by John Keegan
TWENTY-THREE
The Ardennes and the Rhine
The German army, adept as always at surmounting crisis, lost no time in putting distance between itself and the disaster of Normandy. Hitler had been forced to accept the result of the Falaise battle, yet previously he had refused to allow any construction of defences on the line of the Somme and Marne rivers, tentatively designated by Army Group B as an intermediate position between the Atlantic and West Walls. In consequence, once the Westheer crossed the Seine between 19 and 29 August it could and did not pause in its retreat until it reached defensible positions on the great northern European waterways – the Schelde, the Meuse, the tributaries of the Rhine – in the first week of September. The British captured Brussels on 3 September, to ecstatic civic rejoicing, and Antwerp, Europe’s largest port, the next day. By 14 September the whole of Belgium and Luxembourg was in Allied hands, together with a fragment of Holland, and on 11 September patrols of the American First Army actually crossed the German border near Aachen. The vanguard of the Franco-American force which had landed in Provence on 15 August linked up with Patton’s Third Army near Dijon on 11 September. Thereafter, as the 6th Army Group, it went into the line in Alsace. By the end of the second week in September there was a continuous battlefront in northern Europe running from the banks of the Schelde in Belgium to the headwaters of the Rhine at Basle on the Swiss frontier.
However, Patton and Montgomery, Eisenhower’s two most thrusting subordinates, arrived at the approaches of the German frontier both believing that a more clear-cut strategy and a more calculated allocation of supplies would have resulted in the West Wall’s being breached. The roots of this dispute, subsequently known as the ‘Broad versus Narrow Front Strategy’, lay far back in the Overlord campaign, when the air campaign against the French railway system was at its height. The Allied forces had then been so successful in destroying French railway bridges, lines and rolling stock that when the armies at last broke out of the bridgehead in August the means to supply their advance could be provided only by truck and by road. It was hoped that, as the armies advanced, the truck route would be shortened by the progressive capture of ports along the Channel coast (also desirable because Hitler’s flying-bomb launch sites lay in the same area); but Hitler’s insistence on Army Group B’s leaving garrisons to hold Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk and the mouth of the Schelde vitiated that hope. Although Le Havre was captured on 12 September, Boulogne on 22 September and Calais on 30 September, Dunkirk held out until the end of the war, while, more critically for the Allies, the defences of the Schelde estuary were still in German hands at the beginning of November.
In retrospect it can be seen that the failure to clear the Schelde estuary, and thus to open the way for the Allies’ fleet of cross-Channel supply vessels to deliver directly to Antwerp in the immediate rear of the Canadian First, British Second and American First Armies, was the most calamitous flaw in the post-Normandy campaign. It was, moreover, barely excusable, since Ultra was supplying Montgomery’s headquarters from 5 September onwards with intelligence of Hitler’s decision (of 3 September) to deny the Allies the use of the Channel ports and waterways; and as early as 12 September Montgomery’s own intelligence section at 21st Army Group reported that the Germans intended to ‘hold out as long as possible astride the approaches to Antwerp, without which the installations of the port, though little damaged, can be of no service to us.’
Montgomery – despite every warning, and contrary to his own military good sense, which was acute – refused to turn his troops back in their tracks to clear the Schelde estuary. Instead he determined upon using the First Allied Airborne Army (the British 1st and the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions) to leap across the Meuse and the lower Rhine, establish a foothold on the North German plain and capture the Ruhr, heartland of Germany’s war economy. On 10 September – the day on which formal command of ground forces in north-west Europe passed from himself to Eisenhower, and he became a field marshal in recognition of his achievements – he secured the Supreme Allied Commander’s assent to the plan and on 17 September the operation, codenamed Market Garden, began.
