Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Adolph Rosengarten, SLU with the U. S. First Army, in a 1978 article in the professional journal Military Affairs on his experiences with ULTRA, recalled one intercept that might have been decisive. “Dissected during a post-mortem of the Bulge with a reader from another headquarters, one signal in early December I remember from a Luftwaffe Liaison officer to his command had reported that he had reached his destination (if memory now serves, the headquarters of a named Panzer corps), where they were preparing for the forthcoming operations. Homer wrote that after the event even the fool is wise, and today one can infer from that signal that something on a large scale was planned. But, I submit, the American intelligence officer, who in early December 1944 used that isolated intercept to predict an offensive led by two Panzer armies with adequate flank support, would have been sent home.”12

  There was another hint that, properly interpreted, would have prepared the Allies for the assault. Operational Intelligence Centre at the British Admiralty detected, according to Patrick Beesly, “a very considerable southward movement of troops from Norway. On October 30 it reported, ‘the gross tonnage of shipping which has made the passage from Oslofjord to Denmark from the middle of October amounts to 95,000 GRT. It is estimated that this is sufficient to have lifted at least one division from Norway. Elements of the 269th Division previously stationed in the Bergen area have been identified on the Western Front during the last few days.’ The movements continued throughout November and the first half of December.” Beesly adds flatly, “Eisenhower’s intelligence staff cannot have drawn the right conclusions from these reports.

  Overconfidence was one reason, looking in the opposite direction another. Ike was emphasizing the offensive. The Allied bombers were blasting German production facilities. The Red Army was pressing hard on the Eastern front. Rundstedt’s only hope for holding the line once spring came was to husband his forces. To use them up in a German offensive that could achieve nothing more than a slight tactical success made no sense. What SHAEF, the army groups, and the armies were concerned with was not what the Germans might do to them but rather what they would do to the Germans.14

  Only in the Eifel, in German territory, could the Wehrmacht assemble such a mighty force without SHAEF discovering its presence. Had the Germans tried to do it anywhere in France, Holland, or Belgium, local resistance groups would have gotten the word to SHAEF immediately. Indeed, the surprise the Germans achieved at the Bulge is one of the most telling comments on the value of the underground forces to Ike and his armies during the campaigns in France.

  Spies inside Germany might have helped predict the attack, but both SOE and OSS had concentrated on cooperating with the French, and neither had an extensive spy network set up in enemy territory. OSS had only four men inside Germany and they had no communications with London and were producing no intelligence.15

  Eisenhower personally insisted on accepting the blame for the surprise, and he was right to do so, for his failures were the crucial ones. He had failed to read correctly the mind of the enemy commander; he had failed to recognize that Hitler, not Rundstedt, was directing the strategy; he had failed to see that Hitler would try anything. He was the man responsible for the weakness of the line in the Ardennes, the one who had insisted on continuing the offensives north and south of that area. As a result of his policies there was no general SHAEF reserve available.

  But despite his mistakes, Ike was the first Allied general to grasp the full import of the attack, the first to be able to readjust his thinking, the first to realize that although the surprise German offensive and the initial Allied losses were painful, in reality Hitler had given AEF a magnificent opportunity. On December 16, at Versailles, Bradley was inclined to think, on the basis of scattered reports, that the attack was a local one that could be stopped without difficulty. Ike insisted that he send armored divisions from the north and south toward the flanks of the attack. The next day Ike reported to Washington that the enemy had “launched a rather ambitious counterattack east of the Luxembourg area where we have been holding very thinly.” He said he was bringing some armor in to hit the German flanks and concluded, “If things go well we should not only stop the thrust but should be able to profit from it.”16

  By December 19 the Germans were already dangerously behind schedule. Although they had crushed most of Middleton’s VIII Corps, small units or groups of Americans continued to fight and hold up the advance. As expected, the poor road system was hurting the Germans, too, especially because Ike had rushed the 101st Airborne into the key road junction at Bastogne.

