European Center of Military History

When decided to translate and then publish into French the two books from the Office of the Chief of Military History World War Two Book Serial, I was wiling to use the original (and also the best) texts more as a skeleton to deploy the informations to their maximum with war photos.
Unfortunately (beside the fact that the 6000 books were sold) I did several mistakes while publishing the two books : Omaha Beach 6-13 June 1944 and Utah Beach to Cherbourg.
First I added about 900 wartime photos into the two books. It was to much for the European readers. The second, I turned this work into 1st class books using the best quality paper available, large size format, hardcover with olive drab cloth, and over 850 pages for the two books (21×30)(CM). The third was simply to publish the books into French because I think and still do that French speaking readers are not worth all this hard work. This is – by the way – why I am publishing this site in English and believe me, I am really happy with this.

I am willing to do this online now because there is no need to spare on paper, photos or place. So enjoy this work as well I am enjoying it while doing it.

Gunter

– Fred C. Cole
Washington and Lee University
– Lt Gen August Schomburg
Industrial College of the Armed Forces
– James A. Field, Jr.
Swarthmore College
– Maj Gen Hugh M. Exton
US Continental Army Command
– Earl Pomeroy
University of Oregon
– Brig Gen Ward S. Ryan
US Army War College
– Theodore Ropp
Duke University
– Brig Gen Elias C. Townsend
US Army Command and General Staff College
– Lt Col Thomas E. Griess
United States Military Academy
– Office of the Chief of Military History
Brig Gen Hal. C. Pattison, Chief of Military History

Chief Historian, Stetson Conn
Chief Histories Division, Col Albert W. Jones
Chief Editorial and Graphics Division, Col Walter B. McKenzie
Editor in Chief, Joseph R. Friedman

Foreword

During most of the eleven months between D-day and V-E day in Europe, the US Army was carrying on highly successful offensive operations. As a consequence, the American soldier was buoyed with success, imbued with the idea that his enemy could not strike him a really heavy counter blow, and sustained by the conviction that the war was nearly won.
Then, unbelievably, and under the goad of Hitler’s fanaticism, the German Army launched its powerful counteroffensive in the Ardenne in December 1944 with the design of knifing through the Allied armies and forcing a negotiated peace The mettle of the American soldier was tested in the fires of adversity and the quality of his response earned for him the right to stand shoulder to shoulder with his forebears of Valley Forge, Fredericksburg, and the Marne.
This is the story of how the Germans planned and executed their offensive. It is the story of how the high command, American and British, reacted to defeat the German plan once the reality of a German offensive was accepted. But most of all it is the story of the American fighting man and the manner in which he fought a myriad of small defensive battles until the torrent of the German attack was slowed and diverted, its force dissipated and finally spent.
It is the story of squads, platoons, companies, and even conglomerate scratch groups that fought with courage, with fortitude, with sheer obstinacy, often without information or communications or the knowledge of the whereabouts of friends. In less than a fortnight the enemy was stopped and the Americans were preparing to resume the offensive.
While Bastogne has become the symbol of this obstinate, gallant, and successful defense, this work appropriately emphasizes the crucial significance of early American success in containing the attack by holding firmly on its northern and southern shoulders and by upsetting the enemy timetable at St Vith and a dozen lesser known but important and decisive battlefields.
The hard fighting that preceded the Battle of the Bulge has been recounted in two volumes, The Siegfried Line Campaign, and Dr. Cole’s own earlier work, The Lorraine Campaign. Events after it will be related in The Last Offensive, now in preparation. Two other volumes in this sub-series, The Supreme Command and Logistical Support of the Armies, Volume II, are useful supplements to the Ardenne volume.
In re-creating the Ardenne battle, the author has penetrated the fog of war as well as any historian can hope to do. No other volume of this series treats as thoroughly or as well the teamwork of the combined arms-infantry and armor, artillery and air, combat engineer and tank destroyer-or portrays as vividly the starkness of small unit combat. Every thoughtful student of military history, but most especially the student of small unit tactics, should find the reading of Dr. Cole’s work a rewarding experience.

Washington, D.C.
15 June 1964

– HAL C. PATTISON, Brigadier General, USA
Chief of Military History

The Author

Hugh M. Cole received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1937 in the field of European military history. He taught military history at the University of Chicago until 1942, when he joined the Army as an intelligence officer. After graduating from the Command and General Staff School he was assigned to the staff of the Third Army during its operations in Europe. At the close of hostilities he became Deputy Theater Historian, European Theater of Operations. From 1946 to 1952 Dr. Cole directed the work of the European Theater Section, Office of the Chief of Military History, wrote The Lorraine Campaign, a volume that appeared in this series in 1950, and undertook much of the work that has culminated in this volume on the Ardenne Campaign.
He joined the Operations Research Office of The Johns Hopkins University in 1952 and has continued his active interest in military history and his service to the Army both as a scholar and as colonel in the US Army Reserve.

Preface

This volume deals with the crucial period of the campaign conducted in the Belgian Ardenne and Luxembourg, generally known as the Battle of the Bulge. Although the German planning described herein antedates the opening gun by several weeks, the story of the combat operations begins on 16 December 1944.
By 3 January 1945 the German counteroffensive was at an end, and on that date the Allies commenced an attack that would take them across the Rhine and into Germany.
The last phase of operations in the Ardenne, therefore, is properly part and parcel of the final Allied offensive in Europe, and so the course of battle beginning on 3 January 1945 is described in another and final volume of this sub-series.
The problem of the level of treatment is always difficult in the organization and writing of the general staff type of history, which is the design of this volume. In describing a war of movement, the solution usually has been to concentrate on tactical units smaller than those normally treated when the war of position obtains. Thus the French General Staff history of the summer offensive in 1918 abruptly descends from the army corps to the regiment as the appropriate tactical unit to be traced through this period of mobile operations.
The story of the Ardenne Campaign is even more difficult to organize because of the disappearance, in the first hours, of a homogeneous front.
Churchill’s dictum that the historian’s task is “to allot proportion to human events” applies in this instance, although there are limits to the amount of expansion or contraction permissible. Thus the reader is introduced on 16 December 1944 to battles fought by companies and platoons because they are meaningful and because the relative importance of these actions is as great as operations conducted by regiments or even divisions later in the story. As the American front congeals and a larger measure of tactical control is regained, the narrative follows battalions, then regiments, and then divisions.
The building blocks, however, are the battalion and the regiment. In US Army practice during the war in western Europe, the battalion was in organization and doctrine the basic unit, with both tactical and administrative functions. The regiment, in turn when organized as a regimental combat team was the basic maneuver element combining the arms and having staying power. Also, the regiment was the lowest infantry unit to have a name and a history with which the soldier could, and did, identify himself.
The Ardenne battle normally was “fought,” in the sense of exercising decisive command and directing operations, by the corps commander. The span of tactical control in these widely dispersed actions simply was beyond the physical grasp of higher commanders. These higher commanders could “influence” the battle only by outlining (in very general terms) the scheme of maneuver, allocating reserves, and exercising whatever moral suasion they personally could bring to bear. In other words, “tactics came before strategy,” as Ludendorff wrote of the March offensive in 1918.
For the early days of the Ardenne Campaign the narrative opens each successive stage of the account by a look at the enemy side of the hill. This, in fact, is mandatory if the story is to have cohesion and meaning because the Germans possessed the initiative and because the American forces were simply reacting to the enemy maneuvers. The account in later chapters shifts to the American camp in accordance with the measure to which the American forces had regained operational freedom.
This volume represents the most exhaustive collection of personal memoirs by leading participants ever attempted for a general staff history of a major campaign. The memoirs take two forms : interviews with American participants shortly after the action described, and written accounts prepared immediately after the end of World War II by the German officers who took part in the Ardenne Campaign. The use of the combat interview in the European Theater of Operations was organized by Col William A. Ganoe, theater historian, but the specific initiation of an intensive effort to cover the Ardenne story while the battle itself was in progress must be credited to Col SLA Marshall.
The enlistment of the German participants in the Ardenne, first as involuntary then as voluntary historians, was begun by Col Marshall and Capt Kenneth Hechler, then developed into a fully organized research program by Col Harold Potter, who was assisted by a very able group of young officers, notably Capt Howard Hudson, Capt Frank Mahin, and Capt James Scoggins.
The story of the logistics involved in the American operations is treated at length and in perceptive fashion by Roland G. Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies, in two volumes of this sub-series. In the main, therefore, the present volume confines itself to the logistical problems of the German armies. Readers interested in following the course of Allied relationships at high levels of command, and particularly the operations of Allied intelligence on the eve of the German offensive, are referred to Forrest C. Pogue’s The Supreme Command, another volume in this series. Unfortunately the interest of the United States Army Air Forces in tactical support of ground operations was on the wane in the period after World War II and, as a result, a detailed air force history of air-ground cooperation during the battle of the Ardenne remains to be written. To introduce in full the effects of the tactical role played by Allied air power during the ground operations here described would require a volume twice the size of this one. I have tried, however, to keep the role of the air constantly before the reader, even though the specific actor often is anonymous.
As in my previous volume in the European sub-series an attempt is made to include all awards of the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross. The reader will recognize that deeds of valor do not necessarily coincide with the focal point of a particular action, as this is selectively seen and described by the historian; so it has been necessary to relegate to the footnotes and cover in very cursory fashion many of these individual acts of gallantry.
The reader will find no reference to lessons learned. This is not because the history of the Ardenne Campaign is so antique as to lack a useful application to modern military thought or planning for the future. On the contrary, the operations in the Ardenne show in real life tactical forms and formations which (in such things as dispersal, gaps between units, counterattack doctrine, widths of front, and fluidity of movement) are comparable to those taught by current Army doctrine and envisaged for the future. Nonetheless, the most valuable lessons which might be derived from the study of this campaign would lead inevitably to a consideration of special weapons effects and their impact on military operations, which in turn would result in a restrictive security classification for the volume. I hope, however that the Army service schools will find it fruitful to make the extrapolation that cannot be made here.

