CHAPTER SEVEN
AS HITLER’S VISION of kicking in Russia’s front door drowned in blood on the Eastern Front, France increasingly became a rest-and-recuperation zone for burned-out frontline units. Even the West’s supreme commander as of March 1942, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had received his appointment after being removed from his army group in Russia. A few weeks in France to absorb equipment and replacements, to forget the war as much as possible, was a dream that ran a close third to a long furlough or a million-mark wound. Simultaneously the “hero-thieves” of the replacement service staged comb-out after comb-out in the formations that watched the coasts. In 1942 and 1943, just about anyone who wanted to fight, who was able to fight, or who could conceivably be made to fight, was transferred eastward. Their replacements were the lame and the halt, the elderly and the invalid, whole battalions recruited from Russia’s Asian communities or from prisoners of war.
I
IN THOSE CONTEXTS, might the US-initiated projects for a full-scale landing in the spring of 1943 have caught the Wehrmacht at its lowest ebb? For a good part of 1943, High Command West had fewer combat-ready divisions than it possessed in 1942. It was absorbed in implementing Hitler’s September 1942 order to increase the coastal defenses by no fewer than 15,000 strong points. The archives include far more correspondence on details of the Führer’s blockhouse projects than on proposals for repelling a full-scale cross-channel invasion. The Allies’ Mediterranean initiatives drew attention southward. During 1943, the Germans in the West had so many immediate priorities that concern for a D-Day-type operation moved toward the bottom of the list by default.
But it did not disappear. The case for a 1943 invasion of northeastern Europe appears plausible only because of distractions themselves largely the product of Anglo-American initiatives in the Mediterranean. Almost from its creation, High Command West was convinced the Allies would eventually strike northwestern Europe in force. The only question was when and where the blow would fall. Without Operation Torch and its aftermaths, the Germans would have been free to concentrate on preparing for a major landing mounted from Britain. And D-Day was an operation that could only be undertaken once.
Britain’s moral and material capital was nearly exhausted, its fighting manpower so limited that the army sent to Northwestern Europe had to cannibalize itself, breaking up entire divisions to keep the rest operational. Failure, to say nothing of disaster, would have had incal culably negative consequences for the war effort of the island kingdom. The US was powerful enough to bear and recover from the material consequences of defeat on Europe’s beaches. The psychological impact was a different story entirely. June 1944 in England invites comparison in US military history with July 1863 in Pennsylvania. Both occasions generated a sense of participation in something Hegel might have called a world-historical event. Seen in this light, the cross-channel invasion was more than a military operation—too much more to risk its launching in anything but the most favorable circumstances possible.
As High Command West coped with the challenges generated by the Russian and Mediterranean theaters, the Atlantic Wall began taking on a life of its own. By mid-1943, particularly around the major ports, the Wall looked authentic, with trenches, ditches, and minefields, machine-gun nests, concrete strong points, and heavy artillery emplaced in what even to men who knew better seemed impregnable bunkers. The commanders on the spot, however, were not exactly sure what to do with it.
The defense of Western Europe had, by late 1943, become an army responsibility. The Kriegsmarine, defeated in the U-boat campaign, its remaining surface vessels penned in harbor, could do little more than conduct coast-defense operations with a mixed bag of small craft. The Luftwaffe’s attention had shifted to the Eastern Front and to the Reich itself. Staff and operational assignments to Air Fleet 3, responsible for Western Europe, were viewed as either dead ends or rest cures.
On October 25, 1943, Rundstedt submitted a comprehensive memorandum describing the challenges and requirements of a sector that in the next year could expect to become a major theater of operations. He sarcastically noted that he would be very glad if Hitler read this report despite his busy schedule. Otherwise the Führer might accuse his generals of failing to keep him informed should things go wrong, as he had done in December 1941. And there was a great deal to go wrong in the sectors allotted to High Command West.
Rundstedt argued from a paradox. The Atlantic Wall, conceived and ordered by Hitler as the main battle line, lacked the depth to hold by itself. On the other hand, abandoning the coast without a fight would sacrifice the advantage of the Channel as a moat. It would mean the loss of a heavy investment in fortifications. Above all, it would require staking the campaign on a mobile battle in northeastern France against an enemy whose strong point was a capacity for mobile warfare. Therefore, Rundstedt argued, the coastline must be defended to the last.
Rundstedt expected an invasion not much later than spring, 1944. He believed the Allies would land first in the Pas de Calais, then in Normandy and Brittany: sites offering the easiest passages, the shortest supply lines, and the closest locations to Germany’s frontiers. The Allies enjoyed air and naval supremacy. They already had as many divisions available for such an operation as Rundstedt could muster in his entire expanded theater. Most were first-class assault troops, young, sound of wind and limb, and equipped with the best American and British industry could provide.
Experience in both world wars showed that landings made in sufficient force would succeed. But a combination of local counterattacks to disrupt initial successes, supplemented once the Allied Schwerpunkt became apparent by the concentrated blows of a massed reserve, provided the window of an opportunity for defeating the invasion, or at least so bloodying the Anglo-Americans’ noses that they might reconsider their military and political options.
Success once more depended on the panzers. A Führer Directive of November 3 accepted most of Rundstedt’s basic propositions. For two and a half years, Hitler declared, the Reich’s energies had been directed against Asiatic Bolshevism. Now an even greater danger had emerged: the Anglo-Saxon invasion. In the east, space could be traded for time. Not so in the west. An Allied breakout from a successful landing would have prompt and incalculable consequences for the Reich. No longer could the west be stripped for the sake of other theaters. Instead its defenses must be strengthened by every means possible—above all its mobile defenses.
In October 1943, the Western theater had only around 250 armored vehicles—no more than a token against the thousands available to the Western Allies. Its half dozen mobile divisions were skeletons or embryos. The General Staff and the armored force were instructed to provide Panzer IV tanks and assault guns for the reestablished, replenished, and newly created armored formations ultimately responsible for defending northeast Europe.
Was Rundstedt, a man of advanced years and fixed opinions, the general to throw the Allies into the sea? In November 1943 the Führer sent Rommel, restored to health and underemployed commanding a shadow Army Group B, to prepare plans and suggestions for the best ways of meeting an Allied invasion. The appointment arguably reflected Hitler’s long-standing practice of establishing parallel systems for solving difficult problems. Rundstedt was familiar with that process, and pleased enough with the Führer’s newfound interest in the west, that he offered the newcomer full cooperation. Rommel recognized the awkwardness of his position and took pains to avoid stepping on his senior’s toes. But the army’s senior and junior field marshals were like oil and water. Rundstedt tended to let situations develop before he acted, all the while commenting on those developments with an irony that could alternately inspire admiration or fury in his associates. Rommel was a driver, accustomed to seeing every situation as an emergency, making snap decisions, and making those decisions work.
Rundstedt broke the fast-developing ice. On December 30 he made a formal proposal to make Army Group B responsible for the region most exposed to invasion: the Netherlands, Pas de Calais, and Normandy. Rommel applied his famous energy to the Atlantic Wall with good effect. The heart of his thinking, however, involved deploying the panzer formations so close to the coast that they could engage as the enemy crossed the beaches. Without the immediate help of mechanized reserves, the Field Marshal insisted, their air and naval supremacy meant the Allies were certain to get ashore somewhere. Undisturbed for any length of time, they would flank the defenders out of their fixed defenses and roll up the Atlantic Wall like a rug.
Rommel’s approach offered the advantage of employing the panzer divisions in ways grown familiar to their officers in Russia: counterpunch ing a tactically vulnerable enemy, with dash and tactical skill compensating for inferior numbers. It offered as well a closer link between the mechanized formations and the semi-mobile infantry divisions manning the Wall. As was the case with Model and Raus, Rommel’s plan made it less likely that the former would regard themselves as pawns for sacrifice. One of the reasons for the German infantry’s Homeric combat record on the Eastern Front was the widespread knowledge that surrendering to Ivan involved high levels of immediate risk and complete certainty of subsequent discomfort. Conditions of British or American captivity were so favorably mythologized that not a few prisoners taken during the D-Day campaign seemed surprised when their first meal did not include steak.
Rommel thought in wider terms as well. Repulsing the landings at the shoreline would buy military time that might be exploited politically. A decisive victory presented to the Führer by his favorite marshal might well prove an entering wedge for a negotiated peace. If not, there was always the German Resistance, whose plans and hopes for direct action against “history’s greatest warlord” were increasingly open secrets among those in the know at High Command West. Best evidence indicates Rommel was not directly involved in any conspiracies. He was, however, tactician enough to profit from any opportunities created by Hitler’s removal.
Rommel’s principal critic was Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg. His prewar career combined wide experience as a staff officer and attaché with early involvement in developing the armored force. He took 3rd Panzer Division through Poland and led panzer corps in Russia under Guderian in 1941 and Kleist during Operation Blue before his appointment as commander of Panzer Troops West in July 1943. Geyr was no admirer of the battle group tactics that had emerged in Russia as a response to a chronic shortage of tanks. These small formations, he argued, would be disproportionately vulnerable to Allied firepower. What was needed were large-scale counterattacks against the invasion beaches: counterattacks in divisional strength or more. Geyr’s response to the threats from sea and air was to keep German armor well clear of the coast, in camouflaged positions out of range of naval guns. Admittedly, to reach the operational zones the mechanized forces would have to move by night. Properly trained troops under competent officers could nevertheless expect to arrive in good time to throw the invaders back into the Channel.
Rommel expected the invasion to have higher levels of air support than anything previously seen in history. The northern French roads suitable for major troop movements led across rivers and through cities: inviting targets for Allied bombers. It was unreasonable, Rommel argued, to expect divisions positioned according to Geyr’s proposals to reach the battle zone, reorganize, and refit, in less than ten days or two weeks. That was all the time and more the invaders would need to establish a bridgehead impregnable to anything High Command West was likely to bring against it.
The debate played out against a background of evidence that the British and Americans from Africa to Anzio had not demonstrated any particular skill in armored war. The end game in Tunisia had been a triumph of mass against overextension. In Sicily the Italians had collapsed; the Luftwaffe was conspicuous in its absence. But the hastily rebuilt Hermann Göring and 15th Panzer Grenadier Divisions, fighting in dispersed battle groups, kept the Allies off balance and bought time for a reverse Dunkirk across the Straits of Messina. Nor were German panzer specialists impressed by what they considered George Patton’s military excursion to Palermo and along the north coast.
The Italian campaign only highlighted the Allies’ limitations not merely in using armor, but in thinking about its use. In some of Europe’s most broken terrain the Americans committed a full armored division and the British no fewer than five (though only three at any one time), plus a large number of smaller independent units. Periodically, so many tanks were deployed for a particular operation that they got in their own and everyone else’s way—the Liri Valley comes to mind operationally, and tactically the New Zealand armored brigade at Cassino.
On the other hand, the 16th Panzer Division came close to defeating the Salerno landing single-handedly. At Anzio the panzers played a central role in transforming Winston Churchill’s hoped-for wildcat into a “stranded whale.” Those achievements, and a score of lesser ones, had depended on a substantial armored presence, usually from three to five panzer and panzer grenadier divisions. The defense of northwest Europe would require proportionally stronger mobile forces. Where were they to come from in the existing context of compound overstretch?
Adolf Hitler was no Cadmus. Nevertheless the Third Reich had sown at least some of the dragon’s teeth that provided the legendary founder of Thebes with his army—with almost as much internal conflict as that among Cadmus’s dragon-blooded warriors. On December 31, 1942, Hitler authorized the formation of two new Waffen SS divisions, the 9th Hohenstaufen and the 10th Frundsberg. The 9th took its name from the rulers of the medieval Holy Roman Empire, the 10th from a famous commander of mercenary Landsknechts. For most of their careers they served in tandem beginning with their training in France and their brief introduction to combat on the Eastern Front in early 1944.
Beginning in 1942 the Waffen SS found its sources of volunteers, German, ethnic German, and foreign, falling far short of replacement requirements. Increasing numbers of Germanics were being assigned to the ethnic SS divisions springing up throughout occupied Eastern Europe. Hohenstaufen initially received a number of Hungarian Germans. From 1943, however, the ranks of the Waffen SS panzers were in general filled by men from the draft pool, supplemented by periodic infusions of compulsory transfers from the Luftwaffe and the navy.
Standards were upheld by the instructors. More than an army already stretched to its limits, the Waffen SS provided strong, experienced, and motivated cadres to its new armored formations. “Meine Ehre heist Treue,” “loyalty is my honor,” was the SS motto. For the Waffen SS it meant above all fidelity to the principles of National Socialism and the Führer who embodied them. It also meant unconditional trust among comrades. Discipline remained rigid, but “character development” emphasized initiative, aggression, and self-reliance in a context of teamwork. By 1943 parade-ground drill had been abandoned in favor of weapons proficiency, terrain orientation, and camouflage instruction.
