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| Gerd von Rundstedt photographed as a Reichswehr general in the early 1930s, wearing the stand-and-fall gray collar of the period. |
The trap had been prepared months before. The idea for the massive German counteroffensive in the Ardennes was first broached during the summer of 1944. “The Great Blow,” was how the German high command referred to the operation during its planning stages.
“The counteroffensive will be the great blow against the Allies,” Hitler told his generals. “The assault will drive the Americans and English back to the sea…”
Gerd von Rundstedt was the man who would serve as the genius of the “Great Blow.” A German general of the old school, a monocled, aristocratic Junker, von Rundstedt was an ideal choice for the task.
War was his sole interest—his entire life. He was one of those whose entire career was concerned exclusively with military matters. Gerd von Rundstedt considered warfare a cold, exact science. He could be relied upon to plan the huge campaign down to the last and tiniest detail.
There were other reasons why he was chosen. Main among these was the fact that he was popular with officers and men of the battered Wehrmacht. The grim-visaged, ramrod-straight general had earned and maintained the respect not only of the “regulars,” but even of the | troops who normally resented old-line regular Army commanders.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who would be von Rundstedt’s opposite number, once the offensive began, was an individual of a far different stamp. Smiling and friendly, he was the typical product of the happy-go-lucky American civilization. Almost a genius at the horrendous task of getting the opposing personalities of a Grand Alliance to work together, his greatest strength was organization rather than strategy.
Eisenhower, though trained in the regular professional military tradition, preferred to depend heavily on staff analysis. A carry-outer rather than a thinker-upper, he failed to react swiftly enough when the chips were down, some said, and this might have caused a disastrous lapse.
Luckily for the Allied cause, the echelon immediately below him—Bradley, Patton and Montgomery—reacted by instinct. And that instinct helped save the battle.
And to make it even worse, Ike had been through it all before. In Africa, during the early days of fighting, he had committed raw, unblooded troops against veterans. At Kasserine Pass, he had walked into an almost identical trap. There, the British Eighth Army, advancing with hysterical speed from the south had saved his army. And the official scapegoat, Fredenhall, had saved his name.
The tense, critical days of the Ardennes battle—and the retrospective judgment of history—show that von Rundstedt was the best man for the job at hand. It was not von Rundstedt’s planning or his leadership that caused the failure of the drive. The campaign failed for other reasons.
Nor can it be truthfully said that American command or staff work turned the tide.
Actually, Gerd von Rundstedt succeeded in thoroughly out-thinking and surprising the Allied Supreme Commander. In short, he constructed an intricate, elaborate mousetrap—and succeeded in drawing “Ike” Eisenhower into it!
How the German Army managed to accomplish its incredible degree of total surprise and early victories is one of the great wonders of World War II.
In order to launch the offensive, it was necessary for von Rundstedt and Feldmarschall Walter Model, commander of German Army Group B to move—and to concentrate—tremendous numbers of men and quantities of materiel in a relatively small area.
On the opening day of the offensive alone, von Rundstedt’s plan called for hurling seventeen divisions—over 200,000 soldiers—against a narrow sector of the American line!
Behind this huge striking force—ready to move up and consolidate early gains—would stand more than a dozen reserve divisions. This tremendous mass of men was organized into three field armies—the Sixth Panzer under Dietrich, the Fifth Panzer under Manteuffel, and the Seventh Army commanded by Brandenberger.
Needless to say, it was a tremendous task to amass the tanks, guns, ammunition and supplies necessary for this force. Military analysts find their credulity sorely tested by the grim fact that neither Allied air reconnaissance nor Allied intelligence ever suspected that anything new or different was afoot.
To make matters ever more unbelievable, certain preliminary orders issued by the German High Command in preparation for the offensive actually fell into the hands of Allied intelligence. As early as October and November 1944, G-2 sections at various levels were in possession of German communications which gave ample warning of the forthcoming build-up and attack. Yet absolutely nothing was done with this information—it was not even relayed to field units. And so it happened…
The Allied armies had pulled up after a swift race across France. A halt was considered necessary to permit logistics and communications to catch up to the combat troops. Part of the Allied line ran through the Ardennes forest region of Belgium.
Unmindful—or rather unaware—of the German buildup taking place behind the enemy’s lines, the American command had few troops in the sector extending from Luxembourg in the south to St. Vith in the north.
Holding positions along the Schnee Eifel, a commanding hill-mass east of St. Vith, was the green, untried 106th Infantry Division. That unit plus the 4th and 28th Divisions and two combat commands of the 9th Armored Division, were the only outfits holding a line against which von Rundstedt would throw no less than eleven divisions in the first hours of the battle.
The German leaders had worked a miracle. Despite incessant Allied air raids against the Reich and its industry, they had collected nearly five thousand aircraft to use in the offensive. In addition to the new planes, among them Me 262 jets, the German war machine in the West had been equipped with new tanks and artillery pieces in large numbers.
All this equipment had been brought to the front under the very eyes of Allied air reconnaissance. For weeks, German roads leading to the front had been clogged with guns and vehicles. Some of the convoys had been spotted, true enough, and bombed and strafed. Yet, the majority got through.
“One of our biggest troubles was the air of wild optimism that pervaded SHAEF headquarters,” is the off-the-record admission of a retired American general. “We’d sliced across France and the top brass figured that Germany was licked. Anyone suggesting that the Germans had enough strength left to launch a counteroffensive would have been hooted down in the officers mess!”
There were some combat commanders who suspected something was up. Veteran front-line officers sensed there was something in the wind. Mainly on their own initiative, many of them ordered their fuel and supply drums moved far back behind the forward positions—one of the strokes that eventually contributed to the German defeat.
