The men of Colonel Wallace Cheves’ Battalion of the 274th Infantry Regiment who were going to try and help their hard-pressed comrades at Wingen arrived at the front worn and tired. Bedding down on the hard floors of a local factory just over the hill from Wingen, they mixed with the survivors of the 70th and 45th Divisions who had escaped from the débâcle.
Colonel Cheves remembered his first impressions of that meeting between his greenhorns and these new veterans: ‘We thought we’d had it tough, but these men looked worse. Their faces were haggard and worn and drawn from lack of sleep and deeply lined from recent horrible experiences. Most were in their early twenties, but they looked like men of thirty-five or forty years old. They were dirty, unshaven and stinking of sweat. None of them wanted to talk about the things they had seen or the hardships they had endured. The actuality of the war was very close upon us now.’1
On that Thursday, four days after the German attack had begun, yet another American battalion was thrown in to experience its baptism of fire as Cheves’ battalion set off towards Wingen. None of them, not even the Colonel, knew what the true situation at Wingen was. Obviously the Germans had attacked there. The survivors of the 45th and 70th had admitted that, but were they still holding the place? Had some of the American defenders stayed behind and slogged it out? Were the silent, haggard men they had mixed with simply stragglers or even cowards who had just ‘bugged out’ and left the 200 Americans, still unaccounted for, to fight on?
So they marched on in silence. Some of them had been training for years for this moment. How were they going to react when the silence was broken by that first burst of enemy fire?
Colonel Wallace Cheves, a thoughtful and sensitive officer, recalled later: ‘Our hearts and minds harboured many things we would like to have said, but somehow we knew it was better to remain silent. This was the moment we had often wondered about, secretly dreaded. Our faces were set and there was a faraway look in everybody’s eyes.’2
The sounds of battle started to grow louder as they laboured through the snow. Then there was Wingen lying silent below them. It was like a scene from a cheap Christmas card – medieval, half-timbered houses, their steep roofs covered with snow, huddled round the church. Only a thin trail of brown smoke rising from a chimney here and there indicated that it was still inhabited. Where were the SS? Had they already left, taking their two hundred-odd American prisoners from the 45th and 70th Divisions with them? What was going on in Wingen?
The SS men of the Sixth Mountain Division had come sneaking into Wingen that morning. Here and there the Americans had not been caught off their guard and there had been some heavy firing. But for the most part the GIs of the 70th and 45th Divisions were caught by surprise. Corporal Ben Stein of the 45th was one. Veteran of Anzio as he was, his carbine had not been fired for some time and was encrusted with dirt. Now as he peered through the window of the house where he and some other service troops had been sleeping, he saw young SS men triumphantly escorting American prisoners, hands clasped behind their heads. He and the others decided to lie low. But suddenly rifle fire exploded to the front and rear of the house in which they were hiding. A voice thundered in accented English, ‘Americans, come out with your hands high!’
‘We laid down our guns and filed out. The dead man from our platoon lay a few feet away. A German machine gun was set up across the street and white-coated Krauts were standing around with rifles and machine pistols aimed at us. They looked tough and menacing and some had cigarettes dangling from their lips. I figured this was the end of the line.’3
For some it was. They were not maltreated, though they were relieved of their watches, cigarettes and the like. Then they were marched to the church, Ben Stein stumbling over the dead body of a GI in the process. ‘When we started up the front steps, one of our men bent over to tie up his boot. He was shot immediately. I was shocked, but walked on past the dead body, sprawled on the church steps. We were herded down the stairs to the church cellar where we joined about a hundred or more other prisoners. There was very little water or food and German guards were in sight at all times. Buckets were placed around as makeshift latrines. No one moved out of that cellar. There was nothing to do except sleep – and wait.’4
Over 400 Americans were rounded up by the SS, and while the officers made their dispositions for the expected American counter attack, their men ‘feasted on captured US rations,’ as Lieutenant Zoepf recalled, ‘resupplying their losses in clothing and taking American rifles to supplement their weapons.’5
But in spite of their success, the SS had problems too. As Erich Meyer, a machine gunner in the 1st SS Battalion records: ‘We hadn’t slept for days and were exhausted and hungry. . . . We were astonished to see how well American soldiers lived.’6 But food and sleep were not their only problems. No one in the German High Command knew of the SS’s capture of Wingen. As Lieutenant Zoepf remembers, ‘Our signalmen were not successful in establishing any sort of radio contact with Corps. Neither was the forward observer of the 3rd Battalion, Mountain Artillery Regiment Nord.’7 Patrols were hurriedly dispatched to the rear to carry the good news to Corps, for when the Americans counterattacked, the surviving SS men would be completely dependent upon their own resources and the two captured Ami self-propelled guns they had put into service. Already up in the hills the SS could hear the rumble of enemy tanks.
