Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [193]
The Allied response was far swifter than the Germans had hoped it would be. Eisenhower canceled all his prospective drives and concentrated every effort on pinching out the German attack. The German irruption was such that Bradley’s communications were cut with his northern troops, so Eisenhower gave temporary command in the north to Montgomery; in the south Patton’s 3rd Army did a ninety-degree turn to the north and drove toward Bastogne, a feat of sudden improvisation to match anything in the war. Montgomery arrived in the north, “tidied up the front” as he termed it, and ordered the Americans to do what they were doing anyway, hold hard and counterattack as soon as possible. By Christmas Day—not the Christmas many had hoped to spend—the Germans had gone as far as they were going. They had created a long narrow salient, forty miles wide at its base, and about sixty miles deep. The very point of their advance was five miles short of the Meuse, so they never even really achieved their first objective, let alone distant Antwerp. The next day several Allied armored divisions crashed into their northern flank, and Patton’s tankers fought their way through to the surrounded troops at Bastogne. Even more portentous, the sky cleared.
The minute the bad weather front moved off, the air was full of Allied planes. The fighter-bombers ranged everywhere over the battlefield, and nothing that moved and looked German escaped their attention. Hitler refused to be deterred by the pleas of his generals and frantically shuffled pins about on the battle map, as if that would relieve the plight of his soldiers, now fighting desperately to escape the trap their initial success had created for them. More than twenty Allied divisions pounded at the eleven German ones inside the salient, and slowly, the Bulge disappeared. The Germans fought hard and tenaciously, but by mid-January, though they were not cut off and trapped, they were back where they had started from. When the Battle of the Bulge ended, six weeks after it began, Hitler had succeeded only in delaying the Allies by that much time. He had lost 200,000 men and 600 tanks and most of his remaining aircraft. He had used up his last disposable strategic reserve, nothing remained to use against the Western Allies, and nothing against the Russians. As the front subsided into temporary quiet, and the dead were gathered off the blackened snow of the Ardennes, the Russians opened their main drive into Germany.
The great Russian summer offensive of 1944 had halted at the gates of Warsaw. Through the fall and into the winter there was savage fighting for the city of Budapest, but the northern front remained relatively quiescent. In this lull Hitler transferred substantial units westward to take part in the Ardennes offensive. He tried to fortify the Eastern Front but lacked matériel to create any real depth in his defensive positions.
The Red Army was now a fighting machine with few equals either for numbers or proficiency. German intelligence gave them numerical superiority of eleven to one in men, seven to one in tanks, and twenty to one in artillery and aircraft. Hitler refused to believe such figures, but he was not in the front line facing the ominous masses of Soviet soldiers. For the Reds the long hard road was nearly at an end. They were about to enter German territory, had already done so in East Prussia, and the Germans were now to be repaid in their own kind for their Russian policies. Where American and British tanks sported names like “Daisy Mae” and “Donald Duck,” the Russians carried slogans “For the Motherland!” and “Death to the Germans!” The long harvest of bitterness was ripe for reaping.
The Russian offensive started January 12 when General Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front—a “front” being the equivalent of a Western Army Group—launched its attack just north of the Carpathian Mountains. Two days later General Zhukov picked up the gauge north of