General Hodges and Major General Ridgway, still mistakenly fearing an attack north towards Liège, had been furious at the loss of Manhay. They left Brigadier General Hasbrouck of the battered and exhausted 7th Armored under no doubt that he had to retake it at whatever cost. The division’s assault on Christmas Day had been dogged by heavy losses, largely because of the number of trees which it had blasted down across the road in its retreat. But preceded by a fresh battalion of the 517th Parachute Infantry, Hasbrouck’s force entered Manhay that night.
Fifty wounded from the II Battalion of the 3rd SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment could not be extricated from Grandménil. The Germans claimed that when they sent in ambulances well marked with the Red Cross, American tank crews shot them up. The regiment then attempted to send out an officer and an interpreter under a white flag of truce, and a doctor with a flag and armband, to see whether they could evacuate their wounded from Grandménil. But according to the German account, ‘the enemy opened fire on the parliamentaries, so this attempt had to be abandoned’. The Germans did not seem to understand that after the Malmédy massacre the SS were unlikely to be accorded any honours of war. So, leaving a medical orderly with their wounded, the remnants of the battalion slipped back to a defence line with the Der Führer Regiment near Odeigne, which was shelled all day by American artillery.
German activity around the Elsenborn ridge had almost ceased, so patrols from the 99th Infantry Division went forward to destroy ten enemy tanks from the 3rd Panzergrenadiers which had been abandoned after being stuck in the mud. This was to forestall German recovery teams, which were tireless and often ingenious in their attempts to retrieve and repair armoured vehicles.
American salvage parties, often manned by those showing signs of combat fatigue to give them a bit of a break, were sent off to collect weapons and ammunition thrown away earlier in the battle. American commanders were appalled by the tendency of their men to discard equipment and expect the military cornucopia to replace them at will. ‘If the soldier does not need it right then, he will get rid of it,’ one report stated. ‘A bazooka man must not have a rifle. He must be given a pistol instead for personal protection. Otherwise, he will discard the bazooka and its shells because they are cumbersome and heavy.’ Winter clothing, on the other hand, was jealously guarded. In most battalions a man at the aid station was told to take the padded ‘arctic’ coats from wounded men so that these vital items of clothing would not be lost to the unit.
St Vith had suffered badly on Christmas Day. Civilians had stayed in their cellars thinking that the worst must now be over, but in the afternoon of 26 December the ‘heavies’ of RAF Bomber Command arrived overhead. Nearly 300 Lancasters and Halifaxes dropped 1,140 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs.
The blast effect created shockwaves which could be felt in villages several kilometres away, and terrorized the townsfolk sheltering underground as buildings collapsed above them. According to one account, ‘people were struggling against the asphyxiating smoke and soot when another bomb blew a hole in the cellar wall that made them catch their breaths again. Before long, however, burning phosphorus was seeping into the cellar. The malicious substance released poisonous fumes and in the larger rooms set mattresses on fire. With the help of German soldiers, the panic-stricken civilians clawed their way through the hole and into the pulverised street.’
In the St Josef Kloster the chapel collapsed, with blocks of stone and beams smashing through the floor and crushing those below. The incendiaries set fire to anything remotely combustible. They also turned the convent itself into a raging blaze, consuming the old and incapacitated trapped on the upper floors. ‘Most of them were burned alive. Like a more liquid form of lava, hissing phosphorus poured into the cellars that remained standing. People with horrible burns, broken bones, and blown minds were pulled out through the few unobstructed air shafts. Among the last to leave the inferno were the convent’s sisters, blankets tightly drawn over their heads and shoulders.’
‘Saint-Vith is still burning,’ a German officer outside the town recorded. ‘The bomb carpets come close to our village. I have never seen anything like that in all my life. The whole countryside is covered by one big cloud of smoke and fire.’ He returned to St Vith in the evening. ‘All streets are burning … Cattle are howling, ammunition exploding, tires burst. There is a strong smell of burnt rubber.’ Delayed-action bombs continued to detonate from time to time.
