How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (34 page)

As a consequence, Eisenhower decided—over Patton's bitter opposition—that Hodges's 1st Army with nine divisions, plus a new airborne corps of three divisions under Matthew Ridgway, be allocated to Montgomery, giving him twenty-five divisions, leaving Patton with fifteen divisions to advance toward the Saar.

Divisions were not the whole issue. A severe shortage of supplies was developing, since few ports were open, and, as the armies rushed toward Germany, distances increased by the day. Eisenhower allocated the lion's share to Montgomery. Hodges, for example, got 5,000 tons of supplies a day, Patton 2,000 tons.

Both the northern and the eastern thrusts commenced at once. By August 31 spearheads of Patton's army crossed the Meuse River at Verdun, and the next day patrols pushed unopposed to the Moselle River near Metz, thirty-five miles farther east. They were barely thirty miles from the Saar on the German frontier, and fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine River. But Patton's main body had run out of gasoline, and did not move up to the Moselle till September 5. By that time the Germans had scraped together five weak divisions to hold the river line. Patton became stuck in an attack on the fortified city of Metz and nearby points, and got no farther.

Meantime the spearhead of Montgomery's British 2nd Army swept into Brussels on September 3, and the next day another armored force raced on to Antwerp and captured the docks undamaged. Antwerp also was fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine and entry into the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland.

At this moment, the Germans had nothing to oppose Montgomery. As Basil H. Liddell Hart wrote: “Rarely in any war has there been such an opportunity.” But here Montgomery failed. His spearhead paused to “refit, refuel, and rest,” resumed its advance on September 7, but pushed only eighteen miles farther, to the Meuse-Escaut Canal, where the desperate defense of a few German parachute troops halted it.

By mid-September the Germans had thickened their defenses all along the front but were not strong anywhere. Montgomery, instead of intensifying a direct drive eastward through Belgium and southern Holland, now mounted a huge fourteen-division thrust northward (Operation Market-Garden) on September 17 to get over the Rhine at Arnhem, Holland, using the recently formed 1st Allied Airborne Army to clear the path. His aim, not approved by Eisenhower, was an end run around the Ruhr and a direct strike at Berlin.

But the massive rivers running through Holland imposed severe barriers, and British tanks had to follow a single causeway from Antwerp to Arnhem. The Germans checked the thrust before it reached its goal. A large part of the British 1st Airborne Division dropped at Arnhem—“a bridge too far” for the rest of the Allies to reach, as described in Cornelius Ryan's book of the same name. Here the British paras were cut off and forced to surrender, a struggle that became legendary for its heroism.

The failure of both Montgomery and Patton to breach the West Wall and get into the heart of Germany in September 1944 has been the center of a controversy that has raged ever since. Both sides claimed they could have won the war if only the other had not got the necessary gasoline.

Patton, when his fuel supplies were petering out, rushed into Bradley's headquarters “bellowing like a bull” and roared: “To hell with Hodges and Monty. We'll win your goddam war if you'll keep 3rd Army moving.” Montgomery opposed any diversion of supplies to Patton, and his complaints became stronger after his thrust at Arnhem miscarried.

The truth is messier. German General Siegfried Westphal, who took over as chief of staff for the western front on September 5, wrote that the entire German line “was so full of gaps that it did not deserve this name. Until the middle of October, the enemy could have broken through at any point he liked with ease, and would then have been able to cross the Rhine and thrust deep into Germany almost unhindered.”

A number of mistakes occurred. Patton attacked Metz and Nancy, when they should have been bypassed, and his forces should have swung north to Luxembourg and Bitburg, where there were few Germans. This, General Günther Blumentritt reported, would have resulted in the collapse of German forces on the front.

Montgomery's greatest single failure was his pause from September 4 to 7 after reaching Brussels and Antwerp, giving German paratroopers just enough time to organize a defense. The fault, wrote John North, official historian of the 21st Army Group, was a “war-is-won” attitude. Little sense of urgency prevailed among commanders during a vital two-week period in mid-September, and among the troops there was a strong inclination to go slow and avoid being killed.

