Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  After dark on the evening of 19 December, American soldiers from the 105th Engineer Battalion managed to infiltrate Stavelot and destroyed the main bridge across the Amblève, despite enemy tank and machine-gun fire. Peiper was furious: part of his force was now cut off north of the river and there was little sign of bridging equipment coming up from his division.

  The 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division, which Peiper’s Kampfgruppe had expected to catch up with them, was just one of Sepp Dietrich’s formations battering away without success at the southern edge of the Elsenborn ridge. The I SS Panzer Corps headquarters had sent the paratroopers to take Faymonville and then Waimes, from where the American field hospital had been evacuated. But the bulk of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger never advanced further than Faymonville.

  The lack of progress by the Sixth Panzer Army had started a cascade of criticism from Hitler and the OKW, via Rundstedt and Model down to a frustrated and angry Dietrich. In a fresh attempt, Dietrich ordered the 12th SS Panzer-Division to move round from Rocherath–Krinkelt to attack the American 1st Infantry Division positions from Büllingen. The Germans urgently needed to open the road west to Malmédy. Panzergrenadiers of the SS Hitler Jugend, battalions of the 12th Volksgrenadier and tanks assembled in the early hours in Büllingen ready to crush the American 26th Infantry Regiment. The battle for Dom Bütgenbach was to be as intense as that for Rocherath–Krinkelt to the north-east.

  To continue the attacks around Rocherath–Krinkelt and Wirtzfeld, Dietrich sent in his reserve, the 3rd Panzergrenadier-Division, to support the 12th and 277th Volksgrenadiers. The hard pounding intensified, as the massed American artillery regiments on the Elsenborn ridge smashed every village in range now held by the Germans. Their first priority on the morning of 19 December was to break up the renewed attacks against Rocherath–Krinkelt, a task at which the 155mm Long Toms excelled. But the casualty rate among young artillery officers acting as forward observers was very high.

  In the shattered twin villages, the remaining units of the 2nd Division and the Sherman and tank-destroyer platoons continued to fight off the volksgrenadiers and panzergrenadiers. They also prepared their withdrawal to new positions on the side of the Elsenborn ridge. During the afternoon, they started to destroy vehicles, guns and equipment which would have to be left behind. Radiators and oil reservoirs were emptied and the engines revved until they seized. Artillerymen rolled thermite grenades into their gun barrels. And at 17.30 hours, just over an hour after dark had fallen, the first units began their withdrawal. Along the rutted road, engineers had taped TNT blocks to the trees on either side, ready to blow them down to block the way.

  Exhausted after the three-day battle of Rocherath–Krinkelt which had blunted the Sixth Panzer Army, the men slipped and slid in the muddy slush, cursing and sweating. They were so tired that on firmer patches they fell asleep as they continued to trudge forward. Late that night, a small patrol sneaked back to the edge of the twin villages. They returned to report that there were around a thousand Germans there with about a hundred American prisoners.

  A dozen kilometres to the south, the two unfortunate regiments of the 106th Division, trapped in the Schnee Eifel east of St Vith, tried to fight their way back to American lines. The inexperienced officers and soldiers were utterly demoralized. They were short of ammunition, out of radio contact mainly due to German jamming, and the scale of the disaster appeared overwhelming. Many tried to raise each other’s spirits with assurances that a relief force must be on its way.

  Kurt Vonnegut, who was with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, described his comrades as a mixture of college kids and those who had enlisted to avoid jail. Many were ‘poor physical specimens’ who ‘should never have been in the army’. Few had received infantry training. Vonnegut was a battalion scout who knew about weapons only because his ‘father was a gun-nut, so [he] knew how all this crap worked’.

  Some tried to get away in vehicles, but when the Germans opened fire with anti-tank guns, they abandoned them and immobilized the rest. Their commanders, who were ‘flying blind’, sent off scouts to find out what was happening, but they could not even find the artillery battalion which was supposed to be supporting them. The Germans had brought up loudspeakers to play music by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and other American bandleaders, interrupted with promises of ‘showers, warm beds, and hotcakes for breakfast if you surrender’. This provoked an obscene chorus in response. One soldier in a ditch, weeping violently, shouted: ‘Go blow it out your ass, you German son of a bitch!’

