12

Brandenberger’s Grenadiers

TIRED AND UNDERSTRENGTH, Major-General ‘Tubby’ Barton’s US 4th Infantry Division was ordered to garrison the southern Ardennes at the beginning of the month, but it was 13 December by the time they had completed their occupation of positions along a thirty-five-mile stretch of the front. With their left flank adjacent to the 9th Armored Division, only Colonel Robert H. Chance’s 12th Infantry Regiment, whose forward line amounted to outposts overlooking the Sauer river, would find itself in the path of the planned offensive. Theirs was the terrain to be attacked by Volksgrenadiers of General Erich Brandenberger’s Seventh Army, whose aim was to seize and hold ground, then block any US attempt to slice into the southern flank of the panzer armies. However, nowhere else on the Ardennes front was the irrational thinking of Hitler and OKW more in evidence than in their allocation of units to Brandenberger.

His Seventh Army had been reactivated in Stuttgart on 25 August 1939 under General Friedrich Dollmann. Its predecessor had invaded France through Alsace and Lorraine in 1914 and, when most of the Wehrmacht attacked Poland in 1939, Dollmann’s Seventh was left manning the Westwall. It stayed there in 1940 when Rundstedt, Manstein and Guderian invaded France, belatedly attacking outposts of the Maginot Line just before the Armistice. Seventh was thereafter designated an occupation force, from April 1941 taking responsibility for the defence of Normandy.

The least experienced and most poorly equipped of all German formations by 1944, Seventh’s comfortable rear-area life disappeared when the Allies landed on their patch in June 1944. With no experience of any of the blitzkrieg-type invasions of France or Russia, or of fighting the British and Americans in Africa or Italy, and no understanding of the defensive battles in the east, or the threat posed by Allied tactical airpower over the battlefield, Dollmann was rather like his army: out-of-date, ill-trained and unfit for modern war. As Cherbourg fell to the Allies, the sixty-two-year-old Dollmann died from a heart attack on 28 June (although some sources point to suicide, knowing Hitler’s wrath at the capture of this key port), after not quite five years in command. Despite the efforts of his successors, SS General Paul Hausser and Panzer General Heinrich Eberbach, most of the Seventh were killed or captured in Normandy, with very few escaping from the Falaise Pocket. After Eberbach’s unlucky capture (by a British forward patrol as he was on the point of evacuating his HQ in Amiens), the autumn of 1944 found Seventh Army reinforced, lurking behind the Siegfried Line under a new commander, and designated with a role in the forthcoming winter offensive.

The fifty-two-year-old, bespectacled Brandenberger (actually he wore pince-nez, like President Roosevelt or Heinrich Himmler, which clipped on to his nose) possessed little charisma, but was thoroughly competent, having served with Bavarian artillery units in the First World War and spent most of the inter-war period in staff and training posts. He had been chief of staff of border troops on the Westwall in 1939, and had gone on to command 8th Panzer Division with great distinction for two years in Russia, which won him a Knight’s Cross and first brought him to Hitler’s attention. He progressed to leading two army corps, winning Oak Leaves for his Ritterkreuz in November 1943. In Hitler’s eyes, his stock was elevated also because he lacked the aristocratic background of so many of his contemporaries. It was his confidential personnel report that won Brandenberger his army command: ‘Gifted militarily, full of foresight, and very active, he filled his divisions with action and passion. A very experienced combat leader, even in the worst circumstances he always improvised and mastered the situation. Excellent National Socialist behaviour.’¹ Whether true or not, the last four words, one feels, were the most important of the whole assessment.

Nonetheless, Brandenberger irritated his superior, Model, who referred to him as ‘the professor, a typical product of the general staff system’, but the latter was a harsh taskmaster and fell out with most officers during his career. The Army Group ‘B’ chief saw his job as to deliver, not to be liked. His subordinate Brandenberger was not a flashy army commander, nor inclined to stamp his own personality on his commands, as did Manteuffel on his Fifth Panzer, Montgomery with Britain’s Eighth Army or Patton with the US Third. For one thing, he had no time, officially taking over on 3 September, but also he had few troops. To observers, the four divisions plus supporting arms he possessed, totalling perhaps 50,000 men, would constitute merely a corps, scarcely an army. Another challenge for him was that all of his formations were recently raised, meaning none of the new Seventh Army had worked together before; Fifth and Sixth Armies were different, being built around a core of long-established units, with a proven track record.

Appointed to command the Seventh Army on 3 September 1944, Erich Brandenberger (1892–1955) was an old Russia hand, having led armoured divisions and corps on the Eastern Front. A former Kriegsakademie instructor, he was methodical rather than flashy, and earned his army on account of his confidential personnel report which concluded ‘a very experienced combat leader, even in the worst circumstances he always improvised and mastered the situation. Excellent National Socialist behaviour’. (Author’s collection)

Field Marshal Model’s orders, issued on 27 October to an incredulous Brandenberger and his chief of staff, Oberst Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff, were the first hint they had that their formation was going over to the attack. With the focus of Herbstnebelweighted to the north, Seventh Army was assigned the role of southern flank protection. For this they were allotted initially two army corps, each of two infantry divisions, with the promise of further support, including panzers. The highly competent, Kriegsakademie-trained Gersdorff was a complicated character. An aristocratic former cavalry officer of the old school, he had won a Knight’s Cross for guiding what remained of the Seventh out of the Falaise Pocket that August. He was also part of the Stauffenberg plot, a fact he miraculously managed to keep secret during the era of subsequent repercussions. With what must have been divided loyalty by October 1944 (which side did he really want to win?), Gersdorff set about planning his Army’s part in Herbstnebel.

