World: Hitler’s Last Great Gamble

IT began midsummer 1944 as a dream in the mind of Adolf Hitler. By late autumn, Wehrmacht planners had transformed the dream into battle orders. Hitler proposed to regain the offensive by deploying Germany’s last reserves to smash through a lightly held sector of the Belgian front. His panzers would entrap as many as 30 U.S. and British divisions, capture the strategic supply port of Antwerp, and perhaps end the war in the West with a negotiated peace. Hitler thought of it as another Dunkirk and code-named it “Wacht am Rhein [Watch on the Rhine].” Allied archives would later refer to “the Battle of the Ardennes.” To men who were there when the offensive began 25 years ago this week, it was “the breakthrough” or “the Battle of the Bulge”—and a time of sheer nightmare.

Two-day Rush. Today, historians describe the battle as Hitler’s last great gamble, and German generals who survived the war as one of his great blunders. In interviews with several of those generals, TIME’s Bonn Bureau Chief Benjamin Cate learned how they sought to alter der Führer’s plan, and how the postwar history of Europe might have changed had they succeeded.

One of the generals is Hasso von Manteuffel, who in 1944 led the Fifth Panzer Army, one of the two spearheads of the battle. Manteuffel, 72, now lives in quiet retirement near Munich. He told Cate how he and other officers under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander in Chief West, protested that Hitler had set an impossible timetable by ordering a two-day rush to the Meuse, 50 miles distant. “Das ist unwiderruflich [This is irrevocable],” said General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations at supreme headquarters, slamming his fist on a conference table. Manteuffel, a dedicated bridge player, suggested that Hitler was trying for a grosser Schlag, a grand slam. Why not, he proposed to Jodl, settle instead for a more attainable kleiner Schlag, or little slam, by advancing only as far as Liège? Jodl was unmoved.

Hitler promised 300,000 troops for the attack and strong Luftwaffe support. Manteuffel recalls that during one seven-hour meeting, Hitler asked Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring how many planes he could provide. “Three thousand,” Göring said instantly. “You know Göring,” Hitler said to Manteuffel. “I think we shall have 2,000.” The actual count was about 900.

Hitler had a strong reason for not accepting the opinions of his generals. As Siegfried Westphal, Rundstedt’s chief of staff and now a steel executive, told Cate: “The generals had been wrong about both Czechoslovakia and Poland. None of us believed that such blitz campaigns were possible. Even in France, the German military predicted that the campaign would last much more than six weeks. Hitler was proved right, and ever afterward he followed his own judgment. Naturally, France was the last time he was right.”

Had Hitler been persuaded to call off his attack, Europe might have followed a different course. According to Manteuffel, Stalin knew all about Wacht am Rhein through a security leak in German headquarters. He said nothing to his allies. Instead, he waited until the German offensive was spent, then sent the Red Army dashing across Eastern Europe a month after the Ardennes battle began. Stalin was apparently aware that the last 200,000 members of the German army’s strategic reserve were among the men committed to the Ardennes. Had those reserves been available for the Eastern Front, they might have stopped or delayed the Russians. U.S. soldiers, as a result, might have met Russian troops at the Oder instead of on the Elbe, 125 miles farther west. The British would have reached the German rocket base at Peenemünde before the Russians captured its secrets. U.S. and British columns would have been first into Berlin. Moreover, the Russians would have lost the psychological advantage they have exploited throughout Eastern Europe by billing themselves as the true conquerors of the Third Reich.

Quick Reaction. Hitler, however, could not be swayed. On the morning of Dec. 16, 1944, German artillery shattered the darkness before dawn and shook the snow-covered pines with a massed barrage. Four U.S. divisions, stretched thin along an 88-mile front, were overwhelmed. U.S. intelligence was unaware that Rundstedt had tucked 26 divisions, 1,800 armored vehicles and 2,000 pieces of artillery in the snowy groves of the Schnee Eifel, waiting for “Null-Uhr [zero hour].”

Stunned at first, U.S. troops quickly recovered. By doggedly holding St.-Vith and encircled Bastogne, they prevented the Germans from widening their front. Within three days, Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower had 500,000 men en route toward the breakthrough. On Jan. 9, Hitler himself conceded failure. He had lost 27,000 killed, 38,000 wounded and 16,000 prisoners. At least 600 tanks had been destroyed. The U.S. had lost 8,000 dead, 48,000 wounded and 21,000 prisoners. Within a month the bulge had disappeared. Within two, the Allies were across the Rhine and racing through Germany.