PART ONE
1
‘Never in my life have I accepted the idea of surrender, and I am one of those men who have worked their way up from nothing. Our present situation, therefore, is nothing new to me. Once upon a time my own situation was entirely different, and far worse. I say this only so that you can grasp why I pursue my goal with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down.’
Adolf Hitler, 28 December 19441
ON 11 DECEMBER 1944 Toronto is battered with its worst ever winter storm in a single day, which brings twenty inches of snow in a few hours and causes twenty-one Canadians to freeze to death on its streets. In England, RAF squadron logs read ‘missions scrubbed, as the weather is very poor, being overcast all day’.2 Elsewhere, in the gloom of a German afternoon some senior officers collect in the pretty half-timbered settlement of Ziegenberg, about five miles east of the fashionable spa of Bad Neuheim and twenty-five miles north of Frankfurt am Main. To the casual observer, the only thing distinguishing this farming village from dozens like it in the vicinity is its eighteenth-century fortress, Schloss Kransberg, a small castle atop a cliff. Now the stone edifice houses the staff of the Oberbefehlshaber West (Supreme Commander in the West), Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. There is light rain and a chill in the air, no more. Exactly three years earlier, on 11 December 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States; now that struggle was about to enter a new dimension, though not all the august assembly of officers are as yet aware of this.
They have already scratched their signatures across a document offered to them by an SS orderly. It is a pledge of secrecy about the briefing they are to receive. Something, it tells them, to do with an operation called Herbstnebel (Autumn Mist), which means nothing to them. The form threatens Sippenhaft if they break their oath: in other words, instant execution, but their families will be held to blame also, which would mean arrest, if not a concentration camp. This is the long shadow of the 20 July, when other army officers, led by Oberst Graf von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of the Reserve Army, tried to assassinate Hitler in his East Prussian headquarters, code-named Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair).
They are ordered to turn over their pistols and briefcases (another ghost of the July ‘Valkyrie’ plot: Stauffenberg had left his bomb in a briefcase). The lack of trust towards the Wehrmacht is palpable: everywhere it is the SS, Hitler’s bodyguards, who are in control. Still wearing their now empty holsters, the officers collect in the rain-splashed courtyard and board a couple of motor coaches, driven by SS troopers. They begin a circuitous tour which thoroughly confuses them as to their destination, exactly as intended. Their journey through the darkness and rain lasts about half an hour but, bizarrely, deposits them barely a mile from Schloss Kransberg. Unbeknownst to Allied military intelligence, a stairway leads down from the stronghold to several traditional country cottages below, each possessing rustic stone walls, thatched roofs and pretty wooden porches decorated with flower baskets.
Designed by Hitler’s personal architect, Albert Speer, these are, in fact, gas-proof bunkers with modern communications and three-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls and ceilings. Above and below ground, some rooms are panelled with pine and hung with deer antlers, and tapestries depicting hunting or battle scenes. As construction workers had been brought in from elsewhere, not even the locals know the significance of the base: code-named Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest), and built in 1939–40, the complex was designed to be the Führerhauptquartier (Führer headquarters) for the invasion of France, but not used.3
Dismounting at the collection of bunkers below the castle, the officers are ushered past a double row of armed SS guards standing rigidly to attention, and guided to the building innocuously labelled ‘Haus 2’. They descend deep into an underground conference room, and as they sit around a large square table littered with maps, a stony-faced SS guard "takes position behind each chair, a movement that alarms the generals; Fritz Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr Division is nervous even to reach for his handkerchief. Again the pervading sense of menace – even to these loyal servants of the Reich who have proved their bravery countless times. At their head sits Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Armed Forces High Command; on his left an empty chair, then General Alfred Jodl, his deputy. Other top brass – Gerd von Rundstedt, Walther Model, another field marshal who commands Army Group ‘B’, and two of his subordinates, Hasso von Manteuffel of Fifth Panzer Army and Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, former tank sergeant in the First World War and now an SS general – perch nearby. It is crowded, perhaps fifty in the room.
