Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [192]
The generals demurred. Von Rundstedt, cautious and professional, said it would not work; even Model agreed with him: the Germans simply did not have the men and material to do the job. Hitler overrode them; it could work, it must work. Out of his illusions coupled with the Wehrmacht’s recuperative powers was launched the last great German offensive of the Second World War.
The Allies knew something was in the wind. As professional intelligence evaluators, however, they believed correctly that the Germans did not have the matériel for a major counteroffensive, and that therefore they would have sense enough not to launch one. It was Hitler rather than the German Army that surprised them.
In Bradley’s Army Group, Patton to the south of the Ardennes was preparing a drive eastward toward the Rhine. General William Simpson’s 9th Army, north of the Ardennes, was preparing to move in support of Montgomery on their left when he got past the Roer River dams. In the middle, Hodges was left weak, his 1st Army assigned an essentially subordinate role. Having had heavy fighting all the way from Normandy, it now contained tired units low on manpower, or new ones just getting their feet wet.
The Germans had prepared as carefully as they could. They had created two new Panzer armies, 6th SS under General Sepp Dietrich, and 5th under General Otto Manteuffel. Advance units included a commando group under Colonel Otto Skorzeny, the man who had rescued Mussolini from his mountain prison in Italy. Since then Skorzeny had become Hitler’s jack of all trades. Now his commandos included a group of English-speaking Germans dressed in captured American uniforms and equipment. Their task was to confuse the enemy and to take and hold the bridges over the Meuse, the river whose successful crossing would shake the Germans loose on the road to Antwerp. After waiting for a period of bad weather to come in and ground the Allied air forces, the Germans struck early on the morning of December 16.
The immediate success was impressive. The opening drive shattered two American divisions spread along the Schnee Eifel ridge in the north and along the Our River in the south. Routed and overwhelmed, both divisions broke up into component parts, with battalions, companies, and even platoons wandering about the wintry forests, fighting Germans when they bumped into them, or looking desperately for friends. The Germans capitalized on the confusion, which Skorzeny’s commandos compounded. As soon as the news got out that there were enemy soldiers abroad in American uniforms, informal but strict security measures sprang into being; the soldier who faced a squad of grim-looking infantrymen and could not immediately tell who played first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, or who was Betty Grable’s husband, was in serious trouble.
Pushing on through the hills and forests, the Germans made for the road junction at Bastogne. Here they encountered and surrounded the U. S. 101st Airborne Division, which had been ordered up and told to hold on at all costs. Summoned to surrender, the American commander, General MacAuliffe, replied with one word “Nuts!” which then had to be interpreted as well as translated for a German emissary unfamiliar with American slang.
Bastogne not only slowed the German 5th Army down, it stopped them, for they expected to capture American fuel dumps, which were now denied them. On the northern side of the drive Dietrich was making even less headway. Mishandling his armor, he had passed the Schnee Eifel but he could not lever the Americans off the shoulder of the Eisenborn Ridge. With a narrow front he pushed west; at one point his troops began to break northward, west of Malmédy, but were thrown back