39
WINSTON CHURCHILL THOUGHT that battles were the grammatical devices which regulated history. If so, the terrain of the Bulge must rank as one of the most important pages of the Second World War story on which such marks were written. The Ardennes was also one of the most recognisable ‘triumphs’ of American military history. The fact that the campaign had started with a setback, and the US Army had rallied and thrashed their opponents, merely enlarged the nature of the victory. There was no doubt who won, nor any debate about the extent and decisive nature of the US achievement. Subsequent wars, from Korea and Vietnam (the first two overseen by senior officers who had served in the Ardennes) to Iraq and Afghanistan, mired with armistices or hostile public opinion, have proven less easy to define as Churchillian ‘punctuation marks’.
As soon as the fighting had ended, the Allies began to examine the circumstances of the battle. They were shocked that, despite their own superiority in men, machines, technology and intelligence, their opponents, who were mostly ill-trained Volksgenadiers, had still managed to conceal vast numbers of attacking formations, capture 23,554 Allied soldiers and advance almost sixty miles within a few days.1 This concern was exacerbated by the ever-chillier relations between Anglo-American forces in western Germany and their Soviet counterparts, which soon manifested itself as the Cold War.
Among the first to note the worsening nature of the East–West alliance was George Patton. On 7 May, shortly after Hitler’s death and as Germany surrendered, he met the US Under-Secretary of War, Judge Robert P. Patterson, in Austria. The two men got on extremely well together, Patton recording of his political boss, ‘he has a most remarkable memory for names, and could tell the officers to whom he was introduced where he had last seen them. He is also exceptionally well informed on history, particularly that of the Civil War, so we had a very enjoyable talk together.’ Patton was gravely concerned over the Soviet failure to respect the demarcation lines separating the Soviet and American occupation zones.
He was also alarmed by plans in Washington for the immediate partial demobilisation of the US Army, saying to Patterson, ‘Let’s keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.’ Patterson, a robust supporter of the armed forces, who had won a Distinguished Service Cross for valour in 1918 and had mobilised the US Army in 1940, nevertheless responded with a brush-off, typical of the immediate post-war optimism of politicians: ‘George, you have been so close to this thing so long, you have lost sight of the big picture.’2
There was an understanding among many Western military commanders, led by Patton, that Russia remained overtly aggressive and a wise course of action would be to confront Stalin’s brand of Communism while the chance existed. Attending meetings and social functions with senior Red Army officers, Patton noted in his diary on 14 May, ‘I have never seen in any army at any time, including the German Imperial Army of 1912, as severe discipline as exists in the Russian army. The officers, with few exceptions, give the appearance of recently civilized Mongolian bandits.’ Four days later, he again observed, ‘If it should be necessary to fight the Russians, the sooner we do it the better.’ On 20 May, he reiterated his concern in a letter to his wife, ‘If we have to fight them, now is the time. From now on we will get weaker and they stronger.’
Patton’s anxieties were reflected by some Western politicians such as Churchill, who in May 1945 had ordered plans to be drawn up for a possible war against Stalin’s Soviet Union. The objective would be ‘to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire. Even though the will of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, this does not necessarily limit the military commitment.’ The Chief of the Imperial General Staff (Brooke) and his planners responded with outlines for a surprise attack by up to forty-seven British and American divisions (around a million personnel) initiated from the area of Dresden, also using Polish forces and up to 100,000 former Wehrmacht soldiers, including men and their leaders who had fought in the Ardennes.
Brooke’s team observed that (as with the German attack in the Bulge), any quick success would be due to surprise alone. Reflecting on the failure of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, they warned that if a rapid victory was not forthcoming before winter, the Allies would be committed to a total war which would be protracted. Due to a Soviet numerical superiority over the West in Europe of 4:1 in men and 2:1 in tanks, in the official British report submitted to Churchill of 22 May 1945, Brooke’s team deemed the offensive operation ‘hazardous’ – surely an understatement, but one which reflected in every way the strategic situation that OKW faced in November–December 1944.3
Accepting this, albeit reluctantly, Churchill, fearing that the relocation of US forces to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan might tempt Stalin to take offensive action in Western Europe, on 10 June 1945 instructed Brooke to ascertain ‘what measures would be required to ensure the security of the British Isles in the event of war with Russia in the near future’. After further research, staff work and war games, Brooke’s planners concluded that if the United States focused on the Pacific Theatre, Great Britain’s odds against a Soviet drive through Western Europe would be ‘fanciful’. In light of this, the Joint Planning Staff named both plans, for offensive and defensive activities, ‘Operation Unthinkable’, reflecting their view of Britain’s chances of success. Certainly, we know the Wehrmacht’s planners for Wacht am Rhein harboured privately the exact same doubts for success in December 1944.