While Cheves’ men waited above Wingen, their comrades of the 274th Regiment’s First Battalion, under the command of Colonel Willis, were preparing to attack Philippsbourg. First they were to capture the hills around the place and then clear the enemy out of the village. There was a last check of equipment. Frozen and tired after the long truck journey, the infantrymen formed up into skirmish lines. Here and there company commanders gave the order, ‘Fix bayonets.’
‘Let’s go!’ was the next order. Machine guns opened up. There was the clatter of tank tracks. Heavy guns boomed.
Lieutenant Vaught’s A Company on the right was running through the snow towards a hill Willis had ordered them to capture. Almost immediately the Germans spotted them and the SS cannon began firing.
‘I never understood how they ever got across that open space,’ a man in the watching C Company reported later. ‘It was horrible to watch. The earth erupted almost continously as shell after shell plastered the ground around them. But they never faltered – just kept going, leaving dead and wounded behind. I could see men flung into the air, hit the ground, roll over and lie still, deathly still. Some just disintegrated before my eyes.’8 The infantry were paying the price of de Gaulle’s intervention.
‘We were having a tough time,’ recalled Sergeant Durgan of A Company, ‘but, in spite of the disastrous fire, most of us made it across to the foot of the first hill. Here we had protection from the high-angle artillery fire, but still the hill was alive with Krauts who kept shooting away.’9
The brave survivors of A Company now tried to storm the hill but intense small arms fire drove them back. They broke into small groups, fighting back as best they could. Among them was medic Pfc Horton. He kept on tending the wounded, crying to the ashen-faced infantry men lying in the snow, trying to pluck up courage for another go. One of them, Pfc Donald Eddy, was infected by Horton’s spirit. He yelled at the frightened men all around him, ‘Pass out the crap paper, boys!’10
Lieutenant Vaught’s men tried another approach. Instead of a frontal attack, they attempted to go round the hill and come up in the rear of the Germans. Cautiously the infantry moved forward through the firs. But suddenly a German popped up from a foxhole. It seemed as if he was about to surrender so the Americans motioned him forward. As he did so, another German sprang from his hiding place, stick grenade raised. The Americans were quicker off the mark. He went down riddled with bullets but Vaught now decided to let the big guns blast out the Germans. Round after round crashed into the hill, the earth shaking beneath the feet of the waiting infantrymen. Then they were moving forward once more and this time they took the hill without difficulty.
While A Company had been attacking, Captain Jack Wallace’s C Company had been advancing on the left down the railway track towards the village. Suddenly they came under fire and the inexperienced troops, thinking it was their own artillery firing short, sent out a call for the American batteries to lift their fire. The puzzled answer came back, ‘We’re not firing.’ They were under German fire for the first time.
Under Lieutenant Brogan, a squad dashed forward to probe for a weak spot. The Germans soon spotted the scouts, who came under intense fire. For a while they were pinned down. But Brogan’s Irish temper flared and he took off ‘like a big bird’, as Pfc Jones recalled. He dashed towards a nearby house and set up a fire base there to cover the advance of his stalled company.
Now C Company was moving once more, dashing from house to house in a series of spurts. A pillbox stopped them and Pfc Lloyd was ordered to grenade it. As he complained later, ‘I don’t know why in hell they always picked on me when they wanted a shitty job done. Well, anyway, there were Jones and I crawling right up to this pillbox. We were all set to throw out grenades when a Kraut came out waving a white flag.’11
Pfc de Wald, who ‘spoke the Kraut lingo’, asked their prisoner if there were any more Germans inside and to his surprise eighteen more men emerged. Just at that moment the enemy opened fire on the little party. Two Americans and three Germans went down in a confused mess of shattered limbs. The other Germans then decided they didn’t want to surrender after all and tried to use the grenades they had concealed about them. The GIs were quicker. Pfc Kirk dropped one with a shot between the eyes. His grenade exploded in his hands, blowing him to pieces.
