by Leo Barron
Moore was convinced this was serious. It certainly sounded like the German attack they had been dreading, but awaiting, for days. It also seemed to be in the sector they had guessed it would arrive in.
“We had better wake the old man,” he said to the staff. Not long afterward, a slightly groggy McAuliffe entered the ops room. Despite the arrival of the division commander, it was clear to all in the room that for the next few hours, the men of the Deuce were going to be on their own.4
0300 Hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
Area of operations, Able Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Champs, Belgium
At 0300 hours up and down the sector, the German guns opened up. Shells screeched through the cold night and landed along Chappuis’s lines, blasting the frozen earth into the air. German 105mm howitzers proceeded to pour in on the beleaguered GIs, especially in the area near Champs. Shell after shell pocked the ground in great flashes and blasts of heat. The Germans were prepping for the attack, and now the Americans knew it was coming, and where. Overhead, sporadic German bombers unloaded their deadly payloads.5
Within three minutes, Captain Wallace Swanson, the Able Company commander, had lost communication with all three of his platoons.6 Swanson chose to send out runners—a pretty dicey plan, considering the shards of steel filling the night air. He didn’t relish the decision of endangering the lives of these men, but he had little choice.
“All of our communications were destroyed from our CP to the platoons. The only way we could get messages in or out was by runner—and that was dangerous because of the barrages but that was something we had to keep doing out of necessity,” Swanson later wrote.7
The former football star was no newbie to the battlefield, but even he was impressed by the intensity of the rain of German steel coming down around Champs. He described it as “… an all-out barrage, artillery, cannon, mortar and other firepower. It was raining, snowing, hailing down on our Company A positions. This was the strongest, most extensive, continuous barrage I was ever in. Their goal was to devastate our main line of resistance and all connections from the front to the back and around our strong points.”8
From the small house that he was using as his command post, Swanson could see the flashes in the night sky. His command post was centrally located in Champs, leaving Swanson with an all-around view of the devastation. Shell after shell screamed in, creating fountains of snow and hurling frozen sod with each detonation. Luckily, his men were well dug in on the outskirts of the little village, hunkered down in their cold foxholes, waiting for the bombardment to end.
To Willis Fowler, trying to sleep in the potato shed, the shelling was loud, but “didn’t last too long. The shells were going over [our positions] and hitting the town.” Fowler, like the others in his squad nearby, immediately took cover, crouching on the ground. He suspected this was the preamble to the long-awaited attack. “We knew something was up.”9
At the same 2nd Platoon outpost, the situation went from bad to worse in seconds. Private George J. Hodge Jr. was manning a .30-caliber machine gun with his buddy, a Private Snyder. Hodge had been manning the outpost off and on since the beginning of the siege. Like many of the paratroopers that morning, he was relatively new to the unit. He had not jumped into Normandy, and had joined the company toward the end of the Holland campaign. He had seen little combat. Tonight that was about to change.
Within seconds of the first explosions, Snyder suddenly slumped back in his muddy foxhole. Hodge looked over at him and saw that he was wounded in the back. The wound was ghastly, and Hodge knew Snyder needed a medic or he was going to bleed to death. With the German shells still coming in, Hodge knew it would be impossible to carry Snyder out of there. Desperate to get help for his friend, Hodge took a deep breath. Scrambling out of the foxhole, he tore off in the direction of the platoon command post to get help.
It was a long sprint to the 2nd Platoon CP, more than three hundred yards behind the outpost position. Hodge ran over fields and cattle fences, his breath forming puffs of vapor in the night air. Shells slammed into the ground nearby, the shock wave almost knocking him off his feet.
Hodge reached 2nd Platoon’s main line of foxholes in front of the town. Lieutenants John Harrison and Albert Wise had prudently placed the men on the reverse of a slight slope. Their CP was another hundred yards behind the trench line and inside a farmhouse. Like many of the men, Wise and Harrison had only a few hours of sleep. They had been up partaking in a meager Christmas celebration at midnight, and had just fallen asleep when the barrage startled them awake.
