On 27 October, at a conference at Model’s headquarters near Krefeld, the plans were discussed with the army commanders: SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich of Sixth Panzer Army, Manteuffel of the Fifth Panzer Army and Brandenberger of the Seventh Army. Model, accepting that he would not be able to get his version of the ‘small solution’ approved by the OKW without his chief’s support, acceded to Rundstedt’s plan. But even Jodl’s gradual attempts to win the Führer round to a ‘small solution’ made no headway. Hitler stubbornly ignored warnings that much greater forces would be needed, not just to reach Antwerp, but to secure the corridor against Allied counter-attacks.
Jodl warned Rundstedt that the Führer was immovable, so the commander-in-chief west put his views in writing. He clearly could not face another frenzied meeting with Hitler, outraged at the idea that any of his generals could disagree with him. Even Model’s later tactic of suggesting the ‘small solution’, to be followed upon success by a drive north to Antwerp, was firmly rejected. Hitler thought that the American forces in front of Aachen were too powerful, so the only way to weaken them was by outflanking them across the Meuse and then cutting off their supply base.
Generaloberst Heinz Guderian again protested at the concentration of all available German forces in the west. He knew that the Red Army was preparing to strike its next blow on the eastern front as soon as the ground froze hard enough for its tank armies to charge forward from the Vistula. ‘In our current situation,’ Jodl explained to him on 1 November, ‘we cannot shrink from staking everything on one card.’ Guderian’s son was to take part in the Ardennes offensive as Ia, or chief operations officer, of the 116th Panzer-Division.
The field commanders knew that fuel was going to be the chief problem, despite all assurances that they would receive what was needed. On 23 November, at a major conference in Berlin, they raised the question. Dietrich complained that there was no sign of the supplies he had been promised. General Walter Buhle of the OKW tried to prove that they had been delivered by showing pieces of paper, but most of the fuel supplies were still stuck east of the Rhine as a result of Allied bombing. Manteuffel, knowing the effects of the difficult terrain and the mud on fuel consumption, had requested fuel for 500 kilometres, but his army received enough only for 150 kilometres. Keitel had accumulated 17.4 million litres of fuel, but Jodl later admitted that Keitel wanted to hold some back ‘on principle, otherwise the commanders would have been too extravagant with it.’
Any hope of keeping to Hitler’s original plan of attacking in November disappeared. Even the beginning of December looked increasingly uncertain. The transport of fuel, ammunition and the divisions themselves was delayed, partly due to Allied bombing of the transport network and partly due to the earlier difficulties of withdrawing formations to prepare. Hardly a single panzer division found the time and fuel to train many of the novice tank drivers. German forces on the western front had been receiving priority for the replacement of panzers, assault guns and artillery. Waffen-SS divisions received the bulk of the new equipment and had the pick of reinforcements, but even then they tended to be mainly youngsters transferred from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. The shameless preference for SS formations, which had Hitler’s backing, was justified on the grounds that the Sixth Panzer Army had the major breakthrough role, but Jodl conceded later that the panzer divisions in Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army were more effective. ‘There was a certain political interference in the conduct of the war,’ he said.
On 2 December, Model came to Berlin with Manteuffel and Sepp Dietrich, who had been Hitler’s loyal escort commander from the Nazis’ street-fighting days. Both men also supported the ‘small solution’. Hitler insisted that the Antwerp plan remain as he had stated. All preparations were to be made on that basis. Rundstedt did not attend the conference. He sent instead his chief of staff Westphal, who said virtually nothing. Hitler later ‘expressed his astonishment at this conduct’ to Jodl. But Rundstedt was clearly signalling what he thought of the whole project over which he had no control. The final orders were annotated by the Führer ‘Not to be altered’. Rundstedt and Model were told expressly that their task was simply to pass on orders from the OKW ‘to their subordinate commands’.
Model appears to have been fatalistic. He took the view that this was a ‘last gamble’ and he had no choice but to carry it out. Manteuffel later said that it was at this conference on 2 December that he privately decided that his ‘final objective would be the Meuse’ and not Brussels, as Hitler insisted for his army. He knew that ‘the Allied ability to react would be the cardinal factor’.
