Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (48 page)

The fatal crossroads at Baugnez–Malmédy had been retaken on 13 January. The next morning teams of engineers with mine detectors began to check whether SS panzergrenadiers had booby-trapped the bodies of those they had massacred. Then the Graves Registration teams and doctors began their work. The task was extremely difficult, for all the bodies were covered with at least half a metre of snow and frozen hard.

Most had multiple wounds, with bullet holes in foreheads, temples and the back of the head, presumably from when officers and panzergrenadiers went around delivering
coups de grâce
.
Some were without eyes, which had probably been pecked out by crows. The empty sockets were filled with snow. A number of the dead still had their hands above their heads. The bodies were taken back to Malmédy to be defrosted in a railway building. Razors and knives had to be used to cut out pockets to retrieve personal items.

Evidence was assembled for a war crimes trial, and eventually the US Military Tribunal at Dachau sentenced seventy-three former members of the Kampfgruppe
Peiper: forty-three of them to death; twenty-two to lifelong imprisonment; and eight to prison terms ranging from ten to twenty years. Another eleven were tried by a Belgian court in Liège in July 1948, where ten of them received sentences of between ten and fifteen years’ hard labour. In the post-Nuremberg period of the nascent Cold War, all the death sentences handed out at Dachau were commuted, and the prisoners went home in the 1950s. Peiper was the last to be released. After serving eleven and a half years he went to live in
obscurity in Traves, in the French department of Haute-Saône. Former members of the French Resistance killed him there on 13 July 1976. Peiper knew they were coming for him. Shortly before his death, he said that his former comrades would be waiting for him in Valhalla.

Fighting in the Ardennes had reached a degree of savagery unprecedented on the western front. The shooting of prisoners of war has always been a far more common practice than military historians in the past have been prepared to acknowledge, especially when writing of their own countrymen. The Kampfgruppe
Peiper’s cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners in the Baugnez–Malmédy massacre was of course chilling, and its indiscriminate killing of civilians even more so. That American soldiers took revenge was hardly surprising, but it is surely shocking that a number of generals, from Bradley downwards, openly approved of the shooting of prisoners in retaliation. There are few details in the archives or in American accounts of the Chenogne massacre, where the ill-trained and badly bruised 11th Armored Division took out its rage on some sixty prisoners. Their vengeance was different from the cold-blooded executions perpetrated by the Waffen-SS at Baugnez–Malmédy, but it still reflects badly on their officers.

There were a few incidents of American soldiers killing Belgian or Luxembourg civilians, either by mistake or from suspicion that they might be fifth-columnists in an area where some of the German-speaking population still harboured sympathies for the Nazi regime. But on the whole American soldiers demonstrated great sympathy for civilians trapped in the battle, and US Army medical services did whatever they could to treat civilian casualties. The Waffen-SS and some Wehrmacht units, on the other hand, took out their anger at losing the war on innocent people. The worst, of course, were those obsessed with taking revenge on the Belgian Resistance for its activities during the German retreat to the Siegfried Line in September. And one must not of course forget the other massacres of civilians at Noville and Bande, mainly by Sondereinheitkommando
8.

Historians, however, have often overlooked the terrible irony of twentieth-century warfare. After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive
use of artillery shells and bombs. As a result far more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination.

On 20 July 1945, a year to the day after the explosion of Stauffenberg’s bomb at the Wolfsschanze, Generalfeldmarschall Keitel and Generaloberst Jodl were interrogated about the Ardennes offensive. Both the bombastic Keitel and the cold, calculating Jodl were fatalistic in their replies. They knew that they too would soon be facing a war crimes tribunal.

‘The criticism’
, they said in a joint statement, ‘whether it would have been better to have employed our available reserves in the East rather than in the West, we submit to the judgement of history. Whether it was a “crime” to prolong the war by this attack, we leave to the Allied courts. Our own judgement is unchanged and independent of them.’ But they did acknowledge that ‘with the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies committed in the Ardennes, the way was paved for the Russian offensive which was launched on 12 January from the Vistula bridgeheads’. Despite the reluctance of Russian historians to accept the fact, there can be no doubt that the success of the Red Army’s advance from the Vistula to the Oder was in large part due to Hitler’s offensive in the Ardennes.

It is impossible to assess how much Bradley’s ‘calculated risk’ in leaving the Ardennes front so weakly defended aided the German breakthrough. In any case his deployment reflected Allied thinking at the time that the Germans were incapable of launching a strategic offensive. German misconceptions were much more serious. Not only Hitler and the OKW but most generals believed that the Americans would fall back in disorder to the Meuse and defend from there. They had not foreseen the resolute defence of the northern and southern shoulders, which cramped their movements and supply lines so disastrously on an inadequate road network in such bad weather. Also, as already mentioned, Hitler was convinced that Eisenhower would not be able to take quick decisions, because of the complications of coalition warfare.

‘The promptness with which
the Allies reacted did perhaps exceed our expectations,’ Jodl acknowledged later. ‘But above all it was the speed of our own movements which lagged far behind expectations.’ Bradley had boasted with justification on Christmas Eve that
‘no other army in the world
could possibly have shifted forces as expertly and quickly as we have’.
On the second day of the offensive, First Army moved 60,000 troops into the Ardennes in just twenty-four hours. The despised Com Z of General Lee had achieved miracles. It also managed to transport 85 per cent of ordnance stocks out of German reach. Between 17 and 26 December, 50,000 trucks and 248,000 men from quartermaster units shifted 2.8 million gallons of gasoline so that panzer spearheads could not refuel from captured dumps.

