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Table of contents
- 10 Years of Fuss — 21 Beers that Defined the Last Decade of British Brewing — Pellicle
- Technical Services Librarian
- New Books: 2014
- THE BATTLE THAT SEALED GERMANY'S FATE
But he also believed that by driving between the American 12th Army Group north of Spa and the British 21st Army Group in northern Belgium and the Netherlands he would place the British in an intolerable military situation: With their backs against the sea and no access to a major supply port, they would be forced to withdraw across the North Sea to Britain.
Hitler's belief in himself as a military genius had not been dimmed by his defeat in Normandy, the liberation of Paris or the Allied advance across France and into Belgium. All could be restored by one bold stroke, and he devoted his demoniac energy to the preparation of that stroke. Through the late summer, Hitler busied himself with plans for the offensive.
10 Years of Fuss — 21 Beers that Defined the Last Decade of British Brewing — Pellicle
The attempted assassination on him in July by some of his own officers had enhanced an already obsesssive secrecy. He confided his thinkings only to Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of operations at his headquarters. Not until Sept. Hitler knew that only four American infantry divisions and one armored division occupied the area, and he guessed, correctly, that the wooded area to the east would cover the concentration of German forces for the attack.
A German breakthrough, Hitler told his staff officers, would open a drive to the northwest, crossing the Meuse River between Li ege and Namur and smashing ahead toward Antwerp. Jodl and the military planners made some alterations in Hitler's proposal. The thrust out of the Ardennes south of Aachen, they decided, was to be the major drive, carried out by the Sixth S.
Panzer Army, with the new 15th Army on its right flank. The Fifth Panzer Army would be on the left. The generals who would execute the overall plan thought it too ambitious.
Technical Services Librarian
Hitler had anticipated their opposition, but held firm. Jodl conveyed his master's feelings when he told the generals: ''In our present situation, however, we must not shrink from staking everything on one card. Hitler summoned one of his favorites, S. Major Otto Skorzeny, who had led a daring and successful raid to liberate Benito Mussolini, the fallen Italian dictator who had been imprisoned on a mountain peak by the government that had deposed him.
Skorzeny was ordered to form a unit dressed in captured British and American uniforms. After the breakthrough, these men were to rush forward and seize the Meuse bridges at Engis, Amay and Huy. He found only 10 of the former and told the remainder that when they joined the retreating Americans they should pretend to be too shaken to speak. Although the Skorzeny mission succeeded in throwing a scare into the top brass, it accomplished little on the battlefield. Gunther Schulz, one of Skorzeny's team leaders who was captured in the early stages of the mission, told American interrogators that the operation's principal goal was to penetrate the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Versailles, just outside Paris, and assassinate General Eisenhower and other senior Allied officers.
Skorzeny and 50 men, so ran Schulz's account, were to meet at the Cafe de la Paix on the Place de l'Opera in Paris, hardly a safe rendezvous, and then proceed to Versailles.
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The Allies took the necessary security precautions and nothing happened. The Skorzeny mission had little luck in the field. Two teams reached the Meuse and then returned to Germany. A third approached the river on Christmas Eve and was wiped out. A fourth was intercepted by the military police at a bridge between Huy and Namur and arrested.
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Skorzeny himself was not captured, but none of his units ever reached Paris. Although the threat was not realized, it provoked a bad case of spy fever in Allied rear areas. Surprise is the key to military success. The Germans used it masterfully. Not only were they able to concentrate a force of more than 23 divisions close to the American front but they also managed to assemble the necessary stocks of ammunition and fuel without detection.
Stringent measures were taken to preserve their operational secrecy. Within army staffs, for example, only the commanding general, the chief of staff, the operations officer and one other staff officer were told all the details. Terrain and weather aided their efforts. The three German armies moving into jump-off positions were shielded by the coniferous trees of the Ardennes that keep their cover in winter.