Contradictions among these concepts were downplayed as training periods grew shorter. Compliance was an increasingly acceptable substitute for belief. And should compliance fail, sterner methods might be applied. An SS prisoner, himself an Alsatian, described a Waffen SS officer in Normandy ordering an Alsatian deserter beaten to death by his own company.
A third Waffen SS armored division authorized in 1943 is perhaps the most familiar. The 12th SS Panzer’s antecedents went back to May 1942. In that month, three weeks of pre-military training was ordered for all boys between sixteen and eighteen, under the auspices of the Hitler Youth. The army and the SS competed vigorously to provide cadres, many from the panzers. Old-style drill sergeants had little place in a system staffed by combat veterans often only a few years older than their charges. The military emphasis was on skill, will, and initiative in an environment of comradeship. The ideological elements, as a rule directly provided by Hitler Youth officials, synergized with the war stories to foster an ethos of struggle and sacrifice for Volk and Reich.
The next step, at seventeen, was eligibility for at least three months of compulsory labor service. Now under Wehrmacht control, like its peacetime predecessor the Arbeitsdienst emphasized hard work under hard conditions as opposed to focused military or ideological instruction. After 1942 every German drafted into the Wehrmacht at eighteen had passed through these programs, at least in principle. Back to back, they were a natural pipeline to military service and a natural recruiting agent for Hitler’s panzers, army or SS.
When the 12th SS Panzer Division opened its ranks to volunteers under the official draft age, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds lined up in a fashion reminiscent—albeit on a smaller scale—of the “war volunteers” of August 1914. With a cadre drawn primarily from the Leibstandarte and supplemented by army officers with Hitler Youth experience, with chocolate replacing cigarettes in the rations—smoking was officially bad for one’s health in the Reich—the division began training in the summer of 1943.
The instructors took their military responsibilities seriously and found willing students in the teenagers who filled the ranks and set the tone in the combat units even as older men were assigned to the support and technical services. As for ideological conditioning, the volunteers had by then largely indoctrinated themselves. German adolescents were less creatures of propaganda and illusion than many postwar accounts depict. Certainly after 1942 they had a reasonable idea of what was waiting for them “out there,” and reasonable grounds for believing that the skills and attitudes acquired in a Waffen SS uniform were eminently transferable to the Russian Front as survival instruments and coping mechanisms. If one had to board the train, why not travel first class? Or in the cruder language of young men among themselves, if you were in the bucket at least it should be full of—euphemistically—fertilizer.
The Waffen SS also formed three new panzer grenadier divisions: the 16th and 17th in October 1943, the 18th in January 1944. The 16th drew its cadres largely from the Skulls. The 18th was built around an SS brigade initially formed from Totenkopf formations, with a three-year record of stomach-churning atrocities in Russia—mostly behind the lines. Both were predictably most dangerous to civilians, the 16th in Italy and the 18th in Russia. The 17th was forced to show its mettle in northwest Europe, against an enemy that fought back.
The Waffen SS also formed another corps. After the recapture of Kharkov in 1943 Leibstandarte’s commander Sepp Dietrich was recalled to Germany to command I SS Panzer Corps, intended to include his old division and the Hitler Jugend once it was ready for operations. Dietrich, who had fought in the embryonic tank force during World War I and remained a noncommissioned officer in spirit and perspective, was respected for his courage and for caring about his men. Though it took a while, Dietrich also developed a sense of his limitations. He commanded and allowed—better said, encouraged—his staff officers to do the thinking. Many of these were army transfers, and Dietrich as a corps commander was consistently willing to cooperate with army generals after D-Day.
The army’s principal contribution to preparing for the invasion involved reconstructing and reequipping divisions battered to pieces in Russia. In addition, the 16th Panzer Grenadier Division was upgraded to the 116th Panzer Division in spring 1944. A number of panzer grenadier formations emerged: a Führer Escort Brigade and a Führer Grenadier Brigade, both expanded to divisions in early 1945; a Feldherrnhalle Division based on the old 60th Motorized and drawing some manpower from the original storm troops of the SA; and a Brandenburg Division built around the army’s special operations units.
In December 1943 the instruction and demonstration units of the panzer schools were stripped to form the Panzer Lehr Division. An elite force with an initial strength of almost 200 Panzer IVs, Panthers, and Tigers, its creation nevertheless indicated the panzers’ desperate straits. Their principal advantage had always been quality. Quality depended on training—more so as the casualty lists increased. Now, like a peasant family in a hard winter, the army was eating its seed grain.
During the war’s final months a number of ephemeral panzer formations appeared and disappeared. Some had high numbers: 232nd and 233rd. Others had inspiring titles: Clausewitz, Holstein, Müncheberg. What they had in common were cadres provided by training schools and replacement depots; equipment provided ad hoc; and ranks filled by stragglers from broken units, completed from hospitals and convalescent homes and by locally raised recruits, often obtained practically at gunpoint. Few of them lasted long enough to do more than swell Allied tallies of prisoners.
From Hitler who authorized them to the senior officers who created and committed them, these cobbled-together armored formations challenge any notion of a professionally informed “genius for war.” They highlight as well an operational situation, desperate through 1943, that erupted into full-blown crisis in 1944. The panzers, the core of Germany’s war effort, had been ruthlessly expended and marginally nurtured. As the army’s combined-arms capacities diminished, the panzers had evolved—or derogated—from a spearhead to a fire brigade to a firewall, expected not merely to restore emergencies but to avert them. As for personnel, “by 1944,” recalled one army tank driver whose war began at Sedan and ended in the Bulge, “we were like bad soup: old bones and green vegetables.”
The Third Reich’s ultimate vanity formation, however, owed its existence to Hermann Göring. The Luftwaffe chief controlled the Reich’s antiaircraft and airborne forces, but wanted his own ground combat unit as well. The Hermann Göring Division began in 1933 as a 400-man police unit. It grew to be a regiment, then a brigade. In late 1942 it became a division, then a panzer division brought to strength by transfers from the Luftwaffe and the paratroops, and brought to effectiveness by combat-experienced army tankers. Lost in Tunisia, it reformed in Sicily, fought there, in Italy, and then—as noted in Chapter 6—was transferred to Russia in September 1944. Administrated by the Luftwaffe, it was operationally subordinated to the army, which facilitated its acceptance by the soldiers almost as much as did its acknowledged fighting power.
The division had a predictable and cultivated reputation for “hardness.” In Italy and Warsaw, elements were involved in large-scale shootings of “partisans.” A table of standings for indictable war crimes by panzer divisions would probably put it roughly between the Waffen SS and the army. But Göring saw to it that the division was kept well up to strength and on the A list for equipment. Like the Hitler Jugend Division, it attracted a good number of teenage volunteers. Its training facilities—army-provided—kept Hermann Göring’s combat effectiveness at a level that made it a welcome presence in any sector—and also facilitated overlooking such regularly alleged peccadilloes as using civilians for human shields.
II
RUNDSTEDT’S REFUSAL TO decide between Rommel and Geyr led both to seek the Führer’s ear. As the jockeying intensified, the Field Marshal found himself in the position of a poker player who antes but refuses to bet: his stack of military/political chips was steadily diminishing. In February 1944, with more and more armored divisions arriving in France, Rommel’s Army Group B was given the right to command any formations of Panzer Group West in its operational area. Rommel also received the right to recommend sector assignments and command appointments for the mobile formations directly to Rundstedt, thus bypassing Geyr.
In May Hitler created a new army group headquarters under Rundstedt to control southern France, and assigned it three panzer divisions: 9th, 11th, and 2nd SS. Rommel’s Army Group B also received three panzer divisions: the 2nd, 21st, and 116th. The cream of the panzers—1st and 12th SS Panzer, 17th SS Panzer Grenadier, and Panzer Lehr—remained under control of Panzer Group West, but not exactly under Rundstedt’s command. Instead the Panzer Group was now designated part of the Wehrmacht High Command reserve, which, in practice, placed it under Hitler’s direct authority.
The reorganization invites dismissal as no more than another example of Hitler’s meddling in matters outside his competence. Rundstedt’s sarcastic comment that Hitler’s decision left him only the authority to move the sentries in his headquarters is nevertheless at best a half-truth. The field marshal had forgotten a fundamental military axiom: the first duty of a commander is to command; specifically, to decide the organization of his theater. War abhors vacuums. Adolf Hitler filled the one created by Gerd von Rundstedt.
Assigning three mechanized divisions to southern France left seven available for the decisive sector. Either massed as a central reserve or posted within close range of the prospective beaches, they represented a force strong enough to shape, if not decide, the coming battle—not a chess queen, but properly used, perhaps a pair of knights. Their dispersion not only created the obvious possibility of being too weak everywhere. It generated a subtler risk of making everyone just strong enough to generate a false sense of security.
On June 6, 1944, Normandy was a network of isolated, thinly garrisoned strong points. Its armored reserve, the 21st Panzer Division, was still partly equipped with French tanks captured in 1940. Even in those contexts the roots of German defeat ran deeper than a single day’s fighting. Hitler’s alleged late arising on that morning was less important than his continued uncertainty as to whether the Normandy landings were only a diversion. That uncertainty was shared throughout High Command West, however much it was denied later. Committing the armored reserves meant that the die was indisputably cast, and for all their alleged battlefield virtuosity, the generals were no less reluctant than their Führer to throw the final switch.
Uncertainty rendered moot the question of whether Rommel or Geyr was right about the panzers. Might Rommel’s presence at his headquarters, instead of en route to Germany to plead for more tanks farther forward, have made a difference? Rommel could not repeal the laws of space and time. The 21st Panzer Division, which was closest to the invasion zone, played a critical role in frustrating the British attempt to capture the city of Caen but was unable to mount any counterattacks until afternoon. Panzer Lehr and Hitler Jugend were on their way to the invasion site by the evening of June 6. Rundstedt’s headquarters was planning a corps-strength panzer counterattack for as early as the seventh. They believed it might after all be possible to contain, perhaps even defeat, the long-feared invasion. One SS officer dismissed doubt by describing the enemy as “little fish. We’ll throw them into the sea in the morning.”
The Allied beachheads held, though the British and Canadians were hard pressed at some points, especially by Hitler Jugend. Initial defeat left the panzers the fulcrum of later hopes and plans. The Germans’ intention was to withdraw mechanized units presently committed, to bring in others from quiet sectors and the Reich (in particular 9th and 10th SS Panzer, currently deployed in Hungary), and to hit the Allies before they could convert a buildup to a breakthrough. That was frustrated in good part by a massive campaign against roads and railroads by Allied aircraft and the French Resistance. The 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions took longer to cross France than to move from Hungary. Tigers, which were difficult to transport safely by rail, used up engine life and track mileage in extended road marches. Second SS Panzer Division, Das Reich, responded to Resistance harassment during its move toward the beachhead with an escalating series of atrocities, culminating in the massacre of over 600 civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10.
Oradour, a crossroads town, was doomed for no better reason than convenience. There was some talk of excess and of courts-martial, but the death in combat of the senior officer who was directly responsible put an end to such sentimentality. Nor was Oradour an isolated incident. On June 22, 11th Panzer Division, responding to the Franco-American invasion of southern France, recorded killing 125 “resistance fighters” at a cost of 4 wounded. Following the custom of the Eastern Front no prisoners were reported.
Air power was proving even more decisive than expected. Allied tactical air forces were close to their peak strength on D-Day, and the force-ratios they could apply to the still- constricted beachhead were exponentially higher than during the rest of the campaign. In the British sector especially, fighter-bombers cruised the battlefield looking for targets of opportunity: “cab ranks,” the tankers and infantrymen called them.
The direct effectiveness of air attacks against the German tanks has been accurately called into question. The impact of constant bombing and strafing on crew morale and crew effectiveness was beyond doubt even in the best divisions. The Soviet Sturmoviks’ normal attack formation was a circle, rotating over a target until ammunition was exhausted. Units of antiaircraft like the Flakpanzer coming into service had some chance to disrupt the strike, maybe bring down a few of their tormentors. The fighter-bombers struck by twos and fours, seemingly out of nowhere, then were gone before even a good gun crew could find their range.
Staff cars, traveling alone or with small escorts, made even more tempting targets. Casualties mounted among senior officers trying, in the German tradition, to keep touch with their forward units. Rommel was only the most prominent victim. On June 10 the headquarters of Panzer Group West was crippled by a hundred-plane strike that wiped out most of the the senior staff. Geyr was “only” wounded, but his was the kind of narrow escape that left brave men shaken, their judgments clouded and their perspectives skewed. Fritz Bayerlein, hardly the exemplar of a timid man, assigned “broom commandos” to sweep away tire tracks left in roads and fields by the vehicles of his Panzer Lehr Division.
From the Germans’ perspective the Schwerpunkt of the Allied offensive was in the British/Canadian sector where Montgomery, initially in overall command of ground operations, mounted a series of attacks, the major ones named after famous British races. Their purpose, whether to open the way into France or to engage and wear down the German armor reserves, has been intensively debated. Their image is of a series of ham-handed, head-down disappointments that generated casualty rates comparing with the worst weeks of the Somme and enhanced an already-pervasive caution at all levels of command.
