Meanwhile, the Allied pressure on the Western Front was maintained. Aachen fell to the United States First Army on 21 October, but since it lay on the most direct route to the Ruhr it was essential that the Americans were held. First Canadian Army was clearing both sides of the Scheldt and on 1 November, Montgomery launched a successful amphibious assault on the island of Walcheren, which lies at its mouth. Dempsey’s Second British Army was clearing eastwards towards the Rhine from the salient created by MARKET-GARDEN. In Army Group G’s area, Patton, now receiving the lowest priority for supplies within the United States 12th Army Group, was battling to reduce the ancient fortress of Metz. This lay in an exposed salient, which von Rundstedt wanted to abandon, but Balck considered that it was better to allow the Americans to wear down their strength against the fortress, provided that the garrison was able to withdraw in good time.19 Von Rundstedt allowed Balck to have his own way. In any event, Hitler would not have countenanced a withdrawal and, indeed, in early November declared Metz a Festung. Von Rundstedt’s view of the situation at this time was that ‘the soldier can do nothing but buy time for the political leadership to negotiate. He can do nothing but preserve the military power as much as possible.’20 Conservation of force had to be his watchword, but he must have realised that there was no hope of Hitler being prepared to negotiate with the Allies. Towards the end of October, however, he was to be faced with a bombshell.
On 20 October, Hitler summoned von Rundstedt and Model to Rastenburg, but then amended the order. Instead, Westphal and Model’s chief of staff, Hans Krebs, were to attend. They did so and, on the 26th, returned to their headquarters to brief their respective commanders on what had transpired.
The concept for what became known as the Ardennes counter-offensive or, more popularly, the Battle of the Bulge, had been born in mid-September when Hitler, at one of his conferences, announced his intention to strike from the Ardennes for Antwerp, splitting the British 21st Army Group from the United States 12th Army Group. On 25 September, he ordered Jodl to prepare an outline plan, stressing the paramount importance of surprise and the need to take maximum advantage of the winter fogs so that the employment of Allied air power would be restricted. On 9 October, Jodl presented his draft plan. He had blanched at the idea of a thrust on Antwerp, and instead proposed five less ambitious options, consisting of double envelopments from Düsseldorf in the north to the Belfort Gap in the south. Hitler, not surprisingly, was unimpressed and told Jodl to think again. Two days later he presented an acceptable solution. It accurately reflected Hitler’s original concept and was to be carried out by three armies under Model’s command with von Rundstedt exercising overall supervision. The offensive would be spearheaded by two Panzer armies. In the north Sepp Dietrich’s newly formed Sixth Panzer Army, which was built round four SS Panzer divisions, now re-formed after the long mauling they had received in France, and Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army in the south. Brandenberger’s Seventh Army would secure the southern shoulder and Dietrich could call on assistance from von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army to his north. Von Rundstedt himself never quite trusted Model since ‘he was too temperamental’. ‘We had an expression: “to Model”, which meant getting everything very muddled. Then there was the word “to de-Model”, meaning sorting things out again. The troops invented that one. However he was a very capable man, above all very courageous, but impulsive.’21 Even so, on this occasion, Model was as aghast as von Rundstedt. Apart from the blatant over-ambition of the plan, they saw its result as merely the creation of a long narrow salient which would invite Allied counterattacks and would require an inordinate number of men to hold it. As Model remarked: ‘This damned thing hasn’t a leg to stand on.’21
On 27 October, von Rundstedt and Model and their staffs met at Headquarters Army Group B, now at Fichtenhain near Krefeld, to consider the plan. They believed that a much more feasible operation would be one designed to destroy the Allied forces then contained in the salient bounded by Aachen, Maastricht and Liege. These were sizeable, consisting of parts of the American First and British Second Armies and the whole of the United States Ninth Army. This could be achieved by double envelopment, using the Ardennes attack as the southern prong and another attack from the Geilenkirchen area as the northern. Von Rundstedt put what came to be known by the various staffs as the Small Solution, as opposed to OKW’s Large Solution, to OKW at the beginning of November. Jodl came and visited von Rundstedt at Model’s headquarters on 3 November and made it clear that Hitler considered the Small Solution unacceptable. He went on to describe the plan in more detail and state that Hitler wanted the attack to begin on the 25th.
