Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
This past December 16th 2022 marked the 78th anniversary of the German Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (“Operation Watch on the Rhine“) offensive in the Ardennes area of Europe, otherwise known popularly as “The Battle of the Bulge.” The “official narrative” for this battle is that it was an “intelligence surprise” where “Ultra’ code breaking signals intelligence missed because Hitler kept all of the important communications on untappable telephone/telegraph land lines or special couriers. The sole exception being General Patton’s 3rd Army G-2 intelligence officer Colonel (later Brigadier General) Oscar Koch who didn’t rely upon ULTRA and put together the complete picture through a process now known as “All Source Analysis“. Which built an intelligence picture for every intelligence discipline. signals, human, photographic, geographic, combat reports plus dogged order of battle cross filing that sorted every bit of information to plot existence, location and status of enemy ground and air units. A week before the German attack, December 9th 1944, Colonel Koch briefed General Patton’s full 3rd Army staff as to German capabilities and most dangerous probable intentions of those capabilities. Based upon this briefing, Patton ordered his 3rd Army staff to put together a series of counter attack options that were immortalized in a scene from the 1970 movie PATTON.
Figure above from 1997 masters paper “Signal Security In The Ardennes Offensive 1944-1945“ Laurie G. Moe Buckhout, Maj. USA
Like a lot of narratives of World War 2, it uses a couple of nuggets of truth with the German ULTRA security black out and Colonel Koch’s brief to Patton to hide and conceal more than inform. It turns out that a lot more people on the allied side than Colonel Koch foresaw the impending German offensive. And that the failure to act on these multiple sources of accurate intelligence was a Command Failureby the “Ultra Cliques” of allied officers at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), United States Strategic Air Force (USSTAF), the American 12th Army Group, and American 1st Army.
This command failure came less from a German security induced blindness of ULTRA than from a months long manipulation of Ultra intelligence data stream by senior officials in the British government — located in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the “Oil Lobby” through out the Air Ministry and Whitehall ‘Committee Bureaucracy’ as well as the Directorate of Bombing Operations in the Air Ministry — intent on making German oil supplies the top strategic target set over German transportation targets in the Combined Bomber Offensive. Their motives here were not only to collapse the German economy as a “War Termination Strategy,” but more importantly, make sure Air Powerwas seen as responsible for the German collapse after the Russian capture of the Romanian Ploesti oil fields in August 1944. (If you are seeing some post-war institutional motivations here…you are correct.)
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These manipulations were discovered in February 1945 by SHAEF when the after action forensic analysis by Royal Air Force Deputy Chief of Air Staff (DCAS) Air Marshall Bottomley found the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (CSTC) was systematically removing messages relating to the distress of the German Railroad, and collapse of the German economy resulting from the railway problems, starting in the fall of 1944.
This systematic manipulation had the perverse effect of leaving those cleared for Ultra intelligence in senior levels of the allied armies less informed as to the state of Northern German railways building up the German Army Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein strike force than the three American Army’s of 12th Army Group in contact with the Germans. As the lower level coded messages American radio intelligence were vacuuming up — along with higher level codded messages for Benchley Park — they were selectively removed from the bundled Ultra intelligence appreciations sent back to SHAEF from Benchley Park. This altered intelligence left most senior ULTRA users at Army Group level and higher far less able to believe more accurate information that arrived in early December 1944.
Operation Watch on the Rhine as planned by Hitler and the German General Staff. Source: Wikipedia
THE ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS OF INTELLIGENCE
ULTRA and other high level actionable signals intelligence since WW2 are always under tight security. Not destroying the source of the intelligence is the primary reason given as to why…and it is the best one available. However, people who are gate keepers to that knowledge have huge amounts of de facto power. Power that is exercised via the act of granting or withholding access.
The reasons for withholding access often have nothing to do with security or supporting the man on the bleeding edge and everything to do with the careerist and political ambitions of those granting access to secrets. This is where the organization politics of intelligence live.
These considerations of organizational politics generally falls between the stools of political/diplomatic historians and military/intelligence historians as the latter are usually sponsored by or have patrons in government and the former are generally clueless due to their professional location in the Ivory tower of academia.
Professional military officers are the primary authors that touch this subject at all — such that the general public are aware of it outside leaked/declassified decades later top secret government reports – because they have more “skin” in this game and anyone else. Bad intelligence can get them killed, lose battles and lose wars.
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The best in examining it are ex-military officers who fit the profile of what I refer to as “Iron Colonels.” They are *Really Good* officers who are high end field grade rank who should have been flag rank from their energy, professional skill and dedication to their military institution but are some combination of the following: in the wrong career field, lacking the right professional flag rank connections or missing the political polish to both avoid creating enemies and having made all the right assignments to get notice from the people who influence the flag rank promotion boards. These officers generally know where all the bodies are buried, or have the professional experience and drive to know where to look to unearth the “dirty laundry” and document it.
One such officer appears to be John Stubbington, a Cold War era RAF electronic warfare officer turned defense contractor who wrote the book “Kept in the Dark – The Denial to Bomber Command of Vital Ultra and Other Intelligence During World War II.” [Electronic warfare is one of those high energy/high technical skill but dead end for military flag rank promotion career fields in western military’s.] It was in kindle location 6292 of his book where I found his documentation of Air Marshall Bottomley’s February 1945 Post-Ardennes forensic analysis of the ULTRA messages that discovered the black out of German transportation messages to SHAEF.
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This link is to the best review of “Kept in the Dark” you are going to find anywhere —
He graduated from RAF Technical College in 1961 and embarked on a career in electronic and defense intelligence, working with Bomber Command, the Electronic Warfare Support Unit, Support Command Signals HQ, USAF Intelligence Division, and the Royal Signals & Radar Establishment. After retiring from the RAF in 1985 he spent another 20 years in the UK defense industry. In other words, what this book is about is exactly what he knows. In still other words, he’s not just somebody with a conspiracy theory.
I’ve been corresponding with John Stubbington for about a year on an e-mail list involving WW2’s RAF 100 Group (Bomber Support), which provided electronic warfare support to RAF Bomber Command, and only recently finished reading his book.
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UK ULTRA DYSFUNCTION
“Kept in the Dark” is -NOT- light reading. There is a lot of organizational ground to cover in documenting the growth of the UK’s wartime intelligence structure supporting the Combined Bomber Offensive. And explaining how it came about that the UK Air Ministry didn’t provide ULTRA intercepts to the U.K. based RAF Fighter, Coastal and especially Bomber Commands. While at the same time it did so with British military overseas commands and first the American 8th Air Force and later the United States Strategic Air Force in England.
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“Kept in the Dark” has several real gems that are worth the hard slog beyond Air Marshall Bottomley’s Feb. 1945 post-Ardennes Offensive ULTRA intelligence postmortem.
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The USAAF chose not to create it’s own intelligence system in the UK and relied upon the intelligence system supporting Bomber Command.
The US Military traded everything it had on the Japanese codes, AKA the MAGIC decrypts, to get full access to Bletchley Park’s ULTRA materials in real time.
