Smashing Hitler’s Panzers by Mr. Steven Zaloga

ladies and gentlemen today is March 27th 2019 and on behalf of the director of the US Army heritage and Education Center mr. Geoffrey Mangelsdorf and the entire staff of the yuasa heck and the US Army War College welcome to the perspectives and military history lecture series the u.s. AG in the US Army War College sponsored the perspective series to provide a historical dimension to the exercise of generalship strategic leadership and the war fighting institutions of land power in addition we'd like to thank you.thank as always and to the Army Heritage Foundation for their support of everything we do here at the a Eck as you all saw the book I'm pretty sure it's almost sold out back there behind the lecture hall but all the proceeds from those book sales go to the Army Heritage Center Foundation and the hard work they do we'll also have a book signing at the end of the lecture so if you did buy a book please stick around for that so tonight it is my great honor to introduce our speaker mr. Stevens Eluga received his BA in history from Union College and she connected II New York his MA in history from Columbia University and he did his language study graduate research in Krakow Poland I wasn't going to try to pronounce that University he has been involved in defense studies since 1978 with a short interlude in the late 1980s doing television writing and production he has been a senior analyst at teal group core in Fairfax Virginia since 1992 covering the missile and drone industry as well as well as the international arms trade for clients and Industry and government he's also served as an adjunct staff with the strategy forces and resource division of the Institute of Defense analysis is the author of numerous books on military history and military technology writing extensively on tank and armored vehicle development with the with a focus on of course Russian and American armored vehicles he has published extensively on world war ii military history including the devil's garden about the german defenses of Omaha Beach on d-day and Patton versus the Panzers about the Lorraine campaign in 1944 this lecture is based on his Reese book smashing Hitler's pan Panthers published by Panzers published by Stackpole in 2018 ladies and gentlemen please help me welcome mr. Steven Zillow go [Applause] good evening I'm especially happy to be here and giving the talk here tonight because most of my ideas for this book started here in Carlisle over the years I've done quite a bit of work here at the library and Reece Research Center so I think it's appropriate to give the talk here if you look at the subtitle the book it seems rather specialized that a feed of the German 12th SS Panzer Division in the air dancer in the Battle of the Bulge but the aim of this book was to address much broader questions and especially when was the German Ardennes offensive defeated why was it defeated and the reason I'm raising that issue is that for those of you who are familiar with the battle the bulbs battle in the Ardennes most US accounts focus on the defense of Bastogne so if you're familiar with battle of bulge usually that's the explanation the German armies defeated in the the attacks around Bastogne what I'd like to argue tonight is in fact the German offensive was defeated much earlier it was defeated days before and it was defeated in a series of small battles on the ELLs and borne Ridge involving this particular German unit and some other German units that are not very well known and I'm not immediately going to explain why I think they're not very well known but I'm going to jump into the meat of the issue which is when was the offensive defeated and in order to do that first we have to define what the Germans were trying to accomplish in order to say that it was defeated we have to know what they were trying to do before we can say that they were that the campaign was was stopped somewhere so I'm going to define the German objectives you can identify this fara Punk the focal point what was the main point of the German attack where did it occur I'm going to then examine when the Germans themselves realized that the campaign had failed not when the US thought that the campaign had failed when the Germans themselves thought that it had failed then - to culminate the talk I'll try to explain where the plan failed and why the plan failed where does the plan for the Ardennes offensive come from December 1944 Germany's on the verge of defeat they have Western Allies in France Belgium on the German border ready to go into central Germany and of course on the Eastern Front the Russians are in Poland not very far from Berlin it's really only a matter of time before they are defeated Hitler as early as September of 1944 becomes convinced that the only way to regain the strategic initiative in the war is to win a great victory and he has no expectation that he can win a victory against the Red Army it's simply too large he is also under the illusion that it might be simpler to break up the Western Allied alliance namely Britain in the United States some major blow against Britain in the United States would cause political dissension has occurred in 1940 between Britain and France and therefore perhaps who would have the chance to have a major strategic victory so on 16 September 1944 is the first time he mentions the idea of an Ardennes attack this happens to coincide with the 2nd of the summer Panzer offensives I'm going to go back a little bit here the German army during the summer of 1944 launched two Panzer offensive against the US Army they launched one at the beginning of August 1944 an attempt to defeat the u.s. 1st army which was breaking out of Normandy after operation Cobra it's a complete failure the one lesson from this that will have something to do with this campaign the Germans blame the defeat on allied airpower they feel that the attack operation Luo ditch near morte was defeated by allied airpower so Hitler gets this idea ok we're going to have to do this in the winter when the weather is terrible the Allies won't have any airpower to help defeat the German forces the second lesson that he draws is from a campaign that's far less known and that was a Panzer offensive there was staged in September 1944 against Patton's Third Army in Lorraine and the reason it's not very well-known as it fizzled out it was not particularly well done and one of the big problems was is that Hitler tried to mass a large number of tanks to make a major attack against Patton's Third Army and wipe out Patton's Third Army but instead of having a big concentrated mass the local commanders just took little bits of this force and committed them piecemeal and as a result it was never a large blow so the US Army never even really appreciated that they had been the target of a major offensive the offensive basically petered out so Hitler draws a second lesson there his lesson is he can't allow local commanders to parcel out all of the vehicles all these resources for little local attacks and things he's got to keep them all concentrated so as a result for the Ardennes he's going to keep all of his big best units back in Germany back rebuilding and only unleash them in the Ardennes at the beginning of the offensive in October he actually sits down with the head of the okw the German High Command Alfred Yodle and says okay you you you write up this plan and he explained to him what his basic concept was so yellow comes back and he says there's five areas where we can attack the Netherlands Liege Aachen Luxembourg Lorraine all sauce and learn had no interest in four of the five he right from the outset thought about the Ardennes now the reason for this is somewhat self-evident one of Hitler's greatest victories was the defeat of France in 1940 and where did this occur the German forces charged through the Ardennes surprised the Allies and defeated the French and British forces in France so he says aha our great miracle maybe we can do a miracle again there's another reason for the Ardennes at this time also and I'll get into some detail a little bit later US defenses in the Ardennes were very weak