The Battle of the Bulge: Hitler's Final Gamble

By Patrick Delaforce

By late 1944 the Allies were poised to smash the Siegfried Line and break into Germany. Supply lines were shorter thanks to the port of Antwerp. Arnhem aside, there had been a long run of victories and there was no intelligence even from ULTRA to suggest a German counter-offensive.So the major December attack through the mountainous Ardennes by massed Panzers and infantry took the Allies totally by surprise. Fog and low cloud negated the Allies' air supremacy, English-speaking German commandos in captured jeeps created panic and withdrawal of US forces became a near rout with morale all but broken.For ten days the situation worsened and Antwerp was seriously threatened and 21st Army Group in danger of being cut off.Clear skies for the Thunderbolts and coherent counter-attacks by rapidly deployed reinforcements turned the tide in the nick of time, so preventing a catastrophic defeat for the Allies.All this and more is graphically narrated in this fine study of a pivotal battle, that so nearly changed the course of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781473835122

Book preview

THE BATTLE

OF THE BULGE

THE BATTLE

OF THE BULGE

HITLER’S FINAL GAMBLE

PATRICK DELAFORCE

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

Pearson Education Limited

Reprinted in this format in 2014 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

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Copyright © Patrick Delaforce, 2004, 2014

ISBN 978 1 78346 359 6

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Contents

List of maps and figures

Maps

Figures

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum for figures 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1, 13.2, 14.1, 14.2, 19.1, 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 22.1, 24.1, 26.1, 28.1, 28.3, 30.1, 30.3, 31.1, 33.1, 33.2, 33.3, 33.4, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3, 35.4 and 35.5; the US National Archives and Records Administration for figures 13.1, 15.1, 15.2, 17.1, 17.2, 19.2, 20.1, 20.2, 20.3, 20.4, 21.4, 24.2, 27.1, 27.2, 27.3, 27.4, 27.5, 28.2, 28.4, 28.5 and 30.2 and the Text Publishing Company for permission to reproduce extracts from Eclipse by Alan Moorehead.

In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material, and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.

Introduction

Bleak midwinter

In the early days of September 1944 the British Army performed one of its most famous feats of arms. After ten weeks of ferocious, attritional fighting during Operation Overlord to clear the Wehrmacht out of Normandy, their three armoured divisions left the killing grounds of the Falaise–Argentan gap to head northwards. My division (in which I was an RHA troop leader) was the 11th Armoured, led by Major General ‘Pip’ Roberts, arguably the most experienced tank formation commander in the British Army. With its fearsome ‘Black Bull’ emblem it hammered its way through Flanders and captured Amiens in a daring long night charge, surprising Generalleutnant Eberbach still in bed! They thrust northwards and in an astonishing coup de main captured the vital port of Antwerp and its garrison of 15,000 troops. With great help from the Belgian Resistance the immense docklands were taken before the German defenders could sabotage them. Altogether there were 30 miles of wharves and quays, 632 cranes and hoists and 186 acres of warehouse storage space. Its oil storage facilities could house over 100 million gallons. Antwerp would eventually be able to land 40,000 tons per day of POL (petrol, oil and lubricant), ammunition, food, weaponry and reinforcements. An immense build up of supply was needed before the final gargantuan efforts to break the West Wall (Siegfried Line), cross the river Rhine and four other water barriers before capturing Bremen, Hamburg and linking up with the Russians on the Baltic coast.

It had taken a long time for General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery to realise that the logistical battle of supply had to be won and won quickly. Operation Market Garden, that brilliant, flawed, British–American battle to jump the Rhine, distracted the Allied ‘top management’. Adolf Hitler had no such delusions. He ordered his River Scheldt and Walcheren fortresses to fight to the last man to deny the opening of Antwerp port. I have recounted the story of this battleground in my book Smashing the Atlantic Wall. Once the port was opened on 28 November Hitler ordered half of his V-l and V-2 terror weapons (over 10,000) to be targeted on Antwerp docks and city. He ordered his remaining E-boats and U-boats to sink Allied shipping and mine the Scheldt estuary.