  But in the Allied world, there was something close to panic. In Paris the French flags that in August had waved so proudly from nearly every window were now discreetly put back into storage. In Belgium people braced themselves for another German occupation nightmare. Jews who had survived the first occupation went back into hiding.

  A special German detachment of English-speaking soldiers, dressed in American uniforms and infiltrated behind the lines, added to the panic. Some put on U. S. Military Police armbands and misdirected traffic, while others went on kidnaping and assassination missions, with Ike himself as the ultimate target. As one result, Harry Butcher recorded, “Ike is a prisoner of our security police and is thoroughly but helplessly irritated by the restrictions on his moves. There are all sorts of guards, some with machine guns, around him, and he has to travel to and from the office led and followed by an armed guard in a jeep.”17

  In spite of the disastrous beginning, it was at the Bulge that Eisenhower came into his own as a military commander. As General Strong has written, “The Ardennes shows Eisenhower at his very best—decisive, determined and in full control of the situation.”18 On December 19, when the threat appeared most alarming, he called a war council at Verdun, where the Allied High Command met in a cold, damp squad room in a French army barracks, with only a lone potbellied stove to ease the chill. Everyone looked glum and serious.

  Ike opened the meeting by declaring, “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.”

  Patton picked up the theme. “Hell, let’s have the guts to let the —— — —— go all the way to Paris,” he said, grinning. “Then we’ll really cut ’em off and chew ’em up.”19

  Eisenhower next told his commanders what he had already said to Butcher: “It is easier and less costly to us to kill Germans when they are attacking than when they are holed up in concrete fortifications in the Siegfried Line, and the more we can kill in their present offensive, the fewer we will have to dig out pillbox by pillbox.”20

  Another mark of Eisenhower’s self-confidence during this crisis was a conversation he had with Bradley, with only General Strong present to overhear it. Because the early German success had disrupted communications lines, Eisenhower had given command of the U. S. First Army to Monty, on a temporary basis only. Bradley was furious. He did not like Monty to begin with, and it was galling to have the First Army taken from him at the height of the battle.

  “I cannot be responsible to the American people if you do this,” Bradley told Ike—one of his oldest and best friends—and added for good measure that he wished to resign at once. Ike was shocked, according to Strong, but recovered quickly and declared flatly, “Brad, I, not you, am responsible to the American people. Your resignation therefore means absolutely nothing.” Bradley hesitated a moment, then accepted the situation.21

  THE BATTLE THAT FOLLOWED, the Battle of the Bulge, is the most written-about battle of World War II, and it need not be discussed any further here, except to point out that once the attack began, the Germans left behind them their telephone and teleprinter links, so they were forced to use the radio again. That brought ULTRA back into play. The SLUS could report to their commands the location of German units, the relief and replacement of top officers, the chain of command, division boundaries, the location of headquarters, and the movement of larger format
ions.

  Hitler’s bold bid failed, as Rundstedt knew it would. The Allies won a smashing victory in the Ardennes, and the chief result of the battle was that, when good weather came in the spring of 1945, Rundstedt had insufficient forces left to defend Germany. The Allies by then had such overwhelming strength that they no longer required exact, precise information about the enemy. They could simply overwhelm the Wehrmacht.

  Strong’s comment on the intelligence failure at the Bulge was that “the consequences were of course serious, but perhaps too much attention has been paid to this specific question.” A major factor helping the Germans to achieve surprise was Strong’s own estimate of German capabilities, not only in armored units but also in the fuel and the supply situation generally. Strong’s information was such that he believed Rundstedt was incapable of sustaining a major offensive.

  Strong was absolutely correct in this conclusion. As he writes, “It should not be forgotten that our estimate of German capabilities at this stage of the war was basically sounder than the estimate of those who launched the Ardennes offensive—the Germans themselves.”23

  AT THE END OF THE WAR, Colonel Telford Taylor, the man in command of the SLUS and the distribution of ULTRA material, asked all his SLUS to submit a full written report on their experiences. For a third of a century these reports were kept under lock and key at the National Archives, finally being declassified in October of 1978. They provide a major source for the history of ULTRA, its uses, and effectiveness.

