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In the first four years of the war, when in Great Britain two and a quarter million women had been placed in war production, only 182,000 women were similarly employed in Germany.
Not since Napoleonic times had German soldiers been forced to defend the sacred soil of the Fatherland. All the subsequent wars, Prussia’s and Germany’s, had been fought on—and had devastated—the soil of other peoples.
But his armies had outrun their supplies.
On the evening of December 12, 1944, a host of German generals, the senior field commanders on the Western front, were called to Rundstedt’s headquarters, stripped of their side arms and briefcases, packed into a bus, driven about the dark, snowy countryside for half an hour to make them lose their bearings, and finally deposited at the entrance to a deep underground bunker which turned out to be Hitler’s headquarters at Ziegenberg near Frankfurt.
Aachen, the old imperial capital, the seat of Charlemagne, surrendered to First Army on October 24 after a bitter battle—the first German city to fall into Allied hands—but the Americans had been unable to achieve a breakthrough to the Rhine.
This was a considerable force, though far weaker than Rundstedt’s army group on the same front in 1940.
I’ve been commanding the German Army in the field for five years and during that time I’ve had more practical experience than any gentleman of the General Staff could ever hope to have. I’ve studied Clausewitz and Moltke and read all the Schlieffen papers. I’m more in the picture than you are!”
Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies, composed of such heterogeneous elements with such divergent aims… Ultracapitalist states on the one hand; ultra-Marxist states on the other. On the one hand a dying Empire, Britain; on the other, a colony bent upon inheritance, the United States…
Had this dump been captured the German armored divisions, which were continually being slowed down because of the delay in bringing up gasoline, of which the Germans were woefully short, might have gone farther and faster than they did. Skorzeny’s so-called Panzer Brigade 150, its men outfitted in American uniforms and driving captured American tanks, trucks and jeeps, got farthest.
Yet stubborn makeshift resistance by scattered units of the U.S. First Army after the four weak divisions in the Ardennes had been overrun slowed up the German drive and the firm stand on the northern and southern shoulders of the breakthrough at Monschau and Bastogne, respectively, channeled Hitler’s forces through a narrow salient.
However, on the evening of the seventeenth the 101st Airborne Division, which had been refitting at Reims, was ordered to proceed with all speed to Bastogne a hundred miles away.
On December 22, General Heinrich von Luettwitz, commander of the German XLVIIth Armored Corps, sent a written note to General A. C. McAuliffe, commanding the 101st Airborne, demanding surrender of Bastogne. He received a one-word answer which became famous: “NUTS!”
And two days before Christmas the weather had finally cleared and the Anglo–American air forces had begun to have a field day with massive attacks on German supply lines and on the troops and tanks moving up the narrow, tortuous mountain roads.
The question is… whether Germany has the will to remain in existence or whether it will be destroyed… The loss of this war will destroy the German people. There followed a long dissertation on the history of Rome and of Prussia in the Seven Years’ War.
Although he admitted that the Ardennes offensive had not “resulted in the decisive success which might have been expected,” he claimed that it had brought about “a transformation of the entire situation such as nobody would have believed possible a fortnight ago.”
But the Americans could make good their losses; the Germans could not.
This was the last major offensive of the German Army in World War II. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the West, it doomed the German armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler’s throwing his last reserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt.
Hitler [Guderian says] completely lost his temper… declaring the maps and diagrams to be “completely idiotic” and ordering that I have the man who had made them shut up in a lunatic asylum.
He refused to see Speer alone, saying to Guderian: “…I refuse to see anyone alone any more… [He] always has something unpleasant to say to me. I can’t bear that.”
bear that.”
In the end these German architects of the Nazi–Soviet Pact against the West would reach a point where they could not understand why the British and Americans did not join them in repelling the Russian invaders.
The hopes in the promised “miracle weapons,” which had for a time sustained not only the masses of the people and the soldiers but even such hardheaded generals as Guderian, were finally abandoned. The launching sites for the V-l flying bombs and the V-2 rockets directed against Britain were almost entirely lost when Eisenhower’s forces reconquered the French and Belgian coasts, though a few remained in Holland.
