by Leo Barron
Just a few yards slightly southwest of Hemroulle was a large, split hill. The hill was crested by a hedge running diagonally along the top, and a few bordering trees. At the southern base of this area, and along a low creek called the Rau de Petite Fontaine, sat Colonel Cooper’s artillerymen of the 463rd. Here Cooper had positioned his four batteries (Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog).28 The remaining units were dispersed south of Hemroulle and west of Savy in a sharp curve. This careful disposition, overseen by the veteran Cooper, allowed the gunners to fire on multiple targets around the American perimeter. The guns could also be moved up into the antitank positions that Cooper had the men build several days before. To their left, the rest of Harper’s 327th was responsible for the part of the perimeter that extended through the crossroads of Isle-la-Hesse and continued southwest of Bastogne.
Major Stuart Seaton, the 463rd’s executive officer, fondly remembered a Christmas service held in Hemroulle. He wrote after the war, “The division chaplain came out to our town for a Christmas Eve service. We had the service in a stable. Somehow, that service had a distinct significance. A rather humble setting, somewhat reminiscent of an event some 2,000 years previous.” The artillerymen ended the service by singing “Silent Night.” Seaton noted that it was the setting that would cause him to remember that Christmas service over all others for many years.29
Ken Hesler, the twenty-year-old artillery communications man from Greenup, Illinois, attended the same service in the stables that night. “I didn’t think about Christmas. It was just another day—tomorrow would be another day. All you could do was just wait and find out what happens.”
Hesler had spent most of the day relaying messages from forward observers to his HQ in Hemroulle, and he was tired. Nevertheless, he drew guard duty that night along the Hemroulle-Savy road. After the service, Hesler donned his overcoat and shoepacs, grabbed his M1 rifle, and spent the remainder of Christmas Eve on a lonely and cold patrol in a long foxhole south of town.
“You always heard noises in the distance, it seemed, gunfire, explosions, machine gun fire—those kind of sounds were not that unusual in the background on or off all night. [But] it was one of the more quiet evenings in between.”
The only saving grace was a warming tent erected by the 463rd near the road and some trees south of Hemroulle. Heated by a small coal stove, it was a convenient place to dry out, warm up, and get some rest. As it got dark, Hesler was given a break from his duty and sent to the tent to rest up for his next round of sentry duty.30
Early evening, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Headquarters, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Château Rolle, Belgium
At Rolle, Chappuis removed his helmet and sat in on a Christmas Eve Mass given in the ancient chapel by the 502nd’s chaplain, Father Joseph Andrejewski.31 Still suffering from the cold, Chappuis did his best to stay alert for the service. Any soldiers who could be relieved off the line for a few moments were in attendance, rotating in and out, receiving communion and singing Christmas hymns. The chapel, located on the second floor of the ancient turret of the structure, was small and cramped. Only the top brass could squeeze into the cylindrical room; the rest lined the hall outside, straining to hear the padre’s words. The altar was a fantastic array of medieval finery, including linen banners from the early seventeenth century adorned with gilt crosses and figures of the savior and virgin.
Captain Joseph Pangerl, the 502nd’s prisoner interrogator, was a faithful Catholic. He attended the service and described it years later:
“Christmas Eve we had a midnight Mass in the chapel which is in the tower of the castle. The chapel is round, like the tower. It had rough stone walls and was fitted out with rustic but beautiful furniture and had pine boughs all around. The chaplain was our own and we filled the chapel. In fact, there were many who couldn’t get in. The family of the house was also present, of course.” Pangerl remembered that his parents had sent him a package of holiday gifts. In a gesture of goodwill, he gave the package to Madame Maus de Rolle, who distributed them to the local children.32
1800–1900 hours, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Headquarters, 101st Airborne Division, Heinz Barracks
Bastogne, Belgium
The time was 1800 hours, and Colonel Joseph “Bud” Harper was relieved to have Ray Allen’s battalion back under his control. However, it came with a price tag. The assistant division commander, General Higgins, informed him that he owned a rather large chunk of real estate to defend. Looking at the map, Harper could see where the long line that Allen had established with his battalion was spread before the rolling fields west of Hemroulle and Rolle.
