Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (37 page)

The 4th Armored Division was also suffering from the extreme weather.
‘Our company commander was evacuated with pneumonia,’
wrote a soldier with the 51st Armored Infantry Battalion, ‘and we lost our platoon sergeant because his feet froze.’ By the next day there was only one officer left in the company. Patton’s hope of relieving Bastogne by Christmas was fading fast.

Kokott’s forces like most German formations in the Ardennes were running short of ammunition, especially mortar rounds. Allied airstrikes on marshalling yards and forward supply lines were already having an effect. That afternoon, the Americans noticed that the German guns had fallen silent. The defenders guessed that they were conserving their ammunition for a major attack on Christmas morning.

Some fifty kilometres to the north, the remnants of Kampfgruppe
Peiper in La Gleize had prepared the destruction of their vehicles, prior to a breakout on foot across the River Amblève. At 03.00 on 24 December, the main group of some 800 men crossed the river and trudged up through the thick woods on the south side towards the ridge line. Peiper, just behind the point detachment, took Major McCown with him. Two hours later they heard explosions behind them and, down in the valley, the ruined village was lit by the flames from burning vehicles.

Peiper, unsure where the German lines lay, led them south parallel with the River Salm. McCown recounted later that they had nothing to eat but four dried biscuits and two gulps of cognac. An hour after dark they bumped into an American outpost, where a sentry opened fire. The panzergrenadiers were exhausted, especially the two dozen walking wounded. They blundered about in the dark, wading streams to avoid roads and villages. In the early hours of Christmas morning they ran into another American position north of Bergeval, triggering a formidable response with mortars and machine guns firing tracer. McCown escaped during the confusion, and rejoined the American lines where he identified himself to paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne. He was taken to General Jim Gavin’s command post.

Peiper and his men withdrew down into the Salm valley and swam across the freezing river. The I SS Panzer Corps reported his arrival, apparently wounded, later on Christmas morning. This was at about the same time as the 30th Infantry Division crushed the other pocket of his men, trapped near Stavelot. Their resistance was fanatical, probably out of a belief that their opponents would not be taking prisoners.
‘Attacking waves literally
waded knee-deep through their own dead in their desperate assaults,’the after-action report stated. The divisional artillery commander estimated that there were more than a thousand German dead piled at one point, and the woods around Stavelot and La
Gleize were strewn with corpses. The Americans estimated that 2,500 members of the Kampfgruppe
had been killed and ninety-two tanks and assault guns destroyed.

Now that the only breakthrough by the Sixth Panzer Army had been thoroughly destroyed, the eyes of Hitler and the OKW were firmly on Manteuffel’s panzer divisions to the west. The build-up against the northern shoulder line appeared overwhelming. After the 2nd SS Panzer-Division
Das Reich
had crushed the force at Baraque-de-Fraiture, it was reinforced by the advance guard of the 9th Panzer-Division. The
Führer Begleit
Brigade was on its way to attack Hotton, and the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions, supported by the 9th SS Panzer-Division
Hohenstaufen
,
were
attacking the 82nd Airborne on the Vielsalm sector, where General Ridgway insisted on holding a right-angled wedge.

General Bradley was outraged to hear that Montgomery had deployed Collins’s VII Corps along the shoulder line rather than hold it back for a major counter-attack. (In fact it was Collins himself who had committed his divisions because there was no choice.) Once again it demonstrated how completely Bradley failed to understand what was really happening. With four panzer divisions attacking north and north-west, a defence line had to be secured before a counter-attack took place. First Army headquarters, which was considering a major withdrawal on the VII Corps front, even recorded that evening:
‘Despite the air’s magnificent performance
today things tonight look, if anything, worse than before.’ Concern about a breakthrough by the panzer divisions to the west even prompted First Army to consider pulling back all the heavy equipment of V Corps in case of a sudden retreat.

Ridgway was livid when Montgomery overruled him once more, on this occasion by ordering Gavin’s 82nd Airborne to withdraw from Vielsalm to the base of the triangle from Trois-Ponts to Manhay. The 82nd was coming under heavy pressure from the 9th SS Panzer-Division
Hohenstaufen
, the rest of the 1st SS Panzer-Division and the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions. Yet Ridgway felt insulted by the idea that the United States Army should be ordered to give ground in this way. He attributed the move to Montgomery’s obsession with ‘tidying-up the battlefield’, and protested vehemently to General Hodges,
‘but apparently received little sympathy there’
, as Hansen later acknowledged. Bradley
became obsessed with Montgomery’s decision and harped on about it for some time to come.