Market, the seizure of the bridges at Eindhoven and Nijmegen by the American airborne divisions, proved a brilliant success. Garden, the descent of the British 1st Airborne Division on the more distant Rhine bridges at Arnhem, did not. Because of the experience of the German 7th Parachute Division in Crete, where it had been massacred while dropping directly into its objective, the Allied airborne forces had established the doctrine that airborne descents should be made at a distance from the chosen target, on which the parachutists should concentrate only after having assembled and collected their equipment. The 1st Airborne Division got safely to earth; but when it advanced on the Arnhem bridges it found their vicinity held by the remnants of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, which were refitting in the district after their ordeal in Normandy. Between them the two divisions mustered only a company of tanks, some armoured cars and half-tracks; but even the remnants of a Panzer division deployed more firepower than the 1st Airborne, whose artillery support was provided by 75-mm pack howitzers which one of its own gunner officers described as ‘quite unlethal’. The British parachutists, after seeing one of Arnhem’s two bridges fall into the Rhine as they approached it, succeeded in seizing and holding the other. They held it steadfastly until 20 September, hourly expecting the arrival of British tanks to their relief, but the Guards Armoured Division which was advancing to join them found itself confined to a single road between inundated fields and could not move forward at its planned speed. German reinforcements had now gathered around the Arnhem perimeter, constricting it ever more closely, and on 24 September the British received orders to withdraw. Some managed to do so by improvised ferry, many swam the Rhine back to the southern bank. Just over 2000 men succeeded in escaping; 1000 were killed in the course of the battle, and 6000 became prisoners. The 1st Airborne Division had effectively ceased to exist.
Arnhem was the German army’s first overt success since decamping from Normandy. It had also, however, fought a little-noticed but successful defence of Aachen and was meanwhile busily reinforcing its position along the Schelde estuary apparently unobserved and certainly unhindered by Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. During its pell-mell drive to Brussels 21st Army Group had bypassed the unmechanised elements of the German Fifteenth Army left in northern France and along the south Belgian coast. Its new commander, General Gustav von Zangen, took advantage of the distraction of Arnhem to evacuate these remnants, amounting to 65,000 men of nine divisions, across the mouth of the Schelde on to the island of Walcheren and the coastal area of South Beveland, leaving a bridgehead on the south bank at Breskens. The reconstituted Fifteenth Army was left undisturbed by Montgomery until 6 October, when, at last alerted to the precariousness of the liberation armies’ logistic position as long as Antwerp remained unusable – with its outlet to the sea in German hands – he set his Canadian troops to capture and clear the Schelde’s waterlogged banks in what would become the most difficult and unpleasant operation fought by any of the Allied armies in the winter of 1944. When the battle was concluded on 8 November, two river minefields still had to be cleared and it was not until 29 November, eighty-five days after its capture, that Antwerp was at last open to shipping.
Logistic improvisation, including a high-speed truck route carrying 20,000 tons of supplies daily over the 400 miles separating the Normandy beaches from the zone of operations, was meanwhile permitting the resumption of offensives up and down the front. On the American front, next to Montgomery’s, Bradley’s 12th Army Group was confronted by the West Wall, which had fallen into disrepair since 1939 but had been hastily rehabilitated. Eisenhower hoped that a concerted drive either side of Aachen would allow a breakthrough to Cologne before the winter brought campaigning to an end. The West Wall, however, proved a still formidable obstacle when the First and Ninth Armies attacked on 16 November, and, although it
was penetrated, the terrain beyond, particularly the dense thickets of the Hürtgen forest, defied their efforts to break out. At the southern end of the front, Patton, still annoyed about Eisenhower’s refusal to support his ‘Narrow Front’ advance from the Seine the previous August, was fighting a more mobile battle in Lorraine against Balck’s Army Group G, consisting of the divisions which had escaped from the south of France and hastily raised reinforcements from the German Home Army. The Germans benefited from the defensive advantages offered by a succession of river lines, the Moselle, Meurthe and Seille, and by the old French fortification zone built in 1870-1914, and they conducted a step-by-step withdrawal, denying Patton’s Third Army possession of Metz in a bitter battle that lasted from 18 November until 13 December. Not until 15 December was it fully in contact with the lower reaches of the West Wall which followed the line of the Saar river. Patton’s spearheads succeeded in seizing some small bridgeheads across the Saar as the first heavy snow of the winter set in. Devers’s 6th Army Group, consisting of the American Seventh and French First Armies, had been more successful in clearing the Germans out of Alsace to the south, despite having to fight through the difficult mountainous sector of the Vosges. American troops entered Strasbourg on 23 November, but a pocket of resistance around Colmar, protecting the Upper Rhine and the West Wall behind it, still resisted the French army’s efforts to take it in mid-December.
