A Time For Trumpets - The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge

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TOR

TRUMPETS THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

CHARLES B. MacDONALD AUTHOR THE

OF

COMPANY COMMANDER

A TIM £ FOR TRUMPETS THE UNTOLD STORYOFTHE

CHARLES B. MacDONALD Forty years ago, on

December

16, 1944,

the vanguard of three German armies totaling 500,000 men suddenly attacked out of

and snows of the rugged Ardennes Luxembourg in what was the last desperate gamble of Adolf Hitler to reverse the impending defeat of Nazi Germany. In the most abysmal failure of the mists

region of Belgium and

battlefield intelligence in the history of the

U.S. Army, the

Germans achieved

total

surprise.

Six hundred thousand Americans fought in

what came

to

be known as the Battle of

—

the most decisive battle on the the Bulge Western Front during World War II and the greatest ever fought

book

is

by the U.S. Army. This

the definitive account of that strug-

by one who saw the fighting at first hand and who has captured the special aura of the combat; one who knows what gle. It is told

it

is

like to live in

German

a frozen foxhole under

shelling, to see

German

soldiers

wearing greatcoats charging toward him

men possessed, to experience the terror mammoth tanks approaching, their long

like

of

cannon preceding them

like

something

obscene.

The author of A Time for Trumpets is not only a veteran of the battle but also one

(continued on back flap)

;

BOSTON PUBLIC

UBRSKY

A TIME FOR TRUMPETS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR COMPANY COMMANDER THREE BATTLES: ARNAVILLE, ALTUZZO, AND SCHMIDT (with Sidney T.

Mathews)

THE SIEGFRIED LINE CAMPAIGN AIRBORNE

THE BATTLE OF THE HUERTGEN FOREST THE LAST OFFENSIVE

THE MIGHTY ENDEAVOR! AMERICAN ARMED FORCES IN THE EUROPEAN THEATER IN WORLD WAR II

ON A FIELD OF RED: THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL AND THE COMING OF WORLD WAR II (with

Anthony Cave Brown)

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER Staff Sgt. Joseph Arnaldo,

New

Bedford, Mass.

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

A Time for

Trumpets Charles B.

MacDonald

WILLIAM MORROW AND COMPANY, INC

NEW YORK jaiGHLOM BRANCH

Copyright

Maps

©

1985 by Charles B.

copyright

©

MacDonald

1985 by Billy C.

Mossman and

Photographs are courtesy of the United States

Blair, Inc.

Army and

(or their relatives) with the exception of the following:

the individuals pictured

German photographs

cour-

Gunter von der Weiden, and the Still Picture Branch, National Archives; Strong, Williams, de Guingand, and preparing to execute Skorzeny's men, Imperial War Museum; Vandenberg, Smithsonian Institution; and the ENIGMA machine, National Security Agency. tesy Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte,

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

MacDonald, Charles Brown, 1922-

A

time for trumpets.

Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Ardennes, Battle of the, 1944-1945. I. Title. 940.54'21 84-9043 D756.5.A7M26 1984 ISBN 0-688-03923-5 Printed in the United States of America

23456789 BOOK

DF.SIGN

10

BY BERNARD SCHl.KIFER

For

my

brother, Rae,

his wife, Nannie,

and

theirs,

and for

the

American

who fought

in the

soldiers

Ardennes.

and airmen

Contents

Prologue

BOOK one:

two: three: four:

I:

PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

The Decision, the Setting, and the Plan The Deception and the Intelligence Apparatus What Did the Allies Know? The Last Few Hours

BOOK

II:

17

39 62 80

THE FIRST DAY

five:

In Front of St. Vith

101

six:

130

seven: eight:

The Skyline Drive The Southern Shoulder The Northern Shoulder

nine:

Reaction

BOOK

III:

at the

Top

184

THE PENETRATIONS

eleven: twelve: thirteen: fourteen:

Kampfgruppe Peiper "The Damned Engineers" The Race for Bastogne: The First Phase The Race for Bastogne: The Second Phase The Defense of Wiltz

fifteen: sixteen:

Developing Crisis at St. Vith Shaping the Defense of St. Vith

ten:

146

160

197 224 261

280 298 310 333

CONTENTS

BOOK seventeen: eighteen: nineteen:

IV:

In Front of

THE SHOULDERS

Luxembourg City Twin Villages

351

In Defense of the

To Gain

370 391

the Elsenborn Ridge

BOOK V: DAMS AGAINST THE TIDE twenty: twenty-one: twenty-two: twenty-three: twenty-four: twenty-five: twenty-six: twenty-seven:

Command Decisions War Against Kampfgruppe

The The The The

To

Peiper

Last Days of Kampfgruppe Peiper Defense of St. Vith

Defense of Bastogne

Relieve Bastogne

In Front of the Ourthe River Crisis

Before the Meuse

415 430

450 466 488 514 534 560

BOOK VI: THE ROAD BACK twenty-eight: twenty-nine:

Crises in

Command

Erasing the Bulge

Epilogue Author's Note

Acknowledgments U.S.

Army Regimental and Battalion Chart

Order of Battle Notes Bibliography Index

587 604

620 624 626 629 630 656 682 687

A TIME FOR TRUMPETS

Prologue

western reaches of the Ardennes region of Belgium, the villittle distinction. It was just another farming village, lacking the narrow, winding, cobblestoned streets and mountain-like setting of so many villages and towns that help make the Ardennes a picture postcard region. In early September, 1944, on either side of the main highway through the village the Grand' Rue stood a cluster of ten to twelve red brick buildings, mostly dwellings but some with small shops on the ground floor. One was the Cafe de la Poste. Along a winding side road up a gently sloping hill were other houses belonging mostly to farmers, as might be discerned from their attached barns and from compost heaps almost always located near the front door. At the top of the hill was a small church of drab gray native stone. Much of the nearby land was cultivated, but two or three miles away on every side were forests. Since less than a thousand people lived in Bande, it was of insufficient importance for the German Army to station occupation troops in the village. The entire region fell under the jurisdiction of the Kreiskommandant in Bastogne, twenty-four miles to the southeast, and there was a detachment of Feldgendarmerie eight miles to the northwest in Marche. In a nearby forest, close to a hundred German soldiers lived in wooden barracks, their duty to guard Russian prisoners of war who worked in an ammunition depot. During the first days of September, 1944, the exhilaration of impending liberation was in the air in Bande. Adding to the excitement, word spread among the villagers that a group of Belgian resistance fighters of the Armee Secrete had moved into a nearby wood. Such was the elation of approaching freedom after four long years of omnipresent German soldiers their hobnailed boots, their imperious commands, their edicts, their requisitions, their unannounced knocks in the night that might mean

Located lage of

in

Bande had

—

—

—

PROLOGUE

10 a loved

one seized

for deportation

— that some of the

displayed the black, red, and yellow Belgian flag.