“Look at it; this is half of the division perimeter!” Harper exclaimed.
Higgins was unmoved. He replied, “It’s all yours; do what you can with it. There isn’t any other solution.”
Harper knew, like everybody else, that McAuliffe didn’t have a choice. That’s the problem with being on the defensive, Harper thought. You don’t set the tempo because the enemy has the initiative. Therefore, all you can do is merely react to your opponent’s moves.33
Meanwhile, life in the operations room continued. Fred MacKenzie, the reporter from Buffalo, watched the men as they went about their duties. Oddly, a few of the headquarters orderlies caught naps on a pile of coal sitting at the end of one of the halls. In the background, distant German artillery rumbled like thunder on a summer night. MacKenzie looked at his watch. It was almost seven, and he remembered that the division chaplain was hosting a Catholic Mass at 1900 hours. He decided it was a good place to be, especially if this might wind up being his last Christmas.
The young chaplain was holding the service in a converted barracks room. Nearly a hundred paratroopers and soldiers crowded into the tiny space while a field organ droned as the men sang Christmas carols. MacKenzie described the scene in his book: “The simple service and the dimly lighted room were wondrously appropriate to this place where the human spirit sometimes seemed recognizable, a naked and vibrant thing, apart from fleshly woes. It was as though one was dying, or being born, in travail.”34
After Mass ended, the participants filed out of the room and made their way back into the Cave. MacKenzie could feel the fatalism in the air. To the commanders, it didn’t make sense. However, the men felt that this was it; something about Christmas Eve brought out the strong, sober, and sorrowful emotions. As the men went back to work, they quickly did everything they could to put the depressing thoughts out of their minds. One thing was for sure: They weren’t going down without a fight.35
According to Bastogne lore, General McAuliffe left the headquarters early that evening to walk around town for some fresh air. As he walked past the police station, which held several hundred German prisoners, he heard them singing Christmas carols in German: “O Tannenbaum,” and “Stille Nacht.”
Impressed, McAuliffe ducked inside, followed by the guards. When the Germans noticed an American general in their midst, they could not help taunting him in English.
“We shall be at Anvers [Antwerp] in a few weeks,” heckled one of them.
“We’ll soon be freed, and it is you who will be the prisoner,” another prisoner predicted.
“You will like it here, General; it is most comfortable and cozy,” a third prisoner added.
McAuliffe waited until the bravado had stopped, and then softly spoke.
“I was just here to wish you a merry Christmas.”
McAuliffe then left in his jeep that evening to go see his men on the lines and encourage them with those very same words.36
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Hark, The Herald Angels Sing!”
(DECEMBER 24)
“I am sorry to hear your brigade has been fatigued or alarmed. You may be assured that the rebel army in Pennsylvania… does not exceed eight thousand men who have neither shoes nor stockings, are in fact almost naked, dying of cold, without blankets, and very ill supplied with provisions. On this side of th
e Delaware they have not three hundred men. These stroll about in small parties under the command of subaltern officers none of them above the rank of captain, and their principal object is to pick up some of our Light Dragoons.”
—British general James Grant in Brunswick
writing to Hessian commander Colonel
Johann Rall at Trenton, December 21, 17761
1925–1945 hours, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Bastogne, Belgium
Those who survived the terror bombings of Bastogne—thousands of feet beneath the bomb bays of Unteroffizier Karl Heinz Struhs and the other Junker bombers on their Christmas Eve mission of destruction—recalled how the planes came in like a flight pattern, one after another.
The first reports of approaching German aircraft came over the radios around 1925 hours, and within minutes bombs were falling in the center of Bastogne.2 Adolf Hitler had unleashed his fury and frustration on the little Belgian town. Snarling like fat mosquitoes, the bombers and the eruptions of their payloads—high-explosive, fragmentation, incendiaries, and bright magnesium flares—blasted the still winter night.