For the Ardennes campaign, some of Rundstedt’s Oberbefehlshaber West (Supreme Commander in the West) staff occupied Schloss Kransberg, a small castle overlooking the pretty half-timbered settlement of Ziegenberg, north of Frankfurt am Main. Behind the castle in a series of concrete bunkers disguised as country cottages lay Hitler’s secret headquarters, code-named Adlerhorst(Eagle’s Nest). Here, on 11 and 12 December 1944, the Fuhrer addressed all the senior commanders of the forthcoming campaign. Hitler spent his last Christmas at Ziegenberg, and broadcast his final New Year’s message to the German people from the Pressehaus bunker within the complex. Admitting Herbstnebelwas over, the Fuhrer finally quit the Adlerhorst on 15 January 1945. (Author’s collection)
They witness the arrival of a shuffling figure in field grey, ‘a broken man, with an unhealthy colour, a caved-in appearance … with trembling hands’, who unexpectedly takes his seat between Keitel and Jodl. Then the newcomers realise: it is Hitler. Manteuffel, sitting directly opposite him, is shocked at his demeanour; his left arm is completely limp and he is sitting ‘as if the burden of responsibility seemed to oppress him … his body seemed more decrepit and he was a man grown old’.
All eyes on him, Hitler suddenly comes to life; he begins by awarding two newly promoted panzer generals – Harald Freiherr von Elverfeldt of the 9th and Siegfried von Waldenburg, commanding 116th Panzer Division – the Knight’s Cross. He bedazzles them both with intimate knowledge of their formations, then he surveys Germany’s strategic position; in his stride now, he moves on to the weaknesses of the Allies. He reminds those present of his idol, Frederick the Great, who in 1762 was facing a coalition every bit as powerful as the Anglo-US-Russian alliance now ranged against the Third Reich. At Prussia’s last gasp, he tells them, Empress Elizabeth of Russia suddenly died and was succeeded by the pro-Prussian Peter. At a stroke, the anti-Prussian coalition collapsed and Frederick’s fortunes revived dramatically. Now, Hitler announces he has found a way to make history repeat itself by puncturing the coalition ranged against him. That is why these commanders have been summoned.
The Führer’s face has now lit up; the shuffling figure has been replaced by a confident leader who raves for over two hours. Frederick II of Prussia (known to his men as der Alte Fritz, Old Fritz), is never far from the monologue. How he led his military forces personally and had six horses shot from under him; that he was one of the greatest tactical geniuses of all time, and had read every conceivable book connected with the art of war. Hitler will emulate and even exceed Frederick’s achievements. The coming offensive that will destroy the Allied coalition will have unprecedented air support, fresh divisions, new tanks, additional artillery and plenty of ammunition and fuel. He guarantees it, cracks a joke at Hermann Göring’s expense; he realises how they all distrust the Luftwaffe’s boasting – if Hermann promises a thousand aircraft, they should expect 800 to turn up. Nervous laughter.
He announces he has even found a way to negate the dreaded Allied air threat – by attacking in the dead of winter when visibility is at its poorest. However, a vigorous defensive struggle will only postpone the inevitable, so there is only one thing to do: play the card of attack. Britain is a dying empire; America will lose heart if the war turns sour for her. Once the west is stabilised with a negotiated peace advantageous to Germany, we can again turn our attention to Russia. We will master our fate. Manteuffel, who has met Hitler several times, knows that those in the room who have never actually met their Führer before are totally under his spell by the time they leave. These corps and division commanders believe they are the ones who will rescue the Third Reich in five days’ time, just as der Alte Fritz had saved Prussia in years gone by.4
Departing, relieved and forgetting their empty holsters, the carmine-striped breeches and field grey of the generals stride away from the black and silver of the SS. They are more confident of survival than they were on their arrival. As they leave the musty atmosphere of the bunker for fresh, wintry air and their transport, each wonders whose survival they are contemplating, their own or Germany’s.