Model ordered that Seventh Army was ‘to protect the flanks of the operation on the south and south-west … It will break through the enemy positions … and build up a defensive front … Using vanguard units of its Volksgrenadier divisions, the right wing will maintain contact with the Fifth Panzer Army.’ This immediately gave Brandenberger cause for concern, for how on earth were his Volksgrenadiers (only some of whom had bicycles for mobility) to keep up with Manteuffel’s much faster panzers?

Model’s instructions continued, ‘By energetic thrusts to the south and south-west using any favourable opportunities, Seventh Army will gain time and ground to build up a strong defensive front, carrying out intensive destruction and minelaying in front of its lines.’ Once the Allies had started to react to Herbstnebel, Brandenberger and Gersdorff realised, their formation would become the punchbag of Patton’s counter-attacking Third Army. The orders went on: ‘The most important task … is the destruction of enemy artillery units stationed to the south … It will be necessary to provide fully adequate matériel and units for blocking purposes, as well as anti-tank weapons.’²

Brandenberger’s three years’ experience of commanding panzer divisions and corps on the Eastern Front provided him with insights into the problems he would almost immediately encounter in the Ardennes. As he had taught prospective staff officers to do, when an instructor at the Kriegsakademie in 1932–3, he analysed the US Third Army’s capabilities and equipment, as well as its aggressive commander. He assessed correctly that Patton would counter-attack very quickly – much faster than OKW anticipated – and was concerned that the Seventh had been allocated no tanks at all with which to halt and drive back any American assaults. Model’s requirement of ‘units for blocking purposes’ was a euphemism for a mobile armoured reserve to counter Patton’s tanks, and Seventh possessed none.

On 3 November, at one of the many planning conferences attended by the three army leaders, Brandenberger, Dietrich and Manteuffel, the latter echoed the Seventh Army’s concerns; ‘I don’t think we need anticipate a strong reaction coming from the north, or the east bank of the Meuse, but I am rather worried by the possibility of strong enemy counteraction from the south’, meaning, of course, Patton’s Third Army. Generaloberst Jodl tried to reassure him that ‘General Brandenberger will have six infantry divisions and one of panzers in his Seventh Army to cover the southern and southwestern flanks’. Manteuffel countered wisely, ‘Yes, I know, but I have to anticipate strong enemy forces – maybe even the bulk of his [Patton’s] forces – in action in the Bastogne area by the evening of the third day of our attack.’

In the event, Manteuffel only slightly overestimated Patton, but it was clear that it was the US Third Army’s commander whom the Herbstnebel planners considered their greatest threat. General Brandenberger later recalled his conclusion that a southern counter attack ‘would probably be commanded by General Patton, who … had given proof of his extraordinary skill in armoured warfare, which he conducted according to the fundamental Guderian concept, made it quite likely that the enemy would direct a heavy punch against the deep flank of the German forces …’³ Hitler and Jodl were unruffled at these concerns, partly because they had reasoned the Western Allies would be so off-balance and weighed down with bureaucracy that their decision-making and reactions, in mid-winter just before Christmas, would be slow. Hitler was also convinced the Allies would first deploy reinforcements along the west bank of the Meuse rather than boldly attack either flank.

Sworn to secrecy by Sippenhaft, prevented from sharing these plans with all but a trusted few subordinates at this stage, and forbidden to drive forward and make any form of reconnaissance, Brandenberger and Gersdorff conducted map exercises to identify their options. They knew straightaway that climate and terrain were against them: two of the very factors upon which Hitler was counting. The thick fogs of the season, morning mists rising from the rivers and low-lying ground, together with the hills, woods, steep gorges and a difficult road network would play into the hands of the American defenders (however few there were) and make their own going slow. With Seventh’s limited engineering resources, ‘intensive destruction and minelaying’, as well as the provision of ‘units for blocking purposes’, were considered impossible tasks. They realised also that the fast-flowing Our and Sauer rivers which ran across their front would be swollen in December by rain and the first snowmelt, presenting a particular challenge to their meagre bridging units.

In fact, Seventh Army possessed only one bridge-building battalion and five bridging columns. The former, 900-strong, was trained to construct crossings under fire, while the latter was a 100-man unit of two platoons, equipped with bridging parts and pontoons, that constructed and operated vehicle ferries. By comparison, Sixth Panzer Army in the north deployed six bridging battalions and nine bridging columns. Furthermore, all Seventh Army’s potential bridging sites were obvious to their opponents and preregistered by US artillery – hence the emphasis in Model’s order to ensure ‘destruction of enemy artillery units’. Speer’s civilian bridging experts would prove of only limited value under these conditions. Likewise, Brandenberger knew the dangers from the air; whereas Dietrich’s Sixth Army had the four regiments of 2nd Flak Division (164 anti-aircraft guns), the entire Seventh Army could draw only on the protection of the Luftwaffe’s Flak-Regiment 15, with sixty AA guns, though around half were the powerful 88mm, equally deadly to Allied tanks and aircraft.⁴

General Brandenberger’s main combat power rested on the four infantry divisions he would deploy in his attack. As with so many other aspects of the German army, the 20 July 1944 attempt had acted as a spur for Hitler to reorganise his infantry. Cumulatively, the Wehrmacht had lost 1.8 million killed by 1944, of whom 4.5 per cent were officers. Almost as many again had been posted as missing or were prisoners of war; neither of these totals included the wounded. In June, July and August 1944 alone, the Wehrmacht had been deprived of forty-four divisions with the destruction of Army Group Centre during Operation Bagration in the east, in Italy, and the disaster of Normandy. To these could be added another 200,000 men, whom Hitler had ordered to defend the French ports and Channel Islands, manpower and equipment that were now completely surrounded and impotent.⁵ Not only did these lost formations need replacing, but on 6 September Hitler and Jodl had discussed the creation of an additional operational reserve of around twenty-five divisions for his Ardennes offensive.

