Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr despaired of the obstinacy of Hitler and the OKW after it had become obvious that German forces could not reach the Meuse. ‘Every day that the troops waited and continued to hold the salient meant further losses in men and materiel which were disproportionate to the operational significance of the bulge for the German command.’ He argued that the greatest mistake in the planning was to give the Sixth Panzer Army the main strength, when it was bound to face the strongest resistance. The only chance of reaching the Meuse lay with Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army, but even then the idea of reaching Antwerp was impossible given the balance of forces on the western front. Bayerlein described the Ardennes offensive as ‘the last gasp of the collapsing Wehrmacht and the supreme command before its end’.
While undoubtedly an American triumph, the Ardennes campaign produced a political defeat for the British. Monty’s disastrous press conference and the ill-considered clamour of the London press had stoked a rampant Anglophobia in the United States and especially among senior American officers in Europe. The row thwarted Churchill’s hope that Field Marshal Alexander could replace Air Chief Marshal Tedder as deputy to Eisenhower. General Marshall firmly vetoed the idea because it might indicate that the British had won ‘a major point in getting control of ground operations’. And as Churchill recognized, there was a much graver consequence. Montgomery would find himself sidelined once across the Rhine on the advance into Germany, and all British advice would be ignored. The country’s influence in Allied councils was at an end. In fact, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that President Eisenhower’s anger at British perfidy during the Suez crisis just over eleven years later was partly conditioned by his experiences in January 1945.*
German and Allied casualties in the Ardennes fighting from 16 December 1944 to 29 January 1945 were fairly equal. Total German losses were around 80,000 dead, wounded and missing. The Americans suffered 75,482 casualties, with 8,407 killed. The British lost 1,408, of whom 200 were killed. The unfortunate 106th Infantry Division lost the most men, 8,568, but many of them were prisoners of war. The 101st Airborne suffered the highest death rate with 535 killed in action.
In the Ardennes, front-line units manned entirely by African-American soldiers served for the first time in considerable numbers. Despite the fears and prejudices of many senior American officers they fought well, as the 17th Airborne testified. No fewer than nine of the field artillery battalions in VIII Corps had been black, as were four of the seven corps artillery units supporting the 106th Division. Two of them moved to Bastogne and played an important part in the defence of the perimeter. The 969th Field Artillery received the first Distinguished Unit Citation given to a black combat unit in the Second World War. There were also three tank-destroyer battalions and the 761st Tank Battalion, all with black soldiers, fighting in the Ardennes. Captain John Long, the officer commanding Company B of the 761st Tank Battalion, declared that he was fighting ‘Not for God and country, but for me and my people’.
The unsung American victims of the Ardennes offensive were those captured by the enemy and condemned to spend the last months of the war in grim Stalag prison camps. Their journey to Germany was a series of long cold marches, interminable rail journeys packed into boxcars, being bombed and strafed by Allied aircraft and dogged by the debilitating squalor of dysentery.
Sergeant John Kline from the 106th Division described his ordeal in a diary. On 20 December, he and his fellow prisoners were made to march all day without food and with no water to drink. They resorted to handfuls of snow. At a little village ‘the Germans made us take off our overshoes and give them to the civilians’. They saw German soldiers sitting in captured Jeeps eating what was supposed to have been their Christmas dinner. On 25 December, after German civilians threw stones at the column of prisoners of war, he wrote, ‘No Christmas, except in our hearts.’ Two days later they reached Koblenz in the afternoon, and were given some soup and bread from a portable kitchen. As they were marched on in groups of 500, a man in a business suit lunged into the street and hit him over the head with his briefcase. The German guard told him that the man must have been upset over the recent bombings.
As the fighting approached its end in April 1945, the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden came across a group of young, half-starved American prisoners of war, presumably also from the 106th Infantry Division. He described them as having ‘xylophone ribs’, sunken cheeks, thin necks and ‘gangling arms’. They were ‘a little hysterical’ in their joy at encountering fellow Anglo-Saxons. ‘Some American prisoners whom I met this morning seemed to me to be the most pitiful of all I have seen,’ Blunden wrote. ‘They had arrived in Europe only last December, gone immediately into the front line and had received the full brunt of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that month. Since their capture they had been moved almost constantly from one place to another and they told stories of comrades clubbed to death by German guards merely for breaking line to grab sugar beets from fields. They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.’ They at least were alive. A good number of their comrades had lacked the will to survive their imprisonment, like the original for Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who acquired the ‘5,000 mile stare’. Reduced to blank apathy, they would not move or eat and died silently of starvation.
