Armageddon (49 page)

As the Allies renewed their advance, they were plagued by the profusion of mines laid as usual by the Germans as they retreated. In mid-January, the 743rd Tank Battalion lost fifteen tanks to mines in two days. They were crossing ground that had been the scene of savage fighting. Private Ashley Camp leaped up in horror when he discovered that the snow-clad mound on which he sat down to eat his chow was composed of bodies. Sergeant Cockperry Kelly’s tank track hit the feet of a frozen corpse, which sprang rigidly upright against the hull. From positions near Bellevaux, Lieutenant Joseph Couri wrote on 14 January: “This was the coldest night that I experienced in the war. After going through the forest with the turret open and the snow tumbling down from the trees, I was completely wet. The tank . . . was a Frigidaire, and we were going to try and sleep in it. We were better off than the infantry, for it was impossible to dig a foxhole . . . They asked if they could bed down under our tanks, and they did. There was not much sleep that night. The shelling from both sides was continuous.”

The Germans were losing ground steadily, but showed no sign of outright collapse. Incautious actions were punished as brutally as ever by Model’s soldiers. The British 13 Para was approaching the Belgian village of Bure down an open hillside one afternoon early in January when the Germans, who could see them coming, unleashed a mortar and artillery bombardment. Within the space of just fifteen minutes, the unit suffered 160 casualties, including sixty-five dead. During fighting in Diekirch on 25 January, men of the 3/2nd Infantry captured thirty-seven Germans. As they routinely disarmed and searched their captives, they were taken aback to find that one of them was female. Sergeant Clifford Laski reported laconically: “It wasn’t until she took her helmet off and revealed those long locks of hair that we knew her to be a woman, because she wasn’t particularly chesty.” Staff-Sergeant Charles Skelnar’s last memory of Bastogne after its relief was of a 101st Airborne sergeant herding prisoners towards the cage. Every time he saw a German wearing GI boots, the NCO smashed his rifle butt down on the man’s feet. “They fought to the bitter end,” recorded a sardonic Allied intelligence report on 29 December, on the interrogation of 1st SS Panzer prisoners, “and they are still insolent.” Yet Private George Sheppard of the 319th Infantry enjoyed taking prisoners, and found their arrogance broken: “I felt proud. Here was the army of the Master Race, they’ve got their hands up, they’re shouting ‘
Kamerad!
’ they’re down on their knees begging for you not to shoot them.” Interestingly, a British expert on the Waffen SS believes that Joachim Peiper, symbol of German fanaticism and brutality in the Ardennes, suffered some kind of moral or physical collapse following the offensive’s failure. Peiper’s name disappears from all Waffen SS unit records until he emerges again in Hungary late in February 1945. If this is true, it reflects a tendency to hysteria not uncommon among fanatical young Nazi warriors. More than a few killed themselves, like Hein von Westernhagen of the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion, under the stress of defeat. Not unreasonably, the Americans shot eighteen of Otto Skorzeny’s men whom they captured in GI uniforms. The night before their execution, their captors allowed some German nurses who were also prisoners to sing carols to them in the cells.

“L
IGHTNING
J
OE
” C
OLLINS
said he was convinced the Bulge battle had shortened the war by six months. While the drastic depletion of Sixth SS Panzer Army and Fifth Panzer Army was obviously significant, it is hard to accept Collins’s judgement. At the summit of American command, the most notable consequence of victory was a despondency which persisted even after German failure was plain. Colonel Chester Hansen, Bradley’s aide, recorded: “There was a serious discussion at the top about sitting down and waiting for spring.” During the half-hearted German offensive in Alsace, there was talk at SHAEF about allowing 6th Army Group to retire into the Vosges. The battle inspired a resurgence of caution among Allied commanders and intelligence staffs. Alan Brooke believed that it “considerably retarded the defeat of Germany.” The victors recognized that the battle had destroyed Hitler’s principal armoured reserve. But they failed to perceive how desperate the overall predicament of the Third Reich had in consequence become, and thus to exploit the new situation with vigour. Fears were expressed at SHAEF that, unless the Allies could finish the war quickly, new German weapons, above all jet aircraft, would enable the enemy to continue the war through the summer of 1945. “Upon the conclusion of the Ardennes campaign,” declared the official U.S. army post-war report on the campaign, “it was estimated that the Allies had no marked superiority over the Germans in ground force strength.” This assertion would have aroused hysterical mirth at any German headquarters. SHAEF determined to establish the Allied armies in “strong defensive positions” along most of the front, “to free others for attack . . . In late January, the enemy’s combat strength was not considered markedly inferior to that of the Allies.”

