TWO

The 45 Division’s ‘Lost Battalion’ had nearly reached the end of its tether. For nearly a week the trapped men had been holding out on the hillside positions against the SS. There, some two miles north-west of the little village of Reipertswiller, some seven hundred men boxed in on Height 348 had hung on desperately, hoping, as each new dawn illuminated the lunar landscape of shell-holes and dead bodies, that relief would come that day.

Once, a brave young officer, Lieutenant Willis Talkington, had loaded a light tank with rations, ammunition and medical supplies and had fought his way through the SS lines. But trying to return the next morning, it was knocked out. All the tankers were killed and Lieutenant Talkington wounded, though he managed to struggle back to his own lines.

On the 18th the Germans attacked in force. G Company was overrun, with only thirty men escaping death or capture. Now the jubilant SS moved in their celebrated mountain artillery and started pounding the Third Battalion’s unprotected flanks. Casualties began to mount rapidly. One of the two survivors of the ‘Lost Battalion’ reported later: ‘The enemy artillery and mortar fire out there was the worst I’d ever seen. At least three-quarters of the men on the hill had a wound of some kind and a few had two or three. Until the last day we placed the wounded in holes with the other unwounded so that men who weren’t hurt could guard them and give them aid. We had no medical supplies, no food, and no heat to melt the snow for water. Once we found a box of rations underneath an ammunition pile. We gave the rations only to the wounded.’¹

The 45th’s First Battalion was ordered to attack and break through to the trapped ‘Thunderbirds’. They had hardly started when they were pinned down by enemy fire. A withdrawal was ordered and the SS, as always lightning-quick off the mark, rushed six machine guns into the gap left by the withdrawing Americans. The Second attacked again, but was mown down by the fire of those six machine guns. That was the end of the Second’s attempt to relieve the ‘Lost Battalion’.

All communication with the men on Height 348 broke down, save by radio. It was impossible to maintain land lines in that constant bombardment which both sides kept up. By 18 January the divisional artillery were firing a staggering total of 5000 high explosive shells daily in order to offer some protection to the trapped men. General Frederick, the Divisional Commander, ordered the 157th Regiment to which the ‘Lost Battalion’ belonged to hold its positions as long as possible in order not ‘to show weakness’.

A composite group of anti-tank gunners and heavy weapons men were thrown into the attack. They succeeded in knocking out some of the SS machine guns but were soon bogged down by intense enemy fire like all those who had tried before them. One of them, S/Sgt Bernard Fleming, a squad leader, recalled after the war: ‘My squad was in a ditch with three enemy machine guns on us. I asked for a volunteer to get aid. He got only about fifty yards when a machine gun killed him. I asked for another and he got about ten yards before he was shot through the legs. I went out and dragged him behind some cover, then yelled to the others that I was going to the rear myself. I don’t know how I made it, but I did. I saw Colonel Sparks and told him what had happened.’²

Colonel Sparks, who commanded the ‘Lost Battalion’, but who had not been trapped with his men, was desperate. Single-handed he took over a tank and drove through the mud and snow to Fleming’s trapped squad. Personally manning a 30-calibre machine gun, he fired a staggering 5000 rounds of ammunition at the enemy, while directing the tank’s big 76mm cannon. Somehow he managed to get the squad to shelter and then, seeing other wounded men lying helpless in a ditch, he jumped off the tank and personally carried them back to the Sherman and safety.

Still the slaughter went on. That night the Second Battalion of the 411th Infantry Regiment was brought up. On the morrow it would attack and relieve the ‘Lost Battalion’. Hurriedly they were briefed on their mission and the enemy’s strength – and it wasn’t pleasant hearing: ‘The enemy’s infiltration has enabled them to build up a line of estimated company strength in which a number of automatic weapons are emplaced and which is outposted by machine-gun positions. In many places in this line enemy forces are dug in under the rocks on the slopes of hills and because of the accuracy of the artillery and rocket fire brought down when any attempt is made to dislodge these troops, it is believed that there are artillery observers in this line, providing the support fire so necessary to its existence.’³

At dawn on 20 January, a day of snowfall and freezing wind, the men of the 411th’s Second Battalion prepared to move out. Their chances were slim. They were fighting not only a fanatical enemy, well dug in and armed with multiple automatic weapons, supported by artillery, but the appalling weather too. They kicked off in a raging snow storm and as the History of the 157th Regiment records laconically, ‘They were cut down!’

