40

Reputations

MILITARY STUDIES OF the Bulge abound, particularly among the world’s military communities because of the events of twenty-nine years later, when Egypt and Syria jointly launched a near-fatal surprise attack on Israel, heralding the Yom Kippur War of 6–25 October 1973. The circumstances were remarkably similar. Just as the Allies were lured into a false sense of security by the anticipated celebration of Christmas, and an assumption that the German army was exhausted and demoralised by December 1944, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), its secret service counterpart, Mossad, and the CIA, were off their guard as Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, occurring that year during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, approached in 1973.

The prevalent Israeli assumption was that the Egyptian and Syrian armies (which had been so devastated a few years earlier in the Six-Day War of 1967) were inferior and ‘spent’. Yet the Arab armies had recovered, carefully rehearsed, and incorporated new technologies into their plans. Israel received many warnings beforehand, from intelligence sources, satellite imagery, the monitoring of Arab troop movements and those of their Soviet advisers; even King Hussein of Jordan flew secretly to Tel Aviv to warn Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on 25 September, all of which fell on deaf ears until the last moment. Similarly, in 1944, aerial photography, prisoner-of-war interrogations and indicators from Ultra decrypts were ignored in favour of the prevailing mindset that there would be no attack.

As in 1944, both the Syrians and Egyptians preceded their massed tank attacks with the deployment of commandos to seize key positions and disrupt the movement of reserves to the Golan and Sinai. Defending their southern frontier, the Israelis were strung along the Bar-Lev Line in thinly held outposts, in a similar fashion to Middleton’s VIII Corps holding the Ardennes. With many troops occupying fixed defences along a wide front, in both cases the defenders found that enemy attacks against a narrow sector of their lines meant that those units in positions elsewhere could initially contribute little to the decisive action: this also happened to the French in 1940. Although, in 1973 the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal with more imagination and competence than German engineers managed in 1944, it was the IDF, like the US Army in 1944, which managed to hang on, marshal their resources and ultimately prevail.

When the Israelis finally understood an attack was imminent just before war commenced, their reaction was sluggish, with precious hours wasted, and the initial counter-attacks were poorly coordinated, committed piecemeal and destroyed with heavy loss. The fog and friction of war, along with uncertainty, false or ambiguous intelligence reports, and difficult terrain, all combined to degrade Israel’s military picture before and during the first few hours of combat. Just as the Germans had concealed their intentions in 1944 using elaborate security and deception measures, the Egyptians and Syrians did likewise in 1973, blinding or confusing Israel’s array of human and mechanical sensors. They rehearsed the mobilisation of reserves and mounted exercises near the Israeli borders so many times, which created an impenetrable ‘background noise’, that the real intelligence picture for their opponents was soon distorted.

There was some important German influence in Egypt and Syria, which dated back to the war, and had its roots in the anti-British and pro-Nazi attitudes of Vichy Syria, Rashid Ali in Iraq, King Farouk of Egypt and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Post-war these states immediately became a safe haven for those fleeing justice and retribution from the Allies in Europe. Many Egyptian nationalists had been disappointed when Rommel failed to break through at Alamein in 1942 and liberate them from British rule. Later King Farouk had been ‘impressed’ by his garage mechanics recruited from Afrika Korps POWs, and ‘wondered what he might achieve with officers from elite units of the Gestapo and SS who had fought so hard against the hated British’.¹

Perhaps it is just an amazing coincidence that none other than Otto Skorzeny acted as a senior military consultant to Egypt’s first president, General Mohammed Naguib, who seized power from Farouk in 1952 with Gamal Abdel Nasser. For several years, Skorzeny recruited a staff made up of former German officers to train the Egyptian armed forces. These included at least two other senior Ardennes veterans: Generalmajor Otto-Ernst Remer, who (along with Skorzeny) played a decisive role in foiling the 20 July Plot and led to his command of the Führer-Begleit-Brigade in December 1944, and Skorzeny’s business partner, Fallschirmjäger Major Gerhard Mertens, whom we met leading his pioneer battalion at Vianden in the Bulge, and with Skorzeny and Remer held the Knight’s Cross. With Skorzeny in 1943, Mertens had liberated Mussolini, and was employed to raise and train Egypt’s elite Parachute Battalion.