On 19 May 1946, President Truman invited Churchill to speak in the former’s home state of Missouri, at Westminster College in Fulton. Churchill – now acting as prophet and not Prime Minister, for Clement Atlee had defeated him in the General Election on 26 July the previous year – brought with him one of the most famous speeches of all time, which subsequently became shorthand for East–West relations of nearly half a century.
In speaking of an ‘Iron Curtain’ that had descended from ‘Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’, Churchill acknowledged the truth of Russian duplicity which many leaders in the West were still refusing to face. As his daughter-in-law Pamela Harriman later observed in 1987, ‘So powerful was the phrase, it cut like a thunderbolt through the public dialogue; so pronounced was the turning point marked by this speech, so wise does it seem at least in retrospect, that leaders since then return to it and quote it repeatedly to validate their own policies.’4
Ten months later, President Harry Truman himself echoed Churchill’s erudition in an address to the US Congress, amid the crisis of the 1946–9 Greek Civil War. On 12 March 1947, Truman argued that if Greece and Turkey did not receive Western aid badly needed, both countries would fall inevitably under Communist domination, with consequences throughout the region. This became the Truman Doctrine, and historians have come to consider this a convenient date to signal the start of the Cold War, and the birth of a containment policy to stop Soviet expansion.
If anyone harboured lingering doubts, Churchill’s warnings seemed vindicated in 1948. By then the United States had, along with Great Britain and France, combined their occupation zones in West Germany into one military province, hoping to bring security and economic stability to its inhabitants. In February 1948, the three Western powers proposed to the Soviets that a new four-power German currency be created. Stalin refused to accept the idea, intent on triggering a Communist uprising in West Germany through economic unrest. The Western powers went ahead anyway and established their own tripartite currency in June.
The temperature rose rapidly as the Soviets, trying to push the Allies out of West Berlin, suddenly announced that all vehicles and trains travelling through East Germany to the German capital were to be searched. The West refused to permit such interference, whereupon Stalin raised the stakes by blocking the movement of all surface traffic to West Berlin on 27 June, threatening the western portion of the city with starvation. An order to begin supplying West Berlin by air was signed by General Lucius Clay (who had succeeded Eisenhower as Military Governor of occupied Germany in March) the same day. The American ambassador to Britain, John G. Winant, enunciated the West’s view that ‘the right to be in Berlin carried with it the right of access’, and a Top Secret CIA memorandum to Truman stressed the importance of Berlin as a base for intelligence operations, sanctuary for refugees and anti-Communist propaganda missions.5
The ten-month airlift carried over two million tons of supplies in 270,000 flights until the Soviets finally lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949, by which time Berlin had become a symbol of Western resolve to stand up to the Soviet threat, without being forced into a direct conflict. German veterans shook their heads, wondering what might have been had the Luftwaffe been able to mount a similar airlift into Stalingrad over the winter of 1942–3 – or supported Herbstnebel in December 1944.
The Berlin blockade heightened the tensions of the Cold War, greatly increasing concerns about the vulnerability of Western Europe to an attack by the Soviet Army (as the Russian force was officially known from 25 February 1946). Predating the blockade, in the Brussels Treaty of March 1948, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg had already agreed mutual assistance in the event of such an attack. On its own this treaty was too weak to deter the Soviet Union from aggression, but the drama of the blockade and airlift served only to persuade America that Russia was an increasingly serious military threat. The Vandenberg Resolution of June 1948 enabled the US to enter into military treaties with foreign states, and on 4 April 1949 the United States, Canada, the Brussels powers and most of the other Western European nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty, agreeing to mutual defence in the event of an attack by the Soviet Union.
The cornerstone of NATO doctrine was, and remains, Article 5, in which its signatories agreed that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all’. The NATO nations began immediately to study ways of countering Soviet military aggression and of (in the words of Article 3) laying the foundations for ‘cooperation in military preparedness’. Thus by 1948–9, in the minds of all Western military commanders, the Wehrmacht had been replaced as the principal military aggressor by Stalin’s forces, and Western fear throughout the Cold War era was of a sudden surprise attack, of the kind achieved by the Germans, albeit with a smaller force, in December 1944. Against this backdrop, interest in the Battle of the Bulge was heightened not only in terms of US Army history for its own sake, but for the potential lessons it offered for fighting World War Three.
