36

The Performance of a Lifetime

ON 1 JANUARY 1945, in an attempt to regain momentum, Berlin launched two new operations. One was the Luftwaffe’s Bodenplatte, the aerial assault on Allied air bases which was originally intended to precede Herbstnebel. Montgomery was furious that it damaged his personal C-47, a gift from Eisenhower, who immediately replaced it.

On the same day, Hitler directed that Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group ‘G’ (south of Model’s troops) strike at the thinly stretched front of General Sandy Patch’s US Seventh Army, who occupied the Alsace sector, south of Patton’s troops. Patch’s men had landed in southern France in August, and with the First French Army – the two forming Devers’ Sixth Army Group – fought their way past the city of Strasbourg to the German frontier. This second brainchild of Hitler’s, Operation Nordwind(North Wind) – which involved General Hans von Obstfelder’s First and Friedrich Weise’s Nineteenth Armies – was planned over ten days and designed to deflect American attacks away from the southern flank of the Bulge.

From wireless intercepts, the Germans were aware that Patch’s formation was weaker than it had been, had gone over to the defensive and also occupied the fronts of two of Patton’s corps, redirected to the Ardennes. In circumstances similar to Middleton’s on 16 December, the eve of Nordwind found Patch covering 126 miles of front, from Saarbrücken to Strasbourg, with just six divisions. Ike had also withdrawn two of Patch’s divisions into theatre reserve.

Thanks to Ultra, SHAEF was aware that Nordwind was on its way, though not the precise point of impact or its objectives, and simply ordered Patch to withdraw westwards. He was to shorten his lines, create a reserve and relinquish northern Alsace, including Strasbourg, to the Germans. But Ike and Patch had not reckoned with Charles de Gaulle, or the commander of the First French Army, Général Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who, supported by Churchill, refused point-blank the proposal, on political grounds. De Gaulle, with one eye firmly fixed on the proximity of German forces in the Ardennes to France, was concerned about setting precedents, but more importantly felt that conceding territory back to the Germans would undermine his own political leadership. His power base was by no means secure in France, with many left-leaning or avowedly Communist groups seeking any means to discredit him. He could not let Strasbourg, which sat on the Franco-German frontier and symbolised the liberation of France, be reclaimed by the Reich.

Although Captain Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s personal aide, recorded that de Gaulle ‘feared there would be such a reaction in France, that his government might fall’, it was the loss of personal credibility that worried de Gaulle most. In fact, France was not legally governed at all by de Gaulle: he had simply arrived in Normandy and proclaimed himself head of state.¹ In the end, Nordwind was halted and Butcher noted that Ike had diplomatically ‘modified his order because, from a purely military standpoint, he could not afford to have his lines of supply and his vast rear areas endangered by civil unrest, which would accompany a revolt against de Gaulle’s government’.² Butcher’s words smoothed over what promised to become a major diplomatic incident, with de Gaulle effectively blackmailing Eisenhower by threatening civil unrest. The aftershocks reverberated at the highest levels of Allied command and gave warning that de Gaulle would be a challenge to Western solidarity after the war.

In the event, Nordwind saw three German corps punch a hole in the American lines, aided by fog and thick forests, gain about ten miles, then stall. As in the Ardennes, the American ‘shoulders’ held, in this case Major-General Wade Haislip’s XV Corps to the north and Major-General Edward H. Brooks’ VI Corps in the south. Brooks was an unflappable warrior, having won a Distinguished Service Cross in 1918 and led the 2nd Armored Division through Normandy before his promotion to corps command in October. Later in 1945, it would be Brooks who accepted the personal surrender of General Erich Brandenberger, erstwhile leader of the German Seventh Army in the Ardennes. On 5 January, Blaskowitz renewed his attacks against VI Corps and by the 15th of the month Brooks’ formation was fighting for its survival, being assailed on three sides. This was no mere feint: at least seventeen German divisions participated, including the 6th SS-Gebirgsjäger (Mountain), 17th SS-Panzergrenadier, 21st Panzer and 25th Panzergrenadier Divisions. Some of these were reserve formations held by OKW, which might otherwise have been committed to Herbstnebel.

