Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Page 5
During the second half of September an intense debate had arisen, both in Washington and at SHAEF headquarters, over the wording the Supreme Commander should use when addressing the German people. If too conciliatory then the Germans would see it as a sign of weakness and be encouraged. If it sounded too harsh then it might persuade them to fight to the bitter end. On 28 September, SHAEF finally published Eisenhower’s proclamation: ‘The Allied Forces serving under my command have now entered Germany. We come as conquerors, but not as oppressors.’ It went on to emphasize that they would ‘obliterate Nazism and German militarism’.
The Nazi authorities soon countered with their own bizarre attempts at propaganda, even dropping leaflets by bomber over their own lines to strengthen the determination of their troops. One claimed that ‘American officers [are] using riding whips on German women’ and promised that ‘Every German will fight in secret or openly to the last man.’ The ‘secret’ fight was the first hint of Nazi plans for a resistance movement, the Werwolf, which would continue the fight and target Germans who collaborated with the Allies. But the leaflets did not succeed in raising morale. According to a German NCO, ‘the troops were indignant, fearing that the Allies would capture one of these leaflets, and that their imminent captivity would be made most unpleasant’.
Early in October, the US Ninth Army took over the left flank of Bradley’s 12th Army Group next to the British Second Army. This gave Hodges’s First Army a greater density, especially round Aachen, where the 1st Infantry Division coming from the south-east worked its way towards the 30th Infantry Division advancing from the north to cut off the city entirely. By now the state of American vehicles had improved and supplies of ammunition had resumed.
The 12th Volksgrenadier-Division, recently arrived from the eastern front, faced the 1st Infantry Division near Stolberg. One of its officers wrote to a friend to say that their ‘former proud regiment had been smashed completely at Mogilev’. Only six officers out of the whole regiment had survived and three of those were in hospital. The regiment had been completely rebuilt with new personnel and equipment and was now in action. It had suffered badly when thrown into a counter-attack as soon as it detrained at the railhead. ‘The Americans laid down artillery barrages of such intensity that many an old combat soldier from the East was dazed.’ The writer himself was wounded with a hole in his foot ‘the size of a fist’ and was now lying in hospital.
On 11 October IX Tactical Air Command bombed and strafed Aachen for two days, and on 14 October the battle for the city began. Despite attempts by the Nazi authorities to evacuate its 160,000 civilians, some 40,000 remained. Women and old men were horrified to see German troops turning their houses into bunkers with reinforced concrete. The defending force of nearly 18,000 men was a very mixed collection under the command of Oberst Gerhard Wilck, with regular troops, Waffen-SS, Kriegsmarine sailors serving as infantry and low-quality fortress battalions. Before Aachen had been completely encircled on 16 October, the Germans rushed in a battalion of SS, the artillery of the 246th Infanterie-Division, the 219th Assault Gun Brigade and some combat engineers. Men from the fortress battalions were the most likely to surrender at the first opportunity, but Major Heimann of the 246th Infanterie-Division observed: ‘I had the most excellent troops, half of whom were naval personnel intended for the U-Boat arm.’ He also had 150 men from the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, but they wanted to pull out on their own. Heimann had to give them a severe warning that the Führer’s order to hold the town to the last applied to them just as much as to everyone else.
The American attack began with two battalions from the 1st Division coming from the north and north-east, ‘a job that should have been done by two regiments’, as one of their officers complained later. The essential point was to make sure that adjacent companies remained in close contact to prevent the enemy slipping between them to attack from the flank or rear. ‘To make sure that no individuals or small groups were overrun, we searched every room and closet of every building. In addition every sewer was blown in. This not only gave our fighting troops assurance that they would not be sniped at from the rear, but it enabled command and supply personnel to function more efficiently behind the lines.’
