by Leo Barron
By the last of six or more shots, four German tanks were burning wrecks just short of the lane to Rolle.44 Sergeant Black, who witnessed the action, proclaimed:
“The TD next to me fired six shots. Two hit big trees, four hit tanks, and four were knocked out. It was the best I ever saw.”45
One of Dedio’s shots was thrown at the rear of an Mk IV that was making for the intersection at the Dreve. The TD crews saw the brief glow of the reddish orange tracer in the back of the AP shot as it sped away. D’Angelo swears that if Dedio had led the German a bit more, it would have gone right up the back and into the fuel tank. Unfortunately, it missed, and the tank motored past.46
The last panzer struggled to steer around the wrecks of the others. The Panzergrenadiers had been cleared from its deck a ways back. D’Angelo remembers watching the vehicle flare up after Dedio, his gunner, hit it in the rear. There were intense, white-hot flames as the vehicle’s ammo ignited inside the steel tomb.
“I saw something come out of the top and roll onto the back of the tank there, jeez, I thought it was an animal or something,” he said. “It was a German crewman engulfed in flames.”47
Although two Mk IVs had now slipped past, heading for Champs, D’Angelo and Vallitta had accounted for four of the German tanks and blunted the last of the German drive. The 502nd had taken care of the infantry. The paratroopers rapidly silenced any pockets of resistance still trying to fight on in the trampled snow. Teams of paratroopers from B and C companies, as well as Stone’s group, cautiously moved out to take prisoners. The landsers seemed all too willing to surrender, realizing that without their armor there was no hope now.
The pair of Mk IVs that had escaped D’Angelo and Vallitta’s ambush was now passing the Rolle intersection at the Dreve de Mande. Up ahead, part of Baker Company and the 1st Battalion’s commander were waiting for them. Hanlon was aware that the other German tanks behind were being shot up by something in the trees to the south. He knew that the demolition-trained paratroopers had placed antitank mines on this part of the road, but had dragged them off the road the other day when rumors surfaced that Patton’s tankers were coming through to link up. Now Hanlon and his troopers could only hope one of the tanks would miss the road or veer enough to run into one of the ditches.48
The first German tank kept coming, heading straight for his men.
Sergeant Schuyler “Sky” Jackson ran as fast as he could in the snow through the Rolle courtyard as soon as he had heard the news that the Germans were attacking. Along the way, he had passed the many stacks of provisions and equipment, some of it under tarps along the short stone wall leading out of the courtyard gate. Jackson’s expertise was combat engineering. He did demolitions for the regimental HQ, and combat engineers knew how to use bazookas. Seeing one leaning against the wall, Jackson took it, hoping the soldier who was chasing after him would be a good loader. Up ahead, over the cusp of the hill and along the Lane of Trees, Jackson could hear gunfire and the growling noise of German vehicles changing gears. Other men from Stone’s group had gone to ground just short of the road and were opening up a fusillade on any remaining German infantry. Jackson was more intent on a tank.
“We had mined the bridge leading to the château,” Jackson remembered years later. “But it was so cold that everything froze and we couldn’t blow it up.”
He continued. “I ran out the door and saw five tanks coming through the snow with the German infantrymen riding on them. I ran and got a bazooka as the rest of our guys ran out and reinforcements starting coming in from the town.”
Several troopers recognized Jackson as he ran past, already a well-known figure in the 502nd, since he had been decorated for action in Normandy, and he had served as Colonel George Van Horn Moseley Jr.’s bodyguard after D-day. The identification would help later.
Jackson was hot on the heels of the slow-moving Mk IV, which now was bereft of its riders. He rounded the Rolle Lane of Trees, keeping the tall pines on his right for cover, and stood behind the second tree trunk before the road intersection. The German tank had chugged past menacingly. Jackson had a perfect line on it, and brought the bazooka up to his shoulder. The shot was less than a hundred yards, he recalled: “I was behind this tree. Right after it passed, I stepped out and let him have it with my bazooka.”
