Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  Back at SHAEF, the danger became clearer thanks to some captured German instructions. Eisenhower ordered that all reserve formations should be brought in. He told Bedell Smith, Strong and Major General John Whiteley, the British head of the operational planning staff, to organize the details. In the chief of staff’s office, the three men stood around a large map spread out on the floor. Strong pointed with a German ceremonial sword to Bastogne. The town was the hub of the central Ardennes, and most of the main roads leading to the Meuse passed through it. It was the obvious place to block the German advance to the Meuse, and everyone present agreed.

  SHAEF’s immediate reserve consisted of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, resting in Reims after their operations in Holland. The question was whether they could reach Bastogne before Manteuffel’s panzer spearheads arrived from the east. Strong considered it possible, and the orders for them to move were issued immediately.

  It was ironic that Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg should have feared an ambush by Heydte’s paratroopers, for they had dropped more than a hundred kilometres to the north as the crow flies. And Heydte, accepting that there was little he could do with such a weak force, decided to hide most of his men in the forest. He sent out standing patrols to watch the main roads from Eupen to Malmédy and from Verviers. They were to ambush single Jeeps and messengers. Once the sounds of battle came closer, then perhaps his men could assist by seizing a key point just before Dietrich’s tanks arrived. His standing patrols soon collected a range of prisoners and a haul of intelligence on the American order of battle, but since their radios had been lost in the parachute drop Heydte had no way of passing the information back. He had asked Sepp Dietrich for carrier pigeons, but the Oberstgruppenführer had simply laughed at the idea.

  On the evening of 17 December, Heydte’s force doubled in size to around 300 men when more stragglers and a large group which had dropped too far to the north joined them. That night he released all his prisoners and sent them off with some of their own wounded. Then he moved camp. Heydte and his men had no idea of the course of events, except for the rumble of artillery from the Elsenborn ridge more than a dozen kilometres to their south.

  While the 99th Division was being battered east of Rocherath–Krinkelt, the 106th Division to its south was in an even worse state, attacked by the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions. Major General Alan W. Jones, the 106th’s hapless commander, felt powerless as he sat in a school in St Vith, which he had taken over as his command post. Two of his regiments, the 422nd and the 423rd, were almost surrounded in the Schnee Eifel, while his third regiment, the 424th, was holding the line down to the south with a combat command of the 9th Armored Division. His son was with the headquarters of one of the beleaguered regiments, which increased his anxiety.*

  The day before, Jones had failed to comprehend the gravity of the German thrust through the 14th Cavalry’s position on his north flank, and he had not reacted when its commander Colonel Mark Devine warned that he was having to pull back. Devine added that he would try to counter-attack with the 32nd Cavalry Squadron, but their attack was repulsed in the afternoon, and most of his force withdrew to the north-west unable to close the widening breach. Only a single cavalry troop remained in the valley of the River Our, attempting to block the road to St Vith. Jones sent his last reserve battalion to Schönberg in the valley, but it became lost in the dark and turned in the wrong direction. And on the right of the 106th Division’s sector, the 62nd Volksgrenadier-Division had forced Jones’s right-hand regiment, the 424th, back towards the village of Winterspelt and the River Our.

  General Jones, overtaken by events, had tended to rely on the promise of help from outside rather than on his own actions. He expected Combat Command B of the 7th Armored Division to be with him in St Vith by 07.00 hours on Sunday 17 December. He was counting on it to launch a counter-attack to free his two regiments. When Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke, a ‘great bear of a man’, arrived at his command post at 10.30 hours, Jones asked him to mount an attack immediately. Clarke had to tell him that he was on his own. His tanks had been held up by chaotic traffic, caused by units falling back in panic. Jones now bitterly regretted having committed the 9th Armored Division combat command to his right flank the evening before. The two men could only sit and wait.

