by Leo Barron
Miller, like many of the soldiers during those first harrowing days and nights of the Battle of the Bulge, did not know much about the upcoming mission. He knew the Germans had broken through and that he needed to lead his battalion to Bastogne. They were driving in blackout conditions. All he could see in front of him was from the cat’s eyes on his jeep’s headlights. At 0001 hours, the morning of the nineteenth, the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion reached Liège.11 Continuing on from Liège, at one point Miller peered into the night and saw tiny flashes bouncing off the road in front of him like Chinese firecrackers. He looked closer as the flashes approached his vehicle, wondering what it was. He soon found out. The roar of a piston engine warned him that it was a low-flying aircraft strafing the road, and it was too late for him to take cover. He sat in his jeep, frozen and helpless. The flashing and popping stopped as the aircraft passed over his head, leaving him and his platoon unscathed.
Miller later recounted in an interview, “God really was with me.”
Templeton then ordered Miller to push forward to Houffalize and then to Bastogne. It was a straight shot, and it should have been a short trip. Unfortunately, the roads were clogged with human flotsam and jetsam as Miller ran smack into the remnants of American units that had fallen victim to the winter blitzkrieg. Retreating men, too tired to walk, lined the roads like sleeping corpses underneath the trucks that were supposed to take them somewhere. Some were still awake, and Miller asked them about the Germans. The news was not good. The Germans had taken Houffalize, blocking the route to Bastogne. Miller decided to bypass Houffalize and make for La Roche. The time now was between 0700 and 0800 hours.12
Several minutes after Miller took off for La Roche, Templeton lost communications with him. Templeton knew there were roving German patrols, and he worried that his advance guard was in trouble. He ordered a section from 2nd Platoon, Reconnaissance Company, to link up with Miller’s platoon and determine whether they needed assistance. The officer in charge was First Lieutenant Claude W. Duvall. Unfortunately, Duvall and his scout group of armored cars and jeeps were unaware that Miller had taken a detour. As a result, Duvall and his team drove straight into Houffalize and into the mouth of the German advance. After a close encounter with a German tank blocking that town’s main street, Duvall finally received the corrected info: Miller had found an alternative route into Bastogne. Leaving the harrowing journey behind him, Duvall and his men were able to link up with the main force outside of Bastogne later that day. The two recon units had done their job well, radioing back the quickest routes for Templeton and his tank destroyers to travel in order to safely make it to Bastogne.13
On his way through La Roche, Templeton also discovered the crossroads was a mess. Retreating American units were in complete disarray—confused, disorganized, and no one was making any effort to defend the area from the Germans. Smartly, Templeton detached one tank destroyer platoon and one reconnaissance platoon from his unit to set up a roadblock near town, in order to help momentarily hold the town and secure the rear of his column as it passed through.14 Then Templeton, along with a section of reconnaissance vehicles, headed out in advance to find VIII Corps headquarters.
Along the way, Templeton discovered that VIII Corps had moved their headquarters to Neufchâteau. When he arrived there, Middleton immediately ordered him toward Bastogne, stating that he was now under McAuliffe’s command. A slightly confused Templeton nodded, saluted, and backtracked on the double toward Bastogne and to report to McAuliffe.15
In hindsight, this was one of Troy Middleton’s best decisions that day. Faced with the potential of overwhelming German armor, McAuliffe was thrilled to hear he would have tank destroyers to defend the woods, hills, and streets of Bastogne.
Far behind Templeton, Miller, and Duvall, the rest of the 705th (minus two platoons—eight M18s—from A Company left to guard a bridge at Ourtheuville) was rolling down the roads deep into Belgium.16 Sergeant Anthony D’Angelo was a young tank destroyer commander in the 705th. As his C Company moved out, he recalled better days before the war working as a laborer for the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Pennsylvania Railroad Company near his hometown of Wellsville, Ohio.
Now he was leaning back in the open turret of his Hellcat as it sped down the road toward Bastogne, one of the last M18s in the column. D’Angelo’s M18 had the nickname of “No Love, No Nothing” painted on the side of the hull by his crew, after a popular radio hit sung by American sweetheart Ella Mae Morse. Blowing on his hands to keep them warm, D’Angelo witnessed the shocking roadside scenery near La Roche. It would remain forever seared in his memory.