senior US commanders especially armored Bradley looked at the Ardennes and said we don't have to put very many forces here would be a terrible location for the Germans to attack so in any event Lygia Aachen and I'll show this in a map in a moment is what is selected for what is first called watching the Rhine that's the code name for this operations first called watch on the Rhine this is the area where the Ardennes is located as Hitler starts just discussing this plan with his various commanders he comes up with two concepts concept is eventually called the big solution what Hitler's idea is is to launch an offensive from in Germany it's called the F L region it's the forested area next to the Ardennes so the idea is he's going to push up through the Ardennes up to the main port of antwerp which is the big Belgian port and what he's trying to do there is that the British are on one side of that line the Americans are on the other side of line he's hoping to create the second Dunkirk so for those of you who have seen the recent movie he's hoping to recreate that where the British will be forced out of continental Europe by a great defeat the senior German commander is not Hitler but the commanders under him the commander of OB west and the commander of Army Group B don't have great hopes for such a dramatic scheme the German army has suffered a massive defeat in France in the summer of 1944 it's been unable to completely rebuild and for all of Hitler's promises most of the forces just don't seem to be appearing in the reserves in Germany Hitler is unwilling to take resources out of other areas Norway Greece the Balkans and so the senior German commanders look at this plan and say yeah this plan is doable if you give us 40 or 45 divisions Hitler says you have to do with 20 and so they say no maybe we could do a small solution but we can't do the big solution in any event in the later part of October OB West which is the western command under run stead they come up with a plan that they call plan Martin and the next command underneath OB was here's Group B Army Group B under Valter modal he comes up or his office comes up with a plan called herps Nebel which is the German for autumn mist in any event Hitler looks at both of these offerings and says they're completely unsatisfactory they're basically this idea of a small solution not a big drive up to Antwerp just a little envelopment of some American forces defeating a few American divisions and Hitler is quite right in this I mean if he's expecting to get some grand strategic results out of this operation it's got to be something big some little campaign to knock off a few American divisions it's not going to change the course of the war so in any event he tells the the other commanders Rundstedt amodal go back and you know do a better job I'm mentioned on here on this date 18 november 1944 yodel issues tactical directives I'm going to explain why that's important later on I'll skip it for now in any event the final plan is drafted on the 19th of November 1944 operation order herbs Neville autumn mist it's done by Harris Group B by modal's command and basically this time Hitler signs off on it because modal has learned by this stage that there's no use fighting Hitler he's not going to put up with any insubordination from his junior officers so it basically follows the big solution and so Hitler approves on the 9th of December the attack is going to start on 16 December in 1944 now this is what I was talking about when I mentioned earlier big solution and small solution Hitler's ideas the big solution and let me see if the laser is visible here yes it is his big idea here is to go all the way up to Antwerp and of course you have the ocean up here the small solution was this little operation here just going in and surrounding US forces in Aachen now the forces that will be involved the Ardennes campaign are basically three armies six Panzer army no this is the army where 12th SS Panzer Division was located the one that my book focuses on it's led by Sepp Dietrich it's basically of off n SS formation - its media South is fifth Panzer Army this is a regular army Panzer Division or a Panzer Army it's headed by von Manteuffel and then finally down south is basically an infantry army the Seventh Army now getting back to that issue where's the spare pump where is the focal point the focal point in the attack is this it's six Panzer Army and the reason is actually quite simple and it has to do a geography 6 Panzer Army has the quickest route stay at work let me explain why this is the Belgian German border the Ardennes is located in here the battles that I detail are in this area of the Ardennes this is Liege in the mez River this is going to be the first objective in order to get Antwerp you first have to get up there go across the Meuse river now there's a problem here especially in the winter-time east-west roads there's only one there's only one decent road now we got ourselves back into the 1940s it's not like today with European Union European Union you drive anywhere around here you can go across international borders in 1940 1930 1920 you couldn't the borders were basically closed you'd have to go through a city that had a customs point the only customs point is down here it's in a little town called lost sometimes called the lost time gap but it's it's I don't even know if it's on the map but any of it the customs posters right there but up here there are no there are no roads to go over into or towards Lee as you except for secondary roads that especially in the winter months or not in particularly good shape so I'm going to show this in a little bit more detail here's the plan for six Panzer army okay so here's the focal point these are the most important German units and here's what the plan is the plan is typical German tactics meaning that they start the campaign by pushing the infantry forward to overcome the American defenses the American defenses in the sector are basically there's one Infantry Division the 99th division located here there's a second Infantry Division the second Infantry Division up here conducting its own campaign separate from this and there's a third division the hundred six division down in the Somme V therea but outside of the sector of six Panzer Army now the plan is is to have the infantry the German infantry these divisions here penetrate the line overcome the American defenses and once they've done that they're going to swing up north and create a blocking line to prevent the US units up here very strong forces u.s. and 9th army imparts the first u.s. army up here to prevent those guys from coming down and assisting and once the infantry has gotten through then the two tank units 1st SS Panzer Division and 12th SS panic here's 12th the guys I write about in the book these guys are going to go racing forward and cross the Meza river so that's the plan it all seems pretty straightforward until you start looking at the maps this is what the terrain looks like this is a little bit clearer you can see that its ear is heavily forested basically this is the border here so there's no very good roads the only good road is this one up through here through Lawson through the less I'm gap and they're gonna try to push two Panzer divisions through it now you can't push two Panzer divisions through a small secondary road it'd be like pushing it through the roads out here in Karla they're not these are not super highways and it's wintertime so they offer some additional routes so trellises pants or the unit that I wrote about gets three routes they get route a through Roche Roth or would be through crank health and they get one of the two good roads coming up through the low Sun gap first SS Panzer Division their neighboring division and a unit that's very well known for the moment a massacre they get these two southern routes they're going to be going up that away now I'm going to spoil it a little bit but one of the reasons that this attack fails is the original plan is to push most of 12th SS Panzer up this fairly decent Road through loss I'm through the customs posts what ends up happening is that a gigantic traffic jam