‘We can still lose this war,’
General George Patton, 4 January, 1945
On Tuesday, 19 December, 1944, the Top Brass converged on the town of Verdun – Verdun, an ominously evocative name, where in the First World War hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and Germans had been slaughtered. Adolf Hitler had been wounded on those barren ridges which overlooked the town. De Gaulle had been captured there. In 1916 the fate of France had hung in the balance as Germany seemed set on breaking through at Verdun and winning the war.
Now on this cold grey morning, as the Top Brass filed into the squad room at the eighteenth-century barracks, Maginot Caserne, the situation appeared little different. Three days before, the Germans had launched another great attack in the Belgian Ardennes which had caught the Western Allies completely by surprise. Just as at Verdun twenty-eight years before, it had smashed through the American lines in the Ardennes, sending the divisions holding the front there reeling back in disarray. Now, as the clock in the Vauban citadel down in the town began to strike eleven, the Germans fifty miles away were racing for the River Meuse. Beyond that lay their key objectives, the great Allied supply port of Antwerp and Brussels itself.
Shivering in the squalid room, heated by a single pot-bellied stove, the Top Brass took their places, their staffs behind them. All were important men who commanded the destinies of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of soldiers, British, American, Canadian, French, and a dozen other nationalities. But this morning, as the bad news from the front mounted, they seemed powerless to act. Everything now rested in the hands of the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower.
His Chief-of-Intelligence, General Strong, recalled many years later, ‘The meeting was crowded and the atmosphere tense. The British were worried by events. As so often before, their confidence in the ability of Americans to deal with the situation was not great. Reports had been reaching them of disorganization behind the American lines, of American headquarters abandoned without notice, and of documents and weapons falling intact into enemy hands. Stories of great bravery on the part of individuals and units did not change their opinion.’1
The Verdun Conference, as it became known, was perhaps the high point of Eisenhower’s career as Supreme Commander in Europe. His front had been virtually torn in half. Against all the confident predictions of his top intelligence men, who had maintained for the last month that the Germans were beaten – ‘vying with each other for the honor of devastating the German war machine with words’, as Robert E. Merriam of the US 9th Army put it2 – the enemy had launched a major counterattack.
Even if the Germans only succeeded in crossing the River Meuse, would this not mean the end of the confidence the public had placed in the Supreme Commander since the triumphant D-Day landings? Although Eisenhower knew he enjoyed the powerful protection of General Marshall back in Washington, he was too much of a realist not to realize that he had mighty enemies in the Allied camp, especially in Britain. Would they not be only too eager to accuse him of slackness, inefficiency, lack of foresight and worse?
It was not surprising, therefore, that when he entered that icy room, chain-smoking as always, his usual happy grin was absent. Instead, his broad face was pale and set. But, after he had looked around at Generals Bradley, Devers, Patton and the rest, he announced, ‘The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not one of disaster.’ He paused and forced a smile. ‘There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table!’ As always Patton, Commander of the US Third Army, was first off the mark. The remark appealed to his pugnacious, if somewhat flippant, nature. ‘Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut ‘em off and show ‘em up!’3 The ice was broken. From that moment onwards it was Patton’s conference. While Eisenhower crumpled a pack of Lucky Strike (he chain-smoked sixty a day), Brigadier Kenneth Strong sketched in the situation at the front. It was bad. The Germans had already committed twenty divisions in the Ardennes, five of them armoured. Intelligence knew that the enemy had plenty more divisions in reserve, which could be used in the Ardennes. But attacks elsewhere on the long front, stretching from Holland down to Switzerland, could not be ruled out either.
Bradley’s front in the Ardennes had been split and his armies separated by the ‘Bulge’, as it was now being called. There was only one solution, if General Montgomery was not to be asked to come to the rescue (and all the American commanders were bitterly opposed to that): Patton must make a strong counterattack into the ‘Bulge’ from the south.
Following up Strong’s exposé with a few words of his own, Eisenhower turned to Patton and said, ‘George, I want you to go to Luxembourg and take charge of the battle, making a strong counter attack with at least six divisions. ‘When can you start?’
‘As soon as you are through with me,’ Patton answered in his usual brash manner.
According to Strong, ‘There was some laughter around the table, especially from the British officers present.’4 To them, it seemed a typical Patton reaction, rash and unrealistic. To achieve his aim, Patton would have to swing his Third Army around in a ninety-degree angle from their present positions in Lorraine and the Saar. This would mean moving 133,178 motor vehicles over 1.6 million road miles in the worst winter Europe had experienced in a quarter of a century!
