Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  While the 82nd Airborne had rushed on ahead to Werbomont, the 101st started to mount up back at Mourmelon-le-Grand. A long line of 380 ten-ton open trucks were waiting to take up to fifty men apiece. Roll calls by company took place. Men bundled up ‘in their winter clothing looked like an assembly of bears’. Many, however, lacked greatcoats and even their paratrooper jumpboots. One lieutenant colonel, who had just arrived back from a wedding in London, would march into Bastogne still in his ceremonial Class A uniform. The division band, which had been ordered to stay behind, formed up in angry mood. Its members asked the chaplain whether he could speak to the commander of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, to persuade him to allow them to go. He said that the colonel was too busy, but tacitly agreed that they could always climb aboard with the others. He knew that every man would be needed.

  The first trucks left at 12.15 with airborne engineers, the reconnaissance platoon and part of divisional headquarters. The orders were to head for Werbomont. Brigadier General McAuliffe left almost immediately, and two hours later the first part of the main column set off. Altogether 805 officers and 11,035 enlisted men were going into battle. Nobody knew exactly where they were headed, and many thought it strange that they were not going to parachute into battle, but were being transported in like ordinary ‘straight-leg’ infantry. Packed into the open trucks, they shivered in the cold. The column did not stop, and as there was no room to move to the back to relieve themselves over the tailgate, they passed around an empty jerrycan instead. When darkness fell later in the afternoon, the drivers switched on their headlights. The need for speed was deemed to be greater than the risk of encountering a German night-fighter.

  When McAuliffe reached Neufchâteau, thirty kilometres south-west of Bastogne, an MP flagged down his command car. He was given a message from Middleton’s VIII Corps headquarters to say that the 101st Airborne had been attached to his command, and that the whole division should head straight for Bastogne. The advance party, unaware of the change of plan, had already gone on to Werbomont, forty kilometres further north as the crow flies. McAuliffe and his staff officers drove on to Bastogne and, just before dark, found General Troy Middleton’s corps headquarters in a former German barracks on the north-west edge of the town. The scenes of panic-stricken drivers and soldiers fleeing on foot heading west were not an encouraging sight.

  McAuliffe found Middleton briefing Colonel William L. Roberts of Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division, one of the two formations which Eisenhower had ordered to the Ardennes that first evening. Roberts had a better idea of how desperate the situation was than McAuliffe. That morning General Norman Cota had sent him an urgent request to come to the aid of his battered 28th Division near Wiltz, where the 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division was attacking. But Roberts had received firm orders to go straight to Bastogne, so was forced to refuse. The Panzer Lehr Division and the 26th Volksgrenadier had already broken through just to the north, heading for the town.

  ‘How many teams can you make up?’ Middleton asked Roberts.

  ‘Three,’ he replied.

  Middleton ordered him to send one team to the south-east of Wardin, and another to Longvilly to block the advance of the Panzer Lehr. The third was to go north to Noville to stop the 2nd Panzer-Division. Although Roberts did not like the idea of splitting his force into such small groups, he did not contest Middleton’s decision. ‘Move with the utmost speed,’ Middleton told him. ‘Hold these positions at all costs.’

  In the race for Bastogne, hold-ups on the roads caused tempers to flare in the XLVII Panzer Corps. But the main setback to the timetable had been caused by the courage of individual companies from the 28th Infantry Division. Their defence of road junctions along the north–south ridge road known as ‘Skyline Drive’, at villages such as Heinerscheid, Marnach and Hosingen, had made a critical difference. ‘The long resistance of Hosingen’, Generalmajor Heinz Kokott acknowledged, ‘resulted in the delay of the whole advance of 26th Volksgrenadier-Division and thereby of Panzer Lehr by one and a half days.’ Company K’s defence of Hosingen until the morning of 18 December, as the commander of Panzer Lehr also recognized, had slowed his division so much that it ‘arrived too late in the Bastogne area’. This proved decisive for the battle of Bastogne, when every hour counted.

