happen, Rundstedt predicted, would be a deep salient or bulge into the line, costly and indecisive. Field Marshal Walther Model, commander of Army Group B, shared Rundstedt’s pessimism, but neither could get Hitler to change his plans.
To direct the offensive personally, Hitler moved his headquarters from East Prussia to his
Hitler designated twenty-eight divisions for the offensive, twenty in the first wave with 250,000 men, a remarkable figure given Germany’s defeats. The new soldiers were green, of course, without the thorough training of the splendid troops who had swept through the Ardennes in 1940. But there was a hard core of combat veterans and tough noncommissioned officers to stiffen the recruits, plus a number of officers seasoned in battle. The most serious problem was motor transport. No division had more than 80 percent of the vehicles it needed. Fuel was in short supply, and most stockpiles were east of the Rhine.
Even so, Hitler had assembled a thousand tanks for the opening wave in seven panzer divisions, and 450 for the follow-up force. Tactical aircraft were the weakest element: Hermann Goring found only 900, half the number the Luftwaffe deployed in 1940, and a fifth the number of bombers the Allies could throw into the battle. Goring delivered this quantity only on one day—after the ground battle had been decided.
There were many signs of a German buildup opposite the Ardennes in the German Schnee Eifel Mountains, duly reported by air reconnaissance and by Ultra intercepts. But American intelligence (G-2) officers at all levels failed to draw the correct conclusion. They detected German armor but thought it would be used to counterattack the Allied drive toward the Rhine and Ruhr. G-2 saw troop movements in the Eifels as efforts to meet American offensives north and south of the Ardennes. Finally, they believed fuel was so short and troop losses were so great that the German army was in no condition to mount an offensive.
When the attack opened, Bradley was utterly confounded. “Just where in hell has this sonuvabitch gotten all his strength?” he asked his chief of staff, Leven Allen, at 12th Army Group’s tactical headquarters at Luxembourg City. And Eisenhower, who wrote that “I was immediately convinced that this was no local attack,” nevertheless waited till the evening of the second day to alert the two divisions he held in reserve, the 82nd and 101st Airborne. Only then did they start moving to the scene.
Hitler set the attack date for December 16, 1944. Bad weather was predicted for days ahead, keeping Allied aircraft from flying. Snow covered the ground. Hitler originally ordered a three-hour preliminary bombardment, but Manteuffel argued that a short, concentrated preparation would achieve the same effect while lessening the Americans’ alert. And rather than attack at 10 A.M., which Hitler planned, leaving fewer than seven hours of daylight, Manteuffel wanted the artillery concentrations to begin at 5:30 A.M., well before dawn. Half an hour later the ground assault would start, assisted by “artificial moonlight” created by bouncing searchlight beams off the clouds. Hitler accepted all the changes.
On the American side, the 5th Corps’s 99th Infantry Division, a new but reliable force, covered the region from Monshau south to Losheim. There the 14th Cavalry Group, equipped mainly with light weapons, protected the “Losheim Gap” itself—one of the few fairly open regions of the Ardennes, and thus the main avenue of approach.
To the south facing the West Wall and emplaced in the Schnee Eifel Mountains some five miles east of the Our River (the German-Luxembourg frontier) was the 8th Corps’s green 106th Infantry Division, filled with ill- trained replacements assigned just before leaving the States.
Next came the 28th Infantry Division, a veteran outfit refitting after losing 5,000 men in the Hurtgen Forest. It held a twenty-five-mile sector along the Our to the Sure River, about fifteen miles north of Luxembourg City.
Below the 28th Division, the 4th Infantry Division held twenty miles along the river (now called the Sauer) from Echternach to the Moselle River, then along the Moselle to a point twelve miles southeast of Luxembourg City. The 4th Division had suffered in the Hurtgen Forest almost as much as the 28th Division, and likewise was resting and refitting.