The citizens of Bastogne hid in their basements, shivering with cold and fear. As each Luftwaffe plane buzzed over, more flares fell, sputtering and photo-flashing against the stone facades before thudding to the streets. The flares, as much as the bombs, created a freakish effect—strobe lights in the hellish night.
The concussions could be felt easily for miles around the perimeter of Bastogne. The earth pounded and rocked for the men crouching in holes dug in the frozen earth. The 81st Antiaircraft Battalion, armed with .50-caliber machine guns, could do little to stop the bombing. The gunners estimated the Ju 88s were between 900 to 1,800 feet in altitude and roaring in at full speed. Since the bigger antiaircraft guns were oriented toward ground targets, they were powerless. For what seemed like forever to those on the ground, the bombers had a free rein of destruction over Bastogne.3
To the Nazi propagandists, it was just reward for the garrison’s insolence. Several hours before the bombs were falling, leaflets shot from artillery tubes fluttered down into the city. Their message was clear:
HARK the HERALD ANGELS sing! Well soldier here you are in “No-Mans-Land” just before Christmas far away from home and your loved ones. Your sweetheart or wife, your little girl, or perhaps even your little boy, don’t you feel them worrying about you, praying for you? Yes old boy, praying and hoping you’ll come back home again, soon. Will you come back, are you sure to see those dear ones again…. Man, have you thought about it, what if you don’t come back… what of those dear ones?4
Little attention was paid to the leaflets. No one was surrendering. The Germans concluded that Bastogne was now a legitimate military target. The weapons of war had shattered this Christmas, and with it the many lives of the soldiers and civilians holding out in Bastogne.
1925–1945 hours, Sunday, 24 December 1944
Headquarters, 101st Airborne Division, Heinz Barracks
Bastogne, Belgium
Fred Mackenzie was down in the Cave when the bombs hit. No one had heard the first one fall. It just exploded. To the reporter, they seemed to hit in quick succession, like a series of blows. Outside was chaos. MacKenzie described the scene:
An all but imperceptible movement swept along the passage. It seemed to begin at one end, pass through each man, and go on down the corridor. It was like the stirring of leaves through which a vagrant wind passes; they were drawing their physical parts into tight knots to resist the shock. A thin, shrieking whistle and a thunderous roar beat down their senses. The cellar rocked. They crouched along the walls. A second shriek, almost instantaneously after the first, pierced benumbed senses. But the shattering blast of the second bomb blotted out the sensation its falling produced, benumbing them anew. A man seemed to be buffeted between the heaving walls. The third bomb of the stick came down mercifully fast to fracture violently again the ties between conscious mind and body pressing desperately against the unyielding concrete to escape.
As the men tried to regain their senses, Colonel Ned Moore appeared, like the captain of a ship strolling onto the bridge during a violent storm.
“Steady, men. Keep calm. Don’t crowd,” the acting chief of staff commanded, like Christ calming the waters.
One of the men started to panic. “Let’s get out of here,” Corporal Daniel Olney said as he grabbed his blanket and stumbled up the stairs. MacKenzie decided to follow the soldier into the moonlit night. As he stepped outside, he felt the cold, invigorating air. In a sense, he was like someone on the Great Plains emerging from the cellar after a tornado had roared through the town, wondering what had just happened. MacKenzie could still hear the bombing in the distance as the drone of the Ju 88s faded into the night. In front of him were several blazing fires. The flames cast strange, flickering shadows across the taller buildings in the town center down the road from the barracks. One monstrous conflagration caught his attention, and the intrepid reporter ran toward the blaze like a moth drawn to a flame.
As MacKenzie hustled down the Rue de Neufchâteau, he ran into Colonel Curtis Renfro, the 101st’s “spare” colonel, who was heading toward the same fire. Together the two men dashed off to the center of town. Finally, after several minutes of jogging down snow-covered cobblestone avenues, they passed the town square and arrived at the scene. What was once a building was now twisted, burning embers and smashed masonry.
Several troopers were trying to put out the fire using only buckets. It was a losing battle, but they tried anyway. Other men dug furiously, desperately trying to help their buddies out of the rubble. It was dangerous work. All around them the building continued to burn and crumble. The Buffalo reporter could only watch, helpless.
