by Leo Barron
0500–0645 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
The columns of 1st Battalion and 2nd Battalion of
the 115th Panzergrenadier Regiment
Traveling from Al’Caure through Mande Saint-Etienne and Flamizoulle
Bearing down on A Company were eleven Panzerkampfwagen Mk IVs and at least three StuG III assault guns of the 115th Panzer Battalion, and two Panzergrenadier battalions from the 115th Panzergrenadier Regiment. Hauptmann Schmidt, Maucke’s tank commander, had formed his tanks into two snakelike columns, the better to navigate through the many woodlots once outside of Flamierge and the Al’Caure woods. All of Schmidt’s panzers were attached to Major Wörner’s 1st Battalion; Wörner had arrayed his forces into two kampfgruppes. Lagging behind 1st Battalion was 3rd Battalion, under the command of Major Adam Dyroff, whose role was to provide northern flank security for Wörner’s decisive operation. Though Dyroff had no armor, he did have a platoon of StuG IIIs to provide a base of fire against any American tanks.8
Rumbling along, the German tanks ground the snow underneath, as great clots of ice dropped from the treads. The Panzergrenadiers, nervous with the anticipation of combat, clung to the backs of the tanks and kept their heads low in preparation for the coming fight. Within a half hour, the northern column of Wörner’s battalion traveled through Flamizoulle, while the southern column passed through Monty.9
Through the thick fog and the dark, the Germans could only guess when they were approaching the forward American positions. As they closed the distance, the men begin to shout and cheer over the growling engines. Some, still feeling the effects of a bottle of schnapps passed around earlier to celebrate the holiday, were especially loud—drunk, or blau, as the Germans called it. The German officers and NCOs must have realized that Maucke’s orders for a silent assault were by now impossible to enforce.10
The operation proceeded according to plan. Wörner’s column radioed around 0405 hours that they had passed Flamizoulle without making contact with the enemy.11 When the southern column emerged from Mande Saint-Etienne, it received flanking fire from an unidentified antitank gun, which likely damaged one of the tanks, but did little else to the oncoming armor.
As the panzer columns dipped down into pockets of the terrain, the fog was like a curtain. Maintaining interval distances became difficult, especially for the troops trudging behind on foot. Maucke’s soldiers, tired and weary from the forced march to Bastogne, had gone without sleep or food as they prepared all Christmas Eve for the attack. The men had no opportunity to get their bearings in the dark. Coordination between the infantry and armor started to fall apart. As the distance increased, the foot soldiers began to lose sight of the vehicles, and soon the men following behind had to listen for the tanks just to keep up. Gaps as large as two hundred yards began to appear as the tanks outraced the remaining foot soldiers of Wörner’s 1st Battalion, while the Panzergrenadiers of Dyroff’s 3rd Battalion fell even farther behind. For the Germans, the combined armor-infantry attack, upon which Kokott had staked so much, was getting off on the wrong foot.12
0645 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
115th Panzergrenadier Regiment command post
Near Flamizoulle
Though he was still angry with Kokott for denying him the opportunity to perform a proper reconnaissance, Colonel Maucke grew more confident as the reports gradually poured into his command post that morning.13 His 1st Battalion had rolled through the perceived American security zone near Mande Saint-Etienne, and his 3rd Battalion had marched through the American screen line north of Flamizoulle without a hitch. The only perceivable threat came from intermittent artillery fire and an unidentified antitank battery southeast of his front lines near Isle-la-Hesse.
Kunkel’s 26th Reconnaissance Battalion radioed in, confirming the presence of several American armored vehicles near Isle-la-Hesse soon after Maucke’s columns had received the flanking fire.14 Kunkel was once again playing an important role by screening the southern flank of the attack, near Isle-la-Hesse. If the recon troopers failed to contain any American attacks from that direction, it could spell disaster for Maucke’s assault. Initial reports in this sector, though, were good. Here, both the 26th Reconnaissance Battalion and the 39th Fusilier Regiment were advancing steadily to pin Harper’s glider troops.15
The truth was that the initial reports were exaggerated. Instead of near-simultaneous actions, the attack in Champs and to the south near Isle-la-Hesse had started to peter out long before the main attack had even begun.16 Instead of the hoped-for enemy stumbling like a dazed boxer, Maucke’s forces would march into the ring against a boxer who was primed, alert, and ready.
