Armageddon (41 page)

Carlo d’Este has called the Hürtgen “the most ineptly fought series of battles of the war in the west.” It is hard to disagree. A fatal combination of unimaginative command decisions by Bradley and Hodges and undistinguished combat performance by some of the units committed enabled the Germans to inflict greater pain than they suffered in the Hürtgen. While the British floundered in Holland, the U.S. 12th Army Group became almost literally lost in the woods. There is an argument that it was simply not feasible to make substantial advances in terrain such as that of the German border amid winter weather, but Hitler’s panzers were soon to prove otherwise. “We never do anything bold,” Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff Bedell-Smith complained at a staff conference. “There are at least 17 people to be dealt with, so [we] must compromise, and compromise is never bold.”

“If we were fighting a reasonable people,” wrote Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen on 6 December 1944, “they would have surrendered a long time ago. But these people are not reasonable. They have nothing to quit for.” He added five days later: “I believe we have committed a smug and profound psychological error in announcing a program for unconditional surrender, since the German is obviously making capital of this in his effort to fan the fanaticism of the German defence . . . Our demands do nothing to persuade him to realise the folly of his fight. They give him nothing to quit for.”

Hansen’s bewilderment about German persistence reflected in part the absence of any profound American hatred towards the enemy. Germany’s defeat was inevitable. No conceivable throw of the dice by Hitler could prevent the Allies from completing the eventual destruction of his empire. The Nazi leaders’ rejection of surrender was readily comprehensible, for only the gallows could await them. But why did the ordinary German soldier, or even his military commanders, fight stubbornly on, when the only consequence must be to add hundreds of thousands more names to the rollcall of the dead, and to ensure the ruin of such areas of the
Heimat
as had survived Allied bombing? Greater devastation was wreaked in Germany by air attack and ground fighting in 1945 than had occurred in the entire war before December 1944.

Colonel Hansen was surely right that German determination was strengthened by the Allies’ insistence upon unconditional surrender. Some historians have echoed his conviction that the policy was thus mistaken. Yet it seems extraordinary to suppose that Roosevelt or Churchill could have offered negotiable terms to any faction within Germany, military or civilian. We know that Churchill was taken aback by Roosevelt’s unscheduled assertion of the doctrine of unconditional surrender at the Casablanca conference in 1943. The British prime minister would almost certainly have avoided explicit use of those words. His consistent private advocacy of mercy for the German people, once they had been defeated, reflects his greatness of spirit. After May 1945, the Western allies treated the Germans with vastly greater generosity than they themselves had expected while the war was being fought. Had Germany’s generals been granted a window into their nation’s future, many might have perceived early surrender to Eisenhower as a tempting option.

Yet while the war was still being fought it was unthinkable for the Western allies to offer any olive branch. It would have been profoundly damaging to the motivation of ordinary American and British soldiers suddenly to have informed them that the Germans whom they were being asked to die fighting were merely lost souls who had been unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of evil leaders. Any such equivocation by Washington or London would also have provoked a crisis with Moscow. The time for offering mercy could come only when Germany had been militarily abased. It was a serious blunder by Washington to allow leakage of the Morgenthau Plan, calling for the reduction of Germany to a nation of peasant rustics. Stimson, as secretary of war, opposed this folly from the outset. At a meeting in Washington on 5 September to discuss the Plan, he observed wryly: “I’m the man in charge of the department which does the killing in this war, and yet I am the only one who seems to have any mercy for the other side.” It was regrettable that Washington never formally abandoned the Morgenthau absurdity until the Potsdam conference in July 1945. Yet, given the unspeakable suffering which the German nation had brought upon the world, nothing less than its unconditional surrender could be acceptable. It is surprising that some historians have supposed otherwise.