A

has

villagers defiantly les

Bochesl

on September 5, men of the Armee Secrete attacked the German barracks at the ammunition depot. Three German soldiers Before daylight

died in the attack. The next day, the

Bande along

Germans surrounded

the center of

the Grand' Rue, ordered the inhabitants from their homes,

and systematically put the torch to every building. Two days later, on September 8, as troops of the American 9th Infantry Division approached, the last of the German soldiers hurriedly departed. As they left, some of them shook their fists at the obviously exultant inhabitants. "We'll be back!" they shouted.*

On September 16, 1944, the man who had plunged the world into the most devastating war in the history of mankind, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany and self-styled Fuhrer, summoned a number of senior officers to his study. It was in a huge, underground steel-reinforced concrete bunker within the Wolfschanze (Wolf's Lair), Hitler's field headquarters in the swampy pine forest of Gorlitz in East Prussia. Those summoned had come to constitute a kind of household military staff. Among them was one of the few wearing the red stripes of the General Staff on their trews whose advice Hitler still sought and sometimes heeded, the head of the operations (Armed Forces High staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or Command), General Alfred Jodl. The officers were waiting when Hitler entered the study, his shoulders

OKW

sagging, his face drained of color, looking considerably older than his fifty-four years.

Although he had recovered from most of the

incurred not quite two months before

when

injuries

army him by setting off a bomb, smuggled into a conference in a briefcase, he still had a ruptured right eardrum and a sometimes uncontrollable twitching of his right arm. He also had spells of dizziness and a persistent sinus headache. The Fiihrer's voice had become hoarse (it would later be determined because of a benign growth on his vocal chords), and he sometimes had such severe stomach spasms that it was almost impossible for him to keep from crying out, an affliction (it would also be determined later) attributable to pills prescribed for flatulence by his personal physician, who was unaware that they contained strychnine and atropine. A steady diet of those pills had turned his skin yellow, as if he had jaundice, and that very morning, before calling the officers to his study, Hitler had had what was probably a mild corohad

conspirators within the

tried to assassinate

nary, the third in less than a week.

Taking a seat

asked Jodl to sum up the situation on noted the strength of the opposing forces, favor of the Western Allies Great Britain, France,

at his desk, Hitler

the Western Front. Jodl

which was heavily *

Citations for

all

in

first

—

direct quotes are part of the bibliography.

Prologue

11

and the United States. Of more than a million German casualties incurred over the last three months, said Jodl, almost half had been in the West. The German troops, he went on, were continuing their withdrawal from southern France, and in northeastern France they were trying to form a new line based upon sturdy old forts dating from the Franco-

new lines along canals and back from Belgium into the border fortifications, the West Wall. There was one spot of particular concern, added Jodl, referring to a convoluted, heavily forested region encompassing eastern Belgium and much of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where the Americans were attacking and the Germans had almost nothing: the Ardennes. At the word "Ardennes," Hitler sat erect and ordered Jodl to stop. A long pause followed. "I have made a momentous decision," the Fuhrer said at last, the Prussian War. In the north they were forming rivers in the

Netherlands or

falling

firmness of his voice belying his

weakened

condition, his blue eyes alight

with a fervor that nobody had seen since the attempt on his

go over to the offensive, that map that lay across his desk jective, Antwerp!"

is

to say"

life.

"I shall

— he slapped one hand down on a

— "here, out of the Ardennes, with the ob-

With those words, Adolf Hitler set in motion preparations for a battle was to assume epic proportions, the greatest German attack in the West since the campaign of 1940 had brought down the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France in swift and ignominious defeat. It was destined to involve more than a million men and to precipitate an unparalleled crisis for the Allied armies. It was also to involve one of the most egregious failures in the history of American battlefield intelligence. Yet it was also to become the greatest battle ever fought by the United States Army. that

It

was

cold.

Luxembourg

A damp, penetrating cold, typical for the

Grand Duchy of

second week of December. Elise Dele and her son Jean plodded through heavy mist along a deserted highway that followed the west bank of the little Our River. To Elise, there was something almost eerie about returning to her village, Bivels, from which every living soul and even the pigs and cows had been evacuated. Yet she badly needed to get to her farmhouse on the steep slope overlooking the village, the house she had long shared with her husband, Mathias, until the Germans in October had taken him away. She had to get warmer clothes for herself and for Jean. Early that morning, December 10, with the approval of the civil authorities in Vianden (not quite two miles from Bivels), she and Jean had set out, Jean pulling a small cart in which to carry back their belongings. They had passed the first house in the village and were approaching in the

PROLOGUE

12

when two German soldiers appeared at the door. When they beckoned, Jean dropped the handle of the cart and ran. Elise ran, too, but the soldiers quickly overtook her; it was easier for a thirteen-year-old boy to get away than a woman of forty-one. At the soldiers' order, Elise went with them across a temporary footbridge over the Our and up a sharp incline beyond to what appeared to be a low-level command post in a concrete bunker of the West Wall. There a young German officer asked what Elise knew about the American soldiers in and around Vianden. She knew little. The Americans had a post halfway up the steep, cobblestoned main street of Vianden, she said, perhaps eighteen or twenty men. That was all. Those were the only Americans she had seen. The questioning at an end, the officer appeared to be embarrassed by Elise's presence, as if he was at a loss to know what to do with her; but he refused her every entreaty to be allowed to return to Bivels. At last he put her with some soldiers in a truck heading east. Elise had no idea where the soldiers were taking her, but when they turned onto a main road, she recognized it as that leading to the town of the second

Bitburg, eighteen miles inside Germany.

