Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  The Americans always tried to prevent the Germans from recovering and repairing disabled panzers, or from using them as temporary firing positions just in front of their lines. So whenever the SS panzergrenadiers were forced back ‘tanks knocked out of action, but not destroyed, were set afire with gasoline-oil mixes poured on them, and with thermite grenades set in gunbarrels which burned through the barrels’.

  But then another attack overran the front line. Panzers fired down into the foxholes, and twisted back and forth on top to bury the men in them. Only twelve soldiers from one platoon of around thirty men emerged alive. The left-hand platoon of one company had no anti-tank ammunition left, so some six or seven men started to run towards the rear in despair. McKinley stopped them and sent them back to their platoon. Aid men, struggling heroically to evacuate the wounded through the snow, improvised sleds by nailing raised crosspieces to a pair of skis to carry a litter.

  In due course the battalion received orders to pull back, but the fighting was so close that McKinley felt that he would not be able to extricate any of his men. At the critical moment, however, four Shermans from the 741st Tank Battalion appeared. They were able to cover the withdrawal, even scoring hits on three German tanks. ‘When the Battalion assembled in Rocherath,’ McKinley recorded, ‘it was found that of the total strength of 600 men that had started the fight, 197 were left, including attachments.’ Yet only nine men from the whole of the 2nd Division abandoned the battle and headed for the rear. They were picked up by military police as ‘stragglers’. Most men found that they did not get the ‘shakes’ at the height of a battle: it hit them afterwards when the firing had died away.

  The sacrificial stand of the 1st Battalion of the 9th Infantry Regiment helped save the rest of the 2nd Division, and thwart the breakthrough of the 12th SS Panzer-Division. But even McKinley acknowledged afterwards that ‘it was artillery that did the job’, saving his unit from complete destruction. All the time remnants of the 99th Division, which had faced the initial onslaught, continued to slip through to American lines. They were directed back to Camp Elsenborn where they were fed and ammunitioned, then placed in a new line behind Rocherath–Krinkelt. One battalion commander, accused by his own officers of ‘cowardice and incompetence’, was relieved.

  Around 10.00, a group of seven American trucks approached. A tank destroyer fired a round over the leading truck at a range of 500 metres, compelling it to halt. A patrol went forward to make sure that the trucks were genuine, and not captured vehicles. But as they came close, men in the trucks opened fire. It had been a ‘Trojan Horse trick’ to penetrate American lines in the confusion. Around 140 German soldiers leaped from the trucks and tried to escape back towards the woods. The battalion’s mortars and heavy machine guns opened up, and the battalion commander estimated that three-quarters of them were killed, but a number may have feigned death and crept away later. Several of the wounded were taken prisoner, and proved to be members of the 12th SS Division Hitler Jugend. One of the more badly hit refused a transfusion of American blood at the aid station.

  The battle for the twin villages continued, with civilians trapped and deafened from explosions in their cellars. As the fog lifted at about 08.30 hours and daylight strengthened a little, the woods beyond the snowfields became visible. More Panther and Mark IV tanks advanced accompanied by groups of panzergrenadiers and some broke into Rocherath–Krinkelt. The mortar officer in the 38th Infantry Regiment formed four bazooka teams, for stalking tanks around the village. Some men wore goggles because of the flash when firing, but only noticed the burns on their face later. The worst fate was to find a dud round stuck in the bazooka and see the enemy tank traverse its gun towards you. Guile was needed. ‘A tank was observed approaching on a road,’ V Corps reported. ‘A sergeant stationed a bazooka in concealment on each side of the road, and then drove a herd of cows out in front of the tank. The tank slowed to a halt, was knocked out by bazooka fire, and the crew killed by small arms fire as they baled out.’