Montgomery's lack of drive at this critical point illustrates that the best chance to finish the war quickly was lost when Patton's gasoline was shut off at the end of August, and he was a hundred miles closer to the Rhine than the British. He, far more than Montgomery, was capable of exploiting opportunity. Yet, as Westphal pointed out, a breakthrough almost anywhere still could have succeeded till mid-October, and neither Patton, Bradley, nor Montgomery saw it.

Meanwhile on the eastern front, the Germans had experienced nothing but disaster. By January 1944, the Red Army had twice the men and tanks as the German army. The only possibility for Germany to avoid total defeat was immediate withdrawal to the 1941 frontier and construction of a deep mine-strewn defensive line studded with antitank guns, advocated by Erwin Rommel. Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein recommended a similar approach, but Adolf Hitler rejected any retreat not actually forced on him by the Red Army, and on March 30 ousted Manstein. Consequently, throughout 1944, German forces in the east conducted one pointless defensive stand and one retreat after another.

By the end of the year, the Soviets were on the Vistula River opposite Warsaw, had surrounded Budapest, driven the Germans out of southeastern Europe and all but a small part of the Baltic states, and forced Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary out of the war. The Germans had lost a million men. As 1945 began, the Soviets were poised for the final assault on the Third Reich.

23 THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1944, AS WESTERN ALLIED FORCES WERE CLOSING AGAINST the West Wall or Siegfried line, Adolf Hitler met with his closest military advisers at his
Wolfsschanze—
Wolf's Lair—in East Prussia.

Alfred Jodl, Hitler's operations chief, reported that German troops withdrawing from southern France were forming a new line in the Vosges Mountains and on old forts in northeastern France. Other Germans were building new lines in Holland or falling back from Belgium into the West Wall.

There was one place of special concern: the mountainous, heavily forested Ardennes of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. Here Americans were attacking, and the Germans had almost nothing to deter them.

Hitler sat erect and ordered Jodl to stop. After a long pause, Hitler announced: “I have made a momentous decision. I shall go over to the offensive, that is to say here, out of the Ardennes, with the objective Antwerp.”

The Ardennes: the same region through which Hitler had sent his panzers in 1940, and had defeated France and thrown the British off the Continent in six weeks. The French and British hadn't thought the blow would come through there in 1940. Perhaps the Americans would be equally blind in 1944.

With this decision, made at the nadir of German fortunes in the west, Adolf Hitler set in motion a campaign that was a stunning surprise to Allied commanders, on a scale beyond their imagination. It was to be the greatest battle ever fought by Americans, involving more than a million men, precipitating a supreme crisis, and demonstrating the most telling failure in history of American military intelligence.

Hitler reasoned that a swift and overwhelming strike at Antwerp, a hundred air miles away, would cut off the British and Canadian armies in the Netherlands. This would compel them to surrender, ending Britain's participation in the war. The U.S. 1st and 9th Armies, also north of the Ardennes, would be trapped as well. The United States, left with half its army in Europe and fearful of Communist hordes sweeping in from the Soviet Union, might conclude a separate peace. Hitler then could turn all his resources against the Russians, and stop their advance. Hitler and the Nazi regime would survive.

It was a desperation move, betting everything on a single throw of the dice. Yet if Adolf Hitler continued on his present course, he and his regime would perish in short order. He had just enough strength left to make one final effort to alter the balance of power.

Hitler had faith that chance could bring fortuitous circumstances. His greatest hero was Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had held on against impossible odds in the Seven Years War 1757–1763 until the empress of Russia died and the coalition against him evaporated. If Hitler could seize Antwerp and destroy four British, Canadian, and American armies, it could happen again.

Hitler was already planning for the offensive on September 1, when he called Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, stiff, formal and seventy years old, to his headquarters and asked him to return as commander in chief west. Rundstedt, as Charles MacDonald wrote, “was to most Germans the paragon of all that was good and right about the German officers corps.” Hitler disliked him intensely, in part because he represented the class and elegance that Hitler lacked, and in part because, in private, he referred to Hitler as “the Corporal,” the Fuehrer's rank in World War I.

Hitler needed a figurehead around whom Germans could rally, and Rundstedt, true to his soldier's creed of loyalty, agreed to serve. Hitler didn't tell Rundstedt what he had in mind. The field marshal was to defend in front of the West Wall as long as possible, then fall back on it. Everything depended on this defense, Hitler stressed. There was insufficient strength to strike offensively.

