Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (28 page)

Desobry could hear the distinctive noise of German armoured vehicles to the north. Although he knew that ‘sounds at night are much
louder and seem much nearer’, this was clearly quite a force with tanks from the clanking noise of their tracks. ‘Oh brother!’ Desobry said to himself. ‘There is really something out there.’

Heavy firing with automatic weapons and tank gunnery could be heard to the north-east. This came from the destruction of the third team from the 9th Armored Division’s ill-fated Combat Command R. They had unfortunately withdrawn right into the path of the 2nd Panzer-Division. As at Longvilly the night before, German Panthers picked their targets with ease once the first vehicles were ablaze. Lieutenant Colonel Booth, the American commander, had a leg crushed under one of his own half-tracks as he tried to redeploy his trapped column. Survivors abandoned their armoured vehicles, and escaped across country towards Bastogne. Some 200 men were lost as well as all the Shermans and half-tracks.

The sergeant commanding Desobry’s outpost on the northern route to Houffalize, however, felt that as he had seen some American tanks pulling back through their position earlier, they should check before opening fire. He gave his challenge in the darkness, and although he received an answer in English, he realized his mistake. A German tank opened fire, knocking out one of the Shermans. The remaining vehicles rapidly pulled back into Noville. Desobry immediately called in the third group to the north-west. Dawn brought little clarity to the situation because of a heavy ground fog, but soon the sound of German tanks could be heard coming down the northern road from Houffalize. The American defenders prepared their 57mm anti-tank gun and bazooka teams in a cemetery on the edge of Noville. As soon as the enemy vehicles emerged from the fog, they opened up with everything that they had against the Panther tanks and panzergrenadiers.

Two of the Panthers were disabled and provided a good roadblock. But just to make sure that German tank-recovery teams did not manage to sneak up, Desobry sent out a small group with explosives to blow their tracks and wreck their main armament. The ground everywhere was so waterlogged that the Germans would find it difficult to send their panzers round the knocked-out Panthers blocking the road. Desobry’s small force was then strengthened by the arrival of five M-18 Hellcat tank destroyers from Bastogne. He kept them back as his reserve.

Later in the morning the fog began to lift, and to their horror the
Americans saw that the ridge to the north and north-east was covered in German panzers and half-tracks. The battle began in earnest. Many of the panzers got to within a hundred metres of the perimeter, and one even broke into the town before it was shot to a standstill. After an intense two-hour firefight, the Germans pulled back behind the ridge. Then the Germans tried probing attacks from different directions. They were not too difficult to fight off, but German mortar and artillery fire started to cause casualties.

Desobry ignored an order from Bastogne to send a patrol to Houffalize, because it would have had
‘to go through the whole daggone German army to get there’
. With Noville half surrounded by ridges, he suggested to his combat command headquarters back in Bastogne that it would be better if his force withdrew to defend the ridge between Noville and Foy. Colonel Roberts told him that it was his decision, but a battalion of the 101st Airborne was marching up the road from Bastogne to join him. Desobry sent a Jeep for the battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel James LaPrade, just before midday. LaPrade agreed entirely with Desobry’s assessment that they had to take the ridgeline ahead if they were to hold Noville.

As with other battalions of the 101st Airborne, LaPrade’s unit was short of weapons and ammunition. So the 10th Armored Division’s service company loaded their trucks, drove up the road and threw the paratroopers what they needed: bandoliers of rifle ammunition, machine-gun belts, grenades, mortar and bazooka rounds and even spare weapons. As the parachute battalion reached Noville, Desobry called on the supporting artillery battalion to fire at the ridgeline. The paratroopers fanned out and went straight into the attack towards the ridge, with Desobry’s Shermans firing in support.
‘They spread out across the fields,’
he wrote, ‘and those guys when they attacked, did it on the dead run. They would run for 50 metres, hit the ground, get up and run.’ But it turned out that the Germans had planned another attack at the same time, so the two sides ‘were engaged in a head-on clash’. One company made it to the ridgeline, only to be counter-attacked by tanks and panzergrenadiers from beyond. All the companies were taking such heavy losses that LaPrade and Desobry agreed to pull everyone back into the village. The number of badly wounded men overwhelmed the tiny aid station set up in the village.

