One of the
great debates about the Ardennes offensive has focused on the Allied inability
to foresee the attack. There were indeed many fragmented pieces of information
which taken together should have indicated German intentions, but as in almost
all intelligence failures, senior officers discarded anything which did not
match their own assumptions.*
Right from the start, Hitler’s orders for total secrecy could not have been followed. Word of the forthcoming offense even circulated among senior among senior German officers in British prisoner-of-war camps. In the second week of November, General der Panzertruppe Eberbach was secretly recorded saying that General major Eberding, captured just a few days before, had spoken of a forthcoming offensive in the west with forty-six divisions [on paper: 460,000 troops, two Armies]. Eberbach believed it was true, and that it was the last try. Even a Leutnant von der Goltz, captured on South Beveland during the clearing of the Scheldt, had heard that ‘the big offensive, for which they were preparing 46 divisions, was to start in November.’
These secretly recorded conversations were reported by MI 19a on 28 November to the War Office in London and sent onto SHAEF, but this rather vital information does not appear to have been taken seriously. No doubt it was simply dismissed as a desperately optimistic rumor circulating among captured officers, especially since the figure of forty-sex divisions seemed so impossibly high.[600,000 German soldiers fought in the Ardennes offensive.]
During the first week of November, a German deserter recounted in a debriefing that that panzer divisions redeployed to Westphalia were part of the Sixth Panzer Army. This also highlighted the fact that SHAEF intelligence had not heard of the Fifth Panzer Army for several weeks. Both SHAEF and Bradley’s 12th Army Group assumed that the Germans were preparing a strong counter-attack against an American crossing of the Roer. A German spoiling attack before Christmas was also considered quite likely, but hardly anybody expected it to come from Eifel and through the Ardennes, even though the German’s had used this route in 1870, 1914 and 1940.
The Allies could not believe that the Germans in their weakened state would dare to undertake an ambitious strategic offensive, when they needed to husband their strength before the Red Army launched its own winter offensive. Such a gamble was definitely not the style of the commander-in-chief west, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt. This was true, but Allied command had gravely underestimated Hitler’s manic grasp on the levers of military power. Senior officers had always been encouraged to put themselves in their opponents’ boots, but it is often be a mistake to judge your enemy by yourself. In any case SHAEF believed that the Germans lacked the fuel, the ammunition and the strength to mount a dangerous thrust. And the Allies’ air superiority was such that a German offensive into the open would surely play into their hands. In London, the Joint Intelligence Committee had also concluded that ‘Germany’s crippling shortage of oil continues to be the greatest single weakness in her capacity to resist.’
Wehrmacht troop movements into the Eifel around Bitberg were observed, but other divisions seemed to move on so it was assumed the area was just a staging post, or a sector for preparing new formations. Unfortunately, the Ardennes sector was deemed low priority for air reconnaissance and as a result of bad weather very few missions were flown in the region. Just six days before the great attack in the Ardennes, Troy H. Middleton’s VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne concluded: ‘the enemy’s present practice of bringing new divisions to this sector to receive front line experience and then relieving them out for commitment elsewhere indicates his desire to have this sector of the front remain quiet and inactive’ In fact the Germans were playing a clever for of ‘Find the Lady’, shuffling their formations to confuse Allied intelligence.
Patton’s Third Army headquarters noted the withdrawal of panzer formations, and his chief intelligence office, Colonel Oscar W,. Koch, feared that the VIII Corps in the Ardennes was very vulnerable. The conclusion of many, including General Bradley, was that the Germans might well be planning a spoiling attack** to disrupt Patton’s major offensive due to begin on 19 December. A number of other intelligence officers became wise after the event and tried to claim that they had predicted a great offensive, but nobody had listened. Several with SHAEF and Bradley’s Army Group did indeed predict an attack and a couple were very close to getting the date right, but none of them specifically identified the Ardennes as the threatened sector in time. Bradley said he was ‘aware of the danger’, but he had earmarked certain divisions to move into the Ardennes area should the enemy attack there.