Hastily the battalion was reorganized, officers and NCOs shaking the shocked men into some sort of skirmish line. Once more, at noon, they set off again across the bare snowy fields, littered with their own dead, like bundles of abandoned rags, pocked here and there by smoking brown shell-holes like a work of giant moles. They didn’t stand a chance. As the 157th Regiment records yet again, ‘They were stopped cold.’

Now, virtually all hope of contacting the ‘Lost Battalion’ had vanished. Colonel O’Brien, commanding the 157th Regiment, tried frantically to obtain air support for his trapped men. But although the Air Corps were prepared to brave the German flak and have another go at trying to re-supply the ‘Lost Battalion’, the weather stubbornly refused to give them a break. All afternoon it continued to snow and sleet, with visibility down to two hundred yards.

Some time that afternoon O’Brien received a message from General Frederick ordering him to pull out the 157th. It was soon to be relieved of its mission in order to reorganize and fill out the gaps in its ranks after three weeks of combat. O’Brien knew he was beaten. Over a radio whose batteries were fading rapidly he ordered what was left of the ‘Lost Battalion’ to make a last desperate effort to break out. At half-past three the survivors radioed back: ‘We’re coming out. Give us everything you’ve got!’⁴

Firing every weapon that still could be fired, the unwounded and lightly wounded men of the ‘Lost Battalion’ tried to make a break for it to the south-west. Hauptsturmführer Degen’s SS men were waiting for them. Company K, what was left of it, ran straight into the German machine guns and were mown down mercilessly. One hour after they had signalled they were going to break out, K radioed that it was impossible to break through the enemy cordon surrounding the ridge on which they lay.

There were now only 125 fit men left of the 600-odd who had been trapped on the height over a week before. In a last message to them before radio communications broke down and the 157th withdrew, ‘abandoning them to the mercy of the enemy’ (as the 157th history puts it), O’Brien ordered the survivors to break up and infiltrate back to the Division’s lines. Only two men made it.

Even the hard-bitten veterans of the SS were impressed, as they rounded up the survivors of Companies K, L, I, C and G of the ‘Lost Battalion’ at five o’clock that afternoon. They found, according to the divisional history of the Sixth SS, Kampf unter dem Nordlicht: ‘456 enlisted men and 26 officers of the 45th Division, most of them wounded. Over two hundred dead were found and buried. Our own losses were 26 dead, 127 wounded and twelve reported missing.’⁵ The Battle of the Lost Battalion was over.

Back at the HQ of the withdrawing 157th Infantry Division, the lone two survivors, both soon to be evacuated due to nervous exhaustion, told their tales of what it had been like up there on the ridge, surrounded by the SS. One of them, Pfc Benjamin Melton, said, ‘We attacked toward the rear trying to breakthrough. . . . Ammunition was scarce, but we made progress until the enemy artillery zeroed in and some of the men were blown to bits. I saw one officer get a direct hit and just disappear. I was knocked to the ground several times... but I wasn’t wounded. We saw that we weren’t going to be able to get out so we went back to our holes where at least we had a little protection. Somehow the Germans sent word to us to surrender by seventeen hundred hours. But I remembered reading about the massacre at Malmédy¹ and I didn’t want to stay there and be killed in cold blood. Together with Private Walter Bruce and another fellow whose name I don’t remember, I set out to try to get back to our lines. . . . We kept halfway up the slopes of the hills and stayed away from all paths and trails. We saw some shoepaks’ marks in the snow and followed these for a while. Then we saw a shelter half of which covered a foxhole. We laid low until a GI looked from beneath it. You can imagine just how glad we were to see that.’⁶

The other survivor reported how the others had stuck white handkerchiefs around their rifles while the tankers had done the same to the muzzles of their cannon. Then they had placed their rifles muzzle first into the snow to signify they would fire no more. ‘We tried to get more of the fellows to go with us, but they were too scared to leave their holes. Being up on that ridge for a week was living hell. It was pretty cold all the time and we didn’t get much sleep. We had nothing to eat the last three or four days. The mortar and artillery fire kept us pinned down most of the time and most of the men were wounded from it, especially toward the end when it was thickest. . . . The Germans attacked in strong numbers. They were being mowed down with the help of our artillery, but they still kept coming.’⁷