Although Hitler refused to face reality until it was far too late, German generals realized that the great offensive was doomed by the end of the first week. They may have achieved surprise, but they had failed to cause the collapse in American morale that they needed. It was German morale which began to suffer.
‘Officers and men
began to show more and more their loss of confidence in the German High Command,’ wrote Generalmajor von Gersdorff. ‘It was only the realization of the immediate danger of the homeland and its frontiers, which spurred the troops to increase their effort against an unmerciful enemy.’

Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr despaired of the obstinacy of Hitler and the OKW after it had become obvious that German forces could not reach the Meuse.
‘Every day that
the troops waited and continued to hold the salient meant further losses in men and materiel which were disproportionate to the operational significance of the bulge for the German command.’ He argued that the greatest mistake in the planning was to give the Sixth Panzer Army the main strength, when it was bound to face the strongest resistance. The only chance of reaching the Meuse lay with Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army, but even then the idea of reaching Antwerp was impossible given the balance of forces on the western front. Bayerlein described the Ardennes offensive as
‘the last gasp
of the collapsing Wehrmacht and the supreme command before its end’.

While undoubtedly an American triumph, the Ardennes campaign produced a political defeat for the British. Monty’s disastrous press conference and the ill-considered clamour of the London press had stoked a rampant Anglophobia in the United States and especially among senior American officers in Europe. The row thwarted Churchill’s hope that Field Marshal Alexander could replace Air Chief Marshal Tedder as deputy to Eisenhower. General Marshall firmly vetoed the idea because it might indicate that the British had won
‘a major point
in getting control of ground operations’. And as Churchill recognized,
there was a much graver consequence. Montgomery would find himself sidelined once across the Rhine on the advance into Germany, and all British advice would be ignored. The country’s influence in Allied councils was at an end. In fact, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that President Eisenhower’s anger at British perfidy during the Suez crisis just over eleven years later was partly conditioned by his experiences in January 1945.
^*

German and Allied casualties in the Ardennes fighting from 16 December 1944 to 29 January 1945 were fairly equal. Total German losses were around 80,000 dead, wounded and missing. The Americans suffered 75,482 casualties, with 8,407 killed. The British lost 1,408, of whom 200 were killed. The unfortunate 106th Infantry Division lost the most men, 8,568, but many of them were prisoners of war. The 101st Airborne suffered the highest death rate with 535 killed in action.

In the Ardennes, front-line units manned entirely by African-American soldiers served for the first time in considerable numbers. Despite the fears and prejudices of many senior American officers they fought well, as the 17th Airborne testified. No fewer than nine of the field artillery battalions in VIII Corps had been black, as were four of the seven corps artillery units supporting the 106th Division. Two of them moved to Bastogne and played an important part in the defence of the perimeter. The 969th Field Artillery received the first Distinguished Unit Citation given to a black combat unit in the Second World War. There were also three tank-destroyer battalions and the 761st Tank Battalion, all with black soldiers, fighting in the Ardennes. Captain John Long, the officer commanding Company B of the 761st Tank Battalion, declared that he was fighting
‘Not for God and country
, but for me and my people’.

The unsung American victims of the Ardennes offensive were those captured by the enemy and condemned to spend the last months of the
war in grim Stalag prison camps. Their journey to Germany was a series of long cold marches, interminable rail journeys packed into boxcars, being bombed and strafed by Allied aircraft and dogged by the debilitating squalor of dysentery.

Sergeant John Kline from the 106th Division described his ordeal in a diary. On 20 December, he and his fellow prisoners were made to march all day without food and with no water to drink. They resorted to handfuls of snow. At a little village
‘the Germans made us take off
our overshoes and give them to the civilians’. They saw German soldiers sitting in captured Jeeps eating what was supposed to have been their Christmas dinner. On 25 December, after German civilians threw stones at the column of prisoners of war, he wrote, ‘No Christmas, except in our hearts.’ Two days later they reached Koblenz in the afternoon, and were given some soup and bread from a portable kitchen. As they were marched on in groups of 500, a man in a business suit lunged into the street and hit him over the head with his briefcase. The German guard told him that the man must have been upset over the recent bombings.

As the fighting approached its end in April 1945, the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden came across a group of young, half-starved American prisoners of war, presumably also from the 106th Infantry Division. He described them as having
‘xylophone ribs’
, sunken cheeks, thin necks and ‘gangling arms’. They were ‘a little hysterical’ in their joy at encountering fellow Anglo-Saxons. ‘Some American prisoners whom I met this morning seemed to me to be the most pitiful of all I have seen,’ Blunden wrote. ‘They had arrived in Europe only last December, gone immediately into the front line and had received the full brunt of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that month. Since their capture they had been moved almost constantly from one place to another and they told stories of comrades clubbed to death by German guards merely for breaking line to grab sugar beets from fields. They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.’ They at least were alive. A good number of their comrades had lacked the will to survive their imprisonment, like the original for Kurt
Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who acquired the
‘5,000 mile stare’
. Reduced to blank apathy, they would not move or eat and died silently of starvation.

The surprise and ruthlessness of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west. But, as with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the shock of total warfare did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected. It provoked instead a critical mass of desperate resistance, a bloody-minded determination to fight on even when surrounded. When German formations attacked, screaming and whistling, isolated companies defended key villages against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice bought the time needed to bring in reinforcements, and this was their vital contribution to the destruction of Hitler’s dream. Perhaps the German leadership’s greatest mistake in the Ardennes offensive was to have misjudged the soldiers of an army they had affected to despise.