The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (74 page)

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All combat arms felt pinched—the “handling and delivery of armored replacements has been a colossal failure,” an Army investigator wrote—but none more than the infantry, that breed apart, described by one private as “a black line on a war map.” Using obsolete data from World War I and from other World War II theaters irrelevant to Europe, the War Department had predicted that infantry losses would amount to 64 percent of all casualties. The forecast was a botch: by December, the actual figure was 83 percent, and even higher for divisions that saw especially intense fighting. In January 1944, the Army had estimated a need for 300,000 replacement infantrymen worldwide that year. The eventual number was nearly double, 535,000.

Of more than eight million soldiers in the Army as the year ended, barely two million were serving in ground units. That was simply not enough, particularly since the Navy, Marines, and Air Forces tended to get a disproportionate share of the smartest and most physically able young men. The severest shortage was of that priceless creature known as a “745,” the rifleman, so called for his military occupational specialty number. An infantry division might have more than 14,000 soldiers, with another 24,000 troops sustaining the division in ancillary support units, but the point of the spear comprised just 5,200 riflemen in twenty-seven rifle companies. (Others manned mortars and machine guns, cookstoves and radios, stethoscopes and bulldozers and clerical desks.) “We find ourselves totally out of infantry rifle replacements because of the War Department’s inability to ship the numbers that are necessary,” Bradley’s personnel chief warned. As casualties mounted, the shortages grew more desperate and the combat soldier’s fatalism deepened. As one veteran wrote, “Nobody gets out of a rifle company. It’s a door that only opens one way, in. You leave when they carry you out.” Lieutenant Paul Fussell believed that “no infantryman can survive psychologically very long unless he’s mastered the principle that the dead don’t
know
what they look like.”

Frantic efforts were made to muster more riflemen into battle. The Army already had culled privates and noncommissioned officers from forty divisions while they were still training in the United States. Seventeen of those divisions had lost at least two-thirds of their infantry privates and countless junior officers, who then were sent overseas as individual replacements while new recruits filled the ranks behind them. Not only were the original divisions devastated by this turnover—the 65th Division reported that some platoons had churned through as many as sixteen platoon leaders even before leaving the United States—but also many GIs found themselves in battle without sufficient training. “We had to take them over behind a hill right in the middle of the action and show them how to load their rifles,” one warrant officer complained.

Crash programs to convert quartermaster soldiers and other support troops into riflemen also began in late November. These so-called “miracle men,” or “retreads,” often proved wanting, and at least one regiment trying to rebuild after the Hürtgen bloodletting refused to accept hundreds of infantry novices. “State of mind of men being converted into riflemen is, on the whole, not good,” an inspection report advised. A survey of infantry divisions found that nearly three-fourths of respondents agreed that “the infantry gets more than its share of the men who aren’t good for anything else.” Lieutenant Fussell wrote that the implicit message to an infantryman was: “
You
are expendable. Don’t imagine that your family’s good opinion of you will cut any ice here.”

Even the deployment of intact divisions was beset with snafus. Under a plan known as the “Red List,” twenty-nine divisions that were ostensibly “fully equipped and ready for combat within fifteen days after landing” arrived overseas beginning in September. In the event, tanks and other heavy equipment meant for these divisions were routed to embarkation ports through a warehouse complex in Elmira, New York, which was already inundated with thousands of military railcars each month. Congestion and confusion led to chaos—thirty workers in Elmira toiled full-time just to strip off erroneous shipping labels—and the Army conceded that an “inability to keep up with paperwork eventually bogged down the entire operation.” As a result, many units arrived in Europe without critical combat gear, including three divisions that docked in Marseille so bereft of communications equipment that SHAEF spent months making up the shortages.

The Red List was a paragon of efficiency compared to the Army’s individual replacement system. Tens of thousands of soldiers were disgorged onto the Continent woefully unprepared for combat; as Eisenhower conceded, each arrived with the “feeling of being a lost soul … shunted around without knowing where he is going or what will happen to him.” Many lacked mess kits, bayonets, or even rank insignia; replacement lieutenants and captains used adhesive tape to simulate the bars on their shoulders. So many also lacked weapons that the War Department shipped fifty thousand World War I–vintage rifles to Europe. “We left Fort Meade with no rifles, we arrived in Scotland with no rifles, we arrived in France with no rifles, [and] we arrived in Belgium with no rifles,” a soldier recalled.

