THE POZIT WOULD PROVE as demoralizing to German troops as it was heartening to GIs. And no better target could be found for pozit fire than Lieutenant Colonel Peiper’s homicidal Spitze at the head of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. For several days, American gunners had been shooting the new shells at the column as it tacked across Belgium.
Peiper’s drive toward the Meuse seemed ever more quixotic. When the SS spearhead had turned southwest toward Trois-Ponts, U.S. engineers blew all three bridges there, including one with German soldiers atop the span. Thwarted and desperate for gasoline, Peiper now swung north through broken terrain along the Amblève River, harried by both Allied P-47 fighter-bombers—at least two panzers and five half-tracks were demolished from the air—and artillery. Gunners from the 30th Infantry Division fired three thousand rounds at one bridge approach, cooling their red-hot mortar tubes with cans of water.
Peiper had traveled about sixty miles, but sixteen more still separated him from the Meuse. With the risk of encirclement growing, at dusk on Thursday, December 21, he ordered his men to fall back four miles from Stoumont to La Gleize, a hamlet of thirty houses hemmed in by hills. Here his 1,500 survivors and two dozen remaining tanks dug in with more than a hundred American prisoners in tow.
By late Friday, American machine guns, tanks, tank destroyers, and artillery had so battered La Gleize that SS troops called it der Kessel (the Cauldron). Gripping a machine pistol, Peiper dashed between rubble piles, shouting encouragement while his adjutant burned secrets in the cellar. At eight P.M., German transport planes dropped gasoline and ammunition to the besieged men, but GIs recovered most of the supplies except for a few bundles containing cigarettes, schnapps, and a crate of Luger pistols.
“Position considerably worsened. Meager supplies of infantry ammunition left,” Peiper radioed early Saturday morning. “This is the last chance of breaking out.” Not until two P.M., as the Americans pressed nearer, did permission to retreat arrive in a coded message from I SS Panzer Corps. White-phosphorus and pozit shells carved away the La Gleize church, where German troops sheltered under choir stalls. A soldier caught removing the SS insignia from his uniform was placed against a broken wall and shot for desertion. Peiper used the bombardment to mask the sound of explosives deliberately set to destroy his last twenty-eight panzers, seventy half-tracks, and two dozen guns.
At two A.M. on Sunday, December 24, the SS men crept south from the village in single file, led by two Belgian guides. More than 300 wounded Germans and 130 American prisoners remained behind in the La Gleize cellars. Crossing the Amblève on a small bridge, the column snaked down a ridgeline near Trois-Ponts into the Salm River valley. At daybreak, when spotter planes appeared overhead, Peiper hid his men beneath tree boughs and parceled out provisions: four biscuits and two swigs of cognac each.
Soldiers in the 45th Infantry Division man a machine-gun post near Bastogne. The gun is a Browning M1919 heavy machine gun.
At a ford in the frigid river, the tallest SS troops formed a human chain to help the column cross the forty-foot water gap. Early Christmas morning, Peiper would reach the German line at Wanne, a few miles southeast of La Gleize. Of his original 5,800 men, 770 remained. Hurried along by more gusts of American artillery, their uniforms stiff with ice, they left a bloody track across the snow. Peiper and some of his henchmen were later accused of murdering 350 unarmed Americans and 100 or more Belgian civilians in their weeklong spree. But for now justice would be deferred, and a day of reckoning delayed until after the war.
A soldier wearing warm winter clothing prepares to cook outside.
All across the Ardennes, heavy snow had been followed on Saturday, December 23, by killing cold in the continental weather phenomenon known as a Russian High. Newspaper correspondent Alan Moorehead described a “radiant world where everything was reduced to primary whites and blues: a strident, sparkling white among the frosted trees, the deep blue shadows in the valley, and then the flawless ice blue of the sky.” Radiators and even gas tanks froze. GIs donned every scrap of clothing they could scavenge, including women’s dresses worn as shawls.
Troops fashioned sleds from sheet metal, and olive-drab vehicles were daubed with camouflage paint improvised from lime wash and salt. Belgian lace served for helmet nets, and mattress covers, often used as shrouds for the dead, made fine snowsuits. Inflated surgical gloves dipped in paint decorated hospital Christmas trees.