The Lucky Seventh in the Bulge: A Case Study for the Airland Battle

Major Gregory Fontenot

• Publisher: Verdun Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782897200
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This study examines the operations of the 7th Armored Division from 16 December 1944 through 29 January 1945. The focus is on the nature of combat as seen from the perspective of battalion through division-level commanders. The 7th Armored Division provides data on defensive operations, withdrawal, reconstitution and offensive operations. This data is used to examine the validity of the AirLand Battle concepts of "agility, " "initiative, " "depth" and "synchronization."
The study illuminates the tremendous complexity of high-tempo, continuous operations and the validity of the AirLand Battle doctrine. The study reveals the key to success in such operations is the ability to cope with high levels of friction which stems from the clear communication of intent. The study raises questions on the ability of the US Army to fight at night, the Army's doctrine for retrograde operations, and its artillery doctrine.

Chapter 1 — THE GHOST FRONT

“The August battles have done it and the enemy in the West has had it.” — SHAEF G-2 Summary, 23 August 1944

On 24 July 1944, after weeks of hard fighting within the invasion lodgement area, General Omar N. Bradley launched 1st Army on Operation COBRA. COBRA, Bradley’s brainchild for breaking out of the Normandy beachhead, began with a tremendous aerial bombardment of the German frontline positions by over 2,000 Allied bombers. The aerial attack aimed at punching a hole in the German line through which Bradley’s troops would pour. The bombers achieved the desired effect, but killed 500 Americans including Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces. Moreover, the success of the bombers was not immediately apparent which provoked Eisenhower to assure Bradley that he would never again give the air forces the “green light.”{6}

Despite its inauspicious start, COBRA proved to be a great success. On 28 July, 1st Army seized Coutances behind the German defenses and the breakout was on. During the month of August, the Allies grew heady on the strong wine of a string of unbroken successes. The Allies crushed Hitler’s Mortain counterattack in August, but missed destroying the Germans at Falaise. Nonetheless, the campaign of late summer carried the Allied armies across France in a headlong rush. These happy days saw Bradley’s armies racing hither and yon while on their left the British drove rapidly up the channel coast of France. The Allies seemed to be teaching the Germans a lesson in Blitzkrieg which led nearly everyone to believe the end of the war was at hand.

However, the Allied tide crested in September and things began to go awry. First and foremost, the logistical structure could no longer support the rush to the east. The Germans in the channel ports refused to give up. When forced to withdraw, they destroyed the harbor facilities. Consequently, the armies still had to be supplied, to a large degree, over the invasion beaches. At the available ports, clearances were so inadequate that in the first week of September there were 100 Liberty ships waiting to unload. The very success of the Allied advance further aggravated the supply situation. The logisticians planned for the Seine to be reached on D” plus 90. On the 4th of September, or not quite D plus 90, there were sixteen divisions 150 miles past the Seine. In mid-September, US forces closed on Aachen, some 200 miles past the Seine, which was the D plus 33.0 phase line. Each of these divisions required 650 tons a day to sustain operations. The problems in beach and port clearance, compounded by the inadequacy of line haul (despite the Red Ball Express) simply overcame the capability of the logistics structure to support the Allied advance.{7}

In the first week of September, the 7th AD, leading Patton’s 3rd Array, ran out of fuel at Verdun. But logistics alone did not derail the Allied train. The very success of the campaign following COBRA and the ANVIL-DRAGOON operations in August revealed an insufficiency of troops which, by October 1944, reached crisis proportions. The aggregate strength in the European theater reached fifty-four divisions on the Continent and six staging in the United Kingdom. Upon reaching the German border, the Allied armies established a line which stretched nearly 500 miles from the banks of the Rhine in the north to the Swiss border in the south. The numbers meant, in Eisenhower’s words, that he could man each ten miles of the line with “less than one division.”{8} Moreover, the manpower pool available to the planners had already peaked. Thus, there were too few divisions and too few infantry replacements.{9}

Further complicating matters, the Allies were of two minds on how to finish the Germans. Montgomery and Bradley each favored a single thrust as long as it occurred in his respective sector. Eisenhower had to balance the logistical realities and national interests of both Britain and the United States against operational necessity. Logistics and national pride argued for a sharing of the resources and, thus, an advance on a broad front. Furthermore, Montgomery and Bradley favored advancing on an axis which would be narrow and susceptible to being pinched off at the base.

