by Leo Barron
Schmidt reported to Andrews about what he saw in Hemroulle. It was almost 0900, and the sun was beginning to burn off the fog. The curtain was rising. The second act of this deadly Christmas pageant was about to begin.21
0800–0850 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
Charlie Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment positions
In the woods along the Champs–Hemroulle road
No one had told Maucke that as far as the Americans were concerned, the final act was yet to come. Maucke’s men who had ridden along with the tanks were taking a break only long enough to signal headquarters, wait for the infantrymen of Wörner’s and Dyroff’s battalions behind them, regroup, and push on into Bastogne.
Staring from the dark of the woods, the members of Captain Cody’s C Company of the 502nd were catching their breath and preparing their weapons for the attack to regain Allen’s HQ. As he prepared his squad in the woods across the road from the former headquarters, now owned and operated by the Germans, Sergeant Black and others noticed how nonchalant the Panzergrenadiers were as they milled about the burning farmhouse. Some even appeared to be making breakfast, oblivious to the counterattack that was about to happen.
The question holding up the Germans was, Where to go from here? It seemed they had penetrated the American positions. Again, now that light was breaking over the scene, the German tank commanders were perhaps confused. Were they in Bastogne? If not, how close were they to the town’s entrance? Where was the rest of the infantry support? Remembering Maucke’s meeting the night before, the officers certainly knew that Champs was to their left, up the road, and Bastogne, well …how far to the right? Without Maucke’s requested reconnaissance, problems of orientation were starting to arise. Unsure of the ground or the American defenses here, the Germans found it unwise to press on to Bastogne without the infantry support. For the next hour, the tanks and infantry at the farmhouse just sat there, waiting for the foot soldiers to catch up.
As the German officers and tank commanders debated, their vehicle engines idling, the tired and hungry soldiers took advantage of the stop. Feeling cocksure that they had driven off or defeated the Amis, the hungry Panzertruppen started breaking out rations and eating. Others stood guard over the American prisoners they had just captured in the courtyard.
They had no idea that the glidermen had slaughtered the Panzergrenadiers from 3rd Battalion, who were supposed to be providing the bulk of the infantry support for the attack. Those German troops, lying dead in the cold snow hundreds of yards behind them, or taken prisoner by Allen’s men, would never catch up.
Captain Cody had organized the counterattack with as much firepower as the paratroopers were able to muster. His plan was to use the farmhouse as a point of fire, aiming everything at the courtyard and four tanks. Black remembered, “Halfway back to the farmhouse command post, we were cocky about our chances of taking on all those German tanks. Out of nowhere appeared two 705th U.S. TDs that showed up in the woods [D’Angelo’s and Vallitta’s]. When we were within two hundred yards of the farmhouse, we could see four of Jerry’s tanks sitting there with their infantry milling around the house.”
Not all the paratroopers knew about the two M18s on their right, hidden in the trees. Apparently Cody was ignorant of their existence until after the battle. Those who saw the sleek lines and deadly guns of the Hellcats were emboldened now, knowing they could deal with the German armor. Black believed the Germans had made a serious mistake in not coming after them.22
Meanwhile, the Hellcats from Charlie Company girded themselves for battle. Sergeant D’Angelo had noticed the frantic scramble of paratroopers as his tank destroyer sped over to the woods. Dismounting, D’Angelo guided first his and then Vallitta’s M18s down the hidden firebreak trail, which served as a cart path. Walking ahead of “No Love, No Nothing,” he signaled the driver, June “Jeeps” Schultz, to bring the tank destroyer up a hill about ten to twenty feet, close to the tree line, with a great view of the Champs–Hemroulle road. Vallitta’s driver, Paul “the Greek” Stoling, remembered Vallitta parking his tank parallel and about fifty yards to the right of “No Love, No Nothing.” Vallitta’s tank was up a bit more on the ridgeline, with a better view of the field before Rolle that they had just crossed. Stoling remembered that the hiding place was good concealment, in the woods and on a little knoll, the long 76mm gun of their TD set far back enough to be unseen from the edge of the woods. The height would allow the two TDs to fire up to the ridgeline above the Champs–Hemroulle road, but not be seen in turn. The loaders on both Hellcats then drew armor-piercing rounds from the turret ready racks and slammed the shells into the breeches, loading the guns for bear.
