Then And Back Again

[F2d5thCav]

The German offensive had caught General Eisenhower's headquarters by surprise.

Ignoring the lessons of 1940, a favorite of Eisenhower's --General Bradley, allowed his subordinate, General Hodges, to poorly deploy the troops of the First United States Army as they strove to crack the fortifications on the German frontier and push into the Rhineland.  In September of 1944, that had seemed feasible; three months and the ordeal of the Hürtgen Forest later, all Hodges had to show for his staggering losses was a badly deployed field army and a handful of shattered German bunkers.

Hodges' maneuvers had jammed two entire corps (some 200,000 men) into a narrow corridor that ran from the Dutch border south to the massif known to the Germans as the Eifel and to the Allies as the Ardennes.  To enable this concentration of troops, the part of the front that ran through the Ardennes was thinly manned--screened actually-- by a single corps made up of three divisions that had taken stiff losses in the autumn and a new division that had yet to see combat.

Against this thinly manned front, the Germans had secretly massed some 25 divisions.  Hitler intended the offensive to be a stroke that would split the Allied forces in two and seize the port of Antwerp, through which their primary supply lines passed.  Historians have argued about how the Allies could have missed the German troop concentration, but the reasons mainly boiled down to overconfidence that the German forces would soon collapse and too much reliance on an intelligence source called ULTRA.

Thus, when the Germans attacked, Eisenhower's headquarters was surprised, Bradley's force was split into two parts, leaving him unable to effectively exercise command, and General Hodges practically went into a state of shock as it dawned upon him that his field army was in a fight for its life.  Beyond the reaction of the military headquarters, a cold fear washed over Washington and London, as well as terrifying the inhabitants of Belgium and Luxembourg, the vast majority of whom wanted no part of a return of the German military.  For all of them, it was a thoroughly unwelcome reminder that the war could still be lost.

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