by Leo Barron
However, Kokott knew that choking off Bastogne was only the start. He had realized, ever since his communication with von Lüttwitz the other day, that higher headquarters demanded he figure a way to take Bastogne, and take it soon. At the time, Kokott figured the 101st Airborne would try to break out to the southwest. He decided he could tie down the effort by the Americans simply by attacking Bastogne directly, forcing the Americans to shore up that part of their defensive line. He would attack from the southeast, through the outlying village of Marvie. The ground was not great, but the 901st Panzergrenadier Regiment had reported that the enemy forces there were also weak. Moreover, the 901st had seen little action in the last thirty-six hours and were still relatively fresh.
Kokott sent orders out that evening. The 901st would attack late in the day so that the 26th Reconnaissance Battalion and Schriefer’s 77th would have completed their operation and thus could participate in an all-out attack if the 901st succeeded in seizing Marvie. One had to plan for such possibilities. If the Americans collapsed here, the Germans would have to move quickly to take advantage of the route in. The infantry and panzers of the 901st would attack shortly after sunset the evening of the twenty-third. The objective would truly be to take Bastogne. Kokott knew it was a stretch to take Bastogne with the forces he had under his command. It was a gamble that the American defense here was weak and faltering without supply. But his comrades to the north had done the same thing against the 106th Infantry Division. It was certainly worth a shot.61
Kokott, though, had either forgotten or ignored an important fact. His troops were not facing a green division whose soldiers had recently arrived in Europe. He was not facing a unit that had been demoralized and cut up in those first few hours of Wacht am Rhein. It would not be a showdown against line infantry low on supplies. He was facing a veteran airborne division whose paratroopers and glidermen had already fought and won some of the toughest battles on the Western Front. Furthermore, they were not alone. With them in the Bastogne pocket were a seasoned armored combat command and almost an entire battalion of tank destroyers—American tanks that had already inflicted serious losses on the 2nd Panzer Division.
Truth be told, both Kokott’s and von Lüttwitz’s assessments were off—way off. They would need more than a Volksgrenadier division to deal with the stubborn Americans in Bastogne. Luckily for them, help was on the way in the form of the 115th Panzergrenadier and its seasoned commander, Colonel Wolfgang Maucke.62
CHAPTER FIVE
“This Is Our Last Withdrawal.
Live or Die—This Is It.”
(DECEMBER 23)
“To see our poor, brave fellows living in tents, bare-footed, bare-legged, bare-breeched, in snow, in rain, on marches, in camp and on duty without even able to supply their wants is really distressing.”
—Sergeant John Brooks of Pennsylvania at Valley Forge, writing to a friend1
On Saturday, December 23, the stubborn American defenders of Bastogne had reached their most desperate moment. That morning, many of the hard-luck paratroopers of the 101st—the tankers and tank destroyers of the armored units and the artillerymen manning their guns in the frozen gun pits—were growing exhausted. They were cold, hungry, and running out of everything.
Just two days short of Christmas, the lack of ammo was now being compounded by the lack of cold-weather clothing and a shortage of medical supplies. Men on outpost duty or patrols were having a difficult time keeping warm. On the MLR (main line of resistance), after the first snowfall the merely uncomfortable nights turned deadly as temperatures dropped below freezing. Men were constantly shivering, just trying to make it through each frigid night. Christmas cheer was in short supply for the miserable GIs on the MLR.
During the day, with the heat and movement of the men in the foxholes, snow and frozen mud would often melt and form a pool of water at the bottom of the foxholes. As the troopers bedded down for the night and tried to catch some valuable sleep, their soaking-wet clothes would often freeze as stiff as cardboard. Hundreds of men watched the skin on their feet literally peel away from what the military termed “immersion foot” but the GIs still called trench foot. Bare fingers froze to the metal on weapons. Faces went numb from frostbite caused by the windchill at night.
