This order shows a new side to Hitler’s increasingly desperate plans drawn up in the safety of OKW, far from the harsh reality of the battlefield. Hitler allocated Kluge no less than six panzer divisions for the attack. The combined paper strength of the divisions was 1,500 panzers of various types. But in fact Kluge had just 185 tanks in his strike force.
The policy of keeping divisions in existence when their fighting strength had been severely reduced by casualties, detachments and sickness had begun in Russia in 1942. At first the policy had been undertaken for the very good reason that the Soviets were able to identify divisions, but not their strength. So keeping a high number of divisions masked the true weakness of the German forces. It did have a drawback in that the divisional support staff stayed the same irrespective of the number of front line troops. By keeping the number of divisions while reducing the numbers of men there developed a serious skew in the ratio of front line troops to support staff. By 1944 the depletion of the divisions had created a much more serious and unforeseen problem. It was becoming almost impossible for the planning staff at OKH, OKW and even more so for Hitler to keep up to date. One division might have as much fighting power as five others combined. Planning operations became fraught with difficulty.
At Falaise, the lack of armoured punch in the six panzer divisions meant the attack faltered after just five days. Even worse, the accelerating American advance swooped round to the south and drove north, threatening to trap the German attacking force in a pocket south of Falaise. On 17 August, Hitler ordered Kluge to report back to Berlin and replaced him with General Walther Model. Uncertain if he was being recalled to be blamed for the Falaise debacle or because the Gestapo wanted to interrogate him over alleged links to the July bomb plot to kill Hitler, Kluge committed suicide.
Model ordered an immediate retreat from the Falaise Pocket, but the loss of heavy equipment and men had been huge. By the end of August the Germans had lost 450,000 men in France as casualties or prisoners as well as 1,500 tanks and 3,600 aircraft.
After Falaise morale collapsed and supplies became almost non -existent. The Germans fled eastward. Hitler tried to intervene again on 20 August. Furious as he was at the precipitous retreat of his armies, he did not try to devise a plan to stop the rot. Instead he ordered that the public buildings of Paris be dynamited to destruction and every house set on fire. The German commander of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz was appalled by the order. Not daring to refuse, he kept finding excuses to delay the destruction. On 26 August Charles de Gaulle arrived with a division of Free French troops to take the relieved surrender of Choltitz, who was hourly in fear of death at the hands of the SS or Gestapo for failing to carry out his orders.
By the end of August the Germans had been chased out of France and Belgium. The Allies came to a halt, not because of German resistance, but because of the difficulties of getting supplies from Britain through France to the fighting troops. The Germans had destroyed the dock facilities of Boulogne, Calais and other ports as they retreated and all supplies therefore had to be taken in over the Normandy beaches.
By mid-September the Allies had gathered enough equipment and supplies to make an attempt to get over the Rhine and into Germany before winter closed in. A surprise airborne assault took place to capture the bridges at Arnhem while the British XXX Corps attacked towards Arnhem from Eindhoven. This time the newly reinstated Rundstedt did not need Hitler’s orders to move his men to counter the threat. The 2nd SS Panzers were just outside Arnhem and went straight into action. The Allied attack collapsed.
Relieved to have driven off the Allied attempts to invade Germany, Rundstedt reluctantly accepted the loss of the great port of Antwerp. He knew the Allies would be unlikely to launch a major attack before the spring, so he settled down to preparing his defences in a last attempt to delay the inevitable.
Hitler, on the other hand, had no such ideas of defence. Despite a serious stomach illness in late October, he had been thinking about how to win the war, despite all the odds. And, once again, he had decided that if he could knock the western Allies out of action for long enough, he could concentrate all his forces in the East to defeat the Russians. Whether the Germans still had the resources to defeat the Russians, even if they concentrated them all in the east, is doubtful. But Hitler believed they did and set about planning a blow to knock his attackers on the western front out of action. He called it Operation Autumn Mist.
