Just before midnight on the last day of the old year, Sunday, 31 December, 1944, two young officers, Lieutenant George Bradshaw and Lieutenant Richard Shattuck, decided that someone ought to celebrate the advent of 1945 in the 44 Infantry Division’s Fox Company. In spite of the freezing cold the two officers were in high spirits as they clambered out of their snowbound foxholes to wait for midnight.
For nearly two days now the relatively green 44th Infantry had been dug in between the industrial towns of Sarreguemines and Rimling along the River Blies at the extreme left of the Seventh Army’s long line. In spite of the current alert and the tension which had been rising steadily ever since Christmas, the Division had experienced little save minor skirmishes and artillery duels. Although the men in the line had not been told officially that there was a ‘flap’ on, they knew from their contacts with local civilians and the anxious looks on the faces of visiting staff officers that soon, as they phrased it in their crude slang ‘the shit was gonna hit the fan’. Why should they have to stand to virtually every night, with double the normal number of men in the line, if the Top Brass were not expecting some kind of an attack?
On the night of 30 December, it had appeared that trouble was coming their way. In the small hours the infantrymen had been startled by the sound of a booby trap going off. It had been followed by another, and another. In all five of the carefully-laid warnings traps to their front had exploded. All night they had tensed over their weapons, hardly daring to breathe, fancying every new shadow was a German crawling into the attack. But it had been a false alarm after all. The five boobys had been set off by two rabbits, whose dead bodies were added to the usual cans of hash to make a splendid New Year’s breakfast of ‘S and S’, otherwise known more crudely as ‘shit on shingle’.1
Now, unabashed by the fact that the Germans were going to attack at any moment, the two young lieutenants stood in the moonlit snow, carbines raised to fire a feu de joie on the stroke of midnight, while in the freezing foxholes the dogfaces grinned at the crazy antics of the two high-spirited officers.
‘Two minutes to go,’ Bradshaw called to Shattuck. He clicked off his safety catch and prepared to fire, as he started to count off the seconds to 1945.
But Bradshaw was not fated to fire his salute to 1945. Suddenly machine-gun bullets began kicking up the snow all around him. That same instant a fighter plane came zooming out of the moonlit sky, dragging its monstrous black shadow behind it across the snowfield, violent flame rippling the length of its wings, as it shot up Fox Company’s positions. An instant later it had gone, roaring away in a tight curve. The two shaken officers rose to their feet, patting the snow from their uniforms.
‘What the hell’s going on, Dick?’ Bradshaw called to his buddy.1 Shattuck shook his head, but already he could hear the rattle of tank tracks to their front. Instinctively he knew this was it. The long-expected attack was coming in.
About the same time that the German fighter shot up the positions of the 44th’s 114 Regiment, Sergeant Luther Ott of its sister regiment, the 71st Infantry Regiment, holding the line from Bliesbruck eastward to Rimling, was trudging through the snow on patrol. Like the two high-spirited officers, his mind was half on the patrol and half on the New Year. He topped a small hill and suddenly all thoughts of New Year vanished. Later he recorded his astonishment at what he saw in the valley below: ‘It was the biggest swarm of Krauts I’d ever seen in my life! They were all in white, moving in a kind of triangle formation, with the base of the triangle heading right for my company.’2
Sergeant Ott didn’t hesitate, although he knew he was in danger of being overrun at any moment by the advancing Germans. He radioed to his CO, Captain Robert Sindenberg, what he had just seen, and then ran back with the rest of the patrol through the deep snow, as the men of the XIII SS Corps began their attack.
In Berlin, Hitler began to shout shrilly into the microphones of the ‘Poison Dwarf’s’ radio network: ‘Our people are resolved to fight the war to victory under any and all circumstances. . . . We are going to destroy everybody who does not take part in the common effort for the country or who makes himself a tool of the enemy. . . . The world must know that this State will, therefore, never capitulate. . . . Germany will rise like a phoenix from its ruined cities and this will go down in history as the miracle of the 20th Century!