Doctrine for offensive activity in any potential NATO–Warsaw Pact encounter emphasised, as had been learned in the Battle of the Bulge, vast numbers of tanks and mechanised infantry, employed under conditions of surprise, shock and moving at high speed, advancing as far as possible before a reaction was triggered. From the late 1940s, strategists of both sides focused on the terrain of the Fulda Gap, an area between the East German border and Frankfurt am Main that was the most obvious route for any Soviet tank attack on West Germany from Soviet-occupied Europe. Attacking forces instinctively search for geological ‘gaps’ which lead to objectives such as river lines, good manoeuvre terrain, cities or ports. It is no coincidence that Napoleon withdrew along the Fulda Gap after the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, and US XII Corps advanced eastwards through it in March–April 1945.
The region around the village of Fulda is very similar to the Ardennes, and characterised by deeply scoured glacial valleys, separated by steep-sided hills, surmounted by forests. The valleys often have a stream or river running through them, and frequently a road as well. Where valleys meet, roads intersect, and there is normally a village or town; generally the terrain consists of impassable hillsides, wooded hilltops (often with fire breaks through them), narrow valleys with frequent bridges and river crossings. Off-road the ‘going’ for armour is almost impossible. As a consequence, the US and West German forces in the area envisaged a defence by holding road junctions and towns, stationing guns and armour on the hilltops.
Soviet doctrine foresaw combined arms assaults, the frequent use of chemical weapons against built-up areas, and attempts to bypass NATO roadblocks wherever possible. The concept of a major tank battle in the vicinity of the Fulda Gap was a predominant element of NATO war planning throughout the Cold War, and weapons (such as Apache attack helicopters and A-10 tank-busters) were developed specifically to counter it.
Thus, in preparing for a third world war, the template that both East and West used was the German breakthrough into the Ardennes of both 1940 and 1944 via the smaller Losheim Gap. This relatively narrow (five-mile-wide) terrain in the Ardennes did not offer perfect going for tanks, but was better than most of the surrounding ground, and closely resembled the Fulda. Throughout the Cold War, NATO drilled its troops in the Losheim Gap, in rehearsal for what might occur in the Fulda. My personal experience of this was in the mid-1980s with the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), which had been the main peacetime element of UK land forces from the end of the Second World War, where the bulk of the army was based in Germany, prepared to counter aggressive Soviet armoured attacks.
The teeth of BAOR were the three or four divisions – the numbers varied – of I British Corps, subordinated to NORTHAG (NATO’s Northern Army Group). Altogether, BAOR varied between 25,000 and 60,000 troops (which reflected British government defence spending rather than the nature of the threat), commanded by a four-star general in Rheindahlen, which also housed the headquarters of RAF Germany. While the British Corps area of responsibility extended from the West German border near Hanover, in the event of war BAOR would become British Support Command, which would supply the fighting troops of 1 British Corps and guard the rear areas right back to the Antwerp. Then – just as in 1944 – the same port was the logistics centre for the British.
In these years NATO was regularly tested by vast exercises, part of a series called REFORGER (REturn of FORces to GERmany), when the whole of the British (and other) corps deployed on exercise, supported by huge reinforcements arriving from the UK and US. I took part in two of these, Crusader in 1980 and Lionheart in 1984, and during the latter put my humble platoon headquarters in a shallow depression in the ground by a railway bridge. The feature turned out to be a Second World War headquarters location, along the line of the old Stavelot–Malmedy railway line, which my platoon realised when we dug to expand our position, unearthing all manner of cartridges, radio batteries, ammunition boxes and other GI debris. I had unwittingly made the same choice for a command post as my unknown predecessor in 1944, and his unit had left behind the archaeological evidence to prove it. Perhaps supporting my own belief that the Russians might one day attack was the fact that we discovered only shrapnel, empty cartridges, mangled mess tins and incoming bullet heads under the pine needles, suggesting that the position had seen combat action.
West Germany would not join NATO until 1955, but former German officers were already cooperating with official US Army official historians in piecing together their recollections. Their observations were vital to early NATO doctrine, for they had successfully engaged the Soviet army in tactical battles on the Eastern Front, and had also fought over terrain that might feature in any future war with Russia.
*
The first voice in print about the Ardennes belonged to a Texan veteran of the First World War who had pursued a career as a reporter with the Detroit News in the interwar years. By 1941, aged forty-one, Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall had been commissioned as a major and was assigned to the US Army Historical Section. Known as ‘Slam’ (after his initials) to his friends, Marshall started after-action interviews with combat veterans first in the Pacific, and subsequently Europe, becoming chief historian of the European Theater of Operations. He came to know many of the best-known Allied commanders, including Patton and Bradley, conducted hundreds of interviews of all ranks, and was an early proponent of oral history techniques. In particular, Slam favoured group interviews, where he would gather surviving members of a front-line unit and debrief them collectively. Rising eventually to brigadier-general, his writings carried great weight and sometimes caused controversy within the US Army establishment.
