The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Other moves quickly followed. SHAEF’s only experienced combat reserve consisted of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions; both had hoped for another month to recuperate from MARKET GARDEN and the harsh subsequent weeks near Nijmegen, but neither would get another day. Army tactical doctrine, learned in World War I, called for containing an enemy salient by first crimping the shoulders of any incursion. Paratroopers from both divisions were ordered to the Ardennes posthaste to help crimp. The deployments of one armored division and three infantry divisions from Britain to the Continent would be accelerated, as would troopship sailings to France from the United States. Commanders at the front were told that Meuse bridges were to be held at all costs, or blown into the river if necessary. Patton also was instructed to prepare to swing north, and to take Middleton’s beleaguered VIII Corps under his wing. “By rushing out from his fixed defenses,” Eisenhower added in an order to subordinates, “the enemy may give us the chance to turn his great gamble into his worst defeat.” Supply dumps would be defended, evacuated, or burned as required, and defenses around Paris strengthened. Even so, a French officer visiting Versailles on Monday asked General Strong, “Why are you not packing? Aren’t you making any preparation to leave?”

  In a message to Marshall, Eisenhower assured the chief that “in no quarter is there any tendency to place any blame upon Bradley”; he had “kept his head magnificently.” Yet only grudgingly did Bradley acknowledge his peril. While returning to his headquarters—this time in an armored limousine escorted by MPs—he turned his practiced bird hunter’s eye to the passing landscape and cheerfully pointed out pheasants in roadside fields. Upon learning in Luxembourg City that at least fourteen German divisions were attacking, he muttered, “Where in hell has this son of a bitch gotten all his strength?” With the fighting front barely a dozen miles away, his room in the Hôtel Alfa was moved to the rear of the building as a precaution against stray artillery, and he now avoided the front door, entering through the kitchen. Aides removed the three-star insignia from his jeep and covered those on his helmet. Frequent air-raid sirens and booming antiaircraft guns woke him repeatedly despite the sleeping sedatives he took. During a brief moment of panic, staff officers buried secret documents in the headquarters courtyard, disguising the cache as a grave and marking it with a wooden cross and dog tags.

  Still Bradley affected nonchalance. Logisticians and engineers were told to continue working on the army group’s “Rhine crossing plan.” After supper on Monday, December 18, upon studying a map that showed at least four U.S. divisions retreating westward and others threatened with encirclement, he told an aide, “I don’t take too serious a view of it, although the others will not agree with me.”

  * * *

  Among those who no longer agreed was Courtney Hodges. At his headquarters in Spa, the First Army commander had shared Bradley’s defiant attitude of denial for more than a day after the German attack began. An engineer company was sent to work as usual on a rail bridge in Bütgenbach on Sunday, and Hodges initially refused to suspend an attack toward the Roer. At a Christmas party a staff officer who was said to have once sung professionally belted out “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ / Oh, what a beautiful day,” from Oklahoma! Reporters threw their own party in Room 6 of the Hôtel Portugal in Spa on Sunday, marching with glasses raised, as one correspondent wrote, “briskly up, over, and across the bed, and around the room, with everybody bellowing a quite unprintable ditty, beginning with ‘Monday I kissed her on the ankle.’”

  Fourteen First Army divisions held a 165-mile front from Aachen to Luxembourg, and with most of Hodges’s senior staff still on leave in London or Paris, deep unease began roiling the Hôtel Britannique command post as Sunday wore on. Church bells pealed to signal a civilian curfew from six P.M. to seven A.M. Mortar crews outside Spa scattered tin pans and crockery around their pits as a makeshift alarm against infiltrators. Cooks, press censors, and Belgian fusiliers rallied to perimeter strongpoints. Birds were mistaken for German paratroopers, and improvised patrols of Army lawyers and accountants scrambled off in pursuit. Soldiers in muddy boots tromped through the Britannique cocktail lounge, hauling out dental chairs and sick-bay instruments from behind the mahogany bar. Fearful of German reprisals, Belgian gendarmes freed twenty-one jailed collaborators; MPs rounded them up again. “Thermite grenades were issued with which we could destroy our papers,” Forrest Pogue informed his diary, and among those building bonfires in Spa on Sunday night was Major General Pete Quesada, the tactical air commander. Tunisia veterans reminisced about the surprise German offensive in February 1943, when the Army had retreated eighty miles through Kasserine Pass.