The Allied High Command had failed to realise the importance of Antwerp. Indeed, Eisenhower had to order Montgomery to deploy Canadian and British forces for the port’s capture. The Allied High Command then failed to realise the great importance that Hitler placed on the recapture of Antwerp.

This book is the story of the huge, secret, audacious battle plan to retake Antwerp and perhaps capture most of the British and Canadian (plus two American) armies. Hitler called the plan Wacht am Rhein for deceptive purposes (it was not the Rhine, nor was there to be any watching!). His second name for it was Herbstnebel or Autumn Mist, as he could rely on cloud, snow and rain to nullify the Allied airforces.

The Anglo-Saxon world named it the Battle of the Bulge, Ardennes 1944/5. It started two weeks after the first Allied ships arrived in Antwerp. It was to become the largest and perhaps the most savage land battle fought by the Americans in World War Two.

Within a huge triangle of approximately 40–50 miles on each side nearly a million men with 3,000 armoured fighting vehicles (tanks and assault gun SPs) fought each other without much mercy on the snowy ground, in the little hamlets and along the river valleys. In the 40 days of combat, thousands of small vicious firefights took place, mostly during the day, often at night. Above the battlefields the dreaded Allied fighter-bombers, called ‘Jabos’ by the Germans, swooped, soared and left a trail of destruction. Sometimes, not often, the Luftwaffe came too, ‘strafing’ by day, bombing by night.

The American High Command was initially taken completely by surprise, despite ULTRA at Bletchley Park deciphering dozens of clues which could – should – have sent up warning signals. But with some controversial help from Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the Americans reacted very quickly. ‘Old Blood and Guts’, General Patton, sent one of his army corps to try to relieve besieged Bastogne where the gallant US 101st Screaming Eagles Airborne Division held out.

The Führer, like a black spider in the Adlerhorst, devised a whole series of brilliant plans – Wacht am Rhein, Greif (Griffon), Stösser, Bodenplatte and Nordwind. For a variety of reasons, luck, the weather, indomitable American Task Forces fighting German Kampfengruppen and the dominance of the USAAF and RAF in the air war, they all came to naught. But it was a close run thing.

There were heroes aplenty on both sides – seventeen American soldiers won the rare Congressional Medal of Honour, besides the gallant defenders of the Losheim Gap, St Vith and the Twin Towns, Clervaux and Bastogne. There were heroes on the German side too. Generals who led from the front such as von Manteuffel and Bayerlein and leaders such as Otto Remer, the controversial Oberst Peiper, Oberst von der Heydt and Oberst Skorzeny. The Waffen SS panzer forces unfortunately left a trail of murdered GIs and Belgian citizens.

I declare a small personal interest. The 29th Armoured Brigade of 11th Armoured Division, which usually my regiment ‘protected’, was involved in ‘Monty’s’ backstop operations beyond the river Meuse. I was in Brussels (convalescing from wounds) when the Luftwaffe noisily and successfully bombed and strafed the three RAF airfields a mile or so away.

Winston Churchill, who followed the course of the battle and watched the flow and ebb of the battle, needed to ask Marshal Josef Stalin in Moscow ‘whether we can count on a major Russian offensive during January.’ On 6 January 1945, in his own words, ‘The battle in the West is very heavy.’

But when it was all over Churchill wrote, ‘Our subsequent battles on the Rhine, though severe, were undoubtedly eased.’ The best part of three German armies had been badly mauled, almost destroyed.

chapter 1

Winston Churchill:

‘The forward leap was over’

The long hot summer of 1944 had seen two months of fierce fighting after the successful D-Day coastal landings during Operation Overlord. The terrible attritional battles of Epsom, Goodwood, Jupiter, Totalise, Bluecoat and Cobra had ended, with the destruction of most of Adolf Hitler’s Seventh Army in the killing grounds of the Argentan–Falaise pocket.

