Hitler's Last Days (7 page)

And yet Hitler's gamble is achieving some success. The American army has been caught off guard. Even as German infantry creep through the forest in their winter-white camouflage, the highest levels of Allied leadership still believe that Germany is incapable of launching a major offensive. Some dismiss this as a “spoiling attack”—military jargon for a diversion that weakens the American lines by forcing them to shift men and supplies from some other location. The Ardennes is supposed to be a place to train green troops and a place of rest and sanctuary for soldiers who had been on the front lines too long, chosen because Dwight Eisenhower is convinced that an attack through such wooded and mountainous terrain is impossible. “Of the many pathways that lead to France, the least penetrable is through the Ardennes,” notes General Omar Bradley, the commander in charge of the American front lines. “For there the roads are much too scarce, the hills too wooded, and the valleys too limited for maneuver.”

German soldiers load feeder belts holding cartridges into their machine guns.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Bradley is George Patton's immediate superior, in command of the U.S. forces that stand poised to invade Germany's heartland. Only Dwight Eisenhower has more power among American forces in Europe.

Actress Marlene Dietrich autographs the cast on the leg of Earl E. McFarland at a U.S. hospital in Belgium, where she has been entertaining the GIs.
[Department of Defense, U.S. National Archives]

CHAPTER 7

GENERAL PATTON'S HEADQUARTERS

NANCY, FRANCE
DECEMBER 16, 1944

A
S THE
G
ERMAN OFFENSIVE IN
the Ardennes gathers speed, Patton keeps track of events from his headquarters sixty miles south in the town of Nancy. When the time comes that he is called into action, Patton will be taking his orders from Bradley. At the moment, Bradley is caught so unprepared that he has allowed a group of professional American baseball players to tour the area the Germans are now attacking. The famous film actress and singer Marlene Dietrich is also on hand. She has performed in the Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne. Tonight she is scheduled to put on a show for the men of the U.S. Ninety-Ninth Division in the Belgian hamlet of Honsfeld.

That concert is abruptly canceled.

Instead of watching the show, the Ninety-Ninth is digging in, trying desperately to stop the elite German Twelfth and Third SS Panzer divisions from capturing a spot on the map known as Elsenborn Ridge, a vast, treeless hill that is the picture of natural beauty when wild grasses cover its summit in the summer. But there is no beauty right now. Just frozen mud, corpses, and shell craters. Except for those moments when fog covers the hilltop, or the powerful winds are driving rain and snow into their eyes—which is often—the men of the Ninety-Ninth are in a good position in their foxholes. Any German attack will have to travel a half mile uphill over open ground. Shooting them should be as easy as taking aim and pulling the trigger.

But first they have to see the enemy, and that's not easy. A thick forest nine hundred yards down the slope offers the Germans complete concealment. The woods are dark and gloomy inside, as if covered in a shroud of pines. A dense fog makes the Germans even more invisible. The Ninety-Ninth soldiers are easy targets for the German artillery guns hidden in the forest below—including the high-velocity 88mm guns, which fire a round that travels a half mile per second.

The Ninety-Ninth came to the Ardennes for training, not battle. The men lack winter-camouflaged uniforms, ammunition, and warm clothes, and yet they stand ready to hold the line at all costs.

Because if they don't, Hitler's crazy gamble in the Ardennes just might succeed.

As with the equally strategic nearby location known as the Losheim Gap, the Elsenborn Ridge represents a vital corridor that the German army must possess in order for Operation Watch on the Rhine to accomplish its mission. The Losheim Gap is a narrow valley known to be the pathway for funneling tanks through the rugged Ardennes. The ridge is critical because a network of key roads lies on the other side. Capture the ridge, gain access to the roads, and the German divisions suddenly stand a very good chance of making it all the way to Antwerp.

So the Ninety-Ninth must hold the line. If it fails, Hitler may succeed.

*   *   *

Even when the Germans aren't firing, the sounds of their laughter and snippets of conversation carry up the hill to the Ninety-Ninth. The Americans grow depressed and anxious as they hear the never-ending clank of tank treads from the forest, reminding them that the force now gathered down below is indeed an enormous army. In fact, they will learn that the German forces outnumber the Americans by a five-to-one ratio.

As the men await the inevitable, the Ninety-Ninth endures relentless artillery pounding. Those that live to tell the story will long remember the scream of the high-velocity 88mm shells, a sound that gets higher and more pronounced just before impact. They will remember reciting the Lord's Prayer over and over as those assault guns pound their position. They will remember “the filth, the hunger, the cold, and the life of living like an animal.”

American soldiers advance through the forest around Bastogne, Belgium, December 26, 1944.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

And then there is the Ninety-Ninth's new list of unwritten rules: They cannot sleep for any length of time because the German attacks have no set routine. They cannot leave their foxholes during daylight because German gunners zero in on any sign of movement. Many are so cold that they cannot stop shivering.

Over the next four days, the Ninety-Ninth will see 133 more of its men die. Six hundred will fall back to the battalion aid station to be treated for frozen feet. As many as 1,844 will suffer the indignity of going “missing,” meaning that their loved ones will never get the closure that comes with having a body to bury.

But the Ninety-Ninth will not quit. And though there are no Germans to their rear, the troops do not fall back. They must hold the line. So they await that inevitable moment when the Germans sprint the half mile up the hillside to kill them. Hour after hour, day after day, in the midst of that endless artillery barrage, they fire back and wait. All the while they wonder whether they will hold the line, get killed in action, or avoid violent death by surrendering.

But like every soldier on both sides of the battlefield, they will soon learn that surrender does not always prevent violent death. In the next three days, Hitler's infantry will murder more than 350 American soldiers and one hundred Belgian civilians.

A German tank unit waits around a fire in the Ardennes. Their camouflaged tank is behind them.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

A German soldier guards as vehicles advance to the front.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

 

CHAPTER 8

THE ARDENNES

DECEMBER 17, 1944

A
S THE SECOND DAY OF
Operation Watch on the Rhine begins, the German First SS Panzer Division is on the move. They are the lead element in the much larger Sixth Panzer Army, tasked with racing through the countryside as quickly as possible to capture three vital bridges over the Meuse River.

The First is the best of the best, a fighting force so highly regarded by Hitler that he has allowed its men to sew his name onto their uniform sleeves. They are all hardened fighters who have seen more than their share of combat in this war. And their armament bears testimony to their elite stature. It's nothing but the finest for the First Panzer: sixty panzer and Panther II tanks, three flak tanks, seventy-five half-tracks, fourteen 20mm guns, twenty-seven 75mm assault guns, and numerous 105mm and 150mm self-propelled howitzers.

In command of this magnificent fighting force is the dashing poster boy for the SS, twenty-nine-year-old Joachim Peiper. “He was approximately five feet eight inches in height, 140 pounds in weight, long dark hair combed straight back, straight well-shaped features,” an American prisoner of war will later write.