  General Cota in Wiltz knew that his division was doomed. He ordered unsorted Christmas mail to be destroyed to keep it from the Germans, so letters, cards and packages were piled up in a courtyard, doused with gasoline and set on fire. During the afternoon, the remnants of the 3rd Battalion of the 110th Infantry fell back towards Wiltz. The hungry and exhausted men formed up to defend the howitzers of a field artillery battalion south-east of Wiltz, while Cota prepared to pull his divisional command post back to Sibret, south-west of Bastogne.

  That morning, in mist and drizzle, the spearhead of the Panzer Lehr had finally crossed the bridge over the River Clerf near Drauffelt while the 2nd Panzer-Division crossed at Clervaux, having been delayed by the defence of the town and its castle. Congestion was then caused by tanks breaking down – the Panthers were still the most susceptible to mechanical failure – while the horse-drawn artillery of an infantry division struggling on the same muddy track as armoured formations produced furious scenes.

  The commander of Panzer Lehr, Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, a short and aggressive veteran of North Africa and Normandy, blamed his corps commander for having allowed this chaos. Congestion was so bad that the marching infantry of the 26th Volksgrenadier reached Nieder Wampach at about the same time as the panzer troops in their tanks and half-tracks. When vehicles bogged down in the mud, infantrymen took their heavy machine guns and mortars off the vehicles and carried them on their shoulders.

  As darkness was falling on 18 December, and the Panzer Lehr advanced on Bastogne, Bayerlein witnessed a tank battle going on near Longvilly. ‘Panzer Lehr, with their barrels turned northward,’ he wrote, ‘passed by this impressive spectacle in the twilight which, cut by the tracer bullets, took on a fantastic aspect.’ In fact one of his own units was involved. Middleton had ordered Combat Command R of the 9th Armored Division to defend the main routes to Bastogne from the east. After some initial skirmishes against roadblocks and outposts in the late afternoon, the Shermans and half-tracks of Task Force Rose and Task Force Harper were caught between the spearhead of the 2nd Panzer-Division, a 26th Volksgrenadier-Division artillery regiment, and a company of tanks from the Panzer Lehr. Once the first tanks to be targeted had burst into flames, the panzer gunners kept firing at the other vehicles silhouetted by the blaze. Bayerlein attributed their success to the accuracy and longer range of the Mark V Panther’s gun. American crews abandoned their vehicles whether hit or not, and escaped towards Longvilly.

  The Germans boasted later that as a result of this action they captured twenty-three Sherman tanks, fourteen armoured cars, fifteen self-propelled guns, thirty Jeeps and twenty-five trucks, all undamaged. Although the German account of their success was exaggerated, the one-sided battle near Longvilly was a very nasty blow for the Americans.

  The only welcome development that evening in Bastogne was the arrival of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion, which had managed to fight its way through from the north. Colonel Roberts of the 10th Armored Division had already briefed his three team leaders and sent them on their way. Each had a mixture of Sherman tanks, armoured cars and half-tracks carrying the infantry. Team O’Hara set off to Wardin where it took up position on some high ground just to the south of the village. There was no sign of the Germans, but small groups of exhausted men from the 28th Division, bearded and filthy from three days of fighting, came through heading for Bastogne.

  Major William R. Desobry of the 20th Armored Infantry Battalion was ordered north to Noville. An MP led the way in a Jeep to put him on the right road as they had no maps. On reaching the edge of Bastogne, the MP said: ‘Noville is two towns up, straight down the road.’ Desobry sent the reconnaissance platoon on ahead, through
Foy and on to Noville. Both villages were deserted.

  Desobry set up a defence on the north and eastern side of Noville with outposts of infantry squads and pairs of Sherman tanks guarding the roads coming in, then got some sleep soon after midnight. He knew that there was a big battle to come. ‘We could hear gunfire out to the east and to the north and we could see flashes. We could see searchlights and so on. During the night a number of small units came back into our lines and a lot of stragglers. They essentially told us horror stories about how their units had been overrun by large German units with lots of tanks, Germans in American uniforms, Germans in civilian clothes and all sorts of weird tales.’

  Roberts had given Desobry the authority to grab any stragglers and take them under command, but he found that their ‘physical condition and mental condition was such’ that it was easier to send them on to the rear. The only groups that seemed to be worth taking on were an infantry platoon from the 9th Armored Division and a platoon of engineers, but even the engineers were sent on their way the next morning. Reinforcements were coming in the shape of paratroopers, but Desobry sensed that the Germans would attack before they arrived.