Given the situation on the Western Front in November 1944, Hitler’s choice of target could not have been better. He aimed to split the British and American forces, as he had split the British and French forces in 1940, then drive on to capture Antwerp in a lightning 12 day attack. All Allied soldiers caught north of the advance would be captured. As soon as Antwerp was taken, Hitler believed, the Allies would rush troops from other areas of the front in an attempt to retake the city. Once the Allied front line was weakened, Hitler planned to launch a second attack, Operation North Wind, further south at Saarbrucken to take the Americans on the right flank and roll up the entire Allied line.
Simultaneously, hundreds of V2 and V1 weapons would be launched against London, as the capture of Antwerp brought them within range. The British, Hitler jubilantly told Goebbels in mid-November, would be forced to negotiate or face destruction and the Americans would have no choice but to go along with the British.
As in 1940 Hitler was planning a massive panzer attack. As in 1940 the attack would go through the Ardennes region. But this was 1944, not 1940 and the world had changed.
The staff at OKW had been at work since the middle of September on Autumn Mist and on 9 October the draft plans were presented to Hitler. The Führer made no attempt to contact Rundstedt, the overall commander in the West, nor Model, the operational commander of the armies facing the Allies. Instead he pored over maps of the area, studied the latest panzer production figures and studied the lists of divisions and regiments available for use. On 1 November he sent the revised plans back to OKW. Written across the front cover in Hitler’s own hand writing were the words ‘Nicht Abändern’, Not to be Altered.
On 3 November, Jodl outlined the plans of Autumn Mist to Rundstedt, Model and their divisional commanders. The generals listened in amazement. Though impressed that so many reserves had been built up in the face of Allied bombing, they were unanimous that Antwerp was an unobtainable objective. ‘If we reach the Meuse we should go down on our knees and thank God,’ was Rundstedt’s opinion. Jodl rejected all criticism of the plans. They were, he said, the Führer’s own plans and were not to be altered.
The plans envisaged an attack mounted by three armies. In the south at Echternach the Seventh Army, made up of infantry and artillery, was to form a flank guard to keep the US Third Army pinned down. In the centre the Fifth Panzer Army was to smash through the front, capture the strategic communications centre of Bastogne and drive on to cross the Meuse at Dinant before swinging north towards Antwerp. In the north the Sixth SS Panzer Army was to crush the First US Army, take Liege and Maastricht, then join the Fifth Panzer Army in the drive on Antwerp. Hitler gave command of this northern force to his old favourite Sepp Dietrich. As a junior SS man in 1934, Dietrich had helped Hitler organise the arrest and execution of Ernst Röhm and the leaders of the SA. He had proved to be steadfastly loyal ever since, as well as being a gifted, if ruthless, military commander.
In all, Hitler had allocated 200,000 men and 600 tanks for the operation. The most modern and effective tanks and guns were given to the attacking force. The weakness was in the air. The Luftwaffe was a spent force and the skies belonged to the Allies. It was this that led to the delay in starting. Originally planned for 27 November, Autumn Mist had needed to be put back because Allied control of the skies had delayed the concentration of armour and men necessary.
On 10 December, Hitler was finally confident that everything would be ready for 16 December. He travelled to a specially constructed forward command post near Frankfurt am Main, and summ
oned all the senior officers who would be involved in the attack. As the officers filed into a conference room they found themselves under the guns of an armed SS guard. Then Hitler entered to sit at a desk and read a prepared speech. Hitler was clearly ill. His face was puffy and his shoulders were stooped. His left hand which had begun to shake some months earlier was now twitching almost uncontrollably. Hitler opened his speech with an attack on the alliance facing Germany and why, in his view, it was so fragile, and moved on to give one of his typical diatribes about how wars should be fought. As the speech droned on with no end in sight one officer reached to his pocket for a handkerchief, almost getting himself shot by the nervy SS guards. Finally Hitler got to the attack plan, which he described as if already a victorious fact.
