At midnight the cuckoo clock in the cafe struck. Lieutenant Lyie Bouck, on his stretcher on the floor, turned twenty-one years old. "What a hell of a way to become a man," he mumbled to himself.
BOUCK AND his men had successfully blocked the Lanzerath road against a full strength German battalion for a day, inflicting catastrophic casualties of more than l50 per cent. Such heroism and combat effectiveness could hardly be equalled. But in many ways the I&R platoon's experience was typical.
In the 99th Division alone there were any number of junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted men who, although new to combat, stood to their guns, to the dismay of the Germans. At Losheimergraben railroad station Captain Neil Brown's Company L, 394th Infantry, held through the day. At one point, when a Tiger tank appeared. Lieutenant Dewey Flankers ran up to it and launched an antitank grenade up the bore of the cannon before it could fire. Scores of unrecorded actions were taken independently, as communication between platoons was poor, between companies and regimental headquarters nonexistent.
All along the front, from Monschau to the north down to Echternach in the south, German attacks passed through gaps in the line and surrounded the American positions. But the Americans in many cases fought back with every weapon available to them-usually just small arms. They stacked up German bodies and held the crossroads, preventing German tanks from bursting through.
With the few German units in which tanks accompanied the infantry, the Americans had less success. Private Roger Foehringer of the artillery was attached to the 99th, billeted on the outskirts of Bullingen, Belgium. At 0700 on December 16 he was put to work with two others carrying a case of grenades up a hill to a machine-gun pit. "We were not to the point where we could see over the hill, when down on us came a German Tiger." Foehringer jumped into a row of bushes along the road. He lost his rifle and helmet but was untouched by the tank's machine-gun bursts. It moved on, to be followed by another, then a half-track with infantry in the back.
"There is no feeling like being alone, being unarmed, and not knowing what to do," Foehringer recalled. Instinct told him to get back to where he came from, the farmhouse on the edge of Biillingen. He took off cross-country and made it. He found a guy who had fired at one of the German tanks and missed. As the tank began to swing its cannon at their position, Foehringer and his buddy ran for the farmhouse. They found two carbines and went up to the second floor, where they broke the windows and began firing at German troops spread across the field.
"It was real easy shooting," Foehringer said, "until we heard the rumble of a tank." As it began to fire, Foehringer ran down to the cellar, where he found a dozen or so GIs destroying their weapons. The tank shoved its cannon through the basement window, and a voice yelled, "Rausf Raus!"
Foehringer and the others gave up. They were marched east. In Hons-feld, Foehringer saw stark evidence of the kind of fight others in the 99th had put up. In the cemetery "there were frozen corpses behind head stones. You could see that they had fought, one guy at a headstone, another behind a headstone, and there they were frozen just as they had been shot." In the road there were uncountable German bodies- uncountable because so many tanks and trucks had run over them. "They were like pancakes. We tried to detour around them but the guards made us march over them."
Mainly the story of December 16 was one of thwarted German plans. Although they had infiltrated throughout the American line, nowhere had they taken the crossroads that would allow their tanks to roam free behind the lines. As night fell, Hitler's timetable was already falling apart, thanks to an unknown squad of GIs here, a platoon over there, fighting although surrounded and fighting until their ammunition gave out.
To THE SOUTH the 106th Division was penetrated in numerous places, as was the 28th. The Germans achieved surprise but not a breakthrough. General Hasso von Manteuffel, commander of the Fifth Panzer Army, later told interviewers that the GIs put up a "tenacious and brave resistance with skilfully fought combat tactics."
The army's official historian, Charles MacDonald, writes of one regiment of the 28th Division, "With only two battalions supported for part of the day by two companies of medium tanks, the 110th Infantry had held off four German regiments and had nowhere been routed. That was around two thousand men versus at least ten thousand." That sentence encompasses hundreds of stories of heroism, most of which will never be known.
LIEUTENANT Bouck's fight continued to shape the battle. Around midnight, December 16-17, Lieutenant Colonel Peiper reached the Lanz-erath area. The German infantry commanders told him of the strong resistance ahead. They had been repelled three times with terrible losses. Peiper took command. He put two Panther tanks in front of the column, followed by a series of armoured half tracks and then another half-dozen tanks, with thirty captured American trucks behind them, and sixteen 88s at the rear. At 0400 hours they roared off, only to discover the village was empty.