The most controversial Cassandra was Colonel B. A. Dickson, the G-2 (or senior intelligence officer) at US First Army. A colorful character, Dickson was not always trusted by his peers because he had an unfortunate knack of identifying German divisions in the west when their position had been confirmed on the eastern front. In his report of 10 December (six days before the onset of the German Ardennes offensive) he commented on the high morale of German prisoners, which indicated a renewed confidence. Yet even though he noted a panzer concentration in the Eifel, he predicted that the attack would come further north in the Aachen area in 17 December. Several prisoners of war had spoken of an attack to recapture Aachen ‘as a Christmas present for the Fuhrer’. Then, on 14 December, Dickson received the briefing of a German-speaking woman who had reported troop concentrations and bridging equipment behind enemy lines in the Eifel. Dickson was now convinced that the attack was definitely coming in the Ardennes between Monschau and Echternach. Brigadier General Sibert at Bradley’s 12 Army Group, irritated by Dickson who loathed him in return, rejected his report as no more than a hunch. Dickson was told on 15 December to take some leave in Paris.
Hitler’s order for total radio silence among the attack formations had been followed, thus depriving Bletchley Park analysts of a clear picture through ULTRA material. Regrettably, SHAEF analysts relied far to much on ULTRA intelligence, and tended to think that it was the fount of all knowledge. On 26 October, however, it had alighted upon ‘Hitler’s orders for setting up a special force for special undertaking in the west. Knowledge of English and American idiom essential for volunteers’. And on 1 December, it worked out that radio silence had been imposed on all SS formations, which should have rung an alarm bell at SHAEF.
Unlike the German army the Luftwaffe had once again been incredibly lax, but SHAEF does not appear to have reacted to Bletchley transcripts. Already on 4 September, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin had reported after interviews with Ribbentrop and Hitler that the Germans were planning an offensive in the west in November ‘as soon as replenishing of air forcer concluded.’ The subsequent inquiry into the intelligence failure stated, ‘The GAF [Luftwaffe] evidence shows that since the last week of October, preparations have been in train to bring the bulk of the Luftwaffe on to airfields in the West.’
ON 31 October, ‘J[agd] G [eschwader] 26 quoted Goering order that re-equipment of all fighter aircraft as fighter bombers must be possible within 24 hours.’ This was significant because it would certainly indicate preparations for an attack in support of ground troops. And on 14 November, Bletchley noted: ‘Fighter units in West not to use Geschwader badges or unit markings.’ On 1 December, they read that courses for National Socialist Leadership Officers had been cancelled owing to ‘impending special operation.’ The Nazi overuse of the word ‘special’ was probably the reason why this was not seized on. And on 3 December , a report called for by Luftflotte Reich ‘on measures taken for technical supply units that had arrived for operations in the west.’ The next day fighter commanders were summoned to a conference at the headquarters of Jagdkorps II. Soon after, the whole SG4, a specialized ground-attack Geschwader, was transferred to the west from the eastern front. That should have raided some eyebrows.
The head of the Secret Intelligence Service considered it ‘a little startling to find that the Germans had a better knowledge of the US order of battle from their signals intelligence than we had of the German order of battle from Ultra.’ The reason was clear in his view[ Frontlaufer: infiltrators, informers and spies]. It has been emphasized that, out of thirty odd US divisions in the west, the Germans had constantly known the locations, and often the intentions, of all but two or three. They knew that the southern wing of the US First Army, on a front of about eighty miles, was mostly held either by new or by tired divisions. . . .
Bradley’s headquarters remained quietly optimistic about the immediate future. That week staff officers concluded: ‘It is now certain that attrition is steadily sapping the strength of German forces on the western front and that the crust of defense is thinner, more brittle and more vulnerable than it appears on G-2 maps or to the troop in the line [American generals were rarely very familiar with conditions ‘in the line’] Bradley’s chief worry was the replacement situation***. His 12 Army Group was short of 17,581 men, and he planned to see Eisenhower about it in Versailles.
In the north of the VIII Corps sector, the newly arrived 106th Infantry Division had just taken over positions of the 2nd Infantry Division on a hogsback ridge on the Schnee Eifel. ‘;My men were amazed at the appearance of the men from the incoming unit,’ wrote a company commander in the 2nd division. ‘They were equipped with a maze of equipment that only replacements fresh from the States would have dared called their own. And horror of horrors, they were wearing neckties! Shades of General Patton!’ During the handover a regimental commandeer from the 2nd Division told Colonel Cavender of the 43rd Infantry: ‘It has been vey quiet up here and your men will learn the easy way.” The experienced troops pulling out took all their stoves with them. The green newcomers had none to dry out socks, so many cases of trench foot soon developed in the damp snow. [ American footgear was lousy anyway, compared with the Germans and Russian and official advice given out how to avoid trench foot was wrong ****] . . .
