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    Operation Nordwind 1945: Hitler’s last offensive in the West
    Operation Nordwind 1945: Hitler’s last offensive in the West
    Operation Nordwind 1945: Hitler’s last offensive in the West
    Ebook227 pages1 hour

    Operation Nordwind 1945: Hitler’s last offensive in the West

    By Steven J. Zaloga and Jim Laurier

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    The last great assault by the German Army in the West.

    Operation Nordwind is one of the lesser known campaigns of World War II yet one of the more intriguing. Largely overshadowed by the Battle of the Bulge further north, Nordwind was the last great operation by the Waffen-SS Panzer divisions in the west, and the last time the Wehrmacht was on the offensive in the West. The campaign also highlights the difficulties of inter-Allied cooperation between the Americans and the French.

    Though extensively treated in German and French accounts, the campaign has not been well covered in English until now. Alongside detailed illustrations and maps, Steven J. Zaloga unpacks the story of one of Hitler's final battles.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 20, 2012
    ISBN9781782002383
    Operation Nordwind 1945: Hitler’s last offensive in the West
    Author

    Steven J. Zaloga

    Steven J. Zaloga received his BA in History from Union College and his MA from Columbia University. He has worked as an analyst in the aerospace industry for three decades, covering missile systems and the international arms trade, and has served with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federal think tank. He is the author of numerous books on military technology and history, including NVG 294 Allied Tanks in Normandy 1944 and NVG 283 American Guided Missiles of World War II. He currently lives in Maryland, USA.

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    Reviews for Operation Nordwind 1945

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    • 4/5
      A very good read! I liked the writing style and 3D battlefield overviews the most.
    • 5/5
      Great book. Good maps, good pictures, great narrative. Recommended. Five stars

    Book preview

    Operation Nordwind 1945 - Steven J. Zaloga

    ORIGINS OF THE BATTLE

    In the waning hours of New Year’s Eve 1944, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Nordwind, the last German offensive of World War II in the west. It was an attempt to exploit the disruptions caused by the Ardennes offensive further north in Belgium. When Patton’s Third Army shifted two of its corps to relieve Bastogne, the neighboring Seventh US Army was forced to extend its front lines. This presented the Wehrmacht with a rare opportunity to mass its forces against weakened Allied defenses. At stake was Alsace, a border region that had been a bone of contention between France and Germany for the past century. Taken from France by Germany in the wake of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, it returned to France after World War I in 1918, only to be retaken by Germany after France’s 1940 defeat.

    The fate of Alsace was of no particular concern to Eisenhower and the Anglo-American forces in north-west Europe, and the initial plans were simply to withdraw the Seventh US Army to more defensible positions in the Vosges mountains until the more crucial Ardennes contest was settled. However, the forfeit of the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg was completely unacceptable to de Gaulle and the Free French forces, resulting in a political firestorm that forced a reconsideration of Allied plans for dealing with the German attacks. Hitler saw Alsace as the last tangible reminder of Germany’s great victory in 1940 and Strasbourg was the symbol of German control on the west bank of the Rhine; he insisted the city be retaken. The failure of the Ardennes offensive convinced Hitler that some new tactic had to be employed when dealing with the Allies. Instead of a single large offensive, Hitler decided to launch a series of smaller, sequential offensives. As a result, some German commanders called the Alsace campaign the Sylwester offensives after the central-European name for the New Year’s Eve celebrations.

    The initial Nordwind offensive emanated out of the fortified border city of Bitche, but made little progress in the face of stiff American resistance. The American battle cry became No Bulge at Bitche! US units were pulled off the Rhine near the Strasbourg area to reinforce the Bitche sector, providing the local German commanders with another temporary opportunity. A hasty river-crossing operation was staged at Gambsheim and the bridgehead gradually expanded in the face of weak American opposition. In view of the failure of the initial Nordwind offensive around Bitche, Hitler shifted the focus of the Alsace operation farther east towards Hagenau, attempting to link up the two attack forces and push the US Army away from the Rhine. This led to a series of extremely violent tank battles in the middle of January around the towns of Hatten-Rittershoffen and Herrlisheim, which exhausted both sides. An experienced German Panzer commander later called these winter battles the fiercest ever fought on the Western Front.

    When the Red Army launched its long-delayed offensive into central Germany on January 14, the possibilities for further Wehrmacht offensives in Alsace drew to an end. Panzer units were transferred to the Eastern Front, and German infantry units began to establish defensive positions. With the Wehrmacht exhausted and weakened, it was the Allied turn for action. A large pocket of German troops was trapped on the west bank of the Rhine around Colmar, and Eisenhower insisted that the Colmar Pocket be eradicated. The 1ère Armée did not have the strength to do it quickly, so in late January, additional American divisions were moved into Alsace from the Ardennes front. In two weeks of fierce winter fighting, the German Nineteenth Army was decisively defeated and its survivors retreated over the Rhine.

    The January 1945 Alsace campaign fatally damaged one German field army and severely weakened a second. This became startlingly clear in March 1945 when the US Army’s lightning campaign crushed Heeresgruppe G (Army Group G) in the Saar-Palatinate, later dubbed the Rhine Rat Race. The obliteration of the Wehrmacht’s exhausted southern field armies was the root cause of Patton’s dramatic advance through southern Germany in April and May 1945.

    Alsatian civilians return to the ruins of the village of Mittelwihr on the eastern slopes of the High Vosges following the elimination of the Colmar Pocket in February 1945. The wrecked PzKpfw IV/70(A) was probably from Panzer-Brigade 106, which fought in these final battles. (NARA)

    CHRONOLOGY

    THE STRATEGIC SETTING

    By the late autumn of 1944, Allied forces in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) consisted of three army groups: Montgomery’s British and Canadian 21st Army Group in the Netherlands, Bradley’s US 12th Army Group from Belgium to Lorraine, and Devers’ Franco-American 6th Army Group in Alsace. Of the three army groups, Eisenhower afforded priority to the two northernmost, Montgomery’s and Bradley’s. The inclusion of Devers’ 6th Army Group to the force structure had come later than the other two, and was a source of considerable friction between Washington and London. General George C. Marshall, the US chief of staff, had insisted that the Mediterranean theater be de-emphasized after the capture of Rome in June 1944, and that the resources be freed for use in France. Churchill continued to push for further Allied operations in the Mediterranean, but Washington had the final word. As a result, the Seventh US Army and the French 1ère Armée staged an invasion of southern France on August 15, 1944 to clear the Wehrmacht out of southern, western, and central France. Operation Dragoon succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of its planners, liberating two-thirds of France in a lightning one-month campaign that destroyed half of the Wehrmacht’s Heeresgruppe G in the process. By mid-September, the Seventh US Army had met up with Patton’s Third Army near Dijon, creating a solid Allied front from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.

    Men from the 398th Infantry, 100th Division move through the woods near Raon l’Etape during the fighting for the High Vosges mountains on November 17, 1944. This newly arrived unit has the later-style battledress based on the M1943 field jacket. (NARA)

    The Allied supply crisis in late September 1944 halted Devers’ 6th Army Group and gave Heeresgruppe G a short lull to rebuild its defenses in Alsace. By mid-October 1944, Heeresgruppe G included three field armies, with 17 divisions, 500,000 troops, and 40,000

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