The experienced war reporter Alan Moorehead wrote in Eclipse:

Now the sun shone out day after day. The trampled corn turned brilliant yellow. The dust rose up with the smoke of explosions. And through this hot August sun the allied aircraft streamed down on the trapped German armies with such a blitz of bombing as western Europe had never seen … The carnage along the roads was horrible … There could be no reason in this ghastly scene. I say again, I think I see the end of Germany here. This was their best in weapons and men, their strongest barrier before the Rhine. It has been brushed aside, shattered into bits. The beaten Wehrmacht is a pitiable thing.

The euphoria was understandable. The American and British press had been highly critical with the apparent lack of success during June and July 1944. The casualty rate with the British, Canadian and American armies had been heavy – almost at World War One intensity.

And now suddenly out of the blue came this stunning victory. Moreover, Cherbourg had been captured and the port was being gradually reopened.

General George Patton (who had been commanding a ‘Phantom’ deceptive army in SE England, apparently tasked with the capture of the Pas de Calais) had arrived in Normandy, commanding the Third US Army, which ran riot in Brittany and then crossed the River Seine at Mantes. On 24 and 25 August General Bradley ordered the US 4th Infantry division and the 2nd French Armoured division into Paris. All Europe knew that with the liberation of Paris, the Battle of France was won. There was wild enthusiasm in the French capital for General de Gaulle, the FFI (French Forces of the Interior) and for the American troops.

On the day after the fall of Paris, the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) Intelligence summary reviewed the situation: Two and a half months of bitter fighting, culminating for the Germans in a bloodbath big enough even for their extravagant tastes have brought the end of the war in Europe within sight, almost within reach. The strength of the German Armies in the West has been shattered. Paris belongs to France again and the Allied Armies are streaming towards the frontiers of the Reich.’

Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, wrote, ‘By 30 August our troops were crossing the river Seine at many points. Enemy losses had been tremendous; 400,000 men, half of them prisoners, 1,300 tanks, 20,000 vehicles, 1,300 field-guns. The German Seventh Army had been torn to shreds.’ All the senior German Wehrmacht commanders had escaped the pocket, although the brilliant General Rommel had been badly wounded and Field Marshal von Kluge had committed suicide.

‘When you receive these lines,’ wrote von Kluge to his Führer, ‘I shall be no more … I am despatching myself where thousands of my comrades have already gone. I do not know whether Field Marshal Model [Hitler had replaced von Kluge with Model] will yet master the situation. From my heart I hope so but if this should not be the case and if your new, greatly desired weapons, especially those for the Luftwaffe should not succeed then, my Führer, make up your mind to end the war. The German people have borne such untold suffering that it is time to put an end to this frightfulness. There must be ways to obtain this object and above all to prevent the Reich from falling under the Bolshevist heel.’

At the Führer conference on 31 August Hitler told Generals Westphal and Krebs, who were taking the places of Generals Blumentritt and Speidel, The time is not yet ripe for a political decision … At a time of heavy military defeats it is quite childish and naive to hope for a politically favourable moment to make a move. The time will come when the tension between the Allies becomes so strong that in spite of everything, the rupture occurs. History teaches us that all coalitions break up … I intend to continue fighting until there is a possibility of a decent peace which is bearable for Germany and secures the life of future generations. Then I shall make it … Whatever happens we shall carry on this struggle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned enemies gives up in despair!’

