Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (39 page)

The Shermans of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, supported by the American 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion and with P-38 Lightning fighters overhead, advanced from Sorinnes on Foy-Notre-Dame. It was retaken that afternoon, along with Major von Böhm and 148 of his men. Only a few managed to escape through the deep snow. Some families stayed hidden after the village had been liberated because they still heard firing, but this was due to a blazing half-track in a farmyard on which the ammunition continued to explode for a long time. For most, the first thing to do was to cut squares of cardboard as an emergency repair to their smashed windows. It was a great relief that this battle of the ‘Tommies’ and ‘Sammies’ against ‘les gris’ – the ‘greys’, or Germans – had finally come to an end.

A small girl among those being evacuated to Sorinnes had lost her shoes, so an American soldier from the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion forced a German prisoner at gunpoint to take off his boots and give them to her. They were much too large, but she was just able to walk, while the German soldier faced frostbitten feet.

After American and British artillery had hammered the German positions round the farm of Mahenne between Foy-Notre-Dame and Celles, a local story grew up that SS officers had set fire to the place; but no SS were in the area and the destruction was entirely caused by shelling. Once again the black overalls and death’s-head badge of the panzer arm appear to have been mistaken for the Waffen-SS.

Combat Command B of the 2nd Armored Division also entered Celles that afternoon. The famished and exhausted panzer troops, short of ammunition and out of fuel, could not resist for long. Mopping up continued for another two days. Some 2,500 Germans were killed or wounded and another 1,200 captured. In addition, eighty-two armoured fighting vehicles and eighty-two artillery pieces were taken or destroyed, as well as countless vehicles, many of which had been booty taken from American forces earlier. Most were out of fuel and ammunition.

Major von Cochenhausen, with some 600 of his men, managed to escape on foot across country after splitting up. Many were only too willing to give up. Around Celles, hidden Germans begged locals to find the Americans and tell them that they were ready to surrender. They were worried that if they appeared suddenly, even with their hands up, they might be shot. Some were afraid that, because they wore so many items of American uniform, they might be mistaken for members of the Skorzeny Kampfgruppe. In a few cases as a sign of goodwill they handed over their pistol to a Belgian civilian, who would then hand it over to the American soldiers. The locals did not realize until it was too late that they could have made a lot of money selling them instead.
‘The Americans were mad to get their hands on one,’
a farmer said. Many civilians were also afraid of holding on to items of German equipment in case the enemy returned yet again and found them in their houses.

Apart from the 2nd SS
Das Reich
, which still caused great concern to First Army in the fighting round Manhay and Grandménil, the other panzer divisions fared little better on the north-western flank of the Bulge. The 116th Panzer was still ordered to break through east of Marche, but as Generalmajor von Waldenburg recorded, the
‘divisional units which fought in this battle were nearly completely wiped out’
, and Kampfgruppe Beyer of the 60th Panzergrenadiers was cut off. Only a few men and vehicles managed to escape.

That night Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt informed Hitler that the offensive had failed. He recommended a withdrawal from the salient before the bulk of Army Group B was trapped. Hitler rejected his advice angrily and insisted on more attacks against Bastogne, unaware that even more Allied reinforcements were arriving. The 17th Airborne Division was moving into position, although an VIII Corps staff officer thought that its paratroopers had
‘a lot to learn’
. The newly arrived 11th Armored Division also lacked experience, especially the drivers of their Shermans.
‘Their tanks left a trail of uprooted trees and torn wire lines,’
a report commented.

‘A clear cold Christmas,’
Patton wrote in his diary that day, ‘lovely weather for killing Germans, which seems a bit queer, seeing Whose birthday it is.’ Patton had moved his headquarters into the Industrial School in Luxembourg. He proudly showed off his lights, with the bulbs hanging in captured German helmets acting as lampshades.

But the festival brought little joy to the Belgian population of the Ardennes. In a village close to Elsenborn, where the fighting had died down, the Gronsfeld family decided to come out of their cellar to celebrate Christmas Day. The light was blinding with the sun reflecting off the snow as they sat at the kitchen table, father, mother and their young daughter, Elfriede. Suddenly, a German shell exploded near by, sending a sliver of shrapnel through the window.
‘It cut deep
into Elfriede Gronsfeld’s neck. American medics came to her aid, but there was nothing they could do. The girl was buried on December 29. She was five years old. “What can one say to the mother?” one of the village’s women mourned in her diary. “She cries and cannot understand.”’