  German tanks began blasting houses at point-blank range, even sticking their gun through a window. ‘The bayonet was little used,’ another American officer observed later, ‘even in close-in fighting in Rocherath where rifle butts or bare fists seemingly took preference.’ Two Shermans parked by the battalion command post in Rocherath and crewed by a mixture of ‘gunners, drivers, assistant drivers, cooks and mechanics’ fought back. Lieutenant Colonel Robert N. Skaggs suddenly saw a Mark VI Tiger tank approaching some American soldiers guarding German prisoners of war. Skaggs alerted the two tanks and they both opened fire. They missed. The Tiger halted and traversed its turret to fire back at both of them, but both of its shots also missed. Allowed a second chance, the scratch crews of the two Shermans made sure that they did not miss again, and the Tiger burst into flames. As soon as a German tank was hit, American infantry brought their rifles up to their shoulders ready to shoot down any of the crew trying to escape from the turret or hull. If they were on fire and screaming, then they were simply putting the poor bastard out of his misery. Captain MacDonald of the 2nd Division ‘saw a soldier silhouetted against the tracers, throw a can of gasoline at a tank. The tank burst into flames.’

  In another incident in the twin villages, the crew of a Sherman of the 741st Tank Battalion ‘observed a Mark VI [Tiger] approaching frontally. The tank commander knew the difficulty of penetrating the frontal armor, and desired to utilize the faster turret action of the Sherman. The tank was quickly turned round and routed round a small group of buildings to enable the Sherman to bring fire to bear on the side or rear of the Mark VI. The German simultaneously sensing the maneuver followed, and the two tanks were chasing each other round in a circle endeavoring to get into position to fire. The team mate of the Sherman observed the action, [and] as the Mark VI in its course around the buildings exposed its rear, brought fire to bear on it and knocked it out.’ The two commanders jumped out to shake hands jubilantly, climbed back into their tanks and then went back to work.

  Rifle grenades again proved useless, and only one tank was disabled in this way. A sergeant saw a ‘man from another outfit’ fire six or seven rounds of anti-tank grenades at a panzer, and although they were hitting the target they had no effect. In other cases too, the grenades ‘just glanced off’.

  One Mark VI Tiger in Krinkelt in front of the church began firing at the battalion command post. Lieutenant Colonel Barsanti sent out five bazooka teams to stalk the tank. They achieved two hits, but the Tiger was barely damaged. Even so, its commander decided that it was too exposed in the village and made a run for it towards Wirtzfeld. But as the tank charged off, it rounded a corner at full speed and flattened a Jeep. The two occupants had managed to throw themselves into a ditch just in time. This slowed the Tiger just enough for the crew of a 57mm anti-tank gun to get off a round which wrecked the turret traverse mechanism. As it continued on its way, a Sherman fired and missed, but a tank destroyer further down the road brought it to a halt with two rounds. Riflemen then picked off the black-uniformed crew as they tried to escape. ‘None of them got away.’

  The 2nd Division later claimed that in the extended battle around Rocherath–Krinkelt seventy-three panzers had been knocked out by Shermans, bazookas, tank destroyers and artillery, while two Mark VI Tigers had been knocked out by bazookas. These, of course, were rare victories during that onslaught. American losses in men and tanks were very heavy. On the other hand, the determination to fight back and make the enemy pay dearly for every step of his advance proved probably the most important contribution to the eventual outcome of the Ardennes offensive. The Sixth Panzer Army had underestimated both the power of American artillery and the commanding position of the Elsenborn ridge. The SS divisions were sharply disabused of their arrogant assumptions about the low quality of American infantry units.

  The fighting went on all day and into the night, with more and more buildings ablaze. The artillery observer from the 99th Division who had been sent forward to Buchholz
on the first evening gazed at the conflagration in Rocherath–Krinkelt and kept thinking of a line from an Alan Seeger poem: ‘But I’ve a rendezvous with death at midnight in some flaming town.’

  While the fighting in Rocherath–Krinkelt reached its climax, part of the 1st Infantry Division five kilometres to the south-west was consolidating its positions and patrolling to establish the direction and strength of the German advance. Sepp Dietrich, frustrated by the fierce American defence of the twin villages, ordered the 277th Volksgrenadier-Division to continue the attack there. The 12th SS Panzer meanwhile was to move to the south-west, and advance from Büllingen and push further west towards Waimes. The small town of Waimes contained the 47th Evacuation Hospital and part of the 99th Division’s medical battalion. General Gerow ordered a mixed force from the 1st Division with tank destroyers, light tanks and engineers to extricate the medics and the wounded in time.

