German General Hasso von Manteuffel
THE OUR RIVER: "HOLD AT ALL COSTS"
ON SATURDAY MORNING, December 16, two of Manteuffel’s armored corps came down like wolves on a sheepfold, falling on an American regiment at an unnerving ratio of ten wolves for each sheep. Major General Norman “Dutch” Cota’s 28th Infantry Division was holding an impossibly wide twenty-five-mile front along the Our River, with all three infantry regiments on the line. Instead of facing two German divisions across the river, as army intelligence had surmised, Cota’s men found themselves fighting five, plus heavy enemy reinforcements.
As artillery and mortar barrages shredded field-phone wires and truck tires, German infiltrators forded the Our in swirling fog to creep up streambeds behind the American sentries. Forward outposts fell back, or perished, or surrendered. “While I was being searched they came across my teeth [dentures] wrapped in a handkerchief in my pocket,” a captured army engineer recorded. “These they kept.” An American armored column rushing down a ridgetop road blundered into a German ambush: eleven light tanks were destroyed in as many minutes. From his command post in Wiltz, a brewing and tanning town ten miles west of the Our, Cota repeated orders from Major General Middleton at the VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne, another ten miles farther west: “Hold at all costs.” A soldier scribbled in his diary, “This place is not healthy anymore.”
Yet, as in the north, frictions and vexations soon bedeviled the German attack. A bridge for the 2nd Panzer Division collapsed into the Our after only ten tanks had crossed. Engineers eventually built two spans stout enough to hold a Panther, at Gemünd and Dasburg, but steep, hairpin approach roads, pitted by American artillery, reduced traffic to a crawl. Although Cota’s flank regiments yielded ground in the face of flamethrowers and panzer fire, they imposed a severe penalty on the German timetable.
A German field howitzer is transported to the Ardennes.
Along the American right, four German infantry divisions from the Seventh Army formed AUTUMN MIST’s southern front. Over three days, the U.S. 109th Infantry Regiment would fall back slowly for four miles to Diekirch before joining forces with part of the 9th Armored Division. By Sunday night, the weight of metal and numbers won through for the Germans, but the American 112th Infantry Regiment withdrew in good order to the northwest, largely intact although now splintered away from the rest of the 28th Infantry Division. With Cota’s permission, the regiment continued moving north to help defend the Belgian town of St.-Vith.
That left Cota a single regiment, the 110th Infantry, holding an eleven-mile front in the division center. Here Manteuffel swung his heaviest blow, with three divisions in XLVII Panzer Corps instructed to rip through to the city of Bastogne, specifically targeted for quick capture under a Führer order. By midday Sunday, the 110th was disintegrating, though not without a fight. In the medieval town of Clervaux, Luxembourg, one hundred GIs, including clerks and bakers, barricaded themselves inside a castle, firing from arrow slits in the tower at Germans in long leather coats scampering below. Wailing pleas for salvation rose from the dungeon, where dozens of women and children had taken refuge.
A mile up the road, in the three-story Hotel Claravallis, the flinty regimental commander, Colonel Hurley E. Fuller, advised Cota by radio of his peril: at least a dozen panzers on the high ground firing into Clervaux; the castle besieged; ammunition short; artillery overrun or retreating. “Hold at all costs,” Cota repeated. “No retreat. Nobody comes back.”
Clervaux Castle today
At 7:30 on Sunday evening, Fuller was again on the radio to division headquarters, likening his predicament to the Alamo, when a staff officer rushed in to report enemy tanks on the street outside. “No more time to talk,” Fuller told one of Cota’s lieutenants, then slammed down the handset just before three shells demolished the hotel facade.
The castle, too, was burning. Flames danced from the tower roof, and black smoke stained the whitewashed inner walls. A final radio call went out Monday morning, December 18, before a panzer battered down the heavy wooden gates. At one P.M., the little garrison hoisted a white flag in surrender. Silence settled over Clervaux but for crackling fires and the shatter of glass from German looting. In a small inn that once housed the Red Cross club, a sign in the front window still proclaimed OF COURSE WE’RE OPEN.
Not far from Clervaux, frightened civilians in Diekirch wielded hammers and axes to demolish a huge sign erected in the fall to welcome the Americans, lest they be considered collaborators. On the heels of the retreating 109th Infantry Regiment, three thousand men, women, and children fled that Luxembourg town in bitter cold at midnight on Tuesday. The division command post pulled out Tuesday, first to Bastogne, then to Sibret, and eventually to Neufchâteau. A gaggle of army bandsmen, engineers, paymasters, and sawmill operators fought as a rear guard until overrun by whistle-blowing German paratroopers.
“This was the end,” the official army history recorded. “Shots, blazing vehicles, and screaming wounded.” Some GIs escaped by night in groups of ten with map scraps and radium-dial compasses that glowed in the dark. Several hundred others were captured, including one young officer who described being propped up on a German staff car as a hood ornament, legs dangling over the grille, and driven east through march columns of German reinforcements who were “laughing at me as the trophy.”
A German armored personnel carrier (left) and a tank move to an assembly point.
The 110th Infantry Regiment had been annihilated, with 2,500 battle casualties. Sixty American tanks had been reduced to smoking wreckage. Yet once again, space had been traded for time—the Germans had gained only a few miles and had spent forty-eight hours fighting for them. Once again, that bargain favored the defenders. The southern shoulder was jammed almost as effectively as the northern. The German Fifth Panzer Army now marched on Bastogne, true enough, but the stumbling, tardy advance by three bloodied divisions hardly resembled the victorious surprise attack of Hitler’s fever dream.
German soldiers take offensive positions in the forest.