The USAAF was thus a very poor consumer of intelligence as it had no idea as to it’s real value, particularly regards materials from the UK’s Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW). The flawed intelligence on German ball bearings that resulted in the Second Raid on Schweinfurt in October 1943 came from MEW.
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The chief of RAF Bomber Command through out most of WW2, Air Marshall Harris on the other hand — unlike the USAAF leadership — knew where the MEW had started and how truly awful the MEW’s intelligence was. Harris had both the moral courage and operational authority to tell them to “sod off” regards when he termed “Panacea Targets” (Oil, ball bearings, aircraft assembly plants, etc) that were beyond the capability of his night bombers to strike accurately (until air superiority was won over France in the summer of 1944).
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But unlike the USAAF, Harris had of nothing value to trade the UK intelligence bureaucrats for direct ULTRA access.
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So they cut him out.
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This set a “bad behavior precedent” for the UK’s Air Ministry and Whitehall which would make itself felt after D-Day.
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SHAEF AND USSTAF HQ’s GET MOVED & PLAYED
Returning to the Ardennes story line, when SHAEF and USSTAF headquarters’ moved to continental Europe in the summer and fall of 1944. They both lost all the secure land line communications with Bletchley Park. This radically narrowed the secure bandwidth from Bletchley Park available to both headquarters. Only a few secure encrypted telecommunications channels and air couriers were available to reach SHAEF & USSTAF and this provided the means and the opportunity to go with the motive for the “intelligence manipulation by excluding ULTRA messages” games to occur for determining the bombing priority between German oil and transportation.
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And by “manipulation” I mean leaving out data from 20,000 ULTRA intercepts a week starting from October 1944. The following is from a October 1990 RAF historical seminar by Lord Solly Zuckerman via page 65 at the link —
“We now know that the destruction of the railway system had ruined the German economy by October 1944. We also know that the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (CSTC) were sitting on ULTRA intercepts that told the true story from October; they had 20,000 intercepts a weekthey either didn’t have an interest in or the staff to deal with, and it is now known that had we gone on hitting at those nodal centers in a concentrated way, that we had been doing in the last quarter of 1944, the Air Forces would have played a greater part in ending the war than in fact they did.
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A map of the German “Operation Watch on the Rhine” offensive as executed through 25 Dec 1944
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THE US ARMY ULTRA COMMAND CLIQUES & THE ARDENNES OFFENSIVE
Why that several months manipulation is important with the American command failure in the Ardennes requires several other military officer’s written efforts to understand.
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The first is Major Laurie G. Moe Buckhout’s 1997 master’s paper “Signal Security in the Ardennes Offensive 1944-1945.” The second is the August 2001 masters paper “Wizardry for Air Campaigns – Signals Intelligence Support to the Cockpit” by Captain Gilles K. Van Nederveen, USAF. Next is US Army historian Forrest C. Pogue. The fourth is a You Tube lecture by Battle of the Bulge veteran and now deceased History Professor Andrew Jameson. Next is Maj. Richard Riccardelli via his 1985 article “Electronic Warfare in WWII”, in the Winter 1985 issue of the Army Communicator, pages 40 – 49. Sixth is a Youtube presentation by recent US Army intelligence officer and General Patton author Leo Barren and finally a WW2 US Army Captain W. W. Rostow who working for Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) as a “Combat Economist.” Rostow later became a leading US government economist in the Lyndon Banes Johnson Presidential Administration
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Maj. Buckhout’s Ardennes paper explains where the signals intelligence line was drawn between “ULTRA” level security and lower level signals intelligence in SHAEF, how the US Army viewed intelligence officers institutionally at the time and how the ULTRA gate holder role caused a dysfunctional relationship between 1st Army’s G-2 Colonel Benjamin “Monk” Dickson and the following American Army officers — the 12th Army Chief of Staff Brigadier General Truman C. Thorson, 12th Army Group G-2 General Edwin Silbert, 12th Army Group’s signal intelligence officer Col Grant Williams and the 1st Army’s ULTRA Special Liaison Unit commander Lt. Col Alfred G. Rosengarten.
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This personnel set up is important for a number of US Army institutional background reasons. Pre-War US Army intelligence officers were not organized in a professional branch. G-2 intelligence officers were picked at the whim of combat arms commanders based on things in their back ground in things like language skills or past assignments as military attaché’s. Cavalrymen without either language skills or attaché assignments filled many of the lower level intelligence officer slots as their training in scouting was also seen as a good background for battalion or regimental G-2 positions.
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In terms of US Army institutional culture, G-2 intelligence officers were generally looked down upon by combat arms officers. By the lights of combat arms officers, particularly the infantrymen who dominated US Army flag ranks, anyone who was any good would be in infantry or artillery. So if you were really good as a G-2, you had to have some sort of character flaw that kept you from being a combat arms officer. What ULTRA signals intelligence and the secret security structure arising from did for US Army G-2 officers in WW2 was give them tickets to promotion, access to flag rank officers and power. This created an in-group versus out-group command clique system that arose based upon ULTRA access.
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Given this background, here was the short form regards the aforementioned dysfunctional relationships — Col. Dickson was a hard drinking, foreign language skilled pessimist who at one time had been General Bradley’s intelligence officer when Bradley headed 1st Army. When Bradley got 12th Army group he chose the socially polished former attaché’ General Silbert rather than take Dickson with him. This didn’t sit well with Dickson. Then it got worse.
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THE PRICE OF TOO MUCH INTELLIGENCE CLASSIFICATION
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US Army intelligence doctrine in WW2 called for low and mid-level enemy code breaking to be decentralized so as to provide at Army and Corps level commanders with actionable intelligence as fast as possible. This is what Col. Dickson was trained to do. Some time before D-Day, in keeping with British ULTRA security protocols regards sources and methods, SHAEF instituted a hard security line regards low level German Army “PEARL” encryption and and medium level encryption “CIRO PEARL” systems were to be broken. PEARL was still allowed to be done at the radio intelligence companies intercept sites in real time. CIRO PEARL was to be done at Army level, but this delayed intelligence by a week compared to the previous distribution system. Additionally, the control of the radio intelligence assets to do this work was at 12th Army Group level under Col Grant Williams.
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The bottom line was 1st Army G-2 Col Dickson had been frozen out the “ULTRA” command cliques that had developed both in SHAEF and at 12th Army Group.
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To deal with this, Col. Dickson did three things. First, he continued to use his British 21st Army Group contacts developed in the run up to D-Day for higher level intelligence after 12th Army Group was inserted above him in lieu of dealing with Gen Silbert. [This is important because Col Dickson was receiving pre-CSTC blackout transportation campaign battle damage assessments through 21st Army Group ULTRA before and during the Normandy Campaign.] Next, he ignored Col. Williams on the tasking of 1st Army radio intelligence units. And finally, he chose to brief all ULTRA intelligence to 1st Army commander General Hodges instead of Special Liaison Unit (SLU) commander Lt. Col Alfred G. Rosengarten.