Map 1

The great breakout from Normandy, over the river Seine, and Paris, Brussels and Antwerp captured by superb British and American armoured thrusts

A few days later Montgomery’s armoured divisions had surged northwards, achieving over 200 miles in four days, liberating Brussels amidst incredible rejoicing and the huge prize of Antwerp city and docks. More successes occurred when Operation Anvil, the invasion of the French Riviera by the US Seventh Army (with French troops under command), took place, watched by Winston Churchill. Quickly they raced north up the Rhône valley, capturing Avignon, Valence, Lyons (on 3 September) and four days later Besancon, before linking up with General Patton’s Third US Army. Despite Panzer Grenadier divisions arriving from the Italian front, Patton reached the river Moselle and entered Metz. General Eisenhower now had 37 divisions under his command in NW Europe – nearly a million men. General Alexander’s armies in Italy – British, American, Polish and French – were moving steadily northwards to the Gothic line defences and Rome had been captured in June.

Many of the allied commanders were confident that the war would be over by Christmas. The German Army in the West now – in early autumn – had a strength of about seventeen divisions, many of them in poor condition, often without armoured support and with inevitably horse-drawn supply services. General Hans Speidel, Rommel’s former chief of staff, noted, ‘An orderly retreat became impossible. The Allied motorised armies surrounded the slow and exhausted German foot divisions in separate groups and smashed them up … There were no German ground forces of any importance that could be thrown in and next to nothing in the air.’ Indeed, the Luftwaffe appeared to be a spent force and rarely appeared in strength. ‘Of course this pace could not last. The forward leap was over and the check was evident,’ wrote Churchill.

chapter 2

Euphoria followed by

complacency

The euphoria of the glorious summer soon vanished. Hitler’s rocket war against London and SE England continued as 8,000 V-1 flying bombs were launched. Over 6,000 civilians were killed and 18,000 seriously wounded. In the follow-up attack by V-2 long-range rocket bombs, 1,359 were launched against London, killing 1,700 civilians and seriously wounding 6,500. Although great efforts were made by the RAF to bomb, and ground troops to locate and destroy launching pads, the horrifying terror attacks on British civilian morale continued unabated.

By early September the Allied armies had almost completely outrun their supplies of POL and many British and American formations were grounded and unable to advance. At least 20,000 tons of supplies were needed every day. The supply lines back to the Normandy beaches or to Cherbourg were between 250 and 400 miles long. Despite the American ‘Red Ball Express’ truck and trailer delivery and additional supplies by air, the Atlantic Wall ports were not yet on stream in sufficient quantities. On 8 September Winston Churchill wrote a memorandum to General Ismay for the Chiefs of Staff Committee: ‘At the present time we are at a virtual standstill and progress will be very slow … Apart from Cherbourg and Arromanches, we have not yet obtained any large harbours … unless the situation changes remarkably the Allies will still be short of port accommodation when the equinoctial gales are due. One can already foresee the probability of a lull in the magnificent advances we have made. General Patton’s army is heavily engaged on the line Metz–Nancy. Field Marshal Montgomery [as from 1 September] has explained his misgivings as to General Eisenhower’s future plans. No one can tell what the future may bring forth.’ He went on to note, ‘It is at least as likely that Hitler will be fighting on 1 January; and that he will collapse before then.’

Instead of concentrating on the reopening of Antwerp port and the blocking and destruction of the German Fifteenth Army retreating steadily from the Pas de Calais, Field Marshal Montgomery launched the audacious Operation Market Garden to capture three key river bridges on the way to the Zuider Zee. Although eight crossings were captured by brave and skilful airborne troop drops by two US and one British airborne divisions, the vital bridge at Arnhem was not. Nevertheless, the British Second Army had made a salient 60 miles deep into enemy territory, beyond the northern end of the Siegfried Line. By 25 September it was clear that the main purpose of Operation Market Garden had failed, although Churchill and Montgomery put on brave faces!

