Battered Bastards of Bastogne

by George Koskimaki

  The tankers were part of a force in the process of widening the corridor from Neufchateau to Bastogne. It would now be safer to travel.

  December 29

  Daybreak brought a bright clear day. Men of 2nd Battalion of the 327th had an opportunity to watch an armored attack which was coordinated with the efforts of fighter-bombers on their front to the south of Bastogne as the corridor was widened. After the armor reached the men of the 327th, “F” and “G” Companies were moved into Division reserve at the northwest edge of Bastogne.

  Convoys continued moving up the corridor from Mourmelon with the trucks of the 426th Airborne Quartermaster Company bringing in rations, many of them being the popular Ten-in-One type. Overshoes and overcoats arrived for the poorly clad troops. Another convoy brought in one hundred members of the 506th Parachute Regiment and fifty men of 2nd Battalion of the 501st Regiment who had been in Paris at the time the Division left for the Ardennes. These men were experienced and well-trained soldiers who were welcomed with open arms by their units which had been decimated in ten days of fighting.

  The trucks returning to Mourmelon carried out the first mail which the soldiers had written. The unit censors made sure the letters revealed nothing of military value should the packets of letters fall into enemy hands.

  Observation planes as well as fighter-bombers reported extremely heavy enemy anti-aircraft fire whenever they made passes over the perimeter to the north and northeast. Something was going on in those regions which were shielded from view by the heavy forestation.

  A first sergeant on a line company front provides a story of a soldier in his unit who exhibited sharpness of vision to point out one of the enemy batteries which was harassing planes which flew near that location.

  The day would also find recently-returned Major General Maxwell D. Taylor visiting his front line commanders around the perimeter.

  Descriptions of actions in retrieving the bodies of fallen comrades are provided by two soldiers. Acting first sergeant Paul Slevey got a shock when he spotted his countenance in a mirror.

  A diary entry recorded by T/3 George Koskimaki fits in with the night’s activity as described by a front line machine gunner on security duty in Bastogne.

  A tree that wasn’t there

  The keen observation of a front line soldier resulted in an enemy anti-aircraft unit position being taken out. 1/Sgt. Carwood Lipton relates the story of one of his men gifted with sharp vision:

  One of the men in the 3rd Platoon of ‘E’ Company had excellent vision and he was also an outstanding marksman with a rifle. He was PFC. Darrell C. ‘Shifty’ Powers, a tall part-Indian from Clincho, Virginia.

  It was on December 29th that his eyesight paid off for us. We were in our strong defensive positions in the woods southeast of Foy, able to see the town below us and Noville across open fields and along the road about a mile and a half to the north.

  Shifty came over to me that morning and said, ‘Sergeant Lipton, there’s a tree up there towards Noville that wasn’t there yesterday!’ He had no binoculars, but I did. He showed me how to find the tree that he had been looking at It was by the road up towards Noville and I located it through the binoculars.

  It was not an isolated tree as there were a number of trees along the road, but he insisted that it had not been there the day before. As I continued looking through the binoculars, I saw some movement under other trees around it. Then I saw gun barrels—anti-aircraft guns by their appearance as the barrels were elevated—and Germans moving around. We could see that they were setting up an anti-aircraft battery around and under the trees and had put up the tree that ‘Shifty’ saw as part of their camouflage.

  We had a forward observer for the 105’s that were back in Bastogne on call and I got him on the radio. He was there in just a few minutes and when he saw what we had, he had no trouble getting approval for full battery fire.

  To zero his battery on target, he first fired only one gun at a position he could locate on his map, about 300 yards to the right of the trees. When the shells from that one gun hit right on that position he shifted its aim to the left by the distance that position was right of the target and called for all the battery’s guns to lay in on the same azimuth and range. In that way, he got all his guns laid in on the target without alerting the Germans that he was zeroing in on them. When that was done he had all his guns fire for effect, several rounds from each gun.

