Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (34 page)

All over the Ardennes, American commanders on the morning of 23 December gazed in wonder at the cloudless blue sky and blinding winter sun. The temperature had dropped even further, because a ‘Russian High’ of crystal-clear weather had arrived from the east. Air controllers joyfully reported
‘visibility unlimited’
and scrambled P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers to go tank hunting. An ebullient General Patton exclaimed to his deputy chief of staff:
‘God damn!
That O’Neill sure did some potent praying. Get him up here, I want to pin a medal on him.’ Chaplain O’Neill was rushed from Nancy to Luxembourg so that Patton could decorate him with the Bronze Star next day.

Bradley’s staff, like many of the inhabitants of Luxembourg, went out into the street to squint up against the brightness at the condensation trails of Allied heavy bombers flying over to attack Trier and its marshalling yards. Morale soared in foxholes as men stared at the bombers and fighter-bombers once more streaming overhead, glinting like shoals of silver fish.

Allied air support produced another bonus. German artillery batteries did not want to reveal their gun positions by firing while there were fighter-bombers around.
‘As soon as the enemy
air force appeared the effect of the artillery was reduced to fifty or sixty percent,’ Model’s artillery commander reported.

Later in the morning, however, 12th Army Group headquarters was shaken to hear that part of the 2nd Panzer-Division was advancing on Jemelle, just east of Rochefort. This was the site of the army group’s
radio repeater station, and it was guarded by no more than a platoon of infantry and some tank destroyers. Bradley immediately called First Army headquarters to see if reinforcements could be sent, but ‘as he was speaking the line went dead’. The soldiers guarding the repeater station had just removed all the tubes. They were withdrawing as the Germans approached, but they did not destroy the equipment in the hope that the place could be recaptured soon.

At least air-reconnaissance missions could now clarify the movements of the panzer divisions heading north-west for the Meuse. Yet First Army headquarters was still convinced that the Germans wanted to break through towards Liège. Staff officers did not know that Hitler had insisted on a drive westward.

General Rose, with his command post in the embattled town of Hotton, had been forced to split his 3rd Armored Division in all directions. One combat command was still tied down crushing the Kampfgruppe
Peiper around La Gleize, while another was on its way to join him from Eupen. The rest of the division was split into three task forces. Two of them were ready to block the advance of the 2nd SS Panzer-Division
Das Reich
as it advanced up the road from Houffalize towards Manhay on the road to Liège, but Task Force Hogan was surrounded at Marcouray ten kilometres to the south-east of Hotton and out of fuel. An attempt to drop supplies was made that day, but the parachute bundles fell more than six kilometres away, and on the following day they fell nearly ten kilometres away.

On the Houffalize–Liège highway, Baraque-de-Fraiture consisted of three farmhouses by a crossroads close to a village called Fraiture. It lay on the boundary between the 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Armored Division and had been overlooked. But Major Arthur C. Parker III, a survivor of the 106th Division’s débâcle in the Schnee Eifel, recognized the importance of its position. He had started to prepare a defence with his own gunners and a mixture of sub-units retreating that way. They included four anti-aircraft half-tracks with quadruple .50 machine guns – the notorious ‘meat-choppers’.

The small force at ‘Parker’s crossroads’, as Baraque-de-Fraiture was soon known, had been attacked before dawn on 21 December by a large fighting patrol from the 560th Volksgrenadier-Division. The ‘meat-choppers’ had cut them to pieces. Among the wounded, an officer from the SS
Das Reich
was identified. Task Force Kane defending Manhay to the north sent a reconnaissance platoon. And General Gavin, once aware of the danger, sent a battalion of the 82nd to Fraiture to protect Parker’s left flank, and a company of the 325th Glider Infantry also arrived.