builds up over here because there are no roads and as a result 1st ss-panzer gets here first and takes over these roads and 12th SS Panzer is not able to get through here they go through this one awful awful road up here and I'll show some pictures as we get into this talk here's where 12th SS Panzer is gonna try to go through this is a section on the edge of the Ardennes Forest called the Hollerith gap or the whole Irani and the reason it's called the knees it's if you look at the road it's kind of like that it's a sharp angle basically it comes from Germany and then goes south down along the Belgian frontier now there's an added problem in this area this is the Belgian German border the Germans in the late 1930s decide to defend the border by putting up traps so when the Germans show up on the border on December 16 1944 there's tank traps all along the border there's another problem the German army since 1943 has not been on the offensive they have lost some of the skills of offensive mechanized operations they have no engineer breaching equipment they have no specialized equipment like what the Western Allies have well what the British Army has what the US Army has they have no quick way of getting through these tank traps so they're going to be slowed down by their own defenses and they can't blow them in advance because Hitler wants this to be a surprise attack they can't go out a couple weeks before and demolish these things they're you know there's a couple days of work for an engineer force but you can't do it publicly if it's gonna be a surprise attack so those things sit there this is the road that 12th SS Panzer Division is going to have to use as its main route for this attack we're talking in excess of 12,000 troops 3,000 vehicles it's a muddy little forest road it's not really even a road it's a logging trail it's that route a that we saw in that earlier map and they fall back on this simply because the better roads get jammed up for the reason of traffic jams and the other Panzer Division basically takes them over so we're starting out with some serious issues now I'm going to show you the other serious issue I'm moving down south we had been the picture I showed you before is up a little bit north of here this is lost time where the customs post is and where the passage where the good road goes into Belgium up towards Antwerp now this is a German engineering map of asphalt map that's well being the pyramid fortifications along the border and you can see all the fortifications that they put down along the border which are going to be blocking these roads there's another problem in the summer of 1944 there's a railroad overpass that goes over the one good road up into this area it got knocked down nobody rebuilt it's blocking the road so what's going to happen on 16 December 1944 when the Germans launched the attack is their infantry gets here and captures this town very quickly because there's we know US defenses here well what happens is a gigantic traffic jam starts building up back here there's no way to get through and they don't get through until the evening of the first day a number of tanks with conqueror Piper which is first SS Panzer Division the unit down here they managed to push through by basically just going over all the stuff but the problem that the conquer Piper has is you can't get the trucks in behind you you can take your tanks you get to get over the debris on the bridge and stuff like that but all your support all your fuel trucks and ammunition trucks and the people carrying your infantry they're still stuck in the traffic jam back here so this becomes the major bottleneck in this sector let's just take a quick look at what the German plan was this is the expectations this is not what happens is what they want to happen there was no formal schedule there's nowhere you can go down to the National Archives you can actually find the German orders there's no formal schedule they don't say on day one we want to be here it's more general expectations if you go back and you look at the memoirs and the German officers they will explain what they thought was going to happen so as I mentioned the start of the campaign is the infantry divisions are going to get through the American defenses they expect that this is going to happen they'll be through the forest and through the American defenses by the morning of X day the first day of the offensive 16 December 1944 they think that by noon on the first day on 16 December they're gonna be 5 to 6 kilometers beyond the force up on l's and borne Ridge so if you remember that map I head up yet all the forest down there and then you had some clear terrain up there they want to get up onto the high ground up on tails and born ridge which is basically open farm fields okw the army High Command expects that they'll reach the mez River in about two days six Panzer army the people that we're talking about weren't quite that optimistic they expected it would take one day to break the u.s. defenses so they'd be through it on the 16th one day to pass over the Havana which is the high plateau and they would arrive on the MS River by the third day 18 December they would cross the Mose the following day on the 19th now the critical thing about 18 December is the Germans all assumed they would take the US Army three days to react but for the first two or three days the US Army wouldn't understand what was happening it would take three days before the US Army starts to react and so these days are absolutely critical because they've got to get over the MS before the US Army reacts you know sorry me has a lot more forces not in the Ardennes but neighboring on either side of the Ardennes so these first few days are absolutely critical to the progress of the campaign I'm gonna talk a little bit about the unit that is the centerpiece of my book the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jurgen Hitler Aegon is Hitler Youth it's a political movement I would describe it as sort of like a German equivalent of the Boy Scouts but that's unfair because the American Boy Scouts are not a political organization sort of you took the Boy Scouts and connected them with a political party there's a lot of political indoctrination and the other issue is that the German society was heavily militarized so when you belong to the Hitler Youth you also receive preliminary military training now with the Hitler Youth were young people 12 13 14 the ones who were recruited for this particular division were generally no younger than 17 although in fact by this time there's not enough Hitler yogin to go around and so this particular division gets a mishmash of troops now to start off with this division served mostly against the Canadians and Normandy and suffered wicked casualties they suffered Bhawani thousand casualties now the division has a strength of about 12,000 13,000 men but the point is is that in a division like that when you're saying any casualties you're meaning that virtually every combatant and that division is a casualty because every division has a large number of logistics troops and other troops that are not commenters not infantry pawns a Grenadier tank troops of that sort so the units took very heavy casualties and there's some particular examples their tank regiment suffered 85% casualties in Normandy their Panzer grenadiers which is their mechanised infantry they took 75 percent casualties in Normandy so there's very few people very few experienced troops left over after Normandy to give some example at the command level out of the the three battalion commanders and twelve rifle company commanders that there should have been if they had all survived the Normandy campaign there was only one battalion commander or excuse me only only one of these 15 commanders was still in place in in the from the summer into the Ardennes campaign so you know when you hear people say oh the German units kept all this continuity command because you know they had these experienced commanders while one campaign and those are so commanding and the later camp and that was not the case in the Ardennes in the 12th SS Panzer Division very few of the senior