“We were ordered to Bastogne December 18, 1944. The lines were fluid. We saw the 82nd Airborne going one way; we were going the other. I remember seeing burning German and American armor and wrecks alongside the road. I remember that well. Looked like the fires of hell to me,” D’Angelo said in an interview years later.17
To D’Angelo and his crew, the blazing vehicles seemed a stark warning of things to come.
The next few hours were terrifying ones for Colonel Templeton. On his way north to coordinate the arrival of his tank destroyers, his small reconnaissance section ran into a German roadblock near the town of Bertogne. At a bend in the road, the Germans had hidden a small but lethal team of some heavy antiaircraft guns, two heavy machine guns, and even a Sturmgeschütz (StuG) III self-propelled gun. The result was predictable. The Germans got the drop and opened fire, immediately destroying one of the jeeps and wounding several soldiers. Realizing the German roadblock outgunned them, Templeton decided to fall back and seek an alternate route for his TDs around the pesky roadblock. Within minutes, they discovered that one of their six-wheeled M20 armored cars was trapped. The crew quickly abandoned the vehicle. Luckily, Templeton still had an M8 Greyhound armored car, which was armed with a 37mm cannon. Though it lacked the punch of the 75mm cannon on the StuG, it could fire a lot faster. It might at least provide enough covering fire to make good their escape. The Greyhound gunner let loose with a string of volleys. For a moment, the Germans were stunned, allowing the small command detachment to safely withdraw.
Templeton immediately radioed the incoming column of 705th armor to be ready for a possible “hot reception” on the road in. With the advance warning, Templeton felt confident his TDs could either deal with the German roadblock, or take the less risky option of bypassing it. Either way, the roadblock was reportedly not a problem for the 705th. After all, Templeton’s orders to his tankers had been crystal clear: “Come any way possible to Bastogne, but get there.”18
By 2100 hours, Tuesday, December 19, Templeton was in Bastogne. The M18s and their support vehicles came rumbling in shortly after.19
D’Angelo recalled the careful entry into Bastogne, slipping through just as many of the roadways were being closed off by the Germans. “I remember we arrived at Bastogne at night. We swung around several hot spots in order to get into Bastogne. We came in from the south, the only way in. My TD was the last one in.”20
To say that Templeton’s tank destroyers, with their long, 76mm armor-piercing guns, would come in handy defending Bastogne from von Manteuffel’s panzers would be a huge understatement. By the second day of their arrival, they were already proving their worth, successfully defending the northeastern approaches to town. For Templeton, Miller, Duvall, and D’Angelo, the fighting had just begun. They would see a lot more on Christmas morning.
Early to midmorning, Tuesday, 19 December 1944
101st Airborne Division assembly area
Mande Saint-Etienne, Belgium (just west of Bastogne)
Early on Tuesday morning, December 19, thousands of windburned and frozen Screaming Eagles clambered over the sides of their trucks at a roadside west of Bastogne. The men complained and stamped their feet in the cold. They had traveled 107 miles in more than eight hours through freezing sleet and icy-cold rain. Many were in poor spirits, having been almost fully exposed while huddling in the back of the open-topped
“cattle cars.”21 Bob MacDonald, commander of Baker Company, 1/401st, summed up the feeling well: “The whole trip was miserable. It was foggy, it was cold, and occasionally snowing en route. The men were so crowded in the trucks that only half of them could attempt to sleep on the floor, while the remainder stood and took it.”22 It was not how they wanted to spend their days leading up to Christmas.
Trucks full of paratroopers were still arriving in the Mande area as Middleton departed with his VIII Corps headquarters to Neufchâteau.23 The first regiment of the 101st to arrive was Lieutenant Colonel Julian J. Ewell’s 501st. They had rolled into the area of Bastogne the night before. They were followed by Sink’s 506th. The final regiments to “close the back door” and arrive in the marshaling fields near Mande Saint-Etienne on the nineteenth were the 502nd under Chappuis and Colonel “Bud” Harper’s 327th (plus the 1/401st) Glider Infantry Regiment, which arrived at 0930 and 1015, respectively.24
As the cold and nervous paratroopers of Ewell’s 501st heard the distant gunfire, they hiked up their pack straps, shouldered their weapons, and marched off through town to the east. With barely a pause, the 101st Airborne Division had just joined the battle for Bastogne.