Photos of burned-out British tanks littering such battlefields as Epsom and Goodwood are matched by the stories of their burned-out crews. SS First Lieutenant Michael Wittmann’s single-panzer destruction of two dozen armored vehicles in 15 minutes at Villers-Bocage has earned him his own website, the designation “badass of the week” on another, and a commemorative T-shirt available through the Internet. Less well known but no less worthy of recognition is the ramming of a King Tiger by Lieutenant John Gorman’s Sherman. Though Gorman belonged to the Irish Guards, his action reflected less Emerald Isle panache than desperation caused by a jammed gun. Both crews abandoned their disabled tanks, briefly confronted each other, and then ran for their own sides with the war story of a lifetime.
British armor in Normandy had significant shortcomings. Divisions trained as instruments of exploitation made heavy weather of assignment as breakthrough forces. Interarm cooperation was poor, within the armored divisions and between the infantry divisions and the independent tank formations supporting them. The heterogeneous origins of the armored forces, ranging from war-raised infantry battalions converted to tanks, through cavalry regiments that were still riding horses in 1941, to the Foot Guards themselves, facilitated operational entropy that could not be entirely overcome by transfers and replacements.
Orthodox criticisms of the tankers have nevertheless been recently and successfully challenged by a common-sense observation: British concepts of armor employment did not replicate German ones. Twenty-first Army Group intended to make the Germans fight its kind of battle. That involved making carefully prepared set-piece attacks supported by heavy firepower in narrow sectors. It involved exploiting success without taking excessive risks. It was a concept based on technology and material, setting steel to do the work of flesh: in June and July alone, British tank losses totaled around 1,300.
The British way in Normandy combined the “colossal cracks” that were Montgomery’s specialty with the “bite and hold” approach developed in World War I and identified with trench- warfare generals like Plumer and Rawlinson. Normandy added something new to the mix. By 1944 the German practice of responding to enemy tactical success by an immediate, often improvised, armor-tipped counterattack, was common knowledge. The obvious response was to defeat the counterattack. That involved consolidating ground gained, bringing up towed and self-propelled antitank guns, and “seeing off ” the panzers. An outstanding example was offered by 1st Tyneside Scottish on July 1 at Rauray. This typical infantry battalion, supported by a company of Shermans, stopped five separate attacks by battle groups of Hohenstaufen and Das Reich in a 14-hour fight that accounted for the destruction of around 35 tanks and assault guns. Ten of those were claimed by the Tynesiders’ antitank platoon, whose six-pounders had little chance against a Panther except in close-quarters fighting.
Like Frederick the Great’s oblique attack order two centuries earlier, the panzer counterattack lost mystique and effectiveness as its predictability increased. The Allies of 1944 were not the French of 1940 or the Russians of 1941-42. Getting inside their decision cycles might still be possible. Throwing them significantly off balance was likely to be a serious and expensive proposition. In Rommel’s words, “a soldier . . . must have sufficient intelligence to get the most out of his fighting machine. And that these people can do. . . .”
The Germans’ tactical problem was exacerbated by Hitler’s insistence on holding forward positions as opposed to sanctioning the flexible defense sought by the panzer commanders. This policy offered some advantage, as it kept the fighting in the Normandy bocage, among the best defensive terrain in northwest Europe. But it also exposed an infantry whose declining quality often led to heavy, morale-sapping losses. By mid-July German casualties approached 100,000. Fewer than 6,000 replacements had arrived.
The panzer divisions High Command West and Army Group B originally intended for a major counterattack were being drawn one by one into frontline killing grounds. They not only had to replace now-lacking infantrymen, but provide fire support to compensate for a nonexistent Luftwaffe and artillery whose strength rapidly declined under Allied bombs and shells. One panzer grenadier battalion came off a bitterly contested hill with fewer than 50 men still standing. The Hitler Jugend division was eviscerated in a month, losing 17,000 men and its commander—but not before murdering enough Canadian prisoners to initiate a mercifully brief episode of mutual reprisals.
Generals were easier to find than soldiers. The commander of 7th Army, facing the Americans, committed suicide on June 27, and was replaced by Paul Hausser—the first time an SS general was assigned an army command. Geyer drew up a searing critique of the first month’s fighting that attracted Hitler’s attention. On July 6 he was also relieved, his command renamed 5th Panzer Army and assigned to Heinrich Eberbach, whose solid Eastern Front credentials and reputation as an enthusiastic Nazi was in Hitler’s eyes a winning combination.
Meanwhile, the Americans, under Omar Bradley, chewed through the bocage with more determination than finesse. Moving into the Cotentin peninsula, 1st US Army captured a devastated Cherbourg on June 26, but made slow progress toward St. Lo and the open country beyond it. The Germans in this sector multiplied its natural defensive potential by the flexible tactical system dating from World War I and modified in Russia: holding front lines thinly, determining the American tactical Schwerpunkt, then counterattacking. But Normandy was kept short of troops in favor of the northern sector. On July 24, 14 divisions, half of them mechanized, were concentrated around Caen. The Americans faced nine, only three mechanized and one of them just rotated south for a rest cure after being badly mauled by the British while supporting the worn- out infantry. Panzer Lehr Division, for example, was virtually semi-mobile, using its tanks to patrol gaps between strong points manned by panzer grenadiers whose half-tracks had been left behind as useless in the bocage.
On July 25 Allied bombers and American artillery blew open the German front and blew up most of Panzer Lehr. As a combination of shock and exploitation, Operation Cobra succeeded brilliantly. German reserves were exhausted. German commanders who had spent six weeks responding to local, specific threats were unable to readjust their thinking to the changed scale of events. German resistance eroded, then crumbled, then collapsed. A single Panther of Das Reich held up an armored column for most of a morning. But on July 31, 4th Armored Division captured the key road junction of Avranches. On August 1 George Patton’s 3rd Army became operational and began transforming the breakthrough to a breakout.
Von Kluge, recovered from his accident, had replaced Rundstedt on July 7. Ten days later, he assumed command of Army Group B as well when Rommel was wounded in an air attack. He described the situation in blunt terms as a Riesensauerei (ratfuck), with the Americans on the verge of being able to do what they wanted, where they wanted.
Matters grew worse after Montgomery launched his own offensive on July 30. Operation Bluecoat was no blitzkrieg, but it made steady progress against a series of armored counterattacks characterized by tactical skill at the expense of coordination and shock power. Tigers, King Tigers, and Jagdpanthers appeared here and there, by twos and threes, to create temporary shock, awe, and havoc before breaking down or being disabled. Hohenstaufen was down to 34 AFVs on August 4, after only two days’ serious fighting.
Kluge recommended retreat across the Seine. Hitler ordered instead a counterattack toward Avranches and eventually the coast, to be mounted by no fewer than eight of the mechanized divisions currently deployed in France. Kluge, who was significantly involved in the July 20 plot against Hitler, was in no position to temporize, much less protest. Nor was the counterattack’s concept exactly an example of an amateur making war with maps. Indeed, had Kluge consulted a map he might have concluded that the serpentine, narrow Seine was unlikely to be more than an inconvenience to the motorized Allies. Once Normandy was lost the next viable long-term defensive position was the Westwall, on the borders of the Reich itself. Throwing the Allies into the sea might by now be a chimera. But using what remained of the panzers to throw the Americans back into the bocage was a reasonable alternative to seeing the armor ground down day by day or enveloped by an Allied breakout.
Hitler’s admonition to attack at full strength was also theoretically sensible. Kluge, however, was in no position to concentrate the divisions that were holding together his rapidly collapsing front. He managed to assemble 2nd and 116th Panzer, Das Reich, and elements of the Leibstandarte in XLVII Panzer Corps under Hans von Funck—about 300 tanks and assault guns. Funck was a first-rate tank man who had commanded 7th Panzer Division from 1941 to 1943 and XLVII Panzer Corps since March. Speed was his best force multiplier, and the panzers had not forgotten how to hit fast and hard. Going in on the night of August 6, Das Reich captured Mortain and opened the road to Avranches. On its right, the army’s 2nd Panzer drove through one American regiment and almost encircled another.
“Almost,” however, was the operative word. Funck and Kluge lacked the reserves to exploit initial successes. The Americans rallied instead of breaking. Artillery fire called in by a battalion surrounded on high ground outside Mortain took toll of Das Reich’s columns; antitank guns blocked the division’s armor. The 30th Infantry Division and elements of 3rd Armored halted and then counterattacked 2nd Panzer and Leibstandarte. Omnipresent fighter-bombers—American Thunderbolts and British Typhoons—savaged the unarmored vehicles backed up on every road in the sector. Orders to shift to the defensive were garbled or misunderstood, risking both the operation and the troops involved.
Kluge reported the attack no longer feasible. Hitler ordered it continued, sent Eberbach south to command the strike force in place of Funck, and told him to jump off on August 11. Eberbach, whose Nazi sympathy was mostly situational, reported the state of his troops was such that he could not attack before August 20. It took almost two days for him, Hausser, and Kluge, working together, to change Hitler’s mind.
Meanwhile 3rd Army took Le Mans on August 8, and II Canadian Corps mounted Operation Totalize against German positions south of Caen now weakened by the withdrawal of their panzer elements for the Mortain offensive. On the night of August 7-8 two infantry divisions, each led by three battle groups of a tank company or battalion and an infantry battalion mounted in improvised full-tracked armored personnel carriers, bit deeply into the German defenses. But the two armored divisions, one Canadian and one Polish, which were expected to complete the operation by opening the way to the Falaise road junction, were both green. They faced, moreover, a Hitler Jugend Division that moved into the gap with its ranks refilled, its tanks replaced, and a new commander, Kurt Meyer.
Cocky beyond the point of arrogance at 34, Meyer kept in touch with his forward elements by motorcycle, and had 18 broken bones to prove it. His involvement in the murder of Canadian prisoners, which earned him a sentence as a war criminal, was arguably a resume-enhancer in his particular subculture. In his first outing as a divisional commander, Meyer also proved a master of flexible defense. Supported by a Tiger battalion and by 88mm flak guns firing over open sights, Meyer’s Panthers and Panzer IVs bent, snapped back, and held. By August 10 the division was down to 35 tanks. But Falaise was still 13 miles in its rear.
By August 13 it was reasonably clear on both sides of the line that the German armies in Normandy were on the ragged edge of being surrounded. No more than a 30-mile gap remained between the Allied pincers; whatever happened on the ground, the Jabos, the fighter-bombers, would be waiting. Kluge, fighting with a piano wire around his neck, had his command convoy shot out from under him on August 14 and spent the day out of contact. On August 15 he finally prepared an order for a general retreat and informed Hitler and the High Command that withdrawal was necessary. Hitler authorized the withdrawal and simultaneously replaced Kluge with Model.
Kluge committed suicide; Model was in no position to do more than implement Kluge’s orders. At this stage the Germans’ situation was desperate but not hopeless. The Canadians were making heavy weather of the final advance on Falaise, owing in good part to Hitler Jugend, which for the second time in ten weeks fought its frontline units to near destruction. Eberbach’s panzers were still holding on along the southern flank. German staffs also knew how to organize retreats; one might say they were becoming specialists in the subject.
The problem lay in implementation. The long-standing postwar debate among British, Canadian, and US soldiers and scholars over exactly who failed to close the Falaise pocket, and why, has tended to obscure the actual results of withdrawing through a steadily shrinking bottleneck. The full strength of Allied tactical air power came into play. Artillery, even tank guns, joined in to create a gauntlet of fire defying all efforts to break through it. Second and 9th SS Panzer Divisions bought time and space on August 19-20 against an isolated 1st Polish Armored Division. But when the tallies were cast, 10,000 Germans were dead, 50,000 were prisoners, and the Normandy campaign was over.
The question now was whether the Germans could retreat faster than the Allies could pursue them. Continuous air strikes combined with a suddenly burgeoning French and Belgian Resistance to inflict constant nagging losses. The panzers, army and SS, had salvaged a surprising number of men, but their AFV strengths were frequently counted in single digits. By early September Army Group B was down to 100 tanks—2,200 had been lost. Not only damaged tanks, but most of the field repair facilities as well had been abandoned.
The resulting decision was to withdraw the bulk of the panzers behind the Westwall, into Germany, for reequipment. German armor nevertheless fought two sharp rear-guard actions in the autumn of 1944. The most familiar was a coincidence: the dropping of the British 1st Airborne Division onto II SS Panzer Corps and its 9th and 10th Divisions around Arnhem. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space. Whatever the strategic possibilities of Operation Market-Garden, its execution reflected a combination of groupthink and hubris at all command levels, particularly culpable in discounting intelligence reports of a mechanized German presence.