Fighting in the Ardennes reached a degree of savagery unprecedented on the western front. The shooting of prisoners of war has always been a far more common practice than military historians in the past have been prepared to acknowledge, especially when writing of their own countrymen. The Kampfgruppe Peiper’s cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners in the Baugnez-Malmedy massacre was of course chilling, and its indiscriminate killing of civilians even ore so. That the American soldiers took revenge was hardly surprising, but it is surely shocking that a number of generals, from Bradley downwards, openly approved of the shooting of prisoners in retaliation. There are few details in the archives or in American accounts of the Chenogne massacre, where the ill-trained and badly bruised 11th Armored Division took out its rage on some sixty prisoners. . . Historians, however, have also overlooked the terrible irony of twentieth century warfare. After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive use of shells and bombs. As the result more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination. . . .
German and Allied casualties in the Ardennes fighting from 16 December 1944 to 29 January 1945 were fairly equal. Total German losses were around 80,000 dead, wounded and missing. The Americans suffered 75,482 casualties, with 8,407 killed. The British lost 1,408, of whom 200 were killed. The unfortunate 106th Infantry Division lost the most men, 8,568, but many of them were prisoners of war. The 101st Airborne suffered the highest death rate with 535 killed in action.
[My father’s older brother was killed in this Battle.]
The unsung American victims of the Ardennes offensive were those captured by the enemy and condemned to spend the last months of the war in grim Stalag prison camps. Their journey to Germany was a series of long cold marches, interminable rail journeys packed in boxcars being bombed and strafed by Allied aircraft and dogged by the debilitating squalor of dysentery.
As the fighting approached its end in April 1945, the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden came across a group of young, half-starved American prisoners of war, presumably also from the 106th Infantry Division. He described tem as having ‘xylophone ribs, sunken cheeks, thin necks and ‘gangling arms’. They were ‘a little hysterical’ in their joy at encountering fellow Anglo-Saxons. ‘Some American prisoners whom I met this morning seemed to me to be the most pitiful of all I had seen,’ Blunden wrote. ‘They had arrived in Europe only last December, gone immediately to the front line and had received the full brunt of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that month. Since their capture they had been moved moved almost constantly from one place to another and they told stories of comrades clubbed to death by German guards merely for breaking line to grab sugar beets from fields. They were more pitiful because hey were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.’[ and had had very little training] They at least were alive. A good number of their comrades lacked the will to survive their imprisonment, like the original for Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, wo acquired the ‘5,000 mile stare’. Reduced to bank apathy, they would not move or eat and died silently of starvation.
The surprise and ruthlessness of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west, But, as with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the shock of total warfare did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected. It provoked instead a critical mass of desperate resistance, a bloody-minded determination to fight on even when surrounded. When German formations attacked, screaming and whistling, isolated companies defended key villages against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice bought the time to bring in reinforcements, and this was their vital contribution to the destruction of Hitler’s dream. Perhaps the German leadership’s greatest mistake in the Ardennes offensive was to have misjudged the foot soldiers of an army they affected to despise.
* [At the time relations between the British and American top commanders were at an all time low, they had little confidence in the chain of command as it existed at that time and arguing about strategy, priority of supply, experiencing high degrees of distraction ( an exasperated and angry Bradley had the flu, Montgomery was headed back to England for leave, Brooke’s tour of the front was ending, Eisenhower was exhausted and bored) and thus not tuned particularly well to tactical conditions on the front line. In short, their overconfident egos were pre-occupied with the politics of national prestige and military honor- my summary of the first part of this Chapter, no. 7]
Right from the start, Hitler’s orders for total secrecy could not have been followed. Word of the forthcoming offense even circulated among senior among senior German officers in British prisoner-of-war camps. In the second week of November, General der Panzertruppe Eberbach was secretly recorded saying that General major Eberding, captured just a few days before, had spoken of a forthcoming offensive in the west with forty-six divisions [on paper: 460,000 troops, two Armies]. Eberbach believed it was true, and that it was the last try. Even a Leutnant von der Goltz, captured on South Beveland during the clearing of the Scheldt, had heard that ‘the big offensive, for which they were preparing 46 divisions, was to start in November.’