But Patton was undaunted by the prospect. ‘I left my household in Nancy in perfect order before I came here,’ he said triumphantly, pleased with the impression he had made. Eisenhower now looked more kindly on the man he had saved from being removed from his command at least twice in the last couple of years. ‘When can you start?’ he asked again.
‘The morning of 22 December,’ Patton answered without the slightest hesitation.
Colonel Codman, Patton’s aide, recorded later that the reaction to that bold assurance was ‘electric’. ‘There was a stir, a shuffling of feet, as those present straightened up in their chairs. In some faces, scepticism. But through the room the current of excitement leaped like a flame.’5
‘Don’t be fatuous, George!’ Eisenhower snapped severely.
Calmly Patton lit a cigar and said, ‘This has nothing to do with being fatuous, sir. I’ve made my arrangements and my staff are working like beavers at this very moment to shape them up.’
Quickly he sketched in his plan of attack and then, turning to General Bradley, he exclaimed, ‘Brad, this time the Kraut has stuck his head in a meat grinder.’ He held up his fist clenched round the cigar. ‘And this time I’ve got hold of the handle!’
The symbolism of the gesture wasn’t lost on the others. There was laughter, and even Eisenhower grinned. Now the conference began to break up into separate discussion groups. Eisenhower strolled over to Patton just before he left and said, ‘Funny thing, George, every time I get another star [Eisenhower had just been made five-star general], I get attacked.’
‘Yeah,’ Patton quipped, elated with his new task and very much the star. ‘And every time you get attacked, I have to bail you out.’6
One year later, when Patton lay dying in the military hospital in Heidelberg, Eisenhower cabled him: ‘Bradley has just [reminded] me that when we three met in Verdun to consider plans, you and your army were given vital missions. From that moment on our worries with respect to the battle began to disappear. Nothing could stop you, including storms, cold, snow-blocked roads and a savagely fighting enemy. We want you to know that in your present battle we are supremely confident that your spirit will again bring victory.’7
In all the accounts of that celebrated conference at Verdun, which helped to determine the course of the most important battle fought by the US Army in Europe in the Second World War, invariably most of the attention is focused on the star of the show, General Patton. But there was another general present that day whose men were going to play an equally decisive role in the coming events as those commanded by Patton. Indeed, it can be argued that if his troops had been defeated, not only would Patton’s drive into the southern flank of the Bulge have failed, but the whole Western Alliance would have collapsed. That general was Jacob L. Devers, commander of the US 6th Army Group, consisting of the US Seventh Army and the French First Army, currently holding the line of the Upper Rhine from the Swiss border to a little north of Strasbourg.
Big, bald, and something of a bureaucrat, General ‘Jake’ Devers had been a classmate of Patton’s at West Point. Like Patton, Devers was a cavalryman and a keen polo player (in 1931 Devers had captained the team, in which Patton also played, that won the Argentine Polo Cup for the USA). But there the similarity ended. Devers had seen little action and, as the only army commander not specifically recommended by Eisenhower for his appointment, he was regarded with some suspicion by the latter.
Prior to the invasion he and Eisenhower had fought a running battle. Devers insisted on holding on to commanders whom Eisenhower felt he needed for the coming battle. More than once Eisenhower had complained to General Marshall about Devers’ lack of cooperation. Later, when Devers’ armies attacked Southern France and began their four-month-long drive towards the German frontier and their link-up with the Allied troops attacking out of the Normandy bridgeheads, Eisenhower complained that Devers lacked command ability. Indeed, when asked by the US War Department to rate thirty-eight of his highest officers, Eisenhower placed Devers at twenty-four, lower than several humble corps commanders. Worse, he was the only officer of the whole thirty-eight of whom Eisenhower had something negative to report. Devers, he wrote to Washington, was ‘often inaccurate in statements and evaluations. . . . He has not, so far, produced among the seniors of the American organization here a feeling of trust and confidence.’8
Among those in the know, it was generally supposed that the Supreme Commander retained Devers only because he hated removing lieutenant-generals from their jobs. Now, so Eisenhower gave Devers a task which the Supreme Commander thought even he, with his limited capacity for command, could probably carry out.