At about that time, First Sergeant Don “Moe” Williams, D’Angelo’s Connecticut-born first sergeant, drove up in a Jeep to talk with the TD commanders. To keep a better eye on the approaching Germans, he and D’Angelo decided to stay outside the M18s and stroll the wood line. Williams knew where the panzer was that had shot at them earlier, and he wanted D’Angelo’s Hellcat to surprise the tank from the rear. While they finalized their plans, explosions echoed in the distance. Looking up, they watched as a group of C Company paratroopers started their counterattack on the farmhouse across the road. Before D’Angelo and Williams could even finish their conversation, the boys in C Company had already started the battle.23
0850–0930 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
502nd battle positions
Near Rolle Château and along the Champs–Hemroulle road
Maucke’s 1st Battalion had to move. Their expected reinforcements had not shown up, and now they were in enemy territory with less than a battalion of infantry to support them. The sun was up, the fog had lifted, and they were out in the open, silhouetted against the pearl-white snow. If the Jabos showed up, the American fighter-bomber pilots could not have asked for better targets.
Without relaying their decision to Maucke, the German officers at the farmhouse arrived upon their own course of action. The first to move out were the StuGs. The platoon of three or four assault guns pushed northwest toward Champs in an apparent attempt to link up with the 77th Volksgrenadier Regiment.
Meanwhile, still hiding behind the haystack near the Dreve de Mande, Sergeant George Schmidt and his two Hellcats noticed the first two StuGs heading for the Champs–Hemroulle road. Schmidt’s TD fired just as the lead vehicle crested the ridge, several hundred yards up the field and to his left. One StuG shuddered and died on the road. The second one, trailing behind it, had additional armor side skirts, or schuerzen, but they were of little use. The Hellcat was shooting at almost point-blank range. The round slammed into the side of the vehicle, dealing it a fatal blow.
Schmidt had claimed another tank, but now the jig was up. The Germans quickly located the pair of M18s as Schmidt ordered his crew and Wans’s vehicle to back up from the haystack and take up a better position. Outnumbered, and before the Americans could reload, the panzer gunners coming across the field had them in their sights. The trail Mk IV closest to Hemroulle drew a bead on Schmidt’s Hellcat. With a deafening crash, the TD erupted in flames. The impact of the 75mm Panzergranate (armor-piercing) round was so strong that the little Hellcat rolled backward. Crew members bailed out of the burning wreck. Inside the turret, Schmidt and a member of his crew, Private Manuel Rivas Jr., of Tombstone, Arizona, were both killed instantly. Wans’s TD was hit soon after, its crew also bailing out, some with grievous injuries. Under small arms fire, the survivors crawled and dragged their wounded to the nearby trees and gullies near the lane.24 In no time at all, the German tanks had blasted two American tank destroyers without missing a beat.
The rest of the German tanks, including at least four Mk IVs, started to move out from the farmhouse in the same direction, driving right for the approach to the Lane of Trees intersection to Rolle Château. Along the parallel tree line, several of Cody’s troopers desperately dug into the snow and cold earth with helmets, entrenching shovels, or even their bar
e hands. The majority, however, simply lay down where they were, sighted their weapons, and opened fire.