The cost of this little advance down a street which in normal circumstances might have taken two minutes to walk was high. Out of the original twelve, only four were left. Dying in the snow, Pfc Kious, his body riddled with tracer bullets, croaked. ‘Those darn tracers burn a guy’s guts out. Have you any water?’ He died with the cry ‘mother’ on his parched lips.12
B Company had advanced on the decks of some Sherman tanks. Already they had suffered a few casualties from German artillery fire. Now they were almost approaching their objective when a dozen planes came out of the sky with startling suddenness. One of the men recognized them as American. ‘They’re friendly,’ he yelled, but the words died on his lips as two of them peeled off and started shooting up the artillery positions just behind them. ‘Chunks of steel were flying around like snow,’ he recalled, ‘the fragments clipping the limbs of trees. A piece of shrapnel struck my helmet and my ears rang for thirty minutes.’13 He hit the ground with the rest of the survivors and crawled into a nearby ditch. Nevertheless he was glad to spend the rest of the day there in hiding.
The attackers were going to ground almost everywhere in and around Philippsbourg and for the first time the American soldiers were observing the strange effects that violent action could have on quite normal young men. Sergeant Kelsey of B Company was just carrying a wounded NCO into a barn for treatment when he observed a soldier named Applegate attempting to set up his mortar when it was shattered by enemy fire. ‘If you have ever seen a man freeze in place, well, that is just what he did. He just froze bending and couldn’t go any further. Then as if a thunderbolt had struck him, he straightened up and ran like a wildcat for the barn.’14
Now, as Colonel Cheves, the historian of the 70th Infantry Division, observed later, ‘The battle for Phillippsbourg was no longer a battle of opposing infantrymen. It had developed into a duel of death between the big guns on both sides.’15 All that January afternoon the guns thundered back and forth as the infantry bogged down.
At Wingen Colonel Cheves’ Battalion had begun its attack, but already the Germans holding the ridges above the town were ripping into their ranks with machine guns, so cunningly concealed that the GIs had almost walked into them. One of the surprised infantrymen rallied immediately. As his CO wrote later, ‘Sergeant Hughie Shellem wasn’t afraid of anything. He yelled, “Let’s go and get ‘em, just like we did in basic training!” He darted forward. To his front in the trees he spotted a German machine gun. He whipped out a grenade and threw it. The gun ceased firing abruptly.’
Suddenly Shellem stopped, turned, and fell. He had been hit.
‘Medics!’ someone yelled.
A medic dashed forward. He had just reached Shellem when he, too, was hit. Shellem yelled, ‘Break open a case of Purple Hearts, guys. They’ve got me in the tail!’16
They were the last words he ever uttered. His fighting career was over minutes after it had started. He died there in the snow where he had fallen.
The attack started to bog down. As Cheves recorded later: ‘We were in a tough spot lying there in the snow while the unseen enemy blazed away about fifty yards to our front.’17 But the Colonel hadn’t reckoned with young Lieutenant Cassidy about whose ability to lead men in action he had previously had some doubts. The 22-year-old officer, who was a devout Catholic, had ‘no fear of dying as I had made my peace with God. However I had great apprehension that I would not measure up to what was expected of me as a soldier and leader of men.’18
He sprang to his feet and someone yelled, ‘Lieutenant Cassidy, you’d better keep down, you’re going to get killed standing up there!’19 Cassidy paid no heed. He just hunched his shoulders and went forward. His courage inspired the battalion. The mortarmen began to blast the German positions on the ridge. Even before the final round had landed, they were up and charging the Germans, who now began to fall back. In short order they cleaned out the woods and were ready for the new day’s attack on Wingen.
But even now the Germans displayed their greater experience. As Cassidy led his men through the woods, they came across a small house in a clearing. One of his squad leaders, Sergeant Wexler, saw someone waving a white flag in the gloom. He stood up, ordering his men not to fire, and called to the Germans in their own language to come out with their hands up. But it was the old, old trick. In that same instant a German machine gun opened up to the flank. Sergeant Wexler and several of his men fell. The trick had worked and the GIs had learned another bitter lesson. As another freezingly cold night fell on the wooded heights above Wingen, the men of the 70th Division told themselves grimly, as they squatted in their foxholes: ‘The only good Kraut is a dead Kraut.’
They were not the only ones tricked that bitter January day. Leclerc’s veterans of the 2nd French Armored Divison had now arrived at the front, split up into small combat groups in the Bitche salient. Advancing in a blizzard in support of American infantry, they were about to open fire on some tanks to their front when they realized they were American Shermans. Immediately the tank gunners, straining their eyes against the flying snow, relaxed their grips on the firing handles, telling themselves another US tank outfit had somehow taken over the point. Or perhaps they were retreating before a Boche attack?