The maps consulted by the author were those in use at the end of 1944. They include the US Army reproductions of the maps prepared by the British Geographical Section, General Staff, in the 1:25.000 series (G.S., G.S. 4041), the 1:50.000 series (G.S., G.S. 4040), and the 1:100.000 series (G.S., G.S. 4336 and 4416).
The most useful German map proved to be the 1:200.000 Strassen karte von Belgien, a copy of the French Michelin road map, issued to German troops as early as 1940 and, in an English version, used by American armored units. Some of the terrain in question is familiar to me, but this personal knowledge has been augmented by an extensive use of photographs.
Shortly after World War II pilots of the 45th Reconnaissance Squadron, USAF, under the supervision of Maj John C. Hatlem, flew photographic missions designated by the author, over terrain in Luxembourg and Belgium. In addition some special ground photographs were made. The total collection numbers two hundred and sixteen photographs and has proved invaluable in writing this story.
References to clock time are on the twenty-four hour system 0000-H. Fortunately for the reader (and the writer), the Allies converted to British summer time on 17 September 1944 and the Germans vent back to middle European time on 2 October 1944; as a result both forces used the same clock; time in the Ardenne.
Sunrise on 16 December 1944 came at 0829-H and sunset occurred at 1635-H (using Bastogne, Belgium, as a reference point). The brevity of daylight is an important tactical feature of this history, and the reader should note that dawn and dusk (morning and evening twilight) each added only thirty-eight minutes to the hours of light.
A host of participants in the Ardenne battle have answered questions posed by the author, provided personal papers, and read a part or the whole of the draft manuscript. Their assistance has been invaluable.
Although this volume took an unconscionably long while to write, my task was made much easier by the initial efforts of Capt Blair Clark, Capt Howard Hudson, Capt Robert Merriam, and Capt George Tuttle, who spent several months at the close of the war in gathering the sources and preparing first drafts for a history of the Ardenne Campaign. In the Office of the Chief of Military History, Mrs. Magna Bauer, Charles V. P. von Luttichau, and Royce L. Thompson worked over a period of years in gathering data and writing research papers for use in the volume. The reader of the footnotes will obtain some slight measure of my obligation to these three.
In preparation for publication, Mr. Joseph R. Friedman, Editor in Chief, OCMH, has given this volume devoted attention, and Mrs. Loretto C. Stevens of the Editorial Branch has shepherded it through the final steps of editing. Mr. Billy C. Mossman prepared the maps, Miss Ruth A. Phillips selected the photographs, and Miss Margaret L. Emerson compiled the index.
Finally, I am indebted to my secretary, Mrs. Muriel Southwick, without whose exhortations and reminders this book might never have been completed.

For any errors of fact or flaws of interpretation that may occur in this work, the author alone is responsible.

Washington, D.C.
15 June 1964
HUGH M. COLE

On Saturday, Sep 16 1944, the daily Fuehrer Conference convened in the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. No special word had come in from the battle fronts and the briefing soon ended, the conference disbanding to make way for a session between Hitler and members of what had become his household military staff. Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl were in this second conference. So was Heinz Guderian, who as acting chief of staff for OKH held direct military responsibility for the conduct of operations on the Russian front.

Wolf’s Lair is the standard English name for Wolfsschanze, Adolf Hitler’s first World War II Eastern Front military headquarters, one of several Führerhauptquartier (Führer Headquarters) or FHQs located in various parts of Europe. The complex, which was built for Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, was located in the Masurian woods, about 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) from the small East Prussian town of Rastenburg, now Kętrzyn in Poland.
The original bunker system was constructed by Organisation Todt, but the later planned enlargement was never finished; the expansion work was stopped only a few days before the Russian advance to Angerburg (now Węgorzewo), only 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) away.
Hitler first arrived at the Wolf’s Lair late on the night of 23 June 1941,[1] and departed for the last time on 20 November 1944. Overall, he spent over 800 days there during that 3 1/2-year period.

The complex was destroyed and abandoned on 25 January 1945. The remains are located in Poland at the hamlet of Gierłoż (German: Forst Görlitz) near Kętrzyn.

Herman Goering was absent. From this fact stems the limited knowledge available of the initial appearance of the idea which would be translated into historical fact as the Ardenne counteroffensive or Battle of the Bulge. Goering and the Luftwaffe were represented by Werner Kreipe, chief of staff for OKL. Perhaps Kreipe had been instructed by Goering to report fully on all that Hitler might say; perhaps Kreipe was a habitual diary-keeper. In any case he had consistently violated the Fuehrer ordinance that no notes of the daily conferences should be retained except the official transcript made by Hitler’s own stenographic staff.

Trenchant, almost cryptic, Kreipe’s notes outline the scene. Jodl, representing OKW and thus the headquarters responsible for managing the war on the Western Front, began the briefing.[1]

[1] MS # P o69, The Kreipe Diary, 22 July-2 November 1944 (General der Flieger Werner Kreipe). OKH, OKL, and OKW are the abbreviated versions, respectively, of Oberkommando des Heeres, the High Command of the German Army, Oberkommando der Luftwaffe, The Luftwaffe High Command, and Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces High Command.

In a quiet voice and with the usual adroit use of phrases designed to lessen the impact of information which the Fuehrer might find distasteful, Jodl reviewed the relative strength of the opposing forces. The Western Allies possessed 96 divisions at or near the front; these were faced by 55 German divisions. An estimated 10 Allied divisions were en route from the United Kingdom to the battle zone. Allied Airborne units still remained in England (some of these would make a dramatic appearance the very next day at Arnhem and Nijmegen).
Jodl added a few words about shortages on the German side, shortages in tanks, heavy weapons, and ammunition. This was a persistent and unpopular topic; Jodl must have slid quickly to the next item, a report on the German forces withdrawing from southern and southwestern France.
Suddenly Hitler cut Jodl short. There ensued a few minutes of strained silence. Then Hitler spoke, his words recalled as faithfully as may be by the listening OKL chief of staff. “I have just made a momentous decision. I shall go over to the counterattack, that is to say” and he pointed to the map unrolled on the desk before him “here, out of the Ardenne, with the objective-Antwerp.”
While his audience sat in stunned silence, the Fuehrer began to outline his plan.

Historical hindsight may give the impression that only a leader finally bereft of sanity could, in mid-September of 1944, believe Germany physically capable of delivering one more powerful and telling blow. Politically the Third Reich stood deserted and friendless.
Fascist Italy and the once powerful Axis were finished. Japan had politely suggested that Germany should start peace negotiations with the Soviets.
In southern Europe, as the month of August closed, the Rumanians and Bulgarians had hastened to switch sides and join the victorious Russians. Finland had broken with Germany on 2 September. Hungary and the ephemeral Croat “state” continued in dubious battle beside Germany, held in place by German divisions in the line and German garrisons in their respective capitals. But the twenty nominal Hungarian divisions and an equivalent number of Croatian brigades were in effect canceled by the two Rumanian armies which had joined the Russians.

The defection of Rumanian, Bulgarian, and Finnish forces was far less important than the terrific losses suffered by the German armies themselves in the summer of 1944. On the Eastern and Western Fronts the combined German losses during June, July, and August had totaled at least 1.200.000 dead, wounded, and missing.
The rapid Allied advances in the west had cooped up an additional 230.000 troops in positions from which they would emerge only to surrender. Losses in matériel were in keeping with those in fighting manpower.