The drain of ex-Wehrmacht and SS figures trickling away to Egypt and Syria was first broken as a story by the German magazine Der Spiegel in April 1952 under the headline ‘Heil Rommel’.² It noted that other senior figures mentoring the Egyptians included General der Artillerie Wilhelm Fahrmbacher, who held corps commands in the Wehrmacht and tutored the central planning staff in Cairo, Generalmajor Oskar Munzel, an ex-commander of the 2nd and 14th Panzer Divisions, Generalmajor Max von Prittwitz und Gaffron, Generalleutnant von Ravenstein, who had commanded the 21st Panzer Division under Rommel, and Luftwaffe Stuka ace Oberst Hans-Ulrich Rudel. The latter had flown 2,500 combat missions over Russia, claimed 202 Soviet tanks destroyed and emerged as the most highly decorated German serviceman of the war.

Additionally, Der Spiegel mentioned ‘hundreds of former regimental and battalion commanders, staff officers and air force officers’ as well as other SS and Gestapo officers who demonstrated their pro-Arab loyalties by their wartime anti-Jewish credentials.³For example, the sinister Sudeten German SS-Gruppenführer Alois Moser, together with his assistant, SS-Gruppenführer Friedrich Buble, were in charge of training Egyptian youth along the lines of the Hitlerjugend, while in 1972 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency revealed that SS-Standartenführer Erich Weinmann, former Gestapo chief of Prague, had long been residing in Alexandria as consultant to its police force.⁴

These ex-Nazis were true believers, not just guns for hire. Skorzeny was one of the main figures behind ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen), the organisation created to spirit away former SS members to refuges in South America and the Middle East (though at least one historian, Guy Walters, argues that ODESSA never actually existed). Remer was active in German politics, founding two neo-Nazi parties which were banned before he fled to Spain and died in exile. Mertens was active in Remer’s political organisations and Skorzeny’s arms-dealing and consultancy ventures, working with authoritarian regimes in several countries, including Persia and Chile as well as Egypt. Equally unrepentant was Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who advised right-wing governments in Argentina and Paraguay, and was later active in Remer’s Socialist Reich Party.

Their collective legacy to Egypt was both political and military; for example, among the several Palestinian refugees who received commando training from Skorzeny was Yasser Arafat. When Naguib was replaced by Nasser in 1953, Skorzeny was appointed the new Egyptian president’s chief military adviser for several years, becoming a multi-millionaire from arms deals in the process. He had formally departed by the time Egypt united with Syria, creating the United Arab Republic (1956–62), but it is impossible not to believe he and his Herbstnebel colleagues left a profound military influence behind them.⁵

Skorzeny was also very close to Franco’s Spain, holding a Spanish passport until his death in 1975, where he acted as an intermediary in Bonn’s negotiations for possible bases in Spain for the Bundeswehr, in the event of fighting an unsuccessful war with Russia for possession of West Germany. A Canadian journalist reported in 1960 that ‘aggrieved German diplomats in Madrid have complained to the Foreign Office here that Skorzeny enjoys something akin to celebrity status with the Spanish government’.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was prominent in right-wing regimes across the world, where there were genuine fears of Communist world domination. Documents recently released by the Madrid and Bonn governments outlined Skorzeny’s plans to establish a German-recruited formation, numbering up to 200,000 former soldiers, willing to fight under Spanish command, to be known as the Legion Carlos V, in the event of the then widely anticipated Third World War. These plans were made with the connivance of US and German authorities (ironically Eisenhower then being president), and their various secret services.⁶

Skorzeny also placed Rainer Kriebel, a former Afrika Korps staff officer, who had transferred to the Waffen-SS in 1944, as head of a military mission to retrain Syria’s army with ex-Luftwaffe Oberst Heinz Heigl (one-time CO of Kampfgeschwader 200, the German air force’s special operations unit), to mentor its military air service.⁷ In the late 1940s, Kriebel, Remer and Skorzeny had already had to collect their thoughts about their wartime experiences and write reports for the US Army Intelligence Service. They would have also been very familiar with some of the Arab weapons: between 1951 and 1954, Syria bought around 150 refurbished ex-Wehrmacht panzers from France, Czechoslovakia and Spain, some of which were later captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.⁸