When

they got to Bitburg, the

truck stopped at the schoolhouse, and one of the soldiers told Elise to

follow him inside. There another

German

officer

questioned her, then

woman in the town. Elise told the woman she was worried about her son.

sent her to stay in the house of a

The next morning, The soldiers had left no guard,

replied the

woman. Why not

just leave?

was at first too frightened to take her advice. What would the soldiers do if they caught her? For the better part of two days, Elise stayed in the woman's house. On the 11th, it began to snow, which increased her concern about Jean, and the next afternoon she finally made up her mind to go. As she left the house, she was struck with the change in the town. It was teeming with soldiers and military traffic, and some of the troops wore gray uniforms with black collars, which Elise knew to be the uniform of the SS. She had traveled about half the distance of her return journey when she came upon two elderly men whom she knew from a village inside Germany opposite Bivels. They invited her to walk with them. As they continued along the road, Elise began to notice a sharp increase in military traffic. Passing through a wood, she saw great stacks of military equipment piled on both sides of the road just inside the creelines. Not long after that, columns of artillery overtook them, some guns drawn by trucks, others by teams of horses. Each time that happened, she and her companions stepped off the road to get out of the way, but nobody paid them any attention. As they entered another wood, she saw row after row of what looked like small boats. What was going on? Elise only vaguely remembered when the Germans had come in 1914 and had had little experience with the military Elise

Prologue

13

when the Germans had attacked across the Our and Luxembourg and Belgium to the sea, and again just last September, when the Americans had come and made a brief attack across the Our not far from Bivels. On both those occasions, there had been a stream of traffic much like that she was seeing then. Did that mean the Germans were going to attack again? The thought made her all the more anxious to get back to her son. other than in 1940, driven through

When Elise and the two German men reached men lived, she rested in one of their homes; but as

the village where the

darkness

fell

the next

December 13, she set out to cover the remaining distance to Bivels. Not far from some concrete pillboxes, she came upon entanglements of barbed wire. As she tried to work her way through, she activated a trip day,

mine exploded. Elise was terrified, but because she had been bending forward to negotiate the barbed wire, she was unharmed; and to her immense relief, the noise drew no fire from the pillboxes. When at last she reached the point where the ground dropped sharply down to the Our, the valley was immersed in a dense fog. She dared not try the descent under those conditions. Lying down in the snow, she tried to sleep, but that was impossible. For what seemed like an eternity, Elise did her best to keep warm by chafing her hands and legs and stamping her feet. An hour before midnight, the fog lifted. Ignoring the cold, she took off her shoes to cut down on noise and followed a path leading down to the river; but at the river, she saw that the footbridge which she had wire, and a

crossed earlier no longer existed.

Close to weeping from fright and despair, Elise followed the trace of Our until at last she came to that part of Vianden which lay on the east bank, the only place where the little river diverged as a boundary between Germany and Luxembourg. Although the bridge connecting the two parts of the town had long been destroyed, there was an old man who called across the river to partisans of the Luxembourg underground. Elise knew the partisans helped the Americans to man their post and also occupied the ruins of a tenth-century castle at the top of the town, which in happier times was one of the attractions drawing swarms of tourists to Vianden. Early in the morning of December 14, two young men from the unthe

derground came

boat to row Elise across the river. While they them what she had seen behind the German lines. It looked to her, she said, as if the Germans were coming back. As the three made their way up the main street, the young men inmen of the sisted on stopping at the Hotel Heintz where the Americans Intelligence and Reconnaissance (I&R) Platoon of the 28th Division's 109th Infantry were billeted, to tell them what Elise had seen. Although Elise understood no English, it was obvious that what she had to say excited the Americans. They gave her coffee and something to eat, but like the German officers, the American officer who interrogated her (it was 1st Lt. Stephen Prazenka) refused to release her to look for her in a small

crossed, she told

—

—

PROLOGUE

14

to the

Americans bundled her into a jeep and hurried her back town of Diekirch and into the high school, which served as a com-

mand

post.

son. Instead, the

There another American officer wearing a red shoulder patch that looked a little like a square-cut bucket questioned Elise at length. Although the officer was calmer than the soldiers in Vianden, there was no doubt that what she had to say highly interested him. So much so, in fact, that he too declined her request to be allowed to find her son. She was soon in the cab of a truck that took her farther west, to the town of Wiltz and another headquarters that appeared to be even bigger and more important than the one in Diekirch. Elise Dele had no way of knowing it, but a report of what she had to say was quickly on its way up the American chain of command. At headquarters of the VIII Corps in the Belgian town of Bastogne, a clerk jotted down an entry in the G-2 (intelligence) journal:

From 28th Div to MONARCH 2, Msg # 60, 142320 Dec 44: The following is a preliminary interrogation of a Luxembourg woman who has been interrogated by the 28th Inf Div: The woman Biewels

German

[sic]

reports that she had been given permission to go to

where her home

is

to pick

up clothes

.

.

to Bitburg] she observed

many

while there a

.

reconnaissance patrol took her into custody.

.

.

.

[En route

trucks and horse-drawn vehicles,

pontons, small boats, and other river-crossing materiel. In addition,

many artillery pieces, some of which were horsedrawn and others truck-drawn. She was again interrogated at Bitburg and while in this town she observed many troops in light gray She escaped at Bitburg uniform with black collars (SS troops). [and] went to Vianden where she was picked up and taken 28th Div considers the informant fairly reliacross the river she observed

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

able.

.

.

.

.

.

Woman's

stepped on a

trip

and interrogation

condition

is

highly

nervous,

wire which detonated a mine. is

.

.

.

[she]

having

Further check

continuing and complete report will be submit-

ted as early as possible.

A

short time later, a digest of that message was

togne to night

the Belgian town of Spa, where

on December

14, a corporal entered

at fifteen it

its way from Basminutes before mid-

on

into the

G-2 journal of the same as the one

United States Army. The message said much had gone to the VIII Corps except that it erroneously identified the woman as German. In Wiltz, in the meantime, the Americans provided Elise Dele with food and comfortable accommodations, but the next morning they refused to allow her to return to Vianden and sent her instead to Bastogne, whence they intended sending her on to Spa. As it turned out, she was destined to spend a long time in Bastogne most of it taking refuge in a cellar. the

First

that

—

BOOK

I PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

CHAPTER ONE

The

Decision, the Setting, and the Plan

By

late

summer

of 1944, few other than a megalomaniac such as Adolf

Hitler could have discerned any cialist state that

hope

for the beleaguered National So-

Hitler called the Third Reich. Like other

German

rulers

before him, the Fuhrer faced the dilemma of fighting a two-front war,

and west, however much he had tried to avoid it. After conquering France, he had attempted to lure the British into a separate peace; when that failed, he launched what was meant to be a lightning campaign of east

annihilation against the Untermenschen (subhumans) of Russia, whereupon, having "knocked from Britannia's hand the last 'continental sword' at Britain's disposal," he could effectively deal with the British. Yet that strategy too had foundered, on the reef of Russian nationalism and in the

sea of Russia's vast expanses.