‘I want, therefore, in this hour, as spokesman of Greater Germany, to promise solemnly to the Almighty that we shall fulfil our duty faithfully and unshakeably in the New Year, in the firm belief that the hour will strike when victory will ultimately come to him who is most worthy of it, the Greater German Reich.’3
The last German counterattack of the Second World War in the West – Operation Northwind – had begun.
By one o’clock that Monday morning the whole divisional front of the 44th Infantry Division was being engaged by the enemy. On the Division’s left flank the 114th Infantry Regiment beat off a determined effort by the Germans to exploit a bridgehead across the River Blies. A massive artillery bombardment was brought down upon the white-clad attackers and they reeled back, pinned down on the west bank of the Blies.
In the centre the threat to the 324th was more intense. Three times the German attackers tried to cross the River Blies and three times they were thrown back. But the most serious threat to the 44th Infantry came on the left flank, held by the 71st Infantry Regiment. There the Germans attacked in strength, crying, as they ran into the assault, ‘Die Yankee bastard!’ or ‘Come and fight Yankee gangsters’, almost as if they were under the influence of booze or drugs.
Here the German thrust could not be stopped. A German five-company assault north of Rimling curled round the right flank of the 71st’s First Battalion and forced it to withdraw 1000 yards. The Regiment’s Third Battalion was whistled up to restore the lost position. To no avail. Already over 600 Germans had penetrated the First’s positions and occupied the forest to their rear, 2000 yards further on. In the confused night fighting, the Third was diverted for an assault on the forest. They did not get far. In the thick clumps of trees, knee deep in snow, companies soon broke into disorganized platoons and sections, as the fight developed into a confused mix-up. A reserve battalion of the 324th was thrown in to help, but the heavily outnumbered Germans held on stubbornly. The month-long battles along the well-wooded frontiers of the Reich had made them veterans in this kind of fighting; and as always the German NCOs who commanded the small isolated sections were flexible, quick to react, and masters of using a single machine gun to cover firebreaks and trails, so that a handful of defenders might well hold up a whole company of attackers.
In the end the two battalions gave up. They sealed off the southern edge of the forest and dug in. The 2nd Battalion fared little better. Aided by a platoon of Shermans it regained its original positions by six that morning, only to be thrown out again by a German counterattack one hour later. Now the 44th Infantry Division’s link with its right-hand neighbour, the 100th Division, was beginning to crumble. But that was not the only problem facing the ‘Century’ men as dawn broke. To their right the paper-thin line of Task Force Hudelson was under severe attack by elements of two German divisions. In essence, the 100th Division stood a definite risk of being cut off, the very fate about which Eisenhower had warned Devers only days before.
Task Force Hudelson, consisting of the 62nd Armored Infantry Battalion, the 117th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, some combat engineers, mortar crews, a tank destroyer outfit, and the 94th Cavalry, had been preparing their link-up position some ten miles long between the 100th and 45th Divisions for nearly two weeks now. They had worked hard to dig in their machine guns, set trip-flares, sow minefields, so as to make the most of their few numbers. All the same their positions were at least twenty yards apart and in the darkness their commander knew the Germans could feed in whole platoons between his widely spread foxholes without the defenders even noticing. He knew, too, that this position would be an ideal target for the attackers. Indeed so much importance was given to penetrating the Hudelson line by the Germans that a special code-name had been adopted for the attack: ‘Tenth May, 1940’, a date of great significance for the Wehrmacht. For on that day, five years before, the victorious German assault on the West had begun.
That morning when the enemy hit the Task Force, its main component, the 62nd Armored Infantry Battalion, was waiting to be relieved by the 70th Infantry Division.
‘Sure hate to be relieved in this quiet sector,’ Captain Trammell of the 62nd told Captain Long of the 70th’s advance party. But there would be no relief for the unsuspecting 62nd this dawn. When Task Force Hudelson finally left the line it would be a beaten, decimated formation. Soon after midnight, elements of two whole German divisions, the 256th and the 361st Volksgrenadier Divisions, started to probe the Task Force’s positions along their entire front. First struck was the 94th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in the centre, which was soon broken. All that the helpless soldiers could do was to form small groups and, as the Divisional History puts it euphemistically, ‘effect an escape by flight’.
