Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (25 page)

The Germans boasted later that as a result of this action they captured twenty-three Sherman tanks, fourteen armoured cars, fifteen self-propelled guns, thirty Jeeps and twenty-five trucks, all undamaged. Although the German account of their success was exaggerated, the one-sided battle near Longvilly was a very nasty blow for the Americans.

The only welcome development that evening in Bastogne was the arrival of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion, which had managed to fight its way through from the north. Colonel Roberts of the 10th Armored Division had already briefed his three team leaders and sent them on their way. Each had a mixture of Sherman tanks, armoured cars and half-tracks carrying the infantry. Team O’Hara set off to Wardin where it took up position on some high ground just to the south of the village. There was no sign of the Germans, but small groups of exhausted men from the 28th Division, bearded and filthy from three days of fighting, came through heading for Bastogne.

Major William R. Desobry of the 20th Armored Infantry Battalion was ordered north to Noville. An MP led the way in a Jeep to put him on the right road as they had no maps. On reaching the edge of Bastogne, the MP said:
‘Noville is two towns up, straight down the road.’
Desobry sent the reconnaissance platoon on ahead, through Foy and on to Noville. Both villages were deserted.

Desobry set up a defence on the north and eastern side of Noville with outposts of infantry squads and pairs of Sherman tanks guarding the roads coming in, then got some sleep soon after midnight. He knew that there was a big battle to come.
‘We could hear gunfire out to the east
and to the north and we could see flashes. We could see searchlights and so on. During the night a number of small units came back into our lines and a lot of stragglers. They essentially told us horror stories about how their units had been overrun by large German units with lots of tanks, Germans in American uniforms, Germans in civilian clothes and all sorts of weird tales.’

Roberts had given Desobry the authority to grab any stragglers and take them under command, but he found that their ‘physical condition and mental condition was such’ that it was easier to send them on to the rear. The only groups that seemed to be worth taking on were an infantry platoon from the 9th Armored Division and a platoon of engineers,
but even the engineers were sent on their way the next morning. Reinforcements were coming in the shape of paratroopers, but Desobry sensed that the Germans would attack before they arrived.

Lieutenant Colonel Henry T. Cherry’s team, with the 3rd Tank Battalion, a company of infantry, some engineers and a platoon of the 90th Cavalry Squadron, advanced from Bastogne towards Longvilly and the sound of firing. They halted short of the village, whose narrow street was jammed with rear-echelon vehicles from Combat Command R. Colonel Cherry went forward on foot to find out what was happening, but none of the officers in their temporary command post seemed to have any idea of the situation. As at Wardin, stragglers from the 28th were retreating to Bastogne.

Cherry positioned his tanks and infantry a kilometre west of Longvilly and returned to report to Colonel Roberts in Bastogne. He set off back to his men shortly before midnight, and heard over the radio that the remnants of Combat Command R of the 9th Armored Division had pulled out completely. On reaching Neffe, Cherry was warned by a wounded soldier that the road ahead had been cut at Mageret by a reconnaissance group from the Panzer Lehr. Cherry called one of his officers on the radio to tell him to send a small force back to clear them out. But when the half-track with two squads of infantry reached Mageret, they found the German force consisted of three tanks and a company of infantry.

When Colonel Cherry heard what they had discovered, he knew that Longvilly could not be defended, despite Colonel Roberts’s admonition to hold it ‘at all costs’. He ordered his team to pull back to Neffe, fighting their way through if necessary. Cherry, having spotted an ancient chateau with thick walls, decided to set up his command post there. Like Desobry, he sensed that the real battle would start in the morning.

Even though his panzer divisions had at last broken through in the south, General der Panzertruppe von Manteuffel was furious at the delays in capturing St Vith. Part of the trouble came from the fact that the only roads west led through the town, and the boundary with the Sixth Panzer Army lay just six kilometres to the north. And since, in Manteuffel’s view, Dietrich’s army was already attacking on far too narrow a front, some of his forces had moved on to Fifth Panzer Army routes, increasing the traffic chaos.