  Perhaps the prospect of a similar debacle discomfited General Hodges, for at midday on Sunday he closed his office door in the Britannique, sat at his desk, and laid his head on his arms. He took no calls, and for the better part of two days showed symptoms of incapacitation. The precise combination of fatigue, illness, and despair would never be clarified; Major General Ernest N. Harmon, among the Army’s toughest combat commanders, later claimed that Hodges was “probably the most shaken man I have ever seen anywhere who pretends to have the carriage necessary for high command.” Rumors reached Luxembourg City that the First Army commander “almost went to pieces”; Eisenhower and Bradley apparently considered relieving Hodges, by one account, but chose to wait while General Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps rushed to reinforce the front. First Army’s capable if autocratic chief of staff, Major General Bill Kean, effectively took command until late Monday, December 18, when Hodges recovered his balance enough to order Spa evacuated.

  Officers fussed over how to pack newly pressed pinks-and-greens and whether to take their liquor cabinets until reports put German panzers first at six miles, then just two miles from Spa. Both sightings proved false, but they accelerated the evacuation. “I imagine that the Germans felt like [this] when they had to leave Paris,” Pogue wrote. Belgian schoolchildren assembled on a playground to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while their parents ripped down American flags and photos of President Roosevelt. Sobbing, a Jewish woman begged the headquarters to “take my child where the Germans can’t hurt him.” Twelve hundred patients and medicos emptied the 4th Convalescent Hospital within ninety minutes, bolting for Huy. By ill fate, V-1s hit two fleeing convoys, killing two dozen GIs and leaving charred truck chassis scattered across the road.

  When Hodges tarried at the Britannique on Monday, one officer whispered to him, “Save yourself, General. It’s bad enough if we get overrun without your getting captured.” At ten P.M. the command group pulled out for Chaudfontaine, near Liège, where a new headquarters opened at midnight in the Hôtel des Bains. Left behind in Spa were secret maps, and food simmering on the stove. An officer entering the Britannique on Tuesday morning found tables set for breakfast, trees decorated for Christmas, and papers strewn everywhere.

  A British liaison officer reported to Montgomery that Hodges was “completely out of touch”—First Army officers flagged down passing truck drivers in Chaudfontaine to ask what they knew about the fighting. Though no longer paralyzed, Hodges remained isolated and ill-informed: not until a week into the German offensive would he visit any unit in the field, and many subordinates were uncertain where the First Army command post had gone. “We can’t lose three months’ gains in three days very often,” a captain wrote his family, “or we’ll be beating out a reverse invasion.”

  Evacuation of the vast supply dumps in eastern Belgium seemed far more ambitious than the abandonment of a headquarters hotel, but the task was capably done. Some stockpiles were beyond either removal or destruction—for instance, the eight million rations around Liège. Quartermasters in Paris also calculated that even if the biggest depots along the Meuse were captured, enough stocks could be found in the rear to last ten days or more, until emergency shipments arrived from the United States. But smaller supply depots, hospitals, and repair shops were ordered to move west of the river. With help from 1
,700 First Army trucks and 2,400 railcars, some 45,000 tons of matériel and 50,000 vehicles would be shifted out of harm’s way, along with a quarter-million rear-echelon soldiers, patients, and supernumeraries.

  Three miles of primacord was used to blow up grenades, mines, and bangalore torpedoes—as well as twenty tons of sugar, rice, and flour—in an exposed dump near Malmédy. Most critical was the 3.5 million gallons of gasoline within ten miles of Lieutenant Colonel Peiper’s SS spearhead, largely in five-gallon cans grouped in thousand-can stacks. Near Stavelot, where the fuel dump covered several square miles of woodland, 800,000 gallons of gas and 300,000 gallons of grease and oil were spirited away beginning Sunday night, as Peiper approached the town; another 134,000 gallons was ignited in a roadblock conflagration on Highway N-28. More than two million additional gallons were quickly evacuated from Spa using ten-ton tractor-trailers and railcars rushed to a nearby siding. Except for several minor caches captured by the Germans, Rundstedt’s tanks and trucks would be forced to rely on their own dwindling fuel stocks.