  The two regimental commanders decided to give up when their units were bombarded by German artillery from all sides. At 16.00 hours an officer went forward waving a snow cape. Officers and men were marched off with their hands on their heads, stumbling and tripping. Their guards later told them to put the contents of their pockets into their helmet liners so that they could pick out what they wanted. A large number found themselves herded into a farmyard surrounded by a stone wall. At dusk a voice called out: ‘Do not flee. If you flee, you will be machine weaponed.’ They could only cling together for warmth in the long, cold night.

  Vonnegut called it ‘the largest surrender of Americans under arms in American military history’. (In fact the surrender at Bataan in 1942 was much greater, but the capitulation of some 8,000 men in the 106th was certainly the biggest in Europe.) Vonnegut and a dozen others tried to find their way back to American lines through the snow-bound forest, but the Germans of the 18th Volksgrenadier-Division who were mopping up trapped them in the bed of a creek. Loudspeakers broadcast an order to surrender. To hurry them, the Germans fired tree bursts over their heads. Deciding that they had no alternative, the cornered Americans stripped their weapons and threw the working parts away. They emerged with their hands up, and thus began their imprisonment which, in Vonnegut’s case, led to Dresden and the firestorm of February 1945, described in Slaughterhouse Five.

  Officers at VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne were horrified when they heard of the surrender. The deputy chief of staff ‘inferred that the two surrounded regiments might have put up a stronger fight. He characterized a force of that size as “two wildcats in a bush” which might have done some clawing of the enemy instead of surrendering as they eventually did.’

  The Germans could not believe how many men they had surrounded. One of their officers wrote in his diary: ‘Endless columns of prisoners pass; at first, about a hundred, later, another thousand. Our vehicle gets stuck on the road. I get out and walk. Model himself directs traffic. (He’s a little undistinguished looking man with a monocle.) The roads are littered with destroyed American vehicles, cars and tanks. Another column of prisoners pass. I count over a thousand men. In Andler there is a column of 1,500 men with about 50 officers and a lieutenant colonel who had asked to surrender.’

  To Model’s frustration, German traffic east of St Vith was hardly advancing. The 7th Armored Division’s artillery kept up a steady bombardment on the approach roads. After the previous day’s failure to take St Vith, the Germans tried probing and outflanking movements mainly against the 31st Tank Battalion. The 38th Armored Infantry Battalion was ‘licking its wounds’ after the mauling it had received, and platoons needed to be amalgamated because of their losses. But even so the Germans seemed to have come off worst.*

  In the trees in front of them, the 38th Armored Infantry reported, ‘the only Jerries we found were dead ones – most of them killed apparently as they tried to dig themselves in behind some tree or fallen log. Those who were not equipped with shovels had attempted to scoop shallow holes with their helmets, bayonets and even with their fingernails.’ A firebreak, which had been covered by a heavy-machine-gun section on the right flank, was found to have ‘nineteen paratroopers stretched out at almost parade-ground intervals, five yards apart, each one with at least five to eight slugs in his chest or throat’. According to Major Boyer, the ‘paratroopers’ were later found to have been wearing Grossdeutschland uniform and insignia ‘under their jump jacket
s’. During another attack that afternoon, the 90mm guns of a tank-destroyer platoon managed to knock out a Mark V Panther tank and one of the two assault guns supporting the infantry.

  The main threat to Brigadier General Hasbrouck’s defence line lay in the north where the 18th Volksgrenadiers and the Führer Begleit Brigade were pushing round. But although the Führer Begleit saw itself as an elite formation, it also had its psychological casualties. Apparently one member of its staff, Rittmeister von Möllendorf, was ‘hysterical and a nervous wreck. He cries whenever Hitler’s name is mentioned.’

