The Ardennes, 1944-1945

Hitler's Winter Offensive

Christer Bergström

• Publisher: Casemate
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612003153
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Zweiter Weltkrieg

A comprehensive, photo-filled account of the six-week-long Battle of the Bulge, when panzers slipped through the forest and took the Allies by surprise. In December 1944, just as World War II appeared to be winding down, Hitler shocked the world with a powerful German counteroffensive that cracked the center of the American front. The attack came through the Ardennes, the hilly and forested area in eastern Belgium and Luxembourg that the Allies had considered a "quiet" sector. Instead, for the second time in the war, the Germans used it as a stealthy avenue of approach for their panzers. Much of US First Army was overrun, and thousands of prisoners were taken as the Germans forged a fifty-mile "bulge" into the Allied front. But in one small town, Bastogne, American paratroopers, together with remnants of tank units, offered dogged resistance. Meanwhile, the rest of Eisenhower's "broad front" strategy came to a halt as Patton, from the south, and Hodges, from the north, converged on the enemy incursion. Yet it would take an epic, six-week-long winter battle, the bloodiest in the history of the US Army, before the Germans were finally pushed back. Christer Bergström has interviewed veterans, gone through huge amounts of archive material, and performed on-the-spot research in the area. The result is a large amount of previously unpublished material and new findings, including reevaluations of tank and personnel casualties and the most accurate picture yet of what really transpired from the perspectives of both sides. With nearly four hundred photos, numerous maps, and thirty-two superb color profiles of combat vehicles and aircraft, it provides perhaps the most comprehensive look at the battle yet published.

CHAPTER 1

THE ROAD TO THE ARDENNES OFFENSIVE: TOWARDS THE ABYSS

"If we continue to advance at the same pace as that of recent weeks we should be in Berlin on 28 September." General John Kennedy, Assistant Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London, 6 September 1944.¹

The rain was pouring down as the Soviet assault companies left their positions and hurried forward between the German positions. Supported by tracked tank destroyers they hurled themselves over the German enemy. One German position after another was fought down.

It was late afternoon on Thursday 22 June 1944. Operation ’Bagration,’ the Red Army’s greatest offensive ever—the greatest Allied offensive during World War II—had just commenced, and the Germans were completely unaware of this! The fighting continued throughout the night, when Soviet units specialized in night fighting were deployed. Meanwhile, around one thousand Soviet aircraft came buzzing in over the German lines. Since Belorussian partisans already had completed the task of knocking out much of the German rail lines, the aircrews could focus on German artillery positions and strongpoints in the defense.² However, to the headquarters of German Army Group Center, Heeresgruppe Mitte—one of the most powerful army groups of the entire German Army, the one which had withstood attacks of the Red Army longer than any other force—it appeared to be nothing but an expansion of the deep armed reconnaissance thrusts that had been carried out by the Red Army during the recent months. According to the textbook, a major attack was initiated by artillery and large tank concentrations, but here was only a rather limited artillery fire, mainly infantry with self-propelled guns, and only quite few medium tanks.

At five in the morning on 23 June, General Ivan Bagramyan, the commander of Soviet 1st Baltic Front, ordered his artillery to open fire. But what followed was not a general, massive fire all along the line, but rather a shelling of selected points where infantry thrusts had been halted in front of German points of resistance. Not even when the Soviets despatched more powerful armored units—including two regiments equipped with the new heavy Josef Stalin 2 tanks—into the gaps that the infantry had opened in the German lines, did the German High Command fully understand what was actually developing.

North and south of the Belorussian city of Vitebsk, less than one hundred miles southeast of the Latvian border, German 3. Panzerarmee was locked into a desperate battle. Wherever the Germans managed to halt their opponent, Soviet ground-attack aircraft or bombers dropped out of the clouds to wipe out the German positions. During the course of 23 June, Soviet 1st and 3rd Air armies carried out nearly seventeen hundred individual combat sorties in the Vitebsk section alone. The German Air Force remained almost invisible—the local Luftwaffe commander still was of the opinion that this was nothing but a Soviet diversion attack.’³

The Soviet preparations for the offensive had been so skillfully masked that the Germans knew nothing of the huge concentration of forces that had been made against Army Group Center: 1.67 million men with 4,000 tanks and assault guns, plus 24,000 artillery pieces and mortars.

