Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Page 30
As soon as the transport planes departed, the eighty-two Thunderbolts in their escort turned their attention to ground targets. They followed tank tracks to where the Germans had attempted to conceal their panzers, and attacked artillery gunlines. Despite the best efforts of the air controllers, the Thunderbolts made several attacks on American positions. In one case a P-47 began to strafe and bomb an American artillery battery. A machine-gunner fired back, and soon several aircraft joined in the attack. Only when an officer ran out waving an identification panel did the pilots understand their mistake and fly off.
The attack of the 901st Panzergrenadiers against Marvie went ahead after dusk following the departure of the fighter-bombers. Artillery fire intensified, then Nebelwerfer batteries fired their multi-barrelled rocket launchers, with their terrifying scream. The German infantry advanced behind groups of four or five panzers. The 327th Glider Infantry and the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion fired illuminating flares into the sky. Their light revealed Panther tanks, already painted white, and the panzergrenadiers in their snowsuits. The defenders immediately opened fire with rifles and machine guns. Bazooka teams managed to disable a few of the tanks, usually by hitting the tracks or a sprocket, which brought them to a halt but did not stop them from using their main armament or machine guns.
A breakthrough along the road to Bastogne was only just halted after McAuliffe threw in his last reserves and ordered the artillery to keep firing, even though their stocks of shells were perilously low. In fact the defenders fought back so effectively that they inflicted grievous losses. Kokott eventually abandoned the action. He then received an order from Manteuffel’s headquarters that he was to mount a major attack on Bastogne on Christmas Day. The 15th Panzergrenadier-Division would arrive in time, and come under his command. Kokott might have been sceptical of his chances, but the defenders were just as hard pushed, especially on the western side.
The Americans could not cover the perimeter frontage in any strength, and they sorely lacked reserves in the event of a breakthrough. With the front-line foxholes so spread out in places, paratroopers resorted to their own form of booby-traps. Fragmentation grenades or 60mm mortar shells were attached to trees with trip wires extending in different directions. Fixed charges of explosive taped to trunks could be detonated by pullwires running back to individual emplacements.
Just south of Foy, part of the 506th Parachute Infantry continued to hold the edge of the woods. Their observation post was in a house, outside which a dead German lay frozen stiff with one arm extended. ‘From then on,’ a sergeant remembered, ‘it was a ritual to shake hands with him every time we came or left the house. We figured that if we could shake his hand, we were a helluva lot better off than he was.’ Even with the sacks and bags from the airdrop, frostbite and trench foot affected nearly all soldiers. And Louis Simpson with the 327th Glider Infantry observed, ‘in this cold the life in the wounded is likely to go out like a match’.
Facing the attack around Flamierge, Simpson wrote: ‘I peer down the slope, trying to see and still keep my head down. Bullets are whining over. To my right, rifles are going off. They must see more than I do. The snow seems to have come alive and to be moving, detaching itself from the trees at the foot of the slope. The movement increases. And now it is a line of men, most of them covered in white – white cloaks and hoods. Here and there men stand out in the gray-green German overcoats. They walk, run and flop down on the snow. They rise and come towards us again.’
Bastogne had naturally been a priority for American air support, and so were the hard-pressed 82nd Airborne and the 30th Division on the northern flank. But the top priority that day, with half of all Allied fighter-bomber units allocated, had been to stop the German panzer divisions from reaching the Meuse.
From the moment the weather improved and the Allied air forces were out in strength, incidents of friendly fire, both from the air and from the ground, increased dramatically. Anti-aircraft gunners and almost anyone with a machine gun seemed almost physically incapable of stopping themselves from shooting at any aircraft. ‘Rules for Firing’ and instructions on ‘Air-Ground Recognition’ were forgotten. Soldiers had to be reminded that they were not to fire back at Allied aircraft who might be shooting them up by mistake. All they could do was to keep throwing out yellow or orange smoke grenades to make them stop, or firing an Amber Star parachute flare. The self-control of the 30th Infantry Division was the most sorely taxed. These soldiers had suffered attacks by their own aircraft in Normandy, and now in the Ardennes they were to suffer even more.