The “bridge too far” is better understood in British paratrooper John Frost’s words as “a drop too many.” A World War II airborne division had no chance in a close-quarters, stand-up fight with two armored divisions, even in the midst of refitting, unless it confronted an extremely obliging enemy. German corps commander Wilhelm Bittrich, in the Waffen SS since 1934, had led Das Reich, then Hohenstaufen capably. His division COs, Walter Harzer and Heinz Harmel, were both in their thirties, both “fast-burners” who had proven themselves in Normandy. Taken fully by surprise, the SS panzers reacted promptly and with deadly effect. Arguably more remarkable was their punctilious concern for red crosses, white flags, and soldierly honor.
Farther south the Lorraine campaign pitted George Patton against a reconfigured 5th Panzer Army, and both of them against weather and terrain. The Lorraine plateau, surrounded by natural barriers, with its rivers running north-south, and with successive lines of high ground that had shaped tactics in earlier wars, did not lend itself to sweeping mobile operations even apart from the overlapping networks of man-made fortifications that crisscrossed the region. Constant rain turned fields into glutinous mud. “I can imagine no greater burden,” wrote a frustrated Patton, “than to be the owner of this nasty country where it rains every day and where the whole wealth of the people consists in assorted manure piles.”
The Americans were short of fuel and replacements. The Germans were short of everything except experience—and some of that experience was questionable. Fifth Panzer Army was led by Hasso von Manteuffel. He had commanded a battalion, a regiment, and a brigade of panzer grenadiers in Russia, a division in North Africa, and finally 7th Panzer Division and Grossdeutschland in the east. Like most of his contemporaries he led from the front, and was enough of a Hitler favorite to be promoted directly to army command despite the impeccably aristocratic background that gave him the nickname “panzer baron.”
Half his armor strength was in divisions that had been shot to pieces since June 6; the other half consisted of four newly organized panzer brigades. Ideally including a battalion each of Panthers and Panzer IVs and a fully mechanized panzer grenadier battalion, these brigades were originally intended as mobile reserves to counter enemy breakthroughs before they could become breakouts. Their commanders and cadres were largely Eastern Front veterans. However, they lacked the staying power to cope with the levels of artillery and air support available through US communications systems. They lacked the experience and training to counter small- unit tactics far more flexible than anything encountered in Russia. Not least, they often lacked a maintenance element to repair damaged tanks and salvage broken-down ones. That meant rapid, permanent declines in armored strength.
The brigades were also the only reinforcements available for the Lorraine counterattack. In preliminary operations, the 106th under Franz Bake, among the best of the panzers’ regimental-level COs, took the 90th Infantry Division by surprise before dawn on August 8. By late afternoon, three-quarters of Bake’s men were down and only nine of his original 47 AFVs were still operational. On September 13, a French armored battle group encircled and annihilated the 112th Panzer Brigade: a fight at even odds that prefigured the fate of the general offensive launched five days later.
Fifth Panzer Army’s attack was structured along the lines of the ripostes at which the Germans had become so expert in Russia. This was the first time Patton’s army had faced one of these sophisticated, multiple-axis strokes on a large scale. In some of the heaviest armored fighting since Normandy, 4th Armored Division took advantage of fog to come to close quarters with the Panzers at Arracourt on September 19, claiming a kill ratio of ten to one and showing comprehensive battalion-level superiority over German units that made such un-German mistakes as reading maps incorrectly. Manteuffel was ordered to push on even as losses increased beyond prospect of immediate replacement. On September 29 his superiors finally ordered him to stand down. Of more than 600 tanks and assault guns initially committed, almost 500 had been lost for no advantage in particular.
III
THE SLOWDOWN OF the armored war in the West offers an opportunity to address the campaign’s major technical subtext: the quality of Allied armor. For practical purposes that means the Sherman tank. Three major variations of the M4 tank fought in Northwest Europe: the original M4, the M4a3 with a 76mm high-velocity gun, and the Firefly, a British variant mounting their 17-pounder antitank gun. Shermans were the principal equipment of the American, Canadian, French, and Polish armored formations, plus two of the three British armored divisions and four of their seven three-battalion independent brigades. For good and ill, it was a Sherman war.4
The image of victory in the West achieved by throwing thousands of tanks against the enemy’s hundreds remains one of the major tropes in the historiography of World War II. An anecdote that developed in many versions during the final months of World War II describes a German officer boasting to his American captors of the superiority of German weaponry. When asked why, if his hardware was so good, he was the one in the POW cage, the answer was, “I had a battery of 88s. The Americans kept sending tanks down the road. We kept knocking them out. We ran out of ammunition. You didn’t run out of tanks.”
The other side of that story is the Germans’ grim nickname for the Sherman as the “tommy cooker,” recognition of the Sherman’s propensity for bursting into flame before the crew could get out. Allied equivalents—the polite ones—were “Zippo” and “Ronson.” A continually growing body of technically and tactically oriented works concedes the mechanical reliability of US tanks but emphasizes shortcomings in armor protection and firepower by comparison not only to the German Panzer IVs, Panthers, and Tigers, but the Soviet Union’s T-34s and the KV/JS family of heavy tanks.
Underlying the discussion is the assumption that American industry could have manufactured and distributed armored fighting vehicles of any kind desired and in any numbers requested. Between 1942 and 1945, the United States manufactured almost 50,000 Shermans. To this figure can be added over 6,000 Grants and Lees, with their sponson-mounted 75mm cannon, and another 7,000 plus of the M3/M5 family of light tanks. Common sense correspondingly indicates that the technical shortcomings of US tanks vis-à-vis their principal opponents reflected policy decisions rather than production capacities.
American tank development between the wars was structured by a consistent commitment to mobility and reliability over gun-power and armor protection. In that sense the Germans and Americans had more in common than is generally understood—and for many of the same reasons. The Armored Force created in 1940 took most of its immediate cues from the Germans’ experience in France. Those successes were understood—legitimately—as greatest and most cost-effective when achieved by maneuver as opposed to combat. US tanks were similarly projected for use in masses, by divisions and corps, as instruments of penetration and exploitation as opposed to breakthrough. Those missions were perceived as demanding above all speed and reliability. In 1940 those qualities were technologically easier to incorporate in a light tank—especially for a country with no significant experience in tank design and manufacture.
Fast, reliable light tanks were by no means an end in themselves. Mediums would be necessary to break resistance too heavy for the light tanks and to serve as a counterattack force when necessary. Tables of organization for armored divisions initially called for a ratio of one medium regiment to two light ones. After the Tunisian campaign that proportion was reversed. The Sherman’s gun proved effective at up to 2,500 yards firing armor-piercing ammunition. Its high-explosive shells were devastating not only to infantry positions (a major original purpose of the medium tank) but against dug-in antitank guns as well.
Responsibility for creating the conditions for armor to operate belonged to the infantry divisions. They were not expected to operate alone. American know-how and productive capacity would deliver any number of armored fighting vehicles a fully mobilized army might require. Mobilization plans provided for independent tank battalions to support and cooperate with them on a more or less one-to-one basis, similar to the original German concept of the assault gun.
The US Army had another expected ace in the hole. In 1940 none of Europe’s armies, even the Soviet Union, intended to pit tanks against tanks as a matter of course. Given the vehicles’ relative scarcity, such tactics made no more sense than a chess player seeking to exchange queens as an opening gambit. The preferred counter was the towed antitank gun. America developed an alternative: high-velocity guns on self-propelled carriages. The definitive initial Tank Destroyer—a literal, conscious translation of the German Panzerjaeger—was the M-10: a three-inch- high velocity gun in a lightly armored, open-topped turret on a modified Sherman chassis, relying on surprise, speed, and shock against its better-protected adversaries.
The tank destroyer concept has been so sharply and systematically criticized that its genesis is often overlooked. The motto of “seek, strike, destroy” was meant to be applied against the kind of tanks operational in the early 1940s. The M-10’s three-inch gun was at the time of its adoption as good as any armor- piercing weapon on tracks, even the 76mm gun of the Russian T-34. Doctrine called for using tank destroyers in masses—at peak strength there were over a hundred battalions—to stop massive, high-speed, flexible attacks of the kind that took the Germans to the gates of Moscow.
Tank destroyers were, in short, not a bad idea at the time. Ironically they were intended to counter just the kind of operation the overstrained panzers were never able to mount against American forces that were consistently on the offensive. And on the offensive, tank destroyers were enough out of their element to be without a role—particularly as the nature of German tanks changed. With their thin armor and relatively high silhouettes, M10s “stalking” Panthers or Tigers resembled nothing so much as ants attacking an armadillo.
The Shermans were left on their own. Were they good enough? In North Africa, then in Sicily and Italy, American tankers regularly encountered up-gunned Panzer IVs, Panthers, and Tigers. On the whole the Shermans coped—not perfectly, but they coped. To supplement the medium-velocity gun, the US introduced a 76mm design based on the M-10s three-inch. Intended primarily to engage tanks with armor-piercing rounds, the gun was something of an afterthought in the contexts of doctrine that still discounted tank-versus-tank combat, and of experience that asserted the importance of tanks in direct support of infantry. It was correspondingly unpopular among senior officers who preferred the more versatile medium-velocity 75. The proportion of 76mm Shermans in the armored divisions reached an average of a third only at the end of 1944. For the independent battalions, it stabilized at a little over a fourth.
The British took a different tack, mounting their 17-pounder antitank gun—ballistically a rough equivalent of the German 88—in one out of four of their Shermans. In the weeks after D-Day, none of the alternatives proved optional. The 75mm gun was ineffective against German frontal armor at any but near-suicidal ranges. American crews quickly learned that the 76mm was second-rate. To make it better fit a Sherman turret, the Ordnance Department reduced the barrel by over a foot, correspondingly reducing muzzle velocity, ballistic effectiveness, and armor penetration. The Firefly was an excellent tank killer, but its long barrel stood out from the Sherman shorthorns, making it a distinctive and favorite target.
Bocage restricted maneuver. Enough German tanks were present to provide far closer mutual support than had been common in North Africa and Italy. Crew losses mounted; crew morale declined. Awkward questions were raised in Parliament, thanks in good part to the Establishment connections of the Guardsmen riding tanks. Eisenhower contacted Chief of Staff George Marshall demanding that AFVs with 90mm guns be made available as soon as possible. Allied heavy bombers even devoted some effort to knocking out the Reich’s tank factories.
US armored divisions were reorganized prior to D-Day, and the number of by-now nearly useless light tanks reduced to a fourth of their strength. The reconfigured divisions, with three battalions each of tanks, infantry in half-tracks, and self-propelled light howitzers, were significantly more mobile than their German and Soviet counterparts. But with only slightly more than 10,000 men, their shock and staying powers were so limited that after the war, a board recommended adding three infantry battalions and virtually doubling the division’s size.
The new organization reflected the updated field manual released in January 1944, which addressed destroying enemy forces in combat more than did its predecessor, but continued to stress the armored division’s primary role as offensive operations in enemy rear areas. This had worked well enough in Sicily, where George Patton kept the 2nd Armored Division concentrated and used it for exploitation, most notably in the 100-mile lunge to capture Palermo. Admittedly resistance was light, but US armored divisions had never been intended to engage their panzer counterparts directly. German and Soviet armor created opportunity; Americans developed it. Tank killing fell, albeit by default, to artillery and air power.
Nor were Soviet-style deep operations part of the Allied repertoire. Operational art was irrelevant to Britain’s fundamentally maritime strategic paradigm. It required 40 years to develop in the US after World War II, and even then was presented with more enthusiasm than understanding. No specialized armored higher headquarters existed or evolved in either army. US armored divisions were usually allocated among standard corps in a ratio of one to two or three infantry divisions. That reflected both Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy and America’s policy of deploying the smallest possible army. The “90-division gamble” meant armored divisions had to be kept up front instead of being concentrated panzer-fashion.
That the British, after briefly testing the use of massed armor in Normandy, accepted a similar system reflected the fact that the Allied armies were fully motorized.5 The race across France and Belgium showed infantry divisions could keep pace with the armor in a way neither the Germans nor the Soviets could match, while heavily concentrated armor tended to get in its own way. The riflemen were also supported by armor on a scale considered jaw-dropping by Landser standards. An American infantry division on the offensive could usually count on a battalion of fifty Shermans and another of three dozen tank destroyers able to serve as assault guns manqué or to tie into the radio network as supplementary fire support. Its British counterpart could call on up to a brigade of Shermans or Churchills, the latter roughly a better-protected, turreted counterpart of the Sturmgeschütz IIIF, plus a family of specialized armor: flame-throwing tanks, mine-clearing tanks, and tanks with turrets removed and converted to armored personnel carriers.
It nevertheless remains defensible to suggest that in terms of doctrine and material, Allied armor on D-Day was ideally configured to defeat the panzers of Operation Blue. Technical changes during the campaign were marginal. The M-18 Hellcat tank destroyer, introduced in late 1943, could make the incredible top speed of 55 miles per hour, but had almost no protection and carried the same 76mm gun as the new mark of Sherman. Although official tank destroyer doctrine still considered a heavy gun unnecessary, a 90mm gun on a modified M-10 chassis went into production in April 1944. By V-E Day, 22 battalions of them were on the ground in the European Theater of Operations. The M-26 tank, whose heavy armor, 90mm gun, and 48-ton weight made it a reasonable counter to the Panther, was not standardized until 1945; only around 200 were serving with the armored divisions when the war ended.