  * * *

  Crows or starlings might have been mistaken for German parachutists near Spa, but more than a thousand actual airborne troops were due to be dropped north of Malmédy on Null Tag to further disrupt American defenses.

  Nothing went right for the enemy. Airdromes designated for training proved not to exist, half the Ju-52 pilots had never flown in combat, and many paratroopers were either novices or had not jumped since the attack on Holland in 1940. “Don’t be afraid. Be assured that I will meet you personally by 1700 on the first day,” General Dietrich had told the mission commander, Colonel Friedrich von der Heydte. “Behind their lines are only Jewish hoodlums and bank managers.” After confusion and blunders delayed the jump for a day, a howling crosswind on Sunday morning scattered paratroopers up to fifty kilometers from the drop zone. Two hundred jumpers were mistakenly dropped near Bonn, and American gunners shot down several planes. With a single mortar, little ammunition, and no functioning radios, von der Heydte rounded up three hundred men, who stumbled into a losing firefight before fleeing in small groups for the Fatherland; the colonel surrendered after briefly hiding outside Monschau. Two-thirds of the original thousand were killed or captured. That was the end of what proved the last German airborne operation of the war.

  Operation GREIF, or “condor,” proved no more competent. Under the flamboyant Viennese commando officer Otto Skorzeny, 2,000 men had been recruited into the 150th Armored Brigade for behind-the-lines sabotage, reconnaissance, and havoc. Their motor fleet included a dozen Panthers modified to resemble Shermans, German Fords painted olive drab, and a small fleet of captured U.S. Army trucks, jeeps, and scout cars. Some 150 men who spoke English—only 10, mostly former sailors, were truly fluent in the vernacular—would lead raiding parties X, Y, and Z to seize three Meuse bridges. They were issued captured or counterfeit identification documents, as well as GI uniforms, many of which had been purloined from American prisoners under the pretext of disinfection. To mimic American cigarette-smoking techniques and other mannerisms, the men studied Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

  All for naught. Sixth Panzer Army’s troubles on the north shoulder disrupted Skorzeny’s timetable, and a set of GREIF orders discovered on a dead German officer alerted the Americans to skullduggery. First Army MPs on Monday, December 18, stopped three men in a jeep near Aywaille who were unable to give the day’s password; a search revealed German pay books and grenades. Four others on a Meuse bridge in Liège included a GI imposter who carried both the identification card of a Captain Cecil Dryer and the dogtags of a Private Richard Bumgardner. He and his comrades were found to be wearing swastika brassards beneath their Army field jackets. In all, sixteen infiltrators were swiftly captured in American uniforms and another thirty-five were killed without effecting a single act of sabotage on the Meuse. Most of Skorzeny’s brigade eventually was dragooned into battle as orthodox infantry near Malmédy, where inexperience and a lack of artillery led to heavy casualties. Skorzeny himself suffered a nasty head wound.

  The sole accomplishment of GREIF was to sow hysteria across the Western Front. A voluble, imaginative German lieutenant captured in Liège claimed to be part of a team sent to kill Eisenhower. Colonel Skorzeny, he said, had already infiltrated American lines with 60 assassins. The ostensible figure quickly grew to 150, and rumors flew that they could be posing as GIs escorting several captured German generals to SHAEF headquarters. Soon hundreds of jeeps carrying suspected killers and blackguards had been reported crisscrossing France; more than forty roadblocks sprang up around the Café de la Paix in Paris, where Skorzeny and his henchmen were expected to rendezvous. Police bulletins described Skorzeny as six feet, eight inches tall—a considerable exaggeration—with “dueling scars on both cheeks,” supposedly incurred while brawling over a ballerina in Vienna. It was said that some infiltrators carried vials of sulfuric acid to fling in the faces of suspicious sentries; that many spoke English better than any GI; that they recognized one another by rapping their helmets twice, or by wearing blue scarves, or by leaving unfastened the top button of a uniform blouse. It was said that some might be costumed as priests, or nuns, or barkeeps. The Army official history dryly recorded that “Belgian or French café keepers who for weeks had been selling vin ordinaire, watered cognac, and sour champagne to the GIs were suddenly elevated by rumor, suspicion, and hysteria to captaincies in the Waffen SS.”