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The Radio Intelligence (RI) Diagram above shows the over all 12th Army Group RI organization with General Patton’s 3rd Army Radio intelligence RI network broken out. Col. Dickson’s 1st Army had a RI network identical to 3rd Army’s also under Col Grant Williams’s Signal Security Detachment “D” Source: “Electronic Warfare in WWII”, Army Communicator, Winter 1985
All this meant Col Dickson’s 1st Army intelligence files spanned the before AND during the ULTRA “Oil vs. Transportation” manipulation black out by CSTC. Using his contacts with 21st Army Group and his own signals intelligence assets — likely listening to German railway message traffic that was removed by the CSTC between Bletchley Park and SHAEF — he absolutely nailed when the Germans were going to attack almost to the day.
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As Jörg Muth author of “Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901–1940” recently put it on the H-War e-mail list —
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…the G-2 of First Army, “Monk” Dickson, not only alerted his superiors to be build up, but predicted a German offensive in his famous Intel report 37 nearly to the exact date. His report was partly suppressed by the Chief of Staff of First Army as no one wanted to hear about a German comeback when supposedly they were on the ropes.
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In the decades since the Ardennes offensive, Col. Dickson has had his character assassinated and professional skill as an intelligence officer tarnished by biographers of General and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower as well as General Omar Bradley. These authors make much of Col Dickson being on leave in Paris when Hitler’s armored fist landed in the Ardennes. Carlo D’este is one of the worst offenders in that regard.
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I will note that not all the Eisenhower and Bradley historians are as unfair to Col. Dickson as Carlo D’este. One of them was US Army historian Forrest C. Pogue who had a interviewed Col. Dickson, General Sibert and Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff General General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith for several months in 1946 to 1948. This is what Pogue said regards SHAEF’s “Ultra Cliques” to a National Security Agency conference in 1980 that was finally declassified in 2007. And there was more than one such Ultra clique within SHAEF and below it.
As a matter of fact, in the course of a number of months in 1946 through 1948, interviewing Eisenhower’s G-2 (the British general, Major General Kenneth Strong), General Sibert, Colonel Dickson, and a number of others,
I concluded that these chiefs of intelligence at various levels cooperated very little. When I tell you that Montgomery’s G-2** intended to describe Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence as the “Chinless Horror” and felt that he was the least informed of any intelligence chief, you get some notion of the disarray at that level at that time.
This is what Pogue reported to the NSA in 1980 regards Col. Dickson after he and another assistant put together what they together was every ULTRA message from Sept 1944 through the end of the Ardennes campaign to establish “What did they know and when did they know it” for the US Army:
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Later on, the First Army G-2 insisted that his report on 10 December indicated that there indeed was going to be an attack on our front. But when you read all of the possibilities, and all of the capabilities, you find that the area he continually identified was one at the point where Ninth U. S. Army and the British Army joined. It was farther north on Monty’s front than it was down, almost to the point at which the Third U. S. and the First U. S. Army joined. I remember he came down once after he saw my chapter, bringing a great number of graphs and charts under his arm. And he said, “You see, here is where I identified all of the air targets which shows that there was a buildup of German supplies and so we were attacking it.” But I said that he failed to note that the charts also showed that there were nearly as many first priority targets up here in the northern sector, and the attack didn’t come there at all. But that’s rather true of all things that go wrong-the tendency to find out that what you said was right and to leave out all the points at which you said exactly what should not have been said.
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Please note that the mention of the suppression of Col Dickson’s report by General Hodges Chief of staff Brigadier General Truman C. Thorson was “somehow missed” by Forrest Pogue here. Given this was 1946-1948, and Thornson was a command flag officer, we should not be too surprised here. Now this is how General Silbert, General Bradley’s G-2 officer, defended himself to Pogue:
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One of the appalling things is again and again the tendency to equate German reacting to American reaction-the tendency to say that we would not attack under these conditions, therefore they would not attack under these conditions. Later on we said we should have known their psychology. This was the last time that Hitler had the chance to choose, and he chose to take advantage of a period when he assumed that the effete British and Americans would be tending to Christmas festivities rather than paying any attention to the war.
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After I had written these particular pages [for The Supreme Command], I submitted them to the various G-2s involved and I got some almost unbelievable snorts of rage. Some of them came in particular from General Bradley’s G-2, General Sibert. One day the Chief of Military History said to me, “That general’s rather upset with you. I wonder if he could come and talk to you?” And I said “I’m not accustomed to having generals come to see me. I go to see them.” So I went to his headquarters in Washington. His first question was, “How high is your clearance for access to secret material?” And I said I was “BIGOTed”* at the time of the Neptune phase of Overlord. I’d had cryptographic clearance, Top Secret, and all of that. General Sibert responded that this was not high enough and he’d be court martialed if he told me. I’ve been told in later years he was the main source for Anthony Cave Brown’s books. But he didn’t tell Brown everything, so you get some things skewed in Brown as you see when you get to Ultra revelations. And he said [that] if he could tell me, then I wouldn’t hold him responsible for the intelligence failure. There was some information that they were no longer getting that they used to have. Well, that was that. It is very difficult to write history on the basis of “if you could just know what I know then you would know.“
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The most important of the “other important people” Pogue interviewed
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What they ignore is what now deceased (as of 2014) military historian and US Army Ardennes veteran Andrew Jameson found regards pre-attack Allied intelligence, see the 11:00 to 13:30 minute mark at this link:
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Mason Lecture: Andrew Jameson, “Battle of the Bulge”
The National WWII Museum
Published on Oct 11, 2012
Dr. Jameson lays out that starting on December 7, 1944, General Eisenhower had a several day strategy meeting with his Army Group commanders — Generals Montgomery, Bradley and Devers — at Maastricht, Netherlands regards the coming Allied Rhine campaign. During the meeting Patton sends direct to Eisenhower’s G-2 Col Koch’s Dec 9, 1944 intelligence appreciation for 3rd Army, by-passing General Bradley and 12th Army Group. Eisenhower hands the message to Bradley, whose own G-2 sends it to 1st Army’s G-2…Col Dickson.
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Likely the endorsement by 12th Army Group G-2 General Silbert attached to the forwarded 3rd Army message and definitely the later December 16, 1944 SHAEF intelligence appreciation of German Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein preparations make clear that Bradley and everyone at SHAEF thought the German build up was“purely defensive.”
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General Hodges, through his chief of staff, and General Bradley through his discounting 3rd Army G-2 intelligence officer Colonel Oscar Koch’s report made clear they were officers only willing to hear good news. So nothing Col. Dickson said or did was going to make a difference. The entire chain of command above Col. Dickson had a case of VICTORY DISEASE so profound that he quite literally had in his hand his 3rd Army peer’s identical appreciation of German capabilities and most threatening possible course of actions and all the commanding officers above him would not believe.
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So Col Dickson took leave, went to Paris on December 15, 1944, and drank heavily as the hammer fell.