  Lieutenant Colonel Henry T. Cherry’s team, with the 3rd Tank Battalion, a company of infantry, some engineers and a platoon of the 90th Cavalry Squadron, advanced from Bastogne towards Longvilly and the sound of firing. They halted short of the village, whose narrow street was jammed with rear-echelon vehicles from Combat Command R. Colonel Cherry went forward on foot to find out what was happening, but none of the officers in their temporary command post seemed to have any idea of the situation. As at Wardin, stragglers from the 28th were retreating to Bastogne.

  Cherry positioned his tanks and infantry a kilometre west of Longvilly and returned to report to Colonel Roberts in Bastogne. He set off back to his men shortly before midnight, and heard over the radio that the remnants of Combat Command R of the 9th Armored Division had pulled out completely. On reaching Neffe, Cherry was warned by a wounded soldier that the road ahead had been cut at Mageret by a reconnaissance group from the Panzer Lehr. Cherry called one of his officers on the radio to tell him to send a small force back to clear them out. But when the half-track with two squads of infantry reached Mageret, they found the German force consisted of three tanks and a company of infantry.

  When Colonel Cherry heard what they had discovered, he knew that Longvilly could not be defended, despite Colonel Roberts’s admonition to hold it ‘at all costs’. He ordered his team to pull back to Neffe, fighting their way through if necessary. Cherry, having spotted an ancient chateau with thick walls, decided to set up his command post there. Like Desobry, he sensed that the real battle would start in the morning.

  Even though his panzer divisions had at last broken through in the south, General der Panzertruppe von Manteuffel was furious at the delays in capturing St Vith. Part of the trouble came from the fact that the only roads west led through the town, and the boundary with the Sixth Panzer Army lay just six kilometres to the north. And since, in Manteuffel’s view, Dietrich’s army was already attacking on far too narrow a front, some of his forces had moved on to Fifth Panzer Army routes, increasing the traffic chaos.

  Shortly after dawn, the Germans attacked Hasbrouck’s defence line in front of St Vith. Panzers fired tree bursts, bringing down pine branches which made the Americans duck deep in their foxholes. Volksgrenadiers attacked, firing automatic weapons. The 18th Volksgrenadier-Division was considerably more experienced than the 62nd advancing towards the south of St Vith. A second attack late in the morning was supported by a massive Ferdinand self-propelled gun, but a Sherman knocked it out twenty-five metres from the American positions with an armour-piercing round which bounced and penetrated its belly.

  A Greyhound armoured car concealed in some trees slipped in behind a Tiger tank on the Schönberg road so as to fire its puny 37mm gun at point-blank range. The Tiger commander, on spotting it, tried to traverse his turret round to engage, but the crew of the Greyhound managed to get within twenty-five metres and fire off three rounds into the thinly protected rear of the Tiger. ‘There was a muffled explosion, followed by flames which billowed out of the turret and engine ports.’

  The third attack came in the afternoon, with a battalion of infantry supported by four tanks and eight self-propelled assault guns. The assault was only broken up by the enfilade fire of Shermans. The temperature dropped sharply that day, with some snow flurries.

  Manteuffel, seeing little progress, decided to commit his reserve in the form of the Führer Begleit Brigade commanded by Oberst Otto Remer. That afternoon, Remer received the order to advance to St Vith, but his column of vehicles was soon brought to a halt by the appalling conditions of the roads. One of Remer’s officers recorded that the ‘Führer Begleit Brigade was involved in a vast traffic jam with two other infantry formations, all claiming the same road’. Remer ordered his men to keep ‘pushing forward and not to worry about minor considerations’. When told to advance further round to the north, Remer at first ‘declined to move in that direction’, but eventually took up position in a wood south of Born. As the Führer’s favourite, he could clearly get away with behaviour which would have landed any other officer in front of a court martial. Remer’s high-handed attitude during the offensive became something of a black joke among fellow commanders.

