17

 

Europe: The Bitter Fruits of Complacency

 

 

Robert A. Miller's book August 1944 claimed this was the climactic month of the war in Western Europe. At the month's beginning, the Allies' hold on their beachhead in Normandy was still tenuous. The pivotal town of Caen had not been taken. The Americans were bogged down in the bocage. Everywhere the Allies were well behind their planned schedules of advance.

By the month's end, all had changed. Caen had fallen; the Americans had held off the mad offensive Hitler had ordered at Mortain and Patton was making ground-eating drives toward the German frontier. Paris had been liberated. The entrapment at Falaise had seriously weakened the Wehrmacht.

Euphoria set in among Allied leaders and lower ranks alike. Official summaries included statements such as "The August battles have done it; have brought the end of the war in Europe in sight." December 31 was marked as the ultimate date for victory. GIs sang, "I'll be home for Christmas."

Unfortunately, along with the euphoria came complacency, overconfidence, carelessness. Signals intelligence was nevermore complete or timely, but it was in crucial instances disregarded. Ambitious plans would not be altered because of a few misgivings conveyed by Special Liaison Units.

Churchill, for one, was by no means convinced that the scene on the continent was as rosy as it appeared. He read the Ultra reports of how masterfully the Germans were pulling their forces together to form a new defense line from the North Sea littoral to the Swiss border. Freshly formed fighting divisions were being scraped together by combing able-bodied men out of rear echelon troops. Underused Luftwaffe and navy personnel were being reassigned. Men not previously thought to be soldier material were being sworn in and hustled forward to fill in the gaps while battered panzer divisions were withdrawn to be reorganized and reequipped. Decrypts told him of divisions being transferred from the stalemated front in Italy. German war production, adroitly dispersed by Albert Speer, was turning out more materiel than at any previous time of the war. Most significantly, the prime minister noted that the Allies, in their eastward sweep, had still not captured a major usable port. Although Montgomery's armies had taken the port of Antwerp, finding it surprisingly intact, the harbor could not be used until the winding Schelde River estuary that connected it with the sea, as well as the islands offshore from the estuary, could be wrested from German control. Churchill saw these worrisome details, and no doubt growled into his sherry, but by then he was trying to leave the direction of the war to the generals.

Another disturbing element, as Anthony Cave Brown has noted in his book Bodyguard of Lies, was that having pulled off their enormous ruses to fool the Germans about the landings in Normandy, the Allies had no grand deceptions left. Now it was frontal assault against dug-in defenses, conventional arms rather than skillful artifice, and the war would, as Brown expressed it, "deteriorate into dull carnage." The progress was slow and the casualties were heavy, far heavier during the plotless march to Germany's borders than in those heady times when subterfuge dominated.

The Allied leaders could not claim, though, that they lacked for knowledge of German intentions. For example, a flood of decrypts should have made clear to Montgomery the importance the Germans placed in holding the approaches to Antwerp. Those coastlands north of the city denied the port to the Allies. They also provided an escape route for the Germans' Fifteenth Army, strung out along the Normandy coast. But Monty, with the concurrence of Eisenhower, regarded the Schelde as an annoying diversion from his main objective: to push on eastward toward the Ruhr and the Reich heartland. The First Canadian Army, which he assigned to clear the estuary, was not strong enough to do the job. Not until eighty-five days later did the first Allied transports finally enter Antwerp, and in the interim Allied operations were greatly handicapped by problems of supply. In a moment of refreshing candor, Montgomery was later to admit that in underestimating the difficulty of opening up the Schelde he had made "a bad mistake," adding, "I reckoned that the Canadian Army could do it while we were going for the Ruhr. I was wrong."

A serious setback for the Allies, in blood and in spirit, came in September when Montgomery decided he could speed his penetration into the Reich and bring the war to an end in 1944 by dropping paratroops and glider crews behind the German lines in Holland. He code-named his plan Market Garden and won Eisenhower's approval of it. The plan called for a British airborne division to land near the town of Amhem, capture the bridge there over the Rhine River and hold it until an armored relief column could arrive. Two American airborne divisions were to seize key bridges leading up to Amhem while the armored British XXX Corps broke out of its beachhead on the Meuse-Escaut Canal, more than fifty miles to the rear, and drove to Amhem. If the operation succeeded, it would forge a corridor through the German defenses and across the Rhine.