The Bulge offensive cost the Germans between 80,000 and 100,000 casualties. The Americans lost 4,138 men killed, 20,231 wounded and 16,946 captured or missing, between 16 December and 2 January. In the second phase of the battle between 3 and 28 January, American casualties totalled a further 6,138 killed, 27,262 wounded and 6,272 captured or missing. Defeating Hitler’s winter offensive thus cost an overall total of 80,987 men, making the Bulge the most costly battle the Americans fought in north-west Europe, though one for which the “butcher’s bill” was far smaller than that for any major eastern encounter. The January figures illustrate how toughly the Germans continued to fight, even when they were being forced back after the failure of their own operation, starved of fuel and under constant air attack.

The Ardennes struggle rendered Eisenhower less willing than ever to take risks. His nerve had been badly shaken. The best U.S. corps and divisional commanders on the battlefield had shown more pepper and grip during the battle than their superiors at 12th Army Group and SHAEF. Hodges should have been relieved of First Army’s command after his poor showing. But the mood among the Americans in mid-January inclined towards celebrating heroes rather than sacking scapegoats. The Western allies did not recommence major offensive operations on their own account until mid-February. It took seven weeks for Eisenhower’s armies to recover their balance after the shock of the Ardennes.

Yet from the outset it was hard to envisage a scenario for German success. Von Rundstedt’s armies lacked the power to sustain such a vastly ambitious operation to its conclusion in the face of overwhelmingly superior forces. American mobility was decisive. German movements were crippled by difficult terrain and inadequate fuel. Indeed, it is arguable that the fuel shortage contributed at least as much as allied resistance to stopping the panzers, even before Allied air power was committed. During 1944–45 Hitler’s armies achieved remarkable feats when they were immobile and dug in, for they were hard to see and to hit. They were savagely mauled, however, whenever they moved and exposed themselves to air attack as they did in December and January. The Allies were able to move forces freely to the battlefield with their huge inventory of vehicles and almost unlimited fuel, amid negligible interference from the Luftwaffe. Tactically, the Ardennes was one of the worst-conducted German battles of the war, perhaps reflecting the fact that none of the generals giving the orders saw any prospect of success. The sorrows of those American soldiers who proved unable to resist the German panzers were erased by the triumphs of those who finally defeated them.

The principal beneficiaries of the Bulge battle were the Russians. The German Seventh Army was never impressive, but Fifth and Sixth SS Panzer Armies were among the most formidable forces Hitler had possessed in December. Their absence from the Eastern Front when Stalin launched his Vistula offensive was of significant value to the Soviet armies. Even when the panzer formations were belatedly transferred eastwards late in January, they had been devastated by their experience in Belgium and Luxembourg. It is unlikely that Dietrich’s and von Manteuffel’s tanks could have altered the outcome of the eastern battle, but their presence would have made the task of Zhukov and his colleagues much harder. The German fuel famine was strangling the ability of Hitler’s empire to maintain its resistance, almost irrespective of events on the battlefield. But the Ardennes attack imposed in weeks a level of attrition upon German armoured forces which might have taken months had they been deployed in defence. Stalin was always contemptuous of the battlefield contributions of his American allies. But he owed them a debt for the defeat they inflicted upon the Germans in December 1944. He might better have appreciated their achievement if his nature had allowed him to care more about the tens of thousands of Russian lives saved by the failure of Autumn Mist.