Manteuffel was a tough little cavalryman who had served in the Zieten Hussars in the First World War. During the revolutionary upheavals which followed the Armistice he became adjutant to the Freikorps von Oven, which took part in suppressing the Spartacists in Berlin and the Räterepublik in Munich. In the Second World War he rapidly proved himself to be an outstanding leader on the eastern front, first with the 7th Panzer-Division and then with the Panzergrenadier-Division Grossdeutschland. ‘Surprise, when it succeeds,’ he explained, ‘is a decisive part of the success of the panzer formation. Slackness, softness, etcetera amongst all ranks must be sternly put down.’
Hitler’s obsession with secrecy never slackened. No troops were to be briefed until the evening before the attack. Even regimental commanders would know nothing until the day before. No registering of artillery could take place in advance. Despite pleas from the army commanders, the OKW, on Hitler’s instruction, refused permission to brief anyone other than corps commanders, their chief artillery officers and one staff officer. Commanders of corps artillery had to reconnoitre all the gun positions themselves. Not surprisingly, many officers were soon able to work out that a major offensive was in preparation, since the artillery dispositions alone indicated that the deployments were not for defensive purposes.
Troops, as they moved on night marches into their concentration areas in the Eifel, were to be billeted in villages by day, with all vehicles concealed in barns. There were to be no fires and no movement in daylight in case of American reconnaissance flights. Charcoal was provided for cooking as it made little smoke. German officers were amazed that Allied air reconnaissance failed to spot villages and woods ‘full to bursting point’. They half expected a massive air attack at any moment.
Maps were to be distributed only at the very last moment, for security reasons. Total radio silence was to be observed, but that also meant signals nets could not be established until the opening bombardment. For the move to their attack positions, all roads were restricted to one-way traffic. No routes were to be marked in case this was spotted by enemy agents. Recovery vehicles were to be ready to cope with breakdowns. Storch aircraft would fly constantly overhead at night to check on progress and to spot any lights showing, but also to disguise the noise of engines. The civilian population was to be tightly controlled and all telephone lines in the Eifel must be cut. Gestapo officers were sent forward to check on all security measures. Volksgrenadier divisions received the order to take away their men’s paybooks and identity documents so that they would be shot as spies if they deserted.
A fake headquarters north of Aachen transmitting instructions gave the impression that the Sixth Panzer Army was in position there, ready to counter-attack an expected American offensive across the River Roer. And a fake Twenty-Fifth Army was created in the same way as the Allies had invented a 1st US Army Group in eastern England before D-Day. Manteuffel himself ‘started a rumour in a restaurant early in December, to the effect that we were preparing to attack in the Saar area in January. I mentioned this in a loud voice to some of my commanders while we were having dinner one night.’
Goebbels, meanwhile, kept repeating the mantra of the Nazi leadership that ‘the political crisis in the enemy camp grows daily’. But many of their most loyal followers were not convinced by this message of hope; they simply felt that there was no choice but to fight on to the bitter end. A secret recording of a cap
tured Waffen-SS Standartenführer revealed the diehard view of the moment. ‘We have all been brought up from the cradle to consider Leonidas’s fight at Thermopylae as the highest form of sacrifice for one’s people,’ he told a fellow officer. ‘Everything else follows on from that and if the whole German nation has become a nation of soldiers, then it is compelled to perish; because by thinking as a human being and saying – “It is all up with our people now, there’s no point in it, it’s nonsense” – do you really believe that you will avoid the sacrifice of an appreciable number of lives? Do you think you will alter the peace terms? Surely not. On the other hand it is well known that a nation which has not fought out such a fateful struggle right to the last has never risen again as a nation.’
The vision of Germany as a phoenix arising from the ashes had a wide currency among true believers. ‘The only thing is to continue the fight until the last,’ said Generalleutnant Heim, ‘even if everything is destroyed. Fighting until the last moment gives a people the moral strength to rise again. A people that throws in the sponge is finished for all time. That is proved by history.’
