Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (20 page)

General Hodges, finally aware of the danger, ordered the 1st Division then resting behind the lines to prepare to move.
‘We heard a siren-like sound’
, wrote Arthur Couch, ‘and an announcement that all American troops were to return to their units and prepare to move out – there had been a large German attack in the Ardennes area. We gathered our combat gear and climbed onto trucks taking us to the new front line. We were told that a German tank attack had broken through an inexperienced new division straight from America. They were in a chaotic retreat.’ At 22.00 hours, another order from First Army headquarters instructed the 2nd Division to halt its attack north and prepare to move back towards the eastern flank of the Elsenborn ridge to block the advance of the 12th SS Panzer-Division.

After all the delays on the first day, that night Peiper forced his men forward to Honsfeld. His Kampfgruppe had been allotted
‘the decisive role in the offensive’
, and he had no intention of failing. ‘I was not to bother about my flanks, but was to drive rapidly to the
Meuse river
, making full use of the element of surprise.’ His column of tanks, half-tracks and other vehicles stretched almost twenty-five kilometres in length, and because the roads were so narrow he could not change the order of march. He therefore decided to have a strong fighting element right at the front, with panzergrenadiers mounted in half-tracks, followed by a company of Panthers and Mark IV tanks. The heavy battalion of Tiger tanks would follow on behind.

Before the offensive began, Peiper really had believed that if the
German infantry managed to break through at dawn on 16 December as planned, then he could reach the Meuse in just over twenty-four hours. Now he knew that his test-drive of a Panther over eighty kilometres before the offensive had been utterly misleading. The farm roads allotted to him were muddy tracks. The fact that the Führer himself had chosen Peiper’s route for him was hardly a consolation in the circumstances. As Manteuffel had predicted, the panzers’ fuel consumption in this terrain was more than twice what Keitel and the OKW had estimated. Having been warned at the divisional briefing that two trainloads of fuel had failed to arrive and that the spearheads were to make use of captured supplies, Peiper consulted his map. The divisional Ic intelligence officer had marked the position of American fuel dumps at Büllingen and Stavelot. However, the main US Army gasoline dump at Francorchamps between Malmédy and Spa, which held more than 2 million gallons, was not shown.

For Lieutenant Matt Konop with the 2nd Infantry Division headquarters, the first sign of anything ‘unusual’ came on the second morning when the telephone by his mattress rang shortly before seven. The operations officer told him that a report had come in of paratroopers landing south of Eupen, and that some thirty German tanks had broken through to their east. Konop turned on the light and reached for a map to try to work out if anything important was going on. A few minutes later the telephone rang again.

‘Say, Konop, I want you to alert everybody.’
Konop could not identify the voice. ‘Get every gun, man and whatever you can get to prepare a last ditch defense of the C[ommand] P[ost]! Enemy tanks have broken through and are on the road to Büllingen now.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Konop replied. ‘By the way, who is this?’

‘This is General Robertson,’ replied his divisional commander, a man known for his calm, good sense. Konop felt obliged to remind him that the only soldiers available were ‘those men who drive the trucks and former battle exhaustion cases’. Robertson told him to get together every individual he could find. So Konop formed cooks, clerks, drivers and any man who could still hold a weapon into an improvised defence platoon and rushed them down the road from Wirtzfeld. He could already hear machine-gun fire in the distance while he placed bazooka teams and their two 57mm anti-tank guns to cover any side tracks which a panzer commander might select. He put a cook sergeant and his own Jeep driver to man a .50 machine gun and set up observation posts with radios. A military police officer arrived with twenty men, and even though his ‘snowdrops’ were armed only with pistols, they too went into the line.

General Hodges had at last been forced to face reality. At 07.30 hours on 17 December, twenty-four hours after the German offensive began, he finally allowed General Gerow, the commander of V Corps, to halt the 2nd Division in its attack north from Wahlerscheid. Gerow wanted to pull it back towards the twin villages of Rocherath–Krinkelt, which were now threatened. The 99th Division had been forced to retreat by the 277th Volksgrenadier-Division and the 12th SS Panzer-Division
Hitler Jugend
. He and General Robertson agreed that they must protect the road north from Rocherath–Krinkelt to Wahlerscheid so that he could extricate his two regiments.

Gerow did not subscribe to the pointless slogan that the American army never retreats. He had immediately sensed that holding the northern shoulder of the breakthrough was what mattered, and the key to that would be the Elsenborn ridge, which began just west of Rocherath–Krinkelt. They had to hold the twin villages long enough to establish firm positions along the ridge, where he was already bringing in artillery regiments.

