The Gambsheim bridgehead

During the night of 4–5 January 1945, soldiers of the German 553rd Volksgrenadier Division crossed the Rhine in assault boats near Gambsheim, a dozen or so kilometres north of Strasbourg. On the American side of the river this sector was held only by patrols and scattered outposts. By morning the Germans had taken the village and begun to extend their foothold into the Alsatian plain.

The frequently encountered statement that on this day the Nordwind offensive crossed the border and entered Alsace needs correcting. The German attack in northern Alsace had been under way since New Year’s Eve, when the divisions of the First Army struck from the Bitche area in the northern Vosges at the start of Operation Nordwind. The event of 5 January was something else: the crossing of the Rhine and the opening of a second, southern line of attack aimed directly at Strasbourg. The date is therefore correct – it is only what happened on it that needs describing differently.

The second jaw of the pincers

The Nordwind plan was drawn up in the last days of December 1944, when the Ardennes offensive had stalled short of the Meuse. Adolf Hitler reckoned that General Alexander Patch’s US Seventh Army, weakened by giving up part of its strength to the north, would be unable to hold its overstretched front in Alsace. The main blow was to be delivered by the First Army of Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group G, descending from the Vosges towards the Saverne Gap.

Also brought into the plan was Army Group Upper Rhine (Oberrhein), which had been entrusted to Heinrich Himmler at the end of November 1944. The Reichsführer-SS, who had no training whatever in military command, had at his disposal the Nineteenth Army, defending the pocket around Colmar, and units deployed along the right bank of the Rhine in Baden. His task was to tie down Allied forces with raids and bridgeheads on both sides of Strasbourg and, if the main attack succeeded, to march on the city itself. According to accounts cited in the literature, Himmler announced that Strasbourg would be German again before 30 January, the anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power.

The Gambsheim bridgehead was to be the northern arm of this manoeuvre. Had the troops coming down from the Vosges reached Haguenau and Bischwiller, and the forces from the bridgehead advanced to meet them, the US VI Corps, defending the north-eastern corner of Alsace, would have been caught in a sack. The second arm was to be an attack northwards from the Colmar Pocket, south of Strasbourg.

The 553rd Division on the Rhine

The crossing was assigned to Generalmajor Gerhard Hüther’s 553rd Volksgrenadier Division, one of the weakest Volksgrenadier divisions (PL) in the area. In the autumn of 1944 it had twice been all but destroyed – at Nancy and in the Saverne Gap – and rebuilt from replacements, including an SS police regiment and hastily assembled units. According to some studies, at the time of the crossing it formed part of XIV SS Corps, commanded by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who a few months earlier had commanded the forces suppressing the Warsaw Uprising.

The site was carefully chosen. Near Gambsheim the Zorn and the Moder flow into the Rhine, and the ground between them is cut up by dykes, railway embankments, drainage ditches and riverine forest. The Americans held this sector very thinly. It was guarded by Task Force Linden – three infantry regiments of the 42nd Infantry Division under its assistant commander, Brigadier General Henning Linden – which had arrived in Europe without their divisional artillery and without combat experience.

The grenadiers crossed without much difficulty. They took Gambsheim and in the following days extended the bridgehead to Herrlisheim, Offendorf and the Steinwald forest, reaching the edge of Kilstett, from where it was only a dozen or so kilometres to the outskirts of Strasbourg. Supplies and reinforcements were ferried across at night; the Germans did not risk building a bridge, which would have been exposed to Allied air attack. According to figures cited in the literature, by 8 January the bridgehead was about 12 km wide and up to 5 km deep.

Strasbourg in danger

The bridgehead came into being at the worst possible moment for the Allies. On 26 December, at the height of the crisis in the Ardennes, General Dwight Eisenhower had ordered the commander of 6th Army Group, General Jacob Devers, to go over to the defensive and, if necessary, shorten his front – withdrawing VI Corps from the exposed corner of Alsace to the line of the Vosges. That meant giving up Strasbourg, liberated only on 23 November. General Charles de Gaulle protested, ordered the commander of the French First Army (PL), General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, to defend the city even on his own, and on 3 January, at a meeting at Versailles attended by Winston Churchill, obtained Eisenhower’s consent to the defence of Strasbourg. The Seventh Army was to pull back only from the most advanced part of its front on the Lauter to the Maginot Line, and the French took over the defence of the city itself.

The compromise was only just in place when the Germans appeared on the Alsatian side of the Rhine north of Strasbourg. In the city, whose inhabitants remembered four years of annexation, conscription into the Wehrmacht and repression, there was alarm; according to accounts from those days, part of the population, especially people connected with the resistance and the new administration, began to leave the city for fear of German reprisals. The defence of the sector between Strasbourg and the bridgehead was taken over by the French 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, which halted the German push at Kilstett.