Jackson watched as the rocket shot into the tank’s engine compartment. There was a brief blast and oily smoke billowed out of the back of the tank. The Panzer rolled to a stop in the roadside ditch about twenty-five yards north of the intersection. The German crew immediately began to bail out through the hatches. “The crew came out fighting. They did not surrender,” Jackson said. Because they were armed, “we had to shoot them,” he said. As they evacuated their smoking vehicle, Stone’s men poured a fusillade of fire into the five crewmen until they fell from the tank and stopped moving.49
Seeing the second tank driving up the rise toward Champs a bit farther on, Jackson tried to pull a double. Shouting at his loader above the gunfire, he told the man to reload a new rocket. Unfortunately, the nervous headquarters trooper forgot to pull the curved safety pin before clamping the ignition wires of the rocket to the bazooka tube. As Jackson shouted, “Clear!” and the second rocket whooshed from the barrel, he already had a feeling it would be a “one-in-a-million shot.”
Unbelievably, the rocket hit the turret of the second tank but, unarmed, simply bounced around inside the schuerzen turret armor until the rocket engine burned out. Jackson swore at his assistant as the panzer continued around the corner, out of view, toward Champs.50
Hanlon’s men were unable to locate this missing or “rogue” tank. Strangely, and almost mystically, this single tank seemed to then disappear for several hours.51
Barnes, the medical evacuation officer, remembered the scene: “One soldier [presumably Jackson or his loader] pounded me on the back, kept shouting that he hit one tank with his bazooka, but in the excitement had not armed it and all that happened was a loud clang when it hit the tank.”
Walking through the crowd of happy troopers slapping one another on the back and whooping it up, Barnes noticed the carnage in front of the château. “Four German tanks were in sight, smoking, and the ground was strewn with bodies, some clothed in white.”52
0930–1100 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
502nd Battle Positions
Near Rolle and along the Champs–Hemroulle road
In the area around the Rolle Château, the Baker Company’s zig-zag plantation position, and the woods where Charlie Company and the two tank destroyers had parked, the battle began to wind down.53 Germans who were trying to hold out in the field—which was strewn with the bodies of their comrades and burning tanks, and had not an ounce of cover—opted to surrender. When the firing slackened, groups of grenadiers walked forward, hands in the air, as select patrols of paratroopers carefully stepped into the woods and hollows to disarm the enemy and march them toward Bastogne.
The paratroopers were taking no chances, and if a command of “Hände hoch!” (“Hands up”) did not get an immediate response, then the Screaming Eagles would shoot first and ask questions later. Some of the more curious Americans waited until the fires had died down in the tanks and went to examine their handiwork. Remembering the crew member burned to death on the back of the tank, D’Angelo declined.
“I didn’t want to see that.” He said, “I mean, that was still some mother’s son.”54
For others, the end of the battle was a relief. When the Germans had overrun Allen’s headquarters, they captured several men of 2nd Platoon. Now, as Layton Black and others collected the German prisoners, they discovered their comrades still in the farmhouse where Black and his soldiers had left them. For some of the liberated men, revenge gripped their senses. Black remembered one such awful incident:
After the fight, we “mopped up” the battleground area—the thick trees, hillside, farmhouse, barn and yard. Now freed, our 2nd Platoon men who had been captured and held by Jerr
y wanted some sort of revenge. Our round-up was like a fox drive, where you drive all the foxes into a small circle and then capture or kill them. W.O. “Big” Holly [Sergeant William “Holly” Hollingsworth] and I went hunting together. We found a badly wounded German soldier at the edge of the fir trees. He was wounded too badly to speak or move. Seated with him in the snow was a soldier that couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. He was half frozen and scared to death. We saw that the boy was not going to be able to move his wounded friend, so I went for help.
When Black returned, they took the wounded man and boy to a group of German prisoners under guard by members of the 101st. The boy had struggled to try to help move the injured comrade. The other German soldiers were berating the boy and blaming him for the wounded man’s certain death. Just then:
“At this moment one of our own troopers walked out of nowhere, moved into the circle and dropped to one knee. He took aim with his rifle and fired point-blank, shooting the boy through the head. He was dead before he hit the ground.”
