Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (15 page)

Hitler’s prediction of tensions in the Allied camp did come about, but certainly not to the degree he had hoped. Both Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, and Montgomery had again become concerned with the slowness of the Allied advance, which they ascribed to Eisenhower’s incapacity as a military leader. Both wanted a single ground force commander, ideally in the shape of Bernard Law Montgomery. Yet Brooke thought Montgomery harped on about it too much. He was awake to the political reality that everything had changed. The war in north-west Europe had become an American show, as Britain struggled to maintain its armies around the world. So if there were to be a single ground commander, in Brooke’s view, it would have to be Bradley and not Montgomery. But the diminutive field marshal had clearly learned nothing and forgotten nothing, except his promise to Eisenhower that he would hear no more on the subject of command from him.

On 28 November, Eisenhower came to 21st Army Group headquarters at Zonhoven in Belgium. Montgomery always pretended to be far too busy to visit his Supreme Commander even when little was happening on his front. Eisenhower should not have put up with his behaviour. He sat in Monty’s map trailer while Montgomery strode up and down, lecturing him for three hours on what had gone wrong, and why a single ground commander was needed. Montgomery felt that the natural dividing line was the Ardennes, and that he should command all the Allied forces north of that sector, which would have given him most of the First US Army
and all of Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s Ninth Army. Unfortunately, Eisenhower’s silence – he was speechless from exhaustion and boredom – gave Montgomery the idea that it indicated tacit consent with his argument that the Allies had suffered a strategic reverse by failing to reach the Rhine and by the fruitless bloodbath in the Hürtgen Forest. Afterwards, to the astonishment of his own military aide, the field marshal sent a signal to Brooke in London indicating that Eisenhower had agreed with everything he said. And in a cable to Eisenhower on 30 November, Montgomery outlined what he thought had been agreed.

The next day Eisenhower visited Bradley at his headquarters in the Hôtel Alfa in the city of Luxembourg. Bradley was a pitiful sight in bed, suffering from flu and hives. Although Eisenhower was furious with Montgomery over his allegation of a strategic reverse, the letter which he dictated in reply was not pointed enough to penetrate Montgomery’s armoured complacency. A meeting on 7 December was agreed in Maastricht.

On Wednesday 6 December, Eisenhower returned to Bradley’s headquarters, bringing his deputy Air Chief Marshal Tedder to discuss tactics before meeting Montgomery. Major Chester B. Hansen, Bradley’s aide, feared that his general was
‘pathetically alone’
. ‘It is his knowledge of the critical times facing him that has caused the nervousness now evident in him for the first time. He is not irritable but he is more brusque than usual, he looks tired and the slight physical irritations have combined to wear him down physically as well as mentally.’ Eisenhower listened to him, ‘with his face heavily wrinkled as he frowned, his neck stuck deeply into the fur collar of the flying jacket he wears’.

Bradley was also exasperated with the Allies’ lack of progress.
‘If we were fighting
a reasonable people they would have surrendered a long time ago,’ he said. ‘But these people are not reasonable.’ Hansen then added in his diary: ‘The German has proved unexpectedly resistant, however, and he dies only with great difficulty … He has been told by Goebbels that this is a fight to the finish, that the weak shall be exterminated in the labor camps of Siberia. It is little wonder, therefore, that we find them fighting our advance savagely, causing us to kill them in great numbers.’ Goebbels, in an attempt to stop German soldiers surrendering in the west, had indeed put out a story that the Americans had agreed to hand over all their prisoners of war to the Soviets for reconstruction work. He came up with the slogan ‘Sieg oder Sibirien!’
–
‘Victory or Siberia!’

The next day at Maastricht, with Montgomery, Hodges and Simpson, Eisenhower discussed the next stage. He spoke of
‘sledgehammer blows
that will carry them across the Roer and up to the banks of the Rhine’. Eisenhower then expressed his concerns about crossing the Rhine. He was afraid of mines or ice floes destroying pontoon bridges, thus cutting off any troops in the bridgehead. Field Marshal Brooke had been horrified when Eisenhower told him in mid-November that the Allies probably would not be across the Rhine until May 1945. This remark, coming at the end of Brooke’s tour of the front, strongly influenced his view that Eisenhower was not up to the task of Supreme Commander.

