Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The operation was to be commanded by Model’s Army Group B. The attack would be over a sixty-mile front between Monschau and Echternach and would be spearheaded by the recently formed Sixth SS Panzer Army, commanded by SS Oberstgruppenführer Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, an old friend of Hitler’s from their street-brawling days who had been a paymaster NCO in the first war and one of the first recruits to the SS. During this war he had successively commanded the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment, a Waffen SS division and then a corps.

  Dietrich possessed no great intellect and most of the detailed planning and the operational direction of his various commands was carried out by the chiefs of staff, but he was tough, a natural leader popular with his men and, above all else in these troubled times, totally loyal. Dietrich would move through the Ardennes, cross the Meuse between Liège and Huy and press on to Antwerp. His left flank would be protected by Fifth Panzer Army commanded by General of Panzer Troops Hasso-Eccard Freiherr von Manteuffel, who would cross the Meuse at Dinant and advance towards Brussels and then Antwerp, while General of Panzer Troops Erich Brandenberger’s Seventh Army would attack through Luxembourg and keep Patton’s US Third Army from interfering with the main thrust. In support of the main operation would be around 2,000 English-speaking soldiers under the command of SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the hero of the Mussolini rescue, who would be dressed in American uniforms and supplied with captured Allied vehicles and weapons and whose job it was to sow confusion and seize road junctions and bridges. Contrary to popular belief, such a ruse de guerre was not contrary to the laws of war provided those involved changed into the correct uniforms before taking any warlike action, but as Skorzeny’s men had no intention of holding a changing parade, it rendered them liable to execution if captured. Additionally, parachute troops, properly dressed this time, would be used to take and hold the passes through the hills north of Malmedy.

  For the first phase of the operation the Germans assembled 200,000 men, in thirteen infantry and motorized divisions and five panzer divisions, supported by 1,600 artillery pieces. One of the major problems, as Hitler freely admitted, was the absolute air superiority of the Allies but, in case the Germans were unable to rely on bad weather to negate that, they did manage to concentrate 1,770 ground attack fighters and light bombers on airfields in the West, almost two thirds of the total Luftwaffe strength, whose role was to keep the enemy air forces away from the heads of the armoured columns. Absolute secrecy was paramount: only the most senior commanders and those staff officers who had to know for planning purposes were told the objective for which they were being concentrated, until Hitler, who had moved his headquarters from Berlin to Bad Nauheim, personally briefed divisional commanders and above four days before A-Tag. Movement of the troops to the assembly areas could only be done at night and, as many of the formations to be employed had only recently been pulled out of the line elsewhere, they were battle-weary and had received only inexperienced recruits as reinforcements. Very few officers had any opportunity to reconnoitre the ground over which they would have to move, but the Germans believed that these disadvantages could be compensated for by their ability to react faster than the British or Americans and their superior planning and tactical skills. As movement to the assembly areas was much slower than had been anticipated, largely due to the state of the roads and the need to travel by night, the original jump-off date was postponed from 27 November to 10 December, and then, after the meteorologists predicted favourable (i.e. bad) weather later in the month, to 16 December.

  That the Allies were caught by surprise was partly their own fault: they were convinced that the Germans were beaten and that they were incapable of mounting other than local spoiling and counter-attacks; they failed to understand the significance of intercepted requests for aerial photographic reconnaissance of the Meuse; they knew that aircraft were being moved but they did not know why; information from civilian refugees that the Germans were massing tanks and armoured vehicles in the Eifel were discounted, and reports that U-boats in the Atlantic and Baltic were sending far more weather reports than was normal were ignored.All these indications were considered by the Allied staffs at SHAPE and attributed to the Germans using the Ardennes as a rest area, or as a retraining area before moving to the Eastern Front, or possibly to block an Allied attack from the direction of Aachen. The Germans were far too short of fuel to mount an offensive; Rundstedt, Commander-in-Chief West, was known for his caution and would surely never risk an offensive at this stage of the war; and anyway, as nothing had been heard from Ultra, upon which Allied senior commanders had become obsessively reliant, then there could not be anything of significance happening. Montgomery had been given permission to spend Christmas on leave in England, and he had stopped his nightly situation conferences ‘until the war becomes more exciting’.

