by Leo Barron
D’Angelo devised a clever ruse to keep the panzers at bay. He figured that, since most of the American fighting positions were on a reverse slope, the Germans probably didn’t have an accurate estimate of American armor. D’Angelo reckoned that if he popped off a couple of shots from his tank destroyer, it would warn the Germans that the Americans had some firepower on the other side of the hill waiting for them, even if it was only one TD. D’Angelo had his crew lob a few rounds at the Germans. There was no response. Fortunately, the newly arrived German tankers from the 15th Panzergrenadier Division were still organizing and by no means ready for a German all-out assault on any American positions.15
Seeing that no attack seemed imminent, Sergeant D’Angelo and the crew of “No Love, No Nothing” returned to Champs. D’Angelo had teamed up with the other gun in his section: an M18 commanded by Sergeant Lawrence Vallitta. The two sergeants set themselves up in a little farmhouse in Champs for the evening, believing for the moment that they would see little action that day.
“I didn’t have any time to think about Christmas or home,” D’Angelo said. “There was too much happening—seems like we were too busy just trying to stay warm and stay alive.”16
The M18 crews had taken to warming their hands on the backs of the vehicles, where the exhaust came up in torrents of hot air from the large nine-cylinder Continental radial aircraft engine. Through trial and error, the tank destroyer men had also learned another trick—to dig a shallow foxhole, and then drive their Hellcat over the hole, straddling it. With about fourteen inches of clearance under the vehicle, this would make a comfy and well-protected—if somewhat claustrophobic—“bunker” for the crew to sleep in.17
Generally most soldiers preferred the quaint stone farmhouses to truly escape the cold nights, but there were just not enough of these available. D’Angelo noted how many of the Belgian home owners were perfectly willing to give up their upstairs accommodations to the soldiers, preferring to stay in the basements and shelter for the duration of the siege.
As he tossed and turned, trying to get some sleep that Christmas Eve, D’Angelo couldn’t help worrying about the massive amount of German armor he had seen earlier that day with Swanson. Even though HQ was aware of it, to D’Angelo it still felt like some monster just waiting over the hill to pounce on the American lines. Unable to sleep, D’Angelo decided to hunt up some food for his men for Christmas Eve fare. The men were tired of K rations, and had given many of their rations away to paratroopers earlier that day near Longchamps.
“One [civilian] guy butchered a cow, and gave us and the 101st guys some. We were very grateful.”18
The tiny village of Champs, in the northern sector, lay in a bowl-like depression, with hills to the north and south. Here Swanson’s A Company kept their vigil, with orders to watch the ground to the north, particularly the high road to Rouette. The men of Able Company knew something was up. All that afternoon, the noises of German vehicles had come to them loud and clear from that general direction.
The cold paratroopers of Able Company had a long line to watch. In a crescent shape, their line snaked from Longchamps to the northeast (where they attempted to connect with their brothers in Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Sutliffe’s Second Battalion) in a broad curve before Champs and terminated at a hill on their left flank. At this hill, the line was supposed to join airtight with B Company of the 1/401st, but gaps made this more wishful thinking than reality.
Christmas Eve was spent expanding their foxholes or cleaning weapons. Corporal Willis Fowler, the .30-caliber M1919A4 machine gunner from Georgia, stripped his weapon and cleaned each part on a ground cloth. Fowler wanted to make sure the machine gun—complicated and with many moving parts—would not freeze up that night when it might be most needed. He checked and rechecked the head space on the bolt and wiped off belts of .30-caliber bullets, ensuring that each link was free of ice, snow, or grit. Trying to prepare for anything, as well as keep his mind off of home and hearth, Fowler figured it, “seemed like the smart thing to do.”19
Fowler occupied his mind thusly while waiting in his position on the left side of the Rouette road. Fowler’s platoon was entrenched behind a potato shed used as their squad CP. Across the road to the right, the rest of 2nd Platoon was situated along the slope of a hill, occupying several other farm buildings. Swanson’s headquarters was behind this position in a house in Champs near the intersection of the Rouette and Longchamps roads, just behind a school and a stone church. In the waning light of evening, Fowler kept a steady watch over the fields ahead of them for any sign of German activity.