Outside the windows of the tiny home, the partial moon shone off the snowy fields surrounding Champs. As each German shell impacted, a bright orange flash lit up the dark room, followed by the thunderous echo. Watching the bombardment outside, a groggy Wise and Harrison tried to make sense of the chaos while ducking down in their CP. Suddenly Hodge slammed open the door and stumbled inside, panting and wheezing. Gasping, he told the two officers what had happened and asked for a medic for Snyder. Harrison knew Wise could stay in contact with Captain Swannie’s runners and handle the shop while he was gone. Harrison decided he and a medic would go out to the outpost. Hodge would lead them there. Just in time, the artillery fire seemed to be slackening. The three men yanked open the door and prepared to dart out into the cold night air. If they were to rescue Snyder, it would have to be now or never.
The battle had barely even started, and with Snyder down, 2nd Platoon had already suffered its first casualty.10
0300 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
Headquarters, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, Rolle Château
Rolle, Belgium
Insomnia abounded that evening. Because he couldn’t sleep after the Christmas Eve service, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick F. Cassidy (nicknamed “Hopalong” by his fellow officers) was the self-appointed duty officer. It had been a late night in Rolle Château, with the service and all, so Cassidy had let Chappuis sleep, giving his commander a few hours of rest to help him stave off the cold. Cassidy was on one of his periodic checks with the single regimental telephone operator in Rolle when he heard the artillery barrage begin. As Cassidy stood near a window, he could hear the pounding of incoming artillery rounds nearby. Most of the noise seemed to be coming from Champs.
Sure enough, Cassidy quickly got a call from Swanson. Over the noise of gunfire, Swanson told Cassidy that the enemy could be seen moving en masse from the direction of Givry and Rouette and that his “front had become active.” Cassidy asked whether Swanson could determine the strength and objective of the enemy attack. The big Kansan replied negatively to both questions. At this point, none of A Company’s men knew exactly what was going on.11
While Cassidy waited on the line to hear more, there was a terrific explosion. The blast seemed to shake the very foundation of the château. It rattled the windows and illuminated the courtyard outside. A single bomb had detonated in the courtyard of the château, sending a jeep flying through the air as if it were a toy. Nearby, the remnants of a serving line for hungry soldiers lay scattered about like a tornado had swept through the area. Luckily, the walls of the château yard had shielded the soldiers from the flying shrapnel, and as a result no one was injured.
Meanwhile, the 502nd HQ received messages from other units, while the German artillery pounded away outside. Only minutes after the barrage had started, a patrol from Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Sutliffe’s Fox Company called in and reported German soldiers in a nearby copse north of Rolle. They didn’t stay there long. A machine gun near one of the bridges chased them off. The infiltrators were apparently German engineers who had defused the explosives underneath the bridge, allowing their armor to cross the bridge if the need arose.12
As the artillery bombardment tapered off, the headquarters men in Rolle Château heard another sound. It seemed as if all the machine guns in Sutliffe’s 2nd Battalion, spread between Champs and Longchamps, had opened fire at once, firing in
to the Les Bresses woods. 2nd Battalion’s mortars soon joined in the fight.
Sutliffe’s machine gunners and their assistants began to call in on any available line, spotting concentrations of the German troops moving through the logging trail along the wooded hill and acting as spotters for the mortars farther back. The switchboard operator at Rolle relayed the info to the mortar team leaders so they could adjust their fire in the night. The mortarmen moved their tubes so they would drop bombs at 1,600 mils, or due north, deep into the Les Bresses woods. With fingers trembling from the cold, the mortar crews dropped the 60- and 81mm rounds down each tube and hopped back as each round pounded up skyward into the night.
