A World at Arms (149 page)

What had been the overall impact of the “Battle of the Bulge”? Since the Allied offensive from the west was stalling even before the German attack, the over–all length of hostilities was not extended; in early December Montgomery had estimated a Rhine crossing north of Wesel in the middle of March, 1945–very shortly before the actual crossing.
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The casualties on both sides had been heavy: about 80,000 Germans and 70,000 Americans killed, wounded and missing, with a large contingent of the latter, about 8000, having been taken prisoner when two regiments of the 106th Division were forced to surrender.
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Each side lost about seven hundred tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. This balance, however, obscures the fact that the Germans had used up their last reserves while the Allied forces, if no longer growing, could replace their losses. On November 15, Japanese Ambassador Oshima had recalled to von Ribbentrop that in his judgement Germany would have done better in 1918 not to launch an attack in the West, but von Ribbentrop assured him that Germany would indeed go on the offensive again.
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Inside Germany and in the German army, the temporary return to the offensive did have major favorable repercussions on morale, but the failure of the whole project eventually had an even more depressing effect. Here the analogy to 1918, to which Oshima had alluded beforehand, was too close for comfort. The dashing of hopes attached to what was understood to be a last throw of the dice necessarily had a redoubled impact both at the front and at home.

On the Allied side, there were three sets of repercussions. In the American army, there was a fuller recognition that a great deal of hard fighting still lay ahead. After initial confusion and setbacks, the soldiers. and the commanders had pulled themselves together; and success at the Elsenborn ridge and at Bastogne had shown that determined and well-led American soldiers could face Germans with tanks better than their own and hold. Between the Americans and the British, the whole episode had caused little but bad blood. The hesitations of Montgomery which had allowed a German army which might very well have been
completely cut off to withdraw for a
third
time were contrasted with the dash of Patton’s shift to the offensive northwards; the press conference incident infuriated the Americans; and the British leaders, especially Brooke and Montgomery, were more certain of American incompetence than ever before.
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Perhaps even more fateful than the impact on United States–British relations was the effect on the relative positions of the Western Allies and the Soviet Union in the winter of 1944–45. As the Western Allies had to rebuild their own forces for the final assault on Germany, the commitment of Germany’s last reserves to the offensive in the West guaranteed a rapid advance to the Red Army once its winter offensive got started. The German army Chief of Staff, General Guderian, had warned about this beforehand and repeatedly called for ending the Ardennes offensive in order to transfer troops East while that offensive was under way, but to no effect.
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The position of the Soviet Union in the final stages of the European war could only benefit from the fact that all the new units built up and almost all the new heavy weapons delivered during the halt on the Vistula in the last five months of 1944 had been hurled against the American army in its sternest test of the European war.

By the first days of January 1945, when it was obvious that both German offensives in the West had entirely failed to attain any strategic objective, the other elements in German hopes of reversing the tide of the war had already been dashed as well. The strategy of denying supplies to the Western Allies by holding on to the ports had, in effect, collapsed with the opening of Antwerp to Allied shipping in the last week of November. Shifting the aim of Germany’s new weapons, the V-1 and V-2, from London to Antwerp, caused some casualties and damage there but hardly interfered with the effective operation of this key harbor. Already in December over a quarter of American supplies were being unloaded in Antwerp, and in the following months it continued to carry the largest or next to largest share of the load.
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There might still be some items in short supply, but the hope of stalling the offensive capability of the Western Allies by denying them the harbor facilities they needed had failed in the West; in the Mediterranean it had never had a real chance of success once the British had taken
Syracuse and subsequently the Americans had liberated Naples, with the French and Americans freeing Marseilles and Toulon thereafter.

The other way in which the Germans had expected to halt the danger they faced in Western Europe had been a resumption of the submarine war with new types of U-Boats which were fast enough to overtake the convoys and which could move at high speed under water without the need to surface, either for recharging their batteries or to go at higher speed. Such submarines, employed in substantial numbers, were expected to disrupt the trans-Atlantic supply route, thus leaving the Allied troops on the continent stranded without reinforcements or supplies. The engineering development on the submarine types for this new campaign had been completed: the first boats existed. They met or more than met the expectations of the Germans and the fears of the Allies: the boats were fast and not detectable by radar. But the whole project ended up as an eventually unproductive diversion of German material and manpower resources.

Although the sacrifice of the German army in Courland assured the Germans of control of enough of the Baltic Sea to try out the new submarines and to begin training crews in them, the new submarine campaign never became a reality. The fitting of existing submarines with a snorkel, a device that enabled them to remain submerged while recharging batteries, did make it possible for the Germans to carry on the campaign against Allied shipping on a small scale into the last weeks of the war; but whatever the damage inflicted as a result, there was never any prospect that
this
portion of the German naval effort could possibly catch up with the enormous increase in available Allied shipping produced by the cumulative and ever growing excess of construction over losses since the two lines had crossed in the fall of 1943.
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Everything therefore depended on the entirely new electro-boats. Developed during 1942 and 1943, the Germans began building them on a large scale in March, 1944.
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The first of the new submarines (Type XXI) was delivered in June, 1944; by February 1945, 104 of Type XXI and 49 of Type XXIII had been completed, so that in that month the German submarine force with over four hundred ships reached its largest size in World War II. But not one of the new submarines sank an Allied ship. The whole project suffered from great flaws and fatal defects. The decision to go directly into series production meant that important defects were discovered after many of the submarines had been delivered, so that getting them ready took additional months. Above
all, the direct and indirect impact of the Allied bombing campaign precluded any effective renewal of the submarine war by Germany.
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The direct effect of the bombing campaign was three-fold. It led to the actual destruction of some submarines or components in harbor or hit factories providing parts. It dramatically reduced the fuel supplies of the German armed forces by attacks on synthetic oil plants and hence the allocations to the factories producing for the navy.
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Finally it disrupted the whole transportation system so that deliveries of steel, coal, and other critical materials steadily fell behind. As if these direct effects of the bombing offensive, which greatly reduced the number of submarines that could be produced and delayed the delivery of those actually completed, were not enough, there was the even more dramatic indirect effect.