The 1st Division operated with tanks and tank destroyers well forward, each guarded by a squad of infantry against Germans with Panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades. The M-4 Shermans mounted an extra .50 machine gun on the right front of the turret. This proved very useful in Aachen street fighting for suppressing fire from upper windows. Knowing that German soldiers moved from basement to basement, tank crews would first shoot into the cellar if possible with high-explosive shells from their main armament, then fire at the ground floor and work their way up the house. Others would deal with any Germans still sheltering in cellars by throwing in fragmentation and white phosphorus grenades. Flamethrowers often ‘resulted in a quick enemy surrender’.
Bazookas or explosive charges were used to smash through walls from house to house, an activity which became known as ‘mouse-holing’. It was safer to blast through a wall, which would shock anyone in the room beyond, than enter through the door. As soon as an opening into the next-door house had been made, one of the team would throw a hand grenade into the adjoining room, and they would rush in following the explosion. Soldiers carried armour-piercing rounds to shoot up through the ceiling or down through the floor. They then dashed to the top of the house and worked their way down, forcing the Germans into the cellar. When a whole block had been cleared, guards were posted to prevent Germans from sneaking back in. The Germans also used their Panzerfausts in a similar fashion. ‘When attacked in this way,’ a report admitted, ‘American strong-point crews surrendered in most cases immediately, [once] deprived of sight due to dust clouds caused by explosions.’
The Americans soon found that mortar and longer-range artillery fire was uncertain and often dangerous to their own men in urban combat, so they insisted on direct fire wherever possible. In any case, fuses on American mortar rounds were so sensitive that they exploded as soon as they touched a roof, and did little damage to the inside of a building. But their artillery fire was so intense that Oberst Wilck, the commander of the German forces in the town, had to move his command post to an air-raid shelter. ‘The few assault guns which we had just received were put out of action straight away,’ Wilck recounted afterwards. ‘You can’t hold a town with just carbines!’ The Germans in fact had more than carbines, and managed to use their heavy 120mm mortars very effectively.
Allied aircraft were closely managed by a ground controller, but it was impossible to identify specific points in the ruins, so ‘no close-in bombing missions were undertaken’. In any case, the presence of friendly aircraft overhead certainly seemed to bolster the morale of the troops on the ground and kept German heads down. There were firm orders in place not to damage the cathedral, which was spared from ground fire. Even so, the destruction was so great that VII Corps could report that ‘the flattened condition of the buildings’ at least allowed ‘actual physical contact [to] be maintained among adjacent units’.
‘The operation was not unduly hurried,’ VII Corps reported. ‘It was realized that street fighting is a slow, tedious business which requires much physical exertion and time if buildings are searched thoroughly.’ House clearing, the GIs had been told, meant firing constantly at every window until they were inside the house, then with one man ready with a grenade in his hand and two others covering him with rifles, or ideally Thompson sub-machine guns, they would go from room to room. But they soon found that they needed to mark houses occupied by their own troops. ‘Numerous times we have had casualties by grenades thrown into buildings or shooting into them by our own troops after we had occupied the building.’
As the Red Army had discovered, heavy artillery at close range was the most cost-effective, as well as destructive, means of advance. The Americans in Aachen used 155mm self-propelled ‘Long Toms’ at ranges as close as 150 metres. Obe
rst Wilck admitted after his surrender that ‘the direct fire of the 155mm self-propelled gun was very devastating and demoralizing. In one instance a shell completely pierced three houses before exploding in and wrecking the fourth house.’
‘Civilians must be promptly and vigorously expelled from any area occupied by our troops,’ one American officer in Aachen emphasized. ‘Failure to do so costs lives.’ Holding pens were constructed and guarded by MPs, but Collins’s corps did not have enough trained interpreters or members of the Counter Intelligence Corps to filter out Nazi supporters, or interview the hundreds of foreign forced labourers. At one point during the battle, three small boys found a rifle. They fired at an American squad. A sergeant spotted them, ran over to grab the rifle off them and cuffed the boy who held it. This story somehow spread and was taken up as an example of heroism by German propaganda, which claimed with shameless exaggeration that ‘they held up all the enemy troops there’. But as the diarist Victor Klemperer pointed out, the example was surely self-defeating. The Nazis now claimed to be using partisans, whom they had always condemned as ‘terrorists’. It also underlined the weakness of German forces when, according to Nazi newspapers, ‘Eisenhower is attacking with seven armies, with two million men (men not children!),’ Klemperer emphasized.