North of Champs, the target area exploded as rounds burst like high-velocity popcorn kernels among the trees. The terrifying noise of the explosions mixed with the screams of the Volksgrenadiers who had tried to infiltrate by that route. At this same time, the staff officers at Rolle began to yell for the support personnel—cooks, clerks, jeep drivers, etc.—who were promptly ordered to be prepared to buttress 2nd Battalion’s lines in case any Germans made it to the château. Everyone braced for a collision.13
0300–0319 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
Command post, Able Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Champs, Belgium
Swanson’s A Company positions outside of Champs were some of the first to be hit, and hit hard, by the 77th Volksgrenadiers. German recon soldiers, wearing white parkas, had managed to sneak into the western portion of the Les Bresses woods in front of A Company’s foxholes. Rising up from the snow, the Germans attacked the forward outposts. To the startled Americans, the Volksgrenadiers seemed to glow with an ethereal quality emphasized by their white parkas reflecting the waxing moonlight. Firing short bursts from submachine guns, the Germans charged at each position, forcing the outpost men to fall back toward Champs.14
From his CP, Swanson heard the last few artillery rounds bursting in front of him. The echoes of German artillery fire seemed to come straight from Givry, precisely where he and D’Angelo had spotted the enemy buildup the other day. Swanson knew that his troopers, out in the dark ahead of him, were fighting for their lives. However, it would do no good to play Chicken Little. If he started screaming for reinforcements before he determined exactly what the Germans were up to, he could wind up launching the whole regiment in the wrong direction, which could open a dangerous gap somewhere else on the line.
Swanson knew he had to hold tight. He would watch to see exactly where the Germans hit his line, and request reinforcements only if it seemed Champs was in danger of falling. Now was the time to keep cool and use his coach’s intuition to measure just what this new offensive line was made of.
As the Germans crept closer to Champs, gunfire suddenly erupted from the American lines. By 0319 hours, less than twenty minutes into the attack, Swanson realized he was in trouble. Looking out from his window, he determined that the Germans had penetrated between the 1st and 3rd platoons’ battle positions. In addition, the 2nd Platoon command post was on fire. Swanson had his answer. It was time to act.15
With telephone communication down between Champs and Rolle, Swanson preferred to wait before using the radios. The batteries were not entirely trustworthy in the cold. He would have to send out more runners to Chappuis, knowing full well that if the Germans started the bombardment again, the runners might not make it.
0300–0330 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
2nd Platoon command post, Able Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Champs, Belgium
Inside the CP, First Lieutenant John Harrison, the 2nd Platoon leader, was getting ready to dash out into the snow with a medic and bring back a wounded Private Snyder. Just as Harrison and the medic started to leave on their rescue attempt, the men noticed a group of figures darting around in the yard. The enemy had surrounded the building. To their right, they noticed more Germans attacking 1st Platoon’s CP. Quickly Harrison yanked the medic back indoors. The Germans saw the movement and fired a machine gun from almost point-blank range.
Bullets blasted through the nearest window and chewed up the interior as the three men hit the floor. Glass shattered. Plaster exploded from the walls. A small stove in the corner of the room was knocked over and started the room on fire. To make matters worse, a second German machine gun opened up from the other side of the house, raking the back of the structure and preventing the men from escaping out that door.
Wise could hear the Germans shouting outside. Several Panzerfaust rounds came crashing through the walls. Now the room was on fire and thick with smoke. If they didn’t abandon the CP, Harrison knew they would be burned alive.
As Wise lay on the ground, he couldn’t help thinking that the German attacks seemed to focus their fire on the farmhouse. It was as if the enemy knew exactly where the platoon CP was located.
When there was a break in the fire (the Germans were probably reloading), the men made a run for it. They darted into the attached barn. Harrison suggested letting the cows out of the barn and using them as cover. When the cows were released and not fired upon, Harrison, Wise, the medic, Hodge, and several other soldiers made a break for it, leaving boot prints in the snow as they ran for their lives. Running another twenty-five yards southeast, they hid in a tall hedgerow behind the house.
