Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Page 16
Bradley had to ring Patton straight away. As he had predicted, Patton complained bitterly, and said that the German attack was just an attempt to disrupt his own operation. With Eisenhower’s eyes upon him, Bradley had to give him a direct order. The men of the 10th Armored Division were horrified to hear that they were to be transferred from Patton’s Third Army to First Army reserve. ‘That broke our hearts because, you know, First Army – hell we were in Third Army.’ Patton, however, had an instinct just after the telephone call that it ‘looks like the real thing’. ‘It reminds me very much of March 25, 1918 [Ludendorff’s offensive]’, he wrote to a friend, ‘and I think will have the same results.’
Bradley then rang his headquarters in Luxembourg and told them to contact Ninth Army. He did not expect any trouble there. Lieutenant General William H. Simpson was a tall but quietly spoken Texan known as ‘the doughboy general’, whom everybody liked. He had an engaging long face on a bald head with prominent ears and a square chin. Simpson was examining the air-support plan for crossing the Roer when at 16.20 hours, according to his headquarters diary, he received a call from Major General Allen, the chief of staff at 12th Army Group. ‘Hodges [is] having a bit of trouble on his south flank,’ Allen said. ‘There is a little flare-up south of you.’ Simpson immediately agreed to release the 7th Armored Division to First Army. Exactly two hours later, Simpson rang to check that the advance party of the 7th Armored Division was on its way.
Eisenhower and Bradley, having despatched the two divisions, drank a bottle of champagne to celebrate the fifth star. The Supreme Commander had just received a supply of oysters which he loved, but Bradley was allergic to them and ate scrambled eggs instead. Afterwards they played five rubbers of bridge, since Bradley was not returning to Luxembourg until the following morning.
While the two American generals were in Versailles, Oberstleutnant von der Heydte in Paderborn was woken from a deep sleep by a telephone call. He was exhausted because everything had gone wrong the night before and he had not been to bed. His Kampfgruppe had been due to take off in the early hours of that morning, but most of the trucks to bring his men to the airfield had not received fuel in time, so the operation had been postponed; then it looked as if it would be cancelled. General Peltz, the Luftwaffe general on the telephone, now told him that the jump was back on because the initial attack had not progressed as rapidly as hoped.
When Heydte reached the airfield, he heard that the meteorological report from Luftflotte West estimated a wind speed of twenty kilometres per hour over the drop zone. This was the highest speed permissible for a night drop on a wooded area, and Heydte was being deliberately misinformed so that he would not cancel the operation. Just after all the paratroopers had climbed aboard the elderly Junkers 52 transport planes, a ‘very conscientious meteorologist’ rushed up to Heydte’s plane as it was about to taxi, and said: ‘I feel I must do my duty; the reports from our sources are that the wind is 58 kph.’
The whole operation turned into a fiasco. Because most of the pilots were ‘new and nervous’ and unused to navigating at night, some 200 of Heydte’s men were dropped around Bonn. Few of the jumpmasters had ever performed their task before, and only ten aircraft managed to drop their sticks of paratroopers on the drop zone south of Eupen, which had been marked by two magnesium flares. The wind was so strong that some paratroopers were blown on to the propellers of the following aircraft. Survivors of the landing joined up in the dark by whistling to each other. By dawn Heydte knew that his mission was ‘an utter failure’. He had assembled only 150 men, a ‘pitifully small muster’, he called it, and very few weapon containers were found. Only eight Panzerfausts out of 500 were recovered and just one 81mm mortar.
‘German People, be confident!’ stated Adolf Hitler’s message to the nation. ‘Whatever may face us, we will overcome it. There is victory at the end of the road. Under any situation, in battle where the fanaticism of a nation is a factor, there can only be victory!’ Generalfeldmarschall Model declared in an order of the day to the troops of Army Group B: ‘We will win, because we believe in Adolf Hitler and the Greater German Reich!’ But that night some 4,000 German civilians died in an Allied bombing raid on Magdeburg, which had been planned before the offensive.
