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 not enough food, through daytime mud “that was knee deep, 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 11/2 hours to cover a hundred meters.” Sgt. 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 and where more reinforcements were headed, “It was certainly good news. We felt it was the equivalent of saying we were returning to the United States.”
The journey to Elsenborn, however, Swanson remembered “as the worst march of that week,” because of the combination of mud, ice, frozen ground, and snow, seemingly all at once and all along the route. A high-pressure system had moved in from the Atlantic on December 18, temporarily opening the skies so that the Allied air forces could fly a few support missions and starting a daytime thaw that slowed German tanks as much as American infantry. After darkness fell on the 20th the ground began to freeze again; on the 21st there was a hodgepodge of snow, blizzards, fog, and sleet. Through this miserable weather, Charlie Company marched.
“We left most of our supplies behind,” Swanson said, “but our weapons were always ready. Throughout this entire journey our men made their way, cold, tired, miserable, stumbling, cursing the Army, the weather and the Germans, yet none gave up.”
They arrived on the ridge around midnight, and although “we were beyond exhaustion,” the men dug in. A good thing, because at dawn a German artillery shelling came down on them. Too late, the Germans had realized the critical importance of Elsenborn. Swanson’s company was well dug in, but nevertheless took seven casualties. Four of them were sergeants, “which opened up the field for promotions.” One of those hit was Swanson, who got wounded in the neck by shrapnel. “I couldn’t make a sound because blood was pouring down my throat.” Litter bearers brought him to an aid station, where a chaplain bent over him. “I could dimly make out his collar ornament which was a Star of David. He, in turn, misread my dogtag, thought I was a Catholic and gave me last rites. I remember thinking that I really had all bases covered.”1
As noted, Elsenborn was the Little Round Top of the Battle of the Bulge. Peiper could have taken it without difficulty on the 17th or 18th, but he stuck with Hitler’s orders and moved west rather than north once through the American line. The low ridge lay across the direct line from the Eifel to Antwerp and should have been the main objective of the Germans on the northern flank. But the Americans got there first and dug in. Only a direct frontal assault could oust them from the position.
The Germans tried. “The first night at Elsenborn is unforgettable,” Captain Roland of the 99th wrote fifty years later. “The flash and roar of exploding shells was incessant. In all directions the landscape was a Dante’s inferno of burning towns and villages.” The men of his regiment, the 394th Infantry, dug furiously throughout the night. “We distributed ammunition and field rations, cleaned and oiled weapons, dug foxholes and gun emplacements in the frozen earth, planted antitank mines, strung barbed wire, studied maps and aerial photographs by shielded flashlights, plotted fire zones for machine guns, mortars, and artillery, put in field telephone lines to the various command posts, and set up an aid station to receive a fresh harvest of casualties.
“Everyone was aware that there would be no further withdrawal, whatever the cost. Moreover, I could sense in the demeanor of the troops at all ranks that this resolution was written in their hearts.”
Enemy mortar and artillery fire hit the 99th. American artillery fired continuously. At night the temperature fell well below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. No GI had winter clothing. “The wind blew in a gale that drove the pellets of snow almost like shot into our faces. Providing hot food on the front line became impossible, and we were obliged to live exclusively on K rations. Remaining stationary in damp, cold foxholes, with physical activity extremely limited, we began to suffer casualties from trenchfoot. . . . In time the combination of extreme cold, fatigue, boredom, and hazard became maddening. A few men broke under the strain, wetting themselves repeatedly, weeping, vomiting, or showing other physical symptoms.” But there was no more retreating.2
The fighting was at its most furious in the twin villages of Rocherath and Krinkelt, on the eastern edge of the ridge. There a battalion from the 2nd Infantry Division engaged a German armored division. The Germans and Americans were intermingled in a wild melee that included hand-to-hand combat. American tank crews knew they could not take on the big German tanks toe-to-toe, so they allowed the Panthers and Tigers to close on their positions for an intricate game of cat and mouse among the twin villages’ streets and alleys. Shermans remained hidden and quiet behind walls, buildings, and hedgerows, waiting for a German tank to cross their sites. Most engagements took place at ranges of less than twenty-five meters. The 741st Tank Battalion knocked out twenty-seven panzers at a cost of eleven Shermans. The 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion destroyed seventeen enemy tanks at a cost of two of their own vehicles.