Neither was the case. Suddenly the lead Sherman’s 75mm cannon spat fire. At that range the other Sherman couldn’t miss. The first of Leclerc’s tanks reeled to a sudden stop. It began to blaze immediately. The French had been caught out by an old Boche trick. The Germans had led their own column with a captured Sherman, still bearing the familiar white star of the Allied invasion force. The triumphant Germans surged forward, pouring fire into the stalled French tanks from all sides. Other Germans, dressed in US uniforms and driving captured jeeps, whipped in and out of the French column, tossing grenades to left and right and vanished into the whirling snow before the French knew what was happening to them.
Caught completely by surprise, their casualties mounting by the minute, the victors of Paris, Strasbourg and half a score of other battles, knew there was no future for them here. There was only one way out of this bloody confusion. Leclerc’s men fled.
As the fighting began to die down, with the Germans seemingly victorious everywhere, there seemed to be confusion and trickery at all levels of command in the US Seventh Army. From top to bottom nothing seemed to be going right.
Near Wingen an embattled Colonel Cheves, weary and sick, discovered that yet again there was no hot food for his exhausted men. Too sick to look into the matter himself, he sent his hot-headed executive officer, Major Boyd, to find out why. Minutes later Major Boyd strode into Cheves’ CP, choking with rage.
‘Do you know what I found out when I went back to check on those kitchen trucks?’ he yelled. ‘I’ll tell you. The whole goddam bunch of them were just sitting there, not doing a damn thing! Half of them were asleep. And you know what that supply officer of ours was doing? He was sitting there eating! I told him if I ever caught his ass around here again, I’d shoot him on sight!’20
At the highest level, too, confusion, even chaos, appeared to reign. The Germans’ real intentions seemed unclear, in spite of Ultra. Although it had been decided thirty hours ago that de Lattre’s French First Army would take over the defence of Strasbourg and the sector along the Rhine further north, nothing as yet had been seen of the French troops. The line of the Rhine was being held to north and south of Strasbourg, extending some twenty-nine miles, by five lone infantry battalions of Task Force Linden! Now some of these battalions were being thinned out even further since General Patch expected the French to begin taking over the sector. Although Sixth Army Group had warned Patch it would take a ‘tremendous effort’ for the French to take over by midnight on 5 January, Patch still carried out his orders. He began to withdraw his troops from the Rhine so that by the evening of the Fourth, he had the equivalent of two regiments, some six thousand men, defending a front which had been extended to thirty-one miles! It was a recipe for disaster, as a totally new threat began to loom on the horizon.
In Strasbourg itself the US Third Infantry Division, which had been guarding the Alsatian capital, had departed in accordance with the new plan. Now, apart from a few raw French territorials, all that remained there of the US Army was Task Force Linden’s postal officer, a port company of US Engineers and three men who produced a divisional newspaper!
It was not surprising that Charles Frey, the Senior Mayor of Strasbourg, decided it was time to send a belated Christmas card to General de Lattre lying sick in bed in his hotel HQ. Once again he had been stricken by the old congestion of the lungs, a result of being gassed as a young lieutenant in the First World War. The card bore a picture of Strasbourg’s famed single-towered Gothic cathedral and it bore these solemn words: ‘To General de Lattre, our only hope.’21
That night in his primitive aid station at Niederbronn, Major Ezra I. Silver, the 275th Infantry Regiment’s regimental surgeon, was busy working his way through the casualties from the day’s fighting in nearby Philippsbourg. He worked flat out, trying to keep up with the ever-increasing flow of torn young bodies, the floor slippery with blood, the bins overflowing with amputated limbs. With the medics were chaplains of all denominations, trying to calm the fears of the wounded, comforting them the best they could. One of the chaplains was the Baptist Minister D. B. Webber, an officer Silver did not particularly like. Silver had always thought of him ‘as a very stiff and unyielding person’. Now he was with the surgeon as he completed the treatment of a young infantryman who had been badly wounded in the abdomen and leg. Silver had pumped the boy full of morphine and, as the pain wore off, the young soldier opened his eyes and said to the surgeon, ‘Have you got a cigarette, Doc?’ To Silver’s surprise, Webber, who had always lectured the men on the vices of drinking, gambling and smoking, took a packet of cigarettes out of his own pocket, placed one between the lips of the wounded man and held a lighted match to it. The boy took a few drags of the cigarette.
Silver watched fascinated at this transformation in the Baptist chaplain. Suddenly, however, ‘every muscle, in the boy’s body tensed. His eyes rolled back and in a moment, he had passed on – from a blood clot which had reached his lung.’22
Ashen-faced, the Baptist chaplain went out of the aid station and, leaning against the wall outside, broke down and wept.