Herrlisheim

At first the Americans underestimated the threat. Patch ordered the commander of VI Corps, Major General Edward Brooks, to eliminate the bridgehead as early as 6 January, but for the first few days the effort was limited to containing it with infantry. According to American intelligence, there were at most a few hundred poorly organised soldiers on the left bank. In reality – according to German figures cited in the German literature on the subject – there were already more than 3,000 of them, well dug in and supported by anti-tank guns.

On 8 January Combat Command B of the US 12th Armored Division, newly arrived at the front, went into the attack. Its infantry broke into Herrlisheim, but the tanks could not get through the fire of the anti-tank guns, contact with the infantry was lost, and on the morning of 10 January the Americans withdrew from the village. The ground – flat, waterlogged, criss-crossed by canals and embankments and covered in snow in January – favoured the defenders and was positively deadly for tanks.

On 13 January Brooks sent the whole of the 12th Armored Division against the bridgehead. Meanwhile, during the night of 15–16 January, the Germans ferried the 10th SS Panzer Division “Frundsberg” across to the left bank, which the Americans failed to notice. When the 12th Armored renewed its attack on Herrlisheim and Offendorf on 16 January, it ran into a far stronger enemy than it had expected. On 17 and 18 January a tank battalion and an armoured infantry battalion that had entered Herrlisheim were surrounded and destroyed; the Germans captured several serviceable Shermans there. According to figures cited in the literature, the 12th Armored Division lost about 1,250 men and some 70 armoured vehicles in the fighting for the bridgehead. On 19 January, at Drusenheim, the Germans also destroyed a battalion of the 79th Infantry Division.

The village of Herrlisheim, which changed hands repeatedly over two weeks, was largely destroyed. A similar fate befell the villages on the Maginot Line – Hatten and Rittershoffen – where the heaviest tank battles of the operation were being fought at the same time. The civilian population, much of which had not been evacuated, was forced to sit out the battle in cellars.

Withdrawal to the Moder

Although the bridgehead never directly threatened Strasbourg, it sealed the fate of northern Alsace. It tied down forces that VI Corps needed on the Maginot Line, and at the same time threatened to link up with the troops attacking from the north through Hatten towards Haguenau. In the second half of January the German 7th Parachute Division broke through along the left bank of the Rhine and established an overland link with the bridgehead. The exposed corner of Alsace between the Lauter, the Rhine and the Moder had become a trap for the Americans.

A withdrawal of the Seventh Army to a shorter line had been under consideration since the beginning of January; after the defeat at Herrlisheim, Devers and Patch decided to carry it out. During the night of 20–21 January, in a blizzard, VI Corps fell back to a prepared line along the Rothbach, Moder and Zorn rivers, covering Haguenau and the roads to Strasbourg. The Germans realised only after the event and on 22 January widened their link with the bridgehead. Their last attack on the Moder, on 24–25 January, was repulsed, and on 25 January Operation Nordwind was called off. At the same time American reinforcements began to arrive from the Ardennes.

All this was bound up with the second arm of the German plan. On 7 January the Germans struck north from the Colmar Pocket, along the Rhine, towards Strasbourg from the south. Had both attacks succeeded, the city would have been caught in a pincer. Neither, however, came within less than a dozen or so – in places twenty-odd – kilometres of its outskirts.

Place in the war

The Gambsheim bridgehead was one of the last German tactical successes on the Western Front. A small, weak Volksgrenadier division, ferried across the Rhine in boats, held out on the left bank for several weeks and, supported by an SS panzer division, inflicted heavy losses on the US 12th Armored Division and helped to force the Seventh Army to give up the strip of northern Alsace between the Lauter and the Moder. The strategic aim – recovering Strasbourg and destroying VI Corps – the Germans did not achieve. At the end of January Himmler was given a new task – command of Army Group Vistula in Pomerania – where his incompetence was soon exposed.

The losses of Operation Nordwind as a whole are estimated in the literature at about 14,000–16,000 American casualties (killed, wounded, missing and sick) and more than 20,000 German; these figures are approximate. For the Americans, the January fighting in Alsace was the second, less familiar act of the winter crisis that began in the Ardennes. For the 12th Armored Division, Herrlisheim was its first great and very costly test in combat.

The Allies returned to this ground only later. At the beginning of February, after the Colmar Pocket had been eliminated, part of the former bridgehead was retaken. The Germans abandoned the strip between the Moder and their original starting positions only in March 1945, during the American offensive in the Palatinate and the Saar that brought the Seventh Army to the Rhine. Strasbourg remained French, and the dispute of early January, when Eisenhower had been ready to give it up, weighed on Franco-American relations for a long time.