As Peter Harclerode has detailed in his book Arnhem, the plan was flawed from the beginning and became "a tragedy of errors." In the first place, it began too late. Launched sooner, it would have caught the Germans reeling back, disorganized by their defeats in Normandy. By the time Eisenhower had stopped vacillating in his support and Montgomery had pressured for every ounce of scarce supplies he could obtain, the opportunity was gone. The Germans had firmed up their defenses.

Then the operation was undertaken too hurriedly; commanders were given only six days to prepare, not enough time for them to reconnoiter what they would be up against. The British commander sensibly sought to have the paratroops land near Arnhem, but the RAF, believing that antiaircraft fire there would be too intense—an unfounded fear, as it turned out—would agree only to drop zones eight miles away. The number of planes was inadequate to carry out so large an operation, with a result that the paratroop and glider landings were spread out over three days, losing much of the advantage of surprise. Among other errors, the field radio equipment was too low powered to overcome the distances involved and enable the various outfits to communicate with each other.

Most damaging of all, Montgomery persisted in carrying out Market Garden despite copious intelligence warnings of the grave hazards it would encounter. BP decrypts and air reconnaissance showed that the failure to seize control of the Schelde had allowed some seventy thousand German soldiers, with much of their equipment, to be ferried out of Normandy and to begin to regroup in Holland. Admonitions from Ultra were supplemented by those of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who brought to Montgomery's headquarters a briefcase full of Dutch Resistance reports on the buildup of German forces in the lowlands. Montgomery rejected the prince's advice. He belittled the Ultra decrypts. Not once but twice he brushed aside the cautions of his own intelligence officer. And he waved away the objections to his plan brought to him by Eisenhower's chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, and the British intelligence chief of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force), Kenneth Strong.

The hazards pointed out to Montgomery included not only the troops of the Fifteenth Army who had escaped across the Schelde estuary, but also two panzer divisions that were in the Arnhem sector to be reequipped with new tanks. Moreover, two companies of parachute troops were there, plus ten battalions armed with heavy antitank guns. To round out this murderers' row, another BP decrypt revealed, Field Marshal Walther Model had established a headquarters just four miles from Arnhem; he would be on the spot to mobilize and direct the annihilation of the invaders.

As Hinsley has noted, Ultra decrypts even revealed that the Germans anticipated an Allied thrust toward Arnhem and believed that it might involve airborne landings.

Montgomery was not to be deterred. His only response was, when the operation was obviously faltering, to send in a reserve brigade of Polish paratroops to be added to the awful stew in what became known as the "caldron."

Even with all these adversities going against it, Market Garden came close to succeeding. Courageous British paratroops did reach Arnhem, seize the bridge and hold out, not for the two days specified in the plan but for three days and three nights. The American paratroops captured their assigned bridges and held open the corridor despite having their ranks thinned by repeated German counterattacks. What caused Market Garden ultimately to fail was that the armored ground forces could not make the connection. The only road for the linkup was one tank wide and six feet higher than the surrounding marshy terrain, making the deployment of tanks impossible, assuring German defenses easy targets. The Rhine crossing at Arnhem became, in the phrase Cornelius Ryan made famous, "a bridge too far."

After nine days of slaughter, the airborne units were ordered to save themselves if they could. Of the original force of ten thousand men, only about two thousand escaped, some by swimming the wide expanse of the Rhine. The rest were killed or taken prisoners.

The setback of Market Garden proved that the German armies, instead of deteriorating after their hard knocks in Normandy and in southern France, were still capable of mounting a surprisingly strong resistance to Allied advances. Still, the Allied generals were obsessed by their desire to bring the war to a quick end, to finish off the Wehrmacht and be in Berlin by Christmas. Their overconfidence that Allied troops could bring this about led to another horrific bloodletting.

This was the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. A dense tangle of woods, ridges and ravines south of the German city of Aachen, it lay in the way of the plans being developed by Eisenhower, Bradley, Courtney Hodges and their staffs. They had decided that the quickest way for a breakthrough into the Ruhr industrial sector lay in the relatively flat terrain of the Aachen valley, where armor could roll in full force. They saw the forest as a double obstacle. German troops hidden there could spring a flank attack on the Ruhrward push. Also, they could open dam gates on the forest's streams to flood the valley and any Allied armor in it. Hürtgen Forest, the Allied commanders decided, must be taken.