Tensions between the Waffen-SS and the German army were growing because of Hitler’s insistence on saving SS formations in a retreat while ordinary divisions were left to fight on as a rearguard. And the SS never forgot a perceived injury. An officer in the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division claimed that, in the escape from the Falaise pocket at the end of the battle for Normandy, General der Panzertruppe Freiherr von Lüttwitz of the 2nd Panzer-Division had refused to lend a vehicle to evacuate the wounded commander of the SS Division Leibstandarte, who had been shot in the thigh. ‘What a filthy trick!’ he said. He then asserted that Lüttwitz himself had been saved by the commander of an SS panzergrenadier battalion.
‘There were many comments’, acknowledged General Warlimont, ‘to the effect that the SS no longer considered itself a member of the Wehrmacht but had its own organisation.’ Sepp Dietrich wanted his Sixth Panzer Army to be designated an SS panzer army, but this was denied because he had non-SS formations in his command. Dietrich even refused to have General der Artillerie Kruse as his chief artillery officer because he was not a member of the Waffen-SS. Manteuffel, like many others, had little respect for Dietrich’s generalship. He thought that the Sixth Panzer Army ‘was not commanded as one formation, and its component parts did not fight with the same sense of duty as the Army divisions’. Dietrich was regarded as a bad joke by senior army officers. When asked the objectives of his Sixth Panzer Army in the first and second days of the offensive, he is said to have replied: ‘Objectives, objectives! If I had to give everybody objectives, wherever should I be? You general staff officers!’
Oberstleutnant von der Heydte was even more scathing, after meeting him to discuss his parachute drop in front of the Sixth Panzer Army. He said that Dietrich liked to pose as ‘a people’s general’, but he was ‘a conceited, reckless military leader with the knowledge and ability of a good sergeant. He has no moral scruples.’ Heydte, although a German nationalist, detested the Nazis. As a cousin of Oberst Claus Graf von Stauffenberg, he had been exasperated by a questionnaire following 20 July which asked whether he was related to aristocracy of non-German blood or to the former ruling house of Germany, or whether he had been educated abroad or in a Jesuit institute. When Heydte asked about his overall plan, Dietrich could say only that it was to push through to Antwerp ‘and then give the English a good beating’.
Heydte, the head of the Fallschirmjäger Army Combat School, had first been warned of his mission by Generaloberst Kurt Student on the evening of 8 December at Student’s headquarters in Holland. ‘The Führer has ordered a parachute attack in the framework of a powerful offensive,’ Student told him. ‘You, my dear Heydte, are ordered to carry out this task.’ He was to assemble a force of some 1,200 men to drop behind enemy lines to seize key road junctions. He rejected Heydte’s suggestion of using his 6th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment, since that might be spotted by the enemy and secrecy was vital.
Kampfgruppe Heydte was to drop on the first night south of Eupen. Its mission was to block American reinforcements coming south from the Aachen sector. Over the next two days, Heydte received his men and sent them off to Sennelager for a short and intensive training course. Hitler’s refusal to attempt airborne operations after the heavy losses on Crete in 1941 meant that many had never received proper training, and even some of the veterans had not been up in an aircraft since that invasion.
Heydte then went to Limburg to see General Pelz to discuss aircraft requirements. He was not impressed. ‘There was nothing but French girls in the mess of the XII Flieger Korps commanded by Pelz at Limburg,’ he noted.* Pelz complained of their disastrous situation and said: ‘Germany’s last reserves of fuel are being thrown into this Ardennes enterprise.’ Heydte discovered that 112 Junkers 52 transports had been allocated for the mission; but half of the pilots had never dropped paratroopers, nor flown over enemy territory, nor been trained to fly in formation. ‘Only two pilots were old Stalingrad flyers,’ he noted, referring to those veterans who had flown in and out of the Stalingrad encirclement during the doomed attempt to resupply Paulus’s Sixth Army in December 1942.
