Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  After the presidential election in the United States, Goebbels said that President Roosevelt had been re-elected as ‘generally expected’, with the support of American Communists at Stalin’s urging. Yet German propaganda also played a double game, encouraging the belief that the alliance of the Reich’s enemies would soon fall apart. According to the US Counter Intelligence Corps, the Germans circulated leaflets showing ‘Tommy and his Yankee pal regarding with disgust the spectacle of Russians taking over and policing Brussels, Berlin, etc.; the Teuton being apparently unable to get out of his head that when it comes to an abject fear of Bolshevism we’re All Krauts Together’. Other leaflets tried to make the point that ‘while Americans are being slaughtered by the thousand, Monty’s troops are indulging in a “Dutch Holiday Slumber”’.

  ‘German civilians don’t know what to expect,’ the Counter Intelligence Corps reported. ‘They are torn between belief in the “terror” stories of German authorities and those which cross the lines, by rumor and Allied radio, about the fairness of our treatment of civilians in captured areas.’ The Allies were of course helped by accounts which circulated within Germany of Nazi Party corruption at home and of the shameless looting in France by senior officials of the military administration. Gauleiters were amassing great wealth, and their children were allowed cars and petrol when even the heads of companies were rationed to forty litres a week.

  The Counter Intelligence Corps admitted that it had crossed into German territory ‘armed with a few directives, no precedents, uncertainty as to its potentialities, and [with an] uneasy expectation of partisan warfare’. Its priority was to seize Nazi Party records quickly, but its operatives found themselves overwhelmed by the numbers of ‘suspicious civilians’ arrested by American soldiers for screening along with the prisoners of war. German soldiers and civilians found it very easy to escape from American compounds. The other problem which the CIC faced was the number of Belgian and French Resistance members crossing into Germany to loot, or on ‘intelligence missions of their own’.

  In Aachen the Counter Intelligence Corps estimated that up to 30 per cent of the population had defied Nazi orders to evacuate the city. ‘Don’t kick them around,’ was the CIC advice on treating Germans under American occupation, ‘but don’t let them fool you. The Germans are accustomed to taking orders, not complying with requests.’ Many were indeed willing to denounce Nazis and to provide information, but it was often hard for Allied intelligence units to know exactly what to believe. Word had spread of the unrest in bomb-shattered Cologne, where police were engaged in running battles with the so-called ‘Edelweiss Pirates’: bands of dissident youth, plus an estimated 2,000 German deserters and absconded foreign workers sheltering in the ruins.

  Allied bombing had not only flattened cities. Travel by train had become very difficult, if not impossible. German officers and soldiers who had finally obtained home leave found that almost all of their precious days were spent sitting in trains or waiting in stations. ‘A Leutnant of ours went to Munich on leave [from Rheine near the Dutch border],’ a Luftwaffe Unteroffizier Bock recounted. ‘He was away ten days, but he only had one day at home.’

  Hardly any soldier chose to go to Berlin on leave unless he had family or a sweetheart there. Everyone in the capital was exhausted from sleepless nights, as RAF Bomber Command fought its own ‘Battle of Berlin’, hammering the city night after night. ‘What is cowardice?’ ran a typical example of the city’s gallows humour. ‘When someone in Berlin volunteers for the Eastern Front.’

  Visitors were often amazed how its inhabitants from all classes had adapted to the conditions. ‘I am so accustomed now to living among these ruins,’ wrote Missie Vassiltchikov in her diary, ‘with the constant smell of gas in the air, mixed with the odour of rubble and rusty metal, and sometimes even the stench of putrefying flesh.’ Apartments were particularly cold during that winter of fuel shortages. There was little glass available to repair windows and people opened their windows wide when the sirens sounded in the hope of saving any remaining panes from bomb blast.