commanders were still in place between the summer campaign in the Ardennes campaign secondly the the division only starts to rebuild on the 15th of October 1944 in other words two months before the campaign is going to start and once again they're getting raw recruits and these are not simply filling out ten or fifteen or twenty percent of the unit they're filling out most of the unit in many cases with these very junior young kids who have no real military experience that's one thing with the infantry but it's especially difficult in any of the other elements especially the Panzer Force because of the technical requirements and the artillery force also the technical requirements there's a shortage of experienced personnel equipment and fuel they're short of everything to the extent that the tank crews only had two weeks of training so you get these raw recruits who have never served in a tank in many cases didn't even know how to drive an automobile they're given two weeks of training they're given no unit training if they were given you know they're stuck inside a tank and shown how to drive the thing but they're not sent out at company level at battalion level to actually conduct any realistic tactical training and it's limited to two weeks and more than that it's not even on army bases this division is mostly sent off to small towns and conduct their training away from army base where you'd have tank firing fields that sort of thing so the training is minimal there was a little actual vehicle use especially tanks and little live-fire training they had you know they were able to fire a few rounds of tank ammunition it was so bad that they were even limited on the amount of pistol ammunition they could fire so when you know when you read these accounts in World War 2 and they refer to the vafan SS divisions as elite divisions you have to stop to think about when you're talking about maybe in the summer of 1944 12th SS Panzer is an elite division but in the winter of 1944 it's a new green inexperienced unit with poor equipment here's some more detail a division like this should have a regiment of Tanks they would normally have two tank battalions battalion of panther tanks battalion of Panzer fours they in fact only have a single hybrid tampa time meaning mix Panthers and Panzer fours they were authorized under the tables of organization equipment a hundred ninety five tanks they in fact only had about 80 so less than half they substituted some tank destroyers for tanks but these had real problems they're not going to figure and might talk tonight they they took part in the Battle of don't Boonton balk I'm not going to talk about that tonight the this is a mechanized division armored division so they have Panzer Grenadier armored infantry but of the six plants are going to deer battalions only one of them has armored half-tracks the other five battalion are using trucks and the trucks are not cross-country choice they're ordinary commercial Opel blitz trucks the kind that you know you'd shop would have their authorized 522 light a Effie's meaning half-tracks armored cars vehicles like that they only have 185 they're authorized on here 33 cross country vehicles you know big heavy trucks the only of 302 which is very important considering what the weather's like a half-track prime movers things drag your artillery and your big stuff around they only have 90 out of more than 200 authorized they're authorized five units of fuel in the German army a unit of fuel is defined as what it takes to get you 100 kilometers on a road on hand when they start the attack they have one point three units meaning enough to get you 130 kilometers on a road but roughly 60 or 70 kilometers cross country they have the other fuel units but they're back around cologne so they're back 50 60 miles back beyond that trap Jim so this is not a happy situation if 12th SS Panzer Division which is an elite formation is in that situation what about the infantry they're in far poorer condition the unit that I'll talk about most is 277 volts Grenadier division Volks ran a deer division as a new type of formation started in the summer 1944 it's basically a cut-rate infantry division a mostly for defensive operations so there's less personnel instead of having six infantry battalion leaf or or shooting instead instead of nine there's only six but any event they're there they're smaller and weaker than a conventional infantry division when the offensive starts they're at seventy two percent strength so about three-quarters strength the German Army in 1944 rates their divisions at four levels first is a first-rate unit ready for offensive operations second as a unit that's suitable for offensive maybe not top part of it pretty good third means suitable for defense meaning a unit that can engage in defensive operations but not really suitable for offensive operations and four is barely suitable for defense well this unit that's supposed to spearhead 12th SS Panzer Division is rated at 3 which is suitable for defense and for offense the best infantry unit in the area is Twelve Oaks Grenadier division the commander who led this was part of Hitler's personal staff and he was picked for that division a couple of junior officers tried to get him to become the commander because they figured he had the ear of Hitler did get all the equipment they wanted it performed extremely well during fighting with the US Army in Aachen but the problem is it was so good that it was continually pushed into the line into the line into the line if fought around Aachen until the 3rd of December only two weeks before the offensive starts it suffered very high casualties so in two weeks time it's going to try to incorporate 3,000 fresh raw infantry and 500 convalescence wounded troops from the division this infantry comes out of mainly out of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine meaning the German air force the German Navy because the Germans don't have any fuel your air force isn't flying and the Navy's not doing anything so they take these personnel so you know these are perfectly well trained people I mean a young love office sergeant who's a mechanic work on aircraft and this is a highly skilled individual but the problem is he's going to get stuck in an infantry division he has no tactical training for infantry and I might add it's not only the enlisted man it's the same problem with the officers this becomes really clearly the case with this unit 3rd fallschirmjaeger division that's a parachute division this was widely regarded by the US Army in Normandy in 1944 is the best German unit it was excellent superb unit the US Army rated this as the equivalent of two infantry divisions in December 1944 it is horrible one of the reasons is that the officers are these luffa officers who have been sitting out the war on air posts you know they're not incompetent people they know what they're trained to do there look buff personnel but they get stuck in a parachute unit and they don't know anything about ground combat they're promised armored support they're promised an assault gun brigade that never shows up it's caught in the traffic jam that I mentioned another controversy Hitler insisted that the Ardennes offensive begin with a massive artillery barrage he's going to just actually crush the American defenses with artillery there's problems with this not enough guns not enough ammunition because it's a surprise attack Hitler says no artillery reconnaissance he doesn't want people sneaking across the border looking where the american units are he doesn't want aircraft units flying over taking photographs he wants at a calm peaceful area so that nobody suspects an attack is going to come here there's another problem you saw the force in that picture the u.s. divisions had created log shelters in the forest what happens when the artillery comes in the rounds strike the up four of the trees go off now that would be really really lethal against infantry that's out and exposed but if the infantry is in these log dugouts they're very very well protected against artillery so subdistrict an SS officer since 1930s follows Hitler's rules explicitly he follows