CHAPTER NINE

Stalin’s Offensive

THE STORM BREAKS

T
HERE WAS A
Red Army saying: “Where Zhukov is, there is victory.” Georgi Zhukov was forty-eight, a shoemaker’s son from a village some ninety miles south of Moscow, who had fought in the First World War as a tsarist cavalryman. He rose to prominence in the Mongolian conflict of 1939 between Japan and Russia, which remains almost unknown in the West. He played a leading role in the councils of the Soviet high command from the first days of the war in June 1941. Critics argued that luck and German blunders did as much as Zhukov’s own generalship to win his laurels in the battles of Leningrad and Moscow, but this seems ungenerous. In January 1943 he received his marshal’s star. His wholesale executions of men suspected of cowardice or desertion demonstrated a ruthlessness which did Zhukov no disservice in the eyes of Stalin. During the defence of Leningrad, he directed that any man who abandoned his post without written orders should be shot. He deployed tanks behind the forward positions not to kill Germans but to shoot down mercilessly any Russian who fled. Zhukov’s high intelligence and grasp of all military matters, matched by a sobriety unusual among Soviet senior officers, were generally acknowledged. He had been leading large armies for longer than any other Allied commander. While Zhukov was directing the defence of Leningrad back in 1941, Eisenhower was still Chief of Staff of Third Army in Louisiana, newly promoted to brigadier. The Russians did not always get it right—indeed, their mistakes were on a scale as extravagant as everything else about the Eastern Front. But Soviet generals in the last two years of the war handled large forces with much greater assurance than their American and British counterparts.

Zhukov’s perfectionism, his meticulous staffwork and summary dismissal of any officer who failed to meet his standards made him a harsh taskmaster. Yet he was the servant of an even harsher one. In 1941, he burst into tears after a tongue-lashing from Stalin. Reading the memoirs of Russia’s wartime commanders, it is easy to be deluded into supposing that they inhabited a rational world, recognizable to Americans and west Europeans. They did not. From the first day of the war to the last, they existed and fought in a universe more fearsome than that of Hitler’s commanders. Under Stalin, failure signalled death. Not even the greatest marshal was secure from degradation, torture and execution. One day in 1941, Russia’s senior airman became drunk and complained to his supreme warlord: “You’re making us fly in coffins.” Stalin responded quietly: “You shouldn’t have said that.” The general—Pavel Rychagov—was shot, along with much of the Red Air Force high command. Stalin’s military subordinates existed in a state of permanent fear. It is not easy to compare relative evils, rival monsters, yet it is a matter of fact that the senior subordinates of Adolf Hitler enjoyed a much better prospect of survival than those of Joseph Stalin, until military defeat overtook Germany.

Such a man as Zhukov could scarcely be less than utterly ruthless. Yet he inspired enthusiasm among his soldiers, for the reason common to other great commanders throughout history: he was a winner. “Zhukov was very popular, much more popular than Stalin,” said Corporal Anatoly Osminov. The marshal’s stern, unbending presence utterly dominated his headquarters. “He was a hard case,” said one of his artillery staff officers. “He was slow, stubborn, and never said much. It was difficult, if not impossible, to change his mind.” The marshal’s office was studiedly austere—a metal table, maps, a thermos water container with the painted words “drinking water” misspelt on it, and a tin mug chained to the urn. In his operations room in the midst of a battle, Zhukov savagely reprimanded an officer whom he noticed working in a black fur coat, for being improperly dressed. Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko trembled when Zhukov appeared in his artillery forward observation post, and spent ninety minutes studying the German line through his periscope. “I must see for myself,” said the marshal, and quizzed the young officer closely about his living conditions and the gunfire support plan. There was no warmth there, but a steely, uncompromising professionalism of the highest order. “Everyone was terrified of him,” said Lieutenant Evsei Igolnik. “We knew that he was not above using a cane on his own staff officers.” On one occasion, he dispatched a divisional commander to a penal battalion for displaying inadequate energy on the battlefield. Zhukov was the most effective military commander of the Second World War.

Yet, in the Soviet Union’s great advance west from the Vistula and into East Prussia, the glory was not intended for any marshal. For more than two years, to a remarkable degree Stalin had deferred to his subordinate commanders in the conduct of the war. They rewarded him with victories. Stalin’s resentment of Zhukov’s celebrity and popularity had grown, however, eating into what passed for his soul. All his life, the ruler of Russia displayed towards able comrades a blend of admiration and envy which impelled him to murder most of them sooner or later. Although his marshals would fight the great battles now impending, and Zhukov would play the decisive role on the Vistula front, Stalin was determined that in the eyes of the Russian people and of history the January offensive of the Red Army should be identified as his own achievement.