The attack on Houffalize

On 3 January 1945, the eighteenth day of the Battle of the Bulge, General Courtney Hodges’s US First Army opened an attack on the northern flank of the German salient. The main weight fell on General Joseph Lawton Collins’s VII Corps, which, led by two armoured divisions, struck south-east towards the small town of Houffalize. Its left flank was covered by General Matthew Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps. Both armies of the northern flank – the First and the Ninth – were at that time under the command not of the American commander of 12th Army Group but of the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. In the south, from around Bastogne, General George Patton’s Third Army was attacking, and the two forces were to meet precisely at Houffalize.

War chronologies record under this date that the Allies went over to the offensive east of the salient but failed to close the pincers with Patton’s tanks and encircle large German forces. This needs to be made more precise. On 3 January it was not Patton’s tanks that attacked from the north but the divisions of the First Army under Montgomery’s command; the Third Army had been attacking from the south since 30 December and resumed its general offensive on 9 January. Nor was it a matter of pincers that failed to close – patrols of the two armies met at Houffalize on 16 January, as planned. The “failure” historians write about was the choice of the meeting point itself: the Allies decided to squeeze the salient halfway along its length rather than cut it off at its base, near the German frontier, and so most of the German forces managed to get away.

The salient in early January

By the end of December the German offensive in the Ardennes had stalled short of the Meuse. The spearheads of the German 2nd Panzer Division had been smashed near Celles in the first Allied counter-offensive in the Ardennes, and on 26 December tanks of the 4th Armored Division had broken through to Bastogne and brought the town relief. Since 23 December, when the skies over the Ardennes cleared, Allied aircraft had been destroying the supply columns. Even so, the Germans still held a wedge several dozen kilometres deep, and about 40 kilometres of front separated the First Army in the north from the Third Army in the south.

Adolf Hitler had no intention yet of giving up the ground he had won. On 31 December he launched Operation Nordwind in Alsace, and on 1 January the Luftwaffe attacked Allied airfields in Operation Bodenplatte. In the Ardennes themselves, the headquarters of Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B moved some of its panzer divisions from north to south for one more attack on Bastogne. The fighting around the town and the corridor leading to it from the south went on until 7 January and, according to the US official history, was fiercer than the siege of 21–26 December itself. As late as 2 January, heavy Tiger II tanks supporting the 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend” destroyed more than a dozen tanks of the US 6th Armored Division near Wardin. West of Bastogne the Third Army was committing new divisions – the 87th Infantry Division and the 17th Airborne Division, which received its baptism of fire at Flamierge in those very days. It was there too, in the heavy fighting of the 11th Armored Division, that German prisoners were killed at Chenogne on 1 January.

At the base or halfway along?

The textbook way to eliminate a deep penetration is to cut it off at the root. That is exactly what Patton wanted to do. According to the US official history (Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive), he proposed that once Bastogne had been relieved, the Third Army should strike north and north-east from the Luxembourg area, through the western edge of the Eifel towards Bitburg and Prüm, and there meet the First Army attacking from the north. Patton called this route through the Eifel the “honeymoon trail”. Hodges agreed with the concept in principle, but warned that the road network on the northern edge of the bulge, near the frontier, would not suffice for the large armoured force such a cut would require.

Nor did Patton convince his immediate superior. The commander of 12th Army Group, General Omar Bradley, was worried about the winter, which hampered both the advance and air operations, about the difficult terrain and about the lack of reserves – 6th Army Group to the south had already stretched its front dangerously to free Patton’s divisions for the fighting in the Ardennes. According to a US Army Center of Military History pamphlet, Bradley decided against Patton that the Third Army’s objective would be Houffalize, halfway between Bastogne and Sankt Vith, as this was the shortest way to reach the First Army and made the best use of the existing roads. Montgomery, who could have strengthened the attack with British troops, did not want a major regrouping of 21st Army Group, so as not to delay the main offensive in the north towards the Ruhr. On 28 December he agreed with General Dwight Eisenhower that the First Army would link up with the Third Army at Houffalize, after which the attack would turn east towards Sankt Vith. According to some studies, Collins too put forward three options for the attack, and the least ambitious of them was approved.