Replacements traveled for days in unheated French “forty-and-eight” boxcars, considered suitable for forty men or eight horses, although as Eisenhower wrote Marshall, “We have reduced the figure to thirty-five enlisted men per car in order that by tight squeezing men can at least lie down.” They then spent weeks or months in replacement centers known as “stockage depots,” often sleeping on straw in flimsy tents, waiting to join a unit even as their physical fitness and combat skills deteriorated. A
Stars and Stripes
exposé reported that “many replacements had not bathed in thirty days.”

“We want to feel that we are a part of something,” one GI in a stockage depot explained. “As a replacement we are apart from everything.… You feel totally useless and unimportant.” Inactivity,
Stars and Stripes
added, became “a form of mental cruelty.” The Army attempted to mitigate the fears of novice troops headed for combat by segregating “salt waters”—new replacements arriving from the United States—from wounded or sick soldiers just out of the hospital. “The battle veterans,” a battalion commander explained, “scared the pants off the green boys.”

Court House Lee proposed on December 1 that the word “replacement” be supplanted by “reinforcement.” “‘Replacement,’” he told Bradley, “carries a cannon fodder implication that we could overcome by using another term.” The change would take effect shortly after Christmas, but no euphemism could obscure the fact that “the morale of our officers and enlisted men coming though the replacement system is completely shot,” an inspector general’s report warned. Even so, U.S. ground forces in Europe since June 6 had received almost half a million replacements, most of them “salt waters,” and for all its flaws and indignities the system had kept the field armies reasonably strong for seven months.

Now the Army’s ability to replenish its ranks was in jeopardy. SHAEF on December 8 predicted a shortage of 23,000 riflemen by year’s end, enough to preclude any attack into Germany. After returning from London, Eisenhower on December 15 ordered rear-echelon units to comb out more combat troops, and an eight-week course to convert mortar crews and other infantrymen into 745s was truncated to two weeks. At least a few officers wondered whether the time had come to allow black GIs to serve in white rifle companies, but for now that radical notion found few champions in the high command.

No one was more fretful than Omar Bradley, whose army group numbered 850,000 men and almost four thousand tanks, yet mustered less than 80 percent of its authorized strength in riflemen. He contemplated breaking up newly arriving divisions to cannibalize infantry as the British had, despite what he conceded would be “tremendous wastage.” So irked was Bradley at the Pentagon’s failure to provide enough trigger-pullers—“Don’t they realize that we can still lose this war in Europe?” he had asked Eisenhower—that he told SHAEF he planned to fly to Versailles from Luxembourg City to explain his troubles in detail. The conference was scheduled for Saturday morning, December 16—Beethoven’s birthday.

“Go Easy, Boys. There’s Danger Ahead”

T
O
be sure, there were clues, omens, auguries. Just as surely, they were missed, ignored, explained away. For decades after the death struggle called the Battle of the Bulge, generals, scholars, and foot soldiers alike would ponder the worst U.S. intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor and the deadliest of the war. Only from the high ground of history could perfect clarity obtain, and even then the simplest, truest answer remained the least satisfying: mistakes were made and many men died. What might have been known was not known. What could have been done was not done. Valor and her handmaidens—tenacity, composure, luck—would be needed to make it right. The trial ahead would also require stupendous firepower and great gouts of blood in what became the largest battle in American military history, and among the most decisive.

Allied intelligence first recognized in September that the Germans had created Sixth Panzer Army under a swashbuckling commander, Sepp Dietrich. Also that month, an intercepted message to Tokyo from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin described Hitler as intent on amassing a million new troops for combat in the west, “probably from November onwards.” Ultra decrypts in late October revealed that the Luftwaffe was stockpiling fuel and ammunition at eleven airfields north of Aachen; subsequent intelligence showed German aircraft strength in the west quadrupling, to perhaps 850 planes, reversing a policy of concentrating squadrons defensively in the Fatherland. Prisoner reports and a captured German order indicated that the celebrated enemy commando leader Otto Skorzeny—the man who had freed Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop jail—was collecting soldiers who could “speak the American dialect,” perhaps for an infiltration mission. The U.S. First Army had flown 361 reconnaissance sorties over western Germany since mid-November, spotting unusual processions of hooded lights on both banks of the Rhine, as well as hospital trains west of the river and canvas-covered flatcars apparently carrying tanks or trucks. In early December, Allied intelligence reported nearly two hundred troop trains moving forward.