By

summer of 1944, the Allied armies that had come ashore on Normandy and on August 15 in southern France controlled almost all of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg and stood little more than fifty miles from the Ruhr industrial region, whose mines, smelters, and factories were vital to the survival of the German war machine. In

June 6

late in

other Allied armies were close to breaking into the Po valley not from the southern frontier of the Reich; and in the East, during the course of the summer, the Red Army had driven four hundred miles from deep inside White Russia to the Vistula River across from the Polish capital of Warsaw, an advance that conquered half of Poland and put Russian soldiers virtually on the frontier of East Prussia. Red Army troops had been in the Romanian capital of Bucharest for nearly a fortnight and were almost at the gates of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Their advances had forced German withdrawal from Greece and had precipitated the kind of defection of Germany's allies that had presaged collapse in World War I. Italy had long since given in and become a battleground; Bulgaria and Romania had defected, with Finland about to follow; and Italy,

far

17

— PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

18

only the presence of

German

divisions kept

Hungary from doing the

same. In five years of

war the German armed forces had

and three-quarters of a million men, the elite of

lost

almost three

German manpower.

Es-

sential raw materials from Russia, the Balkans, Finland, and France were

no longer

to be had,

luctant to provide

its

and neutral Sweden was becoming increasingly

re-

iron ore to a nation that appeared about to collapse.

Thousand-plane raids by Allied bombers on German cities had become commonplace. Yet Adolf Hitler still saw hope. Or professed that he did. For all the immense losses in battle, Germany had close to ten million men in uniform, including seven and a half million in the army and another ground combat force, a kind of Praetorian guard of the Nazi Party, the Waffen-Schutzstaffel, or SS. There were still others who could be committed to the fight: heretofore-deferred students, men with less than crippling physical defects, nonessential government workers, convalescents from the hospitals, sailors and airmen turned into foot soldiers, new classes made available for the draft simply by extending the age limit at both ends of the induction spectrum (to run from sixteen to sixty). Nor was there concern, as there had been in 1918, about collapse of the home front. The police state had eliminated the internal Red threat so that not once during the war years or at least driven it underground had the ugly noise of street demonstrations reached Hitler's ears. And so ruthlessly had he dealt with the cabal of army officers who tried to kill him for those most deeply involved, death by hanging on meat hooks, that the chance of a with motion-picture cameras recording the agony recrudescent opposition was remote. So, too, the air raids and the demand of his enemies for unconditional surrender had cemented the will of

—

—

—

German people. However damaging the thousand-plane raids, they had failed to prevent German industry from maintaining a remarkably high rate of production. Indeed, not until the late fall of 1944 was German production to the

reach a wartime peak. Smaller industries had been dispersed to the coun-

moved to the East, where the Russians had few big bombers. A new decree would put workers on a sixty-hour week, impressed foreign

tryside or

workers would be driven ever harder, and production of civilian goods would be drastically cut. By those methods, German industry during the fall of 1944 was to produce a record million and a quarter tons of ammunition, three-quarters of a million rifles, a hundred thousand machine guns, and nine thousand artillery pieces. Only in tanks was production to decline, and that would be partially offset by record production of self-propelled assault guns from factories previously moved beyond the range of Allied bombers to Czechoslovakia. Hitler also put great store by a new weapon of which some models were already appearing: jet-propelled fighter aircraft

The Decision,

the Setting,

and

the Plan

three times faster than anything flown by Allied pilots.

Once

19 the

new

jets

got into action in substantial numbers, Hitler maintained, they would

sweep Allied planes from German skies. What Hitler needed was time. For all the crises on the Eastern Front, Hitler was still capable of gaining time there simply by utilizing the age-old process of trading it for space. Although Russian penetration onto the soil of the Reich in East Prussia would be a heavy psychological blow, there was nothing in East Prussia absolutely vital to German survival. (As the master strategist Alfred von Schlieffen had put it: Better an enemy in East Prussia than one on the Rhine.) At the Vistula the Red Army was still three hundred miles from any really critical objective, such as the capital, Berlin, or the coal fields and industry of Silesia. In any case the current Russian offensive had run its course, supply lines too taut to support another great lunge forward

until well into the winter.

The Western Front was another

matter, for there the Allied armies Ruhr. Yet hope Hitler could see on the Western Front as well. Like the Russians, the Allies had outrun their supply lines, and by ordering diehard holdouts in the French and Belgian ports even as the German armies fell back toward the frontier, he had ensured that for some time to come the Allies would still have to base their supplies on the Normandy beaches or on ports far from the front. There was also the factor of the border fortifications on the western frontier, the combination of concrete antitank obstacles (dragon's teeth), pillboxes, and bunkers known to the German soldier as Westwall, and to the Allied soldier as the Siegfried Line. No matter how dated those defenses, Hitler maintained that concrete in any form lent impetus to the defense; and

threatened the

vital

was forbidding. and inhospitable terrain in the West thus spelled time, but in the final accounting, time alone was not enough. To stand beleaguered on the defensive while his enemies gradually strangled him was no solution. He had to go over to the offensive, strike a blow that would change everything, prove decisive. There was no hope for such a decisive blow in the East. The number of new and refitted divisions Hitler could muster for an offensive would simply be swallowed by the great distances and ingested by the Red Army's multitudes. Besides, there was no chance there for a separate peace, for Hitler saw Germany as the last bulwark against the forces of unholy communism, with which he could never traffic. By way of Japan, there had been indications that the Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin, might be willing to parley, but Hitler forbade any dickering with the Untermenschen. "Probing the Soviet attitude," he wrote the wife of his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, "is like touching a glowing stove to besides, the terrain along the frontier

Space

find out

The

in the East, fortifications

if it's

hot."

situation in the

West was

a different matter.