To make do, many of the Americans continued to scrounge and adapt. Some enterprising soldiers happened upon a barn full of burlap bags. Before long, the men were bundling the burlap over their shoes to provide an extra layer of insulation. The effect of an entire unit clad in this fashion must have resembled something from Valley Forge.2
Fortunately, the Americans had discovered a warehouse full of flour in Bastogne. The flour was used by the divisional cooks to make pancakes, which greatly supplemented the GIs’ rations for the next few days. There were more examples of resourcefulness. Captain Jim Hatch remembered that Chappuis, as befitted a good regimental commander, was concerned about his men getting enough to eat. “Silent Steve” ordered his headquarters men to save one of their three rations a day to take up to the front line. On one occasion, Hatch decided to check in on how the men were eating, and found that one squad was dining on a preholiday dinner of fried potatoes and steak scrounged from a nearby farmer.3
Waking up outside of Flamierge, Sergeant Robert Bowen, the acting platoon leader for 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 1/401st Glider Infantry, was not so lucky. He remembered how his squad had suffered through the cold the night before, shivering in the winter air.
“The snow began covering the ground and quickly got deeper. Foxholes now became freezers, and no amount of stamping around could get one’s feet warm,” he said. “The cold had more serious effects, too. The actions on our weapons froze and all the lubrication had to be removed. Men who had foolishly discarded their overcoats and overshoes now suffered horribly. They spent a miserable night wrapped in blankets, shelter halves, and sleeping bags and still cold. I checked my squad several times during the night, mainly to keep warm.”4
The tank destroyer crews fared better. Not that tanks were any warmer (the inside of a tank, with ventilation fans going and everything made out of steel, is actually quite a frigid home), but most of the men of Templeton’s 705th had arrived in Bastogne fully supplied. Tank destroyer men gave much of their food, ammo, and warm clothing to the airborne troops. Tony D’Angelo remembered a particular incident:
“When we left [Germany] we were pretty much fully supplied with ammo, gas, rations, clothes. I remember we were always giving stuff to the 101st guys. See, they didn’t have as much. I remember throwing a guy a pair of socks from my tank and he said thanks—like it must have been Christmas!”5
For the next few days as the soldiers were forced to endure the brutal winter conditions, any man who became a victim of trench foot, frostbite, or sickness meant a valuable warrior removed from the line of defense. On Saturday, McAuliffe realized the situation was becoming critical. Unfortunately, there was little he could do except tell his men to hold on. Hopefully supplies and Santa Patton would soon arrive.
Saturday, 23 December 1944
Area of operations, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Northwest of Bastogne, Belgium
Near the twin hamlets of Longchamps and Champs, Saturday morning found the Screaming Eagles of Chappuis’s 502nd (nicknamed “the Deuce”6) still digging in. It had been a rough morning for Able Company. Swanson had sent out a small patrol late the night before, and he hadn’t heard from them since. In addition, his forward observation post had opened fire on a German patrol, killing one of them.7
Still, compared to MacDonald’s glider fighters and the men of the 506th, the men of the 502nd had escaped most of the fighting so far. Life was a bit more pleasant for the paratroopers. After all the marching around of the last couple of days, the men were finally able to place their machine guns and mortars, trail communications wire, throw some straw down in the bottom of their trenches, and start up the portable stoves for a little warm breakfast.8
S
ergeant Layton Black recalled, “The sounds of war were muffled and far off, but growing closer and closer in the east. We were waiting.”9
For Black, the operation started on a sour note. “When I woke up in the morning [on the first day] in a slit-trench foxhole, water was already settling in. The day started with rain and remained foggy and misty most of the day. It seemed to me that nothing had changed from the way things were three weeks earlier! [In Holland] [o]nly the terrain was different; now there were hills. Same Germans, same noise of war, the same dirty foxhole for a home. We were back in combat.”10
Fortunately, the terrain was different. It was far more defensible than anything the 502nd had in Holland. Chappuis, the introspective commander of the 502nd, had picked a good spot to establish his defensive battle position. Almost directly between the 502nd and the forward positions of the 1/401st ran the Champs–Hemroulle road, running diagonally from the northwest to the southeast. On the northwest end rested the town of Champs; on the southeast end, approximately a mile and a half away, was the slightly larger village of Hemroulle, where Cooper’s 463rd had established their headquarters. Although the ground to the west of the road was mainly made up of gently rolling fields, around the towns on either end and behind the road the terrain became hilly, wooded, and divided by small rivers and frozen ponds. This road (today the N854) was considered one of the best of the seven hard roads running into Bastogne. Chappuis and the other commanders in Bastogne knew such hard roads would be important to the Germans if they tried to force their way into Bastogne.