With Marshall’s Bastogne: The First Eight Days, published in 1946, the floodgates opened to a great wave of literature on the harsh winter campaign, which continues to this day. Although dealing with only the early days of the Bulge and the activities of the 101st Airborne Division, Bastogne offered immediate impressions of soldiers who had fought in these encounters just a year earlier. Slam’s message was how decisive leadership and incidents of individual heroism overcame both the weather and the Germans.6
Other writers immediately went to work interviewing those they could, Americans and Germans, and it helped that most early authors were veterans of the Bulge campaign itself. Aware that as many as 600,000 Americans had fought in the battle, with the commercial opportunities that offered, the next was Robert E. Merriam, whom we first met motoring along the Skyline Drive in October 1944. He had joined the US Army as a private and after Infantry Officers Candidate School became a second lieutenant in 1943, aged twenty-five. In late 1944, shortly after he was sent to the European Theatre, Captain Merriam found himself attached to a Historical Service Team at 7th Armored Division during the Battle of the Bulge.
Merriam remained in Europe after the end of the war as an official US Army Historian, interviewing hundreds of participants and planners of the battle for the Ardennes. As no official public history of the Ardennes campaign was planned for some while (in fact it would be twenty years), on his release from the military Merriam used the interviews he had made, together with his own combat experience to write Dark December, published in 1947. Written so close to the events, Merriam’s account was surprisingly objective, because he had interviewed many German commanders as well as Americans, avoiding the one-sided nature of many contemporary accounts. Praised by Eisenhower, Merriam’s book sold extremely well and he became much sought after as a Bulge expert and book reviewer. Importantly, he concluded that Allied intelligence had failed catastrophically – there was no plan to lure the Germans into attacking, with Middleton’s Corps as bait – and that Montgomery’s generalship was sound: a view that many Americans still find unpalatable today.7
We have also met Captain Charles B. MacDonald, five years younger than Merriam, who fought the battle with US 2nd Division and published his combat memoirs, Company Commander, in the same year of 1947. These three, Marshall, Merriam and MacDonald – all witnesses of the battle – became the mainstay of initial interpretations of the campaign. All saw the Bulge as a reaffirmation of American military greatness. Despite the intelligence failure and early setbacks, within days US troops had recovered from the shock of the attack very quickly, formulated a strategy and counter-attacked with determination and skill.
Many GIs, who were relatively green, had taken on some of Nazi Germany’s best and won, something the French and Belgians in 1940 had failed to achieve over the same terrain against the same enemy. As such, argued Slam, Merriam and MacDonald, the events in the Ardennes were an affirmation of George C. Marshall’s vision and training, and a triumph of American manhood. Despite the dominance of Allied air power, not present in 1940, and lack of fuel – which might lessen, but not degrade America’s enhanced military reputation – this is an interpretation which has endured over time and remains prevalent today.
Merriam saw events unfold at the higher echelons. MacDonald’s brilliant combat memoir covered three major phases of the American effort in north-west Europe at unit level: stalemate along the Siegfried Line, the Battle of the Bulge, and the final drive into Germany. Although Company Commander covered only the initial phases of the Bulge, it remains in print because of the author’s remarkably honest self-analysis of his evolution as a combat leader, for which he would win a Silver Star and Purple Heart.
In 1945 MacDonald joined the staff of the US Army Center of Military History, serving as chief of the European section, writing several official histories on the war in Europe. He came to be seen very much as the official US voice on the Ardennes offensive, in retirement writing a further volume of personal Bulge memoirs, the much-lauded A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge.8 By contrast Merriam, who had been a US Army Historian, pursued a career post-war as a public official, running as the Republican nominee for Mayor of Chicago in 1955, and serving as deputy assistant to President Eisenhower from 1958 to 1961.9
The next major narrative appeared in 1959, fifteen years after the fighting, when John W. Toland, a professional writer who had not fought in the Ardennes, published Battle: The Story of the Bulge, the first account by a non-official historian. His approach was very different from the wide perspective of Merriam or professional depth of Marshall and MacDonald. Battle could have been a literary disaster, but Toland did a great job of making sense of the confusing and chaotic manoeuvres in the winter forests by focusing on personal stories of ordinary soldiers. Toland’s journalistic, anecdotal writing style told the campaign story through the eyes of many eyewitnesses: this was a good approach and acknowledged that the war years were long passed, that some of his readership had no military experience, and many were ‘tactically illiterate’. With Toland, combat history was no longer ‘owned’ by generals and professional officers, but by all ranks, who once had been soldiers and were again civilians.