The 57mm antitank guns of the Americans were too cumbersome with too little firepower to have much effect; the bazooka, however, was highly effective within the villages, especially after dark, when bazooka teams could work their way close enough to the German tanks to get in a killing shot on the tracks. On December 21 the Germans threatened a battalion command post: the CO and his staff dropped their radios and maps, picked up rifles and bazookas, and joined the fight.3
In Closing with the Enemy, Michael Doubler wrote, “The fight for the Elsenborn Ridge saw some of the most bitter defensive battles in the ETO.”4 Sgt. Arnold Parish of the 2nd Infantry agreed. He had made the D-Day landing, when he won the Bronze Star, had been wounded on June 9, and had rejoined his unit in August, so he had four months of combat by mid-December. Elsenborn was the toughest. Men who had thought they had seen it all broke under the German shelling. “We were helpless,” Parish recalled, “and all alone and there was nothing we could do, so I prayed to God.” During the nights, “The time went by very slow as I tried to keep warm but that wasn’t possible so I thought about my mother and hoped she didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. I was glad I was not married.”
Suddenly German floodlights came on, shining against the clouds, and German tanks rolled forward. Parish remembered thinking, Perhaps this is the end of the world. But within seconds he and his platoon were firing back. The Germans were repulsed.5
Southwest of Elsenborn, the 82nd Airborne Division was arriving to bolster the northern shoulder and stop Peiper’s rush westward. On December 20, Col. Ben Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, arrived at Trois-Ponts, where the Salm and Amblève Rivers flowed together. Vandervoort put Company E on the east side of the Salm, while the remainder of the battalion established an MLR among and in the houses along the river on the west bank. Behind the MLR a sheer bluff rose. E Company, on the opposite bluff, had a 57mm gun set up on a shoulder of the road, twenty meters behind the dug-in infantry, who were on the edge of a wood. Lt. William Meddaugh, the CO, put his bazooka teams just ahead and to the left of the infantry. By 0300 hours they were in position to ambush any German force coming from the east. There they waited, no fires, no lights, no smoking, all wide-awake.
German armor—Peiper’s—was coming on, accompanied by infantry. Peiper had a twenty-to-one manpower advantage over Vandervoort, and a colossal firepower superiority. The American paratroopers had no tanks, no tank destroyers, no heavy artillery, only that little 57mm antitank gun, six bazookas, and the ultra-light airborne 75mm pack howitzer for artillery support. The 505th PIR was an elite outfit, to be sure, but not all that elite, because after Normandy and Holland it had more replacements who had only just arrived in Europe than it did veterans. But the replacements were volunteers who had qualified with five jumps and had some additional training after joining the 505th.
The 505th had learned new skills and techniques during its time in Holland. It applied one lesson learned even before daylight. At 0315 hours, an armored German vehicle approached E Company’s position. As it rounded a curve on the road as it wound its way down to the river, a bazooka team bushwhacked it. After the German crew fled, the paratroopers moved their minefield to the far side of the burning hulk. At 0400 a second armored vehicle blew itself up on the mines.
At first light, 0800 hours on December 21, Peiper attacked E Company with infantry and five tanks. The bazookas and the antitank gun knocked out the armor; the men in the foxholes drove back the infantry (a few of whom fell into E Company foxholes) with great loss.I From an OP on the high ground on the west bank, the Americans could see Peiper’s tanks, self-propelled artillery, and mobile flak batteries maneuvering for another attack.
Vandervoort sent F Company across the river, to support E Company with a flank attack, but it had little effect on Peiper’s men and tanks, who were massing for a decisive attack. Vandervoort later remarked that with what amounted to an armored division about to attack an infantry company, “disaster seemed imminent, but not one man of E company left his fighting position.” Vandervoort jumped into a jeep and had his driver take him over the bridge and climb to the bluff above the east bank. He arrived at Meddaugh’s CP just as the first wave of German infantry attacked. They were supported by tanks firing their cannon and machine guns, spraying the American positions.
Enough, Vandervoort decided. He jumped out of his jeep and ran to Meddaugh. “Pull out,” he ordered, “AND DO IT NOW!”
As Meddaugh passed on the word, the Germans began to close in, one of them calling out in English, “Halt Americans! You are surrounded.” Meddaugh made no reply. Vandervoort meanwhile began driving down the bluff to the river bank, “urged on by swarms of 9mm rounds from Schmeisser machine pistols.” Halfway down the bluff, he passed the antitank gun. It had jackknifed into a ditch and had to be abandoned by its crew.