  Lieutenant Colonel Adolph Rosengarten wrote the longest report, and the most self-critical. He stated bluntly “that the Ardennes Offensive, which was very costly, could have been foreseen.” He gave four basic reasons. First, “the enemy was defending on an artificial line with a major obstacle, the Rhine, astride his supply lines.” Second, basic German army doctrine was an active defense. Third, “the German situation, in the big picture, was so desperate that he could afford to take the longest chances.” Fourth, “the effect of our overwhelming air superiority was minimized by choosing a time when daylight was shortest, and the weather most likely to be bad.” Rosengarten admitted that some clues came in from other sources, but were ignored because none came from ULTRA.

  Once the Allies realized that they faced an all-out offensive with Antwerp as the strategic objective, Rosengarten wrote, “The tide swung precipitously from general optimism based on the long-term hopelessness of Germany’s strategic position to calamity and woe, involving the imminent arrival of divisions believed to be in the East (as well as invented ones), and new secret weapons. The problem was to keep the record accurate and straight.”24

  THAT THE SLUS, and the G-2s and their commanders, took more care after the Bulge was clear on January 1, 1945, when the Germans launched another, secondary offensive. Major Donald Bussey, SLU to the U. S. Seventh Army, stated in his postwar report that shortly after the Ardennes offensive began, ULTRA started picking up GAF reconnaissance orders to cover the Saar-Palatinate area. It was clear that an attack was in the offing, and that its objective was to draw off Allied strength from the Bulge. But where would it come?

  Bussey found that by putting together enemy order-of-battle information, along with the boundary lines between German units (information provided by ULTRA), he could “state with relative certainty that the main effort in the attack would be made west of the Hardt Mountains, with a secondary attack between the mountains and the Rhine.” Bussey commented, “If there was ever an essential element of information this was it, for the passes through the Vosges Mountains were a serious obstacle to the rapid movement of Seventh Army reserves.” Using the information Bussey had picked up from the GAF intercepts, Eisenhower reinforced the threatened sector with the 2d French Armored Division and the U. S. 36th Infantry Division (a veteran outfit and one of the best); these movements were not picked up by German intelligence.

  Bussey described the result: “When the attack was launched on 1 January, the German main effort collapsed completely. Their only success was in the sector of the secondary effort, in and east of the Hardt Mountains. This German offensive was properly appreciated and preparations made to successfully meet the threat. Lacking ULTRA it seems very doubtful whether the attack would have been repulsed, or whether other sources of information would have given advance warning. Open sources provided only the most meager evidence of an attack, and there was much opposing evidence suggesting precisely the opposite—a thinning out in the sector and movement of units away from the Saar-Palatinate to reinforce the North.”25

  WHILE IKE’S ARMIES met and repulsed these last-gasp German attacks, his air forces were busy pounding Germany to bits. In the air war, ULTRA continued to be of great help because the Luftwaffe used the radio constantly and carelessly. There was so much ULTRA material that the Tactical Air Forces had not only a SLU attached to headquarters, but in addition a Special Adviser on ULTRA. Major Lucius Buck explained that “the necessity for the Special Adviser grew out of the failure … to recognize the capabilities and role of tactical air power, coupled with the unworkable and fallacious theory that it was the function of Armies and Army Groups to do target planning for the Tactical Air Forces and their Tactical Air Commands; and a ‘Battle of Britain’ emphasis on ULTRA at Air Ministry and War Station, that is, a stressing of Order of Battle aspects and a large discount of the target value. This was inconsistent with American concepts of offensive air power.”26

  Other Americans echoed Buck’s complaint that the British concentrated too much on what the Germans might do to them, not enough on what air power might do to the Germans. Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Rood, SLU at the First Tactical Air Force, wrote in his report to Taylor, “If I have any criticism to make of Bletchley Park’s amazing contribution to the War it is that it failed to recognize after D-Day that targets had replaced the German Air Force as the main interest of air intelligence. At BP I gained the impression that the GAF was a hot subject but at the commands the operations people were completely uninterested in its grandiose plans and ineffective operations. The Allied air superiority was too overwhelming to be affected by anything the GAF might do.”