There was also a dispute about timing. Eisenhower wanted the First Army to attack as early as 1 January, while there was still a chance of catching the Germans in the tip of the bulge. Montgomery, unwilling to send unprepared infantry into an attack in a snowstorm, set it for 3 January. The American commanders, Patton foremost among them, considered him too cautious; the field marshal’s defenders pointed out that his troops were only just finishing off the last German attacks in the north. The debate over whether the shallower pincer was a necessity or a lost opportunity continues in the literature to this day.

Attacking in snow and fog

VII Corps numbered almost a hundred thousand men. In the lead were two “heavy” armoured divisions of the old pattern – General Ernest Harmon’s 2nd Armored Division, the same that had smashed the Germans at Celles on Christmas Day, and General Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored Division. Behind them came the 84th and 83rd Infantry Divisions, while the 75th Infantry Division went into reserve. The British handed over some 200 Sherman tanks to the Americans to make good their December losses. Collins wanted to break quickly across the high, marshy Plateau des Tailles and cut the road from La Roche to Salmchâteau – one of the last two German lines of retreat from the western part of the salient. On his left flank the 82nd Airborne Division, with the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment attached, attacked through the forests towards the River Salm.

The weather proved more dangerous than the enemy. It was bitterly cold, snow covered the ground, the roads were icy, and fog and low cloud meant that on 3 January not a single tactical aircraft of IX Tactical Air Command could take off over the battlefield. According to MacDonald, over the following two weeks the air force was able to support VII Corps’ attack on only a few days. On the evening of 7 January another thick layer of snow fell, with drifts in places a metre deep. Tanks slithered on the steep roads, and the infantry advanced through deep snow, often in temperatures of minus ten to minus twenty degrees.

The Germans defended skilfully. Facing VII Corps were divisions of the Sixth SS Panzer Army – the 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” and the 12th and 560th Volksgrenadier Divisions – which fell back from line to line, leaving mines, felled trees and anti-tank ambushes behind them, and counter-attacked whenever the Americans lost momentum. The armoured thrust brought no breakthrough, so the burden of the fighting soon passed to the infantry; in the end the two infantry divisions suffered heavier losses than the armoured ones. By 13 January VII Corps had lost almost five thousand men.

The British at the tip of the salient, the Americans at Bastogne

At the western tip of the bulge, between the Meuse and the River Ourthe, Montgomery committed Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s British XXX Corps. Its task was to push the Germans out of the tip of the salient until the British units were “pinched out” of the front by the converging American armies. The heaviest fighting here was borne by the 6th Airborne Division, which from 3 to 5 January fought for the village of Bure (PL) near Tellin, which changed hands many times. North of it the 53rd (Welsh) Infantry Division attacked. According to British figures, XXX Corps lost about 1,400 men in the Ardennes up to 17 January – few compared with the American losses, since in this battle there were several dozen Americans for every British soldier.

In the south the Third Army also tried to attack, but in the first days of January it had above all to beat off German counter-attacks. General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, which was to bypass Bastogne to the west and turn towards Houffalize, had to fight for every village. The 87th Infantry Division spent several days assaulting the crossroads at Tillet, halfway between Bastogne and Saint-Hubert, and the 17th Airborne Division lost almost an entire battalion at Flamierge, which was surrounded on 7 January and had to fight its way back to its own lines, leaving its wounded behind. East of Bastogne, III Corps returned to the attack only on 9 January. Patton, who had believed from the start that the Germans had to be cut off deeper, took the slow progress bitterly – according to MacDonald, as early as 6 January he feared the Germans would begin to withdraw before anyone could trap them, and a few days earlier, in the worst moments of the fighting around Bastogne, he had noted in his diary that “we can still lose this war”.