Shortly after dawn, the Germans attacked Hasbrouck’s defence line in front of St Vith. Panzers fired tree bursts, bringing down pine branches which made the Americans duck deep in their foxholes. Volksgrenadiers attacked, firing automatic weapons. The 18th Volksgrenadier-Division was considerably more experienced than the 62nd advancing towards the south of St Vith. A second attack late in the morning was supported by a massive Ferdinand self-propelled gun, but a Sherman knocked it out twenty-five metres from the American positions with an armour-piercing round which bounced and penetrated its belly.

A Greyhound armoured car concealed in some trees slipped in behind a Tiger tank on the Schönberg road so as to fire its puny 37mm gun at point-blank range. The Tiger commander, on spotting it, tried to traverse his turret round to engage, but the crew of the Greyhound managed to get within twenty-five metres and fire off three rounds into the thinly protected rear of the Tiger.
‘There was a muffled explosion
, followed by flames which billowed out of the turret and engine ports.’

The third attack came in the afternoon, with a battalion of infantry supported by four tanks and eight self-propelled assault guns. The assault was only broken up by the enfilade fire of Shermans. The temperature dropped sharply that day, with some snow flurries.

Manteuffel, seeing little progress, decided to commit his reserve in the form of the
Führer Begleit
Brigade commanded by Oberst Otto Remer. That afternoon, Remer received the order to advance to St Vith, but his column of vehicles was soon brought to a halt by the appalling conditions of the roads. One of Remer’s officers recorded that the
‘
Führer Begleit
Brigade was involved
in a vast traffic jam with two other infantry formations, all claiming the same road’. Remer ordered his men to keep
‘pushing forward and not to worry about minor considerations’
. When told to advance further round to the north, Remer at first
‘declined to move in that direction’
, but eventually took up position in a wood south of Born. As the Führer’s favourite, he could clearly get away with behaviour which would have landed any other officer in front of a court martial. Remer’s high-handed attitude during the offensive became something of a black joke among fellow commanders.

All major American headquarters lacked information on the true state of affairs. Hodges’s First Army staff now at Chaudfontaine appeared to
be paralysed in the face of disaster, while at Simpson’s Ninth Army headquarters in Maastricht officers appeared very optimistic.
‘There’s not the slightest feeling of nervousness in American quarters with regard to an attack,’
the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden wrote. ‘On the contrary there is satisfaction that the enemy has chosen to join battle [in the open] instead of lying down behind a barrier of mud and water.’ Reports of air battles above the clouds at altitudes of up to 20,000 feet, between P-47 Thunderbolts and Focke-Wulf 190s and Me 109s caused great excitement.

General Bradley still had no idea that General Hodges had abandoned his headquarters at Spa. At 22.30 hours, Bradley rang Patton to summon him to Luxembourg for a conference as soon as possible. Patton and three key staff officers left within ten minutes. As soon as Patton arrived, Bradley again said to him:
‘I feel you won’t like what we are going to do, but I fear that it’s necessary.’
Bradley was surprised at how nonchalant Patton was about postponing his offensive in the Saar.
‘What the hell,’
he said. ‘We’ll still be killing Krauts.’

On the map Bradley showed the depth of German penetration, which was also much greater than Patton had imagined. Bradley asked him what he could do. Patton answered that he would halt the 4th Armored Division and concentrate it near Longwy, prior to moving north. He could have the 80th Infantry Division on the road to Luxembourg by the next morning, with the 26th Infantry Division following within twenty-four hours. Patton rang his chief of staff and told him to issue the necessary orders and assemble transport for the 80th Division. He confessed that driving back in the dark with no knowledge of how far the Germans had advanced rattled him.
‘A very dangerous operation, which I hate,’
he wrote in his diary.

When Patton called Luxembourg on his return, Bradley said:
‘the situation up there is much worse than it was when I talked to you’
. He asked Patton to get the 4th Armored moving immediately. ‘You and a staff officer meet me for a conference with General Eisenhower at Verdun at approximately 1100.’