The new types of submarines had the obvious advantage over their predecessors of being able to remain submerged practically indefinitely, thereby escaping the Allied air and naval defenses which depended heavily on radar and radio detection (Huff-Duff) contact with the
surfaced
U-Boats. The other side of this advantage, however, was the even greater dependence of any submerged ship on aerial reconnaissance to locate the convoys. Now that the Germans could no longer read the Allied convoy codes, only long-distance aerial reconnaissance could locate targets for the new submarines, and this was simply not available.

It was not merely the reluctance of Göring to use any portion of his air force in a supporting role for the navy, but actual incapacity in the face of the Allied air offensive. It was this offensive which had forced on the Germans their delayed concentration on building vast numbers of fighters, not costly and complicated four–engined long-distance reconnaissance planes. The key airplane, the JV-290, was produced in minute numbers in 1943 and 1944.
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Even this minimal program had to be abandoned in the summer of 1944 under the pressure of Allied air power. The loss of the French coastal bases for U-Boat warfare in August 1944 meant that even longer range planes would have been needed for any serious revival of the U-Boat war; and under the hammer blows of the Allied bombers, the Third Reich had not the slightest chance of producing them from the models which existed.

Had the new submarines been available sooner, they would have cruised the North Atlantic under water and blind. If sufficiently numerous, or perhaps by luck or mischance, they would have hit upon a needle in a haystack once in a while, but in the absence of aerial reconnaissance the whole massive effort would have been ineffective. Their major role,
then, must be seen in a somewhat different light. The whole construction program represented a massive and useless diversion of labor and materials from other armaments projects but gave the navy, and particularly its chief, Admiral Dönitz, an important role in Hitler’s state in that state’s last months. Here was a service and a leader who still claimed to have realistic hopes of turning the tide in the war. For his effective presentation of this dubious image, Dönitz would receive his reward.

As already mentioned repeatedly, the Allied bombing of the German oil industry and the transportation system inflicted critical damage on Germany’s whole industrial and military system in 1944, and it was in the summer and fall of this year that strategic bombing finally came to play the role earlier assigned to it in the theory, hopes, and claims of air power enthusiasts. Earlier bombing of urban and industrial targets had caused vast destruction, heavy civilian casualties, and some disruption of the Axis economy, but its most significant contributions had been of a very different kind. Bombing had been the one major way in which Britain and the United States had been able to bring their military power to bear on the Third Reich at a time when the earlier support of the Soviet Union had enabled the Germans to drive the Allies off the continent, and had left Russia facing German land forces practically alone. Maintaining that control of western and central Europe with a minimum of interference from the Western Allies had been a main mission of the German submarine campaign; and the resources Germany devoted to that effort until the Allies turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, and thereafter to the attempt at reviving a new submarine campaign, had been a major diversion of scarce human and material resources from the Eastern Front. The hundreds of old and new types of submarines sent to sea represented thousands of tanks
not
produced for the war in the East.

The other major contribution of the bombing offensive had been the enforced diversion of German resources to the defense of cities and installations, to the defense of the skies. By 1944, over 1.1 million men were employed in firing and controlling 12,000 heavy and 19,000 other anti-aircraft guns.
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Almost half a million of the crew members were auxiliaries–primarily teenagers and women–who could not have been employed in front-line units; but, on the other hand, not only were enormous quantities of ammunition as well as guns tied up in defense of the Reich against air attacks, but the bulk of the German air force had had to be shifted to this defensive mission. The German air force was absorbing the majority of Germany’s military industrial resources, and primarily for defense against British and American bombers.

This basically indirect effect of the bombing on the war effort of
Germany changed in 1944. The primarily American offensive against oil targets launched in May 1944 was to have a fundamentally different effect from all prior bombing operations for several reasons. In the first place, the Americans had earlier succeeded in overwhelming the German fighter defenses by long-range fighter escorts and could now reach the synthetic oil plants deep inside Germany with large numbers of escorted bombers.
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Furthermore, the advance in Italy enabled them to strike at the Romanian oil fields and refineries at Ploesti not just in an occasional special mission from North Africa but on a regular basis.
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Most important to the success of the air offensive against oil, however, was that the Americans did not repeat the British and their own prior mistake of underrating German recuperative powers. Instead of a single big operation, rarely if ever repeated–on the model of Hamburg the bombers of the 8th Air Force went after the synthetic oil works systematically, repeating the attacks as soon as photo or cryptographic intelligence indicated that repairs had been made.
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The Germans tried to cope with this development by extraordinary repair efforts and a dramatic increase in fighter plane production. Neither worked: the repairs simply could not keep up, and the fighters, though obviously more easy to build than four engined bombers, simply could not cope. Never built in the numbers Speer pretended,
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the new fighters were in many instances destroyed on the ground, shot out of the skies by the more experienced and better trained Allied pilots, or left standing around without fuel.
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Needless to say, the attacks on the synthetic oil plants affected the whole German war effort, not only the air force. The dramatic reduction in fuel production, which varied between 40 and 60 percent of capacity in the fall and winter, had major repercussions on all fronts; the success of the German Ardennes offensive, for example, had been predicated on the assumption that enough petroleum supplies could be captured along the way to Antwerp, as the Germans did not have it themselves.