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By Root 1686 0

full tribute to Patton’s achievement in staving in the southern flank of the Ardennes offensive, but Patton was not a wholly attractive man. The obverse side of his intense racial pride in himself was his anti-Semitism, and his belief in the Bolshevist-Zionist conspiracy was in no way lessened after the liberation of the concentration camps. By the end of his career, the US Army had placed a psychiatrist on his staff to keep an eye on him, and were monitoring his phone calls. He was to die in his sleep on 21 December 1945, twelve days after fracturing his neck in a collision with a truck near Mannheim, in which no one was speeding. ‘The God of War, whom Patton worshipped so devotedly, clearly has a wry sense of humour,’ wrote one reviewer of his biography, and Patton himself acknowledged beforehand that it was ‘a helluva way to die’.42 Perhaps the Almighty had not appreciated Patton’s impertinence in being told to make up His mind and take sides in the struggle between civilization and barbarism.

The battle of the Bulge cost the Germans 98,024 battlefield casualties, including over 12,000 killed, but also 700 tanks and assault guns and 1,600 combat aircraft, against Allied (the great majority American) casualties of 80,987, including 10,276 killed, but a slightly larger number of tanks and tank-destroyers lost.43 The great difference was that in matériel the Allies could make up these large losses, whereas the Germans no longer could. The effect on Allied morale was powerful. ‘The Germans were going to be defeated,’ concluded a British tank commander who had fought in the battle, ‘and not only in their Ardennes adventure but in their whole mad attempt to dominate the world.’44 The time-frame was another matter: on 6 February Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks wagered Montgomery £10 ‘that the German war will be over by 1 May 1945’. He lost by a week.

Hitler had been warned by Rundstedt and Model that the offensive would achieve only a drastic weakening of the Reich’s power to resist the Russians on the Eastern Front, without any concomitant advantage in the west. Nonetheless, he was willing to gamble all, as so often before in his career. The hopes of many Germans that the Red Army could be kept back were thus sacrificed for an offensive in the west, against an enemy far less vicious and rapacious than the one bearing down on the Heimat (homeland) from the east. ‘Only Hitler’s personal folly maintained the Ardennes battle,’ records Max Hastings, ‘encouraged by Jodl, who persuaded him that maintaining pressure in the west was dislocating the Anglo-Americans’ offensive plans.’45 So it was, but only at a greater cost to Germany’s defensive plans, and Hitler was never able to undertake a major offensive again.

It was unusual for Hitler to have been influenced by Jodl, the Chief of the Operations Staff of OKW throughout the war, whose attitude towards his Führer can be gleaned from his speech about the coming victory to Gauleiters in Munich in November 1943, when he said: ‘My most profound confidence is based on the fact that at the head of Germany there stands a man who by his entire development, his desires, and striving can only have been destined by Fate to lead our people into a brighter future.’46 At Nuremberg Göring told Leon Goldensohn that he thought Wilhelm Keitel should not even be on trial because ‘although he was a field marshal, [he] was a small person who did whatever Hitler instructed’.47 Head of the OKW throughout the war, Keitel, in the estimation of the British post-war historian of the German High Command, John Wheeler-Bennett, had ‘ambition but no talent, loyalty but no character, a certain native shrewdness and charm, but neither intelligence nor personality’.48 He was far more sycophantic – Hitler called him ‘as loyal as a dog’ – even than Jodl. Yet he certainly did deserve his Nuremberg punishment: he presided over the so-called Court of Honour that condemned the July Plotters to death; he signed the order to shoot all Soviet commissars on capture, as well as the notorious Nacht und Nebel (night and fog)