Devers’ Seventh Army, commanded by General Patch, would advance north from its present position on the Rhine and fill in the gaps left in Lorraine and the German Saar by the departure of Patton’s Third Army. Under other circumstances Eisenhower would have dearly loved to have ordered Seventh Army into action with Patton’s Third. Patch’s eight or so divisions were badly needed in the Ardennes. But there was a catch. Due to what Eisenhower thought was a lack of effort on Devers’ part, his other army, the French First, had been unable to clear a sizeable force of German troops from French soil. One month earlier General Wiese’s German 19th Army had stubbornly dug themselves in on the western bank of the Rhine around the French town of Colmar. Now the French were basically employed in containing this ‘Colmar Pocket’ and could not be used to fill in the gap that would have been left if the Seventh Army were used offensively. So Eisenhower was forced to tie the Seventh up in a strictly defensive operation. Just before he left, he gave Devers strict instructions what he was to do if his command were attacked by other German forces not so far accounted for by Allied Intelligence. If these ‘missing’ German divisions struck his command, he was to give ground ‘slowly on his northern flank, even if he had to move completely back to the Vosges’. He was not allowed to let the ‘Germans re-enter those mountains and this line was definitely laid down as the one that must be held on Devers’ front’.9 The Supreme Commander did not want another Ardennes debacle.
Thus, as Eisenhower roared away in his armoured car, surrounded by heavily armed outriders (it was reported that German paras had been dropped behind Allied lines to kill the Supreme Commander), the big, bald General, whose grandmother had been born within fifty miles of where he was now standing, was left to ponder his new assignment. His Seventh Army would now have to take over a front eighty miles long, which had once been held by two armies. Not only that, he was faced with the presence of nearly one hundred thousand troops on his side of the Rhine, locked up, for the time being at least, in the Colmar Pocket! And if he was attacked, he was to put up only a token defence, giving up ground which had been paid for in American blood.
We do not know General Devers’ mood that day. Alone of the senior American generals, he has still not found a biographer. But as he waited for his staff car in the cobbled yard of the Maginot Caserne he must have realized just how little faith Eisenhower had in him. For the first time in the six-month-long campaign in Western Europe, the Supreme Commander had specifically ordered one of his generals, if trouble came, to withdraw. The army which prided itself that it never gave up ground it had ‘bought with its own blood’ was now going to do so, and he, Jacob Devers, would command that withdrawal.
In the last years of the Second World War, any observant visitor to one of the major US headquarters in Europe might well have spotted them – a truck, a handful of tents, perhaps a van bristling with aerials, discreetly tucked in an orchard or behind a barn, and all manned by men wearing the blue uniform of the Royal Air Force.
‘What,’ the observant visitor might well ask, ‘were RAF men, and mostly of low rank, doing at a higher headquarters, where full colonels were a dime a dozen?’ These ‘secret limeys’, as they were called, were in fact members of the Special Liaison Unit (SLU), set up by the British Secret Service earlier in the war to maintain and guard the most precious secret of them all, what Winston Churchill called his ‘very reliable sources’. This was the secret information provided by British Intelligence’s own highly skilled decoding branch, the Code and Cipher School, mockingly called by its members ‘the Golf Club and Chess Society’. At the school, based at Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, the staff could decipher top-secret German orders and messages sent by their Enigma coding machine almost as quickly as the German recipients. But ‘C’, as the head of the Secret Service was called, knew that the only way to maintain the security of this amazing intelligence coup was to limit the knowledge of the Bletchley operation to as few people as possible, and this was where the SLUs came in. Attached to top-level battle headquarters, the SLUs received ‘Ultra’ (as the high-level decodes were called) by means of a one-time pad and later by the Typex machine, a ciphering system similar to Enigma. The Ultra information would be taken personally by the officer in charge of the SLU to the commanding general or his deputy. The latter would be allowed to read and digest the message, but the actual message form would have to be handed back to the SLU officer for destruction. Thus did the Allied commanders know what the Germans were going to do.
During the campaign in Europe in 1944/45 Ultra intelligence had served the Allies well on half-a-dozen major occasions. In August, 1944, for example, Ultra had warned that Hitler had ordered a four-division armoured strike against General Hodges’ 1st US Army at Mortain. Hodges, forewarned, had soon put a stop to the German attempt to cut through to the coast and isolate Patton’s Third Army in Brittany.
And so it had gone on throughout the Allied advance across France, Belgium and Holland towards the German frontier. But as the Germans fell back a change had begun to take place. The Wehrmacht had started to use the Reich’s safe network of telephones and teleprinters which Bletchley could not tap. Top-level intelligence had virtually dried up.
That had been the situation throughout November and into December, 1944. Then at one minute after midnight on Saturday, 16 December the night shift at Bletchley was alerted. For weeks, with no messages of any importance coming from Germany, the staff in the cryptanalytical and processing huts had begun to believe that the war had passed them by.1 They were jaded, too, by the months of concentrated effort since D-Day. Now, suddenly, the German High Command, after long weeks of absolute silence, was transmitting again. Tensely the staff waited for the first Enigma message to be decoded. It was from no less a person than Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt himself and it was addressed to his field commanders. It read: ‘The hour of destiny has struck. Mighty offensive armies face the Allies. Everything is at stake. More than mortal deeds are required as a holy duty to the Fatherland.’10 The Battle of the Bulge had begun.