Heading southeast from Champs, a driver on this route would notice a meticulously groomed lane of trees that bisected the road roughly halfway between Champs and Hemroulle. To the right, the trees were elms, more than fifty feet in height, and extended in an almost perfect line for about a hundred yards. At that point, the trees became pines. To the left of the Champs road there were more pines, standing almost twenty feet tall and paired on either side of another lane. This road, known as the Dreve de Mande (usually referred to as the “Lane of Trees” by the Americans), angled northeast from the main route (to the left) and continued about six hundred yards into the woods and hills, ending at a postcard-perfect château called Rolle.11
In this beautiful seventeenth-century stone château surrounded by trout ponds, and located adjacent to the ruins of an earlier tenth-century castle, Chappuis had planted his headquarters. From this location, Chappuis believed he could best direct his regiment and cover the northwest sector.
Those first days after arriving at Bastogne, Chappuis struggled personally with the cold. As a native Southerner, he had trouble adapting to the frigid conditions typical of a European winter. On the ride in from Mourmelon, Captain James J. Hatch, his S3 (operations and training) officer, remembered how Chappuis had sat in the back of the jeep for the entire trip, bundled in blankets.12
Captain Joseph Pangerl, Chappuis’ intelligence officer charged with interrogating POWs, was stationed at Rolle Château for most of the action.13 In a letter home to his parents (written during the siege), he commented on the picturesque location:
“The setting here is much like a Hollywood one,” he noted. “We are on a small hill with hills all around us, covered with pine forests. There are small lakes and rushing brooks that you always associate with such a setting and the fact that it snowed over a week ago and all the snow is still on the ground makes everything look like a Xmas postcard.”
The practical Chappuis had clearly not chosen this location for its romantic appeal. Pangerl described how the stone walls made the headquarters men feel more secure:
“It has been modernized,” he continued in the letter home to his family, “but, naturally, still has the three-foot-thick walls all around and you know what that means in combat dad.”14
In front of the château was a typical French-style courtyard, with walls and an iron gate. Within these grounds there existed two long stone buildings, one on each side. On one side were former servants’ quarters; on the other were stables and a barn. The staff of the 502nd’s headquarters company—a polyglot of engineers, radio communication experts, intelligence officers, cooks, and medics—set up housekeeping in this area.
