AS BASTOGNE WAS a poisonous thorn in General Manteuffel’s left flank, St.-Vith was a prickly nettle on his right. Now the easternmost U.S.-held town of any size in the Ardennes, St.-Vith had over the past three days become a breakwater, with a “German tide rushing past on the north and south and rising against its eastern face,” in the description of the army official history.
The town had been named for Saint Vitus, a Sicilian child martyr. Various unpleasantries had befallen St.-Vith since its founding in the twelfth century, but none was uglier than the battle that engulfed the town in December 1944.
The German troops approaching the town had all but destroyed the 106th Infantry Division on the Schnee Eifel, but the German plan to occupy St.-Vith by six P.M. on December 17 fell short. General Manteuffel’s frustration grew day by day.
The Allied troops included the 7th Armored Division now under Brigadier General Bruce Clarke, following Major General Jones’s flight west, and Major General Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps.
The 7th Armored Division advances through Belgium.
Gunfights had erupted around the town on December 18 and 19, but German lunges were thrown back. With supply lines cut, howitzers were limited to seven rounds per gun each day. Gunners rummaged for ammunition in abandoned dumps; some batteries reported firing “old propaganda shells just to keep projectiles whistling around German ears.” Riflemen were told on December 20 that “for every round fired, a corpse must hit the ground.” In St.-Vith’s narrow streets, broken glass crunched beneath the hooves of cattle fleeing a burning slaughterhouse. Smoke blackened the faces and uniforms of soldiers trying to stay warm over fires lit in tins filled with gasoline-soaked sand. One soldier later described mounting a local counterattack with a “cold, plodding, unwilling, ragged double line plunging up to their knees in snow.”
On Wednesday, December 20, Manteuffel ordered two Volksgrenadier divisions to finish off the town, supported by SS tanks. The next day, German artillery tore into American trenches as waves of infantry swept through the dense woods and Panthers fired flat-trajectory flares to blind Sherman crews. Half an hour later, Clarke’s line had been punctured in three places. At ten P.M., he ordered his troops to fall back onto high ground a kilometer west of town, but by then, nearly a thousand GIs had been killed or captured, and twenty thousand others remained vulnerable in a shrinking defended area east of the Salm River.
Surveillance from a muddy foxhole.
German troops with ice frozen to their eyebrows.
Ridgway now struggled to control a front that abruptly increased in width from twenty-five miles to eighty-five. If the 101st Airborne Division could continue to fight effectively while surrounded, Ridgway wondered why a comparable combat force in the Salm salient could not do the same. But by early Friday, December 22, that force showed signs of disintegration. Patrols simply vanished; an entire battalion staff at Neubrück, three miles south of St.-Vith, had been killed or captured. Clarke reported that his combat command had lost half its strength.
“This terrain is not worth a nickel an acre,” Clarke added, and urged withdrawal. The 7th Armored Division commander, Brigadier General Robert W. Hasbrouck, now encamped at Vielsalm, twelve miles west of St.-Vith, warned that fuel and ammunition shortages had become dire. Just after eleven A.M., Hasbrouck told Ridgway in a message, “If we don’t get out of here … before night, we will not have a 7th Armored Division left.” To his old friend Brigadier General William M. Hoge, whose combat command in the 9th Armored Division also faced dismemberment, Ridgway said, “We’re not going to leave you in here to be chopped to pieces.… We’re going to get you out of here.” Hoge replied plaintively, “How can you?”
Clearing snow from an antitank gun.
In midafternoon on Friday, Ridgway reluctantly ordered Hasbrouck to withdraw all U.S. forces across the Salm River. Montgomery, who had watched the St.-Vith drama with mounting anxiety, rejoiced. “They can come back with all honor,” he said. “They put up a wonderful show.”
Fourteen hours of December darkness and a cold snap that froze the mud on Friday night allowed most to escape, narrowly averting a catastrophe even worse than the Schnee Eifel surrender. A radio dispatch to a field commander instructed, “Your orders are: Go west. Go west. Go west.” GIs urinated on frozen M-1 rifle bolts to free them, then tramped single file on forest trails and farm tracks, each man gripping the belt or pack straps of the colleague ahead. Others tried to be invisible by clinging to tank hulls lit up by scorching enemy tracers. German artillery searched roads and junctions, and only the late arrival of a ninety-truck American convoy lugging five thousand shells permitted counterfire by gunners west of the Salm. “Wrapped in scarves and mufflers, only their eyes showing,” as one lieutenant wrote, retreating troops made for the bridges at Salmchâteau and Vielsalm; Hasbrouck stood on a road shoulder to welcome his men to safety. An 82nd Airborne Division trooper south of Werbomont called to a passing column, “What the hell you guys running from? We been here two days and ain’t seen a German yet.” A weary voice replied, “Stay right where you are, buddy. In a little while you won’t even have to look for ’em.”
American soldiers advance, attempting to surround German troops during the battle for Bastogne.
Ridgway estimated that fifteen thousand troops and one hundred tanks escaped. As many tanks were lost, and casualties east of the Salm approached five thousand, more than the losses incurred on the Schnee Eifel. Clarke and Hasbrouck would long resent Ridgway for delaying the withdrawal, but the fighting retreat meant that nearly a week went by before the German Fifth Panzer Army controlled St.-Vith and the radiant roads that Manteuffel had hoped to take in two days. “Nobody is worried down here,” Ridgway told the First Army by phone at nine P.M. Friday night. “We’re in fine shape.”
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GERMAN TROOPS RANSACKED St.-Vith “in a kind of scavenger hunt,” snarling traffic so profoundly that both Model and Manteuffel dismounted and hiked into town from Schönberg. The field marshal even stood at a crossroads with arms flailing to wave tanks and trucks westward. “Endless columns of prisoners,” a Volksgrenadier officer wrote. “Model himself directs traffic.”
Looting was best done quickly: beginning on Christmas Day, Allied bombers would drop 1,700 tons of high explosives and incendiaries on St.-Vith, obliterating the train station, reducing most houses to stone dust and ash, and entombing hundreds of Belgian civilians. With roads smashed by the bombs, German engineers routed traffic through the rail yards and along a circuitous dirt track to let the conquerors of St.-Vith continue their pursuit. “We shall throw these arrogant big-mouthed apes from the New World into the sea,” a German lieutenant wrote his wife. “They will not get into our Germany.”
The bombing of St.-Vith, December 1944.