Gavin, however, saw the point of the redeployment, and Montgomery was almost certainly right. The 82nd was already overstretched even before the next wave of German formations was due to arrive. Reducing their front from twenty-seven kilometres to sixteen meant a much stronger defence line. The withdrawal began that night, and
‘morale in the 82nd was not materially affected’
. Gavin’s paratroopers soon had plenty of frozen German corpses to use as sandbags in their new positions, and they refused to allow Graves Registration personnel to take them away.

Task Force Kane and a regiment of the newly arrived 17th Airborne were positioned to defend the Manhay crossroads, against what First Army headquarters still believed to be an attempt to capture American supply bases in Liège. The untried 75th Infantry Division was on its way to support Rose’s 3rd Armored Division as it attempted to extricate Task Force Hogan, surrounded at Marcouray.

The defenders at Manhay expected a fearsome attack by the
Das Reich
, but it advanced cautiously through the forests either side of the highway and occupied Odeigne. This was partly due to continuing fuel-supply problems, but mainly to avoid moving in the open on another day of brilliant sunshine. An armoured column in daylight would become easy prey for the fighter-bombers overhead, scouring the snowbound landscape for targets.

Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, the commander of the
Das Reich
responsible for the massacres of Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane on their advance north to Normandy in June, was tall and arrogant with a pitted face. He was famous for his ruthlessness, like most of his officers. They even thought it funny that the
Das Reich
had murdered the inhabitants of the wrong Oradour.
‘An SS-Führer told me with a laugh’
, Heydte was secretly recorded later as saying, ‘that it had been the wrong village. “It was just too bad for them,” [he said]. It turned out afterwards that there weren’t any partisans in that village.’

As soon as dark fell and the Thunderbolt and Lightning fighter-bombers had departed, the tanks and half-tracks of the SS
Das Reich
emerged from the woods and drove north towards Manhay. The Germans employed their usual trick of placing a captured Sherman at the head of
the column. The Americans held their fire, in case it was a task force from the 3rd Armored Division. But then the SS fired flares to blind the American tank gunners. Two panzergrenadier regiments attacked abreast at 21.00. By midnight, they had taken Manhay. The combat command of the 7th Armored lost nineteen tanks in the night battle, and its exhausted tank crews had to escape on foot. The
Das Reich
panzer regiment lost none.

Waldenburg’s 116th Panzer-Division, having been sent round to the west of the River Ourthe, received orders to break through between Marche-en-Famenne and Hotton, then to swing west towards Ciney to protect the right flank of the 2nd Panzer-Division. But Bolling’s 84th Infantry Division held a strong line south of the main Marche–Hotton road. The 116th managed to break through around the village of Verdenne, but the success did not last. This was just the start of what Waldenburg called
‘bitter and ever-changing’
battles. Houses and positions changed hands many times.

Marche itself was threatened. The twenty-one-year-old Henry Kissinger with the 84th’s intelligence branch volunteered to stay behind under cover despite the added risk of being Jewish. But Bolling’s men held firm and his artillery eventually inflicted terrible losses on Waldenburg’s men. Field artillery battalions used the new Pozit fuse at high elevation, if necessary by digging down the trails, so as to achieve air bursts over the German positions. The American infantry watched the effect with savage glee, and reported back
‘
beaucoup
dead’
.

Allied fighter-bombers also wheeled back and forth, dropping bombs and strafing.
‘Of the German Luftwaffe nothing was to be seen or heard,’
Waldenburg commented angrily. The closest his panzergrenadiers came to Marche was the treeline north-west of Champlon-Famenne overlooking the town, where they were constantly bombarded by American artillery. To this day the local landowner cannot sell timber from the forest because of the shards of metal buried deep in the massive conifers.

At the furthest tip of the German salient, the 2nd Panzer-Division had now lost three tanks in its clashes with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment. Lieutenant Colonel Brown, concerned that the Germans were now so
close to the bridge at Dinant, reinforced the approaches in case panzergrenadiers tried to slip through on foot. He had learned that the German fuel situation had become desperate. British artillery began to bombard 2nd Panzer positions around Celles, and plans were made to attack from Sorinnes the next day to crush Böhm’s reconnaissance battalion in Foy-Notre-Dame. Brown did not yet know that the British 53rd Division was starting to cross the Meuse, so he would have strong support.

