Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  Further along the line of retreat, villagers and townsfolk turned out with Belgian, British and American flags to welcome their liberators. Sometimes they had to hide them quickly when yet another fleeing German detachment appeared in their main street. Back in Holland at Utrecht, Oberstleutnant Fritz Fullriede described ‘a sad platoon of Dutch National Socialists being evacuated to Germany, to flee the wrath of the native Dutch. Lots of women and children.’ These Dutch SS had been fighting at Hechtel over the Belgian border. They had escaped the encirclement by swimming a canal, but ‘the wounded officers and men who wanted to give themselves up were for the most part – to the discredit of the British [who apparently stood by] – shot by the Belgians’. Both Dutch and Belgians had much to avenge after four years of occupation.

  The German front in Belgium and Holland appeared completely broken. There was panic in the rear with chaotic scenes which prompted the LXXXIX Army Corps to speak in its war diary of ‘a picture that is unworthy and disgraceful for the German army’. Feldjäger Streifengruppen, literally punishment groups, seized genuine stragglers and escorted them to a collection centre, or Sammellager. They were then sent back into the line under an officer, usually in batches of sixty. Near Liège, around a thousand men were marched to the front by officers with drawn pistols. Those suspected of desertion were court-martialled. If found guilty, they were sentenced either to death or to a Bewährungsbataillon (a so-called probation battalion, but in fact more of a punishment or Strafbataillon). Deserters who confessed, or who had put on civilian clothes, were executed on the spot.

  Each Feldjäger wore a red armband with ‘OKW Feldjäger’ on it and possessed a special identity card with a green diagonal stripe which stated: ‘He is entitled to make use of his weapon if disobeyed.’ The Feldjäger were heavily indoctrinated. Once a week an officer lectured them on ‘the world situation, the impossibility of destroying Germany, on the infallibility of the Führer and on underground factories which should help outwit the enemy’.

  Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model’s ‘Appeal to the Soldiers of the Army of the West’ went unheeded when he called on them to hold on, to gain time for the Führer. The most ruthless measures were taken. Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel ordered on 2 September that ‘malingerers and cowardly shirkers, including officers’ should be executed immediately. Model warned that he needed a minimum of ten infantry divisions and five panzer divisions if he were to prevent a breakthrough into northern Germany. No force of that magnitude was available.

  The retreat in the north along the Channel coast had been much more orderly, mainly thanks to the delayed pursuit of the Canadians. General der Infanterie Gustav von Zangen had conducted the withdrawal of the Fifteenth Army from the Pas de Calais to northern Belgium in an impressive manner. Allied intelligence was severely mistaken when it stated that ‘the only reinforcements known to be arriving in Holland are the demoralized and disorganized remnants of the Fifteenth Army now escaping from Belgium by way of the Dutch islands’.

  The sudden seizure of Antwerp may have been a severe blow to the German high command, but over the following days, when the British Second Army failed to secure the north side of the Scheldt estuary, General von Zangen managed to establish defence lines. These included a twenty-kilometre-wide redoubt on the south side of the mouth of the Scheldt called the Breskens pocket, the South Beveland peninsula on the north side and the island of Walcheren. His force soon mustered 82,000 men and deployed some 530 guns which prevented any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the heavily mined estuary.

  Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Allied naval commander-in-chief, had told SHAEF and Montgomery that the Germans could block the Scheldt estuary with ease. And Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the First Sea Lord, warned that Antwerp would be ‘as much use to us as Timbuctoo’ unless the approaches were cleared. General Horrocks, the corps commander, later admitted his own responsibility for the failure. ‘Napoleon, no doubt, would have realized this,’ he wrote, ‘but I am afraid Horrocks didn’t.’ But it was not the fault of Horrocks, nor of Roberts, the commander of the 11th Armoured Division. The mistake lay with Montgomery, who was not interested in the estuary and thought that the Canadians could clear it later.