  The shells landed all around the enemy position, as we could see through our binoculars, knocking down trees and enemy guns and putting the German position out of action. Their activity after that was to get out of the area and we could see them getting their wounded out and salvaging what they could of their equipment. By the time an hour had passed, there was no one there.

  It all happened because ‘Shifty’ saw a tree almost a mile away that hadn’t been there the day before.

  Watch those woods!

  Upon his arrival on the Bastogne scene, General Taylor was apprised of the fact that the enemy held the dominant ground to the north and northeast of Foy and Noville. Before those towns could be taken and held, the heights had to be secured. An early trip to the front line units was then made. One of those who was stung by a remark made by the Division commander on his first trip to the MLR near Foy was Major Dick Winters, executive officer for 2nd Battalion of the 506th Regiment. He wrote:

  After General Taylor returned from Washington, D.C., he paid us a visit. He inspected the front lines very briskly. His instructions before leaving us were, ‘Watch those woods in front of you!’ We didn’t appreciate that! What the hell did he think we had been doing while he was in Washington!

  Retrieving Fallen Comrades

  Retrieving the bodies of dead comrades who had been killed when they ran into an enemy machine gun nest while on a night patrol is a lasting memory for PFC. Carl H. Cartledge of the 501st regimental S-2 section. His dead comrades were PFC’s Norman D. Blanchette and Arthur Teichman. The two soldiers died on December 28 and the retrieval party went out after them the following day. Cartledge related:

  It was just after Christmas when our team moved out beyond the front line to bring their bodies in—two of the greatest fighting men ever to give their lives for their country—Arthur Teichman of Philadelphia and Norman Blanchette of New Bedford, Mass. Their night patrol had run square into a German machine gun road block with supporting infantry. They had been the lead scouts. Their battle had raged for most of the night. It was heard all around the front.

  We fanned out on either side of the roadway, following it down to where it split two rolling hills. The snow had stopped. We could see no movement out front and drew no fire.

  Blanchette lay on the left side and Teichman on the right. It had been a helluva fight Empty shell casings were all around them in the snow. On the left hilltop was what had been the machine gun emplacement. Eight leather harness straps lay cut away from their wounded. Their KIA’s were marked by blood patches in the snow. They had been battered and had pulled out.

  We carried the frozen bodies of our own back through our lines on stretchers. Counting our losses—for Normandy the 501st Regimental S-2 recon teams had jumped with twenty-four men. Of those, we were down to eleven. Six had been killed—men we would never forget: Blanchette, Gardner, Palmer E. Smith, Stiles, Beamsley and Teichman. They were our lost brothers-in-arms. There would be no shaking of hands with the enemy when the war was over. This was a sad, sad day.

  An incident involving the recovery of fallen comrades is remembered by Pvt. Michael Zorich who had returned from an extensive recuperative stay in a British military hospital after being wounded in Holland. He had arrived at Mourmelon just in time to make the trip to Bastogne. He related:

  We were moving through the woods and came upon a little road with trees on the right and left. From our front approached a jeep pulling a trailer so we had to get to the side of the road. On the trailer were frozen stiff, dead soldiers. It was sad. One piled on the top of the o
ther. As they passed our position, one of the bodies slid off the pile and hit the ground like a slab of concrete and was lying at my feet. God, I lived with that for many a night—it was a young, blond lieutenant wearing a brown tanker’s jacket. His arms were in a surrendering position, frozen stiff and it looked like he was covered with melted sugar. Sgt. Houston ordered me to pick him up and put him back in the trailer. I refused. He ordered someone else—I was too disturbed. The two guys in the jeep had to go pick him up.

  A Look in the Mirror

  The extremely cold weather that gradually encompassed the Bastogne area in December and January meant that personal cleanliness suffered greatly. S/Sgt. Paul W. Slevey remembers well the shock he received the first time he happened to look in a mirror. He wrote:

  On December 29, arrangements were made to have ten men at a time leave the area and go to a chateau near by and clean up. We had been out for ten days and hadn’t been inside a house or building in that time. I took one group over and knocked at the back door and opened it a little. I could see a G.I. lying on the floor getting the last rites. We went to another door and it led into a large room with a fireplace. As I walked past the big mantel there seemed to be a small window at one end of it. My eye caught the image of a bearded, dirty face. I stopped, went back for a better look and I was peering at myself in a mirror.