At first Maucke was ignorant of all of this. He’d had virtually no contact with much of his force since the operation got under way hours earlier. While the panzers and the Panzergrenadiers tried to assemble for the final push, Maucke waited. Finally, at 0645 hours he received the optimistic report from his 1st Battalion, which announced, “Standing before west rim of Bastogne!”17 The decisive phase of the attack was about to begin.
0630–0710 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
1/401st Glider Infantry
Battle positions west of Bastogne
Private Allie Moore, an outpost sentry, came tearing through the snow to Bowles’s command post in a small grove of trees. Moore blurted out that he had seen the line of enemy tanks, and now they were heading straight toward Able. Bowles immediately reported this information to Allen and Harper, who spread the news to McAuliffe’s HQ that the sector was under attack by enemy troops and armor.18
To Bowles’s men, the approaching column sounded like some great, growling, serpentine creature. The first instinct for many of Bowles’s shivering glidermen in 2nd Platoon was to bolt from their forward positions and run. Once they stifled this urge, aided by the professionalism of veteran NCOs, their next urge was to get mad and fight back.
“Scary” was how Carmen Gisi of MacDonald’s nearby B Company later remembered the sound of the advancing tanks. He had been just to the right of Bowles’s A Company. “But we had heard German tanks before, and you did what you had to do.”19
Bowles dashed forward to the outpost on his left flank to see for himself. The tanks and German infantry were in a single column heading toward the center of A Company’s line. Bowles hurried back to his command post near the plot of trees.20 He rapidly discussed the situation with Adams, his 3rd Platoon leader, and his command post officer in charge, Lieutenant Ralph Nelson. Klampert, the tank destroyer platoon leader, was also there, eager to give his unit their orders. The three officers decided that the best course of action was to allow the panzers to pass through their lines and to withhold their fire. This would give Klampert’s tank destroyers an excellent rear shot on the tanks.21 To disrupt the German formations, Bowles requested another artillery fire mission to try to break up the German attack before it could gain the momentum to break his line.22
At the little stone farmhouse on the Champs–Hemroulle road where Ray Allen had his headquarters, Major Hershel E. Angus, Allen’s executive officer, took the call. He sent another duty officer upstairs to rouse Allen. Asked whether he wanted to order the artillery into action, an awakening Allen responded, “No, that will start the whole front firing.” When Angus heard the response, he doubted the aggressive Allen was fully coherent, but before he could question it, Allen came down the stairs, throwing on his overcoat to ward off the chill. Allen repeated the instruction to “tell the men to hold their fire.”23
Allen knew he had to make some rapid-fire decisions. He backed up Bowles’s plan to move his men out of the way as best he could and let the tanks pass through. Allen was gambling. He reasoned that the thick fog and thin light would prompt the bunched-up panzers to pass through the company battle positions. If they missed the positions of his glider-fighters, they would continue on and leave their infantry lagging behind them. If his men opened fire prematurely, the Germans would be able to discern, even in the dar
k, the positions of both Able and Baker companies. From there the German armor would run straight over the meager resistance of Bowles’s men, whose only defense against the tanks was a few bazookas and machine guns.24
Letting the tanks pass through his lines was more difficult than it sounded. It would take tremendous discipline from the glidermen. Per Allen’s instructions during Saturday’s execution of plan A, Bowles had spread out his seventy-seven men over a thousand yards on a low ridgeline facing Mande Saint-Etienne. He had anchored his right flank near a small pine plantation and had positioned his left flank in a small forest lot. Between the two flanks was where he had located his CP on the eastern side of a copse of trees. Farther to their right were more than 150 men of MacDonald’s B Company. The German column was heading almost directly between the two companies and would soon penetrate Allen’s thin line, splitting it as with a blade.25
For a young lieutenant who had certainly not expected to be a company commander until several days ago, the situation must have caused Bowles considerable anxiety. Although he knew he had backup with four tank destroyers, C Company of the 1/401st in reserve on the sloping field behind him, and two companies of the 502nd farther behind him, Bowles’s most immediate concern was his front. It was too late to move his men out of their positions and fall back. Once his men were caught out in the open, the panzers would slaughter his men as they tried to escape.