that our total rule and his infantry will fail the neighboring unit to the South Regular Army and a fifth Panzer army of menthe wife well mont eiffel hears this role and says tell with that I'm not doing that and he says we're going to go back to 1918 two infiltration tactics which succeeded in 1918 instead of warning the Americans that we're going to attack them we're gonna sneak in under cover of darkness under cover of the crappy weather and we're gonna infiltrate we're gonna be back behind the American lines before they're even aware an offensive has started and guess what happens they succeed that's not the second I'm talking about tonight but they're the they're the only ones who really make any inroads into the American defenses this is an important feature whenever you think of the battle bulge immediately think of snow-covered fields well there's a problem it was snowing and freezing in the early part of the month this foster before the offensive it was unusually wet that year so the grounds all mud that it becomes a tank front one tank why what this means is that the tanks can't move cross-country when the Germans come through they're gonna have to stand the roads if they start moving out into the fields they're gonna pod down in the mud now what that also means that Germans are gonna have to fight for every little stony Belgian village and that's what's going to stop them the move starts I'm gonna I'm gonna run through this kind of quick because I'm starting to run out of time the the the Ardennes offensive actually starts several days before the offensive itself starts they have something called operation AB fear and what they're doing is that they're taking all other hidden units from deep inside Germany and moving them forward down to the edge of the battle in order to keep it secret from the Americans they couldn't have their units right up against the via the edge of the battle but there's a problem with this for example of the hundred fifteen tanks and armored fighting vehicles from 12th SS Panzer that moves from the Cologne area down to the Ardennes frontier 46 115 breakdown I'm not going to get into the reasons for that the Germans have some real serious mechanical and training problems but that's just one of the sort of things then they have the traffic jams so okay I'm going to start the battle at this point so 16 December pre-dawn it's dark outside the Germans start a gigantic artillery barrage these are the regiments of the 277th Infantry Division's the one I mentioned earlier they're the ones who have to do the first mission they've got to get through the American defenses which are along this wood line now the interesting thing is is that or what the Germans didn't know what even the Americans didn't appreciate about two days before the attack begins there had been some German troops up on this little hill up here called rat with the US Army called rats hill and they had been harassing the elements of the 99th division who are down here so the nineteen I've got fed up and they took two companies and they sent him up and took over rats hill now why this is critical is that the main road here comes along here and then goes down here this is Hollerith knee and it just so happens that that forest trail that i showed earlier happens to be right here so of this particular u.s. infantry battalion which had three companies on line all located here two days before the offensive suddenly they only had one company and that's where all of the German force are going to come through and that's the reason that the Germans get this penetration through what's called roll been a this little forest road down here they make the attacks and are stopped dead in their tracks but up here they get into that lousy little muddy road so they have a success there and this is what it looks like after the the one day of fighting they're starting this is excuse me this is down south this is a the next sector down what I am just showing in the previous map was further north this is the southern sector going up you're lost I'm going up through that good road net and here they have basically the same problem that they had over in the other sector and here they had one specific problem this particular German regiment Infantry Regiment coming through the Germans had very poor tactical radios not the equivalent of American walkie-talkies or handy talkies they used to rely on field telephones we have to drag the wire behind you they saw the senior commanders who were leading the unit cutting wire and the reason that they're cutting wire is that the u.s. infantry put booby traps down through the woods here so these officers are coming through their seeing the booby-traps they're cutting the wire for the Lube traps these young untrained infantrymen are coming behind and seeing cutting water the infantrymen said aha our bosses are showing us what to do we're going to cut wire they cut the fuel telephone work and what happens is that this unit gets hit by German artillery because they can't they can't communicate back with artillery so this unit gets pretty heavily bashed up either on our Tillery this unit actually does get up into the book calls stationary there's a railroad line here plus a road line I was mentioning third paratroop division they try to get this little town of land xerath the most heavily decorated US unit in the Ardennes is this little intelligence reconnaissance platoon stationed here handful of men not even a full platoon and strength it's probably like 18 18 men they stop an entire German fallschirmjaeger regiment for an entire day and the reason was is that the officer who commanded this particular German unit was a loaf of officer with no tactical training he kept just launching frontal attacks and these guys had a 30 caliber browning light machine gun I just mowed him down and then finally in the afternoon German NCO a noncommissioned officer who was an experienced paratrooper he finally told the the Luftwaffe officer had dropped dead and he took over and basically just encircled the American troops and took him over basically capture them all in about five minutes here's a day into the fight the Germans because of this initial breakthrough here has succeeded in getting into the forest after about a day of fighting now what's happening in the meantime is that up north of here the u.s. 2nd Infantry Division a very experienced division had been conducting its own campaign up trying to capture some some road junctions for further up to the north they hear all the artillery offensive they send some people down here to see what's going on they realize the Germans have start something big and their supply lines second defuse be down here they moved up there for that operation all our supply lines come through this little rocky village of crank Elroy Roth they say we've got to hold that's got ahold of village so they get permission from Corps from from five cord and they start moving their units down into Russia they react immediately the important thing is the general Richardson from second division understands immediately what's going on he starts moving his units and he convinces Joe at Corps level what he's got to do and they start responding there's at the local level this isn't Bradley and eisenhower this is the local guys one thing that he does is that he's trying to move one of his infantry regiments the 38th into these towns that's this unit here he's trying to get those guys from all the way up there come down here set up a defense in this town but he knows the Germans are operating in these woods here and he knows he's got to shield them so he he tells one of his battalions the 1st the 9th infantry that they have to set up a defense at that crossroads the commander of the unit is a young colonel by the name of McKinley and if the name McKinley rings a bell president of United States this is one of his great nephews so so McKinley sets up this little defense at the laws dell crossroads which has been later described in most of the accounts of the battle of bulge as probably the single most heroic defense in the Battle of the Bulge this company they set up in this muddy little field