Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The suggestion, three days before the assault was scheduled to begin, seemed odd, especially coming from the man Eisenhower once described as “the perfect staff officer.”20 It would have been well-nigh impossible for the staff at 1st Airborne Corps to do all the necessary work in time, not to mention the problems of coordinating the new action with the Second Army. That Smith nevertheless recommended it to Eisenhower indicated how seriously he took Strong’s information.

  But Ike could hardly tell Monty how to use his divisions. American army practice was to give subordinates in the field a free hand. Monty was closer to the battle than Ike; Second Army commander and 1st Airborne Corps commander were closer than Monty; presumably they could best judge how to use their strength. As at OVERLORD, Eisenhower could have canceled the operation, but there were two good reasons not to do so. First, the Germans had not been able to stand and fight since the Falaise battle a month earlier. There was no overwhelming reason to believe that they could do so now, and the Allied troops and their commanders were all anxious to go.

  Second, it would have exacerbated the bad feelings between SHAEF, Bradley, and Patton on the one hand, and Monty on the other. Tension was dangerously high already. “I cannot tell Monty how to dispose of his troops,” Ike told Smith, nor could he “call off the operation, since I have already given Monty the green light.” But he did want to make sure Monty had the benefit of Strong’s information and Smith’s recommendations. He told the two generals to “fly to 21st Army Group headquarters and argue it out with Montgomery.”21

  Strong and Smith flew to Brussels, where they met with Monty. Smith recommended that because of the unexpected presence of the 2d ss Panzer Corps in Arnhem, the landing zone of one of the American airborne divisions be switched there.

  Montgomery, Smith later told S. L. A. Marshall, “ridiculed the idea. Monty felt the greatest opposition would come more from terrain difficulties than from the Germans. All would go well, he kept repeating, if we at SHAEF would help him surmount his logistical difficulties. He was not worried about the German armor. He thought MARKET-GARDEN would go all right as set.” Smith added, “At least I tried to stop him, but I got nowhere. Montgomery simply waved my objections airily aside.”22

  The attack went as scheduled. It almost worked, but at a terrible price. Field Marshal Model and his panzers lived up to their reputation, counterattacking fiercely and skillfully, imposing on the British 1st Airborne Division the worst losses suffered by any Allied division in the war. Of the 10,005 men who dropped into Arnhem, casualties totaled 7,578. The division ceased to exist.23

  Overall, the Allies took heavier casualties in MARKET-GARDEN than they did on D-Day. Their attempt to leap the Rhine had been thrown back. There would be no victory before Christmas. A long, tough winter campaign loomed ahead. Much had been lost, nothing gained by MARKET-GARDEN.

  As Strong summed it up in 1979, “Our information was sufficient for me to utter a warning—Intelligence can seldom do much more than that—of potential danger from armoured troops. After that it is up to the decision makers and there is no guarantee that they will heed the Intelligence people.”24

  It is easy, today, to criticize Monty—and his boss, Eisenhower—for not heeding their intelligence people, but every attack carries with it the risk of heavy casualties and failure. Potential losses must be balanced against potential gains. As Strong himself put it in his memoirs, “The astonishing thing was that the great gallantry of those taking part brought the Arnhem operation so near to success. If it had not been for the quick and incisive reactions of the Germans, triggered off by the chance presence on the spot of that most energetic German commander, Field-Marshal Model, all our objectives might have been captured, in spite of the armoured divisions lurking in the background.”25

  Or, to put it into a cliché, with a little bit of luck it would have worked.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ike’s Intelligence Failure at the Bulge

  MIDNIGHT, DECEMBER 15–16, 1944, in the Eifel, the rough mountainous country in western Germany, at the spot where Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany meet, directly opposite the rugged forest area of the Ardennes. All through the Eifel there is feverish activity. Squad leaders wake their men in churches, town halls, cellars, and attics. They hustle the sleepy-eyed soldiers off to their assembly points. Engines roar, and out of haystacks come tanks, gigantic tanks with long muzzles sniffing the air, looking in the mist like prehistoric monsters, to meet with other monsters emerging from barns, from under trees, or camouflage netting. Elsewhere soldiers throw back the tarps that cover their cannon, or remove the brush they had piled up against the big guns, and make ready for action.