Montgomery once again put forward his arguments for a heavy attack across the Rhine north of the Ruhr industrial region while all the other American armies were virtually halted. Eisenhower, no doubt gritting his teeth, once again repeated his position that a thrust towards Frankfurt was also important and he had no intention of stopping Patton.
‘Field Marshal Montgomery’
, the notes of the meeting recorded, ‘could not agree that a thrust from Frankfurt offered any prospect of success. In his view, if it were undertaken, neither it nor the thrust north of the Ruhr would be strong enough … Field Marshal Montgomery said that the difference of view about the Frankfurt–Cassel thrust was fundamental.’ To avoid a clash, Eisenhower tried to convince him that the difference was not very great. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group would have the major role with Simpson’s Ninth Army under his command.

Bradley had to hide his anger when Montgomery went on to argue that
‘all operations north
of the Ardennes should be under one command; all south of the Ardennes under another’. This would mean leaving Bradley with just the Third Army. Eisenhower retorted that future operations dictated that the Ruhr in front of them should be the dividing line. Bradley made his feelings clear to Eisenhower soon afterwards. If his 12th Army Group were to be placed under Montgomery, then he would regard himself as relieved of his duties for having failed in his task as a commander.

Most of the action at that time was taking place on the Third Army front. Patton’s forces were crossing the River Saar in several places, and a few days later the last fortress in the Metz area was taken.
‘I think only Attila
[the Hun] and the Third Army have ever taken Metz by assault,’ Patton wrote with satisfaction in his diary. He was also preparing a
major offensive to begin on 19 December. Yet it is wrong to suggest that Montgomery was acting through jealousy of Patton, as some have suggested. He was far too self-absorbed to be envious. He also appeared quite incapable of judging the reactions of others to what he said. In fact, one might almost wonder whether Montgomery suffered from what today would be called high-functioning Asperger syndrome.

Patton was becoming infuriated with the one element he could not control, the relentless rain. On 8 December, he rang the Third Army chaplain, James O’Neill.
‘This is General Patton. Do you have a good prayer for weather?’
The chaplain asked if he could call back. He could not find anything in the prayer books, so he wrote out his own. ‘Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.’ Patton read and firmly approved. ‘Have 250,000 copies printed and see to it that every man in the Third Army gets one.’ He then told O’Neill that they must get everyone praying. ‘We must ask God to stop these rains. These rains are the margin that holds defeat or victory.’ When O’Neill encountered Patton again, the general was in bullish form.
‘Well, Padre,’
said Patton, ‘our prayers worked. I knew they would.’ And he cracked him across the helmet with his riding crop to emphasize the point.

In the south, the neglected US Seventh Army in Alsace redeployed towards the northern flank of its salient to support Patton’s offensive in Lorraine with its own attack up towards the area of Bitche. This meant that the neighbouring French First Army under General de Lattre de Tassigny felt exposed. Lattre considered his forces undermanned, partly because so many French units were still besieging German garrisons on the Atlantic coast. This, he maintained, was the reason for his army’s inability to crush the Colmar pocket despite the addition of a US infantry division, a failure which prompted many disobliging remarks from American officers. To make matters worse, the bitter cold of the Vosges mountains had badly affected the morale of his troops.

One of the great debates about the Ardennes offensive has focused on the Allied inability to foresee the attack. There were indeed many fragmented pieces of information which taken together should have indicated German intentions, but as in almost all intelligence failures, senior officers discarded anything which did not match their own assumptions.

Right from the start, Hitler’s orders for total secrecy cannot have been followed. Word of the forthcoming offensive even circulated among senior German officers in British prisoner-of-war camps. In the second week of November, General der Panzertruppe Eberbach was secretly recorded saying that a Generalmajor Eberding, captured just a few days before, had spoken of a forthcoming offensive in the west with forty-six divisions.
^*
Eberbach believed this was true, and that it was a last try. Even a Leutnant von der Goltz, captured on South Beveland during the clearing of the Scheldt, had heard that
‘the big offensive
, for which they were preparing 46 divisions, was to start in November’. These secretly recorded conversations were reported by MI 19a on 28 November to the War Office in London and sent on to SHAEF, but this rather vital information does not appear to have been taken seriously. No doubt it was simply dismissed as a desperately optimistic rumour circulating among captured officers, especially since the figure of forty-six divisions seemed so impossibly high.