Eight of Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny’s nine Jeep teams had slipped through American lines on the night of 16 December. They consisted of the best English-speakers, but even they were not good enough. Some carried vials of sulphuric acid to throw in the faces of guards if stopped. Some groups cut wires and carried out minor sabotage, such as changing road signs. One even managed to misdirect an entire infantry regiment. But the greatest success of the operation, combined with Heydte’s disastrous parachute drop near Eupen, was to provoke an American over-reaction bordering on paranoia.

A Jeep with four men was stopped at a bridge on the edge of Liège by military police. The four soldiers wore US Army uniforms, and spoke English with an American accent, but when asked for a work ticket they produced several blanks. The MPs ordered them out, found German weapons and explosives, and swastika brassards under their uniform. The Jeep, it turned out, had been captured from the British at Arnhem.

Their officer, Leutnant Günther Schultz, was handed over to Mobile Field Interrogation Unit No. 1. Schultz appeared to co-operate fully. He admitted that he had been part of Skorzeny’s Einheit Steilau and told the team from the Counter Intelligence Corps that, according to his commander Major Schrötter, ‘the secret orders of the
Fernaufklärer
[long-range reconnaissance teams] were to penetrate to Paris and capture General Eisenhower and other high ranking officers’. All of this came from the rumour at the Grafenwöhr camp which Skorzeny had encouraged, but it is still not clear whether Schultz himself believed it,
or whether he hoped to cause chaos, or perhaps in a wild attempt to impress his interrogators to save his skin.

Schultz told them of an ‘Eisenhower Aktion’ carried out by a ‘special group’ commanded by an ‘Oberleutnant Schmidhuber’, directly under Skorzeny’s orders. Approximately eighty people were involved in the plot to kidnap or assassinate General Eisenhower. They would rendezvous at the Café de l’Epée or the Café de la Paix in Paris, he was not sure which. He also claimed that Brandenburger commandos, who had crossed the Soviet frontier just before the invasion in June 1941, were involved. Another report claimed that they
‘may have a captured German officer
as a ruse, pretending to take him to higher headquarters for questioning’. Despite the improbable image of eighty German soldiers meeting in a Parisian café, the Counter Intelligence Corps believed Schultz’s account. The next morning, Eisenhower’s security was stepped up to such a degree that he almost found himself a prisoner.

General Bradley made sure that when he went out he was sandwiched between another machine-gun-mounted Jeep in front and a Hellcat tank destroyer behind. He had been told by the Counter Intelligence Corps, alarmed by the assassination rumours, that he should not use a car, especially getting in and out on the street outside the main entrance of the Hôtel Alfa in Luxembourg. In future, he was to use the kitchen entrance round the back, and his room was changed to one further back in the hotel. All plates with a general’s stars had been removed from vehicles and even those on his helmet had to be covered over.

The idea of German commando troops charging around in their rear areas turned the Americans into victims of their own nightmare fantasies. Roadblocks were set up on every route, greatly slowing traffic because the guards had to interrogate the occupants to check that they were not German. Instructions were rushed out:
‘Question the driver because
, if German, he will be the one who speaks and understands the least English … Some of these G.I. clad Germans are posing as high-ranking officers. One is supposed to be dressed as a Brigadier General … Above all don’t let them take off their American uniform. Instead get them to the nearest PW cage, where they will be questioned and eventually put before a firing squad.’

American roadblock guards and MPs came up with their own questions to make sure that a vehicle’s occupants were genuine. They
included a baseball quiz, the name of the President’s dog, the name of the current husband of Betty Grable and
‘What is Sinatra’s first name?’
Brigadier General Bruce Clarke gave a wrong answer about the Chicago Cubs.
‘Only a kraut would make a mistake like that,’
the MP declared. Having been told that he should look out ‘for a kraut posing as a one-star general’, he was convinced he had discovered his man, and Clarke found himself under arrest for half an hour. Even General Bradley was stopped and held for a short time, despite having given the right answer to the capital of Illinois. The MP thought differently.

British personnel in the American Ninth Army rear area aroused considerable suspicion during the panic. The actor David Niven, a Phantom reconnaissance officer in Rifle Brigade uniform, was challenged by one American sentry with the question: ‘Who won the World Series in 1940?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’
Niven claimed to have replied with characteristic insouciance. ‘But I do know that I made a picture with Ginger Rogers in 1938.’