To the east side of the road, Sergeant Charles Asay, the squad leader from Sioux City, Iowa, had a similar notion. His 3rd Platoon was placed in foxholes spread down the slope into Champs. Forward of his position, up the incline and in the woods, were several outposts. These positions would basically serve as “speed bumps,” slowing down the enemy and giving advance notification of any attack.
Captain Swanson had already made his rounds as the sun set, sharing with Asay and the other squad leaders what he had seen with D’Angelo earlier that day.
“Swannie—Captain Swanson, that’s what we called him—he told the guys on outpost that night to stay awake,” Asay recalled. “German activity was pretty deep.” Asay, in turn, made sure his squad kept focused on the woods ahead. He checked his own M1 clips in his ammo belt, each packed with eight bullets, wishing he had more. Overall, he didn’t think too much about it being Christmas. “[As an orphan] my family was the army. As for Christmas in the orphanage, if you were a boy you got to pull a blue ribbon from under the tree. Not much to say there.”
One thing the orphanage did give Asay was responsibility. He had to take care of many of the younger boys, so the role of sergeant and squad leader came naturally. That evening, he checked and rechecked his men to make sure they were warm as could be and had enough ammunition for the coming fight. “I was a bit of a mother hen,” he wrote about that night.20
1730–1800 hours, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Command element of the 115th Panzergrenadier Regiment at
26th Volksgrenadier Division Headquarters
Gives, Belgium
That evening, when a tired Colonel Wolfgang Maucke finally arrived at the command post of the 26th Volksgrenadier Division near Gives, he immediately started looking for his new boss, Colonel Kokott, to get his orders. Kokott was elsewhere. Maucke was forced to get his briefing, for the time being, from the division’s operations officer—Major Hans Freiherr von Tiesenhausen. Von Tiesenhausen did not waste time with formalities, cordialities, or reminiscing about the holidays. All of Kokott’s staff knew about the new directive to take Bastogne with the all-out Panzer Angriff on Christmas Day.
Von Tiesenhausen immediately outlined the plan and informed Maucke of his role in it. Maucke’s 115th Panzergrenadier Regiment would assemble in the area around Salle. Maucke’s panzers would spearhead the attack. It would be a classic combined armor-infantry thrust bearing southeast from the Flamierge vicinity and then east into Bastogne. In addition, Maucke would receive support on both of his flanks from Schriefer’s 77th Volksgrenadier Regiment to the north attacking Champs and the 26th Reconnaissance Battalion to the south. To Maucke’s surprise, von Tiesenhausen informed him that the attack would commence at first light the next morning. This, he explained, was to fully exploit the element of surprise. To accomplish this, Maucke would have to have all of his men and hardware in position that night. The final assembly time would be 0300 hours tomorrow (Christmas) morning.
As Maucke stood before von Tiesenhausen and reviewed the orders, he could not believe what he was hearing. Most of his regiment had not arrived in the Bastogne area yet. His regiment was being thrown piecemeal into an attack, in the dark, without maps, reconnaissance of the area, or any time for careful coordination. Many of Maucke’s soldiers, artillery, and tank crews were exhausted from the toil and strain of moving at breakneck speed to Bastogne over the past two da
ys. Because of the loss of a field kitchen, shot up by the American fighter-bombers, one of his battalions had no rations. Mail, which could have been a great morale boost that Christmas Eve, had not caught up with his unit.
Now he had to disseminate orders and prepare his men for an attack that was roughly twelve hours away. Moreover, he hadn’t seen the ground his tanks were supposed to seize in daylight. Maucke would be literally seeing the area in the dark for the first time, and there was little to guide him in carrying out an incredibly crucial attack plan. The veteran commander, who had fought hard in the Italian Campaign, was incredulous. Verrückt—crazy! This won’t do at all, he thought to himself. To plan an attack without having the time to effectively put his force together, fully brief his men, and properly reconnoiter the ground seemed to be asking for trouble. Now Kokott was ordering him to do just that. He knew that his men would carry out his orders. They were good and loyal soldiers, but to Maucke, this whole thing seemed thrown together and haphazard, and reeked of disaster.