A counter-attack by the US 14th Armored Division temporarily halted the Germans, and on the 21st, with casualties mounting, and running out of replacements, armour, ammunition and combat supplies, Brooks, with French help, managed to break contact and withdraw to fresh defensive positions along the Zorn, Moder and Rothbach rivers. By 25 January the German offensive was spent and had drawn to a close, enabling the US Seventh and French First Armies to counter-attack, recapturing the ground lost north of Strasbourg. The Nordwind fighting was every bit as desperate and vicious as that in Herbstnebel, with the weather and ground worse. The terrain comprises high mountains ranging up to 4,000 feet, and plunging valleys, mostly wooded. The ground was known to several of the French and German commanders, who had contested the same area during 1914–18; the young Leutnant Erwin Rommel had cut his teeth in combat there, and the hillsides are littered with the detritus and trenches of both world wars.

Writing of the campaign, one of Himmler’s National Socialist Guidance Officers sent a sympathetic report back to OKW about Nordwind. His words, which might also have encompassed any formation in the Ardennes, concluded:

The longer one observes the Nineteenth Army in their hard battles in Alsace, the more one’s esteem grows for a fighting community that, after all, is not really a trained army, but actually a thrown-together heap. It is fantastic that in spite of this, a cohesive organisation has grown out of that heap. To be sure, however, it is now an exhausted organisation. Even the strongest will is broken through uninterrupted combat. Many individuals are at the end of their rope. If one could give them just two days’ sleep, it might be different. As a result of attrition, there are regiments [normally of 3,000] with a strength of 80–150 men; that such units can actually continue to attack is doubly impressive. Everywhere, the decisive difference comes down to the performance of individuals. Many officers are resigned that their lives are over, and they want to sell them dearly.³

Had Nordwind occurred in isolation it would no doubt have achieved the same status as the Battle of the Bulge for soldiers and historians, but in the event it was overshadowed by the latter and is consequently little known. The US Seventh Army suffered 11,609 battle casualties, not including substantial losses to sickness and frostbite, and the Germans 22,932.⁴ In German minds Nordwind was linked to Herbstnebel, as we have seen from Hitler’s comments during its planning, but the same is true also in American military history. After the war, the US Army issued the Ardennes–Alsace campaign streamer to the battle flags of units that took part in either struggle.

Notwithstanding the problems caused by de Gaulle, Anglo-American relations had been fraught with difficulties for most of 1944, largely due to the political failure to agree a ‘broad’ or ‘narrow front’ strategy against the Germans. The alliance had prospered largely on account of Eisenhower’s efforts as the arch-conciliator. The arch-villain, as we have already noted, was Montgomery, who was unwilling to accept Ike’s supremacy as leader, or that Eisenhower’s ‘broad front’ strategy was correct. With Monty’s appointment to command the northern half of the Bulge from 20 December, this seemed to the British field marshal a vindication of his view that American generalship was inferior.

A news blackout imposed on 16 December slowed the release of details to the outside world from the Ardennes; for example, it was announced only on 18 January by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that, several weeks earlier, ‘the 106th Division had suffered 8,663 casualties, including 416 killed, 1,246 wounded and that most of the 7,001 missing were presumed to be prisoners’.⁵ The news came only once victory in the Ardennes was assured.

Montgomery’s assumption of command in the Bulge was not made public until announced by Bedell Smith in a press conference at SHAEF in Paris on 5 January. In the background, ever since Monty had taken command on 20 December, his boss – the British CIGS, Field Marshal Alan Brooke – while agreeing that SHAEF was a bureaucratic and inefficient organisation, warned Monty privately on numerous occasions, ‘Events and enemy action have forced on Eisenhower the setting-up of a more satisfactory system of command … It is important that you should not, even in the slightest degree, appear to rub this unfortunate fact into anyone at SHAEF. Any remarks you make are bound to come to Eisenhower’s ears sooner or later.’⁶

Two days later Monty brushed off this gentle admonition, for he responded to Brooke, ‘I think I see daylight now on the northern front, and we have tidied up the mess and got two American armies properly organised. But I can see rocks ahead and no grounds for the optimism Ike seems to feel. Rundstedt is fighting a good battle.’⁷ Six days after that, Monty penned another smug missive to his boss following a meeting with Eisenhower: ‘Ike was definitely in a somewhat humbler frame of mind, and clearly realised that present trouble would not have occurred if he had accepted British advice and not that of American generals.’⁸