Afternoon, Tuesday, 19 December 1944
101st Airborne Division Headquarters, Heinz Barracks
Bastogne, Belgium
Colonel Danahy finally reached Bastogne after an odyssey that took him to Werbomont and back. Upon learning that the 101st was actually redirected toward Bastogne, a frustrated Danahy finally arrived later that morning with the so-called advance party, which, ironically, was one of the last divisional units to show up.
Kinnard and the rest of the division staff had decided to relocate the makeshift division headquarters from the schoolhouse in Mande Saint-Etienne to the Heinz Barracks, where VIII Corps was in the process of vacating. McAuliffe and his staff eschewed the two-story building the corps had utilized for its operations center for the more unassuming basement of a barracks building on the southern side of the main courtyard near the main gateway. Kinnard and the others felt that if they had to defend the headquarters, this building would make a better spot, being partially underground and having access to an entrance. To emphasize their determination to fight it out at the headquarters, the paratroopers even rolled in a towed anti-tank gun to cover the entrance in case a panzer decided to show up.25
Upon his arrival, Danahy went immediately to work, trying to glean whatever information he could from VIII Corps holdouts and any of the latest intelligence reports coming in from the fighting to the east of town. Danahy strolled down to the very end of the hallway of McAuliffe’s HQ. Finding the operations center label, he stepped inside and walked over to his section. Fortunately, his NCOs were on the ball, running the shop even while he was away.
Danahy glanced at the operations map where his staff section plotted known and suspected enemy locations around Bastogne. He had to admit it was a pathetic affair; at thirty inches wide, it was downright minuscule, but it was the only one available that showed the region around Bastogne in any detail. Despite its size, it was enough to show Danahy that the Germans were closing in fast. It was only a matter of time before German forces traveling north and south of town would link up to the west and surround Bastogne.26
Danahy grabbed the radio log and quickly went over the morning’s reports. The Germans seemed busy as bees around Bastogne.27 Next he flipped through the divisional logs for that morning. Stepping right out from the marshaling area, Ewell’s 501st had run into the Germans to the east of Bastogne in the town of Neffe between 0800 and 0900.28 In addition, Colonel Sink, the commander of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, reported that his battalion started their attack to the north of Noville at 1400 hours to assist Task Force Desobry, one of the armor teams from Combat Command B, 10th Armored, that was holding the line against the Germans to the northeast of town.29 Meanwhile, Task Force Cherry, another unit from Combat Command B, was fighting for its life around a château in Neffe, east of Bastogne.30 Danahy’s analysts were doing all they could, even poring over captured German documents and personal effects from German dead and prisoners.31 The various reports were telling. We are throwing everything we’ve got at them to save Bastogne, he thought to himself, but at least the Germans aren’t west of Bastogne yet.
Danahy didn’t know it at the time, but the Germans were already there and looking for a fight.
1700–midnight, Tuesday, 19 December 1944
502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment area of operations
Northwest of Bastogne, Belgium
At 1700 hours, Colonel Steve Chappuis received word from division to establish a defensive position near Longchamps and Rolle, northwest of Bastogne.32 Chappuis was also ordered to give up a total of two battalions for the division reserve. Chappuis had to pull 1st Battalion back, leaving 2nd Battalion on the line. He placed 1st Battalion in a cluster of woods called the Bois de Niblamont, which was behind Rolle Château. As a result, 2nd Battalion now had a frontage of nearly 7,000 yards that stretched from the town of Champs to the town of Recogne. 33
For Captain Swanson, Sergeant Asay, and the rest of the men of Able Company, the nineteenth was a frustrating day of digging and walking and digging again. After arriving in the regimental assembly area that morning, they were immediately ordered to dig foxholes. Grunting and panting, the paratroopers stripped off their field jackets as they quickly overheated in the misty woods. Like the rest of the regiment, they remained there until 1715 hours that night, when they received their orders to move out. Cursing, the Screaming Eagles left their freshly dug foxholes and set off to a different location to dig more.
