Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read online

  General Middleton in his VIII Corps headquarters at Neufchâteau, some thirty kilometres south-west of Bastogne, was impatient for Patton’s counter-attack from the south to begin. The 4th Armored Division Combat Command B had reached Vaux-les-Rosières halfway between the two towns. To the irritation of the commander of III Corps, Middleton’s headquarters ordered it to send a combat team north immediately, rather than wait for the major attack which Patton had promised. Patton too was furious, and ordered the combat team to be recalled. Whether or not such a small force could have secured the road is open to question, but some historians believe that it would have made the advance from the south much less expensive in lives and tanks. In any case, the town of Bastogne was cut off from the south that evening, shortly after General McAuliffe had driven back from a meeting with Middleton. The town was not entirely surrounded, but most people assumed it was.

  For the paratroopers of the 101st, encirclement by the enemy was seen as part of the job. Louis Simpson, the poet and company runner, was sent back on an errand to battalion headquarters. On the way he came across a Sherman tank, with a sergeant from the 10th Armoured Division ‘seated negligently in the turret, as if on the saddle of a horse’. Fifty metres down the road, a panzer burned. He asked the sergeant what had happened. ‘They tried to get through,’ the sergeant replied in a bored voice and turned away. Simpson pondered the fact that this was behind his own company’s line. They would have been cut off if the ‘appallingly casual’ sergeant had not fired first. ‘I saw Tolstoy’s sergeant at Borodino, with his pipe stuck in his mouth, directing the fire of his battery. On men like this the hinge of battle swung. They did not see themselves in a dramatic role. They would do great tasks, and be abused for not doing them right, and accept this as normal.’

  At battalion headquarters he heard that they were now surrounded within the Bastogne perimeter. When he returned to his foxhole in the snow, his neighbour called across: ‘Welcome home! So what’s new?’

  ‘We’re surrounded.’

  ‘So what’s new?’

  First Army and Montgomery’s headquarters lacked a clear idea of the situation round St Vith. Montgomery’s instinct was to pull back Hasbrouck’s forces there before they were crushed, but the US Army had a proud dislike of abandoning ground. First Army wanted to send the 82nd Airborne forward to reinforce the defenders. At midday on 20 December, while they were discussing the problem, a letter reached Major General Bill Kean from Hasbrouck in St Vith outlining their embattled state. His horseshoe line extended from Poteau to the north-west of St Vith, down and round to Gouvy station to the south-west. His southern flank and rear were now totally exposed following the advance of the 116th Panzer-Division towards Houffalize.

  Montgomery was convinced that the defence of St Vith had served its purpose well. The threat now lay further to the west, with three panzer divisions heading for the Meuse. He agreed, however, that the 82nd Airborne should continue its advance to the River Salm, but only to help extricate Hasbrouck’s forces through the gap between Vielsalm and Salmchâteau.

  In the afternoon the division’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment advanced towards Cheneux, which was held by the light flak battalion of the SS Leibstandarte and a battalion of its panzergrenadiers. Colonel Reuben H. Tucker, the regimental commander, sent two companies into the attack through the mist. Coming under heavy machine-gun and 20mm-flak fire, they went to ground, suffering many casualties. When darkness fell, they pulled back to the woods behind. On hearing of this, Tucker ordered them to attack again. They managed to get closer in the dark, but barbed-wire fences across the fields held them up. Exposed to an even greater concentration of fire, men torn on the fences were shot down on all sides. The attack was about to stall when Staff Sergeant George Walsh yelled, ‘Let’s get those sons of bitches!’ Only a handful of men made it to the roadblock on the edge of the village. One managed to throw a grenade into a flak half-track and a second cut the throat of a gunner on another. But the two companies suffered 232 casualties, including twenty-three killed. Their action was heroic, but Tucker’s gung-ho decision was shockingly wasteful. The next day, Tucker sent another battalion around the flank, which is what he should have done the first time. With comparatively few losses, the 3rd Battalion took the village, along with fourteen flak wagons, another six half-tracks and a battery of self-propelled guns.