  During air raids, the packed cellars and concrete air-raid shelters shuddered and shook. The low-wattage bulbs flickered, dimmed still further, went out and then came back. Children screamed, many adults buried their heads between their knees. After the all-clear had finally sounded, many admitted to a curious exhilaration when they found themselves still alive. But some people stayed in the cellars even after the others had trooped off. It was warmer and less threatening there.

  ‘Skin diseases’, a doctor reported, ‘have become very common both in the Army and at home, owing to the poor quality of the soap available, overcrowding in air-raid shelters and in those houses which are still standing, shortage of clothing, poor hygiene etc.’ Workers in industrial areas were increasingly succumbing to diphtheria, and venereal diseases had spread, partly as a result of German troops returning from France, Belgium, the Balkans and Poland.

  According to a court-martial judge, there were estimated to be 18,000 Wehrmacht deserters in Berlin. Many were hiding in huts on allotments. They no doubt subscribed to the German army joke: ‘War is just like the picture-house: there’s a lot going on up in the front, but the best seats are right at the back.’ Ordinary Germans were at last ready to shelter deserters, usually sons or nephews but sometimes even strangers, at terrible risk to themselves. By the end of the year, the Wehrmacht had executed some 10,000 men, a figure which was to increase significantly in the final months of the war.

  The families of deserters were also liable to severe penalties. ‘During the night of 29–30 October’, the commander of the 361st Volksgrenadier-Division announced in an order of the day, ‘Soldat Wladislaus Schlachter of the 4th Company, 952nd Grenadier-Regiment, deserted to the enemy. The court martial assembled on the same day passed the death sentence on Schlachter. Thus he was expelled forever from the community of our people and may never return to his home. Most ruthless reprisals will be enacted against the members of his family, measures which are a necessity in this struggle for the survival of the German people.’ Threats were also made against the families of prisoners of war who told their American captors too much.

  The more prosperous classes increasingly feared the tens of thousands of foreign workers in and around the city. Some were volunteers, but most had been brought to Germany as forced labourers. The authorities were losing control of them. Barracks were often burned down, leaving the foreigners homeless. German shopkeepers would claim that gangs of them had broken in to their establishments and stolen supplies, when in fact they themselves had sold the missing items on the black market. Alongside food, cigarettes were the most sought-after commodity. In Berlin, according to one captured officer, a single English cigarette sold for five Reichsmarks, while a Camel went for twice as much. Real coffee was out of almost everyone’s reach at 600 Reichsmarks a kilo. According to one officer, most of the black market in coffee was organized by the SS in Holland.

  Coffee, because of its rarity, was the conspicuous consumption of choice for the Nazi hierarchy. A horrifying and bizarre conversation between two captured Kriegsmarine admirals was secretly recorded in their camp in England in 1945. Konteradmiral Engel told Vizeadmiral Utke about fellow admirals entertained by Arthur Greiser, the notorious Gauleiter of the Wartheland, who was later hanged by the Poles.

  ‘Greiser boasted: “Do you know that the coffee you’re drinking now, cost me 32,000 Jewish women?”’

  ‘Where did they go?’ Vizeadmiral Utke asked.

  ‘“Into the incinerators probably,” Greiser said to us at the time. “Let’s hope we all get as easy a death as they had.” That was the first thing he said. All the admirals sat around laughing themselves sick and thinking of the human suffering behind the coffee they were drinking.’

  Following the Roman tradition of bread and circuses, the Nazi administration organized an ice show in the bomb-damaged Sportpalast to distract people from the shortage of rations. The Deutsches Fraue
nwerk welfare organization produced bakery booklets and brochures on how to save food. One was entitled ‘Main meal without meat’, which no doubt prompted another Berlin joke that the next one would be how to produce a main meal without food. A satirical song, sung to the tune of the Nazi anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, went:

  The prices rise

  The shops are firmly shuttered

  Starvation marches

  With the German race

  Yet those who starve

  Are just the little comrades.

  While those above

  Can merely sympathize.