In purely military terms, the raid was effective. St Vith was no more than ‘a giant heap of rubble’. All roads were blocked for three days at least and some for over a week, while German engineers were forced to create bypasses round the town. But the cost in civilian lives and suffering was untold. Nobody knew exactly how many had taken shelter in St Vith, but some 250 are estimated to have died. The survivors fled to neighbouring villages where they were cared for and fed.
That same night and the next, medium bombers of the Ninth US Air Force attacked La Roche-en-Ardenne. Since La Roche was situated along a river in a narrow defile, it provided a much easier target and only 150 tons of bombs were needed to block the route.
‘Things continued to look better all day today,’ the First Army diarist recorded after a meeting between Montgomery and Hodges. Prisoner interviews suggested that the Germans were facing real supply problems. ‘Although it is yet too early to be optimistic the picture tonight is certainly far rosier than on any other day since the counteroffensive began.’ Bradley, however, was still obsessed with what he regarded as the premature deployment of Collins’s VII Corps. He wrote to Hodges to complain of the ‘stagnating conservatism of tactics there where Monty has dissipated his reserve’. Patton, heavily influenced by Bradley’s view of the field marshal, wrote in his diary: ‘Monty is a tired little fart. War requires the taking of risks and he won’t take them.’
After a telephone call from Manteuffel, General Jodl summoned up the courage to tell Hitler, who had not moved from the Adlerhorst at Ziegenberg: ‘Mein Führer, we must face facts. We cannot force the Meuse.’ Reichsmarschall Göring arrived at Ziegenberg the same evening and declared, ‘The war is lost!’ He suggested that they must seek a truce. Hitler, trembling with rage, warned him against trying to negotiate behind his back. ‘If you go against my orders, I will have you shot!’ Hitler made no further mention of Antwerp. Instead no effort was to be spared to take Bastogne. Just as he had focused on Stalingrad in September 1942, when victory in the Caucasus eluded him, the recapture of Bastogne now became his ersatz symbol of victory.
But while Hitler refused to face reality in public, in rare moments he acknowledged the hopelessness of their position. Late in the evening in the bunker at Ziegenberg, he spoke to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Oberst Nicolaus von Below, about taking his own life. He still blamed setbacks on the Luftwaffe and the ‘traitors’ in the German army. ‘I know the war is lost,’ he told Below. ‘The enemy superiority is too great. I have been betrayed. After 20 July everything came out, things I had considered impossible. It was precisely those circles against me who had profited most from National Socialism. I pampered and decorated them, and that was all the thanks I got. My best course now is to put a bullet in my head. I lacked hard fighters … We will not capitulate, ever. We may go down, but we will take the world with us.’
20
Preparing the Allied Counter-Offensive
Even though the 4th Armored Division had broken through to Bastogne, the airdrop planned for 27 December still went ahead. This time, however, the Germans were better prepared. General McAuliffe’s warning that the aircraft should approach by a different route never got through. The curtain of flak and machine-gun fire was formidable, but the C-47 transports towing the gliders held their course. Eighteen gliders out of fifty were shot down and many others were riddled with bullets. One glider exploded in a fireball as a direct hit from flak set off the ammunition it was carrying. Gasoline cans were also hit and began to leak, but miraculously none caught fire.
A
ltogether some 900 aircraft – both transport and escort fighters – took part in the operation, and twenty-three were shot down. Paratroopers on the ground rushed from their foxholes to rescue those who had baled out and gave them slugs of brandy, to dull the pain from burns and twisted limbs. The pilot of one heavily hit C-47 managed a belly landing in the snow, although it clipped a truck on the road and spun it round, to the terror of the driver who had not seen it coming in.
The forty trucks that had brought in supplies during the night turned south again, loaded with the less seriously wounded, some of the German prisoners of war and glider pilots. Together with seventy ambulances carrying the 150 most serious cases, they trundled south escorted by light tanks through the narrow corridor. Intensive fighting began around Bastogne’s southern flank as the Americans tried to widen the gap, and the Germans did all they could to seal it.
