The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The temptation to get out altogether via a self-inflicted wound was also strong. It did not get light until 0800. It got dark at 1600. During the sixteen hours of night, out in those frozen foxholes (which actually shrank as the night went on and the ground froze and expanded), it was impossible to keep out of the mind the thought of how easy it would be to shoot a round into a foot. A little pain—not much in a foot so cold it could not be felt anyway—and then transport back to Bastogne, a warm aid station, a hot meal, a bed, escape.

  No man from Easy gave in to that temptation that every one of them felt. One man did take off his boots and socks to get frostbite and thus a ticket out of there. But for the others, they would take a legitimate way out or none. Winters recalled, “When a man was hit hard enough for evacuation, he was usually very happy, and we were happy for him—he had a ticket out to the hospital, or even a ticket home—alive.

  “When a man was killed—he looked ‘so peaceful.’ His suffering was over.”

  • • •

  At first light on Christmas Eve morning, Winters inspected his MLR. He walked past Corporal Gordon, “his head wrapped up in a big towel, with his helmet sitting on top. Walter sat on the edge of his foxhole behind his light machine-gun. He looked like he was frozen stiff, staring blankly straight ahead at the woods. I stopped and looked back at him, and it suddenly struck me, ‘Damn! Gordon’s matured! He’s a man!’ ”

  A half hour later, at 0830, Gordon brewed himself a cup of coffee. He kept coffee grounds in his hand grenade canister, “and I’d melted the snow with my little gas stove, and I’d brewed up this lovely cup of coffee.” As he started to sip it, the outposts came in with word that a German force was attempting to infiltrate Easy’s lines. His squad leader, Sgt. Buck Taylor, told him to “get on that machine-gun.”

  Gordon brushed snow from his weapon and the ammo box adjacent to the gun, telling his assistant, Pvt. Stephen Grodzki, to look sharp, pay attention to detail. A shot from a German rifleman rang out. The bullet his Gordon in the left shoulder and exited from the right shoulder. It had brushed his spinal column; he was paralyzed from the neck down.

  He slid to the bottom of his foxhole. “The canteen cup followed me and the hot liquid spilled in my lap. I can see the stream rising upward to this very day.”

  Taylor and Earl McClung went looking for the sniper who had shot Gordon. They found and killed him. Shifty Powers was in the next fox-hole. As Shames had hoped would happen, he had recovered completely. Shifty was from Virginia, a mountain man, part Indian. He had spent countless hours as a youth hunting squirrels. He could sense the least little movement in a woods. He spotted a German in a tree, raised his M-1, and killed the man.

  Paul Rogers, Gordon’s best friend, Jim Alley, and another member of the 3rd platoon rushed over to Gordon. They hauled him out of the hole and dragged him back into the woods, in Gordon’s words, “as a gladiator was dragged from the arena.” In a sheltered area, they stretched him out to examine him. Medic Roe came up, took a quick look, and declared that it was serious. Roe gave Gordon morphine and prepared to give plasma.

  Sergeant Lipton came over to see what he could do. “Walter’s face was ashen and his eyes closed,” Lipton recalled. “He looked more dead than alive.” In the extreme cold, it seemed to Lipton that the plasma was flowing too slowly, so he took the bottle from Roe and put it under his arm inside his clothes to warm it up.

  “As I looked down at Walter’s face he suddenly opened his eyes. ‘Walter, how do you feel?’ I asked. ‘Lipton,’ he said in a surprisingly strong voice, ‘you’re standing on my hand.’ I jumped back, looking down, and he was right. I had been standing on his hand.” A jeep, summoned by radio, came up and evacuated Gordon to the aid station.

  The German attack continued, intensified, was finally thrown back with heavy losses, thanks to a combination of Easy’s rifle and machine-gun fire, mortars, and grenades, ably assisted by artillery. Lipton later counted thirty-eight dead German bodies in front of the woods. Lieutenant Welsh was hit and evacuated.

