Book review: Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble

Anthony Beevor has written another history of another decisive WWII battle — the last throw of the dice for the Nazis, the Battle of the Bulge. Richard Fitzpatrick enjoyed it.

Antony Beevor

Viking, €32.00; ebook €17.99

ANTHONY BEEVOR, master chronicler of World War II’s major battlegrounds, has depicted the Nazis’ last throw of the dice in his latest, exhilarating book, Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble.

The German offensive — which attempted to reprise former glories in the same region in 1870, 1914 and 1940 — caught the Allied Forces off-guard in mid-December, 1944.

Britain’s General Bernard Montgomery, for example, had asked his supreme commander, American General Dwight D Eisenhower, for permission to return home on leave for Christmas, on the eve of the assault.

The Allies couldn’t believe that the Nazis, in their weakened state — Hitler visited Berlin in darkness because he couldn’t stomach seeing it destroyed — would launch a major attack on the Western Front, when they needed to preserve their resources for the Red Army’s impending assault on their other flank.

They knew how depleted their fuel reserves were, too.

Surprise was key. The Nazis wanted to hit the Allies at their flimsiest point, and the forested land around the Ardennes, in Belgium, provided ideal concealment for tanks and troops from the Allied air force.

The attack was launched at 6am on December 16, 1944. German commando troops — who wore US Army uniforms and who had received two hours’ daily linguistic training to perfect their American and English accents — got in behind American lines and caused havoc.

One unit changed road signs, which misdirected an entire infantry regiment.

The Americans grew paranoid of infiltration. Road-block guards asked authentication questions, like: ‘Name the president’s dog’, ‘Name the current husband of Betty Grable’ and ‘What is Sinatra’s first name?’ Brigadier General Bruce Clarke got a question about the Chicago Cubs baseball team wrong.

“Only a kraut would make a mistake like that,” the MP declared. He had been told he should “look out for a kraut posing as a one-star general”, so he was sure he’d got his man and arrested Clarke for half an hour.

The Americans, who were underrated as soldiers by the Germans and dismissed as “cowardly”, because of their dependence on aircraft and tanks, dug in, and showed remarkable resilience in defending isolated villages and crossroads, often against overwhelming odds.

Some, however, went to extreme measures to flee the fighting, chiefly by maiming themselves, including a soldier from the 99th Infantry Division, who laid down “beside a large tree, reached around it, and exploded a grenade in his hand”.

One of the abiding impressions from Beevor’s book is the remarkable toughness of the Nazi soldiers. They were a hardy bunch: “the German … dies only with great difficulty,” as one US major put it. Many of them abhorred surrendering. They believed that only by fighting to the end would the German people who came after them have the moral fibre to rise again.

“We have all been brought up, from the cradle, to consider Leonidas’s fight at Thermopylae as the highest form of sacrifice for one’s people,” a captured Waffen-SS Standartenführer said to a fellow officer in a secret recording.

Beevor writes that American army surgeons observed that “the German soldier shows an aptitude for recovery from the most drastic wounds far above that of the American soldier”, which they attributed to the lower level of body fat of Germans. This made them more operable, while the better-fed Americans were slower to heal.

Beevor’s description of the forest fighting is compelling. The trees were sprinkled with snipers.

The ground underfoot was littered with mines and trip wires. Both sides mined and counter-mined in a deadly game: when an American unit discovered a mine, it would lay its own mine to trap inspecting German parties.

In one incident, three German soldiers stripped a badly wounded American of his possessions, then put a charge under him that would explode if he budged. He wasn’t found for 70 hours, but had just enough energy to warn his rescuers.

In the most notorious episode of the battle, 84 American soldiers, and several Belgian civilians, who had sheltered escapees, were herded into a field and machine-gunned to death on the second day of the offensive. The Malmédy massacre was seized on by Western press corps and led to a nasty American response.

A number of US generals, including Lt General Omar Bradley, tacitly consented to killing German prisoners in retaliation — 60 prisoners were killed by the inexperienced 11th Armored Division at Chenogne.

“There were some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners,” Lt General George S Patton wrote in his diary. “I hope we can conceal this.” Patton, who gave his wartime lover, actress Marlene Dietrich, a set of pearl-handled pistols — she was in France entertaining the troops — is one of many well-known, colourful characters in Beevor’s book. Others include Ernest Hemingway, who was fearless under fire, and the egocentric General Montgomery, whom Eisenhower dismissed as a “psychopath”.

Patton found the incessant rain in Belgium so exasperating that he ordered his chaplain to write a weather prayer. Some 250,000 copies of the prayer (“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains, which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle…”) were printed and handed out to every man in the US Third Army, but failed to have the desired effect.

The weather was a menace. Rain gave way to snow. Soldiers were riven with frostbite, pneumonia and trench foot. The winds were so high on the day the Ardennes offensive was launched that German paratroopers were blown onto the propellers of following aircraft.

The assault lasted a month. The Germans underestimated the power of the Americans’ artillery. The diversion fatally undermined the German Army’s ability to defend their border on the Eastern Front, and led to 2,500 civilian deaths in Belgium.