Room for maneuver had been whittled away at a fantastically rapid rate. On the Eastern Front the Soviet summer offensive had carried to the borders of East Prussia, across the Vistula at a number of points, and up to the northern Carpathians. Only a small slice of Rumania was left to German troops.
By mid-September the German occupation forces in southern Greece and the Greek islands (except Crete) already were withdrawing as the German grasp on the Balkans weakened.
On the Western Front the Americans had, in the second week of September, put troops on the soil of the Third Reich, in the Aachen sector, while the British had entered Holland. The German armies in the west faced a containing Allied front reaching from the Swiss border to the North Sea.
On 14 September the newly appointed German commander in the west, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, acknowledged that the Battle for the West Wall (Siegfried Line) had begun.

Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt : Born in Aschersleben in the Province of Saxony into an aristocratic Prussian family, von Rundstedt joined the German Army in 1892, then entered Germany’s elite military academy in 1902 – an institution that accepted only 160 new students annually and weeded out 75% of the students through exams.
During World War I he rose in rank until 1918 when he was a major and was chief of staff of his division.
After the war, von Rundstedt rose steadily in the small 100.000-man army (the Reichswehr) and in 1932, was appointed commander of the 3. Infanterie Division. Later that year he threatened to resign when Franz von Papen declared martial law and ordered his troops to eject members of the Nazi Party from state government offices.
In 1938 he was appointed commander of the 2. Armee that occupied the Sudetenland, but he retired after it was understood that Werner von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the German Army (OKH), was framed by the Gestapo. Upon his retirement he was given the honorary appointment of Colonel in Chief of the 18. Infanterie Regiment; von Rundstedt frequently wore an infantry colonel’s uniform with his Field Marshal’s tabs until the end of his career. On occasion, he was mistaken for a colonel, but he simply laughed at the notion.

In September 1939 World War II began, and von Rundstedt was recalled to active service to lead Army Group South during the successful invasion of Poland. Turning to the West, he supported Manstein’s “armoured fist” approach to the invasion of France, and this was eventually selected as Fall Gelb. During the battle he was placed in command of seven panzer divisions, three motorized infantry divisions, and 35 regular infantry divisions.

By May 14, 1940, the armoured divisions led by Heinz Guderian had crossed the Meuse and had opened up a huge gap in the Allied front. General von Rundstedt had doubts about the survivability of these units without infantry support, and asked for a pause while the infantry caught up; the halt allowed the British to evacuate their forces to Dunkirk.
Later Rundstedt forbade an attack on the Dunkirk beachhead, allowing the British to fully evacuate it. This turn of events has raised eyebrows over the years. Von Rundstedt and others subsequently argued that the decision was Hitler’s and stemmed from his belief that Britain would more readily accept a peace treaty if he magnanimously spared what remained of her expeditionary force.
Von Rundstedt was promoted to Feldmarschall on July 19, 1940 and took part in the planning of Operation Sealion. When the invasion was called off, von Rundstedt took control of occupation forces and was given responsibility to develop the coastal defenses in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

In June 1941 von Rundstedt took part in Operation Barbarossa as commander of Army Group South, where he led 52 infantry divisions and five Panzer divisions into the Soviet Union. At first his progress was slow, but in September Army Group South captured Kiev in a double encirclement operation made possible by Stalin’s unreasoning refusal to abandon it, even though the Dnieper had been crossed both north and south of it.
The Germans claimed a fantastic haul of 665000 Russian prisoners based on the encircled divisions’ nominal, pre-combat strength as revealed by captured Soviet records.
The Soviets reported that owing to previous losses – also exaggerated by the Germans, yet not subtracted by them from their tally of Soviet prisoners – the encircled divisions possessed merely 452000 men and that, of those, 150541 made their way out of the pocket before the lumbering German infantry divisions caught up with the armour and the ring of encirclement was consolidated.
Thus “only” 300,000 men were permanently trapped, whether captured or killed. After this von Rundstedt moved east to attack Kharkov and Rostov. He strongly opposed continuing the advance into the Soviet Union during the winter and advised Hitler to call a halt, but his views were rejected.

In November, 1941 von Rundstedt had a heart attack, but he refused to be hospitalized and continued the advance, reaching Rostov on November 21. A counter-attack forced the Germans back.
When von Rundstedt demanded to be allowed to withdraw, Hitler became furious and replaced him with General Walther von Reichenau.

Hitler recalled von Rundstedt to duty in March 1942, placing him once again in command of the west. There he proved tardy, so much so that as late as the autumn of 1943, no fortifications worthy of mention existed along the entire Atlantic shore. It was only after Erwin Rommel’s appointment as von Rundstedt’s ostensible subordinate that fortification work began in earnest. During the debates preceding the landing von Rundstedt insisted that the armoured reserves should be held in the operational rear so that they could all be rushed to whatever sector the Allies happened to land in.
Geyr von Schweppenberg, the armored commander, supported him. Rommel, by contrast, insisted that the armored forces must be deployed very near the shoreline, just beyond the reach of allied naval artillery, since Allied command of the air would preclude moving them from further than that.
Badly affected by his experiences in Africa, Rommel believed that Allied air operations would prohibit movement during the day and even gravely inhibit movement at night. Rundstedt was convinced that a landing as far west as Normandy was out of the question and that very little armor should be committed there.
Ultimately, the armored divisions were dispersed and only two were spared to the northern French shore, west of the Seine, with only one assigned to the Normandy sector, with disastrous consequences once the invasion began. After the D-Day landings in June 1944, von Rundstedt urged Hitler to negotiate a peace settlement with the Allies, his frustration culminating in his infamous “Make peace, you idiots !” outburst. Hitler responded by replacing him with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge.

As a result of the July 20 Plot, which outraged von Rundstedt, he agreed to join Guderian and Wilhelm Keitel on the Army Court of Honour that expelled hundreds of officers suspected of being opposed to Hitler, often on the flimsiest of evidence. This removed them from the jurisdiction of the military and turned them over to Roland Freisler. Many were executed.
In mid-August 1944, von Kluge committed suicide and Feldmarschall Walter Mödel was given command of OB West for eighteen days before he was relieved of duty and von Rundstedt was once again placed in command in the west. He quickly rallied the troops just in time to fight Operation Market Garden, winning the battle. Although he was Commander of the Western Forces during the Battle of the Bulge, he was opposed to that offensive from its inception and essentially washed his hands of it. He was relieved of command once again in March 1945 after telling Wilhelm Keitel that Hitler should make peace with the Allies, rather than continue to fight a hopeless war.

Rundstedt was captured by the US 36th Infantry Division on May 1, 1945. During his captivity, he was reportedly asked by Soviet interrogators which battle he regarded as most decisive. They expected him to say Stalingrad, but von Rundstedt replied The Battle of Britain. Annoyed, the Soviets put away their notebooks and left.
While being interrogated, he suffered another heart attack, and was taken to Britain, where he was held in a Prisoner of War Camp in Bridgend, South Wales. The British authorities charged him with war crimes. These concerned allegations of his involvement in mass murders in occupied Soviet territories.
On October 10, 1941, his subordinate, Walther von Reichenau, the 6. Armee commander, had issued his infamous Reichenau Order, which von Rundstedt allegedly approved. Ultimately, he never faced trial, allegedly because of his poor health. He was released in July 1948, and lived in Hanover until his death.

On the Italian front Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s two armies retained position astride the Apennines and, from the Gothic Line, defended northern Italy. Here, of all the active fronts, the German forces faced the enemy on something like equal terms-except in the air. Nonetheless the Allies were dangerously close to the southern entrances to the Po Valley.

In the far north the defection of Finland had introduced a bizarre operational situation. In northern Finland and on the Murmansk front nine German divisions held what earlier had been the left wing of the 700-mile Finno-German front. Now the Finns no longer were allies, but neither were they ready to turn their arms against Generaloberst Dr. Lothar Rendulic and his nine German divisions.
The Soviets likewise showed no great interest in conducting a full-scale campaign in the subarctic. With Finland out of the war, however, the German troops had no worthwhile mission remaining except to stand guard over the Petsamo nickel mines. Only a month after Mannerheim took Finland out of the war, Hitler would order the evacuation of that country and of northern Norway.

Political and military reverses so severe as those sustained by the Third Reich in the summer of 1944 necessarily implied severe economic losses to a state and a war machine fed and grown strong on the proceeds of conquest. Rumanian oil, Finnish and Norwegian nickel, copper, and molybdenum, Swedish high-grade iron ore, Russian manganese, French bauxite, Yugoslavian copper, and Spanish mercury were either lost to the enemy or denied by the neutrals who saw the tide of war turning against a once powerful customer.

