No Silent Night

by Leo Barron

  Suddenly the belch of a German rapid-fire weapon answered the American machine gunners from the edge of the village. The men leaped to the ground for cover as a German machine gun returned fire, pelting the road. Almost instantly, several rounds slammed into the lead jeep, shattering the glass windshield and hitting the young driver, Technician Fifth Grade Donald Kreider. Kreider slumped over and screamed in pain—a German slug had busted open his kneecap like a grapefruit on a firing range. Bostwick remembered the horrifying sight: “The jeep that was leading our parade was hit and the driver wounded, maybe killed. He was hanging half out of the jeep on the driver’s side, some forty or fifty feet in front of me.”

  German lead continued to slash down the entryway to Flamierge, kicking up great spouts of snow and chips of rock from the road. Francis Walsh, watching Kreider bleeding and writhing in agony in the jeep’s front seat, stood up and sprinted toward another jeep. Jumping into the driver’s seat, Walsh stomped down on the gas and jerked the stick into first gear. The jeep lunged forward, spewing snow from the tires. Walsh deftly pulled the jeep parallel to Kreider’s, huddling behind the dashboard for safety. Crawling over into Kreider’s jeep in a prone position, he pulled himself over Kreider’s screaming form and grabbed the wheel of that vehicle. He managed to pull the jeep around, and together, the two men drove back down the mile-long road to Flamizoulle.

  The heroics impressed all who witnessed it, but the glidermen were still pinned down in the center of the street and in the icy ditches bordering it. Gisi was one of them. When the firing started, he dived onto the road and tried to make himself the size of a pea as bullets cracked all around him.

  As he lay there hugging the pavement, Gisi looked over and saw one of his squad buddies staring at something up the road. Gisi turned his head and saw what it was: a hand grenade that someone had dropped during the initial barrage. Gisi recalled, “A few feet away a grenade was lying there. We thought that it would get hit by a machine gun bullet and hit [kill] both of us.”

  In a nearby ditch, Bostwick ducked for cover with Private First Class Norman Blimline, whom the men in 3rd Platoon affectionately called “Blimp.” The two glidermen lay there, helpless, as the German machine guns stitched the road with a blistering fire. From close by, Voboril knew he had to get his men up and moving again. He waved for the 75mm M8 light tank to move forward and blast the German machine gun crews out of the buildings. The M8 HMC chugged forward, its howitzer flashing and booming. The crew of the little tank was firing at every house in Flamierge as if the Germans were everywhere. From his position on the ground, Bostwick watched the tank enter the town. Even with the pesky machine guns silenced, he and Blimline took no chances. They crawled down the ditch, carefully following the tank.21

  Gisi got the short reprieve he needed. He scrambled to his feet and scurried to cover along the road. After several seconds, he looked up and noticed a statue of the Virgin Mary, who was staring down at him. It was one of the many roadside religious icons that were common throughout Belgium and France.

  “Being Catholic, I made the sign of the cross,” Gisi recounted, feeling especially religious at the moment.22

  Ahead of Gisi, Blimp and Bostwick started to clear the houses in town. The two glidermen stood up and jogged to the nearest building. Standard procedure was to first toss a hand grenade through a window or a door. The men felt sure the Germans could be the only occupants of these buildings, as the locals had either left some time ago or were huddled in deep basements for cover.

  Together, Blimp and Bostwick started lobbing fragmentation grenades into the houses, like a paper boy tosses a morning paper. Just then, something came back at them with force.

  “I crawled into my helmet again. There was one hell of a ‘wham!’” Bostwick recalled.

  The Germans had responded with mortars. Bostwick continued his account. “I could hear the hollow ‘choonk’ sound of the shells leaving the mortar tube, indicating the krauts weren’t far from us.” Suddenly everything around them burst and exploded as a salvo of mortar rounds dropped down upon them like deadly baseball-size hailstones. The two leaped for cover, down to the earth and behind any concrete structures of the houses. Bostwick and Blimp were quick enough this day. Though the brief pattern of mortar bombs pounded the street and houses, leaving Bostwick’s ears ringing, it did little else. As soon as there was a break, the two got up, dusted themselves off, and cautiously continued their task of clearing houses.