  All major American headquarters lacked information on the true state of affairs. Hodges’s First Army staff now at Chaudfontaine appeared to be paralysed in the face of disaster, while at Simpson’s Ninth Army headquarters in Maastricht officers appeared very optimistic. ‘There’s not the slightest feeling of nervousness in American quarters with regard to an attack,’ the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden wrote. ‘On the contrary there is satisfaction that the enemy has chosen to join battle [in the open] instead of lying down behind a barrier of mud and water.’ Reports of air battles above the clouds at altitudes of up to 20,000 feet, between P-47 Thunderbolts and Focke-Wulf 190s and Me 109s caused great excitement.

  General Bradley still had no idea that General Hodges had abandoned his headquarters at Spa. At 22.30 hours, Bradley rang Patton to summon him to Luxembourg for a conference as soon as possible. Patton and three key staff officers left within ten minutes. As soon as Patton arrived, Bradley again said to him: ‘I feel you won’t like what we are going to do, but I fear that it’s necessary.’ Bradley was surprised at how nonchalant Patton was about postponing his offensive in the Saar. ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘We’ll still be killing Krauts.’

  On the map Bradley showed the depth of German penetration, which was also much greater than Patton had imagined. Bradley asked him what he could do. Patton answered that he would halt the 4th Armored Division and concentrate it near Longwy, prior to moving north. He could have the 80th Infantry Division on the road to Luxembourg by the next morning, with the 26th Infantry Division following within twenty-four hours. Patton rang his chief of staff and told him to issue the necessary orders and assemble transport for the 80th Division. He confessed that driving back in the dark with no knowledge of how far the Germans had advanced rattled him. ‘A very dangerous operation, which I hate,’ he wrote in his diary.

  When Patton called Luxembourg on his return, Bradley said: ‘the situation up there is much worse than it was when I talked to you’. He asked Patton to get the 4th Armored moving immediately. ‘You and a staff officer meet me for a conference with General Eisenhower at Verdun at approximately 1100.’

  11

  Skorzeny and Heydte

  Eight of Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny’s nine Jeep teams had slipped through American lines on the night of 16 December. They consisted of the best English-speakers, but even they were not good enough. Some carried vials of sulphuric acid to throw in the faces of guards if stopped. Some groups cut wires and carried out minor sabotage, such as changing road signs. One even managed to misdirect an entire infantry regiment. But the greatest success of the operation, combined wit
h Heydte’s disastrous parachute drop near Eupen, was to provoke an American over-reaction bordering on paranoia.

  A Jeep with four men was stopped at a bridge on the edge of Liège by military police. The four soldiers wore US Army uniforms, and spoke English with an American accent, but when asked for a work ticket they produced several blanks. The MPs ordered them out, found German weapons and explosives, and swastika brassards under their uniform. The Jeep, it turned out, had been captured from the British at Arnhem.

  Their officer, Leutnant Günther Schultz, was handed over to Mobile Field Interrogation Unit No. 1. Schultz appeared to co-operate fully. He admitted that he had been part of Skorzeny’s Einheit Steilau and told the team from the Counter Intelligence Corps that, according to his commander Major Schrötter, ‘the secret orders of the Fernaufklärer [long-range reconnaissance teams] were to penetrate to Paris and capture General Eisenhower and other high ranking officers’. All of this came from the rumour at the Grafenwöhr camp which Skorzeny had encouraged, but it is still not clear whether Schultz himself believed it, or whether he hoped to cause chaos, or perhaps in a wild attempt to impress his interrogators to save his skin.

  Schultz told them of an ‘Eisenhower Aktion’ carried out by a ‘special group’ commanded by an ‘Oberleutnant Schmidhuber’, directly under Skorzeny’s orders. Approximately eighty people were involved in the plot to kidnap or assassinate General Eisenhower. They would rendezvous at the Café de l’Epée or the Café de la Paix in Paris, he was not sure which. He also claimed that Brandenburger commandos, who had crossed the Soviet frontier just before the invasion in June 1941, were involved. Another report claimed that they ‘may have a captured German officer as a ruse, pretending to take him to higher headquarters for questioning’. Despite the improbable image of eighty German soldiers meeting in a Parisian café, the Counter Intelligence Corps believed Schultz’s account. The next morning, Eisenhower’s security was stepped up to such a degree that he almost found himself a prisoner.