Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (27 page)

Hasbrouck knew that if the Germans diverted south and took Vielsalm and Salmchâteau some ten kilometres to the west of St Vith, then his forces would be cut off. But both the 9th SS Panzer and the 116th Panzer-Division twenty kilometres to the south-west were heading towards the Meuse either side of the St Vith breakwater. He knew he simply had to hold on there to block the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions which, having now dealt with the two beleaguered American regiments in the Schnee Eifel, could concentrate all their strength against St Vith.

Verdun, in the words of one of Bradley’s staff officers, was
‘an ugly professional garrison town’
, with a population considered hostile by the Americans. 12th Army Group’s rear headquarters was based ‘within great loops of barbed wire, up and down which sentries walked’.

Eisenhower arrived with Air Chief Marshal Tedder in the Supreme Commander’s armour-plated Cadillac. Patton appeared in his
‘fabulous Jeep with plexiglass doors and thirty caliber
machinegun mounted on a post’. Together with the two American army group commanders, Bradley and Devers, they trooped upstairs in the grey stone barracks followed by a bevy of staff officers. A single pot-bellied stove was the only source of heat in the long room, so few outer clothes were removed.

Resolved to set the right tone, Eisenhower opened proceedings.
‘The present situation
is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster,’ he said. ‘There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.’

‘Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris,’ Patton called down the table. ‘Then we’ll really cut ’em off and chew ’em up.’ This prompted nervous laughs. Patton’s instinct to attack the enemy salient at the base found few supporters. Eisenhower was unamused. ‘George, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘But the enemy must never be allowed to cross the Meuse.’

Thanks to fresh Ultra intercepts, SHAEF by now had a much clearer picture of German ambitions in Operation
Herbstnebel
. Eisenhower was determined to rise to the challenge as a field commander, and not preside over the battle as a distant figurehead. This feeling may well have been strengthened by the suspicion that he had not imposed himself strongly enough over the past months.

Standing by the large map of the Ardennes hanging on the wall, staff officers briefed the assembled array of generals on the situation. Eisenhower then listed the divisions being brought over to France. Commanders could give ground if necessary, but there was to be no withdrawal behind the Meuse. General Devers’s 6th Army Group in Alsace was to extend north to take over part of Patton’s Third Army front. This was to free up Patton’s divisions for a counter-attack from the south.

‘When can you start?’ Eisenhower asked, turning to Patton.

‘As soon as you’re through with me.’

Eisenhower wanted him to be more specific. Patton could not resist a display of bravado.
‘On the morning of December 21st, with three divisions’
, he replied.
^*
‘The 4th Armored, the 26th and the 80th.’ Patton did not say that a combat command of the 4th Armored and a corps headquarters were already on the move, and the rest were starting to leave that morning. The idea that the bulk of an army could be turned around through ninety degrees to attack in a different direction within three days produced stunned disbelief around the table.

‘Don’t be fatuous, George,’ Eisenhower said. ‘If you try to go that early, you won’t have all three divisions ready and you’ll go piecemeal. You will start on the twenty-second and I want your initial blow to be a strong one!’ Eisenhower was right to be concerned that an over-hasty attack would reduce the desired effect. But there can be little doubt that Third Army’s energy and staff work produced one of the most rapid redeployments known in the history of warfare.

All through the meeting, Patton’s superior General Bradley said very little. Already suffering from stress and hives, he was also a martyr to his sinuses. Bradley felt very much on the defensive since it had been his decision to leave the Ardennes weakly defended. He felt completely sidelined, for Eisenhower was taking all the decisions and giving orders to Patton over his head. Bradley had also isolated himself by refusing to move his headquarters from the city of Luxembourg on the grounds that this would frighten its inhabitants, but pride certainly played a large part in that decision. In any event, the result was that he remained cut off from Hodges’s First Army headquarters near Liège by the German advance. Neither he nor any of his staff officers had visited an American headquarters since the offensive began. To make his mood even worse, Bradley clearly felt snubbed after the meeting when he invited Eisenhower to lunch. The Supreme Commander declined the offer, saying he would have a sandwich in the car on his way back to Versailles.