At five-thirty the Germans attacked in strength. Without the warning of a preliminary barrage, they rushed the Task Force line. To the surprised defenders there seemed to be hundreds of them, streaming suddenly out of the woods in white camouflage suits. Some tried the old tricks on the Americans. ‘Hold your fire!’ they yelled and the Americans did just that, thinking the Germans were coming in to surrender.
Rapidly the American line began to break down. Captain Trammell, who had so hated to leave this ‘quiet sector’, called back to his commander, Colonel Myers, ‘My men are being cut to pieces!’
But there was nothing Myers could do about it. The Task Force’s front was being swamped everywhere. On the left flank the 117th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron had been virtually surrounded at Mouterhouse. The 62nd was fighting for its life, withdrawing through the village of Bannstein down the road which led to Philippsbourg. The 94th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron had disappeared.
In Bannstein everyone – cooks and clerks included – pitched in in an attempt to stop the victorious Volksgrenadiers. Sergeant Borjourguez manned a mortar on his own and held off thirty Germans trying to outflank the place. Even when he was wounded in the foot he refused to be evacuated. But there was no stopping them. The men of the 62nd began to break up into small groups in order to escape, leaving behind their vehicles. One group under Sergeant Hargett ran into the enemy and, although the sergeant was shot in both arms, he managed to get through.
Ammunition began to run out. The supporting artillery came under direct enemy small arms fire. Germans were sniping at their positions from less than fifty yards away. The end at Bannstein was close.
Captain Long, of the 275th Infantry Regiment’s advance party coming up to relieve the 62nd, was billeted in their Bannstein CP that morning. Long and two companions, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were too excited at the prospect of action to be scared as they set off up the road to witness the battle. Moving out at ‘a smart trot’, as Long recalled years later, they were ‘met almost immediately by a mass of American soldiers in full retreat. We saw the hopelessness of the situation and turned back to the large, two-storey CP. The whole countryside was aflame and it was almost like daylight from the burning barns, small houses, fences etc.’4 Young Captain Long realized that war was not exactly what he supposed it to have been from the lectures at Fort Leonard Wood.
By eleven o’clock Bannstein was completely cut off. Those who could still walk had already abandoned any hope of getting out of the trap by vehicle. These they abandoned and were plodding up the steep snowbound hills making for the next village of Baerenthal. Behind them they left their wounded and their dead. Triumphantly their white-clad attackers swarmed into the village.
Lieutenant-Colonel Hudelson had almost run out of reserves. He had thrown in all his available infantry and they had still not been able to stop the Germans. He appealed to the only outfit not yet committed, the 125th Engineers. Its A Company was ordered into action south of Bannstein. Captain Robert Knight, their CO, told his officers, ‘Here’s the deal. We’re spread mighty thin. That’s why we’re being used for infantry.’ Swiftly he allotted his platoon commanders their tasks, ending with the warning, ‘Move quickly!’5
But it was already too late. As the engineers moved up through the snow, they could see abandoned equipment – and bodies – everywhere. As they passed the double-apron barbed-wire fence they had put up two days before, they found it ‘hanging with dead and dying Germans. Some were hanging limply, some moved, and some lay and screamed. They were covered with a light coat of new fallen snow.’6
Sergeant William Godfrey’s squad was ambushed almost at once. He had just muttered ‘One hell of a way to start off the New Year!’ as his half-track ground its way up an icy hill when there was a flash of scarlet. Close by an enemy burp gun ripped off a volley. Godfrey was slammed against the side of the cab by a sledge-hammer blow. Slowly the half-track began to fall over.
Godfrey regained consciousness to find himself stripped naked, save for his pants, by the Germans, his legs trapped beneath the five-ton half-track. Around him there were four members of his squad, all dead and stripped naked. Next to him there was a naked GI, with a bullet hole right between his eyes. Further up the road he could hear German soldiers talking and the sound of digging.
Freezing and in terrible pain from his wound, he found his trench knife and started digging his legs free. He dug until he was bathed in sweat and there were blisters on his hands. But he managed it. Somehow or other he struggled back to his own lines.
Inevitably the Engineers’ attack failed. They could do little against German armour and artillery. In the end they too pulled back in their remaining vehicles. Nearly a third of the company had vanished and many more had been wounded.
