Chapter 391
By late afternoon, the Luftwaffe and the Red Air Force were only impressing by their absence over several stretches of the front. Losses had been high on both sides, but the Allied Air Forces had been able to replace them far more easily, helping them to gain air superiority, something that they would keep for the remainder of the battle. Something else that had helped them was that especially in the Luftwaffe, pilot quality had been steadily decreasing since losses had started to climb after the fall of Vienna. Until then, the German training system had been able to cope with the losses, if only barely, but once the Allies could bring more planes to bare in the relatively open air-space north of the Alps, the scale tipped. Fuel shortages at the few training schools and the German practice to keep their ace pilots at the front until they were either wounded or died did not help.
This was in stark contrast to British practice. Even before the war RAF Training Command had been far more capable to increase it's throughput, and that was helped by the fact that the Axis powers were more and more left behind in terms of technology. By now RAF Fighter Command was effectively an all-jet force in Europe, and after a number of costly mistakes had evolved the tactics to go with the new aircraft. Meanwhile the Germans and Soviets were both developing jets of their own, but neither the Me-262 nor the Yak-15 existed in numbers large enough to warrant combat use and the Mig-9 prototype had already had it's fatal crash at that stage.
If all this is kept in mind, it should come as no surprise that when Army Group Centre's headquarters being moved as a routine precaution and before Hitler could forbid it, Field Marshal Rommel's car was caught by two roving British Meteor fighter-bombers. One of them was shot down by the escort as the pilot pulled out of his attack run, but the other showered the area with more rockets and bombs. All of the passengers of Rommel's staff car were wounded, though what kept the Field Marshal's wounds from being too serious was that the rocket that came closest went off on the opposite side of the car.
Even so, Army Group Centre's command structure was temporarily incapacitated as Generaloberst Marcks, his Chief of Staff, had already been heavily wounded earlier in the day. Ultimately both men would survive the battle and the war, but the air attack still gave the Allies an advantage for a few critical hours while the Germans sorted themselves out. Normally one could have expected whoever was temporarily in charge at the new command post to keep things going, but between deteriorating communications and Generalleutnant Schuster, a recent transfer directly from the OKW, not being the most decisive and capable officer in the history of the Wehrmacht taking three hours to decide that Rommel might not arrive after all the Allies managed position themselves for the big counter-attack in the morning without anyone on the Axis side putting the pieces together. Rommel and Marcks were notorious amongst their peers for being able to sniff out traps, but with both of them out of the picture, no one took countermeasures while that was still possible. In fact Marcks would never return to the front and ended up surrendering the field hospital he was being treated at to a Major of the RAMC when British troops arrived to take over.
The Allied attack went in just before dawn the next morning. General Zhukov was kept busy with holding and probing attacks against his left flank and Allied mechanized spearheads attacked and crashed through both flanks of the German bulge in the Allied lines. What heralded the effective destruction of Army Group Centre on that day was that in fact the Germans on the field that day were still a very strong force, but also very brittle. Constant action had depleted ammunition stores for everyone, but especially the Germans in the bulge suffered from logistical issues caused by a mixture of destruction caused by the fighting, destruction caused on purpose by retreating Allied forces and generally the state of the German economy. The bulge itself was seventy kilometres wide and some forty deep, containing bunched up elements of three German Armies that prepared for one final effort against the admittedly weak Allied forces directly opposing them. On paper that was a very strong force, but they had suffered in a war of attrition against the Allies for months and months on end, with fewer and fewer replacements of men and machines making it to them, to the point that one of those Armies was to be dissolved to get the others back up to strength. They were also exhausted after days of near constant fighting with little sleep, something that also was true for their Allied counterparts.
Still, the two Allied spearheads quickly broke through the weak Volksgrenadier Divisions guarding the right flank of the bulge and made good progress towards the German rear areas. On the other side, it was more difficult. Here Panzerbrigade 17 just so happened to be in the way of the Allied advance and was supported by elements of the 12th Guards Rifle Division, therefore putting up much more of a fight, though they too were eventually forced to withdraw under the weight of Allied firepower.
By the time Field Marshal Rommel had awoken, left the hospital against the orders of his doctors and finally returned to his headquarters, it was eleven in the morning and two British spearheads were rampaging through his rear areas. He ordered an immediate retreat only to be told that Berlin had given 'hold in place' orders and was enforcing this rigorously. Rommel had his staff prepare the move anyway and tried to telephone Berlin to request permission to retreat.
Which was denied as can be expected. Normally he would have ignored that order and retreated anyway, but at around twelve, when a German counter-attack against the Italians came closest of everything on that day to derailing allied plans, a number of SS officers just so happened to come by with hand-delivered orders from Hitler that he had issued earlier in the day and that merely reinforced what Rommel had already been told. Unwilling to openly desert, he did what he was told under the eyes of the “messengers”.