On the bluff, Meddaugh had his men withdraw using lessons from close-quarter fighting in Holland. In Vandervoort’s words, “the men intuitively improvised walking fire in reverse. Moving backward and using the trees for cover, they simply out-shot any pursuer who crowded them too closely.”
When the GIs reached the edge of the bluff they had to jump down a sheer cliff, pick themselves up (there were a number of broken bones and many sprained ankles), run a 100-meter gauntlet across a road, cross over a railroad track, and wade the icy river. GIs in the town along the bank, and up on the bluff behind, fired at any German who showed on the opposite bluff. E Company made it to the town, but with 33 percent casualties, all of whom were carried to the battalion aid station in Trois-Ponts. When every man was accounted for, engineers blew the bridge. It was a textbook withdrawal, except that in this case there was no text, as the U.S. Army had not bothered to teach its soldiers how to retreat.
Vandervoort described the E Company survivors as they came into Trois-Ponts: “They were a tired, ragged, rugged looking bunch. But what I saw was beautiful. About one hundred troopers, with weapons and ammunition, still ready to fight.”
Peiper brought some Panther tanks to the edge of the bluff. They started to hose down the streets of Trois-Ponts with their machine guns. Then, as Vandervoort recalled, “A Tiger tank appeared on the edge of the bluff road. The menacing white skull-and-cross-bones of the S.S. insignia, and the black-and-white battle cross painted on its armor were clearly visible. It depressed its long-barreled, bulbous muzzle and began firing point-blank down into our houses.”
A couple of bazooka rounds hit the Tiger, but only bounced off. Vandervoort called for the mortar platoon to go after the tank. The men selected white phosphorus, to reduce German visibility. “With amazing accuracy,” Vandervoort said, “the first round hit the Tiger right in front of the turret. Searing phosphorous globules arched in all directions. Enemy infantry soldiers near the tank scattered like quail. The driver slapped the now-not-so-menacing monster into reverse and accelerated back into the concealment of the woods.”
Now another member of the team could go to work. The division artillery observer could spot the German vehicles as they regrouped back from the bluff. He called in fire that forced the enemy to take to the wood, there to spend the remainder of the daylight hours. After dark, German infantry tried to ford the Salm, but were beaten back.6
The Battle of Trois-Ponts was a subject Peiper didn’t much want to talk about in his interview with Ken Hechler. He would say only that after leaving Stavelot, “we proceeded at top speed toward Trois Ponts in an effort to seize the bridge there, but the enemy blew up the bridge in our faces.”
Hechler: “What was the importance of the bridge in Trois-Ponts; in other words, what do you think you might have been able to do if you had captured the bridge intact?”
Peiper: “If we had captured the bridge intact and had had enough fuel, it would have been a simple matter to drive through to the Meuse River early that day.”
Later, Hechler asked Peiper, “What orders did you receive from headquarters?” Peiper sniffed cynically, then said, “I got one message that I should report immediately the location of my dressing stations for the wounded, and that unless I reported the amount of gas I still had on hand, I could not hope for any additional gasoline.”
Peiper went north to find a bridge, but never found one he could take. Trois-Ponts turned out to be his high-water mark. When Hechler asked him what he would have done differently, he spoke not of the battle there but more general subjects: get more gasoline, no artillery preparation, keep the horses off the roads, attack with combined arms, take along bridging units with the point, and, last, “Put a general at each street corner to regulate traffic.” Peiper indicated that there were two good reasons for such a move, and one of them was not traffic control.7
Peiper’s opposite number, General Gavin, rather agreed with Peiper about the quality of German generals, but he put Colonel Peiper in that category, too. Thirty-four years after the battle, Gavin wrote in a letter to Vandervoort, “I have never been able to understand why the Panzer Commander upon reaching the Salm did not bring up all his infantry and make a night assault, establishing a bridgehead during darkness and getting armor across before daylight.” Such a combined arms attack would have worked, Gavin felt, and “we had very little behind Trois-Ponts.” Gavin denounced Peiper’s generalship, calling it “inexcusable.” Then he thought about Peiper’s problems with the German high command, and couldn’t help comparing the mess that existed in the Wehrmacht with the generally smooth-functioning SHAEF. He was struck by another thought: “Sometimes one suspects that some of the senior German officers, figuring the war was lost anyway, did not want to win.”8
SHAEF made its own mistakes. On December 20 Eisenhower decided to divide command of the battle between Montgomery and Bradley. His reasoning was that the German advance in the center of the Bulge had split the U.S. First and Third Armies and severed Bradley’s telephone communications with Hodges. As Bradley’s headquarters were on the southern flank, Eisenhower decided to put Montgomery in command of the First and Ninth American Armies on the northern shoulder of the Bulge. Such a command arrangement was what Montgomery had all along been proposing and Eisenhower refusing, which hurt, while the transfer of command at the height of a crisis made it appear as if the Americans had to turn to the British to rescue them, which hurt even more. But Eisenhower insisted it had to be done.