On 11 December, taking the most experienced pilot with him, Heydte went on to see General der Flieger Beppo Schmidt, the most disastrous intelligence officer the Wehrmacht ever produced. Schmidt had constantly predicted all through the Battle of Britain that RAF Fighter Command was at its last gasp, yet Göring had protected and promoted his toady ever since. Schmidt, ‘who was heavily under the influence of alcohol’, declared that ‘Success or failure in the German attack on Antwerp will decide the outcome of the war.’ Schmidt told Heydte that he was to split his force in two, with one group to drop west of Malmédy and the other near Eupen. Heydte said this was ridiculous. They would be too small to be effective since many men would not make the dropping zone. And when Heydte warned that the lack of training of both pilots and paratroopers was so serious that the operation would fail, Schmidt cursed his two visitors and dismissed them for questioning the abilities of Luftwaffe personnel.
After a long drive through the night, Heydte went on to see Generalfeldmarschall Model in a hunting lodge south of Münstereifel. Model was blunt. He said the operation was not his idea and asked whether it stood a one in ten chance of success. Heydte had to agree that it was possible. Model apparently replied that ‘the entire offensive had not more than a ten percent chance of success’, but ‘it was the last remaining chance of concluding the war favourably’. Model then sent him to see Sepp Dietrich, whose headquarters were half an hour’s drive further to the south.
While Heydte waited most of the morning to see Dietrich, an orderly-room clerk told him the secret plan for sabotage operations by a Kampfgruppe led by Otto Skorzeny, an astounding breach of security for which he could have been shot. Finally, Heydte was shown into Dietrich’s office. Heydte thought he looked like ‘an old non-commissioned officer permanently addicted to alcohol’. Dietrich opened the conversation by demanding: ‘What can you paratroopers do, anyhow?’ Heydte replied that, if told the mission, he could judge whether or not it was possible. Failing to obtain a clear reply, Heydte then asked what was known of enemy strength in the area. ‘All that was known’, Heydte recorded, ‘was that the front line was held by American units; and that behind them there were only “a couple of bank managers and Jewboys”’, in Dietrich’s words. ‘As for tactical and operational reserves, nobody could tell me anything.’
Heydte later entertained fellow officers in captivity with his version of how the conversation went, imitating Dietrich’s thick Swabian accent. When he tried to explain some of the problems the operation faced, Dietrich clearly considered this defeatism. The offensive would crush the Americans.
‘We’ll annihilate them,’ he shouted.
‘But what about the enemy, Herr Oberstgruppenführer?’
‘Good Lord, I don’t know. You’ll find out soon enough.’
r /> ‘Who will you send in first?’
‘I can’t tell you yet – whoever is the first to turn up.’
Heydte’s account continued: ‘When I added that you can only jump when the wind is favourable, he said: “Well, I’m not responsible for the Luftwaffe’s shortcomings! It’s just another example of their uselessness.”’
The only useful aspect to this bizarre encounter was that Dietrich agreed he should not split his force in two. Heydte discovered more from Dietrich’s chief of staff, SS-Brigadeführer Krämer – ‘a highly overstrung and overworked man’, which was hardly surprising since he had to do everything for Dietrich. Krämer told him that the panzer spearhead of the 12th SS Division Hitler Jugend would be with them ‘within twenty-four hours’. Heydte demanded an artillery forward observation officer to drop with them and he was provided with SS-Obersturmführer Etterich. Heydte then heard that the drop was to take place on the morning of 16 December between 04.30 and 05.00 hours, just before the opening bombardment. Motor transport would be laid on to take his force to the airfields at Paderborn and Lippspringe.
The other special operation which the OKW planned was a commando venture, using picked troops in captured American vehicles and uniforms to penetrate Allied lines and cause mayhem in the rear. Hitler had summoned SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny to East Prussia on 21 October for a personal briefing long before Rundstedt or Model knew anything of the offensive. ‘Skorzeny,’ Hitler said, ‘this next assignment will be the most important of your life.’ Skorzeny, two metres tall and with a large scar on his left cheek, towered over the bent and sickly Führer. Heydte described the huge Austrian as a ‘typical evil Nazi’ who used ‘typical SS methods. So he formed a special body of people of the same type as himself.’ General der Panzertruppe von Thoma also regarded Skorzeny as an Austrian criminal, and described him as ‘a real dirty dog … shooting is much too good for him’.