O
N
7
D
ECEMBER,
Eisenhower met Montgomery, Tedder and Bradley for a planning conference at Maastricht. In recent weeks, Montgomery had resumed his familiar written and verbal bombardment about the need to concentrate allied efforts upon a thrust to the Ruhr, “the only worthwhile objective on the western front.” He argued that since Normandy the absence of a single ground commander had caused allied efforts to fail. He now proposed that 21st Army Group, with a U.S. army of at least ten divisions under command, should attack in pursuit of a Rhine crossing between Nijmegen and Wesel. Eisenhower, however, refused to accept the British view that the autumn campaign had been a failure. He suggested that it might be compared to Normandy. German forces had been steadily “written down,” to create the circumstances for a decisive breakthrough. This was fanciful in the extreme. But so was Montgomery’s proposal. The British commander’s credibility as a strategist had been greatly diminished by the events of the autumn. Since June he had rendered himself so obnoxious in American eyes that most senior U.S. officers detested him.

As Supreme Commander, Eisenhower continued to display exemplary patience and discretion in avoiding a breach with the British field-marshal. Because relations between the two were somehow maintained, it is easy to forget that Montgomery provided Eisenhower with plentiful reasons to demand his dismissal. This would have been a disaster. The 21st Army Group’s commander was a British hero. He was also, despite Antwerp and Arnhem, by far the ablest professional the British Army possessed. Later, in the spring of 1945, Montgomery’s excesses caused Brooke seriously to fear that the Americans would insist upon supplanting him with Alexander, the only credible alternative. Alexander was much beloved by Churchill, and by the Americans, as a delightful military gentleman, an authentic hero of the First World War gifted with good looks, charm, courtesy and exquisite sartorial judgement. These merits, however, masked laziness and lack of intellect. Brooke dismissed Alexander as “a very, very, small man [who] cannot see big.”

It was vital to the Allied cause that Montgomery should keep his job. Eisenhower was perhaps the only man with the diplomatic skills to make this possible, despite Montgomery’s relentless provocation of the Americans in general and the Supreme Commander in particular. By December, all possibility of a quick end to the war was gone, under any commander and by any strategy. From Alsace to Holland, the tired soldiers of the Allied armies faced a strongly reinforced German defence. The winter weather made off-road movement almost impossible, and crippled the air forces. At the Maastricht conference, Montgomery secured Eisenhower’s agreement that he should push towards the Rhine early in January, supported by Simpson’s Ninth Army on his right. But this would not be at the expense of other Allied operations further south—the “broad-front strategy.” By this stage, no other policy was credible. An assault on a narrow front merely invited the Germans to move troops from a quiet sector to the threatened one. The relative passivity of the British since September had already enabled the enemy to shift forces southwards from Holland to face the Americans. There was every reason to suppose that they would do the same wherever they were granted a breathing space. In American eyes, since D-Day Montgomery had established a reputation for repeatedly promising more than he and his armies could deliver on the battlefield. Since September, whatever the disappointments and frustrations of U.S. ground operations, it was indisputable that the Americans had borne the brunt of the fighting.

By the standards of the Western allies, if not by those of the Russians or Germans, they had accepted painful casualties. Between 1 September and 16 December 1944, the U.S. First Army lost 7,024 men killed, 35,155 wounded, and 4,860 missing and captured; Ninth Army had suffered 10,056 casualties of all kinds during its brief existence; Third Army’s losses were 53,182. The three armies had sustained an additional 113,742 non-battle casualties, mostly trench foot and combat fatigue. They had also lost almost a thousand tanks. Some of these were recoverable, and all were easily replaced. They had taken 190,000 German prisoners.

Yet, “to put it candidly,” wrote Bradley later, “my plan to smash through to the Rhine and encircle the Ruhr had failed . . . Between our front and the Rhine, a determined enemy held every foot of ground and would not yield. Each day the weather grew colder, our troops more miserable. We were mired in a ghastly war of attrition.” Eisenhower at Maastricht committed himself to more of the same, a continuation of the slow, dogged advance across the front. Hodges’s First Army would maintain its advance across the Roer. Patch’s Seventh Army would continue to support Patton, whose Third Army would launch a new offensive on 19 December, for which its commander cherished high hopes. Not one of the great men who gathered at Maastricht, not to mention the humble footsoldiers slogging through hills and forests in the snow and mud of mid-December, possessed any inkling that Hitler might have plans of his own.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Bulge: An American Epic