Believing in the power of their troops to overcome weakened Nazi garrisons, the generals were sure the Hürtgen threat could be overcome in a matter of days. The taking required more than a month—a month in which division after division was fed into the German meat chopper. U.S. general James Gavin reported later that American casualties amounted to thirty-three thousand men—twenty-four thousand battle casualties and nine thousand cases of trench foot and respiratory diseases resulting from the miserable weather. Hardly mentioned, barely remembered, the battle nonetheless chewed up more men by far than Market Garden, with little more to show for their sacrifice.

The failure to open the port of Antwerp, the defeat at Arnhem and the grim details of the Hürtgen Forest offense were major contributors to the deceleration of the Allied drive toward Germany. Stung by Arnhem, Monty reverted to his usual caution and stopped to recuperate. The U.S. First Army captured the German city of Aachen but then came up against what Ultra decrypts recognized as two reinforced panzer divisions and settled into a stalemate. In the south, Patton's gasoline-starved armor was frustrated by its inability to subdue the stubborn fortress at Metz. Any hope of ending the war that winter evaporated.

And after being duped time and again by Allied deceptions, Hitler was about to have his turn.

 

 

The Bulge: When Ultra Missed the Main Point

 

On a bitterly cold night in late December 1944, my group of "cryptographers" sat over the dregs of our coffee at Hall Place in Bexley, Kent. We had finished our evening shift and our midnight snack. Our mood was one of despair, for we had just learned the news of what was to become known as the Battle of the Bulge. The German counteroffensive through the Ardennes forest had come as a stunning surprise. The lines of raw, newly arrived, half-trained GIs, and of battle-weary troops sent there for R and R, spread out over too wide a front, were being overrun by giant panzer tanks and waves of German infantry.

Our question was, how could this be happening? How had the Allies been caught so completely off guard? How, if Station X was breaking these endless streams of code we were so diligently processing, could some message have failed to warn of this vicious counterstrike by the Germans? Was our whole war effort an empty charade? Were those masses of message forms we'd intercepted and processed just piling up in some Limey warehouse hopefully awaiting the day when someone somehow would find the key to them?

Never had the limitations of the "need to know" been so galling to us, so frustrating. We longed to hear that the work we were doing, this activity in lieu of bleeding and dying, did make some worthwhile contribution, did have some meaning. Reassurance seemed essential if we were to pick ourselves up on the morrow and continue to do our job.

But we were common soldiers, below that broad dividing line of the military caste system separating enlisted men from officers, the system that ruled that we were there merely to do and not to know. There was nothing for it but to overcome our doubts, crawl into our frigid bunks and get the sleep that would let us, out of deference to those poor guys across there on the continent, keep plugging away with the same care as before.

Most of us didn't learn the truth until years later, until the walls of secrecy came tumbling down.

It may have been, we learned, that the Germans had become aware that their Enigma systems had been compromised. As a result, Hitler directed that none of his orders, or those of his generals, relating to his surprise attack were to be sent by wireless. A counterintelligence report prepared by SHAEF in November 1944 stated that a Dutchman, Christiann Antonius Lindemans, recruited as an agent by the German secret service, had wormed his way into the confidence of Dutch authorities and betrayed both the Allied plans for the Arnhem landings and the secrets of Ultra. Lindemans's disclosures, the report asserted, convinced the Germans to limit their use of the Enigma, even though the task of completely replacing its far-flung dispersion could only partially be met by the end of the war.

Whatever the truth of the Lindemans story, the Germans achieved a definite drop-off in the volume of Enigma traffic. BP decrypted messages ordering units to avoid the use of radio. Selmer Norland has recalled seeing a message that read, "Fuer Alle SS Einheiten funkstille" or "For all SS units, radio silence." Winterbotham has told of orders being delivered to the front "by hand by motor-cyclists."

This decline in traffic was in itself viewed by BP analysts as a warning of something big brewing. Norland recognized the importance of the SS message: "It was what we called a five-Zed message, five Zs for 'top priority.' It was a clear indicator of what was going to happen."