That night, Desobry and LaPrade conferred in their command post in Noville’s school on what they could do to hold on to the village. General McAuliffe in Bastogne had asked General Middleton, who had been ordered to take his VIII Corps headquarters back to Neufchâteau, if he could pull back the force in Noville, but Middleton had refused. While Desobry and LaPrade were studying the map upstairs, the 10th Armored’s maintenance officer, who was responsible for recovering damaged vehicles, drove up and parked right outside. This was contrary to all standard practice as it gave away the whereabouts of a command post. The Germans concentrated all their fire on the building. LaPrade and a dozen others were killed. Desobry, coated in dust, had a head wound, with one eye half out of the socket.

Desobry was evacuated in a Jeep. On the way back to Bastogne, they were stopped in Foy by a German patrol from the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division. The volksgrenadiers, seeing he was in a bad way, generously allowed the Jeep to continue. Desobry, despite his pain, was shaken to find that the Germans had cut the road behind his force at Noville. Just to the south of Foy,
Easy Company of the 506th
was digging in when they heard engines through the fog. A soldier said to Lieutenant Jack Foley,
‘You know those sound like motorized vehicles.’
‘Vehicles?’ another soldier cried. ‘Hell, they’re tanks!’ The fear was heightened because they could not see ‘what was out there’. ‘All you could do was hear.’

Desobry, in spite of his stroke of luck at being let through, was again to suffer the misfortunes of war. One of the most serious mistakes made in the defence of Bastogne was to leave the 326th Airborne Medical Company at a crossroads near Sprimont, a dozen kilometres north-west of the town. They had set up their tents and were already treating the first casualties to arrive as refugees continued to stream by. The company was so exposed that a surgeon went into Bastogne to ask General McAuliffe for permission to move into the town.
‘Go on back, Captain,’
McAuliffe said. ‘You’ll be all right.’

That night, as they were operating on badly burned men and other victims, a Kampfgruppe
from the 2nd Panzer-Division attacked. Machine-gun fire ripped through the tents killing and wounding many of the men lying on stretchers. With no troops to defend them, the senior American officer had no option but to surrender immediately.
The Germans gave them forty-five minutes to load all the wounded, equipment and supplies on to their trucks.

Their German captors escorted them towards Houffalize. Desobry recovered consciousness on a halt in the journey and, on hearing German voices, thought that they must have taken many prisoners. He was cruelly disabused by his American driver. Desobry tried to persuade him to make a dash for it, but the driver was not prepared to take the risk. The bitter truth sank in. He was a prisoner of war.
^*

For the Germans of the 2nd Panzer-Division, it was a great coup to have captured so much equipment and medical supplies, especially morphine. For the 101st Airborne, it was a disaster. Their wounded were now condemned to suffer in fetid cellars and the garage of a barracks in Bastogne, where the short-staffed medics lacked morphine and other drugs. The conditions were primitive, with no latrine and a single electric light bulb in the main garage ward. The wounded were
‘laid in rows on sawdust covered with blankets’
. Those deemed unlikely to survive lay nearest the wall. ‘As they died they were carried out to another building’ used as a morgue.

Montgomery, at his tactical headquarters outside Zonhoven in Belgium, was deeply disturbed by the lack of information on the battles raging to his south. On the morning of 19 December he sent two of his young liaison officers, whom he used as old-fashioned ‘gallopers’, to report back on the state of the battle. They were accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Bigland, who was his link with Bradley. Driving through freezing fog in a Jeep, they headed for General Hodges’s advance headquarters in Spa.

‘We arrive at First Army HQ, located in an hotel,’
Captain Carol Mather noted at the time, ‘and find it abandoned. A hurried evacuation has evidently taken place. The tables in the dining room are laid for Christmas festivities. The offices are deserted.’ The place felt like the
Marie Celeste
. ‘The truth begins to dawn. The German attack is more
serious than we had thought, for the evacuation of the headquarters shows every sign of a panic move.’ They collected some of the classified papers left lying around to prove that they had been there in case anyone disbelieved them later.