Westphal now suggested to von Rundstedt that he should go to Hitler himself and personally dissuade him. Von Rundstedt turned this down ‘for he considered that Hitler’s stubbornness and his habit of conducting hour-long monologues and preventing anyone else from speaking made such personal representations hopeless. He had already had enough of such painful experiences.’23 However, something had to be done, especially about the date of the attack which allowed totally insufficient time for preparation.
For a start, there was the problem of disengaging many of the formations earmarked for the offensive from the battles being fought around Aachen and the Maas and in Lorraine. Not until the end of October was it possible to withdraw the headquarters of I and II SS Panzer Corps from the front line, which placed a heavy burden on HQ Sixth Panzer Army in re-equipping and bringing the four SS Panzer divisions up to strength. Many of the Panzer divisions themselves had been heavily committed, as had a number of other formations needed for the attack. There was, too, the need to disengage Fifth Panzer Army from the Aachen area. This was done by replacing it by Fifteenth Army from Holland and creating a new army there, Twenty-Fifth, under Friedrich Christiansen. This did bring about one concession to von Rundstedt and Model. It was clear that Model could not both prepare for a major offensive and cover a front that stretched from the North Sea round through Holland and virtually down to the Franco-Luxembourg border. Consequently a new army group was created, H, under Kurt Student, and this took First Parachute, now commanded by Alfred Schlemm, and Twenty-Fifth Armies under command.
Given the heavy losses recently suffered by the German armies in both the East and West, manpower was a critical problem. On 25 July, Hitler had issued a ‘total war’ directive. Among the measures ordered was the induction of one million recruits for the Wehrmacht. These were comb-outs from industry, and 17 year-olds. Most of them were formed into Volksgrenadier divisions, stiffened by the skeletons of divisions already destroyed. These were slimmer in numbers that the conventional infantry division, just 10,000 men compared to 17,000. Von Rundstedt afterwards declared that this was a mistake, especially the decision to raise some Volksgrenadier divisions from what was called Volksdeutsch List III, men of German extraction, and others, domiciled outside Germany:
‘The quality wasn’t the same as it used to be. We had sick men, old men and those not quite fit for active service, besides which we had those dreadful fellows, taken from “Volksliste 3” who were nothing better than deserters in uniform. It was unfortunate: we expected a so-called “Volksdeutscher” soldier to give his life and blood whilst his relatives were in a concentration camp in Poland. It wasn’t a clever move.’24
Even with this new influx at the beginning of December, von Rundstedt reported his command as being 3,500 officers and 115,000 men below establishment. The problem was that reinforcements and replacements were not matching casualties. Morale was a constant concern. The lower grade of the new replacements meant that incidents of self-inflicted wounds so rose that von Rundstedt had to issue a special order warning of the severe penalties that would be meted out to those who took this route to avoid further fighting.25 At the same time, in a special order of the day, he appealed to the veterans to ‘pass on your will for victory and your combat experience’ to the new arrivals at the Front.26
While the quality of weapons systems
remained high, quantity was a problem. True, in spite of the Allied bombing, German war production peaked in 1944, largely thanks to Albert Speer’s plan for moving industry away from the cities to carefully camouflaged satellite factories in the country. But losses had risen, too. Also the bombing had severely disrupted communications and the delivery of replacement weapons was taking very much longer than hitherto. In the Panzer divisions, for instance, the establishment of a tank company had fallen from 22 tanks to 17 by early 1944 and to 14 by November. Often, too, assault guns, with their very limited gun traverse, were substituted for tanks. Furthermore, the replacement tank crewmen had received only the most rudimentary training and it was not uncommon for drivers to be posted into divisions at this time who had not as yet driven a tank. The artillery was sufficient in numbers, but the guns were of such varying calibre that ammunition supply, aggravated by the vastly reduced railway system and limited motor transport, together with the fact that, for security reasons its movement had to be tightly controlled, was a nightmare. At the root of the problem was fuel. Germany’s stocks were now declining rapidly, both through bombing and the Russian advances in the East. Von Rundstedt calculated that five ‘allocations’ of fuel were needed, but when the offensive opened only 1.2 – 1.5 allocations were available. The assumption was that the remainder could be brought up from dumps east of the Rhine once the offensive started,27 contrary to the popular postwar belief that the attacking troops would rely on captured US stocks.23 One thing that von Rundstedt did insist on, however, was that the troops’ rations should not suffer and they continued to get their hot stew. His own staff, on the other hand, were restricted to 1.5 ounces of meat per day. The Field Marshal himself, though, ‘a very light eater, would often cut off a tiny piece of his ration for himself and pass the rest to one of his officers’.28