In 8th Corps reserve, Troy Middleton held the new 9th Armored Division, except Combat Command B, attached to 5th Corps’s 2nd Infantry Division. In the whole corps area, Middleton had 242 medium Sherman tanks and 182 self-propelled (SP) guns or tank destroyers.
Much depended upon the advance of Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army with four SS panzer divisions. It was nearest the Meuse in the decisive sector.
When the attack burst across the front lines early on December 16, the U.S. 99th Infantry Division below Monschau successfully blocked Dietrich’s right-hand or northern punch around Udenbrath—and thus stopped his shortest route to Antwerp. Dietrich’s left-hand or southern punch broke through around Losheim, and was able to push westward over the next two days against tough American resistance around Butgenbach and Elsenborn. But the 99th Division’s resistance denied the Germans the northern shoulder they had planned to seize, and provided a base to press against them later.
Meanwhile 1st SS Panzer Division drove forward in an effort to outflank Liege from the south. The leading column, a battle group under SS Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Peiper with a hundred tanks, pressed forward, aiming for the Meuse crossing at Huy. At Malmedy on the way, it gained ignominy by massacring eighty-six American prisoners, as well as a number of Belgian civilians.
Peiper’s group halted just east of Stavelot on December 18, but didn’t grab the bridges over the Ambleve there. Peiper also didn’t go for a huge supply dump just to the north with 2.5 million gallons of fuel, or for Spa, a few miles farther on, where Hodges’s 1st Army headquarters was located. American reinforcements reached Stavelot during the night and blew the bridges over the Ambleve in Peiper’s face the next day.
Peiper tried to detour down the river valley but Americans checked him at Stoumont, about six miles farther on. Peiper now learned that he was well ahead of the rest of 6th Panzer Army.
On Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army front the attack got a good start. Storm battalions infiltrated into the American front, opening the way for the tanks, which advanced at 4 P.M. on December 16 and pressed forward in the dark with the help of “artificial moonlight.”
Manteuffel’s forces broke through in the Schnee Eifel against the 106th Infantry Division and 14th Cavalry Group. These forces covered the important road junction of St. Vith, some ten miles to the west. Two infantry divisions and a regiment of tanks of Walter Lucht’s 66th Corps surrounded two regiments of the 106th and forced at least 8,000 men to surrender.
Farther south two panzer corps, Walter Kruger’s 58th and Heinrich von Luttwitz’s 47th, attacked westward. The 58th crossed the Our River and drove to Houffalize, aiming at a crossing of the Meuse between Ardenne and Namur. The 47th was to capture the key road center of Bastogne— where six roads came together—and drive on to the Meuse south of Namur.
Outposts of the U.S. 28th Division delayed but could not halt the Germans crossing the Our, and by the night of December 17 they were approaching Houffalize and Bastogne—and the north-south road between them, which the Germans needed to develop their westward sweep.
In the extreme south, the 5th Parachute Division of Brandenberger’s 7th Army got to Wiltz, a dozen miles west of the Our, but the 28th Division’s right wing gave ground slowly, and 9th Armored and 4th Infantry Divisions checked the advance after it had gone four miles. By December 19, the southern shoulder of the German attack was being held firmly—and Patton’s 3rd Army to the south would shortly be reinforcing it.
Meanwhile Manteuffel’s pressure on St. Vith and Bastogne increased. The Germans made their first small attack on St. Vith on December 17. The next day the bulk of the U.S. 7th Armored Division arrived. Outlying villages fell to German assaults, while panzers outflanked St. Vith north and south.
By December 18, Luttwitz’s 47th Corps was closing on Bastogne with two armored divisions (2nd and Panzer Lehr), plus the 26th Volksgrenadier Division. But a combat command of the U.S. 9th Armored Division, plus engineers, had arrived to help defend the crossroads, and the 101st Airborne Division under Anthony C. McAuliffe reached Bastogne on the morning of December 19.
After the Germans were unable to rush the town against fierce defenses, the two panzer divisions swung around both sides of Bastogne, leaving the 26th Division with a tank group to reduce it. Thus Bastogne was cut off
