It was not a bad way to spend a war if you had to be in one. The Allies, meanwhile, relaxed along their peaceful front, firing a few shots now and then, and there was much non-violent patrolling. Morale was high as 10 German panzer and 14 infantry divisions clanked forward through the shrouding mist. Air Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring promised (that's all it would turn out to be, a promise), 3,000 airplanes to support the final effort.Īs if in league with the Führer, heavy freezing fog rolled in and cloaked the treetops like a vast parachute canopy, completely hiding the advancing force from the eyes of superior Allied airpower. He had been hoarding and re-equipping armored divisions, and others were pulled in from Russia. By his order the officers who heard the plan had to sign in writing that they would not reveal it to anyone, under penalty of death. They still had the natural barrier of the Rhine to fall behind, but Hitler felt the defensive war was going nowhere the daring, decisive blow must be struck. Some of his senior commanders had deep misgivings, feeling they were risking it all too early. The plan, first called "Watch on the Rhine," later changed to "Autumn Fog," was carried forward with great secrecy. He urged them to supreme fighting savagery in this battle, to dispense with "human inhibitions." The coming battle was to decide nothing less than "whether we live or die," he exhorted. Using the same bunker that had served him so well in the great blitz of '40, he turned the flame up under his commanders in a speech that rattled on for two hours. But as some of his generals later recalled, the Führer had that hypnotic fire back in his eye, seemed ready to do another victory jig. If all that was delivered, he would seek a peace he could live with on the Western Front, and throw his armies against the driving Russians in the east. This time his goal was to seal off British forces in the north, snap the stretched-thin American supply lines, and take the key port of Antwerp 125 miles from the Ardennes. His dream was to strike again through the Ardennes, to again split the seams of the Allied armies. If those who couldn't remember such recent catastrophic history were doomed to repeat it, so much the better for the Führer. Even then the Allies had been blind to the Ardennes, concentrating their forces to the left and right, considering the great thick forest in the center as impassable. He dreamed of the glorious spring of 1940, when his war machine, full of the fuel of triumph, hammered like a hundred thousand Thors out of the Ardennes and then onward to the sea, cutting Allied forces in two. Hitler was thinking, dreaming and plotting all of that. in the Ardennes sector where a single corps, the 8th American, of four divisions, held a front of 75 miles." But the Allies weren't thinking Ardennes, weren't thinking defense the last thing they were thinking was defeat and mad enemy offensives. Especially was this true, as Winston Churchill wrote in Triumph and Tragedy, "in the weak center. The conquering Allies had closed menacingly toward the German border along a thousand-mile front, a front too broad not to have weak spots. An intelligence colonel, so out of touch with the upbeat spirit of the day as to predict a serious attack impending in the Ardennes, was advised to go to Paris - take a rest, have fun. Data was gathered, but even the few who began to see the threat in the picture were not taken seriously. He was raising something else: an old-time thunder-and-lightning blitzkrieg force of such stunning power and numbers that it was beyond the interpretive grasp of those piecing together the Allied intelligence picture. Indeed, in a Germany seemingly staggering backward on punched-out legs, Hitler raised some 700,000 new recruits, many of them too old and too young, but most of them still believers. Despite their reverses both in the west and east since the Normandy invasion in June, the morale of the German people, well-insulated with propaganda and blind faith in their Führer, was still high in the autumn of 1944. There was the man named Adolf Hitler, for one. Thus spoke Monty, and who in the glow of optimism of that time was willing to say he was wrong? His situation is such that he cannot stage any major offensive operations." George Patton and his tanks came crunching and skidding through the ice and snow to rescue the "Battered Bastards" of Bastogne, some 76,890 Americans were dead, missing forever, wounded or taken prisoner,īefore all that, such was the confidence of the Allies that Montgomery had just the day before given his all-is-well situation report to a group of colleagues: "The enemy is at present fighting a defensive campaign on all fronts. When the action that wasn't was over, after U.S.
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