  An even greater threat to Hasbrouck’s rear came when the 9th SS Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen followed the same route a little further north, via Recht and Poteau, which the Kampfgruppe Hansen had taken earlier. In the fighting near Poteau, an SS runner received a stomach wound when an American shell exploded. As his comrades put him on a stretcher, with some of his intestines protruding, one of them made a move to take his steel helmet off, but he begged him to leave it on. At company headquarters an Unterscharführer tried to remove the helmet, but the man screamed his protest. By the time they reached the dressing station, he was barely conscious. A medic ‘lifted the man’s head up, undid the chin strap and took the helmet off. The top of the skull with the brain came off with it. The man must have realised that he had taken another piece of shrapnel right under the rim of his helmet. It had sheared through his skull. He lived until his helmet was removed.’

  Hasbrouck knew that if the Germans diverted south and took Vielsalm and Salmchâteau some ten kilometres to the west of St Vith, then his forces would be cut off. But both the 9th SS Panzer and the 116th Panzer-Division twenty kilometres to the south-west were heading towards the Meuse either side of the St Vith breakwater. He knew he simply had to hold on there to block the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions which, having now dealt with the two beleaguered American regiments in the Schnee Eifel, could concentrate all their strength against St Vith.

  Verdun, in the words of one of Bradley’s staff officers, was ‘an ugly professional garrison town’, with a population considered hostile by the Americans. 12th Army Group’s rear headquarters was based ‘within great loops of barbed wire, up and down which sentries walked’.

  Eisenhower arrived with Air Chief Marshal Tedder in the Supreme Commander’s armour-plated Cadillac. Patton appeared in his ‘fabulous Jeep with plexiglass doors and thirty caliber machinegun mounted on a post’. Together with the two American army group commanders, Bradley and Devers, they trooped upstairs in the grey stone barracks followed by a bevy of staff officers. A single pot-bellied stove was the only source of heat in the long room, so few outer clothes were removed.

  Resolved to set the right tone, Eisenhower opened proceedings. ‘The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster,’ he said. ‘There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.’

  ‘Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris,’ Patton called down the table. ‘Then we’ll really cut ’em off and chew ’em up.’ This prompted nervous laughs. Patton’s instinct to attack the enemy salient at the base found few supporters. Eisenhower was unamused. ‘George, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘But the enemy must never be allowed to cross the Meuse.’

  Thanks to fresh Ultra intercepts, SHAEF by now had a much clearer picture of German ambitions in Operation Herbstnebel. Eisenhower was determined to rise to the challenge as a field commander, and not preside over the battle as a distant figurehead. This feeling may well have been strengthened by the suspicion that he had not imposed himself strongly enough over the past months.

  Standing by the large map of the Ardennes hanging on the wall, staff officers briefed the assembled array of generals on the situation. Eisenhower then listed the divisions being brought over to France. Commanders could give ground if necessary, but there was to be no withdrawal behind the Meuse. General Devers’s 6th Army Group in Alsace was to extend north to take over part of Patton’s Third Army front. This was to free up Patton’s divisions for a counter-attack from the south.

  ‘When can you start?’ Eisenhower asked, turning to Patton.

  ‘As soon as you’re through with me.’

  Eisenhower wanted him to be more specific. Patton could not resist a display of bravado. ‘On the morning of December 21st, with three divisions’, he replied.* ‘The 4th Armored, the 26th and the 80th.’ Patton did not say that a combat command of the 4th Armored and a corps headquarters were already on the move, and the rest were starting to leave that morning. The idea that the bulk of an army could be turned around through ninety degrees to attack in a different direction within three days produced stunned disbelief around the table.

  ‘Don’t be fatuous, George,’ Eisenhower said. ‘If you try to go that early, you won’t have all three divisions ready and you’ll go piecemeal. You will start on the twenty-second and I want your initial blow to be a strong one!’ Eisenhower was right to be concerned that an over-hasty attack would reduce the desired effect. But there can be little doubt that Third Army’s energy and staff work produced one of the most rapid redeployments known in the history of warfare.