In 1973, thousands of hand-held Rocket-Propelled Grenades (RPGs), a weapon developed from the 1944 Panzerfaust, annihilated IDF counter-attacks, where the recipients were frequently Israeli half-tracks and up-gunned Sherman tanks, acquired from the US as surplus after the Second World War, some of them conceivably veteran machines from the Ardennes campaign. To counter the threat of Allied air power in 1944, the Germans developed very effective mobile air defences based on tanks and trucks; the Arabs similarly used Soviet-designed surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries to negate some of the danger posed by the Israeli Air Force. The Soviet ZSU 23-4 used by the Egyptians (quadruple-mounted anti-defence cannon built on to a tank) was actually a direct copy of the Wirbelwind anti-aircraft panzer used in December 1944.

The Egyptians also preceded their attacks with air attacks on radar installations, airfields and command posts, but these were remarkably ineffective, as in the manner that Bodenplatte (the Luftwaffe air attack originally conceived to herald Herbstnebel) failed for the Germans. Although by 1973 the military influence in Egypt and Syria was emphatically Russian, the Soviet approach had been developed from studying and improving upon German blitzkrieg doctrine and its component equipment. Skorzeny’s chief legacy to Egypt was the surprise attack and deception template first used in 1944 in the Ardennes, and developed by Nasser’s successor, Anwar el-Sadat, when the latter became president of Egypt in 1970. This was the same Lieutenant Sadat of the Egyptian Signal Corps who in 1942 had relayed secret messages of support from his army colleagues to Rommel.⁹

The Yom Kippur War for Israel exactly reinforced the lessons learned after 1944: that bias, self-deception, overconfidence and careless considerations of enemy capabilities can lead to an unpleasant military surprise. As in 1944, faulty intelligence analysis, swayed by preconceptions, obscured the real intentions and capabilities of Israel’s opponents. Both attacks indicate that, despite cutting-edge intelligence technology, operational surprise was still – and remains – possible. The unanticipated events of September 11 2001 serve to reinforce this lesson: a devious and clever opponent is always capable of outwitting even a technologically advanced power.¹⁰

As we saw when discussing the events and consequences of the Malmedy massacre, the 1946 trial of its perpetrators, held in the former Dachau concentration camp, also thrust the Bulge into the post-war limelight. The crime had outraged the American military, and after the war the US Army sought to bring those responsible to justice. Eventually, as noted, seventy-five former Waffen-SS men were assembled and tried en masse before a military court of senior US Officers between May and July. The accused included Sepp Dietrich, Fritz Krämer, his chief of staff, Hermann Priess, of the I SS Panzer Corps and seventy-two other members of Kampfgruppe Peiper, including its commander. The verdicts ranged from forty-three, including Peiper and Hans Hennecke, sentenced to death; twenty-two (including Sepp Dietrich) to life imprisonment; Priess and one other were given twenty years; one was sentenced to fifteen years and five to ten years. Despite the overwhelming desire for justice, it started to emerge that, in their enthusiasm, investigators and prosecutors had overstepped the mark by conducting mock trials, using false death sentences, beatings and abuse to extort confessions.

When a subcommittee of the US Senate began to investigate the trial in 1949, the ambitious Senator Joseph McCarthy whose state, Wisconsin, contained a large American German population, started challenging the verdicts. Using the aggressive questioning and bullying tactics which later made him famous, even towards the survivors of the massacre, he interpreted the trial as an attempt by left-wing German Jewish intelligentsia in the US Army to attack the anti-Communist German defendants. He left the proceedings before the year was through, but many felt at the time his motivation to intervene was pure self-interest. His star waned quickly after formal censure by his colleagues in 1954.