These secretly recorded conversations were reported by MI 19a on 28 November to the War Office in London and sent onto SHAEF, but this rather vital information does not appear to have been taken seriously. No doubt it was simply dismissed as a desperately optimistic rumor circulating among captured officers, especially since the figure of forty-sex divisions seemed so impossibly high.[600,000 German soldiers fought in the Ardennes offensive.]
During the first week of November, a German deserter recounted in a debriefing that that panzer divisions redeployed to Westphalia were part of the Sixth Panzer Army. This also highlighted the fact that SHAEF intelligence had not heard of the Fifth Panzer Army for several weeks. Both SHAEF and Bradley’s 12th Army Group assumed that the Germans were preparing a strong counter-attack against an American crossing of the Roer. A German spoiling attack before Christmas was also considered quite likely, but hardly anybody expected it to come from Eifel and through the Ardennes, even though the German’s had used this route in 1870, 1914 and 1940.
The Allies could not believe that the Germans in their weakened state would dare to undertake an ambitious strategic offensive, when they needed to husband their strength before the Red Army launched its own winter offensive. Such a gamble was definitely not the style of the commander-in-chief west, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt. This was true, but Allied command had gravely underestimated Hitler’s manic grasp on the levers of military power. Senior officers had always been encouraged to put themselves in their opponents’ boots, but it is often be a mistake to judge your enemy by yourself. In any case SHAEF believed that the Germans lacked the fuel, the ammunition and the strength to mount a dangerous thrust. And the Allies’ air superiority was such that a German offensive into the open would surely play into their hands. In London, the Joint Intelligence Committee had also concluded that ‘Germany’s crippling shortage of oil continues to be the greatest single weakness in her capacity to resist.’
Wehrmacht troop movements into the Eifel around Bitberg were observed, but other divisions seemed to move on so it was assumed the area was just a staging post, or a sector for preparing new formations. Unfortunately, the Ardennes sector was deemed low priority for air reconnaissance and as a result of bad weather very few missions were flown in the region. Just six days before the great attack in the Ardennes, Troy H. Middleton’s VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne concluded: ‘the enemy’s present practice of bringing new divisions to this sector to receive front line experience and then relieving them out for commitment elsewhere indicates his desire to have this sector of the front remain quiet and inactive’ In fact the Germans were playing a clever for of ‘Find the Lady’, shuffling their formations to confuse Allied intelligence.
Patton’s Third Army headquarters noted the withdrawal of panzer formations, and his chief intelligence office, Colonel Oscar W,. Koch, feared that the VIII Corps in the Ardennes was very vulnerable. The conclusion of many, including General Bradley, was that the Germans might well be planning a spoiling attack** to disrupt Patton’s major offensive due to begin on 19 December. A number of other intelligence officers became wise after the event and tried to claim that they had predicted a great offensive, but nobody had listened. Several with SHAEF and Bradley’s Army Group did indeed predict an attack and a couple were very close to getting the date right, but none of them specifically identified the Ardennes as the threatened sector in time. Bradley said he was ‘aware of the danger’, but he had earmarked certain divisions to move into the Ardennes area should the enemy attack there.
The most controversial Cassandra was Colonel B. A. Dickson, the G-2 (or senior intelligence officer) at US First Army. A colorful character, Dickson was not always trusted by his peers because he had an unfortunate knack of identifying German divisions in the west when their position had been confirmed on the eastern front. In his report of 10 December (six days before the onset of the German Ardennes offensive) he commented on the high morale of German prisoners, which indicated a renewed confidence. Yet even though he noted a panzer concentration in the Eifel, he predicted that the attack would come further north in the Aachen area in 17 December. Several prisoners of war had spoken of an attack to recapture Aachen ‘as a Christmas present for the Fuhrer’. Then, on 14 December, Dickson received the briefing of a German-speaking woman who had reported troop concentrations and bridging equipment behind enemy lines in the Eifel. Dickson was now convinced that the attack was definitely coming in the Ardennes between Monschau and Echternach. Brigadier General Sibert at Bradley’s 12 Army Group, irritated by Dickson who loathed him in return, rejected his report as no more than a hunch. Dickson was told on 15 December to take some leave in Paris.