Not only were the

PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

20

distances shorter, the strategic objectives within acceptable range, and

the opposing forces far less overwhelming in numbers. Hitler also saw a real possibility of inducing the Allies, for all their

proud decrees about

unconditional surrender, to accept a separate peace. Never in history, as he perceived it, had war produced such strange

bedfellows as the Western democracies and the Soviet Union. "Ultracapitalist states

on one

side," he

would tell his generals on the eve of his on the other; on one side a dying em-

big offensive, "ultra-Marxist states pire

— Britain; on the other side a colony, the United

claim

its

inheritance."

Each of the

three, he said,

States, waiting to

was determined "either

to cheat the others out of something or get something out of it."

victory

artificial coalition It

A

great

on the Western Front, Hitler declared, would "bring down

was absurd

many were

this

with a crash." for

Anglo-American armies

defeated, would allow the

to fight a

mucky

war which,

if

Ger-

communism to among such strange

fingers of

grub about in western Europe. Impossible strains bedfellows would surely develop, and already Hitler thought he detected them, including some in the Anglo-American alliance. If he could destroy the British and Canadian armies, Britain would be unable to replace its losses, and Canada would hardly be inclined to send another contingent to the slaughter. In which case, would the United States be willing to continue the absurd fight alone? It was obvious that the survival of the United States of America itself was not at stake: And not Germany had sullied American the enemy in the Pacific, Japan honor at Pearl Harbor. If a catastrophic blow to the Allied armies should precipitate a separate peace, that would enable Hitler to turn a still powerful army and all Germany's resources to putting an end to the Red menace, thus fulfilling his ambition to destroy communism and the pagan Russian hordes utterly, to level Moscow and Leningrad, blotting their names forever from geography and history alike. Had not Frederick the Great who among all the military leaders of history was Hitler's idol, whose maxims were always on the tip of the Fiihrer's tongue to silence the pessimist, invoke new sacrifice, or justify cruel discipline, and whose portrait hung behind the desk in Hitler's study in the Reichschancellery faced vastly superior forces converging on his kingdom in the Seven Years' War? And had not Frederick, by engaging and defeating his enemies one by one, hung on until the historical accident of the death of the empress Elizabeth of Russia brought to the throne one of Frederick's admirers, Peter III, which split the coalition opposing him? Under intense adversity, would the unholy alliance of capitalism and bolshevism hold up any better? With the British and Canadian armies wiped out, would it not become obvious to the American people that their sons were dying to impose on western Europe the dic-

—

—

—

—

tatorship of the proletariat?

As

early as the last day of July, 1944,

when

the Allied armies were

The Decision,

the Setting,

and

the Plan

21

about to break out of their Normandy beachhead, Hitler, point had adamantly refused to sanction any withdrawal

who

to that

— and replaced

commander-in-chief in the West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, it admitted to a few intimates that eventual withdrawal to the West Wall might be the only recourse. That would mean, in time, an offensive mounted from behind the protection of the West Wall, a decision which Hitler revealed to a select group on August 19. He planned, he said, to launch an offensive on the Western Front at the beginning of November when heavy fog and rain poor campaigning weather traditionally came to northwestern Europe, weather that would seriously inhis

for proposing

—

—

—

terfere with the operations of the Allied air forces.

Not quite a fortnight later, on September 1, Hitler called to the Wolfschanze the man he had so recently removed from command, Gerd von Rundstedt, and asked him to return as commander-in-chief in the West. A wizened, venerable old soldier (he was almost seventy), von Rundstedt was to most Germans the paragon of all that was good and right about the German Officer Corps. Hitler disliked him intensely, partly because he was such an obvious exemplar of that elite corps with its plumy elegance, whose officers, Hitler knew, saw him in his role as supreme military commander as an imposter, and partly because Hitler also knew that in private conversations von Rundstedt referred to him mockingly by his rank in the Great War as "the Corporal." On the other hand, after having been relieved in France, von Rundstedt had demonstrated his loyalty by presiding over a Court of Honor to expel those officers associated with the attempt on the Fuhrer's life. Besides, Hitler needed a proud figurehead around which the troops might rally. He needed, too, someone whose presence as commander-in-chief might lull Allied commanders, who would expect that such an experienced and capable old soldier would conduct his campaign according to accepted canons of the military art. At the meeting in the Wolfschanze, Hitler treated von Rundstedt "with unwonted diffidence and respect," while the old soldier "sat there motionless and monosyllabic," but as a loyal German, von Rundstedt agreed to serve. He was to defend for as long as possible in front of the West Wall, then fall back on the fortifications for the decisive battle. Everything depended on that battle, Hitler stressed, for under the conditions existing in the Third Reich, there was insufficient strength to mount an offensive. Having thus deceived his commander-in-chief, Hitler set about creating the conditions for his offensive. To his minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, he gave the assignment of combing the country for enough untapped manpower to create twenty-five new divisions, while others might later be culled from Finland and Norway. To assure von Rundstedt's holding the line, he accorded the Western Front priority on tanks coming off the assembly lines; but to create an armored force to

PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

22

form the

steel heart of the offensive,

West

he ordered the four SS panzer

from the

divi-

and refitted, without telling von Rundstedt why. To control the armor, he created a new headquarters, the Sixth Panzer Army,* commanded by a hard-drinking old crony from the early, street-brawling days of the Nazi Party, SSObergruppenfuhrer Josef ("Sepp") Dietrich. Although von Rundstedt appealed for reinforcements from the new formations, Hitler refused all but minimal help; for as he had anticipated, the Allied armies had outrun their supply lines and would soon grind to a halt. There was a spasmodic climax: an attempt with three airborne divisions to gain bridgeheads over the canals and sprawling rivers of the Netherlands, including the Lower Rhine, and turn the flank of the West Wall; but when that failed, the Supreme Allied Commander, General D wight D. Eisenhower, had no recourse for a time but to accept a slow, sions then fighting in the

to be pulled

line

grinding battle of attrition.