The chain of events which led to the Battle of the Bulge began in that long, hot summer, during the closing stages of the battle for Normandy. Although some historians of the Ardennes date the birth of the campaign to a sudden brainwave in Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters on 16 September 1944, they are mistaken: the seeds were sown much, much earlier.
The leader of the Third Reich himself was contradictory. He was fascinated by everything to do with war and military operations, but in never having progressed beyond the rank of corporal he did not appreciate the methodology of military staff work necessary to every undertaking. As Major Percy Schramm, the German High Command’s official historian and war diarist, recalled, ‘He thought that if he had ever learnt to think in the terms of a General Staff officer, at every single step he would have to stop and calculate the impossibility of reaching the next. Consequently, he concluded, he would never have even tried to come to power since on the basis of objective calculations he had no prospect of success in the first place.’5
Early luck in his political and military campaigning persuaded Hitler that he was a genius; he read widely, but randomly, on military affairs, while possessing a phenomenal memory for facts and figures. All of this convinced him he had a sound understanding of the logistical needs of his forces. He was neither a genius – nor had any concept of defence logistics – but nevertheless concluded his own intuition was preferable to the plodding of his General Staff. Hitler’s service of nearly four years at the Front in the Kaiser’s army, with the award of both classes of Iron Cross, gave him the confidence to enter politics. The army had essentially helped him into power in 1933 to counter Communism, and supported him during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ against the rising power of Ernst Röhm’s brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (the SA), who considered themselves the future defence force of the Third Reich.
The army, with the navy then known as the Reichswehr, were limited by the Versailles Treaty to no more than 100,000 men, whereas the SA numbered over three million. Röhm openly wanted to be Minister of Defence and the threat had manifested itself on 2 October 1933, when he proclaimed, ‘I regard the Reichswehr now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilisation as well, is the future task of the SA.’ The black-shirted Schutzstaffel (the SS), led by its thirty-three-year-old Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, were lent weapons surreptitiously by the army, which they used on 30 June 1934 to execute as many as 300 senior SA leaders, including Röhm. The Brownshirts were not banned, but their malign influence had been checked and thereafter diminished.
The Reichswehr (and many of the SS) had looked down on the SA, whom both regarded as a rabble – the majority were unemployed, farm labourers, or the unskilled and poorly educated working classes of Germany’s urban centres – but it was also the very background from which Hitler had sprung.6 Unlike most in the ranks of the early SS or Reichswehr, Himmler had neither seen service in 1914–18 nor become an officer, and would have failed the stringent entry requirements of candidates for his organisation. Despite his personal failings, Himmler’s subsequent leadership of the Schutzstaffel would reflect a desire, like an over-ambitious parent, to thrust his personal, unrequited aspirations on to his children. From this moment, the Reichsführer’s much smaller SS eclipsed their rivals within the Party and grew rapidly in size. They had begun in 1921 as a thirty-man security detachment of the SA, by 1929 they numbered only 300, but had risen to 50,000 in 1932 and quadrupled within another year; all were bound by personal loyalty to Hitler. While in 1934 the Reichswehr may have felt that Hitler was ‘their’ man, ten years later he had outwitted them all and was now their cruel and unsympathetic overlord – perhaps because, deep down and because of his humble origins, the Führer had always felt uncomfortable in the company of army officers, a high proportion of whom were aristocrats.7
Hitler had already dismissed one of these loathed, stuffy aristocrats, the Oberbefehlshaber West (usually abbreviated to OB West), Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Germany’s senior serving soldier and nearly fourteen years Hitler’s senior, on 2 July 1944. From the distant Wolfsschanze, Hitler had countermanded orders issued by Rundstedt, giving permission for units in Normandy to withdraw rather than stay put. Rundstedt contacted Keitel at Hitler’s HQ immediately to protest; when asked what alternatives Rundstedt could think of, the latter shouted down the phone, ‘Schluss mit dem Krieg, Idioten!’ (literally ‘Finish with the war, idiots’, but usually interpreted as ‘Make peace, you fools!’). Rundstedt was soon packing his bags, sacked on grounds of age and ill-health (the firing was sweetened by two unusual gestures from the Wolfsschanze: a cordial letter and the award of Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross). The field marshal will re-enter the Bulge story, on being reappointed OB West in September. His immediate replacement was Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, who would soon take on the additional duties of commanding Army Group ‘B’, in place of Rommel, who had been wounded by an air attack on 17 July.