In retrospect, the German position after the summer reverses of 1944 seemed indeed hopeless and the only rational release a quick peace on the best possible terms. But the contemporary scene as viewed from Hitler’s headquarters in September 1944, while hardly roseate, even to the Fuehrer, was not an unrelieved picture of despair and gloom. In the west what had been an Allied advance of astounding speed had decelerated as rapidly, the long Allied supply lines, reaching clear back to the English Channel and the Côte d’Azur, acting as a tether which could be stretched only so far. The famous West Wall fortifications (almost dismantled in the years since 1940) had not yet been heavily engaged by the attacker, while to the rear lay the great moat which historically had separated the German people from their enemies the Rhine River.
On the Eastern Front the seasonal surge of battle was beginning to ebb, the Soviet summer offensive seemed to have run its course, and despite continuing battle on the flanks the center had relapsed into an uneasy calm.
Even the overwhelming superiority which the Western Allies possessed in the air had failed thus far to bring the Third Reich groveling to its knees as so many proponents of the air arm had predicted.
In September the British and Americans could mount a daily bomber attack of over 5000 planes, but the German will to resist and the means of resistance, so far as then could be measured, remained quite sufficient for a continuation of the war.

Great, gaping wounds, where the Allied bombers had struck, disfigured most of the larger German cities west of the Elbe River, but German discipline and a reasonably efficient warning and shelter system had reduced the daily loss of life to what the German people themselves would reckon as acceptable. If anything, the lesson of London was being repeated, the noncombatant will to resist hardening under the continuous blows from the air and forged still harder by the Allied announcements of an unconditional surrender policy.

The material means available to the armed forces of the Third Reich appeared relatively unaffected by the ceaseless hammering from the air. It is true that the German war economy was not geared to meet a long-drawn war of attrition. But Reich Minister Albert Speer and his cohorts had been given over two years to rationalize, reorganize, disperse, and expand the German economy before the intense Allied air efforts of 1944. So successful was Speer’s program and so industrious were the labors of the home front that the race between Allied destruction and German construction (or reconstruction) was being run neck and neck in the third quarter of 1944, the period, that is, during which Hitler instituted the far-reaching military plans eventuating in the Ardennes counteroffensive.

The ball-bearing and aircraft industries, major Allied air targets during the first half of 1944, had taken heavy punishment but had come back with amazing speed.
By September bearing production was very nearly what it had been just before the dubious honor of nomination as top-priority target for the Allied bombing effort. The production of single-engine fighters had risen from 1016 in February to a high point of 3031 such aircraft in September. The Allied strategic attack leveled at the synthetic oil industry, however, showed more immediate results, as reflected in the charts which Speer put before Hitler.
For aviation gasoline, motor gasoline, and diesel oil, the production curve dipped sharply downward and lingered far below monthly consumption figures despite the radical drop in fuel consumption in the summer of 1944.
Ammunition production likewise had declined markedly under the air campaign against the synthetic oil industry, in this case the synthetic nitrogen procedures. In September the German armed forces were firing some 70000 tons of explosives, while production amounted to only half that figure. Shells and casings were still unaffected except for special items which required the ferroalloys hitherto procured from the Soviet Union, France, and the Balkans.

Although in the later summer of 1944 the Allied air forces turned their bombs against German armored vehicle production (an appetizing target because of the limited number of final assembly plants), an average of 1500 tanks and assault guns were being shipped to the battle front every thirty days.
During the first ten months of 1944 the Army Ordnance Directorate accepted 45917 trucks, but truck losses during the same period numbered 117719. The German automotive industry had pushed the production of trucks up to an average of 9000 per month, but in September production began to drop off, a not too important recession in view of the looming motor fuel crisis.
The German railway system had been under sporadic air attacks for years but was still viable. Troops could be shuttled from one fighting front to another with only very moderate and occasional delays; raw materials and finished military goods had little waste time in rail transport. In mid-August the weekly car loadings by the Reichsbahn hit a top figure of 899091 cars.

In September Hitler had no reason to doubt, if he bothered to contemplate the transport needed for a great counteroffensive, that the rich and flexible German railroad and canal complex would prove sufficient to the task ahead and could successfully resist even a coordinated and systematic air attack-as yet, of course, untried.
In German war production the third quarter of 1944 witnessed an interesting conjuncture, one readily susceptible to misinterpretation by Hitler and Speer or by Allied airmen and intelligence.
On the one hand German production was, with the major exceptions of the oil and aircraft industries, at the peak output of the war; on the other hand the Allied air effort against the German means of war making was approaching a peak in terms of tons of bombs and the number of planes which could be launched against the Third Reich.[2]

[2] The results of the numerous joint intelligence studies undertaken immediately after World War II on the relation between German production and the Allied air offensive are well summarized in the third volume of the official Army Air Forces series, Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol., III, Europe : ARGUMENT to V-E Day, January 1944 to May 1945 (Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 195).
See also MS # P-059, Tank Losses (Generalmajor Burkhart Mueller-Hillebrand); K. O. Sauer, Effects of Aerial Warfare on German Armament Production (T.I. 341, M.I.F. 3); United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), Military Analysis Division, The Impact Of the Allied Air Effort On German Logistics (Washington, 1947).

But without the means of predicting what damage the Allied air effort could and would inflict if extrapolated three or six months into the future, and certainly without any advisers willing so to predict, Hitler might reason that German production and transport, if wisely husbanded and rigidly controlled, could support a major attack before the close of 1944. Indeed, only a fortnight prior to the briefing of 16 September Minister Speer had assured Hitler that German war stocks could be expected to last through 1945.
Similarly, in the headquarters of the Western Allies it was easy and natural to assume the thousands of tons of bombs dropped on Germany must inevitably have weakened the vital sections of the German war economy to a point where collapse was imminent and likely to come before the end of 1944.

Hitler’s optimism and miscalculation, then, resulted in the belief that Germany had the material means to launch and maintain a great counteroffensive, a belief nurtured by many of his trusted aides. Conversely, the miscalculation of the Western Allies as to the destruction wrought by their bombers contributed greatly to the pervasive optimism which would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Allied commanders and intelligence agencies to believe or perceive that Germany still retained the material muscle for a mighty blow.[5]

Assuming that the Third Reich possessed the material means for a quick transition from the defensive to the offensive, could Hitler and his entourage rely on the morale of the German nation and its fighting forces in this sixth year of the war ? The five years which had elapsed since the invasion of Poland had taken heavy toll of the best physical specimens of the Reich.
The irreplaceable loss in military manpower (the dead, missing, those demobilized because of disability or because of extreme family hardship) amounted to 3.266.886 men and 92.811 officers as of 1 September 1944.[3]

[3] German ground force losses are discussed in more detail in H. M. Cole, The Lorraine Campaign, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1950), pp. 232. See also OKH, Gen. St. d. H/Organizations Abteilung (hereafter cited as OKH/Org. Abt.) KTB, 2 December 1944, which gives the revised personnel situation as of 1 November 1944.

Even without an accurate measure of the cumulative losses suffered by the civilian population, or of the dwellings destroyed, it is evident that the German home front was suffering directly and heavily from enemy action, despite the fact that the Americans and British were unable to get together on an air campaign designed to destroy the will of the German nation.
Treason (as the Nazis saw it) had reared its ugly head in the abortive Putsch of July 1944, and the skeins of this plot against the person of the Fuehrer still were unraveling in the torture chambers of the Gestapo.
Had the Nazi Reich reached a point in its career like that which German history recorded in the collapse of the German Empire during the last months of the 1914-1918 struggle ? Hitler, always prompt to parade his personal experiences as a Frontsoldat in the Great War and to quote this period of his life as testimony refuting opinions offered by his generals, was keenly aware of the moral disintegration of the German people and the armies in 1918.
Nazi propaganda had made the “stab in the back” (the theory that Germany had not been defeated in 1918 on the battlefield but had collapsed as a result of treason and weakness on the home front) an article of German faith, with the Fuehrer its leading proponent. Whatever soul-searching Hitler may have experienced privately as a result of the attempt on his life and the precipitate retreats of his armies, there is no outward evidence that he saw in these events any kinship to those of 1918.