When Himmler seized his chance to control the Ersatzheer (Reserve Army) on 21 July 1944, in place of Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters, he also assumed responsibility for raising new army units and training them. This was empire-building on the part of the Reichsführer-SS, for he saw an opportunity to finally ‘Nazify’ the German army. His partner in this enterprise was propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Earlier in 1944 the latter had already seen the need to shake Germany into a (belated) mobilisation of all resources for a ‘total war’ – something his British, Russian and US opponents had done from the outset. On 18 February 1944, in a passionate speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin, Goebbels had advocated the complete devotion of the Reich’s economy and society towards the war effort. He argued that if they did not prevail in Russia, then Germany would fall to Bolshevism, and the rest of Europe would follow. ‘Two thousand years of Western history are in danger,’ he screamed.

Supporting Himmler’s recruitment drive, Goebbels now saw his chance to move to a total war footing, shutting theatres and universities, mobilising youth to work in the Red Cross or help with air defence, and – finally going against the Nazi creed – encouraging women to become part of the war effort, too. In July 1944 some 500,000 German women were still working in domestic service, when their Allied counterparts, typified by ‘Rosie the Riveter’ in the USA, were working in armaments factories. Hitherto their role had been to stay at home and bring up children for the Reich, even encouraged to do so with the award of a ‘Mother’s Cross’ for bearing large families. The army, meanwhile, was forced to identify itself totally with the state, to prevent a repetition of 20 July. Goebbels’ Party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, echoed this on 3 August with an editorial stating ‘True marriage between Party and Wehrmacht has today become a living reality … The Army that will win this war will be a National Socialist People’s Army.’⁶

Between them, Himmler and Goebbels established that all new infantry formations raised after July 1944 were labelled Volksgrenadier. The title embraced both the political notion of the Volk (‘People’), and the older, distinguished notion of the Grenadier, a term that harked back to the days of Frederick the Great. Thus, the concept was designed to appeal to modernists and traditionalists.⁷ Nineteen such divisions were created by order on 31 August 1944, another seventeen on 9 October and seven more before the end of the month; a total of forty-three fresh formations must have seemed like a heaven-sent miracle with which to prosecute the war. From where did this manpower suddenly appear?

Himmler, controlling recruitment, had created mobile drafting units, Heldenklaukommandos (literally ‘hero-snatching units’), press gangs who searched the Reich for manpower. Although there was fierce inter-service rivalry between the German army, navy and air force, the Luftwaffe could no longer justify the 1.9 million personnel on its books in the summer of 1944, nor did the Kriegsmarine have jobs for all the 700,000 men they employed at the same time. Neither organisation, in any case, was prepared to argue with the Reichsführer-SS. Similarly, the Ersatzheer was already responsible for some 2.4 million soldiers, a quarter of the Wehrmacht’s total strength. The majority were on courses or under some form of education or instruction, so training periods were abbreviated. The Reserve Army also administered the wounded, many of whom were on convalescent leave: they were called back to duty or had their recovery periods shortened. These were all veterans, although in some cases physically or psychologically exhausted.⁸ Speer and Goebbels also assessed that 3.2 million men were working in government administration and industry, some of whom could be diverted to the army.

With health and fitness entry requirements for army personnel also relaxed, Himmler’s commandos, local party officials and hospitals (which were forced to discharge wounded soldiers earlier than hitherto) filled the new divisions with a mix of older, poorly trained fortress troops withdrawn from garrisons elsewhere; Kriegsmarine sailors who no longer had vessels to crew or maintain; Luftwaffe ground personnel now redundant given the paucity of aircraft; able-bodied civilians ‘combed out’ of jobs in industry; older men exempted from war service because of large families or their farms; railway workers who were replaced by women; and new age groups, born in 1926–7, mobilised on reaching seventeen or eighteen. Some of the latter, as we saw with Grenadier Werner Klippel at Hotton, were as young as sixteen.

Ethnic German men, the Volksdeutsche, were also regarded as fair game for military service and conscripted. These population groups, who lived beyond the borders of the Reich, included Czechs, Slovaks, Danes, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Slovenians from Yugoslavia, and Baltic Germans from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose ancestry might, once upon a time, conceivably have been German or Austro-Hungarian; they might not even speak German, but looked Germanic, were suspicious of Britain and the United States, and hated Communism. By 1944, approximately 100,000 Volksdeutsche, 10 per cent of whom were Ukrainians, were already working alongside 500,000 Germans in Luftwaffe air defence. From January 1943 Hitlerjugend (HJ – Hitler Youth) boys, aged fifteen or over, and from 1944, Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM – ‘League of German Girls’) girls, could be called up to work as Flakhelfer, releasing further manpower for the Volksgrenadier divisions.

By this stage of the war, some of these Volksdeutsche would also be conscripted into the Waffen-SS divisions that deployed to the Bulge. Several frontier provinces of Belgium, France and Luxembourg were forcibly absorbed into the state, making their citizens German and thus liable for service. In many cases, their reliability would prove questionable, though this could sometimes be offset by good leadership. Such a blend of backgrounds, nationalities, ages and experience hardly made for homogenous units.