  On 20 December the fighting round St Vith approached a climax as Model and Manteuffel became desperate to seize the town in an all-out assault. The Germans used their Nebelwerfer rocket launchers, targeting American mortar pits, whose crews were causing savage losses to the ranks of the Volksgrenadier battalions. Under heavy shellfire, many soldiers, bunched into a foetal position in the bottom of their foxholes, would keep repeating the 23rd Psalm, as a mantra to calm themselves ‘in the valley of the shadow of death’.

  Visibility was ‘still very bad’, Hasbrouck reported. ‘Twenty-one enemy attacks were launched from north, east and south. Tanks were coming in from all directions accompanied by infantry.’ The five American field artillery battalions fired almost 7,000 rounds on that day alone. ‘The only way ammunition supply had been kept up was by hunting for and finding abandoned dumps toward the front … The 434th Field Artillery Battalion was reported to have fired even some old propaganda shells [used for leaflets] just to keep projectiles whistling around German ears.’

  One attack was led by SS panzergrenadiers from the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, using a captured American half-track at the front of the column in the hope of confusing the defenders. But Shermans and bazooka teams managed to deal with them. ‘We stressed to every man’, wrote Major Boyer of the 38th Armored Infantry Battalion, ‘that “no ammunition could be wasted – that for every round fired, a corpse must hit the ground,” and that fire should be held until Germans were within 25 yards,’ when fighting in the woods around the town. This order was also to discourage men from revealing their positions by firing too early.

  Oberst Otto Remer’s Führer Begleit Brigade finally did what it had been told, and began a probing attack on St Vith down the road from Büllingen. But Remer considered American resistance to be ‘too heavy’ and moved his brigade north and into thick woods below Born. He decided that he would take the main road west towards Vielsalm, but was then rather affronted when told to move back to the south. He claimed that he did not have enough fuel for his tanks, but the objective he had been given – the twin villages of Nieder-Emmels and Ober-Emmels – were little more than five kilometres away.

  That evening after firing had died away, Hasbrouck’s men could hear the sound of tanks. They knew that the Germans were almost certainly preparing an even greater onslaught for dawn the next morning.

  With his Kampfgruppe under attack from all directions, Peiper brought back his outlying group from west of Stoumont. They then abandoned the town and pulled back to counter-attack the 117th Infantry from the 30th Division. Peiper had been bitter about the lack of support from his own division. He claimed later that he had been told that unless he reported on the state of his fuel supplies, he would not receive any more. Radio contact had been non-existent until the night before when an officer from the Leibstandarte had managed to get through, with a new and more powerful radio. Peiper learned that the division had sent forward the 2nd SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment to open a route. These troops had bridging equipment and before dawn they waded ‘neck-deep’ into the fast-flowing and freezing River Amblève supported by machine-gun and tank fire. But, by the light of illuminating flares fired overhead, American soldiers crouching at windows in houses which overlooked the river began to pick off the SS pioneers and panzergrenadiers. ‘Them bastards was hopped up,’ one of them said later. Three times the Americans were driven out of their positions in the houses by the river, ‘forced out by direct fire from tanks, and three times the infantry came back and drove out the SS men’.

  Peiper’s panzergrenadiers had continued their casual killing of civilians. They had murdere
d two women and a man ‘in a nearby street for no apparent reason’, and later they put nine men against the walls of houses and killed them too. An SS trooper in an armoured vehicle ‘emptied his machine gun into a house’, killing a fourteen-year-old boy. The killing spree continued, but some bodies were not found until several days later. Belgian civilians were killed on the road towards Trois-Ponts: five were found shot in the head, while a woman was killed lying in bed. On the evening of 19 December, twenty townsfolk, mainly women and children, were forced out of a basement at gunpoint and shot by a hedge. Altogether more than 130 civilians, mostly women and children, were murdered in and around Stavelot. The young men had fled beyond the Meuse to avoid retribution for Resistance attacks in September, or to escape being marched off for forced labour in Germany. Waffen-SS claims that their killings were reprisals for partisans shooting at them had no basis in truth.