On 16 October, the 30th and 1st Divisions finally met up north-east of Aachen, having suffered heavy casualties. Two days later, Himmler declared that ‘Every German homestead will be defended to the last.’ But on 21 October Oberst Wilck surrendered with the remainder of his exhausted and hungry men. He was not a devotee of Hitler and knew that the killing went on because Hitler was living in his own fantasy world. ‘Even the Führer’s adjutant told me how the Führer is surrounded by lies,’ he remarked in captivity. Knowing that it would please Hitler, Himmler would come in with a beaming face to say: ‘Heil mein Führer, I wish to report the establishment of a new division.’
One of Wilck’s men later complained that the worst part of being taken prisoner was being marched through Aachen. ‘The civilian population behaved worse than the French,’ he said. ‘They shouted abuse at us and the Americans had to intervene. We can’t help it if their houses have been smashed to smithereens.’ German women had soon emerged from cellars under the rubble to search for food. They could be seen butchering a fallen horse in the street hit by shellfire, and wheeling back turnips in little wooden baby carriages.
Goebbels tried to lessen the impact of the defeat. German propaganda assured the German people that ‘the time gained at Aachen, Arnhem and Antwerp has made Fortress Germany impregnable. The Luftwaffe is being rejuvenated and Germany now has more artillery and tanks to throw into battle.’
The most frustrating delay for the Allies was their inability to use the port of Antwerp. This gave the Germans the breathing space they needed to rebuild and redeploy their armies for Hitler’s new plan. But other factors also played a part. Encouraged by victory fever and the idea that the European war would be over by Christmas, American commanders in the Pacific had seized the chance to boost their own strengths. SHAEF suddenly woke up to the fact that the ‘Germany first’ policy, originally agreed in 1941, had slipped out of the window, resulting in alarming shortages of ammunition and men.
The Nazis, with Germany now threatened from the east, the south-east and the west, suffered their own internal tensions. On 15 October, Admiral Nikolaus Horthy, after secret negotiations with the Soviet Union, declared over the radio that Hungary was changing sides. The Germans knew of his betrayal. A commando led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the enormous Austrian who had snatched Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, kidnapped Horthy’s son as a hostage in a street ambush just before the broadcast.* Horthy himself was brought back to Germany and the government was handed over to the fascist and fiercely anti-semitic Arrow Cross.
In East Prussia, as the Red Army advanced on to German territory for the first time, the power struggle behind the scenes intensified. General der Flieger Kreipe, the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, was now persona non grata in the Wolfsschanze. Keitel and even Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Oberst von Below turned their backs on him as a ‘defeatist’. Göring decided to extend his deer hunt near by at Rominten, Kreipe noted in his diary, because ‘he has to watch Himmler and Bormann a little closer. Himmler has now requested some squadrons for his SS.’ This appears to have been Himmler’s first attempt to increase his military empire beyond the ground forces of the Waffen-SS. Part of the power game around the Führer depended on the two gate-keepers: Bormann, who controlled access over anyone outside the Wehrmacht and SS, and Keitel. ‘Before the Generals or anyone get to Adolf to make a report,’ a captured general remarked to his companions, ‘they are given detailed instructions by Keitel what they are to say, how they are to say it, and only then are they allowed into Adolf’s presence.’
On an inspection of flak batteries nearer the front, Kreipe wrote on 18 October of the Red Army incursion: ‘Fears in East Prussia, the first refugee treks to be seen, horrible.’ Göring had to leave Rominten in a hurry, and Keitel tried to persuade Hitler to leave the Wolfsschanze, but he refused. A few days later, Kreipe visited the Panzer Corps Hermann Göring at Gumbinnen. ‘Gumbinnen is on fire,’ he noted. ‘Columns of refugees. In Nemmersdorf, shot women and children have been nailed to barn doors.’ Nemmersdorf was the site of an atrocity, which was almost certainly exaggerated in Nazi propaganda, and Kreipe had probably not visited the scene.