  It was a massive error and led to a very nasty shock later, but in those days of euphoria generals who had served in the First World War convinced themselves that September 1944 was the equivalent of September 1918. ‘Newspapers reported a 210-mile advance in six days and indicated that Allied forces were in Holland, Luxembourg, Saarbrücken, Brussels and Antwerp,’ wrote the combat historian Forrest Pogue. ‘The intelligence estimates all along the lines were marked by an almost hysterical optimism.’ The eyes of senior officers were fixed on the Rhine, with the idea that the Allies could leap it in virtually one bound. This vision certainly beguiled Eisenhower, while Montgomery, for his own reasons, had become besotted with it.

  Antwerp and the German Frontier

  At the end of August, just when it seemed as if the German front was on the point of collapse, supply problems threatened to bring Eisenhower’s armies to a halt. The French rail network had been largely destroyed by Allied bombing, so around 10,000 tons of fuel, rations and ammunition had to be hauled daily all the way from Normandy in the supply trucks of the US Army’s ‘Red Ball Express’. The distance from Cherbourg to the front in early September was close to 500 kilometres, which represented a three-day round trip. Liberated Paris alone needed an absolute minimum of 1,500 tons a day.

  Only the wealth of American resources could have managed such a task, with some 7,000 trucks racing day and night along one-way routes, consuming almost 300,000 gallons of fuel a day. Altogether some 9,000 trucks were written off in the process. In a desperate attempt to keep up momentum in the dash across France, jerrycans had been delivered to front-line formations by the transport aircraft of IX Troop Carrier Command and even by bombers. But aircraft used up three gallons of aviation fuel for every two gallons of gasoline they delivered. Every aspect of the supply crisis underlined the urgent need to open the port of Antwerp, but Montgomery’s focus was on crossing the Rhine.

  On 3 September, Montgomery heard that, although a large part of the US First Army would support him in the north, it would not be under his command. Having thought that Eisenhower had agreed to a northern thrust under his sole control, he became exasperated when he heard that Patton’s Third Army had not been brought to a halt as he had expected. Montgomery wrote to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, in London on that fifth anniversary of Britain going to war. He revealed his intention to go all out for a Rhine crossing as soon as possible. He evidently felt that was the best way of forcing Eisenhower’s hand to give his army group the bulk of the supplies and the command of Hodges’s First Army.

  Patton, instead of halting his army until the supply situation improved, had secretly stolen a march in his advance towards the Saar. ‘In order to attack,’ Patton explained in his diary, ‘we first have to pretend to reconnoiter and then reinforce the reconnaissance and then finally attack. It is a very sad method of making war.’ Patton was quite shameless in getting his own way. Bomber pilots did not grumble when switched to a fuel run, because sometimes when they delivered supplies to Third Army divisions, a case of champagne would be brought to the pilot ‘with [the] compliments of General Patton’. Patton could afford to be generous. He had somehow ‘liberated’ 50,000 cases.

  Montgomery was so determined to mount the major strike in the north that he was prepared even to jeopardize the opening of the port of Antwerp for supplies. The new field marshal’s operational outline of 3 September revealed that he had dropped the idea of diverting strong forces to clear the Scheldt estuary. This was why Roberts’s 11th Armoured Division, on entering Antwerp, had received no orders to advance across the Albert Canal and round into the Beveland peninsula to the north-west where the Germans were starting to prepare positions.

  Within the next few days the rem
nants of the German Fifteenth Army on both sides of the Scheldt started to become a formidable fighting force once more. The German army’s extraordinary capacity to recover from disaster had been shown time and time again on the eastern front as well as in the west. Morale was bad, but the determination to fight on had not collapsed entirely. ‘Even if all our allies abandon us, we must not lose courage,’ an Unteroffizier wrote home. ‘Once the Führer has his new weapons deployed, then the Final Victory will follow.’

