western front and that the crust of defence is thinner, more brittle and more vulnerable than it appears on our G-2 maps or to the troops in the line.’ Bradley’s chief worry was the replacement situation. His 12th Army Group was short of 17,581 men, and he planned to see Eisenhower about it in Versailles.

  At a press conference on 15 December to praise the IX Tactical Air Command, Bradley estimated that the Germans had no more than six to seven hundred tanks along the whole front. ‘We think he is spread pretty thin all along,’ he said. Hansen noted that as far as air support was concerned, ‘Little doing today … Weather prevents their being operational even a quarter of the time.’ The bad visibility to prevent flying, which Hitler had so earnestly desired, was repeated day after day. It does not, however, appear to have hampered artillery-spotting aircraft on unofficial business in the Ardennes. Bradley received complaints that ‘GI’s in their zest for barbecued pork were hunting [wild] boar in low-flying cubs with Thompson submachine guns.’