  • • •

  On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the men received General McAuliffe’s Christmas greetings. “What’s merry about all this, you ask?” was the opening line. “Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South and West. We have identifications from four German Panzer Divisions, two German Infantry Divisions and one German Parachute Division . . . . The Germans surround us, their radios blare our doom. Their Commander demanded our surrender in the following impudent arrogance.” (There followed the four paragraph message “to the U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne” from “the German Commander,” demanding an “honorable surrender to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation,” dated December 22.)

  McAuliffe’s message continued: “The German Commander received the following reply: ’22 December 1944. To the German Commander: NUTS! The American Commander.’

  “We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas. A. C. McAuliffe, Commanding.”2

  The men at the front were not as upbeat as General McAuliffe. They had cold white beans for their Christmas Eve dinner, while the division staff had a turkey dinner, served on a table with a tablecloth, a small Christmas tree, knives and forks and plates.3

  Out on the MLR, Sergeant Rader was feeling terrible about having to put men out on OP duty on Christmas Eve. His childhood buddy, Cpl. Don Hoobler, suggested, “Why don’t we take that post tonight and just allow the men to sleep. We can lay it off as a kind of Christmas present to the men.” Rader agreed.

  When darkness fell, they moved out to the OP. It was miserably cold, a biting wind taking the wind-chill factor well below zero. “As the night wore on, we talked of our homes,” Rader remembered, “our families, and how they were spending their Christmas Eve. Don felt sure all of them were in church praying for us.”

  On Christmas Day, the Germans attacked again, but fortunately for E Company on the other side of Bastogne. The following day, Patton’s Third Army, spearheaded by Lt. Col. Creighton Abrams of the 37th Tank Battalion, broke through the German lines. The 101st was no longer surrounded; it now had ground communications with the American supply dumps. Soon trucks were bringing in adequate supplies of food, medicine, and ammunition. The wounded were evacuated to the rear.

  General Taylor returned. He inspected the front lines, according to Winters, “very briskly. His instructions before leaving us were, ‘Watch those woods in front of you!’ What the hell did he think we had been doing while he was in Washington?”

  (Winters has a thing about Taylor. In one interview he remarked, “And now you have General Taylor coming back from his Christmas vacation in Washington . . . . ” I interrupted to say, “That’s not quite fair.” “Isn’t it?” “Well, he was ordered back to testify . . . .” Winters cut me off: “I don’t want to be fair.”)

  The breaking of the siege brought the first newspapers from the outside world. The men of the 101st learned that they had become a legend even as the battle continued. As the division history put it, the legend “was aided by the universality of the press and radio, of ten thousand daily maps showing one spot holding out inside the rolling tide of the worst American military debacle of modern times. It was aided by a worried nation’s grasping for encouragement and hope; for days it was the one encouraging sight that met their eyes each morning. And the War Department, earlier than was its practice, identified the division inside the town, so even before their bloody month in the town was up, to the world the 101st became the Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne. The elements of drama were there—courage in the midst of surrounding panic and defeat; courage and grim humor in the midst of physical suffering, cold, and near-fatal shortages; a surrender demand and a four-letter-word rebuttal; and a real comradeship . . . . Courage and comradeship combine
d to develop a team that the Germans couldn’t whip.”4

  Of course, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division was also in Bastogne, but it was not identified in the press. And of course the 82d Airborne fought as costly and desperate a fight on the northern shoulder of the Bulge, a fight that was at least as significant as the one at Bastogne. But it was not surrounded and never got the publicity the 101st received.

  The 101st still had a complaint. As the story of the Battle of the Bulge is told today, it is one of George Patton and his Third Army coming to the rescue of the encircled 101st, like the cavalry come to save the settlers in their wagon circle. No member of the 101st has ever agreed that the division needed to be rescued!