When SHAEF Chief of Staff General Bedell Smith called Bradley on the telephone to inform him of the transfer, Smith pointed out that it was a logical move. Bradley protested at the implied insult, but added, “Bedell, it’s hard for me to object. Certainly if Monty’s were an American command, I would agree with you entirely.”
Eisenhower got on the phone an hour or so later. By then Bradley was set against any change. “By God, Ike,” he shouted into the phone, “I cannot be responsible to the American people if you do this. I resign.”
Eisenhower, shocked and angry, took a deep breath, then said softly but firmly, “Brad, I—not you—am responsible to the American people. Your resignation therefore means absolutely nothing.”
There was a pause, then another protest from Bradley, but this time without any threats. Eisenhower signed off, “Well, Brad, those are my orders.”
After hanging up, Eisenhower placed a call to Montgomery to inform him of the command switch. The telephone connection was unfortunately indistinct. Montgomery heard what he wanted to hear and attached his own meaning to the garbled conversation. He told Field Marshal Alan Brooke that Eisenhower “was very excited, and it was difficult to understand what he was talking about; he roared into the telephone, speaking very fast.” The only thing Montgomery understood was that Eisenhower was giving him command of U.S. First and Ninth Armies. “This was all I wanted to know. He then went on talking wildly about other things.”
Montgomery hung up, got into his jeep, and headed off to visit First and Ninth Army headquarters. A British officer who accompanied him said he strode into Hodges’s headquarters “like Christ come to cleanse the temple.” According to Montgomery’s account, however, Hodges was “delighted to have someone to give him firm orders.”9
Montgomery’s perceptions were often unusual, sometimes unique. He had an active fantasy life, for example imagining that he had always intended to hold at Caen so Bradley could break out. His fantasies were fed by the adulation of the British public, exacerbated by his sense of how unfair it was that Ike, not he, was the Supreme Commander, topped by his realization that Britain was now a junior partner whose contributions to the AEF were shrinking while those of the Americans were swelling.
His attitude as he met with the American Army commanders was, Well here you have these magnificently equipped men and such mountains of equipment and you’ve gone and botched it terribly. I predicted all this. But Ike wouldn’t listen, so now I’ll have to straighten out this mess.
But that, too, was all fantasy. He had not predicted the German counteroffensive, indeed was preparing to go home for Christmas when the blow was struck. Nor did he take control of the battle, as he imagined himself doing.
No one did. Once Eisenhower set the broad objectives—to hold firm along Elsenborn Ridge, to stop the Germans short of the Meuse, and to prepare a coordinated counterattack against the shoulders of the Bulge—this was not a general’s battle. At Bastogne, at Elsenborn, at St.-Vith, at Trois-Ponts, it was a battalion commanders’ battle, or the company commander’s, or the squad leaders’. Putting Monty in command on the northern flank had no effect on the battle, but it was threatening to have a bad effect on the amity of the British-American alliance.
If Hitler made his biggest investment in Peiper, he made his best in Otto Skorzeny’s battalion, which had spread out in Peiper’s wake. Throughout the Bulge, those 500 or so volunteers in American uniforms were having an impact beyond their numbers. They turned signposts, causing great confusion. They spread panic. Once it was known that the Skorzeny battalion was behind the lines, the word went out with amazing speed—trust no one. The GIs, especially the MPs, questioned everyone, right up to Bradley—who plays center field for the Yankees? Who is Mickey Mouse’s wife? What is the capital of Illinois? General Bradley was detained for answering Springfield to the last question; the MP insisted it was Chicago. One general was arrested and held for a few hours because he put the Chicago Cubs in the American League.
