THE LAST GERMAN GROUND OFFENSIVE
THE FINAL DAY of the year had ticked by with fresh snow and more omens. A reconnaissance flight at last light detected German artillery lumbering forward into new gun pits. The U.S. Seventh Army placed all its troops on high alert and canceled holiday celebrations. A reporter who insisted on toasting the departure of 1944 declared, “Never was the world plagued by such a year less worth remembering.” Devers’s diary entry for December 31 was just as cheerless: “Patch called me.… He was sure he was going to be attacked during the night.”
The land attack indeed fell that night, the last substantial German offensive of the war in western Europe. Hitler had given another pep talk to commanders in Army Group G, conceding failure in the Ardennes but offering another chance to thrash the Americans in Operation NORDWIND (NORTH WIND). A lunge by eight divisions southwest down the Vosges would recapture the Saverne Gap and link up with Nineteenth Army troops still holding out in the Colmar Pocket; in addition, the attack would force Patton to withdraw from Bastogne to deal with this new threat. French troops in Alsace were weak and disorganized, the Führer promised, and the U.S. Seventh Army was overextended along a 126-mile perimeter.
A German soldier fires a flare.
The Americans were also alert and entrenched. Ultra intercepts provided no specific enemy attack order, but ample intelligence revealed that the main offensive would come against the Seventh Army left, west of the Haardt Mountains, with a complementary attack to the east between the mountains and the Rhine.
“German offensive began on Seventh Army front about 0030 hours,” Patch’s chief of staff wrote in a diary entry on Monday, January 1. “Krauts were howling drunk. Murdered them.” Shrieking SS troops, silhouetted by moonlight that glistened off snowfields near the Sarre River, hardly dented the American left wing. A single .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun, spewing left and right with long, chattering bursts, was credited with slaying more than one hundred attackers. “Gained only insignificant ground,” the German Army Group G war diary recorded; then, by nightfall on Tuesday: “The attack has lost its momentum.”
German soldiers run for cover.
The most flamboyant German sally occurred on New Year’s Day, an air attack by nine hundred German planes flying at treetop altitude across the Western Front. Operation BODENPLATTE (BASEPLATE) included pilots said to be wearing dress uniforms with patent-leather shoes and white gloves after celebrating the arrival of 1945. The raiders caught seventeen Allied airfields by surprise, destroying 150 parked planes and damaging more than 100 others. Montgomery’s personal aircraft was among those wrecked. But German losses approached 300 planes, some shot down by their own antiaircraft gunners who, for reasons of secrecy, had not been informed of BASEPLATE. Worse still was the loss of 237 German pilots, including veteran airmen, instructors, and commanders. “We sacrificed our last substance,” one Luftwaffe officer said.
A German pilot suited up and ready.
Even as NORTH WIND collapsed on the German right, a secondary New Year’s attack ten miles to the east by the German 6th SS Mountain Division bent the U.S. Seventh Army line sufficiently to alarm SHAEF and terrify the citizens of Strasbourg, thirty miles southeast. German propaganda broadcasts from Radio Stuttgart reported shock troops assembling to seize the city, with reprisals certain to fall on citizens who had helped the Allies. Rumors of U.S. Seventh Army detachments packing to leave along the Rhine “spread like a powder fuse and caused a general panic,” according to a French lieutenant.
Field Marshal Montgomery’s personal aircraft
Lowered French flags and the sight of official sedans being gassed up added to the dread. Journalists reported that roads west were clogged with “women pushing baby carriages [and] wagons piled high with furniture” as Strasbourg steeled itself for yet another reversal of fortune. One soldier spied inverted dinner plates laid across a road in the thin hope that they sufficiently resembled antitank mines to delay, at least briefly, the Germans’ return.