Little happened on 22 December because the
Das Reich
had been waiting for fuel supplies to arrive and for Remer’s
Führer Begleit
to catch up. But at dawn on 23 December the 4th SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment attacked both the crossroads and the paratroopers at Fraiture, whom it surprised eating breakfast. The real attack on Parker’s crossroads came late in the afternoon, with the whole of the 4th SS Panzergrenadiers and two companies of tanks. The fall of snow had revealed the defenders’ positions, rather than camouflaging them, and their Shermans had no room for manoeuvre. Panzer gunners knocked out the armoured vehicles and shot up one foxhole after another. General Gavin had ordered the defenders to hold at all costs, but Parker’s force was completely overwhelmed soon after nightfall. Three Shermans got away, and some men escaped into the woods when a herd of frenzied cows stampeded.

Gavin and Rose, afraid that the
Das Reich
would smash through Manhay and into their rear, scraped together whatever forces they could find. General Ridgway lost his temper at this unexpected threat, and ordered the exhausted survivors of the 7th Armored Division, who had just escaped across the River Salm, to hold Manhay. He was in an unforgiving mood after Hasbrouck and Clarke had opposed his plan to fight on west of St Vith, and then been supported by Montgomery.

In the early hours of 23 December, the headquarters of I SS Panzer Corps received a radio message from Kampfgruppe Peiper.
‘Position considerably worsened
. Meagre supplies of infantry ammunition left. Forced to yield Stoumont and Cheneux during the night. This is the last chance of breaking out.’ American artillery and tanks continued to bombard La Gleize. The much feared Kampfgruppe, lacking both fuel and ammunition, was now powerless to respond.

Peiper held more than 150 American prisoners, including Major Hal McCown. He had already attempted to interrogate McCown and to
proclaim his own belief in Nazism and its reasons for fighting the war. McCown had been moved to a small cellar that morning with four other American officers. During the afternoon, an American 105mm shell hit the wall, blasting a large hole in it and throwing the German guard halfway across the room. Another shell landed just outside, sending fragments and stones flying through the cellar. An American lieutenant was killed and three Germans were wounded.

Later, McCown was taken to see Peiper again, who told him that he was going to break out on foot but did not know what to do with his American prisoners. Peiper had just received permission to make his way back to German lines. He proposed a deal. He would leave all the prisoners and his own wounded behind, and take just McCown with him as a hostage. McCown would then be set free if the American commander released the German wounded. McCown replied that he obviously could not make any agreement about prisoners of war. All he could do was sign a paper saying that he had heard Peiper’s suggestion. That night Peiper’s men began to prepare their surviving vehicles for demolition. They would have to wade across the River Amblève in the dark to slip into the trees on the southern side.

The Ninth Army commander General Bill Simpson was proud of his 30th Division’s ruthless fightback against the Peiper Kampfgruppe.
‘American troops are now refusing to take any more SS prisoners,’
his aide wrote, ‘and it may well spread to include all German soldiers. While we cannot order such a thing, the C[ommanding] G[eneral] himself personally hopes that every GI will hear these stories and make that a battle rule, as the 30th Division did.’ Simpson was pleased to hear that Germans now called the division ‘Roosevelt’s Butchers’. He had also received a report on prisoners taken in the Malmédy sector that their commanders had ‘promised them that in this new fight they would not have to fight the 30th Div. They fear it that much.’

On the Elsenborn ridge, American artillery continued to pound the villages and towns below with white phosphorus and high explosive, even after the main attacks had petered out. The small town of Faymonville on the southern side, occupied by a detachment of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger, had been targeted day after day. The local priest begged a German officer to arrange a ceasefire so that non-combatants could be evacuated.
On the morning of 23 December, the Germans instead simply ordered the 600 civilians trapped in Faymonville to leave for Schoppen, a village further behind the German lines. An officer told them that anyone who tried to walk towards American positions would be shot. The priest urged them to think again, but the Germans replied that they would start shooting his parishioners, five at a time, if they refused to leave.