Hitler’s order for total radio silence among the attack formations had been followed, thus depriving Bletchley Park analysts of a clear picture through ULTRA material. Regrettably, SHAEF analysts relied far to much on ULTRA intelligence, and tended to think that it was the fount of all knowledge. On 26 October, however, it had alighted upon ‘Hitler’s orders for setting up a special force for special undertaking in the west. Knowledge of English and American idiom essential for volunteers’. And on 1 December, it worked out that radio silence had been imposed on all SS formations, which should have rung an alarm bell at SHAEF.
Unlike the German army the Luftwaffe had once again been incredibly lax, but SHAEF does not appear to have reacted to Bletchley transcripts. Already on 4 September, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin had reported after interviews with Ribbentrop and Hitler that the Germans were planning an offensive in the west in November ‘as soon as replenishing of air forcer concluded.’ The subsequent inquiry into the intelligence failure stated, ‘The GAF [Luftwaffe] evidence shows that since the last week of October, preparations have been in train to bring the bulk of the Luftwaffe on to airfields in the West.’
ON 31 October, ‘J[agd] G [eschwader] 26 quoted Goering order that re-equipment of all fighter aircraft as fighter bombers must be possible within 24 hours.’ This was significant because it would certainly indicate preparations for an attack in support of ground troops. And on 14 November, Bletchley noted: ‘Fighter units in West not to use Geschwader badges or unit markings.’ On 1 December, they read that courses for National Socialist Leadership Officers had been cancelled owing to ‘impending special operation.’ The Nazi overuse of the word ‘special’ was probably the reason why this was not seized on. And on 3 December , a report called for by Luftflotte Reich ‘on measures taken for technical supply units that had arrived for operations in the west.’ The next day fighter commanders were summoned to a conference at the headquarters of Jagdkorps II. Soon after, the whole SG4, a specialized ground-attack Geschwader, was transferred to the west from the eastern front. That should have raided some eyebrows.
The head of the Secret Intelligence Service considered it ‘a little startling to find that the Germans had a better knowledge of the US order of battle from their signals intelligence than we had of the German order of battle from Ultra.’ The reason was clear in his view[ Frontlaufer: infiltrators, informers and spies]. It has been emphasized that, out of thirty odd US divisions in the west, the Germans had constantly known the locations, and often the intentions, of all but two or three. They knew that the southern wing of the US First Army, on a front of about eighty miles, was mostly held either by new or by tired divisions. . . .
Bradley’s headquarters remained quietly optimistic about the immediate future. That week staff officers concluded: ‘It is now certain that attrition is steadily sapping the strength of German forces on the western front and that the crust of defense is thinner, more brittle and more vulnerable than it appears on G-2 maps or to the troop in the line [American generals were rarely very familiar with conditions ‘in the line’] Bradley’s chief worry was the replacement situation***. His 12 Army Group was short of 17,581 men, and he planned to see Eisenhower about it in Versailles.
In the north of the VIII Corps sector, the newly arrived 106th Infantry Division had just taken over positions of the 2nd Infantry Division on a hogsback ridge on the Schnee Eifel. ‘;My men were amazed at the appearance of the men from the incoming unit,’ wrote a company commander in the 2nd division. ‘They were equipped with a maze of equipment that only replacements fresh from the States would have dared called their own. And horror of horrors, they were wearing neckties! Shades of General Patton!’ During the handover a regimental commandeer from the 2nd Division told Colonel Cavender of the 43rd Infantry: ‘It has been vey quiet up here and your men will learn the easy way.” The experienced troops pulling out took all their stoves with them. The green newcomers had none to dry out socks, so many cases of trench foot soon developed in the damp snow. [ American footgear was lousy anyway, compared with the Germans and Russian and official advice given out how to avoid trench foot was wrong ****] . . .
Fighting in the Ardennes reached a degree of savagery unprecedented on the western front. The shooting of prisoners of war has always been a far more common practice than military historians in the past have been prepared to acknowledge, especially when writing of their own countrymen. The Kampfgruppe Peiper’s cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners in the Baugnez-Malmedy massacre was of course chilling, and its indiscriminate killing of civilians even ore so. That the American soldiers took revenge was hardly surprising, but it is surely shocking that a number of generals, from Bradley downwards, openly approved of the shooting of prisoners in retaliation. There are few details in the archives or in American accounts of the Chenogne massacre, where the ill-trained and badly bruised 11th Armored Division took out its rage on some sixty prisoners. . . Historians, however, have also overlooked the terrible irony of twentieth century warfare. After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive use of shells and bombs. As the result more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination. . . .