  At 11.15 hours Peiper’s troops again tried to establish a bridgehead over the river, with panzergrenadiers swimming and wading across. Rapid rifle and machine-gun fire killed many of them in the water and bodies were washed downstream. Only a few made it to the northern bank and they too were soon dealt with. A simultaneous attack was mounted from the west, forcing back the 1st Battalion of the 117th Infantry a hundred metres or so, where they held on until the firing petered out at dusk around 16.00 hours.

  Peiper’s difficulties had increased from another direction. Combat Command B of the 3rd Armored Division reached the Amblève valley that morning, coming from Spa via woodland tracks. One task force, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William B. Lovelady, emerged from the trees on to the road between La Gleize and Trois-Ponts, and there surprised and destroyed a column of German trucks carrying fuel escorted by assault guns and infantry.

  The desperate position of the Kampfgruppe Peiper was not due solely to the courageous resistance shown by the 30th Infantry Division, tank battalions and engineer units. The powerful defence of the Elsenborn ridge to the east had prevented the rest of the 1st SS Panzer-Division and the 12th SS Hitler Jugend from reinforcing Peiper’s advance. II SS Panzer Corps, with the 9th SS Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen, had started to advance parallel with I SS Panzer Corps. The 2nd SS Panzer-Division Das Reich was supposedly following, but the single-track roads were so jammed with traffic that it had sought a route further south.

  The Sixth Panzer Army blamed these failures on the fact that the only road was ‘for the most part impassable because of the mire’. In many places, the mud was axle-deep, but in fact it was the American 1st Division’s resolute defence of Bütgenbach which prevented the I SS Panzer Corps from using the much better road to the north. As a result, the 12th SS Panzer and the 12th Volksgrenadier-Division were kept battering away at the southern flank of the Elsenborn ridge, while the 3rd Panzergrenadier-Division and the 277th Volksgrenadiers attacked the eastern end above the twin villages of Rocherath–Krinkelt and Wirtzfeld. The 2nd Infantry Division continued to find that ‘under almost continuous, heavy enemy artillery fire, wire lines went out nearly as soon as they were laid or repaired and communication was primarily by radio’.

  Camp Elsenborn was a typical army post with officer apartments near the main gate, surrounded by single-storey barracks, garages and armouries. It stood in the middle of hilly, barren, windswept firing ranges. The barracks teemed with exhausted, dirty and bearded stragglers who were fed, rested briefly and then sent back into the line. Doctors and medics provided first aid to the wounded before evacuating them further back, now that the 47th Field Hospital in Waimes had been relocated just in time. Men discovered buddies they thought had been killed, and asked after others who were missing. Stories circulated of SS troopers killing wounded and executing prisoners and, coming on top of the news of the massacre at Baugnez, the determination to resist at all costs increased. Refugees packed the village of Elsenborn, and American troops became deeply suspicious of them, seeing them as potential German sympathizers. But until they were evacuated on Christmas Day, their fate under German artillery fire was little better than if they had stayed in their farms and houses below.

  On the eastern side of the Elsenborn ridge, the 2nd Infantry Division and the remnants of the 99th found digging in on the shale hillside very hard, so they filled wooden ammunition boxes with dirt, and covered their foxholes with doors ripped out of the barracks. Short of stretchers, they scrounged several from Camp Elsenborn, although they were still sticky with blood and smelled bad when warm. On the exposed hillside, they shivered in uniforms damp from the mud and wet snow, so they made makeshift heaters for their foxholes, either using some gasoline-soaked earth in a tin, or burning bits of wood in a jerrycan with a large hole cut out at the bottom as a fire-door. These inventions concealed the flames from observation, but the foxhole-dweller’s unshaven face soon became impregnated with a black, oily grime. Many tried to create a warm fug in their foxhole by covering it and their stove with a waterproof cape, causing a few to asphyxiate themselves in the process. Almost everyone suffered from thudding headaches, brought on by the barrages fired over their heads by the field artillery just behind. The fact that the rounds were coming from their own guns did not stop men who had been under heavy enemy fire over the last few days from flinching at the noise.

