Friday 12 January was eventful in other ways. Göring, apparently forgiven for the disaster of Operation Bodenplatte, was summoned to the Führer’s presence at the Adlerhorst to receive Hitler’s congratulations on his fifty-second birthday. It was hardly an auspicious occasion. The date was far more important for other reasons. At 05.00 Moscow time, Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front attacked out of the Sandomierz bridgehead west of the River Vistula following a massive bombardment, which a panzergrenadier officer said was ‘like the heavens falling down on earth’. Soviet tank armies advanced with slogans painted on their tank turrets declaring: ‘Forward into the fascist lair!’ and ‘Revenge and death to the German occupiers!’ The next day Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front attacked from south of Warsaw, while two other Fronts assaulted East Prussia.
General Guderian had not exaggerated, but, like Cassandra’s, his warnings had been ignored. The Red Army had deployed 6.7 million men along the whole of the eastern front. He was almost speechless when he heard that Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army, which was being withdrawn from the Ardennes, was to be transferred not to the Vistula or East Prussia but to Hungary to save the oilfields.
As soon as news of the great Soviet offensive reached 12th Army Group, Bradley immediately wanted to spread the impression that his forces’ imminent victory in the Ardennes ‘had enabled the Russian to attack with far greater numbers and more spectacular success than would otherwise have been possible’. He was right. There can be little doubt that the commitment and then grinding down of German forces in the Ardennes, especially the panzer divisions, had mortally weakened the Wehrmacht’s capacity to defend the eastern front. But as another general in British captivity observed: ‘The fear of Russia will keep Germany fighting to the bitter end.’
23
Flattening the Bulge
Just as the final battle in the Ardennes commenced, the Germans threw more divisions into Operation Nordwind. On 5 January, after the initial attack had failed in its objectives, Himmler’s Army Group Oberrhein finally began its supporting thrusts against the southern flank of the American VI Corps. The XIV SS Corps launched an attack across the Rhine north of Strasbourg, and two days later the Nineteenth Army advanced north from the Colmar pocket either side of the Rhône–Rhine Canal. The very survival of General Patch’s VI Corps was threatened.
Devers, receiving no sympathy from Eisenhower, handed responsibility for the defence of Strasbourg to Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army, which now had to extend its front from the city to the Belfort Gap, a distance of 120 kilometres. But the point of greatest danger was round Gambsheim and Herrlisheim, where the XIV SS Corps had created a bridgehead south-east of Haguenau.
On 7 January, the 25th Panzergrenadier and the 21st Panzer-Division went into the attack. They reached the Haguenau Forest thirty kilometres north of Strasbourg, but were halted by the 14th Armored Division, Devers’s last reserve. To the north in the Low Vosges, the 45th Infantry Division managed to hold back the 6th SS Mountain Division. One of the 45th Division’s battalions was surrounded, and fought on for almost a week. Only two men escaped.
Hitler was still obsessed with Frederick the Great’s dictum that he who throws in his last battalions wins the war. On 16 January, he sent in his final reserves, the 7th Fallschirmjäger-Division and the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg. Their attack along the Rhine as they tried to reach the Gambsheim bridgehead battered the inexperienced 12th Armored Division at Herrlisheim. This development provided the main subject for discussion at Eisenhower’s morning briefing on 20 January. ‘What gets me, Honest to God,’ the Supreme Commander exclaimed, ‘is that when two of their divisions are loose, we sit around and get scared.’ Air Marshal Sir James Robb noted in his diary: ‘The discussion which follows reveals a growing wonderment at the failure of our forces, whether divisions or corps, to achieve any real results compared to the immediate success of comparatively small German attacks.’
