HITLER LEFT the Adlerhorst at six P.M. on January 15 and returned to Berlin the next morning aboard the Brandenburg. There would be no jackboots in Antwerp or even across the Meuse, no dividing of Allied armies, no petitions for peace from Washington and London. “I know the war is lost,” he said, according to a staff officer. “The superior power is too great. I’ve been betrayed.” Still, Hitler had extracted his armies from the Ardennes at a deliberate pace and in good order. Manteuffel abandoned fifty-three tanks along the roadside on a single day for want of fuel or spare parts, but many other tanks returned to Germany. In the south alone, thirteen divisions from the Fifth Panzer Army and the Seventh Army crossed five bridges thrown over the Our. The enemy, Eisenhower admitted, “will probably manage to withdraw the bulk of his formations.” Nearly two weeks would pass after the capture of Houffalize before the retreating Germans slammed the last steel door in the West Wall.
Adolf Hitler, January 30, 1942
In the west, the war receded for good. Once again Belgium and Luxembourg had been liberated. Children shrieked with joy while sledding near a stone quarry in Luxembourg, oblivious to the heckle of Thunderbolt cannons above the retreating enemy just to the east. The milky contrails of bombers bound for Cologne or Duisburg or Berlin etched the sky from horizon to horizon. Across the Ardennes, women stood in their doorways, eyeing the olive-drab ranks tramping by. “Are you sure?” they asked. “Are you sure they have really gone for good?”
The liberation of Colmar, France, on February 2, 1945.
The dead “lay thick,” wrote American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn as the guns fell silent, “like some dark shapeless vegetable.” For weeks, the frozen ground was as hard as iron and precluded burials, except with earthmoving equipment and jackhammers; many of the three thousand civilians killed in the Ardennes were wrapped in blankets and stored in church crypts to await a thaw. At the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Hombourg, Belgium, grave diggers with backhoes worked around the clock to bury as many as five hundred GIs a day. Each was interred in a hole five feet deep, two feet wide, and six and a half feet long, but only after his overshoes had been removed for reuse. One dog tag was placed in the dead man’s mouth; the other was tacked to a cross or a Star of David atop the grave. Those whose tags had been lost went to a morgue tent for photographs and dental charting. Fingertips were cleaned and injected with fluid to enhance prints, while technicians searched for laundry marks, tattoos, and other identifying clues, all to avoid conceding that here was yet another mother’s son known only to God.
Troops of the U.S. 7th Armored Division advance along a road toward St.-Vith in Belgium, retaken in the final days of the Battle of the Bulge.
Among the dead gathered by Graves Registration teams combing the bulge were those murdered by Peiper’s men near Malmédy, recovered in two feet of snow when the Baugnez crossroad was recaptured in mid-January. Investigators carried the frozen corpses, stiff as statuary, to a heated shed. There, field jackets and trouser pockets were sliced open with razor blades to inventory the effects, like those of Technician Fifth Grade Luke S. Swartz—“one fountain pen, two pencils, one New Testament, one comb, one good-luck charm”—and Private First Class Robert Cohen, who left this world carrying thirteen coins, two cigarette lighters, and a prayer book in Hebrew.
* * *
AN ARMY TALLY long after the war put combined U.S. battle losses in the Ardennes and Alsace from December 16 to January 25 at 105,000, including 19,246 dead. Thousands more suffered from trench foot, frostbite, and disease. Roughly one in ten U.S. combat casualties during World War II occurred in the bulge, where 600,000 GIs had fought, four times the number of combatants in blue and gray at Gettysburg. More than 23,000 were taken prisoner; most spent the duration in German camps, living on seven hundred calories a day and drinking fake coffee “so foul we used to bathe in it,” as one captured officer later recalled. Families of soldiers from the obliterated 106th Infantry Division organized the “Agony Grapevine,” conceived by a Pittsburgh lumberman whose son had gone missing on the Schnee Eifel. Volunteers with shortwave radios kept nightly vigils, listening to German propaganda broadcasts that sometimes named captured prisoners.
Soldiers examine a helmet pierced by German bullets.
Nurses and doctors treat severely wounded soldiers on a hospital train.
Of more than sixty thousand wounded and injured, those who had come closest to death often lay wide-eyed on their hospital cots, as one surgeon wrote, “like somebody rescued from the ledge of a skyscraper.” Many would need months, if not years, to recover. A wounded officer described a jammed hospital courtyard in March filled with broken men on stretchers. A soldier wrote his parents in Nevada of narrowly surviving a gunfight on January 13, when a German shell scorched past him. “I looked down and my rt. hand was gone.… Dad, you’ll have to be patient with me until I learn to bowl left-handed.”
German losses would be difficult to count with precision, not least because the Americans tended to inflate them. (Patton at times simply made up numbers, or assumed that enemy casualties were tenfold the number of prisoners taken.) A U.S. Army estimate of 120,000 enemy losses in the month following the launch of AUTUMN MIST was surely too high, and Bradley’s claim of more than a quarter million was preposterous. One postwar analysis put the figure at 82,000, another at 98,000. The official German history would cite 11,000 dead and 34,000 wounded, with an indeterminate number captured, missing, sick, and injured.
American tanks pass bodies of German soldiers.
Model’s success in extricating much of his force—in late January, Germany still listed 289 divisions, the same number counted by SHAEF on December 10—belied the Reich’s true plight. “He bent the bow until it broke,” Manteuffel said of the Army Group B commander. German forces in the west had virtually no fuel reserves and only about a third of the ammunition they needed. The Luftwaffe was so feeble that Hitler likened air warfare to “a rabbit hunt.” More than seven hundred armored vehicles had been lost in the Ardennes, German manpower reserves were exhausted, and the rail system was so badly battered that as of January 19, all freight shipments were banned except for coal and war matériel. After more than five years of war, four million German soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. Hitler professed to find solace in a letter Frederick the Great had written during the Seven Years’ War: “I started this war with the most wonderful army in Europe. Today I’ve got a muck heap.”
Patton sensed the kill. “When you catch a carp and put him in the boat,” he told reporters, “he flips his tail just before he dies. I think this is the German’s last flip.” Manteuffel came to the same conclusion. The Battle of the Bulge had left the Germans so enfeebled, he warned, that they henceforth would be capable of fighting only “a corporal’s war,” a small skirmish. And right he was. The end of this great conflict was in sight.