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Glossary
Abatis: Barriers across roads and tracks made by cutting down and dropping trees, which were often mined or booby-trapped.
Com Z: The Communications Zone commanded by General Lee responsible for all supplies and replacement soldiers.
Counter Intelligence Corps: The US Army equivalent of the British Field Security.
CSDIC: Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre included those holding pens and prison camps, such as Trent Park in England, where the conversation of German prisoners was secretly recorded by mainly German Jewish volunteers.
Dogface: US Army slang for an infantryman.
Doughboy: A term from the First World War for an ordinary American soldier.
G-2: Senior staff officer or staff for intelligence.
G-3: Senior staff officer or staff for operations.
Jabo: German abbreviation for fighter-bomber or Jagdbomber.
Kübelwagen : The German army’s counterpart to the Jeep, it was made by Volkswagen and slightly larger and heavier.
Meat-chopper: US Army slang for anti-aircraft half-track mounting quadruple .50 machine guns when used against enemy infantry.
Meuse river: The French and English name for the river which German, Dutch and Flemish speakers called the Maas.
Non-battle casualties: Include the sick, those suffering from trench foot or frostbite, and neuropsychiatric or combat-fatigue breakdown.
Pozit fuses: These ‘proximity’ fuses for artillery shells, used for the first time in the Ardennes, exploded with devastating effect as air bursts above the enemy’s heads.
PX: The Post Exchange, which sold items, including cigarettes, to US Army personnel.
Roer river: Rur river in German, but here for the sake of clarity given the Flemish/French/English name of Roer even on German territory.
SA: Sturmabteilung, the Nazi ‘brownshirt’ stormtroopers.
Schloss: German castle, or large country house.
Screaming meemies: The US Army slang for the German six-barrelled Nebelwerfer rocket launcher which made a terrifying sound.
SHAEF: Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. General Eisenhower’s headquarters based at Versailles commanding the three army groups on the western front.
Trench foot: Trench foot was officially called ‘immersion foot’ in the US Army, but everyone continued to use the First World War term of ‘trench foot’. It was a form of foot rot which was due to damp feet, a failure to change to dry socks and a lack of mobility. It could become gangrenous.
Ultra: The interception of German signals prepared on Enigma machines which were decoded at Bletchley Park.
Volksgrenadier: German infantry divisions reconstituted in the autumn of 1944 with a smaller establishment.
Wehrmachtführungsstab: The Wehrmacht operations staff led by Generaloberst Jodl.
Westwall: German name for the defence line on the Reich’s western border which the Americans and British called the Siegfried Line.
Acknowledgements
A book like this could not have been research
ed without an enormous amount of help from friends and strangers. I am above all deeply grateful to Rick Atkinson, who generously passed me all his research notes on the period. These proved an excellent guide, saving me much time in the early stages in the archives when one is apt to flounder.
I also owe a great deal to many others who deserve my heartfelt thanks. Le comte Hadelin de Liedekerke Beaufort, on whose estates round Celles the German spearhead of the 2nd Panzer-Division was smashed, not only invited me to stay. He also put me in touch with M. Jean-Michel Delvaux, the historian of civilian experiences in the region of Celles and Rochefort during the war, and whose own impressive work was a huge help. HSH le duc d’Arenberg, on whose estate the 116th Panzer-Division fought, kindly arranged for his steward, M. Paul Gobiet, to drive me around to all the places of interest.
Sebastian Cox, the head of the Air Historical Branch at the Ministry of Defence, provided general advice on the use of airpower and was especially helpful on the details of Operation Bodenplatte. Orlando Figes put me in touch with his uncle Ernest Unger, who kindly related the story of Gerhardt Unger. Ron Schroer of the Australian War Memorial contacted Hans Post, who kindly provided his memoir and tapes of his interviews on his experiences in the SS during the campaign. Professor Tami Davis Biddle of the US Army War College, Sir Max Hastings, Dr Stefan Goebel and James Holland all helped with advice, material and books.
I am also indebted to Ronald Blunden, my publisher in France, for the papers of his father, Godfrey Blunden; Mrs Anne Induni, the daughter of Air Marshal Sir James Robb, the Deputy Chief of Staff (Air) at SHAEF, for her father’s paper ‘Higher Direction of War’, written at Bentley Priory in November 1946; and Dr Arthur S. Couch for his unpublished memoir of the winter of 1944.
I naturally owe a great deal to the help and good advice of archivists, including William Spencer and his colleagues at The National Archives at Kew; Dr Conrad Crane, Dr Richard Sommers and all the staff at USAMHI, Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Dr Tim Nenninger and Richard Peuser at the NARA at College Park, Maryland; the staff at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London and the staff at the Imperial War Museum. Harland Evans helped me gather material at The National Archives, the IWM and the Liddell Hart Centre.