Belgian civilians at least had the choice of fleeing the onslaught, but some stayed with their farms and animals, resigned to another German occupation. They did not know, however, that the SS Sicherheitsdienst security service was following hard on the heels of Waffen-SS formations. As far as these SD units were concerned, the inhabitants of the eastern cantons were German citizens and they wanted to know who had disobeyed the orders in September to move east of the Siegfried Line with their families and livestock. Locals avoiding service in the Wehrmacht and those who had collaborated with the Americans during the autumn were liable to arrest, and even execution in a few cases. But their main targets were those young Belgians in Resistance groups which had harried the retreating German forces in September.
General Hodges, finally aware of the danger, ordered the 1st Division then resting behind the lines to prepare to move. ‘We heard a siren-like sound’, wrote Arthur Couch, ‘and an announcement that all American troops were to return to their units and prepare to move out – there had been a large German attack in the Ardennes area. We gathered our combat gear and climbed onto trucks taking us to the new front line. We were told that a German tank attack had broken through an inexperienced new division straight from America. They were in a chaotic retreat.’ At 22.00 hours, another order from First Army headquarters instructed the 2nd Division to halt its attack north and prepare to move back towards the eastern flank of the Elsenborn ridge to block the advance of the 12th SS Panzer-Division.
After all the delays on the first day, that night Peiper forced his men forward to Honsfeld. His Kampfgruppe had been allotted ‘the decisive role in the offensive’, and he had no intention of failing. ‘I was not to bother about my flanks, but was to drive rapidly to the Meuse river, making full use of the element of surprise.’ His column of tanks, half-tracks and other vehicles stretched almost twenty-five kilometres in length, and because the roads were so narrow he could not change the order of march. He therefore decided to have a strong fighting element right at the front, with panzergrenadiers mounted in half-tracks, followed by a company of Panthers and Mark IV tanks. The heavy battalion of Tiger tanks would follow on behind.
Before the offensive began, Peiper really had believed that if the German infantry managed to break through at dawn on 16 December as planned, then he could reach the Meuse in just over twenty-four hours. Now he knew that his test-drive of a Panther over eighty kilometres before the offensive had been utterly misleading. The farm roads allotted to him were muddy tracks. The fact that the Führer himself had chosen Peiper’s route for him was hardly a consolation in the circumstances. As Manteuffel had predicted, the panzers’ fuel consumption in this terrain was more than twice what Keitel and the OKW had estimated. Having been warned at the divisional briefing that two trainloads of fuel had failed to arrive and that the spearheads were to make use of captured supplies, Peiper consulted his map. The divisional Ic intelligence officer had marked the position of American fuel dumps at Büllingen and Stavelot. However, the main US Army gasoline dump at Francorchamps between Malmédy and Spa, which held more than 2 million gallons, was not shown.
Sunday 17 December
For Lieutenant Matt Konop with the 2nd Infantry Division headquarters, the first sign of anything ‘unusual’ came on the second morning when the telephone by his mattress rang shortly before seven. The operations officer told him that a report had come in of paratroopers landing south of Eupen, and that some thirty German tanks had broken through to their east. Konop turned on the light and reached for a map to try to work out if anything important was going on. A few minutes later the telephone rang again.
‘Say, Konop, I want you to alert everybody.’ Konop could not identify the voice. ‘Get every gun, man
and whatever you can get to prepare a last ditch defense of the C[ommand] P[ost]! Enemy tanks have broken through and are on the road to Büllingen now.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Konop replied. ‘By the way, who is this?’
‘This is General Robertson,’ replied his divisional commander, a man known for his calm, good sense. Konop felt obliged to remind him that the only soldiers available were ‘those men who drive the trucks and former battle exhaustion cases’. Robertson told him to get together every individual he could find. So Konop formed cooks, clerks, drivers and any man who could still hold a weapon into an improvised defence platoon and rushed them down the road from Wirtzfeld. He could already hear machine-gun fire in the distance while he placed bazooka teams and their two 57mm anti-tank guns to cover any side tracks which a panzer commander might select. He put a cook sergeant and his own Jeep driver to man a .50 machine gun and set up observation posts with radios. A military police officer arrived with twenty men, and even though his ‘snowdrops’ were armed only with pistols, they too went into the line.