Unlike Toland, the trio of Marshall, Merriam and MacDonald had worked as official historians. In response to a presidential directive in August 1943 the US Army had established a Historical Branch which deployed Information and Historical Service Teams, to which Merriam and Forrest C. Pogue belonged, to collect documents, interviews and impressions direct from the combat zone. (This was a task similar to the one I performed for NATO and the UK in Bosnia and Iraq.)
Another prominent historian in the branch was Major Kenneth W. Hechler who was attached to the US 9th Armored Division in 1945 when its units captured the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen.10 In September 1945 he conducted the first Historical Branch interview with Jochen Peiper and the following year interviewed many of the defendants prior to the Nuremberg Trials, including Hermann Göring. Approaching his hundredth birthday as I write, Ken Hechler was a Truman aide and went on to serve as a Congressman from 1959 to 1977 but maintained a writing career periodically publishing books and articles connected with the Bulge and Remagen.
The collection of information and narrative writing of unit operations would, in time, become the American Forces in Action Series, of which the US Army had published fourteen studies by 1947, of which Marshall’s Bastogne was one.11 A second, longer task was to write a comprehensive history of the war. This evolved as the U.S. Army in World War II Series, and was produced by a separate Historical Division, established in November 1945, which MacDonald joined.
Redesignated later as the Office of the Chief of Military History (OCMH), its authors received open access to all documents and were instructed to present triumphs and failures in a fair and unbiased way. Written at some chronological distance from the events, these histories were generally praised as comprehensive and analytical. Pogue’s masterful portrait of Ike’s military leadership, The Supreme Command, was one OCMH volume which appeared in 1954. Hugh M. Cole, who had been a historian with Patton’s Third Army at the time of the Bulge, and was a professional colleague of Marshall and MacDonald, was the eventual author of the OCMH volume, The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge, published in 1965.
Cole’s official US history was published in 1965, but far more influential was a movie released in the same year, director Ken Annakin’s Battle of the Bulge. It brought the campaign to an audience too young to remember the war. This was not the first film dealing with the Bulge, and has been succeeded by several others, but remains the most ambitious and memorable.12 William A. Wellman (himself a First World War veteran) had earlier directed the black and white movie Battleground, released in 1949, which focused on a squad of 101st Airborne Division in the woods around Bastogne. In complete contrast to the broad perspective of Battle of the Bulge, the Wellman movie dwelt on the psychology and morale of a very small group of soldiers, with very little action footage or heroics.
Wellman’s film was based on a diary kept by the screenwriter Robert Pirosh, formerly a master sergeant, who had won a Bronze Star when serving with the 320th Infantry Regiment (Thirty-Fifth Division) in the Ardennes, and was anxious to preserve accuracy. Regarded as ‘the best of the war movies made during the immediate post-war period’, Battleground received five Academy Award nominations, winning two, including one for Pirosh.13 Despite its age, it still holds up extremely well and captures the atmosphere of fear and isolation in the foggy and sub-zero conditions of 1944. Released at the height of the Cold War, it contained an uncompromising message about the contemporary Russian menace; when an army chaplain was asked if the war was really necessary, the character responds, ‘We must never let any kind of force dedicated to a super race or a super idea or a super anything get strong enough to impose itself on a free world.’14
On the other hand, Battle of the Bulge, which premiered on 16 December 1965 (the twenty-first anniversary of the battle), suffered from being shot in the bright sunlight of 1960s Spain, which hardly resembled the wintry, freezing forests of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. The reason for this was that President Franco’s Spanish army offered a battalion of fully equipped soldiers plus many wartime-era tanks and vehicles, mostly US surplus, for a knock-down fee. Another problem was that out of a rich cast of real personalities, Annakin chose to keep all his characters fictional: not a single one depicted an actual historical figure, and none were associated with any real units. This is curious, given that the British-born Annakin had earlier directed a very successful D-Day movie, The Longest Day, and his senior military adviser, General Meinrad von Lauchert, was the commander of 2nd Panzer Division during the real Battle of the Bulge.
