STAKING EVERYTHING ON ONE CARD
DECEMBER 11, 1944
AN IRON-GRAY SKY rose above the gray-green Taunus Hills in Hesse, Germany, on Monday morning, December 11. A motorcade carrying German Führer Adolf Hitler and his staff of fifty officers and SS bodyguards rolled toward one of the remote headquarters the regime had built for itself in better days. The convoy sped south from the train station in Giessen toward Frankfurt for fifteen miles before turning west, past the heel-clicking sentries outside Ziegenberg Castle. The cars traveled a final mile beneath a camouflage canopy suspended from trees above the narrow road. With a crunch of tires on gravel, the convoy pulled to a stop, and the Führer climbed from the rear seat of his limousine, his face puffy and pale.
To the unschooled eye, the seven buildings of the Adlerhorst-the Eagle's Eyrie-resembled a small farming village, or perhaps a simple hunting camp. Several houses had wooden porches with flower baskets. Interior furnishings included oak floor lamps and tasseled shades; deer-antler trophies hung on the knotty-pine paneling. But a closer look revealed the cottages to be bunkers with thick concrete walls and reinforced roofs; the architect Albert Speer had designed them in 1939 as a field headquarters for officers directing military campaigns to the west of Germany. Some buildings were disguised as haystacks or barns, and a maze of subterranean passages with heavy metal doors and peepholes linked one building to another. Artificial trees were added to the native conifers to create thick cover and prevent snooping by enemy aircraft. Hidden antiaircraft batteries ringed the compound. A concrete bunker half a mile long and masked as a brick retaining wall led across a shallow glen to Ziegenberg Castle, with its single stone tower dating to the twelfth century. After centuries of neglect, the castle had been refurbished in the 1800s, and in recent years, it had served as a rehabilitation hospital for wounded officers.
Hitler shuffled into his private chalet, known as Haus 1. The pronounced limp in his left leg was of mysterious origins. Doctors had recently removed an abscess from his vocal cords, and the long overnight trip from Berlin to Giessen aboard the Führer train, Brandenburg, had further exhausted him. "He seemed near collapse," one officer later wrote. "His shoulders drooped. His left arm shook as he walked."
In a few hours, he would unveil to his field commanders his planned masterstroke for snatching victory from his enemies. Destiny had brought him to this moment, to this dark wood, and he was ready, as his operations chief, General Alfred Jodl, put it, "to stake everything on one card." But first he needed rest.
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DUSK ENFOLDED the Taunus Hills at five P.M., when two buses arrived at the compound. Heavy rain dripped from the pine boughs as a group of senior officers lined up to board. Many believed they had been summoned to the castle to toast Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's sixty-ninth birthday on Tuesday, but a terse request that each man surrender his sidearm and briefcase at the guards' post suggested a less festive occasion. For half an hour, the buses lurched this way and that through the forest, the circuitous route intended to obscure the fact that they were traveling less than a mile across the glen to Haus 2, the Adlerhorst officers' club, connected by a covered walkway to the Führer's Haus 1.
A double row of armed SS guards formed a line from each bus to the club's main door; a steep flight of steps, now ringing beneath the heavy footfall of black boots, led to an underground situation room. As directed, each officer took his seat at a long rectangular table, with an SS man behind each chair in an attitude of such scowling intimidation that one general later admitted fearing "even to reach for a handkerchief." Rundstedt and Field Marshal Walter Model, the two senior German commanders in the west, sat impassively elbow to elbow.
Ten minutes later, Hitler hobbled in and sat with a grimace behind a small separate table at the head of the room, flanked by General Alfred Jodl and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German armed forces. The Führer's hands trembled as he pulled on his spectacles and picked up a sheaf of paper. Those who had not recently seen him were stunned by his appearance. One general wrote that he looked like "a broken man, with an unhealthy color, a caved-in appearance ... sitting as if the burden of responsibility seemed to oppress him." Manipulating his dangling left arm with his right hand, "he often stared vacantly, his back was bent, and his shoulders sunken," another officer reported.
Then he spoke, and color flushed into his pale cheeks. His dull eyes once again seemed to kindle from within. For the first fifty minutes, he delivered a soaring lecture on history, fate, and how he had battled against "the policy of encirclement of Germany," devised by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill.
Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies, composed of such diverse elements with such different aims. Ultra-capitalist states on the one hand; ultra-Marxist states on the other.... Even now these states are at loggerheads.... These antagonisms grow stronger and stronger from hour to hour. If now we can deliver a few more heavy blows, then at any moment, this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder.
Hitler believed that as the Allies approached one another, with Russian troops converging on Germany from the east and English, French, Canadian, and U.S. troops approaching from the west, the strain among the Allied nations would grow.
The palm of victory will in the end be given to the one who was not only ablest, but-and I want to emphasize this-was the most daring.
Toward that end he had a plan, originally code-named WACHT AM RHEIN (WATCH ON THE RHINE) but recently renamed HERBSTNEBEL (AUTUMN MIST). This he would now disclose on pain of death to any man who betrayed the grand secret.
It had come to him as in a fever dream, when he was sick in September. Brooding over what Jodl called "the evil fate hanging over us," the Führer had been hunched over his maps when his eye fixed on an unlikely seam through the Ardennes Forest-the mountain range spanned Luxembourg, Belgium, and France and connected to the Eifel range in Germany. Its rugged plateau was less than 2,500 feet high, but deep streambeds cut through the sixty miles between the German border and the Meuse River.
The Meuse River was the largest of the area's waterways. If the German army could cross it, they would have a chance of reaching Antwerp, the port city in Belgium that was the main entry point for all supplies for Allied troops in Europe. It could handle dozens of ships at a time, which, at the moment, were unloading more than a thousand tons of supplies a day for the Allies.
Hitler decided that for Germany to forestall the nation's imminent defeat, the enemy must be struck in one great, bold, and unexpected attack. A monstrous blow by two panzer armies could swiftly reach the Meuse bridges between Liège and Namur. If that plan succeeded, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group in the north would be separated from U.S. General Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group in the south. This would remove the enemy threat to the Ruhr region, Germany's industrial heartland. By destroying much of the Anglo-American strength in the west, Hitler believed he could require Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sue for peace. As for the offensive's ultimate geographic objective, Hitler, in a conference with his senior generals, had abruptly blurted out a single word: "Antwerp."
Copyright © 2015 by Rick Atkinson