The link-up at Houffalize

On the morning of 16 January 1945, a month after the start of the German offensive in the Ardennes, the American 11th Armored Division of General George Patton’s Third Army took the high ground by the road just south of Houffalize. South-west of the little town a patrol of the division, led by Major Joseph M. L. Greene, ran into a patrol of the 2nd Armored Division of VII Corps of the First Army. The two American armies, separated since 16 December by the German wedge, were joined up again, and the salient that the press called “the Bulge” had been cut through at its middle. The statement in chronologies that on 16 January the First and Third Armies linked up after the Battle of the Bulge agrees with the sources – with the proviso that the battle was by no means over at that point.

The same chronologies state under 17 January that the end of the Battle of the Bulge was officially announced that day. There was no single announcement of that kind. 17 January brought an organisational decision: at midnight the First Army returned from the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group – which is why some studies give 17 January and others 18 January. The fighting, however, went on: the US Army counts operations up to 25 January as part of the Ardennes–Alsace campaign, and the last engagements to regain the positions held before the German offensive ended on 28 January.

Two weeks of attack

The pincers that closed on 16 January were the final stage of the American counter-offensive in the Ardennes, which had begun back in December, and they had been set in motion two weeks earlier. On 3 January Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges’s First Army struck from the north towards Houffalize, led by Major General Joseph Lawton Collins’s VII Corps; from the west the British XXX Corps was attacking the tip of the salient. In the south the Third Army, which had been attacking from Bastogne since 30 December, had to beat off German counter-attacks throughout the first week of January and resumed its general advance only on 9 January. Both Montgomery and Bradley chose a meeting at Houffalize, halfway along the salient, although Patton had proposed a deeper thrust at its base, near the German border.

Progress was measured in kilometres a day. Snow, frost, icy roads and the fog that on most days kept aircraft on the ground favoured the defenders. The Germans fell back from line to line, leaving mines and roadblocks behind them, and counter-attacked whenever the Americans lost momentum. On 8 January Adolf Hitler agreed to a withdrawal from the furthest-advanced part of the salient, but only to a line a few kilometres west of Houffalize. By 13 January VII Corps, which was fighting its way across the snow-covered plateau north of the town, had lost almost five thousand men. That evening its soldiers could already see the flashes of the Third Army’s guns to the south.

In the south Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps was making even slower progress. Only on 11 January did clear signs of a German withdrawal appear: the 87th Infantry Division found Saint-Hubert and several neighbouring villages abandoned, held only by rearguards, roadblocks and minefields. In mid-January Hitler accepted that the salient could not be held and agreed to a withdrawal to the high ground east of Houffalize. He rejected, however, the requests of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and of the commander of Army Group B, Field Marshal Walter Model, to let the troops withdraw in stages all the way behind the Rhine. They could fall back only under pressure, and only as far as the Siegfried Line. On 15 January the 101st Airborne Division, which in December had been waiting in encircled Bastogne for relief, entered Noville, eight kilometres from Houffalize.

A meeting in the ruins

Houffalize, a road junction in the valley of the Ourthe, had in December been one of the points through which supplies flowed to General Hasso von Manteuffel’s German Fifth Panzer Army. For that reason Allied aircraft had bombed it repeatedly from the turn of December and January in order to block the passage. By the time the American patrols reached its outskirts, the town lay in ruins.

There was nothing ceremonial about the meeting itself. The patrols exchanged passwords and reports, and the commanders of the two armies took the news as the close of the first stage of the counter-offensive. The American official history (Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive) calls it an achievement that was in a sense hollow: the advance had been so slow and the German withdrawal so skilful that most of the troops who might have been caught in a pocket had managed to get away to the east. According to MacDonald, the Germans, despite their lack of fuel and the crushing superiority of Allied air power, saved most of their men and weapons, although in the end they had to abandon and destroy many tanks and guns for want of spare parts and petrol.

The link-up also removed the reason for which General Dwight Eisenhower had on 20 December given Montgomery command of the First and Ninth Armies – the broken communications between Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg and the armies north of the breach. The arrangement had irritated the Americans from the start, and after Montgomery’s press conference at Zonhoven on 7 January, at which the field marshal presented his role in the battle in a way that Bradley and his staff found disparaging, it became the subject of open dispute. Bradley – as he himself recalled – then told Eisenhower that he would sooner resign than go on serving under Montgomery.

17 January: the First Army returns and the quarrel over credit

According to MacDonald, the First Army reverted to Bradley’s command at midnight on 17 January; a US Army Center of Military History brochure simply gives 17 January, other studies 18 January, the first day on which the army was operating within the 12th Army Group. Lieutenant General William Simpson’s Ninth Army remained under Montgomery’s command, to take part in the advance to the Rhine as part of his 21st Army Group. Bradley immediately began preparing what he described as a “hasty” offensive – a new advance through the Eifel towards the Rhine that would eliminate the remnants of the salient on the way.