That Saturday even the SLU men in Europe were caught by surprise. One of them, John Weston, attached to General Bradley’s head quarters in Luxembourg, recalled over forty years later how on the afternoon of that Saturday ‘I was in the little village of Echternach on the Luxembourg/German border. German spotter planes were in evidence. That same night Rundstedt’s forces attacked. To say there was some confusion was to understate the position. Due to the radio blackout ordered by Hitler . . . there was very little Ultra intelligence. Hence the surprise.’11
But now back in Bletchley, the boffins were working all out, listening to the whole German front, almost five hundred miles of it, trying to discover where those ‘missing’ German divisions were located and how they might be employed. And one of the areas which came under their scrutiny, was Alsace-Lorraine, held by the armies of General Jacob Devers.
Heavily wooded and very rugged for the most part, save for the Rhine plain and the area which borders on the German Saar, Alsace-Lorraine had been fought over for centuries. Originally neither French nor German, it had been snatched back and forth by the heirs of Charlemagne’s great Frankish Empire until, in 1648, Louis XIV made it part of France. Over two centuries later, in 1870, Germany annexed most of Alsace and part of Lorraine by force and made Alsace-Lorraine a Reichsland, an Imperial territory, governed by German officials, virtually under the same terms as their new African colonies. For nearly fifty years the area was German, its menfolk conscripted into the German Army, its official language German, with French forbidden by law, until, in 1918, the French regained their lost provinces, again by force.
In 1940 Alsace-Lorraine changed hands once more. After the fall of France Alsace and part of Lorraine were reincorporated into the German Reich, their citizens becoming Reichsdeutsche. Not only that. In order to encourage the process of ‘Germanization’, this time the German authorities resettled thousands of ethnic Germans in the area, giving them land and encouraging them to marry the ‘natives’. Naturally, Alsatians were drafted into the Wehrmacht and mostly sent off to fight on the Eastern Front where there would be little danger of them deserting to the enemy. Many, too, believing in the Nazi cause, volunteered for the German Army, and not only for the Wehrmacht. Some were even prepared to volunteer for the Waffen SS. Indeed, one-third of the elite 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ now advancing towards Bastogne was made up of Alsatians! Virtually everyone in that French border province had a relative serving in the German Army.
It was not surprising, therefore, that German Intelligence was well aware of what was now going on in the area, as Patton’s men moved from the Saar to fight in the Bulge and Devers’ soldiers moved northwards to fill the gap. They had their agents and sympathizers in every village and hamlet. Any of those simple farmers, who amused the GIs with their enormous meals of sauerkraut, laden with pork chops, sausages, and fat-belly pork, or horrified them by the way they hand-stuffed grain down the necks of their geese to produce the world-famed paté de foie gras, might well be an informer. There was a constant flow of information about American troop movements and formations across the Rhine as Christmas Eve approached and Patton’s offensive got underway.
SS Colonel Linger, commander of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, who was later captured in Alsace, told his interrogators: ‘When the breakthrough in the Ardennes had been stopped by the Allies, it was realized that several American divisions had been sent north to aid the Americans in their defence. It was therefore decided to launch an attack against what we felt sure to be a weak position.’12
Indeed German information was so good about the movements and dispositions of the Amis, as they called the Americans, on the other side of the Rhine that one day before Patton began his attack into the Bulge on 22 December, German Army Group G was ordered to exploit the situation in Alsace-Lorraine. On that day Hitler ordered German forces in the Saar to attack the Americans to gain the Saverne Gap in the Phalsbourg-Saverne sector in order to annihilate Devers’ Seventh Army and to secure a juncture with the German Nineteenth Army in the Colmar Pocket.
For this purpose two assault groups were to be readied. The first was to attack from east of the Blies River towards the south. Here it would breach the Maginot Line at Rohrbach and line up with the right flank of the second group for an attack on Phalsbourg. The second group was to attack from east of the fortress town of Bitche towards the south in several spearheads. After linking up with the first group, both were to attack towards the Phalsbourg-Saverne line.
Forty-eight hours after the attack in the north, shocktroops from Army Group Upper Rhine on the eastern bank of the river would attack across it. Their aim would be to establish bridgeheads to north and south of Strasbourg. In the meantime Wiese’s Nineteenth Army would break out of the Colmar Pocket in two prongs. One would drive for Saarebourg to link up with the forces coming down from the north. The other would cut through the French First Army and head for Strasbourg, where it would join up with the shocktroops coming from the Rhine bridgeheads.