As Maucke started to leave, von Tiesenhausen reminded him, “At 2200 hours you are to report to the command post of the 26th VGD, where you will receive your orders personally from the divisional commander.”
Maucke nodded. Kokott was coming. At least he would have a chance to protest his orders to the man who signed them. Maucke wondered, however, what chance he would have. It all seemed so desperate.21
1700–1800 hours, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Headquarters, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Rolle Château, Belgium
Southeast of Swanson’s A Company positions at Champs, the main road led out of town and passed over a small bridge fording the river Grand Etang. The road gradually climbed and continued to a bend between the woods. From here, as the ground leveled out, it was only four hundred yards to the “Lane of Trees” (Dreve de Mande) that marked the intersection with the Rolle Château road. Following this wooded lane to the left would guide someone directly to the front gateway of the Rolle Château—the headquarters of the 502nd.
Here, Chappuis’ signalmen were finishing their work, making sure communication was solid between the 502nd HQ and the various battalions and companies nearby. The cold signalmen had finally tied in all the units with communication wire. The herculean task had taken all day, and the men were exhausted from working in the snow. Outside of the château, demolition teams were placing charges underneath the two stone bridges around Champs. In addition, the engineers planted mines along the road between Champs and Longchamps and provided antitank chain mines to prevent panzers from crossing the bridges. Finally, these teams left two men at each of the bridges to ensure that they would blow them if and when the time came—a last desperate act if the headquarters was in danger of being overrun. Demolitions Sergeant Schuyler “Sky” Jackson was one of the soldiers attached to headquarters who was on one of these teams.
“The temperature, though, was around zero,” he wrote after the war. “There were a couple of replacements who actually froze to death on duty. I would always have two guys go out there to keep the men awake and prevent them from freezing.”22
Back inside the château, the intelligence staff received a terse message from division at 1735 hours. It read, “Be on alert for a possible enemy attack from the west tonight.” Undoubtedly the radio switchboard operators laughed when they heard this. Division didn’t need to tell them what was coming, since it was they who had reported this information in the first place.23
Early evening, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Assembly area, Charlie Company, 1/502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Hemroulle, Belgium
The Champs-Hemroulle road runs straight as it continues southeast from the intersection of the Rolle Château road to Hemroulle and then directly into Bastogne. Along this section, thick woods patchworked the valleys and hills carved by the Rau Rolle directly to the east. At one point, these woods almost touched the road, lined with concrete telephone poles and wire cattle fencing.
Just a few hundred yards south of where the woods came to the road, a double-structure, two-story stone farmhouse stood on the west side. Colonel Ray Allen had chosen this whitewashed building as his new headquarters after executing plan A the day before.
Another hundred yards farther south, the road forked at the entrance to the town of Hemroulle. Hemroulle itself, composed of a small church and about ten to fifteen buildings, is only a little more than a mile from the entryways to Bastogne proper. Colonel : “Silent Steve” Chappuis had instructed Major John Hanlon to position both Baker and Charlie companies of the 502nd as a reserve in and around Hemroulle that night. The idea was that if either Allen’s glidermen or Chappuis’ headquarters needed help, Hanlon could be there in a jiffy.
Christmas Eve, Sergeant Layton Black’s 2nd Platoon found themselves lodging in a warm but dilapidated barn on the outskirts of Hemroulle. As the men bedded down in the hayloft, Black remembered “[We] covered ourselves with the loose hay. I was never that warm again in the Bulge.”
Nervous young soldiers in Black’s squad kept asking whether they would fight soon. Black knew the 502nd was overdue for its share of defending Bastogne. He and the other NCOs tried to calm the men so they could all get a sound rest, but few were sleeping.
At one point, a voice asked aloud, “Sergeant Black, are you asleep yet?”