By mid-1944, the huge number of Luftwaffenhelferinnen, female assistants in the Luftwaffe, and other girls called up to work as Flakhelfer, enabled valuable air force manpower to be re-roled as infantry in the Volksgrenadier divisions for the coming offensive. (Author’s collection)

Training such groups was Obergefreiter (a lance corporal of several years’ service) Günter Koschorrek, a wounded and much decorated Eastern Front veteran, who noted in his diary on 9 October, ‘the rabble to be trained in our company consists of a mix of older East Europeans of German ethnic descent, most of whom were heads of families, and naval personnel, who because of the shortage of ships are to be retrained as tank infantry. Because of the undisciplined attitude of the sailors, many of whom had served in the Kriegsmarine for years, instructors who were highly decorated combat veterans were preferred because these were the only people the sailors would respect. Even so, it was not always easy for us instructors to find the right tone of voice to use in order to get the message across to this group.’⁹

Whereas the old Ersatzheer under Stauffenberg and his boss, Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm, had turned out 60,000 new soldiers a month, by the end of August Himmler had assembled 450,000 new grenadiers.¹⁰ It was a stupendous achievement. Not all became infantrymen, for Himmler created or redesignated other units to become VolksArtillerie corps (heavy artillery groups attached to army corps) and VolksWerfer brigades, which operated the Wehrmacht’s multi-barrelled rocket launchers, known to the Allies as ‘screaming minnies’ but to the Germans as Nebelwerfers.

To lead all these Volks-titled organisations, Himmler could draw from a large pool of experienced combat leaders, like Koschorrek, all highly decorated and given accelerated promotion. The posting of officers to the Volks units was initially delayed, because Himmler insisted on his own vetting procedure, to ensure his new formations were led by true National Socialist fanatics. Practicality overtook this Himmlerian fantasy and the measure soon lapsed. Throughout the war a very high number of German commanders perished while leading their men in combat, in sharp contrast to the Anglo-American forces where this happened comparatively rarely. Experience of the First World War, which killed many battalion and brigade leaders, persuaded the Allied armies that commanders had a role out of the line of fire, directing the battle, rather than getting their heads blown off. German leadership culture dictated otherwise, as this pre-battle order, issued on 20 November 1944, reminded officers: ‘Commanders up to and including divisional commanders should be where they can obtain the best overall view of the battlefield, where they can intervene personally at a moment’s notice. They must not only lead their men, but … direct the extensive and varied fire of supporting weapons. We still attack too much with our legs and not enough with our weapons.’¹¹

This debate, as to where a field commander should be, has still not been resolved, despite many advances in military technology and communications. A battalion CO killed in the British 1982 Falklands campaign was posthumously blamed for leading a failed attack which rendered his battalion leaderless, while another who died in 2009 was similarly criticised for being in the lead vehicle of his battlegroup in Afghanistan, instead of further back. Neither observation constitutes a slur on the reputation of a brave officer, but underlines the tension in all modern armies today as to how far forward a tactical commander should place himself.

Unsurprisingly, given Himmler’s obsession with his pagan quasi-religion, Protestant and Catholic chaplains were left out of the Volksgrenadier order of battle, while a Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier, or Nazi Guidance Officer, effectively a political commissar, was introduced instead. Their job was to deliver morale-building lectures to the troops and furnish independent reports on the loyalty of their commanders. They were inexperienced, zealous and universally resented. Many senior commanders after the war recalled with bitterness the ability of these quite junior Nazis to be able to overrule their decisions.

In 1944, German divisions were frequently commanded by an Oberst (colonel); regiments – the equivalent of a British brigade – led by an Oberstleutnant (lieutenant-colonel) or a Major; battalions by a Hauptmann (captain); and companies by a Leutnant(lieutenant), in each case a grade or two lower than their Allied opponents. This partly reflected necessity, but also that German combat arms were lean, efficient and needed fewer officers because more weight was thrust onto the shoulders of NCOs, the Fronthasen (‘front hare’) – a euphemism for a veteran soldier. In the German army system every officer migrated through the ranks, serving as a corporal and sergeant first, so the calibre of NCOs was generally very high. In March 1944, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, head of the Army Personnel Office, outlined the Reich’s expectations of its leaders: ‘The Führer wants soldiers who distinguish themselves by their courage [and] willingness to assume responsibility … but the most decisive factor of all is … the ability to command; social origins or educational background should not even be taken into consideration …’¹²

At the other end of the spectrum, basic training for new recruits had shrunk from sixteen weeks in 1938 to twelve by early 1944. With little ammunition to spare for recruits and time in short supply before the Bulge, such was the requirement for fresh divisions that some Volksgrenadierunits were raised and sent to the front in six weeks. The reality was that those personnel already in the forces, such as re-roled Luftwaffe aircraft mechanics and Kriegsmarine sailors, were lucky if they had a month in which to reskill and learn the basics of fieldcraft before being committed to battle as a Landser. This term, used universally throughout the Reich for any soldier, was a corruption of the old German Landsknecht, the trooper of the Thirty Years War, and akin to GI Joe, the French grognard (literally ‘grumbler’) or British Tommy Atkins. Although the arrival of all these fresh divisions seemed impressive, on being reappointed to OB West in September 1944 Rundstedt immediately warned OKW that ‘the state of training of the newly-arrived Volksgrenadier divisions is poor due to insufficient time dedicated to instruction. Greater in-depth training has been disrupted by the constant commitment of … weapons schools to the fighting.’¹³

To a certain extent it was all smoke and mirrors for Hitler’s benefit, because these new formations did not represent the full-strength units that had previously featured on the Wehrmacht’s order of battle. A glance at the map table in the Wolfsschanze would be misleading; although the number of units represented might be as high as ever, the combat capability of each was lower. A Volksgrenadier division, for example, had a nominal strength of 10,072 men in three regiments of two battalions each. Instead of a reconnaissance battalion with armoured cars and motorcyclists, Volksgrenadiers had an Aufklärungskompanie (reconnaissance company), equipped with bicycles (quite what they were intended to achieve on a 1944 battlefield is anyone’s guess). The main combat power of previous German divisions had rested on their nine infantry battalions; now there were only six. By November 1944, the average divisional strength was 8,761, nearly half of the September 1939 figure of 16,626. For comparison, the average US divisional strength, in January 1945, taking into account casualties, was around 13,400.

