The Second World War (128 page)

Other, more accurate stories began to spread. On 17 December, the second day of the offensive, Peiper’s SS troopers from the
Leibstandarte
killed sixty-nine prisoners of war in cold blood, and then in what became known as the Malmedy massacre shot down another eighty-six in the snow. Two men escaped and reached American lines. The thirst for revenge became palpable as the account passed from mouth to mouth, and many German prisoners were shot as a result. Despite the febrile mood, there were a few indications that not everything was going the Germans’ way. Some of the green troops from the 99th Infantry Division and the veterans of the 2nd Infantry Division had managed to block the 12th SS
Hitler Jugend
Division. They then withdrew in good order to the natural defensive position of the Elsenborn Ridge. Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army was not making the headway expected, even though it had at least captured one minor fuel dump. Fortunately for the Allies, his forces never reached the major one near Stavelot which held four million gallons.

Weather conditions from a German point of view remained perfect, with low cloud which grounded the Allied air forces. Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army just to the south was doing better than Dietrich’s SS Panzer Army. Having smashed through the hapless 28th Infantry Division, it was heading for Bastogne. The experienced US 4th Infantry Division on the southern flank was resisting the Seventh Army valiantly.

Eisenhower summoned a conference for 19 December at Verdun. The Ardennes crisis certainly proved to be his finest hour as supreme commander. Despite all the earlier criticism of his tendency to compromise and bend to the opinion of the last general he had spoken to, he showed good judgement and strong leadership. His message was that this presented a great opportunity to inflict maximum damage on the enemy in the open, rather than winkling him out from behind minefields and defensive positions. Their task was to prevent the German spearheads from crossing the Meuse. The enemy had to be contained until the weather changed and the Allied air forces could be let loose on him. To achieve this, they first had to strengthen the shoulders facing the breakthrough. Only then could they begin to counter-attack.

Patton, who had been well briefed by his chief intelligence officer, had already told his staff to draw up contingency plans for a major change of axis away from the Saar, to attack the southern flank of the German breakthrough. He was pleased with the idea of abandoning the ‘
manure-filled, waterlogged villages
’ of Lorraine. The German offensive reminded him of Ludendorff’s great push in March 1918, the
Kaiserschlacht
. Patton appears to have been relaxed when Eisenhower turned to him at this moment of crisis. ‘
When can you attack
?’ the supreme commander asked.

‘On December 22, with three divisions,’ he answered. ‘The 4th Armored, the 26th and the 80th.’ For Patton it was an exquisite moment. All the army group and army commanders and chiefs of staff present stared in astonishment. The move required turning the bulk of his army through ninety degrees and unscrambling crossed lines of supply. ‘It created quite a commotion,’ Patton noted with satisfaction in his diary. But Eisenhower said that three divisions were not enough. Patton replied with his inimitable confidence that he could beat the Germans with just three, but if he waited any longer he would lose surprise. Eisenhower gave his approval.

The next morning, 20 December, Bradley was predictably put out to hear that Eisenhower had decided to give Montgomery command over both the Ninth and the First US Armies. The point was that Montgomery could be in constant contact with them, while 12th Army Group headquarters in Luxembourg was trapped south of the ‘bulge’, as the salient created by the German advance was now called. Eisenhower had been persuaded
of this by his chief of staff Bedell Smith, partly because of the chaos in First Army and the suspicion that Hodges might have collapsed. Bradley, who had been caught on the back foot by the offensive, feared that this development could be seen as a vote of no confidence in his performance. Above all, he hated the idea that it might encourage Montgomery in his demands to be given Allied field command. During the tense and unhappy telephone conversation, Bradley even threatened to resign. Eisenhower, despite their long friendship, was firm. ‘
Well, Brad, those are
my orders,’ he said, finishing the call.

Patton, on the other hand, was in his element, rearranging his troops, diverting tank destroyer battalions to bolster his armoured forces and preparing to attack. The 101st Airborne Division had reached Bastogne only just before Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army. In fact the weak perimeter was already under small-arms fire when the trucks halted. The paratroopers trudged forward past fleeing American soldiers, whom they relieved of their ammunition. An officer of the 10th Armored Division, discovering how short they were, drove off to a supply dump and came back with a truck full of ammunition and grenades, which were thrown to the para-troopers as they marched on. As the sound of firing intensified, they began to dig shell-scrapes and foxholes in the snow-covered ground.

