Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (47 page)

Montgomery believed that SHAEF had agreed with his plan, which he had shown only to Whiteley, the British deputy chief of operations. He did not know that Eisenhower considered Bradley stood a better chance of breaking through to the south, because the Germans would transfer their best formations to the north to protect the Ruhr. Above all, there was the general opposition among all American commanders, and voiced most passionately by Bradley on Tuesday 16 January, when he flew to Paris. Bradley landed at Villacoublay aerodrome, and drove to Versailles. The tensions of the last two weeks, and no doubt sleepless nights, had made him tired, but the flame of righteous indignation kept him going. Eisenhower was made to see that, after the recent row, there would be a storm of protest if Montgomery was allowed to command the main offensive with American forces under his command. It was Montgomery’s own fault that political considerations and rivalries now dictated Allied strategy.

On 18 January, determined to repair fences, Churchill made a speech in the House of Commons to emphasize that
‘the United States troops
have done almost all the fighting and have suffered almost all the losses … Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory.’

The same afternoon, Simpson rang Montgomery. ‘I have just finished talking to Brad. He asked if it would be convenient for you to meet him here at my place [Maastricht] at 10.30 tomorrow morning.’

‘I will be delighted,’ Montgomery said. ‘Where is Brad now?’

‘He is with Courtney [Hodges].’

Simpson then rang Bradley straight away. Bradley said that he intended to get to Maastricht early so that he could talk to Simpson before Montgomery arrived. The purpose of the visit was to have a conference on ‘future inter-group plans’. This presumably meant that he wanted to thwart Montgomery’s arguments, which were based on the premise that
‘First and Third US Armies in
their present condition’ would be incapable of continuing the counter-offensive in the Ardennes, which aimed to break through the Siegfried Line towards Prüm and Bonn. What Bradley said to Simpson drastically changed his previously positive attitude both to Montgomery and to his plan.

‘Any future moves
of the Ninth,’ Simpson then wrote, ‘in the light of present British publicity policy, will be [to] the greater glory of the FM himself, since he sees fit to assume all the glory and scarcely permits the mention of an Army Commander’s name. Bitterness and real resentment is creeping in because of both the FM’s and the British press’s attitude in presenting British military accomplishments won with American blood, broadcast throughout Europe by the BBC.’

Bradley was finally getting his revenge for the way the field marshal had humiliated him on Christmas Day and afterwards. Montgomery was the one who would be sidelined once the Allied armies were across the Rhine. Bradley had said at the beginning of December that
‘His forces are now relegated
to a very minor and virtually unimportant role in this campaign where they are used simply to protect the flank of our giant steamroller.’ Although not true then, it was about to become true now.

Montgomery was not 12th Army Group’s only
bête noire
. Relations with SHAEF had continued to deteriorate. This was partly because Bradley could not forgive Eisenhower for having transferred First Army to Montgomery, and partly because Bedell Smith did not conceal his rather low opinion of Bradley’s headquarters and Hodges. On 24 January, Bradley held a conference in his office after lunch, with Hodges, Patton and seven other generals. During this meeting Major General
Whiteley called from SHAEF to say that several divisions would be withdrawn from his forthcoming offensive to create a strategic reserve and to strengthen Devers in Alsace.
^*

Bradley lost his temper and said for everyone in the room to hear:
‘The reputation and the good
will of the American soldiers and the American Army and its commanders are at stake. If you feel that way about it, then as far as I am concerned, you can take any goddam division and or corps in the 12th Army Group, do with them as you see fit, and those of us that you leave back will sit on our ass until hell freezes over. I trust you do not think I am angry, but I want to impress upon you that I am goddam well incensed.’ At this every officer in the room stood and clapped. Patton said in a voice loud enough to be heard: ‘Tell them to go to hell and all three of us [Bradley, Patton and Hodges] will resign. I will lead the procession.’