The attack began at dawn on16 December. The western Allies were convinced that the German army was on the point of collapse and was quite unable to resist an attack, never mind mount one. The first few days saw easy victories and swift advances. The stretch of line being assaulted was held by four American divisions, Hitler was attacking with twenty-eight. As the panzers surged forward they met unexpected resistance at Bastogne where a single American division refused to retreat. When called upon to surrender, the American commander General Anthony McAuliffe replied simply ‘Nuts’. By holding the vital road centre of Bastogne, the Americans slowed up the supplies for the panzers and so slowed the panzers themselves. In the north the British commander Montgomery brought down reinforcements and took command of the Americans. He stopped Dietrich and the SS panzers.
On 24 December the low cloud which had covered the area suddenly cleared. The Allied aircraft swarmed into the skies to bomb and strafe the German columns. The remains of the Luftwaffe came up to fight them off, but was shot from the skies. Two days later the German attack was brought to a halt at Celles. As Rundstedt had feared, they had not even reached the Meuse.
Hitler was not depressed. Despite the fact that the attack had got nowhere near Antwerp, he gave the order to proceed with North Wind. It began on 1 January 1945 and failed dismally.
Rundstedt asked for permission to pull the men and tanks back to their start lines, which offered better defensive positions than the exposed areas where the attack halted. Predictably, Hitler refused. He demanded that no retreat take place. The predictable result was that the Germans took heavy casualties when the Allied counterattack began on 14 January. By the time the Allies called off their attacks the Germans had lost almost 100,000 men as casualties or prisoners together with almost all the new tanks that had been sent to the front.
By then Hitler had other and more pressing worries. Heinz Guderian, who had been left in charge of the Eastern Front, had for some time been sending Hitler messages about the state of the war against Russia. He had received no replies and no instructions. Now Guderian had come to see Hitler in person to tell him the terrible news. The Russians were about to attack and the German armies would be unable to stop them. Total collapse was about to happen.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Road to Berlin
After the failure of the German attack at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Germans were thrown on to the defensive by the Soviet Red Army. Hitler had lost the initiative and was merely responding to Russian attacks. The problems were manifold, but all came down to the fact that Hitler no longer had enough men or equipment to mount a sustained assault with any real chance of success. The distances were too great and the Red Army too numerous for that.
But Hitler did not give up his ambitions nor his faith in the ultimate victory that would be Germany’s, increasingly, invoking the memory of Frederick the Great. He also began to make statements to his generals of mystical importance: ‘Providence will bestow victory on the people that has done most to earn it,’ Hitler announced on 1 January 1944. His generals would have preferred to hear more solid reasons for believing in ultimate victory.
Although he was not going to tell the generals, Hitler did have solid reasons to hope for victory. His increasing paranoia, however, was to do much to undermine the efforts that were going well. Hitler had long been talking about secret weapons which he would unleash on his enemies at a time of his choosing. In 1943 the Panther and Tiger tanks had been used on the Eastern Front. Although they were undoubtedly the best tanks in the war, they did not have the impact they could and should have had, because they were committed before adequate numbers became available, a mistake made by the British in the First World War, and explicitly cautioned against by Guderian in his book Achtung – Panzer!
Despite this, Hitler retained his blind faith that the next generation of secret weapons would turn the tide of war. All that was needed was the time necessary to develop the weapons and then manufacture them in large quantities. It was to gain that time that Hitler drew up his plans for the Eastern Front for 1944.
For the first time since 1937 Hitler planned no major summer offensive action for the Wehrmacht. Instead his plan was to fight tenaciously for every inch of ground, retreating only when absolutely necessary. The Germans still held vast swathes of western Russia, from the suburbs of Leningrad in the north to the Crimea in the south. There was, Hitler thought, plenty of space with which to play.