Like almost all the American troops in the Ardennes battles, the 101st Airborne was simply not equipped for winter warfare. Because of the supply problems over the previous three months, absolute priority had been given to fuel and ammunition. Most men were still in their summer uniforms and they suffered terribly in the freezing conditions, especially in the long nights when the temperature dropped sharply. They could not light fires, as that would immediately attract German artillery and mortar bombardment. Trench-foot cases rose alarmingly and accounted for a large proportion of the casualties. Under fire in their foxholes, standing in slushy mud by day which froze hard at night, they had little opportunity to take off their boots, and put on dry socks. There was no hope of washing and shaving. Many suffered from dysentery and, marooned in a foxhole, could only resort to using their helmet or a K-Ration box. A further horror was discovered. Boar from the forests were eating the stomachs of unburied casualties. Those who had profited from the chaotic hunting expeditions before the battle must have had queasy thoughts. Most soldiers had become indifferent to the sight of bodies, but the graves registration personnel who cleared up afterwards had no choice.

Although Patton still favoured the idea of allowing the Germans to advance further so as to destroy them better, he accepted Bradley’s decision that Bastogne, a vital road hub, had to be held at all costs. The 101st Airborne was supported by two armoured combat commands, two
companies of tank destroyers and an artillery battalion which was short of shells. Everything depended on the skies clearing so that C-47s could parachute ammunition and supplies into the encirclement.

Montgomery also had not been idle. As soon as he recognized the threat to his rear, he had swung Horrocks’s XXX Corps round into a blocking position on the north-west bank of the Meuse to secure the bridges. This happened to coincide perfectly with Eisenhower’s plan to prepare the Meuse bridges for demolition, to prevent the Germans from seizing them.

As soon as he heard from Eisenhower that he was to take over First US Army, Montgomery left for Spa. He arrived in Hodges’s headquarters, according to one of his own staff officers, ‘
like Christ come to
clean the temple’. Hodges appears at first to have been in a state of shock, incapable of taking a decision. It transpired that he and Bradley had not been in touch for two days, proving that Eisenhower had been right to call in Monty.

What Patton called his ‘
chestnut pulling expedition
’ would be ready to start, as he had told Eisenhower, on 22 December. ‘We should get well into the guts of the enemy and cut his supply lines,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘
Destiny sent for me
in a hurry when things got tight. Perhaps God saved me for this effort.’

Yet already events were turning in the Americans’ favour through determination and bravery. On the northern shoulder of the breakthrough, V Corps, commanded by Eisenhower’s old friend ‘Gee’ Gerow, was defending the Elsenborn Ridge with a mixture of infantry, tank destroyers, engineers and above all artillery. They managed to fight off the 12th SS Panzer Division
Hitler Jugend
during the night of 20 December and the following day. Altogether, some
782 German corpses
were found in front of their positions.

Montgomery failed to acknowledge the extraordinary resilience and bravery of those American units holding the shoulders of the breakthrough. Instead he focused only on the mess he found at First Army and his role in clearing it up. Field Marshal Brooke was dreading how he would behave on finally receiving the command he wanted, and Montgomery confirmed his worst fears.

In a meeting with Bradley on Christmas Day, Montgomery said that things had gone wrong since Normandy because his advice had not been followed. A seething Bradley listened in silence. With his armour-plated conceit, Montgomery assumed as he had in Normandy that silence implied agreement with everything he said.

Bradley had gone to see Montgomery to persuade him to launch his counter-attack as soon as possible. But in this case Montgomery was almost certainly right to delay. Patton’s rapid reaction had taken the
Germans aback, but by attacking with just three divisions, instead of the six Eisenhower had wanted, he extended the Battle for Bastogne rather than ending it. Montgomery, in his deliberate way, wanted to seal the bulge, and then smash it. He would not give a date, since he needed to be sure of good weather for the Allied air forces to attack.