Several of the film’s themes reflected reality: the US false sense of security before the battle, Germans disguised as American troops, the Wehrmacht’s shortage of fuel and the ruthless march of a panzer column (led by the fictional Colonel Hessler, played by Robert Shaw), inspired obviously by Jochen Peiper and his Kampfgruppe. Although 1960s Spain was still awash with Second World War-era German armoured vehicles, there was no effort to use armour authentic to the period. Purists have noted the irony of the film using US-produced M-47 ‘Patton’ tanks to depict Tiger IIs.
The film therefore implied that every German tank was a King Tiger, whereas we know very few were actually used compared with other models (and those deployed were notorious for mechanical breakdowns). It is perhaps significant that neither of its two screenwriters, Philip Yordan and Milton Sperling, had seen any military service but were Hollywood professionals. Though it remains a television staple, with hindsight the movie represented a low point in post-Second World War cinematography: ‘the worst of the large-scale war epics’ remains the critics’ collective view.15 The Saturday Review accused the screenwriters of ‘going out of their way to avoid historical fact’, and Eisenhower himself felt the historical inaccuracies were such that he emerged from retirement to denounce the film.16
Despite its shortcomings, the most important interpretation of Annakin’s movie was that it reaffirmed in US minds that the Battle of the Bulge was a purely American struggle, representative of that mighty continent’s involvement in the European Theatre. That thirty-two US divisions fought in the Ardennes, where the daily battle strength of US Army units averaged twenty-six divisions and 610,000 men, proves that the Battle of the Bulge was a bigger commitment for the US Army than Normandy, where nineteen divisions fought, and far larger than the Pacific.17Altogether, the US Army Ground Forces activated ninety-one divisions during the Second World War: of which all but three entered combat. The vast majority of these deployed to Europe (sixty-one divisions), as opposed to the remainder, which deployed to the Pacific, to which should be added six US Marine divisions.18
Far more important in the Ardennes were the endless non-divisional units, independent tank destroyer, artillery, tank and anti-aircraft battalions, who played their role alongside the badged divisional units, swelling US numbers and firepower greatly. The legacy of these statistics, the early authors such as Marshall, Merriam, Hechler, Pogue and MacDonald, and Annakin’s Battle of the Bulge movie, was that the Ardennes has since become American shorthand for the whole ground campaign in Europe. The Bulge represented the US achievement in the Second World War in a way no other single battle ever could.
Ike himself had already returned to the Bulge battlefields with a camera crew to star in one of the first made-for-television documentaries, a grainy, black and white, twenty-six-part series made by ABC-TV and released in 1949. It had the same title as his memoirs, Crusade in Europe, published the year before, and proved such a hit on the small screen that other networks imitated the successful formula.19 Ike narrated personally from key locations that had dominated the fighting in North- West Europe, including the Ardennes, then little changed from the dramatic events of the previous war-torn decade.
Four years after Ken Annakin’s movie, the next significant contribution to understanding the Bulge was John Eisenhower’s The Bitter Woods, which appeared in 1969.20 Perhaps motivated by his father’s stinging criticism of the earlier film, The Bitter Woodswas outstandingly well researched, incorporating many fresh interviews with participants, of high and low rank. Whereas the earlier writers – Marshall, Merriam and MacDonald – had only limited access to German commanders, who were often still captive and cautious in their responses because of potential war crimes trials, John Eisenhower’s status brought him access to almost anyone he wanted. West Germany had joined NATO in 1955, the same year its new army, the Bundeswehr, was established and led by former, moderate, Wehrmacht officers: the former enemy was now a staunch ally.
Thus, in the more benign atmosphere of the 1960s, he was able to meet and charm former opponents such as Manteuffel and von der Heydte as well as Allied commanders such as Bruce C. Clarke and Montgomery. The younger Eisenhower had graduated from West Point on D-Day, 6 June 1944, and was trained as a soldier; his book therefore, conceived as a study of command, offered much tactical analysis and new insights. Although his father died just before its publication, the volume was well received and has dated only because of the 1974 revelation of the Allied code-breaking effort at Bletchley Park, and our knowledge of the extensive contribution that Ultra made to Allied victory – or, in the case of the Bulge, to the Allies’ intelligence failure. Nevertheless, The Bitter Woods remains a fine case study of a major Second World War campaign.
Another good account of the campaign, by Second World War veteran Gerald Astor, appeared in 1992. However, A Blood-Dimmed Tide neatly illustrates the prevailing bias of many accounts. Astor skilfully wove his narrative around the stories of forty-seven American soldiers, but only seven Germans. The vast majority of histories of the Ardennes campaign have – perhaps understandably – concentrated on the US side of the campaign, where the more numerous GI veterans proved more accessible and easier to interview in English. Furthermore, of those few Germans who feature in the many Bulge books, Jochen Peiper and Otto Skorzeny inevitably steal the reader’s attention, leaving little voice for the 300,000 other Germans who participated, an imbalance this present book attempts to correct.
