Armageddon - Max Hastings [158]
Far away on the Italian front, Allied troops occupying a house vacated by the Germans found a letter on the kitchen table addressed: “For English soldiers.” It read: “Dear Kamerad, on the Western Front German troops are attacking the line of Americans. German tanks have destroyed a great deal of the enemy troops. The new German Luftwaffe is on the West Front and she is very, very good. The war is in a new station, she is over when the Germans are victorious. Germans are fighting for their lives. The English are fighting for the Jews. AN GERMAN SOLDIER.”
“The roads are littered with wrecked American vehicles, cars, tanks,” Lieutenant Belmen of the Wehrmacht’s 1818th Artillery gloated in his diary on 19 December. “Another column of prisoners passes. I count over a thousand men. Nearby there is another column of 1500, with about 50 officers, including a lieutenant-colonel who had asked to surrender.”
The Germans had given the Americans an impressive tactical demonstration of how to launch an assault in difficult terrain, using infiltration and encirclement rather than allowing themselves to be pinned down in front of pockets of resistance, as the Allies so often did. In the first five days of the Ardennes battle, the Germans destroyed 300 American tanks and took 25,000 prisoners. Some American historians have sought to argue that only support troops or isolated individuals broke and fled. “A belief would long persist that when the Germans first struck, some American troops fled in disarray,” wrote Charles MacDonald. “. . . That was patently false. No front-line American unit fled without a fight.” It is impossible to accept this view. Eyewitness evidence of panic in some units, and of pathetic tactical failure in others, is overwhelming. When 1st SS Panzer attacked Stoumont, for instance, eight American tank destroyers were overrun without firing a shot after being abandoned by the infantry company alleged to be supporting them. On the first day, the 394th Regiment suffered 959 casualties, of which just 34 were dead and 701 “missing.” There is no reason to regard any of this, however, as ground for unique national embarrassment. Men of every army run away when their front is broken or they find themselves enveloped by superior forces. The British often did so, and the Russians—and the Germans. If guilt and shame were appropriate, these belonged at American higher headquarters.
A critical point about the Ardennes battle is that instances of American chaos, of hysterical men fleeing for the rear, created a misleading picture. Any soldier might be forgiven for succumbing to fear as seventeen enemy divisions crashed without warning into his front. The wider reality, however, was that from its first day the ill-conceived German assault went as wrong as the British drive to Arnhem three months earlier. Much has been made of Allied blindness to the offensive possibilities of the Ardennes forests. Bradley had manned the region weakly, because it was considered difficult country through which to move large bodies of men and vehicles. So indeed it proved. From the first hours of 16 December, massive German traffic jams developed behind the front, as vehicles struggled to advance along the constricted approaches, while engineers made slow work of bridging rivers and streams.
German vehicles suffered immense difficulties on steep, narrow, twisting mountain roads. Guns sometimes had to be winched round hairpin bends. On 17 December, von Manteuffel and Model met on foot, both commanders having abandoned their transport in despair. Peiper, leading his battle group of 1st SS Panzer, had to walk six miles when the tanks became stuck. During its November retreat, the