If the attack succeeded, the German High Command reasoned, it would provide a highly needed shot in the arm for the war-weary German people. The re-capture of Strasbourg, which held a special place in German hearts, just as it did in French ones, would be a tremendous propaganda coup, one which the ‘Poison Dwarf’2 in Berlin would make the most of. A German victory would also have very valuable military and political results. The destruction of Devers’ Seventh Army would certainly bring all American offensive action in the Ardennes to a halt. More importantly, if Strasbourg and the Alsace were recaptured, their loss would certainly bring down General de Gaulle’s shaky provisional government in Paris. The communist resistance, numbering millions and probably still armed, in spite of de Gaulle’s efforts to disarm them, would definitely try to seize power and Allied communications and supply lines through France would be thrown into complete disarray. Perhaps, with luck, the whole Allied coalition in the West would collapse.
This, then, was the plan, and the Führer himself had set the time and date for this new surprise attack, the last of the war in the West. Operation Northwind would begin at twenty-three hundred hours on 31 December, 1944. Adolf Hitler was going to give Devers’ young soldiers in the freezing hills and remote hamlets of Alsace-Lorraine a New Year’s Eve surprise they would not forget.
A week before the start of Operation Northwind Devers had completed his take-over of Patton’s old positions. His Seventh Army now occupied an eighty-four-mile front from the Rhine to a point a few miles west of Saarbrucken, and a flank along the Rhine north and south of Strasbourg. His VI Corps held positions on the right from the Rhine to Bitche, with the 79th and 45th Infantry Divisions in the line and the 14th Armored Division in reserve. On VI Corps’ left flank, holding a front of ten miles with little more than a regiment, was Task Force Hudelson. On Task Force Hudelson’s left flank XV Corps held the line running westwards to within a few miles of Saarbrucken, using the 100th, 44th and 103rd Infantry Divisions, with the 106th Cavalry Group on its left flank, keeping a very loose contact with Patton’s Third Army. Along the Rhine itself, covering a front of forty miles, two task forces in regimental strength were deployed, elements of the 70th and 42nd Infantry Divisions, known again by the name of their commanders as Task Force Herren and Task Force Linden.
It was an enormous front to hold, even for veteran soldiers – the equivalent of six divisions, spread out over eighty-four miles and facing the best soldiers in Europe, perhaps in the world. But for the most part the young men of Devers’ Seventh Army weren’t even veterans. The men of his 42nd, 63rd and 70th Divisions had just arrived from the States and were as green as the growing corn. In the case of the 7oth Infantry Division, its soldiers had still been training in Fort Leonard Wood two months before, men moving up into the front line as late as 27 December!
Others of Devers’ Divisions, such as the 12th and 14th Armored and the 44th and 100th Divisions (the first two of which were being kept in reserve), had had limited combat experience in the December battles on the German border, but even they had been fleshed out with raw replacements straight from the ‘repple depples’3 to make up for their losses. In the whole of his long line Devers had only two really experienced divisions, the 79th Infantry (of which we will hear more later) and the veteran 45th Infantry Division, the ‘Thunderbirds’ (named after their divisional insignia).
The ‘Thunderbirds’ had first gone into action in Sicily in July, 1943, taking part in the first invasion of European territory. Before they set off for their first taste of combat, the then commander of the Seventh Army, General Patton, had regaled the green troops with one of his rough-tough fighting speeches, replete with the usual aggressive, blood-tingling obscenities: ‘Battle is far less frightening than those who have never been in it are apt to think. . . . All this bullshit about thinking of your mother and your sweetheart . . . is emphasized by writers who describe battles not as they are but as writers who have never heard a hostile shot or missed a meal think they are. . . . Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. . . . Remember in fist fights the attacker wins. . . . Attack ruthlessly, rapidly, viciously, and without rest. . . . Kill even civilians who have the stupidity to fight us.’13
Later, Patton said he thought his pep talk to the Forty-Fifth was ‘a helluva good talk, one of my best.’ It certainly had the desired effect on the green ‘Thunderbirds’! Alexander Clifford, a British war correspondent, watched horrified as men of the 45 mowed down German PoWs with a heavy machine gun as they climbed out of a truck at Comiso Airfield. Clark Lee, an American correspondent, reported how a Sergeant Barry West, escorting thirty-six German PoWs back to the cage, stopped the column behind the front and shot the lot of them. A Captain Jerry Compton smoked out forty-three snipers and then lined them up against a barn and had them machine-gunned.