THE SEASON OF “NIGHT, FOG AND SNOW”

A
S WE HAVE
seen, many German soldiers asserted in 1944, and have maintained ever since, that they fought until the end in fear of Soviet vengeance. It was ironic, therefore, that the next phase of the titanic struggle for Germany—Hitler’s winter offensive in the Ardennes—inflicted a severe check upon the advance of the Allies on the Western Front and gravely weakened the Wehrmacht’s ability to resist the Russians in the east. It is true that the Allied zones of occupation had been fixed, but no lines had been drawn for halting the armies. If the Anglo-Americans had been able to advance further faster, many Germans would have been spared the fury of the Red Army in the last days of war.

None of this, of course, was of the smallest interest to Hitler, who had no intention of remaining among those present if Germany was defeated. As far back as August, when his panzers’ assault at Mortain was being destroyed by Allied fighter-bombers, he formed a design for a major counter-attack in the west. He told Keitel (Chief of Staff of OKW, the armed forces), Jodl (Chief of OKW’s Operations Staff) and Speer that in November, the season of “night, fog and snow,” he would strike at the Allies when they could not deploy their airpower. On 16 September, he informed his operations staff at the Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in East Prussia, that the attack would be made in the Ardennes, and codenamed
Wacht am Rhein
. His intention was to lunge sixty miles across Luxembourg and Belgium; seize Antwerp, the Allies’ vital supply base; and separate the Americans from the British and Canadians. He did not delude himself that the German Army could expel the Allies from the continent altogether. But he believed that sufficient damage could be inflicted to fracture the Anglo-American alliance, buy time to strike anew against the Soviets, and allow his swelling arsenal of V-weapons to change the course of the war. He believed that a resounding defeat could persuade the Western allies, whom he held in little respect, to make terms. By contrast, he recognized that no military reverse would deflect the Russians.

Hitler’s generals never for a moment shared their Führer’s fantasies. It was true that the Americans in 1944 had followed the French in 1940 by deploying only a thin screen of troops in the Ardennes, which could easily be pierced by a determined assault. But in the Second World War the outcome of an offensive against a powerful enemy was seldom decided by the events of the first hours or even days. It hinged upon the ability of the attackers to sustain momentum, reinforcing constantly as fresh troops passed through tired ones, feeding forward the huge supplies of ammunition and fuel necessary to keep punching, while the defenders were rushing men, tanks, aircraft to the battlefield. In the winter of 1944, even after shifting large armoured forces from the east while the Russians were relatively quiescent, the Germans no longer possessed the resources to achieve this. Worse, they lacked fuel even to get their armour as far as Antwerp, unless they captured large stocks. Every German tank went into the Ardennes battle carrying just 150 gallons, enough for 150 miles, perhaps two or three days of combat. Once these were gone, the panzers would be in the hands of God or the devil. Germany’s generals did not doubt that they could give the Americans a bloody nose, by hitting hard where the Allies were weak. But they anticipated that, when the offensive ran out of steam against strengthening Allied resistance, Germany would have expended its last strategic armoured reserve to gain only a few hundred square miles of snow-bound fields and woodlands.

Model and von Rundstedt—who was deliberately kept in ignorance of Hitler’s plan until December—instead proposed a limited operation, designed to maul the American divisions holding the Ardennes front and dislocate Allied preparations to cross the Roer. Germany’s warlord rejected this out of hand. He decreed that an assault should be made on the grandest scale: 200,000 men of Fifth Panzer, Sixth SS Panzer and Seventh Armies would strike a sector in which the Americans deployed only 83,000 troops. In the famous words of Sepp Dietrich, once the Führer’s chauffeur and now commander of Sixth SS Panzer Army: “All Hitler wants me to do is to cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on to take Antwerp. And all this at the worst time of the year through the Ardennes when the snow is waist-deep and there isn’t room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armoured divisions. When it doesn’t get light until eight and it’s dark again at four and with re-formed divisions made up chiefly of kids and sick old men—and at Christmas.”