AT DUSK ON Tuesday, with the last remnants of the 99th Infantry Division bundled to the rear except for stouthearts fighting with the 2nd Infantry Division, the Americans slipped from Krinkelt and Rocherath in thick fog, abandoning those flaming towns for better ground a thousand yards west—a curved crest two thousand feet high, running from southwest to northeast and unmarked on Belgian military maps. American commanders named this high ground after a nearby village: Elsenborn Ridge. Here Major General Leonard Gerow, the V Corps commander, believed the German attack could impale itself.
V Corps gunners muscled 90mm antiaircraft guns to be used as artillery onto the ridge. Troops shoveled dirt into empty wooden ammunition boxes for field fortifications and burrowed down in the shale slope, roofing the hollows with pine logs and doors ripped from their hinges in a nearby Belgian barracks. Riflemen from the 2nd Infantry Division filled the ridgeline on the right and those from the 99th held the left, braced by the veteran 9th Infantry Division taking positions below Monschau in the north. An officer described a command post near Elsenborn as “a big crowd of officers, all with map cases, binoculars, gas masks, etc., milling about. Nobody knew anything useful, even where the enemy was.”
Here, for three days and nights, German paratroopers and the 12th SS Panzer Division smashed against the defensive bulkhead again and again. One message from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division to their commanding officer Major General Clift Andrus’s headquarters advised, “Attack repulsed. Send litters.” Then: “Much happening out there. We are killing lots of Germans.”
U.S. man power moves this cannon gun through the mud on the German–Belgian front line.
German tanks were called panzerkampfwagens, meaning “armored combat vehicles.”
The heaviest blows fell on the 26th Infantry Division’s 2nd Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Derrill M. Daniel. On Wednesday, his men withstood a night attack by twenty truckloads of whooping German infantry supported by panzers churning through mud, and a rampage of machine-gun and 75mm fire by eight Panthers. Thursday brought worse yet, with a three-hour cannonade before dawn by German howitzers and Nebelwerfers; then two battalions of German paratroopers and SS panzer grenadiers spilled from a pine wood in the west, trailed by thirty panzers. The 2nd Battalion’s right flank crumbled, and SS tanks wheeled up and down the line, crushing GIs in their foxholes.
“Get me all the damned artillery you can get,” Daniel radioed. Ten thousand rounds in eight hours—among the fiercest concentrations in the European war—kept enemy infantry at bay, but panzers closed to within a hundred yards of the battalion command post in a farm compound. For much of the day, Daniel and his staff crouched in a cellar with the wounded, burning classified papers as tank and machine-gun rounds blistered the four-foot-thick stone walls. Sleeting counterfire from American Sherman tanks and the new 90mm tank destroyers finally evicted the last attackers from behind a barn by shooting right through it; only one panzer escaped. An eerie silence descended with the night.
Army patrols reported enemy dead “as common as grass,” and grave diggers would count nearly eight hundred bodies, along with the wrecked hulks of forty-seven panzers and self-propelled guns. During the protracted fight at Elsenborn Ridge, five thousand were killed, wounded, or went missing in the U.S. 2nd and 99th Infantry Divisions alone.
Debris left at an Allied gun position on Elsenborn Ridge.
But the American line held. Here the Sixth Panzer Army reached its high-water mark, as far as it would get on the north shoulder of what came to be called “the bulge,” that fifty-mile-wide area of Belgium and Luxembourg that the Germans occupied for a month in the winter of 1944–45. General Dietrich needed an eight- to twelve-mile cushion on his right flank to keep his German assault columns out of range of American artillery as they lumbered toward the Meuse. Instead, his troops were forced to move away from the main road through Bütgenbach to seek secondary avenues farther south; three routes allocated to I SS Panzer Corps remained blocked, with others under fire. An attack farther north near Monschau failed abjectly when one German division arrived late to the battle and the other was knocked back. Only Peiper’s foray showed clear promise in this sector. The 12th SS Panzer Division had been mauled, and other SS units seemed slow and clumsy.
The Americans, by contrast, demonstrated agility and a knack for concentrating firepower. Sixty thousand fresh troops had been shuttled into the Ardennes on Sunday, December 17, among the quarter million reinforcements who would arrive within a week. Four U.S. infantry divisions clotted the north shoulder so effectively that German army command’s war diary acknowledged “the Elsenborn attack is gaining only quite insignificant ground,” while the German Army Group B lamented “slower progress than anticipated.” The tactical fortunes of Dietrich and his lieutenants seemed increasingly doubtful, to the point that Field Marshals Rundstedt and Model, watching the offensive come unstitched, agreed to abruptly shift the German main effort from the Sixth Panzer Army in the north to General Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army in the south. With northern routes denied or constricted, there was a new urgency on the German left, and the roads leading through Luxembourg toward Bastogne and then to the Meuse were now more vital than ever.
Reinforcements head to the front lines in the Ardennes.