The surprise and ruthlessness of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west. But, as with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the shock of total warfare did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected. It provoked instead a critical mass of desperate resistance, a bloody-minded determination to fight on even when surrounded. When German formations attacked, screaming and whistling, isolated companies defended key villages against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice bought the time needed to bring in reinforcements, and this was their vital contribution to the destruction of Hitler’s dream. Perhaps the German leadership’s greatest mistake in the Ardennes offensive was to have misjudged the soldiers of an army they had affected to despise.
1. US Infantry advancing through a hole blasted in the Siegfried Line, or Westwall, in October 1944.
2. Fallschirmjäger mortar crew in the Hürtgen Forest. Mortars accounted for the highest number of casualties on both sides.
3. 1st Infantry Division in the Hürtgen Forest.
4. Medics with wounded soldier.
5. French troops in the Vosges. The North African soldiers in the First French Army attacking the Colmar Gap south-west of Strasbourg suffered terribly from the cold.
6. 7 December 1944, Maastricht meeting with (l to r) Bradley, Tedder, Eisenhower, Montgomery and Simpson.
7. German prisoners captured in early December in the Hürtgen Forest near Düren.
8. Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, commander-in-chief Army Group B.
9. Field Marshal Montgomery appears to be lecturing an increasingly exasperated Eisenhower once again.
10. General der Panzertruppe Hasso-Eccard Freiherr von Manteuffel of the Fifth Panzer Army.
11. Oberstgruppenführer-SS Sepp Dietrich of the Sixth Panzer Army wearing his Knight’s Cross with oak leaves.
12. Oberst then Generalmajor Heinz Kokott, the rather more enlightened commander of the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division at Bastogne.
13. Oberstleutnant Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte, the law professor turned paratroop commander.
14. The briefing of panzer commanders in a snow flurry just before the Ardennes offensive on 16 December 1944.
15. Two SS panzergrenadiers enjoying captured American cigarettes.
16. 16 December. A Königstiger tank of the Sixth Panzer Army carrying soldiers of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division on the first day of the advance.
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17. German infantry in a Volksgrenadier division advance loaded down with machine-gun belts and panzerfaust anti-tank grenade launchers.
18. The first killing of American prisoners by SS panzergrenadiers from the Kampfgruppe Peiper in Honsfeld who then proceeded to loot the bodies. The boots have been removed from the victim on the left.
19. SS panzergrenadiers from the Kampfgruppe Hansen pass a burning convoy of American vehicles near Poteau.
20. American prisoners taken by the 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.
21. 17 December. Part of the 26th Infantry Regiment (1st Infantry Division) arrives just in time to defend Bütgenbach at the base of the Elsenborn ridge.
22. Members of the same regiment manoeuvring an anti-tank gun in the mud as the Germans approach.
23. Belgian refugees leaving Langlir (south-west of Vielsalm) as the Fifth Panzer Army advances. Most wanted to cross the Meuse to escape the fighting and German reprisals for Resistance activities earlier in the year.
24. As the Germans advanced on the town of St Vith following the encirclement of the 106th Infantry Division, the people of Schönberg fled the fighting to shelter in caves.
25. American medics turned skis into improvised toboggans to drag the wounded on stretchers back to a point where they could be loaded on to Jeeps.
26. With a comrade already dead in the foreground, American troops dig in hastily on the forward edge of a wood to avoid the effect of tree bursts.
27. As the Germans advance on Bastogne and the first members of the 101st Airborne arrive to defend it, townsfolk start to flee in farm carts.
28. A platoon of M-36 tank destroyers emerge from the mist near Werbomont in support of the 82nd Airborne Division also rushed in by huge convoys of trucks.
29. German Volksgrenadiers taken prisoner in the fighting round the twin villages of Rocherath–Krinkelt.
30. Brigadier General Robert W. Hasbrouck, who commanded the 7th Armored Division and the defence of St Vith, receiving the silver star from Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges of the First Army.
31. In the wake of the scare caused by Otto Skorzeny’s disguised commandos behind American lines, US military police check the identities of Belgian refugees near Marche-en-Famenne.
32. Dinant. Belgian refugees rush to cross the Meuse to safety to avoid German reprisals and the fighting.
33. A bazooka team from Cota’s 28th Infantry Division withdraw after three days of fighting in Wiltz. This helped delay the Germans and allow the 101st Airborne just enough time to establish a defensive perimeter around Bastogne.
34. A young SS trooper taken prisoner near Malmédy, fortunate not to have been shot out of hand after the massacre nearby at Baugnez.
35. Civilians murdered by Kampfgruppe Peiper at Stavelot.
36. Vapour trails over Bastogne. On 23 December, the skies suddenly cleared to Allied relief and German anxiety. This allowed the Allied air forces to deploy the overwhelming strength of their air forces.
37. The change in the weather at last allowed the US Air Force to send in its C-47 Dakota transport aircraft to drop supplies into the Bastogne perimeter.