“There were thirty-two wounded men in there,” a shocked lieutenant cried out, pointing at the monstrous, consuming inferno. On the way to the site, MacKenzie had learned that the holocaust in front of him had been the medical aid station for Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division. Finally, disgusted and defeated, the diggers retreated and yielded to the growing fire.
The lieutenant then pointed at the debris and remarked, “One of the men told me that a Belgian nurse was caught under a falling timber just as she was nearly out,” said the lieutenant. “She was taking care of the wounded.”
To the war correspondent, it was bad enough to lose young men, but to hear that a young woman had passed away was even worse. MacKenzie later learned that her name was Renée Lemaire, daughter of Gustav Lemaire, a village merchant. She was a nurse, in a sense, tending to the wounded in the aid station. Lemaire had already become something of a legend to the wounded Americans. Her tending to their every need, her basic medical abilities, and her compassion as she dispensed dollops of brandy as a painkiller all endeared her to the soldiers of the 101st. Indeed, her nickname became “the Angel of Bastogne.” Equally important was the work of another nurse, Augusta Chiwy, an African from the Belgian Congo, who cared for the wounded side by side with American medics and doctors.5
What seemed callous could have been accidental. Perhaps it was a rogue German bomb, or perhaps it was intentionally triggered by the Ju 88 bombardier. It certainly was a fat and tempting target: The medical aid station was located in a three-story building on the edge of town. Half-tracks and jeeps were parked outside to deliver the evening’s load of wounded and frostbitten. To a Luftwaffe bombardier at almost 2,000 feet, zipping by at more than two hundred miles per hour in the dark, it could have appeared to have military value—perhaps a headquarters or some other important target?
The single bomb had penetrated through the aging timber roof and then detonated on contact with the station floor. The ensuing explosion had shattered the glass windows for blocks as smoke and flame erupted from the openings. Captain John “Jack” T. Prior, an army medical officer who was there that night, recorded the experience years later:
I was in a building next to my hospital preparing to go next door
and write a letter for a young lieutenant to his wife. The lieutenant was dying of a chest wound. As I was about to step out the door for the hospital one of my men asked if I knew what day it was, pointing out that on Christmas Eve we should open a Champagne bottle. As the two of us filled our cups, the room, which was well blackened out, became as bright as an arc welder’s torch. Within a second or two we heard the screeching sound of the first bomb we had ever heard. Every bomb, as it descends, seems to be pointed right at you. We hit the floor as a terrible explosion next door rocked our building.
Prior had rushed outside, trying to pull away the planks and bits of stone. He could hear the cries of the wounded, trapped underneath. More bombers started strafing the area with their machine guns. Several times, he and the enlisted men had to duck under nearby vehicles for cover, reemerging to continue their rescue work.
Prior wrote, “A large number of men soon joined us and we located a cellar window (they were marked by white arrows on European buildings). Some men volunteered to be lowered in to the smoking cellar on a rope and two or three injured were pulled out before the entire building fell into the cellar.”
When the ground floor had collapsed into the basement, dozens of wounded soldiers were instantly buried, killed, or entrapped. Prior believed that Renée Lemaire was one of them. He later remarked, “It seems that Renée had been in the kitchen as the bomb came down and she either dashed into, or was pushed into, the cellar before the bomb hit.” Prior wrote: “Ironically enough, all those in the kitchen were blown outdoors since one wall was made of glass.”
Chiwy was more fortunate. She survived, being one of those flung from the adjacent building when the bomb detonated. The tragedy would hang heavy on the hearts of the soldiers that evening. It was just another cold, cruel reminder of the senselessness of war. Prior continued in his account: “Before our unit left Bastogne we dissected the hospital rubble and identified the majority of the bodies, including Renée Lemaire.” Tenderly, Jack Prior brought the remains to her parents, wrapped in a silk parachute cloth that she had wanted for a wedding dress. He also wrote a posthumous commendation for Lemaire and forwarded it to McAuliffe.6