  For the first time since the spring of 1943, at Kursk in faraway Russia, the German Army, the mighty Wehrmacht, is about to take the offensive.

  AS LONG AGO as the middle of September 1944, on the eve of the Arnhem battle, Hitler had started planning his counterattack against Eisenhower’s armies. He had selected the Ardennes for this, his masterstroke, for a number of good reasons. Eisenhower was unlikely to station strong forces there, partly because the road net was inadequate to supply many troops, more because of the nature of the terrain in the Eifel. The natural defensive strength of the mountain country meant that Ike’s armies would have to flow to the north and south of the area. Further, the Allies would never expect an attack through the Ardennes, even though that was where the German tanks broke through the French lines in 1940, because the Allies did not believe Hitler could collect sufficient fuel to sustain an attack through the Ardennes into the open country beyond the Meuse River.

  Hitler’s plan of attack was bold and daring, designed to win not just a local tactical victory but rather a strategic success that would reverse the fortunes of the war. The basic idea was for two panzer armies to break through the thinly held line of the U. S. First Army in the Ardennes, with two additional German armies providing flank protection and reinforcements. The panzers, once into the clear, would cross the Meuse River, then turn northwest, toward Antwerp, the largest port in Europe and Eisenhower’s lifeline. The attack would split the British and American forces in Europe while cutting their supply lines. If Hitler’s wildest fantasy then came true, the Western Allies would sue for peace, leaving Germany free to turn all of her forces against the Red Army, then pressing against Germany’s eastern border. To succeed, Hitler needed to gather enough strength in the Eifel to strike with overwhelming force at the point of attack; he needed surprise; and he needed enough gasoline reserves to carry his tanks to Antwerp.

  Security was a sine qua non, and security meant first of all keeping to an absolute minimum the number of those who knew of the offensive, those “in the know.” This suited Hitler’s inclination anyway, because after the July 20 attempt on his life, Hitler trusted almost none of his generals—with good reason.

  One that he did trust was Rundstedt, whom he called out of retirement to serve as commander of the attack. In fact, however, Rundstedt’s role in the Ardennes battle was similar to Patton’s in the Normandy battle—he was a decoy. Hitler personally took charge of the tactical details; Rundstedt’s presence was designed to make the Allies think that if a counterattack did come, it would be north of the Ardennes, because Rundstedt was too much the professional soldier to try anything so crazy as a tank attack through the Ardennes without sufficient gasoline.

  Hitler oversaw everything, missing no detail. It was an impressive performance. Gathering two panzer armies in the Eifel was a gigantic logistical task. Men, tanks, cannon were brought in from all over Europe, from Norway to Austria. Other units were pulled away from the fighting in Holland, conveyed back over the Rhine, refitted and reinforced, and sent back again over the Rhine to the Eifel. Enormous quantities of fuel, ammunition, food, bridging equipment, camouflage netting, and other materials were moved into the assembly area, and all movement had to take place by night. Come dawn, everything was hidden from the Allied air forces.

  The Germans too
k special precautions to prevent deserters from crossing the line with news of the activity in the Eifel. In the first two weeks of December, there were only five deserters on the whole Western front; usually there were ten or more per day. German officers with knowledge of the plan were not allowed to fly west of the Rhine for fear of capture in the event of an accident. Hitler counted on, and got, Europe’s traditionally bad late-fall weather, which hindered Allied air reconnaissance.

  Security covered everything. Along the Eifel front line, only units that had been in position for some weeks were allowed to fire, and even they at a reduced rate, to give the idea that they were low on ammunition. Radio communication was kept up at exactly the same rate, day after day for a month and more. Patrolling was kept down to a minimum.