  Nevertheless, Rood went on, “GAF news continued to come over the link in its carefully processed form while the target information arrived without the benefit of BP’S usual dependable thought.”

  In his analysis of the situation, Rood pointed out that “target intelligence is naturally more controversial than order of battle because in it intelligence becomes operational. Perhaps I was seeking order where there could be no order. Yet I feel that had BP exercised the same careful and ubiquitous guidance in this field as it did in order of battle, some of the wasteful target arguments might have been eliminated and the bombers used more intelligently.”27

  Insofar as there was a GAF left after D-Day, ULTRA provided the clues that rendered it inoperative. Lieutenant Colonel James Fellers, SLU to the IX Tactical Air Command, noted that in attacking GAF facilities, “it was of key importance to produce bomb craters. Repair was no longer a simple process of bulldozer and roller. In the existing weather, the craters filled with water, drainage was poor, and considerable delay in restoring serviceability was affected. ULTRA revealed that the real way to render the GAF non-operational was not in shooting up individual aircraft by strafing, but rather by destroying fuel stocks and supplies, rendering airfields unserviceable and delaying repairs. The significance of ULTRA in affecting such changes in Allied tactics is noteworthy.”28

  There was general agreement among the U. S. Army Air Force officers who served as SLUS that ULTRA was the best guide to target priorities. Within hours of a raid, BP would pick up the Germans’ own damage report and assessment, thus telling the Allies whether they needed to hit that particular target again. And, as Major Ansel Talbert, SLU at U. S. Eighth Air Force, pointed out, ULTRA was “the agent which changed different viewpoints into a common policy.” Throughout the war, both the British and American air forces complained that they had too many masters to
serve—SHAEF, 21st Army Group, 12th Army Group, the various armies, and even corps headquarters. Each master had his own idea as to the proper use of Allied air power.

  ULTRA served as the ultimate guide, rejecting this or that pet theory on the basis of the German reaction while embracing others. As Talbert noted, “The oil offensive was not undertaken until a few weeks before the invasion and there was considerable skepticism in many air force quarters whether it would pay off in time to affect German air and ground operations. By Fall 1944, ULTRA began to reveal shortages of fuel which grew in proportions rapidly and soon clearly were revealed by ULTRA as being general, NOT local. This convinced all concerned that the air offensive had uncovered a weak spot in the German economy and led to exploitation of this weakness to the fullest extent.”29

  BY THE SPRING OF 1945, Germany was finished. Ike’s air forces dominated the sky overhead, his troops could go almost anywhere at will, the Russians were closing in on Berlin, and his need for information about the enemy’s plans, intentions, and capabilities had all but disappeared. There was, however, to be one more minor flap over intelligence.

  Allen Dulles, head of the OSS operation in Switzerland, and his agents became convinced that the Germans were building an Alpine redoubt, or fortress, in the Bavarian Alps, where Hitler intended to make a last-ditch, Wagnerian stand, a true Götterdämmerung. As early as September 1944, OSS reports had warned of the possibility that as the war neared its end the Nazis would probably evacuate key government departments to Bavaria.30

  Then on February 16, 1945, Dulles’ office sent to OSS headquarters in Washington a bizarre report obtained from agents in Berlin: “The Nazis are undoubtedly preparing for a bitter fight from the mountain redoubt.… Strongpoints are connected by underground railroads … several months’ output of the best munitions have been reserved and almost all of Germany’s poison gas supplies. Everybody who participated in the construction of the secret installations will be killed off—including the civilians who happen to remain behind when the real fighting starts.”31