These incidents, when they came out, nearly cost Patton the command of the Third Army in the UK a year later, but by that time the Thunderbirds had been well and truly blooded in the bitter fighting that had followed in Italy. The landings in Southern France had been the 45th’s next assignment and now, four months later, after the long hard slog through France from the Riviera, the veterans of the Thunderbird division were tired, old men before their time, best exemplified by the cartoons drawn by Sergeant Bill Mauldin who had been wounded while fighting with the 45th. Willy and Joe, tough, cynical, ill-disciplined and very worn, they were the real Thunderbirds this December.
Both Devers’ reserve formations were veterans as well. The Third Infantry Division, ‘the Rock of the Marne’, as it called itself on account of its epic stand on the River Marne in 1918, was even more experienced than the 45th. It had first gone into action under Patton’s command in North Africa in 1941. Thereafter it had fought in Sicily, at Anzio, had helped to capture Rome, and had taken part in the landings in Southern France. By the time the war would be finished it would have spent 531 days in combat, suffering over 30,000 casualties – more then any other US Division, gaining one fifth of all the Medals of Honor awarded to US Army troops in the Second World War, a record thirty-six.
The other reserve infantry division, the 36th (Texas) Division, had first gone into combat in September 1943 at the Salerno landings. The 36th saw heavy fighting at Salerno and San Pietro, but its real baptism of blood had been the assault crossing of the River Rapido a little later in the Italian campaign – a crossing which had ended in total disaster. Of the Division’s 141st Regiment, which had gone into action three thousand strong, only forty men returned. In the end 1,681 men were posted dead, wounded or missing in the abortive Rapido attack. So heavy were the losses that after the war prominent Texans wanted an official enquiry into the conduct of General Mark Clark, the commander of the Fifth US Army, who had ordered the fatal attack. As one officer of the 36th told a correspondent bitterly, ‘I had 184 men. . . . Forty-eight hours later, I had seventeen. If that’s not mass murder, I don’t know what is!’14
But the Division recovered from the Rapido disaster and went on to see much fighting in Italy and then in Southern France and on the drive to the German border. Now it, too, was tired and fleshed out with raw replacements. So when the German attack came, as the High Command knew it would come now, it would be left, in the main, to the new boys to do what had to be done in Alsace-Lorraine. For the weary veterans of the 3rd, 36th, and 45th as the day of the German attack grew closer, the bold slogan of that dying year, ‘Win the War by Forty-Four’, had been replaced by a very cynical new one: ‘Stay Alive in Forty-Five’.
On a clear but cold 26 December, 1944, while further north in the Ardennes Patton’s Third Army was making its first tenuous contacts with the ‘Battered Bastards of Bastogne’, the Seventh Army was alerted for action. That day the G2 of the Seventh, Brigadier-General Eugene L. Harrison, received a warning of what was soon to come. It was an Ultra message from Bletchley via General Devers’ head quarters. As the G2 noted in his diary at the time, not giving any indication of how the vital information had been obtained: ‘Excellent enemy sources indicate enemy units building up in Black Forest area4 for offensive. Other indications for enemy action exist. Imperative that all defensive precautions be immediately effective.’15
That day both Devers and General Alexander Patch, commanding the Seventh Army, shifted their headquarters far to the rear. Neither of them wanted to suffer the fate of General Hodges, commanding the US 1st Army, who had had to flee from his headquarters at Spa in the Ardennes when it had seemed about to be overwhelmed.
That same day Devers went to see Eisenhower at his HQ in the Petit Trianon outside Paris. He explained that all his Intelligence sources indicated that he was soon going to be attacked in the Alsace-Lorraine area. Perhaps Devers hoped for additional units to bolster up his dangerously thin line. But there were no reserves. They were all committed in the Ardennes. Or perhaps he thought that Eisenhower might change his orders and give his armies a more aggressive role in the coming battle. We do not know. All we know from the Supreme Commander himself is that he repeated his orders of the 19th: ‘I told Devers he must on no account permit sizeable formations to be cut off and surrounded.’16 The implication was clear. When the attack came, Devers was to put up token resistance and then retreat into the High Vosges mountains, surrendering the lowlands to the Germans; and if he did that, then Strasbourg would fall into German hands for the third time in the last seventy-odd years! A major political crisis was beginning to brew.
Tension was beginning to mount in the huge area covered by Devers’ command. Parallel with the great scare in the Ardennes, caused by the appearance of Skorzeny’s commandos and the scattered drop of Colonel von der Heydte’s paras in the Belgian High Venn country, now reports of German paras landing behind Seventh and First Armies’ lines came flooding in from all sides. They were reported dropping behind the front in the wooded Niederbronn area. Others were said to be landing at Phalsbourg, which until recently had been General Patch’s HQ. Others were seen floating down near the Saverne Gap.