The attack that came on 16 December nonetheless caught the American Army flat-footed.
The assault went off like clock-work—exactly as Gerd von Rundstedt had planned it. General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army slammed into the unblooded 106th Division. The 106th went to pieces.
Observers even then found it difficult to understand why such a raw unit—the 106th had only recently arrived from the States—had been assigned a key holding position. The result of an attack against the division should have been a foregone conclusion.
In experience, men and officers were no match for Hitler’s hardened veterans. The 106th broke—and large segments of it ran—and two regiments, the 422nd and 423rd, were all but completely wiped out.
To the south of the 106th, two entire German corps struck the “Bloody Bucket” 28th Division—which was holding more than twenty-seven miles of the front.
Evidently, the heady perfume of victorious optimism still clogged the nostrils of the brass at SHAEF. Although seventeen German divisions had been committed in the opening stages of the battle, the reports from the front were shrugged off by SHAEF intelligence sections.
“Just a local diversion,” one top-level SHAEF G-2 officer decided.
Gerd von Rundstedt’s reports were received with jubilation in Berlin.
“I told the Führer on the first day of attack that surprise had been completely achieved,” Colonel General Alfred Jodl stated after the war. “The best indication was that no reinforcements were made in your sector before the attack.”
The German drive overwhelmed the thinly-spread American defense forces in the Ardennes. The line was pushed back. Regiments and divisions, out-numbered and out-gunned, were forced to fall back. For more than forty-eight hours, SHAEF seemed in a state of paralysis.
Fearful rumors spread and what had been optimism turned to gloom—and then to a state almost bordering on hysteria. Even ranking officers were carried away by the wave of defeatism that swept the rear areas.
“The Germans are unbeatable…”
“We’ll be licked…”
“They’ll have us fighting with our backs to the sea…”
First the German strength and potential had been under-estimated. Now, it was over-estimated.
Despite the showing it was making in the Ardennes, the slender resources of the Wehrmacht had been stretched beyond the breaking point. Fuel—for ground vehicles and aircraft—was the most serious shortage.
One of the most vital points in von Rundstedt’s planning called for swift movement—blitz thrusts through the American line—for the purpose of capturing U.S. fuel and oil dumps. Without this, he knew the drive could not be sustained. The panzer divisions had gasoline for only a few days—there were no reserves of gas left in Germany.
It is here that the foresight—almost bordering on occult perception—of the American field commanders paid off. Their action in moving their supply dumps to the rear denied the critically needed gasoline to the Germans.
The Battle of the Bulge was fought at the divisional, regimental, battalion and company levels. In the confusion and chaos that followed the first day, the courage and determination of front-line units saved the situation, rather than any “Big-Picture” strategic or tactical moves or decisions emanating from SHAEF.
Fierce defensive actions were fought at St. Vith by Brigadier General Bruce Clarke and his Combat Command B of the 7th Armored Division and at Bastogne, where airborne troopers were completely surrounded and cutoff.
These stands, as well as others, slowed the German drive and ruined von Rundstedt’s carefully planned timetable. The delaying actions were essential—for it was not until 22 December that George Patton’s Third Army brought the full weight of its counter-punch against the south side of the Bulge. It was also about that time that the weather cleared enough for Allied air to resume large-scale operations.
Patton’s attack and the resumption of air assaults sealed the fate of von Rundstedt’s offensive, but it was not until mid-January that the Allies were able to start a drive to recapture lost ground.
There is an old saw among military men to the effect that one side’s strategical success is automatically the other’s strategical blunder. If this were accepted at face value, then the Battle of the Bulge would be a textbook example to illustrate the theory.
Using the opposing commanders—von Rundstedt and Eisenhower—as the representative single symbols of the two armies which faced each other in the Ardennes, one must arrive at an inescapable conclusion.
The German general clearly achieved all the elements of strategic superiority. Through his planning and command, entire corps and fantastic masses of weapons and equipment were brought to a front-line sector from widely-separated areas without serious hitch and, more importantly, without the knowledge of the Allies.
The assault was a complete surprise. Conceived as a last-ditch measure, the counteroffensive was brilliantly executed and stood an excellent chance of succeeding up to the very last.
General Dwight Eisenhower’s intelligence service was faulty to the point of being virtually worthless in the period before and during the early stages of the battle. SHAEF G-2 was completely in the dark about German intentions—and grossly miscalculated enemy intentions and strength in the opening days of the Ardennes conflict.
In addition, it would almost appear that Eisenhower’s staff was unnerved by the implications of the Bulge. Starting with such decisions as those placing the unreliable 106th Division in a vital position and which spread divisions like the 28th over great stretches of front, SHAEF staff-work does not stand up under close scrutiny.
Decisions to shift other units to the Bulge to throw back the Germans seemed slow in coming. Several days elapsed before the full implication of the drive was realized and sufficient force diverted from other sectors to plug the gaps.
The coldly calculated offensive engineered by Gerd von Rundstedt, the stern-visaged Prussian, ended in defeat. It nearly ended differently, however. For von Rundstedt had built a trap—an excellent trap—and he had enticed Eisenhower into it.
Luckily for the Allies, although Ike walked into the trap, he had enough power and punch to fight his way out eventually. Otherwise, the story of World War II might have had an entirely different ending…
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| Hitler and von Rundstedt examining a situation map. |
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| Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt and high-ranking Wehrmacht and SS officers inspecting shock troops of the 6th SS Panzer Army. The camouflage of this Sd.Kfz. 251 half-track consists of dark gray with sand and brown/green lines and mottle sprayed on top. |