Black admitted he had become somewhat numb to the killing as well. He wrote: “The sick and disgusted feeling I had was only for the way our officer had killed the boy, not that he had done so.”55
Now that the sun was out and the morning fog had burned off, the scene before the Americans was bright and vivid. About their positions lay the bodies of German soldiers, twisted and still, staining the snow red with their blood and viscera. In some places where the cross fire had been intense, the corpses were stacked on top of one another in piles, as if some great being had dumped a load of rag dolls in the snow. The still hulks of German tanks dotted the landscape. Some poured smoke out in a great black spiral that rose to the sky. Others merely steamed and sizzled in the snow.
Black and the rest of Charlie Company counted some thirty-five German prisoners and sixty-seven Germans killed in their sector.56 There were very few casualties among the Americans. By 1100, it was clear to both the Americans and Germans that paratroopers and tank destroyers had stopped dead Maucke’s armored attack.
In the woods across from the farmhouse, D’Angelo felt “relieved.”57 He still had no interest in taking a closer look at his deadly work. He was tired from being up all night and day, and his ears were still ringing from “No Love, No Nothing’s” gun blasting so close to his head.
To this day, D’Angelo still believes the action was a validation of the training and intense gunnery practice the 705th had been put under by Colonel Templeton. While stateside, the men of the 705th had earned a reputation at Fort Hood, Texas, as some of the best shots in the tank destroyer corps.58 He admitted, however, that luck, or something else, played a part in the outcome Christmas Day.
D’Angelo said, “By the grace of God, we got our rounds off before the Germans, or it would have been a different story.”59
D’Angelo and Vallitta made sure the ready rack in both turrets was restocked with ammo, and then took a moment to smoke a cigarette and relax with their crews. Around them, the Charlie Company paratroopers were digging in and enlarging their fighting positions along the wood line, in anticipation of another attack. Others were rounding up and counting pale and shocked German prisoners. A short time later, D’Angelo remembered Colonel Templeton driving up to his TD with First Sergeant “Moe” Williams and a bottle of scotch: “Colonel Templeton came up to me and said, ‘Job well done! Here sergeant, give your boys a drink.’” The Wellsville, Ohio, native took a swig and passed the bottle around to his crew. Templeton then handed out the first warm meal the tank destroyer crews had seen in days. “That meal was hot cakes. It tasted every doggone bit as good as turkey did when you’re into your K-rations!” D’Angelo recalled.
D’Angelo was glad to be alive and glad things had quieted down in his area. Nonetheless, he had orders to stay in the Rolle sector and work with the 502nd in case of any further attacks that day.
“We had no more problems the rest of the day. As a matter of fact, I had a good [Christmas] day after that.”60 Although the 502nd paratroopers and Templeton’s TDs had eliminated Maucke’s northern column, the rest of the German force was still barreling towards Hemroulle to the south. The threat to Bastogne was not over yet, and all that stood between the town and the Germans was Cooper’s “Bastard Battalion” of artillerymen.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Let the Shit Hit the Fan!”
(CHRISTMAS DAY)
“One saw men lying nearly everywhere who were mortally wounded and whose heads, arms, and legs had been shot off…. Likewise on watch and on post in the lines, on trench and work details, they were wounded by the fearfully heavy fire.”1
—Account by a Hessian soldier
0730–0900 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
Along the 463rd Parachute Field Artillery gun line,
Able, Baker, and Dog batteries
Hills east of Hemroulle, Belgium
The Americans could not have possibly guessed where the rest of Maucke’s attack force was going. Stalled on the hills above the town of Hemroulle, the tanks and infantry seemed to pause, engines rumbling, exhaust rising over the woods. They waited, ready to pounce, hundreds of yards from the American defenders dug in around the village. The force was still only a mile or so from the outskirts of Bastogne.