The Germans were losing the war in the west. By 1 July, the Anglo-Canadians had landed twelve divisions in Normandy and the Americans thirteen – but these achievements were totally dwarfed by developments in the east, for June 1944 was a month of two ‘D-Days’. On 22 June 1944 (the third anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union), the Red Army had launched their summer offensive in White Russia, which resulted in the complete destruction of Army Group Centre. In Operation Bagration, four Russian army groups with 126 infantry divisions, 6 cavalry divisions, 16 motorised brigades and 45 armoured brigades penetrated almost 200 miles, and by 3 July had liberated Minsk. The German Ninth and Fourth Armies, totalling nearly 400,000 men, or twenty-eight divisions, were surrounded by swift armour envelopments and ceased to exist. This was a military catastrophe double the size of Stalingrad, and in terms of matériel and losses of experienced manpower ranked as the most calamitous setback of the war, one from which the Wehrmacht would never recover.
Then, of course, came the events of Thursday, 20 July, Stauffenberg’s completely unforeseen assassination attempt in Hitler’s own East Prussian headquarters. Narrowly surviving, Hitler became even more mistrustful of his generals. If the Wehrmacht had any leeway before the assassination attempt, it had none afterwards; no longer would the Führer tolerate any insubordination, for he now saw even disagreement as disloyalty. Heinz Linge, Hitler’s SS valet, remembered that after 20 July, ‘Only about "sixty people, whose names Hitler had listed personally, were permitted access to him without a prior body search. Briefcases and the like had to be left behind. I saw the need for such measures, but they depressed me. Generals, colonels, staff officers, lieutenants, NCOs and simple privates with the highest decorations came – men who had risked their lives for Hitler – and had to be patted down by the RSD (Reichssicherheitsdienst, the SS sub-unit responsible for Hitler’s security) like convicted thieves.’8 Hitler interpreted 20 July as a conspiracy of army officers against him, for it included no ordinary soldiers and few from other professions; furthermore, most were old-school aristocrats and members of the General Staff. Thus he took against each group – officers, nobles and the General Staff – but especially those whose background combined elements of all three – which happened to include many of his field commanders and their best staff officers.
The aftermath of the Stauffenberg plot became a witch-hunt against this combination. It amounted to a self-inflicted wound, removing vital talent, groomed through many years of study and experience, from the front lines just when it was needed most, for they were the only ones in the Reich with the necessary skills to counter the Allies. Their Waffen-SS rivals, however talented, were too few in number. The army was collectively humiliated, even its military salute was abolished: forthwith, the correct salutation was the Nazi raised arm and ‘Heil Hitler’.9
They were forbidden by law to join political parties, even to vote: an historic way of keeping the army out of politics.10 Thus, after the war, Wehrmacht commanders argued they were set apart and had nothing to do with the political processes of the Reich, whereas in fact they had acquired a convenient moral blind spot. The older officers who had served the state without question under the Kaisers, during the difficult pre-Nazi Weimar era of the Reichswehr, and latterly under Hitler, had devoted their professional and personal loyalty to the Fatherland. Since 2 August 1934 Hitler had made the Wehrmacht swear loyalty to him personally. The oath, which all serving soldiers and new recruits subsequently swore, ran as follows: ‘I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.’ Now he was cashing in, demanding payment on this sacred rite.
