Bradley was finally getting his revenge for the way the field marshal had humiliated him on Christmas Day and afterwards. Montgomery was the one who would be sidelined once the Allied armies were across the Rhine. Bradley had said at the beginning of December that ‘His forces are now relegated to a very minor and virtually unimportant role in this campaign where they are used simply to protect the flank of our giant steamroller.’ Although not true then, it was about to become true now.
Montgomery was not 12th Army Group’s only bête noire. Relations with SHAEF had continued to deteriorate. This was partly because Bradley could not forgive Eisenhower for having transferred First Army to Montgomery, and partly because Bedell Smith did not conceal his rather low opinion of Bradley’s headquarters and Hodges. On 24 January, Bradley held a conference in his office after lunch, with Hodges, Patton and seven other generals. During this meeting Major General Whiteley called from SHAEF to say that several divisions would be withdrawn from his forthcoming offensive to create a strategic reserve and to strengthen Devers in Alsace.*
Bradley lost his temper and said for everyone in the room to hear: ‘The reputation and the good will of the American soldiers and the American Army and its commanders are at stake. If you feel that way about it, then as far as I am concerned, you can take any goddam division and or corps in the 12th Army Group, do with them as you see fit, and those of us that you leave back will sit on our ass until hell freezes over. I trust you do not think I am angry, but I want to impress upon you that I am goddam well incensed.’ At this every officer in the room stood and clapped. Patton said in a voice loud enough to be heard: ‘Tell them to go to hell and all three of us [Bradley, Patton and Hodges] will resign. I will lead the procession.’
On 20 January, as the Americans approached St Vith, a German artillery officer wrote in his diary: ‘The town is in ruins, but we will defend the ruins.’ Attacking would not be easy with waist-deep snowdrifts. The next day he wrote: ‘The noise of battle comes closer to the town … I’m sending back all my personal belongings. One never knows.’ On 23 January, Combat Command B of the 7th Armored Division was given the honour of retaking the town which it had so bravely defended.
The fighters and fighter-bombers of the XIX Tactical Air Command and the Typhoons of 2nd Tactical Air Force continued to attack the retreating German vehicles. On 22 January XIX TAC claimed more than 1,100 motor vehicles destroyed and another 536 damaged. But such estimates were not confirmed by research later. ‘The three tactical air forces claimed the destruction of a total of 413 enemy armoured vehicles,’ the British official report stated. ‘From a subsequent ground check carried out it appears that this figure is at least ten times too large.’ The real contribution of Allied aircraft, it stated, came from ‘the strafing and bombing of the supply-routes which prevented essential supplies from reaching the front’. German sources supported this conclusion. The Allied air forces ‘did not play a decisive tactical part’ in fighting at the front, Generalmajor von Waldenburg said later. ‘The effect on the rear areas was stronger.’
On 23 January the 7th Armored Division secured St Vith. All survivors had fled, and the town was as silent as the grave. The only building of note left standing was the Büchel Tower. By 29 January the front line had been more or less restored to that of 15 December: it had taken a month and two weeks. Hansen wrote in his diary: ‘The Third Army today regarded the battle of the salient as officially ended and started new attacks toward German objectives.’
In that last week of January, Bradley moved his Eagle Tac command post from Luxembourg to the provincial capital of Namur. Patton called on him to say goodbye. ‘He is a good officer,’ Patton wrote in his diary, ‘but utterly lacks “it”. Too bad.’ The provincial governor was made to move out of the magnificent Palais de Namur, and Bradley established himself in vice-regal style. Simpson, visiting on 30 January, described it as ‘a tremendous palaces, replete with satin wall covers, velvet drapes, too many full-sized oils of the royal family, thick carpets and polished marble floors. The bedrooms, used as offices, are immense – as large as the ground floor of a good sized private home.’