Alan Moorehead, writing in Eclipse, described the situation in the autumn of 1944:

It was a most dangerous period of delay. Every hour, every day the German morale was hardening. As the broken remnants of the Fifteenth [from Pas de Calais] and Seventh [from Normandy] German armies struggled back to the Reich, they were regrouped into new formations. Anything and everything served at this desperate moment. Submarine crews were put into the line as infantry. The German water-police were mobilised. There was a brigade of deaf men who presumably received their orders in deaf-and-dumb language. There was a whole division of men who suffered from stomach ailments and had to be served special bread. Throughout the Reich every officer and man was summoned back to his post. We began to collect extraordinary prisoners; near-sighted clerks who had left their city offices three weeks before; men with half-healed wounds, even cripples and children of fifteen or sixteen. It was a makeshift hotchpotch army, an emergency army put in simply to hold the gap, simply to fight for time while the German generals reorganised on a sounder basis. Little by little a crust was formed reaching along the valley of the Rhine from the Swiss border to the Zuider Zee.

The German High Command was also fortunate. As their own supply lines shortened, their battle grounds in the autumn were favourable for defensive tactics. The First Canadian Army, with British formations under command, fought in appalling conditions in the swamps and polders on both sides of the Scheldt estuary. The canals in Belgium – the Albert and Meuse–Escaut – were formidable water barriers. The British Army fought west of the river Maas in the dreaded Peel country, with its high water-table and swamps where slit-trenches and foxholes filled quickly with water and the dirt roads and tracks raised several feet above the sodden fields crumbled quickly into mud. Every farmhouse was a German DF (defensive fire) target. It was a nightmare. In the south the Americans fought in the Vosges mountains and in the Hürtgen Forest – nightmares of a different sort. The Allied superiority in AFVs (armoured fighting vehicles) and numbers of tanks was nullified. The airforces were often grounded on their advanced airfields by snow, ice or heavy rain. In any case, few substantial targets could be identified. The early winter rains were the worst for many years, flooding the rivers and streams and making quagmires through which the PBI (poor bloody infantry) had to struggle. Casualties mounted from trench foot. The German defenders also had the option of opening water and canal sluices and locks to literally flood the battlefields.

On 10 October Winston Churchill wrote to President Roosevelt: The pressure on the Dutch salient seems to be growing very severe and our advances are slow and costly.’ Casualties had already caused Field Marshal Montgomery to ‘cannibalise’ divisions: 59th Staffordshire had been disbanded and the gallant 50th Northumbrian, which had won four Victoria Crosses, was soon to go. A week later the President replied: ‘All of us are now faced with an unanticipated shortage of manpower and overshadowing all other military problems is the need for quick provision of fresh troops to reinforce Eisenhower in his battle to break into Germany and end the European war … He is now fighting the decisive battle of Germany with divisions which have been in continuous combat since they landed on the Normandy beaches in the first part of June. The need for building up additional divisions on the long front from Switzerland to the North Sea is urgent.’

Churchill visited Generalisimo Josef Stalin in Moscow and attended a magnificent Armistice Day parade in Paris. But two weeks later he was writing to Stalin: ‘The battle in the west is severe and the mud frightful. The main collision is on the axis Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne. This is by no means decided in our favour yet, though Eisenhower still has substantial reserves to throw in. [By now the Allies had 54 divisions in NW Europe.] To the north west Montgomery’s armies are facing north, holding back the Germans on the line of the Dutch Maas. To the east we are making slow but steady progress and keeping the enemy in continued battle.’

The important meeting at SHAEF in Versailles on 22 September achieved very little. Montgomery did not attend it! The minutes of the conference stated, The envelopment of the Ruhr from the north by 21st Army Group, supported by the US First Army is the main effort of the present phase of operations plus the opening of the port of Antwerp as a matter of urgency.’ The autumn stalemate continued throughout October, although on the 21st General Bradley issued orders for a general advance to the Rhine. The First and Ninth US Armies would attack on 5 November and the Third US Army on the 10th. In appalling weather by the end of November the First US Army had closed up to the river Roer opposite Düren. The Ninth US Army had reached the line from Julich to Linnich – a total advance of about eight miles into Germany. But Patton’s Third US Army had severely weakened the German defences in the Vosges, and the Seventh US Army took Strasbourg (by appropriately the 2nd French Armoured division) and threatened the Nineteenth German Army in the ‘Colmar pocket’.