  In the room was a stove from a field kitchen; on that was a clean garbage can full of hot water. Each G.I. got one-half helmet full so we could brush our teeth, shave and take a bath. We didn’t get a change of clothes. I wore my O.D. shirt for 59 days until I got a new one.

  Bombing and Strafing

  The diary of T/3 George Koskimaki fits in with the account of PFC. John C. Trowbridge who had been sent to Bastogne from his front line position to provide security for armored units which served as “fire brigades”. These vehicles were rushed to threatened points on the perimeter. The notation in the diary for December 29 reads as follows:

  December 29, 1944—German bombers dropped some heavy stuff as well as butterfly anti-personnel bombs early this morning. The Krauts hit one building in our area and also strafed a little. Hazy weather. The German counter-offensive has stalled.

  As a member of a machine gun team from 1st Battalion of the 501st, PFC. John Trowbridge was sent to Bastogne when the fighting in his area quieted down. He describes what happened one moonlit night:

  We took over prepared positions, which had both foxholes and deep slit trenches, some with thin covering, which were better for sleeping. We felt safer here away from the front lines, until one moonlit night when Jerry came over bombing and strafing. We were enjoying the fireworks, watching the anti-aircraft tracers filling the sky until a bomb exploded a few yards from our hole. We didn’t know we were being strafed until daylight, when we saw where the 20mm shells had exploded in the snow all around us.

  December 30

  As the 30th day of December dawned, added reinforcements from other divisions were moving into the fray. One of the soldiers of the 6th Armored Division describes a trip to Bastogne where they were positioned in the Wardin-Neffe area. With the decrease in enemy activity in the 501st perimeter in front of Neffe, Colonel Julian Ewell ordered a patrol into town to check out the presence of German troops.

  This was the day General George Patton visited various units of the 101st and soldiers provided their recollections of his visits.

  6th Armored Division Moving Up

  As a member of one of the divisions moving into the Bastogne area in a supporting role, Sgt. David Reich of the Reconnaissance Platoon of the 44th Armored Infantry, 6th Armored Division, remembers the trip to the Bastogne area. The weather was both a hazard and a help. He wrote:

  Near noon on December 30, one of my pals volunteered me for a patrol to Bastogne. We were to find march routes and recon assembly areas for a move and an attack on December 31 towards Wardin and Neffe. We contacted units of the 101st and the 4th Armored Divisions before returning to our unit.

  Near dusk on the 30th, with a light snow falling, we began to lead our combat team toward Bastogne. A tank was our lead vehicle to set the pace as roads were so slick. When darkness set in, the storm became a gale with very heavy snow and tanks were slipping and sliding into our jeeps on the grades.

  Late in the evening, our route was blocked by the 11th Armored Division marching across our front. We found a back road way to Bastogne and continued on our march. We gave thanks for the storm as it was the best cover ever.

  Have They Pulled Out?

  A request had come in from 501st regimental commander Colonel Julian Ewell to find out if the Germans were still in strength in Neffe, or had they pulled out. The assignment went to the S-2 team of which PFC. Carl Cartledge was a veteran member. He wrote:

  On one of the last days of December, Sgt. Jim Ganter called me on the field phone. Colonel Ewell wanted a daylight patrol into Neffe to determine if the Germans had pulled out. We had reported for several days the reduced activity and yesterday had observed no enemy movement at all.

  We moved out early that morning—Becker, Collins, Brown, Chief Sayers and myself. Brown took the point and we fanned out about a hundred yards apart, taking advantage of the clumps of fir trees for part of the way. The snow made the going tough at times, but finally we reached the farm houses. It appeared the Jerries had pulled out.