What was left of the 157th Regiment trailed back the way it had advanced so confidently in what now seemed another age. They had lost over thirty-five percent of their effectives and in the next three days would absorb 1,000 replacements, including fifty officers. Altogether the 45th Division had lost ninety-seven officers and 1,599 enlisted men, a tremendous blood-letting, the like of which the Division had not experienced since the bad days in Italy the year before. As the regimental history of the 157th Infantry puts it bluntly, ‘January 21 brought defeat. The Regiment was ordered off the line, leaving behind six of its companies, cut off, surrounded, hopelessly outnumbered. In the mountains the snow deepened.’⁸

On the same day that the 45th Infantry Division received its orders to begin withdrawing to the Moder River line, two men of the 103rd Division staggered into their own lines, naked and stiff and blue with cold. They told the aidmen who tried to revive them that they had been captured by the Germans, who had stripped them of their clothes and then freed them.

At first the men of the 103rd were puzzled by the strange event, but soon they realized what the enemy was up to when more and more Germans dressed as Americans began to probe their positions. As the history of the 103rd Division noted: ‘Just before the move the people of Alsace became strangely quiet. The shining joy was gone from the eyes of this liberated people. . . . Tears welled in the eyes of young and old. Alsatians who had given up half or all of their homes to the Cactus (the divisional patch of the 103rd) asked hopefully, “Vous nix parti?” Most of the 103rd soldiers, unwilling to break that news and under orders to say nothing, lied in reply. “No, no”, they said, “just shifting troops”.⁹

But the civilians seemed to know what was going on. Those who had served with the Resistance told the GIs it would be death for them and their families if the Germans returned. The GIs were angry. ‘Why pull back?’ they asked. ‘Why leave these people to the mercy of the SS? Besides, won’t we have to take back all this hard-won ground in the spring?’ But it was no use. Orders had to be obeyed. Like thieves in the night the Americans began to withdraw that Saturday afternoon, hampered by Germans dressed in American uniform, so that nobody trusted anyone. It was recorded in the 103rd lines that ‘the children, always a barometer of native feeling, began to hurl icy snowballs at the troops. The soldiers didn’t care much. “We deserve it,” they thought.’¹⁰

It was no different in the villages which had been fought for so hard by the men of the 70th Infantry Division and which now had to be abandoned. Jean Beck, then a youngster in the village of Niederbronn, today a professor at the University of Arizona, recalled: ‘Until 20 January it was pretty quiet in Niederbronn. The Americans retreated south-east in the direction of Pfaffenhoffen. All Sunday long there was not one soldier left in the town. However, during the night we heard shooting. On Monday at about 10 a.m. the Germans came from Philippsbourg. In front were a few cars pulled by horses, the Germans being out of gas. Then came a cannon pulled by horses. Everybody else was on foot. We could not understand why the Americans had retreated.’¹¹

Thirty years later those bitter memories still lingered. A group of veterans attempting to visit the iron foundry in Niederbronn where they had been billeted in 1945 were turned away in 1979. The factory guard ‘explained his uncooperative attitude in a scolding about the January 1945 American abandonment of Niederbronn.’¹²

Some units evacuated the civilian population of the villages they had held to save them from reprisals. Thus the Hellcats’ military police company evacuated the civilians at Rohrwiller under fire and were the last to leave the area, save for the final skirmish line.

Others were more concerned with their own safety. The men of the 14th Armored were halted by 155mm cannon skidding off the pavé and blocking the road so that the traffic piled up for miles behind it. Now the freezing soldiers sat in their vehicles and thought, ‘If the Krauts attack now!’¹³ But the Germans didn’t attack and they passed through an empty Hatten, cows and pigs poking around in the desolation, looking for fodder.