Faced with this unexpected advance, Devers was forced to retreat to a new line along the Rothbach, Moder and Zorn rivers. This withdrawal was well executed, and the new defensive positions held. The German offensive petered out around 25 January after General de Lattre’s First Army, aided by the US XXI Corps on the northern side, began to crush the Colmar pocket, or what the Germans called Bridgehead Alsace. The American 3rd Infantry Division was supported by Cota’s 28th Division, which one would have thought had suffered enough after the Hürtgen Forest and being crushed east of Bastogne. Fighting in the snow-covered forest of Riedwihr, the 3rd Infantry Division found itself under heavy counter-attacks, and Lieutenant Audie Murphy’s astonishing bravery won him a Congressional Medal of Honor and a future career as a movie star in Hollywood. Once again, the Germans fought so doggedly in retreat, despite Allied superiority in aircraft and artillery, that more units from the Ardennes were diverted south. The Colmar pocket was not finally crushed until 9 February.
The 101st Airborne Division was one of the formations allocated to finish the fighting in Alsace, so its men were relieved to find that this time they were too late to take part. Ten days before, on hearing that the 101st was to move to Alsace, Major Dick Winters had thought: ‘My God, don’t they have anybody else in this army to plug these gaps?’ The division certainly needed a rest. During its last days at the northern end of the Bastogne pocket, Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry had first been sent in to capture Foy. ‘Every replacement that came into the platoon got killed in that town,’ said a veteran of the company, ‘and I don’t know why.’ The attack had started as a disaster, until the company commander was rapidly replaced. Then on 14 January, as temperatures dropped to minus 23 Centigrade and the snow deepened, the 506th advanced across open snowfields towards Noville where many of their comrades had died with Team Desobry at the very start of the battle.
Once Noville had been taken they were given another objective, the village of Rachamps just east of the route to Houffalize. Sergeant Earl Hale and Private Joseph Liebgott cornered six SS officers in a barn. They lined them up and warned them that they would shoot if they tried anything. A shell exploded outside, wounding Hale by the door, and instantly an SS officer whipped out a knife from his boot and slashed Hale’s throat. Liebgott shot him dead, and then gunned down the others. A medic patched up Hale’s throat. He was lucky – the oesophagus had been cut, but not the windpipe. Hale was evacuated by Jeep to Bastogne.*
Sergeant Robert Rader noticed an ordinary German soldier taken at Rachamps who looked as if he were grinning. An infuriated Rader raised his rifle to shoot him, but another paratrooper grabbed the barrel, shouting, ‘Sarge, he has no lips or eyelids!’ The German had lost them through frostbite on the eastern front. Rachamps was Easy Company’s very last action in the battle for Bastogne. On 17 January, the 101st was relieved by the 17th Airborne. Packed into open trucks once again instead of aircraft, they were off to Alsace.
Resistance did not lessen in the salient, as the Fifth Panzer Army started to withdraw on 14 January towards Houffalize, which was still being bombed by the Allied air forces. The 2nd Panzer-Division and the Panzer Lehr covered the retreat in the usual German way of using assault guns and tanks with infantry to cover the withdrawal of their artillery regiments. Whenever American howitzers fired white phosphorus shells, it brought a ‘violent enemy artillery reaction’.
Just as on the southern front, artillery pounded villages, setting houses and farms on fire. Often the shelling was so intense that German soldiers would seek shelter in the cellars, forcing the civilians aside. Pigs, horses and cows trapped in burning barns and byres stood little chance. In one village eleven people died from a single shell, which hit a stable in which twenty civilians were sheltering. Sometimes the old men, women and children could not stand the relentless shelling any longer, and would try to escape out into the snow. Mistaken for combatants, several were shot down. If those wounded were lucky, American ambulances or trucks would evacuate them to hospitals in the
rear. Little, however, could be done for all those suffering from dysentery, pneumonia, diphtheria and a host of other serious ailments brought on by the filthy and freezing conditions of the last few weeks.
Moved by the fate of the luckless Belgians, American troops handed out rations, cigarettes, candy and chocolate. Only a few, brutalized by the war, went about looting and molesting women. To tell the compassionate from the brutal by outward appearances was impossible. Troops of all three nations by that stage looked like brigands, filthy, dishevelled and bearded. Villagers who had benefited earlier from American largesse were struck by the comparative poverty of British troops, who still shared what little they had. The Belgians did not much like the taste of either bully beef or British army-issue cigarettes, but were too polite to say so.