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OF ANTWERP, SHAEF’S VICTORY DISEASE, AND OPERATION UNTERNEHMEN WACHT AM RHEIN
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The key to both the German hammer that 1st Army G-2 Col Dickson was drinking over, and the VICTORY DISEASE so prevalent at the SHAEF commander’s meeting at Maastricht, Netherlands, was the Port of Antwerp. The port was the logistical Schwerpunkt — or roughly translated in English the strategic center of gravity — of the Western front. There were two good reasons for this. First, Hitler’s orders to have every Atlantic port west of the German border held with a heavily fortified stay behind garrisons was, strategically, very savvy. As it denied the Western Allies the ability to land enough food, fuel, and most importantly, the thousands of tons of artillery ammunition needed to break through German border fortifications close enough to the front. The systematic Allied destruction of the French railway network that had made the Normandy landings successful, had also robbed Western Allies of the logistical capability to breach the German border in 1944 without a closer major port.
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The second reason was a mistake made by the Allies in pushing Operation Market Garden after capturing the city of Antwerp in September 1944. The British XXXth Corp’s push towards Arnhem on the Dutch-German border through a “paratrooper carpet” of the US 82nd & 101st Airborne and British 1st Airborne Divisions was a dead end. A dead end that allowed the disorganized German Wehrmacht time to fortify the 80 mile (129 KM) long northern Belgium and southwestern Netherlands sea channel approaches to Antwerp. As an article in the historylearningsite.co.uk web site put it:
The capture of Antwerp would have solved all supply problems. The port could handle 1,000 ships at a time weighing up to 19,000 tons each. Antwerp had 10 square miles of docks, 20 miles of water front, and 600 cranes. Senior Allied commanders counted on Antwerp handing 40,000 tons of supplies a day – when it was captured. Antwerp was about 80 miles from the open sea on the River Scheldt. Between the port and the sea were the islands of Walcheren and North Beveland and South Beveland that was attached to mainland Holland by a small isthmus – all held by the Germans who could do a great deal to disrupt the flow of shipping into the port.
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It took the the British, Polish and Canadian troops of the 1st Canadian Army from October 2 to November 8, 1944, paying a blood price of over 12,000 battle casualties, to capture the area. It took a further three weeks to clear the channel of sea mines and block ships. During this time of combat and channel clearance, starting in October 1944, clouds of Luftwaffe V-1 cruise missiles were aimed at the port which required a screen of hundreds of anti-aircraft guns crewed by 22,000 Allied men to ring the port of Antwerp. (More V-1’s fell in the Antwerp area in the 167 days of Luftwaffe bombardment, ending in March 1945, than fell in London!) Finally, by December 14th, 19,000 tons of supplies were being unloaded at Antwerp each day.
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This strategic “logistical victory” was the backdrop for the decisions and deafness at that SHAEF meeting at Maastricht, Netherlands. The Allied “ULTRA command clique” was only thinking of what it was going to do to Hitler, not what Hitler could do to them. It collectively thought since it finally had Antwerp after five months. And it had Hitler’s “Command intent” with ULTRA. That they were the master of the universe because the Germans had to know the war was lost and every move Hitler could do had to be defensive.
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It did not occur to the Allied high command at Maastricht that their ULTRA perceptions could be manipulated, and not just by Hitler.
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Hitler, with his radio security preparations for Operation Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein, very much begged to differ with SHAEF about staying on the defensive. Yet despite Hitler’s directives, other German military preparations tipped off US Army and US Army Air Force G-2 officers across the line of contact with German ground forces in the last days before the German assault kicked off. This was in the short period of the time during which the 1st Army’s G-2 Col. Dickson went to Paris to drink and after his and General Patton’s warnings of Hitler’s impending attack.
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THE OTHER ALLIED INTELLIGENCE SHOES DROP
While Col. Dickson had reasons to drink, it was actually far worse than he knew. There were other very interesting and ignored intelligence indicators both “above his pay grade” at SHAEF and below it at the 28th Infantry Division, which never made it to him. These intelligence indicator “Dropped Shoes” of the German December 1944 Ardennes offensive that point to “command failure” by the “Ultra list” at SHAEF, 12th Army Group and 1st Army and not “intelligence failure” by those outside that group as the proximate cause of the “surprise” in the Ardennes Offensive.
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For the first shoe, see the diagram and following two passages that are from the 2001 dated research paper “Wizardry for Air Campaigns Signals Intelligence Support to the Cockpit” by Captain Gilles K. Van Nederveen, USAF.
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Communication diagram for the 3rd Radio Squadron Mobile (Ground) USAAF for Dec 1944. Note Detachment “A” and SHAEF at upper right. Source: “Wizardry for Air Campaigns Signals Intelligence Support to the Cockpit”
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Page 9
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“The 3rd RSM (G) was divided into three detachments to support Ninth Air Force units. Detachment A stayed with Ninth Air Force, Detachment B went to IX TAC and 70th Fighter Wing, and Detachment C supported XIX TAC and the 100th Fighter Wing. Detachment B landed in France on 8 June 1944, with the rest of the unit arriving shortly thereafter. The unit intercepted its first transmission on 9 June.15 In short order the detachment set up near Cricqueville which had a perforated steel plank airfield from which 354th Fighter Group flew P-51s. Meanwhile, Detachment A produced order of battle reports and situation reports and stayed in close touch with RAF Cheadle to assist in codebreaking. Detachments B and C passed all intelligence they intercepted directly to fighter control centers (FCCs) of the tactical air commands which, in turn, radioed American fighters and bombers. On 6 October 1944 Detachment D was set up to support XXIX TAC with Y intelligence. Concurrently Detachment A moved to support air planners at SHAEF, while Detachment E took over supporting Ninth Air Force.”
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Page 13
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“In 1944, preparations for the Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge) caused the German High Command to impose strict signal silence.ing preparations for the German operation. On 16 December 1944, using the L Detachment A of the 3rd RSM (G) may be the only allied unit that picked up signals indicatuftwaffe AAA as their source, codebreakers heard that 90 Ju-52 transports and 15 Ju-88 medium bombers were being moved in Germany. The message was cancelled but then repeated on December 17th. The aircraft carried Lt. Col. Von Der Heydte’s Luftwaffe paratroopers who were to jump behind Allied lines and cause confusion.
This fact was unknown to the codebreakers, but based on observed air traffic patterns, the 3rd RSM reported some sort of operation was being mounted by the Germans. The message was passed to SHAEF and acknowledged, but no action was taken by higher headquarters since no one really believed the Germans could mount an operation this late in the war. Moreover, Ultra, the German Engima code traffic, revealed nothing. On December 18th, finding German parachutes at Detachment B’s site in Jalhay, Belgium, the unit under Capt. Silverstein evacuated the site, saving it from the German ground assault. Capt. Silverstein wrote after the war that he believed, based on the reduced volume of intercepts in December 1944, that the Germans were using strict signal security to hide their preparations from the Allies. After-action reporting indicates that while the detachment’s signal was intercepted and passed on to higher headquarters, no one acted on it until the German attack began. German signal security was unusually good during the Battle of the Bulge.17 This gave U.S. SIGINT units little information with which to support Allied aircraft.
15. Arnold Franco, Code to Victory (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1998), p. 65. This is the 3rd only account written by a member of the RSM(G) and covers the unit from the UK till Arnold Franco’s discharge in 1945 from the Army.