Fog and mist shrouded the area. Allied photo-reconnaissance missions flying over the area simply could not spot the Germans. At times, attentive American sentries reported hearing the sound of tanks and trucks across the lines. But investigation met only the stillness of the forest. German unit commanders may not have known the details of the closely held plan but they were experienced soldiers, as were their men. No one commented when wood fires were forbidden and charcoal was distributed to avoid smoke from unit fires.
For 40 years, the conventional wisdom has been that the Allies had no warning of the German attack, largely because they had received little or no information through ULTRA, which intercepted German high-command radio signals and sent the decoded messages to senior Allied commanders. In his new book, Charles B. MacDonald asserts that ULTRA United States codename for decrypted German messages information reaching higher headquarters disclosed that the Sixth Panzer Army, which was to play a major role in the battle, had been designated as a strategic reserve for Hitler's headquarters.
ULTRA picked up messages concerning the movement of almost troop-and-supply trains to the west, and it reported regularly on requests to the Luftwaffe for reconnaissance flights over the area of the offensive. In addition, another intelligence process intercepted a message to Tokyo from Baron Hiroshi Oshima, Japan's Ambassador in Berlin, about a talk with the Nazi leader that revealed that Hitler had mentioned an offensive ''after the beginning of November.
The Allies, MacDonald claims, knew something was brewing on the other side of the line, but they failed to interpret the information correctly.
New Books: 2014
In the heady Allied atmosphere of late , a German offensive involving half a million troops was unthinkable. The Germans, who had been deceived in the Normandy operation by fake Allied wireless messages, tried the same trick against the Americans, establishing a fictitious 25th Army in the Cologne area. The intercepted false messages may have diverted Allied attention from the real buildup in the Ardennes. Secrecy and surprise were not the only significant elements.
Many of the German armored units had fought in Russia, where, as the tide turned, their operations were largely defensive. They had to be reindoctrinated in offensive tactics and trained for night operations over hills and through forests. It is a tribute to the German soldier and his officers that after more than five years of war they were able to absorb the lessons and launch an offensive notable for its drive and perseverance in the face of what, in the end, were overwhelming odds on the ground and in the air.
On Dec. Until the day he died, Hitler believed that the successful invasions of Denmark and Norway and the defeat of the French Army in were due to his strategic direction. Setbacks, such as the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, were blamed on the stupidity or irresolution of commanders on the spot.
After a long political harangue, Hitler confidently told the generals that all the necessary weapons, tanks, heavy artillery and other field guns were in place.
Newly activated Volksgrenadier divisions of old men and boys were said to be high in morale and weaponry. And the commanders were told they could rely on air support by 1, aircraft drawn from Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering's depleted Luftwaffe, though they received only Brimming with confidence, Hitler assured his generals that everything not absolutely essential for defense had been withdrawn from the Eastern Front for the offensive.
The attack would begin on Dec. On the appointed day, the Germans burst across the front behind a torrent of shells. The Americans, accustomed to fighting with air support, had none on this occasion. Some units had arrived so recently that not all their weapons were ready. The weight and pace of the advance out of the mists unnerved many Americans. Donald P. Vith to his superiors thusly: ''It wasn't orderly; it wasn't military; it wasn't a pretty sight - we were seeing American soldiers running away.
These and other near- panics among American troops can be attributed to a number of causes.
THE BATTLE THAT SEALED GERMANY'S FATE
The first is that although replacements had been made in the original Normandy units whose losses had been high, the broad front strategy Eisenhower and his staff had evolved for the invasion of Germany called for additional fresh divisions. Most of those called up to the front had seen no action. Now they were hit in their first combat by highly trained, dedicated German troops.
The result bore out an old British military axiom: ''You don't know war until you have fought the Germans. When the test came, it was not by infantry patrols but by a savage onslaught of half a million men armed with the best tanks in the world and commanded by experienced and able officers. Given the situation along the front in December , the American dispositions, in retrospect, do not appear foolhardy.