Only on the third day of the Soviet offensive, 24 June, did it dawn on the German High Command that the Red Army in fact had launched a major attack aiming at nothing less than the destruction of Heeresgruppe Mitte.⁴ But by then it was too late. The armored forces of the 1st Baltic and 3rd Belorussian fronts already had achieved deep incursions. At Vitebsk, 38,000 men from German 3. Panzerarmee were surrounded. Farther to the south, at Bobruysk, a major part of German 9. Armee was enveloped.

From the initial hour, the Soviet Air Force controlled the skies, and air attacks played a crucial role to the rapid collapse of Heeresgruppe Mitte. On 2 July, the Red Army’s pincers closed around 105,000 troops of German 4. Armee at the Belorussian capital Minsk. A couple of days later, the 4. Armee’s last resistance had been completely broken. Sixty thousand men marched into Soviet captivity. At this stage, Heeresgruppe Mitte had lost 350,000 of the 490,000 soldiers which had stood at its disposal only a fortnight earlier. During the following weeks, another 100,000 men would be added to the German army group’s loss list.

Following the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Germans had been pushed back bit by bit by the Red Army, but with the exception of the breakdown on the Crimean Peninsula in the spring of 1944, this had taken place with mainly coherent German front lines. Until Operation ’Bagration,’ the hope had remained that somewhere it would be possible to ’lock’ the Red Army along powerful defensive lines on the Eastern front. The collapse of Heeresgruppe Mitte during the first days of July 1944 gave the German High Command the painful realization that the war against the Soviet Union inevitably was lost.

On 13 July, the Soviet offensive expanded as Marshal Ivan Konyev’s 1st Ukrainian Front attacked German Heeresgruppe Nordukraine in northwestern Ukraine. Here too, the Soviet air supremacy played a decisive role to the outcome of the ground battle. Due to the air support, Konyev’s troops succeeded in surrounding and annihilating a large German force at Brody. By 29 June, the 1st Ukrainian Front had inflicted 198,000 casualties on Heeresgruppe Nordukraine, against its own losses of 37,400 men. While Konyev’s forces pushed the Germans out of the Ukraine and severed the connection between Heeresgruppe Nordukraine and Heeresgruppe Mitte, the battered remnants of the latter German army group fled more or less in panic towards the west. By the end of July, the Red Army had reached the Gulf of Riga, thus cutting off yet another German army group—Heeresgruppe Nord—in Estonia and northern Latvia, while Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front was closing in on Warsaw.

German paratroopers in Normandy in the summer of 1944. At this time, Germany was under heavy pressure on all fronts and it was rather obvious that the war was lost, which also was reflected in the morale of the troops on both the Eastern and the Western fronts. However, this insight on the German side would not last throughout the year. (BArch, Bild 101I-586-2225-11A/Slickers)

Only a rapid deployment of strong German reinforcements—including some that had been brought from Normandy, where the Germans and the Western Allies were locked into positional warfare following the landings on 6 June—could halt the Red Army, just to the east of Warsaw. The connection with Heeresgruppe Nord barely could be reestablished.

These Soviet breakthroughs were the climax of the serious crisis which the Germans had been hurled into after the first days after the Allied invasion of Normandy in northwestern France as it stood clear that the British-American bridgehead could not be eliminated. The heavy artillery of the Allied warships which controlled the area around the landing beaches, the massive Allied air superiority—against around 10,000 Allied fighters and bombers stood an average of slightly more than one thousand German aircraft on the Western Front—as well as the increasing numerical superiority of the Allied ground forces, made it clear beyond doubt that it merely was a question of time before the Germans would have lost their control over France. Throughout July 1944, the German commanders expected a major Allied breakthrough any day.⁵ By the third week of July, the relation of forces at Normandy was about the same as at Operation ’Bagration’—around 1.5 million Allied troops faced 380,000 men on the German side.⁶

On 20 July 1944, a group of conspirators struck against Hitler in a final desperate attempt to save a hopeless situation. The result is well-known—the plot failed, and the powerful grip which the Nazi dictator already held on the German Armed Forces was even further strengthened.