US design and procurement agencies did manage to develop and introduce by late 1944 the definitive light tank of World War II. Weighing a bit over 18 tons, with a medium-velocity 75mm gun adapted from an aircraft model and a top speed of 35 miles per hour, the M-24 was ideal for 1941. In 1944 all it needed was a buggy whip.
On the British side the number of Fireflies was doubled. More 17-pounders were mounted on more Lend-Lease M-10s, and on obsolescent tank chassis, of which there were so many in Britain’s inventory. At best these were stopgaps. But British tank designers, who for much of the war might as well have been working for the other side, finally got it right with the Comet, a fast 35-ton Panther killer with a modified 17-pounder gun and a better all- round tank than the M-26. But only a single armored division received the new vehicles during the war. The even better Centurion set postwar standards of effectiveness for years, but only began field trials in May 1945, reflecting a government decision to delay projects that could not enter service in 1944. The bureaucrats responsible did not have to clean human remains from burned-out Sherman hulls.
With those points made, others can be offered as counterweights. Stephen Zaloga appropriately observes that technical comparisons and tank-on-tank duels are disproportionately interesting to battle buffs and war gamers, particularly with the development of computerized visuals. In fact, the number of tank-versus-tank battles fought during the European campaign was limited, and many of those were small scale, involving a half dozen on each side. Postwar research, moreover, indicated that in those situations the most important factor was reaction time: seeing first, firing first, and hitting first. Second came tactics: positioning and movement. Technical comparisons were less significant.
An experienced crew, or a well-trained one, had a better chance in a direct confrontation. On the other hand, a poor crew with an inferior tank in a hull-down position, or on the flank or rear, had at least a first-strike edge over better men advancing in a state-of-the-art AFV. That held true even for the much- vilified tank destroyers. British M-10s manned by artillerymen successfully engaged Panzer IVs in Normandy; M-18s showed well against attacking Panthers at Arrancourt and many another now-forgotten sites.
“Advancing,” however, is the operative word. About half of all Allied tank losses in the European theater of operations came from high-velocity gunfire. British and Americans alike tended to describe any such round as an 88. Case studies suggest that as many as three-fourths were in fact 75mm. These could have come from Panthers or Panzer IVs, assault guns or open-topped tank destroyers—and not least from the towed antitank guns, whose crews contributed heavily to German defensive successes in Normandy. One or two well-positioned, well- camouflaged Pak 75s (and the Russian Front had made the Germans experts in concealment) could slow the boldest tankers until infantry could arrive to finish them off. And the gunners often had a good chance of getting clear to fight again before matters reached grenade range.
“Advancing” might also be cited as an adjective modifying the positive consequences of the Sherman’s well-established mechanical reliability. While it is certainly preferable to have tanks on line rather than under repair, recently available German statistics for the Eastern Front make clear that the crucial variable in maintenance was ability to recover the vehicle. In the predominantly offensive campaign for Northwest Europe, where the Allies generally occupied the battlegrounds, would it have been any more difficult to salvage a less-reliable tank with higher survivability in combat?
Much clearer is the fact that missions shaped proficiency. By 1944, as the previous chapter indicates, the panzers were configured by equipment and experience to fight other mechanized forces, whether by holding a front or counterattacking. Most Allied tank engagements were combined-arms operations involving buildings and entrenchments, troops caught in the open and unarmored vehicles. A Sherman in an American armored division might carry as little as a third of its gun ammunition in armor-piercing rounds. Machine guns could be used more often than the main armament in “routine” situations: the .50-caliber on the turret of most Shermans chewed through earth and walls with devastating effect.
It is correspondingly reasonable to suggest that tank crews conditioned to that kind of fighting might lose a little of the type of situational awareness required for tank-on-tank action. But the panzers were always somewhere in the background. Any German tank encountered could take on the dimensions of a Panther or Tiger. Allied and Japanese airmen in the Pacific similarly reported destroyers as cruisers and cruisers as battleships. Stress and adrenaline were major factors; panzer crews in Russia were no less prone to upgrade their opposition for scoring purposes and bragging rights.
Armor revisionists are fond of stating—accurately—that only three Tiger battalions fought in Normandy, all in the British sector. It is no less true that in their greatest number, during the Battle of the Bulge, Panthers were only a quarter of the AFVs committed—even before they started breaking down. But in the middle distance on a cloudy day, the differences between a Panzer IVJ and a Tiger can be difficult to discern even without the distractions of combat. What stood out was their common feature: the long-barreled, high-velocity gun calculated to make instant believers of US Ordnance types more interested in engines and transmissions than in weapons design.
V
DURING THE AUTUMN of 1944, in the aftermath of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, and in the aftermath of the Red Army’s colossal breakthroughs in the East, the Nazi regime and the German people mobilized their last reserves of ferocity and fanaticism. The propaganda vision of a people’s community at arms and the free rein given to violence on both foreign and home fronts enhanced a pattern of exploitation and dehumanization already permeating German society from the factories to the countryside. Rationality gave way to passion and to fear as retribution loomed for a continent’s worth of crimes.
The Wehrmacht went out fighting and it went down hard. Like the German people, it neither saw nor sought an alternative. The prospective fate implied in the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender could assume terrifying form to men who had seen—and participated in—the things done “in the name of the Third Reich and the German people.” That meant reconstructing shattered divisions by placing officers at road junctions and impressing every man without a clear destination, even if cooks became tankers and sailors found themselves in the Waffen SS. It meant filling out ranks with teenage draftees and men combed out of the increasingly moribund navy and air force. It meant reequipment by an industrial system that continued to defy the best efforts of the Combined Bomber Offensive. It meant morale enforced by laws making a soldier’s family liable for any derelictions of duty. It meant field courts-martial that seemed to impose only one sentence: death.
Combine Eisenhower’s commitment to a continuous front with the relative weakness of Allied ground forces, and weak spots must inevitably emerge. The most obvious one was in the American sector: the Ardennes Forest, a static sector manned by a mix of green divisions and veteran outfits that had been burned out elsewhere. Hitler’s intention, shared and underwritten by High Command West, was to replicate the success of 1940 by striking through the Ardennes for Antwerp. The port’s capture would both create a logistical crisis for the Allies and divide the British from the Americans, opening the way to their defeat in detail and—just possibly—to a decisive falling-out between partners whose squabbling, egalitarian relationship was never really understood by German strategic planners who believed in client systems rather than alliances.
That the Allies still had absolute control of the air over the front, and that German fuel supplies were about enough to get their tanks halfway to Antwerp, did not concern the Führer. Nor were his generals excessively disturbed. The planners of High Command West preferred in principle a more limited operation: a double envelopment aimed at Liege. They were, however, never able to convince even themselves why Germany’s last reserves should be used that way. What was to be gained, except a drawn-out endgame?
At least the West was geographically small enough to offer something like a legitimate strategic objective. The Eastern Front presented only the prospect of a second Kursk, with the last of the panzers feeding themselves into a Russian meat grinder somewhere east of the existing front line. Panzer Lehr’s Fritz Bayerlein echoed many of his counterparts when he said he persuaded himself that the attack would succeed in order to give his orders credibility and sustain the aggressive spirit of his subordinates. If Operation Watch on the Rhine proved a Twilight of the Gods, then it would be a virtuoso performance as far as the army’s professionals and the zealots of the SS could make it.
By mid-December a buildup overlooked or discounted by confident Allied commanders gave the Germans a three-to-one advantage in men and a two-to-one advantage in armored vehicles in their chosen sector of attack. A new 6th SS Panzer Army had been organized in September under Sepp Dietrich. By this time in the Western theater the distinctions and antagonisms between army and Waffen SS had diminished, especially in the panzer formations, where the consistently desperate situation and the relatively even numbers of divisions made close mutual support a necessary norm. In the projected offensive, 5th Panzer and 6th SS Panzer Armies would fight side by side with few questions asked.
Part of the army panzers’ reconstruction involved reorganization. Both in Russia and in the West, the events of 1944 had resulted in serious losses of trained specialists and no less serious discrepancies between the numbers actually available in the combat units and those in the divisions’ rear echelons. One response was pairing panzer divisions by twos in permanent corps that would assume service and training responsibilities. Five were organized and saw action, against the Russians in the final campaign. More significant was the introduction on August 11 of the Panzer Division Type 1944. This gave each panzer grenadier regiment an organic pioneer company and each tank battalion organic maintenance and supply companies. Both changes acknowledged the decentralization that had become the panzers’ tactical and operational norm. Battalions consistently shifting rapidly from place to place and battle group to battle group would now be more self-sufficient. Divisions would now be better able to concentrate on planning and fighting—at least in principle.
The new panzer divisions were still authorized two tank battalions, each of as many as 88 tanks. Paper may be infinitely patient; reality is less forgiving. In the autumn of 1944, Allied heavy bomber strikes repeatedly hit most of the big tank manufacturing complexes: Daimler-Benz, MAN in Nuremberg, and the Henschel Tiger II plant in Kassel. Speer was able to sustain production, but only around half of the 700 Panthers and Panzer IVs scheduled for delivery in December reached the intended users.
The shortages also reflected decisions made in the Armaments Ministry. Speer had kept up tank production by transferring resources from the manufacture of other vehicles and by cutting back on spare parts. The latter dropped from over a quarter of tank-related contracts in 1943 to less than 10 percent in December 1944. Critical resources, like the molybdenum that made armor tough as opposed to brittle, were in critically short supply. Quality control slipped badly in everything from optics to transmissions to welding. The continued willingness of Germans to report for work despite the bombing is often cited. The on-the-job efficiency of men and women deprived of everything from their homes to a night’s sleep has been less investigated.
The increasing use of slave labor in war plants had consequences as well. Distracted, tired foremen and overseers were easier to evade. Risks that seemed foolhardy in 1943 took on a different dimension as the Reich seemed on the edge of implosion. Deliberate sabotage was probably less significant than hostile carelessness. But increasing numbers of panzers were coming on line with screws poorly tightened, hoses poorly connected—and an occasional handful of shop grit or steel filings deposited where it might do some damage. That was no small matter in contexts of frequently inexperienced crews and frequently nonexistent maintenance vehicles.
The immediate response was to reduce the number of tanks in a company to 14, and where necessary to replace those with assault guns of varying types. Even with these makeshifts, 15 panzer divisions still had only one tank battalion. Sometimes an independent battalion would be attached—Leibstandarte, for example, benefited by receiving the Tigers of the 501st SS as its de facto second battalion. Other divisions found themselves with new battalions equipped with Jagdpanthers or Jagdpanzer IVs, trained for antitank missions rather than tank tactics, or in the close cooperation with panzer grenadiers that remained the assault guns’ mission in an offensive.
Training and equipment were general problems in divisions preparing for the Ardennes offensive. Panzer Lehr, the army’s show horse, had its full complement of men, a third tank battalion equipped with assault guns, and one of the supplementary heavy antitank battalions. Das Reich, however, reported a large number of inexperienced recruits, and reported individual and unit training as at low standards. Leibstandarte described morale as excellent, but combat readiness above company level as inadequate. The 116th Panzer Division was short of armor, motor vehicles, and junior officers and NCOs. Second Panzer Division lacked a third of its vehicles: on December 14, one panzer grenadier battalion was riding bicycles. It was all a far cry from the spring of 1940.
In its final form, Watch on the Rhine6 incorporated three armies deployed on a 100-mile front under Model, commanding Army Group B since Rundstedt had been restored, at least nominally, to his former position in September. The balance of forces at the cutting edge, and their missions, demonstrated the army’s decline relative to the Waffen SS. Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer was the spearhead, with Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Hohenstaufen, and Hitler Jugend as its backbone, and five army infantry divisions as spear-carriers and mop-up troops. Fifth Panzer Army would cover Dietrich’s left, and Manteuffel had the army’s armored contribution: Panzer Lehr, 2nd and 116th Panzer Divisions, plus four infantry divisions. Protecting his left flank in turn was the responsibility of 7th Army, with four infantry divisions and no armor to speak of.
Watch on the Rhine’s order of battle incorporated 200,000 men, 600 armored vehicles, almost 2,500 supporting aircraft—that number itself a triumph of concentration involving stripping the Reich’s air defenses. Radio silence was draconically enforced. Camouflage was up to Eastern Front standards. Parachute drops and sabotage units were expected to confuse surprised defenders even further. The offensive seemed structured to maximize what the Germans—the panzer troops in particular—considered their main strength: sophisticated tactical and operational expertise.
Model could in principle call on another ten divisions, but only two were panzers; the offensive would rise or fall with its starting lineup. The operational plan was Sichelschnitt recycled. Dietrich, at the Schwerpunkt, was to break through around Monschau, cross the Meuse around Liege, and strike full tilt for Antwerp. Manteuffel would cross the Meuse at Dinant and aim for Brussels. The panzers were expected to be across the Meuse before the Allies could move armor sufficient to counter them.