Finally I am forever grateful to my agent and friend Andrew Nurnberg, as well as Robin Straus in the United States, and also Eleo Gordon, my editor at Penguin in London, and Kathryn Court in New York. Peter James again proved to be the ideal copy-editor, but my greatest thanks as always go to my wife and editor of first resort, Artemis. The book is dedicated to our son Adam, who achieved a First in Modern History while I was writing some of the most complex chapters and thus spurred me on to greater effort.
THE BEGINNING
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1. VICTORY FEVER
* See Glossary.
* The name L’Armée Blanche had nothing to do with the white armies of the Russian Civil War. It had evolved from the secret Belgian intelligence network established under German occupation during the First World War, which was called La Dame Blanche because of the legend that the Hohenzollern dynasty of the Kaiser would fall when the ghost of a white lady appeared.
3. THE BATTLE FOR AACHEN
* German army officers joked that Skorzeny had received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for having freed Mussolini, but ‘he would have been given the [even higher distinction of the] Oak Leaves if he had taken him back’.
4. INTO THE WINTER OF WAR
*A private from a quartermaster company picked up, ‘according to his VD contact form, nine different women in the vicinity of the same corner, took them to six different hotels, and actually managed seven sexual exposures’, all within eight hours. The VD rate in the European Theater of Operations doubled during the year, with more than two-thirds of venereal infections acquired in France originating in Paris.
* Hemingway repeated a very similar joke himself in Across the River and into the Trees, but after the bitterness of their marriage breakdown, neither would of course admit that they had heard it from the other.
6. THE GERMANS PREPARE
* It is striking how many accounts at this time refer to young French women who had accompanied their lovers on the retreat to Germany because they knew that the Resistance would seek revenge for their collaboration horizontale. It is, however, very hard to get an idea of their subsequent fate. Many of them must have lost their ‘protector’ in the savage fighting over the last six months of the war. And German women, convinced that French women had done nothing since 1940 except try to seduce their menfolk, would not have taken them in.
7. INTELLIGENCE FAILURE
* The secret recording of conversations among selected German prisoners of war was carried out by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC). Interpreters, most of whom were German Jewish refugees, listened to conversations picked up by concealed microphones and recorded on wax discs. Transcripts of relevant material were distributed afterwards to the War Office, Admiralty, the Secret Intelligence Service, ministries and also SHAEF from 1944.
* General Patton was renowned for making his military police charge any soldier without a necktie for being improperly dressed.
8. SATURDAY 16 DECEMBER
* The worst disaster resulting from the V-1bombardment took place in Antwerp that evening when one struck a cinema, killing nearly 300 British and Canadian soldiers and wounding another 200 as well as many civilians.
9. SUNDAY 17 DECEMBER
* See map, The Destruction of the 106th Division, p. 119 above.
* ‘One futile effort’ was made the next day, but due to bad co-ordination with Transport Carrier Command no drop took place.
† Staff officers described Devine as ‘excited, nervous, over-talkative, agitated, could barely control his actions, and gave undue attention to trivial personal injuries. At no time did he present the appearance of a competent commander.’ He was treated with sedatives in hospital and released on 19 December, but was then found directing traffic in La Roche-en-Ardenne while trying to order a battalion of tanks to turn round. He was again sedated and evacuated.
* When news of the massacre reached England, German army generals held prisoner there were shaken. ‘What utter madness to shoot down defenceless men!’ said one. ‘All it means is that the Americans will take reprisals on our boys.’ Another added: ‘Of course the SS and the paratroopers are simply crazy, they just won’t listen to reason.’
12. TUESDAY 19 DECEMBER
* See map, The Destruction of the 106th Division, p. 119 above.
* In most accounts of the meeting, Patton apparently said the morning of 21 December, but in his own diary Patton puts 22 December. It is impossible to tell whether this was what he believed he said at the time, or whether he changed it because he recognized that Eisenhower was right.
* Desobry encountered a number of paradoxes during his imprisonment, such as listening in a German hospital train near Münster to
a recording of Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’, while British bombers smashed the city. He was then held in a panzergrenadier training establishment in Hohne next to Belsen concentration camp, along with British paratroopers captured at Arnhem.
13. WEDNESDAY 20 DECEMBER
* There are several accounts of Hodges’s collapse at this time. One comes in his aide’s diary three days later. ‘The General is now well located in a private home. With a chance for rest, and with good food again provided, he is obviously feeling fitter and better able to cope with the constant pressure of this work and strain.’
* Bayerlein claims that on 19 December, after the first attack failed, he had convinced Lüttwitz that the whole corps should be concentrated against Bastogne, because they could not afford to leave such a centre of road communications untaken in their rear. Lüttwitz is said to have referred the proposal upwards, but it was firmly rejected. Bayerlein heard from him that they ‘considered Bastogne child’s play’.
18. CHRISTMAS DAY
* SHAEF was hardly being duped by Montgomery. General Bedell Smith admitted later that the alarmist tone in cables back to Washington was a deliberate tactic. ‘You know, we exploited the Ardennes crisis for all it was worth’ to get resources and replacements which were otherwise going to the Pacific. ‘We were short of men, so we yelled loud. We asked for everything we could get.’