February 1996 - World War II History Round Table



Volume 7 Number 3

Published by The WW II History Roundtable

Edited by Jim and Jon Gerber

Welcome to the December meeting of the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Roundtable.

Tonight’s program will be on another aspect of the Battle of the Bulge. There are so many different aspects to study about the Battle of the Bulge that almost a year’s worth of programs could be done. Tonight we’ll hear about the center of the Bulge around the city of Bastogne.

High-level Cover up?

In late November of 1944, SS General Sepp Dietrich had just returned from the Western Front and was chatting with guests at a party in a Berlin hotel. Spending a lot of time with Dietrich was a beautiful Irish woman in her mid-thirties. She was the wife of a top Hungarian diplomat who was nearly twice her age.

Apparently Dietrich felt free to discuss the war because Hungary was an ally of Germany. He had no idea that the diplomat’s wife was an Allied spy. For months, she had been notifying London about information that she had picked up at Berlin social affairs. Within hours, the Irish woman informed London that the 6th SS Panzer Army, led by Sepp Dietrich, was assembling in the Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg. For whatever reason, an intelligence officer at SHAEF apparently pigeonholed the alarming report without as much as investigating its authenticity.

The area along the 75 mile long Ardennes sector was thickly wooded and very hilly and became known as the Ghost Front. Because of the topography, General Omar Bradley, leader of the 12th Army Group, thinly manned this region with a combination of green divisions “just off the boat” and decimated and exhausted veteran units that had just fought in the Hurtgen Forest just north of the Ardennes. In early December 1944, the Germans and the Americans were within rifle distance of each other. They had a sort of gentleman’s agreement: you don’t shoot at us and we won’t shoot at you. Few, if any on both sides, were aware that German armies had invaded Belgium by blasting through this same region in 1870, again in 1914, and most recently in 1940.

Despite the calmness along the Ghost Front, there were signs that the Germans were cooking up something big for the area. Six weeks earlier the Americans had captured documents of a German order creating an English-speaking brigade under SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny. He had gained worldwide fame in 1943 by leading the bold rescue of Mussolini from a mountain peak in Italy. On December 1, a captured German told about a panzer unit that was assembling at the rear of the Wehrmacht lines in the Ardennes where no armored formations were thought to be. This unit was identified as the crack 2nd Panzer Division. Another sign that something was going on was that the Buzz bombs which had been fired regularly onto key Allied supply centers at Liege and Antwerp suddenly ceased. Also, all German radio communications had fallen silent.

On December 4, a German woman slipped through the lines in the Ardennes and told American intelligence officers about increasing German activities behind the lines. Seven days later, a prisoner taken by a GI patrol said that members of German divisions manning the Ghost Front had been recalled from furlough and that the Wehrmacht was planning to attack. A courier from an SS outfit strayed into American lines by mistake and was taken into custody. He carried a message to a unit on the Ghost Front to: Remain where you are and prepare for an attack which is planned. That same night a small German patrol was ambushed and captured. Taken from the leader’s coat was an order for a December 16 attack.

The entire US chain of command, from General Bradley to GIs on outpost duty, were unaware that the Germans, in a masterpiece of logistics, had moved up to the Ghost Front, by the night of December 15, about 650,000 troops, 1906 artillery pieces, and nearly fifteen hundred panzers. It was the equivalent of transporting the entire population of San Francisco and their vehicles, for many miles, without anyone else in California knowing about it. In the early morning hours of December 16, the massive attack began. The Americans were taken by total surprise. Before the savage fighting ended six weeks later, with the Germans having been driven back behind the Siegfried line, more than a half-million men on each side bled and suffered in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Who was responsible for the colossal American failure to piece together the wealth of suspicious clues and arrive at a logical conclusion that might have prevented the Wehrmacht’s great successes in the early days of the Ardennes offensive? One reason was that ULTRA had dried up since the Germans had ceased radio communications. Another was that the Germans had conducted a brilliant deception plan that had lulled the Americans to sleep. They had apparently felt that the Wehrmacht was no longer able to conduct a major offensive.

There appeared to have been frantic efforts to cover up high level failures. It was not until 25 years after the war that secret SHAEF papers were released. British Brigadier Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence, learned that a covert investigation had been conducted under his nose into who or what had been responsible for the Allied intelligence breakdown. General Strong was also shocked to discover that both file copies of SHAEF intelligence summaries for the two-week period leading up to the Battle of the Bulge were “missing.”

There is also evidence that surviving papers had been doctored. Hugh M. Cole, the US Army’s official historian, reported years later: “Sentences, phrases and punctuation marks from American intelligence documents of pre-Ardennes origin had been twisted and turned, noted in and out of context, interpreted and misinterpreted, in arduous efforts to fix blame and secure absolution.” This continues to be one of the war’s most tantalizing mysteries.

Well, It Must Mean Something

An odd bit of fact coming out of the war was that aces (those with five or more air-to-air kills) tended to have blue or light colored eyes(over two-thirds), were shorter than average, and(later in life) had more daughters than sons. This may mean something, but so far no one has figured out what.

More reading on tonight’s topic:

Hitler’s Last Gasp

by Trevor Dupay

Harper Collins

New York, New York 1994

A Time For Trumpets

by Charles McDonald

Quill Press

New York, New York 1985

Battle of the Bulge

by John Toland

Random House Pub.

New York, New York 1959

The Bitter Woods

by John D. Eisenhower

DaCapo Press

New York, New York 1969

Battle of the Bulge

by Danny Parker

Greenhill Books

London

Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive

by Danny Parker

Greenhill Press

London 1997

(This book is written about the German side of the battle)

Death of a Division

by Charles Whiting

Stein and Day Publ.

New York, New York 1980

The Regiment

by Harry Kemp

Nortex Press

Austin, TX 1990

(This was written by one of tonight’s speakers)

To Save Bastogne

by Robert Phillips

(Written by one of tonight’s speakers)

Happy Holidays

See you next year.

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