Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army made initial spectacular progress, breaking the American lines, taking some 8,000– 9,000 prisoners, and opening up a gap of more than 30 kilometres in the front. His troops poured through the opening, and had pressed forward by 18 December—though, held up by barely passable roads and detonated bridges, still more slowly than the operational plan required—almost to the Meuse, a distance of some 100 kilometres, where they encountered heavy American resistance at the vital communications point of Bastogne. The town had to be taken and the Meuse crossed if the planned advance on Antwerp was to have the remotest chance of success. But the offensive was slowing. And on 19 December, Eisenhower halted Allied offensive action along the rest of the front in order to rush reinforcements to the Meuse. Hitler’s offensive was on the verge of stalling.100
To the troops this was far from clear. One lieutenant was impressed that day, he recorded in his diary, as the ‘endless columns of prisoners pass; at first, about a hundred, half of them negroes, later another thousand’. When his vehicle stuck, he found none other than Field-Marshal Model—‘a little, undistinguished looking man with a monocle’—directing traffic. The roads, the junior officer noted, were ‘littered with destroyed American vehicles, cars and tanks. Another column of prisoners passes. I count over a thousand men.’101 Another lieutenant, with explicitly Nazi views, was elated at the offensive and delighted in the brutality as he thought the tables were now being turned on the Americans. ‘You cannot imagine what glorious hours and days we are experiencing now,’ he told his wife in his letter home.
It looks as if the Americans cannot withstand our important push. Today we overtook a fleeing column and finished it… It was a glorious bloodbath, vengeance for our destroyed homeland. Our soldiers still have the same old zip. Always advancing and smashing everything. The snow must turn red with American blood. Victory was never as close as it is now. The decision will soon be reached. We will throw them into the ocean, the arrogant, big-mouthed apes from the New World. They will not get into our Germany. We will protect our wives and children from all enemy domination. If we are to preserve all tender and beautiful aspects of our lives, we cannot be too brutal in the deciding moments of this struggle.102
Such extreme attitudes (encouraged by propaganda concoctions on the terror of American ‘negro soldiers’, including the base calumny that ‘drunken niggers murder German children’103) were almost certainly no rarity, but conceivably less representative than the contrasting views entered in the diary of a soldier, killed in January, whose unwillingness to fight was coloured by the destruction of his home in Hamburg and the blame he attached for this personal tragedy and the wider calamity of the war to Hitler and the Nazis. ‘On the 16th December, about 05.30 in the morning, we attacked,’ he wrote. ‘I shall march once more through Belgium and France, but I don’t have the smallest desire to do so… If [only] this idiotic war would end. Why should I fight? It only goes for the existence of the Nazis. The superiority of our enemy is so great that it is senseless to fight against it.’104
How most soldiers felt as they advanced into the Ardennes is impossible to assess. Their main consideration was probably survival—living to tell the tale—coupled with daring to hope that this offensive might indeed prove a turning point on the way to a peace. Letters and diary jottings from soldiers serving in the Ardennes and on other fronts suggest that such hopes were widespread. ‘I think the war in the west is again turning,’ wrote a corporal from the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division on 17 December. ‘The main thing is that the war will soon be decided and I’ll be coming home again to my dear wife and we can again build a new home. The radio is now playing bells from the homeland.’105 Another corporal learnt of the attack when Field-Marshal Model’s proclamation to his soldiers was read out in the barracks. ‘Hopefully, the change will now come for Germany to a successful final struggle and peace in the foreseeable future,’ he jotted in his diary.106 An NCO based in the Courland echoed the sentiment. ‘The news from yesterday’s OKW report, that the offensive in the west has begun, will certainly have filled you with great joy,’ he wrote. ‘We were all thrilled here. No one had reckoned with that before Christmas. Let’s hope that it will bring the decision and with it the end of the war in the west.’107
