Schadenfreude, as Montgomery now demonstrated, was by no means an exclusively German trait. Amid the dogs, goldfish, and singing canaries in his Zonhoven encampment, he had written Brooke just before midnight on Tuesday that “it looks as if we may now have to pay the price for the policy of drift and lack of proper control.”
There is great confusion and all signs of a full scale withdrawal. There is a definite lack of grip and control, and no one has a clear picture.… Everyone knows something has gone wrong and no one knows what or why.… The general situation is ugly as the American forces have been cut clean in half and the Germans can reach the Meuse at Namur without any opposition.
Little of this was true. The Americans had not been cut in half, no full-scale withdrawal had begun, and no German was near Namur, except perhaps a few lost paratroopers. But First Army surely needed help, and once given the opportunity the field marshal threw himself into battle with, as one writer later observed, “the energy and verve that were as characteristic as his peacockery.” Having been alerted to the impending command change at 2:30 Wednesday morning, he had dispatched a major to Chaudfontaine for a “bedside conference” with Hodges, who was roused from sleep to learn that four British divisions were moving toward the Meuse to secure the riverbanks and bridges. Roadblocks also had been built on the Brussels highway with vehicles and piled carts.
The field marshal himself arrived in Chaudfontaine at 1:30 P.M. on Wednesday in a green Rolls-Royce flying a Union Jack and five-star pennant from the front fenders, accompanied by outrider jeeps with red-capped MPs. As usual he was dressed without orthodoxy in fur-lined boots, baggy corduroy trousers, and as many as eight pullovers. “Unwrapping the bearskin in which he was enveloped,” Iris Carpenter reported, “he picked up his box of sandwiches, his thermos jug of tea, and his situation map all chalked over with his grease pencil, and marched inside.” An American officer described him as “a monkey on a stick jumping up and down … a pompous conquering hero,” but as he stalked into the Hôtel des Bains he seemed to a British officer “like Christ come to cleanse the temple.” Neither image did Montgomery justice. Politely declining Hodges’s offer of lunch—“Oh, no, I’ve got my own”—he propped his map on a chair and said calmly, “Now let’s review this situation.… The first thing we must do is tidy up the battlefield.”
Three hours later they had both a plan and an understanding. Hodges and his staff appeared tired and dispirited, British officers later reported, but determined to hold fast. Although Hodges feared that two First Army divisions had been surrounded—in fact, only two-thirds of the star-crossed 106th was lost—he stoutly resisted Montgomery’s proposal to withdraw the north shoulder, perhaps as far as the Meuse. The field marshal for now relented: First Army would dig in where it could and, with help from General Simpson’s Ninth Army, assemble a strike force to counterattack the Germans from the north, complementing Patton’s blow from the south. Dempsey’s Second Army would continue to feed forces down from Holland, and British stocks would help make good American losses, including 100 25-pounder guns with 300,000 rounds of ammunition; 20,000 snow suits; 2,000 trip flares; and 350 Sherman tanks with duck-bill cleats affixed for better traction. By nine o’clock that evening, all Meuse bridges would be rigged for demolition, and, as the British XXX Corps soon reported, “the enemy’s hopes of bouncing the Meuse crossings have almost vanished.”
As he returned to Zonhoven, Montgomery considered relieving Hodges; but whatever ailed the First Army commander appeared to have passed. “Hodges is not the man I would pick,” Montgomery reported, “but he is much better.” Eisenhower concurred in a private cable to the field marshal: “Hodges is the quiet reticent type and does not appear as aggressive as he really is. Unless he becomes exhausted he will always wage a good fight.”
SHAEF ordered the new command arrangement to remain secret. Censorship, already tightened to prevent full disclosure of the HERBSTNEBEL reverses, also ensured that Americans at home would be spared knowing that much of the U.S. Army in Europe now was led by a wee Brit in a black beret. “They seemed delighted to have someone to give them orders,” Montgomery told Brooke, with some justification. Brooke warned him not to gloat, but the field marshal could not help himself. “The Americans have taken a 1st Class bloody nose,” he wrote a friend in London. “I am busy sorting out the mess.”
As for Bradley, Eisenhower proposed awarding him a Bronze Star as a sop for losing two-thirds of his command. He also asked Marshall to consider giving him a fourth star. “I retain all my former confidence in him,” Eisenhower wrote the chief. “It would have a fine effect generally.”