  While Eisenhower recognized the importance of securing the approaches to the port of Antwerp, he too was keen to get a bridgehead across the Rhine. In particular, he wanted to use the newly created First Allied Airborne Army in a major operation. His interest was shared by both General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff in Washington, and the US air force chief General ‘Hap’ Arnold. The great investment in time and effort building up the airborne arm had spurred on their desire to use it again at the first opportunity.

  No fewer than nine plans for its deployment had been considered since the breakout in Normandy, but the speed of the Allied advance meant that every project had been overtaken before it could be launched. The exasperation of the paratroopers waiting on airfields can be imagined, as they repeatedly stood to, with aircraft and gliders packed, and then stood down again. General Patton boasted at a Third Army press conference: ‘The damn airborne can’t go fast enough to keep up with us.’ He then added: ‘That is off the record also.’

  During the first week of September Field Marshal Montgomery began to look closely at the possibility of airborne drops to cross the Rhine at Arnhem. Operation Market Garden, to be launched on 17 September, was not merely ambitious. It was shockingly ill planned, with a minimal chance of success, and should never have been attempted. The drop zones, especially in the case of Arnhem, were too far from their bridge objectives to achieve surprise. Plans were not co-ordinated between the First Allied Airborne Army and the ground forces. The British XXX Corps was expected to charge up a single road for 104 kilometres to relieve the British airborne division at Arnhem, assuming it had secured the bridge there over the Neder Rijn, or lower Rhine. Worst of all, no allowance was made for anything to go wrong, including a change in the weather, which would prevent reinforcements from coming in rapidly.

  The American 101st Airborne Division secured Eindhoven, and the 82nd Airborne eventually took Nijmegen and the bridge over the River Waal, only because Generalfeldmarschall Model refused to allow it to be blown up on the grounds that he might need it for a counter-offensive. But determined resistance and constant German flank attacks on the exposed road, soon known as ‘Hell’s Highway’, seriously hampered the advance of the Guards Armoured Division.

  Allied intelligence knew that the 9th SS Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen and the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg were in the area of Arnhem. But analysts made the fatal mistake of assuming that both formations were so run down after the retreat from France that they would not represent a serious threat. The German reaction to the drop of the British 1st Airborne Division was swift and brutal. Only a single battalion made it to the bridge, and even then it was trapped on the northern side. On 25 September, surviving paratroopers were evacuated across the river. Total Allied losses, British, American and Polish, exceeded 14,000 men. The whole operation did little to enhance American confidence in British leadership.

  Allied excitement at the prospect of jumping the Rhine in almost one bound had distracted attention from the more mundane but essential task of securing a proper supply line. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was livid that SHAEF, and especially Montgomery, had ignored his warnings to secure the Scheldt estuary and the approaches to Antwerp. Despite Eisenhower’s urging to concentrate on the one major port captured with its dock facilities intact, Montgomery had insisted that the First Canadian Army should proceed with clearing the German garrisons holding out in Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk. Yet none of these ports, which suffered from demolitions carried out by the defenders, would be navigable for some time.

  Eisenhower, largely recovered from a knee injury, at last began to try to clarify Allied strategy. He set up a small advance headquarters near Reims, and on 20 September SHAEF took over the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles, an establishment of Belle Epoque grandeur. During the First World War, it had been the headquarters of the Inter-Allied Military Council. On 7 May 1919, Georges Clemenceau had dictated the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles in its main salon, several days before the document was signed in the Hall of Mirrors of the Château de Versailles.

  Over the next two weeks, more departments moved into numerous buildings around it, including the huge stables. Soon some 1,800 properties around Versailles were commandeered to house 24,000 officers and men. In Paris, Lieutenant General John C. Lee, the American supply supremo of the Communications Zone, known as ‘Com Z’, took over 315 hotels and several thousand other buildings and apartments to house his senior officers in style. He also appropriated the Hôtel George V almost entirely for himself. The pompous and megalomaniac Lee even expected wounded soldiers to lie to attention in their hospital beds whenever he appeared on a tour of inspection in boots, spurs and riding whip, accompanied by a fawning staff.

