protecting the southern flank. Some 200,000 men in five panzer and thirteen People’s Grenadier divisions were assigned to the first wave, supported by around 600 tanks and 1,600 heavy guns. However, many of the men were young and inexperienced. Some divisions came, already battle-weary, from the fighting on the Saar. Fuel shortages were a major concern, even with some supplies taken from the hard-pressed eastern front. And an even bigger worry was the weakness of the Luftwaffe. All available planes—including two-thirds of the entire fighter force—were assembled for the attack. Hopes had to be placed in bad weather limiting the massive supremacy in the air of the Allies. Even so, the Wehrmacht began with a substantial numerical advantage in ground-troops and heavy armaments in the 170-kilometre-wide attack zone.13 The element of surprise would be vital to make this momentary superiority tell. But even surprise would not be enough if the offensive could not be sustained.
There were grounds enough for scepticism about the chances of success. Both Rundstedt and Field-Marshal Model, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, thought the aim of Antwerp, around 200 kilometres away, far too ambitious, given the strength of available forces. They favoured a more limited aim of beating back and destroying the Allied forces along the Meuse, between Aachen and Liege. But Hitler wanted no ‘little solution’, no ‘ordinary’ victory. He would not be moved from the aim he had stipulated for the offensive. In the end, Rundstedt and Model declared themselves to be ‘fully in agreement’ with Hitler’s ambitious plan. Privately, both remained extremely dubious. Model thought it had ‘no chance’. Dietrich and Manteuffel also bowed, their own doubts still unassuaged, to the imperative.14 Like most military commanders, they saw it as their duty to raise objections to the operational plan but then, when these were rejected, to fulfil to the best of their ability the orders of the political leadership, however futile they deemed these to be. Hitler still had the capacity, however, to make the impossible seem possible. Manteuffel himself accepted that Hitler’s addresses to the divisional commanders on 11 and 12 December had made a positive impact. ‘The commanders’, he later wrote, ‘took away from this conference a picture of the enemy’s overall situation. They had been given an appreciation of the situation from the one source in a position to see the full military picture and it seemed to give an assurance of favourable conditions.’15
In the top echelons of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, there was no readiness to back the well- founded misgivings of those who would lead the offensive. Keitel and Jodl were daily in Hitler’s immediate proximity and remained heavily under his domineering influence. Both remained believers in his unique qualities as Fuhrer, adepts of his form of charismatic authority.16 If they harboured doubts, they kept them to themselves. Jodl refrained from any criticism of Hitler’s decision even when interrogated by his Allied captors in May 1945.17
On 15 December Rundstedt put out his ‘order of the day’, exhorting his troops on the eve of battle. ‘Soldiers of the western front!’ he proclaimed. ‘Your great hour has struck. Strong attacking armies are marching today against the Anglo-Americans. I don’t need to say any more. You all feel it: it’s all or nothing!’ Model’s own ringing exhortation followed: ‘We will not disappoint the trust of the Fuhrer placed in us, nor that of the homeland, which has forged the sword of retaliation. Advance in the spirit of Leuthen’ (the legendary victory of Frederich the Great in the Seven Years War, almost two centuries earlier).18 At 5.30 a.m. on 16 December, an hour-long artillery barrage began. About 7 a.m., before sunrise on a frosty morning, with thick cloud offering protection from enemy aircraft, the German infantry marched out of the dawn mist and began their assault. Germany’s last major offensive was under way. The stakes could scarcely have been higher. They were indeed, as Jodl had put it, all placed on one card.
II
Nor had the civilian leadership of the Reich given up hope that depressing autumn. Whatever illusions Nazi leaders harboured, however ready they were to delude themselves and listen to their own propaganda, they were intelligent enough to see how rapidly the situation was deteriorating. Yet they still somehow hoped against hope that Hitler would find a way out, that the Allied coalition would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, or that the deployment of new ‘wonder weapons’ could bring a dramatic change of fortunes.