‘There was relief, but not real relief,’ as their Divisional History records: ‘Behind were their friends and comrades, in the rubble of those towns and on those fields, and more of their friends and comrades were in the hospitals. . . . They felt a little as if they were giving up, as if they had fought and suffered and died in vain. . . . And it was a bitter grating night, that night, a night of tears in the soul and it snowed.’¹⁴

Some didn’t get away as easily as Sixth Corps HQ thought they would. The men of the 42nd Division’s 222nd Regiment had hardly started to move out at seven-thirty that Saturday evening when the Germans burst right through their final skirmish line. Hurriedly they tumbled out of their trucks and went into action, driving the Germans back into the night. Thereafter they left a retaining force of a squad from each company with orders to make as much noise as possible in order to create the impression that the Rainbow Division was still in the line. The rest stole away in a raging blizzard which wiped out their tracks as if they had never been there.

‘For the sake of propriety and then for the salvation of what the Japanese call “Face”,’ the historian of the 222nd Regiment wrote after the war, ‘it was a withdrawal. But in the minds and consciences of the men it was a retreat.’¹⁵

‘It was cold that night, a bitter cold that ate into our bones. It snowed that night, a blinding blanket which wet us to the skin. We retreated that night, a retreat that hurt our minds. But worse than all these things was what our eyes told our soul. Our eyes saw people, newly liberated French people, trudging down those snowbound roads with their houses on their backs and despair in their eyes. Hordes of civilians who had trusted us, moving once again to escape the imminence of a German advance.’¹⁶

Despite the snow and the icy roads the withdrawal of Brooks’ Sixth Corps to the new line of the River Moder was a success. By dusk on 21 January his divisions were well established and substantial reserves had been assembled to meet the expected continuation of the German efforts to retake Alsace. On this new line Brooks had employed the 45th and 103rd Divisions, the 79th with Task Force Linden (42nd Division) attached, the French 3rd Algerian Division, and his only fresh outfit, the veteran 36th Infantry Division. Opposing him from west to east on the same line were 6th SS Mountain Division, the 47th Volksgrenadier, 7th Parachute, 10th SS Panzer and 21st Panzer Divisions. The 553rd Volks-grenadier Division was still located in what had been the Gambsheim bridgehead area.

But as the twenty-first came to an end the only American division of Brooks’ Sixth Corps actually in contact with the enemy was the 36th Infantry, as the Germans probed for a weak spot in the new line through which to send their armour. They weren’t very successful – fifteen German tanks attempting a breakthrough south of Bischwiller were soon knocked out by the Texans’ tank destroyers and artillery and a hundred, enemy infantry trying to infiltrate their line near Kurtzenhausen were surrounded and mopped up.

That day the Germans contented themselves with following up after the withdrawing Americans, moving up fresh supplies, in particular ammunition. For the German High Command had already ordered the offensive to be continued. The new objective would be Saverne and a fresh attempt made to link up with the German Nineteenth Army attacking northwards from the Colmar Pocket.

So the survivors waited in their new positions for the Germans to come again and once more the snow began to fall.

But at last things were beginning to turn in the Americans’ favour. Up in the Ardennes five days earlier, on 16 January, the American northern and southern thrusts into the ‘Bulge’ had linked up at the Belgian town of Houffalize. Admittedly most of the German troops in the Bulge had managed to escape but the American line was restored and it could be only a matter of time before the Americans attacked once more and reached the positions on the German frontier from which they had been so rudely ejected nearly six weeks before.

On the same day that Patch had given the order for Brooks’ Sixth Corps to withdraw to the line of the Moder, the first Russian tanks had crossed the old Polish-German frontier. Now a new threat in the East loomed up for the German High Command, which would soon mean moving the Sixth SS Panzer Army from the Ardennes to meet the challenge. In the Ardennes, therefore, the Germans were now definitely on the defensive which meant that Eisenhower could begin moving troops from that area in order to start clearing up the ‘Alsatian sore’, which had been troubling him for so long. As early as 18 January he had ordered that the 101st Airborne Division should be moved from Bastogne to take their place in the line with Brooks’ Sixth Corps. Soon Eisenhower would move a whole US Corps to Alsace. His aim was to ensure that ‘King Jean’ would have enough strength finally to eradicate the Colmar Pocket which had been a thorn in his side ever since it had been created, by what Eisenhower believed was a lack of spirit and aggression on the part of the French.