  To Clarke’s astonishment, he heard Jones tell his corps commander in Bastogne on the telephone that the situation was under control. Jones’s mood veered between irrational optimism and despair. Clarke was even more concerned because there was little radio contact with the two regiments out on the Schnee Eifel, apart from their demands for resupply by airdrop.* Colonel Devine of the 14th Cavalry Group then appeared in the command post, claiming that German tanks were just behind him. Jones and Clarke saw that Devine had lost his nerve, so Jones told him to report to General Middleton in Bastogne. Yet Devine had not imagined the German tanks. Another SS Kampfgruppe was breaking through ten kilometres to the north.†

  At 14.30 hours, they heard small-arms fire. Jones and Clarke went up to the third floor of the school and sighted German troops emerging from the woods in the distance. Jones told Clarke that he should now take over the defence of St Vith. Clarke accepted, but wondered what troops he had, apart from the two engineer service companies and headquarters personnel already out on the road east to Schönberg. Half an hour later this force, miraculously joined by a platoon of tank destroyers, was attacked. The tank destroyers managed to scare the panzers back into the woods beyond the road. But the main reason for the slowness of the German advance on 17 December came from the state of the roads and the traffic jams, which blocked artillery and other panzer units coming forward.

  Volksartillerie units had not moved forward because their draught horses could not cope with hauling heavy guns through the deep mud churned up by panzer tracks. Even some of the self-propelled artillery of the 1st SS Panzer-Division had to be left behind because of the shortage of fuel. Both Model and Manteuffel were seething with impatience. Model, on finding several artillery battalions still in their original positions, ordered General der Panzertruppe Horst Stumpff to court-martial their commanders. ‘When I told him it was because of the fuel shortages and road conditions that they hadn’t moved, he rescinded the order.’ At one stage, out of sheer frustration, Manteuffel began to direct traffic at a crossroads. ‘I expected the right-hand corps to capture St Vith on the first day,’ he acknowledged later. Like Bastogne, St Vith’s network of paved roads was vital for a rapid advance to the Meuse.

  While the Germans held back east of St Vith and made little more than skirmishing thrusts, Clarke sent his operations officer out on the road west to Vielsalm to await his combat command. The scenes along the road shocked officers in the 7th Armored Division. ‘It was a case of “every dog for himself”; it was a retreat, a rout,’ one officer wrote. ‘It wasn’t orderly; it wasn’t military; it wasn’t a pretty sight – we were seeing American soldiers running away.’ At one stage the combat command took two and a half hours to move five kilometres, and then they had to bulldoze vehicles off the road.

  In Malmédy, their artillery encountered civilians fleeing in a variety of vehicles, with ‘panic stricken soldiers running through the square towards the west … A field hospital north of Malmédy was being evacuated and ambulances were darting up and down. A truck loaded with nurses went through the square at top speed. The nurses’ hair was flying.’ Just over a kilometre from St Vith, part of Clarke’s combat command came around a bend and spotted three panzers and an infantry company coming towards them. They quickly set an ambush, ‘head-on at the bend of the road at point-blank range’. The three panzers were knocked out, and the infantry scattered, losing some fifty men.

  Clarke himself went to the Vielsalm road and was horrified to see a field artillery battalion retreating, having abandoned its guns. He asked his operations officer why he had let them block the road. He replied that the lieutenant colonel in command had threatened to shoot him if he in
terfered. Clarke found him and said that he would shoot him if he did not get his trucks off the road. The lieutenant colonel, intimidated by Clarke’s superior rank and build, finally did as he was told.

  Another artillery officer proved very different. Lieutenant Colonel Maximilian Clay appeared with a battalion of self-propelled 105mm guns, saying he wanted to help. His 275th Armored Field Artillery Battalion had been supporting the 14th Cavalry Group, which was now far away to the north. Clarke welcomed him warmly and told him where to go. Finally, at 16.00 hours, Clarke’s own reconnaissance squadron arrived, followed by the rest of his combat command. Clarke sent them straight through the town to strengthen the thin defence line on the eastern side. Not long afterwards, Clarke’s divisional commander Brigadier General Robert W. Hasbrouck joined Jones and Clarke to discuss the situation. He too had been disturbed by ‘the continuous stream of frenzied soldiers hurrying to the “safety” of the rear’. To Jones’s despair, Hasbrouck ruled out a counter-attack to rescue the two stranded regiments. Holding on to St Vith was far more important. Jones observed bitterly that no general in the American army had lost a division so quickly. Late that afternoon, the two prongs of the 18th Volksgrenadier-Division closed on Schönberg and cut off the two regiments completely.