The Russian attacks came in a succession of local waves, flung forward one after another. This policy was dictated to the Soviets by their generally bad level of supply logistics. It took some weeks to transport to an area enough men, guns, tanks and supplies for an attack, and once the attack was launched the supply system was totally unable to keep up with the advancing divisions. The men subsisted on what they could carry with them, but once the ammunition or food began to run out, the advance would come to a halt. Meanwhile, the men and materiel for another attack had been built up elsewhere and this would be launched as the first came to an end.
In this way the German commander on the Eastern Front, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, was kept guessing about what the Soviets would do next, and was forced to rush his reserves back and forth along the front, using up precious oil and petrol which the Germans no longer had to spare. For the Germans the situation was made worse by Hitler’s insistence that no position be abandoned until the last possible moment.
In March of 1944 Hitler’s refusal to allow Manstein to pull divisions out of Korsun when a Soviet attack threatened to outflank them led to 60,000 men being surrounded. Manstein sent a strong force of panzers to drive through the Russian lines and open a corridor along which the Korsun divisions could retreat. He extricated 30,000 of his men, but the rest were left dead or prisoners.
Suffering from eye trouble, Manstein went back to Germany and took the opportunity to visit Hitler. Able to confront Hitler face to face after months of futile messages and phone calls, Manstein told Hitler in no uncertain terms how self-defeating the orders not to retreat were proving to be on the Eastern Front. After a blistering row, Manstein was sacked. He was never to serve in the German army again. In 1945 he surrendered to the British and was imprisoned for 8 years for allowing the SS to carry out war crimes in his area of command. Released in 1953, Manstein retired to write his memoirs and play a role in various veterans associations. He died in 1973. With Manstein gone Hitler had lost his most talented strategist just when he would have needed him most.
In March the Soviet Marshal Zhukov reached the Carpathian Mountains, threatening the Rumanian oilfields on which Germany depended. In response, Hitler sent divisions from France to the area. This action fatally weakened the defences of France, allowing the Allies to land successfully on D-Day in June.
This was a crucial moment in the war, and Hitler knew it. Whatever his faults as a military commander, and they were many, Hitler at his best was one of the finest strategists of the 20th century. During 1943 he stated on several occasions that 1944 would decide the war and that the decisive moment would be that of the Anglo–American invasion of France. If that could be defeated, Hitler argued, he would be able to move the many divisions he was forced to keep in France to
the east and so be in a position to defeat Russia, or at least force a peace. If, on the other hand, the invasion was successful then Germany would be facing a war on two fronts without enough resources to fight it. It would only be a matter of time before defeat became inevitable.
The assistant chief of OKW in the autumn of 1943 was General Walter Warlimont. In his recollections written after the war, Warlimont recorded that Hitler had told him several times that if the western Allies got ashore in France in 1944 the war was effectively lost.
When the Allies did manage to land successfully in France in June 1944 Hitler, by his own admission, must have known Germany was defeated. In the opinion of many leading generals, the time had come to sue for peace. Field Marshal Rundstedt said as much and was sacked for it.
If the critical danger was not clear after D-Day, it soon became stark enough for all to see. On 23 June the Red Army opened up with a vast artillery barrage along 150 miles of the Eastern Front east of Minsk. They then unleashed four massive assault columns consisting of 1.7 million men, 2,700 tanks and 25,000 guns. The defending Germans were outnumbered by more than 2 to 1 and had hardly any tanks.
On the first day of the Soviet attack 30,000 Germans were trapped around Vitebsk and 20,000 at Bobruisk. A week later the Russians had raced the 100 miles to Minsk to surround another 100,000 men. Hitler ordered the trapped forces to hold on, but they had been taken by surprise and lacked the stores to survive. Some managed to break out to the west, but most were killed or captured. In all the Germans lost 200,000 men in the month of fighting. Army Group Centre had effectively ceased to exist. The battle, the beginning of the Russian Operation Bagration, was the key which unlocked the way to their continued advance. By the end of August the Soviets had pushed forward into Rumania and Bulgaria in the south, while in the north they were almost at the German border.
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