Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  Unaware of the vital part played by the shattered 28th Division, the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne were disgusted by the bearded and filthy stragglers fleeing west through the town. They grabbed ammunition, grenades, entrenching tools and even weapons from them or from abandoned vehicles to make up for their own shortages. Belgian civilians, on the other hand, emerged from their houses with hot soup and coffee for the soldiers, and walked along beside them as they gulped it down.

  The first regiment to arrive, Colonel Julian Ewell’s 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, marched east towards Longvilly in the pre-dawn darkness to support Team Cherry of the 10th Armored. The men could hear firing ahead through the damp, chill fog. Soon they encountered traumatized survivors from the destruction of Combat Command R the evening before, who told them: ‘We have been wiped out.’

  Colonel Cherry had reached the chateau just south of Neffe during the night of 18–19 December, but any hope of making it his command post was dashed at dawn. The reconnaissance platoon of the 3rd Tank Battalion and part of the 158th Engineer Combat Battalion holding the crossroads in Neffe were attacked by an advance detachment of the Panzer Lehr. A bazooka team knocked out one Mark IV tank, but the weight of machine-gun fire and shellfire coming at the reconnaissance platoon was so great that they had to pull back along the road which ran up a valley to Bastogne.

  Two men managed to warn Cherry in the chateau of what had happened. Another four tanks including a Mark VI Tiger, as well as an armoured car and another hundred panzergrenadiers, were sighted coming from the east. Cherry and his handful of headquarters personnel prepared to defend the chateau, a square solid building with a single tower. They dismounted the machine guns from their vehicles and set them up in the windows. For Cherry, it was terrible moment. His main force between Mageret and Longvilly had been cut off, and was blocked in a traffic jam with the remnants of the 9th Armored Division’s Combat Command R. Cherry could only watch as the Germans prepared their trap.

  At around 13.00 hours the noise of battle became audible. The 77th Grenadier-Regiment of the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division launched an immediate attack on the jammed column. Artillery and assault guns joined in as well as a company of tanks from the Panzer Lehr. ‘The surprise was complete,’ the rather professorial Generalmajor Kokott noted. The Americans were surrounded, and chaos ensued as vehicles collided with each other as they tried in vain to escape. The battle was over in an hour and a half. Only a few vehicles managed to escape towards the north. Several officers and a hundred men were captured.

  As they approached Neffe, Colonel Ewell’s 1st Battalion of the 501st Parachute Infantry could hear shooting clearly through the fog and drizzle. Ewell spread his men out on both sides of the road with the order to dig in. As they were preparing foxholes, tanks could be heard. Desperate cries for bazooka teams followed.

  The 2nd Battalion, meanwhile, was moving to defend Bizôry, two kilometres to the north of Neffe. It too would be caught in a bitter battle, and was soon renamed ‘Misery’. Morale among the German forces had been greatly boosted by the two highly successful engagements against American armoured columns, but they were about to receive a sharp disappointment. Later that afternoon the 26th Volksgrenadier reconnaissance battalion and the 78th Grenadier-Regiment found themselves involved in heavy fighting around both Mageret and Bizôry. The attack on Bizôry produced ‘painful losses’. Part of the Panzer Lehr Division was also heavily engaged at Neffe. The Americans had won the race to Bastogne, with their reinforcements.

  Colonel Ewell established a defensive line along high ground less than three kilometres west of Bastogne’s market square. ‘The enemy had made good use of the time!’ the commander of the 26th Volksgrenadiers acknowledged ruefully. And the Panzer Lehr was so desperate for fuel that it was reduced to draining the tanks of captured or knocked-out vehicles.

  This ‘day of surprises’ made it clear to Bayerlein that the higher command idea of taking Bastogne off the march was now impossible. But the commander of the XLVII Panzer Corps, General der Panzertruppe Freiherr von Lüttwitz, blamed him for the failure to take Bastogne. Bayerlein retorted by blaming the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division, and Lüttwitz himself, who had slowed him down by committing the Panzer Lehr to battle east of the River Clerf contrary to the original plan. Bayerlein also said that Lüttwitz’s leadership was ‘not sufficiently coherent and energetic’. He had failed to concentrate the three divisions into a full-scale attack, and had allowed them to become ‘scattered’.