As Hitler began more detailed planning for his offensive, one factor remained constant the goal of destroying the British and Canadian armies, which were located in the far north, mostly in the Netherlands. Although the British had seized the great Belgian port of Antwerp, German troops upon Hitler's specific order still held onto the banks of the Schelde Estuary, which connects the port with the North Sea, and thereby denied Allied ships the use of the harbor. Yet it could be expected that Antwerp would eventually be opened and serve as the principal port for Allied supplies. Since a drive to Antwerp would not only deny the Allies the port but also trap the British and Canadian armies, Antwerp was a strategic objective of the first order. That objective ruled out launching the offensive against the Allied south wing, for from the Vosges Mountains of Alsace or the hills of Lorraine in northeastern France the route to Antwerp was too long. The shortest distance no more than sixty miles was in the north, along the boundary between the American and British armies north of the old Carolingian capital of Aachen, but there the multiple rivers and canals posed serious obstacles to tanks. That left the Ardennes, a region that had long fascinated Hitler, where German armies had attacked with tremendous success in 1914 and again, at Hitler's personal instigation,

—

—

—

in 1940.t

At

that point, Hitler

had no way of knowing how strong the Allied

might be in the Ardennes by the time his offensive was ready. Indeed, even as he reached his decision, there was considerable concern about a drive by a corps of the American First Army through the Arline

* Although Hitler sometimes referred to that headquarters as the Sixth SS Panzer Army, it would officially be accorded the honorific only in the spring of 1945. tBut not also, as is often erroneously remarked, in 1870. That advance was from the SaarPalatinate through the Wissembourg Gap into Alsace.

The Decision,

the Setting,

and

the Plan

23

dennes and into the contiguous region inside Germany known as the Eifel. There two American infantry divisions had crossed the frontier and penetrated a thinly fortified sector of the West Wall near and astride a high ridgeline, the Schnee Eifel, while a few miles to the south an armored division had crossed Luxembourg, penetrated the West Wall, and headed for the crossroads town of Bitburg. Not until September 17 were hastily assembled troops able to halt the drive at the Schnee Eifel, and even then the Americans retained control of the ridge. Only four days later would German pressure force the armored division to abandon its thrust on Bitburg and retire into Luxembourg. On the other hand, Hitler might well expect that Allied commanders in 1944 would view the Ardennes much as their predecessors had in 1914 and 1940, as being too compartmented and too heavily forested to accommodate a major offensive. The Supreme Allied Commander in World War I, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, had called the Ardennes "an almost impenetrable massif," and one of his generals, Charles Lanrezac, reputedly said: "If you go into that death-trap of the Ardennes, you will never come out." If Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1944 held a similar view, he too would accord little credibility to the possibility of a German thrust through the Ardennes, so that an attack there could be expected to hit a

weak

point in the Allied line.

Some

days before Hitler made his dramatic announcement at the Wolfschanze on September 16, he had directed his plans and operations officer, General Jodl, to study the possibility of an offensive in the Ardennes, and he himself had pored over the results. Opposite the Ardennes, inside Germany, dense forests in the Eifel region provided a ready cloak for the assembly of an attacking force; and however restrictive the terrain, German armies had demonstrated in 1940 that mobile forces could negotiate the Ardennes swiftly. From the frontier, the route through the Ardennes to the strategic objective of Antwerp was little more than a hundred miles as the Messerschmitt flew, and a drive to Antwerp through the Ardennes would trap not only the British and Canadians but also the American First and Ninth Armies around Aachen fully half the Allied forces on the Continent a prize as alluring as that gained in the dash to the sea in 1940.

—

Any

coalition that lost half

—

its field

strength

would surely

collapse.

At

the

very least the offensive would eliminate the immediate threat to the

Ruhr, thus enabling Hitler to draw on the Western Front for troops to meet the next big lunge by the Red Army. Although Hitler was aware that he could muster no such power as he had employed in 1940, particularly in the air, he saw methods of overcoming that. It would certainly be November before the new and refitted divisions were ready, and by choosing a period of prolonged bad weather, he would assure that his panzer divisions were well on the way to Antwerp before clearing weather enabled the Allied planes to operate. So,

— PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

24

Antwerp (it would take a mere week to get Eisenhower could mount a major riposte, for would have to determine the extent of the offensive, and

too, he expected to be in there, he said) before

Eisenhower

first

responding to such a strategic threat to forces of three nationalities the armies of a democratic alliance would require so Hitler reasoned decision at the political level. That too would take time. At the Wolfschanze on September 25, Hitler spelled out in more detail what he had in mind. The artillery preparation was to be massive, followed by infantry assault to achieve a swift penetration and enable a first wave of panzer divisions to begin a rapid drive to seize bridgeheads over the Meuse River, a major military obstacle defining the western and northern reaches of the Ardennes. Quick seizure of bridgeheads over the in

—

Meuse was essential for continuing the thrust to Antwerp. At that point, a second wave of panzer divisions was to be committed, while infantry divisions followed

and peeled

off north

and south to protect the flanks of

the penetration.

The Schwerpunkt (main

effort) of the offensive

the four SS panzer divisions of the Sixth Panzer

was

Army,

to

be delivered by

a manifestation of

and ability of the SS units, which even as late were made up in large measure of volunteers. (Naming the SS for the Schwerpunkt was also a slap at the army, whose officers had tried to kill him.) The main effort was to be supported by army panzer divisions under another recently created headquarters, the Fifth Panzer Army, commanded by a successful and trusted general brought from the Eastern Front, Hasso von Manteuffel; while infantry divisions under the Seventh Army, commanded by General der Panzertruppen Erich Brandenberger, were to protect the south flank of the penetration. The offensive would require a minimum of thirty divisions, a third of them armored, and Hitler expected the Luftwaffe to support the offensive with more than a thousand planes. While charging Jodl and his operations staff with devising a detailed plan of operations, the Fiihrer also ordered them to draw up a comprehensive cover and deception plan; for, as Hitler emphasized, secrecy was basic to the plan. Everybody let in on the plan, including clerks and typists, was to sign a pledge of secrecy upon pain of death. Field commanders, including Field Marshal von Rundstedt himself, who was to be the overall commander, were to be brought in only as time, detailed planning, and assembly of forces required. Hitler may have forgotten that he himself had already been less than discreet about his intentions when, three weeks earlier, on September 4, the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, Baron Hiroshi Oshima, had called at the Wolfschanze in company with the German foreign minister, von Ribbentrop, for another of what had come to be periodic conferences. Probably because Japan was Nazi Germany's only ally with muscle, Hitler had Hitler's faith in the loyalty

as the fall of 1944

— The Decision,

the Setting,

and

the Plan

25

long been candid with the Japanese ambassador, yet as the defeats in the

mul f 'plied, he had become uncharacteristically defensive. Wheii Oshima expressed some concern about the perils facing Germany, Hitler assured him that he still had ample resources for restoring field

the situation.