  Altogether, without the Allies ever suspecting a thing, Hitler gathered an impressive force in the Eifel, not so great as he had hoped, but much larger than his skeptical generals had thought possible when he first announced his plan. The total was nearly two hundred thousand combat troops with about five hundred tanks and nearly two thousand guns, organized into two panzer armies of twenty-four divisions.

  Like Eisenhower, Hitler knew that to achieve surprise it is necessary not only to make sure the enemy does not know where you are attacking but to get him to look for an attack in another place. All the shifting of German troops, the movement of units across Europe, could not be totally hidden from Allied intelligence. Divisions do not disappear. It might be possible to make Strong and his subordinates think that two or three, or even five or six, divisions had been cannibalized—broken up and placed as reinforcements—but not ten or more. There had to be some believable explanation about what was happening to the divisions withdrawn from the front lines. Nor could the movement of all those guns, tanks, and trucks be kept a complete secret.

  Hitler therefore tried to divert Allied attention to the north, in the Roer River area, where SHAEF G-2 already expected a counterattack. The Germans did what they could to encourage that idea. Troops’ movements toward the Roer were not carefully concealed. As the Allies did in FORTITUDE, the Germans created a ghost army, the Twenty-fifth, with radio traffic, movement orders, and all the other activity associated with the organization of a new army. The existence of the Twenty-fifth helped in accounting for divisions actually attached to Sixth ss Panzer Army. Civilians were openly evacuated from the Roer area, and artillery fire was greatly increased.

  From what the Germans could tell, the deception scheme had worked. The Americans in the Ardennes, only three divisions strong (VIII Corps, General Troy Middleton commanding), were cocky after the long string of successes they had won—overconfident and security-lax. VIII Corps radio chitter-chatter had told the Germans that nothing was suspected and that no reinforcements were on the way.

  On December 15, Hitler got a prediction of bad weather for the next week, and gave the order to go. The final briefings came as a surprise to many of the officers and men, but their surprise soon gave way to elation. The Wehrmacht was on the move again! It would be just like the spring of 1940.1

  MIDNIGHT, DECEMBER 15–16, 1944, at SHAEF headquarters, Trianon Palace Hotel, Versailles, outside Paris. General Eisenhower took one last sip of champagne, waved one last good-bye. He was in a fine mood. It had been a wonderful party, held at WAC quarters, to celebrate a marriage earlier that day between two enlisted personnel of the inner SHAEF staff.

  Ike had something else to celebrate too—that day he learned that his nomination as General of the Army, with its five stars, had been sent by FDR to the Senate. In 1940 Ike had told his son John that he expected to retire within a year or so at the rank of lieutenant colonel, after having been a major for sixteen years. Since the war began, he had risen from light colonel to five-star general—six promotions in a little over three years.2

  Christmas, promotions, weddings, parties—the mood was a gay one throughout the Allied Expeditionary Force. Monty had written Ike on December 15 to ask permission to “hop over to England” to spend the Christmas holidays with his son. Ike said he was delighted Monty had the chance and added a heartfelt, “I envy you.”3 In mid-November the U. S. First Army had moved its headquarters to Spa, just north of Malmedy on the edge of the Ardennes. An intelligence officer with the First Army later wrote, “Until then, we had been in the field in tents. I mention this because there is no doubt that once we moved into buildings we began to feel more civilized, and on the whole I don’t think the headquarters was on its toes as well as it had been when the men were out in the swamps or fields. Spa, an almost untouched city, is one of the great European resorts, and the buildings into which we moved offered many luxuries.”4

  Buoyant, breezy, sure of itself, the AEF waited only for a break in the weather to finish the job against the Wehrmacht. When the First Army gathered into its POW cages the 250,000th German prisoner, a staff officer suggested that they hold a formal ceremony at which the lucky German would be given a War Bond.5 In 1979, General Strong recalled “the general euphoria that existed among the top commanders. The German was already beaten and that was that!”6

  It was difficult to think otherwise. On December 3, Eisenhower had written to the Combined Chiefs, “General Strong reports to me in his latest G-2 report that the attacks that began in November have eliminated at least 128,000 Germans. I know that there have been counted through the cages of the First, Ninth and Third Armies, more than 40,000 prisoners. Our losses have been nothing like the figures given above.”7

  Two days later, in a personal letter to Marshall, Ike said, “At present we have newly formed Divisions arriving on our front, and have attracted several Divisions directly from Hungary and East Prussia. In spite of all this, the enemy is badly stretched on this front and is constantly shifting units up and down the line to reinforce his most threatened points.”