As noted above, thirty years after the events of the Bulge, the last great secret of the Second World War, the use of strategic intelligence derived from the German Enigma enciphering machine, was revealed in 1974. The medium was Group Captain Fred Winterbotham’s ground-breaking book, The Ultra Secret, which immediately challenged the intelligence picture painted by all Bulge authors writing previously. Few were aware of (or were forbidden from unveiling) the knowledge gleaned from Enigma decrypts – so valuable, they were given the special classification Top Secret Ultra, or simply Ultra. Winterbotham, who was in charge of the secure delivery of Ultra to field commanders, via the Special Liaison Units (SLUs) whom he recruited and trained, included a special chapter on Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive in his book. He demonstrated Ultra’s weakness: that when OKW and its associated headquarters relied on telephone rather than radio communications, many lives were lost because the Allies could learn nothing of the Germans’ plans and intentions.
It was easy to dismiss Ultra’s failure to anticipate the German tactical surprises in the Ardennes of May 1940 because the system, working out of Bletchley Park, now a suburb of Milton Keynes, was not then fully functioning. Not so in December 1944; Winterbotham acknowledged there had been a genuine intelligence failure, caused by an over-reliance on high-grade Ultra signals intelligence. There was no evidence that Ultra had been compromised, and Hitler’s decision to maintain radio silence during the build-up to the attack had been simply good operational security; the Germans in any case went back to the use of Enigma after the beginning of the Bulge attack. Winterbotham recalled of the German precautions, ‘prisoners of war later revealed how all the troop and tank movements up to the front had been done at night and that signals had been delivered by hand by motorcyclists’.
Charles Whiting challenged this view of Ultra in his 1994 book, Last Assault, alleging that the Bletchley Park code-breakers had identified and warned the Allied High Command in advance of the impending attack. He concluded that the result at Ike’s headquarters was not complacency, but a devious plan to let the assault come, even weakening the front to be attacked, in order to surround and destroy the last German panzer reserves. Whiting argued that with his foreknowledge of Herbstnebel, ‘Eisenhower had been prepared to sacrifice a whole US corps [Middleton’s VIII] to get the Germans to come out of their prepared defences and fight in the open’.21
A prolific author of military histories and veteran of the Second World War himself who disdained generals, always writing from a private’s point of view, Whiting built his 1994 book around the accusation that Middleton’s corps was ‘purposefully weakened’ during the weeks prior to the Ardennes assault, as Eisenhower ‘had to force [the Germans] out … into an area of his own choice – the Ardennes’. Whiting went on to assert ‘But what of the bait? What of the young soldiers of Middleton’s corps … How could Eisenhower explain away their sacrifice?’ Hinting that Ike immediately instituted a cover-up at the highest levels to conceal his strategy, Whiting concluded, ‘Now I think the time has come to reveal how thousands of young American lives were sacrificed for such a strategy – deceit in high places, sacrifices in lower ones. It is not a pretty tale.’22
Whiting’s book ignores the success of German operational security and deception, which played a big part in blinding American military vision. The concepts of deception and surprise have been advocated by every military theorist from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz and were first recorded at Troy in Homer’s Iliad. As with most military setbacks, the answer lies not with one big conspiracy but a series of avoidable institutional failures. Whiting’s book sits in the same category as the debate about precisely what the US knew in advance of Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attacks: he failed to provide any hard evidence, merely extreme conjecture.23
Many more official archives in the US and UK have been released since Whiting’s 1994 book and, despite assiduous scrutiny, none of them provide the slightest hint of a cover-up. The complicity of a huge number of senior officers would have been required to initiate and conceal such a strategy in 1944, and no memoirs have surfaced to date supporting Whiting’s view. As an official historian serving at the highest levels in the Balkans and Iraq, supported by the most advanced array of intelligence sources and devices, I have personally witnessed senior commanders and intelligence personnel misappreciate enemy intentions and capabilities in the Clausewitzian fog and friction of operations. In these pages I have tried to lay Whiting’s assertions to rest. If anything, the Ardennes proved the resilience of the US soldier, and his ability to improvise, rather than the wisdom and insight of his commanders. Such mistakes happen, and would recur, as history soon proved.