Captain Donald Pence, a new boy from the 70th Infantry, recalled later how his men sighted enemy patrols everywhere (though there weren’t any) and how they worried about the ‘Krauts just over the hill’ from their positions, getting ‘loaded up on Schnapps for their next attack’.
General de Lattre, the autocratic commander of the First French Army, known behind his back as ‘King Jean’, was alerted by Devers’ HQ that ‘parachute commandos have been dropped at various points in the rear of the Western Front’.17 He was advised to put the men guarding his lines of communication on red alert, for 6th Army Group thought these German commandos were attempting to cut his communications through the vital Belfort Gap below the Colmar Pocket.
Hastily, de Gaulle in Paris mobilized whatever reserves he could find to protect the rear areas of the front. As far back as Lille, not far from the Channel coast, and Nancy, still officially Patton’s HQ, officers in command were ordered ‘to hold themselves ready to carry out without delay and with all resources at their disposal any especially urgent tasks requested by the Allied authorities,’ whatever might be the state of the equipment of their troops.18
In fact, their equipment was virtually non-existent. The formations in the rear line areas were a rag-and-bobtail lot. The ones being hastily mobilized in Lille, for instance, had either a battledress blouse or an overcoat, but never both. Others were clad and armed with the military cast-offs of four Armies, the American, British, Canadian – and German. In other instances General Dody, the overall land commander, noted that some units were ‘still in civilian clothes and had merely sky-blue overcoats unrecognized by the Allies’.19
In the end the French High Command managed to scrape together some fifty thousand men for rear line duty, guarding crossroads, railway installations, and the like, though General Dody thought them ‘not fit to fight’. One division, the Tenth Infantry, was to be sent into the line around the Colmar Pocket; but the Tenth’s sole contribution to what was to come was not exactly calculated to enhance Franco-American relations. On the way up to the new front its troop train stopped at Amagré-Lucqy station, not far from the city of Laon. There, one regiment of the Tenth systematically looted a stationary train full of Christmas presents from ‘back home’ intended for American troops in the line. The theft was immediately hushed up, but it caused quite a stir at the time.
On the same day that the Tenth was alerted for action, all the commanding generals of German Army Group G were taken from the Army Group HQ at Wachenheim to Hitler’s own battle headquarters for the Battle of the Bulge at Ziegenberg Castle, not far from Giessen. Here they were searched, their briefcases examined and their pistols taken away from them, as was customary since the attempt to assassinate the Führer the previous July. Hitler no longer trusted the men who, in the good days, had achieved such victories for him. Then they were ushered into the presence of the Führer and Gerd von Rundstedt. After the usual preliminaries Hitler began to speak, and for the first time many of those present realized that their mostly battered and sadly depleted units, which had suffered grievously in the month-long frontier battles, were now being committed to a new surprise counterattack in Alsace-Lorraine. But, for once, the Führer seemed almost reasonable. He told them, ‘The task set for this new offensive does not go beyond what is possible and can be achieved with our available forces. We are committing eight divisions. With the exception of one division which comes from Finland, seven are, of course, worn out from fighting. . . . But the enemy opposing us – if we have luck with five divisions, possibly only four or even three – is not fresh either. . . . We shall find a situation which we could not wish to better. . . . If this operation succeeds it will lead to the destruction of a part of that group of divisions which confronts us south of the breakthrough point. The next operation will then follow immediately. It will be connected with a further push. I hope that in this way we shall first smash these American units in the South. Then we shall continue the attack and shall try to connect it with the real long-term operation itself. . . . This second attack has an entirely clear objective – the destruction of the enemy forces. No questions of prestige are involved. It is not a question of gaining space. The exclusive aim is to destroy and eliminate the enemy forces wherever we find them. It is not even the task of this operation to liberate all Alsace. That would be wonderful. It would have an immense effect on the German people, a decisive effect on the world, immense psychological importance, a very depressing effect on the French people. But that is not what matters. As I said before, what matters is the destruction of the manpower of the enemy. . . . I consider it a particularly good omen that in German history New Year’s night has always been of good military omen. The enemy will consider New Year’s night an unpleasant disturbance because he does not celebrate Christmas but New Year.... When, on New Year’s Day, the news spreads in Germany that the German offensive has been resumed at a new spot and that it is meeting with success, the German people will conclude that the old year was miserable at the end but that the new year has a good beginning. That will be a good omen for the future. Meine Herren, I want to wish each of you, individually, good luck!’20
As New Year’s Eve approached, the tension mounted. In the 100th Infantry, the ‘Century Division’, Intelligence reported that US PoWs were being asked by their German captors about their gas masks and the state of gas training in the US Army. Immediately the alarm went out. The Germans were going to use gas. At once the Division started to re-issue gas masks to their troops who had long flung them away.