The press conference at Zonhoven

The attack went on in the shadow of a quarrel between the allies. On 7 January Montgomery, with the approval of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, called a press conference at his headquarters at Zonhoven. He began with praise: he spoke of the courage and fighting quality of the American soldiers and said that “General Ike” was the captain of the team. But then he described the battle as though he had won it himself – saying that when the situation “began to deteriorate”, Eisenhower had given him command in the north, that he had brought the whole available strength of the British group of armies into play gradually and finally “with a bang”, and that it had been one of the most interesting and tricky battles he had ever handled. In doing so he left out the names of all the American commanders except Eisenhower.

The American generals took this as claiming the credit for a battle fought almost entirely by Americans. German propaganda made matters worse: according to the BBC correspondent Chester Wilmot, his report of the conference was intercepted, rewritten with an anti-American slant and broadcast by a radio station at Arnhem controlled by Joseph Goebbels’s ministry. At Bradley’s headquarters it was taken for a BBC broadcast. Bradley – as he himself recalled – told Eisenhower that he would resign rather than serve under Montgomery, and soon issued his own statement to the press stressing that placing the First Army under the British had been a temporary arrangement. Winston Churchill tried to calm the dispute. Years later Montgomery admitted that in the atmosphere of the time he should never have held the press conference at all.

Hitler agrees to a withdrawal

Under pressure from north and south, the German command began to reckon with losing the salient. On 5 January Field Marshal Model ordered the commander of the Fifth Panzer Army, General Hasso von Manteuffel, to give up the 9th SS Panzer Division to the north against Collins’s attack; the next day Manteuffel, on his own authority, also pulled the 12th SS Panzer Division out of the line at Bastogne and pressed for permission to retreat to a line based on Houffalize. On 8 January Hitler authorised the withdrawal of troops from the tip of the bulge, but not as far as Manteuffel wanted – only to a line based on the great bend of the Ourthe, about eight kilometres west of Houffalize. The SS panzer divisions were to assemble in reserve around Sankt Vith, at the base of the salient. According to MacDonald, this was Hitler’s first, if tacit, admission that the Ardennes offensive had failed. The Germans fell back slowly, covered by rearguards and minefields; on 10 January American patrols entered the abandoned La Roche-en-Ardenne, and for several days the British on the other bank of the Ourthe found no Germans.

Place in the war

The attack launched on 3 January achieved its objective in less than two weeks: on 15 January the 101st Airborne Division entered Noville, and on the morning of 16 January patrols of the Third Army’s 11th Armored Division and the First Army’s 2nd Armored Division met at Houffalize. The bulge had been cut in half, and the First Army soon returned to Bradley’s command. By the end of January the Americans had pushed the Germans back to their starting positions of 16 December; on 23 January they retook the ruins of Sankt Vith.

The success, however, had its price and its limits. The US official history judges the meeting at Houffalize to have been in a sense a hollow achievement: the attack was so slow, and the Germans delayed the pursuit so effectively, that most of the troops who might have been caught in the pocket got away. According to MacDonald, the combination of the American decision to “push in” the salient rather than cut it off and a skilful German withdrawal allowed the Germans to leave the Ardennes with losses no greater than in any planned delaying action – despite a crippling shortage of fuel and Allied superiority in the air. The January phase of the battle alone, from 3 to 28 January, cost the US Army almost 40,000 killed, wounded and missing – nearly as many as the whole period of the German offensive.

Patton and his supporters took this as proof that a deeper cut at the base of the salient would have produced a far greater victory; the defenders of Bradley’s and Montgomery’s decision replied that in the snow, on a few narrow roads through the Eifel and without reserves, such a manoeuvre might have ended by bogging down. What is certain is that the issue was decided elsewhere. Before the Allies closed the pincers at Houffalize, the Red Army had launched its great offensive on the Vistula on 12 January. Hitler then began to withdraw his best divisions from the Ardennes – the Sixth SS Panzer Army, which in December was to have taken Antwerp, was fighting in Hungary by February and March. The quarrel over the Zonhoven press conference and Montgomery’s role in the battle, for its part, strained trust between American and British commanders for the rest of the war and for long years of post-war memoirs.