‘Having visited villages recently cleared of the German Offensive,’ a British civil affairs officer noted, ‘it’s good to see the joy of the people and their expressions of relief.’ But in some places both British and American troops appalled their hosts by smashing up furniture for firewood. An officer in the 53rd Welsh Division noted that to escape the terrible cold, ‘the troops have been over-enthusiastic in building up a roaring blaze in the old stone hearth, and consequently the chimney overheated, setting fire to part of the roof’. Almost every house occupied by Allied soldiers was left a squalid mess, with substantial damage. The British 6th Airborne Division appears to have provoked the greatest number of complaints.
The British XXX Corps pursued the Germans from the direction of La Roche-en-Ardenne, on the southern flank of Collins’s VII Corps. ‘The right wing of the 2nd Panzer-Division in the area of Nisramont had to face west,’ wrote Generalmajor Lauchert. ‘During this redeployment, a gap opened into which a British battalion advanced as far as Engreux. The British attack behind the back of the defence line could only be halted by a feint attack. The divisional command post had to pull out back to Mont.’ Like the American infantry, the British struggled badly in the deep snow. They were not helped by their sodden ammunition boots freezing rock hard. German jackboots were known to be more weather-resistant. The commanding officer of the 1st Gordons in the 51st Highland Division came across one of his sergeants in a wood, where he had strung up the corpse of a German soldier from a branch and had lit a fire under him. ‘He was trying to thaw him out,’ he wrote, ‘in order to take off his boots.’
A Kampfgruppe of the 2nd Panzer-Division, with engineers, infantry, assault guns and tanks, set up a defence line in front of Houffalize. Hidden by the dark, its Panthers were able to take on American tanks at a range of 400–500 metres as they emerged from the woods because they showed up so clearly against the snow. ‘Very soon an American tank burst into flames and provided such brightness that the American tanks were well lit and were easy to shoot. After a fire-fight lasting at most fifteen minutes, twenty-four American tanks went up in flames and a further ten were captured undamaged. The Germans lost only two tanks destroyed out of twenty-four.’ As with most of these encounters, this account was probably both optimistic and boastful, but there can be little doubt that the Germans inflicted a number of bloody noses in the final stages of the battle.
On 15 January, the 30th Infantry Division attacking the village of Thirimont found that ‘brick houses had been turned into veritable pill boxes, and heavy machineguns and other automatic weapons emplaced in them’. It required two battalions from the 120th Infantry Regiment, a tank battalion and a tank-destroyer battalion, as well as ‘over 11,000 rounds of 105mm and 155mm ammunition’, to take the place. The regiment suffered more than 450 casualties at the hands of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division. Because of the deep snow and ice, ‘ambulances couldn’t get anywhere near the wounded’, so the medical battalion borrowed horses and sledges from farmers to bring them back. Most of the Germans taken prisoner were suffering from frostbitten feet and could hardly walk.
Patton drove out in his Jeep to see the troops attacking Houffalize. ‘At one point’, he wrote, ‘we came across a German machinegunner who had been killed and apparently instantly frozen as he was in a half-sitting position with his arms extended, holding a loaded belt of ammunition. I saw a lot of black objects sticking out of the snow and, on investigating, found that they were the toes of dead men.’ He too was struck by the way the faces of men frozen rapidly on death turned ‘a sort of claret color’. Patton regretted not having his camera with him to record this.
On 15 January, Hitler returned by train to Berlin, as Zhukov’s and Konev’s tank armies raced towards the line of the rivers Oder and Neisse. The industrial region of Silesia was about to be overrun. Apart from one sortie to an army headquarters on the Oder front, the Führer would never leave the capital again.
By nightfall on 15 January, both combat commands of the 2nd Armored Division had advanced to within a kilometre or so of Houffalize and consolidated for the night. Patrols were sent into the ruins of the town to discover enemy dispositions. They entered the town at 01.00 on 16 January but found little sign of the enemy. Patrols were also sent east to the River Ourthe where enemy positions had also been abandoned. ‘Contact was established with Third Army patrols at 09.30 that day, marking the juncture of the First and Third Armies in the Ardennes offensive.’