  However, Wacht am Rhein was not Rundstedt’s idea but Hitler’s, and the Allies had heard nothing from Ultra because the Germans had imposed radio silence, with all reports and instructions delivered by secure telephone, by hand of courier or mouth of staff officer.* When at 0700 hours on the morning of 16 December, after an hour’s artillery bombardment, Model’s spearhead suddenly appeared out of the mist, the result was complete surprise, panic and shock. He faced 83,000 Americans in five divisions with 400 tanks and 504 artillery pieces spread all along the front and he outnumbered them in men, tanks, guns and motivation. At first it looked as if the Germans might achieve a shattering success: Sixth SS Panzer Army failed to break through in the north of their area of responsibility but penetrated as far as Malmedy in the south. Fifth Panzer Army did break through and forced the surrender of the US VIII Corps on 18 December, while to the south Brandenberger’s horse-drawn army made modest gains. Fifth Army was now poised to seize the important crossroads at Bastogne, for if they could take that, then they had a clear run towards the Meuse. On 20 December, Eisenhower ordered that all troops north of the German breakthrough should come under the command of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, and all those south of it to be under Bradley. This made eminent sense as Bradley had refused to move his army group headquarters to the rear (he said he had never retreated and that anyway it would upset his soldiers) and his communications with the US First and Ninth Armies north of the Bulge had been severed, but it was to be the cause of yet another major inter-Allied row in due course. On 21 December the Germans took St Vith when Montgomery ordered a withdrawal to shorten the front, and Rundstedt ordered that this success should be reinforced by allocating the reserves to Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army and moving elements of Sixth SS Panzer Army south to him.

  Despite their achieving complete surprise, not everything was going the Germans’ way, however. The bad weather and the snow had helped but also hindered, as roads turned to mud and snow flurries forced tank crews to drive almost blind; the Luftwaffe was unable to find the dropping zones for the paratroops and dropped many in the wrong places, where most were captured; the fuel situation was critical as the Allied dumps that the Germans had hoped to capture had been moved west or destroyed, and Bastogne, which had to be taken speedily, was holding out under Brigadier-General Anthony McAuliffe, who refused repeated calls to surrender and, even when completely encircled, held on, being resupplied by air. Skorzeny’s men generally failed in their mission to capture strategic junctions and many were captured and after hasty courts martial shot, but their very presence did sow distrust amongst the Allies, who could no longer assume that people dressed as them in vehicles with Allied markings were actually who they purported to be. At Malmedy 1 SS Panzer Division shot a number of American prisoners, presumably because they did not want to have to detail troops to guard them, and, as atrocity breeds atrocity, this in turn led to German prisoners being shot.

  On 23 December, Manteuffel’s leading elements had got to within four miles of Dinant on the Meuse, but that was as far as Wacht am Rhein was going to get, for on that same day the Allies shifted from running aimlessly about in circles
to stabilizing the front, the Germans ran out of fuel, the weather cleared, allowing the Allied air forces to operate, and Patton – reluctantly, because he badly wanted to capture the Saar – was attacking from the south towards Bastogne. On 26 December, Patton’s armour broke through to Bastogne, and now Eisenhower saw an opportunity to cut off the German salient and encircle and destroy the armies within it. Here was exposed a fundamental difference in the thinking of the two Western Allies. Montgomery concentrated on blocking the German advance, and only intended to counterattack much later, once men, stores, ammunition and guns were in place. Eisenhower and his American subordinates, however, wanted to attack straight away while the opportunity existed. On 28 December, Eisenhower ordered Bradley to form the southern pincer that would meet with Montgomery’s thrust from the north and cut off three German armies. Montgomery, whom Eisenhower flew to brief that same day, would not agree. He stated that he could not be ready to attack before 1 January (later postponed to 3 January) and recommended that the American armies to the south withdraw to consolidate and prepare for the offensive when all was in place. Montgomery also renewed his request for a single Land Forces Commander, under Eisenhower, in a remarkably insensitive letter sent to Eisenhower on 30 December. This, along with the suggestion in the British press that Montgomery had saved the Americans’ bacon and was the hero of the hour, an impression reinforced by a press conference he gave, infuriated the American generals and was the last straw as far as Eisenhower was concerned, particularly as Montgomery had only deployed three British divisions and they had not done very much. He drafted a signal giving the Joint Chiefs the choice of Montgomery or himself. Had the signal been sent, there can be no doubt that it would have been Montgomery who would have been sacked (and it was not only American officers who would have been happy to see the last of him) and only a last-minute intervention by his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Frances ‘Freddie’ de Guingand, on 31 December, persuaded Montgomery to write a cringing letter of apology and Eisenhower to tear up his signal.