To Ken Hesler, the twenty-year-old who had been on sentry duty for the 463rd just outside of Hemroulle all night, the foreboding sense of attack was overwhelming. After witnessing the bombing of Bastogne and being woken up to pull guard duty twice that night, he had quickly “gone horizontal” again in the warming tent off the Hemroulle road.
“I think it was about six-seven Christmas morning, I heard a commotion that woke me up. I pulled on my boots—shoepacs with the felt lining. We always took them off in the warming tent to dry. I grabbed my M1 and went out with one to two others. We knew something was going on, but we didn’t know what. We just went out, ran up to this ridge overlooking Hemroulle and took up positions. I got there when B Battery was just about to move its guns.”
To add to his anxiety, it suddenly occurred to Hesler that if the German tanks made it to his position, there wasn’t much he and his comrades could do. “… [I]t wasn’t enough to stop anybody if they were coming—we only had rifles.”2
The Germans were regrouping before they decided to roll down into Hemroulle. At this point, the German tank commanders might have mistaken Hemroulle for the outskirts of Bastogne. Unknown to the Germans, they were about to become trapped in a net of fire. It was the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel John T. Cooper.
“As it began to snow and ammo decreased to critical conditions, we organized our battalion for the possibility of stand and fight, for there were no other places to go,” Cooper wrote after the war. “We posted, dug in out-post guards with telephone communications to battalion HQ as well as to the battery they represented. Guns covering all tank approaches were dug in and prepared. Our guns were mutually supporting. Banking on the fact that a tank will attack a gun head on, we had another gun that would have a side shot at the tank.”
Cooper continued to describe his setup: “The preparation for the tank attacks we received on Christmas Day had been planned and set up for several days. Snow had covered the gun positions. All we had to do was move our gun section in and start shooting.”3
To the American command in Bastogne, Colonel Cooper’s foresight was remarkable. His work prepping the 463rd’s area of operations for antitank defense was a godsend. Days earlier, he ordered his men to dig out U-shaped berms from the frozen earth, located about fifty to a hundred yards ahead of the regular direct-fire positions. With the small guns wheeled into these positions, the profile of both gun and gun crew was kept to a minimum, and the barrels of the 75mm Packs could be lowered to shoot straight and true at any tank that closed on them. Cooper’s plan, as laid out and practiced by the gun crews, was to have one of the guns in each battery fire at the first tank in an assault, while the other guns went after the rest. Hesler d
escribed the crew responsibilities and positions on each gun:
There were generally four to a crew, and usually about four to five more. The other four to five were ammo carriers. The gunner [on the left] would set the azimuth at zero traverse and set the elevation. The assistant gunner [on the right] would set and open the breech, close it, and fire it by pulling the lanyard. The third guy would place the ammo in the breech. The fourth guy was back a bit and he was the fuse-setter.4
To protect the flanks of the guns, Cooper had his men dig foxholes on each side of the battery positions, occupied by machine gun and bazooka teams. These were the battalion security crews—members of the 463rd who were specifically delegated with the responsibility of protecting the batteries from enemy infantry.
Those busy days before Christmas, Cooper’s experience from combat in Sicily was showing. His command and coordination, outposting of his forward observers (FOs), and communication structure were among the best-organized parts of the American defense in that sector. For the doubting Thomases and those who were still under the impression that his unit was made up of greenhorns, watching the batteries of the 463rd set up around Hemroulle had impressed them, to say the least. That Christmas Day, the veteran gunners of the 463rd were about to impress them even more.
It would be hard to determine exactly how many German vehicles reached Cooper’s trap. By 0730 hours, members of the 463rd security teams, emplaced in foxholes in the fields and farmyards to the southwest of Hemroulle, were firing bazookas, heavy machine guns, and basically anything they could get their hands on as the Germans entered their lines near the woods. Noise and confusion were rampant. Some of these bazooka hits may have taken a toll on the German tanks. It was this gunfire that woke Hesler up that morning.