Added to these problems was the continuing pressure being exerted by the Allies. This made it very difficult to keep the divisions earmarked for the counter-offensive intact, let alone hold the enemy at arm’s length. In the north, von Rundstedt had demanded of OKW from September onwards that he be allowed to withdraw behind the River Waal. He argued that this would shorten his front sufficiently to save five divisions. Hitler turned this down in spite of the Allied crossing of it at Nijmegen during MARKET-GARDEN. The British Second Army’s advance eastwards towards the Rhine from the MARKET-GARDEN salient in October created another grave threat and was only stopped by a counter-attack in the Venlo area at the end of the month. On the 29th, von Rundstedt once again urged that Fifteenth Army be allowed to fall back behind the Waal, but Hitler would only concede a withdrawal to the north bank of the Maas. A further concern in the occupied Netherlands was the able-bodied Dutch males of military age, whose numbers were estimated as 600,000. Von Rundstedt was concerned that if the Allied advances into the Netherlands continued, they might well take up arms against his troops and create yet another burden. At the same time, Sauckel was crying out for more manpower to make good the losses in the Third Reich’s labour force created by the raising of the Volksgrenadier divisions. It therefore seemed logical to von Rundstedt to use the Dutch manpower to satisfy Sauckel’s demands and he issued an order to this effect to army Group B and Christiansen in the Netherlands on 2 November. This order was to form the basis of yet another of the war crimes charges made against him.29
Besides the continuing desperate fighting around Aachen, which had forced the transfer from the south of Fifth Panzer Army and saw the British and Americans close up to the River Roer by early December, November brought further crises in the southern part of C-in-C West’s front. On the 8th, Patton launched an attack in the Saarland. Six days later, First French Army thrust at the Belfort Gap. US Seventh Army also joined in and the upshot was that, by the end of the month, Balck’s army group had been driven back to the Rhine south of Baden Baden, apart from around Colmar, where Nineteenth Army was left in an exposed salient with its back to the river. Patton finally captured Metz and drove First Army back to the River Saar. The condition of many of Army Group G’s divisions was, in von Mellenthin’s words, ‘deplorable’,30 but the situation might have been much graver had it not been for the bad weather which persisted during the month. The snow and rain slowed the Allied armour and, more significantly, restricted their air power. Even so the net result of all this was that, as early as 21 November, von Rundstedt warned OKW that nine mobile and four infantry divisions would no longer be available for Hitler’s Ardennes counter-offensive.31
This von Rundstedt used as a fresh argument for the Small Solution, but Hitler’s ‘dead hand’ began to lie even more heavily on the project. On 19 November, von Rundstedt was sent a 12-page instruction on the assault tactics to be used in the offensive. All subordinate commanders were to be briefed on these and Hitler demanded copies of the briefs,32 a deeply demeaning intrusion on the authority of C-in-C West. Next day, Model sent a written plea to von Rundstedt to have the Small Solution reconsidered. He argued that the Allies had concentrated a significant amount of force in the Aachen area and that a ‘two-pronged pincer movement’ against it would be a ‘devastating blow’ and would create the right circumstances for fulfilling Hitler’s overall aim of splitting the Allied armies. He also stated that he considered 30 November as the earliest date on which the attack could be mounted.33 Hitler rejected this out of hand. Model tried again to get the Small Solution accepted at a conference at von Rundstedt’s headquarters on the 23rd, but also said that the Panzer divisions earmarked for the attack would now not be ready before 15 December because he had been forced to commit some of them to the fighting. Again he got nowhere. According to Westphal, von Rundstedt now asked Jodl to come and see him, which he did on the 26th. He was entirely sympathetic to the Small Solution, but said ‘with tired resignation’ that his hopes of convincing Hitler were slim.34 The final attempt to make Hitler change his mind came on 2 December. At Model’s request, Hitler agreed to see him and his army commanders in Berlin, where he had stopped off for some three weeks en route from Rastenburg to his headquarters in the West. Westphal was also present. Von Rundstedt, however, did not attend. Instead he spent the day watching a map exercise being conducted at Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army headquarters.