By December 21, however, a number of Skorzeny’s men had been captured (most of them were shot) and the remainder were trying to get back inside German lines. Sgt. Edgar Lauritsen of the 82nd Airborne had a typical experience. While a German tank was shelling his CP, two jeeploads of soldiers in American uniforms, a captain and eight enlisted men, pulled up in front, got out, and started walking around the other side of the house toward the German lines. Lauritsen hollered to them that they were going the wrong way, but they ignored him. His suspicions aroused, he demanded to know their outfit.
“Ninety-ninth,” the captain called over his shoulder.
“What outfit in the 99th?”
“Headquarters,” said the captain, but the word tested his English—it came out slightly guttural.
“Halt!” Lauritsen bellowed. The captain and his men started running. Lauritsen shot the captain in the back, but his companions grabbed him and dragged him to the German lines.10
Another German in an American officer’s uniform drove a jeep to a roadblock, where he was interrogated by a battalion staff officer. The German’s speech and identification papers were flawless—too flawless, it turned out. The authentic Adjutant General’s Office Identification Card, carried by all GIs, had printed at the top: “Not a Pass—For Indentification Only.” With Teutonic exactness, the German forger had corrected the spelling, so that the forged card read “Identification.” That missing “n” cost the German officer his life.11
One MP at headquarters, 84th Infantry Division, had a bright idea. He asked men he stopped at roadblocks their shirt size, on the assumption that Germans accustomed to the metric system would have trouble remembering a 141/2-32 shirt wouldn’t fit a big man.12
Overall, the GIs spent an inordinate amount of time checking on each other. Meanwhile, a rumor started by captured members of Skorzeny’s battalion was widely and rapidly circulated—it was that the main mission was to assassinate Eisenhower. Thus everyone at SHAEF became super security-conscious. Insistent guards sealed Eisenhower into his headquarters at the Trianon Palace. Guards with machine guns took up places all around the palace, and when Eisenhower went to Verdun or elsewhere for a meeting he was led and followed by armed guards in jeeps. That kind of security, commonplace around the world a half-century later, was so unusual for SHAEF in 1944 that it left an impression of panic. Stories to that effect were what Montgomery had in mind when he described Eisenhower’s telephone conversation to Brooke.
But Eisenhower was far from panicked. On December 21, he expressed his mood and perception in a rare Order of the Day. “We cannot be content with his mere repulse,” he said of the Germans. “By rushing out from his fixed defenses the enemy may give us the chance to turn his great gamble into his worst defeat. . . . Let everyone hold before him a single thought—to destroy the enemy on the ground, in the air, everywhere—destroy him!”13
His confidence was great because his basic situation was so good. He was rushing reinforcements to the battle to take advantage of the German audacity, men and equipment in great numbers. Maj. John Harrison, at First Army headquarters, wrote his wife on December 22: “There is something quite thrilling about seeing all of the troops and armour moving in on the Kraut. There has been a steady stream for days and tho the Belgians are mighty worried I am sure they are amazed at the sights they see. The armor moves about 25 miles an hour in and out of towns and to see and hear a tank roar thru a fair sized town, turn on one tread and never slow down is quite a sight. The Belgians still line the streets and tho they are not as joyous as when we first moved in, they still wave and show their appreciation.”14
In the middle of the Bulge, the Germans had made better progress than Peiper had managed, but they had been unable to exploit the breakthrough because the 101st Airborne and elements of the 10th Armored Division got to Bastogne before they did. Although the Germans surrounded the Americans they were denied the use of the roads and flowing around Bastogne was time-consuming. So from December 19 on they tried to overrun the place, with apparently overwhelming strength. Altogether they launched fifteen divisions at Bastogne, four of them armored, supported by heavy artillery.
Inside the perimeter, casualties piled up in the aid stations. Most went untreated, because on December 19 a German party had captured the division’s medical supplies and doctors. Nevertheless, spirits stayed strong. Corp. Gordon Carson took some shrapnel in his leg and was brought into town. At the aid station, “I looked around and never saw so many wounded men. I called a medic over and said, ‘Hey, how come you got so many wounded people around here? Aren’t we evacuating anybody?’ ”
“Haven’t you heard?” the medic replied.
“I haven’t heard a damn thing.”