Three Americans throughout the 1980s and 1990s also helped return the Battle of the Bulge to wider US consciousness. The first was the radio journalist and interviewer Studs Terkel, who died, aged ninety-six, in 2008. His contribution to understanding the Second World War, ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II, won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Terkel was discharged after a year in the US Army Air Force because of perforated eardrums, a condition resulting from childhood operations and making him unfit for overseas duty. However, he found a way to serve by celebrating the service of others in The Good War. It was his most popular work, in which he demonstrated how the efforts of ordinary Americans at home were as important as those of the combat troops, sailors, fighter pilots or generals at the front. Among his chapters, The Good War recorded the Battle of the Bulge through the eyes of doctors and nurses as well as infantrymen, his strength – in the words of one British reviewer – was that his work was ‘completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralising’.24
A few years later, author and television presenter Tom Brokaw followed the same path with his 1999 book The Greatest Generation. As he put it, when standing on the Normandy beaches in 1994, ‘by then I had come to understand what this generation of Americans meant to history. It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.’25 Brokaw argued, as many have done but few as persuasively, that, following the careless Jazz Age of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it was the Great Depression of the later 1920s and 1930s that toughened the Americans who went to war in December 1941. (Ironically, Second Lieutenant Fitzgerald’s training officer at Fort Leavenworth in 1917 was Captain Dwight Eisenhower.)26
Their experiences of poverty, hunger and unemployment, pushed to the edge in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, made them far more resilient than the Third Reich and Japan ever expected, and so better able to overcome the adversities of war and death. Thus, this argument runs, without the necessary pain of the Depression years, the miseries of the Hürtgen and Ardennes might not have been overcome; it certainly magnifies the achievement of the GI Generation in 1941–5. Brokaw’s title has endured alongside the methods of Terkel, who was credited with transforming oral history into popular literature and a valid historical discipline, now studied and practised by universities the world over.
The third major influence was Professor Stephen E. Ambrose, founder of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. As a military historian, Ambrose’s earliest studies were on the civil war, though he became the official biographer of Eisenhower and later Nixon. However, he was most associated with his works on the Second World War, including Band of Brothers, which followed Major Dick Winters’ Company ‘E’, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of Maxwell Taylor’s 101st Airborne Division from their training in the USA and southern England (on the very doorstep of my home) through D-Day to their war in the Ardennes and beyond. Ambrose’s achievement with Band of Brothers was to link the very well-known story of D-Day to that of the Ardennes, the twin high-water marks of America’s European War, through a single unit that fought in both battles.
Later works included D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, leading to his appointment as adviser for Steven Spielberg’s 1998 seminal movie Saving Private Ryan.27 This in turn gave rise to the highly popular 2001 HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers, based on his earlier book, all of which helped sustain the wide interest in the Second World War brought about by the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day and the Bulge.28 The executive producers, Spielberg and Tom Hanks (respectively director and star of Saving Private Ryan), set the emphasis firmly on the winter of 1944–5; whereas two of the ten episodes are set in Normandy, four portray aspects of the Bulge, usually dwelling on the freezing woods around Bastogne.29
It was after his first book on the Normandy campaign, Pegasus Bridge, that I first met Ambrose, who demonstrated his deft, forensic touch in bringing together Major John Howard, whose glider troops seized the bridge of the title in the dying minutes of 5 June 1944, Oberst Hans von Luck, senior surviving officer of the 21st Panzer Division, and Madame Arlette Gondrée who as a young girl had witnessed the June 1944 drama.30 Ambrose was the first to reassemble these three at the Pegasus Bridge, getting them to tell essentially the same story, but from three widely differing points of view. I owe him an enormous personal debt of gratitude, for all three became friends.
Meanwhile, in every state in the United States the flame of remembrance has been kept alight for soldiers of the campaign and their relatives at local level by the influential Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, formed in 1981 at the Arlington County Courthouse, Virginia. Their worthy aims suggest an outward-looking organisation that will stand the test of time: memory of the sacrifices involved; preservation of historical data and battle sites; fostering international peace and goodwill, as well as the promotion of friendship among the survivors and their descendants. The few full members left are those who received a battle star for the Ardennes Campaign, though their descendants now keep the numbers and interest as high as ever. The readership of their sixty-nine chapters, spread throughout the US and Belgium, eagerly await each edition of their very professional quarterly newsletter, The Bulge Bugle. Since 1982, this journal has produced an unrivalled source of veterans’ stories of inestimable value to present and future historians, such as Charles B. MacDonald’s former aide and researcher, Danny S. Parker, who has emerged as a sage on the Ardennes, with four books on different aspects of the campaign to his credit.31 I am equally grateful to them.