  That night the exhausted German troops dug in as the rain came on. ‘Ammunition and rations were brought up,’ recorded the commander of the 26th Volksgrenadiers. ‘Now and then there was a nervous burst of machinegun fire or the thunder of mortar fire which lasted a couple of minutes and after a few salvos died down again.’

  Eight kilometres north of Bastogne, the twenty-six-year-old Major William Desobry commanding the 20th Armored Infantry Battalion had spent an anxious night in Noville. The tall and athletic Desobry with his 400 men awaited the onslaught of what he would later discover to be the bulk of the 2nd Panzer-Division. At around 04.00 hours, Desobry’s men noticed that no more stragglers were coming through. Soon afterwards, they heard the first shots. The outpost along the road to Bourcy, having opened fire, pulled back into the town as ordered. Its sergeant, who had been shot in the mouth, reported with difficulty that Germans had appeared in half-tracks.

  Desobry could hear the distinctive noise of German armoured vehicles to the north. Although he knew that ‘sounds at night are much louder and seem much nearer’, this was clearly quite a force with tanks from the clanking noise of their tracks. ‘Oh brother!’ Desobry said to himself. ‘There is really something out there.’

  Heavy firing with automatic weapons and tank gunnery could be heard to the north-east. This came from the destruction of the third team from the 9th Armored Division’s ill-fated Combat Command R. They had unfortunately withdrawn right into the path of the 2nd Panzer-Division. As at Longvilly the night before, German Panthers picked their targets with ease once the first vehicles were ablaze. Lieutenant Colonel Booth, the American commander, had a leg crushed under one of his own half-tracks as he tried to redeploy his trapped column. Survivors abandoned their armoured vehicles, and escaped across country towards Bastogne. Some 200 men were lost as well as all the Shermans and half-tracks.

  The sergeant commanding Desobry’s outpost on the northern route to Houffalize, however, felt that as he had seen some American tanks pulling back through their position earlier, they should check before opening fire. He gave his challenge in the darkness, and although he received an answer in English, he realized his mistake. A German tank opened fire, knocking out one of the Shermans. The remaining vehicles rapidly pulled back into Noville. Desobry immediately called in the third group to the north-west. Dawn brought little clarity to the situation because of a heavy ground fog, but soon the sound of German tanks could be heard coming down the northern road from Houffalize. The American defenders prepared their 57mm anti-tank gun and bazooka teams in a cemetery on the edge of Noville. As soon as the enemy vehicles emerged from the fog, they opened up with everything that they had against the Panther tanks and panzergrenadiers.

  Two of the Panthers were disabled and provided a good roadblock. But just to make sure that German tank-recovery teams did not manage to sneak up, Desobry sent out a small group with explosives to blow their tracks and wreck their main armament. The ground everywhere was so waterlogged that the Germans would find it difficult to send their panzers round the knocked-out Panthers blocking the road. Desobry’s small force was then strengthened by the arrival of five M-18 Hellcat tank destroyers from Bastogne. He kept them back as his reserve.

  Later in the morning the fog began to lift, and to their horror the Americans saw that the ridge to the north and north-east was covered in German panzers and half-tracks. The battle began in earnest. Many of the panzers got to within a hundred metres of the perimeter, and one even broke into
the town before it was shot to a standstill. After an intense two-hour firefight, the Germans pulled back behind the ridge. Then the Germans tried probing attacks from different directions. They were not too difficult to fight off, but German mortar and artillery fire started to cause casualties.

  Desobry ignored an order from Bastogne to send a patrol to Houffalize, because it would have had ‘to go through the whole daggone German army to get there’. With Noville half surrounded by ridges, he suggested to his combat command headquarters back in Bastogne that it would be better if his force withdrew to defend the ridge between Noville and Foy. Colonel Roberts told him that it was his decision, but a battalion of the 101st Airborne was marching up the road from Bastogne to join him. Desobry sent a Jeep for the battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel James LaPrade, just before midday. LaPrade agreed entirely with Desobry’s assessment that they had to take the ridgeline ahead if they were to hold Noville.