General Hodges had at last been forced to face reality. At 07.30 hours on 17 December, twenty-four hours after the German offensive began, he finally allowed General Gerow, the commander of V Corps, to halt the 2nd Division in its attack north from Wahlerscheid. Gerow wanted to pull it back towards the twin villages of Rocherath–Krinkelt, which were now threatened. The 99th Division had been forced to retreat by the 277th Volksgrenadier-Division and the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend. He and General Robertson agreed that they must protect the road north from Rocherath–Krinkelt to Wahlerscheid so that he could extricate his two regiments.
Gerow did not subscribe to the pointless slogan that the American army never retreats. He had immediately sensed that holding the northern shoulder of the breakthrough was what mattered, and the key to that would be the Elsenborn ridge, which began just west of Rocherath–Krinkelt. They had to hold the twin villages long enough to establish firm positions along the ridge, where he was already bringing in artillery regiments.
Robertson ordered forward his only reserve, a battalion of the 23rd Infantry Regiment, from Elsenborn in trucks. These troops dismounted east of Rocherath, and looked with foreboding at the thick pinewoods. All they knew was that a unit of the 99th Division, which ‘had had the hell knocked out of them’, was withdrawing in front of the 12th SS Hitler Jugend. Behind them, bursts of firing could be heard as anti-aircraft half-tracks blazed away at the V-1 buzz-bombs flying overhead. ‘The snow around the road junction had been churned into a yellowish mixture of snow and dirt from recent heavy shelling,’ wrote Charles MacDonald, a company commander.
He took his men forward to the edge of the woods. Even in the open, visibility extended no more than a hundred metres in the damp mist. They could hear small-arms fire ahead of them, mainly the ripping noise of rapid-fire German automatic weapons, rather than the slower, more deliberate cadence of their American counterparts. Then, a salvo of ‘screaming meemies’ came over. As soon as MacDonald’s men heard artillery shells they picked a thick pine tree to stand behind, hoping to avoid any splinters from an overhead burst. With little enthusiasm except the instinct of self-preservation, MacDonald’s company returned to digging foxholes. It was hard work with the small shovels because of the tree roots under the wet snow.
The threat that morning to the 2nd Division’s headquarters in Wirtzfeld, which Lieutenant Konop prepared to defend, did not come from the Hitler Jugend Division to the east: it came from Peiper’s Kampfgruppe to the south. Peiper, horrified by the state of the tracks he was expected to follow, had decided to ignore his orders and the route prescribed by Hitler. His corps commander later agreed. ‘Owing to the wretched condition of the roads,’ he wrote, ‘the wheeled vehicles had be towed in places for considerable distances.’
Before dawn on 17 December, the Peiper Kampfgruppe launched an attack on Honsfeld. Its leading vehicles simply followed in the wake of a retreating American column. Even though the small American force was taken by surprise, the Kampfgruppe lost two Mark V Panthers, but captured a large number of trucks and half-tracks. Peiper’s SS panzergrenadiers executed nineteen American prisoners in a field, and two villagers who were made to face a wall were shot in the back of the head. For the panzergrenadiers, it could have been the eastern front again where they had slaughtered prisoners and civilians without a second thought. They proceeded to loot the houses and the chapel. Peiper detailed a small group to stay behind to guard his line of communications. Two days later, five of these panzergrenadiers forced Erna Collas, a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, to show them the way to a farm. She was never seen again until her body was found in a foxhole five months later. She had been riddled with bullets, almost certainly after she had been raped.