  That was exactly what Hitler wanted Ike to believe. Indeed, if Hitler could have seen Eisenhower’s letter to Marshall, he would have been delighted. From Hitler’s point of view, there was even better to come. Eisenhower declared that G-2 studies “show that the German is more frightened of our operations” in the Roer and Saar—that is, north and south of the Eifel—“than anywhere else,” and thus more likely to counterattack there.8

  The SHAEF intelligence team, along with its subordinate units attached to the armies, corps, and divisions in the field, liked to think of itself as the best in the world. As Eisenhower’s report to Marshall indicated, G-2 recognized that new divisions were coming into the line, that the Germans had been attempting to gather together an armored reserve, and that a counterattack was a distinct possibility. Indeed, First Army’s G-2 Estimate No. 37 of December 10, 1944, declared that second among four possible German actions was “a concentrated counterattack with air, armor, infantry and secret weapons at a selected focal point at a time of his own choosing.”9

  Strong told Smith, early in December, that the German reserve might be transferred to the Eastern front, or that it might strike in the Ardennes or east of the Vosges, whenever the Germans had a prediction of six days of bad weather. Smith asked his G-2 head to go to Bradley to warn him of these possibilities. Strong did so, and Bradley said, “Let them come.”

  Bradley’s G-2 at Twelfth Army Group concluded that the enemy was using the Eifel as a training ground, putting replacements into the line there in order to give them experience. First Army G-2 reported in early December, “During the past month there has been a definite pattern for the seasoning of newly-formed divisions in the comparatively quiet sector opposite VIII Corps prior to their dispatch to more active fronts.” And VIII Corps’ G-2 reported on December 9, “The enemy’s present practice of bringing new divisions to this sector to receive front line experience and then relieving them out for commitment elsewhere indicates his desire to have this sector of the front remain quiet and inactive.”10

  In sum, at midnight on December 15–16, 1944, the Allies were as ignorant of German intentions and capabilities as the G
ermans had been of Allied plans at midnight on June 5–6, 1944. When, at dawn on December 16, the German artillery barrage began and the tanks started to grind their way westward through the mist and fog, the attack came as a complete surprise.

  THE WORLD’S GREATEST intelligence establishment had been badly fooled. Attacking where they were not expected helped the Germans but it was the size, fury, and sustained power of the attack that came as the greatest surprise to SHAEF.

  Forrest Pogue, SHAEF’S official historian (and later General Marshall’s biographer), has written a comprehensive analysis of the intelligence failure. His conclusion is that there were four major reasons for it. First, although Ike and Bradley realized the Germans were capable of some offensive action somewhere, they were reluctant to move their troops from point to point to meet every possible threat, not only because it was impractical but also because it would disrupt their own offensive plans. The second reason was SHAEF’S emphasis on an offensive strategy. The third was the erroneous belief that Rundstedt, the cautious and traditional soldier, was controlling strategy and would not put his troops into the open where the Allied air force could destroy them. The fourth was the belief that the German fuel shortage would preclude any major counterattack.11

  As noted earlier, ULTRA was of little help once the Germans stabilized the line and could use the telephone. What little ULTRA did reveal was, for purposes of predicting the Ardennes attack, misleading. Most ULTRA material came from the Luftwaffe, and most Luftwaffe traffic consisted of complaints about the fuel situation. The various Allied G-2s had come to rely excessively on ULTRA, rather like Mockler-Ferryman in the desert at Kasserine Pass. Because ULTRA did not reveal any preparations for an attack, while it did indicate a severe fuel shortage, the G-2s concluded that there was nothing to worry about.