Hinsley's history has detailed scores of messages portending a major action by the Germans. As early as August, Baron Oshima was reporting on a "very thorough" mobilization by which Hitler was expecting to form 110 to 125 new divisions and to rebuild the German air force so that it would be able to stand up to the Allies. In September, Oshima used his Magic machine to tell of his latest interview with Hitler, in which the führer confided that a million new troops were ready, together with units withdrawn from other fronts, to undertake a great offensive in the West.

Enigma decrypts showed panzer divisions being withdrawn east of the Rhine for rest and refitting. Their places in the defensive line were taken by new "Volksgrenadier" divisions made up of reassigned air force and navy troops, overage men and Hitler Youth teenagers. Other decrypts revealed the formation of a new Sixth Army and of the reorganization of the Fifth Panzer Army. Decoded railway Enigma messages reported train after train of men and supplies being conveyed to the western front. Luftwaffe decrypts told of Goring energetically gathering together aircraft to replace the close-support operations that had been all but eliminated during the fighting in Normandy, and of preparing the new formations for a "lightning blow."

BP analysts noted the skillful resistance against the Allies being conducted by Rundstedt and wondered, in view of this sensible use of the army, whether Hitler might be "unwell," allowing Rundstedt to function "without higher intuition."

Available at Britain's Public Record Office is Bletchley Park's own twenty-seven-page analysis of what went wrong, written as the crisis was ending. Having by then substantiated "Source" rather than Boniface as the supplier of its information, BP said in its summary, "Source gave clear warning that a counteroffensive was coming. He also gave warning, though at short notice, of when it was coming." The trouble was that "he did not give by any means unmistakable indications of where it was coming, nor . . . of its full scale."

There was the catch. Because of "new and elaborate deceptions staged by German security," the word Ardennes never appeared in the decrypts. Although the Ardennes was where Hitler had achieved his great success in 1940, it was now in 1944 regarded as the least likely point of a German attack.

As Hinsley observed, the generals of both the Allied and German armies agreed what the Germans should do in the waning months of 1944. They should husband their depleted forces to wage a stubborn withdrawal west of the Rhine and then use that great natural barrier for a last-ditch stand to protect the Reich. They lacked the troops, ammunition and fuel for a counteroffensive other than a minor "spoiling" action to blunt the coming Allied advances.

All of this sensible military prognosis figured without Hitler. Living more and more in his fantasy world, he refused to accept the reports of inadequate resources. As the Allies thinned out their Ardennes defense lines to strengthen their offensives north and south, he saw the opportunity for another grand coup. He would confuse any spies of Allied intelligence by giving his armies new names: the Fifth would become the "Gruppe von Manteuffel," after a young and able general whom Hitler trusted, while the Sixth would be designated, in English translation, the "Rest and Refitting Staff 16." He would further befuddle observers by shifting his troops back and forth across the entry to the Ardennes, moving three divisions one way and two back while holding the extra one for the offensive's buildup. Then, with his Volksgrenadier divisions holding the line, his Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies would file through to launch the attack.

His delusional idea was that his panzers would smash through the weak American lines, turn north into Belgium, drive to Antwerp, split off the British divisions in the north, force them into another Dunkirk and so dishearten the British people—who were already suffering the demoralizing effects of the V-2 rockets being rained on England—that they would drop out of the war.

Hitler's generals, knowing they were far short of the men and materiel to carry out so grandiose a scheme, tried to persuade him to accept a lesser plan such as a drive toward Liege that stood a chance of encircling large numbers of British troops. He remained adamant. They must carry out the counteroffensive exactly as he had envisioned it.

Despite the partial wireless blackout, the codebreakers at Bletchley Park knew a great deal about these developments. Decrypts told of Luftwaffe pilot aircraft being brought up to guide fighters and fighter-bombers to their targets, as well as the pulling together of a paratroop division. The formation of Volksgrenadier divisions and their dispatch to the front were also amply reported. BP read Hitler's orders for a special operation to be made up of volunteers fluent in English and American idioms and for "captured U.S. clothing, equipment, weapons and vehicles" to be collected for these troops.

All that was missing was where these forces would head once the offensive began.

Partly, Hitler succeeded because he kept his secret even from his own generals for so long. Not until November did Rundstedt and the other top officers learn of the plan. The lower-echelon generals were given only a few days' notice, so short a time that they could not do adequate planning.