On 24 July, the Americans despatched 350 heavy bombers against the German positions at the southwestern corner of the Allied bridgehead in Normandy, where the cornerstone of the German defense consisted of the armored division Panzer Lehr under Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein. This bombing cost Panzer Lehr a loss of 350 men and ten armored vehicles, but this was not more than the Germans could take. Bayerlein, who assumed that this was the prelude to yet another American attempt to break through, despatched his reserves. These had barely occupied their forward positions when the Americans on the following day unleashed a new massive aerial assault. This began at 0938 hrs, when fighter-bombers from eight fighter groups from U.S. 9th Air Force struck the German positions along a four-mile wide front. This continued for nineteen minutes, and then no less than fifteen hundred heavy bombers of U.S. 8th Air Force lumbered in and dropped three thousand tons of bombs over the same area. These aircraft had barely disappeared before another seven fighter groups of the 9th Air Force appeared and started to bomb and machine gun the totally devastated German positions. This was in turn followed by a fifty-minute bombardment by five hundred and eighty medium bombers.

These three hours of air attacks had, in the words of Bayerlein, a totally ’exterminating morale effect on the troops,’ who in several cases ’surrendered, deserted to the enemy or escaped to the rear, as far as they survived the bombing.’⁷ Others ’got crazy or paralyzed and were unable to carry out anything.’⁸ After the end of the war Bayerlein admitted that ’for me, who during this war was in every theater committed at the points of the main efforts, this was the worst I ever saw.’⁹

U.S. soldiers, supported by M10 tank destroyers, advance in the vicinity of Avranches in France in August 1944. (The Paul Warp Collection)

With Panzer Lehr ’totally exterminated’ and other German units—like the 116. Panzer-Division—prevented by Allied fighter-bombers from intervening in the battle, the American ground forces finally managed to achieve the operational breakthrough which they had sought for two months. On 30-31 July, the German positions at Avranches crumbled.

Next day, the American units in Normandy were lifted out of the Allied 21 Army Group, which under command of the British General Bernard Montgomery until then had had the unified command of all Allied ground forces in Normandy. Certainly, General Montgomery continued to hold the position as supreme commander of the Allied ground forces in France for another couple of weeks, but now the 12th Army Group was formed under the command of the previous C.O. of U.S. First Army, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, with the task of directing the operations of the two American armies: First Army, which now was placed under command of Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, and the new Third Army, which was formed from units brought from First Army. Lieutenant General George S. Patton was appointed to command the Third Army.

The Allied main force—812,000 American soldiers with 2,450 tanks and tank destroyers—was positioned on the western flank.¹⁰ The Germans, who had concentrated 645 of their slightly more than 800 tanks at Normandy against British 2nd Army and Canadian 1st Army on the eastern flank, had no chance against Patton’s armored forces once these had started their advance towards the south.¹¹ Displaying a brilliant organizational ability, Patton managed to bring seven U.S. division across a single bridge at Avranches in only 72 hours.¹²

According to plans, a new tactical air command was formed within the U.S. 9th Air Force, XIX Tactical Air Command under Major General Otto P. Weyland, assigned with the task of providing the Third Army with close air support.¹³ XIX Tactical Air Command would develop a new American close air support tactic—the Armored Column Cover method, according to which an air controller with direct radio communication with airborne aircraft was assigned to the leading column of the advancing armored units, while fighter-bombers simultaneously were in the air above, ready to strike down on anything the forward air controller would direct them onto.

Patton’s Third Army spread out fan-shaped towards the west, the south, and the southeast from the gap at Avranches, and carried out a lightning offensive while Weyland’s airmen covered its flanks. In reality, Major General Middleton’s VIII Corps of the Third Army hardly encountered any resistance. The ’sweep’ through Britanny in the West was made in an area mainly evacuated by the Germans, where villages and towns had been taken over by the French resistance.¹⁴ The remnants of the four German divisions in this area hastily withdrew in order to establish strong defenses of the Atlantic ports of Brest, Lorient, and Saint-Nazaire.

A formation of American Douglas A-20 attack bombers from the 9th Air Force heading for France to support the battle at Normandy. Allied aircraft played a decisive role on the Western Front in 1944. (US Army)

Neither were the Germans able to offer any effective resistance against Patton’s advance towards the southeast, and on 8 August, Le Mans, ninety miles south of the German positions at Caen on the eastern flank at Normandy, was liberated. Thus, Heeresgruppe B, the German army group in Normandy, was threatened to become cut off west of River Seine. Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge, who on 2 July had succeeded Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt as this army group’s commander, suggested a retreat from Normandy to a new defensive line from the Seine’s mouth into the English Channel and further southeast to ...