An American soldier on the Elsenborn ridge wrote to his wife that day:
‘The bombers have fine
, feathery white streams of vapor streaked across the sky and the fighters scrawl wavy designs as they try to murder each other.’ They would keep their eye on Piper Cub artillery spotters, often half dozen or more in the sky at once. When the aircraft suddenly kicked their tails straight up and dived towards the ground, ‘we knew it was time to look for cover’. In another letter he wrote, ‘We’re getting strafed once or twice a day by our own planes.’

Profiting from clear skies again, American fighter-bombers
‘like a swarm of wasps’
roamed over St Vith as well. ‘We prefer to walk instead of using a car on the main highway,’ a German officer wrote in his diary.
‘The American Jabos keep on attacking everything which moves on the roads … We walk across the fields from hedgerow to hedgerow.’ But soon a much heavier droning sound of aircraft engines could be heard. Formations with seventy-six B-26 bombers had arrived and proceeded to flatten the remains of St Vith. The tactic was cynically known as ‘putting the city in the street’, that is to say filling the roads with rubble so that German supply convoys could not get through this key crossroads.

General Bradley, who had withdrawn into himself due to the shame of losing the bulk of his 12th Army Group to Montgomery, had barely involved himself in the advance of Patton’s two corps. But on Christmas Day, at Montgomery’s invitation, he flew to St Trond near 21st Army Group headquarters at Zonhoven accompanied by a fighter escort. He was determined to push Montgomery into launching an immediate counter-offensive.
‘Monty was always expecting everybody to come to him,’
Bradley complained later with justification. ‘Ike insisted on my going up to see him. I don’t know why in the hell I should.’ Although Montgomery’s headquarters looked ‘very festive’, with the walls covered in Christmas cards, Bradley claimed that he had only an apple for lunch.

Bradley’s version of their encounter was so suffused with resentment that it is hard to take it literally. One can certainly imagine that Montgomery showed his habitual lack of tact and displayed an arrogant self-regard to the point of humiliating Bradley. He even harped on again about the single command of ground forces which should be given to him, and repeated his exasperating mantra that all their setbacks could have been avoided if only his strategy had been followed. But Bradley’s accusation that ‘Monty has dissipated the VII Corps’ by putting it into the line rather than holding it back for a counter-attack again demonstrated his ignorance of events in the north-west. He even claimed to Patton on his return to Luxembourg that Montgomery had said that
‘the First Army cannot attack for three months’
. This is very hard to believe.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that Montgomery was influenced by intelligence reports which said that the Germans intended to make another reinforced lunge for the Meuse. He therefore wanted to hold back until they had spent their strength. But his instruction the
day before to Hodges’s headquarters that Collins’s VII Corps should be prepared to fall back in the west as far north as Andenne on the Meuse was an astonishing mistake which Collins had been absolutely right to disregard. So while Bradley had underestimated the German threat between Dinant and Marche, Montgomery had exaggerated it. Unlike American commanders, he did not sense that Christmas Day had marked the moment of maximum German effort.

Bradley had convinced himself that the field marshal was exploiting the situation for his own ends and was frightening SHAEF deliberately with his reports. He told Hansen later: ‘I am sure [it was] Montgomery’s alarms that were being reflected in Paris. Whether we realized it or not Paris was just hysterical.’
^*
He then added:
‘I am sure [the] Press in the US got all their information and panic from Versailles.’
He felt that they should have a press section at 12th Army Group to counter the wrong impressions. British newspapers seemed to revel in stories of disaster, with headlines such as
‘Months Added to War?’
The next morning after his return, Bradley contacted SHAEF to demand that the First and Ninth Armies should be returned to his command, and he proposed to move his forward headquarters to Namur, close to the action on the northern flank. The war within the Allied camp was approaching a climax, and Montgomery had no inkling that he was playing a losing hand very badly indeed.