He had great faith in the German people and in their devotion to himself as Leader, a faith both mystic and cynical. The noise of street demonstrations directed against himself or his regime had not once, during the years of war, assailed his ears. German troops had won great victories in the past, why should they not triumph again ?
The great defeats had been, so Hitler’s intuition told him, the fruit of treason among high officers or, at the least, the result of insufficient devotion to National Socialism in the hearts and minds of the defeated commanders and the once powerful General Staff. The assassination attempt, as seen through Hitler’s own eyes, was proof positive that the suspicions which he had long entertained vis-à-vis the Army General Staff were correct. Now, he believed, this malignant growth could be cut away; exposure showed that it had no deep roots and had not contaminated either the fighting troops or the rank and file of the German people.[6]
Despite the heavy losses suffered by the Wehrmacht in the past five years, Hitler was certain that replacements could be found and new divisions created. His intuition told him that too many officers and men had gravitated into headquarters staffs, administrative and security services. He was enraged by the growing disparity in the troop lists between “ration strength” and “combat strength” and, as a military dictator, expected that the issuance of threatening orders and the appointment of the brutal Heinrich Himmler as chief of the Replacement Army would eventually reverse this trend.
At the beginning of September Hitler was impatiently stamping the ground and waiting for the new battalions to spring forth. The months of July and August had produced eighteen new divisions, ten panzer brigades and nearly a hundred separate infantry battalions. Now twenty-five new divisions, about a thousand artillery pieces, and a score of general headquarters brigades of various types were demanded for delivery in October and November.

[6] Exact dating for the various phases of the Ardenne plan, as these evolved in Hitler’s mind, now is impossible. Magna E. Bauer has attempted to develop a chronology in MS # R-9, The Idea for the German Ardenne Offensive, 1944. See also MSS # P-069 (Kreipe) and A-862 The Preparations for the German Offensive in the Ardennes, September to 16 December 1944 (Maj. Percy E. Schramm).

How had Germany solved the manpower problem ? From a population of some eighty million, in the Greater Reich, the Wehrmacht carried a total of 10.165303 officers and men on its rosters at the beginning of September 1944. What part of this total was paper strength is impossible to say; certainly the personnel systems in the German armed forces had not been able to keep an accurate accounting of the tremendous losses suffered in the summer of 1944.
Nonetheless, this was the strength figuratively paraded before Hitler by his adjutants. The number of units in the Wehrmacht order of battle was impressive (despite such wholesale losses as the twenty-seven divisions engulfed during the Russian summer offensive against Army Group Center). The collective German ground forces at the beginning of September 1944 numbered 327 divisions and brigades, of which 31 divisions and 13 brigades were armored. Again it must be noted that many of these units no longer in truth had the combat strength of either division or brigade (some had only their headquarters staff), but again, in Hitler’s eyes, this order of battle represented fighting units capable of employment.
Such contradiction as came from the generals commanding the paper-thin formations, some of whom privately regarded the once formidable Wehrmacht as a “paper tiger,” would be brushed angrily aside as evidence of incompetence, defeatism-or treason.

But the maintenance of this formidable array of divisions and brigades reflected the very real military potential of the Greater Reich, not yet fully exploited even at the end of five years of what had been called total war. As in 1915 the Germans had found that in a long conflict the hospitals provided a constant flow of replacements, and that this source could be utilized very effectively by the simple expedient of progressively lowering the physical standards required for front-line duty. In addition, each year brought a new class to the colors as German youth matured. This source could be further exploited by lowering the age limit at one end of the conscription spectrum while increasing it at the other.
In 1944, for example, the age limit for “volunteers” for the ranks was dropped to sixteen years and party pressure applied conducive to volunteering. At the same time the older conscription classes were combed through and, in 1944, registration was carried back to include males born in 1884.
Another and extremely important manpower acquisition, made for the first time on any scale in the late summer of 1944, came from the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe. Neither of these establishments remained in any position, at this stage of the war, to justify the relatively large numbers still carried on their rosters. While it is true that transferring air force ground crews to rifle companies would not change the numerical strength of the armed forces by jot or tittle, such practice would produce new infantry or armored divisions bearing new and, in most cases, high numbers.

In spite of party propaganda that the Third Reich was full mobilized behind the Fuehrer and notwithstanding the constant and slavish mouthing of the phrase “total war,” Germany had not in five years of struggle, completely utilized its manpower-and equally important, womanpower-in prosecuting the war.[4]

[4] B. H. Klein in his Germany’s Economic Preparations for War (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1959) advances the thesis that, contrary to Nazi propaganda, the Third Reich never went over to an allout industrial and economic effort until the war was lost.

Approximately four million public servants and individuals deferred from military service for other reasons constituted a reserve as yet hardly touched. And, despite claims to the contrary, no thorough or rational scheme had been adopted to comb all able-bodied men out of the factories and from the fields for service in uniform. In five years only a million German men and women had been mobilized for the labor force. Indeed, it may be concluded that the bulk of industrial and agrarian replacements for men drafted into the armed services was supplied by some seven million foreign workers and prisoners of war slaving for the conqueror.

Hitler hoped to lay his hands on those of his faithful followers who thus far had escaped the rigors of the soldier life by enfolding themselves in the uniform of the party functionary. The task of defining the nonessential and making the new order palatable was given to Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels, who on 24 August 1944 announced the new mobilization scheme : schools and theaters to be closed down, a 60-hour week to be introduced and holidays temporarily abolished, most types of publications to be suspended (with the notable exception of “standard political works,” Mein Kampf, for one), small shops of many types to be closed, the staffs of governmental bureaus to be denuded, and similar belt tightening. By 1 September this drastic comb-out was in full swing and accompanied within the uniformed forces by measures designed to reduce the headquarters staffs and shake loose the “rear area swine,” in the Fuehrer’s contemptuous phrase.

This new flow of manpower would give Hitler the comforting illusion of combat strength, an illusion risen from his indulgence in what may be identified to the American reader as “the numbers racket.”
Dozens of German officers who at one time or another had reason to observe the Fuehrer at work have commented on his obsession with numbers and his implicit faith in statistics no matter how murky the sources from which they came or how misleading when translated into fact. So Hitler had insisted on the creation of new formations with new numbers attached thereto, rather than bringing back to full combat strength those units which had been bled white in battle. Thus the German order of battle distended in the autumn of 1944, bloated by new units while the strength of the German ground forces declined. In the same manner Hitler accepted the monthly production goals set for the armored vehicle producers by Speer’s staff as being identical with the number of tanks and assault guns which in fact would reach the front lines. Bemused by numbers on paper and surrounded by a staff which had little or no combat experience and by now was perfectly housebroken-never introducing unpleasant questions as to what these numbers really meant-Hitler still saw himself as the Feldherr, with the men and the tanks and the guns required to wrest the initiative from the encircling enemy.

How the Plan Was Born

The plan for the Ardenne counteroffensive was born in the mind and will of Hitler the Feldherr. Its conception and growth from ovum are worthy of study by the historian and the student of the military art as a prime example of the role which may be played by the single man and the single mind in the conduct of modern war and the direction of an army numbered in the millions.

Such was the military, political, economic, and moral position of the Third Reich in the autumn of 1944 that a leader who lacked all of the facts and who by nature clung to a mystic confidence in his star might rationally conclude that defeat could be postponed and perhaps even avoided by some decisive stroke. To this configuration of circumstances must be added Hitler’s implicit faith in his own military genius, a faith to all appearance unshaken by defeat and treason, a faith that accepted the possibility, even the probability, that the course of conflict might be reversed by a military stroke of genius.

There was, after all, a prototype in German history which showed how the genius and the will of the Feldherr might wrest victory from certain defeat. Behind the desk in Hitler’s study hung a portrait of Frederick the Great. This man, of all the great military leaders in world history, was Hitler’s ideal. The axioms given by Frederick to his generals were on the tip of Hitler’s tongue, ever ready to refute the pessimist or generalize away a sticky fact. When his generals protested the inability of soldier flesh and blood to meet further demands, Hitler simply referred to the harsh demands made of his grenadiers by Frederick. When the cruelties of the military punitive code were increased to the point that even the stomachs of Prussian officers rebelled, Hitler paraded the brutal code of Frederick’s army before them. Even the oath taken by SS officer candidates was based on the Frederician oath to the flag.
An omnivorous reader of military history, Hitler was fond of relating episodes therefrom as evidence of his catholic military knowledge or as footnotes proving the soundness of a decision.
In a very human way he selected those historical examples which seemed to support his own views. Napoleon, before the invasion of Russia, had forbidden any reference to the ill-fated campaign of Charles XII of Sweden because “the circumstances were altered.” Hitler in turn had brushed aside the fate of both these predecessors, in planning his Russian campaign, because they had lacked tanks and planes. In 1944, however, Hitler’s mind turned to his example, Frederick II, and found encouragement and support. Frederick, at the commencement of the Seven Years War, had faced superior forces converging on his kingdom from all points of the compass. At Rossbach and Leuthen he had taken great risk but had defeated armies twice the strength of his own. By defeating his enemies in detail, Frederick had been able to hang on until the great alliance formed against Prussia had split as the result of an unpredictable historical accident.