The firing along the line seemed to move from the south to the north up the woods, following the moving Germans. Black and his men opened up as if on cue, pouring rifle, grenade, machine gun, and bazooka fire into the Germans directly across the road. Frank Miller remembered the attack well: “So when they [the Germans] started firing, they [officers] said ‘fire at the flashes,’” Miller recounted. “Then they were firing and we were firing, we just kept shooting back and forth, it seemed like everybody was firing at once, and there were lots of flashes, you’d fire at flashes.”25
Making for the road, the tank drivers had turned their flanks to the woods where Cody’s men and Williams’s TD section were hiding. The panzer turrets slowly rotated to the right, letting loose at the trees, but the Germans could see little in the way of targets. The paratroopers were staying low in their quickly constructed scrapes and holes, and Vallitta’s and D’Angelo’s Hellcats were set well back. German machine guns raked the woods, splintering fir trees left and right, but the fire was clearly random and panicked. The Americans, by contrast, were dropping by the dozens the German soldiers caught out in the open and around the farmhouse without the protection of the tanks.26
“We opened up at the same time,” Black said. “We poured all our rifle fire into that old farmhouse. All four [German] tanks took off north, headed down the road toward Champs, one right behind the other, as if the only thing that mattered was saving the tanks.”27
One panzer, the Mk IV responsible for destroying Schmidt’s Hellcat, turned in the opposite direction of its comrades and headed south toward Hemroulle, leaving a total of four or five Mk IVs bearing northwest toward Champs. This tank, nicknamed “Lustmolch” (“Happy Salamander”) by its crew, attempted to make good its getaway toward Hemroulle.28
Not so for the others. C Company and Captain Stone’s ad hoc headquarters force that had raced out from Rolle down the Dreve de Mande thoroughly raked the panzers with a storm of small-arms fire. They shredded the tanks of the last few infantrymen riding on the backs of the vehicles and then proceeded to pour fire into anything that moved on the ground.
Using the slope near the road for protection, the Americans dived to the ground and fired from a prone position at anything coming on, across, or diagonal to the road.29
Baker Company’s platoon, under Hanlon’s command in the zigzag tree plantation to the north, opened fire. Even though they were firing from a much longer range, they strafed the oncoming Germans with machine guns from a new direction. Just as the 1/401st had done, the paratroopers and tank destroyers had caught the Germans in another trap as they hit them from three sides: the west, the north, and the south. Panzergrenadiers fell backward in the snow, literally in heaps of bodies. There was no cover, and the German tanks started racing farther away from the panicked soldiers. Hanlon was so close to the tanks and infantry, he could read the various stencils on the panzers and see the intense expressions on the Panzergrenadiers’ faces. As he walked by one of his paratroopers, he asked the man how the Germans had managed to penetrate their lines.
The paratrooper replied, “Beats me. But they’ll have a hell of a time getting out.” Hanlon knew this man was right. The carnage was confirming this soldier’s prediction.30
Near the regimental headquarters, two 81mm mortar crews had pooled their resources. There was a shortage of mortar parts and ammo. One group had supplied the tripod and baseplate, while another crew brought the tube. Then, using radios, they linked up with forward observers who performed call-for-fire missions on the panicked Germans near the captured farmhouse. Within minutes, the crews had fired 102 rounds of ammunition on the German infantry. The result was a rain of devastation on the remaining German troops.31 As a result, the last remaining grenadiers started to run from Allen’s captured headquarters and out into the open.
Black watched the bedlam as some of the Germans raced from the farmhouse to catch up with their comrades riding on the back of the tanks. Unfortunately, almost as fast as they could do so, they were being shot, pitching off the decks of the panzers and falling into the snow.32 Gunfire continued to reverberate through the air. By now the battle around Allen’s former HQ had turned into a one-sided affair, with the Americans in possession of the farmhouse once again. The German soldiers, some hunkered down in the open field nearby, were unable to mount much of an attack. Others tried brave assaults in the direction of the woods, but that only made it easier for the Americans to cut them down in groups. Bazooka rounds lanced out from the woods like arrows of fire trailing smoke, trying to find a moving tank as it sped down the road, spewing snow and ice in its wake. Now that the panzers had exposed their flanks to the American TDs, the perfect opportunity presented itself.33