Having lied to his commander, Hitler ordered his propaganda chief,

Joseph Goebbels, to find somewhere the manpower to create fifteen new divisions with a new name,
Volksgrenadier,
and reinforce thirty-five existing ones. Goebbels did so: seventeen-year-olds, men in their mid-forties, transfers from the navy, Luftwaffe, and rear services, drafts from garrisons in Scandinavia. Hitler withdrew four SS panzer divisions from the line in the west to be refitted, and created a new headquarters, 6th Panzer Army, commanded by Josef (Sepp) Dietrich, an old crony, a bullish former butcher and sergeant in the First World War. Dietrich was hard driving, had little education, and relied on a brilliant assistant, Fritz Kraemer, for military advice.

On the Allied side, there was no idea whatsoever of a threat through the Ardennes. Troy Middleton's 8th Corps was covering an eighty-mile stretch, most of the region. Two of his four divisions were raw and new, two recuperating from heavy losses in battles elsewhere. Talking with Middleton, Omar Bradley said: “Even if the German were to bust through all the way to the Meuse, he wouldn't find a thing in the Ardennes to make it worth his while.”

Eisenhower and Bradley were more concerned with the failure of an offensive Bradley had undertaken to smash through to the Rhine, then swing north and encircle the Ruhr. Patton's 3rd Army was to drive through the Saar to Frankfurt, while, north of the Ardennes, Courtney Hodges's 1st Army and the new 9th Army under William Simpson were to thrust eastward from Aachen to Cologne and Bonn. Patton gained Metz on December 13, but was stopped cold at the Siegfried line short of the Saar. In the effort, Patton's army lost 27,000 men.

The 1st and 9th Armies tried to cross the Roer River and the Hürtgen Forest a few miles to the east of Aachen. Six American divisions were chewed up (35,000 men lost) in bitter close-in attrition battles in and around those dark woodlands in three months beginning September 12.

Meanwhile Jake Devers's 6th Army Group (U.S. 7th and French 1st Armies) reached Strasbourg and the Rhine on the east by December 15. But across the Rhine lay the Black Forest, no acceptable route to the heart of German power.

The key to Hitler's plan was to strike at a time when bad weather would endure for a week, keeping Allied aircraft out of the sky for that period. He figured it would take his panzers that long to reach Antwerp.

The major obstacle was the Meuse River, just beyond the Ardennes. The first wave of tanks had to seize bridgeheads over it quickly. Then a second wave of panzers was to strike off for Antwerp, while infantry divisions fanned off north and south to protect the flanks of the salient.

The final plan was for the offensive (code-named
Herbstnebel,
or Autumn Mist) to be launched by twenty divisions, seven of them panzers, along a sixty-mile front from Monschau, twenty miles southeast of Aachen, to Echternach. Sepp Dietrich's 6th Panzer Army was to deliver the main effort—or
Schwerpunkt—
from Monschau to Losheim, fifteen miles south, exactly the place Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division had driven through in the 1940 campaign. Dietrich was to cross the Meuse south of Liège, then head for Antwerp, while anchoring his northern flank on the east-west Albert Canal.

On Dietrich's left or south, Hasso von Manteuffel's 5th Panzer Army was to attack through and south of St. Vith, cross the Meuse at Namur, then wheel northwest, bypassing Brussels, and guard Dietrich's flank.

South of Manteuffel, Erich Brandenberger's 7th Army, primarily infantry, was to attack on either side of Echternach, move west, and peel off divisions to block movement from the south.

A plan for a converging attack by 15th Army around Aachen had to be dropped, since troops had to be sent east to meet Soviet pressure. Consequently, Hitler could not block the Allies from bringing down reserves from the north.

Nevertheless, if all went well, more than a million Allied troops would be surrounded. But how such a huge army was to be defeated, even if encircled, no one really knew.

Secrecy was mandatory. Hitler prohibited transmission by telephone, telegraph, or radio. The few let in on the plan signed a pledge of secrecy on the pain of death. Rundstedt was not brought into the picture until the late stages.