  As with other battalions of the 101st Airborne, LaPrade’s unit was short of weapons and ammunition. So the 10th Armored Division’s service company loaded their trucks, drove up the road and threw the paratroopers what they needed: bandoliers of rifle ammunition, machine-gun belts, grenades, mortar and bazooka rounds and even spare weapons. As the parachute battalion reached Noville, Desobry called on the supporting artillery battalion to fire at the ridgeline. The paratroopers fanned out and went straight into the attack towards the ridge, with Desobry’s Shermans firing in support. ‘They spread out across the fields,’ he wrote, ‘and those guys when they attacked, did it on the dead run. They would run for 50 metres, hit the ground, get up and run.’ But it turned out that the Germans had planned another attack at the same time, so the two sides ‘were engaged in a head-on clash’. One company made it to the ridgeline, only to be counter-attacked by tanks and panzergrenadiers from beyond. All the companies were taking such heavy losses that LaPrade and Desobry agreed to pull everyone back into the village. The number of badly wounded men overwhelmed the tiny aid station set up in the village.

  That night, Desobry and LaPrade conferred in their command post in Noville’s school on what they could do to hold on to the village. General McAuliffe in Bastogne had asked General Middleton, who had been ordered to take his VIII Corps headquarters back to Neufchâteau, if he could pull back the force in Noville, but Middleton had refused. While Desobry and LaPrade were studying the map upstairs, the 10th Armored’s maintenance officer, who was responsible for recovering damaged vehicles, drove up and parked right outside. This was contrary to all standard practice as it gave away the whereabouts of a command post. The Germans concentrated all their fire on the building. LaPrade and a dozen others were killed. Desobry, coated in dust, had a head wound, with one eye half out of the socket.

  Desobry was evacuated in a Jeep. On the way back to Bastogne, they were stopped in Foy by a German patrol from the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division. The volksgrenadiers, seeing he was in a bad way, generously allowed the Jeep to continue. Desobry, despite his pain, was shaken to find that the Germans had cut the road behind his force at Noville. Just to the south of Foy, Easy Company of the 506th was digging in when they heard engines through the fog. A soldier said to Lieutenant Jack Foley, ‘You know those sound like motorized vehicles.’ ‘Vehicles?’ another soldier cried. ‘Hell, they’re tanks!’ The fear was heightened because they could not see ‘what was out there’. ‘All you could do was hear.’

  Desobry, in spite of his stroke of luck at being let through, was again to suffer the misfortunes of war. One of the most serious mistakes made in the defence of Bastogne was to leave the 326th Airborne Medical Company at a crossroads near Sprimont, a dozen kilometres north-west of the town. They had set up their tents and were already treating the first casualties to arrive as refugees continued to stream by. The company was so exposed that a surgeon went into Bastogne to ask General McAuliffe for permission to move into the town. ‘Go on back, Captain,’ McAuliffe said. ‘You’ll be all right.’

  That night, as they were operating on badly burned men and other victims, a Kampfgruppe from the 2nd Panzer-Division attacked. Machine-gun fire ripped through the tents killing and wounding many of the men lying on stretchers. With no troops to defend them, the senior American officer had no option but to surrender immediately. The Germans gave them forty-five minutes to load all the wounded, equipment and supplies on to their trucks.

  Their German captors escorted them towards Houffalize. Desobry recovered consciousness on a halt in the journey and, on hearing German voices, thought that they must have taken many prisoners. He was cruelly disabused by his American driver. Desobry tried to persuade him to make a dash for it, but the driver was not prepared to take the risk. The bitter truth sank in. He was a prisoner of war.*

  For the Germans of the 2nd Panzer-Division, it was a great coup to have captured so much equipment and medical supplies, especially morphine. For the 101st Airborne, it was a disaster. Their wounded were now condemned to suffer in fetid cellars and the garage of a barracks in Bastogne, where the short-staffed medics lacked morphine and other drugs. The conditions were primitive, with no latrine and a single electric light bulb in the main garage ward. The wounded were ‘laid in rows on sawdust covered with blankets’. Those deemed unlikely to survive lay nearest the wall. ‘As they died they were carried out to another building’ used as a morgue.