The weather had deteriorated even more, greatly restricting air operations. Apart from a bombing raid on Trier which included Harris’s Bomber Command, little had been achieved, and this was not from lack of trying or cooperation. Coningham, the New Zealander who now commanded the RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force, got on extremely well with Quesada. The skies only began to clear on 23 December. Two days later came ‘
a clear cold Christmas
, lovely weather for killing Germans’, as Patton wrote in his diary. The air forces did not waste the opportunity. P-47 Thunderbolts and RAF Typhoons established a co-ordinated campaign of ground attacks, while the fighters dealt with 900 Luftwaffe sorties on the first day. Allied supremacy was rapidly established. Within a week, the Luftwaffe could put up no more than 200.

Quesada’s IX Tactical Air Command was greatly admired by American ground forces for its panache, but it had acquired a reputation for bad navigation and target recognition. In October when called in to attack specific positions on the Westwall in Germany, not a single aircraft found the target. One even flattened the Belgian mining village of Genk, causing eighty civilian casualties. The 30th Division was hit hard when it reached Malmedy. This was the thirteenth time since landing in Normandy that it had been attacked by its own aircraft, and GIs even started to refer to the Ninth as ‘
the American Luftwaffe
’. This rather underlined the German army joke since Normandy that ‘if it’s British, we duck; if it’s American everybody ducks; and if it’s the Luftwaffe nobody ducks’.

On 1 January 1945, the Luftwaffe, on Göring’s order, made a maximum effort, with 800 fighters from all over Germany coming in to attack Allied airfields. To achieve surprise they were to come in at tree-top level, under Allied radar cover. But the extreme secrecy precautions imposed on Operation
Bodenplatte
(Baseplate) meant that many pilots were insufficiently briefed and German flak units were not notified. It is estimated that nearly a hundred aircraft were shot down by their own anti-aircraft batteries. Overall the Allies lost about 150 aircraft while the Luftwaffe lost close to 300, with 214 pilots killed or taken prisoner. It was the Luftwaffe’s final humiliation. Allied air power was now unchallenged.

With the encirclement of Bastogne finally broken on 27 December 1944, Montgomery came under pressure to launch his counter-attack by 3 January. But the field marshal remained obsessed with command issues. Brooke
was right to be uneasy, for Monty began to lecture Eisenhower again in the same tones as he had used with Bradley. ‘
It looks to me
’, Brooke wrote in his diary, ‘as if Monty, with his usual lack of tact, has been rubbing into Ike the results of not having listened to Monty’s advice! Too much of “I told you so” to assist in creating the required friendly relations between them.’ Once again Eisenhower failed to be tough with him, and this prompted Montgomery to write him a disastrous follow-up letter, laying down the law on strategy and insisting that he should be given command over Bradley’s 12th Army Group as well.

General Marshall had also been provoked by the way the British press played Montgomery’s refrain, calling for a virtually independent command. He therefore wrote to Eisenhower urging him to make no concessions. This, combined with Montgomery’s letter, prompted Eisenhower to draft a signal to the combined chiefs of staff which basically said that unless Montgomery was replaced, preferably by Alexander, then he would resign. Montgomery’s chief of staff, de Guingand, heard of this ulti matum. He persuaded Eisenhower to hold back for twenty-four hours and went straight to Montgomery with an apology already drafted, which asked Eisenhower to tear up his previous letter. Montgomery had been put back in his box, but only for the moment.

Eisenhower’s use of Patton’s Third Army created a number of side-effects further south. Devers had to take over part of Patton’s front. This would mean shifting troops from the south and withdrawing from Strasbourg to straighten the line. De Gaulle, who had not been consulted, objected angrily when he heard. The idea of giving up Strasbourg just over a month after liberating it would threaten the very stability of his government. The political implications were far more significant than Eisenhower had realized.

On 3 January, at Churchill’s urging, a conference was held at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Versailles with de Gaulle, Churchill and Brooke. Eisenhower conceded that Strasbourg would be held after all, and de Gaulle was so carried away that he immediately drafted a communiqué. His chef de cabinet, Gaston Palewski, took it round to the British embassy to show it first to Duff Cooper, the British ambassador. This vainglorious announcement ‘
suggested that de Gaulle
had summoned a military conference which the Prime Minister and Eisenhower had been allowed to attend’. Duff Cooper managed to persuade Palewski to tone it down.