CLEAR SKIES also permitted resupply of Bastogne, besieged but unbowed after the rejected surrender ultimatum. Shortly before noon on Saturday, the first C-47s dropped parachute bundles. By four P.M., more than 240 planes had delivered 5,000 artillery shells, almost as many mortar rounds, 2,300 grenades, a dozen boxes of morphine, 300 units of plasma, and 1,500 bandages. Jeeps tore around the drop zone on the western edge of Bastogne, where paratroopers scooped up the bundles and hauled ammunition directly to gun batteries and rifle pits. Flights the next day would bring rations, a quarter million machine-gun rounds, and almost one thousand radio batteries. Brigadier General McAuliffe also had the invaluable services of Captain James E. Parker, a fighter pilot who had arrived several days earlier as an air support officer with enough radio crystals in his pocket to talk directly to the P-47 squadrons now bound for Bastogne. Swarming wasps by the hundreds attacked fast and low with napalm and high explosives, guided by Parker to Manteuffel’s panzers, trucks, and assault guns. Tracks in the snow made them easy to find.
U.S. troops scan the skies for parachute drops from supply planes, December 1944.
Bastogne was reprieved but hardly delivered. German attacks from the west and southwest grew so intense on Saturday night that despondent American officers shook hands good-bye. Despite aerial replenishment, the garrison was reduced to five hundred gallons of gasoline and a day’s rations; 101st Airborne Division gunners who had been rationed to ten rounds daily heeded McAuliffe’s advice to look for the whites of enemy eyes.
More than three thousand civilians remained trapped with the Americans. Several hundred wounded GIs lay cushioned only by sawdust in a church.
Napalm fires ringed the town, and the chatter of machine guns carried on the wind as the short day faded.