Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  The newly arrived and even less experienced 106th Infantry Division to the south, in the Schnee Eifel, would be shattered by the German offensive over the next three days. It was rapidly outflanked when the 14th Cavalry Group in the Losheim Gap, covering the area between the 99th Division and the 106th, retreated without warning. This also left the right flank of the 99th vulnerable. As its 395th Infantry Regiment pulled back in desperate haste, soldiers bitterly remembered the slogan ‘The American Army never retreats!’ Having received no rations, they forced open some drums of dried oatmeal. So desperate were they that they tried to stuff handfuls of it into their mouths and fill their pockets. An officer recorded that one soldier even offered another $75 for a thirteen-cent can of Campbell’s soup.

  The cavalry group had faced an almost impossible task. Strung out in isolated positions across a front of nearly nine kilometres, its platoons could only attempt to defend fixed positions in villages and hamlets. There was no continuous line and the cavalry was not manned, trained nor equipped for a stationary defence. All it had were machine guns dismounted from reconnaissance vehicles, a few anti-tank guns and a battalion of 105mm howitzers in support. The very recent arrival of the 106th meant that no co-ordinated plan of defence had been established.

  In the days before the offensive, German patrols had discovered that there was a gap nearly two kilometres wide between the villages of Roth and Weckerath in the 14th Cavalry sector. So, before dawn, the bulk of the 18th Volksgrenadier-Division, supported by a brigade of assault guns, advanced straight for this hole in the American line, which lay just within the northern boundary of the Fifth Panzer Army. Manteuffel’s initial objective was the town of St Vith, fifteen kilometres to the rear of the American front line on the road from Roth.

  In the murky grey daylight, the men of the 14th Cavalry at Roth and Weckerath found that the Germans were already behind them, having slipped through partly concealed by the low cloud and drizzle. Communications collapsed as shell bursts cut field telephone cables and German intercept groups played records at full volume on the wavelengths which the Americans used. The surrounded cavalry troopers in Roth fought on for much of the day, but surrendered in the afternoon.

  The 106th Division did not collapse immediately. With more than thirty kilometres of front to defend, including a broad salient just forward of the Siegfried Westwall, it faced major disadvantages, especially when its left flank was burst open on the 14th Cavalry sector around Roth. With eight battalions of corps artillery in support, it inflicted heavy casualties on the volksgrenadiers, used as cannon fodder to break open the front for the panzer divisions. But the 106th Division did little to counter-attack the flank of the German breakthrough on its left, and this would lead to disaster the next day.

  As Model’s artillery chief observed, the difficult terrain of wooded country slowed the advance of the German infantry and made it very hard for his artillery to identify its targets. Also Volksgrenadier divisions did not know how to make proper use of artillery support. They were not helped by the strict orders on radio silence, which had prevented signals nets from being established until the opening bombardment.

  Communications were even worse on the American side. Middleton’s VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne had no clear idea of the scope of the offensive. And at First Army in Spa, General Hodges assumed that the Germans were mounting ‘just a local diversion’ to take the pressure off the V Corps advance towards the Roer river dams. And yet although V-1 ‘buzz-bombs’, as the Americans called them, were now passing overhead every few minutes to bombard Liège, Hodges still did not recognize the signs.* Despite General Gerow’s urging, he refused to halt the 2nd Division’s advance north. In Luxembourg at 12th Army Group headquarters during the 09.15 briefing, the G-3 officer reported no change on the Ardennes sector. By then General Bradley was on his way to Versailles to discuss manpower shortages with General Eisenhower.

  A diary kept by Lieutenant Matt Konop with the 2nd Division’s headquarters gives an idea of how Americans, even those close to the front, could take so long to comprehend the scale and scope of the German offensive. Konop’s entry for 16 December began: ‘05.15: Asleep in Little Red House with six other officers – hear loud explosions – must be a dream – still think it’s a dream – must be our own artillery – can’t be, that stuff seems to be coming in louder.’ Konop got up in the dark and padded to the door in his long johns. He opened it. An explosion outside sent him scurrying back to wake everyone else. They all rushed down into the cellar in their underclothes, finding their way with flashlights. Eventually, when the shelling eased, they returned upstairs. Konop called the operations section to ask if there was anything unusual to report. ‘No, nothing unusual,’ came the answer, ‘but [we] had quite a shelling over here. Nothing unusual reported from the lines.’ Konop crawled back to his mattress, but could not get back to sleep.

