Inferno - Max Hastings [375]
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 farthest point, Foye-Nôtre-Dame, but by 3 January Hodges’s and Patton’s armies were counterattacking north and south, while Model’s tanks had exhausted their fuel and momentum. On the sixteenth 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. The 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 northwest 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 his part in restoring the Ardennes front, his instinct for indiscretion remained undiminished. Visiting a field hospital, he almost committed another blunder to rival his assaults on combat-fatigue cases in Sicily. Asking one man how he had been injured, he exploded when the soldier answered, “I shot myself in the foot.” Then the victim, whose ankle was shattered, added, “General, I’ve been in Africa, Sicily, France and now Germany. If I was going to do this to get out of the service, I’d have done it a long time ago.” Patton said, “Son, I’m sorry, I made a mistake.”
The worst victims of the Ardennes offensive were the German people. Most now cherished ambitions only to see the Western Allies, rather than the Russians, occupy their cities and villages. After the shocks of December 1944, however, strategic prudence became the theme of Eisenhower’s operations. His armies’ subsequent advance into Germany was sluggish, influenced by a morbid anxiety to avoid exposing flanks to counterattack. The Russians in the east, meanwhile, became important beneficiaries of Hitler’s losses: when they launched their own great offensive on 12 January 1945, many of the German tanks which might have checked their advance lay wrecked on the Western Front. The Ardennes battle, by dissipating Hitler’s armoured reserves, hastened Germany’s end, and not in a fashion to its people’s advantage. It ensured that the Red Army, rather than the Americans and British, led the way to Hitler’s capital. Only on 28 January did Eisenhower’s forces reoccupy the line they had held before Hitler launched Autumn Mist.
WHILE THE STRUGGLE in the Ardennes dominated headlines across much of the world, in Italy the Anglo-Americans continued their thankless, yard-by-yard struggle up the peninsula. Many Allied soldiers became increasingly embittered by the belief that they were suffering shocking privations for scant purpose or recognition. In some units, discipline became precarious. A platoon in Lt.