On October 21, Hitler called in Otto Skorzeny, the officer who had rescued Benito Mussolini from his captors in 1943. Hitler promoted him to SS lieutenant colonel and told him to form a special force to go in advance of the offensive. In the first wave, a company of English-speaking commandos, wearing American field jackets over their German uniforms and riding in American jeeps, was to rush ahead, cut telephone lines, turn signposts to misdirect reserves, and hang red ribbons to imply roads were mined. Second, a panzer brigade of 2,000 men in American dress was to drive through and seize the bridges over the Meuse.

The second wave never materialized. Army command failed to provide the American equipment needed. But the first wave had astonishing success. Forty jeeps got through, and all but eight returned. The few Germans who were captured created the impression that many sabotage bands were roving behind the front. MPs and other soldiers stopped every vehicle, questioning drivers to see if they were German. Traffic tie-ups created chaos, and hundreds of innocent Americans were arrested.

General Bradley himself had to prove his identity three times: “The first time by identifying Springfield as the capital of Illinois (my questioner held out for Chicago); the second time by locating the guard between the center and tackle on a line of scrimmage; the third time by naming the then current spouse of a blonde named Betty Grable. Grable stopped me but the sentry did not. Pleased at having stumped me, he nevertheless passed me on.”

Rundstedt was appalled when he learned of the offensive. “Available forces were far too small for such an extremely ambitious plan,” he said. “No soldier believed that the aim of reaching Antwerp was really practicable.”

If the Germans crossed the Meuse, both flanks would be vulnerable to a major counterstrike. All that would happen, Rundstedt predicted, would be a deep salient or bulge into the line, costly and indecisive. Field Marshal Walther Model, commander of Army Group B, shared Rundstedt's pessimism, but neither could get Hitler to change his plans.

To direct the offensive personally, Hitler moved his headquarters from East Prussia to his
Adlerhorst—
Eagle's Aerie—in the Taunus hills east of the Rhine near Bad Nauheim.

Hitler designated twenty-eight divisions for the offensive, twenty in the first wave with 250,000 men, a remarkable figure given Germany's defeats. The new soldiers were green, of course, without the thorough training of the splendid troops who had swept through the Ardennes in 1940. But there was a hard core of combat veterans and tough noncommissioned officers to stiffen the recruits, plus a number of officers seasoned in battle. The most serious problem was motor transport. No division had more than 80 percent of the vehicles it needed. Fuel was in short supply, and most stockpiles were east of the Rhine.

Even so, Hitler had assembled a thousand tanks for the opening wave in seven panzer divisions, and 450 for the follow-up force. Tactical aircraft were the weakest element: Hermann Göring found only 900, half the number the Luftwaffe deployed in 1940, and a fifth the number of bombers the Allies could throw into the battle. Göring delivered this quantity only on one day—after the ground battle had been decided.

There were many signs of a German buildup opposite the Ardennes in the German Schnee Eifel Mountains, duly reported by air reconnaissance and by Ultra intercepts. But American intelligence (G-2) officers at all levels failed to draw the correct conclusion. They detected German armor but thought it would be used to counterattack the Allied drive toward the Rhine and Ruhr. G-2 saw troop movements in the Eifels as efforts to meet American offensives north and south of the Ardennes. Finally, they believed fuel was so short and troop losses were so great that the German army was in no condition to mount an offensive.

When the attack opened, Bradley was utterly confounded. “Just where in hell has this sonuvabitch gotten all his strength?” he asked his chief of staff, Leven Allen, at 12th Army Group's tactical headquarters at Luxembourg City. And Eisenhower, who wrote that “I was immediately convinced that this was no local attack,” nevertheless waited till the evening of the second day to alert the two divisions he held in reserve, the 82nd and 101st Airborne. Only then did they start moving to the scene.

Hitler set the attack date for December 16, 1944. Bad weather was predicted for days ahead, keeping Allied aircraft from flying. Snow covered the ground. Hitler originally ordered a three-hour preliminary bombardment, but Manteuffel argued that a short, concentrated preparation would achieve the same effect while lessening the Americans' alert. And rather than attack at 10 A.M., which Hitler planned, leaving fewer than seven hours of daylight, Manteuffel wanted the artillery concentrations to begin at 5:30 A.M., well before dawn. Half an hour later the ground assault would start, assisted by “artificial moonlight” created by bouncing searchlight beams off the clouds. Hitler accepted all the changes.