Bolling’s 84th Infantry Division and parts of the 3rd Armored Division continued, with great difficulty, to hold a line south of the Hotton–Marche road against both the 116th Panzer-Division and the 2nd SS Das Reich. Combat Command A of the 3rd Armored was pushed further round to the west, as a screen for the assembly of Collins’s VII Corps. The 2nd Armored Division, Patton’s former command known as ‘Hell on Wheels’, was arriving by forced march in great secrecy for a counter-attack planned for 24 December. The advance of the 2nd Panzer-Division was faster than expected. But Collins had been greatly relieved to hear from Montgomery, ‘chipper and confident as usual’, that the bridges over the Meuse at Namur, Dinant and Givet were now securely defended by the British 29th Armoured Brigade. It was that night that the 8th Rifle Brigade killed two Skorzeny commandos in a Jeep. The main problem at the bridges was the flood of refugees fleeing across the Meuse to escape. ‘The German push has unsettled the whole population,’ wrote an officer with civil affairs, ‘and they seem to fear the worst. Already the refugees are moving along the roads and we are out to stop them causing trouble to traffic.’ Blocked at the bridges, Belgians resorted to boats to cross the Meuse.
Montgomery also assured Collins that the brigade would advance to link up with Collins’s right flank on the next day, 23 December, but A Squadron of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment commanded by Major Watts was already at Sorinnes, six kilometres east of Dinant. Watts had no idea where either the Americans or the Germans were, so he spread his eighteen tanks out to cover every route into Dinant, using them more like an armoured reconnaissance regiment. For the three armoured regiments in the brigade, the great frustration was to be going into battle with their ‘battle-weary Shermans’, rather than their new Comet tanks.
The British also started to receive valuable help from locals. The Baron Jacques de Villenfagne, who lived in the chateau at Sorinnes, just three kilometres north of Foy-Notre-Dame (not to be confused with the Foy near Bastogne), was a captain in the Chasseurs Ardennais and leader of the Resistance in the area. He acted as a scout for Watts’s squadron on his motorcycle, and reported on the advance of the 2nd Panzer-Division in their direction.
The approaching battle made one thing very clear to farming folk. They needed to prepare food for what could be a long siege, sheltering in their cellars. At Sanzinnes, just south of Celles, Camille Daubois, hearing of the advance of German forces, decided it was time to slaughter his prize pig, a beast of 300 kilos. Because it was so large, he felt he could not do it himself, and called the butcher, who was about to take refuge beyond the Meuse. He only agreed to help with the slaughter, but when he arrived and saw the animal, he exclaimed: ‘That’s not a pig, that beast’s a cow!’ Not prepared to use the knife he insisted on an axe, with which he severed the head. They strung it up to drain the blood and the butcher dashed off. But when men from a Kampfgruppe of the 2nd Panzer arrived later, the pig’s carcass disappeared, no doubt to their field kitchen known as a Gulaschkanone.
Oberst Meinrad von Lauchert, the commander of the 2nd Panzer-Division, split his force just north of Buissonville to search out the quickest route to the Meuse. The armoured reconnaissance battalion, under Major von Böhm, moved on ahead towards Haid and Leignon because it had been refuelled first. Two panzers in the lead sighted an American armoured car and opened fire. The armoured car was hit, but the crew escaped. Its commander Lieutenant Everett C. Jones got word to Major G
eneral Ernest Harmon, the commander of the 2nd Armored Division. The pugnacious Harmon, who was itching to go into the attack, ordered his Combat Command A under Brigadier General John H. Collier to advance immediately.
That evening the main panzer column, commanded by Major Ernst von Cochenhausen, reached the village of Chevetogne, a dozen kilometres north-west of Rochefort. The inhabitants of the village had so far had little more to fear than the V-1s flying overhead towards Antwerp, one of which had exploded in the woods near by. Apart from that, the war seemed to have passed them by. They had seen no American troops since the liberation of the area in September, and never imagined that the Germans would return.