  Their teamwork soon paid off. After they assaulted another house, five German soldiers appeared in the doorway, with their hands firmly placed on the backs of their heads. The duo then enlisted the aid of one of Voboril’s Greyhound armored cars, which blasted away at the cellar windows of the next house with its .30-caliber machine gun.

  The group repeated this a few times, steadily advancing deeper into Flamierge. Chucking his last grenade into a window, Bostwick heard screaming, too high-pitched to be a man’s voice.

  “I ran into the house, to the head of the stairway leading to the basement, and held my rifle ready as the sounds of footsteps ascended the stairs. Sergeant [Hubert] Watson and some of the others joined me just as an old man and three women, all civilians, appeared. Two of the women were elderly and one appeared to be about twenty years old. The old man had a terrible gash over his right eye and the skin was hanging down over the eye. My grenades had done this.”

  Bostwick felt terrible. He recounted what happened next: “The young girl asked if we were Americans; we assured her that we were. She bawled and bawled and kissed every one of us on the cheek. The old man was attended to by the medics. They were loaded onto a vehicle and returned to our lines.”

  Using a flashlight, Sergeant Watson, Bostwick’s squad leader, led the pair into the smoke-filled basement, weapons ready. He discovered a passageway that clearly led to another room. Bostwick motioned to Watson that he wanted to toss a hand grenade into the room, but Watson shook his head. He didn’t want to injure any more civilians. Instead, the sergeant took a deep breath and plunged into the dark room while the other two covered him.

  Bostwick later wrote, “Watson had guts. He entered the room with that stupid flashlight throwing a feeble glow before him. Suddenly, the light fell upon a German uniform. It was incredible. There were seven others, fully armed, standing with their backs to the wall, standing in the darkness, with their hands over their heads.”

  Eight more Germans joined the tally of prisoners the glider fighters were acquiring. After they relieved them of their weapons, Bostwick and the others then led them outside for questioning and processing. By the end of the short block, they had four more prisoners, Germans who had stumbled out of another house, shocked and dazed from the M8’s cannon shells that had turned the basement into a lethal kill zone.23

  Despite the lackluster artillery prep, the fight for Flamierge, though intense, had turned out well for Ray Allen’s men. Regiment got word about 1050 that Voboril’s force had pretty much regained the town.

  But the truth was that Kokott’s panzers were coming. Their orders were simple—take Flamierge, wipe out the glidermen there, and slice up Allen’s extended line.24

  0945–1155, Saturday, 23 December 1944

  G4 Office, 101st Airborne Division Headquarters, Heinz Barracks

  Bastogne, Belgium

  Late Saturday morning, fortune was finally going to reward the stubborn GIs holding Bastogne. Lieutenant Colonel Carl W. Kohls’s hard work had paid off. For several days he had been desperately trying to arrange the aerial resupply mission that could be the salvation of the Americans in Bastogne.

  It came as a relief to Kohls when the weather cleared Saturday morning. Like so many groundhogs, GIs crawled from their foxholes to warm their faces and gaze in wonder at shadows they could finally see on the ground.

  It only got better. Out of the sky, like guardian angels, two groups of pathfinders arrived that morning. The drone of an IX Troop Carrier Command C-47 aircraft split the sky around 0945
. Several more followed. Through the clear, cold air, the pathfinders, whose mission it was to parachute in and prepare drop zones, tumbled out of the aircraft, surprising even the Germans who were on watch around Bastogne.

  As the men gently settled into the snowy fields close to Bastogne, pathfinder leader First Lieutenant Gordon Rothwell unhooked his parachute harness and quickly found the division headquarters. He linked up with an overjoyed Colonel Kohls, the two planning the particulars of the scheduled supply drop.

  This was great news for the headquarters team, who perked up almost instantly. At last, resupply! The weather had cleared, and the news reenergized the G4 staff as they rushed to work.

  Rothwell informed Kohls that the first flight would arrive over the drop zone within an hour and a half. Kohls wasn’t worried. He had long ago designated the planned drop zones, and he directed Rothwell and his team out to the area west of town. In short, the DZ would be almost in Colonel Allen’s and Major Hanlon’s backyards.