War in the Raw
CIVILIAN refugees with woeful tales of burning villages and Germans in close pursuit tumbled into Bastogne, “an ancient town in the dreariest part of the Ardennes,” as a tourist guidebook had once described it. Dray carts piled high with furniture and scuffed baggage clogged the main square despite Army placards warning that “unattended vehicles will be impounded by military police.” Shops along the Grand-Rue pulled tight their shutters after the power failed on Sunday, and by midday Monday, December 18, the grumble of artillery could be heard even in the cellar corridors of the Sisters of Notre Dame, a boarding school where hundreds took refuge.
The first paratroopers from the 101st Airborne arrived at dusk on Monday after a sleet-spattered hundred-mile drive from Reims. XVIII Airborne Corps under General Ridgway had been directed to help seal the twenty-mile gap between V Corps and VIII Corps, with Gavin’s 82nd Airborne making for Werbomont, southwest of Spa, and the 101st bound for Bastogne. Sergeants had trotted through the troop barracks the previous night, bawling, “Get out of the sack. You ain’t reserve no more,” and officers interrupted a ballet performance in mid-jeté to order paratroopers in the audience to assemble for battle.
Since leaving Holland in November the 101st had been plagued with several dozen AWOL incidents each week, as well as the usual drunken brawls; troopers held contests to see who could punch out the most windows in Reims. Worse yet, many of the division’s senior leaders were absent. They included the commander, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, who had flown to Washington; his assistant commander, who was in England with seventeen officers to lecture on MARKET GARDEN; and the chief of staff, who had killed himself with a pistol a week earlier. That left command to the division artillery chief, a short, genial brigadier general from Washington, D.C., named Anthony Clement McAuliffe. Having graduated from West Point at the end of World War I, McAuliffe had risen slowly through the ranks of the interwar Army as a gunner with an interest in both technological and sociological innovation: before joining the 101st, he had worked on development of the jeep and the bazooka, and on a study of race relations in the service. He had parachuted into Normandy and landed by glider in Holland; now he drove to Bastogne at the head of a division he led by default.
Several thousand replacement troopers who had received barely a week of field training jammed into open cattle trucks behind him—“like olives in a jar,” as one account noted. Some, without helmets or rifles, pleaded for both from the retreating GIs who clogged every road west of Bastogne. COMZ dispatched an emergency convoy hauling five thousand entrenching shovels, two thousand sets of wool drawers, and five thousands pairs of arctic overshoes, sizes six to fourteen. Through Monday night and early the next morning, twelve thousand cold, sodden paratroopers and glidermen poured into Bastogne, where the American predicament was described as “fluid and obscure.” By ten A.M. on Tuesday, all four regiments had arrived, accompanied by a few disoriented artillery and armor units press-ganged along the way. General McAuliffe put his command post in the Hôtel de Commerce, facing the train station, and his first wounded into a local seminary. Early Wednesday morning, after a few parting words of encouragement, General Middleton decamped in his Packard for a new VIII Corps headquarters in Neufchâteau, eighteen miles southwest.
Bearing down on Bastogne were three divisions from Fifth Panzer Army, well aware
of U.S. reinforcements thanks to careless American radio chatter. Little in the battle had unfolded according to the German master plan, starting with that nettlesome resistance by Cota’s 28th Division in Luxembourg. Fuel shortages pinched harder with each passing hour. Panzer tracks chewed up byroads so severely that wheeled vehicles by the score were abandoned in mud sloughs; with few engineers to clear mines, tank crews took up the task with harrows and rollers found in farm sheds. Foot soldiers slouching westward almost outpaced Manteuffel’s motorized columns, and Field Marshal Model now privately doubted that HERBSTNEBEL could achieve even the modest goals of the so-called small solution, much less the seizure of Antwerp.
Bastogne and its seven radial roads assumed ever greater importance—“an abscess on our line of communication,” in a German commander’s phrase—and field-gray spearheads smashed into the feeble roadblocks east of town, setting Army half-tracks ablaze with tracer rounds, then picking off GIs silhouetted against the flames. Two straggling artillery battalions at Longvilly fired over open sights at two hundred yards before the survivors stumbled back into Bastogne, half their howitzers lost. Forty Sherman tanks were demolished in a single night, and defenders in Neffe retreated under showers of incendiary grenades. “We’re not driven out,” one officer radioed, “but burned out.” Under the onslaught of those three divisions—2nd Panzer, 26th Volksgrenadier, and Panzer Lehr—the American defenses buckled and bent.