The Malmedy massacre trial had, nevertheless, become well and truly mired in controversy, and the international situation had moved on. Although NATO had been formed originally, in the words of its first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, ‘to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down’, the Cold War had grown more intense, requiring the help of West Germany and putting pressure on the US Army to commute the death sentences to life imprisonment and shorten the prison terms. Eventually all seventy-three of the convicted were released; among the last were Dietrich, released in October 1955, and Peiper, freed in December 1956.

Less fortunate were those of both sides who died and were listed as missing in action (MIA), their combat graves never being identified. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s reports would hit the newspapers of human remains being recovered in the battlefield areas. Modern military researchers using metal detectors, ground-penetrating radar and DNA techniques have increased the rate of finds and greatly improved the probability of positive identification. This was prompted by the Bosnian wars of the 1990s and the needs of the United Nations to analyse, interpret and identify the mass graves of various ethnic factions, a grisly reality I witnessed in person, and which gave birth to the whole new science of forensic archaeology.

The efforts of local enthusiasts in the Ardennes have been supplemented by specialised investigation and recovery teams from the US Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC), whose heart-warming mission is ‘never to leave a fallen comrade behind’. Author Bill Warnock has written movingly in The Dead of Winter: How Battlefield Investigators, WWII Veterans, and Forensic Scientists Solved the Mystery of the Bulge’s Lost Soldiers, of the meticulous research involved in the recovery and identification of twelve missing GIs in the Ardennes over recent years, often helped by my colleague William C. C. Cavanagh, while others have managed similar feats for the young Volksgrenadiers and Fallschirmjäger who lie in their lonely graves.¹¹ From the amount of battlefield detritus I have stumbled on over the years, it is evident there are many more soldiers yet to be ‘brought home’.

And what of their commanders? Courtney H. Hodges, who succeeded Bradley at the US First Army, witnessed a unique double, being present at the surrenders of both Germany at SHAEF headquarters in Reims and the Japanese Empire in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945; he retired as commander of First Army in 1949. George Patton of the Third became the military governor of Bavaria. Frequently careless with the media and inclined to controversy, on 28 September Ike felt obliged to relieve him of his governorship and on 7 October of his beloved Third Army. A token was offered to him in the form of the tiny US Fifteenth Army, then a small headquarters staff tasked to compile a history of the war in Europe. But peacetime was not for Patton and he had decided to leave this last position and not return to Europe after his Christmas 1945 leave, before fate intervened in the form of a traffic accident on 8 December.

This left him with a broken neck and a spinal cord injury, paralysing him from the neck down. He died in his sleep of a heart attack on 21 December 1945. There was no evidence of foul play (as many conspiracy theorists have suggested) and although he did not die as he might have wished, in combat, he lies buried at the head of his men in the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg. Simpson of the Ninth undertook a mission to China in July 1945 and subsequently commanded the US Second Army in Tennessee. Very much the unsung hero in the USA, he retired in November 1946. Troy Middleton led his superb VIII Corps through to the end, accumulating 480 days of combat from 1943 to 1945, more than any other American general officer. He retired a second time in 1945, returning to take up a series of distinguished positions at Louisiana State University.

A staggering number of America’s post-war leaders had served in the Ardennes, in many cases it being their performance on that winter battlefield that pushed them to the very top: they would influence their armed forces for decades to come. The Bulge experience not only dominated the Cold War in Europe but stretched as far forward as Korea and Vietnam, where during 1964–8 General William Westmoreland harked back to the days when he had served as chief of staff of the 9th Infantry Division on the northern shoulder of the Bulge. His deputy in that theatre was the tank battalion commander who had broken into Bastogne, Creighton Adams, who would serve as Army Chief of Staff from 1972 before cancer killed him two years later. Another Korean War general was Oscar Koch, Patton’s G-2, who became commander of the 25th Infantry Division, retiring from military service in 1954.¹²

Eisenhower succeeded George C. Marshall as Army Chief of Staff at the war’s end to be followed in 1948 by Omar Bradley. His next three successors were all Bulge veterans: J. Lawton Collins, Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor. Eisenhower went on to head Columbia University briefly before returning to Europe as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), from 1950 until 1952, when he was followed by Matthew Ridgway. Although President Truman had approached Ike to run as his successor, in the event Ike ran as a Republican, marking the Grand Old Party’s first incumbent of the Oval Office in twenty years, serving for two terms as the thirty-fourth President.

