Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (26 page)

Isolated paratroopers and air crew from the scattered drop soon fell into American hands. A survivor from a Junkers 52, brought down behind the Ninth Army, told his interrogators that they had
‘taken off believing
they were on a practice flight, but learned while in the air that they were on a special mission’.

After moving their hiding place, Heydte’s force clashed on 19 December with some of the troops from the 18th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division who were combing the forest. There were a dozen casualties on both sides. Some of the soldiers searching for the German paratroopers did not report the parachutes they found; they simply cut them up to make silk scarves.

Heydte, who was sickening and suffered from trench foot, gave up any idea of an advance on Eupen and decided to move east instead toward Monschau. His men were visibly weakened by malnutrition. They struggled through forest and marshes, and were soaked in the freezing waters of the Helle river which they had to wade. On 20 December, after another, heavier skirmish, Heydte told his men to make their way back to German lines in small groups. Altogether thirty-six were captured, but the rest reached safety. The thirty-seven fatal casualties in the Kampfgruppe were entirely from anti-aircraft fire on the first night.

On 22 December Heydte, by then feeling very ill and utterly exhausted, went into Monschau on his own and broke into a house. When discovered by a civilian, he was relieved when the man told him that he would have to report him to the American military authorities. After a spell in hospital, Heydte was transferred to a prison camp in England. It was comfortable, but he and other officers held there never realized that their conversations were being recorded.

On 19 December at dawn, Peiper’s Kampfgruppe
attacked Stoumont with a battalion of panzergrenadiers, a company of paratroopers, and tanks in support on the road. The first assault failed. Stoumont seemed solidly held, and the 119th Infantry of the 30th Division launched a counter-attack on their right flank. But a little later in the thick morning mist the trick of Panther tanks charging at maximum speed worked once more. The anti-tank gunners did not stand a chance in the bad visibility. Only ghostly bazooka teams stalking panzers in the fog managed to achieve a couple of kills from the rear. A 90mm anti-aircraft gun sent to Stoumont in desperation managed to knock out a Tiger from the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion.

Peiper’s Kampfgruppe
cleared Stoumont nevertheless, crushing the infantry company defending it. Two platoons of Shermans arrived too late, and had to pull back. Peiper’s force pushed on four kilometres to the west to Stoumont station. American officers assembled a scratch force just in time. It included the reserve battalion from the 119th, fifteen incomplete Shermans extracted from a nearby ordnance depot by the newly arrived 740th Tank Battalion, a battery of howitzers and another 90mm anti-aircraft gun. With short cliffs on the north side of the road, rising to steep, wooded hillsides above, and a sharp drop on the south side down to the railway track along the river, this position could not be outflanked. Even though First Army headquarters feared that Peiper’s force would turn north towards Liège, Stoumont station would be the furthest point of his advance. The rest of the 30th Infantry
Division and General Jim Gavin’s 82nd Airborne were concentrating in the area just in time: the 30th to counter-attack the German spearhead and the 82nd to advance from Werbomont to support the defenders of St Vith.

Around 260 Belgian civilians, in an attempt to escape the fighting in Stoumont itself, went down into the cellars of the Saint-Edouard sanatorium, which from the steep hillside overlooked the Amblève valley. But the Germans took over the building as a strongpoint. Priests held masses to calm the frightened women and children when the Americans counter-attacked next day and fought their way in.

The civilians thought they were saved, and greeted the GIs with joy, but the Germans came back in the night. ‘Sister Superior led the crowd in reciting twelve rosaries for those fallen in battle.’ The Americans again launched an attack, with Sherman tanks firing at point-blank range into the sanatorium. The roof collapsed, walls were blasted down, and parts of the basement ceiling came down in a cloud of dust and smoke. The priest gave general absolution, but by a miracle none of the women and children was hurt.

On the morning of 19 December, Peiper heard that the Americans had retaken Stavelot to his rear, thus cutting his Kampfgruppe
off from any hope of resupply when it was almost out of fuel. He sent his reconnaissance battalion back to retake the small town. Peiper sensed failure. He still bitterly regretted that his Kampfgruppe
had
been forced to wait for the infantry to open the way on the first day of the offensive. It should have been a surprise attack without artillery preparation, he believed, but with armoured combat teams as well as infantry. In the subsequent advance west, the long snaking column had proved a big mistake. They should have had many smaller groups, each one probing for intact bridges and a way through.

His Waffen-SS troopers continued to kill prisoners at almost every opportunity. In La Gleize on the route back, a member of the 741st Tank Battalion, cut off by the German attack the day before, remained hidden in the church.
‘From his place of concealment,’
a report stated, ‘this soldier observed the [German] tanks and infantry halt an American armored car. The occupants surrendered and were told to get out. They were promptly fired upon by machine weapons as they stood there with hands up. The Germans then took the vehicle and moved away.’ And
Rottenführer Straub of the reconnaissance battalion later recounted another incident to fellow prisoners from the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division.
‘Our battalion advanced to Stavelot
and on to La Gleize. From there we went back to Stavelot. Our Sturmführer just shot [prisoners] outright … There were twelve of them the first time. He just shot them because they were in the way.’