As Eisenhower was about to get into the staff car, he turned again to Patton.
‘Every time I get a new star I get attacked,’
he joked, referring
also to his previous promotion just before Rommel’s surprise offensive at Kasserine in Tunisia.

‘And every time you get attacked, I pull you out,’ Patton retorted, clearly feeling on top of the world. He then went to a telephone and called his own headquarters in Nancy to confirm the movement order for his divisions using a prearranged codeword. Patton returned, smoking a cigar, to talk to Bradley, who, according to his aide Chester Hansen, was
‘fighting mad’
.

‘I don’t want to commit any of your stuff [i.e. formations] unless I have to,’
Bradley said to Patton. ‘I want to save it for a damn good blow when we hit back and we’re going to hit this bastard hard.’ This suggests that Bradley still resented Eisenhower’s decision that Patton should launch a rapid counter-attack. But when Bradley and his retinue drove back towards Luxembourg, they passed a convoy of Patton’s III Corps already on the road. Third Army staff had not wasted a moment.

Eisenhower had been right to dismiss Patton’s instinct to cut off the German offensive at its base. Although American forces in the Ardennes had doubled to nearly 190,000 men, they were still far too few for such an ambitious operation. The Third Army was to secure the southern shoulder and the city of Luxembourg, but its main priority was to advance north
to Bastogne where the 101st Airborne
and part of the 10th Armored Division were soon to be surrounded.

The situation in the whole area was chaotic. Colonel Herman of the 7th Tank Destroyer Group took over the defence of Libramont, south-west of Bastogne. Nobody there knew what was happening, so he stopped all stragglers and even an artillery column passing through the town.
‘Where are you going?’
he demanded.

‘We’re retreating, sir,’ came the reply.

‘The hell you are,’ said Herman. ‘This is where you turn around and fight.’ By midnight on 19 December, Herman had collected a force of some 2,000 men, to which he added another leaderless artillery battalion the next morning.

Resistance still continued in Wiltz even though the road west to Bastogne had been cut by German patrols, thus blocking efforts to resupply the remnants of the 28th Division in the town with rations and ammunition. At 14.30 the 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division, blowing whistles and supported by forty tanks and self-propelled assault guns, attacked the
town from several sides. By nightfall, the defenders had been pushed back to the centre of the town, amid burning buildings. General Cota sent a message to their commander: ‘Give them hell!’ That night survivors were ordered to break into small groups and head for Bastogne. A convoy of thirty vehicles tried to leave but ran into heavy fire and was abandoned. Having blown the bridges, the last engineer unit did not leave Wiltz until 11.00 the next day.

The trucks and trailers heading for Bastogne packed with paratroopers were directed to Mande-Saint-Etienne, half a dozen kilometres to the west, so as not to clog the town. Roads leading out of Bastogne were blocked by panic-stricken army drivers trying to escape. Even their officers had to be threatened with pistols to force them to move their vehicles aside to allow the 101st Airborne through. Paratroopers frozen from the long journey jumped down stiffly. Everybody realized the need for speed, with two panzer and one infantry division closing on Bastogne. Those who had to shoulder mortar tubes and their base-plates staggered along under the load like
‘a hod-carrying Egyptian slave’
, in the words of Louis Simpson with the 327th Glider Infantry.

Unaware of the vital part played by the shattered 28th Division, the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne were disgusted by the bearded and filthy stragglers fleeing west through the town. They grabbed ammunition, grenades, entrenching tools and even weapons from them or from abandoned vehicles to make up for their own shortages. Belgian civilians, on the other hand, emerged from their houses with hot soup and coffee for the soldiers, and walked along beside them as they gulped it down.

The first regiment to arrive, Colonel Julian Ewell’s 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, marched east towards Longvilly in the pre-dawn darkness to support Team Cherry of the 10th Armored. The men could hear firing ahead through the damp, chill fog. Soon they encountered traumatized survivors from the destruction of Combat Command R the evening before, who told them:
‘We have been wiped out.’