  • • •

  With the encirclement broken, the men of the 101st expected to return to Mourmelon to bask in the Allied world’s adulation and perhaps to celebrate the New Year in Paris. But the heroic stand at Bastogne had been a defensive action; to win the war the Allies were going to have to resume their offensive; the Germans had come out of their fixed positions in the West Wall and made themselves vulnerable; Eisenhower wanted to seize the opportunity. But his problem at the end of December was the same as it had been in the middle of the month, a manpower shortage. The stark truth was that the Germans outnumbered the Allies on the Western Front. The United States had not raised enough infantry divisions to fight a two-front war. This was a consequence of the prewar decision by the Government to be lavish with deferments for industrial and farm labor, and to refrain from drafting fathers. There was also a shortage of artillery shells, brought on by a decision in September—when it seemed the war in Europe would be over in a matter of weeks—to lower production of shells on the industrial priority list. To go over to a general offensive, as he had decided to do, Ike needed the 101st and 82d in the line.

  It was a question of timing. Eisenhower wanted to attack even before New Year’s Eve, but Monty, commanding the forces (all American) on the northern shoulder of the Bulge, stalled and shivered and made excuses, so it did not happen.

  For Easy, that meant staying in the line. Conditions improved, somewhat—the men got overshoes and long underwear and sometimes hot food. But the cold continued, the snow did not go away, the Germans hit the company with mortar and artillery fire daily, patrols had to be mounted, German patrols had to be turned back.

  • • •

  On December 29, Easy was in the same woods it had occupied for nine days. With the clear weather, the men on OP duty could see Foy below them and Noville across open fields and along the road about 2 kilometers to the north.

  Shifty Powers came in from an OP to report to 1st Sergeant Lipton. “Sergeant,” he said, “there’s a tree up there toward Noville that wasn’t there yesterday.” Powers had no binoculars, but Lipton did. Looking through them, Lipton could not see anything unusual, even after Powers pinpointed the spot for him.

  One reason Lipton had trouble was that the object was not an isolated tree; there were a number of trees along the road in that area. Lipton expressed some doubts, but Powers insisted it had not been there the previous day. Lipton studied the spot with his binoculars. He saw some movement near the tree and then more movement under other trees around it. Then he saw gun barrels—88s by their appearance, as they were elevated and 88s were the basic German antiaircraft weapon as well as ground artillery piece. Lipton realized that the Germans were putting an antiaircraft battery in among the trees, and had put up the tree Powers spotted as part of their camouflage.

  Lipton put in a call for a forward artillery observer. When he arrived, he saw what Powers and Lipton had seen. He got on the radio, talking to a battery of 105 mm back in Bastogne. When he described the target he had no trouble getting approval for full battery fire, despite the short supply of artillery ammunition.

  To zero in on the target, the observer called for a round on a position he could locate on his map, about 300 meters to the right of the trees. One gun fired and hit the target. Then he shifted the aim 300 meters to the left and called for all the battery’s guns to lay in on the same azimuth and range. When he got a report that all was ready, he had his guns fire for effect, several rounds from each gun.

  Shells started exploding all around the German position. Lipton watched through his binoculars as the Germans scrambled to get out of there, salvaging what they could of their guns, helping wounded to the rear. Within an hour the place was deserted.

  “It all happened,” Lipton summed up, “because Shifty saw a tree almost a mile away that hadn’t been there the day before.”

  • • •

  The German 88 battery had been going into place as a part of renewed pressure the Germans were putting on Bastogne. Having failed in their original plan to get across the Meuse River, the Germans needed Bastogne and its road net to hold their position in the Bulge and to be prepared for withdrawal. They launched furious attacks against the narrow corridor leading into the town from the south, and increased the pressure all around. By the end of the year eight German divisions, including three SS Panzer Divisions, were fighting in the Bastogne area. Patton’s Third Army was attacking north, toward Bastogne; U.S. First Army, under Gen. Courtney Hodges (who was under Monty at this time) was scheduled to begin an attack south “sometime soon.” If they linked up in time, they would cut off the Germans in the Bulge salient. If the Germans could stop Patton’s thrust, and take Bastogne, they would have the road net that would enable them to escape.