Three things seemed crystal clear to Hitler as explanation for Frederick’s final victory over his great enemies :

– victory on the battlefield, and not defeat, was the necessary preliminary to successful diplomatic negotiations and a peace settlement
– the enemy coalition had failed to present a solid front when single members had suffered defeat
– finally, Prussia had held on until, as Hitler paraphrased Frederick’s own words, “one of [the] damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more.”

If Hitler needed moral support in his decision to prepare for the counteroffensive at a time when Germany still was reeling from enemy blows, it is very probable that he found this in the experience and ultimate triumph of Frederick called the Great.
Although the first announcement of the projected counteroffensive in the Ardennes was made by Hitler in the meeting on 16 September, the idea had been forming for some weeks in the Fuehrer’s mind. Many of the details in this development can never be known. The initial thought processes were buried with Hitler; his closest associates soon followed him to the grave, leaving only the barest information. The general outlines of the manner in which the plan took form can be discerned, however, of course with a gap here and there and a necessary slurring over exact dates.[5]

[5] For a detailed description of the Goebbels comb-out see the manuscript study prepared by Charles V. P. von Luttichau entitled The Ardennes Offensive, Germany’s Situation in the Fall of 1944, Part II, The Economic Situation (195). OCMH.

The first and very faint glimmerings of the idea that a counteroffensive must be launched in the west are found in a long tirade made by Hitler before Generaloberst Alfred Jodl and a few other officers on 31 July 1944.

Generaloberst Alfred Jodl (10 May 1890 – 16 October 1946) was a German military commander, attaining the position of Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) during World War II, acting as deputy to Wilhelm Keitel. At Nuremberg he was tried, sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal.

Alfred Jodl was born Alfred Josef Ferdinand Baumgärtler in Würzburg, Germany, the son of Officer Alfred Jodl and Therese Baumgärtler, becoming “Alfred Jodl” upon his parents’ marriage in 1899. He was educated at Cadet School in Munich, from which he graduated in 1910.
After schooling, Jodl joined the army as an artillery officer. During World War I he served as a battery officer on the Western Front from 1914–1916, twice being wounded.
In 1917 Jodl served briefly on the Eastern Front before returning to the west as a staff officer. After the war Jodl remained in the armed forces and joined the Versailles-limited Reichswehr.

Jodl had married Irma Gräfin von Bullion in September 1913. A woman from a Swabian family of Princes five years his senior, Irma died in Königsberg in the spring of 1943. After major spinal surgery she contracted pneumonia after been obliged to stay in an air raid shelter during the first major bombing raid. In November Jodl married Luise von Benda, a close family friend.

Jodl’s appointment as a major in the operations branch of the Truppenamt in the Army High Command in the last days of the Weimar Republic put him under command of General Ludwig Beck who recognised Jodl as ‘a man with a future’ although it was only on September 1939 that Jodl met with Hitler for the first time. In the build-up to World War II, Jodl was nominally assigned as a Artilleriekommandeur of the 44. Artillerie Division from October 1938 to August 1939 during the Anschluss, but from then until the end of the war in May 1945 he was Chef des Wehrmachtsführungsstabes (Chief of Operation Staff OKW). Jodl’s only time when he truly acted as a Chief of Staff was during the swift occupation of Denmark and Norway.
During the campaign, Hitler interfered only when the German destroyer flotilla was demolished outside Narvik and wanted the German forces there to retreat into Sweden.
Jodl successfully thwarted Hitler’s orders. The second time Jodl disagreed with Hitler was during the summer offensive of 1942. Hitler dispatched Jodl to the Caucasus to visit Feldmarschall List to find out why the oil fields had not been captured. Jodl returned only to corroborate List’s reports that the troops were at their last gasp.

He was injured during the July 20 plot. Due to this, Jodl was awarded the special wounded badge alongside several other leading Nazi figures. He was also rather vocal about his suspicions that others had not endured wounds as strong as his own, often downplaying the effects of the plot on others. Jodl signed the Commando Order of October 28, 1942 (in which Allied Commandos were not to be treated as POWS) and the Commissar Order of June 6, 1941 (in which Political Commissioners were to be shot).

At the end of World War II in Europe, Jodl signed the instruments of unconditional surrender on 7 May, 1945 in Reims as the representative of Karl Dönitz.

Jodl was then arrested and transferred to Flensburg POW camp and later put before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. Jodl was accused of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. The principal charges against him related to his signature of the Commando Order and the Commissar Order; both of which ordered that certain prisoners were to be summarily executed.
Additional charges at his trial included unlawful deportation and abetting execution. Presented as evidence was his signature on an order that transferred Danish citizens, including Jews and other civilians, to concentration camps. Although he denied his role in the crime, the court sustained his complicity based on the given evidence.
His wife Luise Jodl attached herself to her husband’s defence team. Jodl pleaded ‘not guilty’ “before God, before history and my people”. Found guilty on all four charges, he was hanged (with Keitel, on October 16, 1946), although he had asked the court to be executed by firing squad.

Jodl’s last words were reportedly “My greetings to you, my Germany.” He was declared dead 18 minutes later. His remains were cremated at Munich, and his ashes raked out and scattered into the Conwentzbach, a small river flowing into the larger Isar River (effectively an attempt to prevent the establishment of a permanent burial site to those nationalist groups who might seek to congregate there – an example of this being Benito Mussolini’s place of rest in Predappio, Italy). A cenotaph in the family plot in the Fraueninsel Cemetery, in Chiemsee, Germany is dedicated to him.

Jodl’s Nuremberg verdict was controversial in US military circles and on 28 February 1953, the München Hauptspruchkammer (Main denazification court) posthumously found Jodl not guilty of the main charges brought against him at Nuremberg, citing the French co-President of the Tribunal, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, who had in 1945 called the verdict against Jodl a mistake. His property, which had been confiscated in 1946, was returned to his widow. However, the judgment was revoked on 3 September 1953 by the Minister of Political Liberation for Bavaria.

At this moment Hitler’s eyes are fixed on the Western Front where the Allies, held fast for several weeks in the Normandy hedgerows, have finally broken through the containing German forces in the neighborhood of Avranches. Still physically shaken by the bomb blast which so nearly had cut short his career, the Fuehrer raves and rambles, boasts, threatens, and complains. As he meanders through the “conference,” really a solo performance, one idea reappears again and again : the final decision must come in the west and if necessary the other fronts must suffer so that a concentrated, major effort can be made there.
No definite plans can be made as yet, says Hitler, but he himself will accept the responsibility for planning and for command; the latter he will exercise from a headquarters some place in the Black Forest or the Vosges. To guarantee secrecy, nobody will be allowed to inform the Commander in Chief West or his staff of these far-reaching plans; the WFSt, that is, Jodl, must form a small operational staff to aid the Fuehrer by furnishing any needed data.[7]

[7] The Wehrmachtfuehrungsstab, or WFSt, was the Armed Forces Operations Staff.

Hitler’s arrogation to himself of all command and decision vis-à-vis some major and concerted effort in the west was no more than an embittered restatement, with the assassination attempt in mind, of a fact which had been stuffed down the throats of the General Staff and the famous field commanders since the first gross defeat in Russia and had been underlined in blood by the executions following the Putsch of 20 July. The decision to give priority to the Western Front, if one can take Hitler at his own word and waive a possible emotional reaction to the sudden Allied plunge through the German line at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, is something new and worthy of notice.

The strategic and operational problem posed by a war in which Germany had to fight an enemy in the east while at the same time opposing an enemy in the west was at least as old as the unification of Germany. The problem of a war on two fronts had been analyzed and solutions had been proposed by the great German military thinkers, among these Moltke the Elder, Schlieffen, and Ludendorff, whose written works, so Hitler boasted, were more familiar to him than to those of his entourage who wore the red stripe of the General Staff.
Moltke and Schlieffen, traveling by the theoretical route, had arrived at the conclusion that Germany lacked the strength to conduct successful offensive operations simultaneously in the east and west.
Ludendorff (Hitler’s quondam colleague in the comic opera Beer Hall Putsch) had seen this theory put to the test and proven in the 1914-1918 war. Hitler had been forced to learn the same lesson the hard way in the summer of 1944.