Hudelson threw in his precious last reserve, the 19th Armored Infantry Battalion. Its orders were to stop the Germans at all costs. The men didn’t get far. As what was left of the cavalry reconnaissance outfits pulled back through them in something akin to panic, they were stuck by an all-out attack as the Germans followed close on the heels of the retreating cavalrymen. The officers knew they didn’t stand a chance if they decided to fight. They would be encircled and overrun. Hastily the order was given for them to withdraw. Some of the infantrymen didn’t like the idea of withdrawal one bit. Mortar Sergeant Schickel, still game for a fight in spite of the chaos all around, yelled to his boss, Tech Sergeant Wright, ‘Hey what’s the target!’
Wright shouted back, ‘Drop ‘em in the wood. There are so many Krauts there you couldn’t miss if you goddam tried!’7
Wright was right. There were enemy soldiers everywhere. Even the local civilians who were pro-German now joined in the attack on their ‘liberators’. As the Divisional History of the 14th Armored Division records, one Frenchwoman who had up to now ‘appeared friendly’ to the Americans began sniping at the retreating GIs. She succeeded in killing one of them. Then, ‘They (the GIs) cut her in half with a blast from quadruple 0.5 inch machine guns.’8
The survivors of Lieutenant-Colonel Hudelson’s Task Force were now in full retreat. Everywhere there was chaos and confusion. Infantrymen, engineers, tankers, cavalrymen, gunners, all using the same narrow roads, skidding and sliding as the tracked vehicles slipped on the steep slopes. This was the big ‘bug-out’ and all of them knew it. The enemy was right behind them. As the Divisional History says: ‘(It was) like walking in a nightmare.’
Twenty-four hours before, listening to Colonel Hudelson briefing the new officers of the 70th Division in his Baerenthal CP, Captain Pence had had the ‘distinct impression that, rather than expecting an attack, Hudelson was impatient at not being himself allowed to attack’.9 Now his outfit was finished. By dusk on its first day of combat it would be stood down as a fighting force.
The task of trying to hold the area from Baerenthal to Dambach was now given to the 70th Infantry Division’s 275th Regiment. It was a division that had never heard a shot fired in anger, led by senior officers whose last experience of combat had been in the First World War. A potential disaster seemed in the making.
For the veteran 45th Infantry Division the first day of 1945 dawned bright and beautiful. On their front, as yet, there was no sign of the great attack. As the Journal of the Division’s 157th Infantry Regiment recorded: ‘Jan. 1st 1945 was a clear cold day, the type of day Americans are apt to call perfect football weather.’10 Back in the middle of December the morale of the Division had been badly affected by the first rumours from the Ardennes: ‘The Normandy troops were fleeing back to the beaches’; ‘Patton had been routed’; ‘a tremendous new Dunkirk was in the making.’ But morale had been restored by the good news now coming from Bastogne. So, as the first rumours started to spread in the divisional area about the plight of the 44th and the 100th Divisions, they did not take them too seriously.
But to their rear the ‘feather merchants’ and ‘canteen commandos’, as the service and supply troops were called contemptuously by the ‘dogfaces’, did. As the chronicler of the Division’s 179th Regiment recalled afterwards: ‘Rear echelons, remembering the fate of the 1st Army echelons, 7 Army HQ, 12 TAC HQ, huge trucking and ordnance outfits, all packed up and fled! Leaving food uneaten on the table, they “partied”1 and never stopped until they had reached Luneville!’†
Traffic was paralysed. The roads were jammed with trucks, jeeps, trailers and vans, all going back. The terrible waste that always follows an army was multiplied many times as equipment was abandoned. Like H. G. Wells’ The End of the World, ‘the rear pulled out as if the end had really come’.11
But now the 45th Division was drawn into the action. As the true position of Task Force Hudelson became clear, two battalions of the 179th Regiment were ordered up to fill the gap. It was a terrible march, with trucks slithering and sliding off the icy roads, past troops from the Rest Center fleeing westwards, past fleeing refugees, frightened old women and children, pulling carts piled with their worldly possessions, past columns of tanks of the 14th Armored Division ‘moving in both directions at once,’ as the chronicler of the 179th records, ‘through a confusion that on a small scale must have resembled the French débâcle of '39’.12
Other units of the 45th Division now started to be drawn into the fight. The first probing attacks were against the 157th Regiment. Patrols began hitting their lines everywhere. A column of some 300 Germans with seventeen horse-drawn artillery pieces was spotted and an air attack was requested. In the perfect, clear weather it was thought the dive-bombers of the TAC airforce couldn’t miss. But the ‘American Luftwaffe’, as it was often called due to the many times it had bombed its own troops (or ‘Lootwaffe’, from its habit of widespread looting) could, and it was only on the second attempt that the ‘flyboys’ were able to put the Germans to flight and the pressure on the157th began to relax. But not for long. In the coming week the only veteran division that General Devers had in the line was to experience fighting just as tough as they had at Anzio the year before.