Peiper was now loose behind American lines. The only Americans in the vicinity were service troops, drivers, medical personnel-nothing to stop an armoured column with such firepower.
By 0800 Peiper had gassed up his vehicles with captured fuel. Then he headed west towards Malmedy. Peiper was running parallel to Elsenborn Ridge, the dominant physical feature of that part of the Ardennes. The nature of his thrust, meanwhile, was pushing men of the 99th and 2nd divisions back towards the ridge. The ridge was unoccupied, undefended. Whoever got there first would have the high ground and thus the decisive advantage.
Peiper's breakthrough was one of many that morning. The sheer weight of German numbers could not be denied. Americans continued to fight, but without ammunition resupply they couldn't do much. Many surrendered. Two regiments of the 106th surrendered-7,500 men, the biggest mass surrender in the war against Germany. Everywhere Major Skorzeny's disguised, English-speaking units began to spread panic, issue false orders, switch road signs, and otherwise carry out their missions, but the units assigned to take the Meuse bridges failed in their task.
BRADLEY SPENT most of December 16 driving from Luxembourg city to Versailles, so he was out of touch. At the Trianon Palace Hotel, Eisen-hower's headquarters, he found his boss in a good mood. Eisenhower had just received word of his promotion to the rank of five-star general. At dusk an intelligence officer arrived with news. There had been an enemy attack that morning in the Ardennes. Bradley dismissed it as of little consequence, just a local spoiling attack. But an hour later another report came in-there were at least twelve German divisions involved.
Bradley still thought it an irritant, nothing major. Eisenhower disagreed. Studying the map, he ordered Bradley to send the 7th Armoured Division to St. Vith on the northern flank and the 12th Armoured to Echternach in the south. The 12th was scheduled to attack east of Metz, Bradley reminded Eisenhower, and Patton would be furious at having to call off his offensive. "Tell him," Eisenhower replied, "that Ike is running this damn war."
Hitler was certain it would take Eisenhower two or three days to recognize the extent of the threat and assumed that he would not be willing to call off his offensives north and south of the Ardennes until he had checked with Churchill and Roosevelt. Eisenhower proved him wrong on both points. He saw that not only was this a major offensive but that it was the best thing that could happen. The Germans were out of their fixed fortifications, out in the open where American artillery, tanks, infantry, and fighter-bombers would be capable of destroying them.
On the morning of December 17 Eisenhower ordered the 101st and 82nd Airborne, then refitting in Reims, into the battle. He sent the 101st to Bastogne, a crossroads town in the centre of the German thrust. He wanted it held at all costs and ordered a command team from the 10th Armoured Division to join the 101st there. He sent the 82nd to the northern flank, near Elsenborn.
Hitler had thought that it would take Eisenhower days to move reinforcements into the Ardennes. He was wrong about that one too. The airborne divisions could not go to their position by plane, as the weather continued to be foggy,
snowy, cold. But Eisenhower had trucks. He ordered the drivers in the Red Ball Express to use all their resources as troop carriers. On December 17 alone, 11,000 trucks carried 60,000 men, plus ammunition, medical supplies, and other materiel into the Ardennes. In the first week of the battle Eisenhower was able to move 250,000 men into the fray. This was mobility unprecedented in the history of war. Not even in Vietnam, not even in Desert Storm, was the US Army capable of moving so many men and so much equipment so quickly.
Still, it took time to recover from the initial blow and regroup. Meanwhile, hundreds of German tanks were loose behind the front lines, free to move in almost any direction.
ON DECEMBER 17 the sky over Belgium was overcast, but the Luftwaffe pilots flew between 600 and 700 sorties in support of the ground forces. A thousand and more Allied pilots were there to meet them over St. Vith and began a daylong dogfight.