Colonel Cherry had reached the chateau just south of Neffe during the night of 18–19 December, but any hope of making it his command post was dashed at dawn. The reconnaissance platoon of the 3rd Tank Battalion and part of the 158th Engineer Combat Battalion holding the crossroads in Neffe were attacked by an advance detachment of the
Panzer Lehr. A bazooka team knocked out one Mark IV tank, but the weight of machine-gun fire and shellfire coming at the reconnaissance platoon was so great that they had to pull back along the road which ran up a valley to Bastogne.

Two men managed to warn Cherry in the chateau of what had happened. Another four tanks including a Mark VI Tiger, as well as an armoured car and another hundred panzergrenadiers, were sighted coming from the east. Cherry and his handful of headquarters personnel prepared to defend the chateau, a square solid building with a single tower. They dismounted the machine guns from their vehicles and set them up in the windows. For Cherry, it was terrible moment. His main force between Mageret and Longvilly had been cut off, and was blocked in a traffic jam with the remnants of the 9th Armored Division’s Combat Command R. Cherry could only watch as the Germans prepared their trap.

At around 13.00 hours the noise of battle became audible. The 77th Grenadier-Regiment of the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division launched an immediate attack on the jammed column. Artillery and assault guns joined in as well as a company of tanks from the Panzer Lehr.
‘The surprise was complete,’
the rather professorial Generalmajor Kokott noted. The Americans were surrounded, and chaos ensued as vehicles collided with each other as they tried in vain to escape. The battle was over in an hour and a half. Only a few vehicles managed to escape towards the north. Several officers and a hundred men were captured.

As they approached Neffe, Colonel Ewell’s 1st Battalion of the 501st Parachute Infantry could hear shooting clearly through the fog and drizzle. Ewell spread his men out on both sides of the road with the order to dig in. As they were preparing foxholes, tanks could be heard. Desperate cries for bazooka teams followed.

The 2nd Battalion, meanwhile, was moving to defend Bizôry, two kilometres to the north of Neffe. It too would be caught in a bitter battle, and was soon renamed ‘Misery’. Morale among the German forces had been greatly boosted by the two highly successful engagements against American armoured columns, but they were about to receive a sharp disappointment. Later that afternoon the 26th Volksgrenadier reconnaissance battalion and the 78th Grenadier-Regiment found themselves involved in heavy fighting around both Mageret and Bizôry.
The attack on Bizôry produced ‘painful losses’. Part of the Panzer Lehr Division was also heavily engaged at Neffe. The Americans had won the race to Bastogne, with their reinforcements.

Colonel Ewell established a defensive line along high ground less than three kilometres west of Bastogne’s market square.
‘The enemy had made good use of the time!’
the commander of the 26th Volksgrenadiers acknowledged ruefully. And the Panzer Lehr was so desperate for fuel that it was reduced to draining the tanks of captured or knocked-out vehicles.

This
‘day of surprises’
made it clear to Bayerlein that the higher command idea of taking Bastogne off the march was now impossible. But the commander of the XLVII Panzer Corps, General der Panzertruppe Freiherr von Lüttwitz, blamed him for the failure to take Bastogne. Bayerlein retorted by blaming the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division, and Lüttwitz himself, who had slowed him down by committing the Panzer Lehr to battle east of the River Clerf contrary to the original plan. Bayerlein also said that Lüttwitz’s leadership was
‘not sufficiently coherent and energetic’
. He had failed to concentrate the three divisions into a full-scale attack, and had allowed them to become ‘scattered’.

That night the exhausted German troops dug in as the rain came on.
‘Ammunition and rations were brought up,’
recorded the commander of the 26th Volksgrenadiers. ‘Now and then there was a nervous burst of machinegun fire or the thunder of mortar fire which lasted a couple of minutes and after a few salvos died down again.’

Eight kilometres north of Bastogne, the twenty-six-year-old Major William Desobry commanding the 20th Armored Infantry Battalion had spent an anxious night in Noville. The tall and athletic Desobry with his 400 men awaited the onslaught of what he would later discover to be the bulk of the 2nd Panzer-Division. At around 04.00 hours, Desobry’s men noticed that no more stragglers were coming through. Soon afterwards, they heard the first shots. The outpost along the road to Bourcy, having opened fire, pulled back into the town as ordered. Its sergeant, who had been shot in the mouth, reported with difficulty that Germans had appeared in half-tracks.