“They’ve got us surrounded—the poor bastards.”15
As the battle for Bastogne raged, it caught the attention of the world. The inherent drama, the circled-wagons image, the heroic resistance, the daily front-page maps showing Bastogne surrounded, the early identification of the division by PR men in the War Department, combined to make the 101st the most famous American division of the war. As the division history put it, the legend of the 101st was aided by those maps “showing one spot holding out inside the rolling tide of the worst American military debacle of modern times.”16
But the 101st was not alone inside Bastogne. A combat command team of the 10th Armored was there, along with supporting units from the combat engineers, anti-aircraft units, and more. What stands out about the defense of Bastogne was not so much infantrymen in foxholes holding off the German tanks as the combined-arms approach the GIs used. It was something to learn for the paratroopers, who had in Normandy and Holland fought pretty much on their own.
Now they had tanks around them, but no advanced knowledge of the techniques of infantry fighting with tanks. Even as the battle raged, Col. William Roberts, CO of the 10th Armored team, circulated among the paratroopers, giving them tips on the proper employment of tanks, their capabilities and limits. Roberts’s chief criticism of the 101st was that the junior officers tended to use tanks as immobile pillboxes to block roads; Roberts told them to keep the tanks moving and to use them as a mobile reserve.
Inside the thirty-kilometer perimeter encompassing Bastogne, Lt. Col. Harry Kinnard, the 101st’s operations officer, organized the four infantry regiments into a combined-arms team, each with its permanent attachment of tanks, TDs (tank destroyers), and antitank guns. Each team was responsible for a roadblock, for a crossroads, or for a mutually supporting position on prominent terrain.17
Corp. Robert Bowen, 401st Glider Infantry, 101st, a wounded veteran of Normandy and Holland, was a squad leader on the western sector of the perimeter. At dawn on December 21—following a below-zero night, with ankle-deep snow on the ground—Bowen’s CO told him the enemy had slipped through and had established a roadblock between the 101st and Bastogne. “That roadblock has to be taken out, Bowen,” the CO said. He gave Bowen two squads and told him to get at it.
“Short, sweet and scary,” Bowen characterized the order. He wished the regiment had an officer to put in charge, but it didn’t. He met with his men, discussed the situation, and agreed that there had to be a better way than just charging. At that moment, a tank appeared.
“The colonel told me to run down this road and shoot the shit out of those houses,” the sergeant in command of the tank said, in a cocky way. Bowen informed him that the Germans in the houses had panzerfausts. “His mood suddenly changed,” Bowen remarked, “as he had run into panzerfausts before.”
“What’ve you got in mind, then?”
Bowen proposed that he send his squads down each side of the road, with support from enfilading fire from a squad to the left. But, he lamented, “I don’t think we’ve got enough firepower to drive them out.”
“Suppose I take care of the houses with my cannon?” the tanker asked. “My .50-cal can rake those foxholes dug in around them. OK?”
“OK?” Bowen replied. “Man, you’ve just come from heaven.”
They went at it. The tank began to fire, cannon and machine gun. The squad on the left laid down more fire. Bowen’s squads moved down the road, using marching fire. Within less than a half hour, some of the Germans were fleeing while others threw up their hands. “It was a textbook attack,” Bowen said, “working better than anything we had ever done in practice.”
At the roadblock, there were a dozen dead Germans, another score of wounded. “I noted how young they were, nothing but teen-aged boys.” The tank sergeant was euphoric. He told Bowen, “I’ve been in this shit since D plus twelve and seen a lot of things. But I never saw anything like this. You guys are tops in my book.”
The threat met and defeated, Bowen went back to his original position. That night the thermometer plunged again. “The night passed like a horrible dream,” Bowen remembered. “Nothing I could do could keep me warm. I begged for dawn to come.”
When it did, a heavy ground fog reduced visibility to near zero. Germans used the cover to move in on the American positions; their white camouflage cover helped hide them. As Bowen put it, they were “Opaque figures in snow suits emerging from nowhere.” A fierce firefight ensued. Bowen looked for the tank that had been so helpful the previous day. He found it, badly damaged. The sergeant had been firing the .50-caliber when an antitank shell hit the turret just under him. His face was horribly cut by shrapnel. Bowen got him to an aid station, then returned to the original position.
Things couldn’t have been much worse. Germans were scattered in a semicircle around him, firing at his men in their holes. There were eleven German tanks supporting the infantry. Bowen could do nothing about them because the 57mm antitank gun assigned to his team was useless—its wheels were frozen solid in the ground and it could not be moved. A TD from the 10th Armored had a frozen turret and had no way to thaw it. But at the critical moment, a second TD appeared. Sgt. Chester Sakwinski was in command. He held the enemy tanks at bay, rising from a sunken courtyard to fire at the enemy, then backing down to escape the counterfire.