After a year as Army Chief of Staff in August 1949, Bradley was appointed as the United States’ first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Maxwell Taylor would later serve in the same office between 1962 and 1964. Eisenhower was briefly the first Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army Europe (USAEUR); among his successors in that post was Clarence R. Huebner, who had commanded the US 1st Infantry Division on Omaha Beach and taken over V Corps when his predecessor left to command the Fifteenth Army. Manton Eddy, one of Patton’s corps commanders, William M. Hoge, who made his name at St Vith, and Anthony McAuliffe, author of the ‘Nuts!’ note at Bastogne and eventually Bruce C. Clarke all followed Huebner, the latter from 1960 to 1962. The flamboyant Leland S. ‘Hollywood’ Hobbs, commander of the 30th Division, retired as Deputy Commander of the US First Army in 1953. Harry Kinnard, who suggested the ‘Nuts!’ response to McAuliffe, later led the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in Vietnam. His 1965 battle in the Ia Drang valley was recounted in the 1992 book We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young.

James Gavin played a central role desegregating the US Army, beginning with the incorporation of the all-black 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion into his 82nd Airborne Division. Retiring as a lieutenant-general, he was called out of retirement in 1961 to serve as a highly successful US Ambassador to France. After the war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) became the CIA, whose second director had formerly commanded the US Ninth Air Force, the tactical formation based in England and France, which supported the Allied armies over the Ardennes – Hoyt S. Vandenberg; he was followed later by Walter Bedell Smith, from 1950 to 1953. One of his departmental chiefs, the Head of Covert Operations, was Edwin L. Sibert, Bradley’s former G-2 at Twelfth Army Group. On 30 March 1945 the 3rd Armored Division’s popular commander, Maurice Rose, had the unfortunate distinction of becoming the highest ranking American killed by enemy fire in the European Theatre during the war, caught in a German tank ambush near the city of Paderborn. Most felt he would have gone to much higher office after the war.

‘Dutch’ Cota’s reputation had already been tainted by the Hürtgen Forest. Though not his fault, the battering his division received in the Ardennes didn’t help. He was unfortunate that, after such a fine performance on Omaha Beach, he twice ended up in the lion’s jaws, and left the US Army in 1946. One of his subordinates, James Earl Rudder, on the other hand, flourished. From a lieutenant in the National Guard before the war, Rudder rose eventually to become a major-general and president of his alma mater, Texas A & M University. In many ways his achievements there during the 1960s, of turning an ultra-conservative, all-white male military school of 7,500 students into a 14,000-strong, co-educational, multi-ethnic college, where membership of the Corps of Cadets was voluntary, were as brave as taking on the Germans twenty years earlier.

In the United Kingdom, Field Marshal Montgomery stepped into Brooke’s shoes as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in June 1946, which was universally regarded as a disastrous move, as he antagonised both his superiors and subordinates. Monty may have been a robust commander in war but proved no peacetime warrior, insulting all and sundry – particularly his American contemporaries – through ill-judged post-war lectures and memoirs. With his elevation, the career prospects of any officers, however talented, who had served at SHAEF, were limited on account of Monty’s prejudices against that organisation. Major-General Strong retired, eventually becoming the first Director of the Joint Intelligence Bureau and latterly first Director-General of Intelligence at the UK Ministry of Defence. His 1968 memoirs, Intelligence at the Top, did their best to whitewash SHAEF’s failure to predict the Ardennes. Monty’s own G-2, Edgar ‘Bill’ Williams, returned to academic life, being elected a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1945; by then he had received several decorations and would be knighted in 1973.

