Ardennes 1944: Hitlers Last Gamble

by Antony Beevor review a startlingly

detailed account
A military history of the Battle of the Bulge brings realism to the battlefield and coherence
to the larger story of the second world war
Timothy Snyder
Wednesday 20 May 2015 15.30 AEST

he beginning of the end was Operation Bagration, which began on 22 June 1944. In a
massive offensive timed to coincide with the third anniversary of the German
invasion of the USSR, the First Belarusian Front of the Red Army routed and
destroyed the Wehrmachts Army Group Centre. Some 1.7 million Soviet troops,
many of them riding in trucks and jeeps supplied by the United States, crashed through the
Belarusian forests and swamps, forcing the Germans to withdraw all the way to central
Poland. As the Red Army approached the Vistula river, the Polish resistance, the Home
Army, tried to take Warsaw from the Germans. The Red Army watched from across the
Vistula as the local German garrison and SS forces defeated the Poles and murdered tens of
thousands of civilians. Meanwhile the Wehrmacht, in a remarkable and generally
overlooked action, turned the energy of panic into the determination to defend, and dug in
at new positions beyond the Vistula.
At this point, in September 1944, Hitler made one of the most remarkable decisions of the
war: to send some of the best troops that stood between the Red Army and Berlin, notably
the Fifth and Sixth Panzer armies, to fight the Americans in Belgium rather than the Soviets
in Poland. Hitler gambled that the US Army could be forced by a surprise offensive into a
panic, like the Red army in 1941, the French army in 1940 and the Polish Army in 1939.
Although Hitler had a precise understanding of some of the operational details of the war,
his choice to attack the Americans rather than defend against the Soviets was essentially
psychological. Only a dramatic offensive victory, he thought, could break the will of the
Anglo-Saxons and the unnatural alliance between the Soviets, Americans and British. The
Americans could send their machines across the Pacific and the Atlantic, but did they have
the stomach for a long war in Europe? Had Hitler known more about the way the war was
fought and won in the Pacific, he might have seen this issue differently. The British could
land on the continent with the Americans at Normandy, but could they stay? Or could they
be seen off again, as at Dunkirk in 1940? On 17 September 1944, a day after Hitler ordered
the offensive in the west, the British attempted the disastrous airborne operation known as
Operation Market Garden, losing 14,000 men to no purpose.
Meanwhile, as Antony Beevor documents, the leading British and American generals on the
western front were dividing the imagined spoils of a war that was far from won. General

Pattons arrogance and impatience competed with Field Marshal Montgomerys armoured
complacency, though Montgomery was far too self-absorbed to be envious. Eisenhower
figures in this account as more mature than the others, but lacking in imagination and in
the ability, at least at first, to bring his subordinates into line. Even after the success of DDay and a parade in Paris, the Germans were still defending important pockets in Belgium,
and the Americans foolishly chose to bull their way directly through the Hrtgen Forest.
That plan, says Beevor, was just about as foolish as it could be. By the time the Americans
emerged at the other end, they had lost some 33,000 men.
In December 1944, the Germans were preparing for an offensive on the same lines as in
1870, 1914 and 1940 and no one among the allies seemed to have a clue. Only Churchill,
writes Beevor, was immune to the victory fever. Too dependent on Ultra, the
decryption of German radio made possible by Polish mathematicians and the British team at
Bletchley Park, the Americans and British realised belatedly that the Germans, using
traditional methods, knew more about them than they did about the Germans. On the eve of
the German offensive, General von Manteuffel was in disguise doing his own intelligence
work, while Montgomery was asking Eisenhower for leave to go home for Christmas on the
grounds that Germany was no longer capable of mounting an attack. So when the blow fell
on 16 December, the brass was surprised but the men fought. At the crux of Beevors book
are its middle chapters, each covering a single day, which deliver the essential message of
the battle and perhaps of the war: that the Americans fought even when they were losing.
The Germans achieved surprise without delivering shock.
The slow advance through the Hrtgen Forest had hardened and educated the green
American troops. Like the Red Army in the east, they were beginning to use German tricks
and, when they could, German weapons. The Americans held villages and crossroads for as
long as they could, which sometimes meant only days or hours but even this mattered.
Some of the American tank units were manned by African Americans, fighting for the first
time on a large scale. On Beevors account, they fought well; he reports that Captain John
Long of the 761st Tank Battalion was fighting Not for God and Country, but for me and my
people. We dont know what the Germans made of this, but we do know that they were
frustrated by American resistance in general. The American staff officers, surprised as they
had been, had time to see the German advance resolve itself into a certain shape on their
maps, and could plan their counterattack. By the end of January the bulge, as the
Americans called the shape of the German advance, had been flattened.
Given the revival of interest in the political and military history of eastern Europe, to which
Beevor himself has contributed, it is no longer possible to write set-piece histories about the
western front without the eastern backdrop. The shadow of the east hangs over this entire
study. The Americans and the British experienced in December 1944 a total failure to see a
coming German offensive, just as the Soviets had before Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The
winter fighting in the shadows of forests recalled the eastern front to many of the Germans
who had been there; some of those German veterans were soldiers of the Waffen-SS, who
brought the habit of atrocity with them. They killed US prisoners of war, most notoriously at
Malmdy on 17 December. The Americans, as Beevor is careful to note in sections of the
book that American readers might find startling, reciprocated with similar war crimes. In
general, Beevors portrayal of the American soldier is a welcome relief from the rounded
stereotypes of nationalist commemoration.