SS panzergrenadiers convinced themselves of the most extraordinary stories to justify their actions. An eighteen-year-old soldier from the 1st SS Panzer-Division told a fellow prisoner of war that the reputation of one of their senior NCOs for shooting unarmed men was so well known that they had to deal with Americans who pretended to surrender but were secretly bent on revenge.
‘Some of them came along’
, he said, ‘waving a white flag and we knew very well that they were out for our Oberscharführer, because he’d killed so many of them, so we took our machine pistols and shot them before they could do a thing. That’s the way we work.’

After dark on the evening of 19 December, American soldiers from the 105th Engineer Battalion managed to infiltrate Stavelot and destroyed the main bridge across the Amblève, despite enemy tank and machine-gun fire. Peiper was furious: part of his force was now cut off north of the river and there was little sign of bridging equipment coming up from his division.

The 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division, which Peiper’s Kampfgruppe
had expected to catch up with them, was just one of Sepp Dietrich’s formations battering away without success at the southern edge of the Elsenborn ridge. The I SS Panzer Corps headquarters had sent the paratroopers to take Faymonville and then Waimes, from where the American field hospital had been evacuated. But the bulk of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger never advanced further than Faymonville.

The lack of progress by the Sixth Panzer Army had started a cascade of criticism from Hitler and the OKW, via Rundstedt and Model down to a frustrated and angry Dietrich. In a fresh attempt, Dietrich ordered the 12th SS Panzer-Division to move round from Rocherath–Krinkelt to attack the American 1st Infantry Division positions from Büllingen. The Germans urgently needed to open the road west to Malmédy. Panzergrenadiers of the SS
Hitler Jugend
, battalions of the 12th Volksgrenadier
and tanks assembled in the early hours in Büllingen ready to crush the American 26th Infantry Regiment. The battle for Dom Bütgenbach was to be as intense as that for Rocherath–Krinkelt to the north-east.

To continue the attacks around Rocherath–Krinkelt and Wirtzfeld, Dietrich sent in his reserve, the 3rd Panzergrenadier-Division, to support the 12th and 277th Volksgrenadiers. The hard pounding intensified, as the massed American artillery regiments on the Elsenborn ridge smashed every village in range now held by the Germans. Their first priority on the morning of 19 December was to break up the renewed attacks against Rocherath–Krinkelt, a task at which the 155mm Long Toms excelled. But the casualty rate among young artillery officers acting as forward observers was very high.

In the shattered twin villages, the remaining units of the 2nd Division and the Sherman and tank-destroyer platoons continued to fight off the volksgrenadiers and panzergrenadiers. They also prepared their withdrawal to new positions on the side of the Elsenborn ridge. During the afternoon, they started to destroy vehicles, guns and equipment which would have to be left behind. Radiators and oil reservoirs were emptied and the engines revved until they seized. Artillerymen rolled thermite grenades into their gun barrels. And at 17.30 hours, just over an hour after dark had fallen, the first units began their withdrawal. Along the rutted road, engineers had taped TNT blocks to the trees on either side, ready to blow them down to block the way.

Exhausted after the three-day battle of Rocherath–Krinkelt which had blunted the Sixth Panzer Army, the men slipped and slid in the muddy slush, cursing and sweating. They were so tired that on firmer patches they fell asleep as they continued to trudge forward. Late that night, a small patrol sneaked back to the edge of the twin villages. They returned to report that there were around a thousand Germans there with about a hundred American prisoners.

A dozen kilometres to the south, the two unfortunate regiments of the 106th Division, trapped in the Schnee Eifel east of St Vith, tried to fight their way back to American lines. The inexperienced officers and soldiers were utterly demoralized. They were short of ammunition, out of radio contact mainly due to German jamming, and the scale of
the disaster appeared overwhelming. Many tried to raise each other’s spirits with assurances that a relief force must be on its way.

Kurt Vonnegut, who was with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, described his comrades as a mixture of college kids and those who had enlisted to avoid jail. Many were
‘poor physical specimens’
who ‘should never have been in the army’. Few had received infantry training. Vonnegut was a battalion scout who knew about weapons only because his ‘father was a gun-nut, so [he] knew how all this crap worked’.

Some tried to get away in vehicles, but when the Germans opened fire with anti-tank guns, they abandoned them and immobilized the rest. Their commanders, who were ‘flying blind’, sent off scouts to find out what was happening, but they could not even find the artillery battalion which was supposed to be supporting them. The Germans had brought up loudspeakers to play music by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and other American bandleaders, interrupted with promises of
‘showers, warm beds, and hotcakes for breakfast if you surrender’
. This provoked an obscene chorus in response. One soldier in a ditch, weeping violently, shouted: ‘Go blow it out your ass, you German son of a bitch!’