  Montgomery, at his tactical headquarters outside Zonhoven in Belgium, was deeply disturbed by the lack of information on the battles raging to his south. On the morning of 19 December he sent two of his young liaison officers, whom he used as old-fashioned ‘gallopers’, to report back on the state of the battle. They were accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Bigland, who was his link with Bradley. Driving through freezing fog in a Jeep, they headed for General Hodges’s advance headquarters in Spa.

  ‘We arrive at First Army HQ, located in an hotel,’ Captain Carol Mather noted at the time, ‘and find it abandoned. A hurried evacuation has evidently taken place. The tables in the dining room are laid for Christmas festivities. The offices are deserted.’ The place felt like the Marie Celeste. ‘The truth begins to dawn. The German attack is more serious than we had thought, for the evacuation of the headquarters shows every sign of a panic move.’ They collected some of the classified papers left lying around to prove that they had been there in case anyone disbelieved them later.

  Montgomery did not wait for instructions from SHAEF. His staff officers began to issue detailed orders to the SAS and Phantom reconnaissance teams. Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps received a warning order to move to defend the Meuse. Brigadier Roscoe Harvey, the commander of 29th Armoured Brigade, was summoned back from shooting woodcock. He expostulated that his brigade had not ‘got any bloody tanks – they’ve all been handed in’. This was true. They were waiting to receive the new Comet, the first British tank produced in five years of war that would be a match for the Tiger and Panther. Harvey was told to take back his old Shermans, those that were still ‘runners’, and move with all speed to Dinant to block the very crossing points on the Meuse which Major General Erwin Rommel had seized in 1940.

  Montgomery’s gallopers meanwhile drove through ‘oddly deserted countryside’ to Hodges’s rear headquarters at Chaudfontaine south-east of Liège, where they found him. ‘He is considerably shaken,’ Mather reported, ‘and can give no coherent account of what has happened. Nor is he in touch with General Bradley’s 12th Army Group. Communications seem to have completely broken down.’ While Bigland set off on a circuitous route to Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg, the two captains drove back to Zonhoven as quickly as the icy roads permitted.

  Montgomery was ‘clearly alarmed’ when the two young officers recounted what they had seen. He told Mather to drive straight back to First Army headquarters. ‘Tell Hodges he must block the Meuse bridges!’ Mather asked how he was to transmit such orders when Hodges was not under 21st Army Group.

  ‘Just tell him,’ Montgomery s
aid. ‘The Liège crossings in particular must be defended at all costs. He must block the bridges by any means. Call up L[ine] of C[ommunications] troops. Use any obstacles he can find, including farm carts! He must hold the bridges all day tomorrow, and make sure that officers supervise each operation. You can tell him so from me!’ Mather was also to inform Hodges that Phantom teams and SAS in Jeeps would be sent straight to the bridges. The British XXX Corps would move with all speed to the north bank of the Meuse to block routes to Antwerp. Montgomery insisted that he must see Hodges the next morning. ‘If possible bring him back here tonight!’ Eisenhower, equally adamant about the Meuse crossings, had already given orders to General Lee’s Com Z headquarters. It was to move any available engineer units to mine the bridges and send in scratch battalions of rear-area troops. The French also offered seven battalions, but they were poorly armed and trained.

  Montgomery was already convinced, with a good deal of justification, that Bradley in Luxembourg could not direct First Army, which was cut off on the northern side of the German salient, or ‘Bulge’ as it was soon to be known. He told Major General Whiteley, the senior British operations officer at SHAEF, to tell Eisenhower that he should be put in command of all Allied forces north of the German salient. Whiteley, who was no admirer of the field marshal and his demands for increased powers, felt that this time he had a point. He discussed the situation with Major General Strong, Eisenhower’s intelligence chief and a fellow Briton, and the two of them went that night to see Bedell Smith, the SHAEF chief of staff.

  Bedell Smith, woken from his sleep, exploded at what he saw as a British plot. He called them ‘Limey bastards’ and told them that they should both consider themselves relieved of their duties. Then, after some reflection, he changed his mind. Bedell Smith was unimpressed by Hodges’s First Army headquarters and its relationship with Bradley’s 12th Army Group, but his real concern was that Bradley was out of touch. He rang Eisenhower to discuss giving Montgomery command of the northern front and suggested that this would also push the 21st Army Group into committing British forces to the battle.