Von Manteuffel recalled that Model presented a ‘masterly summary’ of the issues and that even Hitler was ‘visibly impressed’.35 He was not, however, to be swayed. After the seven hour conference had finished, Hitler had a private discussion with von Manteuffel and said that he accepted that the forces available to reach such a distant objective as Antwerp were probably insufficient. Nevertheless, he was determined on the gamble, so that the situation in the West could be sufficiently stabilised for him to transfer forces to the East, where the Russians were preparing for a major offensive across the Vistula.36 Significantly, von Manteuffel said that Westphal took no part in the discussions and appeared to display a complete lack of knowledge of Model’s dispositions.37 This would indicate that von Rundstedt had now resigned himself to the inevitable and saw no point in pursuing the Small Solution any further. He may have been influenced in this by his assertion after the war that Hitler annotated the final orders for the attack ‘Not to be altered’.38
On 26 November, Hitler had declared that the attack would be launched on 10 December. Yet it was only on the 10th that he left Berlin for his western headquarters, the Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Eyrie), an admission that this date was over-optimistic. On the following day, he formally agreed a postponement to the 15th. This was not just to give Model more time to deploy his divisions, but also because the fuel dumps were still woefully ill stocked.
The Adlerhorst itself was situated just one kilometre south of von Rundstedt’s headquarters, which were now at Schloss Ziegenberg in the Taunus Hills north of Frankfurt-am-Main. This virtual co-location was a stark indicator that Hitler intended to conduct the offensive himself and that von Rundstedt was to all intents and purposes superfluous. The responsibility for setting up the facilities in t
he Adlerhorst appears to have rested with the army, but Martin Bormann, who was part of Hitler’s entourage, complained, on arrival at 0300 hours on the 11 th, about the poor preparation, especially the badly installed teleprinters and the lack of facilities for his two secretaries, remarking that ‘The proverb “on whom the Lord bestows an office, he also bestows intelligence” certainly does not apply to officers.’39 On the 11th and 12th, Hitler summoned all commanders, down to and including corps commanders, taking part in WATCH ON THE RHINE (Wacht am Rhein), as the offensive was codenamed, for a final ‘pep talk’, half on each evening. They had to report to von Rundstedt’s headquarters first and were taken from there in buses, which, for security reasons, made a half hour long detour for a journey which took only three minutes by the direct route. Von Rundstedt himself had to attend on both occasions, which must have been a trial for him, given his distaste for Hitler’s diatribes. Von Manteuffel recalled, too, that: ‘the seating accommodation was inadequate and the SS generals politely left the chairs to their senior army colleagues, while they stood. This created the impression on some of the army generals that an SS officer was posted behind each army officer’s chair.’40 As usual, the monologue itself was lengthy. After a long historical introduction, Hitler announced that new U-boats, the submerged high speed Types XXI and XXIII, were about to become operational and would radically change the face of the war at sea.41 Furthermore, wars were only decided when one side realised that it could never win. By demonstrating that Germany would never surrender, the Allies would be forced to end the war. Besides, the starkly contrasting political systems of the Soviet Union and Western Allies meant that their coalition was bound to collapse. Finally, he did not believe that the enemy in the West was markedly superior in numbers and claimed that the Americans alone had suffered 240,000 casualties during the past three weeks. In equipment terms, too, the German tanks were markedly superior.42 Dietrich, who was present on the second evening, also said that Hitler gave the fact that the German people could no longer endure the Allied bombing as another reason for mounting the offensive. He noted, too, that no one else spoke and that when Hitler asked each commander whether he was ready all replied in the negative.43 It was probably because of this that Hitler relented once more on the 12th and postponed the offensive by a further day to 16 December.
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