Germany gains a respite
The deceleration of the Allied drive against the outer defences of Germany in the autumn and early winter of 1944 was caused largely by the logistic difficulties under which they campaigned enhanced by their far greater divisional needs than those of the Germans, 700 tons a day as opposed to 200 tons a day. There was also the improved fighting power of the German army. In early September Hitler had charged Goebbels to raise within the Home Army (now commanded by Himmler since the dismissal and execution of its commander, Fromm, after the July Plot) twenty-five new Volksgrenadier divisions to man the western defences. The manpower was found by ‘combing through’ headquarters, bases and static units inside Germany, a process which also yielded replacements for the broken divisions which had struggled back to the West Wall from Normandy. Between 1 September and 15 October an additional 150,000 men were found in this way – though losses in the west in that period exactly equalled that figure – and another 90,000 from within the resources of OB West (to which post Rundstedt had again been appointed on 2 September). Moreover, despite the full resumption of the Anglo-American Pointblank bombing offensive after Normandy, German industry had achieved higher levels of output of war material in September than in any month of the war, thanks to the success of Speer’s policy of dispersal of production and assembly away from the traditional centres. As a result, tank and assault-gun production during 1944 approached that of the Soviet Union during the same period. The 11,000 medium tank and assault guns, 16,000 tank destroyers and 5200 heavy tanks produced were sufficient to keep existing Panzer divisions in the field (despite their appalling losses in Normandy and White Russia) and to provide the material for thirteen new Panzer brigades, nine of which were subsequently to be reconstituted as weak Panzer divisions.
Much self-delusion was necessary at Hitler’s headquarters to represent this rebuilding and re-equipment as genuine reparation for the losses suffered in the catastrophic summer of 1944. Hitler, however, was a master of self-delusion and also of the art of clutching at straws. Although adamant in his refusal to allow any of his commanders to surrender ground for whatever reason, nevertheless he always reconciled himself to the loss of ground that inevitably occurred by asserting that the enemy had thereby overreached himself and exposed himself to a counter-strike which would repay all the damage done and recover the abandoned territory into the bargain. This self-defence mechanism had allowed him to justify denying permission to Paulus to break out of Stalingrad in November 1942, refusing Arnim leave to evacuate Army Group Africa from Tunisia while time allowed in March 1943, and driving the Fifth Panzer Army to destruction in the Mortain counter-attack of the August just past. In the aftermath of Normandy, indeed before the battle was fully over, the same pattern of deception began to surface in Hitler’s strategic appreciation. On 19 August, while the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies were still struggling out of the neck of the Falaise pocket, he summoned Keitel, Jodl and Speer and told them to begin preparing the restoration of the Westheer because he planned to launch a major counter-offensive in the west in November; ‘night, fog and snow’, he predicted on 1 September, would ground the Allied air forces and thus inaugurate the conditions for a victory.
Hitler announced his decision to undertake the offensive to his operations staff at the Wolf’s Lair on 16 September, having briefed Jodl some days previously to prepare an outline plan. It was then that he first revealed both the location and objective of Wacht am Rhein, as the attack was codenamed. ‘I have made a momentous decision,’ Hitler announced. ‘I shall go over to the offensive . . . out of the Ardennes, with the objective, Antwerp.’ His reasoning emerged in more detail as planning progressed: Antwerp, in mid-September still unavailable for use by the Allies, was potentially their major port of supply for an offensive into Germany. If taken by the Germans its loss would set that offensive back many months. Meanwhile his V-2 rockets, the main launching sites for which lay just beyond Antwerp, would be inflicting increasingly serious damage on London, with a demoralising effect on its population. Further, in the course of the drive on Antwerp, which lay only sixty miles from the Westheer’s positions in the Ardennes, he would cut off the British Second and Canadian First Armies from the Americans positioned further to the south, encircle and destroy them. The balance of force on the Western Front would thus be equalised, if not actually reversed, and the growing power of his secret-weapons campaign would allow him to regain the strategic initiative. It would then be the Ostheer’s turn to strike at the Russians on the eastern borders, so that Germany, profiting by its occupation of a central position between its enemies, could recoup its theoretically intrinsic advantage and strike for victory.