Tragically, the earlier tip-offs by Ultra and Magic had bred among Allied commanders a dependence on their output. Without having German plans and intentions verified by the codebreakers, Allied leaders discounted warnings from other sources. From the Ardennes sector came GI reports of hearing the muffled roar of powerful engines, POWs' confessions that a great attack was in the offing and local residents' accounts of seeing armor and men massed behind the front. All was ignored. As the BP analysis put it, "There is a risk of relying too much on Source. His very successes in the past constituted a danger."

Allied commanders were so convinced the war was in its midwinter doldrums that when the blow fell Montgomery was playing golf in Belgium and had received Eisenhower's permission to go back to England to celebrate Christmas with his family. Eisenhower was attending his valet's wedding, and other officers were on R and R in Paris. While some Allied intelligence officers expressed concern about the buildup, none felt sure enough to counter their generals' prevailing expectations.

Before dawn on December 16, the area that German messages had referred to as "the quiet sector" erupted. Artillery blasted the green or tired GIs crouched in their frozen foxholes. Searchlights bouncing their beams off low-lying clouds provided light for the "storm battalions," made up of the most battle-experienced officers and men, to infiltrate the American lines. A special operation of English-speaking Germans, dressed in U.S. uniforms and driving jeeps, slipped through to create confusion and near panic among the rear echelons. The big tanks of the Sixth Panzer Army, followed by those of the Fifth, rolled over the defenders. SS troops once again followed the fighting legions to perpetrate such atrocities as the massacre of American prisoners at Malmédy.

Hitler's new version of an Ardennes surprise had its moment of success. But in the end the counteroffensive went as his generals had predicted. The Germans simply lacked the strength to push through to Antwerp. Even though the American troops' shock was great, they put up a defense stubborn enough to throw the offensive off schedule on its very first day. The Germans' drive to capture Allied fuel dumps to replenish their fast-waning supplies came within a quarter mile of the huge reserve at Stavelot in Belgium but could advance no closer. Similarly, the push to gain control of the road and communications hub of Bastogne and make the Americans there surrender was frustrated. The Germans sent to negotiate the capitulation received General Anthony McAuliffe's famous single-word reply, "Nuts," which had to be translated for the Germans as "Go to hell." When the bad weather ended, the GAF's efforts to support the army were overwhelmed by masses of Allied planes swarming over the German columns. As soon as the drive started and full use of wireless was resumed, BP was decoding every phase of the attack. According to Hinsley, "Thanks to the exceptionally prompt decryption of copious high-grade Sigint, the Allies encountered no surprises once they had overcome the initial shock." Eisenhower and his generals, reading the German commands' operational and reconnaissance orders for each day, knew when the Sixth Panzer Army changed its course from trying to reach Antwerp to trying to take Liege, when the Luftwaffe reached its peak and began its precipitous decline and when the attack finally stalled.

Hitler's dream soon became a nightmare. Pummeled by Allied aircraft, pounded from the south by Patton's divisions and from the north by Americans temporarily assigned to Montgomery, hamstrung by Hitler's refusal to countenance withdrawals, the German armies suffered losses far greater than those of the Allies.

Bradley later wrote in his memoir that he and other U.S. generals foresaw, as GIs grimly slowed down the German drive, the opportunity to turn from defensive to offensive operations and cut the German salient at the waist, entrapping the fuel-starved German armies. But as at Falaise, Montgomery foiled the plan by having to "tidy up" his lines before launching his attack, a full five days after Patton had begun his assault. Monty's caution, combined with foul weather that held up both offensives, permitted the bulk of German forces and equipment to escape.

Nevertheless, the battle left the Wehrmacht badly wounded. As Churchill summed up, "This was the final German offensive of the war. It cost us no little anxiety and postponed our own advance, but we benefited in the end. The Germans could not replace their losses, and our subsequent battles on the Rhine, though severe, were undoubtedly eased."

Rundstedt, who never favored the offensive and left much of its conduct to subordinate commanders, called it "Stalingrad No. 2."

Montgomery gave the final benediction, in a blessed reversal of his earlier opinions: "The battle of the Ardennes was won primarily by the staunch fighting qualities of the American soldier."

And all those years after, we in whom the Bulge had planted seeds of doubt were assured that our efforts had not been in vain.