  MPs at checkpoints sought to distinguish native English speakers from frauds with various shibboleths, including “wreath,” “writhe,” “wealth,” “rather,” and “with nothing.” Some asked the identity of the Windy City, since an intelligence report advised that “few Germans can pronounce Chicago correctly.” Other interrogatories included: What is the price of an airmail stamp? What is Sinatra’s first name? Who is Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend? Where is Little Rock? Robert Capa, burdened with a Hungarian accent and an ineradicable smirk, was arrested for failing to know the capital of Nebraska. Forrest Pogue, when asked the statehouse location in his native Kentucky, carefully replied, “The capital is Frankfort, but you may think it is Louisville.” When the actor David Niven, serving as an officer in 21st Army Group, was asked, “Who won the World Series in 1940?” he answered, “I haven’t the faintest idea. But I do know that I made a picture with Ginger Rogers in 1938.”

  Cooks, bakers, and clerks were tutored in the mysteries of bazookas, mortars, and mines. Trigger-happy GIs gunned down four French civilians at a roadblock, and an Army doctor was shot in the stomach after answering a sentry’s challenge with, “You son of a bitch, get out of my way.” Promiscuous gunfire could be heard in Versailles near the Trianon Palace, now entombed in concertina wire, and a fusillade behind Beetle Smith’s house one night brought the chief of staff out in his pajamas, cradling a carbine. “We deployed into the garden and began shooting right and left,” Robert Murphy, a visiting diplomat, later recounted. “The next morning a stray cat was found in the garden riddled with bullets.”

  With Skorzeny and his cutthroats presumed to be still at large, Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to move from the St.-Germain villa to smaller quarters near his office. Each day his black limousine continued to follow the usual route to and from SHAEF headquarters, but with the rear seat occupied by a lieutenant colonel named Baldwin B. Smith, whose broad shoulders, prominent pate, and impatient mien made him a perfect body double for the supreme commander.

  * * *

  The real Eisenhower, traveling with Tedder in a bulletproof Cadillac first used in Africa, arrived in Verdun for a war council on Tuesday morning, December 19. At an ancient French army barracks within a muddy quadrangle, he soon was joined by Bradley, Jake Devers, and Patton, who drove up smoking a cigar in a jeep with plexiglass doors and a .30-caliber machine gun mounted on a swivel. At 11:30 A.M. they climbed upstairs to a dank stone squad room with a single potbellied stove, a large table, and a map unfurled across a wall. Bradley, already in a testy mood, pointed to a red ar
row labeled “20 German tanks” approaching Namur on the Meuse, farther west than previously reported. “What the hell is this?” he demanded. An intelligence officer hurried to the map, snatched off the errant marker, and apologized for the error.

  “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster,” Eisenhower said, settling into his chair. “There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.” From the other end, Patton chimed in, “Let’s have the guts to let the bastards go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll cut ’em off and chew ’em up.”

  Two staff officers reviewed the battlefront in detail. At least seventeen German divisions had joined the attack already; the identities of most were known. The heaviest pressure could be felt at St.-Vith and Bastogne, two vital road centers. Atrocities had been documented. Daily Luftwaffe sorties over St.-Vith had declined sharply from six hundred on Sunday, although a persistent overcast also had grounded Allied planes. Seven French infantry battalions would help defend the Meuse, along with half a dozen COMZ engineer regiments. American strength in the Ardennes had doubled since Saturday, to about 180,000 troops in ten infantry and three armored divisions. More would soon follow.

  Eisenhower then spoke. Devers’s 6th Army Group would assume the defensive in Alsace, he said, and contribute reserves for the Ardennes. Scattered forces must be pulled together for “positive concerted action.” Holding the high ground south of Liège would keep supply depots outside enemy artillery range. By squeezing the shoulders of the German salient, shoring up the Meuse, blunting the enemy advance, and creating “a supply desert,” they could smash Rundstedt’s bulge—as it was now called—with an American counterblow again aimed at the Rhine. Third Army, which currently held an eighty-mile front with three corps facing the Saar, would pivot north to knife into the exposed German left flank.