However, there was nothing standard about the Volksgrenadier order of battle and some divisions, for example the 212th, were lucky to retain a seventh infantry battalion, 500- or 600-strong, traditionally used for divisional reconnaissance. This was always called the Fusilier Battalion, and harked back to an older military tradition; but for most divisions this was reduced to a single 200-man Fusilier Company. The use of older military terminology was to suggest strength which simply did not exist. Besides the loss of three battalions, Volksgrenadier divisions also suffered a dilution of their remaining six, losing mostly logistics and administrative personnel, although this served to increase the proportion of combat versus service troops to around 80 per cent. In 1939 infantry battalions boasted a theoretical strength of twenty-three officers and 800 NCOs and men; by late 1944 this had shrunk to fifteen officers and 700 NCOs and men, but in practice they were lucky to achieve five officers and 500 NCOs and men.

By way of compensation for their fall in manpower, there was a greater allocation of automatic weapons. The mainstay of this was the arrival into Volksgrenadier arsenals of the Maschinepistole-44, the world’s first modern assault rifle, alternatively known as the Sturmgewehr. With its signature curved magazine holding thirty rounds, the MP-44 was the direct ancestor of the famous Kalashnikov AK-47, the US M-16 and all modern self-loading, automatic-fire rifles. Nearly 500,000 MP-44s had been manufactured by the war’s end, used predominantly by the Volksgrenadiers, its metal stampings and wooden stock making it cheap and quick to assemble. It was designed to replace the standard bolt-action, five-round 7.92mm K-98 Mauser rifle, first introduced to the German soldier in 1898 (and which I witnessed being used by Bosnian Croat soldiers in the mid-1990s).¹⁴

Each infantry company was meant to possess two platoons’ worth (about fifty) of MP-44-equipped grenadiers and one of Mauser-clutching riflemen. Although slightly heavier than the Mauser, the MP-44’s main drawback was the same as the 7.92mm MG-42 machine-gun with which the Volksgrenadiers were also furnished. ‘Their MG-42 machine-guns could fire 1,500 rounds a minute,’ remembered 2nd Infantry Division Sergeant Joseph Jan Kiss, Jr. ‘It scared the holy hell out of us. It was a vicious, wicked gun. Just went BBRRRRUUPPP. We called it “Hitler’s saw”. Our air-cooled only fired 600 rounds a minute.’¹⁵ Yet the high rate of automatic fire of the MG-42 and MP-44 (500–600 rounds per minute) meant an excessive consumption of ammunition, which was always in short supply. These weapons did, to a certain extent, offset the lack of Volksgrenadiernumbers (an MP-44 had twenty times the firepower of a Mauser), but they couldn’t make up for the lack of combat experience.

All German divisions were graded periodically by their higher commanders as to their readiness and capability, according to a scale of Kampfwert (combat performance), from I to IV. It is telling that at the time of Herbstnebel, no Volksgrenadier division in the west was rated Kampfwert I (able to perform an all-out attack); some were Kampfwert II (capable of limited offensive actions) most were III (fit for mobile defence) and a few IV (fit only for static defence). This was no slur on their enthusiasm, but a reflection of several factors, revolving around their mobility and equipment. While the panzer and Waffen-SS divisions possessed the lion’s share of half-tracks and trucks, all Volksgrenadier units relied on horses to tow equipment and supplies across the battlefield. In the summer of 1944 the Wehrmacht had lost 250,000 horses, which greatly affected its mobility. In an effort to restore some degree of mobility, one Volksgrenadier battalion in six was bicycle-mounted, a pathetic acknowledgement of how immobile the infantry arm had become. A couple of days into the Bulge, one GI specifically remembered that ‘Every fourth or fifth German [we captured] carried about a five-and-a-half inch hose. We wondered why. Then it dawned on me – it was to siphon gas from disabled vehicles; they were short of gas.’¹⁶

Another way to compensate for the smaller infantry divisions was to attach to their parent army corps a generous quantity of artillery. There were VolksArtillerie formations available to the Seventh, but, as with engineers and air defence, Sixth Army in the north had the lion’s share. Whereas Dietrich had three corps of ‘People’s Artillery’, totalling 685 gun barrels, 180 of them over 150mm calibre, Seventh were allotted two VolksArtillerie corps, comprising 319 guns, of which only 76 were over 150mm. The bigger the calibre, the heavier the shell, and its concomitant destructive power, so here, too, Brandenberger lost out. Seventh’s VolksArtillerie units included guns, mostly captured in Russia, of no fewer than eight different calibres – a quartermaster’s nightmare. Formations obviously work much better with a consistency of weapons and ammunition throughout.¹⁷

The Wehrmacht was also generally at a disadvantage when it came to communications. The standard army man-pack field radio was in very short supply, heavy and required two men to carry all its components. Issued as a couple of cumbersome steel boxes weighing over forty pounds apiece, the VHF portable field transceiver was developed in 1936–9 and obsolete by 1944. The same held true for tank radios, which in any case were hampered by the screening effect of the trees and geology of the region. All required many components made of raw materials that were in short supply by 1944. The Wehrmacht never had the chance to revisit their pre-war designs and found that US radios were generally lighter, more robust in the field, and, of course, mass-produced. As with many things, the US Army had out-engineered their opponents by 1944, producing field equipment of far superior quality.¹⁸