When

the current replenishment of the air forces

said Hitler

now

is

completed

— and the new army of more than a million men, which

being organized,

is

ready,

I

with units to be withdrawn from

intend to combine the all

new

possible areas and to

is

units

open a

large-scale offensive in the West.

The news astounded Oshima. When? he asked. To which Hitler replied: "After the beginning of November." A few days later, Baron Oshima reported the conversation to his government in Tokyo where, as in Berlin, nobody was aware that since mid- 1941 the United States had been intercepting and decrypting Japanese diplomatic wireless (radio) traffic, a process known by the codename MAGIC. By means of MAGIC, Oshima's report that Hitler was planning "a large-scale offensive in the West" to start sometime "after the beginning of November" was on the desks of intelligence officers in the Pentagon in Washington almost as soon as it reached the desks of the foreign office in Tokyo. In Julius Caesar's time, the Ardennes region of what was to become Belgium and Luxembourg constituted the most extensive forest in all Gaul; but over the centuries, as the region passed under the control of one ruler after another, including Charlemagne, much of the land was cleared by agriculture and animal husbandry, so that by the start of the twentieth century only about half of it was still wooded. The most extensive stands that remained were in the east, close to the borders with Germany, almost all of them coniferous, stately firs harvested from time to

time for timber, then replanted in orderly rows. Between the two world wars the Ardennes became a haven for tourists, its countryside dotted with picturesque villages with narrow streets

and here and there abbeys and castles, or the ruins of them, a place where tourists partook of the region's renowned venison, wild boar, and marvelously succulent cured ham. A westward extension of the high plateau of the Eifel, so deeply etched through the centuries by serpentine streams that it appears to be less plateau than mountains, the Ardennes presents a rugged face scarred by deep gorges and twisting stream valleys. It

has the shape of a big isosceles triangle with an eighty-mile base along

the frontiers, extending from an ill-defined point in the north near the

Belgian town of Eupen (fourteen miles south of Aachen) to the vicinity of

Luxembourg

City, the capital of

Luxembourg,

in the south.

Although

PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

26

beyond the Meuse River, so deep and broad is the cut of the Meuse that for military purposes the region can be said to end there, some sixty miles from the base of the triangle. As the most extensive stands of forest are close to the German frontier, so too is the most forbidding terrain. For almost the entire length of the frontier, the terrain poses a major obstacle to military movement. In the north rises the Hautes Fagnes (High Marshes), in effect a ridgeline whose crest marks the highest elevation in the Ardennes (2,777 feet). It is an almost trackless moor covered with forest or peat bogs, the part of the region protrudes westward

latter

providing the source of medicinal waters for the thermal baths of

Aachen and

of Spa, the Belgian resort

whose name long ago passed

into

English as a synonym for thermal watering places.

Southeast of the Hautes Fagnes, in Belgium's easternmost reaches, dense forests mark the frontier to the vicinity of a road center, St. Vith. Because American troops who attacked there in September held onto the nearby prominent feature just inside Germany, the Schnee Eifel, that ridgeline in the fall of 1944 constituted a part of the obstacles to be faced by any attacker from the east. The little Our River, which rises in eastern Belgium, becomes a major

Luxembourg, where it marks the frontier and whose almost clifflike sides are covered with firs. The roads leading west toil upward to a high ridge which American troops, familiar with the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia, called the "Skyline Drive." Behind that ridge lies another gorge cut by the Clerve and Sure Rivers. After absorbing the waters of the Clerve, the Sure drains southeastward to the frontier, where it absorbs the Our and forms the border with Germany (the Germans call it the Sauer) until it joins the Moselle River northeast of Luxembourg City at roughly the southern terminus of the Ardennes. Along the entire stretch of the Ardennes near the frontier, only one corridor at all conducive to military movement exists, a sector some five miles wide beginning at the northern end of the Schnee Eifel. Taking its name from the village of Losheim, just inside Germany, it is known as the Losheim Gap. The term "gap" is relative, for even though it lacks extensive forest along the frontier, a belt of woodland two miles thick has to be crossed before gaining more open country a few miles deeper into Belgium, and the hills are steep, the valleys deep. Nevertheless, as the Kaiser's armies entered the Ardennes in 1914, a force heavy in horse cavalry pushed through the Losheim Gap in advance of the main body and quickly reached the Meuse. The same thing happened in 1940 when a panzer division under an obscure general, Erwin Rommel, passed through the Losheim Gap to gain the Meuse by nightfall on the third day obstacle as

it

crosses into

flows through a gorge

of attack.

From the high ground along the frontier the terrain slopes gradually downward toward the west, losing some of its convulsive nature except

The Decision, for tortuous

the Setting,

and

the Plan

meanderings of streams through deep valleys

27 in the

extreme

north and south. In the center, around Bastogne, the true nature of the is readily discernible, no more of an obstacle to milimovement than is always present in a gently rolling landscape. Beyond the little Ourthe River, roughly two-thirds of the distance to the

region as a plateau tary

Meuse, the same rolling hills prevail, for the most part, the rest of the way to the Meuse. The Meuse itself follows a south-north course before swinging northeast at the town of Namur. After washing the industrial wastes of one of Belgium's principal cities, Liege, it finally resumes a northward course through the Netherlands to the sea. The roadnet for such a pastoral region was extensive, although the roads usually twisted and turned in conformity with the stream valleys and in many places passed through thick forests or sharp defiles where they might be readily blocked. As an added obstacle, at every crossroads or road junction stood either a closely knit town or village or at least a collection of stone farm buildings, which almost always constricted the width of the road. Although most of the railroads had been put back into service for military traffic by late 1944, the repairs ended some miles short of the German frontier, and without connections to lines inside Germany, railroads in the Ardennes would have little bearing on the fighting to come. Not so across the frontier in the Eifel. There, in countryside even more heavily forested than that of the Ardennes, the Germans in preparing for the onset of World War I had constructed a number of rail lines feeding from marshalling yards at Cologne in the north and Koblenz in the south and from other crossings of the Rhine River in between. Since the distance between the Rhine and the western frontier is only about forty-five miles, trains moving along those spur lines have relatively short hauls. The lines lead to towns that are also road centers: Bitburg in the south; Prum and Gerolstein in the shadow of the Schnee Eifel; and Gemiind and Schleiden in the north. Although the sole arterial line runs along the valley of the Moselle on the southern periphery of the region to the old Roman outpost town of Trier, spur lines lead north from marshalling yards at Trier to Bitburg and the other road centers within the Eifel.