They arrived in Longchamps around 1925 hours that night and then moved up to Monaville. Swanson had both 2nd and 3rd platoons on the line, while he had 1st Platoon as the company reserve. Private Ted Goldmann remembered the frustration of not knowing where they were or where they were going all that Tuesday. Goldmann was a member of Asay’s squad and had spent a week at bazooka school in December with his friend and squad mate Private John C. Ballard. Soon they were on their way to Bastogne. When they got off the trucks the next morning, they had no clue as to where they were. Goldmann wrote:
We could have been in China for all we knew. We hadn’t seen any towns because practically everyone had managed to drop off to sleep. We marched two miles to a bare hill (it seemed a hell of a place to us) and sat down. We dug shallow holes, filled them with straw, built fires and ate K-rations. After many stops and starts and at about 11 o’clock at night (darkness at 5) we stopped outside a small village and were given a squad area and told to dig in and set up a MG and try to get some sleep. We had a tree-lined gulley so we didn’t do any digging, threw the MG up on the edge of the gulley, set one at a time on guard and to hell with the Germans [and] went to sleep.34
For Goldmann and the others, that first night at Monaville was a cold and damp one, as sleet fell down around them. Fortunately, though, it was also an uneventful one. Still, the paratroopers could hear the noises of combat to the east, where the Germans were battling with Sink’s 506th. Goldmann, Asay, Ballard, and other veterans of the 502nd sensed their moment would come all too soon.35
Afternoon to evening, Tuesday, 19 December 1944
463rd Parachute Field Artillery Battalion gun line
Hemroulle, west of Bastogne, Belgium
Colonel Cooper’s “Bastard Battalion” arrived at Bastogne the morning of the nineteenth. Between 1400 and 1500 hours, Cooper directed his cannon-cockers to set up their gun line near the village of Hemroulle, behind the 327th GIR and the 502nd PIR. As instructed, the 463rd would fire in direct support of the 327th.
Surveying the area around Hemroulle, Cooper set up his command post in a nearby farmhouse with the Fire Direction Center (FDC). In the U.S. Army during World War II, an FDC was the brain of an artillery battalion. There, radio operators and artillerymen plotted and directed the various artillery strikes on the enemy. The Americans had learned d
uring World War I that to accurately plot, destroy, and assess the success of massed gunfire, communication was the key. The FDC was one of the chief reasons the Americans had such an overwhelming advantage in artillery in World War II. No one could match the U.S. Army’s accuracy and ability to mass fires at a single point on the battlefield at the same time. A lot of this advantage lay in the fact that the Americans could supply communications equipment all the way down to the platoon level. Therefore, a mere platoon leader—lieutenant or sergeant—could relay information back to a battalion FDC and bring dozens of shells on a single target in practically no time. No other army of its time could do that.36
Across the road, the medics set up their aid station in the town chapel. Cooper then oversaw the setup of his 75mm Pack howitzers throughout the area, the four batteries spread out to give a maximum amount of coverage to the area around the village. In an indirect-fire mode, his guns would be able to fire in a 360-degree defense of the perimeter if called upon. The gun teams were also instructed to start working on direct-fire positions for antitank work. At 1700 and 1725 hours, both Able and Dog batteries, respectively, registered their guns. Satisfied with his setup, Cooper waited for the requests for fire missions he knew would soon be coming.37
2345 hours, Tuesday, 19 December 1944
327th Glider Infantry Regiment Headquarters
Mande Saint-Etienne, west of Bastogne, Belgium
At 2245 hours, a report came in to Colonel Harper’s headquarters that a supply convoy had been ambushed on the road to Hargimont at a crossroads not far from Salle. At 2345 hours, the regimental radio operators received another report from division. Someone had seen a burning truck at the location of the reported ambush. In addition, that someone claimed hearing small arms fire in the area where the 326th Medical Company had set up their field hospital at the crossroads of the Marche and Salle roads, an area known to locals as the Barrière Hinck.38 It was growing obvious to Harper and his men that the Germans had moved quicker than thought, and they were already about six miles west and closing.39