The two regimental commanders decided to give up when their units were bombarded by German artillery from all sides. At 16.00 hours an officer went forward waving a snow cape. Officers and men were marched off with their hands on their heads, stumbling and tripping. Their guards later told them to put the contents of their pockets into their helmet liners so that they could pick out what they wanted. A large number found themselves herded into a farmyard surrounded by a stone wall. At dusk a voice called out:
‘Do not flee. If you flee, you will be machine weaponed.’
They could only cling together for warmth in the long, cold night.

Vonnegut called it
‘the largest surrender of Americans under arms in American military history’
. (In fact the surrender at Bataan in 1942 was much greater, but the capitulation of some 8,000 men in the 106th was certainly the biggest in Europe.) Vonnegut and a dozen others tried to find their way back to American lines through the snow-bound forest, but the Germans of the 18th Volksgrenadier-Division who were mopping up trapped them in the bed of a creek. Loudspeakers broadcast an order to surrender. To hurry them, the Germans fired tree bursts over their heads. Deciding that they had no alternative, the cornered Americans stripped
their weapons and threw the working parts away. They emerged with their hands up, and thus began their imprisonment which, in Vonnegut’s case, led to Dresden and the firestorm of February 1945, described in
Slaughterhouse Five
.

Officers at VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne were horrified when they heard of the surrender. The deputy chief of staff
‘inferred that the two surrounded regiments might have
put up a stronger fight. He characterized a force of that size as “two wildcats in a bush” which might have done some clawing of the enemy instead of surrendering as they eventually did.’

The Germans could not believe how many men they had surrounded. One of their officers wrote in his diary:
‘Endless columns of prisoners pass
; at first, about a hundred, later, another thousand. Our vehicle gets stuck on the road. I get out and walk. Model himself directs traffic. (He’s a little undistinguished looking man with a monocle.) The roads are littered with destroyed American vehicles, cars and tanks. Another column of prisoners pass. I count over a thousand men. In Andler there is a column of 1,500 men with about 50 officers and a lieutenant colonel who had asked to surrender.’

To Model’s frustration, German traffic east of St Vith was hardly advancing. The 7th Armored Division’s artillery kept up a steady bombardment on the approach roads. After the previous day’s failure to take St Vith, the Germans tried probing and outflanking movements mainly against the 31st Tank Battalion. The 38th Armored Infantry Battalion was
‘licking its wounds’
after the mauling it had received, and platoons needed to be amalgamated because of their losses. But even so the Germans seemed to have come off worst.
^*

In the trees in front of them, the 38th Armored Infantry reported,
‘the only Jerries we found
were dead ones – most of them killed apparently as they tried to dig themselves in behind some tree or fallen log. Those who were not equipped with shovels had attempted to scoop shallow holes with their helmets, bayonets and even with their fingernails.’ A firebreak, which had been covered by a heavy-machine-gun section on the right flank, was found to have ‘nineteen paratroopers
stretched out at almost parade-ground intervals, five yards apart, each one with at least five to eight slugs in his chest or throat’. According to Major Boyer, the ‘paratroopers’ were later found to have been wearing
Grossdeutschland
uniform and insignia ‘under their jump jackets’. During another attack that afternoon, the 90mm guns of a tank-destroyer platoon managed to knock out a Mark V Panther tank and one of the two assault guns supporting the infantry.

The main threat to Brigadier General Hasbrouck’s defence line lay in the north where the 18th Volksgrenadiers and the
Führer Begleit
Brigade were pushing round. But although the
Führer Begleit
saw itself as an elite formation, it also had its psychological casualties. Apparently one member of its staff, Rittmeister von Möllendorf, was
‘hysterical and a nervous wreck. He cries whenever Hitler’s name is mentioned.’

An even greater threat to Hasbrouck’s rear came when the 9th SS Panzer-Division
Hohenstaufen
followed the same route a little further north, via Recht and Poteau, which the Kampfgruppe
Hansen had taken earlier. In the fighting near Poteau, an SS runner received a stomach wound when an American shell exploded. As his comrades put him on a stretcher, with some of his intestines protruding, one of them made a move to take his steel helmet off, but he begged him to leave it on. At company headquarters an Unterscharführer tried to remove the helmet, but the man screamed his protest. By the time they reached the dressing station, he was barely conscious. A medic
‘lifted the man’s head up
, undid the chin strap and took the helmet off. The top of the skull with the brain came off with it. The man must have realised that he had taken another piece of shrapnel right under the rim of his helmet. It had sheared through his skull. He lived until his helmet was removed.’