On 4 December Eisenhower wrote to his boss in America, General George Marshall: ‘No sign of an early collapse of German morale in the west. The enemy should be able to maintain a strong defensive front for some time assisted by weather, floods and muddy ground.’ He might have added too, superb defensive actions by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander-in-Chief Army Group West. From the Swiss border north to Aachen, the allies were halted before the Siegfried Line. In the Vosges the Germans had a foothold on French soil. From Aachen north to the mouth of the river Maas, the allies were held in check. Churchill wrote to his friend Field Marshal Smuts on 3 December: ‘In spite of Metz and Strasbourg and other successes we have of course sustained a strategic reverse on the Western Front … We must now regroup and reinforce the armies for a spring offensive. There is at least one full scale battle to fight before we get to the Rhine in the north which is the decisive axis of advance.’ Three days later he wrote to President Roosevelt: ‘The fact remains that we have definitely failed to achieve the strategic object which we gave our armies five weeks ago. We have not yet reached the Rhine in the northern part and most important sector of the front. We shall have to continue the great battle for many weeks before we can hope to reach the Rhine and establish our bridgeheads.’

For three months the American and the British views on the strategy to break into and beyond the long West Wall, with its 3,000 reinforced concrete pillboxes and gun emplacements protected by minefields and concrete dragon’s teeth, differed completely!

The British view was that Montgomery’s 21st Army Group should make a concentrated, violent attack on the northern flank. Eisenhower and all his generals were convinced (despite Patton’s brilliant ‘end-run’ from Brittany to Paris and beyond) that the correct approach was for all the American armies to attack what was in front of them all the time. What the Germans called a Schwerpunkt, a hard-driven nail into the enemy defences, was an alien concept. Since by now the Americans had twice as many divisions in NW Europe and the supreme commander was an American, Churchill and his generals had no alternative but to acquiesce to Ike’s philosophy. A key conference at Maastricht on 7 December was held at Montgomery’s request. Eisenhower reiterated, ‘My basic decision was to continue the offensive to the extreme limit of our ability.’ The lower Rhineland was to be cleared by converging offensives from the Roer and the Reichswald as soon as General Bradley had captured the Roer dams. General Patton was ordered to capture the Saar before Christmas. None of the Allied commanders who met at Maastricht believed that the Germans would attempt any large-scale counter-offensive. Nevertheless, the weather – the worst for 50 years – prevented the full use of the Allied armour and airpower. Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group communiqué noted, ‘The enemy is at present fighting a defensive campaign on all fronts. His situation is such that he cannot stage major offensive operations. Furthermore at all costs, he has to prevent the war from entering a mobile phase. He has not the transport or the petrol that would be necessary for mobile operations, nor could his tanks compete with ours in the mobile battle. The enemy is in a bad way. He has had a tremendous battering.’

On 15 December Eisenhower was playing golf in Versailles, attended a wedding and conferred with General Bradley. Montgomery was preparing for a week’s leave in the UK to see his son. Colonel ‘Monk’ Dickson, the First Army Chief of Staff, had a 72-hour pass to Paris. Assistant Chief of Staff General John Whitely told Ike that there was ‘nothing to report in the Ardennes sector’.

And Churchill wrote, ‘A heavy blow now impended.’

chapter 3

On the other side of the hill:

Third Reich

The Third Reich would not last a thousand years. It was dying slowly and surely. Its vast tentacles were being lopped off. The zenith had been when Operation Barbarossa had seen the Wehrmacht fighting just outside Moscow. Since then Stalingrad, Tunis, Sicily, the loss of the Ploesti oilfields, Rome, France, Belgium, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece and most of Poland and Yugoslavia had shown the Allies that not