Hitler’s belief in the fantasy he had constructed for himself was strengthened by the fact that the natural point of departure for his forthcoming offensive lay in the Ardennes. For it was on the German side of the Ardennes, the Eifel, that he had gathered the army which had broken the French front in 1940, and through the Ardennes that his Panzer divisions had then advanced to make their surprise attack. In 1944, as in 1940, the Eifel and the Ardennes offered his soldiers the protection of thick forest and narrow valleys almost impenetrable to air surveillance; inside that maze of broken ground and dense vegetation his new army of Panzer divisions could assemble and move forward to their attack positions with the minimum of anxiety at any premature discovery of their presence and intentions. Moreover, in a feckless repetition of the strategic errors made by the French high command four years earlier, Supreme Allied Headquarters had deemed the Ardennes a secondary front during the autumn of 1944 and, by keeping the bulk of their forces, British and American, concentrated to the north and south, had allowed it to become for the second time precisely the same sector of weakness that Kleist and Guderian had been able to exploit in May 1940.
For all that, the generals with whom Hitler had entrusted the execution of Wacht am Rhein did not share his confidence in the plan. Rundstedt and Model, Kluge’s successor as commander of Army Group B, agreed between themselves in late October that the plan did not have ‘a leg to stand on’. Together they devised an alternative, which they called the ‘Small Solution’ in distinction from Hitler’s ‘Big Solution’, aimed at damaging the enemy forces opposite the Ardennes rather than trying to destroy them. Hitler would have none of it. First of all he sent Jodl to see Model on 3 November with word that the plan was ‘unalterable’, and on 2 December he called Model and Rundstedt to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin – now his main headquarters after he had left Rastenburg for good on 20 November – to impress the point on them in pers
on. His only concessions to them were to set back the opening date of the offensive still further (it had already been postponed from 25 November) and to give it a new codename, Autumn Mist, originally chosen by Model for the ‘Small Solution’.
‘All Hitler wants me to do’, complained Sepp Dietrich, commander of one of the two armies earmarked for the operation, ‘is to cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on and take Antwerp. And all this in the worst time of the year through the Ardennes when the snow is waist deep and there isn’t room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armoured divisions. When it doesn’t get light until eight and it’s dark again at four and with re-formed divisions made up chiefly of kids and sick old men – and at Christmas.’ This analysis by one of Hitler’s most loyal supporters was closely exact. On paper the German order of battle for Autumn Mist appeared impressive. It consisted of two Panzer armies, the Fifth and Sixth, commanded by Manteuffel, one of the best of the younger German tank generals, and Dietrich; between them they deployed eight Panzer, one Panzergrenadier and two parachute divisions, most of which had fought the Normandy campaign, therefore enjoyed experienced leadership and had been brought up to strength again since the retreat from Falaise. They included the 1st, 2nd, 9th and 12th SS Panzer and the 2nd, 9th, 116th and Lehr Panzer Divisions, the 3rd and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions (the latter belonging to the supporting Seventh Army) and the 3rd and 5th Parachute Divisions. However, appearance and reality diverged. Although every effort had been made to find men and equipment for these divisions, so that the 1st and 12th SS Panzer, for example, were well up to strength, even such first-line formations as the 2nd and 116th Panzer deployed only a hundred tanks each, while the Volksgrenadier divisions which provided support for the armoured spearheads were ill equipped, under strength and filled out with ‘ethnic’ Germans who owed their nationality to frontier changes. The 62nd Volksgrenadier Division, for example, contained many Czech and Polish conscripts from regions annexed to the Reich who spoke no German at all and belonged in sympathy to the Allied armies they were committed to attack; the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division, rebuilt on the ruins of its predecessor which had fought so stoutly at Omaha beach, was filled with airmen and sailors; and the 79th Volksgrenadier Division had been formed out of soldiers ‘combed out’ of rear headquarters.