  That was the situation on New Year’s Eve. At midnight, to celebrate the coming of the year of victory and to demonstrate how much things had changed in Bastogne in the past few days, every gun in Bastogne and every mortar piece on the MLR joined in a serenade of high explosives hurled at the Germans.

  • • •

  Corporal Gordon, along with more than a dozen other wounded Easy men, was evacuated to the rear. Another seven men from the company lay buried in shallow graves in the woods. Easy had put 121 officers and men on the trucks back in Mourmelon twelve days earlier. Its fighting strength was down to less than 100.

  Gordon was taken by ambulance to Sedan, then flown to England and on to a hospital in Wales. He was heavily sedated, paralyzed, hallucinating. He was placed in a plaster cast from his waist to the top of his head, only his face was left unplastered. But the cast that kept him immobile also prevented treatment of the wounds made by the bullet entering and exiting his back, so it was removed and replaced by the device known as the Crutchfield tongs. The apparatus was applied by boring two holes in the crown of his head, then inserting steel tongs into the holes and clamping them into place. A line attached through pulleys provided traction while preventing any movement without the need for a cast. He stayed in that position, flat on his back gazing up at the ceiling, for six weeks. Slowly he began to have some feeling in his extremities.

  The doctor, Maj. M. L. Stadium, told him that had the bullet varied one-half inch in one direction, it would have missed him; had it varied that much in the other direction, the wound would have been fatal. Gordon considered himself to be “fortunate, very fortunate. A million dollar wound.” Only a man who had been in the front line at Bastogne could describe such a wound in such words.

  * * *

  1. Ralph Ingersoll, Top Secret (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946).

  2. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny,545.

  3. There is a photograph on p. 549 of Rendezvous with Destiny of that dinner. The officers are looking appropriately glum, but what the men of Easy bring to my attention is the luxurious (everything is relative, they admit) surroundings. One of those staff officers was Lt. Col. (later Lt. Gen.) Harry W. O. Kinnard. Twenty years later, in an interview about the Battle of the Bulge, Kinnard said, “We never felt we would be overrun. We were beating back everything they threw at us. We had the houses, and were warm. They were outside the town, in the snow and cold.” Every surviving member of E Company has sent me a copy of that newspaper story, with caustic comments, the mild
est of which was, “What battle was he in?”

  Winters’s dinner that night consisted of “five white beans and a cup of cold broth.”

  4. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 586.

  12

  The Breaking Point

  BASTOGNE

  January 1–13, 1945

  DURING THE SIEGE Easy had been on the defensive, taking it. The greatest disadvantage to being on the defensive in the woods was that the pines gave an optimum tree burst to artillery shells. But in other ways being on the defensive had some decided advantages. By New Year’s Day, the snow was a foot deep in some places, frozen on top, slippery. Even the shortest infantry movements were made under the most trying conditions. To advance, a man had to flounder through the snow, bending and squirming to avoid knocking the snow off the branches and revealing his position. Visibility on the ground was limited to a few meters. An attacker had little contact with the men on his left and right, and he could not see a machine-gun position or a foxhole until he was almost on top of it. There were no roads, houses, or landmarks in the woods, so an advancing force would report its position by radio only by approximation. Squads on the attack had to move on compass bearings until they bumped into somebody, friend or enemy. Ammunition boxes for resupply were hand-carried to the foxholes, as always, but in this case by men who had no clear idea of direction.

  Attacking in the cleared grazing fields was equally daunting. There was only one road, Noville-Foy-Bastogne, and it was ice-coated on top, with black ice under the snow. German 88s were zeroed in on the road, which was also mined. But the alternative to attacking down the road was to come cross-country over the fields, which offered no concealment.