For his private residence, Bradley took over the Château de Namur. It was in rather a forlorn state, so German prisoners of war were sent in to clean it up. Bradley’s staff felt ‘compelled to ransack the houses of collaborationists’ for furniture. Even Hansen acknowledged that Eagle Tac was now being known as ‘Eagle Took’. The chateau too had marble fireplaces and floors, according to Simpson, as well as large gardens and a magnificent view over the Meuse valley. Bradley insisted on having an ice-cream machine installed.
On Sunday 4 February, Montgomery was invited for a meeting and lunch. He arrived in his Rolls-Royce flying the Union Jack and escorted by outriders. According to Hansen, he made ‘his customary slow, dramatic, deliberate hawk-like entrance’. Apparently he received a very cool reception from all the American officers. ‘His ego, however, remained impervious to it and he joked, talked and gesticulated. He prevailed consistently and talked too loudly throughout the meal.’
In what appears to have been a deliberate snub, Bradley and Eisenhower simply left Montgomery at the table. They drove off through the rain to Bastogne to meet Patton. Soon after they had crossed the Meuse, they ‘passed scarred and blackened hulks of enemy tanks as well as Shermans. There appeared remains of crashed C-47s and a lot of other abandoned impedimenta of war. Patton met us at the rear echelon headquarters of the VIII Corps in Bastogne. He consulted with Ike and Bradley in a small coal-stove room where the 101st Airborne sheltered its troops during the historic siege of the city.’ The three generals then had their photographs taken together in the bombed centre of the town, climbed back into their vehicles and drove north up to Houffalize. They ‘passed [numerous] Sherman tanks with scars of enemy artillery plainly imprinted on their armor’. From there, they carried on to meet General Hodges, who had moved his headquarters back to the town of Spa. It was a symbolic lap of honour which excluded the field marshal.
Belgium faced a crisis, to which SHAEF reacted slowly. Food shortages led to strikes in the mines, which in turn produced crippling coal shortages during that harsh winter. Government attempts to control rocketing prices were easily circumvented and the black market spread. In the countryside people reverted even more to barter, with much of the trade consisting of American and British troops exchanging tins of rations for fresh eggs.
An estimated 2,500 civilians had been killed in Belgium as a result of the Ardennes offensive, with another 500 non-combatants dead in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It is thought that about a third had been killed by Allied air raids. If one adds in those who perished in V-weapon bombardments from at least 5,000 missiles during the whole winter from October to March, civilian casualties increase to more than 8,000 dead and missing and 23,584 wounded.
The destruction had been massive. Buildings, churches, farms, roads and railways had suffered terrible damage. So had sewers, water-pipes, telephone wires and electricity cables. Some 88,000 people were homeless. Those families returning with their few possessions on a handcart found that even houses which had not been hit by shells or bombs had no doors. Both Germans and Allies had ripped them out to provide overhead covering for foxholes and trenches. Bedding had also been seized in an attempt to provide a little warmth or camouflage. There was also a great shortage of warm clothing. A British civil affairs officer noted that a ‘tremendous number of Belgian women are wearing coats made from Army blankets, and ski-suits from battledress, having just dyed them to black or brown and removed the pockets’.
In the Belgian provinces of Luxembourg and Namur, eighteen churches had been ruined and sixty-nine others badly damaged. In many cases, the shelling had also ploughed up graveyards, hurling ancient bones around. In La Roche, which had been bombarded by both sides, 114 civilians had died and only four houses out of 639 remained habitable. The town was a mass of rubble. American bulldozers had to be called in to clear paths down the ma
in streets. The following spring, locals noticed that swallows returning to nest became completely disorientated.
The Ardennes, which depended almost entirely on farming and forestry, had been dealt a body-blow. Few chickens were left, and some 50,000 farm animals had been killed in the fighting or taken by the Germans. The shelling had also filled trees with shards of shrapnel, reducing the value of timber and causing problems in sawmills for a long time afterwards. Only a small amount of the livestock slaughtered in the battle could be butchered for consumption. The vast majority had to be buried. Many of the surviving livestock died after drinking water from shellholes, or other sources contaminated by rotting bodies or white phosphorus. There was also a food crisis in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from war-damage and because the Germans had stripped the north of the country.