The influence of the Ardennes lingered in Germany too. Many senior commanders perished in 1945, were hanged at Nuremberg, like Jodl and Keitel, or died of natural causes – Rundstedt in 1953, Brandenberger in 1955 and Dietrich in 1966 – Hasso von Manteuffel was released from Allied captivity in 1947, served in the Bundestag from 1953 to 1957 and advised on the redevelopment of the Bundeswehr. Fritz Bayerlein, too, was released from detention in 1947 and, like Manteuffel and Brandenberger, took part in the US Army Historical Division’s Foreign Military Studies Program.

This amounted to nearly 2,500 papers, devoid of politics and purely military in scope, written from 1945 to 1959 by former senior officers, which covered most aspects of the Reich’s war effort. They were influential because at the operational level they concentrated on German successes, in logistics, the handling of armour, command and control, security, deception and surprise. They helped to rebuild German military self-confidence – vital to NATO – and forge the reputation of the new Bundeswehr.

Some studies – in the era of the Cold War – examined the methodology of defeating the Soviets in battle, but many focused on Germany’s last big campaign in the west – the Battle of the Bulge. The program, devised with considerable forethought, included the invaluable ‘ETHINT’ (European Theater Historical Interrogations) series of interviews with senior commanders, conducted immediately after the war. It also covered narrative histories of units on the Western Front and campaign analyses, written by committees of former officers. Just about every senior Herbstnebel commander alive after the war, and in western custody, took part. As many were conducted within a year of the events of the Bulge, they provide a particularly rich seam of primary source material, which I and countless others have found profitable to mine.

Friedrich von der Heydte became head of the Institute for Military Law at the University of Würzburg, a Brigadier-General in the Bundeswehr Reserves, and an influential figure in post-war Catholic circles. Heinz Guderian’s son, Heinz-Günther, stayed with the Greyhound (Windhund) Panzer Division until the war’s end. Joining the Bundeswehr at its creation, he rose to become Inspector-General of Panzer Troops, fittingly the same post his father had held in the Wehrmacht, retiring in 1974. Guderian’s former commander of the Greyhounds, Gerhard, Graf von Schwerin, was appointed as chief adviser on military issues and security policy to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The odious Wilhelm Mohnke, whose wartime career was characterised by his proximity to executions and massacres, was captured in Berlin and handed over to the NKVD and, curiously, released in 1955. Despite several attempts in Britain and Germany to indict him for war crimes, he constantly denied any complicity and, rather unjustly, died of natural causes in August 2001.

Perhaps the most curious story of all was that of Jochen Peiper, who in 1972 built himself a retirement home near Traves in eastern France. Leading a quiet and discreet life, translating books and writing articles about the war and motor sport, he made no attempt to conceal his identity. In 1974 he was identified by a former Communist partisan and by 1976 the left-wing newspaper L’Humanité had drawn attention to his whereabouts. Sending his family away to safety, the former Kampfgruppe commander was last seen alive the night before Bastille Day in 1976. The following day, Gendarmes were called to the charred remains of his house, gutted by fire, which contained the badly burned body of the late SS-Obersturmbannführer, a bullet in his chest and still clutching a rifle and pistol. The brazen manner of his execution caused Communist Party offices to be attacked throughout France, but, as his biographer pointed out, Peiper could have begun a new life anywhere in the world, simply by buying a plane ticket.¹³ Perhaps he knew his own history compelled him to stay in Europe: Malmedy had finally caught up with him.

At the other end of the command chain, the Second World War ended for most GIs in some small town in Germany. Captain B. MacDonald was actually over the border in Czechoslovakia, at Radčice, near Pilsen. He attended a gathering put on by the village population to celebrate the war’s end. At the close, those present prepared to sing their national anthem, the first time they had been permitted to perform it in public for seven years. It was a poignant moment. ‘The people rose as one, and every boy, girl, man and woman joined in the singing with clear, lusty voices that made goose-pimples rise on my arms. Some of the older people cried, and it was all I could do to keep the tears from my eyes.’ Afterwards MacDonald walked on to the terrace and saw ‘light streaming from the windows and Army vehicles driving on the highway with their headlights on … I suddenly realised that I could light a cigarette once again in the open without fear of drawing enemy fire, and I did. It was a simple thing, but it gave me a wonderful feeling that life was worth living again.’¹⁴