17 Franco, 159.”
3rd RSM (G) radio intercept site in NW Europe. One of these sites was nearly over run by Luftwaffe paratroopers.
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SHAEF was quite literally told of the German commando parachute drops the day before and the day they happened…and ignored them.
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The final intelligence ‘dropped shoe’ comes from the G-2 of US Army General Simpson’s Ninth Army. The Ninth had been placed on the Northern flank of 12th Army Group in November 1944. In the few weeks Ninth Army occupied it’s positions, the Ninth Army’s G-2 officer not only identifies 6th Panzer Army’s assembly area, but he convinced Lt. Gen. William Hood Simpson to request the 36th Bombardment Squadron (RCM) to fly sorties to jam their tank radios!
This is the cover of Stephan Hutton’s book on the 36th Bombardment Squadron (RCM) . This squadron flew specially fitted B-24 planes in radio & radar jamming missions for the 8th Air Force, the RAF Bomber Command, and Patton’s 3rd Army.
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SUMMING UP THE ARDENNES ALLIED COMMAND FAILURE
To sum up information on this thread regards the command performances of General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower at SHAEF, General Spaatz at USSTAF HQ Forward, General Omar Bradley and General Courtney Hicks Hodges based on the the following list of intelligence successes from north to south:
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1. Detachment A of the 3rd RSM (G) picks up the radio orders for 90 Ju-52 transports and 15 Ju-88 medium bombers carrying Lt. Col. Von Der Heydte’s Luftwaffe paratrooper _TWICE_ before the German attack was kicked off, sent both intercepts to SHAEF, and was ignored in both instances.
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2. The US Ninth Army G-2 not only identifies 6th Panzer Army’s assembly area, but he also convinces Lt. Gen. William Hood Simpson to request the 36th Bombardment Squadron (RCM) to fly sorties to jam their radios. A request which was denied by 8th Air Force because of the German IADS heavy Flak gun threat B-24 to jamming planes. The 36th was allowed by 8th AF to fly similar sorties for Patton’s counter-attacking 3rd Army later in December 1944, as the German army had outrun it’s IADS.
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3. Per Jörg Muth’s Oct. 31, 2018 H-WAR post, the G-2 of 1st Army “Monk” Dickson, not only spotted the attack coming, in his Intelligence Report 37 he almost predicted it’s exact date, and had his report suppressed by Gen General Courtney Hicks Hodges 1st Army chief of staff Brigadier General Truman C. Thorson for his troubles.
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4. South of the Ardennes, 3rd Army G-2 General Koch had figured out the 6th Panzer Army’s attack. He convinced General Patton to alert SHAEF and do a full staff work up for a counter attack on the southern flank of the impending German armored offensive .
The video link below is set at 26:30 minute and should be watched to about the 33:30 hack with Barren answering Ww2 veteran’s questions regards the intelligence ‘lay of the land’ for the Ardennes. The answers to those questions cover Col Koch’s 3rd Army intelligence appreciation and how the 1st Army’s 28th Infantry Division human intelligence report of German bridging equipment seen on December 13th or 14th 1944 got buried before it ever reached 1st Army Group G-2 Col. Dickson
Once the German offensive got underway, the command performance of Gen General Courtney Hicks Hodges chief of staff, and official alter ego, Brigadier General Truman C. Thorson with Intelligence Report 37 before the attack, and Hodges own partial collapse in his headquarters’ the first day of the German offensive, says Hodges was expecting to be relieved for failure.
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General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower giving General Montgomery command of the Ninth Army and 1st Army units to the north of the penetration, plus sending Montgomery to evaluate General Hodges, looks in hind sight like Ike was wanted Field Marshal Montgomery to relieve General Hodges without taking any of the political blow back himself.
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Field Marshal Montgomery didn’t bite. Montgomery did have the example of the US Army/USMC “Smith versus Smith” controversy in the Pacific to go by here.
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[Stray thought — This may be where the Courtney part of name for Anton Myrer’s ‘Courtney Massengale’ character in ONCE AN EAGLE came from.]
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At 12th Army Group, General Omar Bradley had intelligence appreciations on the Sixth Panzer Army from Ninth and Third Army’s and likely nothing from 1st Army thanks’ to Hodges Chief of Staff. His headquarters’ also passed a specific request for the 36th Squadron’s (Sqd.) jamming support from Ninth Army to SHAEF. And as a matter of standard operating procedure his Ninth Air Force air liaison would have passed to 12th Army Group as well as SHAEF the signal intercept by Detachment A of 3rd RSM (G) of the Luftwaffe air transport orders as actionable intelligence. If for nothing else to alert 12th Army Group artillery and anti-aircraft units to be alert for a possible German air resupply mission near the front lines.
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At SHAEF level, I cannot express how damning the approved request for Jamming support by the 36th Bombardment Sqd. (RCM) from Ninth Army was for the “intelligence failure” narrative for the Ardennes Campaign. Then as now, aerial jamming planes were a strategic asset for the air campaign. Their allocation in war is a major focus of senior military command at theater level and higher.
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STRATEGIC JAMMING IN PERSPECTIVE.
Long range jamming platforms have been the focus of air campaigns against integrated air defense system (IADS) since World War 2. There have never been enough of them and their allocation is a strategic level concern in every war fought since 1945.
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The inter-service politics surrounding them is the stuff of recent vintage US Marine Corps legend. In the 1991 and 2003 air campaigns against the IADS of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The USMC leveraged it’s ownership of 12 EA-6B Prowlers to keep it’s AV-8B Harrier jump jets and many of its F.A-18C/D strike fighters independent of the USAF theater air tasking order so the USMC could do it’s dedicated on-call close air support doctrine.
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This was a complete military service -identity issue- conflict between the USAF and USMC and the overriding strategic need need for USMC aerial jamming support assets for deep strikes by the USAF in both air campaigns carried the day for the Marine Corps.
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The USAF had not bought the internally mounted joint service developed ALQ-165 jammer for it’s F-16 fleet in the late 1980’s through out the 1990’s. First this was done to fund the B-2 stealth bomber and later the F-22 stealth fighter. This procurement failure by the USAF brass meant F-16’s could not operate deep in Iraqi air space without USMC EA-6B Prowler jamming support.
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Returning to WW2, the 36th Jamming Squadron and Maj. Richard Riccardelli’s 1985 “Electronic Warfare in WWII” article here:
“In December 1944, and prior to the German winter offensive (Battle of the Bulge), Ninth Army requested airborne jamming of 6th Army Panzer radio nets. With 6th Panzer Army suspected in the zone between British forces and First Army, Ninth Army sought to break up a potential panzer attack. Ninth Army’s request was rejected by Eighth Air Force because in order to effectively jam these signals, the aircraft would have to be flown in an area of heavy flak and known heavy fighter aircraft concentration.25 However, from December 29, 1944 to January 7, 1945, Third Army received airborne jamming support at the Battle of the Bulge. Twelfth Army Group reported inconclusive findings on the effectiveness of this jamming 26, but German prisoners of war in another report indicate that the jamming was very effective.27 “
25. 12th Army Group. Report of Operations, p. 232.