But did not break. The Longvilly gunfight cost the Volksgrenadiers four precious hours of daylight on Tuesday. Farther north on the same day, U.S. combat engineers dynamited culverts and bridges, felled trees, and laid abatis with such obstructive skill that the frustrated LVIII Corps countermarched up various blind alleys in search of easier routes west.
* * *
No less vital in delaying the enemy was a combat command from the 10th Armored Division, which Middleton on Monday night had ordered to defend a trio of strongpoints outside Bastogne. An especially vicious brawl unfolded in Noville, a foggy sinkhole four miles north of town, where fifteen Sherman tanks and other armor arrived in time to confront much of the 2nd Panzer Division. A murky dawn on Tuesday brought the telltale rattle of German tank suspensions, followed by vague gray shapes drifting from the east. The Americans answered with artillery—aimed “by guess and by God” because of map shortages—and even pistol fire. Soon the fog lifted like a raised curtain to reveal German armor and grenadiers spread thickly across a slope half a mile distant. American tank destroyers ripped into nine panzers, leaving three in flames. German infantrymen turned and fled, pursued by bullets.
All morning and through the afternoon the battle raged. A battalion of 101st paratroopers from Bastogne attacked on a dead run at two P.M., colliding in a brutish mêlée with another German assault just beginning to boil across a smoky ridgeline. Enemy barrages pounded Noville to rubble, killing the paratrooper commander and badly wounding his 10th Armored counterpart; only artillery counterfire kept grenadiers on three sides from overrunning the American redoubt.
At midday on Wednesday, December 20, a radio message to the Hôtel de Commerce advised, “All reserves committed. Situation critical.” McAuliffe authorized survivors to fall back into Bastogne at five P.M., cloaked in smoke and darkness; for want of a tank crew, paratroopers drove one of the four remaining Shermans. American casualties exceeded four hundred men, but the 2nd Panzer had lost over six hundred, plus thirty-one panzers and at least two days in the division’s drive toward the Meuse. A few hours after Noville fell, Gestapo agents murdered seven Belgians who had survived the siege, including a schoolmaster and the village priest.
Strongpoints east of Bastogne, now reinforced by the 501st Parachute Infantry, proved just as formidable for Panzer Lehr and the 26th Volksgrenadier. Barbed wire and musketry near Neffe snared German skirmishers in what paratroopers called a “giant mantrap.” “We took no prisoners,” a captain reported. “We mowed them down as if they were weeds.” Renewed enemy attacks on Wednesday ran into “a dam of fire” laid by scores of guns firing from Bastogne.
Little profit had been found in frontal assaults, and belatedly the Germans revised their tactics. Manteuffel urged 2nd Panzer to press westward past the Ourthe River despite gasoline shortages so severe that the division wasted a day waiting for fuel trucks. Panzer Lehr would leave a regiment to besiege Bastogne with the 26th Volksgrenadier, but most of the division now sidled to the left to bypass the town on the south.
Among the few heartening reports to reach Fifth Panzer Army on Wednesday was the annihilation of a 101st Airborne medical detachment, which had failed to post sentries at a crossroads encampment west of Bastogne. Shortly before midnight a German patrol of six panzers and half-tracks raked the medical tents and trucks with gunfire—“the bullets were so close that I thought I would have to brush them off,” one private reported. Within minutes the division surgeon had been captured, along with ten other medical officers, more than a hundred enlisted men, and litters, wounded patients, surgical instruments, and penicillin.
* * *
“Above all,” Middleton had instructed McAuliffe, “don’t get yourself surrounded.” Precisely how eighteen thousand Americans, under orders to hold Bastogne at all costs against forty-five thousand Germans, should avoid encirclement was not clear, particularly in weather so dismal that Allied aircraft on Wednesday flew a total of twenty-nine sorties in Europe, only nine of them over the Ardennes. A day later, on Thursday morning, December 21, an enemy column severed the last open road south, and Bastogne was indeed cut off. Resurgent optimism flared through the German chain of command.