At 11.00 hours, the terrified townspeople set off into the open. Unfortunately, the pilot of an American spotter plane saw the column trudging with difficulty through the deep snow, and identified it as an enemy concentration. American artillery on the Elsenborn ridge opened fire. As shells began exploding all around, the old men, women and children panicked, running in all directions. The priest ran back to Faymonville to ask the Germans to radio the Americans to cease their firing but they refused to do anything. Eight or so were killed or died later and many others were injured, before they reached the relative safety of Schoppen.

The German besiegers of Bastogne somehow still believed that the Americans were hoping to escape the encirclement. On 23 December, they tried to strengthen their presence on the west side of the town, continuing the attack round Senonchamps and Mande-Saint-Etienne to tighten the ring and to cut off any further ‘attempts to break out’. Hitler, refusing to believe
‘Manteuffel’s report that he could not take Bastogne
with the forces he had’, sent an officer to check on 23 December. He, however, supported Manteuffel’s assessment.

The defenders were certainly very short of food, but they still appear to have been better fed than Kokott’s volksgrenadiers, whose supply situation was so bad that
‘up to ten men had to share half a loaf’
. And while American paratroopers suffered in the extreme cold from their lack of winter uniforms, they at least had villages round the perimeter in which they could warm up. Their volksgrenadier opponents were even worse off, which was why they stripped American bodies of boots and items of clothing for themselves. And in the continuing tension caused by the Skorzeny commandos, this led to the shooting of some of those who wore American kit when they surrendered. Apart from weapons, the only piece of German equipment which American soldiers hankered after was the German army’s brilliantly simple knife–fork–spoon combination.
The Germans had also proved more foresighted by issuing snow camouflage suits, while the Americans had to improvise.

‘The first enemy fighter-bombers’
, Generalmajor Kokott recorded, ‘appeared towards 0900 hours, swooped down on communication roads and villages and set vehicles and farmyards on fire.’ Unfortunately for the paratroopers on the south-western perimeter, little air support appeared. The drastic drop in temperature during the night froze the turret-traverse mechanism on many of their supporting tanks and tank destroyers. Even anti-tank guns could not be moved as they had been frozen into the ground. Cross-country movement for infantry was also difficult, with a hard crust on the top of half a metre of snow.

The main German attacks that day to break the ring were mounted against the Flamierge sector in the north-west at noon, and another later against Marvie on the south-east side by the 901st Panzergrenadier-Regiment from the Panzer Lehr Division. Towards the end of the morning, however, an unexpected threat appeared from the south. The Fifth Panzer Army had not imagined that General Patton would have been able to move any of his forces north so quickly.

‘Towards noon,’
Kokott wrote, ‘at first singly, but then in droves, men of the 5th Fallschirmjäger appeared near the divisional command post at Hompré. They were coming from the front lines and moving east. Barely an officer was in sight. When questioned, the men yelled: “The enemy has broken through! They’ve advanced north with tanks and have captured Chaumont!”’ Chaumont was no more than three kilometres to the south of Kokott’s headquarters.

The stragglers were soon followed by vehicles and the horse-drawn carts of the Fallschirmjäger division. In no time at all, American fighter-bombers had sighted the congestion in Hompré and wheeled in to attack. Any German with a weapon began ‘firing wildly’ at the attacking planes.
‘Houses caught fire, vehicles were burning
, wounded men were lying in the streets, horses that had been hit were kicking about.’

This chaos coincided with a massive supply drop all around Bastogne. German soldiers, on seeing the quantity of white and coloured parachutes to their north, assumed in alarm that this was the start of a major airborne operation. They took up the cry: ‘Enemy paratroopers are landing to our rear!’ Even Kokott was shaken by an eventuality that he had never considered. But a sort of order was gradually established,
with volksgrenadiers halting the young soldiers of the 5th Fallschirmjäger who were fleeing. An anti-aircraft battery near Hompré received the order ‘about face’. The gunners were to switch from aerial targets to prepare their guns for ground operations.