Other members of the team were becoming fully involved. The heavy weapons platoon sent 81mm mortar fire on the enemy. A forward observer directed artillery—but there wasn’t much because of a severe shell shortage in Bastogne. A half-track pulled up, bringing a squad of fighting men forward.
Bowen checked his line. “Some of their wounded lay in the snow, one babbling incoherently and the other screaming. German dead were sprawled in contorted positions.” But his own casualties were mounting. An NCO, who had been in jail in Reims on December 16 and volunteered to rejoin the company, got killed. Bowen picked up a bazooka and three shells from the half-track, took careful aim at a Tiger 200 meters distant, fired—and grazed the turret. The Tiger turned its 88mm cannon on Bowen’s position. He decided he had better save the remaining two rounds and disappeared into his foxhole. But a mortar shell found him. He was badly wounded and, shortly thereafter, captured. The German doctors treated him, then sent him east, to a POW camp.18 So it went for the armored troopers and airborne infantry in Bastogne.
Lt. Helmuth Henke was an aide to Gen. Fritz Bayerlein, CO of the Panzer Lehr Division, which had been reconstituted after the pounding it had taken in France in the fall. On December 22, Bayerlein handed him a letter, “From the German Commander to the U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne.” It demanded an “honorable surrender to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation.” Bayerlein told Henke, who spoke good English, to join a colonel from the staff, get a couple of enlisted men and two white flags, approach the American lines, arrange a local truce, and deliver the letter to the American CO.
All went well. The GIs stopped firing when the Germans did and the four-man party waved its white flags. The Germans came into American lines, where Henke told a lieutenant that he had a message for the American CO. The lieutenant blindfolded the Germans, put them in a jeep, and drove to Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s headquarters in Bastogne. A staff officer there asked Henke, “What is your business?” Henke, still blindfolded, handed over Bayerlein’s written demand.
As McAuliffe read, his staff officers bombarded Henke with questions: “Why do you shoot prisoners?” “Why are German soldiers fighting in American uniforms?”
Henke replied, “I know nothing of such things and cannot imagine them happening.”
Then a new voice said, “Take them back,” as the staff officer placed McAuliffe’s reply into Henke’s hand. The Germans were driven back to the front, where their blindfolds were removed and a brief cease-fire arranged. Henke finally had a chance to read McAuliffe’s response. It said, “Nuts.”
He looked at his American escort, Col. Joseph Harper. “Nuts?” he asked, in disbelief.
“It means, ‘Go to hell,’ ” Harper replied.
Henke knew what that meant. Before departing for his own lines, “I told the American officer what I told every soldier whom I took prisoner, ‘May you make it back to your homeland safe and sound.’ ”
“Go to hell,” was Harper’s reply.19
Another face-to-face encounter between the enemies went better. German Lt. Gottfried Kischkel, an infantry officer outside Bastogne, was in his foxhole on the afternoon of December 22. An American tank was hit and began burning. Kischkel heard cries for help from the tank. “So I crawled to it. An American was hanging out of the hatch, badly wounded. I pulled him out and dragged him to a ditch, where I applied first aid.”
Kischkel looked up from his bandaging and saw several Americans staring down with their M-1s pointed at him. An American lieutenant asked, in German, “What are you doing?”
“He cried for help and I helped,” Kischkel replied. The Americans put their heads together. Then the lieutenant asked, “Do you want to be taken prisoner, or do you want to go back to your comrades?”
“I must return to my comrades.”