A fanatical believer in the Clausewitzian doctrine of the offensive as the purest and only decisive form of war, Hitler only had to decide whether his projected counteroffensive should be made in the east or the west. In contrast to the situation that had existed in the German High Command of World War I, there was no sharp cleavage between “Easterners” and “Westerners” with the two groups struggling to gain control of the Army High Command and so dictate a favored strategy. It is true that OKH (personified at this moment by Guderian) had direct responsibility for the war on the Eastern Front and quite naturally believed that victory or defeat would be decided there. On the other hand, OKW, with its chiefs Keitel and Jodl close to the seat of power, saw the Western Front as the paramount theater of operations. Again, this was a natural result of the direct responsibility assigned this headquarters for the conduct of all operations outside of the Eastern Front. Hitler, however, had long since ceased to be influenced by his generals save in very minor matters. Nor is there any indication that Keitel or Jodl exercised any influence in turning the Fuehrer’s attention to the west.
There is no simple or single explanation for Hitler’s choice of the Western Front as the scene of the great German counterstroke. The problem was complex; so were Hitler’s mental processes. Some part of his reasoning breaks through in his conferences, speeches, and orders, but much is left to be inferred.

As early as 1939 Hitler had gone on record as to the absolute necessity of protecting the Ruhr industrial area, the heart of the entire war-making machine. In November 1943, on the heels of Eastern Front reverses and before the Western Allies had set foot in strength across the Channel, Hitler repeated his fears for the Ruhr, “… but now while the danger in the East remained it was outweighed by the threat from the West where enemy success would strike immediately at the heart of the German war economy.[8]

[8] The so-called Hitler Conferences from which Hitler’s earlier thinking is derived are found in whole or in fragments in Felix Gilbert, ed., Hitler Directs His War (New York : Oxford University Press, 1950).

Even after the disastrous impact of the 1944 Soviet summer offensive he clung to the belief that the Ruhr factories were more important to Germany than the loss of territory in the east. He seems to have felt that the war production in Silesia was far out of Soviet reach : in any case Silesia produced less than the Ruhr. Then too, in the summer and early autumn of 1944 the Allied air attacks against the Ruhr had failed to deliver any succession of knockout blows, nor was the very real vulnerability of this area yet apparent.

Politically, if Hitler hoped to lead from strength and parlay a military victory into a diplomatic coup, the monolithic USSR was a less susceptible object than the coalition of powers in the west. Whereas Nazi propagandists breathed hatred of the Soviet, the tone toward England and the United States more often was that of contempt and derision, as befitted the “decadent democracies.” Hitler seems to have partaken of this view, and in any case he believed that the Allies might easily split asunder if one of them was jolted hard enough. The inability of the western leaders to hold their people together in the face of defeat was an oft-expressed and cardinal axiom of the German Fuehrer, despite the example of the United Kingdom to the contrary.

From one point of view the decision for the west was the result of progressive elimination as to the other fronts. In no way could victory in Italy or Finland change the course of the war. Russia likewise offered no hope for any decisive victory with the forces which Germany might expect to gather in 1944. The campaigns in the east had finally convinced Hitler, or so it would appear, that the vast distances in the east and the seemingly inexhaustible flow of Soviet divisions created a military problem whose solution lay beyond the capabilities of the Third Reich as long as the latter was involved in a multifront war. To put it another way, what Germany now needed was a quick victory capable of bearing immediate diplomatic fruit. Between 22 June 1941 and 1 November 1942 the German armies in the USSR had swept up 5.150000 prisoners of war (setting aside the Russians killed or severely wounded) but still had failed to bore in deep enough to deliver a paralyzing blow. A quick and decisive success in the second half of 1944 against 555 Soviet units of division size was out of the question, even though Hitler would rave about the “Russian bluff” and deride the estimates prepared by his Intelligence, Fremde Heere Ost.
Still other factors were involved in Hitler’s decision. For one thing the Allied breakout in Normandy was a more pressing danger to the Third Reich than the Soviet advance in the east. Intuitively, perhaps, Hitler followed Schlieffen in viewing an enemy on the Rhine as more dangerous than an enemy in East Prussia. If this was Hitler’s view, then the Allied dash across France in the weeks following would give all the verification required. Whether at this particular time Hitler saw the German West Wall as the best available springboard for a counteroffensive is uncertain. But it is quite clear that the possession of a seemingly solid base for such an operation figured largely in the ensuing development of a Western Front attack.

After the announcement of the west as the crucial front, in the 31 July conference, Hitler seemingly turned his attention, plus such reserves as were available, to the east. Perhaps this was only a passing aberration, perhaps Hitler had been moved by choler in July and now was in the grip of indecision. Events on both fronts, however, were moving so rapidly that a final decision would have to be made. The death of Generalfeldmarschall Guenther von Kluge, Commander in Chief West, seems to have triggered the next step toward irrevocable commitment. Coincident with the appointment of Model to replace the suicide, Hitler met with a few of his immediate staff on 19 August to consider the situation in France. During this conference he instructed Walter Buhle, chief of the Army Staff at OKW, and Speer, the minister in charge of military production and distribution, to prepare large allotments of men and materiel for shipment to the Western Front. At the same time Hitler informed the conferees that he proposed to take the initiative at the beginning of November when the Allied air forces would be unable to fly. By 19 August, it would appear, Hitler had made up his mind: an attack would be made, it would be made on the Western Front, and the target date would be early November.

The remaining days of August were a nightmare for the German divisions in the west and for the German field commanders. Shattered into bits and pieces by the weight of Allied guns and armor, hunted and hounded along the roads by the unopposed Allied air forces, captured and killed in droves, the German forces in France were thoroughly beaten. All requests for permission to withdraw to more defensible positions were rejected in peremptory fashion by Hitler’s headquarters, with the cold rejoinder “stand and hold” or “fight to the last man.” In most cases these orders were read on the run by the retreating divisions.

At the beginning of September Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model was “put in the big picture” by the Fuehrer. Hitler gave as his “intention” for the future conduct of operations that the retreating German armies must hold forward of the West Wall, thus allowing time needed to repair these defenses. In general the holding position indicated by Hitler ran from the Dutch coast, through northern Belgium, along the forward edge of the West Wall in the sector between Aachen and the Moselle River, then via the western borders of Alsace and Lorraine to some indefinite connection with the Swiss frontier. Here, for the first time on the Western Front, Hitler relaxed his seemingly pigheaded views on the unyielding defense and permitted, even enjoined, a withdrawal. This permission, however, was given for a very definite purpose: to permit the reorganization of Germany’s defense at or forward of the West Wall, the outer limit of Greater Germany.

Despite the debacle in France, Hitler professed himself as unworried and even sanguine. On the first day of September, Rundstedt was recalled to the position of Commander in Chief West which he had been forced to relinquish at the end of June under Hitler’s snide solicitude for his “health.” The new commander was told that the enemy in the west would shortly be brought to a halt by logistic failures (in this forecast the Fuehrer’s intuition served him well) and that the giant steps being taken toward Germany were the work of isolated “armored spearheads” which had outrun the main Allied forces and now could be snipped off by local counterattacks, whereupon the front would stabilize. Since the US Third Army under Lt Gen George S. Patton, Jr., was advancing with its right flank open (contact with the US Seventh Army driving north from the Mediterranean had not as yet been made), Hitler ordered Rundstedt to counterattack against this exposed flank and cut the advanced American armor by seizing Reims. For this unenviable task the Fifth Panzer Army, at the moment little more than an army headquarters and a few army troops, would be beefed up and handed over to the new commander in chief.[9]

[9] The background of the abortive Fifth Panzer Army attack is described in Cole, The Lorraine Campaign, pp. 190-95.

The thrust to Reims was not intended as the grand-scale effort to regain the initiative which by this time was fully rooted in Hitler’s mind. The Fifth Panzer Army was to counterattack, that is, to be committed with limited forces for the attainment of a limited object. The scheme visualized for November, no matter how vague its shape in the first week of September, was that of a counteroffensive, or a major commitment of men and matériel designed to wrest the initiative from the enemy in pursuance of a major strategic victory.
The counterattack was made, but not as planned and not toward Reims. The base for the proposed operation, west of the Moselle River, was lost to the Americans before the attack could be launched. A watered-down variant on the east side of the Moselle was set in motion on 18 September, with Luneville as the first objective; it degenerated into a series of small, piecemeal attacks of only momentary significance.[10]

[10] The story of this operation is told in Cole, The Lorraine Campaign, ch. V. passim.

This, the single major effort to win time and space by counterattack and so give breathing space to the Reich and footing for a counteroffensive, must be written a complete failure. Nonetheless, by the second week of September there were encouraging evidences all along the Western Front that the battered German troops were beginning to get a toehold here and there, and that the enemy who had run so fast and so far was not holding the pace. Except for a handful of bunkers and pillboxes the battle front was in process of stabilizing forward of the West Wall. Meanwhile German efforts to reactivate and rearm these fortifications were in full swing.