Wehrmacht wireless equipment was only issued at company level, while platoons and squads had no direct means of wireless contact. In contrast, every American rifle platoon possessed the superb SCR (Signal Corps Radio)-536: the walkie-talkie, which weighed around five pounds and had a range of one mile. The positive side of the lack of low-level signals equipment was that junior German commanders were required to develop a higher degree of initiative, rather than wait for orders, as was the tendency in the top-down culture of British and American units. Such independence, however, came at the cost of situational awareness. Instead, for communications downwards, a Kompanietrupp (company headquarters group) had three Melder (messengers), mounted on bicycles if necessary, to relay orders to each Zug (platoon). This was one of the most dangerous tasks in a battalion, and frankly should not have been necessary in the 1940s era of wireless radios; it was, as we have seen, a role Hitler had performed in 1914–18 for which he won his Iron Crosses.

The need for real-time direction of artillery and mortar fire was paramount in the Ardennes. German wireless sets were heavy, cumbersome and obsolete by 1944, and they preferred instead to rely on field telephones, connected by miles of cable, which were effective in defence but useless in attack. On the other hand, in the SCR-536, the US Army found a battle-winner. Originally designated the ‘handie-talkie’, it was more popularly known as the ‘walkie-talkie’. Weighing five pounds, its one-mile range was often restricted by the Ardennes terrain to a few hundred feet, but it provided great situational awareness for US infantry squads, platoons and companies. (NARA)

Wherever possible, German units relied on field telephones, which worked well in static defence but not in the kind of rapid advance envisaged by Herbstnebel. This affected forward artillery observers, who were deployed, but not in the quantities used by US forces. Thus, advancing Volksgrenadiers could not reply on timely fire support to the extent of their opponents. At short range, they made extensive use of flare pistols, sending up combinations of coloured flares to initiate quick bombardments. An indication of the obsolescence of communications equipment was that their standard means of transport was a horse-drawn signals wagon.

Kanonier Emil Frie of the 18th Nebelwerfer Brigade observed that in peacetime his launchers were towed by half-tracks, as here, but by December 1944 his unit had one Opel truck to tow three launchers, and sometimes his chief ’s Kübelwagen, making them look ‘like a circus’. (Author’s collection)

Seventh Army could also call on the 8th and 18th VolksWerfer brigades, which fielded 108 Nebelwerfers – those ‘screaming minnies’ of various calibres, but, again, Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army in the north had managed to grab three brigades, with 340 of the multi-barrelled rocket launchers.¹⁹ In Seventh Army, seventeen-year-old Kanonier Emil Frie had been drafted into the third battery of the 18th Brigade in April that year and had since learned how to launch and direct his Nebelwerfer rockets, which were effective to around four miles. They were fired from a group of five barrels, mounted on a pair of pneumatic tyres. Each 150mm rocket was carried by one man, but the larger 210mm warheads were a four-man lift. Frie recounted how each launcher was pulled by an Opel Blitz truck, which carried the crew of an NCO and five men, their baggage and the rockets. In peacetime the launcher was towed by a half-tracked vehicle but by December 1944 only the faithful Opel was available: ‘it often happened that one truck towed three launchers … Sometimes the VW Kübelwagen used by the chief of the unit was also hitched on behind. The whole train then looked more like a circus and had little in common with a dangerous military unit.’²⁰ Lack of vehicles and especially petrol hampered the artillery and rocket troops, as well as the tanks.

The cutting edge of both Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies would rest on the four armoured divisions and several independent battalions of panzers that Manteuffel and Dietrich each possessed, yet Seventh Army owned not a single tank whatsoever. All it had were their divisionalPanzerjäger (anti-tank) battalions. These included a company of tracked, turretless armoured vehicles – little four-man Sturmgeschütz (literally ‘assault gun’, and abbreviated to StuG) or Hetzer (‘Baiter’) tank destroyers, both carrying a 75mm gun and built on to a tank chassis. This equated to between six and fourteen vehicles per anti-tank battalion.²¹ Lightweight compared to tanks (a StuG weighed twenty-nine tons, a Hetzer half that), they were effective in defence, but the limited traverse of their main gun, having no turret, made them very vulnerable in attacks of the kind envisaged by Herbstnebel. American tank men regarded these as ‘an interminable viper slinking across the terrain’ by comparison to a ‘tyrannosaurus of a King Tiger, which was too big and too dumb to succeed, and sloshed through the mud like a primeval beast’. The StuG ‘made a hell of a nice target. Just fire low and you’d hit something … Fascinating to look at, but you don’t win a war by fascinating the enemy,’ wrote one tanker.²² Another company in the same anti-tank battalion possessed horse-drawn 75mm anti-tank guns. As we shall see, even a modest allocation of some extra cannon and armour would have aided Brandenberger considerably.