  All through the meeting, Patton’s superior General Bradley said very little. Already suffering from stress and hives, he was also a martyr to his sinuses. Bradley felt very much on the defensive since it had been his decision to leave the Ardennes weakly defended. He felt completely sidelined, for Eisenhower was taking all the decisions and giving orders to Patton over his head. Bradley had also isolated himself by refusing to move his headquarters from the city of Luxembourg on the grounds that this would frighten its inhabitants, but pride certainly played a large part in that decision. In any event, the result was that he remained cut off from Hodges’s First Army headquarters near Liège by the German advance. Neither he nor any of his staff officers had visited an American headquarters since the offensive began. To make his mood even worse, Bradley clearly felt snubbed after the meeting when he invited Eisenhower to lunch. The Supreme Commander declined the offer, saying he would have a sandwich in the car on his way back to Versailles.

  As Eisenhower was about to get into the staff car, he turned again to Patton. ‘Every time I get a new star I get attacked,’ he joked, referring also to his previous promotion just before Rommel’s surprise offensive at Kasserine in Tunisia.

  ‘And every time you get attacked, I pull you out,’ Patton retorted, clearly feeling on top of the world. He then went to a telephone and called his own headquarters in Nancy to confirm the movement order for his divisions using a prearranged codeword. Patton returned, smoking a cigar, to talk to Bradley, who, according to his aide Chester Hansen, was ‘fighting mad’.

  ‘I don’t want to commit any of your stuff [i.e. formations] unless I have to,’ Bradley said to Patton. ‘I want to save it for a damn good blow when we hit back and we’re going to hit this bastard hard.’ This suggests that Bradley still resented Eisenhower’s decision that Patton should launch a rapid counter-attack. But when Bradley and his retinue drove back towards Luxembourg, they passed a convoy of Patton’s III Corps already on the road. Third Army staff had not wasted a moment.

  Eisenhower had been right to dismiss Patton’s instinct to cut off the German offensive at its base. Although American forces in the Ardennes had doubled to nearly 190,000 men, they were still far too few for such an ambitious operation. The Third Army was to secure the southern shoulder and the city of Luxembourg, but its main priority was to advance north to Bastogne where the 101st Airborne and part of the 10th Armored Division were soon to be surrounded.

  The situation in the whole area was chaotic. Colonel Herman of the 7th Tank Destroyer Group took over the defence of Libramont, south-west of Bastogne. Nobody there knew what was happening, so he stopped all stragglers and even an artillery column passing through the town. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

  ‘We’re retreating, sir,’ came the reply.

  ‘The
hell you are,’ said Herman. ‘This is where you turn around and fight.’ By midnight on 19 December, Herman had collected a force of some 2,000 men, to which he added another leaderless artillery battalion the next morning.

  Resistance still continued in Wiltz even though the road west to Bastogne had been cut by German patrols, thus blocking efforts to resupply the remnants of the 28th Division in the town with rations and ammunition. At 14.30 the 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division, blowing whistles and supported by forty tanks and self-propelled assault guns, attacked the town from several sides. By nightfall, the defenders had been pushed back to the centre of the town, amid burning buildings. General Cota sent a message to their commander: ‘Give them hell!’ That night survivors were ordered to break into small groups and head for Bastogne. A convoy of thirty vehicles tried to leave but ran into heavy fire and was abandoned. Having blown the bridges, the last engineer unit did not leave Wiltz until 11.00 the next day.

  The trucks and trailers heading for Bastogne packed with paratroopers were directed to Mande-Saint-Etienne, half a dozen kilometres to the west, so as not to clog the town. Roads leading out of Bastogne were blocked by panic-stricken army drivers trying to escape. Even their officers had to be threatened with pistols to force them to move their vehicles aside to allow the 101st Airborne through. Paratroopers frozen from the long journey jumped down stiffly. Everybody realized the need for speed, with two panzer and one infantry division closing on Bastogne. Those who had to shoulder mortar tubes and their base-plates staggered along under the load like ‘a hod-carrying Egyptian slave’, in the words of Louis Simpson with the 327th Glider Infantry.