All that said, the scale was completely different. The SS was aiming to punish the Belgian
resistance that had welcomed the Americans; although the toll of 8,000 Belgian civilian
dead is horrible, it is far fewer than the 120,000 or so Poles murdered a few months earlier
in Warsaw. This suggests the greatest contrast between the eastern and the western fronts:
the politics of liberation. The Belgian and French rsistants fighting now alongside the allied
armies were involved in a political struggle about who would govern their liberated
homelands. They were frustrated as conservative politicians in exile were recognised as
legitimate rulers. In the east, these questions would not arise. Local resistance movements,
insofar as they survived the far harsher German reprisals, would be overmastered by the
Soviets. The politicians in exile would stay there. The new governments, as far west as
Berlin, would be those that Soviet authorities found palatable, which is to say communist.
This political difference, nicely captured in Andrzej Bobkowskis Polish memoir of wartime
Paris, En guerre et en paix, is the undertone of Beevors fine concluding sections.
The day after Christmas 1944, a week into the Battle of the Ardennes but a month before the
final German defeat, General Guderian tried to explain the calculus to Hitler. As he argued,
American resistance meant that the gamble in the west had already failed. As many forces as
possible, he argued, should be returned to the eastern front to guard the Vistula. Hitler was
enraged by his estimates of Soviet troop strengths: Who is responsible for producing this
rubbish? On 12 and 13 January 1945, the First Belarusian Front and the First Ukrainian
Front indeed attacked from their Vistula bridgeheads, and the campaign for Berlin had
begun. There can be little doubt, concludes Beevor, that the commitment and then the
grinding down of German forces in the Ardennes, especially the Panzer divisions, had
mortally weakened the Wehrmachts capacity to defend the eastern front. Usually, and
quite rightly, the emphasis is on the tremendous sacrifices of the Red Army on the eastern
front. But at this decisive moment, it was the sacrifices of the Americans that prepared the
way for a rapid Soviet advance and thus, perhaps, for an extended Soviet empire. If the
Panzer armies had remained on the Vistula, the Americans rather than the Soviets might
have liberated Berlin and Vienna. Hitlers military choice to fight on the west rather than the
east ended up defining, in political terms, what west and east meant after the war.
Though Beevor sketches these political implications, he has written a military history.
History, and especially the martial kind, has the feature that events are portrayed much
more clearly in retrospect than they can possibly have been seen at the time. The trap for
the military historian, then, is to shine too bright a light through the fog of war. Beevor has
the art of preserving the individual perspective on the battlefield while placing it among the
perspectives of platoon, regiment, division, commanders, politicians and civilians. The
pointillist whole that emerges is convincing as a portrait of war and startling in its detail.
Beevor cares about the soldiers and the readers and the truth, an old-fashioned set of
concerns that is balanced with modern literary skill. This book clarifies, without simplifying,
the human experiences and political stakes of the battle for the Ardennes Forest in
December 1944 and January 1945, bringing realism to the battlefield and coherence to the
larger history of the war.
Timothy Snyder is the author of Bloodlands. His book Black Earth: The Holocaust as
History and Warning will be published by Bodley Head in September. This article has been
amended to correct the reviewers surname.

More reviews

Topics
History
Save for later Article saved
Reuse this content