The Second World War (127 page)

Only the prospect of revenge animated him, and his Ardennes offensive produced a fierce anticipation. Hitler, with the assistance of the OKW staff, had drafted the orders down to the last detail. Originally called Watch on the Rhine as a cover name to imply a defensive operation, its real name was Autumn Mist. The attacking armies had to reach the Meuse in forty-eight hours and take Antwerp within fourteen days. He told his commanders that this would trap the First Canadian Army and knock Canada out of the war, and that in turn
would persuade the United States to consider peace.

Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt, who was perfectly prepared to launch a limited offensive to smash the Aachen salient, knew that the objective of Antwerp was utterly unrealistic. Even if the weather remained sufficiently bad to ground the Allied air forces, and even if they managed to seize Allied fuel dumps intact, the Germans simply lacked the strength to maintain the corridor. It was just like Hitler’s obsession with the Avranches counter-attack in early August, which he had forced on Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge. A dramatic and unexpected strike was no good unless you could sustain it. Rundstedt was later deeply offended when he discovered that the Allies called it ‘the Rundstedt offensive’, as if it had been his plan.

On 3 November, when Jodl outlined the plan to the commanders involved, they were all dismayed: Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief west; Model, the commander-in-chief of Army Group B; Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the Sixth SS Panzer Army; and Generaloberst Hasso von Manteuffel, the commander of the Fifth Panzer Army. Yet when it finally came to the briefing on the eve of battle six weeks later, many of their young officers and soldiers were convinced, or managed to convince themselves, that along with the V-2s fired at England, this offensive would be the turning point for which they had waited so long.

On 28 November, while savage fighting in the rain and now sleet continued on the north German border, Eisenhower visited Montgomery at his headquarters in Belgium. Almost before the supreme commander had sat down in his map caravan, Montgomery began to hector him about their lack of success in the present battles. Hoping once again to exploit Eisenhower’s apparent inability to say no to him clearly, Montgomery considered that he had obtained agreement that he should command all Allied forces north of the Ardennes. But Bradley, who had no intention of allowing part of his army group to serve under Montgomery, managed to change Eisenhower’s mind again soon afterwards. On 7 December, Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery met in Maastricht. Montgomery heard that his reinforced northern push was no longer on the cards. Bradley clearly had to work hard to conceal his smile of satisfaction.

While Eisenhower and his army group commanders had been arguing again over whether to concentrate their next attack north or south of the Ardennes, Allied intelligence suddenly noticed that they had lost track of the Sixth SS Panzer Army. It had been located near Cologne, and the assumption was that, along with Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army, it was preparing a counter-attack against the US First Army as soon as it crossed the River Roer. At Maastricht, Eisenhower raised with Bradley the
question of the Ardennes sector, covered only by Middleton’s VIII Corps, but Bradley was unconcerned. He explained that he had left it weak so as to reinforce the offensives to the north and south. None of the generals at the Maastricht conference expected a large-scale counter-offensive. The Germans were desperately short of fuel for their panzers, and even if they did break through, where would they go? There had been intelligence rumours that they had their eye on Antwerp, but no senior officer took that seriously. Montgomery planned to return to England for Christmas.

On 15 December, Hitler and his entourage moved in his personal train to the Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) Führer headquarters
at Ziegenberg
, near Bad Nauheim. Rundstedt’s headquarters were already in the adjacent Schloss. To the horror of the generals, Martin Bormann’s Nazi Party Chancellery came too, and Bormann complained that the facilities were insufficient for all his typists. Nazi bureaucracy, both in Berlin and at local levels, seemed only to increase as disaster threatened, no doubt to give the impression that the Party was still in control of events. Instructions, directives and regulations cascaded forth on every subject just when the transport and therefore also the postal system were collapsing under the weight of Allied bombing.