and they're gonna be attacked by everything artillery infantry tanks everything they set up on the evening of the 16th of December or excuse me the 17th of December and they'll hold out for roughly 18 hours but against everything and they basically stopped 12th SS Panzer from getting out into these fields enough time for the 38th Infantry to get into the little village and set up defenses this is a contemporary overhead view the Germans are up in this area coming down here in this area's McKinley's defenses and 38th is stationed down in here so here is how the attack breaks out on the afternoon of the 18th the German tanks and armored vehicles start coming out they push aside by the later part of the morning they push aside McKinley's unit which by this stage has been decimated I mean it started with somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 men by this stage it's down around a hundred suffered wicked casualties and so in any of them but they accomplished their mission their mission was to hold the crossroads long enough for the thirty-eighth to set up so there's the details in my book I go into quite a bit more detail about the nitty-gritty of the battle but what happens so let me go back here and make a point the German infantry is coming across here with the tanks standard German doctor if you're gonna find the town I gotta find a town with tanks because they're vulnerable to enemy infantry you got to get in there with infantry and tanks but what happens is the McKinley and some of the other units near the edge start calling in artillery in the artillery basically strips away the German infantry in these open fields and there's a slaughter of German infantry so it ends up happening is that what's coming in here is mostly tanks and armored vehicles but they're coming into a town that's full of infantry infantry armed with bazookas any tank guns three companies of Tanks and a tank destroyer battalion so they're coming in to what the Germans themselves call the Panzer graveyard they're its tanks without infantry they can't do very well in these type conditions so basically this is one of the two key units they had to get up to the Medicine River instead again to the Meuse river it's gotten caught up in three days of nasty urban fighting in this little village and we're gonna see the consequences I'm gonna mention just briefly what happens the neighboring unit for his SS Panzer they go charging through losheim gap that little area that I showed before where there's practically no US forces they get up as far as the little village of love glazed by that stage the u.s. is blooming in infantry divisions they get trapped this is Conqueror Piper conquer Piper's of course notorious for the mall mini Massacre so the fair Punk was these two Panzer divisions 12th up to the north and just below it first SS within the first three days this one has gotten stopped in this little village and 1st ss-panzer is trapped in a little valley around the glazed okay let's make a little summary here the plan expected that the Panzers would have been on the move around the 19th they're not they're still trapped in crank l Roche Roth and up in Lille's conquer pie Perla glaze the plan was is that once they did their penetration sitting behind were two more SS Panzer divisions the ii ss-panzer course so what would have happened is they were expected by the 19th p up on the MS river and at that point six panzer army was going to throw forward two more and then they were an all race up towards the antwerp well that's not happening because nobody's getting through those traffic jams were through these defended towns the other important consequence on the 18th of December is I mentioned earlier there were three German armies and committed to the Ardennes offensive Hitler had planned to add a fourth the 15th army which is way up north in Arakan had planned to send that unit in around the 18th to reinforce the northern sector but even Hitler takes one look at what's happening and says no so 15th Army's pulled out so suddenly instead of having four armies attack he's got three by this time by roughly the 18th of December basically three days into the attack six Panzer army headquarters accepts that the 1st Panzer Corps attack the main focal attack has failed German headquarters meaning runstats headquarters OB West realized that the big solution the real mission of the Ardennes offensive is impossible in by the 19th of December there's just no hope of redeeming it down further south 5 Panzer II has gotten through they broke through a green American division 106 and they're moving up towards man hey you know up towards Bastogne but the problem is there's nowhere to go these guys are way down south they're not going to be able to get up to any of the key positions on the moves or ever they're just gonna be stooging around out of Bastogne now the US Army always the best on big defensive but from a German perspective best don't nothing it's a it's a little road town the important towns were these ones further up north this is the situation at the end of the campaign basically this front becomes stagnant right before Christmas so you have the infantry and newly-introduced Panzer Grenadier division infantry and this they're just basically licking their wounds on the battle that I didn't talk about although I detailed it in my book after they got beaten up here in cranky Roche Roth the remaining pawns of Grenadier regiment and what remaining tanks they had were sent down to Boonton Bach and there they ran into the 1st Infantry Division the big red one and they got smashed to bits they are over the course of about two days of fighting so they're down here looking their wounds 3rd fallschirmjaeger division does it go anywhere so basically they got a small penetration into the American lines but you know they're supposed to be way way way over on the MS river so it's failed by Christmas Rundstedt says aspera Lin wants permission to go to a defense defensive posture he's recognized there's no hope for the offensive ii ss-panzer corps which was supposed to be shifted behind 1st ss-panzer corps was shifted instead to Montoya's thing mont eiffel's units go towards Bastogne they're the principle combatants there and ii ss-panzer goes up towards man hey we're by this time the US Army has mobile iso:3200 as armor division gets in behind Bastogne and creates the big cell pocket where the German tanks are encircled and crushed ok reasons for the failure of autumn mist plan overestimated German capabilities Hitler acted as though the German army in the winter of 1944 was comparable to the German army in the summer of 1944 because I detailed earlier it was much much weaker much poorer quality than it was in the summer it's significantly underestimated the United States or the US Army when you read German accounts by frontier vest or other intelligence organisations it's like reading about Kasserine pass they take the lessons of Kasserine pass from the summer from February of 1943 the u.s. defeat in Tunisia and they act as though the US Army has learned nothing since Tunisia and so there's this assumption that the US Army's going to behave the way that it did in Kasserine pass which is was not the case on Sicily it was not the case in Italy it certainly wasn't the case in France but they still have this rather misguided assessment of the US Army's capabilities what I pointed out earlier whether mud forced the Panzers to fight for the villages that stopped them because it's difficult to do German artillery was insufficient to overcome the US Army's village strong points on the other hand US artillery was superb it's hard to underestimate the importance of us artillery in this phase the Battle of the Bulge everybody thinks the Battle of the Bulge is a big tank battle it was an infantry artillery battle and artillery was very very important us combined arms teams succeeded in village defenses it wasn't just the infantry krinkle Ross Roth as I mentioned was held by a good chunk of a tank battalion in a tank destroyer battalion there were central into in the defense defense in the Ulsan born sector that whole area I was talking about before