During the first week of November, a German deserter recounted in a debriefing that panzer divisions redeployed to Westphalia were part of the Sixth Panzer Army. This also highlighted the fact that SHAEF intelligence had not heard of the Fifth Panzer Army for several weeks. Both SHAEF and Bradley’s 12th Army Group assumed that the Germans were preparing a strong counter-attack against an American crossing of the Roer. A German spoiling attack before Christmas was also considered to be quite likely, but hardly anybody expected it to come from the Eifel and through the Ardennes, even though the Germans had used this route in 1870, 1914 and 1940.

The Allies could not believe that the Germans in their weakened state would dare to undertake an ambitious strategic offensive, when they needed to husband their strength before the Red Army launched its own winter onslaught. Such a gamble was definitely not the style of the commander-in-chief west, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt. This was true, but the Allied command had gravely underestimated Hitler’s manic grasp on the levers of military power. Senior officers have always been encouraged to put themselves in their opponents’ boots, but it can often be a mistake to judge your enemy by yourself. In any case, SHAEF believed that the Germans lacked the fuel, the ammunition and the strength to mount a dangerous thrust. And the Allies’ air superiority was such that a German offensive into the open would surely play into their hands. In London, the Joint Intelligence Committee had also concluded that
‘Germany’s crippling shortage
of oil continues to be the greatest single weakness in her capacity to resist.’

Wehrmacht troop movements into the Eifel around Bitburg were observed, but other divisions seemed to move on so it was assumed the area was just a staging post, or a sector for preparing new formations. Unfortunately, the Ardennes sector was deemed a low priority for air reconnaissance, and as a result of bad weather very few missions were flown in the region. Just six days before the great attack in the Ardennes, Troy H. Middleton’s VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne concluded:
‘the enemy’s present practice
of bringing new divisions to this sector to receive front line experience and then relieving them out for commitment elsewhere indicates his desire to have this sector of the front remain quiet and inactive’. In fact the Germans were playing a clever form of ‘Find the Lady’, shuffling their formations to confuse Allied intelligence.

Patton’s Third Army headquarters noted the withdrawal of panzer formations, and his chief intelligence officer, Brigadier General Oscar W. Koch, feared that VIII Corps in the Ardennes was very vulnerable. The conclusion of many, including General Bradley, was that the Germans might well be planning a spoiling attack to disrupt Patton’s major offensive due to begin on 19 December. A number of other intelligence officers became wise after the event and tried to claim that they had predicted the great offensive, but nobody had listened. Several within SHAEF and Bradley’s 12th Army Group did indeed predict an attack,
and a couple were very close to getting the date right, but none of them specifically identified the Ardennes as the threatened sector in time.

Eisenhower’s senior intelligence officer Major General Kenneth Strong included an offensive in the Ardennes as one of several options. This had made a marked impression on Eisenhower’s chief of staff Bedell Smith in the first week of December. Bedell Smith told Strong to go to Luxembourg and warn Bradley, which he did. In their conversation, Bradley said that he was
‘aware of the danger’
, but that he had earmarked certain divisions to move into the Ardennes area should the enemy attack there.

The most controversial Cassandra was Colonel B. A. Dickson, the G-2 (or senior intelligence officer) at US First Army. A colourful character, Dickson was not always trusted by his peers because he had an unfortunate knack of identifying German divisions in the west when their position had been confirmed on the eastern front. In his report of 10 December, he commented on the high morale of German prisoners, which indicated a renewed confidence. Yet even though he noted a panzer concentration in the Eifel, he predicted that the attack would come further north in the Aachen area on 17 December. Several prisoners of war had spoken of an attack to recapture Aachen
‘as a Christmas present for the Führer’
. Then, on 14 December, Dickson received the debriefing of a German-speaking woman who had reported troop concentrations and bridging equipment behind enemy lines in the Eifel. Dickson was now convinced that the attack was definitely coming in the Ardennes between Monschau and Echternach. Brigadier General Sibert at Bradley’s 12th Army Group, irritated by Dickson who loathed him in return, rejected his report as no more than a hunch. Dickson was told on 15 December to take some leave in Paris.