The offensive had been delayed for over two weeks because neither panzer nor infantry formations were ready. Hitler had wanted to assemble thirty divisions for the offensive. In the end there were twenty in the attacking force, and five in reserve. On the northern side of the main thrust Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army would head for Antwerp, with the Fifteenth Army protecting his right flank. The Fifth Panzer Army on the southern side would first head for Brussels, with the Seventh Army on its left flank.

The very few American senior officers who voiced their concern about a possible German offensive in the Ardennes were humoured by their colleagues. Increased German activity across the Rhine had been picked up by air reconnaissance, but this was attributed to the counter-attack which they expected once they crossed the Roer to the north. Headquarters of 12th Army Group was convinced that the Germans had been so weakened that there was no threat at all. When Middleton said to Bradley that his VIII Corps was very thin on the ground on the 135-kilometre Ardennes sector, his army group commander replied: ‘Don’t worry, Troy. They won’t come through here.’ Middleton had four infantry divisions, the 99th and 106th which were unblooded, and the 28th and 4th which were both shaken and exhausted after fighting in the Hürtgen Forest. He also had the 9th Armored Division in reserve and the 14th Cavalry Group as a reconnaissance outfit.

At 05.30 hours on 16 December, German artillery opened fire. The effect
of 1,900 guns along the front firing at the same moment was profoundly disorientating. Shaken GIs struggled out of sleeping bags, grabbed their weapons and crouched at the bottom of their foxholes until the bombardment was over. But once it ended they saw an eerie light. This false dawn was in fact ‘artificial moonlight’, with German searchlights behind the front line bouncing their beams off the cloud. The German infantry in snow camouflage advancing through freezing mist and the tall trees of the Ardennes forest looked like ghosts. While isolated forward groups fought back bravely, the bulk of the two green US divisions on the northern side were hit by the spearheads of the two panzer armies. Communications
broke down, yet the front-line companies of the untested 99th Infantry Division, supported by part of the 2nd Division, conducted a dogged fighting withdrawal against a Volksgrenadier Division and the 12th SS
Hitler Jugend
Division. But, just to the south, two regiments of the 106th Infantry Division were surrounded.

Dietrich’s southern spearhead was formed by the 1st SS Panzer Regiment of his former command, the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
. This regiment, reinforced with 68-ton Royal Tiger tanks, was led by Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, a leader of outstanding ruthlessness. When his column was held up by a blown bridge and chaos on the narrow road, Peiper simply directed his tanks through a minefield, losing half a dozen of them but making up for lost time.

Because of the field telephone lines cut by shellfire and the general confusion, Hodges’s First Army headquarters at Spa assumed from the few reports they received that the Germans had just mounted a local spoiling attack. Hodges even ordered the 2nd Infantry Division to continue its probing operation towards the Roer dams, not realizing it was already involved in a very different battle.

General Eisenhower at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles was left undisturbed to an enjoyable day. He heard that he was definitely going to receive his fifth star. It must have been galling that his subordinate Montgomery had received his at the beginning of September. Then he caught up on correspondence, and attended the wedding of his orderly who was marrying a Women’s Army Corps driver from his headquarters. He expected Bradley for supper, with whom he intended to share a consignment of fresh oysters.

When Bradley arrived they went to a briefing room to discuss replacements. They were interrupted by a staff officer with news of a breakthrough in the Ardennes sector. Bradley felt that it did not sound like anything more than a spoiler to disrupt Patton’s imminent attack, but Eisenhower’s instincts were sound. He judged it to be more serious. He told Bradley to send Middleton’s VIII Corps some help. In reserve were the 7th Armored Division to the north, and the 10th Armored with Patton in the south. Patton, as they expected, was not pleased, but both divisions were ordered to move. Eisenhower and Bradley went to have dinner, but Bradley was allergic to oysters and had scrambled eggs instead. Afterwards, they played five rubbers of bridge with a couple of SHAEF staff officers.