One of the worst problems was how to deal with well over 100,000 mines buried by both sides, as well as booby-traps, unexploded shells and explosives abandoned all over the place. Some forty Belgians died in and around the former Bastogne perimeter after the fighting was over. In one incident ten British soldiers were maimed or badly wounded when one of their comrades stepped on a mine. The minefield must have been densely sown in a real ‘devil’s garden’, because one after another fell victim trying to rescue the others.
Children were sent away to safe areas when the thaw came so that they would not step on a mine. But a number were hurt playing with munitions, especially when they emptied live shells to make their own fireworks. Allied troops did what they could in the short time before they were redeployed, but the main task fell upon the Belgian army, as well as volunteers and later conscripts brought in as démineurs. The squads dealing with unexploded shells and mines had to explode them in place. In villages and towns, they would warn the local inhabitants before the blast to open their windows, but some houses were so old that they could not be opened.
The rains which brought a rapid thaw in late January meant that carcasses and corpses, hidden by the snow, began to decompose rapidly. The stench was terrible, but the threat of disease, which might affect their own troops, prompted the American military authorities to send in army engineers with bulldozers. Moving German corpses was always dangerous as they might have been booby-trapped, so a rope had to be attached round the legs or hands, then the body towed a distance to make sure that a grenade had not been placed underneath. The Allied dead received individual graves, many of which were decorated with flowers by the local people. German bodies were simply dumped in mass pits like plague victims. Some corpses were so carbonized by phosphorus that their nationality was impossible to distinguish. Whether German or Allied, people hoped that death had come quickly for them.
24
Conclusions
The fatal crossroads at Baugnez–Malmédy had been retaken on 13 January. The next morning teams of engineers with mine detectors began to check whether SS panzergrenadiers had booby-trapped the bodies of those they had massacred. Then the Graves Registration teams and doctors began their work. The task was extremely difficult, for all the bodies were covered with at least half a metre of snow and frozen hard.
Most had multiple wounds, with bullet holes in foreheads, temples and the back of the head, presumably from when officers and panzergrenadiers went around delivering coups de grâce. Some were without eyes, which had probably been pecked out by crows. The empty sockets were filled with snow. A number of the dead still had their hands above their heads. The bodies were taken back to Malmédy to be defrosted in a railway building. Razors and knives had to be used to cut out pockets to retrieve personal items.
Evidence was assembled for a war crimes trial, and eventually the US Military Tribunal at Dachau sentenced seventy-three former members of the Kampfgruppe Peiper: forty-three of them to death; twenty-two to lifelong imprisonment; and eight to prison terms ranging from ten to twenty years. Another eleven were tried by a Belgian court in Liège in July 1948, where ten of them received sentences of between ten and fifteen years’ hard labour. In the post-Nuremberg period of the nascent Cold War, all the death sentences handed out at Dachau were commuted, and the prisoners went home in the 1950s. Peiper was the last to be released. After serving eleven and a half years he went to live in obscurity in Traves, in the French department of Haute-Saône. Former members of the French Resistance killed him there on 13 July 1976. Peiper knew they were coming for him. Shortly before his death, he said that his former comrades would be waiting for him in Valhalla.
Fighting in the Ardennes had reached a degree of savagery unprecedented on the western front. The shooting of prisoners of war has always been a far more common practice than military historians in the past have been prepared to acknowledge, especially when writing of their own countrymen. The Kampfgruppe Peiper’s cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners in the Baugnez–Malmédy massacre was of course chilling, and its indiscriminate killing of civilians even more so. That American soldiers took revenge was hardly surprising, but it is surely shocking that a number of generals, from Bradley downwards, openly approved of the shooting of prisoners in retaliation. There are few details in the archives or in American accounts of the Chenogne massacre, where the ill-trained and badly bruised 11th Armored Division took out its rage on some sixty prisoners. Their vengeance was different from the cold-blooded executions perpetrated by the Waffen-SS at Baugnez–Malmédy, but it still reflects badly on their officers.