“No, not yet,” Black replied.
“When do you think we are going up?” the paratrooper then inquired.
“Maybe tonight. Better get some sleep.” Black tried to steady his voice to sound like the self-assured NCO his soldiers thought he was. Black, though, knew their time was coming, and he didn’t want to scare his men.
After the war, Black recalled that night. “I thought about home, about Christmas in the States, about Mom and Dad, about my best girl, my three brothers and my sister. Also, I thought about the very first Christmas, the barn, the hayloft, in a far-off time. What did it all mean?”
Fortunately for Black’s squad of “Screaming Eagles” that night, there would be a welcome break in the Christmas menu and a real boost to his squad’s morale. Black described the event. “Maybe it was 2000 [eight p.m.] when someone came into the barn, yelled, ‘Santa Claus is here!’ and passed out a box of cookies to each of us. They just might have been the best cookies I ever ate.”24
Early evening, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Area of operations, 1/401st Glider Infantry Regiment
West of Hemroulle, Belgium
Almost due west of Hemroulle the ground gradually climbed and flattened out into large, open fields. It was in this broad, snowy area before Allen’s headquarters that Towns’s hard-fought Charlie Company had entrenched some distance behind their brothers in Able and Baker companies.
For one of Towns’s men, Private First Class Robert Lott, squatting in a foxhole, Christmas Eve just meant colder weather. The temperature had dropped again, and Lott and his fellow glider troopers of Charlie Company did their best to stay warm. One of Lott’s buddies, Jack Gresh, was getting sick from the cold. The GIs took him to a nearby barn for protection from the elements. Inside the farmhouse, Lott remembered a welcome sight:
“There was this woman in the house making soup. She let us stay and eat. We had several guys all crammed under that dining room table, sleeping, just to keep warm in there.” Lott appreciated the Belgian woman’s gratitude and found it “the best Christmas gift any of us could have asked for at that time.”25
After the beating it had sustained the previous day, mercifully, Captain Towns’s company was now in reserve. Shivering in their foxholes, some of the glidermen could hear the sound of gurgling panzer engines in the distance, coming from the direction of Salle and Tronle. For many, there was a sad resignation—they felt it was going to be their last night on earth. Ray Allen said in an interview after the war:
We had seen the Germans building up west of our lines for two days, and the men knew that division was expecting the German
s to attack on Christmas Day. They knew division believed our area was the most likely area to be attacked by tanks, and division didn’t think our thinly spread line could hold if we were attacked by tanks. The men felt this could be their last night together—and their last Christmas Eve. Some of them felt they probably wouldn’t live to see dawn. So they climbed out of their carefully prepared foxholes, shook hands with one another and wished each other a Merry Christmas. Then they got back in their foxholes and waited.26
Farther west, on the newly established 1/401st lines stretching north from the Marche road, and pushed back almost a mile from Mande Saint-Etienne, was the rest of Allen’s battalion. Entrenched on a slight ridge were Bowles’s Able Company to the south and MacDonald’s Baker Company to its north. Here, spread more than two miles in length and almost reaching the outskirts of Champs was Allen’s “do or die” main line of resistance: the only thing between the road to Bastogne and Kokott’s forces.
In an open position along these gently rolling hills, New Jersey native Carmen Gisi was mulling over the previous day’s desperate fighting and retreat from Flamierge. Although he was cold and tired, incredibly, Gisi’s spirits were still high. He had heard about the surrender request from the Germans, and like many of his comrades, had to laugh at McAuliffe’s response.
“We all thought it was a joke,” he recalled. “Because we felt like we were knocking the hell out of them.”
Still, not every soldier shared Gisi’s foxhole optimism. Gisi remembered that Benny Cohen, a young Jewish soldier in the foxhole next to him, had quietly disposed of his dog tags when he got news the 101st was officially surrounded.27
As some shivered in their holes, others celebrated the holiday with the little cheer and ceremony that could be arranged.
Early evening, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Headquarters, 463rd Parachute Field Artillery battalion
Hemroulle, Belgium