derailed the attack on the much earlier than Bastogne Bastogne is more Christmas time the keypoint no plausible German opportunity operational opportunities in the best own sector beyond attrition there's nowhere to go if you've ever been up to the Bastogne air and you go over to the mezrab you go over towards Dino which is the town it's over on the other side of the MS from from Bastogne it's got this narrow little passageway to get out of it there's these cliffs if the Germans head across the meze or they're not going anywhere the British sent in some armored units that's blocked it's all worked up there's nothing there's nowhere to go and then besides that if you're down in that area you can't get up to answer you have to go through most of Belgium so they have no operational opportunities so that's the end of my presentation and I think that we have time for questions and I will turn it over to Carl [Applause] alright ladies and gentlemen we have some time for Q&A if you see Mary over there and myself if you raise your hands if you have a question and like I said please life wait for one of the other of us to to come to you so who would like to get us started tonight right here in the middle I'm just curious what why Mary German sources you used in your book the all the planning documents were from the records of Harrah's Group D Harris Group D is a somewhat misleading title these records are held at the National Archives and records Center down in College Park Harris Group D was the formation that preceded OVU West runstats headquarters they still have most of these operational plans so tracing the the lineage of the Ardennes offensive you can go down there there's the maps there's all the various plans the divisional records are mostly missing I was having a discussion earlier tonight about German wartime records Luftwaffe records they think the German archivist right now think that about only 3% of Luftwaffe records survived don't know about it on the ver magoffin SS side maybe 5% but it's not a lot in the case of 12th SS Panzer Division there are no written records of 12th SS Panzer Division in the Ardennes what there is is there are unit histories there was a unit history put together by the comrade and chef of the veterans group and then besides that right at the end of World War two the US Army historical center went around a senior German commanders they had a program called FMS foreign military studies and they had the senior German commander sit down and write their memoirs or their recollections of these battles so my main source for at divisional level was the FMS studies most of these infantry divisions for example the 277 volts Grenadier that I mentioned there are three histories of the 277th in the ffs series there's multiple ones for 12th SS panzer for 1st ss-panzer corps some records have been starting to appear the the regimental records for ss-panzer regiment 12 The Pianist regiment of the division have mostly disappeared except Hungarian who I know found them in Prague in the military archives and in vain Yakov accepters not for the Ardennes great great stuff for Normandy nothing for your downs so German records are not great there are there are a lot of records so I don't mean to say there are records but as compared to the US Army US Army I have day-to-day casualty records all sorts of stuff you know situation maps tons it tons and tons of detail on the German side I've got I got most of the big picture but there's still there's still big gaps and and I think there always will be realizing you know it's speculation but it's kind of fun you know Hitler had this big solution have you speculated if he succeeded in this big solution how it would have altered the war at all my answer to that is and I've actually been asked this one of my publishers actually wants to a series on you know what if things my answer is he should have they should have talked to the to the jinyu's the returned junior commanders but the commanders underneath Hitler run stat modal those people those people did leave behind notes and stuff they thought big solution and no chance at all none zero in fact it's so bad that in some of the planning the planning didn't go beyond the Mo's they figured out how to get up to the Mo's and that was it they just thought there's no chance from getting any further we don't even have to bother doing that so that that's how bad was I don't think I had any chance I mean this isn't a case of oh if they had tweaked this or they had tweaked that you would have gotten a different result if they had tweak certain things like if they'd gotten the two Panzer divisions up that better Road yeah they probably would have penetrated deeper but they wouldn't have gotten much further the US Army had the resources and they had the ability to move it fairly quickly and the Germans had lots of deep deep problems which is what I wanted to hint at by describing the situation with 12 this Panzer Division alright we have right up here in the very front wonderful talk why or perhaps maybe it was ignored German they didn't understand the terrine didn't they see that the as I've been there short vacation the it kind of it's like a a washboard that kind of goes against yeah where they want to go Hitler yeah did why didn't they see like the the the the mountains and the terrain and the road was the routes go like north-south and not the way I think there's two reasons for that number one Hitler didn't know the terrain Hitler Hitler never spent any time there dunce Hitler had this dream vision from the Battle of France 1940 when of course they were going through with much less extensive forces the density of forces going through the Ardennes in 1940 was nowhere near what it was in the winter and also didn't go through this sector there were German units who went through this sector but not the main you Athenians further down south down towards Luxembourg so he didn't have a firm grab on that either a lot of the planning was very perfunctory in the sense that when you look at the planning they understood that for example that tank trap business in this road business robe on a what the Hillary Oregon divisions abusing was not considered one of the main roads that was considered basically for reconnaissance forces they didn't really expect to use it they knew all those tank traps were there they had plans in place an engineer batons were supposed to come down with high explosive rip a few holes in those tank traps get units through more engineers we're gonna come in and put earth over the the tank traps that's great until you have a traffic jam and your engineers are ten ten or fifteen kilometers back stuck in the traffic jam but you've got to get through those obstacles right now and you know repeating this at this other point the Germans the German army had gotten progressively worse as the war went on in offensive tactics they had no offensive engineer specialized equipment of the type that you see in the Russian army the US Army the British Army yeah something as simple as dozers you don't think that's a big deal but in or to an army as dozers can get over obstacles the Germans had no tank dozers I mean it sounds like a strange little point but tank dozers doing a big job the US Army didn't have until the summer 44 either so I don't I don't mean to suggest it was why do you think the historiography is all focused on Bastogne and the action and the south versus this more critical area of the battle I'm gonna tell you my conspiracy theory I just just had some something happens early in December which I'm sure some of you are aware of Bradley's headquarters the 12th Army Group headquarters was located in a spa Belgium just sort of up the road from where I was talking about its main communication link was captured by the Germans so the headquarters suddenly lost some of its ability to communicate especially up north up to ninth army ninth army supper on Aachen so Montgomery comes to Eisenhower and says well let me take over the northern side because my command stuff which is up on the northern side and he's interface with 9th army anyhow let me take over that sector and have Bradley just take care