As so often before, however, German focus devolved into tunnel vision. None of the specific plans addressed the subject of Allied air power. The responsible parties similarly avoided addressing directly the fuel question. By comparison to the Western campaign’s early months, fuel supplies were impressive, but the Panthers and Tigers were always thirsty. Were the Americans likely to be so confused, so feckless, and so obliging as to leave their fuel dumps intact as refilling points? In the climate of December 1944, asking such a question suggested dangerous weakness of will and character.
Sepp Dietrich might be an unrefined, unimaginative, hard-core Nazi, but he did not lack common sense. All the Waffen SS had to do, he later said sarcastically, was “cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on to take Antwerp . . . through the Ardennes when the snow is waist-deep and there isn’t room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armored divisions. When it doesn’t get light until eight and it’s dark again at four—and at Christmas.” Sixth SS Panzer Army had four days to reach the Meuse. Dietrich and his staff set the infantry divisions to breach US defenses on day one, December 16. When the hastily reconstituted army units faltered in the face of determined American resistance, the word was “panzers forward.” But Kharkov and Kursk were a long way back. The Waffen SS had made its recent reputation in defensive fighting. Experience in offensive operations had been diluted by expansion. Officer casualties had been heavy. From battalion to division, 6th SS Panzer Army correspondingly eschewed finesse in favor of head-down frontal attacks.
Tactical maneuver was further restricted by rain periodically freezing into snow as temperatures hovered in the low thirties. Fields already saturated by the heavy rains of early autumn turned into glutinous paste when the heavy German tanks tried to cross them. The alternative was straight down the roads and straight down the middle from village to village. Each attack was expected to put the finishing touches on an enemy that seemed on the ragged edge of breaking. Yet the “Amis” held on—and without the fighter-bombers grounded by the same weather that slowed the panzers.
For the sake of speed the SS neither used their reconnaissance battalions to probe for weak spots, nor their pioneers to assist the tanks. The tanks repeatedly pushed ahead and just as repeatedly lost contact with their infantry, only to run afoul of ambushed Shermans and M-10s, or bazooka teams taking advantage of relatively weak side armor. Even the 57mm popguns of the infantry’s antitank units scored a few kills. The panzer grenadiers, many of them half-trained recruits or converted sailors and airmen, were at a surprising disadvantage against American regiments, some of which had been in action since Normandy.
The 12th SS Panzer Division, on the German right, lost most of its Panthers in the first two days and made no significant progress thereafter. Its neighbor, Leibstandarte, similarly held up, responded by sending forward an armor- heavy battle group. It included most of the division’s striking power: a battalion each of Panthers, Panzer IVs, and Tiger Bs: together around 100 tanks, a mechanized panzer grenadier battalion, pioneers, and some self-propelled artillery. Its commander was Lieutenant-Colonel Jochen Peiper. He had been Himmler’s adjutant from 1938 to 1941 and had enjoyed the Reichsführer’s mentoring and patronage. He had developed into a hard-driving, charismatic risk-taker whose men followed him in good part because of his reputation as someone who led from the front and was the hardest man in any unit he led. Peiper was, in other words, an archetype of the kind of officer the Waffen SS nurtured in Russia and now turned loose in the West.
Peiper was also just the man to throw the dice for an entire panzer army. His mission was to reach the Meuse, capture the bridges before they were demolished, and hold until relieved. It was 100 miles over back-country roads that were little more than trails. Orders were to avoid combat when possible, and to tolerate no delays. The battle group’s movements were a model tactical exercise—at first. The panzers bypassed confused American rear-echelon troops, slipped between elements of American convoys, and overran American supply dumps. With his fuel low, Peiper refilled his tanks with 50,000 gallons of US gas captured without firing a shot.
The panzers captured a key bridge at Stavelot on December 18, and pushed through to the Amblève River. All they had to do was cross, and the way to the Meuse would be open. But an American engineer battalion blew the bridges Peiper was expecting to rush—in one case literally under the gun of a Tiger VIB. American tanks and infantry, moving faster than expected, retook Stavelot and cut the panzers’ line of communication. The sky was clearing, and the fighter-bombers returned to hammer Peiper’s columns relentlessly. The battle group was down to three dozen tanks, as much from breakdowns as from combat loss. Its infantry, exposed to the weather day and night in their open-topped half-tracks, on cold rations and broken sleep, were numb with cold and fatigue. Peiper requested permission to withdraw. It was refused. Relief attempts were stopped almost in their tracks. As the Americans closed in, Peiper made his stand at a village called La Gleize. After two breakout efforts failed, with his tanks out of fuel and his ammunition exhausted, on Christmas he led out on foot the men he had left. Moving by night, 800 survivors of the 6,000 who began the strike a week earlier made it back to Leibstandarte’s forward positions.
Peiper left behind about 100 of his own wounded and another 150 American POWs. The senior US officer later reported that the Germans had appropriately observed the rules of war. But from the operation’s beginning, Kampfgruppe Peiper and the rest of Leibstandarte had left a trail of bodies in its wake: as many as 350 Americans and well over 100 Belgian civilians. The consequences were epitomized by the GIs bringing in some prisoners from Peiper’s battle group who asked an officer if he wanted to bother with them. He said yes. Not everyone did. For the rest of the war it was not exactly open season on Waffen SS prisoners, but they surrendered at a higher degree of immediate risk than their army counterparts.
Pieper was not necessarily a liar or a hypocrite when he not only insisted at La Gleize that he did not shoot prisoners, but seemed surprised by the allegation. He is best understood as resolving a specific form of the cognitive dissonance that increasingly possessed the Wehrmacht in particular and the Reich as a whole. The question of whether someone, Peiper or a superior, somehow either gave orders to take no prisoners or made it clear that “no delays” was a euphemism for “no prisoners” is misleading. Since Normandy, a pattern had developed in which both sides processed refusing quarter, shooting prisoners, and similar frontline atrocities, as mistakes, misunderstandings, or part of “the filth of war”: fear, frustration, vengeance, the semi-erotic thrill of having an enemy completely at one’s mercy.
Inexperienced troops are more prone to be trigger-happy, and there was ample inexperience on both sides of the line in June 1944. Even a thoroughly ideologized German was likely to see a difference between more or less Aryan “Anglo-Saxons” and despised, despicable Slavs. Nor was there much to gain by making things worse than they had to be. Within the same few days in Normandy, elements of the Hitler Jugend murdered Canadian prisoners in cold blood, and other troops of the division negotiated a local truce with a British battalion enabling both sides to bring their wounded to safety. Such agreements were not everyday occurrences, but they did happen. An officer of 9th Panzer Division describes one of his men bringing a wounded American back to his own lines and returning laden with chocolate and cigarettes as tokens of appreciation. A story improved in the telling? Perhaps. But nothing similar was plausible even as a rumor in the East. And one Russian Front was bad enough.
What did transplant from the East was a frontline culture that since 1941 had developed into something combining convenience and indifference, embedded in a matrix of hardness. Hardness was neither cruelty nor fanaticism. It is best understood in emotional and moral contexts, as will focused by intelligence for the purpose of accomplishing a mission. It was—and is—a mind-set particularly enabling the brutal expediency that is an enduring aspect of war.
In commenting on Kurt Meyer’s trial and death sentence, a Canadian general asserted he did not know of a single general or colonel on the Allied side who had not said “this time we don’t want any prisoners.” In fact, there is a generally understood distinction, fine but significant, between not taking prisoners and killing them once they have surrendered. Recent general-audience works on the Canadians and Australians in World War I, for example, are remarkably open in acknowledging relatively frequent orders at battalion and company levels of “no prisoners” before an attack. Shooting or bayoneting unarmed men is another matter entirely. It might be called the difference between war and meanness.
James Weingartner highlights the discrepancy between the US Army’s judging of war crimes by Americans and its response to comparable offenses involving Germans. That was not a simple double standard. For the Americans, as for the British and Canadians, expedience and necessity remained situational rather than normative, on the margin of legal and moral systems but not beyond them. On the German side of the line, hardness transmuted expediency into a norm and redefined it as a virtue. Impersonalization and depersonalization went hand in hand. Interfering civilians or inconvenient POWs might not be condignly and routinely disposed of—but they could be, with fewer and fewer questions asked externally or internally. The French government was shocked and embarrassed to find Alsatians represented among the perpetrators of Oradour. Defended in their home province as “forced volunteers,” they were tried and convicted, but pardoned by Charles de Gaulle in 1953 for the sake of national unity.
The inability of the Waffen SS to break through on the north shoulder removed any possibility of success Watch on the Rhine might have had. Instead of exploiting victory, Das Reich and Hohenstaufen found themselves stymied by roads blocked for miles by abandoned vehicles out of fuel or broken down. While the SS ran in place, however, Manteuffel had used his infantry skillfully to infiltrate, surround, and capture most of the green 106th Infantry Division’s two forward regiments before sending his armor forward. The 116th Panzer made for Houffalize. Second Panzer and Panzer Lehr pushed through and over the 28th Infantry Division toward Bastogne, destroying an American armored combat command in the process.
The 101st Airborne Division got there first, dug in, and has been celebrated in story, if not song, ever since. The Germans originally hoped to take the town by a coup de main. When that proved impossible, Bayerlein argued that Bastogne was too important as a transportation center to be bypassed. Manteuffel was already concerned that his forward elements were too weak to sustain their progress; attacking Bastogne in force would only make that situation worse. He was also too old a panzer hand to risk tanks in a house-to-house fight against good troops. The Panzer Baron had begun his career in the horse cavalry, understood the importance of time for Watch on the Rhine, and decided to mask the town and continue his drive toward the Meuse.
That the choice had to be made highlighted the growing difficulty the panzers faced in being all things in every situation. In 1940, motorized divisions had been available for this kind of secondary collateral mission. In 1941, the marching infantry could be counted on to come up in time to free the panzers for their next spring forward. In 1944, 15th Panzer Grenadier Division did not arrive at Bastogne from army group reserve until December 24.
Fifth Panzer Army benefited from a cold front that set in on the night of December 22, freezing the ground enough for the Panthers to move cross-country. Soft ground, however, was the least of Manteuffel’s problems. His spearheads knifed 60 miles deep into the American positions, along a 30-mile front. Second Panzer Division, generally regarded by the Americans as the best they faced, got to within five miles of the Meuse on December 24—ironically near Dinant, where 7th Panzer had staged its epic crossing in 1940. But its fuel was almost exhausted. Model responded by ordering the division to advance on foot. Brigadier General Meinrad von Lauchert had been commanding the division only since December 13. He had been a panzer officer since 1935, led everything from a company to a regiment in combat, and recognized bombast. But he was not a sorcerer, and could not conjure fuel where none existed. Second Panzer was at the far end of its operational tether.
By platoons and companies, Americans fought bitter defensive actions throughout the sector—in one case holding out in a castle. Thirty-two men would be awarded the Medal of Honor from first to last during the Battle of the Bulge, and determination increased as word spread that the Germans were not taking prisoners. To the north, what remained of the 106th, a regiment of the 28th, and combat commands of 7th and 9th Armored Divisions, held another key road junction—St. Vith—for five vital days against first infantry, then the elite panzers of the Führer Escort Brigade from Model’s reserve. Not until 2nd SS Panzer Division advanced far enough to threaten the town from the north did the hard-hammered garrison withdraw.
In the process of working their way forward, elements of Dietrich’s panzers seeking to evade the clogged roads in their sector began edging onto 5th Panzer Army’s supply routes. Manteuffel ordered them kept off; the corps commander responded by establishing roadblocks whose men were authorized to use force to regulate traffic. There are no records of shots being fired, but army and SS columns remained entangled as tempers flared and cooperation eroded.
Model released some of his characteristic nervous energy by briefly directing traffic himself, while reassuring Hitler that the chances of victory remained great. But the overall supply situation was rapidly deteriorating. The clearing skies accompanying the cold front meant the return of allied planes en masse: an average of 3,000 sorties a day, disrupting operations and turning the movement of troops and vehicles to nighttime—including the vital fuel trucks.
Model had from the beginning recommended eschewing a drive to the Meuse in favor of a quick turn north to isolate and then encircle the dozen or so American divisions concentrated around Aachen. Dietrich’s staff had been clandestinely working on a similar backup plan since December 8. Manteuffel underwrote their thinking on December 24, when he phoned the High Command and declared Antwerp was beyond his reach.
