The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (217 page)

Yet stubborn makeshift resistance by scattered units of the U.S. First Army after the four weak divisions in the Ardennes had been overrun slowed up the German drive and the firm stand on the northern and southern shoulders of the breakthrough at Monschau and
Bastogne
, respectively, channeled Hitler’s forces through a narrow salient. The American defense of Bastogne sealed their fate.

This road junction was the key to the defense of the Ardennes and of the River Meuse behind. If strongly held it not only would block the main roads along which Manteuffel’s
Fifth Panzer
Army was driving for the
Meuse River
at Dinant but would tie up considerable German forces earmarked for the push beyond. By the morning of December 18, Manteuffel’s armored spearheads were only fifteen miles from the town and the only Americans in it belonged to a corps headquarters staff which was preparing to evacuate. However, on the evening of the seventeenth the
101st Airborne
Division, which had been refitting at
Reims
, was ordered to proceed with all speed to Bastogne a hundred miles away. By driving its trucks with headlights on through the night it reached the town in twenty-four hours, just ahead of the Germans. It was a decisive race and the Germans had lost it. Although they encircled Bastogne, they had difficulty in getting their divisions around it to renew the drive toward the Meuse. And they had to leave strong forces behind to contain the road junction and to try to take it.

On December 22, General Heinrich von Luettwitz, commander of the German
XLVIIth Armored
Corps, sent a written note to General A. C. McAuliffe, commanding the 101st Airborne, demanding surrender of Bastogne. He received a one-word answer which became famous: “
NUTS!”

The definite turning point in Hitler’s Ardennes gamble came on the day before Christmas. A reconnaissance battalion of the German 2nd Panzer Division had reached the heights three miles east of the Meuse at Dinant the day before and had waited for gasoline for its tanks and some reinforcements before plunging down the slopes to the river. Neither the gasoline nor the reinforcements ever arrived. The U.S.
2nd Armored
Division suddenly struck from the north. Already several divisions of Patton’s
Third
Army were moving up from the south, their main objective being to relieve Bastogne. “On the evening of the twenty-fourth,” Manteuffel later wrote, “it was clear that the high-water mark of our operation had been reached. We now knew that we would never reach our objective.” The pressure on the northern and southern flanks of the deep and narrow German salient had become too great. And two days before Christmas the weather had finally cleared and the Anglo–American air forces had begun to have a field day with massive attacks on German supply lines and on the troops and tanks moving up the narrow, tortuous mountain roads. The Germans made another desperate attempt to capture Bastogne. All day Christmas, beginning at 3
A.M
., they launched a series of attacks, but McAuliffe’s defenders held. The next day an armored force of Patton’s Third Army broke through from the south and relieved the town. For the
Germans it now became a question of extricating their forces from the narrow corridor before they were cut off and annihilated.

But Hitler would not listen to any withdrawal being made. On the evening of December 28 he held a full-dress military conference. Instead of heeding the advice of Rundstedt and Manteuffel to pull out the German forces in the Bulge in time, he ordered the offensive to be resumed, Bastogne to be stormed and the push to the Meuse renewed. Moreover, he insisted on a new offensive being started immediately to the south in
Alsace
, where the American line had been thinned out by the sending of several of Patton’s divisions north to the Ardennes. To the protests of the generals that they lacked sufficient forces either to continue the offensive in the Ardennes or to attack in Alsace he remained deaf.

He talked on and on.
^*
It must have been obvious to the generals long before he finished that their Commander in Chief had become blinded to reality and had lost himself in the clouds.

There followed a long dissertation on the history of Rome and of Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. Finally he returned to the immediate problems at hand. Although he admitted that the Ardennes offensive had not “resulted in the decisive success which might have been expected,” he claimed that it had brought about “a transformation of the entire situation such as nobody would have believed possible a fortnight ago.”

Was this last phrase an admission of ultimate defeat? Hitler quickly tried to correct any such impression.

Whereupon he appealed to the generals to support the new attacks “with all your fire.”

It was too late. Germany lacked the military force to make good his words.

On New Year’s Day Hitler threw eight German divisions into an attack in the
Saar
and followed it with a thrust from the bridgehead on the Upper Rhine by an army under the command of—to the German generals this was a bad joke—Heinrich Himmler. Neither drive got very far. Nor did an all-out assault on Bastogne beginning on January 3 by no less than two corps of nine divisions which led to the most severe fighting of the Ardennes campaign. By January 5 the Germans abandoned hope of taking this key town. They were now faced with being cut off by a British-American counteroffensive from the north which had begun on January 3. On January 8 Model, whose armies were in danger of being entrapped at
Houffalize
, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permission to withdraw. By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensive on which Hitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition, the German forces were back to the line from which they had set out.