Few Nazi leaders were apprised of the plan for the Ardennes offensive. One who was, however, was Albert Speer, among the most resigned about Germany’s inevitable fate (to go from his later account) but possibly the most crucial of Hitler’s immediate lieutenants in enabling the war to continue. Without Speer’s efforts, drive and organizational skill in the autumn of 1944 in making the armaments available, the Ardennes offensive would not have been feasible however much Hitler and his top military aides wanted it.
It is striking, in fact, how late the almost complete collapse of the economy took place and how great the efforts were, even then, to overcome the increasingly insuperable difficulties. In their post-war interrogations, Speer and the leading figures in his ministry were adamant that the damage to Germany’s economic infrastructure only became insurmountable during the autumn of 1944, largely as a consequence of the systematic destruction of the transport and communications network through a relentless Allied bombing campaign that had begun in October. Whatever their private thoughts about Germany’s chances of avoiding defeat, the actions of Speer’s able and energetic subordinates showed they were far from resigned to inevitable disaster. They performed organizational near miracles (if in part by grossly inhumane exploitation of foreign workers) to enable the economy to continue functioning at all, prolonging the war in its most destructive phase. Some indeed, most notably Karl Otto Saur, the ruthless head of the Technical Department, retained an astonishingly optimistic view of Germany’s chances almost down to the end of 1944.
By the autumn of 1944 it was impossible to manufacture enough to compensate for the losses.19 Heavy air raids caused a sharp drop in the availability of steel for manufacture of ammunition.20 Coal production was cushioned until late autumn by reduced deliveries for winter stocking, but catastrophic from November onwards, while serious shortages of most indispensable basic products mounted in the second half of 1944. Speer reckoned that there was a drop in armaments production of 30–40 per cent across 1944, worsening sharply as the year went on. By late autumn there were critical shortages of fuel and gas. The emergency needs of the Luftwaffe could be met only until around October. Aviation fuel levels could not be sustained following the attacks earlier in the year on the synthetic oil plants, though minimum production of motor spirit and diesel oil continued to the end of the war. By autumn, anti-aircraft defence was being accorded priority over fighter production. Speer estimated that some 30 per cent of the total output of guns in 1944 and 20 per cent of heavy calibre ammunition together with up to 55 per cent of armaments production of the electro-technical industry and 33 per cent of the optical industry went on anti-aircraft defences, meaning diminished armaments provision for the front and a weakening in the fighting power of the Wehrmacht. Emergency transport arrangements meant that armaments production could be more or less sustained until late autumn. By then, increasingly damaging attacks on the transport network, including crucial attacks on canals in late autumn, were causing massive disruption to both civilian and military supplies, to the growing concern of the OKW. The severe lack of fuel and other supplies so evident at the outset of the Ardennes offensive, which worried Model and Dietrich, arose in good part from the transport difficulties as the number of railway wagons available for armaments fell by more than a half. Speer went so far as to claim that transport problems, meaning that adequate fuel supplies could not be provided to the frontline troops on time, were decisive in causing the swift breakdown of the Ardennes offensive.21
Speer’s departmental heads broadly agreed with his assessment that late autumn was the time when the economic crisis became overwhelming. According to Hans Kehrl, head of the Raw Materials and Planning departments, the concentrated Allied attacks on the Reich’s transport system had an increasingly drastic effect on production from October onwards and became a decisive factor after December. He estimated that the drop in output owing to lack of transport facilities was around 25 per cent from June to October, but 60 per cent between November and January 1945.22 The effects on the distribution of raw materials were particularly severe. Werner Bosch, in Kehrl’s department, highlighted the critical shortage of cement, needed for building works (including the extensive underground factories run largely on slave labour), as supplies halved from November onwards. He allocated the dwindling supplies through rigorous rationing on a system of priorities. He claimed after the war that he had realized by spring 1944 that the war could not be won and thought (as, he imagined, did Speer himself) that Germany’s leadership should have sought peace terms as soon as possible. ‘As it was, however,’ he remarked, ‘people in his position could do nothing except get on with their own work.’23 Whatever his