Also on 18 October, just as the battle for Aachen was coming to an end, Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery met in Brussels. Since the British and the Canadians were so involved clearing the Scheldt estuary, Eisenhower decided that the US First Army should focus on obtaining a bridgehead across the Rhine south of Cologne, while the recently arrived Ninth Army protected its left flank. As might be imagined Montgomery was not pleased that the First Army was to be given priority, but he had been silenced for the moment after his climbdown. For the Americans, on the other hand, this strategy led to the plan to advance through the Hürtgen Forest. Neither the commanders nor the troops had any idea of the horrors that awaited them there.
Into the Winter of War
The brief Soviet rampage on to East Prussian territory in October prompted Goebbels to play up stories of rape, looting and destruction by the Red Army. He tried to invoke the idea of Volksgemeinschaft, or national solidarity, in the face of mortal danger. Yet on the western front Wehrmacht generals were shocked by reports of German soldiers looting German homes.
‘The soldiers’ behaviour today is unbelievable,’ said a doctor with the 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division. ‘I was stationed in Düren and the soldiers there robbed their own people. They tore everything out of the cupboards … They were like wild animals.’ Apparently this behaviour had started when the division was in Italy. And other formations which had looted during the retreat through France and Belgium did not change their habits when back on German soil. Their tattered uniforms had not been replaced, some 60 per cent of them were estimated to be infested with lice, and they were permanently hungry. Just behind the front line, there were reports of soldiers blinding horses so that they could be slaughtered and eaten.
This did not mean that they were reluctant to fight on, for the knowledge that the Red Army had reached the borders of the Reich had concentrated their minds. Significantly, a captured German army doctor called Dammann considered that ‘German propaganda urging the men to save their Fatherland has helped to keep down the number of cases of combat exhaustion.’
Looting by German soldiers was not the only reason for relations between civilians and troops to deteriorate sharply in western Germany. Women wanted the fighting to end as quickly as possible. For them, East Prussia was very far away. ‘You’ve no idea what morale is like at home,’ an Obergefreiter told fellow prisoners. ‘In the villages the women cursed and yelled: “Get out! We don’t want to be shot to bits!”’ A member of the 16th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment agreed. ‘They called us “prolo
ngers of the war”, and that wasn’t just in one place either, but in fifty towns and villages in the West.’ An Unteroffizier Mükller said that in Heidelberg ‘The mood there is shit, yet the hatred is not directed at the enemy, but against the German regime.’ People were saying: ‘If only the Allies would hurry up and come to end the war.’ While most within the armed forces were still eager to believe in Hitler’s promises of secret weapons, cynicism was much greater in civilian circles, except of course for the Party faithful and the desperate. In some places the unreliable V-1 flying bomb was already referred to as ‘Versager-1’, or ‘No. 1 Dud’.
Goebbels seized every opportunity to make civilians in the west of Germany fear an Allied victory. The announcement in September of the plan by Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, to turn Germany ‘into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’ was disastrous. It enabled Goebbels to claim that ‘every American soldier will bring Morgenthau along with him in his duffle bag’ and Germany would be broken up. This idea clearly influenced Wehrmacht forces in the west. An officer taken prisoner was asked by his American interrogator whether he regretted the destruction of the Rhineland. ‘Well, it probably won’t be ours after the war,’ he replied. ‘Why not destroy it?’
The Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter warned: ‘The German people must realize that we are engaged in a life and death struggle which imposes on every German the duty to do his utmost for the victorious conclusion of the war and the frustration of the plans of destruction planned by these cannibals.’ The fact that Morgenthau was Jewish also played straight into the hands of the propaganda ministry and its conspiracy theories of a Jewish plot against Germany. The ministry tried to increase the effect with some dubious quotations from the British press, including ‘Henningway’ cited in the Daily Mail as saying: ‘The power of Germany will have to be destroyed so thoroughly that Germany will never rise again to fight another battle. This goal can only be achieved by castration.’