Clearly, Monty’s attitude would lead to trouble in the Allied camp. It erupted after a press conference he held at his Twenty-First Army Group headquarters in Zonhoven (these days known as the ‘Villa Monty’), Belgium, on Sunday, 7 January, two days after his command in the Bulge had been made public. Using maps to illustrate the campaign (which had not yet drawn to a close), he began with some prepared remarks before moving on to questions.⁹ ‘As soon as I saw what was happening in the Ardennes, I took certain steps myself to ensure that if the Germans got to the Meuse, they certainly would not get over that river,’ he said. ‘I employed the whole available power of the British group of armies: this power was brought into play very gradually and in such a way that it would not interfere with the American lines of communications. Finally it was put into battle with a bang and today British divisions are fighting hard on the right flank of the United States First Army. You thus have the picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who have suffered a hard blow. The battle has been most interesting; I think possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled.’¹⁰

At a distance of many decades, this text still oozes arrogance; at the time it was regarded as incendiary – and was portrayed as such in the Allied media. From London, the Daily Mail duly reported the next day, ‘Montgomery Foresaw Attack. His Troops Were All Ready To March. Acted “On Own” To Save Day’.¹¹

Montgomery and his supporters subsequently claimed he was misunderstood or misinterpreted, but the field marshal knew exactly what he was doing. The media event was held in Monty’s villa, not at SHAEF or an American headquarters. He had cleared his proposed text – which did not remotely resemble the words he actually delivered – and the holding of the conference itself, in advance, with Eisenhower, Brooke and Churchill.

However, throughout the event he omitted to recognise the enormous sacrifices of American soldiers in the Bulge, failed to name a single US commander, vastly overstated the role of the British and cast himself as the strategic genius behind the defence, whereas it had been Eisenhower. It was so provocative that Major Tom Bigland, Monty’s personal liaison officer attached to Bradley’s headquarters, who had been present, noted on the same evening that ‘shortly after the BBC Nine o’clock news had covered it, and on a wavelength close to that of the BBC’, German radio also reported the conference in English, aware that it would ‘stir up anti-British feelings among the Americans’.¹²

It is hard not to agree with Eisenhower, Bradley and most American commanders that Monty’s version of events was a gross distortion of the truth of the Ardennes campaign. Monty was not clever with war correspondents, but even sympathetic ones, like the Australians Chester Wilmot and Alan Moorehead, were dismayed. His only guiding hand, his long-suffering chief of staff, Major-General Francis ‘Freddie’ de Guingand, was in England being treated for appendicitis. Even his headquarters staff agreed with Brigadier ‘Bill’ Williams, his intelligence chief, that ‘the presentation was quite appalling’. Major Bigland, who knew both Bradley and Monty well, thought this incident caused more Anglo-American ill feeling ‘than anything else in the war – even efforts to put things right in the press failed’.¹³

There was another motive for Monty’s press conference. The field marshal continued to ignore Brooke’s advice, and on 31 December had sent Eisenhower another missive about reforming the SHAEF command structure and giving him, Monty, greater prominence. As a result, Ike finally snapped and had drafted (but not sent) a letter to Marshall in Washington, DC, asking to be relieved – in fact it was a request to choose between Monty and himself. Eisenhower’s British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, supported his boss without hesitation. De Guingand had sensed trouble and warned Monty that he was not irreplaceable, for his great rival, Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, commanding Allied forces in Italy, was prepared to take over Twenty-First Army Group in his stead; moreover, ‘Alex’ and Eisenhower were old friends, having worked together in the Mediterranean in 1942–3.

At de Guingand’s dictation, Monty had written a swift letter of apology to Ike (‘Very distressed that my letter may have upset you and I would ask you to tear it up. Your devoted subordinate, Monty’). Thus Monty’s 7 January press conference was also designed to send a coded apology to Eisenhower. He concluded, ‘it is teamwork that pulls you through dangerous times; it is teamwork that wins battles … the captain of our team is General Eisenhower. I am devoted to Ike. We are the greatest of friends.’ But these words went unheard, and the damage created a full-scale transatlantic gale. Churchill’s own contribution to damage limitation was his historic 18 January 1945 House of Commons speech, where he graciously paid tribute to the American soldiers and warned, ‘Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war’.¹⁴ The Prime Minister’s words were a coded rebuke to Montgomery.