26.Ibid.
27. Thompson and Harris, p. 324.”
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The word that jumps out is –staffing-.
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The Ninth Army request for jamming support had to be well staffed to make it through the approval process to get to Eighth Air Force and get rejected there on the grounds of B-24 vulnerability to German Flak gun concentrations in the Ninth Army’s proposed jamming orbit of Sixth Panzer Army radio emitters.
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The Third Army’s later approved jamming sorties by the 36th Jamming Sqd. — during Gen. Patton’s Ardennes counter-attack — had to meet similar levels of good staff work.
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This staff work for requesting the 36th Jamming Sqd’s support was akin to a request asking for the Operation Cobra type carpet bombing and had to include as a minimum the following:
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A catalog of Sixth Panzer Army’s radio emitters power and their approximate geographic locations.
An intelligence appreciation of the Sixth Panzer Army’s capabilities and logistical posture.
Ninth or Third Army’s intelligence appreciation of what the Sixth Panzer Army’s future actions meant for their planned operations.
An understanding of the 36th Jamming Sqd’s tank radio jamming capabilities to plan the jamming orbits needed.
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Despite the highly classified nature of the 36th Jamming Sqd’s capabilities, their were liaison teams of the British Branch of the American MIT Radiation Laboratory (BBRL) all over North West Europe from two months before D-Day to the Ardennes offensive. Starting in April 1944 briefing every senior staff officer the BBRL could catch was briefed. [Odd trivia moment, one of the April 1944 BBRL briefer’s would have been John Trump, the uncle of Pres. Donald J. Trump] So Ninth and Third Army senior staff would have been well aware of the capabilities of the British build Jostle and American built Jackal tank radio jammers in the 36th Squadron’s B-24’s.
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The implications of the other three bullets are that they define “What did Allied Senior Command Know about Sixth Panzer Army and when did they know it?“
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Ninth Army’s request would have been vetted by 12th Army Group’s G-2 office and especially it’s radio countermeasures (RCM or electronic warfare in modern terms) section, been recommended for approval by 12th Army Group’s Chief of Staff to General Bradley for endorsement.
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A similar process would have happened in SHAEF with the G-2 section, SHAEF’s chief of staff General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith approval, (and likely both Ike and Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder would have been verbally briefed/notified of the content and nature of Ninth Army request), and endorsement of Ninth Army request before it was sent to Eight Air Force.
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At Eighth Air Force, the A-2 for General Doolittle would have looked at the same three points and endorsements, then done a full fledged all source intelligence appreciation of the flak dangers of the Ninth Army’s proposed 36th Jamming Squadron jamming orbits. Then calculated the possible losses, and recommended to 8th AF CoS the disapproval of the planned operations and concurrence from General Doolittle.
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At a guess it would have taken three-to-four days from leaving Ninth Army to having 8th Air Force say “No” and a few hours for the “No” to reach Ninth Army afterwards.
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The key takeaway was the commander, G-2 or A-2 and Chief of Staff’s for 12th Army Group, SHAEF, USSTAF, and 8th Air Force all had to be aware of what the Ninth Army thought the Sixth Panzer Army was up too before the Ardennes Offensive and what it wanted done vis-à-vis the 36th Jamming Sqd.
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VICTORY DISEASE AND THE THREE HINGES OF FATE
Given the SHAEF’s utter dedication to “Hitler is on the Defense, ULTRA says so” to the exclusion of all other data. The ‘Hinges of Fate’ in the CSTC’s removal of transportation messages is what the “ULTRA command clique” could have done, should have done and would have done, but didn’t do, with Allied strategic airpower between October 1944 and the December 16, 1944 start of the German offensive that would have removed German offensive military capability and made SHAEF’s VICTORY DISEASE irrelevant?
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This counterfactual analysis involves three men, SHAEF commander US Army General Eisenhower, his Deputy RAF Air Marshall Tedder and US Army Air Force USSTAF commander General Spaatz . They, like General’s Bradley and Hodges, had excluded intelligence on German military capability because of a wrong headed VICTORY DISEASE based belief about having Nazi intent cold via ULTRA. However, unlike Bradley and Hodges, these men controlled Allied tactical airpower in France and Italy as well as the heavy bomber fleets of the 8th and 15th Air Forces. They could have done a great deal differently in targeting the bomb tonnages these forces delivered if they had the ULTRA data the CSTC blacked out. And all three had demonstrated ‘command flexibility’ regards the use of airpower in targeting German transportation that earned them the CSTC/Oil Lobby ULTRA message blackout to the tune of 20,000 messages a week.
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Explaining this counterfactual requires the written work of another military officer, a former US Army captain in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S. which was the fore runner of the CIA) turned President Lyndon Banes Johnson administration economist named W W. Rostow. He wrote a short book in the late 1970’s, published in 1980 by the University of Austin press, titled “Pre-Invasion Bombing Strategy: General Eisenhower’s Decision of March 25, 1944.” Then Captain W. W. Rostow was in a unique position to write on this decision as a “Combat Economist” in the Enemy Objectives Unit (E.O.U.) of the Economic Warfare Division of the U.S. Embassy in London. This is important because the EOU was aligned with the UK’s Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), Air Ministry and the CSTC oil industry faction that blacked out SHAEF of Transportation campaign ULTRA data, but was not fully inside the ULTRA daily summary “need to know” list. So the E.O.U. — and by extension W. W. Rostow — was unaware of what was going on between October 1944 and February 1945. And while Rostow interviewed Lord Zuckerman in the late 1970’S for his book, the latter was still under the 50-year rule of the UK’s “Official Secrecy Act.” So Rostow was completely unaware of the CSTC’s ULTRA games when he wrote the book very much from the E.O.U.’s point of view.
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This makes W. W. Rostow work unique as what lawyers call “an admission against interest,” in that we can see both the mindset of the CSTC Oil Campaign faction and what that faction thought of Eisenhower, Tedder and Spaatz at the time (March 1944 to the end of WW2) in relation to their preferred “War Termination via destroying German oil supplies by Air Power” institutional strategy. In so many words, W.W. Rostow has provided the motives for that ULTRA blackout to go with the means and opportunity.
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Summing up Rostow’s thumb nail E.O.U. vantage point sketches shows those men as follows:
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General Eisenhower — He was focused like a laser beam on isolating the Normandy area from German reinforcement for the D-Day invasion. He had favored aerial interdiction generally as SHAEF in the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. He wanted the transportation plan over the oil plan specifically. However, as SHAEF head, Eisenhower was required by the realities of his limited real power to building a messy military-political consensus that gave various powerful military factions some of what they wanted to get them all pointed in the same general direction. This made him an ‘easily manipulated enemy’ for the Oil Faction’s book.
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Air Marshal Tedder — Head of the Transportation Plan faction at SHAEF, the clear enemy of the CSTC oil plan lobby, and the patron of Solly Zuckerman. Whom the oil campaign faction irrationally hated both for reasons of his being an outsider and especially being a damned sharp minded operational analyst who didn’t suffer fools at all. The CSTC faction had referred to the “Transportation Plan” that Air Marshal Tedder advocated to General Eisenhower as “Zuckerman’s Folly” to both personalize their dislike of the plan and the man. (If you think this has the stink of anti-Semitism about it, you would be right.)