  The defence of St Vith would take the form of a large horseshoe. The town stood on a small hill, which was surrrounded a couple of kilometres further out by a circular ring of higher hills covered in woods, which the infantry, the reconnaissance squadron and the scratch units would defend with support from the tanks. ‘The build-up of a defensive cordon around the town’, wrote Hasbrouck, ‘was a piecemeal procedure with units being placed in the line as they arrived in Saint Vith.’ At that stage they did not know that the Kampfgruppe Hansen, based on the 1st SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment, had slipped through to their north and attacked Combat Command A of the 7th Armored near Recht. This was the panzer unit which had so unsettled Colonel Devine. The battle between the Americans and the SS lasted all night. The luckier villagers managed to escape to a nearby slate quarry, while their houses were blasted from both sides. These unfortunate ‘border Belgians’ were regarded with suspicion by American soldiers because they spoke German and had framed photographs of sons in Wehrmacht uniform. And Germans distrusted them because they had defied the September order to move into Germany beyond the Siegfried Line. Around a hundred men from St Vith had been killed serving in the German forces during the war. Others had deserted and were now determined not to be caught by the Feldgendarmerie or the SD, following closely behind the lead formations.

  Peiper’s long column had turned west, picking up speed. By midday it was close to the crossroads at Baugnez, five kilometres south-east of Malmédy. Peiper despatched a small force of panzergrenadiers and tanks to Baugnez to reconnoitre. His troops had just missed bumping into Combat Command R of the 7th Armored Division, on its way south to support the defence of St Vith.

  Oblivious to the threat ahead the next unit of the 7th Armored Division, part of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, followed on through Malmédy. As the men were driven in open trucks through the town, locals who knew of the sudden German advance from refugees tried to warn them by pointing ahead shouting, ‘Boches! Boches!’, but the soldiers did not understand and just waved back. Their vehicles motored on towards the crossroads at Baugnez, and there the convoy ran straight into the SS half-tracks and panzers.

  The German tanks opened fire. Trucks were set ablaze as men tumbled off to seek shelter or run for the forest. Panzergrenadiers rounded up some 130 prisoners and herded them into a field by the road. The SS took rings, cigarettes, watches and gloves from their prisoners. When one of their officers opened fire, they began to shoot their prisoners with automatic weapons and the tanks joined in with their machine guns. Some American soldiers made it to the trees, others feigned death, although many were still shot through the head with pistols. Although the mass killing took place at Baugnez, it was to become infamous as the Malmédy massacre. Altogether, eighty-four Americans died, as well as several civilians who tried to shelter some escapees.

  Peiper, who had continued on the road to Ligneuville, was not present when the killings took place. But if one takes into account the murder of prisoners in Honsfeld, to say nothing of his record of extreme brutality on the eastern front, one cannot imagine that he would have objected. He claimed later that the firing started only when the prisoners ran for the trees. The few soldiers who escaped the massacre made it back to American lines by the late afternoon.

  A patrol from an engineer combat battalion in Malmédy reached Baugnez that same afternoon after the departure of the SS, and saw the bodies. A military policeman on traffic duty at the crossroads, who had witnessed the whole incident, was brought to First Army headquarters at Spa. He described to Hodges and his assembled officers how the prisoners had been ‘herded together into a side field and an SS officer fired two shots from his pistol and immediately there came the crackle of machinegun fire and whole groups were mown down in cold blood’. Staff officers at Spa were shaken and furious. ‘Immediate publicity is being given to the story,’ General Hodges’s chief of staff noted. Word spread like wildfire to all command posts, to SHAEF and to the 12th Army Group in Luxembourg, where Hansen recorded that the news ‘took the breath away from the room for an instant – as though the room had suddenly become a vacuum’. Major General Elwood R. Quesada of IX Tactical Air Command made sure that his pilots were fully briefed the next morning. Revenge was clearly going to be the order of the day.*