While Bowles could do little about the tanks now menacing his front, he had a solution for the infantry. At carefully selected positions all along the line, the glidermen had set up nine machine guns. Bowles had arranged the guns so they could provide overlapping fields of fire. At least five of these guns were the big, belt-fed .50-caliber M2s on tripods. These were the guns Gisi and others had secured at Crossroads X several days earlier, and they were about to come in handy.26
Captain MacDonald and his men had also heard the Germans approaching early that night. Because the Panzergrenadiers had left their equipment unsecured, the glidermen could hear the clinking, clattering, and banging of canteens and gas masks in the draw as the Germans moved into their attack positions near MacDonald’s left flank. MacDonald’s radio operator, Edward Garrett, then reported, “The krauts are attacking with lots of tanks to our left front.”27
The B Company unit closest to Able was 1st Platoon, under the command of First Lieutenant John T. O’Halloran. Like many of the units in Bastogne, 1st Platoon was understrength, with only fifteen soldiers and one officer on its roster. MacDonald realized it was dangerous for this platoon to remain on the line, so he had borrowed a squad from Towns’s Charlie Company. Though the platoon was still woefully undermanned, almost all the soldiers were grizzled veterans, and morale remained high.28 They waited as the German tanks, spewing snow behind their tracks, blue exhaust faintly visible in the dim light, slowly advanced toward them.
Finally, at 0645 hours, the ground shuddered and shook, and the tanks were on top of them. The single column was an armored fist heading straight for Able Company and its 2nd Platoon. Self-preservation became the standing order for many of Bowles’s 2nd Platoon men, who crawled out of the holes and darted over to Adams’s 3rd Platoon positions until the tanks had passed. No one wanted to be ground into the snow beneath the treads of a twenty-five-ton steel monster on Christmas.29
While the soldiers of 2nd Platoon scurried for cover, Bowles watched the procession wind its way through the copse of trees in the center of 2nd Platoon’s positions. The plodding metal behemoths spent thirty minutes tentatively passing through the lines. Bowles stood, awestruck. Most of his men remained silent and concealed as the enemy drove on past their foxholes. Not all could remain quiet, however. Off to the left, Sergeant Tom McLaughlin, disobeying orders, opened up on the column of tanks with his .50-caliber machine gun. This singular action might have deceived the Germans into thinking they were only passing through another screen line of outposts.30
Unlike the men in 2nd Platoon, those in the headquarters section could not scamper out of their foxholes in time. For them, the panzer parade had several terrifying moments. Lieutenant Ralph Nelson led this group, and they fought back hopelessly with mere rifles and carbines.31 The big Mk IVs, like steamrollers, crushed equipment into flattened metal pancakes as their treads clanked onward. Harold R. Hansen, an Able Company private, remembered a particularly close call: “An enemy tank rode over our foxhole in which my buddy and I squatted down, hoping it would keep going. It did, but destroyed my M1 and our bazooka. My buddy’s helmet got smashed.”32
Another glidermen, Private First Class Paul E. Krick, was a runner for Able Company. As he approached an embankment near the company foxholes, tracers screamed by him. Krick ducked behind the little ridge. When he dared to look up again, he watched his company scatter before his eyes as the glidermen split up in the face of the oncoming tanks. According to Krick, scores of soldiers were scampering across an open field, looking for cover. One tracer found its mark, and a gliderman crumpled to the ground. Another soldier ran over and knelt by him. Before Krick could see what else happened, a Mk IV rolled too close for comfort and he ducked back behind the embankment to hide.
