The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (216 page)

Now with the enemy at the gates, the Nazi leaders bestirred themselves. Boys between fifteen and eighteen and men between fifty and sixty were called to the colors. Universities and high schools, offices and factories, were combed for recruits. In September and October 1944 a half-million men were found for the Army. But no provision was made to replace them in the factories and offices by women, and Albert Speer, the Minister for Armament and War Production, protested to Hitler that the drafting of skilled workers was seriously affecting the output of arms.

Not since Napoleonic times had German soldiers been forced to defend the sacred soil of the Fatherland. All the subsequent wars, Prussia’s and Germany’s, had been fought on—and had devastated—the soil of other peoples. A shower of exhortations fell upon the hard-pressed troops.

SOLDIERS OF THE WESTERN FRONT!

… I expect you to defend Germany’s sacred soil … to the very last! …

Heil the Fuehrer!

VON RUNDSTEDT,
Field Marshal

Nevertheless, with the roof caving in, there were an increasing number of
desertions
and Himmler took drastic action to discourage them. On September 10 he posted an order:

A
Colonel Hoffmann-Schonforn
of the
18th Grenadier
Division proclaimed to his unit:

In September what the skeptical German generals called a “miracle” occurred. To Speidel it was “a German variation of the ‘miracle of the Marne’ for the French in 1914. The furious advance of the Allies suddenly subsided.”

Why it subsided has been a subject of dispute to this day among the Allied commanders from General Eisenhower on down; to the German generals it was incomprehensible. By the second week in September American units had reached the German border before
Aachen
and on the Moselle. Germany lay open to the Allied armies. Early in September Montgomery had urged Eisenhower to allot all of his supplies and reserves to the British and Canadian armies and the U.S.
Ninth
and
First
armies for a bold offensive in the north under his command that would penetrate quickly into the
Ruhr
, deprive the Germans of their main arsenal, open the road to Berlin and end the war. Eisenhower rejected the proposal.
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He wanted to advance toward the Rhine on a “broad front.”

But his armies had outrun their supplies. Every ton of gasoline and ammunition had to be brought in over the beaches in
Normandy
or through the single port of
Cherbourg
and transported by truck three to four hundred miles to the advancing front. By the second week of September, Eisenhower’s armies were bogging down for lack of supplies. They were also running into unexpected German resistance. By concentrating his available forces at two critical points Rundstedt was able, by the middle of September, to halt at least temporarily Patton’s
Third
Army on the Moselle and
Hodges
’
First
Army in front of
Aachen
.

Eisenhower, prodded by Montgomery, had then agreed to a bold plan to seize a bridgehead over the Lower Rhine at
Arnhem
and thus obtain a position from which the
Siegfried Line
could be outflanked on the north. The objective fell far short of Montgomery’s dream of racing into the Ruhr and thence to Berlin, but it promised a strategic base for a later try. The attack, led by a massive drop of two American and one British airborne divisions, flying in from bases in Britain, began on September 17, but due to bad weather, to the circumstance that the airborne troops landed right in the midst of two S.S. panzer divisions they did not know were there, and to the lack of adequate land forces pushing up from the south, it failed, and after ten days of savage fighting the Allies withdrew from Arnhem. The British 1st Airborne Division, which had been dropped near the city, lost all but 2,163 of some 9,000 men. To Eisenhower this setback “was ample evidence that much bitter campaigning was to come.”
⁷

Yet he hardly expected the Germans to recover sufficiently to launch the stunning surprise that burst on the Western Front as Christmas approached that winter.

On the evening of December 12, 1944, a host of German generals, the senior field commanders on the Western front, were called to Rundstedt’s headquarters, stripped of their side arms and briefcases, packed into a bus, driven about the dark, snowy countryside for half an hour to make them lose their bearings, and finally deposited at the entrance to a deep underground bunker which turned out to be Hitler’s headquarters at
Ziegenberg
near Frankfurt. There they learned for the first time what only a handful of the top staff officers and army commanders had known for more than a month: the Fuehrer was to launch in four days a mighty offensive in the West.