  Front-line divisions were outraged that the supply organization should concentrate on its own comforts before anything else, and French authorities complained that American demands were far greater than those of the Germans. One magazine said that SHAEF stood for the ‘Societé des Hôteliers Américains en France’. Eisenhower was furious with Lee, who had blatantly contravened his instruction not to colonize Paris, but he never quite summoned up the determination to sack him. Even Patton, who loathed and despised Lee, never dared to cross him in case he retaliated by shutting down supplies to his Third Army.

  The Supreme Commander also found that strategic issues had not been clarified, even after the great setback at Arnhem. Once Montgomery had an idea in his head, he could not let go. Ignoring the fact that his own forces had not opened Antwerp to ships and that his pet project of Market Garden had failed, he still argued that the bulk of supplies should be allotted to his army group for a strike into northern Germany. In a letter of 21 September, the day that the British parachute battalion was forced to surrender at Arnhem, Montgomery ticked off his Supreme Commander for not having stopped Patton in his tracks altogether. Significantly, even the Germans thought Montgomery was wrong. General Eberbach, whom the British had captured in Amiens, told fellow generals in Allied captivity: ‘The whole point of their main effort is wrong. The traditional gateway is through the Saar.’

  Patton argued that Montgomery’s plan to lead a ‘narrow front’ with a ‘single knife-like drive toward Berlin’ was totally mistaken. Montgomery was far too cautious a commander for such a strategy and his northern route had to cross the main rivers of northern Europe at their widest. Bradley remarked that Montgomery’s so-called ‘dagger-thrust with the 21st Army Group at the heart of Germany’ would probably be a ‘butter-knife thrust’. Patton, who was struggling to take the fortified city of Metz, had been told to go over to the defensive, which did not improve his mood. But on 21 September, when Eisenhower referred to Montgomery as ‘a clever son of a bitch’, Patton was encouraged to believe that the Supreme Commander had at last started to see through the field marshal’s manipulative ways. As part of his campaign to be appointed land forces commander, Montgomery had predicted that tight control of the campaign would wane once Eisenhower had assumed command. ‘The problem was’, as the historian John Buckley emphasized, ‘that it was Monty himself as much as anyone, who worked to undermine his chief.’

  Eisenhower tried to brush over the differences between Montgomery’s proposal and his own strategy of advancing on both the Ruhr and the Saar at the same time. In fact he gave the impression that he supported Monty’s single thrust, but just wanted to allow a little flexibility in the centre. This was a grave mistake. He needed to be explicit. Eisenhower knew that he could issue direct orders to Bradl
ey and General Jacob L. Devers, the two American army group commanders, who were his subordinates. But he gave too much leeway to Montgomery because he was an ally and not part of the US Army chain of command. Eisenhower should have known by then that General Marshall in Washington would back him as Supreme Commander, and that Churchill no longer had any influence with President Roosevelt, especially when it came to military decisions. Eisenhower’s reluctance to insist that the time for discussion was over and that his orders must be followed enabled Montgomery to keep questioning a strategy with which he disagreed, and chiselling at it constantly to get his own way. Montgomery had no idea of the tensions he was provoking in Anglo-American relations, which would come to a head in December and January.

  The situation was not helped by Montgomery’s failure to attend an important conference held by Eisenhower on 22 September at his headquarters in Versailles. In his stead, he sent his chief of staff Major General Francis de Guingand, known as ‘Freddie’, who was liked and trusted by all. American generals suspected that Montgomery did this on purpose so that he could wriggle out of agreements later. The conference focused on the strategy to be adopted as soon as the port of Antwerp was secured. Eisenhower accepted that the main thrust would be made by Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, which was to envelop the Ruhr from the north. But at the same time he wanted Bradley’s 12th Army Group to cross the Rhine in the region of Cologne and Bonn, to encircle the Ruhr from the south. Eisenhower set all this out in a letter to Montgomery two days later to ensure that there could be no doubt in the field marshal’s mind.