  As it was, Bradley’s attack from the southern shoulder of the salient was launched on 1 January and coincided with Fall Bodenplatte, an attempt by the Luftwaffe to prevent the Allied air forces from interfering with Model’s withdrawal. Nine hundred German aircraft attacked twenty airfields in Holland, Belgium and northern France, destroying or damaging 260 RAF and USAAF aeroplanes, but the Luftwaffe lost 300 of their own, and, while the Allies could replace theirs, the Germans could not. Since Montgomery did not launch the northern pincer until two days after Bradley, the opportunity to cut off the Germans was lost, and they were able to withdraw steadily and to avoid being encircled. On 8 January, Hitler authorized the abandonment of the Bulge pocket but it was not until 16 January that the two Allied pincers met, and not until the first week of February that all resistance in the salient was eliminated. The next objective for the Allies would be the Rhine, the largest water obstacle in Europe.

  The so-called Battle of the Bulge cost the Germans 10,749 dead, 34,225 wounded and over 600 armoured vehicles destroyed or abandoned having run out of fuel.92 It robbed them of their last reserves that could have been sent East and, combined with the wasteful despatch of troops to Hungary, left very little to defend the Homeland when Stalin launched his Vistula offensive in response to a plea from Churchill to take the pressure off the Ardennes.

  * * *

  Colonel-General Guderian predicted that the next Soviet offensive would come through Poland across the Vistula; he even predicted the date, but Hitler did not believe him, being convinced that the Red Army would need far longer to sort itself out and regroup after Operation Bagration. Sure enough, on 12 January five Soviet Fronts hurled themselves at the German lines and found a weakened opponent. They ripped a twenty-mile gap in Army Group Centre through which the Russian armour poured, with infantry riding on the tanks, and leaving any German units that still held their ground for the following waves to mop up. Warsaw fell on 17 January, relieved by the Polish Army under Russian command, but only after it had been held back long enough to allow the Germans to destroy Bór-Komorowski’s, anti-communist Home Army. Cracow fell the next day and the Red Army caught the German counter-attack forces deploying, pinned them against the River Oder and destroyed them. In Hungary, Budapest fell on the 18th and two Fronts burst into East Prussia, pinning the Third Panzer Army around Königsberg, where they were joined by the garrison of Memel, evacuated by the German navy in the teeth of the Red Army. Now the German army could only retreat, with hastily formed ad hoc battle groups of a battalion or two, a few tanks and what guns could be scraped together desperately trying to buy time for the armies to withdraw and then scuttling back themselves. Two weeks after the launch of the Vistula offensive, the Red Army had advanced nearly 250 miles, and stood on the Oder, only fifty miles from Berlin.

  The very last German offensive of the war took place in Hungary, when, on 6 March, Sixth SS Panzer Army, withdrawn from the Ardennes and still commanded by Dietrich, scraped together eleven panzer and motorized and twenty infantry divisions and attempted to retake Budapest from Lake Balaton, sixty miles away. It was a totally pointless exercise – the troops would have been far better employed along the Oder or on the Austro-Hungarian border – and some of the armoured divisions were down to twenty tanks each, while none of the infantry divisions was more than 50 per cent manned, but they did have a batch of the brand-new Tiger II tanks, sixty-ton monsters with an 88mm gun and totally impervious to any tank or anti-tank gun. Extraordinarily, some of the old tactical flair was still there and the Germans broke through the Soviet defences, but the early thaw meant that the Tigers sank in the mud once they ventured off roads, the attack soon ran out of steam in the marshes, the Soviets counter-attacked in overwhelming strength and Sixth Army could only retreat towards Vienna, leaving most of their brand-new tanks stuck in the swamps.