  *

  Leave was much easier for the Allied armies on the western front. The British and Canadians went to Brussels and the Americans to Paris. Senior officers could always find a good excuse to visit SHAEF at Versailles or Com Z in the city itself. From mid-September, almost 10,000 American soldiers were arriving in Paris every day on seventy-two-hour passes. The priorities of what the poet-paratrooper Louis Simpson called ‘the over-heated soul of the dogface fresh from his dugout’ were predictable. Paris became known as ‘the silver foxhole’, and the term ‘zig-zag’ covered both drink and sex. Pigalle became known as ‘Pig Alley’ where prostitutes, both professional and amateur, charged anything up to 300 francs or five dollars.*

  General Lee, the authoritarian commander of Com Z, was appalled by the informal and at times insulting behaviour of GIs on leave in Paris. He tried to instil some smartness by sending out officers from his headquarters to take the name of any soldier who failed to salute. The Avenue de Kléber soon became known as the ‘Avenue de Salute’ among front-line soldiers who resented the officers and MPs trying to make them behave.

  GIs offset the expense of prostitutes and drink by buying cartons of Chesterfield, Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes for fifty cents through the US Army’s PX organization, then selling them for anything from fifteen to twenty dollars. French authorities complained in vain that US troops were exploiting their exemption from both import duties and exchange controls. American soldiers were able to make a killing at the expense of the French government by converting their pay in francs back into dollars at the official rate, then selling the dollars on the black market at a huge profit. Soldiers lured women with the offer of cigarettes, tinned ham, nylon stockings and other items posted from the States.

  University graduates and anyone with a feel for European culture sympathized with the French and yearned, not just for carnal reasons, to see Paris, the intellectual capital of the world. But those with little knowledge of foreign countries tended to despise the French as losers who could not speak a proper language. They expected French girls and women alike to be ready to service the desires of their liberators. One of the very few phrases that many of them bothered to learn was ‘Voulezvous coucher avec moi?’ The American embassy described US troops in Paris as ‘ardent and often very enterprising’ in the pursuit of women. In fact the lack of subtlety soon became counter-productive. Summoned in a café by a whistle and a proffered pack of Lucky Strike, one young woman earned the cheers of French onlookers by taking a cigarette from the GI, dropping it to the ground and grinding it under her foot. Young French males, unable to compete with American largesse, became increasingly bitter at what they saw as the presumption of their liberators. Mutual suspicion and resentment grew on both sides. ‘The French, cynical before defeat; sullen after rescue,’ wrote Louis Simpson. ‘What do the sons of bitches want?’

  If the black market in Berlin was flourishing, in Paris it became rampant when American deserters teamed up with local criminal gangs. The profits from stolen US Army gasoline were so large that even drug dealers were drawn to this new market. Up to half the jerrycans in continental Europe went missing. Increased criminal penalties, making the fuel more traceable by adding coloured dye, and numerous other attempts by the American authorities failed to dent a trade which made the supply situation at the front even worse. Paris soon became known as ‘Chicago-sur-Seine’.

  The most notorious racket that autumn was perpetrated by the railway battalion. These troops would stop the train on a bend so that the MPs guarding against theft at the end of the train could not see, then unload meat, coffee, cigarettes and canned goods to their confederates. A twenty-pound drum of coffee could go for $300 and a case of 10-in-1 rations for $100. Blankets and uniforms were also stolen from hospital trains. Some 180 officers and enlisted men were eventually charged and sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from three to fifty years. Altogether some 66 million packs of cigarettes disappeared in a single month.

  French dislike for the ‘new occupation’ increased with the signs of American military privileges. White-helmeted American MPs directing traffic on the Place de la Concorde gave priority to US vehicles approaching the American embassy. Roosevelt had delayed recognition of the provisional government because he suspected that de Gaulle wanted to be a military dictator, but after much pressure from the State Department and Eisenhower, the President gave in. On Monday 23 October Jefferson Caffery, the US ambassador, Duff Cooper, the British ambassador, and Aleksandr Bogomolov, the Soviet representative, finally presented their letters of credence. De Gaulle invited Cooper and his wife to dinner that night, but he was still in such a bad mood that the British ambassador in his diary described the evening as an ‘extremely frigid and dreary party, worse even than his entertainments usually are’.