On 20 January, as the Americans approached St Vith, a German artillery officer wrote in his diary:
‘The town is in ruins
, but we will defend the ruins.’ Attacking would not be easy with waist-deep snowdrifts. The next day he wrote: ‘The noise of battle comes closer to the town … I’m sending back all my personal belongings. One never knows.’ On 23 January, Combat Command B of the 7th Armored Division was given the honour of retaking the town which it had so bravely defended.

The fighters and fighter-bombers of the XIX Tactical Air Command and the Typhoons of 2nd Tactical Air Force continued to attack the retreating German vehicles. On 22 January XIX TAC claimed more than 1,100 motor vehicles destroyed and another 536 damaged. But such estimates were not confirmed by research later.
‘The three tactical air forces
claimed the destruction of a total of 413 enemy armoured vehicles,’ the British official report stated. ‘From a subsequent ground check carried out it appears that this figure is at least ten times too large.’ The real contribution of Allied aircraft, it stated, came from ‘the strafing and bombing of the supply-routes which prevented essential supplies from reaching the front’. German sources supported this conclusion. The Allied air forces
‘did not play a decisive
tactical part’ in
fighting at the front, Generalmajor von Waldenburg said later. ‘The effect on the rear areas was stronger.’

On 23 January the 7th Armored Division secured St Vith. All survivors had fled, and the town was as silent as the grave. The only building of note left standing was the Büchel Tower. By 29 January the front line had been more or less restored to that of 15 December: it had taken a month and two weeks. Hansen wrote in his diary:
‘The Third Army today
regarded the battle of the salient as officially ended and started new attacks toward German objectives.’

In that last week of January, Bradley moved his Eagle Tac command post from Luxembourg to the provincial capital of Namur. Patton called on him to say goodbye.
‘He is a good officer
,’ Patton wrote in his diary, ‘but utterly lacks “it”. Too bad.’ The provincial governor was made to move out of the magnificent Palais de Namur, and Bradley established himself in vice-regal style. Simpson, visiting on 30 January, described it as
‘a tremendous palaces
, replete with satin wall covers, velvet drapes, too many full-sized oils of the royal family, thick carpets and polished marble floors. The bedrooms, used as offices, are immense – as large as the ground floor of a good sized private home.’

For his private residence, Bradley took over the Château de Namur. It was in rather a forlorn state, so German prisoners of war were sent in to clean it up. Bradley’s staff felt
‘compelled to ransack
the houses of collaborationists’ for furniture. Even Hansen acknowledged that Eagle Tac was now being known as ‘Eagle Took’. The chateau too had marble fireplaces and floors, according to Simpson, as well as large gardens and a magnificent view over the Meuse valley. Bradley insisted on having an ice-cream machine installed.

On Sunday 4 February, Montgomery was invited for a meeting and lunch. He arrived in his Rolls-Royce flying the Union Jack and escorted by outriders. According to Hansen, he made
‘his customary slow
, dramatic, deliberate hawk-like entrance’. Apparently he received a very cool reception from all the American officers. ‘His ego, however, remained impervious to it and he joked, talked and gesticulated. He prevailed consistently and talked too loudly throughout the meal.’

In what appears to have been a deliberate snub, Bradley and Eisenhower simply left Montgomery at the table. They drove off through the rain to Bastogne to meet Patton. Soon after they had crossed the Meuse,
they
‘passed scarred and
blackened hulks of enemy tanks as well as Shermans. There appeared remains of crashed C-47s and a lot of other abandoned impedimenta of war. Patton met us at the rear echelon headquarters of the VIII Corps in Bastogne. He consulted with Ike and Bradley in a small coal-stove room where the 101st Airborne sheltered its troops during the historic siege of the city.’ The three generals then had their photographs taken together in the bombed centre of the town, climbed back into their vehicles and drove north up to Houffalize. They ‘passed [numerous] Sherman tanks with scars of enemy artillery plainly imprinted on their armor’. From there, they carried on to meet General Hodges, who had moved his headquarters back to the town of Spa. It was a symbolic lap of honour which excluded the field marshal.