Eisenhower immediately sought to conciliate Bradley, who, with his staff, had ‘exploded with indignation’. On 9 January, Ike awarded his friend a Bronze Star for his leadership of the Twelfth Army Group through the crisis, and the same day Bradley held a press conference of his own, to justify his role, which he felt had been impugned by Monty. He defended his own strategy and explained that ‘in leaving the Ardennes lightly held, I took a calculated risk. Had we followed more cautious policies, we would still be fighting west of Paris’, generously concluding that ‘Field Marshal Montgomery has made a notable contribution to the battle’.¹⁵ This led to the New York Times headline the next day, ‘Our Risk May Win, Bradley Declares’.¹⁶

Other, pro-Montgomery papers criticised Bradley: ‘Gen. Bradley Taken to Task’, headlined the Daily Mail, suggesting, ‘Some of his [Bradley’s] statements will be regarded by the British as unnecessarily offensive. The statement that Field Marshal Montgomery’s command on the northern flank is only temporary bears only one interpretation, namely, that Montgomery is good enough to be given a position of responsibility in an emergency, but when the danger is over his services are no longer required … The British will regard, with dismay, Montgomery’s relegation to a somewhat unimportant part of the front held before von Rundstedt’s break-through. The country will need convincing that his services could not be put to better use.’¹⁷

More than a month later, Churchill, Eisenhower, Brooke and Bedell Smith were still engaged in damage limitation. Eisenhower wrote to Marshall on 9 February that the conference ‘is still rankling in Bradley’s mind and I must say I cannot blame him’.¹⁸ As he commented in his 1948 memoirs, Crusade in Europe, ‘This incident caused me more distress and worry than did any similar one of the war. I doubt if Montgomery ever came to realize how resentful some American commanders were. They believed he had belittled them – and they were not slow to voice reciprocal scorn and contempt.’¹⁹ Despite his protestations, Monty knew he had belittled them, and thereafter Anglo-American military relations were never quite the same.

For General Jim Gavin of the 82nd and other American commanders, the 7 January press conference came hard on the heels of Montgomery’s decision to launch his counter-attack in the Bulge on 3 January. Bradley, Patton and their subordinates were highly critical of the late start, and shared the unanimous view that his counter-stroke should have begun much earlier, perhaps on 31 December or 1 January. In his memoirs, Gavin thought that, while ‘British and American troops always fought well side by side’, American leaders could not understand Monty’s desire for a ‘tidy battlefield’, or why he wanted a ‘very conservative, albeit costly, phase line by phase line counter-offensive’.²⁰

To Gavin’s mind, Monty’s flaws were essentially cultural. The most sympathetic of American commanders towards Montgomery, he concluded that the field marshal simply did not understand America’s ‘national psychological make-up’. GIs liked a fast-moving, fluid battle, which meant that Monty’s more formal ‘set-piece’ events were ‘rarely to American liking’. Along with Simpson and Collins, he admired Montgomery’s professionalism, but all were appalled by his lack of tact.²¹ We have dwelt on the 7 January press conference and its consequences at length because it helped shape America’s post-war view of the Ardennes and British generalship, right down to today.²²

Perhaps the final military judgement should come from one of Monty’s opponents. Much later on, Hasso von Manteuffel observed, ‘The operations of the American First Army had developed into a series of individual holding actions. Montgomery’s contribution to restoring the situation was that he turned that series of isolated actions into a coherent battle fought according to a clear and definite plan. It was his refusal to engage in premature and piecemeal counter-attacks which enabled the Americans to gather their reserves and frustrate the German attempts to extend their breakthrough.’²³ Manteuffel’s interpretation was at odds with the conclusions of the late Stephen E. Ambrose, who in 1997 maintained, ‘Putting Monty in command of the northern flank had no effect on the battle’.²⁴

Could Herbstnebel have succeeded? Its operational aim was to reach the Allies’ logistics base of Antwerp, which opened for maritime freight on 26 November, as the Red Ball Express and other road-based supply lines from Normandy wound down. Hitler’s assessment, that Antwerp was the Allied ‘centre of gravity’ (their most vulnerable asset, without which they could not continue to prosecute the war), was basically correct. Yet Herbstnebel’s overarching strategic objective was different. It was to destroy the cohesion of the Western Allies. Again, in concluding that Nazi Germany might survive, or buy much-needed time, if the Western alliance somehow shattered, was logical.

However, in assuming the alliance was fragile, Hitler was fundamentally mistaken. He believed that the Americans and British were not ‘natural bedfellows’ and that a fundamental setback, such as the loss of Antwerp, would cause the Anglo-US common purpose to founder. His rationale was illustrated on 31 August 1944, shortly after the end in Normandy, when he remarked, ‘They are stumbling to their ruin … The time will come when the tensions between the allies will become so great that the break will occur … Throughout history coalitions have always gone to pieces sooner or later. One has only to wait for the moment, no matter how hard the going.’²⁵ This statement was more a reflection on his personal view of the value of coalitions than the political reality of 1944.