Woken soon after midnight by the vibrations caused by tanks rumbling up the main street, the villagers crept to the windows of their houses to see if this force was American or German, but the vehicles were moving without lights and it was too dark to distinguish. The column came to a halt a little way up the hill, and then, to their alarm, they heard orders barked unmistakably in German. News of the massacres of civilians further east by the Kampfgruppe Peiper had spread rapidly. The black panzer uniforms with the death’s-head badge prompted many to believe that these troops were also SS. But the 2nd Panzer-Division was different, and its behaviour towards civilians was on the whole correct. On entering a farm kitchen in Chapois, one of its officers warned the surprised housewife that she had better hide her hams. His soldiers were famished and they would not hesitate to take them.
In the early hours of 24 December, Kampfgruppe Cochenhausen reached Celles, a small and ancient town in a dip just a few kilometres south of Foy-Notre-Dame. Major von Cochenhausen attempted to push through the small town to head straight for Dinant, but the lead Panther tank hit a mine laid the day before by American engineers. According to local folklore, two German officers stormed into the little restaurant on the corner called Le Pavillon Ardennais. The patronne, Madame Marthe Monrique, who had just been woken by the blast, met them downstairs in her dressing gown. They demanded to know how many kilometres they still had to cover to reach Dinant. With great presence of mind, she apparently replied that there were only a dozen kilometres. ‘But the road is mined, you know! The Americans have buried hundreds of mines.’ Cursing, the Germans decided to pull back into nearby woods in case Allied aircraft caught them in the open at dawn.
Cochenhausen established his command post in the woods at a local grotto known as the Trou Mairia. His force included the 304th Panzergrenadier-Regiment, a battalion of the 3rd Panzer-Regiment, a panzer artillery regiment and most of the division’s anti-aircraft battalion. Signs pointing to the divisional field hospital or Feldlazarett bore the trident symbol of the 2nd Panzer-Division. To prevent information getting back to the Allies, panzergrenadiers were put to work sawing down telephone poles and cutting wires. Another detachment of the 2nd Panzer-Division was just to the east at Conjoux. The villagers there were reminded how in September the local German commander had sworn, just before pulling out, that they would be back.
After Leignon, Böhm’s Kampfgruppe had turned west in the night towards Dinant. Just before Foy-Notre-Dame, near the farm of Mahenne, a British Firefly Sherman of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment lay in wait. The Firefly had the longer and far more powerful 17-pounder or 76.2mm high-velocity gun. Sergeant Probert, the commander, hearing the unmistakable noise of tracked vehicles approaching, woke his crew. The first round missed the leading vehicle but hit a munitions truck, causing an explosion which must have shaken the whole German column. After rapidly reloading, Probert’s crew got off another round which destroyed a Mark IV panzer. Then, following the Royal Armoured Corps slogan of ‘shoot and scoot’, they reversed out rapidly before the Panthers in the column targeted their position. They reported back to Major Watts at Sorinnes. Major von Böhm, unsure after the ambush how strong the Allies were in the area, and because his vehicles were almost out of fuel, decided to halt at the small village of Foy-Notre-Dame. His crews concealed their vehicles in farmyards, and packed into the houses to warm up and find food.
During that night of 23–24 December, the thermometer dropped to minus 17 Centigrade, and the moon shone on the frozen, snowbound landscape. The Baron de Villenfagne, with his friend Lieutenant Philippe le Hardy de Beaulieu, both dressed in white, managed to identify several of the main German positions. They came across a group of amphibious vehicles concealed under trees at Sanzinnes, which was subsequently shelled by American artillery. The two men returned to the Château de Sorinnes at 04.00 hours and woke Major Watts. Lieutenant Colonel Alan Brown, the commanding officer of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, arrived soon afterwards and they briefed them on the German dispositions and the location of Cochenhausen’s command post. The vital target was the Ferme de Mahenne, because if that were neutralized the Kampfgruppe Böhm would be separated from Cochenhausen’s force. The baron then went to see the 29th Brigade’s artillery commander, begging him to spare the great church at Foy-Notre-Dame, which the gunners managed to do when shelling the village taken over by Böhm’s Kampfgruppe.