  They again faced the 3rd Panzergrenadiers, which consisted of little more than a large Kampfgruppe in its total strength, and the 277th Volksgrenadiers, worn down by the earlier battles. These two formations attacked north of Rocherath–Krinkelt past a crossroads the Germans named ‘Sherman Ecke’, or Sherman Corner, because of some knocked-out Sherman tanks with drooping barrels. But, as they mounted the little valley of the Schwalm, they were crushed by the weight of American artillery fire. ‘The concentrated enemy artillery fire from the Elsenborn area was so strong’, wrote the commander of the panzergrenadiers, ‘that all roads leading to the front and all assembly areas were covered, and all our attacks brought to a standstill.’

  The Elsenborn ridge provided the Americans with perfect fire positions for their sixteen field artillery battalions with 155mm Long Toms and 105mm howitzers, and seven battalions of corps artillery, including 4.5-inch and 8-inch guns. The longer-range artillery batteries were able to hammer villages and crossroads up to sixteen kilometres into the German rear. The unfortunate Belgian civilians trapped there could only sob and say their prayers in cellars, as their houses shook from the bombardment. ‘Farmers learned to take care of cattle during the briefest of morning lulls that were soon known as the Americans’ Kaffeepause.’ It was impossible to bury the dead while the battle raged. Most were laid out in the local church wrapped in blankets. When the temperature dropped suddenly two days before Christmas, nobody could dig graves in the frozen ground.

  During the night of 20–21 December, the Germans launched their largest attack on the southern flank against the 26th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division around Dom Bütgenbach. Supported by more than thirty tanks and assault guns, two battalions of SS Hitler Jugend were sent into battle. A Belgian farmer had watched as twenty exhausted German youngsters, from fifteen to seventeen years old, were dragged weeping from his cellar in Büllingen by NCOs to force them into battle.

  A total of twelve American artillery battalions and a battalion of 4.2-inch mortars placed ‘a ring of steel’ around the 1st Division’s defensive positions. Yet a group of the Hitler Jugend panzers broke through on the 26th Infantry’s right flank and began to ‘iron’ the foxholes of the forward defence line, running over them and firing into them. Arthur S. Couch was operating a 60mm mortar near battalion headquarters. ‘Soon I noticed that tank shells were coming right over my head, along with tracer machine gun bullets. It was a foggy night so at first I couldn’t see the German tanks, but as dawn started I could see a number of German tanks maneuvering around about 200 yards in front of my position. I soon ran out of mortar shells so I asked by radio for some more from battalion headquarters in a manor house about 400 yards to my left. To my welcome surprise, two men from
battalion came running with large numbers of new shells in a cart. The German tanks seemed to know we had a mortar position but they couldn’t see it in the foggy conditions. Another phone call said one of my mortar shells had landed in a German tank and blown it up. After a few more minutes I could see that a German tank was going along our front line and firing directly into the foxholes. I kept firing because I was very concerned that German infantry troops would soon be able to advance the 200 yards towards my position if I didn’t stop them. I got word on my phone that German tanks were in the battalion headquarters.’

  Several of these panzers were knocked out by anti-tank guns and Shermans, but only the arrival of a platoon of tank destroyers with the high-velocity 90mm gun managed to smash the attack. The losses inflicted on the Hitler Jugend were devastating. A Graves Registration unit counted 782 German dead. The 26th Infantry suffered 250 casualties.

  More assaults on the ridge were mounted, but it became clear to both Rundstedt and Model that Hitler’s beloved Sixth Panzer Army had utterly failed in its task, both around Monschau in the north, which was now reinforced with the 9th Infantry Division, and above all in front of Elsenborn. Its commander Sepp Dietrich was both angry and resentful, feeling that he was not to blame for the Führer’s disappointment.

  When the Ardennes offensive started, several British officers at 21st Army Group were teased by Belgian friends, who said that their Resistance groups were making preparations to hide them. When they replied that that would not be necessary as everything was well in hand, they received the answer: ‘That is precisely what you said in 1940, and you left us next day.’ Montgomery had no intention of allowing anything of the sort to happen again.