  It was still dark at 07.15 when he reached the command post at Wirtzfeld. The progress of the 2nd Division’s advance appeared satisfactory on the situation map. Its 9th Infantry Regiment had just captured the village of Wahlerscheid. An hour later Konop looked round Wirtzfeld. There were no casualties from the shelling, except that a direct hit on a heap of manure resulted ‘in the pile being suddenly transported over the entire kitchen, mess-hall and officers’ mess of the Engineer Battalion’. Later in the morning, he agreed with the division’s Catholic chaplain that after the morning’s bombardment they should be careful about holding mass in the church next day because it was an obvious target.

  At 17.30 hours, Konop saw a report that German tanks had broken through the 106th Division. This was described as a ‘local enemy action’. Having nothing else to do, he returned to his room to read. He then spent the evening chatting with a couple of war correspondents who had arrived to doss down. Before going to ‘hit the hay’, he showed the two journalists the door to the cellar in case there was another bombardment the next morning.

  Cota’s 28th Division, adjoining the 106th to the south-west, was initially taken by surprise because of the bad visibility, but the Germans’ use of artificial moonlight proved a ‘blunder’. ‘They turned searchlights into the woods and then on clouds above our positions, silhouetting their [own] assault troops. They made easy targets for our machinegunners.’

  Fortunately, before the offensive began the division had trained infantry officers and NCOs to act as forward observers for the artillery. One company of the division’s 109th Infantry Regiment, which was dug in, brought down 155mm howitzer fire just fifty metres in front of its own position during a mass attack. It claimed a body count of 150 Germans afterwards for no American casualties.

  The compulsion to exaggerate achievements and the size of enemy forces was widespread. ‘Ten Germans will be reported as a company,’ a battalion commander in the division complained, ‘two Mark IV tanks as a mass attack by Mark VIs. It is almost impossible for commanders to make correct decisions quickly unless reports received are what the reporter saw or heard and not what he imagined.’

  The 112th Infantry Regiment of Cota’s 28th Division found that ‘on the morning of the initial assault, there were strong indications that the German infantry had imbibed rather freely of alcoholic beverage … They were laughing and shouting and telling our troops not to open fire, as it disclosed our positions. We obliged until the head of the column was 25 yards to our front. Heavy casualties were inflicted. Examination of the canteens on several of the bodies gave every indication that the canteen had only a short time before contained cognac.’

  Waldenburg’s 116th Panzer-Division attacked on the boundary between the 106th and 28th Divisions. But, instead of finding a gap, the Germans were taken in the flank by the extreme right-hand battalion of the 106th and a platoon of tank destroyers. In the forest west of Berg, Waldenburg reported, the assault company of his 60th Panzergrenadier-Regiment was not merely stopped but ‘nearly destroyed’ when the Americans ‘fought very bravely and fiercely’. The Germans rushe
d forward artillery to cover the river crossings, but the woods and hills made observation very difficult and the steep slopes offered few places to site their batteries.

  Waldenburg’s 156th Panzergrenadier-Regiment to the south, on the other hand, advanced rapidly to Oberhausen. Then he found that the dragons’ teeth of the Siegfried Line defences made it impossible for the panzer regiment to follow its prescribed route. He had to obtain permission from his corps headquarters to allow it to follow the success of the 156th Panzergrenadiers who had seized crossing points over the River Our. The heavy rains and snow in the Ardennes had made the ground so soft that panzer units were restricted to surfaced roads. Tank tracks churned the mud of lesser routes to a depth of one metre, making them impassable for wheeled vehicles, and even other panzers. The bad weather which Hitler had wanted to shield his forces from Allied airpower came at a high price, and so did the wild, forested terrain, with which he had concealed his purpose.