  The Hitler Jugend was to find that the southern flank of the Elsenborn ridge was as strongly held as the eastern flank. The 1st Division alone was backed by six battalions of artillery and a battery of 8-inch guns. The Americans were also fortunate that the ground was so soft in many places that it made off-road movement for the German tanks almost impossible. When American anti-tank guns and tank destroyers knocked out the leading panzer on a road, the others were blocked. Anti-aircraft half-tracks with quadruple .50 machine guns known as ‘meatchoppers’ then proved very effective in forcing back the SS panzergrenadiers.

  Neither General Gerow nor General Hodges had any idea that Hitler had forbidden the Sixth Panzer Army to head north towards Liège. The Führer, wanting to avoid the concentration of American forces around Aachen, had dictated that the SS panzer divisions strike due west towards the Meuse and not vary their route. But Peiper’s direction of advance had already convinced the American command that they had to extend the northern shoulder westward. General Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps was to establish a defensive line from Stavelot, deploying both the experienced 30th Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne, which was already heading for Werbomont.

  Following the Malmédy massacre of the day before, the American command issued an urgent warning to all troops: ‘It is dangerous at any time to surrender to German tank crews, and especially so to tanks unaccompanied by infantry; or to surrender to any units making a rapid advance. These units have few means for handling prisoners, and a solution used is merely to kill the prisoners.’ The lesson was: ‘Those that fought it out received fewer losses. Those that surrendered did not have a chance.’

  Peiper launched his attack on Stavelot at dawn, having let his exhausted men catch up on sleep during the night. Major Paul J. Solis had arrived in the early hours with a company of the 526th Armored Infantry Battalion, a platoon of anti-tank guns and a platoon of towed tank destroyers. He was still positioning his men and guns when they were surprised by two Panther tanks and a company of panzergrenadiers, charging around the hillside on the road to the bridge over the Amblève. The first Panther was hit and caught fire, but it had built up such momentum that it smashed into the anti-tank barrier erected across the road. The second Panther pushed on and occupied the bridge in Stavelot, to be followed rapidly by the panzergrenadiers.

  The Americans did not have time to blow up the bridge. Solis’s force was driven back into the town. Peiper’s men alleged, without any justification, that Belgian civilians fired on them and they proceeded to shoot twenty-three of them, including women. After heavy fighting throughout the morning, Solis’s small force had to withdraw a little way up the road to Francorchamps and Spa. The main American fuel dump at Francorchamps had not been marked on Peiper’s map, and he decided to carry on west along the valley of the Amblève. In any case, General Lee’s Communications Zone troops had succeeded in evacuating the bulk of the fuel supplies potentially within Peiper’s grasp. Between 17 and 19 December, American supply troops removed more than 3 million gallons of fuel from the Spa–Stavelot area. The biggest Allied loss was 400,000 gallons, destroyed on 17 December by a V-1 strike on Liège.

  That afternoon a misleading report reached Hodges’s headquarters that Spa itself was threatened. General Joe Collins, who was sitting next to the First Army commander, heard its chief intelligence officer whisper to Hodges: ‘General, if you don’t get out of town pretty quickly, you are going to be captured.’

  ‘The situation is rapidly deteriorating,’ the headquarters diary noted. ‘About three o’clock this afternoon there were reports that tanks were coming up from Stavelot headed towards Spa. Only a small roadblock and half-tracks stood between them and our headquarters.’ Hodges rang Simpson, the Ninth Army commander, at 16.05. ‘He says that the situation is pretty bad,’ Simpson recorded. ‘He is ready to pull out his establishment. He is threatened, he says.’ Spa was evacuated, and the whole of First Army staff moved to its rear headquarters at Chaudfontaine near Liège, which they reached at midnight. They learned later that, as soon as they left Spa, ‘American flags, pictures of the President and all other Allied insignia were taken down and that the mayor released 20 suspected collaborationists out of jail.’

