From Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light
The attack indeed fell that night, the last substantial German offensive of the war in western Europe. Hitler had given another Adlerhorst pep talk to commanders in Army Group G, conceding failure in the Ardennes, but offering another chance to thrash the Americans in Operation NORDWIND, North Wind. A lunge by eight divisions southwest down the Vosges axis would recapture the Saverne Gap and link up with Nineteenth Army Group troops occupying the Colmar pocket; in addition, the attack would force Patton to withdraw from Bastogne to parry this new threat. French troops in Alsace were weak and disorganized, the Fruhrer promised, and the U.S. Seventh Army was overextended along a 126 mile perimeter.
The Americans were also alert and entrenched. Ultra intercepts provided no specific enemy attack order, but ample intelligence revealed the German order of battle and unit boundaries below Saarbrucken. Patch had little doubt that the main attack would come against the Seventh Army left, west of the Haardt Mountains, with a complimentary attack to the east between the mountains and the Rhine.
“German offensive began on Seventh Army front about 0030 hours,” Patch’s chief wrote in a diary entry on Monday, January 1. “Krauts were howling drunk. Murdered them.” Shrieking Waffen-SS troops, silhouetted by moonlight that glistened off snowfields near the Sarre River, hardly dented the American left wing. A single .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun, slewing left and right with long, chattering bursts, was credited with slaying more than one hundred attackers. Volksgrenadier corpses piled up in a kill sack soon dubed, “Morgue Valley.” “Gained only insignificant ground,” the Army Group G war diary recorded; then by nightfall on Tuesday: “The attack lost its momentum.”
The most flamboyant German sally occurred on New Year’s Day, an attack by nine hundred Luftwakke planes flying treetop altitude across the Western Front. Operation BODENPLATTE, Baseplate, also known as the “Hangover Raid,” included pilots said to be wearing dress uniforms with patent-leather shoes and white gloves after celebrating the arrival of 1945. The raiders caught seventeen Allied airfields by surprise, destroying 150 parked planes and damaging more than 100 others. Montgomery’s personal aircraft was among those wrecked. But German losses approached 300 planes, some shot down by their own antiaircraft gunners who, for reasons of secrecy, had not been informed of BODENPLATTE. Worse still was the loss of 237 German pilots, including veteran airmen, instructors, and commanders. “We sacrificed our last substance,” one Luftwaffe office said.
Even as NORWIND collapsed on the German right, an ancillary New Year’s attack ten miles to the east spilled from old Mignot Line bunkers to gain traction through corrugated terrain below Bitche. Bypassing American strongpoints in the Low Vosges, the 6th SS Mountain Division bent the Seventh Army line sufficiently to alarm SHAEF and terrify Strasbourg, thirty miles southeast. Propaganda broadcasts from Radio Stuggart reported German shock troops assembling to seize the city, with reprisals certain to fall on Alsatians who had helped the Allies. Rumors of Seventh Army detachments packing to leave along the Rhine “spread like a powder fuze and caused a general panic,” according to a French lieutenant.
Lowered tricolors and the sight of official sedans being gasses up added to the dread. Journalists reported that roads west were clogged with “women pushing baby carriages [and] wagons piled high with furniture, as “Strasbourg steeled itself for yet another reversal of fortune. One soldier spied inverted dinner plates laid across a road in the thin hope that they sufficiently resembled an antitank mines to delay, at least briefly, the Hun’s return.
Well, so much for Ike’s certainty that Devers had to abandon his forward positions and Strasbourg to have any hope of stopping the German offensive.