Black remembered walking the tree line, encouraging the men of his squad to keep up their fire. He crouched close to one of the two tank destroyers in the woods. He overheard “Moe” Williams and Tony D’Angelo talking near him. Williams guaranteed Layton that his M18s would “get those sonsabitches for ya.”34
“Williams asked me to hold up my men while he taught the Germans a small lesson in tank warfare,” Layton recalled.35
D’Angelo could not believe his eyes. There in front of him, at a range of about three hundred yards, were four German Mk IVs, with their lightly armored flanks exposed, grinding along the road toward the Dreve de Mande and the town of Champs beyond. The Germans had not seen him in the woods. As he had told the paratrooper lieutenant, this was the way it was supposed to be done in the tank destroyer corps. In fact, this was a picture-perfect, textbook position for an attack.36
The 76mm could penetrate the German armor, but only at close range. Unlike the German 8.8cm KwK 43 and the 7.5cm KwK 40 L/48 tank guns, the American 76mm penetration performance dropped off considerably at long range. The tanks, D’Angelo noted, were perfectly within the 550-yard range for maximum penetration with the armor-piercing rounds he had. At close range like that, D’Angelo knew his rounds could get through the two-inch side armor on the StuGs and Mk IVs. That is, if they hit. There could be no misses. The firing had to be fast, furious, and accurate, for if the panzers located their position, D’Angelo’s and Vallitta’s tank destroyers would join the fate of the other two M18s earlier that morning.37
A Mk IV or two had already slipped past, but D’Angelo would be damned if the others would get away. Right before him, traveling one after another at a speed of about fifteen miles per hour, were two Mk IVs. The tanks’ camouflage was mixed and mottled with a sloppy application of white paint. Smoke arose from the panzers’ exhaust as the engines revved and the drivers shifted into a faster gear.38 Another clot of white-coated infantry soldiers fell from the back of one of the tanks, several twitching in the snow as Stone’s group and C Company continued to fire. Over the noise of the gunfire, the rumbling engines of the tanks, and the shouts of the men in combat, it was, thankfully, hard to hear the screams of the dying and wounded Panzergrenadiers. Bullets ricocheted and spun off the tank armor in strange sparking flashes.
Standing under “No Love, No Nothing’s” gun, D’Angelo shouted to his gunner, Sam Dedio. “I told him to take the last tank first, and then one at a time on up the line and fire when ready.”39
Vallitta shouted a similar command to his crew. Tucked into the driving compartment of his M18, but with a good view of the action, Stoling heard Vallitta working off D’Angelo’s plan to box the Germans inside the trap. “He [Vallitta] told us to take the lead tanks,” Stoling remembered.40
D’Angelo’s gunner, Dedio, set his sights on one of the tanks and fired first. There was a deafening crack! from the 76mm gun. Mesmerized by the sight of the enemy, D’Angelo had forgotten he was right underneath the gun. “Because of that, my left ear is dead from that battle.”
The round struck the rear of the last panzer, where the armor was thin. The German tank slewed to a halt, smoking furiously. D’Angelo noti
ced Dedio had popped up from the turret to look.
“I told him to get the hell down, there’s two more!”41
Vallitta’s tank destroyer fired to the right of “No Love, No Nothing,” hitting one of the German tanks, but the others kept coming.
D’Angelo’s adrenaline was pumping now. He had Schultz back up the Hellcat and reposition it, angled a bit more to the right, as some of Dedio’s shots were hitting trees. Vallitta’s gunner, Corporal Lewis M. Clark, was a bit more experienced than Dedio—his shot had been a direct hit.42
Nevertheless, the rest would have to be up to Dedio, as Vallitta’s gun went down. The last round had overheated and stuck in the chamber, Stoling recalled. Stoling had to reverse Vallitta’s M18 into the woods and the trail so the crew could take out the rammer and knock the shell casing out. To Vallitta’s frustration, he had lined up his Hellcat on one of the best shots he would ever have during the war, but the jammed round had rendered his vehicle hors de combat.43
This was not the case for “No Love, No Nothing.” Dedio fired the main gun repeatedly. D’Angelo’s crew worked fast, loading each round like they were on an assembly line. Loader James P. Proulx would slide the long brass round in the breech of the angled 76mm gun. Once the breechblock snapped closed, he would shout, “Up!” Dedio, on the left of the turret, would line the target up in the single-lensed gunsight. When the crosshairs were on target, Dedio would depress the electric gun trigger—a foot pedal on the turret floor. With a great blast, the gun would fire, the recoil knocking the spent and smoking shell out into a canvas bag on the turret floor. Proulx would then pull another round from the rack in front of him, shove it in the breech, and the whole cycle would repeat.