Bradley, starting to fear that he might have been wrong, raced back next day in his Packard staff car to his tactical headquarters in Luxembourg. He literally ran up the stairs to the war room and gazed at the huge situation map on the wall. Large red arrows showed the German advances.
‘
Where in the hell
’, he said in disbelief, ‘has this son-of-a-bitch gotten all his strength?’ It was still hard to get precise information. The teleprinter line to First Army headquarters at Spa had been cut. When Eisenhower’s aide Harry Butcher reached 12th Army Group main headquarters at Verdun, he noted that the atmosphere there reminded him of the mood after the disaster at Kasserine.

At Third Army headquarters, on the other hand, they were spoiling for a fight. Patton had half expected a counter-offensive in the Ardennes. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘
We should open up
and let them get all the way to Paris. Then we’ll saw ’em off at the base.’ To the north, there was still confusion at Ninth Army headquarters on what the Germans were up to. An unusually large Luftwaffe attack on their own forces prompted suggestions that this was ‘
a diversion for a larger
counter-offensive in First Army zone’. Staff officers were saying that ‘everything depends on what troops are at von Rundstedt’s disposal’. Hodges, at First Army headquarters, was either genuinely ill, as some accounts say, or had collapsed from stress. It was Hodges who had dismissed the warnings of his chief intelligence officer.

At SHAEF on 17 December, Eisenhower and his staff went through all the information available, trying to work out German intentions and how to react. They assumed that the Germans were simply trying to split the 12th and 21st Army Groups. The only reserves they had left were the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, resting near Rheims after Operation Market Garden. After careful study of the map, they decided on Bastogne. Three more divisions still in England were told to prepare to move immediately. The 82nd Airborne, in the event, was diverted to Werbomont, closer to Spa.

The mistaken idea that the German offensive was heading for the French capital spread further back, with alarmist rumours. A key element in the German plan had included a parachute drop by Oberst Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte’s 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment, to seize a bridge over the Meuse to accelerate the advance. Its approach had been disrupted mainly by anti-aircraft fire, and most of Heydte’s men were scattered almost every where except the target drop zone. Heydte found himself with such a small force that they could only hide up near the bridge and observe events as they waited for the panzer spearheads to arrive. The widely scattered drops, however, certainly increased the confusion on the Allied side.

The Germans had also developed a deception plan. The SS commando leader Otto Skorzeny had been instructed personally by Hitler to slip through with a small force of English-speaking volunteers, dressed in American uniforms and driving captured US Army vehicles. They were to seize another bridge over the Meuse and generally cause mayhem in
the rear. Skorzeny’s main group, held back by the massive traffic jams, never managed to break through, but some of the small teams did. On 18 December, three of them in a Jeep were stopped at a roadblock. They did not know the password. The GIs searched them and found that they were wearing German uniforms underneath their American olive drab. But although their mission ended in failure, and susbsequent execution, they managed to cause far greater chaos by telling their interrogator first that assassination teams were on their way to Versailles to kill General Eisenhower.

Eisenhower found himself confined to his quarters by sub-machine-gun-wielding bodyguards. Rumours spread that German squads were going after Bradley and Montgomery as well. Every soldier and officer, no matter how senior, was stopped at roadblocks by MPs and questioned on US geography, baseball and a range of other questions which only Americans were likely to know. A curfew was imposed in Paris, and SHAEF introduced a forty-eight-hour blackout on news, which fuelled speculation even more.

People became convinced that the Germans were about to retake the city. French collaborators in Fresnes Prison began taunting their warders, saying that the Germans would soon be back to set them free. The guards replied that they and the resistance would kill them all before the enemy reached the gates of Paris. Hysteria reached as far afield as Brittany, where rear-area establishments were told to prepare to evacuate. Captain M. R. D. Foot of the SAS, recovering from severe injuries in a hospital in Rennes, asked a British nurse what the commotion was about. ‘
We’re packing up
,’ she told him. ‘But what about the wounded who cannot be moved?’ he asked. ‘I am sure that the nuns next door will look after you,’ she replied.