Captain Jack Barensfeld led a twelve-plane squadron of P-47s. When he arrived on the scene, he "saw two or three fighters on fire, spiralling towards the ground both sides. I saw a Thunderbolt going down in flames. Enemy aircraft all over the place. Our controller, 'Organ,' is calm and calling in a prime target-a pontoon bridge across the River Rur. Many enemy vehicles backed up behind it. A great amount of flak coming up. Three or four of our aircraft received battle damage but no one aborted. We used our bombs and rockets on the vehicles and the bridge, then set up several strafing passes. There were burning vehicles and some damage to the bridge when we left after about 20 minutes."
On the ground the Germans made their major breakthrough in the centre, in the direction of Bastogne, but had their own problems. Armoured units flowed to the west not in an even stream, but irregularly from traffic jam to traffic jam. The road net in the Ardennes was just as Eisenhower had said it would be, inadequate. Much of the German artillery was horse-drawn, which added greatly to the congestion.
All through December 17 Peiper continued to drive west, avoiding Elsenborn Ridge, looking for bridges, gasoline dumps, ammunition dumps, blasting pockets of resistance out of the way when necessary. By 1600 hours Peiper had reached the outskirts of Stavelot. The town was clogged with American vehicles. He subjected it to a bombardment from his tanks, then sent his armoured infantry to attack the town. As darkness fell, American small arms repulsed the enemy. Through the night Peiper watched as the Americans pulled out their trucks, heading west.
Peiper's success in breaking through was heady stuff to the Germans. Even if he was behind schedule, it had been a glorious couple of days. Corporal Bertenrath recalled: "We enjoyed those first days of success, moving forward, taking prisoners and, above all, capturing the wonderful provisions we found in Allied vehicles: chocolate, cigarettes, potatoes, vegetables, meat, and even something for dessert. I asked my squad, 'My God, how do they manage such things?'" But being behind American lines gave Bertenrath a sense of impending doom, because "on one road through the forest were stacks of shells that stretched for, I would guess, two kilometres both left and right-we drove through an alley of shells. I had never seen the like of it. I told my squad, 'My God, their supplies are unlimited!'"
At dawn, December 18, Peiper instructed two Panther commanders to charge Stavelot at maximum speed. They drove around the curve, firing rapidly, and penetrated the antitank obstacle at the curve. The Germans followed up with other vehicles, and the Americans evacuated the town. Not, however, before destroying the gasoline dump at Stavelot. Sergeant Jack Mocnik and two others of the 526th Armoured Infantry Battalion drove a jeep up the hill to the gasoline dump, accompanied by two halftracks. Mocnik's party began firing .30- and .50 calibre machine-gun bursts into jerry cans of gas, and finally they got one to catch fire. As they scrambled away, "the darndest fire you ever saw flared up," Mocnik recalled. "The cans would explode and fly through the air like rockets trailing fire and smoke."
Frustrated, Peiper drove at top speed to get to Trois-Ponts (Three Bridges). Once across the Ambleve and Salm rivers, which flowed together in the village, he would have an open road to the Meuse.
IN SOME American headquarters, at supply dumps, and in the field there was confusion if not chaos. Men set to burning papers and maps, destroying weapons, and running to the rear. There was a breakdown in discipline, compounded by the breakdown of some colonels. Among many, fear drove all rational thought out of their mind. Go west as fast as possible was the only thought.
On December 17 the trickle of frightened men fleeing the battle began to turn into a stream. By December 18 the stream was becoming a flood. Waves of panic rolled westwards. In Belgium and northern France, American flags hanging from windows were discreetly pulled inside. In Paris the whores put away their English-language phrase books and retrieved their German versions.
On the third day of the attack, December 19, German armour began to acquire momentum; the greatest gains made by the armoured spearhead columns were achieved that day. As the Germans straightened out their traffic jams behind the front, the Americans in retreat were colliding with the reinforcements Eisenhower had sent to the battle, causing a monumental traffic jam of their own.
The US Army in retreat was a sad spectacle. When the 101st Airborne got to Bastogne on December 19, the columns of reinforcements marched down both sides of the road towards the front. Down the middle of the road came defeated American troops, fleeing the front in disarray, mob-like. Many had thrown away their rifles, coats, all encumbrances. Some were in a panic, staggering, exhausted, shouting, "Run! They'll murder you! They'll kill you! They've got tanks, machine guns, air power, everything!"