None of this suggested an enemy offensive, at least not to the minds of those scrutinizing the evidence. The Sixth Panzer Army and the added Luftwaffe planes were seen as a counterattack force designed to shield the Ruhr but unable to mount “a true counter-offensive”—in SHAEF’s judgment—because of fuel shortages and the German military’s general decrepitude. An intercepted Luftwaffe order for aerial reconnaissance of the Meuse bridges, a site curiously far afield for those only protecting the Ruhr, was deemed a ruse. A rumor of German intentions to recapture Antwerp was dismissed in a 21st Army Group intelligence review on December 3: “The bruited drive on Antwerp … is just not within his potentiality.” After all, hundreds of confirmed reports portrayed a battered, reeling foe.

Those nearest the front—the tactical units splayed along the Siegfried Line—proved no more prescient. U.S. V Corps officers interviewing German prisoners in early December discounted reports of intensified training in infiltration techniques and assault tactics. Tanks maneuvering west of the Rhine were assumed to be green units undergoing seasoning, much as novice American units were seasoned in the Ardennes. A woman interrogated on December 14 described the forest near Bitburg as jammed with German equipment, and four Wehrmacht soldiers captured on December 15 reported more combat units arriving at the front; but these and various other clues provoked little alarm. None of the seven First Army divisions around the Ardennes foresaw an enemy offensive; the 99th Division instead averred that “the entire German army [is] disintegrating.”

Several factors fed this disregard, including a failure to recognize that Hitler rather than the prudent Rundstedt was directing German field armies in the west. “The war from the military side would now seem to be in the hands of soldiers,” a 21st Army Group analysis stated, “a change making the enemy easier to understand but harder to defeat.” No sensible field marshal was likely to risk losing the Sixth Panzer Army—the Reich’s last mobile reserve in the west—in a winter offensive. In imagining their German counterparts, Forrest Pogue observed, American commanders believed that because “
we
would not attack under these conditions, therefore
they
would not attack under these conditions.” To assume otherwise required the ability “to forecast the intentions of a maniac,” Bradley’s intelligence chief later wrote.

Top Allied officers also had become overly enchanted with Ultra, as they had before Kasserine Pass in 1943. By late 1944, the cryptologists at Bletchley Park were daily providing about fifty intercepted German messages detailing troop movements and unit strengths. “They had become so dependent on Ultra that if it wasn’t there,” a SHAEF officer said, “then there wasn’t anything there.” Montgomery’s intelligence chief, Brigadier E. T. Williams, agreed. “Instead of being the best, it tended to become the
only
source,” he wrote soon after the war ended. “We had begun to lean: that was the danger of Ultra.” Intercepts had provided provocative clues—about those Luftwaffe planes on western airfields, for instance—and also raised troubling questions for those inclined to be troubled. Why was the Italian front required to ship one thousand trucks to Rundstedt? Why was Hitler’s personal guard moving toward the Western Front? Why were Sixth Panzer Army troop trains so far forward, if Dietrich’s mission was to protect the Ruhr? But ruthless German security about
HERBSTNEBEL
and strict radio silence by the units committed kept the inner secret from reaching Allied ears.

Some would later claim clairvoyance. Colonel Monk Dickson, the tempestuous First Army intelligence chief, wrote in Estimate No. 37, issued on December 10, that “the continual buildup of forces west of the Rhine points consistently to his staking all on the counteroffensive.” But Dickson placed the expected German blow in the wrong place—north of the Ardennes, “between the Roer and the Erft”—and at the wrong time, “when our major ground forces have crossed the Roer River.” Further, his fractious relations with SHAEF and 12th Army Group intelligence officers, who considered him a windy alarmist, undermined Dickson’s vague warning, as did his subsequent departure from Spa for a four-day holiday in Paris.