They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks and assault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losses were also severe—8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured or missing, and 733 tanks and tank destroyers.
^*
But the Americans could
make good their losses; the Germans could not. They had shot their last bolt. This was the last major offensive of the German Army in World War II. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the West, it doomed the German armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler’s throwing his last reserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt.

   In his long lecture to the generals in the West three days after Christmas Hitler had been quite optimistic about the
Russian front
, where, though the Balkans was being lost, the German armies had held firmly on the Vistula in Poland and in East Prussia since October.

   But for how long? On Christmas Eve, after the Russians had surrounded
Budapest
, and again on New Year’s morning Guderian had pleaded in vain with Hitler for reinforcements to meet the Russian threat in Hungary and to counter the Soviet offensive in Poland which he expected to begin the middle of January.

   Nonetheless Guderian returned to Hitler’s headquarters for a third time on January 9. He took with him his Chief of Intelligence in the East, General Gehlen, who with maps and diagrams tried to explain to the Fuehrer the precarious German position on the eve of the expected renewal of the Russian offensive in the north.

When Hitler argued that the Eastern front had “never before possessed such a strong reserve as now,” Guderian retorted, “The Eastern front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.”
¹²

And that is what happened. On January 12, 1945,
Konev
’s Russian army group broke out of its bridgehead at
Baranov
on the upper Vistula south of
Warsaw
and headed for
Silesia
. Farther north Zhukov’s armies crossed the Vistula north and south of Warsaw, which fell on January 17. Farther north still, two Russian armies overran half of East Prussia and drove to the Gulf of Danzig.

This was the greatest Russian offensive of the war. Stalin was throwing in 180 divisions, a surprisingly large part of them armored, in Poland and East Prussia alone. There was no stopping them.

“By January 27 [only fifteen days after the Soviet drive began] the Russian tidal wave,” says Guderian, “was rapidly assuming for us the proportions of a complete disaster.”
¹³
By that date East and
West Prussia
were cut off from the Reich. Zhukov that very day crossed the Oder near Lueben after an advance of 220 miles in a fortnight, reaching German soil only 100 miles from Berlin. Most catastrophic of all, the Russians had overrun the Silesian industrial basin.

Albert Speer, in charge of armament production, drew up a memorandum to Hitler on January 30—the twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power—pointing out the significance of the loss of Silesia. “The war is lost,” his report began, and he went on in his cool and objective manner to explain why. The Silesian mines, ever since the intensive bombing of the
Ruhr
, had supplied 60 per cent of Germany’s coal. There was only two weeks’ supply of coal for the German railways, power plants and factories. Henceforth, now that Silesia was lost, Speer could supply, he said, only one quarter of the coal and one sixth of the steel which Germany had been producing in 1944.
¹⁴
This augured disaster for 1945.

The Fuehrer, Guderian later related, glanced at Speer’s report, read the first sentence and then ordered it filed away in his safe. He refused to see Speer alone, saying to Guderian:

On the afternoon of January 27, the day Zhukov’s troops crossed the Oder a hundred miles from Berlin, there was an interesting reaction at Hitler’s headquarters, which had now been transferred to the Chancellery in Berlin, where it was to remain until the end. On the twenty-fifth the desperate Guderian had called on Ribbentrop and urged him to try to get an immediate armistice in the West so that what was left of the German armies could be concentrated in the East against the Russians. The Foreign Minister had quickly tattled to the Fuehrer, who that evening up
braided his General Staff Chief and accused him of committing “high treason.”

But two nights later, under the impact of the disaster in the East, Hitler, Goering and
Jodl
were in such a state that they thought it would not be necessary to ask the West for an armistice. They were sure the Western
Allies
would come running to them in their fear of the consequences of the Bolshevik victories. A fragment of the Fuehrer conference of January 27 has preserved part of the scene.

On such a slender thread the leaders of the Third Reich began to pin their last hopes. In the end these German architects of the Nazi–Soviet Pact against the West would reach a point where they could not understand why the British and Americans did not join them in repelling the Russian invaders.