At home, the mood was also suddenly lifted at the news of the offensive. The first the public heard was through the brief OKW report on 18 December. Goebbels was personally elated and more than ready to take the credit for making the offensive possible by raising troops to take part through his ruthless total-war drive. It showed, he thought, what could be done through toughness, resilience and refusal to capitulate in the face of difficulties or be discouraged through ‘minor setbacks’. He nevertheless advocated caution in the reportage in order not to arouse exaggerated expectations.108 Newspapers publicized the offensive for the first time on 19 December, and, following Goebbels’ instructions, without trumpet-blowing.109 The response to the German attack was, even so, immediate and hugely enthusiastic. ‘Great surprise’ and a ‘deep inner joy’ were recorded by propaganda offices as early reactions to the OKW news. There was a sense of being ‘freed from a nightmare’. ‘What a lovely Christmas present’ was a sentiment frequently heard. That such an offensive could be launched had in itself significantly raised confidence in the leadership and the strength of the Reich, even if it was abundantly plain ‘that the whole of France and Belgium would not be reconquered immediately’.110 A day later, Goebbels was convinced that the impact on morale within the Reich was unquestionably successful. ‘The few sentences in the OKW report on Monday [18 December] have prompted a mood in the country which recalls the great times of our offensives,’ he recorded. ‘In Berlin that evening the entire Christmas schnapps rations were consumed. The people are deeply joyous that we have again gained the initiative, especially since no one in the public, other than the few in the know, had expected that. The surprise is all the greater as a result.’111
The Wehrmacht’s own propaganda agents, secretly taking soundings in Berlin, acknowledged the ‘very good mood’, despite trying to dampen the excessive optimism of the ‘hurrah-patriots’. Some thought the French and Belgians would this time welcome German troops with open arms after they had had the chance to experience ‘Anglo-American occupation’.112 A positive impression was also gleaned by those outside the German propaganda apparatus. A Swedish correspondent in Berlin reported great enthusiasm at the news of the offensive, exhilaration and confidence among soldiers and a lifting of the gloom that had earlier prevailed.113 But the euphoria could not last. Already by Christmas it was fading.
The news from the front remained positive for some days. Hitler himself was in high spirits, like a man rejuvenated.114 The small town of Saint-Vith on the north of the front was taken on the 21st, but, further south, the more important Bastogne, heavily besieged (and tying down three German divisions in the process), still held out. Manteuffel’s troops, from the 5th Panzer Army, bogged down in mud as well as facing fierce resistance, could make only slow progress. On 23 December they reached Buissonville and Celles, about 7 kilometres from the Meuse, east of Dinant. But that was as far as they got. The high point of the offensive had already passed.
Rundstedt had expressed doubts on 20 December about the chances of crossing the Meuse (though Model was at this time still more optimistic).115 Karl Otto Saur, close to supplanting Speer as Hitler’s blue- eyed boy in the Armaments Ministry, said after the war that he had realized the offensive had failed as early as 19 December (implying that this was the date at which he knew the war was lost).116 Model told Speer on 23 December that the offensive had failed.117 It was plain to any perceptive soldier by 24 December, General Guderian later commented, that the offensive had finally broken down.118 By Christmas, the American and British reinforcements rushed to the area had shored up Allied defences. On 26 December, armoured units from Patton’s 3rd US Army, which had hastened northwards, finally broke through to the encircled American troops in Bastogne and ended the siege.119 Model still vainly hoped for a regrouping of forces to regain the initiative near Bastogne, and at least cement more limited goals than Antwerp, which he acknowledged was now out of reach. But Manteuffel’s advance was at an end. It had been spectacular while it lasted, but could go no further.
Meanwhile, the weather had cleared and Allied aircraft were now fully able to exert their superiority as their ceaseless attacks—the Allies flew six times more sorties during the offensive than Goring’s crippled Luftwaffe— pounded German supply lines. Reinforcements of men and
The failure only gradually became apparent to the German public. Goebbels soon began to hint at setbacks in