By now virtually all Devers’ units were under attack by an estimated eight German divisions, and already by mid-afternoon on that Monday it was becoming clear that the 44th Infantry Division was the most endangered. On its left flank, in the vicinity of Gros Rederching, the Germans had forced elements of the 44th to withdraw, and by doing so they were, in turn, exposing the flank of the 100th Infantry Division. But there was worse to come. As the Division’s 399th Infantry Regiment came under ever-increasing attack by the Germans, its S-3 was called by an unknown officer of the 117th Reconnaissance Squadron on their flank. ‘We’re falling back a little,’ the cavalryman said lamely.
‘How far is a little?’ Major Convey, the S-3 snapped back.
‘About two thousand yards.’
Convey knew what a withdrawal of that magnitude might do to the Division’s tactical position. ‘Do you have to fall back that far?’ he asked.13
His answer was a click on the phone. The unknown cavalryman had hung up. When next heard from, the 117th Cavalry had fallen back much more than two thousand yards. In fact, it had retreated eight or nine miles to south of the town of Wingen. There it found the enemy already in position and fled again. After that the 117th Cavalry disappeared from the combat zone completely. There would be work for the Inspector-General’s branch once the battle was over.
The Germans now began to exploit the cavalry’s flight and the 100th Division’s wide open flank. They pressed home their attack, isolating and cutting off frightened groups of infantrymen. Some, however, were not so frightened. Instead of surrendering, as stragglers were beginning to do by the score, they dug in. One such group consisted of Pfcs Bower, Powell, Meza, Lane, McIntyre and Eyverson. They had been on outpost duty in a French school. Now they were surrounded by Germans, all exits blocked. They asked the French janitor, who had not fled with the rest, if there was any secret way out. He led them to a room where a window had recently been sealed up with cement blocks – ‘galloping stones’ as the locals called them. With their knives they began hacking away at the stones. Then they heard footsteps coming down the corridor. Andy Powell, a full-bloodied Red Indian, moved to the side of the door and waited. Just as the first stone came crashing to the floor a solid blow smashed the door panel. A German poked his head through, candle in hand. As the 100th Division’s history recorded, ‘That was a bad error and showed poor training. Powell blew the Kraut’s stupid head off with one rifle shot!’14
Working feverishly, as more and more Germans flooded into the corridor, they enlarged the hole until they could clamber through. To their chagrin they found they were in another room. They ran through it. A German appeared but Meza was quicker on the draw. He cut him down with a burst from his tommy gun.
Alerted by the firing, Germans were now appearing everywhere. The Americans dashed down a corridor. Luck was with them. By accident they had stumbled into the basement furnace room, where they looked for a hiding place. All that afternoon they hid there, as the Germans combed the building. As night fell they decided to make a break for it down the corridor. To their horror they came across three weary Germans sleeping soundly in their path. Saying a prayer that they wouldn’t wake up and the door beyond wouldn’t squeak, they stepped over them one by one and sneaked outside. Half an hour later they reached the American lines to be challenged by a sentry with ‘Halt! What’s the password?’
As Bower said later, ‘We could have kissed that sentry, beard and all!’15
1 Hash on toast.
2 GI slang for ‘left’, from the French partir = to leave. † New Seventh Army HQ.