Montgomery did not wait for instructions from SHAEF. His staff officers began to issue detailed orders to the SAS and Phantom reconnaissance teams. Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps received a warning order to move to defend the Meuse. Brigadier Roscoe Harvey, the commander of 29th Armoured Brigade, was summoned back from shooting woodcock. He expostulated that his brigade had not
‘got any bloody tanks – they’ve all been handed in’
. This was true. They were waiting to receive the new Comet, the first British tank produced in five years of war that would be a match for the Tiger and Panther. Harvey was told to take back his old Shermans, those that were still ‘runners’, and move with all speed to Dinant to block the very crossing points on the Meuse which Major General Erwin Rommel had seized in 1940.

Montgomery’s gallopers meanwhile drove through
‘oddly deserted countryside’
to Hodges’s rear headquarters at Chaudfontaine south-east of Liège, where they found him.
‘He is considerably shaken,’
Mather reported, ‘and can give no coherent account of what has happened. Nor is he in touch with General Bradley’s 12th Army Group. Communications seem to have completely broken down.’ While Bigland set off on a circuitous route to Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg, the two captains drove back to Zonhoven as quickly as the icy roads permitted.

Montgomery was
‘clearly alarmed’
when the two young officers recounted what they had seen. He told Mather to drive straight back to First Army headquarters. ‘Tell Hodges he must block the Meuse bridges!’ Mather asked how he was to transmit such orders when Hodges was not under 21st Army Group.

‘Just tell him,’ Montgomery said. ‘The Liège crossings in particular must be defended at
all
costs. He
must
block the bridges by any means. Call up L[ine] of C[ommunications] troops. Use any obstacles he can find, including farm carts! He must hold the bridges all day tomorrow, and make sure that officers supervise each operation. You can tell him so from me!’ Mather was also to inform Hodges that Phantom teams and SAS in Jeeps would be sent straight to the bridges. The British XXX
Corps would move with all speed to the north bank of the Meuse to block routes to Antwerp. Montgomery insisted that he must see Hodges the next morning. ‘If possible bring him back here tonight!’ Eisenhower, equally adamant about the Meuse crossings, had already given orders to General Lee’s Com Z headquarters. It was to move any available engineer units to mine the bridges and send in scratch battalions of rear-area troops. The French also offered seven battalions, but they were poorly armed and trained.

Montgomery was already convinced, with a good deal of justification, that Bradley in Luxembourg could not direct First Army, which was cut off on the northern side of the German salient, or ‘Bulge’ as it was soon to be known. He told Major General Whiteley, the senior British operations officer at SHAEF, to tell Eisenhower that he should be put in command of all Allied forces north of the German salient. Whiteley, who was no admirer of the field marshal and his demands for increased powers, felt that this time he had a point. He discussed the situation with Major General Strong, Eisenhower’s intelligence chief and a fellow Briton, and the two of them went that night to see Bedell Smith, the SHAEF chief of staff.

Bedell Smith, woken from his sleep, exploded at what he saw as a British plot. He called them
‘Limey bastards’
and told them that they should both consider themselves relieved of their duties. Then, after some reflection, he changed his mind. Bedell Smith was unimpressed by Hodges’s First Army headquarters and its relationship with Bradley’s 12th Army Group, but his real concern was that Bradley was out of touch. He rang Eisenhower to discuss giving Montgomery command of the northern front and suggested that this would also push the 21st Army Group into committing British forces to the battle.

Eisenhower agreed to the proposal, partly because Bradley had taken no steps to reinforce the line of the Meuse as he had ordered. He began to consult the map to decide where the boundary line should be drawn. He decided it would go from Givet on the Meuse, and run north of Bastogne to Prüm behind German lines. Montgomery would command all Allied forces to the north, thus leaving Bradley with just Patton’s Third Army and Middleton’s VIII Corps, which would be attached to it.

Bedell Smith rang Bradley in Luxembourg to warn him that Eisenhower thought of giving Montgomery command over the Ninth and
First Armies. According to Bedell Smith, Bradley admitted that he had been out of touch with Hodges and the First Army for two or three days.
‘Certainly if Monty’s were an American command,’
Bradley acknowledged revealingly, ‘I would agree with you entirely. It would be the logical thing to do.’