On Tuesday 26 December, Patton famously boasted to Bradley:
‘The Kraut has stuck
his head in the meat grinder and I’ve got the handle.’ But this bravado concealed his lingering embarrassment that the advance to Bastogne had not gone as he had claimed it would. He was acutely aware of Eisenhower’s disappointment and frustration.

After the brilliant redeployment of his formations between 19 and 22 December, Patton knew that his subsequent handling of the operation had not been his best. He had underestimated the weather, the terrain and the determined resistance of the German Seventh Army formations defending the southern flank of the salient. American intelligence had failed to identify the presence of the
Führer Grenadier
Brigade, another offshoot of the
Grossdeutschland
Division. And the 352nd Volksgrenadier-Division, based on the formation which had inflicted such heavy losses on Omaha beach, deployed next to the 5th Fallschirmjäger. At the same time, Patton had overestimated the capacity of his own troops, many of them replacements, especially in the weakened 26th Infantry Division in the centre. His favourite formation, the 4th Armored Division, was also handicapped by battle-weary tanks. The roads were so icy that the metal-tracked Shermans slid off them or crashed into each other, and the terrain, with woods and steep little valleys, was not good tank-country.

Patton’s impatience had made things worse by demanding head-on attacks, which resulted in many casualties. On 24 December, he acknowledged in his diary:
‘This has been a very bad
Christmas Eve. All along our line we have received violent counter-attacks, one of which forced the 4th Armored back some miles with the loss of ten tanks. This was probably my fault, because I had been insisting on day and night attacks.’
His men were weak from lack of rest. Things looked little better on the morning of 26 December.
‘Today has been rather trying in spite of our efforts,’
he wrote. ‘We have failed to make contact with the defenders of Bastogne.’

The defenders could hear the battle going on a few kilometres to the south, but having been let down before, they did not expect Patton’s forces to break through. In any case, they were fully occupied in other ways. Another attack on the north-west sector reached Hemroulle. It was fought off by the exhausted paratroopers supported by the fire of field artillery battalions, but the American guns were now down literally to their last few rounds. At least the clear, freezing weather continued so the fighter-bombers could act as flying artillery. In the town, fires still raged from the bombing. The Institut de Notre-Dame was ablaze. American engineers tried to blast firebreaks, and human chains of refugees, soldiers and nuns passed buckets of water to keep the flames at bay.

The clear skies also permitted the arrival of sorely needed medical assistance. Escorted by four P-47 Thunderbolts, a C-47 transport appeared towing a Waco glider, loaded with five surgeons, four surgical assistants and 600 pounds of equipment, instruments and dressings. The glider
‘cut loose at 300 feet’
as if for a perfect landing, but it overshot and skidded over the frozen snow towards the German front line.
‘The medical personnel
barreled out and ran back to American lines while the doughboys charged forward to rescue the glider which carried medical supplies.’ Another ten gliders followed bringing urgently needed fuel, then more waves of C-47 transports appeared to drop parachute bundles with 320 tons of ammunition, rations and even cigarettes.

The surgeons wasted no time. They went straight to the improvised hospital in the barracks and began operating on the 150 most seriously wounded out of more than 700 patients. They operated all through the night and until noon on 27 December, on wounds that in some cases had gone for eight days without surgical attention. As a result they had to perform
‘many amputations’
. In the circumstances, it was a testament to their skill that there were only three post-operative deaths.

Generalmajor Kokott became increasingly concerned during the artillery battle on the southern side about the weight of guns supporting the
4th Armored Division. He heard alarming rumours about what was happening, but could obtain no details from the 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division. He knew that there had been heavy fighting round Remichampagne, then in the afternoon he heard that an American task force had taken Hompré. Assenois was now threatened, so Kokott had to start transferring his own forces south.

At 14.00, Patton received a call from the III Corps commander, who proposed a risky venture. Instead of attacking Sibret to widen the salient, he suggested a charge straight through Assenois north into Bastogne. Patton instantly gave the plan his blessing. Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, who commanded the 37th Tank Battalion from a Sherman named ‘Thunderbolt’, was told to go all the way. Abrams asked Captain William A. Dwight to lead a column of five Shermans and a half-track with infantry straight up the road. The corps artillery shelled Assenois and fighter-bombers dropped napalm, just before the Shermans in tight formation charged into the village firing every gun they had. The Germans who scattered on both sides of the road risked hitting each other if they fired back. Beyond Assenois, some volksgrenadiers hurriedly pushed some Teller mines on to the road. One blew up the half-track, but Dwight leaped down from his tank and threw the other mines aside to clear a path.