Trotting on the heels of the tanks, Wörner’s Panzergrenadiers moved through Able Company. Looking ghostly in their white suits, the Germans began firing their weapons randomly, sometimes into the air, to see whether they could scare the Americans into revealing their positions. As they came over the ridge, they used the flamethrowers for the same purpose, not realizing they were squirting the hot flames at empty foxholes. The frozen ground also acted as a retardant, and, fortunately for the Americans, nothing—and no one—caught fire.
In a foxhole not far from Hansen, Sergeant Joseph Rogan, a forward observer with the 463rd PFAB, watched the tidelike procession of rolling steel. Rogan had seen the tanks emerge from the fog at 0630 hours. He quickly shook his friend Rester Bryan awake. Grabbing their rifles, the two FOs started firing at the infantry on the tanks. The bullets pinged off the armor of the Mk IVs as they rolled past their foxhole. The two men then turned their attention on the infantry marching behind the armor. While Bryan plugged away at the Panzergrenadiers, Rogan reached for the phone to call back to the 463rd’s FDC in Hemroulle. He expected to hear static, but instead heard nothing—the phone line was dead. He quickly grabbed for his fallback—a radio he had wrapped in blankets the previous night to keep the batteries from freezing. It worked.
Rogan’s call reporting that he was overrun to Major Victor Garrett, the 463rd’s operations officer, gave barely enough time for Cooper’s gunners to move most of their Pack howitzers into the colonel’s preplanned antitank positions. The other guns opened up in the indirect-fire mode, showering the oncoming Germans with 123 rounds of high-explosive. Directly in front of Able and Baker companies, the thunderous blast of 75mm high-explosive shells pounded the snowy fields, drowning out the screams and cries of the dying Panzergrenadiers unlucky enough to be caught in the barrage.33
Suddenly Rogan noticed Bryan had stopped firing. He looked over his shoulder and saw the body of his partner slumped over the side of the hole. He touched the body but saw no reaction. Bryan was dead, but Rogan did not have time to think about it. The Germans were swarming around the nearby foxholes, and an enraged Rogan decided he was not going down without a fight. He reloaded a clip and continued to fire his rifle at the enemy.34
Bursts from German rifles killed two other members of the 463rd: Howard Hickenlooper and John T. Hall. A German submachine gun shot the fatal 9mm round that slammed into Hickenlooper’s neck, while Hall fell as the result of a burst of fatal fire from an MG 42, which caught him in the chest. Five more men suffered wounds—even burns from boiling flamethrower fuel oil that, fortunately, failed to ignite.35 Overall, the casualties could have been far greater had the Germans stopped or continued to search for the remaining GIs in both of Allen’s forward companies. Instead, anxious to keep pace with the tanks, Wörner’s troops walked on toward their objective.36
As he watched the tanks roll over A Company’s positions, MacDonald kept relaying messages around the battalion, as he had the only working SCR-300 “walkie-talkie” radio. MacDonald informed Allen that about four hundred German infantry had occupied the field where Able Company had previously held the line. Allen asked him to relay a message to Captain Towns and Charlie Company, who were right in the path of the oncoming Germans. Preston Towns’s exhausted men, basically recuperating from Friday’s fight and sitting in reserve, were not too far from Allen’s HQ. Allen wanted them warned as to what was coming their way. Via MacDonald, Allen instructed Towns to see whether he could bring the men of his company up and counterattack.39
From his foxhole, a startled Gisi watched the panzers “shooting their [main] guns point-blank” at the American positions. Some of the men fought back, but, realizing the futility, most stayed in their holes and prayed the Germans did not spot them. “There wasn’t much else we could do,” Gisi remembered.
“It happened pretty quick,” Lieutenant Clarence “Gus” Ryan, MacDonald’s executive officer, recounted years later in a letter he wrote to Gisi: “We could hold the infantry, but not the tanks, so I told the platoon leaders to let the tanks through and they would get ’em in the rear but to knock every Jerry on foot.”40 Luckily the men in Baker Company had also equipped themselves with a few of the .50-caliber machine guns from Crossroads X. The men had removed the guns from the trucks and emplaced them in a manner similar to what Able Company had done across their front.41