Major General Harmon, instantly recognizable from his barrel-chest, military moustache and gravelly voice, could scarcely control his impatience to be at the enemy. He had received orders from General Collins to hold back until the moment was ripe for a counter-attack, but Collins could not be reached as he was preoccupied with the dangerous situation on his east flank. Montgomery had even issued an instruction that, because of the threat from the 2nd Panzer and Panzer Lehr in the west, Collins’s corps could,
‘if forced’
, swing back to a line between Hotton and Andenne, some thirty kilometres north of Marche as the crow flies. This would have constituted a major retreat and, unlike the withdrawal of Gavin’s 82nd Airborne, a huge mistake. But fortunately Montgomery had left Collins with the authority to take his own decisions.

Harmon suspected that there was a large panzer force around Celles, but had no confirmation until two P-51 Mustangs reported flak firing from near by. (No contact had yet been established with the British at Sorinnes.) Amid considerable confusion between First Army headquarters and VII Corps during Collins’s absence, Harmon refused to wait any longer. He ordered his Combat Command B to join Combat Command A at Ciney, and sent forward two battalions of self-propelled artillery. When finally Collins spoke to Harmon by telephone that evening and gave him leave to attack next morning, Harmon apparently roared:
‘The bastards are in the bag!’
Montgomery backed Collins’s decision to deploy the 2nd Armored Division, even though it now meant that his plan to hold back the VII Corps for a counter-attack had unravelled.

The Cochenhausen Kampfgruppe had taken up all-round defence in two pockets between Celles and Conneux, while awaiting promised reinforcements from the 9th Panzer-Division. But the 9th Panzer was in turn delayed, waiting to refuel. The 2nd Panzer’s forward elements were also clamouring for ammunition and fuel, but the extended supply
line was far from secure. This was made worse by renewed American attacks on the high ground south-west of Marche and the increasing numbers of Allied fighter-bombers overhead. Staff in the 2nd Panzer-Division headquarters south of Marche burned with frustration that this should happen when they were so close to their objective. An instruction from Generalfeldmarschall Model went out to Foy-Notre-Dame:
‘If necessary, elements of the
reconnaissance battalion were to capture the Dinant bridge on foot, in a coup de main,’ just as Colonel Brown had imagined. But Böhm’s Kampfgruppe
was the hardest pressed of all, as British artillery ranged in on it.

Frustration soon turned to alarm in the 2nd Panzer-Division headquarters
‘since both pockets reported
that their supply of ammunition and fuel would not allow them to continue the battle much longer’, Oberstleutnant Rüdiger Weiz recorded. ‘And since the fuel available at the front was not sufficient for the withdrawal of the forces, the nearly unsolvable question arose how to bring help to the elements fighting in the front line.’

Lauchert decided to pull out the Kampfgruppe
commanded by Major Friedrich Holtmeyer screening Marche. He ordered it to move west via Rochefort, and thrust towards Conneux to relieve the encircled forces there. This operation could be carried out only at night because of American air supremacy. Lüttwitz agreed with the plan, but permission first had to be obtained from Fifth Panzer Army headquarters. Lauchert received authorization that afternoon, but the reconnaissance battalion was no longer responding on the radio. Holtmeyer’s force set out that evening, but this difficult manoeuvre in the dark was further hindered by American groups attacking as they withdrew.

Ten kilometres south-east of Marche, the village of Bande stands on a hill above the N4 highway from Marche to Bastogne. As mentioned earlier, German SS troops had burned thirty-five houses along the N4 highway near the village during their retreat from the region in September as a reprisal for attacks by the Belgian Resistance. On 22 December, leading elements of the 2nd Panzer-Division had passed by, and on the following day some of their troops were billeted in the village. They behaved well. On Christmas Eve, a very different group, some thirty strong, appeared wearing grey SS uniforms. They had the badge of the
Sicherheitsdienst – an SD in a lozenge – on the left sleeve. The majority of this Sondereinheitkommando
8 were not German, but French, Belgian and Dutch fascists led by a Swiss and attached to the Gestapo.