Belgium faced a crisis, to which SHAEF reacted slowly. Food shortages led to strikes in the mines, which in turn produced crippling coal shortages during that harsh winter. Government attempts to control rocketing prices were easily circumvented and the black market spread. In the countryside people reverted even more to barter, with much of the trade consisting of American and British troops exchanging tins of rations for fresh eggs.

An estimated 2,500 civilians had been killed in Belgium as a result of the Ardennes offensive, with another 500 non-combatants dead in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It is thought that about a third had been killed by Allied air raids. If one adds in those who perished in V-weapon bombardments from at least 5,000 missiles during the whole winter from October to March, civilian casualties increase to more than 8,000 dead and missing and 23,584 wounded.

The destruction had been massive. Buildings, churches, farms, roads and railways had suffered terrible damage. So had sewers, water-pipes, telephone wires and electricity cables. Some 88,000 people were homeless. Those families returning with their few possessions on a handcart found that even houses which had not been hit by shells or bombs had no doors. Both Germans and Allies had ripped them out to provide overhead covering for foxholes and trenches. Bedding had also been seized in an attempt to provide a little warmth or camouflage. There was also a great shortage of warm clothing. A British civil affairs officer
noted that a
‘tremendous number
of Belgian women are wearing coats made from Army blankets, and ski-suits from battledress, having just dyed them to black or brown and removed the pockets’.

In the Belgian provinces of Luxembourg and Namur, eighteen churches had been ruined and sixty-nine others badly damaged. In many cases, the shelling had also ploughed up graveyards, hurling ancient bones around. In La Roche, which had been bombarded by both sides, 114 civilians had died and only four houses out of 639 remained habitable. The town was a mass of rubble. American bulldozers had to be called in to clear paths down the main streets. The following spring, locals noticed that swallows returning to nest became completely disorientated.

The Ardennes, which depended almost entirely on farming and forestry, had been dealt a body-blow. Few chickens were left, and some 50,000 farm animals had been killed in the fighting or taken by the Germans. The shelling had also filled trees with shards of shrapnel, reducing the value of timber and causing problems in sawmills for a long time afterwards. Only a small amount of the livestock slaughtered in the battle could be butchered for consumption. The vast majority had to be buried. Many of the surviving livestock died after drinking water from shellholes, or other sources contaminated by rotting bodies or white phosphorus. There was also a food crisis in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from war-damage and because the Germans had stripped the north of the country.

One of the worst problems was how to deal with well over 100,000 mines buried by both sides, as well as booby-traps, unexploded shells and explosives abandoned all over the place. Some forty Belgians died in and around the former Bastogne perimeter after the fighting was over. In one incident ten British soldiers were maimed or badly wounded when one of their comrades stepped on a mine. The minefield must have been densely sown in a real ‘devil’s garden’, because one after another fell victim trying to rescue the others.

Children were sent away to safe areas when the thaw came so that they would not step on a mine. But a number were hurt playing with munitions, especially when they emptied live shells to make their own fireworks. Allied troops did what they could in the short time before they were redeployed, but the main task fell upon the Belgian army, as well as volunteers and later conscripts brought in as
démineurs
. The squads dealing with unexploded shells and mines had to explode them
in place. In villages and towns, they would warn the local inhabitants before the blast to open their windows, but some houses were so old that they could not be opened.

The rains which brought a rapid thaw in late January meant that carcasses and corpses, hidden by the snow, began to decompose rapidly. The stench was terrible, but the threat of disease, which might affect their own troops, prompted the American military authorities to send in army engineers with bulldozers. Moving German corpses was always dangerous as they might have been booby-trapped, so a rope had to be attached round the legs or hands, then the body towed a distance to make sure that a grenade had not been placed underneath. The Allied dead received individual graves, many of which were decorated with flowers by the local people. German bodies were simply dumped in mass pits like plague victims. Some corpses were so carbonized by phosphorus that their nationality was impossible to distinguish. Whether German or Allied, people hoped that death had come quickly for them.