Any lingering optimism was dispelled on Christmas when 2nd Panzer was attacked by its literal counterpart, the 2nd US Armored Division. The Americans encircled the panzers’ leading battle group, destroying it as artillery and RAF Typhoons frustrated relief efforts by the rest of the division supported by elements of the 9th Panzer, newly arrived from High Command reserve. Six hundred men escaped—walking and carrying no more than their personal weapons. It was getting to be a habit for the panzers. Two thousand more were dead or prisoners. Over 80 AFVs remained on the field, knocked out or with empty fuel tanks. The rest of the division fought on around the village of Humain, so fiercely that it took one of the new flame-throwing Shermans to burn out the last die-hards. On December 27, 2nd Panzer was withdrawn. On January 1, 1945, it reported exactly five serviceable tanks.
Panzer Lehr, on 2nd Panzer’s left, had moved more slowly and less effectively—due in part perhaps to a bit of self-inflicted fog and friction. Bayerlein missed a possible chance to reach the Meuse when, on December 22, he halted to rest his men and allow them to celebrate Christmas with the extra rations sent forward for the occasion. According to some reliable accounts, Panzer Lehr’s commander had also sacrificed a good part of December 19 flirting with a “young, blond, and beautiful” nurse in a captured American hospital.
The story invites comparison with the “yellow rose of Texas,” whose dalliance with Santa Anna allegedly distracted the Mexican general in the crucial hours before the battle of San Jacinto. But a harem of nurses would have made no difference as Allied reinforcements continued to arrive in the northern sector and Patton’s Third Army conducted a remarkable 90-degree turn north that took it into Bastogne on December 26.
Hitler was confronted with two choices: evacuate the salient and withdraw the panzers for future employment, or continue fighting to keep the Allies pinned down and draw them away from the industrial centers of the Ruhr and the Saar. Being Hitler, he decided on both. The infantry was left to hold the line, supported by what remained of the army’s panzers and, temporarily, the Waffen SS, for whom Hitler had other plans.
The operational result was two weeks of head-down fighting as American tanks and infantry hammered into the same kind of farm- and-village strong points that had so hampered Watch on the Rhine. Now it was German antitank guns ambushing Shermans whose relatively narrow treads restricted their off-road mobility in the deepening snow. Not until January 16 did Patton’s 11th Armored Division connect at Houffalize with elements of the 1st Army advancing from the north, forcing back Panzer Lehr despite its orders to hold the town “at all costs.” For the next two weeks the Americans pushed eastward as the defense eroded under constant artillery fire and air strikes. It was not elegant but it was effective. The Bulge from first to last cost the Germans over 700 AFVs—almost half of the number committed. About half the Panthers still in German hands were downlined for repair.
VI
THE BATTLE OF the Bulge was the end of panzer operations in the West. Afterward it became, in Manteuffel’s words, “a corporal’s war—a multitude of piecemeal fights.” It was not much of an exaggeration. Operation North Wind was originally intended to support the Ardennes offensive. Launched into Alsace in January, well after Watch on the Rhine had failed, North Wind burned out four more mechanized divisions to no purpose on any level, strategic, operational, or tactical. The American spearheads that pushed toward the Rhine in February and the British and Canadians that struggled through the Reichswald to their north encountered limited armored opposition, and most of that on company scale. As the Allies crossed the Rhine, encircled the Ruhr, and fanned out across a dying Reich, the scale diminished further.
At least so it appeared. Much of the time the Germans were shuffling the panzers from crisis point to crisis point in a near-random fashion defying close analysis. Regiments and divisions, reduced to cadres and skeletons, mounted counterattacks noted in their records and histories that had so little impact that they failed to make Allied war diaries except as last stands.
Panzer Lehr offers a good case study. After Houffalize it was withdrawn into reserve and rebuilt—numerically at least. The quality of the replacements was described as “bad”: poor training, no experience. Vehicles were in short supply. Most of the tanks were under repair or lying by the side of the road somewhere. When new ones arrived they had not been adequately inspected and tested at the factories. They had not been “driven in” due to the lack of fuel. For the same reason the quality of the new drivers was low. Without time for checkups and overhauling at unit level, non-operational losses were an ongoing problem even when moving from skirmish to skirmish.
Panzer Lehr next saw action in February, committed to the Reichswald in support of the hard-pressed 116th Panzer. Its counterattacks were repeatedly stopped by tank and artillery fire of an intensity the division had never experienced. Mobile operations did not occur, grumbled one commenter, because the enemy refused to engage in them! From the Reichswald, Lehr was ordered south against the US 9th Army. It was “urgently awaited” locally—but as a mobile antitank defense against the fast-moving Americans. Hitler wanted a full-scale counterattack—a mission the panzer regiment’s commander dismissed as “clearly unimaginable.” Instead Lehr went into the line around Rheydt and Mönchengladbach and took heavy losses from air strikes and ground attacks. It fell back to Krefeld too weak to defend the city.
For what it was worth, Panzer Lehr’s tank destroyers helped hold the Adolf Hitler Bridge across the Rhine until it could be blown. By then the division had only 20 serviceable tanks. Its panzer grenadier regiments had been reduced to battalion strength. Fuel shortages and breakdowns cost heavy vehicle losses. Communications equipment, a core element of the panzers’ effectiveness throughout the war, was in short supply. Replacements were so scarce the division was impressing stragglers. When, on March 7, Panzer Lehr Division was finally authorized to retreat across the Rhine itself, infantry strength was down to a single battalion. Two tanks remained operational. “It would be superfluous,” noted the commenters, “to describe the mood of the totally exhausted soldiers.”
Two days later a battle group of fragments, built around 18 freshly repaired or newly arrived tanks, was ordered to the Remagen bridgehead. Along with bits and pieces of the 9th and 11th Panzer Divisions, grandiosely titled “Corps Group Bayerlein,” it was expected to wipe out the bridgehead before the Americans could reinforce it. Bayerlein, Model—whose army group was responsible for the sector—and Hitler disagreed on the timing and direction of the attack. Albert Kesselring, who replaced Rundstedt as High Commander West on March 11, added his voice to the mix.
Hitler had convincingly insisted that the Russians were about to suffer a catastrophic defeat, after which the main German forces would redeploy and deal with the Western allies. All Kesselring had to do was hold on. How much of this Kesselring believed and processed through the generic optimism that gave him the nickname “smiling Albert” remains incalculable. What was certain was that the projected jump-off points for the attack kept falling into American hands before the Germans could get into position. First US Army made the subject moot on March 22 with an armored breakout to the northeast that joined 9th Army’s spearheads to encircle the whole of Army Group B.
The Ruhr Pocket matched anything achieved by the Russians: over 300,000 Germans in some kind of uniform with some kind of military identity, ranging from schoolboys carrying bazookas to the remnants of famous divisions like 3rd Panzer Grenadier, 116th Panzer, and Panzer Lehr. An attempt at breakout failed when the Americans again overran the assembly areas. Lehr’s records speak of “over-hasty withdrawals” and concede the division’s fighting spirit was broken. By April 5, 15 AFVs remained. One battle group was built around four of them, three squads of bazooka men, a dismounted panzer grenadier company, and a local-defense pioneer company with all of its men over 50 years old.
Ten days later, as the Americans continued to carve up the pocket, the division staff concluded further resistance useless. The last rounds were fired off; the last armored vehicles destroyed; and what remained of Panzer Lehr waited for the Ami tanks to come and get them. Walther Model committed suicide on April 21 after telling a group of stragglers to go home and wishing them luck. When Germany surrendered, the German army in the West included three mechanized divisions: two armored, one panzer grenadier. The once mighty had fallen a long way.
The military bureaucrats responded to disaster by shuffling paper. In October 1944 a new type of panzer grenadier battalion was introduced on a scale of one or two to each army and Waffen SS division. Its rifle companies rode bicycles instead of trucks. In March the armored force introduced the Panzer Division 45. It created the “mixed panzer regiment,” a battalion each of tanks and mechanized infantry plus support units: 40 tanks, half Panthers and half Panzer IVs. The other panzer grenadiers were now “partially motorized,” a euphemism for the riflemen moving on foot. Panzer divisions unable to meet even these reduced standards were to be converted to “battle groups.” Waffen SS panzer divisions lost two of their six infantry battalions, and two of the remaining four were to be equipped with bicycles. For practical purposes the new order remained a paper exercise. It nevertheless epitomized that demodernization of the Wehrmacht noted by so many scholars. And on March 28, Heinz Guderian was dismissed as Chief of Armored Troops and Acting Chief of Staff.
Guderian’s position had never been exactly stable, despite his involvement in screening officers accused of complicity in July 20, his acceptance of the brutal suppression of the Polish Home Army and the destruction of Warsaw, and his tail-wagging support for the army’s increasing Nazification. Requiring all General Staff officers to be “National Socialist officers” might be discounted as eyewash. But making the Nazi salute compulsory was more than a gesture—and was widely understood as such by all ranks.
After the war Guderian described his behavior as a set of compromises intended to encourage Hitler to listen to military reason. For Guderian that meant concentrating Germany’s resources on the Eastern Front. He understood that this was the least worst alternative. But the Western allies had in fact halted their offensive, and been halted, short of the Rhine. Guderian shared a common German sense that Anglo-American fighting power was sufficiently mediocre that, for a while at least, High Command West could hold on with limited reinforcements. And at worst there was still some space in the west to trade for time. The Ruhr, Guderian argued, was finished: bombed out. The Silesian factories, in contrast, were still producing and must be defended.
German intelligence reported over 200 Soviet infantry divisions and two dozen tank and mechanized corps from the Baltic to the Carpathians—eleven-to-one odds in infantry, seven-to-one in tanks, plus the massive forces deployed in Hungary that through December continued the pressure on Budapest. Guderian responded on two levels. He began transferring mobile divisions eastward, with the intention of forming a central reserve strong enough to wage a maneuver battle on the Reich’s frontier: the Lodz-Hohensalza area. That kind of fight, he argued, remained the strength of German soldiers and commanders. In any case it was the only chance for—what? Did Guderian share Hitler’s hopes for the kind of miracle that had saved Frederick the Great? Was he playing out a bad hand because of professional pride? Or was he concerned with scoring points against his internal opponents?
What is known is that by mid-December Guderian had managed to reposition fourteen and a half panzer and panzer grenadier divisions. All were understrength. Most had been reconstructed like their counterparts remaining in the west, with replacements drawn from anywhere and equipment assembled ad hoc—not much for a front of 750 miles.
What is also known is that Guderian continued to argue in vain for the withdrawal of Army Group North from Courland, where its two dozen divisions were operationally useless, and to advocate equally in vain for a general shortening of the lines in the east—a position supported by Harpe and Reinhardt, the senior officers on the ground.
What is finally known—not least because Guderian was at pains to tell his version of the story in postwar safety—is that on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Day, and January 9, Guderian met with Hitler, described the catastrophe looming in the east, and was blown off. Hitler dismissed the intelligence estimates as nonsense and ordered the responsible officer committed to an asylum. Guderian responded by calling the Eastern Front a house of cards that would collapse entirely if broken at any point. Hitler ended the dialogue by reasserting that the Eastern Front must make do with what it had.
When Guderian denounced the Führer’s “ostrich strategy,” he was being too generous. The ostrich is supposed to hide its head in the sand when confronting danger. Instead Hitler extended his neck—into Hungary. In early December, three rebuilt panzer divisions—3rd, 6th, and 8th—were dispatched to the theater as the core of a counteroffensive to recover ground lost in the autumn. That plan was forestalled first by predictable shortages of fuel and ammunition, then by a major Soviet offensive beginning in late December that set the stage for the war’s final large-scale clash of armor.
Operationally Stavka’s intention was to complete the capture of Budapest and open the way to Vienna. Strategically the aim was to fix Hitler’s attention. Budapest would prove a difficult nut to crack, but the design’s second half succeeded brilliantly. Hitler initially responded by sending south the two best divisions of Guderian’s painfully assembled reserve, Totenkopf and Viking: IV SS Panzer Corps under Herbert Otto Gille. Gille is one of the forgotten generals of the Waffen SS—perhaps because he fits neither of the familiar physical stereotypes: bar-room brawlers like Dietrich and Eicke or male models like Meyer and Peiper. Slightly built, wearing glasses, Gille looked like a middle-aged high-school science teacher. But he had commanded Viking for over a year and brought its survivors out of the Korsun Pocket, the first to wade into a flooded, freezing river at the head of a human chain. He led IV SS Panzer Corps ably in the autumn fighting around Warsaw, in the process winning Totenkopf’s collective respect: neither an easy task nor necessarily a positive recommendation.
More than any of his senior counterparts in the Waffen SS, Gille eschewed ideologically connected behavior and rhetoric. He projected an alternate image with long and respectable antecedents in German military culture: a good comrade off duty but hard as he needed to be when it counted—a soldier doing a job. Now his job was to break through to Budapest. On the night of January 1 the panzers struck. Taking advantage of a collective post-New Year’s hangover on the Russian side, IV SS Panzer Corps advanced 30 miles and knocked out over 200 tanks. But with half their strength still under way and only 100 Panthers and Panzer IVs between them, Viking and Totenkopf had no chance to break into the city directly. Finding that out cost them 3,500 men and 40 tanks and assault guns.