All Volksgrenadier divisions possessed a few tracked, turretless armoured vehicles like this four-man Sturmgeschütz (literally ‘assault gun’, and abbreviated to StuG), armed with a 75mm gun. At only 7 feet tall, its low profile made it easy to conceal and effective in defence, but the limited traverse of the main weapon, having no turret, made it very vulnerable in attacks of the kind envisaged by Herbstnebel. Panzer divisions used large numbers of them as substitute tanks, while American tankers regarded the StuG as ‘an interminable viper slinking across the terrain’. (NARA)

The Seventh Army commander continued to protest about his lack of armour; as noted, he had originally been promised a panzer division by Jodl at OKW; later this was revised to a Panzergrenadier formation (mechanised infantry which included some tanks), but they were used elsewhere on the front. In the final days before the offensive, Gersdorff lodged a formal complaint with Model over the famine of tank support and, at the last minute, Seventh Army was allocated some StuGs. This was Oberstleutnant Hollunder’s Fallschirm-Sturmgeschütz-Brigade 11, a battalion-sized unit of about 500 men and a theoretical thirty StuGs armed with 75mm guns, which had been attempting to halt the tidal wave of General Jake L. Devers’ US Sixth Army Group in its romp through southern France. The 11th StuG Brigade entered combat in the vicinity of Nancy and was virtually destroyed in September, withdrawn and remained under-strength when given to Brandenberger in mid-December, at which time it possessed three batteries of six or seven vehicles, totalling about twenty assault guns.²³ Called a ‘brigade’ for the purposes of deception, the Eleventh was another example of the bizarre, competitive world of the German armed forces. They were Göring’s idea, designed originally to support paratroops, who had no tank support of their own, so came under Luftwaffe control: an oddity for armoured crewmen to wear the badges of their air force.

Apart from these vehicles, Volksgrenadiers had very few towed anti-tank guns; instead they were lavishly equipped with personal anti-tank weapons, such as the hand-held Panzerschreck (‘tank terror’) and Panzerfaust (‘tank fist’). Although the former’s hollow-charge warhead could penetrate the armour of every Allied tank easily, its range of just 120 yards meant that the two-man crew had to squat in their foxholes and practically wait for opponents to roll on to them. The same applied to the single-shot, throwaway Panzerfaust, with its shorter range of 60–100 yards, and issued in the tens of thousands. Unfortunately for their operators, Allied doctrine was to precede any advance with an artillery bombardment, precisely to destroy any such threats with high explosive. Nevertheless, both these anti-tank weapons constituted a cheap, practical way to counter Allied tanks at very short range, if at a high cost in personnel. By the war’s end nearly six million Panzerfausts had been manufactured – the US 82nd Airborne Division assessed it as even more effective than their own bazookas, and used captured stocks whenever possible in the Ardennes. After the war, of course, Russian designers adapted it into the highly successful RPG (Rocket-Propelled Grenade) family of shoulder-launched anti-armour weapons.

Each Volksgrenadier division also had its own firepower in the form of an artillery regiment of four battalions, in theory nine batteries of cannon, totalling fifty-four weapons; however, the allocation of guns had been diluted in 1944, in an effort to equip all the new formations. Previously, divisions had a similar number of guns, but distributed across twelve batteries; the smaller number of these sub-units was an economy measure, designed to trim the number of officers and specialist staff needed. In earlier times, vehicle-drawn batteries possessed modern 150mm howitzers and 105mm guns, designated heavy and light, but by 1944 the Volksgrenadier horse-drawn units were mostly equipped with field guns of First World War vintage, 77mm Feldkanone re-bored to 75mm, or captured from vanquished nations, such as France, Italy and Russia. These were less accurate, had a shorter range and slower rate of fire than their more modern equivalents.

*

In the Ardennes offensive, Brandenberger’s Seventh Army had a front of over twenty miles to cover, initially with just four weak infantry divisions. The extreme left (southern) wing of the attack was the concern of General der Infanterie Dr Franz Beyer’s LXXX Corps, which comprised, from south to north, the 212nd and 276th Volksgrenadier divisions. Further north, simultaneous attacks would be launched by the LXXXV Corps of General Baptist Kneiss, who likewise possessed two divisions, the 352nd Volksgrenadiers, and a miscellany of Luftwaffe personnel swept up into a formation called the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division.

Kneiss had commanded his LXXXV Corps since July, but was allowed to take a month’s leave beforehand, incredibly returning to active duty on the day Herbstnebel began. Of his two commanders, forty-one-year-old Oberst Ludwig Heilmann was the superbly energetic leader of the 5th Luftwaffe Division. He had joined the army as a private in 1921, invaded Poland as an infantryman, volunteered for airborne training and jumped into Crete as a battalion commander in 1941. He had led a regiment fighting British paratroopers on Sicily. However, Heilmann’s finest hour was defending Monte Cassino earlier in 1944 which brought him Swords to the previously awarded Knight’s Cross and Oak Leaves. Popular with his men but stubborn, he used to refer to his high decorations for bravery as Blech (tin) or a ‘good cure for throat-ache’ (the Knight’s Cross being worn around the neck), when joking with the ‘stubble hoppers’, the veterans in his units. A capable and resourceful commander at regimental level, Heilmann was appointed to his new post on 15 October; the Ardennes would be his first test in charge of a division.

Heilmann’s formation, however, was a different matter. Raised in March 1944, destroyed at Falaise and re-formed in October, the 5th Fallschirmjäger was airborne in name only; but a fraction of its personnel were trained jumpers, and most of them were the result of Himmler’s policy of redirecting unemployed Luftwaffe troops into combat roles. Most had hitherto enjoyed a comfortable war on airbases behind the lines, servicing and maintaining aircraft, carousing with the local female population and returning to clean sheets and mattresses. Unfit, untrained in ground tactics, few had seen action or fired weapons in anger. The only thing they shared with Heilmann was the swooping eagle badge of the Luftwaffe they all wore on their tunics.