  The thought of Russian troops on German soil struck panic into the civilian population. In Budapest the Red Army had shot out of hand any member of the SS that it captured, rounded up every Hungarian civilian with a German name and deported them to Siberia, raped everything in skirts regardless of age and helped themselves to anything moveable. If that was what they would do in Hungary, how much worse would it be in Germany?

  * * *

  In the Far East, General MacArthur was concentrating 200,000 troops to invade Luzon, the main island of the Philippines and the site of the nation’s capital, Manila. In order to provide air bases from which the Fifth United States Army Air Force could provide air cover for the Luzon operation, he needed to capture the island of Mindoro to the south of Luzon. It would be a tricky operation,as Mindoro was 260 miles from Leyte and thus out of range of land-based aircraft, but, despite the efforts of what was left of the Japanese navy, 24 Division landed there against negligible opposition on 15 December and work to develop airstrips began. While what few Japanese surface vessels were left might be unable to do very much damage to Halsey’s fleet, kamikazes and the weather could. From 4 January 1945 swarms of suicide planes attacked American ships, and, while they never came near to scoring a victory, they damaged thirty warships, some of them badly. On 6 January a kamikaze attack on the battleship New Mexico killed Lieutenant-General Herbert Lumsden, who, having been sacked by Montgomery for not being sycophantic enough, hung around in Home Forces in England before being appointed as British Liaison Officer to MacArthur’s staff. Anti-kamikaze measures included reducing the fleet from four medium-sized task forces to three large ones, increasing the number of anti-aircraft weapons on ships and stationing picket destroyers sixty miles away from the main fleet to give early warning. And as if kamikazes were not enough, the American fleet then ran into a typhoon, which sank three destroyers and damaged a number of other ships, as well as costing Halsey 146 aircraft and 800 men.

  The Japanese garrison of Luzon was around 80,000 combat troops, with the same number again of administrative, navy and air force personnel. In accordance with the latest
Japanese doctrine, they did not attempt to oppose the first American landing at Lingayen 100 miles north of Manila on 9 January, which was supported by a ferocious naval bombardment, but withdrew into the centre of the island. American progress thereafter was slow, despite MacArthur’s urgings, as the Sixth Army’s commander, Krueger, was concerned that to drive into the hinterland too early might allow the Japanese to emerge and cut him off from his supply base. On 29 January another landing took place, by IX Corps at San Antonio and Subic Bay, west of Bataan, and on the 31st 11 Airborne Division went ashore fifty miles south-west of Manila. MacArthur could now attempt to attack and recapture Manila, which was not only a politically important objective as the capital but also where large numbers of prisoners of war were being held who, if not rescued quickly, might be massacred by the Japanese as they withdrew. General Yamashita, who was responsible for the defence of the Philippines, had, in an uncharacteristic act of humanity, ordered that Manila was to be an open city, that is, abandoned by the Japanese Army and not to be defended. Yamashita did not, however, have full powers of command over the naval infantry on Luzon, and Vice-Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi determined that he and 17,000 of his men would defend Manila, whatever Yamashita ordered. On 4 February the Americans got into the northern suburbs of the city and freed a large number of sick and malnourished prisoners, but it took another month to clear the entire capital. Fighting degenerated into a house-to-house slog, with all the bitterness and brutality that goes with such short-range battles, and, by 3 March, when the Japanese defenders, who refused to surrender and had to be killed, were no more, the city was a wreck. While the American death toll was only around 1,000, huge numbers of Filipino civilians lay dead, crushed by falling buildings, shot by the Japanese on suspicion of helping the Allies or caught in the middle of an exchange of fire.