WITH THE Battle of Hill 400, the Htirtgen campaign came to a close. The forest they held, for which they had paid such a high price, was worthless.
The Battle of Htirtgen lasted ninety days. Nine divisions plus supporting units on the American side were involved. There were more than 24,000 combat casualties, another 9,000 victims of disease or combat exhaustion. German general Rolf von Gersdorff commented after the war, "I have engaged in the long campaigns in Russia as well as other fronts and I believe the fighting in the Hiirtgen was the heaviest I have ever witnessed."
On December 8, from Hill 400, Lieutenant Eikner remembered: "We could see across the Rur River to a town called Nideggen. Trains were puffing in there and bringing in troops and all."
They were heading south. Eikner had cause to feel discouraged. If, after all that pounding, the Germans were building a reserve somewhere to the south, why then it was the Germans, not the Americans, who had won the battles of attrition in the fall of 1944. The Americans had no reserve at all, save the 82nd and 101st Airborne, which were near Reims, being brought up to strength after the Holland campaign. Every other division in ETO was committed to offensive action.
Chapter Seven
The Ardennes: December 16-19, 1944
WHEN THE Americans reached the German border, their best intelligence sources dried up. Inside Germany the Wehrmacht used secure telephone lines rather than radio, which rendered Ultra, the British deciphering device, deaf and blind. Weather kept reconnaissance aircraft on the ground. And in the Ardennes patrols were rare and seldom aggressive, as each side was willing to leave the other alone so long as things stayed quiet. There the line had been stagnant for two months.
In early December, Eisenhower reviewed the situation on the Western Front with Bradley. His overwhelming goal was to strengthen US First and Ninth armies to continue the winter offensive north of Aachen. Turning to the centre of his line, he and Bradley discussed the weakness in the Ardennes. Four divisions, two green, two so worn down by Hiirtgen fighting that they had been withdrawn and sent to this rest area to refit, spread over a 150-kilometre front, seemed to invite a counterattack.
Bradley said it would be unprofitable to the Germans to make such an attack. Of course the Germans had sliced right through the area in May 1940, but that was against almost no opposition, in good weather. The generals agreed that the newly formed Volkssturm divisions were hardly capable of offensive action through the Ardennes on winter roads. So they told each other that an Ardennes attack would be a strategic mistake for the enemy.
Eisenhower and Bradley's thinking was logical. Every senior general in the German army agreed with them. Nevertheless, they were dead wrong. Had they looked at the situation from Hitler's point of view, they would have come to a much different conclusion.
Hitler knew Germany would never win the war by defending the Siegfried Line and then the Rhine. His only chance was to win a lightning victory in the West. If surprise could be achieved, it might work. Nothing else would. As early as September 25 Hitler had told his generals he intended to launch a counteroffensive through the Ardennes to cross the Meuse and drive on to Antwerp.
His generals objected, making the same points Eisenhower and Bradley had made. Hitler brushed them aside. When asked about fuel, he said the tanks could drive forward on captured American gasoline. He promised new divisions with new equipment and the biggest gathering of the Luftwaffe in three years.
Hitler said the German onslaught would divide the British and American forces. When the Germans took Antwerp, the British would have to pull another Dunkirk. Then he could take divisions from the west to reinforce the Eastern Front. Seeing all this, Stalin would conclude a peace, based on a division of Eastern Europe. Nazi Germany would not win the war, but it would survive.
Here was the old Fiihrer, all full of himself, exploding with energy, barking out orders, back on the offensive. The remembrance of those glorious spring days in May 1940 almost overwhelmed him. It could be done again. It could! It was a matter of will.
To PROVIDE the will, Hitler counted on the children. The German soldiers of December 1944 were mostly born between 1925 and 1928. They had been raised by the Nazis for this moment, and they had that fanatical bravery their Fuhrer counted on.
They were well equipped. Hitler brought men, tanks, and planes from the Eastern Front and assigned the greater portion of new weapons to the Ardennes. The Luftwaffe managed to gather 1,500 planes (although it never got more than 800 in the air at one time, and usually less than 60 per day). German manpower climbed in the west from 416,000 on December 1 to 1,322,000 on December 15.
Impressive though the German buildup in the eastward extension of the Ardennes known as the Eifel was, it was not a force capable of reaching its objectives on its own resources. It would depend on surprise, the speed of the advance once through the American lines, a slow American response, captured American supplies, panic among retreating American troops, and bad weather to neutralize the Allied air forces. That was a long list.
Hitler had managed to achieve surprise. Using many of the same techniques the Allies had used to fool the Germans about the time and place of the cross Channel attack in June-the creation of fictitious units, false radio traffic, and playing on preconceptions that the German buildup was in support of a counterattack north of Aachen-Hitler gave the Americans a sense of security about the Ardennes. On the eve of the opening action in the greatest battle the US Army has ever fought, not a single soldier in that army had the slightest sense of what was about to happen.
ACROSS FROM the Eifel the American troops were a mixed lot. The 2nd Infantry Division, in nearly continuous battle since June 7, was moving through the 99th Division on its way to attack the Rur River dams from the south. The 2nd had been in Hiirtgen, so it had many more replacements than veterans, but it had a core of experienced company commanders and platoon leaders. The 99th and another newly arrived division, the 106th, placed to its right, had few experienced personnel. There was little or no unit cohesion, and most of the riflemen were only partially trained. But the 99th had spent sufficient time at the front to have toughened up. It ran patrols, made mistakes, learned from them. The general attitude, as expressed by one soldier, was, "The German troops facing us were of low quality and appeared to be of the opinion that if we didn't bother them, they would leave us alone."
The weather was cold, the days dreary and snowy. The men in the foxholes were eating snow because their canteens were empty and they could not build fires to boil water. Rations were cold. Clothes were World War I issue and entirely inadequate.
Always hungry, the men of Charlie Company, 395th Regiment, tried to supplement their diet with venison. Private Vernon Swanson went after the locally abundant deer with his BAR (Browning automatic rifle), a common practice for GIs in Belgium that winter. He dropped one, but the deer was only wounded. "We followed the blood trail for quite a distance into German territory and then discovered the Germans had stolen our deer. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and we did not send a combat patrol to recover our deer."