‘O.K. beat it, Dave,’ came the reply, ‘but watch your step for Crissake.’

At a more senior level Major General Allan Adair, the commander of the Guards Armoured Division, accompanied by his ADC, was stopped at a checkpoint manned by African-American soldiers. Adair’s much loved but famously incompetent ADC Captain Aylmer Tryon could not find their identity documents. After much fruitless searching for them, the large NCO finally said, to Adair’s delight,
‘General, if I were you, I’d get myself a new aide.’

Another way of checking was to make the soldier or officer in question lower their trousers to check that they were wearing regulation underwear. A German Jew, who had escaped to England soon after Hitler came to power, asked his commanding officer in the Royal Army Service Corps for permission to visit Brussels. Born Gerhardt Unger, he had, like many other soldiers of German Jewish origin, anglicized his name in case of capture by the Nazis. On the evening of 16 December, Gerald Unwin, or Gee, as he was known, began drinking with some American soldiers from the First Army in a bar. They told him of their German Jewish intelligence officer, a Lieutenant Gunther Wertheim. Gunther was his cousin and had escaped from Germany to America. So,
on the spur of the moment, he decided to accompany his new friends back to their unit when they left early the next morning.

As they came closer to the Ardennes front, they became aware of heavy firing in the distance and scenes of panic. At a roadblock near Eupen, Gee was arrested. He had no movement order or authorization to be in the area, and although he wore British uniform, he spoke with an unmistakable German accent. Hauled off to an improvised cell-block in a local school, Gee was fortunate not to have been shot out of hand in the atmosphere of rumour and fear then caused by Heydte’s paratroopers. He was saved for the moment by the fact that his underwear was standard British army issue, but he was locked up nevertheless in the school until summoned for interrogation the next day. As he was marched into the room, the intelligence officer gasped in astonishment: ‘Gerd?’ he said. ‘Gunther!’ Gee exclaimed in relief, on seeing his cousin.

One of Skorzeny’s teams was captured on the evening of 18 December at Aywaille, less than twenty kilometres from the Meuse. The three men were found with German papers, and large sums in American dollars and British pounds. They were tried and sentenced to death five days later. Altogether sixteen members of Einheit Steilau were captured and sentenced to ‘be shot to death with musketry’. One group asked for a reprieve on the grounds that they were following orders, and faced certain death if they had refused to do so.
‘We were sentenced to death,’
their appeal stated, ‘and are now dying for some criminals who have not only us, but also – and that is worse – our families on their conscience. Therefore we beg mercy of the commanding general; we have not been unjustly sentenced, but we are de facto innocent.’ Their appeal was refused and the sentences confirmed by General Bradley.

One of the group taken at Aywaille repeated the story about the plan to seize or kill General Eisenhower, thus confirming the worst fears of the Counter Intelligence Corps. There were also reports of a group of Frenchmen, former members of the Vichy Milice and the SS
Charlemagne
Division, who had been given the task of penetrating Allied lines to sabotage fuel dumps and railway cars. They were said to be wearing American coats, and pretending to be forced labourers who had escaped from a factory.

Another three members of Einheit Steilau, due to be executed at Eupen on 23 December, made a last request just before their execution.
They wanted to hear some Christmas carols sung by German nurses interned near by. While the firing squad stood ready,
‘the women sang in clear strong voices’
. The guards looked at the condemned men, and apparently ‘hung their heads struck by the peculiar sentimentality of it all’. The officer in command of the squad was ‘half afraid that they’d shoot at the wall instead of the man when the command was given’.

On 23 December, when British troops from the 29th Armoured Brigade guarded the bridge over the Meuse at Dinant,
‘visibility was almost nil’
due to fog, the commanding officer of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment wrote. ‘An apparently American Jeep drove through one of the road blocks approaching the bridge on the east side of the river. This road block, as were all the others, was mined by the 8th Rifle Brigade who had established a movable barrier and arranged for mines to be pulled across the road should any vehicle break through the barrier without stopping. As we were by now in contact with the Americans, this Jeep was not fired on, but as it refused to stop the mines were drawn across the road and it was blown up.’ It was found to contain three Germans. Two were killed and one taken prisoner.