How could this have happened? By what process would the vast political-military architecture of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s war machine, carefully constructed since 1941, involving huge numbers of politicians, staff officers and civil servants supporting many high-level military committees, and Eisenhower’s SHAEF, numbering 20,000 multinational personnel, suddenly collapse because of an unexpected German success, such as the loss of Antwerp? The wartime ‘special relationship’ was born of an unusually close bond between Churchill, whose mother was American, and Roosevelt. It was echoed by King George VI, and Brooke – if sorely tested by his protégé, Montgomery – Marshall and Eisenhower, for whom it was said to be a ‘religion’. (‘You can call me a sonofabitch’, Ike is alleged to have said, ‘but not an American sonofabitch.’) Its immense strength was such that it grew into NATO after the war.

Apart from dividing the Allies, Herbstnebel had another purpose altogether, which was to buy time. With the Anglo-American armies divided or off-balance, all available reserves would then be rushed eastwards to meet the anticipated 1945 Soviet offensive – a strategic plan which recognised Germany’s diminishing resources. By late 1944 the fronts were interconnected: one could only be reinforced at the expense of another, and the forces used in the Bulge were also desperately needed in the east, where, for example, twelve weak infantry divisions covered 725 miles from the Carpathians to the Baltic, with no reserves.

Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, as chief of OKH, and responsible for the Russian Front, was highly critical of the late start of Herbstnebel, originally planned for mid-November but delayed several times. He observed that the mid-December date, even if it resulted in a decisive victory in the west, left no time to switch reinforcements to the east to meet the expected Soviet New Year push, which duly materialised on 12 January. Three times, on 24 December, 1 and 9 January, Guderian warned Hitler of the fragility of the east, stating on the last occasion that the front was ‘like a pack of cards’. When Marshal Koniev struck three days later, with his forty-two rifle divisions, six armoured corps and four mechanised brigades (numbers which dwarfed those employed in the Ardennes), there was little to check his advance. With forces ratios of 11:1 in infantry, 7:1 in tanks, 20:1 in artillery and 20:1 in the air, Warsaw fell on 17 January and by 5 February Zhukov had reached the River Oder, fifty miles from Berlin.²⁶

It would have taken far more than bickering and apportioning blame for the loss of Antwerp to drive apart the British and Americans, who were – in any case – bound by a common pledge, which they took seriously, of demanding the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Germany and Japan. Hitler had no conception of the strength of the Anglo-American coalition and failed to realise he had no means of damaging it. Thus Herbstnebel was doomed from the start. Even if, by some unholy miracle, his troops had made it to Antwerp – what then? It is significant that there was no campaign plan to develop any military activity after the seizure of Antwerp.

Against all the odds, had Hitler succeeded, there is every reason to suppose the Western Allies in 1944–5 would have carried on fighting and eventually recaptured the port. At the very beginning of 1945, Eisenhower had seventy-three divisions under his command in North-West Europe, with almost unlimited fuel, vehicles and ammunition. Of these, forty-nine were infantry, twenty armoured and four airborne. Twelve were British, eight French, three Canadian, one Polish, but the vast majority (forty-nine) were American.

Additionally, there were numerous independent armoured and artillery battalions or brigades, and powerful Belgian, Dutch and Czechoslovak battlegroups. It would have been necessary to destroy a substantial chunk of these for the Reich to achieve a decisive result. Even though the Germans had the initial element of surprise, Herbstnebel employed a maximum of only twenty-eight divisions, with very limited fuel and ammunition. Having stunned their opponents into complete inactivity, some of these victorious German divisions were supposed afterwards to redeploy to the east and fight the Russians!