T/4 Robert J. Hale, one of Chappuis’s radio operators, dug in with a buddy near a wall of firewood in the courtyard. From his vantage point, he watched the comings and goings during the daylight hours of the twentieth and twenty-first:
Captain (James C.) Stone (the headquarters captain) would come and go, twirling his thin, but elaborate mustache. He holed up in a cellar under one of the stone buildings. Communications people occupied every available nook and cranny—barns, attics, basements and haystacks in the compound sheltered a wide variety of troopers. Wounded took up a large area in the stables; S2 (Military Intelligence) people and demo personnel shared available space with medics and men from the wire (communications) gangs. Parts of existing supplies were spread out under tarps on a sloping hillside, just outside the walls. I seem to recall at least one 6 X 6 truck parked just outside the main gates and under it one or two deep foxholes had been dug.15
Mixed in with the Screaming Eagles were several civilians. Rolle was the traditional center of much of the local community. There was the family, including Madame Nicole Maus de Rolle, twenty-seven years old at the time, and her children. The family had owned the land since 1902. Their take on this bizarre invasion of American personnel was at first mild bemusement. Later, as the château became the focus of German artillery attention, the madame opened up her massive home as a shelter for many of the nearby Belgian families caught in the deadly cross fire. Her generosity would be remembered by the locals for many years after the war.16
0950 hours, Saturday, 23 December 1944
3rd Platoon, Reconnaissance Company of
the 705th (one squad of Baker Company attached)
Outskirts of Flamierge, Belgium
Privates first class Carmen Gisi and Richard V. Bostwick had already spent two harrowing days at Crossroads X, the site of the field hospital ambush, and now they were going back into battle again. The two men grumbled, feeling that they were carrying more than their share of the fighting. Their mission was to force the German patrols back out of Flamierge, which the Germans had taken without much of a fight earlier that morning.
Bostwick remembered the particular mission and wrote about it after the war. He recounted the event: “In the morning, Captain Mac summoned our squad to the CP. It seemed that our squad’s number had been coming up too darned often. When there was a dirty job to be done, we were the ones to do it. Mac didn’t waste any words and we were soon prepared to go to the village on a ‘combat patrol.’ This meant being prepared to fight.”17
Once again, MacDonald had picked their squad to team up with Lieutenant Rudolph Voboril’s 3rd Platoon, Reconnaissance Company of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion.
Voboril would lead the combat patrol in his jeep. Following him would be four jeeps, two M8 Greyhound armored cars, and then a Howitzer Motor Carriage (HMC) M8, which was a small, converted M5 Stuart tank mounting a 75mm howitzer. The glidermen had found it stalled out and abandoned on a road. Bringing it back to life, they had commandeered it for the mission. With the glidermen riding along on the jeeps like migrant workers, overcoats and scarves flapping in the cold wind, the motley patrol moved out.18
As they started off, the men finally noticed that a minor miracle had occurred over Bastogne. The clouds that had blotted out the sun for the last five days were gone. As the men glanced up, they noticed the skies were showing some rare patches of blue. Better yet, the sun was actually shining. They knew this was a good portent: The fighter-bombers would soon be back.
Within minutes, the American artillery opened up from behind them. Carmen Gisi instinctively hunched over as the 75mm rounds screamed over his head and the heads of his comrades, Richard Bostwick and Francis Walsh. The three men then watched as the rounds impacted in Flamierge, the tiny little crossroads town si
tting in the dip of land and across from the snowy hills they were facing. It was a memorable scene, as fountains of earth and snow sprayed up in the air, the shells bursting amid the hamlet of houses and showering the area with deadly shards of steel.19 They knew the Germans were there. Walsh and his platoon had already skirmished with them the night before, and the Americans wanted as much steel as possible on the target.20
Unfortunately, the barrage was a short one. In fact, to the men of 3rd Platoon, it seemed that almost as soon as the barrage started, it stopped. Colonel Allen had desired to pound with artillery the Germans deployed in and around the town, but for some reason the effort was coming up a bit short. Unknown to the glider fighters, Cooper’s gunners were merely following McAuliffe’s instructions from the day before. At that time, the general had given specific orders to his artillery battalions. Since the vital artillery ammo could rapidly run out, McAuliffe limited his artillery commanders to conserve ammo and only fire barrages on priority targets. Basically, any enemy position that was a direct threat to the American defense of the perimeter.
Gisi recalled the bouncy and bumpy ride as the glidermen rode into Flamierge on the back of the jeeps, armored cars, and a light tank. After the shelling lifted, Rudolph Voboril’s jeep stopped just outside the town. With a wave of his hand, Voboril motioned two machine gun teams to set up and start spraying the edge of the town like Chicago gangsters. Red tracers spit out and lanced into the sky above the village.