  Peiper’s spearhead pushed on to Ligneuville where it met heavy resistance for the first time in the form of American tanks. A short, fierce battle left a Panther and two half-tracks burning, while the Americans lost two Shermans and an M-10 tank destroyer. Peiper’s men shot another eight American prisoners. Ahead in the town of Stavelot on the River Amblève, civilians were appalled to see their American liberators fleeing in vehicles. Many began to pack bags with their valuables and some food. They feared more German vengeance after the Resistance actions in September. Twenty-two men and women had been killed then in nearby Werbomont by German troops and Russian auxiliaries. The rush to escape beyond the River Meuse and the chaos which that would cause on the roads prompted the American authorities to forbid any civilian movement. Fortunately for the Americans and the fleeing Belgians, Peiper halted his column at dusk just short of Stavelot.

  Since the main road was on the side of a very steep hill there was no room for Peiper’s tanks to manoeuvre, and the sharp curve in the road just before entering the town meant that the defenders could focus all their anti-tank fire on one point. Peiper pulled back his Kampfgruppe and bombarded the village with mortar and artillery fire instead. Meanwhile he sent off some of his tanks to find a way to bypass Stavelot to the south, by crossing the River Salm at Trois-Ponts. But as other vehicles followed they were hit in the flank by a circuitous American counter-attack from Stavelot. This was beaten off, but Peiper ordered another assault on the town, this time using his panzergrenadiers on foot. But after suffering nearly thirty casualties, he decided to wait for the rest of his panzergrenadier battalion to catch up. As night fell, the Kampfgruppe could see in the distance the lights of American military vehicles escaping to the west, so they opened fire with their tanks at maximum range on the road.

  While the Peiper Kampfgruppe forged west down the valley of the Amblève, more battalions from the US 1st Division arrived to strengthen the southern approach to the Elsenborn ridge. The 2nd Battalion of the 26th Infantry prepared positions facing Büllingen during the afternoon. It was ready with four M-10 tank destroyers in support, to take on the advancing Germans who had been held back by American artillery fire from the ridge behind them.

  The vital battle to defend the ridge was already taking place on its eastern flank around Rocherath–Krinkelt. General Robertson of the 2nd Division, having thrown his 23rd Infantry Regiment into a line east of the twin villages as the 99th Divis
ion was beaten back, began bringing the 38th Infantry back down the road from Wahlerscheid. A barrage by American artillery at midday kept the Germans’ heads down as they pulled back from their forward positions. In such a confused situation, friendly fire was a real danger. That morning, a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot jettisoned his bombs to engage a Messerschmitt over the 3rd Battalion and caused twelve casualties.

  With reinforced platoons flanking the eastern side of the Wahlerscheid–Rocherath road, General Robertson himself went out to meet the battalions with trucks to take them to the new positions near Rocherath.

  At least the far left of the line, some fourteen kilometres north of Elsenborn, appeared solid. The 326th Volksgrenadier-Division had attempted one attack after another on either side of Monschau, but American artillery had broken each one. The new top-secret proximity, or Pozit, fuse was used on shells for the first time in action, without authority from higher command, but with great success as they exploded over the attackers in accurate air bursts.

  An armoured infantry battalion from the 5th Armored Division would reach Mützenich to strengthen the line not long after dark. And to their rear the 18th Regiment from the 1st Infantry Division was starting its sweep of the forests south of Eupen, to deal with Heydte’s isolated paratroopers. General Gerow was puzzled as to why the Sixth Panzer Army had not attacked in much greater strength on the northern flank, rather than concentrate its forces just south of the Elsenborn ridge. This was of course at Hitler’s insistence, but Manteuffel still felt that Dietrich had made a great mistake in restricting himself to such a narrow frontage, with so little room for manoeuvre.