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General Spaatz — The man was seen as a trimmer, a faithless ally of the Oil Lobby and a bureaucrat more concerned with the USAAF not being in any way blamed for a failed Normandy landing than winning the war with airpower. Then after he moved USSTAF headquarters out of the UK. General Spaatz was seen as being more worried about the wants and needs of SHAEF in striking railway marshaling yards, and building a relationship with General Eisenhower, than winning the war via airpower by destroying German oil.
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Allied Air Operations in the Battle of the Bulge Source: www.gyges.dk
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Allied Ardennes Counter-Offensive 26 Dec 1944 – thru 28 January 1945.
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The proverb “There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see,” applies here. The “Surprise” Ardennes offensive was not an intelligence failure. It was a command failure. A command failure which at its root came from a shadowy and powerful group of British national security bureaucrats manipulating intelligence flow for “higher reasons” that included elements of both policy disagreement and blatant careerism.
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There is a career making PHD military history thesis and a good book in this.
Laurie G. Moe Buckhout, Maj. USA “Signal Security In The Ardennes Offensive 1944-1945” Master’s Thesis 4 August 1996 – 6 June 1997 Ft. Leavenworth Kansas
Captain David A. Dawson USMC, Evelyn A. Englander, Major Charles D. Melson USMC (Ret.) U.S. MARINES IN THE PERSIAN GULF, 1990-1991: ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND MUSEUMS DIVISION HEADQUARTERS, U.S. MARINE CORPS WASHINGTON, D.C. 1992
(See pages 123 – 124 and the 5th out of 20 times “EA-6B” is used at the link)
W. W. Rostow, “The Enemy Objective Unit: Waging Economic Warfare From London” 11 July 1991 essay presented at an OSS symposium held at the National Archives.
W. W. Rostow, “Pre-Invasion Bombing Strategy: General Eisenhower’s Decision of March 25, 1944.”
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John Stubbington, “Kept in the Dark – The Denial to Bomber Command of Vital Ultra and Other Intelligence During World War II,” Pen & Sword, 2010 432 pages, b/w illustrations, hardcover, Electronic Edition Aug 13, 2013, Amazon Digital Services, : B007ZD13CY, ISBN-13: 978-1848841833
16 thoughts on “Command Failure in the Ardennes, December 1944”
fascinating anecdote trent, a similar thing happened with the Tet offensive, yes it was the last major offensive of the Viet Minh militia, and they did not succeed strategically, but according to Samuel Adams in his memoir he saw the massing of forces, very clearly, but Westmoreland’s G2 General Daniel Graham, did not include the estimates in the briefing packet, probably because it would have meant admitting that the Viet Minh still had presence, and more troops would be needed to stave off an offensive, of course strategically this played like a defeat with the public, and led to Lyndon Johnson’s stepping down, and the chaos of the 68 convention,
A similar thing happened almost 20 years earlier with MacArthur and his intel chief Colonel Fellers if memory serves, they ignored the incursion of Chinese troops into the Korean theatre of operations, hence the friction with Truman, and the stalemate that leads to this day,
Good grief there’s a lot of stuff here, this is like 10 posts worth of material…
My recollection is that Bradley in his memoirs says they were “surprised” by the German attack because they didn’t think the Germans would do something that had zero chance of actually succeeding and would weaken their ability to keep fighting a controlled retreat. Seemed like a lame excuse to me…
I always thought Courtney Massengale was modeled on Mac Arthur.
That was a very interesting post, Trent. An intel hero in “Once an Eagle” was named “Monk.”
A similar thing happened almost 20 years earlier with MacArthur and his intel chief Colonel Fellers if memory serves, they ignored the incursion of Chinese troops
WEB Griffin has that story in one of his Marine series. I think it was Willoughby, though.
Willoughby’s contribution during the Korean War is subject to some significant controversy, with several sources insisting that he intentionally distorted, if not out and out suppressed, intelligence estimates that showed the Chinese were massing at the Yalu River. Willoughby allegedly did so in order to better support MacArthur’s (mistaken) assertion that the Chinese would never cross the Yalu, and thus allow MacArthur a freer hand in his drive to the Yalu.
perhaps, fellers was his chief of staff, military intelligence, has become an oxymoron, naval intelligence like rochefort and layton might be different
well on the eastern front, their forces were heavily depleted, but to the West, they had encountered some resistance at normandy and at the provence landing, but their main force was still intact right, fortune favors the bold, but that is no reason to take unnecessary risks,
manchester so idolized macarthur, that he let that aspect of his strategy pass, but others from schiffter to perret, were not so understanding, and as you say myrer had an view from the bottom up,
Thank you for a fascinating essay! It explains rather a lot. Human nature causing delay and distractions, even among allies.
Fascinating. How many lives were lost because of this? Not every one at the Bulge since the Germans likely would have attacked had things gone perfectly.
Wars are won by the side that screws up less and maybe which side has the least worst generals. Barbarossa bought us a lot of slack and we needed every inch of it. It’s always the guys on the pointy end that pay.
MacArthur isn’t very popular, especially among the troops he commanded in WWII but he managed to conduct his entire campaign with fewer casualties than the first 3 days of The Battle of The Bulge.
Great and informative post and discussion.
I like Whattifferey more than most, but MCS’s juxtaposition of MacArthur with generals in Europe is hard to for me to see as an analytic–it’s a bit like comparing the Mighty 8th’s war against the 20th Air Force’s. Circumstances too divergent, IMO.
OTOH, it brings to my mind Ike’s remark about Napoleon — “I thought he was a genius, until I had to run a coalition war effort.” (OWTTE)
You can play the good general/bad general all day. None of MacArthur’s landings were very big going into the Philippines and he sure didn’t have the numbers of troops compared to Europe, all the better that he was careful with them. He, in turn, was caught out when the Chinese came pouring across the Yalu, and for much the same reason outlined above, he had convinced himself that that couldn’t happen.
Nobody was ever as sure that MacArthur was a genius as MacArthur and he would have said it just that way.
thats why I made the comparison with the pacific theatre, Im sure there was some sloppy use of MAGIC source material, some speculate the shootdown of yamamoto, was one hair’s breath close to compromising the leak, john paul stevens had regrets for his part in decoding this part of data, yamashita was probably the best of japanese land forces and yamamoto at sea, MacArthur scapegoated the former for conditions in Manila, when more well connected officers to the Royal Court were responsible
Re Korea, even if MacArthur could positively ascertain Chinese troop movements, his instinct would be to advance forces into the lions den, like the commander of Light Brigade, Cardigan was it,
This past ****December 16th 2022**** marked the 78th anniversary of the German Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (“Operation Watch on the Rhine“) offensive in the Ardennes area of Europe, otherwise known popularly as “The Battle of the Bulge.”
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Is this rhetorical flash or an error?
Just a quick note. We are up to 10 HIMARS destroyed in the special “Kill The HIMARS” game the Russians are running now. One does seem to have been bought by Radavan, and will go in his collection.