Oberst Eric-Otto Schmidt, who possessed a solid record of experience in infantry units, serving in Poland and Russia, had commanded 352nd Volksgrenadier Division since 6 October, shortly after its activation as a unit in Schleswig-Holstein.²⁴ He had some help from a sprinkling of seasoned officers and NCOs in his formation, which was created from the remnants of the old 352nd Infantry Division, destroyed in Normandy. The original unit had been stationed behind Omaha Beach on D-Day where it had caused great harm to the US First and Twenty-Ninth Divisions, but was overwhelmed in the subsequent fighting, with very few of its ranks escaping unscathed. For example, only one Normandy veteran was known to have served in the Ardennes with its 916th Volksgrenadier Regiment, Leutnant Willi Heller of the 6. Kompanie. Another veteran recalled that 50 per cent were seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Hanoverian conscripts, 20 per cent were Poles classed by the authorities as being of German stock (Volksdeutsche), and therefore eligible for combat service, a further 20 per cent came from the recently dissolved Vlassov division of Russian volunteers, and the final 10 per cent were Ostfront veterans.²⁵

Leading the Seventh Army’s other formation, LXXX Corps, was General Dr Franz Beyer, a reliable veteran Ostfront hand, who was leading a formation in the attack because he was assessed as being a convinced National Socialist: Himmler had vetted all the senior commanders for their loyalty.²⁶

The more experienced of Beyer’s two divisional commanders, Franz Sensfuss, had taken over his formation on 17 September 1944 when its sub-units came together for the first time. The Generalleutnant’s 212th Volksgrenadier Division contained mostly young recruits, including many Bavarians aged seventeen. The 212th had been reconstructed from a destroyed division, as was its twin, Generalmajor Kurt Möhring’s 276th Volksgrenadiers. Möhring was something of a rising star in the army. At sixteen he had volunteered to serve as a Fahnenjunker (officer cadet) in the First World War, doing well enough to be retained in the 1919 slimmed-down Reichswehr. Twenty years later he was an infantry battalion commander; promoted to Oberst and given a regiment in 1942, this was followed by the significant command, still in Russia, of the elite GrossDeutschland Division for a year. His reward was a Knight’s Cross and ultimately the 276th Volksgrenadiers. Möhring’s experience was unrivalled, having commanded in Poland, France and Russia, reaching the gates of Moscow, and at Kursk, before commencing the Battle of the Bulge. However, 276th proved to be ill prepared for their coming test, which was blamed on inadequate training, just as Rundstedt had warned in September, and too few good leaders to make it a first-class formation. As we shall see, it would perform less well than Senfuss’s 212th.

In sum, the Wehrmacht that attacked the Ardennes in December 1944 was an inferior version of its predecessor, which reached the peak of professionalism by mid-1942 and had declined slowly since. Its experienced troops had generally been wounded in the east and sent to Western Europe to convalesce. Many of the ‘comb out’ from industry were in their late forties, less fit and slower to react in combat; to offset this, most of the youngsters were true disciples, fanatics who believed in Endsieg, the final victory, were highly motivated and fit, so fought bravely if carelessly. Generally, though, the Volksgrenadiers comprised ill-trained and ill-equipped men held together by the quality of their few officers and experienced NCOs.

Actual bayonet strength – as a head count of riflemen is called – in a Volksgrenadier division was at least 1,500 less than in an equivalent US formation, but total divisional firepower was similar. About equal in artillery, German divisions enjoyed a superiority in automatic weapons (if they were issued as planned), and bazooka-type anti-tank guns. American units had a much higher proportion of administrative and logistics personnel, and so experienced none of the headaches of mobility, fuel and ammunition supply that routinely bugged their counterparts.

Unfortunately, the Volksgrenadier divisions were essentially devised for defence, not offence. Despite the impressive firepower, without armoured help their manpower was generally inadequate to batter their way through a front line, even thinly held lines in the Ardennes; if they achieved a penetration, units were unable to exploit with a pursuit, for they lacked any mobility. Successful offensive operations have always required manoeuvrability and reserves of manpower to reinforce success quickly. Alas, the Volksgrenadiers had neither. They were relatively poorly prepared, too. Secrecy was so paramount that junior officers in all the attacking divisions were only given their individual assignments on 15 December, leaving less than twenty-four hours in which to ready and brief their men.

Friedrich Schmäschke, a seventeen-year-old former sailor and runner with the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division, had been manning a concrete blockhouse behind the lines when he and his mates received their orders on 15 December.

The peaceful silence of the bunker was now replaced by restless muttering. There were even comrades who broke out in wild euphoria … Then we had a hot meal which some ghoulishly called our ‘hangman’s meal’. Our iron rations were distributed and checked. Some of the men turned to the liquor ration to raise their spirits. Everything non essential was left at the bunker. Hand grenades, Panzerfausts and extra small arms ammunition was passed out and we had to lie down and rest while fully dressed … It had a numbing effect on us. Our minds were cleared, resulting in a terrible emptiness. No thoughts of home or family … The morning of 16 December came inexorably. We were to be awakened at 04:00 am but that didn’t prove necessary since nobody slept.²⁷

When I first visited the area held by 352nd Division in December 1989, I came across a relic from the fighting. The countryside was still and blanketed by deep virgin snow as it had been in 1944, though it hadn’t penetrated the woods where the Volksgrenadiershad gathered on 15 December, forty-four years earlier. Their foxholes were still evident, and so were the shell craters caused by retaliatory US artillery fire. It was there I found the helmet. Issued to a grenadier for the coming battle, at some stage damaged by shrapnel, it had been discarded. It was of the traditional German coal-scuttle shape, I noted, but slightly different from the helmets the Wehrmacht usually wore. For this was a steel helmet from the First World War. In equipping all their Volksgrenadiers for the coming offensive, the Reich’s quartermasters had to have been scraping the very bottom of the barrel in order to issue this 1917-model Stahlhelm.

So carried away in their enthusiasm for Herbstnebel were the Führer and OKW that they failed to see they were sending their Seventh Army into battle in late 1944 exactly as it had been deployed in 1914: with its infantry marching on foot and horses dragging the same weapons it had used thirty years before.