By occupying Antwerp, Hitler’s armies would have been left at the end of a vastly overextended logistics tail, stretching from the Ardennes to the Belgian harbour. Such a line of communications would have been disastrously vulnerable to Allied air interdiction, about which Göring and his diminished Luftwaffe could do absolutely nothing. If Allied air power or snow didn’t destroy the German advance, the arrival of mud would most certainly. There were very few adequate roads that led via the Ardennes, from the Meuse to Antwerp. Although Generalmajor Friedrich von Mellenthin had maintained, when attached to 9th Panzer Division, that his experiences in Russia ‘stood me in good stead; I knew all about the problems of moving through snow and ice – a subject about which the Americans still had much to learn’, only main roads were paved in 1944, and those soon broke down with the constant passage of wheels and tracks in traffic volumes for which they had not been designed.²⁷

Germany’s experience of Russia provided endless examples of the wear and tear to men, horses, vehicles and weapons caused by mud. Guy Sager, a German soldier in Russia, recalled how his truck, ‘whose wheels by this time were balls of mud, was pulled forward while its engine rattled helplessly’.²⁸ Mud, like snow, increased fuel consumption and placed greater strain on engines and gears, plastered radiators, piled up under mudguards and tore off axles and other vehicle parts. This applied equally to weapons, where artillery became inaccurate and clogged rifles inoperable. Operating in mud physically drained soldiers far more than snow, and demoralised them also. In 1918, General Ludendorff (after whom the Remagen bridge was named) commented, ‘You can’t clean your rifle when your hands are covered an inch thick’.

The traditional German solution to moving huge numbers of men and amounts of matériel over long distances was to use railways, not trucks – Germany had plenty of coal but little gasoline. In the invasions of France and Russia, trains were very quickly sustaining the advance. Yet despite Germany’s wealth in locomotives and rolling stock, the threat from the Allied air forces ensured that railways were of no immediate relevance in assisting a German advance to Antwerp. The Wehrmacht would have to rely on trucks, after all – all of which Hitler overlooked, or refused to acknowledge.

Hitler’s dream of a massive assault reaching Antwerp in days was sabotaged by the reality that his army was scarcely more mobile than their predecessors who had entered Belgium in August 1914. In the earlier assault, using the Schlieffen Plan, it was the sheer inertia of hundreds of thousands of men and horses struggling on foot and hoof to keep up with an ambitious timetable in good weather that eventually led to the Kaiser’s ambitions being dashed. The scenario in December 1944 was the same with three added complications: the weather was appalling, the Allies ruled the air and their first line of opponents, the US Army, were tactically savvy and well resourced.

Even the tactical aim for the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies of reaching the Meuse proved too difficult for the petrol-guzzling panzers. Utilising captured American vehicles and fuel might have been a short-term remedy (just as for Rommel in the North African desert) but was not a viable solution for a prolonged campaign. If the main panzer columns had reached the River Meuse – which none did – they would have been highly vulnerable crossing it, and certainly intercepted on the far bank, as the British 29th Armoured Brigade managed to do at Dinant to a German-crewed jeep on 23 December. Herbstnebel was thus thrice damned: tactically from getting to the Meuse, operationally from reaching Antwerp and strategically from fracturing the Anglo-American alliance.

Hitler failed to realise or refused to see that by 1944 the European war had become a Materielschlacht, a war of resources, where the unleashed economic might of the United States was outperforming that of Nazi Germany. He bamboozled his subordinates with promises of victory by secret weapons, yet failed to appreciate that the limited deployment of new tactical technologies could not alter the strategic balance in Germany’s favour. Longer range U-boats, Tiger II tanks, MP-44 assault rifles, Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters, Me-163 rocket interceptors, V-1 doodlebugs and V-2 rockets could only nibble at the Allied superiority of numbers.

It was preordained that Hitler’s army would not reach the Meuse; it was not strong enough. ‘Consent and evade’ seemed to be the tactic practised by most German commanders from late 1944. Consent to Hitler’s wild plan, but evade responsibility for the consequences of its failure. At the end of the day, deep down Hitler’s generals must have realised that the Bulge was likely to bog down into fighting for the possession of a few small Belgian towns or village crossroads. Even the loyal hatchet man Sepp Dietrich could not conceive of its success; only a few ‘true believers’ like Jochen Peiper thought it might work.

When Major Ken Hechler asked the tank commander in September 1945, ‘Did you honestly expect to reach the Meuse in one day?’ according to the interview transcripts, Peiper ‘paused for a brief period before answering, wrinkled his brow and said, “if our own infantry had broken through by 07.00 a.m. as originally planned, my answer is ‘yes’, I think we might have reached the Meuse in one day”’.²⁹ Very few German field commanders seemed to have shared his view. These minor tactical flourishes sidestepped the operational certainty that the Allies were going to squeeze the Bulge flat after the panzers had run out of fuel.