There are no cities in the Eifel and few in the Ardennes. Except for Liege on the northern periphery and Luxembourg City and Arlon to the south, there are only the picturesque villages and an occasional town with a population of two to five thousand. Yet those towns pull together a

number

of roads and then release them in various directions. So St. Vith near the frontier, Malmedy in the north, and Bastogne and Houffalize in the center would become critical features in any military advance. The people of Luxembourg reflect a fierce independence befitting a region that has been a separate entity, although not always autonomous,

— PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

28

Of Germanic

since the tenth century.

descent, they speak a dialect,

Letzemburgesch, which to the American soldier sounded

The population

like German. composed primarily of the northeastern corner most are eth-

of the Belgian Ardennes

French-speaking Walloons, but in

is

Germans, reflecting the fact that before the Treaty of Versailles, the easternmost province, Eupen-et-Malmedy, had long been a part of Germany. In late 1944, in such border towns as Eupen and St. Vith, shop signs were in old German script and almost all the people spoke German. Many even a majority might be loyal to Belgium, but the American soldier did not trust them. Almost every home had a photograph of a father or son in German uniform, and few American soldiers bothered to nic

—

—

reason that ethnic Germans in regions conquered by the German Army had no choice but to serve the Fatherland. Situated not far from the North Sea, the Ardennes has a harsh, wet

Some of the heavNovember December, iest rains come in and early so saturating the soil that any movement off the roads is difficult; and with them comes the fog climate, with rainfall averaging 35 to 40 inches a year.

or mist that sometimes late afternoon.

deeper

fails

to clear before

midday and reappears again

Snow sometimes accumulates up

in the drifts

As American

in

to a foot in depth

— and cold, raw winds sweep the heights.

would consistently note, the Ardennes presented little attraction for anybody except (they might have added) a tourist. Surely it proffered nothing of strategic importance to German armies forced back on their homeland in desperate straits. Yet that was reckoning without the fact that by way of the Ardennes it was just over a hundred miles, as the Messerschmitt flew, to Antwerp. intelligence officers

Although Hitler had

specifically directed that his offensive

through the Ardennes, Alfred Jodl and

his

be made

planning staff studied various

on five, only one of which involved that Ardennes which Hitler had specified, and even that failed to name Antwerp as the objective. As proposed by the planners, that operation would consist of two prongs: a main effort passing through the Ardennes and then turning north, where it would meet a thrust launched from the vicinity of Aachen a shallow double envelopment which could be expected to trap not the British and Canadians but just the American First and Ninth Armies. Proposing the alternative plans may have been simply a logical procedure for men with General Staff- trained minds; on the other hand, the plan for a shallow envelopment may have been a alternatives, eventually settling

part of the

—

subtle attempt by Jodl to modify Hitler's grandiose scheme, to reduce to the dimensions a trained

recognized as within

German

such a ploy it was, ambition but to increase If

and experienced military planner such

it

it,

it

as Jodl

capabilities.

failed.

The

effect

was not

to lessen Hitler's

for he liked the idea of supplementing the

The Decision,

the Setting,

and

the Plan

29

Ardennes thrust with a second prong originating near Aachen; and on Antwerp as an objective, he was immovable. As finally worked out by Jodl and his staff, the offensive was to be launched along a sixty-mile front from Monschau in the north, some twenty miles southeast of Aachen, whence led the only lateral road across the Hautes Fagnes, to the medieval town of Echternach in the south, downstream from the juncture of the Our and Sure Rivers. Sepp Dietrich's Sixth Panzer Army, comprising the Schwerpunkt, was to attack along a front extending from Monschau to a point within the Losheim Gap, with a panzer division debouching from the gap to follow the path of Erwin Rommel's division in 1940, bypassing opposition, and quickly gaining and crossing the Meuse. (Jodl dug from the archives a copy of the 1940 plan.) Dietrich was to pass south of Liege, cross the Meuse upstream from the city, then head for Antwerp while anchoring his northern flank on the considerable obstacle of the Albert Canal. On Dietrich's left, General von Manteuffel's Fifth Panzer Army was to attack through and south of St. Vith, cross the Skyline Drive, jump the Meuse upstream from the bend in the river at Namur, and then wheel northwest, bypassing the Belgian capital, Brussels, and protecting the Sixth Panzer Army's southern flank. Erich Brandenberger's Seventh Army, made up primarily of infantry, was to attack on either side of Echternach, and while advancing westward was to peel off divisions to block to the south. Forty-eight hours after the offensive in the Ardennes began, the Fif-

Army, composed of infantry reinforced by a panzer and a Panzergrenadier (mechanized) division, was to be prepared to attack teenth

Aachen. The basic objective was to and prevent them from reinforcing in the all went well, the attack was to continue southward to near Liege and trap the Americans around Aachen.

from the

vicinity of

ican divisions

pin

down Amer-

Ardennes; but reach the

if

Meuse

Although Hitler

down American diviattack, like that by the Fifteenth Army, rea suggestion that Army Group H, which

'spoke grandly of yet another attack in Alsace to tie

sions there, plans for that

mained

indefinite.

defended

So did

might drive through the Canadians to link Antwerp, thereby constricting the trap around the Allied armies. Nobody said anything about how the Germans were going to liquidate the more than a million Allied troops who would presumably be trapped. Accepting the plan, Hitler continued his deception by giving it a codeRHEIN (Watch on the Rhine), designed to name, Operation provide a defensive rather than offensive connotation. The next day the head of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, issued a general order to all commanders on the Western Front asserting that for the moin the Netherlands,

with the Sixth Panzer

Army

at

WACHTAM

.

PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

30

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