A simultaneous attack by III Panzer Corps similarly foundered against resistance too strong to be broken by the hundred-odd tanks available, even though 25 were Tigers. Gille’s corps redeployed, went in again on January 9 around Esztergom, and broke into the rear echelons of the Soviets encircling Budapest. This time the SS got to within sight of the city towers. Gille called for a breakout. Hitler refused.
On January 12 the overextended SS again pulled back and shifted locations, this time south to Lake Balaton. On January 18 the corps attacked a third time, broke through on a 20-mile front, and advanced almost 40 miles the first day. The long 75s of “Guderian’s Ducks” proved their worth as the panzers drove forward across open country on hard-frozen ground. On January 20 the Waffen SS reached the Danube, and this time came within 15 miles of Budapest before the surprised Russians concentrated enough force to stop what remained of them.
Taken together, the three attacks had been another bravura performance by Hitler’s panzers, tactically on a level with the best of anything done in 1941-42. Gille and his men understood their efforts as a rescue mission, and had fought with reckless desperation even by Waffen SS standards. Once more, however, requests for a breakout were dismissed. Instead Hitler ordered the corps to withdraw.
The Führer saw Gille’s operations as an initial step in driving the Red Army back from Budapest and securing the oil fields that were the Reich’s last source of fuel. In mid-January he had begun removing SS divisions from the Ardennes for rebuilding. Most of what remained of Germany’s arms production was poured into that process. Once again sailors without ships, airmen with neither planes nor bases, found themselves wearing SS runes. Guderian’s expectation was that these refurbished shock troops would be transferred east. Instead, Hitler ordered 6th SS Panzer Army to Hungary for the offensive that, he informed his generals, would decide a war that was essentially about controlling resources.
Operation Frühlingserwachen (Spring Awakening) was the final showcase and last stand of the panzers. Six Waffen SS divisions were committed. Sixth SS Panzer Army had I SS Panzer Corps with Leibstandarte and Hitler Jugend: parent and child. The II SS Panzer Corps included Das Reich and Hohenstaufen, old and new avatars of Himmler’s personal army. Gille’s corps was initially assigned to Balck’s 6th Army, alongside III Panzer Corps with two of the army’s originals: 1st and 3rd Panzer Divisions. Put together, it added up to around 600 AFVs, the best available. Leibstandarte still boasted its battalion of 36 Tiger Bs. Hitler Jugend had an attached battalion of 31 Jagdpanzer IVs and 11 Jagdpanther.
But the transfer of men and material was disrupted at every turn by Allied air attacks, and the consequences of earlier attacks, on a railway network no longer capable of sustaining the rapid, reliable, large-scale troop movements of 1942-43. Not until March 6 was the main German attack ready—and then almost 300 of its tanks and assault guns reached the front only during the next week.
Hitler entertained hopes of not merely relieving Budapest, but crossing the Danube, continuing into Romania, and recapturing those oil fields as well. Reality was a last-ditch breakout attempt on February 11 by what remained of the city’s garrison. Fewer than 1,000 men reached German lines. The commander, seeking to escape through the city sewer system, was driven to the surface by flooding and unheroic ally surrendered the next day.
At least with Budapest gone the panzers were free to concentrate on their Soviet opponents—if they were able to reach them. The weather had broken in late February. Rain and melting snow softened the ground so badly that Balck established “road courts-martial,” with the power to execute out of hand anyone responsible for road maintenance who failed in that duty. Morale did not improve. Nor did the offensive make much initial progress as the heavier AFVs became bogged down on roads Dietrich described as “catastrophic” or sank up to their turrets in the marshy fields. The panzer grenadiers took heavy losses advancing on foot against a well-developed defensive system manned by no fewer than 16 rifle divisions. By the second day they had managed to open enough gaps for the panzers to move through. By the third day Hitler Jugend achieved a local breakthrough when a dozen of its heavy tank destroyers took out a Soviet antitank screen and the reconnaissance battalion’s half-tracks machine-gunned and drove over the fleeing Russians in a style reminiscent of eighteenth-century cavalry. But the advance stopped at the Sio Canal, connecting Lake Balaton with the Danube.
In the absence of air and artillery support, the panzers were compelled to push right up to the canal banks to cover the infantry as they crossed. That brought them into killing range of Soviet antitank guns, and AFVs were no longer expendable assets. Where they were forced to retreat, the rubber boats of the assault troops were easy targets. Elsewhere Das Reich and Hohenstaufen were stymied. Leibstandarte managed to establish a bridgehead, and its pioneers managed to put a bridge across the Sio. But field bridging equipment had long since failed to keep pace with the panzers’ increasing weight. The bridge promptly collapsed. Only heroic improvisation under heavy fire reopened it sufficiently to funnel forward tank destroyers able to counter the T-34/85s that for three days kept counterattacking what was in any case a foothold to nowhere. On March 15, Dietrich and his staff ordered a withdrawal, intending to shift the army’s Schwerpunkt to II SS Panzer Corps. On March 16 it ceased to matter.
The Soviets had been able to contain Spring Awakening without committing their sector reserves. Instead those forces were concentrated west of Budapest, on the German left flank and rear. On March 14, Gille’s corps reported the threat. On March 16, under cover of a heavy fog, a million men and 1,699 armored vehicles tore a 20-mile hole in the Axis defenses and kept going. Balck, an operational optimist, had been too engaged by Spring Awakening’s chimerical prospects to retain deployable German armored reserves. By the time he, Dietrich, and Hitler could agree on the timing and direction of a counterattack, its prospects were long gone and the situation had deteriorated to sauve qui peut.
Viking was almost surrounded. Its CO pulled back in defiance of Hitler’s order to stand fast, but it was Hohenstaufen’s intervention that enabled Viking’s remnants to withdraw. The IV and II SS Panzer Corps in turn held open a corridor long enough for most of the Germans cut off by the Soviet offensive to escape. That included all that was left of 1st Panzer Division—11,473 men and exactly one operational tank, as of April 1. Leibstandarte and Das Reich, the farthest east of the Panzers, managed to bring out the men able to walk.
Hohenstaufen’s panzer regiment alone accounted for more than 100 verified kills in the course of the fighting. But 6th SS Panzer Army was reduced to fewer than 100 AFVs. More than 1,000 tanks and assault guns, Hungarian as well as German, fell to the Soviets. Relatively few had been knocked out. It was empty fuel tanks, engine breakdowns, and “General Mud” that finished off the panzers. The Russians captured enough usable tanks to put them into service against their former owners.
The German front in the south was never reestablished. For the next six weeks, operations amounted to a fighting withdrawal to, then past, Vienna. The Germans still had some sting in their tails. The last remaining tanks of Leibstandarte, predictably led in person by Peiper, retook a few villages around Sankt Pölten. For the panzers, SS or army, the primary mission nevertheless became covering the retreat as long as possible, then, wherever possible, pulling back quickly enough to surrender to the Americans. But the story of those final days is best expressed in the myth of the chamber pot.
On March 27, Hitler, enraged by the failure of his chosen troops in Hungary, ordered Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Hohenstaufen, and Hitler Jugend to remove the cuff titles bearing their division names. The alleged response exists in many versions involving combinations of a chamber pot full of armbands and high decorations being sent to the Führer’s headquarters—sometimes accompanied by a severed arm, and sometimes by the injunction “kiss my ass.”
Reality was predictably less spectacular. The most credible version has Dietrich saying with tear-filled eyes, “So this is the thanks for everything,” and ordering the morale-killing message not to be passed to his men. The chamber pot and the epithet are gestures of defiance borrowed and adapted from Goethe’s Sturm und Drang play Götz von Berlichingen—a bit of wishful thinking by postwar SS nostalgists. Ironically, the divisions had been ordered to remove their armbands for security purposes when sent to Hungary. Many replacements never even received them.
From Stavka’s perspective, Hitler could not have been more obliging had he been on Stalin’s payroll. The Soviet High Command’s plan to finish the war dated from October, and involved two major offensives. The secondary attack would be mounted against East Prussia; the main one across Poland. In a decision with as many postwar implications as military aspects, Zukhov and Konev, personal and professional rivals since the war’s early days, were each assigned command of a front under Stalin’s direct command—objective Berlin.
Given the Soviets’ overwhelming numerical superiority, developed operational effectiveness, and improving logistical capabilities, the Germans could do little but play out the hand, as a trumped bridge player tosses meaningless cards onto the table. Even before Gille was transferred to Hungary, Guderian’s concept of a mobile defensive battle fought by a strong central reserve was arguably two years behind the times. Its potential was further diminished when the army group commanders concentrated four more mechanized divisions closely behind what they considered vital sectors. That approach, a variant of the Model model, was arguably only a year out of date. Its success depended on a far closer balance of quality and quantity than existed in 1945. The dispersed panzers were in fact a security blanket for an infantry who might stand to a finish—but whose chances of withstanding a major attack were limited to the point of being imaginary.
The main Soviet offensive made five miles in the first three hours of January 12. By the end of January 13, the breakthrough was 25 miles deep. The panzer divisions in its way were overwhelmed, able to do no more than fight for mere survival. Zukhov’s 26th Guards Rifle Corps evoked the panzers’ glory days by seizing a vital bridge before German engineers could throw the demolition switches. Warsaw fell on January 17, and Hitler’s blind rage led him to turn Guderian over to the Gestapo for interrogation, albeit briefly. On January 20, Konev’s spearheads entered Silesia. By January 31, Zukhov was on the Oder at Küstrin, 40 miles from Berlin.
The primary German response, initiated by Hitler, was to transfer the newly organized Grossdeutschland Corps from East Prussia. With Grossdeutschland, Brandenburg and Hermann Göring Divisions also under command, it went into action on January 16. But the trains carrying its rear echelon were intercepted by Soviet tanks; the best it was able to do was to serve as a rallying point for disorganized soldiers and fleeing civilians. Ever-dividing, ever-shrinking pockets, most coalesced around a couple of tanks, perhaps some half-tracks, and a company or so of panzer grenadiers, made their way toward the Oder, hoping above all to avoid attracting Soviet attention. The lucky ones beat Zukhov by a day or two.
To the north the Russian attack took five days to break through a German defense, enervated by the withdrawal of its armored reserve. As Russian tanks reached the Baltic, the Germans withdrew in the only direction open to them—eastward, into Königsberg. And the near-forgotten Courland Pocket, with its two forlorn panzer divisions, stood to, waiting for the Russians to finish it.
The Red Army’s pause at the end of January was in part to refresh its logistics, in part to secure its flanks, and in part to structure its internal priorities. The attacks into Pomerania and Silesia in February and March scarcely make a footnote to the story of Hitler’s panzers, apart from their success in screening a withdrawal- cum-evacuation into the relatively safe zone of the Sudetenland. The battle for Berlin was another matter. The Reich’s capital was defended by the Wehrmacht’s flotsam: boys and old men, convalescents and comb-outs, foreigners fighting with ropes around their necks, equipped with anything handy. Factories and rail sidings were full of armored vehicles that could not be moved for lack of fuel and fear of air attack.
Guderian’s hopes of forming new reserves by transferring divisions from the West and evacuating Courland were not much less delusional than the Führer’s. His plans for a local spoiling attack to disrupt the Russians on Berlin’s doorstep primarily featured winning a screaming argument with Hitler. The attack itself collapsed within days—a predictable outcome given its limited striking power.
The final Russian offensive began on April 16. It was still a Zukhov- Konev derby, with the final prize the Reichstag. Familiar numbers flash across the screen: 21st Panzer Division, 25th Panzer Grenadier, LXVI Panzer Corps, 3rd Panzer Army, SS Northland Panzer Grenadiers. All by now were shadow formations exercising ad hoc command over constantly changing orders of battle that meant nothing except in a wire diagram. The tanks and assault guns that remained went down by ones and twos, on streets and in neighborhoods with names all too familiar.
No narrative of the Reich’s final days can be called typical. Let one stand nevertheless for many. The 249th Assault Gun Brigade was evacuated from West Prussia, reorganized and reinforced, and picked up new guns in Spandau, at the factory itself. It went into action in Berlin on April 27. In three days it destroyed 180 Soviet AFVs—at least by its own reckoning—and had only nine guns left. They fought in the heart of Berlin: on Frankfurter Allee, around the Technische Hochschule, across Alexanderplatz. One of the officers was hanged by an SS flying squad, presumably for “cowardice.” Another received the Knight’s Cross for valor.
On May 5, Hitler’s death was announced. The CO called his men together, and it was decided to break out toward the Elbe. In the darkness, the brigade lost contact. Half cut its way through to the Elbe. The other half, three guns, came under Russian fire. The lead vehicle took a direct hit. The next one got stuck. The third came to help, saw the second gun blown apart, and was itself disabled. Its crew escaped. The 249th had fought to the last gun and the last round. Adolf Hitler had long been aware the war was lost. Instead of a glorious final victory, he sought a heroic downfall, a Wagnerian Götterdammerung. What he achieved was in macrocosm the fate of this single small unit: downfall in chaos.