38. Unable to evacuate their wounded from Bastogne, the American command had to leave their casualties in cellars in the town, where they lay on straw awaiting the arrival of surgical teams dropped in by glider.
39. Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne sing carols on Christmas Eve just a few hours before the all-out German attack on the perimeter.
40. The end of the German thrust to the Meuse. Remnants of the Kampfgruppe Böhm from the 2nd Panzer-Division in a farmyard in Foy-Notre-Dame.
41. General Patton (right) reaches Bastogne on 30 December and decorates both Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe (left) and Lieutenant Colonel Steve Chappuis (centre), the commander of the 502nd Parachute Infantry, with the Distinguished Service Cross.
42. American reinforcements advancing in steeply wooded Ardennes terrain.
43. A patrol from the British XXX Corps in the Ardennes wearing snowsuits made out of villagers’ bedsheets.
44. The Allied counter-offensive in January 1945. Soldiers from the 26th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division finally advance from Bütgenbach, which they had defended since 17 December.
45. La Roche-en-Ardenne was so badly destroyed that when swallows returned to rebuild their nests in the spring, they became disorientated.
46. Investigators start the work of identifying the American soldiers massacred at Baugnez near Malmédy.
47. After the massacre of American soldiers near Malmédy, their comrades, with the encouragement of senior commanders, shot most Waffen-SS soldiers who surrendered. Yet many had been forced into SS uniform against their will, or were pathetically young, like this boy.
48. Joachim Peiper on trial for war crimes including the massacre near Malmédy. Although the death sentence was commuted, members of the French Resistance killed him later.
Order of Battle, Ardennes Offensive
ALLIED
12th Army Group
Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley
US First Army
Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges
V Corps
Major General Leonard T. Gerow
102nd Cavalry Group; 38th and 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadrons (attached)
613th Tank Destroyer Battalion
186th, 196th, 200th and 955th Field Artillery Battalions
187th Field Artillery Group (751st and 997th Field Artillery Battalions)
190th Field Artillery Group (62nd, 190th, 272nd and 268th Field Artillery Battalions)
406th Field Artillery Group (76th, 941st, 953rd and 987th Field Artillery Battalions)
1111th Engineer Combat Group (51st, 202nd, 291st and 296th Engineer Combat Battalions)
1121st Engineer Combat Group (146th and 254th Engineer Combat Battalions)
1195th Engineer Combat Group
134th, 387th, 445th, 460th, 461st, 531st, 602nd, 639th and 863rd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalions
1st Infantry Division ‘Big Red One’
Brigadier General Clift Andrus
16th, 18th and 26th Infantry Regiments
5th, 7th, 32nd and 33rd Field Artillery Battalions
745th Tank Battalion; 634th and 703rd Tank Destroyer Battalions
1st Engineer Combat Battalion; 103rd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion
2nd Infantry Division ‘Indianhead’
Major General Walter M. Robertson
9th, 23rd and 38th Infantry Regiments
12th, 15th, 37th and 38th Field Artillery Battalions
741st Tank Battalion; 612th and 644th Tank Destroyer Battalions
2nd Engineer Combat Battalion; 462nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion
9th Infantry Division ‘Old Reliables’
Major General Louis A. Craig
39th, 47th and 60th Infantry Regiments
26th, 34th, 60th and 84th Field Artillery Battalions
15th Engineer Combat Battalion; 38th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron
746th Tank Battalion; 376th and 413th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalions
78th Infantry Division ‘Lightning’
Major General Edwin P. Parker Jr
309th, 310th and 311th Infantry Regiments
307th, 308th, 309th and 903rd Field Artillery Battalions
709th Tank Battalion; 628th and 893rd Tank Destroyer Battalions
303rd Engineer Combat Battalion; 552nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion
Combat Command R, 5th Armored Division (attached); 2nd Ranger Battalion (attached)
99th Infantry Division ‘Checkerboard’
Major General Walter E. Lauer
393rd, 394th and 395th Infantry Regiments
370th, 371st, 372nd and 924th Field Artillery Battalions
324th Engineer Combat Battalion; 801st Tank Destroyer Battalion
535th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion
VII Corps
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p; Major General Joseph Lawton Collins
4th Cavalry Group, Mechanized; 29th Infantry Regiment; 740th Tank Battalion
509th Parachute Infantry Battalion; 298th Engineer Combat Battalion
18th Field Artillery Group (188th, 666th and 981st Field Artillery Battalions)
142nd Field Artillery Group (195th and 266th Field Artillery Battalions)
188th Field Artillery Group (172nd, 951st and 980th Field Artillery Battalions)
18th, 83rd, 87th, 183rd, 193rd, 957th and 991st Field Artillery Battalions
Two French Light Infantry Battalions