The next day, 18 January, Prime Minister Winston Churchill used a speech in the House of Commons to put an end to the quarrel between the allies. He said that United States troops had done “almost all the fighting” in the Ardennes, and that in telling of the British Army’s part one must take care not to claim for it an undue share of credit for what was “undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war” and would be regarded as “an ever-famous American victory”. He also warned against listening to “the chatter of mischief-makers”. The speech helped to cool tempers, but it did not remove the resentment that American commanders nursed to the end of the war and in their memoirs.

Yet this was not the end of the battle, even though the Allied press was increasingly writing about it in the past tense. Before dawn on 18 January Major General Manton Eddy’s XII Corps of the Third Army forced the Sûre on the Luxembourg border and attacked northwards – Patton’s attempt, albeit too late, to return to his idea of striking at the base of the salient. On 23 January Major General Matthew Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps and the 7th Armored Division retook the ruins of St. Vith, which the same division had defended in December. By 25 January the front had returned more or less to the line of 16 December, and in American military historiography that date is regarded as the end of the campaign; clearing the west bank of the river Our went on until 28 January, and the last German units reached their starting positions only at the beginning of February. The chronologies’ mention of an “official announcement” on 17 January thus simplifies a process that stretched over nearly two weeks.

The best divisions leave for the east

The German withdrawal from the Ardennes was hastened by events at the other end of Europe. On 12 January the Red Army launched a great offensive on the Vistula, and over the following days it broke through the German front in Poland and East Prussia. As early as 14 January Hitler ordered two Volksartillerie corps to be transferred from the Ardennes to the east and put the SS panzer divisions on standby. Pulled out of the line, they served for a few more days as a “fire brigade” at threatened points. On 22 January Hitler ordered the whole of Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army to leave the Ardennes as quickly as possible – together with the headquarters of two SS panzer corps, four SS panzer divisions and the elite Führer Begleit and Führer Grenadier brigades. According to MacDonald this was an unconditional admission that the offensive in the West had failed and that the Eastern Front once again had priority. The army did not go to the Oder, however, but to Hungary, where in March it took part in the last German offensive of the war, Operation Frühlingserwachen at Lake Balaton.

Left behind in the Ardennes were divisions which – as MacDonald writes – had not only watched the great hopes of the December offensive evaporate, but also took the departure of the SS units with bitterness. They nevertheless defended themselves effectively and slowed the American pursuit all the way to the Siegfried Line.

Losses

Figures for the losses depend on the time frame adopted and the method of counting. A preliminary report limited to the First and Third Armies listed 75,482 Americans killed, wounded and missing, including more than 8,400 killed. MacDonald gives 39,672 battle casualties for the operations from 3 to 28 January, including 6,138 killed and died of wounds and 6,272 missing and captured, and 41,315 for the period of the German offensive – more than 80,000 in all. Other studies that include support units speak of about 89,000. The British XXX Corps lost about 1,400 men up to 17 January. German losses in the battle as a whole have been estimated at between 81,834 (the lowest German estimate) and 103,900 (the highest Allied estimate); the German historian Hermann Jung, counting only the three armies that took part in the offensive, arrived at about 67,000. According to MacDonald, the January fighting may have accounted for 30–40 per cent of German losses. The people of the Ardennes suffered badly: many towns, such as Houffalize, St. Vith and La Roche-en-Ardenne, were almost completely destroyed, and thousands of Belgian and Luxembourg civilians were killed.

Place in the war

The meeting at Houffalize closed the last great crisis of the Western Allies in the war. The German offensive, which was to have crossed the Meuse to Antwerp, split the British and American armies and induced the Western Allies to negotiate, ended with a return to the starting positions – with the difference that the Americans made good their losses within a few weeks, while the Germans no longer had anything with which to replace the tanks, aircraft and experienced soldiers they had lost. The use of the last reserves in the West, just as the Red Army was setting off from the Vistula, made the Soviets’ rapid advance to the Oder easier.

In February and March 1945 the Western Allies went over to an offensive that took them through the Eifel and the Rhineland to the Rhine. The argument over whether the shallower pincers at Houffalize were a necessity or a lost chance to encircle a large part of the German army continues in the literature to this day. The quarrel over credit proved more lasting: the Zonhoven press conference and Montgomery’s month in command of the First Army weighed for a long time on relations between American and British commanders, although the Ninth Army remained under the field marshal’s orders until the crossing of the Rhine and the fighting in the Ruhr. For the US Army the Battle of the Bulge, finally over in the last days of January, remained the bloodiest battle of the entire war.