  Caffery was far more sympathetic towards the French than most of the senior officers at SHAEF, and as a result a number of them held him in contempt. He was an awkward man, both formal and ill at ease, and clearly did not enjoy diplomatic life. The Francophobe senior officers were determined to subordinate him to their own hierarchy and not allow any diplomatic independence. Caffery and Georges Bidault, the inexperienced French foreign minister, commiserated with each other over their difficulties. Bidault was constantly apologizing to Caffery and Cooper for de Gaulle’s needless provocations. He even said to Caffery later that ‘there is absolutely no one else in sight and that it must be admitted that de Gaulle loves France, even if he doesn’t like Frenchmen’. Cooper’s main problem was his old friend Winston Churchill. The Prime Minister wanted to visit SHAEF, without saying a word to de Gaulle beforehand, an act which would have been seen as an insult. Eventually, Churchill was persuaded to formalize his visit, and he walked down the Champs-Elysées with General de Gaulle, acclaimed by vast crowds. Their furious contretemps on the eve of D-Day was tactfully forgotten.

  De Gaulle’s displays of bad temper were due in part to the grave economic and political difficulties his government faced. Food and fuel supplies were uncertain, causing frequent protests. SHAEF estimated that 1,550,000 buildings had been destroyed during the war. Factories and mines were still not working properly, and the country’s ports and transport system remained half paralysed after all the destruction from Allied bombing and German looting. De Gaulle also needed to deal with an embittered Resistance movement, which resented both its own loss of influence and the re-establishment of state power by the Gaullists returned from London. The French Communist Party and its supporters were the most vocal in their protests. Their hopes of carrying liberation into revolution had been thwarted, but they did not know that Stalin was totally opposed to the idea. He feared that the United States might cut off Lend-Lease support if there were disturbances in France behind Allied lines.

  De Gaulle played his trump card towards the end of October. He would allow the French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez to return to Paris from Moscow, but in return the two Communist ministers in his government would have to support his decree to abolish the ‘patriotic militias’ and force them to surrender their weapons. With uniforms and weapons provided by SHAEF, de Gaulle began to incorporate the patriotic militias into the regular French forces, sending the majority to General Jean-Marie de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army advancing towards Strasbourg at the southernmost part of the Allied line.

  One person who had no inten
tion of surrendering his weapons was Ernest Hemingway, who had played at partisans around Rambouillet just before the liberation of Paris. At the beginning of October, Hemingway had to leave his roving court on the German frontier where the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Division had been breaching the Siegfried Line. After committing perjury to a court of inquiry into his illegal military activities at Rambouillet, he was acquitted and allowed to remain in France as an accredited war correspondent.

  Although he took time and trouble in Paris to encourage the writing of Sergeant J. D. Salinger of the 4th Division, who had already started Catcher in the Rye, Hemingway remained an inveterate war tourist: he was after all the man who had coined the term ‘whore de combat’ during the Spanish Civil War. He returned to the Ritz in Paris to drink and sleep with Mary Welsh, the next Mrs Hemingway. Some time later, when drinking with Colonel ‘Buck’ Lanham, the commander of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, he seized a photograph of Mary’s husband, threw it into the lavatory and fired a German machine pistol at it, with disastrous effects on the Ritz plumbing.

  He also flirted paternally with Marlene Dietrich, who was in France entertaining American troops. One of Dietrich’s ‘ardent admirers’ was General Patton, who gave her a set of pearl-handled pistols. Another was Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, the extraordinarily young and good-looking paratrooper major general who became her lover. Gavin also later became the lover of Martha Gellhorn, the third Mrs Hemingway, who now could not stand the sight of ‘Papa’ any more. Paris was indeed a turbulent feast for the last year of the war.