German and Allied casualties in the Ardennes fighting from 16 December 1944 to 29 January 1945 were fairly equal. Total German losses were around 80,000 dead, wounded and missing. The Americans suffered 75,482 casualties, with 8,407 killed. The British lost 1,408, of whom 200 were killed. The unfortunate 106th Infantry Division lost the most men, 8,568, but many of them were prisoners of war. The 101st Airborne suffered the highest death rate with 535 killed in action.
[My father’s older brother was killed in this Battle.]
The unsung American victims of the Ardennes offensive were those captured by the enemy and condemned to spend the last months of the war in grim Stalag prison camps. Their journey to Germany was a series of long cold marches, interminable rail journeys packed in boxcars being bombed and strafed by Allied aircraft and dogged by the debilitating squalor of dysentery.
As the fighting approached its end in April 1945, the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden came across a group of young, half-starved American prisoners of war, presumably also from the 106th Infantry Division. He described tem as having ‘xylophone ribs, sunken cheeks, thin necks and ‘gangling arms’. They were ‘a little hysterical’ in their joy at encountering fellow Anglo-Saxons. ‘Some American prisoners whom I met this morning seemed to me to be the most pitiful of all I had seen,’ Blunden wrote. ‘They had arrived in Europe only last December, gone immediately to the front line and had received the full brunt of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that month. Since their capture they had been moved moved almost constantly from one place to another and they told stories of comrades clubbed to death by German guards merely for breaking line to grab sugar beets from fields. They were more pitiful because hey were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.’[ and had had very little training] They at least were alive. A good number of their comrades lacked the will to survive their imprisonment, like the original for Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, wo acquired the ‘5,000 mile stare’. Reduced to bank apathy, they would not move or eat and died silently of starvation.
The surprise and ruthlessness of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west, But, as with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the shock of total warfare did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected. It provoked instead a critical mass of desperate resistance, a bloody-minded determination to fight on even when surrounded. When German formations attacked, screaming and whistling, isolated companies defended key villages against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice bought the time to bring in reinforcements, and this was their vital contribution to the destruction of Hitler’s dream. Perhaps the German leadership’s greatest mistake in the Ardennes offensive was to have misjudged the foot soldiers of an army they affected to despise.
* [At the time relations between the British and American top commanders were at an all time low, they had little confidence in the chain of command as it existed at that time and arguing about strategy, priority of supply, experiencing high degrees of distraction ( an exasperated and angry Bradley had the flu, Montgomery was headed back to England for leave, Brooke’s tour of the front was ending, Eisenhower was exhausted and bored) and thus not tuned particularly well to tactical conditions on the front line. In short, their overconfident egos were pre-occupied with the politics of national prestige and military honor- my summary of the first part of this Chapter, no. 7]
** The Allied forces could have been mounting there own ‘spoiling attack’ at this time:
“The supreme commander had opted for an operational strategy of firepower and attrition – the direct approach- as opposed to a war of opportunistic maneuver. After encouraging a bloody attack through the Vosges, SHAEF possessed neither a coherent strategic goal for is southern wing nor the agility to exploit unexpected success. Even Patton believed Devers should have jumped the Rhine, yet little thought seems to have been given either in Versailles or in Luxembourg City to use the Third Army’s tank legions to exploit the bridgehead at Rastatt. In misusing 6th Army Group, as one Army historian later charged, Eisenhower unwittingly gave the Germans a respite, allowing Hitler to continue assembling a secret counter-offense aimed at the Ardennes in mid-December. Crossing the Rhine after Thanksgiving might well have complicated German planning for what soon would be known as the Battle of the Bulge”
See Rick Atkinson’s account:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-stroll-through-war-in-western-europe.html
*** If replacements were lucky to survive their first few days in combat. So few did that members of their units stopped bothering even to learn their names.
****J.D. Salinger’s mother knitted and sent the him two pairs of wool socks every week.
No comments:
Post a Comment