It would not matter that around 800 American tanks, nearly 2,000 trucks and 800 aircraft were lost in the Ardennes for they could be replaced immediately, and many were repaired. Every German piece of armour, truck or plane destroyed was unrecoverable and irreplaceable. Eisenhower concluded after the war that the Ardennes campaign set Allied plans back by between two and three months at the most, and actually hastened the end of the war by destroying German reserves that would have been encountered on the other side of the Rhine later on. In fact, the Russians were the real beneficiaries of Herbstnebel, for the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies would have done very serious damage to the Red Army’s advance on Berlin, and would have consumed less gasoline fighting in its defence. Even then, they would not have altered the operational outcome. With minor variations, it is difficult to conceive of any other outcome to the Ardennes offensive other than a German defeat.

If shattering the Anglo-US coalition was Hitler’s strategic objective, he chose the wrong methods – to reach for Antwerp via the Ardennes – by which to achieve it. The only way in 1944 he might have influenced, or tested, the Allied strategic alliance would be by his own strategic diplomatic overtures – putting out peace feelers. But in the Führer’s world such a concept was verboten. As we have seen, Hitler’s own understanding of international coalitions was naïve in the extreme. He rarely travelled abroad in his life, spoke no foreign languages and understood very little of other cultures or races. Instead he preferred to believe in his own pseudo-Wagnerian nonsense of pan-European Aryan peoples. Germany’s alliance with Italy, whose soldiers were always regarded as inferior, was never equal. Similarly, Nazi relations with Japan represented a series of lost opportunities as the Axis partners never coordinated their military activities to mutual advantage.

The most beneficial alliance, that with the Soviet Union between August 1939 and June 1941, bought peace on Germany’s eastern frontier when she most needed it, but was unilaterally sabotaged by Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Even there, the opportunities to be gained by liberating millions of Ukrainians from the oppressive yoke of Communism were thrown away by Nazi brutality. Likewise, many Frenchmen, led by Pétain, might have done more to help Germany, but found the Vichy regime was merely a front by which to plunder France of her assets; so, too, with other occupied nations. Similarly in the First World War, the Führer would have witnessed the unequal way the Kaiserreich treated its Austro-Hungarian, Turkish and Bulgarian partners.

The strengths and weaknesses of international alliances and coalitions were simply beyond Hitler’s comprehension: he never interpreted the world in terms of forging friendships and sharing ideals. Ironically his own party, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), had been an amalgamation of many small political organisations with divergent views. Hitler gobbled them up for their Deputies in the Reichstag and their members, like a corporate giant today greedily acquiring a market share. For all the rhetoric, Adolf Hitler only ever thought in terms of seizing and maintaining power for its own sake, not of building consensus. Thus he could not understand the nature and strength of the Allied alliance against him. On many levels, then, his Ardennes adventure was predestined to be nothing more than an irrelevant and hopeless dream.

The triumph of the US Army was that it had been surprised by Hitler’s war machine in the most unfavourable circumstances imaginable, had taken a very bloody hit, struck back and ultimately had not been found wanting. The truest test of an army is not when everything is going according to plan, but when it can prevail despite the Clausewitzian fog of war. In the public mind, the Ardennes was principally a land battle, but in the degradation of the German logistics ‘tail’ and destruction of their forces on the battlefield, the Allied air forces played a key role. The triumph was essentially one of a team – infantry, armour, artillery and air power working in harmony, as typified by the little battle for Hotton. Each arm, integrated with the others, was necessary to triumph in the Ardennes.

The Third Reich’s convoluted and competitive command chains, with Hitler’s cronies and favourites interfering, meant the Fatherland could never match the Allied professionalism and skill in making war. Hitler’s forces were destined always to achieve a poor second place. They had their moments of dazzling bravura, but were to shine briefly only with the effect of a solo instrument among a mediocre ensemble, which looked better than it was, led by an ill-tempered bandmaster.

Although defeat lay four months away, the men and matériel thrown away in the Ardennes meant that Germany had already lost the Second World War in Europe by the end of the Bulge.

The man responsible more than any other was Eisenhower. He had seen the need for decisive action immediately on 16 December. Like the conductor of a professional symphony orchestra, he had overseen the preparations of the assembled groups of woodwind, brass, percussion, strings and keyboards, all skilled on their own instruments, each section led by their principals. They were well-rehearsed and had already given several virtuoso concerts before they came to their greatest challenge. The conductor sought to resolve personality clashes and rivalries, and worked the artistes hard. The result was the performance of a lifetime.