"They were just babbling," Major Dick Winters of the 506th PIR recalled. "It was pathetic. We felt ashamed."
Reporter Jack Belden described the retreat as he saw it in the Ardennes on December 17, 1944. There were long convoys of trucks, carrying gasoline, portable bridges, and other equipment, headed west, with tanks and other armed vehicles mixed in. "I noticed in myself a feeling that I had not had for some years. It was the feeling of guilt that seems to come over you whenever you retreat. You don't like to look anyone in the eyes. It seems as if you have done something wrong. I perceived this feeling in others too. The road was jammed with every conceivable kind of vehicle. An enemy plane came down and bombed and strafed the column, knocking three trucks off the road, shattering trees and causing everyone to flee to ditches." Jabos in reverse. Then came the buzz bombs, or V-ls. "It went on all night. There must have been a buzz bomb or a piloted plane raid somewhere every five minutes."
Every man for himself. It was reminiscent of the German retreat through the Falaise gap. But there were critical differences. All along the front scattered groups of men stuck to their guns. They cut the German infantry columns down as a scythe cuts through a wheat field. The GIs were appalled at how the enemy infantry came on, marching down the middle of a road, their weapons slung, without reconnaissance of any sort, without armour support. The German soldiers knew nothing of infantry tactics. What was happening was exactly what Eisenhower had predicted-the Volkssturm divisions were not capable of effective action outside their bunkers. In far too many cases, however, they were attacking eighteen- and nineteen-year-old barely trained Americans. Both sides had been forced to turn to their children to fight the war to a conclusion.
Another difference between the German retreat in August and the American retreat was that as the beaten, terrified GIs fled west down the middle of the road, there were combat reinforcements on each side headed east, marching to the sound of the guns.
AT DAWN on December 19, as German tanks prepared to surround Bastogne and the 101st marched into the town, Eisenhower met with his senior commanders in a cold, damp squad room in a barracks at Verdun, the site of the greatest battle ever fought. There was but one lone potbellied stove to ease the bitter cold. Elsenhower's lieutenants entered the room glum, depressed, embarrassed-as they should have been, given the magnitude of the intelligence failure.
Eisenhower walked in, looked disapprovingly at the downcast
generals, and boldly declared, "The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table."
Patton quickly picked up the theme. "Hell, let's have the guts to let the bastards go all the way to Paris," he said. "Then we'll really cut 'em off and chew 'em up." He had already seen the obvious: the Germans were putting their heads in a noose. By attacking the southern shoulder of the salient with his Third Army, Patton could cut enemy supply lines, isolate the tanks inside what was already being called "the Bulge," and destroy them. Before leaving Metz, he had told his staff to begin the preparations for switching his attack line. So when Ike asked him how long it would take for two Third Army corps that were facing east to turn and face north and attack the German flank, Patton boldly replied, "Two days."
Elsenhower's decisiveness and Patton's boldness were electrifying. Their mood quickly spread through the system. Dispirited men were energized. For those on the front line, help was coming.
From the Supreme Commander down to the lowliest private, men pulled up their socks and went forth to do their duty. It simplifies, but not by much, to say that here, there, everywhere, from top to bottom, the men of the US Army in northwest Europe shook themselves and made this a defining moment in their own lives and in the history of the army. They didn't like retreating, they didn't like getting kicked around, and as individuals, squads, and companies they decided they were going to make the enemy pay.
Chapter Eight
The Ardennes: December 20-31, 1944
BY MIDDAY, December 20, Charlie Company, 395th Infantry Regiment, 99th Division, had been retreating for three and a half days, mostly without sleep and water and enough food, through mud that was so deep "that men carrying heavy weapons frequently mired in mud so others had to take their weapons and pull them out. In one area it took one and a half hours to cover a hundred metres." Sergeant Vernon Swanson said that when word came down at 1700 hours that the regiment was withdrawing to Elsenborn Ridge, where it would dig in beside the 2nd Division, "it was certainly good news. We felt it was the equivalent of saying we were returning to the United States."
Citizen Soldiers [Condensed] Page 12