My mistake. Only 6 are gone, but they have found them all.
At the top level, the “Oil Lobby” wasn’t wrong. The German military couldn’t function without fuel and lubricants. On another level, so what, there was a long list of essential materials and there’s a good argument that production doesn’t matter if they can’t get to the front. All of the logistics threads dealing with truck transport in Ukraine apply except with horses instead. The attack did run out of fuel short of its goals.
The bombing war seems especially vulnerable to the keystone illusion. Knock this one thing out and the rest collapses. Oil, ball bearings etc. The argument was that these all depended on hard to replace or move equipment. The problem was that we couldn’t actually hit these targets effectively. There were reasons beyond the lack of precision of precision bombing. The Germans knew how the Norden Bomb Sight was supposed to work could use camouflage and other things to make it even less effective. In a way, the Bomber Mafia wanted to be fooled since this keystone illusion supported their whole strategy.
Bombing marshaling yards and train tracks wasn’t the Knock Out, bomb craters are easy to fill in tracks are easy to fix, rolling stock is portable so it would mean bombing and re- bombing the same targets over and over. Mostly they weren’t “precision” targets. Cities weren’t either, but bombed they were.
fascinating anecdote trent, a similar thing happened with the Tet offensive, yes it was the last major offensive of the Viet Minh militia, and they did not succeed strategically, but according to Samuel Adams in his memoir he saw the massing of forces, very clearly, but Westmoreland’s G2 General Daniel Graham, did not include the estimates in the briefing packet, probably because it would have meant admitting that the Viet Minh still had presence, and more troops would be needed to stave off an offensive, of course strategically this played like a defeat with the public, and led to Lyndon Johnson’s stepping down, and the chaos of the 68 convention,
A similar thing happened almost 20 years earlier with MacArthur and his intel chief Colonel Fellers if memory serves, they ignored the incursion of Chinese troops into the Korean theatre of operations, hence the friction with Truman, and the stalemate that leads to this day,
Good grief there’s a lot of stuff here, this is like 10 posts worth of material…
My recollection is that Bradley in his memoirs says they were “surprised” by the German attack because they didn’t think the Germans would do something that had zero chance of actually succeeding and would weaken their ability to keep fighting a controlled retreat. Seemed like a lame excuse to me…
I always thought Courtney Massengale was modeled on Mac Arthur.
That was a very interesting post, Trent. An intel hero in “Once an Eagle” was named “Monk.”
A similar thing happened almost 20 years earlier with MacArthur and his intel chief Colonel Fellers if memory serves, they ignored the incursion of Chinese troops
WEB Griffin has that story in one of his Marine series. I think it was Willoughby, though.
Willoughby’s contribution during the Korean War is subject to some significant controversy, with several sources insisting that he intentionally distorted, if not out and out suppressed, intelligence estimates that showed the Chinese were massing at the Yalu River. Willoughby allegedly did so in order to better support MacArthur’s (mistaken) assertion that the Chinese would never cross the Yalu, and thus allow MacArthur a freer hand in his drive to the Yalu.
perhaps, fellers was his chief of staff, military intelligence, has become an oxymoron, naval intelligence like rochefort and layton might be different
well on the eastern front, their forces were heavily depleted, but to the West, they had encountered some resistance at normandy and at the provence landing, but their main force was still intact right, fortune favors the bold, but that is no reason to take unnecessary risks,
manchester so idolized macarthur, that he let that aspect of his strategy pass, but others from schiffter to perret, were not so understanding, and as you say myrer had an view from the bottom up,
Thank you for a fascinating essay! It explains rather a lot. Human nature causing delay and distractions, even among allies.
Fascinating. How many lives were lost because of this? Not every one at the Bulge since the Germans likely would have attacked had things gone perfectly.
Wars are won by the side that screws up less and maybe which side has the least worst generals. Barbarossa bought us a lot of slack and we needed every inch of it. It’s always the guys on the pointy end that pay.
MacArthur isn’t very popular, especially among the troops he commanded in WWII but he managed to conduct his entire campaign with fewer casualties than the first 3 days of The Battle of The Bulge.
Great and informative post and discussion.
I like Whattifferey more than most, but MCS’s juxtaposition of MacArthur with generals in Europe is hard to for me to see as an analytic–it’s a bit like comparing the Mighty 8th’s war against the 20th Air Force’s. Circumstances too divergent, IMO.
OTOH, it brings to my mind Ike’s remark about Napoleon — “I thought he was a genius, until I had to run a coalition war effort.” (OWTTE)
You can play the good general/bad general all day. None of MacArthur’s landings were very big going into the Philippines and he sure didn’t have the numbers of troops compared to Europe, all the better that he was careful with them. He, in turn, was caught out when the Chinese came pouring across the Yalu, and for much the same reason outlined above, he had convinced himself that that couldn’t happen.
Nobody was ever as sure that MacArthur was a genius as MacArthur and he would have said it just that way.
thats why I made the comparison with the pacific theatre, Im sure there was some sloppy use of MAGIC source material, some speculate the shootdown of yamamoto, was one hair’s breath close to compromising the leak, john paul stevens had regrets for his part in decoding this part of data, yamashita was probably the best of japanese land forces and yamamoto at sea, MacArthur scapegoated the former for conditions in Manila, when more well connected officers to the Royal Court were responsible
Re Korea, even if MacArthur could positively ascertain Chinese troop movements, his instinct would be to advance forces into the lions den, like the commander of Light Brigade, Cardigan was it,
This past ****December 16th 2022**** marked the 78th anniversary of the German Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (“Operation Watch on the Rhine“) offensive in the Ardennes area of Europe, otherwise known popularly as “The Battle of the Bulge.”
===
Is this rhetorical flash or an error?
Just a quick note. We are up to 10 HIMARS destroyed in the special “Kill The HIMARS” game the Russians are running now. One does seem to have been bought by Radavan, and will go in his collection.
My mistake. Only 6 are gone, but they have found them all.
At the top level, the “Oil Lobby” wasn’t wrong. The German military couldn’t function without fuel and lubricants. On another level, so what, there was a long list of essential materials and there’s a good argument that production doesn’t matter if they can’t get to the front. All of the logistics threads dealing with truck transport in Ukraine apply except with horses instead. The attack did run out of fuel short of its goals.
The bombing war seems especially vulnerable to the keystone illusion. Knock this one thing out and the rest collapses. Oil, ball bearings etc. The argument was that these all depended on hard to replace or move equipment. The problem was that we couldn’t actually hit these targets effectively. There were reasons beyond the lack of precision of precision bombing. The Germans knew how the Norden Bomb Sight was supposed to work could use camouflage and other things to make it even less effective. In a way, the Bomber Mafia wanted to be fooled since this keystone illusion supported their whole strategy.
Bombing marshaling yards and train tracks wasn’t the Knock Out, bomb craters are easy to fill in tracks are easy to fix, rolling stock is portable so it would mean bombing and re- bombing the same targets over and over. Mostly they weren’t “precision” targets. Cities weren’t either, but bombed they were.