Refugees flee Bastogne with their animals and possessions.
Watching for the enemy near Lutrebois, Belgium, January 1, 1945.
CIVILIAN REFUGEES with woeful tales of burning villages and Germans in close pursuit tumbled into Bastogne, “an ancient town in the dreariest part of the Ardennes,” as a Belgian guidebook had once described it. Carts piled high with furniture and scuffed baggage clogged the main square, despite army placards warning that UNATTENDED VEHICLES WILL BE IMPOUNDED BY MILITARY POLICE. Shops along the Grand-Rue pulled tight their shutters after the power failed on Sunday, and by midday on Monday, December 18, the grumble of artillery could be heard even in the cellar corridors of the Sisters of Notre Dame, a boarding school where hundreds took refuge.
The first paratroopers from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division arrived at dusk on Monday after a sleet-spattered hundred-mile drive from Reims, France. Under Major General Matthew Ridgway, XVIII Airborne Corps had been directed to help seal the twenty-mile gap between V Corps and VIII Corps, with Brigadier General James M. Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division making for Werbomont, southwest of Spa, and the 101st bound for Bastogne. Sergeants had trotted through the troop barracks the previous night, bawling, “Get out of the sack. You ain’t reserve no more,” and officers interrupted a ballet performance to order paratroopers in the audience to assemble for battle.
In winter camouflage, the 82nd Airborne Division pushes through the snow.
Since November, the 101st had been plagued with several dozen AWOL incidents each week, as well as the usual drunken brawls; troopers held contests to see who could punch out the most windows in Reims. Worse yet, many of the division’s senior leaders were absent. They included the commander, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, who had flown to Washington; his assistant commander, who was in England with seventeen officers; and the chief of staff, who had killed himself with a pistol a week earlier. That left command to the division artillery chief, a short, genial brigadier general from Washington, D.C., named Anthony Clement McAuliffe. Having graduated from West Point at the end of World War I, McAuliffe had risen slowly through the ranks of the peacetime army as a gunner with an interest in both technological and sociological innovation. Before joining the 101st, he had worked on development of the jeep and the bazooka, and on a study of race relations in the service. He had parachuted into Normandy and landed by glider in Holland; now he drove to Bastogne at the head of a division he led by default.
On January 16, 1945, American ambulances and other vehicles arrive in the destroyed town of Foy, Belgium.
Several thousand replacement troopers who had received barely a week of field training jammed into open cattle trucks behind him—“like olives in a jar,” as one account noted. Some, without helmets or rifles, pleaded for both from the retreating GIs who clogged every road west of Bastogne. COMZ (the acronym for the Communication Zone, whence movements and supplies were organized) dispatched an emergency convoy hauling five thousand entrenching shovels, two thousand sets of wool underwear, and five thousand pairs of arctic overshoes, sizes 6 to 14. Through Monday night and early the next morning, twelve thousand cold, soaking-wet paratroopers and glidermen poured into Bastogne. By ten A.M. on Tuesday, all four regiments had arrived, accompanied by a few disoriented artillery and armor units grabbed along the way. Brigadier General McAuliffe put his command post in the Hôtel de Commerce, facing the train station, and his first wounded into a local seminary.
Narrow roads made movement difficult in the Ardennes.
Bearing down on Bastogne were three divisions from Germany’s Fifth Panzer Army, well aware of U.S. reinforcements thanks to careless American radio chatter. Little in this stage of the battle had unfolded according to the German master plan. Fuel shortages pinched harder with each passing hour. Panzer tracks chewed up roads so severely that wheeled vehicles by the score were abandoned in mud trenches. With few engineers to clear mines, tank crews took up the task with rake-like harrows and rollers found in farm sheds. Foot soldiers slouching westward almost outpaced Manteuffel’s motorized columns, and Field Marshal Model now privately doubted that AUTUMN MIST could achieve even the modest goals of the so-called small solution, much less the seizure of the port of Antwerp.