  The pathfinders were greeted with smiles and grins by the headquarters types. The newcomers were regarded as heroes. They quickly found a large, ten-foot-tall stack of bricks belonging to a Belgian woman named Mrs. Massen. It was on the highest point in the area, perfect for setting up their radio and signal equipment to help guide the aircraft in. The brick pile also had the double advantage of offering possible cover, in case the enemy spotted them and opened fire.

  Within minutes Rothwell’s men were transmitting. A little after eleven in the morning, they had established contact with the first wave of resupply planes. When Kohls heard the news, he breathed a great sigh of relief. Around 1150 hours, the pathfinders had a visual on the massive air armada and began to direct them toward the drop zone. For General McAuliffe and the others, the armada meant the paratroopers would soon have what they needed to continue defending Bastogne.25

  Noon–1230, Saturday, 23 December 1944

  26th Volksgrenadier Division Headquarters

  Hompre, Belgium

  Until that noon, Colonel Heinz Kokott thought things were going well. The 26th Reconnaissance Battalion, together with some panzers from the 2nd Panzer Division, had commenced their attack to the west of Bastogne. Initial reports claimed that Major Kunkel had captured Flamierge, though the report was still unconfirmed as of noon. In addition, Colonel Schriefer’s 77th Volksgrenadier Regiment was moving steadily southward to attack the American units west of Bastogne.

  While he stood over the operations map and listened to reports coming in on the radio at his headquarters in Hompre, Kokott heard a sudden commotion from outside. At first, he ignored it, but then he noticed as more and more of his staff stepped outside to see what was going on. Curious, he too stepped out into the cold.

  What greeted him was a disaster in the making. Leaderless mobs of German paratroopers—Fallschirmjägers—many discernible by their squared-off helmet rims and Luftwaffe smocks, were streaming past the division headquarters. Kokott knew they belonged to the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division, part of the Seventh Army to the south. The Seventh Army had the task of blocking General George Patton’s Third U.S. Army as it was driving northward to the relief of Bastogne. Obviously things did not appear to be going so well. Kokott could see the looks on their faces. They seemed a beaten and demoralized force. One of his staff officers shouted at the paratroopers, asking what had happened.

  A frightened soldier responded, “The enemy has broken through! He moved to the north with tanks and has captured Chaumont!”

  Soon Kokott learned that Patton’s tanks and infantry had wiped out the Fallschirmjäger battalion defending Chaumont. The remnants were now stumbling past him. Most of the officers and NCOs had died fighting the American forces, leaving their soldiers leaderless, panicked, and lost. Meanwhile, horse-drawn vehicles were showing up around Hompre, starting to tie up traffic as supply and support elements of the broken paratroops tried to escape the American tidal wave arising from the south.

  For a moment, Kokott felt sorry for the men who were retreating. Like many landsers, these men were not hardened infantry soldiers. Though many were young and fit, a majority of them had served most of the war in rear echelons units as clerks, cooks, and technicians. In the case of the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division, most of these men had never actually participated in a parachute jump or been parachute trained. They were Fallschirmjäger in name only, much less knew the first thing about being a soldier, let alone a Fallschirmjäger. Now they were told to stop General George S. Patton’s Third Army, one of the finest Allied armor-heavy forces. It was no wonder that so many of them broke.

  Despite his sympathies, Kokott had to whip them into shape. They were no longer Luftwaffe clerks. They were going to have to be soldiers now, which meant they had to turn around and fight. If they didn’t, Patton’s forces would not only overrun the 5th Fallschirmjäger, but, without protection to his southern flank, Kokott’s 26th Volksgrenadier Division would be overrun too. Kokott ordered his staff officers to start organizing the masses into cohesive units.