of the southern sector who he is in contact with well as we all know Bradley and Montgomery were not too happy campers and they're very they're at each other's throats so in any event and Bradley regards as an insult you know a chunk of the US Army is being subordinated to the verge 21st Army Group so there's a certain amount of bitterness there now this sector is in the sector that Montgomery commands now if you go and look the history the history of the units that are under there remain in Bradley's commune with 12th Army Group get a lot more detail in the unit's further up and I don't think that's peculiar to just this situation if you look at what happens with with Devers and the US forces down south and L sauce 7th us or I mean first French army you know you I have the stack of the green books the US official or army histories at home the the eto is like this for Bradley's units and the one for Devers is one volume so I've died you know I don't want to push this point too far but I do think that had agree that that had something to do with it I'm not saying it's the only reason but that had something to do with it good evening sir I'm asking you a question in relationship to your how can you account which you emitted about the failure of the operation known as on a mist how were us combined-arms team successful in defending these our den village the our den villages or that area of like the Low Countries Germany when they were encountering German units I mean there may not have been as many of them because this was considered you know the weaker area you know hence the Bulge that we now call um my question is how were how do you think how where are you are your combines armed teams were successful in the village defenses when they're encountering German equipment such as the FG 42 and the very first assault rifle in the world known as the Sturm Khepera stg44 yeah I'm the on the German small armed side as a variants easy answer they didn't have any Volks ran a deer units were supposed to get the top-notch equipment they're supposed to get Sturm aver 44s though whole idea of Volks grenadiers is given more defensive firepower in a smaller package of manpower there's fewer men and a Volks Grenadier division than in a conventional infantry division the unit that we're talking about here the 277th had very very few servitor of 44 they also they don't get into the villages they're killed by artillery outside the villages now the the fallschirmjäger the the 3rd fallschirmjaeger division down south did have fg42 s but that's just a case of very poor training in the unit there those are not really paratroopers down there they're not the caliber of troops they were in the 3rd fallschirmjaeger division in normandy there you just go back and look at the silo battles in normandy and listen to how the u.s. reports their encounters with 3rd fallschirmjaeger they're considered almost like Superman but the the division in the winter of 1944 is just a poor shadow of what it was in the summer and that's one of my points here about the Ardennes just because the German army was terrific in the summer of 1944 does not mean it was the same army in the winter of 1944 in your analysis of the German shortages of arms and equipment did that come from the post-war German accounts and if so what's your reliability factor was wouldn't have been to their advantage to show that they were short of everything I think that they were relatively honest about it because a lot of the statistics don't come from the unit's themselves they oftentimes come from I don't want to say quartermaster records because that's that's an inaccurate description of the records but they come from deep records they're not just coming from you know for example the divisional commanders who write their memoirs for foreign military studies they could go back and try to diminish their own responsibility by saying oh we didn't have this oh we didn't have that but you can in fact go back into other types of records from higher commands for example there's a whole series of these charts which lists division by division that are taking part in the Ardennes campaign and they list in excruciating detail every single weapon that these units have and that's that stuff isn't falsified these are contemporary documents they're written at the time and they were for use in the central headquarters in Berlin to get some appreciation for the strengths or the weaknesses of their units so yes I think that the FMS studies you do have to be careful with because there could be some attempts of justification for the defeats but I think that when you look at the internal German army records that you you you get a clearer sense of it and a more precise sense of it thank you very good speech two-part question please do you think that Piper was directly responsible for the Malmedy Massacre and the second question is when they let's say the 106 division I think relieved the second Indian division on the line you have any idea the number of casualties took place in the 106 Green division on the piper situation I'm going to completely defer because I've never really done any serious work on a Danny Parker who is a very well-known historian American historian on the Battle of the Bulge he'd recently wrote a book on the Malmedy Massacre so if you are interesting that I'd go and get Danny Parker's book he's a really good researcher and I might add I don't know if he wants me to say this but I know he's doing some further work in that area so if you are interest in that whole issue I would go and take a look at his stuff he does you know really first-rate work 106 had three infantry regiments in a line they lost two there was only one regiment I don't remember the exact number of troops it was pride they probably lost somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand troops but it was it was roughly in that neighborhood that was the single most serious defeat of the US Army in the in the battle of bulge for those of you who aren't familiar with 106 was a brand new green division which had literally arrived in the Ardennes only a few days before they got shifted into the front of line and without any combat experience at all two of the regiments were encircled they surrendered one regiment survived ladies and gentlemen with that it is my pleasure to introduce mr. Geoffrey Mangelsdorf the director here at the AHEC to make a few words so Steven thank you so much for your presentation the end and more so I I think the dialogue afterwards you are clearly a scholar and author researcher through and through the kind of folk that we like to have present here to this kind of crowd and as is in keeping with great military tradition most of you all would recognize that we traditionally around the army recognize a great performance great two great things with the presentation of a coin and we have a similar tradition here at USA I hope that you would accept this as a small token of our appreciation it'll go up in the wall in my office [Applause]

Channel: The USAHEC

Views: 166,508

Keywords: USAHEC, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Steven Zaloga, Panzer Division, World War II, Battle of the Bulge

Id: 6LOfS2kp7V8

Length: 66min 30sec (3990 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/JustARandomCatholic]

Hello,

I'm very fond of Zaloga, and this is a good lecture of his. However, please remember to add a ~paragraph sized submission statement, explaining what this lecture is, what it talks about, interesting arguments it makes, etc. Thanks in advance!

[u/pier4r]

Why I find it interesting?

The lecture goes to the background story of the ardennes offensive and then in details (many know the general information about the battle of the bulge but now why things went south in detail). For example the fact that the roads that the German offensive had to use, were unsufficient.

Plus there are tidbits, for example the fact that before the ardenness there were two counteroffensive using armoured divisions on the German side, one of which was not even felt so because it was executed really poorly (piecemeal).

Way more info are in the lecture and related sources.