Robertson ordered forward his only reserve, a battalion of the 23rd Infantry Regiment, from Elsenborn in trucks. These troops dismounted east of Rocherath, and looked with foreboding at the thick pinewoods. All they knew was that a unit of the 99th Division, which
‘had had the hell knocked out of them’
, was withdrawing in front of the 12th SS
Hitler Jugend
. Behind them, bursts of firing could be heard as anti-aircraft half-tracks blazed away at the V-1 buzz-bombs flying overhead.
‘The snow around
the road junction had been churned into a yellowish mixture of snow and dirt from recent heavy shelling,’ wrote Charles MacDonald, a company commander.

He took his men forward to the edge of the woods. Even in the open, visibility extended no more than a hundred metres in the damp mist. They could hear small-arms fire ahead of them, mainly the ripping noise of rapid-fire German automatic weapons, rather than the slower, more deliberate cadence of their American counterparts. Then, a salvo of ‘screaming meemies’ came over. As soon as MacDonald’s men heard artillery shells they picked a thick pine tree to stand behind, hoping to avoid any splinters from an overhead burst. With little enthusiasm
except the instinct of self-preservation, MacDonald’s company returned to digging foxholes. It was hard work with the small shovels because of the tree roots under the wet snow.

The threat that morning to the 2nd Division’s headquarters in Wirtzfeld, which Lieutenant Konop prepared to defend, did not come from the
Hitler Jugend
Division to the east: it came from Peiper’s Kampfgruppe to the south. Peiper, horrified by the state of the tracks he was expected to follow, had decided to ignore his orders and the route prescribed by Hitler. His corps commander later agreed.
‘Owing to the wretched condition of the roads,’
he wrote, ‘the wheeled vehicles had be towed in places for considerable distances.’

Before dawn on 17 December, the Peiper Kampfgruppe
launched an attack on Honsfeld. Its leading vehicles simply followed in the wake of a retreating American column. Even though the small American force was taken by surprise, the Kampfgruppe
lost two Mark V Panthers, but captured a large number of trucks and half-tracks. Peiper’s SS panzergrenadiers executed nineteen American prisoners in a field, and two villagers who were made to face a wall were shot in the back of the head. For the panzergrenadiers, it could have been the eastern front again where they had slaughtered prisoners and civilians without a second thought. They proceeded to loot the houses and the chapel. Peiper detailed a small group to stay behind to guard his line of communications. Two days later, five of these panzergrenadiers forced Erna Collas, a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, to show them the way to a farm. She was never seen again until her body was found in a foxhole five months later. She had been riddled with bullets, almost certainly after she had been raped.

Peiper decided to leave most of the trucks in Honsfeld because of the mud, and ordered the commander of the 9th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment to stay there to mop up and secure the area. Then, instead of driving due west to the valley of the Amblève as he had been instructed, Peiper pushed north to Büllingen where the American 2nd Division’s fuel dump was marked on his map. The Kampfgruppe took the village unopposed soon after 08.30 hours that Sunday morning, and destroyed twelve American light aircraft parked on a landing strip. A civilian emerged wearing a swastika armband to greet them. He gave the Nazi
salute as each vehicle passed, then showed the SS soldiers where the Americans stored their fuel. The panzergrenadiers put their prisoners to work refuelling vehicles and loading jerrycans on to the half-tracks. One wounded soldier was finished off with a
Kopfschuss
, a pistol shot through the head at close range, but according to civilian witnesses the other prisoners were more fortunate than their comrades in Honsfeld. The American official history, on the other hand, states that fifty were shot at Büllingen.

Just west of Büllingen, Company B of the 254th Engineer Battalion was overrun by German tanks. The panzers did not just ‘iron’ the foxholes by charging over them, they halted to twist back and forth on their axis to collapse the trench walls and bury the occupants in mud and snow. Fortunately, help was on the way. The 26th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division, after travelling in trucks through the early hours, reached Camp Elsenborn on the ridge at 09.00 hours. One of its battalions was immediately sent south to Bütgenbach.

On the way down, it skirmished with an advance patrol of paratroopers from the 3rd Fallschirmjäger’s reconnaissance battalion. After urging the civilians in Bütgenbach to shelter in their cellars, the Americans pushed on towards the next hamlet of Dom Bütgenbach, two kilometres west of Büllingen, where they heard that SS troops had taken the village. On some high ground by the road, they found a scratch force made up of around fifty clerks and supply personnel from the 99th Infantry Division who had been taken in hand by a captain from a tank-destroyer battalion. The battalion of the 26th Infantry wrongly assumed that the enemy force in Büllingen was from the 12th
Hitler Jugend
Division. These infantrymen could not understand why it did not continue to attack north. But the reason for the lull was that Peiper’s spearhead had already set off south-west, to regain the route to the Amblève valley.