On 28 December another alert was sounded. It was reported that many German sympathizers who had fled with the retreating Germans the previous November were coming back. There was going to be a mass drop of French saboteurs throughout Alsace-Lorraine. All foreigners wandering about rural Alsace were ordered to be rounded up. Most of these, supposedly Poles working on the land, were now declared to be German agents, who would provide ‘safe houses’ for the French saboteurs soon to be parachuted into the rural areas.
The next day, Devers, at 6th Army Group, radioed Patch: ‘A hostile attack against your flank west of Bitche may force you to give up ground from your main position. To meet such a possibility it is necessary that your west flank be protected by a reserve battle position. With this in mind, reconnaissance and organization of a reserve battle position will be instituted without delay. . . . One half of each division and attached troops currently earmarked as SHAEF reserve located in your area may be employed at any given period to assist in organization of ground, provided troops so employed can be reassembled and prepared for movement on eight-hour notice’.21
Even before the battle had begun, it was clear that Devers had accepted the inevitable – he’d run first and then, perhaps, he’d live to fight again.
On the night of 30 December small-arms fire was reported at a dozen different spots along the American front. Was it just the usual ‘nervous nellies’ firing at shadows, or was it someone firing at Germans attempting to probe the American forward positions? Who was firing at whom? No one knew.
At the hamlet of Lichtenberg an American officer appeared and ordered that the village concert scheduled for New Year’s Eve should be stopped. Why? What did he know, the puzzled, apprehensive villagers asked themselves. In Wingen, as they celebrated morning Mass, fireworks stored for the New Year’s celebration5 (or so they said) exploded and blew up part of the main road nearby. Later, people would say, it had been the Germans who had done it. After all, Wingen was going to become a key spot in the battle to come. At the border village of Althausen, some small boys who had skipped Mass said later that they had seen a German patrol coming in out of the hills. That morning, as the first heavy snowfall of the winter began to fall, refugees, their carts piled with their bits and pieces, began to trudge out of the hamlet of Heideneck, heading for La Petite-Pierre, although not a single shot had yet been fired. Among them were the priest and the mayor, the two officials most likely to be arrested when the Gestapo returned. What did they know? What had they heard? The ‘Prussians’, as they still called the Germans in their local dialect, had come this way in 1870 and 1940. Was it just instinct or was it something else that had told them the Prussians were coming again? Behind them they left the old and those too sick to flee, and those who would welcome the returning Prussians!
On New Year’s Eve the man whose army was going to bear the brunt of the attack to come, General Alexander Patch, commander of the US Seventh Army, visited his two corps commanders, General Brooks of VI Corps and General Haislip of XV Corps, at the latter’s command post at the village of Fénétrange.
Patch, a tall balding man whose face was marked by deep lines etched from his nose to the corners of his mouth, had seen much of war in France. In 1917 he had commanded a machine-gun battalion working with the French. In the Second World War he had commanded a corps at Guadalcanal so successfully that he had been given command of the US Seventh Army which had fought all the way from the beaches to the Reich. Now he knew that he was about to wage his third battle on French soil. For Ultra and his Intelligence men knew the German attack was imminent. Eight thousand reinforcements, they had discovered, had been ferried across the Rhine to Wiese’s Nineteenth Army in the Colmar Pocket. Reinforcements, they had learned, were being hastily shipped to the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, currently facing Brooks’ Sixth Corps. The German 21st Panzer Division was moving south along the Rhine – indication after indication, and they all mounted up to one thing. As General Patch told his two commanders bluntly, Brooks and Haislip could expect an all-out attack on their fronts in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
It was the last day of 1944. In the heady days of non-stop victory back in the autumn, many of the Top Brass, Montgomery and Eisenhower among them, had thought that the Second World War in Europe would be over by now. Instead the Germans were still attacking furiously in the Ardennes and the worried generals sitting around the rough wooden table in that remote village knew that it would soon be their turn. The actors were in place, the stage was set, the drama could begin.
1 For those interested in such things, the huts are still there.
2 Minister of Propaganda, Dr Joseph Goebbels, so named on account of his small stature and vitriolic tongue.
3 GI nickname for a replacement depot.
4 The German Black Forest just across the Rhine from the Seventh Army’s positions.
5 Fireworks are used to celebrate the Alsatian New Year.