The Ardennes offensive was almost at an end. A British regiment discovered that the Wehrmacht had run out of decorations for valour. Signed photographs of Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt were being offered in lieu. But a captured German communication to a corps headquarters stated: ‘The Division does not consider that this type of reward has any effect in encouraging the infantry to fight.’
As Eisenhower had decided, the US First Army reverted to the control of Bradley’s 12th Army Group after the First and Third Armies had joined hands. This became official at midnight on 17 January. ‘The situation is now restored,’ Hansen recorded triumphantly. But Montgomery was not finished yet. Determined to retain control of the Ninth Army, he came up with a plan to give it priority over the proud First Army.
‘At 10.30’, General Simpson’s diarist recorded on 15 January, ‘the Field Marshal Monty [sic] arrived at our office for a conference with the C[ommanding] G[eneral] re the Ninth’s taking over an additional sector. The FM tossed a bombshell. He requested the CG to prepare plans for the Ninth Army, of four Corps and 16 Divisions, to advance on Cologne and the Rhine river at the earliest practicable date … This would mean that the Ninth was to carry the ball for the western front drive – be the main effort, while the First Army would assume a holding mission on our south and, after the breakthru, protect the Ninth’s south flank … 21st Army Group is now apparently considering such an operation quite seriously, and will submit our plan to SHAEF for approval.’
This was clearly a ploy by Montgomery, going behind the back of Bradley. But getting the Ninth Army to formulate its plans first was a clever move, especially since Simpson and his officers were thrilled with the idea of being given priority over the First Army, which would be forced into a subordinate role. ‘That “protect the Ninth’s flank” would be the greatest and most satisfying crack at the Grand Old Armie possible!’ Simpson’s diary recorded. ‘How all here would love to see that in print!’
Montgomery believed that SHAEF had agreed with his plan, which he had shown only to Whiteley, the British deputy chief of operations. He did not know that Eisenhower considered Bradley stood a better chance of breaking through to the south, because the Germans would transfer their best formations to the north to protect the Ruhr. Above all, there was the general opposition among all American commanders, and voiced most passionately by Bradley on Tuesday 16 January, when he flew to Paris. Bradley landed at Villacoublay aerodrome, and drove to Versailles. The tensions of the last two weeks, and no doubt sleepless nights, had made him tired, but the flame of righteous indignation kept him going. Eisenhower was made to see that, after the recent row, there would be a storm of protest if Montgomery was allowed to command the main offensive with American forces under his comman
d. It was Montgomery’s own fault that political considerations and rivalries now dictated Allied strategy.
On 18 January, determined to repair fences, Churchill made a speech in the House of Commons to emphasize that ‘the United States troops have done almost all the fighting and have suffered almost all the losses … Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory.’
The same afternoon, Simpson rang Montgomery. ‘I have just finished talking to Brad. He asked if it would be convenient for you to meet him here at my place [Maastricht] at 10.30 tomorrow morning.’
‘I will be delighted,’ Montgomery said. ‘Where is Brad now?’
‘He is with Courtney [Hodges].’
Simpson then rang Bradley straight away. Bradley said that he intended to get to Maastricht early so that he could talk to Simpson before Montgomery arrived. The purpose of the visit was to have a conference on ‘future inter-group plans’. This presumably meant that he wanted to thwart Montgomery’s arguments, which were based on the premise that ‘First and Third US Armies in their present condition’ would be incapable of continuing the counter-offensive in the Ardennes, which aimed to break through the Siegfried Line towards Prüm and Bonn. What Bradley said to Simpson drastically changed his previously positive attitude both to Montgomery and to his plan.
‘Any future moves of the Ninth,’ Simpson then wrote, ‘in the light of present British publicity policy, will be [to] the greater glory of the FM himself, since he sees fit to assume all the glory and scarcely permits the mention of an Army Commander’s name. Bitterness and real resentment is creeping in because of both the FM’s and the British press’s attitude in presenting British military accomplishments won with American blood, broadcast throughout Europe by the BBC.’