  It was time to hunt for German stragglers or food. We knew all the secret places—behind the doors at the side of the fireplaces, the trap doors, the attics. Somewhere there might be a ferocious ‘wild chicken,’ a discarded cured ham or bottle of pears, cognac or anything to drink. Even some ersatz coffee would be great.

  Collins and I advanced on the nearest farm building. I opened up with a burst from my Thompson on the wooden slab door and exploded into the room. No one was inside. Collins quickly ran through the other rooms, but I had spotted the trap door in the floor. There had to be some food down there. I leaned over, took the ring in my hand and flung it open.

  There were three German soldiers waving white handkerchiefs frantically while one bleated out breathlessly, ‘Nicht schiessen—Ich haben cousin in Chicago!’

  General Patton Shows Up

  Memories of the surprise visits of General George Patton to various locations around the perimeter of the 101st are related by three troopers. Two were at 502nd Parachute Infantry regimental headquarters when the general arrived to award its commander a DSC and to inspect enemy tanks which had been knocked out near the chateau. Another soldier was surprised to have the general appear at his artillery forward outpost in the midst of a firing mission.

  In a V-Mail letter to his parents dated December 30, 1944, Captain Joseph Pangerl described the visit of General George Patton to 502nd regimental headquarters at Chateau Rolle for the purpose of decorating the regimental commander, Colonel Steve Chappuis:

  It is almost eight o’clock in the evening. Not much has happened since then and it is very quiet. This afternoon we had the pleasure of General Patton’s presence. He came right to our castle and pinned a medal on our Colonel for we were the regiment that finally stopped the last big German effort. I was waiting for him with my camera outside and as I took his picture he walked over to me and said, ‘Now get a good one!’ I took one only a few feet away and, then one of him pinning the medal on the Colonel. That really tickled me. I can’t wait to have the picture done now.163

  Medical evacuation officer Henry Barnes was at the Chateau Rolle when General George Patton appeared on the scene to decorate two of the officers involved in the fighting. Barnes wrote:

  It was on December 30th that I saw General Patton himself at the Chateau Rolle. He was wearing his famous white-handled revolvers and gave both General McAuliffe and Colonel Chappuis, the 502nd Parachute Infantry commander, the DSC medals. He must have liked the tanks he saw burned out around the chateau.

  I heard him shouting over a field phone. He had a high-pitched voice and he was bawling out the division commanders of the
units on his flanks. At their protests his answer was the same—‘I am up here. Why aren’t you?’

  Damn It—Stay Down!

  Captain Donald n. Martin was serving as liaison officer to the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment from the 463rd Parachute Field Artillery Battalion. He had gone out to the positions of 2nd Battalion of the 327th a few days after the breakthrough. The glidermen were under attack from a mixed armored infantry group. He wrote:

  We were getting another attack from that direction and I only had one forward observer with them so he needed some help. By the time I arrived the infantry battalion commander had been hit. I went on past Battalion Headquarters to a long sloping hill that was very bare of vegetation and set up an OP where I could observe from and see the enemy real well.

  There were several tanks down in the valley before me. I am sure these were a part of the tank unit that had attacked the 463rd earlier. I called Major Vic Garrett and told him what I was seeing. He gave me one gun to adjust on them. That gun was from ‘B’ Battery. The Germans discovered me and my radio operator there so every time we moved, they would fire at us.

  Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., (right) chats with Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe and Lt. Col. Steve Chappuis (center), after awarding them both the DSC for their defense of Bastogne.

  Suddenly, I glanced around. Some people were coming up the hill behind us. I yelled for them to stay down. They paid no heed, just kept walking. Well this really infuriated me so I started yelling some real Sunday school words at them. Cpl. Scrivener nudged me and said, ‘Sir, you better stop yelling like that—it is General Patton! I had been so intent on firing on the tanks that I had not tried to identify the approaching party when I had glanced back but just got the word to them to stay down.