  Further south, the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division had the task of opening the front for Manteuffel’s most experienced formations, the 2nd Panzer-Division and the Panzer Lehr Division. They hoped to reach Bastogne, which lay less than thirty kilometres to the west as the crow flies, during that night or early the next morning. But Generalmajor Heinz Kokott, the commander of the 26th Volksgrenadiers, had an unpleasant surprise. The 28th Division fought on even after its line along the high ground and road known as ‘Skyline Drive’ had been broken. What had not been expected, he wrote later, ‘was the fact that the remnants of the beaten units did not give up the battle. They stayed put and continued to block the road.’ This forced the German command to accept that ‘the infantry would actually have to fight its way forward’, and not just open a way for the panzer divisions to rush through to the Meuse. ‘At the end of the first day of the offensive, none of the objectives set by the [Fifth Panzer] Army were reached.’ The ‘stubborn defense of Hosingen’ lasted until late in the morning of the second day.

  Even though the 26th Volksgrenadiers eventually forced a crossing, repairs to the bridge over the Our near Gemünd were not ready until dusk at 16.00 hours. Traffic jams with the vehicles of both the 26th Volksgrenadier and the Panzer Lehr built up, because the Americans had blocked the road to Hosingen with enormous craters and ‘abatis’ barriers of felled trees. German pioneer battalions had to work through the night to make the road passable. The 26th Volksgrenadier lost 230 men and eight officers, including two battalion commanders, on the first day.

  On the American 28th Division’s right flank, the German Seventh Army pushed forward the 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division to shield Manteuffel’s flank as his Fifth Panzer Army headed west for the Meuse. But the 5th Fallschirmjäger was a last-minute replacement to the German order of battle and struggled badly. Although 16,000 strong, its officers and soldiers had received little infantry training. One battalion, commanded by the flying instructor Major Frank in the 13th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment, had twelve officers with no field experience. Frank, in a conversation secretly taped after his capture, told another officer that his NCOs were ‘willing but inept’, while his 700 soldiers were mostly just sixteen or seventeen years old, but ‘the lads were wonderful’.

  ‘Right on the very first day of the offensive we stormed Führen [held by Company E of the 109th Infantry]. It was a fortified village. We got to within 25 metres of the bunker, were stopped there and my best Kompaniechefs were killed. I stuck fast there for two and a half hours, five of my runners had been killed. One couldn’t direct things from there, the runners who returned were all shot up. Then, for two and a half hours, always on my stomach, I worked my way back by inches. What a show for young boys, making their way over flat ground and without any support from heavy weapons! I decided to wait for a forward observation officer. The Regimental commander said: “Get going. Take that village – there are only a few soldiers holding it.”

  ‘“That’s madness,” I said to the Regimentskommandeur.

  ‘“No, no, it’s an order. Get going, we must capture the village before nightfall.”

  ‘I said: “We will too. The hour we lose waiting for the forward observation officer I will make up two or three times over afterwards … At least give me the assault guns to come in from the north and destroy their bunker.”

  ‘“No, no, no.”

  ‘We took the village without any support and scarcely were we in it when our heavy guns began firing into it. I brought out 181 prisoners altogether. I rounded up the last sixty and a salvo of mortar shells fell on them from one of our mortar brigades right into the midst of the prisoners and their guards. Twenty two hours later our own artillery was still firing into the village. Our communications were a complete failure.’

  The divisional commander Generalmajor Ludwig Heilmann clearly had no feeling for his troops. Heydte described him as ‘a very ambitious, reckless soldier with no moral scruples’, and said that he should not be commanding a division. His soldiers called him ‘der Schlächter von Cassino’, the butcher of Cassino, because of the terrible losses suffered by his men during that battle. And on the first day of the Ardennes offensive, his units were battered by American mortar fire as they floundered across the River Our, which was fast flowing and had a muddy bottom.