Bastogne and its seven radial roads assumed ever greater importance to the Germans, and spearhead troops smashed into the feeble roadblocks east of town, setting U.S. half-tracks ablaze, then picking off GIs silhouetted against the flames. Forty Sherman tanks were demolished in a single night, and defenders in nearby Neffe retreated under showers of incendiary grenades. “We’re not driven out,” one officer radioed, “but burned out.” Under the steady onslaught of those three German divisions—2nd Panzer, 26th Volksgrenadier, and Panzer Lehr—the American defenses buckled and bent.
German Tiger (front) and Panther (rear) tanks assemble.
But they did not break. The gunfight cost the Germans four precious hours of daylight on Tuesday. Farther north on the same day, U.S. combat engineers dynamited culverts and bridges, and felled trees with such obstructive skill that frustrated German LVIII Corps countermarched up various blind alleys in search of easier routes west.
No less vital in delaying the enemy was Middleton’s order that the 10th Armored Division defend a trio of strongpoints outside Bastogne. An especially vicious brawl unfolded in Noville, a foggy sinkhole four miles north of town, where fifteen Sherman tanks and other armor arrived in time to confront much of the 2nd Panzer Division. A murky dawn on Tuesday brought the telltale rattle of German tanks, followed by vague gray shapes drifting from the east. The Americans answered with artillery—aimed “by guess and by God” because of map shortages—and even pistol fire. Soon the fog lifted like a curtain to reveal German armor and grenadiers spread thickly across a slope half a mile distant. American tank destroyers ripped into nine panzers, leaving three in flames. German infantrymen turned and fled, pursued by bullets.
A U.S. soldier fires a howitzer.
All morning and through the afternoon, the battle raged. A battalion of 101st paratroopers from Bastogne attacked on a dead run at two P.M., colliding with another German assault just beginning to boil across a smoky ridgeline. Enemy barrages pounded Noville to rubble, killing the paratrooper commander; only artillery counterfire kept grenadiers on three sides from overrunning the Americans.
At midday on Wednesday, December 20, a radio message to the Hôtel de Commerce advised, “All reserves committed. Situation critical.” McAuliffe authorized survivors to fall back into Bastogne at five P.M., cloaked in smoke and darkness; for want of a tank crew, paratroopers drove one of the four remaining Shermans. American casualties exceeded four hundred men, but the 2nd Panzer Division had lost over six hundred, plus thirty-one panzers and at least two days’ time in the German drive toward the Meuse.
American soldiers in winter camouflage on patrol near Bastogne.
U.S. Army Signal Corps photographers and cameramen document German POWs.
Strongpoints east of Bastogne, now reinforced by the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, proved just as formidable for the German Panzer Lehr and 26th Volksgrenadier Divisions. Barbed wire and musketry near Neffe snared German troops in what paratroopers called a “giant mantrap.” “We took no prisoners,” a captain reported. “We mowed them down as if they were weeds.” Renewed enemy attacks on Wednesday ran into “a dam of fire” laid by guns firing from Bastogne.
Little profit had been found in frontal assaults, and belatedly the Germans revised their tactics. General Manteuffel urged his 2nd Panzer Division to press westward past the Our River despite gasoline shortages so severe that the division wasted a day waiting for fuel trucks. The Panzer Lehr Division would leave a regiment to besiege Bastogne with the 26th Volksgrenadier Division, but most of the division now turned left to bypass the town on the south.
Among the few heartening reports to reach the Fifth Panzer Army on Wednesday was the annihilation of a 101st Airborne Division medical detachment, which had failed to post sentries at a crossroads encampment west of Bastogne. Shortly before midnight, a German patrol of six panzers and half-tracks raked the medical tents and trucks with gunfire. Within minutes, the division surgeon had been captured, along with ten other medical officers and more than a hundred enlisted men, as well as stretchers, wounded patients, surgical instruments, and penicillin.
“Above all,” Middleton had instructed McAuliffe, “don’t get yourself surrounded.” Precisely how eighteen thousand Americans, under orders to hold Bastogne at all costs against forty-five thousand Germans, should avoid encirclement was not clear, particularly in weather so dismal that Allied aircraft flew a total of twenty-nine sorties in Europe on Wednesday, only nine of them over the Ardennes. A day later, on Thursday morning, December 21, an enemy column severed the last open road south, and Bastogne was indeed cut off. Resurgent optimism flared through the German chain of command.