On 28 December, General Bradley wrote a memo for Eisenhower, urging him to put pressure on Montgomery. ‘With the enemy attack losing its momentum in the Ardennes,’ he wrote, ‘it is important that strong counter-attacks be launched while his stocks of supplies are depleted, his troops tired and before he has had time thoroughly to dig in and consolidate his gains. The object of the counter-attack would be to trap the maximum enemy troops in the salient and to put our forces in a favorable position for further offensive action … The counter-attack must be launched immediately. Reports have been received that the enemy is digging in along the shoulders of his salient.’* Bradley was wrong to think that ‘further delay will permit the enemy to bring more troops into the salient’. That very day First Army noted that ‘high intelligence channels [a euphemism for Ultra] report that German concerns over the Soviet advance in Hungary might prompt the transfer of troops from the Ardennes to the Balkan front’. And in fact the opposite to what Bradley feared was soon to happen as the Red Army prepared its major winter offensive.
That evening Bradley was at least able to divert himself when Leland Stowe and Martha Gellhorn, who had not managed to get to Bastogne, came to dinner at the Hôtel Alfa in Luxembourg. Bradley appeared to be ‘much smitten with “Marty” Gellhorn’, Hansen recorded. ‘She’s a reddish blonde woman with a cover girl figure, a bouncing manner and a brilliant studied wit where each comment seems to come out perfectly tailored and smartly cut to fit the occasion, yet losing none of the spontaneity that makes it good.’ Hansen added that General Patton, also present, ‘grew flirtatious in his own inimitable manner with Marty’.
While Bradley twitched with impatience, Eisenhower was keen to discuss the situation with the field marshal. To a certain degree, he shared Montgomery’s concern that the Allies had not yet assembled strong enough forces to crush the German salient. The slowness of Patton’s advance from the south did not bode well, rather as Montgomery had predicted five days before. But at the same time Eisenhower was all too aware of Montgomery’s ingrained reluctance to move until he had overwhelming force. The crushing of the 2nd Panzer-Division had greatly encouraged him.
Montgomery, who had been overinfluenced by his impression that ‘the Americans have taken the most awful “bloody nose”’, correspondingly underestimated the damage inflicted on their attackers. He refused to believe that First Army had recovered sufficiently to mount such an ambitious operation. And he certainly did not think that Patton in the south was capable of achieving what he so belligerently claimed. Montgomery also feared that the Germans, once surrounded, would fight with even more desperation, and inflict far more casualties on the Allies. He was convinced that, using their massive airpower and artillery, the Allies could cause greater damage from defensive positions than by advancing into a battle of attrition.
On 26 December, Bradley wrote to General Hodges, arguing that the Germans had suffered badly and that he did not view the situation ‘in as grave a light as Marshal Montgomery’. He urged Hodges to consider pushing the enemy back ‘as soon as the situation seems to warrant’. Hodges does not appear to have seen that moment coming as quickly as Bradley. In fact right up to the afternoon of Christmas Day Hodges and his chief of staff had been begging for reinforcements just to hold the line. And ‘General Hodges’, as his headquarters diarist noted, ‘has had enough of exposed flanks for the last two weeks.’
In stark contrast Patton wanted to advance north from Luxembourg, with his earlier idea of cutting the German salient off at the base. This was ruled out by First Army because the road network south-east of the Elsenborn ridge would not support the massive armoured advance necessary. ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins accordingly prepared three plans of attack, and took them to First Army headquarters on 27 December. His preferred one was for his VII Corps to advance from Malmédy south-east to St Vith to join up with Patton’s Third Army and cut the Germans off there. Hodges, however, clearly preferred ‘the most conservative of the three plans’.
Montgomery also insisted on the shallower thrust, just heading for Houffalize. In his forthright way, Collins told Montgomery: ‘You’re going to push the Germans out of the bag, just like you did at Falaise.’ But as far as Montgomery was concerned, this was not Normandy in the summer. A major encirclement in such terrain and in such weather was far too ambitious. He had a point. It would be fine for the Red Army, equipped for warfare in deepest winter. The broad tracks of its T-34 tanks could cope with the ice and snow, but Shermans had already shown how vulnerable they were in such conditions.