  Just to the south the American 9th Armored Division held a narrow three-kilometre sector, but was pushed back by the 212th Volksgrenadier-Division. To its right, outposts of the 4th Infantry Division west and south of Echternach failed to see German troops crossing the Sauer before dawn. Their outposts on bluffs or ridges high above the river valley may have had a fine view in clear weather, but at night and on misty days they were blind. As a result most of the men in these forward positions were surrounded and captured very rapidly because German advance patrols had slipped through behind them. A company commander, while finally reporting details of the attack by field telephone to his battalion commander, was startled to hear another person on the line. A voice with a heavy German accent announced: ‘We are here!’ One squad in Lauterborn was caught entirely by surprise and taken prisoner. But the over-confident Germans marched them down the road past a mill, which happened to be occupied by Americans from another company who opened fire. The prisoners threw themselves in the ditch where they hid for several hours, and then rejoined their unit later.

  Once again, field telephone lines back from observation posts were cut by shellfire and radios often failed to work due to the hilly terrain and damp atmospheric conditions. Signals traffic was in any case chaotic, with careless or panic-stricken operators jamming everyone else. Major General Raymond O. Barton, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, only heard at 11.00 hours that his 12th Infantry Regiment either side of Echternach was under strong attack. Barton wasted no time in committing his reserve battalion and sending in a company from the 70th Tank Battalion. As darkness fell later that afternoon, the 12th Infantry still held five key towns and villages along the ridge route of ‘Skyline Drive’. These were the all-important crossroads which blocked the German advance. ‘It was the towns and road junctions that proved decisive in the battle,’ concluded one analysis.

  The 4th Infantry had also dropped tall pines across the roads to make abatis barriers, which were mined and booby-trapped. The division’s achievement was all the more remarkable when considering its shortages in manpower and weaponry after its recent battles in the Hürtgen Forest. Ever since the fighting in Normandy, the 4th Infantry Division had seized as many Panzerfausts as it could to use them back against the Germans. Although their effective range was only about forty metres, the infantrymen found them much more powerful in penetrating the Panther tank than their own bazooka. Forty-three of their fifty-four tanks were still undergoing repair in workshops to the rear. This did not prove as disastrous as it might have done. Manteuffel had wanted to provide Brandenberger’s Seventh Army with a panzer division to break open the southern shoulder, but none could be spared.

  General Bradley’s journey that day on the icy roads from
Luxembourg to Versailles took longer than expected. Eisenhower was in an expansive mood when he arrived, for he had just heard that he was to receive his fifth star. Bradley congratulated him. ‘God,’ Eisenhower answered, ‘I just want to see the first time I sign my name as General of the Army.’

  Major Hansen, who had accompanied Bradley, returned to the Ritz where Hemingway was drinking with a large number of visitors. ‘The room, with two brass beds,’ wrote Hansen, ‘was littered in books which overflowed to the floor, liquor bottles and the walls were fairly covered with prints of Paris stuck up carelessly with nails and thumbtacks.’ After talking with them for a time, Hansen ‘ducked out and walked wearily to the Lido where we saw bare breasted girls do the hootchy kootchie until it was late’.

  At the end of the afternoon, while Eisenhower and Bradley were discussing the problem of replacements with other senior officers from SHAEF, they were interrupted by a staff officer. He handed a message to Major General Strong who, on reading it, called for a map of the VIII Corps sector. The Germans had broken through at five points, of which the most threatening was the penetration via the Losheim Gap. Although details were sparse, Eisenhower immediately sensed that this was serious, even though there were no obvious objectives in the Ardennes. Bradley, on the other hand, believed that this was simply the spoiling attack he had half expected to disrupt Patton’s offensive in Lorraine. Eisenhower wasted no time after consulting the operations map. He gave orders that the Ninth Army should send the 7th Armored Division to help Troy Middleton in the Ardennes, and that Patton should transfer his 10th Armored Division. Bradley remarked that Patton would not be happy giving it up with his offensive about to start in three days. ‘Tell him’, Eisenhower snarled, ‘that Ike is running this war.’