This was probably the same incident (recorded with a certain artistic licence by Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen) in which four Germans in a Jeep lost their nerve on a guarded bridge and tried to smash their way through. The sentry pulled a string of mines across the road, and the Jeep blew up. Three of the Germans were killed instantly, the fourth wounded. The guards walked up, shot the fourth one dead, then tipped the Jeep and all the bodies into the river,
‘swept up the bridge’
and resumed their post.

Skorzeny’s 150th Panzer-Brigade proved a complete anticlimax. Their tanks, most of which were German Mark IVs and Panthers unconvincingly camouflaged to look like Shermans, were painted in olive-drab paint with the white Allied star, in some cases with the surrounding circle omitted. Skorzeny himself knew that they would not have fooled the Americans except perhaps at night. He soon gave up all idea of thrusting through to the Meuse bridges after being bogged down in mud and thwarted by the immense traffic jams which built up behind the 1st SS Panzer-Division. On the evening of 17 December he asked Sepp Dietrich to commit his force instead as an ordinary panzer brigade. Dietrich gave
his consent and told Skorzeny to take his force to Ligneuville. Dietrich had another reason for agreeing so readily. The commanding general of I SS Panzer Corps asked for Skorzeny’s forces to be withdrawn, as they were
‘hindering the operation of the corps
by driving between vehicles and doing exactly as they pleased’.

On 21 December, the 150th Panzer-Brigade attacked north to Malmédy in a freezing fog. They forced back a regiment of the 30th Infantry Division until the American artillery ranged in, using the new and highly secret Pozit fused shells, which exploded on proximity to their target. More than a hundred men were killed and 350 wounded in the day’s fighting, including Skorzeny, who was badly wounded in the face by shrapnel and nearly lost an eye. The 150th Panzer-Brigade was withdrawn entirely from the offensive and Operation
Greif
was over. But in its only action it managed, purely by chance, to sow confusion, just as Einheit Steilau had done. First Army became convinced by the attack on Malmédy that the Sixth Panzer Army was preparing a drive north.

The original contributor to Allied confusion, Oberstleutnant von der Heydte, was increasingly depressed in his Kampfgruppe’s forest hideout south of Eupen. He was bitter about the
‘amateurish, almost frivolous manner
displayed at the higher levels of command, where the order for such operations originated’. Dietrich had assured him that he and his men would be relieved within a day. But there was no indication of a breakthrough round Monschau, and the American artillery on the Elsenborn ridge to the south still thundered away. Without radios, there was no hope of discovering the progress of the battle.

Heydte’s 300 paratroopers had little food left, having jumped with emergency rations: two rolls of pressed bacon, two portions of sausage, two packets of ‘Soya Fleischbrot’, dextro-energen tablets, some of the German army hard bread called
Dauerbrot
, marzipan and Pervitin, a benzedrine substitute which had by then been banned. Under the cover of darkness, a group of his men had crept up to an American artillery battery during the night of 17 December and managed to steal some boxes of rations. But these did not last long when divided between 300 men.

Heydte’s outposts near the road never attempted to attack a convoy,
but picked off single vehicles. The Americans found a single strand of wire stretched across at neck height for anyone sitting in a Jeep. This was attributed to Heydte’s men, and it prompted the decision to fit an angled iron attachment on the front of Jeeps to cut any wires strung across roads or trails. There were very few incidents of this sort, but it was considered necessary to reassure drivers, especially when they advanced further into Germany because of the rumours of Werwolf
resistance groups made up of Hitler Youth fanatics.

On 17 December Sergeant Inber of the 387th Anti-Aircraft Artillery, driving south from Eupen, overtook a slow column of trucks with ease. But 400 metres ahead of it he was
‘ambushed, captured
and whisked off the road before the leading vehicle of the convoy reached the point’. Inber was led off to Heydte’s main lair, about a kilometre into the woods, where the paratroopers treated him well. Heydte told Inber that he would release him if he could guide two of his injured men to an American aid station. The other American wounded whom they had captured were placed by the road where an ambulance could pick them up.