Three days after the withdrawal to the Moder Line, Eisenhower met General Juin once again. Three days earlier de Lattre had counterattacked against the Germans attempting to break out of the Colmar Pocket, but without success. The weather had been in league with the enemy. The snow was knee-deep and progress would have been painfully slow even without other obstacles; but other obstacles were plentiful – mines, dug-in 88mm cannon, last-ditch-stand machine-gunners, sudden vicious counterattacks. Even the veteran 3rd US Infantry Division, fighting with the French, could make little progress. After forcing their way across the River Ill, the infantry called up the Shermans, only to gaze in horror as the bridge they had captured collapsed under the weight of the thirty-ton tank. The attack came to a standstill.

Thus it was that Eisenhower tried to put some fire into the French. Juin was horrified. As always la gloire de France was uppermost in his mind. He reported what Eisenhower had said to de Gaulle and the latter expressed surprise at the ‘severity of a judgement’ he believed was directed at the French Command and Army. The next day Juin was sent back to Versailles to protest to Eisenhower. The Frenchman reminded him that although the front of the French First Army had been doubled since New Year’s Day, it had not lost any ground. Indeed it had just started an offensive, in spite of enormous difficulties. Maliciously Juin added that it was difficult not to make a comparison ‘between the valiant efforts they furnish and the goings-on in the neighbouring Army further to the north.’¹⁷ The dig was obvious. The French had stood and slogged it out; the Americans had retreated!

Having made his dig, Juin hurried to reassure the Supreme Commander that ‘if errors have been committed . . . the fact remains, nevertheless, that the important thing today is that you win the battle of Alsace as you have won the battle of the Ardennes. That, in my opinion, as I told you yesterday, should be your sole preoccupation of the moment.’¹⁸

As always Eisenhower backed off when anyone talked tough to him. After all, he saw it as his job to try and hold the alliance together. He told Juin that he had never ‘compared unfavourably the troops and leaders of one nationality with respect to any other.’¹⁹

The next day Eisenhower saw de Gaulle and told him he had no intention of criticizing the French First Army. All he wanted them to do was to clear the Colmar Pocket with the same élan they had shown in Italy and the drive from the beaches. De Gaulle wasn’t flattered. He had no intention of frittering away French manpower in what was basically a side-show. The French Army would be needed in full strength for the battles to come in Germany. As always de Gaulle was inclined to let the Americans win his victories for him, if they did not involve French prestige. He pleaded that his First French Army was too weak in infantry and artillery to undertake more than just local actions in the near future. With that Eisenhower had to be content, the problem of the Colmar Pocket still unsolved. He expressed his appreciation for this ‘frank exchange of views on little problems that seemed at the moment to be difficult’, but which in the end would ‘always lead to a mutually satisfactory understanding’.²⁰

Understandably ‘King Jean’ was not a very happy man when he drove to attend the conference at the 3rd US Infantry Division’s command post at the small Alsatian town of Ribeauville on 24 January. His forces had been stalled everywhere and ‘a certain pessimism hung over the conference’. He listened to his divisional commanders present their ‘balance sheets’ and then he turned to General Barr, Devers’ Chief-of-Staff. ‘You can see,’ he told the American, ‘we cannot extricate ourselves without additional means. So give me the 21st Corps (American) which has nothing to do on the Sarreguemines side. Then you will see.’²¹

Barr smiled in his usual friendly manner, but said nothing. He let ‘King Jean’ get on with his attempts to cheer up his crestfallen divisional commanders and give them their orders for the following day. When ‘King Jean’ was finished Barr spoke for the first time. ‘If we agree to your request, General, when will the business be finished?’ King Jean consulted his map for a moment. ‘On 10 February at the latest,’ he announced. (he would be one day out). ‘Good,’ Barr said and that was all!²²

Six hours later, back at his command post at Rothau, ‘King Jean’ received a telegram from Devers which read: ‘The 21st US Army Corps with its organic elements and the reinforced 75th U.S.I.D will be put under the orders of the French 1st Army immediately. The French 1st Army will place the 3rd and 28th U.S.I.D under the orders of the US 21st Army Corps. . . . General Milburn, commanding the US 21st Army Corps will . . . report to the General commanding the French 1st Army at Schirmeck at 10.00 in the 25th January’.²³

Although it was half-three in the morning, ‘King Jean’ was beside himself with joy. ‘God be praised,’ he wrote later. ‘Now we should have them! . . . With its three army corps, the French 1st Army had victory in its grasp.’²⁴

 

1 See C. Whiting, Massacre at Malmédy, for further details.