Hitler was exultant when he heard that the forward elements of the 2nd Panzer-Division were now only seven kilometres from Dinant. He passed on his warmest congratulations to Lüttwitz and Lauchert, the divisional commander. Both men must have winced, knowing how precarious their position was, with little chance of supplies getting through. Lüttwitz, who had commanded the 2nd Panzer in the doomed Avranches counter-attack in August, recommended to Manteuffel that they should start to withdraw the division from the tip of the whole German salient. But he knew that Hitler would never contemplate such a move.
On the left flank of the 2nd Panzer, Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr had advanced from Saint-Hubert north to Rochefort, with General von Manteuffel accompanying them. Their artillery shelled the town in the afternoon. A patrol entered the edge of Rochefort and reported back that it was empty, but they had not looked carefully enough. A battalion from the 84th Infantry Division and a platoon of tank destroyers were concealed and waiting. The road into Rochefort ran along the L’Homme river in a rocky gorge, which made the German attack a risky enterprise. As night fell, Bayerlein gave a characteristic order: ‘Right, let’s go! Shut your eyes and in you go.’
Led by the 902nd Panzergrenadiers, commanded by Oberstleutnant Joachim Ritter von Poschinger, the charge was brought to a sudden halt under a massive fusillade at a major barricade in Rochefort. The fighting was ferocious and lasted through the night. The panzergrenadiers lost many men and a heavy Jagdpanzer was knocked out near the central square. The American defenders, heavily outnumbered, were eventually forced back. The survivors escaped north next day, to join up with the 2nd Armored Division.
Most of the townsfolk sought shelter in caves at the base of the cliffs surrounding Rochefort. They were to stay there for some time, since Rochefort now became a target for American artillery. During the worst of the shelling, Jeanne Ory and her younger sister asked their mother: ‘Mummy, are we going to die?’ She replied: ‘Say your prayers, my children.’ And everyone around would recite the rosary together. One man found a friend dead in the frozen street face down with a cat sitting serenely on his back, profiting from the last of the body’s heat. The Trappist monks from the Abbaye de Saint-Remy took on the task of removing bodies.
That evening, President Roosevelt in Washington wrote to Josef Stalin. ‘I wish to direct General Eisenhower to send to Moscow a fully qualified officer of his staff to discuss with you Eisenhower’s situation on the Western Front and its relation to the Eastern Front, in order that all of us may have information essential to our coordination of effort … The situation in Belgium is not bad but it is time to talk of the next plan. In view of the emergency an early reply to this proposal is requested.’ Stalin replied two days later to agree. The very mention of ‘emergency’ in the last sentence must have suggested to him that the Allies had their backs against the wall. Air Chief Marshal Tedder and General Bull were designated to confer with Stalin. They prepared to fly f
rom France to Cairo and then on to Moscow, but because of long delays they would not see Stalin until 15 January, well after the crisis was over.
17
Sunday 24 December
Sunday 24 December again produced bright sun and blue skies. Captain Mudgett, the 12th Army Group meteorologist in Luxembourg, was ‘almost hysterical with his continued success in the weather. He looks proudly out over the blue sky that stretches way into Germany over the stone ramparts and the three spires of the cathedral.’
Bradley’s Eagle Tac headquarters now had few fears about the defence of Bastogne, with the men of the 101st Airborne ‘clinging stubbornly to their position like a wagon train in the pioneer days of the west’. But staff officers were well aware of the plight of the wounded in the town. McAuliffe had asked for four surgical teams to be dropped by parachute. Plans went ahead for them to be brought in by glider instead.
While Patton’s III Corps with the 4th Armored Division was struggling to break through to Bastogne from the south against much heavier resistance than expected, Hansen was amused by a bizarre report. ‘Today a quartermaster soldier asked for the road to Luxembourg while passing through Arlon. He got on the wrong road, [and] drove up the road to Bastogne. When someone fired on him, he only got more frightened, pressed his accelerator and finally drove into the area of the 101st – the first person to make contact with them, and in a purely accidental manner.’