Not that he could have done very much. The counter-attack that the Italian forces so bravely fought off had eaten up the last of his reserves, and at noon sharp the Allies started a general attack all along the front from the Rhine to the pre-war Czechoslovak border. They to used some of their last reserves, but unlike with the Wehrmacht, those were units that hadn't seen serious action at all over the last few days.
Rommel kept begging Berlin for permission to withdraw, but by the time he decided to do it anyway after being denied again, it was three in the afternoon, British forward units were only thirty kilometres apart after a lightning-fast advance against little opposition as most of the rear was either not defended at all or by provisional infantry by units that were not that great to begin with. This only left a few roads, and very soon they were clogged up by convoys of wounded, high-priority specialists and the first combat units. Signals intercepts soon revealed this to the Allies.
Marshal Alexander had expected this to happen earlier, and decided to take an even greater gamble by ordering an all-out attack with the aim of keeping more of the German forces in the bulge pinned in place.
That his ended up working out as well as it did is a sign of how brittle the Wehrmacht had become at this point, because even the exhausted Allied Forces, the 7th Armoured among them started making surprisingly good progress almost from the start. The day was coming to an end, but there was an opportunity to punch a gaping hole in the axis front line, and Alexander intended to take it, while his counterpart on the other side could do nothing but watch the collapse. By the time the cauldron was closed that evening it was already dark, but still, twenty-five thousand Axis troops had managed to escape, for the most part rear-area units and another three-hundred thousand were outside of the cauldron at the flanks.
Inside of it there were more. That all of them had been cut of by a numerically inferior force in only a day's worth of fighting is not only a feat unparalleled in the history of the British Army before or since but can by and large be blamed on the interference from Hitler. In the face of two year's worth of constant reverses, Stalin effectively leaving the Germans hung out to dry and the situation at the front, he found it easy to break the Generals at the OKW to his will. What didn't help was that the initial 'breakthrough' had happened on such a narrow stretch of front that everything was asking for something like this to be attempted, and beyond that no one would have ever imagined this level of success. The Allies had merely wanted to force a German withdrawal, expecting far more resistance once breaking through the initial defences.
Even though fighting in and around the cauldron would last for three more weeks, for all intents and purposes the Battle of the Fulda Gap was over. It had been the largest tank battle in history.
Such was the situation on the ground.
One could expect that the Allies would not be able to keep the cauldron closed for very long, but it needs to be remembered that there were simply no axis forces in position to do much of anything. Always one to reinforce failure, Hitler had thrown everything left into the battle, something that came back to bite him now. To the point that when told that the Allies had cut off a quarter-million men with seemingly next to no effort, he started one of his most famous rants only to be cut off mid-sentence by a heart attack that would end up leaving him permanently weakened. In what had become something of a theme recently, this delayed what immediate Axis response there could be.
However, that was by no means the end of the story. Counter-attacks from inside and outside of the pocket managed to open escape routes on three different occasions, allowing another twenty-five thousand to re-join the rest of them. What remained inside the pocket were, for all intents and purposes, the bulk of the combat forces available to Rommel. What had not been cut off or escaped was a hodge-podge of men that came from just about any of the units that were close to whatever breakout was established at the time. After the third attempt to break out from the inside, Rommel was forbidden from trying again and was promised relief by Hitler when he was capable of working again in the form of a 'massive and sweeping' attack by Waffen-SS General Steiner. However Hitler seemed to be of the belief that Alexander had been twiddling his thumbs since the initial battle, and was unwilling to realize that it had been more than a week since then at this point. Instead the Allies had fallen back on their ample experience from World War One and dug in deep in a fashion that would have made Field Marshal Haig sit up and take notice, though if he would have approved of the concept of hedgehog defence is open to debate.
General Steiner had been given sweeping authority to take units from the reserve to restore the front, but again Hitler was increasingly prone to ignoring reality as there simply was no strategic reserve left. When he reported back to the OKW that he was unable to assemble a force large enough to be more than moving targets in the week that was given, it took them a staggering sixteen hours before anyone worked up the courage to tell Hitler. The response was his most famous rant, mostly because it was immortalized in what is considered the definitive treatment of the battle, the award-winning German TV miniseries Fuldaschlacht and the memetic status clips of it attained on the Interlink.
At any rate, time was against the Germans. They had little in the way of real reserves left, as the Volkssturm can't really be seen as a true military force. The Soviets claimed that due to the ongoing fighting in China no more units could be sent at the moment, which was even true, mostly, and lastly for the first two weeks the Allies were content sitting on the defensive to the north and concentrating operations on containing and reducing the pocket, in fact it ended up helping them greatly. Being as fixated on relieving Army Group Centre as he was, Hitler refused permission for any sort of attack along the German half of the front even though both Soviet and German commanders practically begged for it.
Inside the pocket meanwhile the situation grew increasingly dire as time wore on. The Luftwaffe and Red Air Force had caught the worst of it in the Battle of the Fulda Gap and the Allies surged a dozen fighter squadrons from especially the Italian and Royal Indian Air Forces to replace exhausted units, so maintained almost total air control, if only locally, so already limited supplies were used up without replacement. Still, Field Marshal Rommel was confident that he could hold out long enough. But alas, something happened that caused an almost immediate collapse.
