At the tail end of 1944, the Russians took stock of their successes. With the Allied advance to the Rhine so fiercely contested, the hope was for the Soviet Union to lighten the pressure by a quick resumption of its offensive. But the Red Army was not about to repeat the classic error of outdistancing its supply lines. Time was needed for a build-up of tanks and artillery that would annihilate the German Baltic forces and carry the Russians across the river Vistula, at a kilometre wide one of the strongest natural defences guarding the eastern approaches to the heartland of the Reich.
Hitler and his generals spent the lull in the proceedings debating their options. The frustrations of the professional military were palpable. Hitler simply refused to recognise the enormity of the Soviet threat. Never one to hide his contempt for the Red Army (a ‘useless rabble’ he called them in one of his less excitable moods), he nonetheless credited his fellow dictator with a tendency to act rationally – a case of the pot failing to recognise that the kettle was equally black. Military logic suggested that Stalin’s first priority would be to sweep up the 200,000 German troops in the Kurland Pocket, directed by Hitler to fight to the last. Thereafter, it was East Prussia that Hitler thought to be most at risk.
Guderian, though, with first-hand experience of the Red Army, believed otherwise. He was inclined to hedge his bets. The likeliest prospect was seen as an attack to the south towards Vienna, barred by five redoubts between the Vistula and the Oder. This meant that the Russians had five great battles ahead of them to get within striking distance of Berlin. Failure at any stage would be the signal to begin the rollback. Confident that the Eastern Front could be held, Hitler turned his attention to the West. With the Allies held down at the Siegfried Line, Hitler had time to reinvigorate the Wehrmacht. He did so with ruthless energy. Reserves of manpower were discovered by the simple expedient of lowering the recruitment age while roping in those hitherto let off as too old or unfit to wear uniform. It was an awesome thought that a battered Germany, beset on all sides by powerful enemies, still had 10 million men in uniform, two-thirds of them in an army backed by formidable military hardware.
Hitler had something more ambitious in mind than a defensive war, but there were few that he trusted to share his plans. After the July plot on his life he was wary of declaring himself openly, even to his senior commanders, who had no inkling of Operation Watch on the Rhine (later Autumn Mist), until 22 October, barely a month before the intended start date. It was then that Hitler called together the Chiefs of Staff of Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, recently recalled from retirement to take up his old job as Commander-in-Chief West and of Field Marshal Walther Model, commander of Army Group B which straddled the Western Front.
The strategy, to sweep through the Ardennes forest on a 60-mile front along the Belgian and Luxembourg frontiers and then, having crossed the Meuse, make straight for the Channel coast to take Antwerp, was nothing if not audacious. If successful it would disrupt the Allied troop supply, extend German control of the Netherlands and split the British and Canadian armies in the north from the Americans in the south, allowing both to be encircled. With Antwerp recaptured there would be no Allied escape by sea. Three armies were to be thrown into the assault. After a breakthrough by the infantry, the tanks would follow at speed, bypassing strongly held towns and villages, a tactic which had been used to great effect on the Eastern Front.
But there were glaring deficiencies. Many of the troops were fresh to battle and inadequately trained, essential equipment had still to come on stream and air support was minimal. Only a quarter of the fuel needed could be guaranteed; advancing units were expected to capture supplies from the enemy. Moreover, fighting conditions in winter over a heavily wooded and mountainous region were hardly propitious. But Hitler was adamant. Even if he could not destroy his enemies, cutting them off from their supply lines via Antwerp would, he calculated, weaken Allied resolve and even conceivably lead to a negotiated peace on the Western Front so that Germany could concentrate on the threat to the East.
Rundstedt and Model did their best to persuade him otherwise. The two leading commanders in the field, General Hasso von Manteuffel who led the Fifth Panzer Army and General Sepp Dietrich of the Sixth Panzer Army, also voiced their fears. But Hitler’s orders were ‘irreversible’. His only concession was to postpone the attack until 16 December when poor weather was expected to offer protection against aerial bombing.
The Wehrmacht started with another advantage. The strategy adopted by the Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, of advancing on a broad front inevitably left some sectors light on manpower. In the Ardennes, General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group covered 80 miles of Belgian–German border with just one armoured and three infantry divisions. Two of these had lately arrived fresh from the United States and the other two were exhausted by their recent bruising encounter with the enemy in Huertgen Forest. Though perilously overstretched, his troops, many of them fresh arrivals, were encouraged to think that a weakened enemy was unlikely to mount a winter campaign in such unfavourable territory. The morning of 16 December proved just how wrong received wisdom could be.
At 5.30 a.m., German artillery opened up a 45-minute barrage, destroying communication links between Allied commanders and their forward observation points. When the guns stopped, searchlights pierced the night sky, the beams bouncing off the clouds to create artificial moonlight. Made ghostly by their white combat gear, the ranks of infantry, fourteen abreast, rushed the American lines. The surprise was total.
American forces crumbled across the entire 80-mile front. By the time the high command realised that they were not dealing with localised attacks but a full-scale offensive, the German push had extended fifteen miles into Allied lines. Fifteen thousand GIs had been captured, thousands more lay dead or wounded in the snow, while others wandered aimlessly, cut off from their own lines and having no idea how to find them. Despair for the Americans equalled jubilation for the Germans, whose morale rose to giddy heights.
‘The Americans are on the run,’ wrote a German soldier to his wife. ‘We cleared an enemy supply dump. Everybody took things he wanted most. I took only chocolate. I have all my pockets full of it. I eat chocolate all the time, in order to sweeten this wretched life … Don’t worry about me. The worst is behind me. Now this is just a hunt.’
It took a change of command at the highest level for the Allies to regain the initiative. With the risk of the German advance cutting off Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg, on 19 December Eisenhower handed over the northern front, including the Ninth and First Armies, to Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group, leaving Bradley to concentrate on the southern sector.
Barring the way to Antwerp, Montgomery threw the bulk of the American First Army and much of the Ninth into the battle area. British and Canadian forces were used as a backstop to hold the line of the Meuse. There were sound reasons for this, not least the wish to avoid the administrative complications of thrusting the British troops into the centre of an American army. But it was a decision that was to damage Montgomery’s reputation with his US colleagues who resented his boast of a British victory achieved, as they said, on the backs of American casualties. Of more than 30 Allied divisions engaged in the struggle, nine-tenths were American.
The high point of German success was Manteuffel’s breakthrough to within striking distance of the Meuse and his encirclement of General McAuliffe’s 101st Airborne Division, known as the ‘Screaming Eagles’, who had raced to protect Bastogne, one of the road junctions with the potential to determine the outcome of the campaign. With the growing strength of German artillery within range of the town, McAuliffe was given two hours to surrender or face ‘total annihilation’. Knowing that Patton’s Third Army was charging to the rescue, he held his nerve.
The Third Army’s race north, up from Luxembourg, was a spectacular demonstration of mobile warfare. More than 130,000 tanks and trucks, in double-banked columns, took part in the ‘round-the-clock trek’ over icy roads. They were kept going by six new supply points holding 235,000 rations and 300,000 gallons of petrol. ‘The troops in heavy great coats still caked with the mud of the Saar were huddled against the wintry cold that knifed through their canvas topped trucks while the tank commanders, their faces wrapped in woollen scarves, huddled in the turrets of their Shermans.’
Four days after the Third Army started its 130-mile ‘fire call’ run, the tanks of the Fourth Armoured Division were in Bastogne.