In the end, Eisenhower plotted the middle course, shifting supplies from one Army Group to another as opportunity or politics dictated. He acquiesced to Montgomery’s MARKET-GARDEN operation which kicked off on 17 September 1944. Within days MARKET-GARDEN stalled. Bradley’s armies also ground to a halt in mid-September. Major General Leonard T. Gerow’s V Corps arrived at the West Wall on the heels of the retreating Germans, but lacked the strength to penetrate the German defenses. Gerow, who left V Corps on 18 September to testify at the Pearl Harbor investigation, still felt confident enough to confide to his subordinates that, “It is probable the war with Germany will be over before I am released to return to V Corps.{10}

Gerow made his prediction without consulting the Germans who were in the process of achieving what they called the “miracle in the west.” Though the Germans had been mauled in the campaign in France, they had, in fact, won the race for the West Wall. Equally important, they had done so with much of their fighting force and nearly all of their tactical headquarters intact. Thus, in September, they were able to smite Montgomery at Arnhem, block 1st Array in the Ardennes, and halt Patton at Metz. In the south, Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers’ 6th Army group had •cleared southern France of the Germans, but still had to cope with a German bridgehead at Colmar. On 20 October, Eisenhower correctly concluded that “there is a lot of suffering and sacrificing for thousands of Americans and their allies before the thing is finally over.”{11}

The war in the west settled into a war of attrition while the Allies attempted to build up adequate combat power to breach the Rhine and continue the war of movement. This phase of the fighting witnessed the terrible battles of the Huertgen forests which chewed up American divisions in the north. Patton’s army fought a difficult siege against Metz which finally fell in November. Devers continued to struggle with the Germans in the Colmar pocket. After hard fighting, Montgomery cleared the estuary before Antwerp at the end of November. But, the Allies did not expect to renew the general offensive until the middle of December. It would take that long to build up adequate supplies and rebuild their infantry strength. In the meantime, Eisenhower had to take risks in some sectors in order to garner his strength in other, more critical, sectors of the line.{12}

Eisenhower and Bradley took such a risk in the Ardennes. The risk seemed justified because the difficult terrain favored the defender and neither man believed the Germans had the capability to launch a major counteroffensive. Furthermore, the Germans seemed content to remain passive in the Ardennes. Both sides apparently regarded the Ardennes as a good place to train new formations and rest tired units. The Ardennes became what Charles B. McDonald, in The Siegfried Line Campaign, termed a combination “nursery and old folks home.”{13} On 16 December, Major General Troy H. Middleton’s VIII Corps defended ninety miles of rugged and wooded terrain in the Ardennes sector with part of four divisions and one cavalry group of two squadrons. Gerow’s V Corps, like VIII Corps assigned to Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges’ 1st Army, defended the northernmost part of the Ardennes on Middleton’s left. The Luxembourg-French border formed Middleton’s boundary with 3rd Army.{14}

The trace of VIII Corps’ main line of resistance extended from the Losheim Gap through the Schnee Eifel and all the way south to the Luxembourg border. Of Middleton’s four divisions, the 4th and the 28th had been mauled in the Huertgen forest. The remaining two were the untested 106th ID and the 9th AD. The 14th Cavalry Group, which maintained a tenuous link with V Corps, screened the Losheim Gap in the north. The 106th, which controlled the 14th Cavalry Group, defended the Schnee Eifel from the Losheim Gap to the German town of Lutzmankampen roughly sixteen miles south of the Gap. The 28th ID extended the line on the right of the 106th with one combat command of the 9th AD on its right. The 4th ID defended the southernmost sector of the Corps front. Middleton retained one combat command of the 9th AD in reserve. Brigadier General William M. Hoge had the remaining combat command in Faymonville, Belgium, just to the rear of Gerow’s southernmost division, the 99th ID. Hoge’s command, assigned to V Corps, had the mission of supporting a V Corps attack scheduled to begin on 16 December. Though Middleton was not content with these arrangements, they represented the best he could do with what he had. Bradley considered the risk “negligible” because he believed Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander in Chief Vest, could not undertake a major offensive (See Map 1 ).{15}

