Last Roll of the Dice

American infantrymen of the 290th Regiment fight in fresh snowfall near Amonines, Belgium.

Seventy-five years ago, from the 16th of December, 1944, until the 25th of January, 1945, a massive struggle took place along what had been known as the Ghost Front. On the 16th of December, three German armies launched a counter-offensive in the Ardennes Forest along the fog shrouded border of Germany with Belgium and Luxembourg. Present for duty on that day were* -

The German Plan for Die Wacht am Rhein**

With the British 21st Army Group (Montgomery) mostly to the north of the Dutch-Belgian border, and the American 12th Army Group (Bradley) to the south of that line, the German plan would have neatly cut the Allied armies in two.With the bonus of seizing the major port of Antwerp further aggravating an already tenuous supply problem for the Allied armies in Europe.

Fortunately for the Allies, the German forces available in the West were by no means sufficient for such a Herculean task. Hitler's plan was something of a pipe dream and his generals tried to convince him to launch this operation as a spoiling attack, hit just hard enough to disrupt the Allied line to give the German military time enough to prepare their defenses along the Rhine River.

Hitler, of course, was having none of that.

Early in the war his generals had also been very cautious about launching a war with the Western Allies (France and Britain) assuming that the French Army alone would be enough to stop the new Wehrmacht dead in its tracks along the Western Front. They had been proven wrong. Hitler saw himself as a military genius, one of his nicknames (among his sycophants) was Gröfaz, short for Größter Feldherr Aller Zeit, the greatest general of all time. In the latter years of the war, German soldiers used the term in a derogatory sense. They'd been screwed by the Führer too many times to take that term seriously.

Hitler had been lucky in the early years of the war. It went to his head. Now, once again, the German soldier would pay the price for his leader's arrogance. (Not to mention all of the civilians in the path of the offensive.)

For most of the battle the weather was terrible, nullifying Allied air superiority. This allowed the Germans to build up forces close to the front without fear of detection or interdiction. While there were some indicators that a German offensive was in the works, many in the Allied intelligence services pooh-poohed the idea.

Many believed that the Germans were on their last legs, some even believed that the war would be over by Christmas. Far too many on the Allied side thought that the war was winding down.

The American front in the Ardennes was manned in many places by divisions new to the front, unseasoned by combat and posted in the Ardennes to "break them in," units like the Golden Lions of the 106th Infantry Division on the hills of the Schnee Eifel. Other American units had been badly damaged in the fighting in the fall, especially units like the 28th Infantry Division, the "Keystone" Division of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, which had seen serious casualties in the Hürtgen forest back in November. (My Great-uncle John had been wounded there while fighting in the 4th Infantry Division, the "Ivy" Division. A German colleague of mine in NATO told me that his father, fighting in the Wehrmacht, had been captured there. Small world...)

Some of the attacking German units were made up of battle hardened SS troops brought from the Russian Front for this battle, but a number of units were brand new, made up of new recruits and former airmen and sailors. Men not used to ground combat and barely trained for such duties.

The Germans had gathered a large number of armored vehicles, especially tanks, for this offensive. If they ran into difficulties, they could scarcely afford the loss in men and vehicles. While the Russian Front was quiet for the moment, the German intelligence services predicted a big Soviet offensive in January. Stripping that theater for troops to use in an ill-conceived offensive in the West probably shortened the war significantly. It denuded the Eastern Front which led directly to the horrors in that area after the war, under Communist occupation.

Could the Germans have succeeded in the Ardennes? Could they have seized Antwerp, split the British from the Americans and at least forced a stalemate in the West? I suppose it was possible, after all it was just as big a shock to the Allies as the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam came as a shock to the Americans. But it, like the Bulge, inflicted serious, irreplaceable casualties on the enemy.

Unlike 1968, however, the West was made of much sterner stuff in 1944. The enemy was defeated badly and we pressed on to win the war. Of course, the American public backed the war in 1944, the press didn't lie about the war in 1944, and there were far fewer traitors holding high political office in 1944. A large part of warfare is the will to succeed, couple that with the necessary resources and victory is practically assured.

The Germans had little of that in 1944.

Look at the comparative strengths in January, a month after the commencement of the attack -

Allied strength had more than doubled, German casualties were increasing, their tank strength had been halved, fuel was running short. The weather was better, the German Army was dying in the Ardennes.

A lot of men died to prove to Hitler that the war was lost in the West. But it took thousands of more casualties, military and civilian, to get the Germans to surrender. A horrible price to pay for the delusions of a sick and twisted man. The Germans finally quit shortly after Hitler shot himself in April of 1945, imagine the outcome if von Stauffenberg's bomb had succeeded in killing Hitler in July of 1944.

History is replete with "what ifs." But the harsh reality is death and destruction.

The cost of the Ardennes Offensive -

Twenty-one years ago, on this very date, I stood in this place with two of my fellow sergeants, pondering the enormity of those events so long ago, and contemplating the bitter cost.

The Malmedy Memorial, very close to where the massacre occurred.
(Google Street View)

Where the massacre took place, across the street and up from the memorial site.
(Google Street View)

The price of freedom, Baugnez, Belgium
(Google Street View)

Remember...

Lest we have to do it again.





* All statistics were drawn from this source.
** "The Watch on the Rhine," the original German name for the operation, meant to deceive the Allies into thinking it was a plan to defend the Rhine River.