For the Wehrmacht, these words were sworn publicly, and both parties – the soldiers and Hitler – were persuaded that deviation from it was treason against the state. Disobeying the Führer was not an option. Thereafter, the Wehrmacht hid behind this oath, with their argument that obedience was everything and they were somehow set apart from politics. The reality was that collectively, German military leadership lacked Zivilcourage, moral courage, to overcome their oath, even when military logic demanded they should. After 20 July the officers were persuaded it was their duty to fight on and to inspire their men, by leadership or terror, to do likewise.
Uprising at home, disaster in Normandy. The day following the bomb plot, Kluge, newly appointed to Army Group ‘B’, had written to Hitler, ‘In the face of the total enemy air superiority, we can adopt no tactics to compensate for the annihilating power of air except to retire from the battlefield. I came here with the firm resolve to enforce your command to stand and hold at all cost. The price of that policy is the steady and certain destruction of our troops …’11 Hitler’s typical response was to demand, ‘The utmost boldness, determination, and imagination must inspire every commander down to the lowest levels.’12 This was providing, of course, that such boldness and imagination was in accordance with his own wishes. Four days after Kluge’s letter, the Americans had launched Operation Cobra to break out of Normandy. Following a massive aerial bombardment on 25 July, units of Lieutenant-General J. Lawton Collins’ US VII Corps led an assault which took two days to overcome most organised German resistance and seal off the Cherbourg peninsula. ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins and his formation would continue to harry the Germans in the Ardennes.
There is evidence that Hitler may have been evaluating commanders for a future offensive as early as 30 July, for on that date he interviewed Freiherr Hasso von Manteuffel, then commanding the elite GrossDeutschland Division on the Eastern Front. He was one aristocrat (Freiherrtranslates as Baron) Hitler could stomach because he was known as a brilliant leader of men, who could be relied upon to deliver whatever was asked of him.
By the following day the Normandy front had broken wide open in the vicinity of Avranches, and a desperate Hitler looked for ways of containing the American deluge with mobile counter-attacks. However, after the daily conference on 31 July at the Wolfsschanze, Hitler embarked on a Führer monologue that revolved around the idea of ‘a final decision happening in the West, where Germany’s destiny will be decided’, which he would command from somewhere in western Germany – the Black Forest or Vosges were mentioned. Jodl was tasked to form a small planning staff to enable this, while other fronts might have to be denuded of forces in order to achieve this final, victorious effort.
The notion of a decisive battle in the west dates from even earlier, however, when in a November 1943 Directive Hitler had stated, ‘In the East, the vastness of the space will, as a last resort, permit a loss of territory even on a major scale, without suffering a mortal blow to Germany’s chance for survival. Not so in the West! If the enemy here succeeds in penetrating our defences on a wide front, consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time.’ Hitler had anticipated the invasion which arrived in Normandy on 6 June 1944, and ordered the construction of the Atlantic Wall, concluding, ‘It would produce the greatest political and strategic impact if it [an invasion] were to succeed … I expect that all agencies will make a supreme effort toward utilising every moment of the remaining time in preparing for the decisive battle in the West.’13
The moment had passed for his decisive battle to be fought on the landing beaches, but on 31 July 1944 Hitler was still looking for a strategic turnaround in the west, rather than on the Russian Front. With considerable foresight he had ordered the chain of forts and bunkers constructed in 1938–9 along the Franco-German border and known by the Allies as the Siegfried Line, but throughout the Reich as the Westwall, to be rearmed. Furthermore, Jodl was told to study the documents relating ‘dem Vorbild des Jahres 1940’ – the model of 1940, which can only refer to the Wehrmacht’s successful attack through the Ardennes into France. The staff in the Wolfsschanze may have been focused on Normandy, but here is evidence of the Führer’s ‘Plan B’ if the French front collapsed.14 Thus, the seeds which grew into the Battle of the Bulge had been sown personally by Hitler even before the end of the struggle in Normandy.