  Earlier that evening two officers from the 7th Armored Division, who had just returned from leave, found that their formation had left Maastricht. Setting out to find them, they first went to Spa and in Hodges’s abandoned headquarters they gazed in astonishment at the situation maps which had not been removed in the rush to evacuate. They took them down and carried on to St Vith, where they handed them over to Brigadier General Bruce Clarke. Clarke studied the maps in dismay. They revealed, as nothing else could, the First Army’s failure to understand what was going on. ‘Hell, when this fight’s over,’ Clarke said, ‘there’s going to be enough grief court-martialling generals. I’m not in the mood for making any more trouble.’ He promptly destroyed them.

  Peiper, in an attempt to find an alternative route, had sent off a reconnaissance force of two companies south of the Amblève to Trois-Ponts, a village on the confluence of the Amblève and the Salm. It appears that they became hopelessly lost in the dark. From Trois-Ponts the road lay straight to Werbomont. Peiper, having forced the Americans out of Stavelot, left behind a small detachment on the assumption that troops from the 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division would arrive, and then set off for Trois-Ponts himself.

  The 51st Engineer Battalion, which had been based at Marche-en-Famenne operating sawmills, had received orders the evening before to make for Trois-Ponts to blow the three bridges there. Company C arrived while Peiper’s force was attacking Stavelot and set to work placing demolition charges on the bridge over the Amblève and the two bridges over the Salm. They also erected roadblocks across the road along which the Peiper Kampfgruppe would come. A 57mm anti-tank gun and its crew were pressed into service, as was a company of the 526th Armored Infantry Battalion on its way to St Vith to join up with the rest of the 7th Armored Division.

  At 11.15 hours, the defenders of Trois-Ponts heard the grinding rumble of tanks approaching. Peiper’s vanguard included nineteen Panthers. The crew of the 57mm anti-tank gun were ready and its first round hit the track of the leading Panther, bringing it to a halt. The other tanks opened fire and destroyed the gun, killing most of its crew. At the sound of firing the engineers blew up the bridges. Peiper’s route to Werbomont was blocked. The defenders in houses on the west bank opened fire on panzergrenadiers trying to cross the river. Using various ruses, including a truck towing chains to make the noise of tanks and infantrymen firing bazookas to imitate artillery, the defenders convinced Peiper that their force was much stronger than it was.

  Furious at this setback, Peiper decided to return to Stavelot and take the road along the north bank of the Amblève instead. His column thundered along the road towards La Gleize. The steep, forested slopes on the north side of the valley allowed no room for manoeuvre. Peiper still felt that, if only he had enough fuel, ‘it would have been a simple matter to drive through to the River Meuse early that day’.

  Find
ing no resistance in La Gleize, Peiper sent off a reconnaissance group who discovered a bridge intact over the Amblève at Cheneux. They were seen by an American spotter aircraft flying under the cloud. Fighter-bombers from IX Tactical Air Command were alerted and soon dived into the attack, despite the bad visibility. The Kampfgruppe lost three tanks and five half-tracks. Peiper’s column was saved from further punishment by the early fall of darkness at 16.30 hours, but the Americans now knew exactly where they were. The 1st SS Panzer Corps, which had been out of radio contact with Peiper, also found out by intercepting the Americans’ insecure transmissions.

  Peiper pushed on under the cover of darkness but when the lead vehicle reached a bridge over the Lienne, a small tributary of the Amblève, it was blown up in their faces by a detachment from the 291st Engineer Combat Battalion. Peiper, who suffered from heart problems, must have nearly had a stroke at this further setback. He sent a tank company to find another bridge to the north, but just as they thought they had found one unguarded, they were attacked in a well-executed ambush. It was in any case a fruitless diversion because the bridge was not strong enough for their seventy-two-ton Königstiger tanks. Thwarted and with no more bridges left to try, the column turned round with great difficulty on the narrow road and returned to La Gleize to rejoin the Amblève valley to Stoumont three kilometres further on. Peiper halted the column to rest for the night before attacking Stoumont at dawn. This at least gave civilians in the village the chance to get away.

  Peiper had no idea that American forces were closing in. A regiment of the 30th Infantry Division already lay ahead, blocking the valley road another two and a half kilometres further on, and the 82nd Airborne was starting to deploy from Werbomont. The trap was also closing behind him. A battalion from another regiment in the 30th Infantry Division, strengthened with tanks and tank destroyers, relieved Major Solis’s men north of Stavelot, and that evening fought its way into the northern part of the town.