There were a few incidents of American soldiers killing Belgian or Luxembourg civilians, either by mistake or from suspicion that they might be fifth-columnists in an area where some of the German-speaking population still harboured sympathies for the Nazi regime. But on the whole American soldiers demonstrated great sympathy for civilians trapped in the battle, and US Army medical services did whatever they could to treat civilian casualties. The Waffen-SS and some Wehrmacht units, on the other hand, took out their anger at losing the war on innocent people. The worst, of course, were those obsessed with taking revenge on the Belgian Resistance for its activities during the German retreat to the Siegfried Line in September. And one must not of course forget the other massacres of civilians at Noville and Bande, mainly by Sondereinheitkommando 8.
Historians, however, have often overlooked the terrible irony of twentieth-century warfare. After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive use of artillery shells and bombs. As a result far more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination.
On 20 July 1945, a year to the day after the explosion of Stauffenberg’s bomb at the Wolfsschanze, Generalfeldmarschall Keitel and Generaloberst Jodl were interrogated about the Ardennes offensive. Both the bombastic Keitel and the cold, calculating Jodl were fatalistic in their replies. They knew that they too would soon be facing a war crimes tribunal.
‘The criticism’, they said in a joint statement, ‘whether it would have been better to have employed our available reserves in the East rather than in the West, we submit to the judgement of history. Whether it was a “crime” to prolong the war by this attack, we leave to the Allied courts. Our own judgement is unchanged and independent of them.’ But they did acknowledge that ‘with the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies committed in the Ardennes, the way was paved for the Russian offensive which was launched on 12 January from the Vistula bridgeheads’. Despite the reluctance of Russian historians to accept the fact, there can be no doubt that the success of the Red Army’s advance from the Vistula to the Oder was in large part due to Hitler’s offensive in the Ardennes.
It is impossible to assess how much Bradley’s ‘calculated risk’ in leaving the Ardennes front so weakly defended aided the German breakthrough. In any case his deployment reflected Allied thinking at the time that the Germans were incapable of launching a strategic offensive. German misconceptions were much more serious. Not only Hitler and the OKW but most generals believed that the A
mericans would fall back in disorder to the Meuse and defend from there. They had not foreseen the resolute defence of the northern and southern shoulders, which cramped their movements and supply lines so disastrously on an inadequate road network in such bad weather. Also, as already mentioned, Hitler was convinced that Eisenhower would not be able to take quick decisions, because of the complications of coalition warfare.
‘The promptness with which the Allies reacted did perhaps exceed our expectations,’ Jodl acknowledged later. ‘But above all it was the speed of our own movements which lagged far behind expectations.’ Bradley had boasted with justification on Christmas Eve that ‘no other army in the world could possibly have shifted forces as expertly and quickly as we have’. On the second day of the offensive, First Army moved 60,000 troops into the Ardennes in just twenty-four hours. The despised Com Z of General Lee had achieved miracles. It also managed to transport 85 per cent of ordnance stocks out of German reach. Between 17 and 26 December, 50,000 trucks and 248,000 men from quartermaster units shifted 2.8 million gallons of gasoline so that panzer spearheads could not refuel from captured dumps.
Although Hitler refused to face reality until it was far too late, German generals realized that the great offensive was doomed by the end of the first week. They may have achieved surprise, but they had failed to cause the collapse in American morale that they needed. It was German morale which began to suffer. ‘Officers and men began to show more and more their loss of confidence in the German High Command,’ wrote Generalmajor von Gersdorff. ‘It was only the realization of the immediate danger of the homeland and its frontiers, which spurred the troops to increase their effort against an unmerciful enemy.’