From there, the two officers watched as their CP went up in flames, lighting up the cold night. Just a few men had time to grab their weapons. Harrison eventually crept forward to try to collect more survivors of 2nd Platoon and organize some sort of defense. Wise stayed at the hedge with a small group taking potshots at the Germans as they continued their attack into town.16
0300–0330 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
Machine gun section, 3rd Platoon, Able Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
West side of the Rouette–Champs road, Champs, Belgium
Through the wisps of smoke and fog rising from the ground in the moonlight before him, Corporal Lewis Fowler saw the lines of white-coated soldiers approaching. He had just walked out of the potato shed to man his foxhole located on the corner of the wooden structure. To the left of the Rouette–Champs road was the gentle slope of snow-covered, fallow field leading up to a ridge a quarter mile to his front.
German armored vehicles appeared on the ridge. In the cold silence, Fowler could hear his breathing, the distant rumble of the tanks, and the nervous shifting of Private Bill Emerson, his assistant gunner, who was manning the .30-caliber machine gun. Even though Fowler knew for certain his gun was working, it now seemed that Emerson had frozen up.
“He hadn’t been firing the machine gun. I knew I had to get that gun into action.”
The former peanut farmer from Georgia hopped down into the pit and pushed Emerson aside, taking the gun from him. He set the sights on the white figures silhouetting themselves on the ridge as they advanced ten or more abreast.
“I told him, ‘I’m going to whup up on that column.’” Fowler reassured the frightened Emerson with as much bravado as he could muster himself.
Fowler squeezed the trigger. His obsessive work that night cleaning the weapon paid off. The machine gun burst to life, spitting out red tracers with a deadly chatter. The weapon worked “like a charm.” As the white-clad soldiers began to fall in front of him, Emerson had finally come to life, rapidly feeding belt after belt into Fowler’s hungry gun.17
To Fowler’s right, across the road, and to his left, the machine guns of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd platoons were largely silent. The cold that night had frozen up the bolts, and ice had built up in the actions. Several soldiers desperately tried urinating on the mechanisms to get them to thaw.18 Meanwhile, the riflemen opened up with staccato fusillades of fire, flashing across the snowy ground.
0300–0330 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
3rd Platoon, Able Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment
East side of the Rouette–Champs road, Champs, Belgium
Ri
ght after the bombardment had ceased, Sergeant Charles Asay was moving. Asay—the self-admitted “mother hen”—was out of the potato shack and sprinting across the road, encouraging his men to hold off the attack. Private Ted Goldmann had a hard time keeping up with Asay. Years later, he remembered how the outpost to their front was quickly overwhelmed by German Volksgrenadiers:
The squad on the right side of the road wasn’t so lucky. Four men were in the house with the barn, and two men were in a haystack when the Germans infiltrated. Only two men were on their MG [machine gun]. The Germans brought up two tanks to the outpost along with infantry, and since there was no telephone, they had no orders to withdraw. Anyway, the tanks had them covered. The corporal, Jimmy Goodyear, who escaped in March, said these six men on the outpost were also captured, that he had seen them all, which substantiated our beliefs.
Goldmann went on to mention that “Fowler was a miracle man with that LMG [light machine gun].” He credited Fowler with saving their left flank and keeping the main German thrust at a standstill down the left side of the Rouette road.19
Asay was more concerned about the right flank. He could hear sporadic firing and the occasional oaths of men shouting in hand-to-hand combat. It seemed to him that the troopers of 1st and 2nd platoons and his own platoon CP were being overrun. Grabbing several of his men, he started across the road, firing and chucking grenades at the oncoming figures, who were still pouring down the hillside and making for the houses to his right. It didn’t take long for him to realize his platoon had lost an entire squad on his flank. To someone at higher headquarters, those missing men would be only numbers, but to him they were comrades—Lunde, Gorde, Howard, Edwards, Begonyi, and Summerford. Now, completely overwhelmed by the determined Volksgrenadiers, they were gone.20