Despite the delays in the initial breakthrough, German morale was high.
‘I think the war in the west is again turning,’
wrote a Gefreiter in the 3rd Panzergrenadier-Division, waiting that day to advance. ‘The main thing is that the war will soon be decided and I will be coming home again to my dear wife and we can again build a new home. The radio is now playing bells from the homeland.’

General Bradley, returning that morning from Paris to Luxembourg in his own olive-drab Cadillac, found an escort of machine-gun-mounted Jeeps waiting for him in Verdun because of reports of German paratroopers. Hansen asked about the possibility of moving 12th Army Group headquarters, because German divisions were now less than thirty kilometres to their north.
‘I will never move backwards with a headquarters,’
Bradley replied. ‘There is too much prestige at stake.’ This defiance would serve him ill over the next few days.

Both men sensed that a German reoccupation of the Grand Duchy might be brutal after the warm welcome its people had accorded to the Americans less than three months before. When entering the city of Luxembourg, Bradley saw the Stars and Stripes hanging from a house. ‘I hope he doesn’t have to take it down,’ he murmured. The city of Luxembourg had so far been spared the full horrors of war. It was dubbed
‘the last air-raid shelter in Europe’
, because it had not been bombed by either the RAF or the USAAF.

The Cadillac drew up outside the 12th Army Group’s forward headquarters known as ‘Eagle Tac’, four blocks from the general’s residence in the Hôtel Alfa. Bradley hurried up the stairs. He came to a halt in front of the situation map and stared at it in fascinated horror. ‘Pardon my French,’ he said, ‘I think the situation justifies it – but where in hell has this son of a bitch gotten all his strength?’

Bradley and his staff were shaken by the way German intelligence had identified the weakest part of their whole front. And since the Americans’ policy was one of attack, their lines had not been built in depth with reserve formations. Yet Bradley still wanted to believe that a major redeployment could be avoided. First Army at Spa that day wondered
‘whether 12th Army Group
fully appreciates the seriousness of the situation’. Third Army also appears to have been surprised at the slow reaction.
‘The Army Group commander called
General Patton on the phone,’ the chief of staff recorded, ‘and told him that he might have to call on him for two more divisions. The decision was not to be made for forty-eight hours.’

At Ninth Army headquarters, nobody seemed to have any idea of the size of the attack. Staff officers could indulge only in confused speculation. A Luftwaffe attack on their front prompted suggestions that this was
‘a diversion for a larger counter-offensive in First Army zone’
.
Ninth Army staff officers told war correspondents desperate for information that
‘everything depends on what troops are at von Rundstedt’s disposal’
.

Back at SHAEF, the danger became clearer thanks to some captured German instructions. Eisenhower ordered that all reserve formations should be brought in. He told Bedell Smith, Strong and Major General John Whiteley, the British head of the operational planning staff, to organize the details. In the chief of staff’s office, the three men stood around a large map spread out on the floor. Strong pointed with a German ceremonial sword to Bastogne. The town was the hub of the central Ardennes, and most of the main roads leading to the Meuse passed through it. It was the obvious place to block the German advance to the Meuse, and everyone present agreed.

SHAEF’s immediate reserve consisted of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, resting in Reims after their operations in Holland. The question was whether they could reach Bastogne before Manteuffel’s panzer spearheads arrived from the east. Strong considered it possible, and the orders for them to move were issued immediately.

It was ironic that Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg should have feared an ambush by Heydte’s paratroopers, for they had dropped more than a hundred kilometres to the north as the crow flies. And Heydte, accepting that there was little he could do with such a weak force, decided to hide most of his men in the forest. He sent out standing patrols to watch the main roads from Eupen to Malmédy and from Verviers. They were to ambush single Jeeps and messengers. Once the sounds of battle came closer, then perhaps his men could assist by seizing a key point just before Dietrich’s tanks arrived. His standing patrols soon collected a range of prisoners and a haul of intelligence on the American order of battle, but since their radios had been lost in the parachute drop Heydte had no way of passing the information back. He had asked Sepp Dietrich for carrier pigeons, but the Oberstgruppenführer had simply laughed at the idea.

On the evening of 17 December, Heydte’s force doubled in size to around 300 men when more stragglers and a large group which had dropped too far to the north joined them. That night he released all his
prisoners and sent them off with some of their own wounded. Then he moved camp. Heydte and his men had no idea of the course of events, except for the rumble of artillery from the Elsenborn ridge more than a dozen kilometres to their south.