The idea had been simmering in his mind since mid-September, when Eisenhower’s armies had been brought to a halt on the German frontier west of the Rhine. Although the U.S.
Ninth
, First and Third armies tried to resume the offensive in October with the objective of “slugging” their way to the Rhine, as Eisenhower put it, the going had been hard and slow. Aachen, the old imperial capital, the seat of Charlemagne, surrendered to First Army on October 24 after a bitter battle—the first German city to
fall into Allied hands—but the Americans had been unable to achieve a breakthrough to the Rhine. Still, all along the front they—and the British and Canadians to the north—were wearing down the weakening defenders in battles of attrition. Hitler realized that by remaining on the defensive he was merely postponing the hour of reckoning. In his feverish mind there emerged a bold and imaginative plan to recapture the initiative, strike a blow that would split the U.S.
Third
and
First
armies, penetrate to
Antwerp
and deprive Eisenhower of his main port of supply, and roll up the British and Canadian armies along the Belgian-Dutch border. Such an offensive, he thought, would not only administer a crushing defeat on the Anglo–American armies and thus free the threat to Germany’s western border, but would then enable him to turn against the Russians, who, though still advancing in the Balkans, had been halted on the Vistula in Poland and in East Prussia since October. The offensive would strike swiftly through the Ardennes, where the great breakthrough in 1940 had begun, and which German intelligence knew to be defended only by four weak American infantry divisions.

It was a daring plan. It would, Hitler believed, almost certainly catch the Allies by surprise and overcome them before they had a chance to recover.
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But there was one drawback. The German Army was not only weaker than it had been in 1940, especially in the air, but it was up against a much more resourceful and far better armed enemy. The German generals lost no time in bringing this to the Fuehrer’s attention.

“When I received this plan early in November,” Rundstedt later declared, “I was staggered. Hitler had not troubled to consult me … It was obvious to me that the available forces were far too small for such an extremely ambitious plan.” Realizing, however, that it was useless to argue with Hitler, Rundstedt and Model decided to propose an alternative plan which might satisfy the warlord’s insistence on an offensive but which would be limited to pinching off the American salient around Aachen.
⁸
The German Commander in Chief in the West, however, had so little hope of changing the Fuehrer’s mind that he declined to attend a military conference in Berlin on December 2, sending his chief of staff,
Blumentritt
, instead. But Blumentritt, Field Marshal Model, General Hasso von Manteuffel and S.S. General Sepp Dietrich (the last two were to command two great panzer armies for the breakthrough), who attended
the meeting, were unable to shake Hitler’s resolve. All through the late autumn he had been scraping the barrel in Germany for this last desperate gamble. In November he had managed to collect nearly 1,500 new or rebuilt tanks and assault guns, and in December another 1,000. He had assembled some twenty-eight divisions, including nine panzer divisions, for the Ardennes breakthrough, with another six divisions allotted for an attack in
Alsace
to follow the main offensive. Goering promised 3,000 fighter planes.

This was a considerable force, though far weaker than Rundstedt’s army group on the same front in 1940. But raising it had meant denying the German forces in the East the reinforcements their commanders thought absolutely necessary to repel the expected Russian winter attack in January. When Guderian, the Chief of the General Staff, who was responsible for the Eastern front, protested Hitler gave him a stern lecture.

When Guderian protested that the Russians were about to attack in overwhelming strength and cited figures of the Soviet build-up, Hitler shouted, “It’s the greatest bluff since Gengis Khan! Who’s responsible for producing all this rubbish?”
⁹

   The generals who assembled at the Fuehrer’s headquarters at
Ziegenberg
on the evening of December 12, minus their briefcases and revolvers, found the Nazi warlord, as Manteuffel later recalled, “a stooped figure with a pale and puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, his left arm subject to a violent twitching which he did his best to conceal. A sick man … When he walked he dragged one leg behind him.”
¹⁰

Hitler’s spirits, however, were as fiery as ever. The generals had expected to be briefed on the over-all military picture of the offensive, but the warlord treated them instead to a political and historical harangue.

With this pep talk resounding in their ears the generals dispersed, none of them—or at least so they said afterward—believing that the Ardennes blow would succeed but determined to carry out their orders to the best of their ability.

This they did. The night of December 15 was dark and frosty and a thick mist hung over the rugged snow-laden hills of the
Ardennes Forest
as the Germans moved up to their assault positions on a seventy-mile front between
Monschau
, south of
Aachen
, and Echternach, northwest of Trier. Their meteorologists had predicted several days of such weather, during which it was calculated that the Allied air forces would be grounded and the German supply columns spared the inferno of
Normandy
. For five days Hitler’s luck with the weather held and the Germans, catching the Allied High Command completely by surprise, scored several breakthroughs after their initial penetrations on the morning of December 16.

When a German armored group reached
Stavelot
on the night of December 17, it was only eight miles from the U.S.
First
Army headquarters at Spa, which was being hurriedly evacuated. More important, it was only a mile from a huge American supply dump containing three million gallons of gasoline. Had this dump been captured the German armored divisions, which were continually being slowed down because of the delay in bringing up gasoline, of which the Germans were woefully short, might have gone farther and faster than they did. Skorzeny’s so-called Panzer Brigade 150, its men outfitted in American uniforms and driving captured American tanks, trucks and jeeps, got farthest. Some forty jeeploads slipped through the crumbling front, a few of them getting as far as the River Meuse.
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