All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [372]
Sufficient American units offered stubborn resistance, especially at the vital shoulders of ‘the bulge’, to prevent the breakthrough from becoming a rout. American reserves, notably two airborne divisions, were rushed forward. One of Bradley’s soldiers watched survivors of the bitter fighting at Cheneux on 20–21 December pull back from the line. ‘The shattered remnants of the 1st Bn came straggling listlessly down the road, a terrible contrast to the happy battalion which had only two days before gone up the same road wisecracking and full of fight. They were bearded, red-eyed, covered with mud from head to foot, and staring blank-facedly straight to the front. No one spoke … They had written a page in history which few would ever know about … such was the confusion of places, units and deeds being churned around in the witch’s brew which was the present battle.’
For the Allies, powerful relief was at hand as reinforcements were fed into the line, while the German predicament worsened by the hour as American artillery delivered pulverising bombardments. ‘My sergeant and I jumped into a ditch,’ wrote SS senior NCO Karl Leitner about his own experience on 21 December. ‘After approximately ten minutes a shell hit to the right of us, probably in a tree. My sergeant must have been badly wounded in the lung – he just gasped, and after a short time died. I had taken a piece of shrapnel in my right hip. Then a shell exploded in a tree behind. A piece of shrapnel hit me in my left ankle, other fragments slashed my right foot and ankle. I pushed myself half under my dead comrade … Fragments from another shell hit me in the left upper arm.’ It was several hours before Leitner was rescued and taken to a dressing station, during which the American barrage never let up.
Montgomery was given command of the northern sector of the front, and deployed formidable forces ready to meet the Germans if they reached the British armoured line, as most did not. On 22 December the weather cleared sufficiently to allow the Allied air forces to fly, with devastating consequences for the panzers. The German armoured spearheads advanced sixty miles at their furthest point, Foye-Nôtre-Dame, but by 3 January Hodges’ and Patton’s armies were counter-attacking north and south, while Model’s tanks had exhausted their fuel and momentum. On the 16th the two American pincers overcame deep snow as well as the enemy to meet at Houffalize. The Germans had suffered 100,000 casualties out of half a million men committed, and lost almost all their tanks and aircraft. Wehrmacht infantry captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder said of his own part in the Battle of the Bulge, ‘We finished the battle where we had started it; then I knew – that’s it.’ In January 1945 Schröder acknowledged the inevitability of Germany losing the war, as he had declined to do a month earlier.
The Allies lacked sufficient nerve to attempt to cut off the German retreat; Model’s forces were able to withdraw in good order, with American forces following rather than crowding them. Eisenhower was content merely to restore his front, after suffering the most traumatic shock of the north-west Europe campaign. The Ardennes battle left a legacy of caution among some commanders which persisted until the end of the war. ‘Americans are not brought up on disaster as are the British, to whom this was merely one more incident on the inevitably rough road towards final victory,’ in the sardonic words of Sir Frederick Morgan.
‘The record of accomplishment is essentially bland and plodding,’ wrote that magisterial American historian Martin Blumenson. ‘The commanders were generally workmanlike rather than bold, prudent rather than daring, George S. Patton being of course a notable exception.’ Yet if Patton’s reputation for energy was enhanced by