Eisenhower’s planned meeting with Montgomery in Brussels had to be postponed until 28 December because the Luftwaffe destroyed his train in a bombing raid. Just before leaving, he heard that Montgomery was at last contemplating a general offensive. ‘Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!’ he exclaimed. To his exasperation, the Counter Intelligence Corps remained obsessed with his personal security, and because of fog and ice the meeting had to be switched to Hasselt, close to Montgomery’s headquarters. ‘The roads are a sheet of ice, following last night’s snow and ice storm,’ General Simpson of Ninth Army noted that day.
Just before his meeting with the Supreme Commander, Montgomery had called a conference at Zonhoven on 28 December at 09.45 with the northern army commanders – Hodges, Simpson, Dempsey and General Harry Crerar of the First Canadian Army. Montgomery reaffirmed his plan. His own intelligence chief, the G-2 at First Army and Major General Strong at SHAEF all pointed to a renewed German attack. He therefore proposed to let the Germans first exhaust themselves and their resources, battering against the northern line, while fighter-bombers dealt with their rear. He also expected ‘some sort of engagement on the British or Ninth Army fronts, as a demonstration’. In fact, Hitler had already cancelled the Fifteenth Army offensive planned to the north.*
Montgomery would move the British XXX Corps in to take over the defence from Hotton to Dinant, so that Collins’s VII Corps could reform ready to lead a counter-strike down to Houffalize. During the final phase of crushing the German salient, he intended to launch Operation Veritable, the planned Canadian army offensive down the west bank of the lower Rhine.
That afternoon at 14.30, Eisenhower and Montgomery met in Hasselt station. This was their first encounter since the battle had begun, and Montgomery was irritated that the Supreme Commander had not replied to his daily signals outlining the course of events. Closeted under guard at Versailles, Eisenhower had not ventured out since the Verdun conference. And during the unfortunate meeting on Christmas Day, Bradley had been forced to admit that he had no idea what Eisenhower’s plans were. Montgomery was scornful of what he saw as Eisenhower’s total inaction.
Eisenhower agreed to Montgomery’s plan to advance on Houffalize, rather than St Vith as Bradley wanted. But once again Montgomery could not contain himself. He said that Bradley had made a mess of the situation, and that if he, Montgomery, did not have full operational command of all the armies north of the Moselle, then the advance to the Rhine would fail. For form’s sake he offered to serve under Bradley, but this was hardly sincere after what he had said about him.
Montgomery assumed that his bullying had worked and that Eisenhower had agreed to all his proposals. Back in London, however, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke was disturbed when he heard Montgomery’s account of the meeting. ‘It looks to me as if Monty with his usual lack of tact has been rubbing into Ike the results of not having listened to Monty’s advice!! Too much “I told you so”.’
Eisenhower’s staff at SHAEF, including the British, were furious at what they heard of the meeting, but Montgomery was about to make things much worse. Afraid that Eisenhower might back off from what he thought had been agreed, the field marshal wrote a letter on 29 December, again insisting on a single field command and again claiming that the Allies would fail if his advice was not followed. Major General de Guingand, his chief of staff now back in Belgium, delivered it to Eisenhower next day. For Eisenhower, Montgomery’s letter was the final straw. The field marshal even had the temerity to dictate what Eisenhower’s order should say when giving him ‘full operational direction, control and co-ordination’ over Bradley’s 12th Army Group in the attack on the Ruhr.
The arrival of Montgomery’s letter happened to coincide with a cable from General Marshall in Washington. He had been shown articles in the British press claiming that Montgomery had saved the Americans in the Ardennes and that he should be appointed overall ground force commander. Marshall made his feelings very clear to Eisenhower. ‘Under no circumstances make any concessions of any kind whatsoever. You not only have our complete confidence but there would be a terrific resentment in this country following such an action. I am not assuming that you had in mind such a concession. I just wish you to be certain of our attitude on this side. You are doing a grand job and go on and give them hell.’
Eisenhower replied to Montgomery in reasoned tones, but with an unmistakable ultimatum. ‘In your latest letter you disturb me by predictions of “failure” unless your exact opinions in the matter of giving you command over Bradley are met in detail. I assure you that in this matter I can go no further … For my part I would deplore the development of such an unbridgeable gulf of convictions between us that we would have to present our differences to the CC/S [Combined Chiefs of Staff].’ There was no doubt whom the Combined Chiefs would back in a showdown.