“I expected no other answer,” the American said. He told Kischkel to take off.20
On December 23 the skies cleared. The Allied air force, grounded for a week, went into action. Medium bombers hit German transport facilities, especially bridges and rail yards around and behind the Eifel. Jabos shot up German vehicles and columns. Capt. Gerd von Fallois, commanding a tank unit outside Bastogne, called it “psychologically fantastic. Airplanes everywhere. Thousands. Shitting all over us. I didn’t see a single Luftwaffe plane.”21
The American transport planes, C-47s, dropped tons of supplies into Bastogne—medicine, food, blankets (although not enough to give one to every man), ammunition, especially artillery shells—with an over 90 percent success rate. The Germans continued to attack—they launched one of their heaviest assaults on Christmas Day—but it was a fool’s business. They made no gains for a heavy price against the resupplied men of the 10th Armored and the 101st Airborne. As Captain von Fallois put it, “The Americans were extraordinarily brave. It was amazing what their troops were accomplishing. I knew we wouldn’t get any farther than Bastogne.”22
From the Battle of Trois-Ponts on, Peiper ruefully told Hechler, “events turned rapidly against us.”23 As Major Guderian of the 116th Panzer Division put it, “We started with fuel enough for only fifty kilometers.” Captured American fuel gave the Germans enough for another twenty kilometers. Meanwhile behind the German lines, the traffic jams had been straightened out and a supply line established, so more fuel and ammunition could be brought forward (the Germans relied on captured American supplies for food). But by the time the roads cleared, during the night of December 22–23, so did the skies. As Guderian laconically remarked, “We had no defense against air attacks. The columns could no longer come forward.”24
Peiper’s advance ended. That afternoon at 1700 hours he got an order via radio—withdraw. “When I received that message,” Peiper told Hechler, “I realized that the only chance was to break out without any vehicles and wounded. Accordingly on 24 December, at 0100, we abandoned all our vehicles and started walking back.”25 For the Germans, the offensive phase of the Battle of the Bulge was over. One of Peiper’s privates, Günter Brückner, asked a question to which the answer was obvious: “We were so well equipped, beautiful weapons, but what is the use of having a brand-new tank, but no gas? What is the use of having a machine gun when I have no more ammunition?”26
Or, what is the use of having the world’s best fighter airplane when there is no fuel to run it? By this stage, the Germans had built hundreds of single-engine jets (Messerschmitt 163) and twin-engine jets (ME 262) and were going into production on a jet bomber. The Americans were not going to have jets until October. The ME 262 was so much better than any propeller-driven plane that some Allied airmen worried that if the war went on the Germans might regain control of the sky by June. But that was unlikely, because the Luftwaffe was without fuel. The all-out strategic bomber assault on German refineries and other oil-related targets had a cumulative effect that was devastating to the German army and air force.
Except for December 17, there was no air war in the first week of the Bulge. But on the 23rd in some areas, the 24th in others, the day broke clear. Captain Barensfeld led his squadron of P-47s on both days. “At last, ah hah! We were off. We knew exactly what to do and where to go. Frustration of the past several days of nothing but bad news manifested itself. Our people pitched in with a zest. Crew chiefs, armament people, everyone worked to put up the maximum amount of missions. We ran almost a shuttle operation to the battle area. There was very little Luftwaffe opposition. Evidently they had ‘shot their wad’ on the first two days.
“Targets all over the place. Our air controllers zeroed us in on hundreds of fat targets. We caught them out of fuel and exhausted. Hundreds and hundreds of vehicles; tank, trucks, lined up on the road as in a traffic jam.”27
But the next day brought the frustration of being shut down. That was typical: in the thirty days between mid-December 1944 and mid-January 1945, only eight were sufficiently clear to allow missions to be flown.
For the Wehrmacht, almost everything had gone wrong, all of it predictable—indeed, exactly what Eisenhower had predicted would happen if the Germans launched an offensive in the Ardennes, did happen. It had been madness to attack in the Ardennes, an area with the most difficult terrain and least adequate road system in all of Western Europe, with insufficient fuel.
Of course, Eisenhower had tried to continue the Allied offensive in September and October, when his troops had insufficient fuel. But by December, the Allied supply lines were bringing forward fuel and ammunition in great quantity. The Allies had fuel dumps scattered throughout Belgium and Luxembourg. Peiper’s supply officer had a map of the American fuel dumps, but this did Peiper little good, either because GIs defended the dumps successfully, or because they evacuated the dumps (American supply troops successfully removed over three million gallons of gasoline from the Spa-Stavelot area on the northern flank), or because they burned the fuel before Peiper could get to it. The biggest American loss to the enemy was a 400,000-gallon gasoline dump, destroyed on December 17 by a V-1 strike at Liège.28
Now it was the Germans’ turn to retreat, abandoning their vehicles and heavy weapons, in disarray. Their week of glory was over.
I. Later, Vandervoort’s intelligence officer interrogated prisoners. He asked them why they had come straight across open ground shooting and yelling. The POWs replied that that was what they had been doing ever since the start of their offensive and up to then everybody had run away or surrendered.