At 11:30 on Friday morning, a delegation of four Germans carrying a white flag appeared in a spruce copse dusted with new snow southwest of Bastogne. “We are parliamentaires,” an English-speaking captain told an American officer, then presented a note composed on a captured American typewriter, with each umlaut inserted by hand, and addressed “an den amerikanischen Kommandeur der eingeschlossen Stadt Bastogne.” An appended translation to the American commander of the surrounded city of Bastogne explained:
The fortune of war is changing.… There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: In order to think it over, a term of two hours will be granted beginning with the presentation of this note. If this proposal should be rejected, one German artillery corps and six heavy AA battalions are ready to annihilate.… All the serious civilian losses caused by this artillery fire would not correspond with the well-known American humanity.
The note had been authorized by Lieutenant General Heinrich von Lüttwitz, commander of XLVII Panzer Corps.
At 12:25 P.M. the ultimatum reached McAuliffe in his smoke-stained command post, which reeked of cordite from a bombing raid the previous night. Encircled or not, the 101st remained almost at full strength; only five battalions among the four regiments had so far seen intense combat. Six hundred stragglers, mostly from the 28th Division, had been fed a hot meal and mustered into Team Snafu, a quick-reaction battalion. The Bastogne arsenal included forty Shermans; armor officers mimeographed useful tips on tank tactics for their infantry brethren. Six artillery battalions were arrayed in circular gun pits to allow each battery to shoot at every compass point, although McAuliffe, a field artilleryman for a quarter-century, had advised his cannoneers not to fire “until you see the whites of their eyes.” Vehicles were slathered with whitewash for camouflage, and Belgian linen closets provided sheets for snow capes. The men now received only two meals a day, but cooks had whipped up excellent flapjacks from doughnut flour discovered in a Red Cross pantry.
Perhaps inspired by the legendary epithet uttered by a French general when asked to surrender at Waterloo—“Merde!”—McAuliffe offered a one-word answer to the ultimatum: “Nuts.” A paratrooper officer then handed it to the “parliamentaires,” whereupon a baffled German officer asked, “Is the reply negative or affirmative?”
“The reply is decidedly not affirmative,” the American sa
id. “If you don’t understand what ‘nuts’ means, in plain English it is the same as ‘go to hell.’ … We will kill every goddamn German that tries to break into this city.”
“We will kill many Americans. This is war.”
Only after the event did an irate Manteuffel learn of Lüttwitz’s gambit. “This is crazy,” he told the corps commander. “Now we must find the artillery and bomber force to make good your threat and level the town.”
* * *
As Bastogne was a poisonous thorn in General Manteuffel’s left flank, St.-Vith had become an irksome nettle on his right. The town had been named for Saint Vitus, a Sicilian boy martyred during the reign of Emperor Diocletian, and the holy patron of dancers, dogs, and chronic oversleepers. Various unpleasantries had befallen St.-Vith since its founding in the twelfth century, including pillages in 1543, 1602, and 1689, but none was uglier than the battle that engulfed the town in December 1944. Despite swift destruction of the 106th Division on the Schnee Eifel, the German plan to occupy St.-Vith by six P.M. on December 17 fell short, and Manteuffel’s frustration grew longer day by day.
Gunfights had erupted around the town on December 18 and 19, but German lunges were thrown back, first by two engineer battalions, then by General Clarke’s Combat Command B from the 7th Armored, bolstered on his right by remnants from the 106th and a combat command from the 9th Armored Division. Now the easternmost U.S. redoubt of any size in the Ardennes, St.-Vith in three days had become a breakwater, with a “German tide rushing past on the north and south and rising against its eastern face,” in the description of the Army official history.
With supply lines cut, howitzers were limited to seven rounds per gun each day. Gunners rummaged for ammunition in abandoned dumps; some batteries reported firing “old propaganda shells just to keep projectiles whistling around German ears.” Riflemen on December 20 were told that “for every round fired, a corpse must hit the ground.” In St.-Vith’s pinched streets, broken glass crunched beneath the hooves of cattle fleeing a burning slaughterhouse. Exhausted officers gobbled amphetamines, and greasy smoke blackened the faces and uniforms of soldiers trying to stay warm over sand-filled tins soaked in gasoline. One soldier later described mounting a local counterattack with a “cold, plodding, unwilling, ragged double line plunging up to their knees in snow.” A survivor from the 106th wrote, “Here I was to grow into an old man and die over and over again.”
The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 Page 62