Bradley’s risk came to haunt him in December 1944 because in reality Hitler, not von Rundstedt, commanded in the west. As early as the summer of 1944, Hitler had a great counteroffensive in mind, not a passive defense of the Vest wall. The Mortain counterattack in August merely represented Hitler’s first attempt to undo the Allies, not his last. Hitler took stern measures to increase combatant strength. First, he named Heinrich Himmler as chief of the Replacement Army. Secondly, he ordered Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels to comb the remnants of German manpower from protected industries, medical deferments, and superfluous air force and naval units. Accordingly, in the Fall of 1944, Goebbels began mobilizing both the remaining manpower in the Reich and its industry to create the reserve necessary for Hitler’s plan. He garnered the needed resources by great effort on the home front and great sacrifice by the combatant units at the front, which were already starved for replacements of men and equipment.{16}

Map 1 – Troop Dispositions, 16 Dec 1944 (reproduced from US Army Armor School Study. Battle at St Vith.)

In September, Hitler began to plan the operation which he envisioned would begin on 1 November 1944. Specifically, he ordered Goebbels to provide a strategic reserve of twenty-five divisions. On 13 September, Hitler directed that the SS divisions be withdrawn from the Western Front to the Cologne region where they would be assigned to the 6th Panzer Army to refit. Hitler then specified that the offensive would occur in the Ardennes and that the objective would be Antwerp.{17}

Hitler’s motives for the counteroffensive have been the subject of considerable speculation. Apparently, he hoped to destroy the British armies northeast of Antwerp. If successful, the seizure of Antwerp and the destruction of British armies might force Britain out of the war. Aiming the attack along the boundary between the American and British armies lends credence to this interpretation. As a minimum, a successful attack on Antwerp would bag the Allied troops north of the penetration and would wrest the initiative from Eisenhower.{18} This accomplished, Hitler might then be able to shift his effort to the east and stop the Russians who were on the verge of entering the Reich.

The Ardennes commended itself to Hitler because the terrain was such that a major offensive would seem unlikely to the Allies which would aid the Wehrmacht in achieving surprise. The Ardennes also formed the general boundary between the British and the Americans. Attacking at the boundary between the two major Allied groups of armies would make it difficult for them to achieve the close cooperation necessary during a crisis. Once through the Ardennes the Germans would have decent terrain on their northwesterly advance to Antwerp. The weather in the Ardennes region would also help shield the German advance from Allied airpower. Finally, the weakness of the Allied defenses in the Ardennes would facilitate the penetration.{19}

The German plan went through several iterations during the Fall. Delays were imposed because of exigencies on the Front and difficulties in concentrating troops. Some delay also occurred because fewer troops could be found than desired. Hitler also met with limited opposition from his generals who felt the plan was too bold. In the end, Hitler had his way and the offensive kicked off on 16 December 1944. Generalfeldmarschall Model, commanding Army Group B, had overall responsibility for the Ardennes campaign. Model directed four armies including 15th Army in the north, 6th and 5th Panzer Armies in the center, and 7th Army in the south. Though 15th Army originally had the mission of enveloping from the north, it played no role in the offensive.

The three assault armies fielded seven panzer divisions, ten volks grenadier (infantry) divisions, and one parachute division. The German high command also sent Skorzeny’s 150th Panzer Brigade, using American equipment and uniforms, and some 1,000 paratroopers to create chaos in the American rear. Army Group B retained a reserve of one panzer division, two panzer grenadier (motorized infantry) divisions, two volks grenadier divisions, and the two brigades of the Führer Escort. The Escort Brigades were nearly division-sized units — one of infantry and one of armor. The Germans also massed an impressive amount of artillery to support the attack.{20} The four divisions of Middleton’s VIII Corps and the 99th of Gerow’s V Corps constituted the target for this impressive array.

This study is not concerned with the entire scope of the counteroffensive, bu...