Peiper decided to leave most of the trucks in Honsfeld because of the mud, and ordered the commander of the 9th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment to stay there to mop up and secure the area. Then, instead of driving due west to the valley of the Amblève as he had been instructed, Peiper pushed north to Büllingen where the American 2nd Division’s fuel dump was marked on his map. The Kampfgruppe took the village unopposed soon after 08.30 hours that Sunday morning, and destroyed twelve American light aircraft parked on a landing strip. A civilian emerged wearing a swastika armband to greet them. He gave the Nazi salute as each vehicle passed, then showed the SS soldiers where the Americans stored their fuel. The panzergrenadiers put their prisoners to work refuelling vehicles and loading jerrycans on to the half-tracks. One wounded soldier was finished off with a Kopfschuss, a pistol shot through the head at close range, but according to civilian witnesses the other prisoners were more fortunate than their comrades in Honsfeld. The American official history, on the other hand, states that fifty were shot at Büllingen.
Just west of Büllingen, Company B of the 254th Engineer Battalion was overrun by German tanks. The panzers did not just ‘iron’ the foxholes by charging over them, they halted to twist back and forth on their axis to collapse the trench walls and bury the occupants in mud and snow. Fortunately, help was on the way. The 26th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division, after travelling in trucks through the early hours, reached Camp Elsenborn on the ridge at 09.00 hours. One of its battalions was immediately sent south to Bütgenbach.
On the way down, it skirmished with an advance patrol of paratroopers from the 3rd Fallschirmjäger’s reconnaissance battalion. After urging the civilians in Bütgenbach to shelter in their cellars, the Americans pushed on towards the next hamlet of Dom Bütgenbach, two kilometres west of Büllingen, where they heard that SS troops had taken the village. On some high ground by the road, they found a scratch force made up of around fifty clerks and supply personnel from the 99th Infantry Division who had been taken in hand by a captain from a tank-destroyer battalion. The battalion of the 26th Infantry wrongly assumed that the enemy force in Büllingen was from the 12th Hitler Jugend Division. These infantrymen could not understand why it did not continue to attack north. But the reason for the lull was that Peiper’s spearhead had already set off south-west, to regain the route to the Amblève valley.
Despite the delays in the initial breakthrough, German morale was high. ‘I think the war in the west is again turning,’ wrote a Gefreiter in the 3rd Panzergrenadier-Division, waiting that day to advance. ‘The main thing is that the war will soon be decided and I will be coming home again to my dear wife and we can again build a new home. The radio is now playing bells from the homeland.’
General Bradley, returning that morning from Paris to Luxembourg in his own olive-drab Cadillac, found an escort of machine-gun-mounted Jeeps waiting for him in Verdun because of reports of German paratroopers. Hansen asked about the possibility of moving 12th Army Group headquarters, because German divisions were now less than thirty kilometres to their north. ‘I will never move backwards with a headquarters,’ Bradley replied. ‘There is too much prestige at stake.’ This defiance would serve him ill over the next few days.
The Cadillac drew up outside the 12th Army Group’s forward headquarters known as ‘Eagle Tac’, four blocks from the general’s residence in the Hôtel Alfa. Bradley hurried up the stairs. He came to a halt in front of the situation map and stared at it in fascinated horror. ‘Pardon my French,’ he said, ‘I think the situation justifies it – but where in hell has this son of a bitch gotten all his strength?’
Bradley and his staff were shaken by the way German intelligence had identified the weakest part of their whole front. And since the Americans’ policy was one of attack, their lines had not been built in depth with reserve formations. Yet Bradley still wanted to believe that a major redeployment could be avoided. First Army at Spa that day wondered ‘whether 12th Army Group fully appreciates the seriousness of the situation’. Third Army also appears to have been surprised at the slow reaction. ‘The Army Group commander called General Patton on the phone,’ the chief of staff recorded, ‘and told him that he might have to call on him for two more divisions. The decision was not to be made for forty-eight hours.’
At Ninth Army headquarters, nobody seemed to have any idea of the size of the attack. Staff officers could indulge only in confused speculation. A Luftwaffe attack on their front prompted suggestions that this was ‘a diversion for a larger counter-offensive in First Army zone’. Ninth Army staff officers told war correspondents desperate for information that ‘everything depends on what troops are at von Rundstedt’s disposal’.