When Kokott heard from the commander of his 39th Regiment that American tanks had entered Assenois, he immediately knew that
‘it was all over’
. He gave orders for the road to be blocked, but, as he feared, they were too late. With the lead Sherman firing forward, and the others firing outwards, Dwight’s little column blasted any resistance from the woods on either side of the road. At 16.45, soon after dusk, the lead Shermans of Abrams’s tank battalion made contact with the 326th Airborne Engineers manning that sector. Troops and tanks from the rest of the 4th Armored Division rushed in to secure the slim corridor and protect a convoy of trucks with provisions, which raced in during the night. Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, the commander of the 101st Airborne, who had been in the United States, came in soon afterwards to take over from Brigadier General McAuliffe. The siege of Bastogne was over, but many feared that the main battle was about to begin.

The 5th Fallschirmjäger had been badly mauled. Major Frank, a battalion commander in the 13th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment who was
captured that day and interrogated, was intensely proud of the way his youngsters had fought. Some of them were only fifteen.
‘But what spirit!’
he exclaimed later in prison camp. ‘After we had been taken prisoner, when I was alone, had been beaten and was being led out, there were two of them standing there with their heads to the wall, just in their socks: “Heil Hitler, Herr Major!” [they said]. It makes your heart swell.’

Lüttwitz heard that the
Führer Begleit
Brigade was coming to help cut the corridor, but he and his staff did not believe it would arrive in time for an attack planned for the next morning. He then heard that they had run out of fuel. Lüttwitz observed acidly that
‘the
Führer Begleit
Brigade
under the command of Oberst Remer always had gasoline trouble’.

News of the 4th Armored’s breakthrough spread rapidly and prompted exuberant rejoicing in American headquarters. The correspondents Martha Gellhorn and Leland Stowe stopped by Bradley’s headquarters that evening to obtain more information, as they wanted to cover the relief of Bastogne. So did almost every journalist on the continent. The story was on almost every front page in the western hemisphere. The 101st Airborne found itself famous, but press accounts overlooked the vital roles of Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division, the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion and the artillery battalions.

Around Celles and Conneux mopping up continued all day, with some fierce engagements. But since the Panthers and Mark IVs were out of fuel and armour-piercing rounds, the fight was certainly one sided. The forward air controller with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment called in a ‘cab-rank’ of rocket-firing Typhoons. The target was indicated with red smoke canisters, but the Germans rapidly fired similar-coloured smoke canisters into American positions east of Celles.
‘Fortunately the RAF were not
deceived by this,’ Colonel Brown recorded, ‘and made their attack on the correct target.’ The 29th Armoured Brigade, still in the area, heard that it was to be reinforced by the 6th Airborne Division.

The Kampfgruppe
Holtmeyer, on its way from Rochefort in a vain attempt to help its comrades at Celles and Conneux, had been blocked at Grande Trussogne, a few kilometres short of its objective. It picked up exhausted men who had escaped the night before from the reconnaissance battalion overrun at Foy-Notre-Dame. At Grande Trussogne, these troops were attacked by an infantry battalion of the 2nd Armored
Division supported by Shermans. An American Piper Cub spotter plane then called in British Typhoons whose rockets smashed the column mercilessly, killing Major Holtmeyer.

Manteuffel instructed the Kampfgruppe
to withdraw to the bridgehead at Rochefort held by the Panzer Lehr. Lüttwitz’s headquarters passed on the message immediately by radio. Holtmeyer’s replacement gave the order to blow up the remaining vehicles. Next day, he and most of his men made their way on foot back towards Rochefort, concealed by falling snow.
‘Luckily,’ wrote Oberstleutnant Rüdiger Weiz
, ‘the enemy was slow in following up and did not attack the route of retreat in any way worth mentioning.’ But American artillery did catch up and shell the bridge in Rochefort over the River L’Homme, causing a number of casualties. That night and the following day, some 600 men in small groups managed to rejoin the division.