As with his not being allowed to break out, the Allied decision to break in was a wholly political one. In London Prime Minister Churchill was smelling victory, being eager to see British troops marching through Berlin, so he kept on pressuring Alexander to attack immediately. The Field Marshal intended to do so eventually and refused to be rushed. Oddly enough this was a time when Churchill turned out to be right as events both during the attack and later in the year would bear out, as when Alexander acquiesced and launched a hastily prepared attack, the hungry and tired German forces, after weeks of near constant air and artillery attacks, folded like a house of cards almost immediately in the face of rested and resupplied allied troops. The 8th Army attacked from the south and faced only weak, almost scattered resistance. In the face of this, Alexander fully unleashed them, with orders to attack as far north as was deemed practicable, which led to a meeting at an abandoned farmhouse on the 8th of May 1944 between Acting Major General Niemczyk and a certain German...
~**---**~
Field Marshal Rommel had put on his best uniform. For what he was about to do it seemed to be the proper thing, but the British Officer sitting in front of him had not done so. Oh, he was still not quite in the dirty, somewhat grimy battle dress of the two soldiers escorting him, he was a staff officer after all, but he had the dust of the road on him and the way he had carried himself on walking in told Rommel that the man had once held a combat command, something reinforced by his relatively young age for the crossed baton, sword and star of a Major General he was wearing.
His name sounded very Polish, which irked some of his own officers, but between a pronounced Scottish accent and his very... British demeanour as well as the cap badge of a Scottish Armoured Regiment Rommel decided that he wasn't dealing with one of the Emigree officers that had led the Polish Army for most of the war so far. A war that he now considered to be lost for Germany. That had been true for quite a while if he was to be honest with himself, but the last hope hadn't died for him until he had heard that the Soviets wouldn't be pulling units from the front in China and when he had seen the British fly over Berlin in daylight with the Luftwaffe being glaring in it's absence. They had even interrupted this year's Führergeburtstag in April by triggering the air raid sirens in the middle of Hitler's speech and then bombing several targets all over unoccupied Germany with unheard of precision. Rommel had heard that the Soviet Ambassador had still not been found in the rubble of their embassy. Their fighter jets had driven it home by flying in formation over the city, releasing red, white and blue smoke while they did so. It had all lasted less than twenty minutes, but it showed that the Allies could own the air even over Berlin for a time if they so chose.
And less than a month later he was sitting here, about to surrender what was, on paper, about a quarter of the best troops the Wehrmacht still had but what had been reduced to little more than two understrength and immobile corps in order to avoid them being starved to death or crushed by British tanks. Somehow it had happened again. Then, there was no somehow about it. Even though they had possessed the numbers, the oh-so famed Berlin-Moscow Axis had been out fought and out-generaled.
“So why did you want to meet with me, Field Marshal?” the General asked, fully aware that Rommel had wanted to meet with Field Marshal Alexander who had declined the offer and instead had ordered the commander of the closest unit to go. Which just so happened to be the 7th Armoured Division, a unit that he had faced over every single battlefield of the war. But he didn't have much grounds to complain, so he stiffened in his chair.
“General, I am here to offer the unconditional surrender of Army Group Centre and any associated units to the forces of the British Empire.”
There, he had said it and become a traitor. His British counterpart tilted his head and took a deep breath.
“Under what conditions, if I may ask?” he said, leaving the 'you are in no position to demand any, so don't waste my time' was left unsaid, but Rommel could hear it anyway, reinforcing his opinion that he was dealing with a field officer.
“I'm in no position to demand anything, but I have two requests.” he said, pausing until the General motioned for him to continue. “My field hospitals are running out of everything, so could your medical corps expedite taking them over?”
The General nodded. “That can be arranged, Field Marshal. What else?”
Rommel sighed and thought of the picture that sat on the overturned munitions crates acting as a desk in his headquarters. “Could my wife and son be told that I am still alive? I hear that they were... found behind your lines a few months ago.”
“I will see what I can do. Was there anything else?”
Rommel shook his head.
“Good then, Field Marshal.” the General said and sighed. “So, to ensure that this goes off without any undue issues, you have three hours to return to your headquarters and order your units to surrender. Anyone refusing to do so and-or resisting any allied personnel arriving to take there surrender will be dealt with harshly.”
Understanding what the General was saying, Rommel thanked his lucky stars that the last significant SS units had been wiped out the week before when they had insisted on leading a counter-attack to the north against a black-african British Division.
“I understand. All units will be ordered to surrender without any acts of resistance, but there may be some who refuse those lawful orders.” he said, effectively washing his hands of anyone who was to stupid or loyal to that Austrian house painter to see what the clock had struck.
“Well, I have to go back and inform my superiors.”
The General had been accompanied by a member of the Press Corps, and the picture taken that day would join the ranks of a number of iconic photographs taken during the war.
tbc
Wow, more than a decade....