  Suddenly Kokott heard the ripping fire of machine guns and the chunking sounds of 20mm flak cannons pounding skyward. He stared into the midday sun and saw winged dots screaming down from the heavens like mythical Harpies. He knew instantly what they were. The American fighter-bombers had returned. The traffic jam of disorganized men, plodding horses, wagons, and idling vehicles moving along at a snail’s pace in the bright sun was just too easy and attractive a target for the Allied pilots. Once again, Kokott braced for destruction.26

  1206–1430, Saturday, 23 December 1944

  514th Fighter Squadron

  Over Sibret, Belgium

  It wasn’t even noon, and the 514th Fighter Squadron had already seen a great deal of action that day. Now, miles from their base near Mourmelon, another flight of P-47s was diving through the thin cloud layers and into combat over Bastogne. Originally this flight had the mission to provide security to the lumbering procession of C-47s that were heading to Bastogne to drop supplies. Like sheepdogs, the stubby P-47s protected the herd of Dakotas from any Luftwaffe wolves that might be hunting for easy prey. The fighters, faster than the big transports, would fly lazy Z-shaped patterns over the flight in order to keep pace and watch all possible attack angles. The fighters had left Mourmelon at 1206 hours, but because the distance was so short, they reached their rendezvous point over western Bastogne at 1230.

  Within minutes of linking up with the procession of C-47s, the pilots of the 514th spotted a worthwhile target to the southwest between Sibret and Hompre. It was a convoy of more than twenty German vehicles. Some of them were trucks pulling artillery, and some were staff cars driving along the road. The flight commander gave a “Tallyho!” With a roar from the huge turbo-charged Pratt & Whitney engines, the fighters peeled off and started to line up to strafe the convoy. For the pilots of the 514th, it was a turkey shoot. Howling down from the skies over Bastogne, scores of silver jug-shaped fighters dived on anything German around the perimeter.

  Down below, Kokott’s men were unprepared for the “Jabos” (German slang for Allied fighter-bombers). The Germans had grown complacently comfortable with the absence of Allied fighter-bombers due to the poor flying weather. Little was done, initially, in the way of setting up a thorough antiaircraft defense. Terrified German soldiers dived into icy ditches for cover. Vehicles were perforated or blasted apart as their gas tanks ignited from the aerial assault. It seemed there was no place to hide. The Thunderbolts were relentless, like jackals picking apart the Germans below. In minutes the convoy was reduced to a smoking and burning wreckage of metal and flesh. Later the pilots claimed they destroyed twelve vehicles and damaged another eight in only six passes.

  As they turned for home around 1400 hours, one of the pilots noticed a vivid scene far below. Across the white fields, puffs that looked like little exploding kernels of popcorn were erupting to the west of Bastogne. It appeared the American positions in that area were under a sustained German artillery bom
bardment. Indeed, they were. The targets were Allen’s bold glider-fighters around Flamierge, and their situation had taken a decided turn for the worse.27

  1230–1300, Saturday, 23 December 1944

  26th Volksgrenadier Division Headquarters

  Hompre, Belgium

  Colonel Kokott witnessed the wrath of the “Jabos” as they screamed down from the sky and visited death and destruction on the convoys between Hompre and Sibret. Vehicles vanished in clouds of fire and ash, while crumpled and bloody forms that once resembled German soldiers lay scattered along the roadways, some burned horribly beyond recognition.

  Kokott watched as his officers and NCOs went to work. With the efficiency that the Wehrmacht was known for, they rounded up the survivors and began to organize them to care for the wounded and prepare for a possible ground attack. Meanwhile, antiaircraft crews continued to fire away at the spots in the air, brass shells rattling out of their guns with the fury of rapid fire.

  Many of Kokott’s men were so shocked by the savagery of the attack that they failed to notice the arrival of the transports, focused as they were on trying to reorganize. From the southwest came a steady, ominous drone. A procession of cargo planes started to arrive over Bastogne—an aerial parade. When the slow-moving air trucks began to disgorge parachutes by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, the Volksgrenadiers realized what was happening, Kokott most of all.

  Watching with his mouth open, Kokott suddenly received a message from his operations center. He read it to himself as he watched in despair. “Enemy parachutists [are] jumping and landing in our rear,” it read.

  Curiously, no one in the German high command ever contemplated the Allies’ reinforcing their trapped airborne troops with more paratroopers. In all their meticulous planning, the possibility had never been discussed.