Gerd Von Rundstedt - The Ardennes Offensive

The Ardennes Offensive

Hitler, however, had no intention of staying on the defensive in the west over the winter. As early as mid-September he was planning a counter-offensive. By October, with the front stabilising, he had decided on an attack in the Ardennes, designed to split the British and American fronts at a weakly held point, cross the Meuse and recapture Antwerp. On 27 October Rundstedt and Model met with General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations at OKW, and told him flatly that they considered this impossible with the available forces. Instead they suggest a more modest operation destroy the Allied concentrations around Liège and Aachen. Jodl took their views back to Hitler, but on 3 November he told them that the Führer's mind was made up, and that he wanted the attack to begin before the end of November. The spearhead was to be the 6th Panzer Army, commanded by Sepp Dietrich and largely made up of Waffen-SS units such as the Leibstandarte, Das Reich and Hitlerjugend, and the 5th Panzer Army, commander by General Hasso von Manteuffel.

Model persuaded Jodl that the deadline was unrealistic, and on 2 December he and Westphal went to Berlin to argue their case with Hitler. Rundstedt refused to go, because, he said, he hated listening to Hitler's monologues. This marked his effective abdication as a military leader: he was now only a figurehead, and apparently content to be so. After the war he disowned all responsibility for the offensive: "If old von Moltke thought that I had planned that offensive he would have turned over in his grave." Hitler arrived on the western front on 10 December to supervise the offensive, which now set for 16 December. He gave orders directly to the army commanders, bypassing both Rundstedt and Model. Manteuffel said: "The plan for the Ardennes offensive was drawn up completely by OKW and sent to us as a cut-and-dried Führer order." The plan was essentially a re-run of the Manstein plan of 1940, but in vastly altered circumstances: although the Germans had built up a local superiority of numbers, along the Western Front as a whole they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, and also critically short of fuel. Any local success would soon be neutralised.

Taking advantage of surprise and poor weather (which helped neutralise the Allies' command of the air), the offensive made initial progress, breaking through the weak American formations in this quiet sector of the front. But the Allies were quick to react, and the Germans were soon falling behind their ambitious timetables. To the north, Dietrich's 6th Panzer Army was blocked by stubborn defence at St. Vith and Elsenborn Ridge and advanced little more than 20 km. Manteuffel, in the centre, did better, reaching Celles, a few kilometres short of the Meuse, on 25 December. This was a penetration of about 80 km, less than halfway to Antwerp, and on such a narrow front as to create an indefensible salient. The resistance of the American garrison at Bastogne greatly delayed the advance, making a forcing of the Meuse impossible. When the cloud cover lifted on 24 December, the Allied air forces attacked with devastating effect. Rundstedt urged OKW to halt the offensive, lest the "bulge" created by the German advance become a "second Stalingrad", but Hitler was determined to press on. A few days later U.S. forces attacked from the north and south of the bulge, forcing the Germans first to halt and then to retreat.

In this last phase of the war the Waffen-SS had developed an ethos of reckless bravado and disregard for the traditional rules of war held dear by older Army commanders such as Rundstedt. Young Waffen-SS officers had been teenagers when Hitler came to power and had received intense political indoctrination in the Hitler Youth and the SS. They had then been toughened by the experiences of the Eastern Front. By late 1944 they knew the war was lost, and that they were unlikely to survive it: they therefore cared little what others thought of their actions. A good example of this type of Waffen-SS officer was Joachim Peiper, an officer in the Leibstandarte under the command of Wilhelm Mohnke. His "Battler Group" (Kampfgruppe) was charged with seizing the bridges over the Meuse ahead of the advance of the 6th Panzer Army. Although he showed great dash, he was unable to fulfil this mission. On 17 December, near Malmedy, a group of Peiper's men, perhaps acting out of frustration, opened fire on a large group of unarmed U.S. prisoners of war, killing 84. This became known as the Malmedy massacre. Responsibility for this crime ran from Peiper to Mohnke to Dietrich to Model to Rundstedt, although none of them had been present and none had ordered any such action. When Rundstedt heard about it, he ordered an investigation, but in the chaos of the failing offensive nothing came of this.

Although such occurrences were commonplace on the Eastern Front, they were a rarity in the West, and the outraged Americans were determined to prosecute all those with responsibility for this massacre. Here Rundstedt's problem was his reputation. The Ardennes offensive was known to the Allies as "the Rundstedt offensive", and the Allied press routinely described him as being in charge of it. The British commander in Europe, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, said on 7 January 1945: "I used to think that Rommel was good, but my opinion is that Rundstedt would have hit him for six. Rundstedt is the best German general I have come up against." Since Rundstedt, as far as the Allies knew, was in charge of the offensive, it followed for them that he was responsible for what his subordinates did during it.

On 8 January, Hitler authorised Manteuffel to withdraw from the tip of the bulge, and on 15 January he gave up the whole enterprise and returned to Berlin. By the end of January the Germans were back where they had started. But the offensive had burned up the last of Rundstedt's reserves of manpower, equipment and fuel, and as a result neither the West Wall nor the Rhine could be properly defended. On 18 February, as the Allies entered Germany, Rundstedt issued an appeal to the German Army to resist the invader, urging the troops to "gather round the Führer to guard our people and our state from a destiny of horror." Hitler rewarded his loyalty with the Swords to his Knight's Cross. Despite fierce resistance in places, the Germans were forced back from the West Wall during February, and a series of Allied offensives, rolling from north to south, drove across the Rhineland towards the great river. On 2 March the Americans reached the Rhine near Düsseldorf. Rundstedt had been aware as early as September of the importance of the many bridges over the Rhine, and of the necessity of denying them to the enemy. He made careful plans for the bridges to be blown up if the enemy reached the Rhine. On 7 March, however, these plans failed when the Americans found a railway bridge at Remagen intact, and rapidly established a bridgehead on the eastern bank. This could hardly be blamed on Rundstedt, but he was the commander and Hitler needed a scapegoat. On 9 March Hitler phoned Rundstedt and told him he was to be replaced by Albert Kesselring, to be transferred from Italy. That was the end of Gerd von Rundstedt's military career after 52 years.

On 11 March Rundstedt had a final audience with Hitler, who thanked him for his loyalty. He then returned to his home in Kassel, but enemy bombing and the Allied advance into western Germany made him decide to move his family, first to Solz, a village south of Kassel, then to Weimar, then to Bayreuth, and finally back to the sanatorium at Bad Tölz where he had stayed several times before. Rundstedt's heart condition had worsened and he also suffered from arthritis. There was no attempt at further escape: Rundstedt, accompanied by Bila and Hans Gerd and a few loyal staff, stayed at Bad Tölz until it was occupied by American forces on 1 May, the day after Hitler's suicide in Berlin. That evening he was made a prisoner of war by troops from the 36th Texas Division.