Despite the somber and often despairing reports prepared by Model and his successor, Rundstedt, during late August and early September, Hitler and his intimate staff in the East Prussian headquarters continued to give thought to a decisive attack in the west.
About 6 September, Jodl gave the Fuehrer an evaluation of the situation inherited by Rundstedt. The task at hand was to withdraw as many troops from the line a possible, refit and re-form units. On the scale required, this work could not be completed before the first day of November. Since he was probably listening to a clearer phrasing of his own cloudy concept, Hitler agreed, but with the proviso that the battle front must be kept as far to the west as possible. The reason, expressed apparently for the first time, was that the Allied air effort had to be kept at a distance from the Rhine bridges or the consequences might be disastrous. Did Hitler fear that fighter-bombers operating from fields in France or Belgium might leave the Rhine crossing complex stricken and incapable of supporting the line of communications to the armies then on the left bank of the Rhine ?
Or did he foresee that the Rhine bridges would be systematically hammered in an effort to strangle the German bid for the initiative when the day for the counteroffensive came ?

As a target date, 1 November now seemed firm. Hitler had tossed it out in an off-the-cuff gesture; Jodl had evaluated it in terms of the military situation as seen in the remote Wolf’s Lair; and in his first report after assuming command, Rundstedt unwittingly added his blessing by estimating that the West Wall defenses would be refurbished and manned sometime around 20 October.
The Commander in Chief West, be it noted, was not yet privy to any attack plans except those for the Fifth Panzer Army.

Since Hitler was convinced that his western armies would hold before or at the West Wall position, and by intuition or self-hypnosis he held to this conviction, the next step was to amass the forces needed to issue offensively from the West Wall base of operations.
During July and August eighteen new divisions had been organized, fifteen of which were sent to the Eastern Front, one to Norway, and only two to the Western Front.
A further Hitler order on 2 September commanded the creation of an “operational reserve” numbering twenty-five new divisions. This order lay behind the comb-out program entrusted to Goebbels and definitely was in preparation for a western counteroffensive. Early in August the Western Front had been given priority on tanks coming off the assembly line; this now was made a permanent proviso and extended to cover all new artillery and assault gun production.

Further additions to the contemplated reserve would have to come from other theaters of war. On 4 September OKW ordered a general movement of artillery units in the Balkans back to the Western Front. The southeastern theater now was bereft of much of its early significance and the German forces therein stood to lose most of their heavy equipment in the event of a Soviet drive into the Balkans. The northern theater likewise was a potential source of reinforcements, particularly following the defection of Finland in early September and the collapse of a homogeneous front.
These “side shows” could be levied upon for the western counteroffensive, and even the sore-beset German armies in the east, or so Hitler reasoned, could contribute armored divisions to the west. But in the main, the plan still evolving within the closed confines of the Wolf’s Lair turned on the withdrawal and rehabilitation of units which had taken part in the battle for France. As a first step the SS panzer divisions in the west were ordered out of the line (13 September) and turned over to a new army headquarters, that of the Sixth Panzer Army.
Having nominated a headquarters to control the reconstitution of units specifically named for participation in an attack to be made in the west, the logical next step in development of the plan came in Hitler’s announcement on 16 September : the attack would be delivered in the Ardennes and Antwerp would be the objective.
Why the Ardennes ?
To answer this question in a simple and direct manner is merely to say that the Ardennes would be the scene of a great winter battle because the Fuehrer had placed his finger on a map and made a pronouncement. This simplified version was agreed to in the months after the war by all of those major German military figures in Hitler’s entourage who survived the last battles and the final Gotterdammerung purges.
It is possible, however, that Hitler had discussed the operational concept of a counteroffensive through the Ardennes with Jodl-and before the 16 September edict. The relationship between these two men has bearing on the entire “prehistory” of the Ardenne campaign. It is analyzed by the headquarters diary-keeper and historian, Maj Percy E. Schramm, as follows :

The function of Genobst Jodl in the Fuehrer’s headquarters consisted of preparing-on the general staff level-the decisions the Fuehrer made in his capacity of C-in-C of the Wehrmacht. Jodl also was responsible for their execution. But these were not his only duties. Whenever the Fuehrer conceived a new military plan it was Jodl with whom the idea was discussed and closely examined. It was again Jodl who obtained the information necessary to transmute a vague idea into a workable plan. It was also he who raised objections and suggestions which had been voiced by the immediately subordinate commands. These facts were so little known to the outside world that the public scarcely knew Jodl, and that within the Wehrmacht-even among those in leading positions-he was mostly considered only as an executive tool, by some people even as too willing a tool. The view was widely held that the Fuehrer did not accept any opinion other than his own. It was not recognized that, although Hitler in the final analysis might only follow his own trend of thought, he acquired the inner assurance necessary for his actions by constantly discussing his intentions within the confines of his inner circle. For this reason, the Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff (Jodl) was an extremely important figure in all strategic decisions…. In his relationship to the Fuehrer, his functions were not merely executive, but involved a very complex process of giving and taking, altering and retrenching, warning and stimulating.[11]

[11] MS # B-034, OKW War Diary, 1 April-18 December 1944 : The West (Schramm).

The evidence is clear that Jodl and a few of his juniors from the Wehrmacht Operations Staff did examine the Ardennes concept very closely in the period from 25 September, when Hitler gave the first order to start detailed planning, to 11 October, when Jodl submitted the initial operations plan.
Other but less certain evidence indicates that those present in the select conference on 16 September were taken by surprise when Hitler made his announcement.
Jodl definitely ascribes the selection of the Ardenne to Hitler and Hitler alone, but at the time Jodl expressed this view he was about to be tried before an international tribunal on the charge of preparing aggressive war. Even so, the “argument from silence,” the fact that there is no evidence of other thought on the Ardenne as the point of concentration prior to Hitler’s statement on 16 September-has some validity.

The most impressive argument for ascribing sole authorship of the Ardenne idea to Hitler is found in the simple fact that every major military decision in the German High Command for months past had been made by the Fuehrer, and that these Hitler decisions were made in detail, never in principle alone.

The major reasons for Hitler’s selection of the Ardenne were stated by himself, although never in a single tabulation on a single occasion nor with any ordering of importance :

The enemy front in the Ardennes sector was very thinly manned. A blow here would strike the seam between the British and Americans and lead to political as well as military disharmony between the Allies. Furthermore an entrance along this seam would isolate the British 21st Army Group and allow the encirclement and destruction of the British and Canadians before the American leadership (particularly the political leadership) could react.
The distance from the jump-off line to a solid strategic objective (Antwerp) was not too great and could be covered quickly, even in bad weather.
The configuration of the Ardennes area was such that the ground for maneuver was limited and so would require the use of relatively few divisions.
The terrain to the east of the breakthrough sector selected was very heavily wooded and offered cover against Allied air observation and attack during the build-up for the assault.
An attack to regain the initiative in this particular area would erase the enemy ground threat to the Ruhr.

Although Hitler never referred directly to the lightning thrust made in 1940 through the Ardennes as being in any sense a prototype for the operation in the same area four and a half years later, there is indication of a more than casual connection between the two campaigns in Hitler’s own thinking. For example, during the 16 September expose he set the attainment of “another Dunkirk” as his goal. Then, as detailed planning began, Hitler turned again and again to make operational proposals which had more than chance similarity to those he had made before the 1940 offensive. When, in September 1939, Hitler had announced his intention to attack in the west, the top-ranking officers of the German armed forces had to a man shown their disfavor for this daring concept. Despite this opposition Hitler had gone ahead and personally selected the general area for the initial penetration, although perhaps with considerable stimulation from Generalfeldmarschall Fritz Erich von Manstein. The lightning campaign through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France had been the first great victory won by Hitler’s intuition and the Fuehrerprinzip over the German General Staff, establishing a trend which had led almost inevitably to the virtual dictatorship in military command exercised by the Fuehrer in 1944. Also, the contempt for Allied generalship which Hitler continually expressed can be regarded as more than bombast. He would be prone to believe that the Western Allies had learned nothing from the experience of 1940, that the conservative military tradition which had deemed the Ardennes as impossible for armor was still in the saddle, and that what German arms had accomplished in 1940 might be their portion a second time. Two of the factors which had entered into the plans for the 1940 offensive still obtained: a very thin enemy line and the need for protecting the Ruhr. The German attack could no longer be supported by an air force which outweighed the opposition, but this would be true wherever the attack was delivered. Weather had favored movement through the Ardennes defiles in the spring of 1940. This could hardly be expected in the month of November, but there is no indication that Hitler gave any thought to the relation of weather and terrain as this might affect ground operations in the Ardennes. He tended to look at the sky rather than the ground, as the Luftwaffe deteriorated, and bad weather-bad flying weather-was his desire. In sum, Hitler’s selection of the Ardennes may have been motivated in large part by the hope that the clock could be turned back to the glorious days of 1940.[12]

[12] General Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1952, app. 3.

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