Armageddon - Max Hastings [174]
In the second week of January, even German propaganda broadcasts were obliged to recognize the reality of failure in the Ardennes. “The Winter Battle,” as the Ardennes offensive had been described, now became “the defensive battle.” German listeners were encouraged to translate their hopes to Alsace. Berlin’s pundits emphasized “the miracle” of continued German resistance. After the surge in Wehrmacht morale in mid-December, now many men once more succumbed to despair. “If only this idiotic war would end!” Private Heinz Trammler wrote miserably in his diary in the Bulge. “Why should I fight? It is only for the survival of the Nazis. The superiority of the enemy is so great that it is pointless to struggle against it.”
On 7 January near Bastogne, a battalion commander in 9th SS Panzer Division wrote to his friend Otto Skorzeny, complaining bitterly about the quality of the replacements that were reaching him—mostly Ukrainians who do not even speak German. There is a shortage of everything, but here it is the men that count. I have learnt what it means, for instance, to have to attack without heavy weapons, because there is no transport to bring forward mortars and anti-tank guns. We have to lie out on frozen ground, a target for enemy fighter-bombers. Still, it is not going any better for the Americans. If only we had just one division here, trained and equipped and with the élan we both knew in 1939, so long ago! Well, we shall and must win one day. My best regards to you and also to my old comrades of Vis and Orianberg. Heil Hitler!
Major William DuPuy, commanding the 1/357th Infantry, believed that the Germans at the end of the Bulge battle “didn’t so much lose heart, as they lost organization. They just finally fell apart. They were strained beyond the elastic limit.” Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder of 18th Volksgrenadiers felt bitterly disillusioned. “That’s it—we’ve lost the war,” he thought. He took over command of a battalion which was reduced to just eighty men. Yet as late as 13 January British Second Army Intelligence recorded respectfully: “The enemy can claim to have wrested the initiative from the Allies . . . He has provided his people with a tonic which they sorely needed, and for at least a week took their minds off the gloomy situation at the end of a disastrous year . . . he has gained time . . . Against this, however, the cost was tremendous for the results achieved.”
As the Allies renewed their advance, they were plagued by the profusion of mines laid as usual by the Germans as they retreated. In mid-January, the 743rd Tank Battalion lost fifteen tanks to mines in two days. They were crossing ground that had been the scene of savage fighting. Private Ashley Camp leaped up in horror when he discovered that the snow-clad mound on which he sat down to eat his chow was composed of bodies. Sergeant Cockperry Kelly’s tank track hit the feet of a frozen corpse, which sprang rigidly upright against the hull. From positions near Bellevaux, Lieutenant Joseph Couri wrote on 14 January: “This was the coldest night that I experienced in the war. After going through the forest with the turret open and the snow tumbling down from the trees, I was completely wet. The tank . . . was a Frigidaire, and we were going to try and sleep in it. We were better off than the infantry, for it was impossible to dig a foxhole . . . They asked if they could bed down under our tanks, and they did. There was not much sleep that night. The shelling from both sides was continuous.”
The Germans were losing ground steadily, but showed no sign of outright collapse. Incautious actions were punished as brutally as ever by Model’s soldiers. The British 13 Para was approaching the Belgian village of Bure down an open hillside one afternoon early in January when the Germans, who could see them coming, unleashed a mortar and artillery bombardment. Within the space of just fifteen minutes, the unit suffered 160 casualties, including sixty-five dead. During fighting in Diekirch on 25 January, men of the 3/2nd Infantry captured