Between Celles and Conneux, several Germans were captured in American uniform. They were not part of the Skorzeny Kampfgruppe, but were shot on the spot anyway. These unfortunates, suffering from the cold and on the edge of starvation, had stripped the clothes from dead Americans. In their desperation to live they pleaded with their captors, showing their wedding rings and, producing photographs from home, talked desperately of their wives and children. Most Alsatians and Luxembourgers from the 2nd Panzer-Division wanted to surrender at the first opportunity, and even some Austrians had lost their enthusiasm for the fight. One of them murmured to an inhabitant of Rochefort:
‘Moi, pas Allemand! Autrichien.’
And he raised his hands in the air to show that he wanted to surrender.

American soldiers in Celles, believing that Germans were hiding in the Ferme de la Cour just by the church, attacked it with flamethrowers. There were no Germans, only livestock which burned to death. It was the second time this farm had been burned down during the war. The first was in 1940 during the previous German charge to the Meuse.

At Buissonville, between Celles and Marche, American medical personnel set up their first-aid post in the church. The local priest and the American Catholic chaplain communicated in Latin as they worked together. In the same village, a less Christian attitude was adopted when American soldiers in a half-track took two German prisoners into the woods and shot them. They explained to Belgians who had witnessed
the scene that they had killed them in revenge for the American prisoners who perished near Malmédy.

Some American officers became rather carried away by the victory over the 2nd Panzer-Division.
‘It was estimated that
the division’s strength just before this four-day period was approximately 8,000 men and 100 tanks,’ claimed a senior officer at VII Corps. ‘Of the personnel, 1,050 were captured and an estimated 2,000–2,500 killed. Materiel captured or destroyed included 55 tanks, 18 artillery pieces, 8 anti-tank guns, 5 assault guns, and 190 vehicles … The meeting of the US 2nd Armored Division and the German 2nd Panzer-Division was a fitting comparison of Allied and German might.’ But this triumphalism rather overlooked the fact that the 2nd Panzer was out of fuel and low on ammunition, and the men were half starved.

After the battle, according to the Baron de Villenfagne, the countryside around Celles was
‘a vast cemetery
of vehicles, destroyed or abandoned, and of equipment half buried in the snow’. Teenagers, obsessed by the war, explored burned-out panzers and examined the carbonized bodies inside. A number indulged in dangerous war games. Some collected hand grenades, then threw them to blow up in abandoned half-tracks. A boy in Foy-Notre-Dame died after playing with a Panzerfaust which exploded.

The setback before Dinant only seemed to increase German bitterness. When a woman in Jemelle had the courage to ask a German officer why his men had nearly destroyed their village, he retorted:
‘We want to do in Belgium what was done to Aachen.’

West of Hotton, most of the 116th Panzer-Division’s attempts to relieve its surrounded Kampfgruppe
were crushed by American artillery fire. But eventually a feint attack to distract the Americans enabled the survivors to break out clinging to armoured vehicles, and throwing grenades as they crashed through American lines.

During the battle, the
Führer Begleit
Brigade had received orders to disengage and head to Bastogne to assist Kokott’s attempts to close the corridor. Oberst Remer protested twice at the casualties that this would cost, but was overruled each time. Remer also complained that
‘motor fuel was so scarce
that almost half of the vehicles had to be towed’, so it is hard to tell whether Lüttwitz’s suspicions were justified.

East of Hotton, Rose’s 3rd Armored Division faced attacks from the
560th Volksgrenadiers consisting mainly of
‘four or five tanks with an infantry
company or about twenty tanks with an infantry battalion’. These were supported by self-propelled assault guns and artillery. But the arrival of the 75th Infantry Division to strengthen Rose’s task forces meant that the sector had a stronger defence, even though its untried units suffered badly in their counter-attacks to secure the Soy–Hotton road. The icy conditions were proving particularly difficult for Sherman tank crews, because the metal tracks were so narrow and had little grip. Urgent efforts were made to add track extensions and spike-like studs to cope with the problem.