Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (36 page)

In the early hours of 24 December, Kampfgruppe Cochenhausen reached Celles, a small and ancient town in a dip just a few kilometres south of Foy-Notre-Dame. Major von Cochenhausen attempted to push through the small town to head straight for Dinant, but the lead Panther tank hit a mine laid the day before by American engineers. According to local folklore, two German officers stormed into the little restaurant on the corner called Le Pavillon Ardennais. The
patronne
, Madame Marthe Monrique, who had just been woken by the blast, met them downstairs in her dressing gown. They demanded to know how many kilometres they still had to cover to reach Dinant. With great presence of mind, she apparently replied that there were only a dozen kilometres.
‘But the road is mined, you know! The Americans have buried hundreds of mines.’
Cursing, the Germans decided to pull back into nearby woods in case Allied aircraft caught them in the open at dawn.

Cochenhausen established his command post in the woods at a local grotto known as the Trou Mairia. His force included the 304th Panzergrenadier-Regiment, a battalion of the 3rd Panzer-Regiment, a panzer artillery regiment and most of the division’s anti-aircraft battalion. Signs pointing to the divisional field hospital or
Feldlazarett
bore the trident symbol of the 2nd Panzer-Division. To prevent information getting back to the Allies, panzergrenadiers were put to work sawing down telephone poles and cutting wires. Another detachment of the 2nd Panzer-Division was just to the east at Conjoux. The villagers there were reminded how in September the local German commander had sworn, just before pulling out, that they would be back.

After Leignon, Böhm’s Kampfgruppe
had turned west in the night towards Dinant. Just before Foy-Notre-Dame, near the farm of Mahenne, a British Firefly Sherman of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment lay in wait. The Firefly had the longer and far more powerful 17-pounder or 76.2mm high-velocity gun. Sergeant Probert, the commander, hearing the unmistakable noise of tracked vehicles approaching, woke his crew. The first round missed the leading vehicle but hit a munitions truck, causing an explosion which must have shaken the whole German column. After rapidly reloading, Probert’s crew got off another round which destroyed a Mark IV panzer. Then, following the Royal Armoured Corps slogan of ‘shoot and scoot’, they reversed out rapidly before the Panthers in the column targeted their position. They reported back to Major Watts at Sorinnes. Major von Böhm, unsure after the ambush how strong the Allies were in the area, and because his vehicles were almost out of fuel, decided to halt at the small village of Foy-Notre-Dame. His crews concealed their vehicles in farmyards, and packed into the houses to warm up and find food.

During that night of 23–24 December, the thermometer dropped to minus 17 Centigrade, and the moon shone on the frozen, snowbound landscape. The Baron de Villenfagne, with his friend Lieutenant Philippe le Hardy de Beaulieu, both dressed in white, managed to identify several of the main German positions. They came across a group of
amphibious vehicles concealed under trees at Sanzinnes, which was subsequently shelled by American artillery. The two men returned to the Château de Sorinnes at 04.00 hours and woke Major Watts. Lieutenant Colonel Alan Brown, the commanding officer of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, arrived soon afterwards and they briefed them on the German dispositions and the location of Cochenhausen’s command post. The vital target was the Ferme de Mahenne, because if that were neutralized the Kampfgruppe
Böhm would be separated from Cochenhausen’s force. The baron then went to see the 29th Brigade’s artillery commander, begging him to spare the great church at Foy-Notre-Dame, which the gunners managed to do when shelling the village taken over by Böhm’s Kampfgruppe.

Hitler was exultant when he heard that the forward elements of the 2nd Panzer-Division were now only seven kilometres from Dinant. He passed on his warmest congratulations to Lüttwitz and Lauchert, the divisional commander. Both men must have winced, knowing how precarious their position was, with little chance of supplies getting through. Lüttwitz, who had commanded the 2nd Panzer in the doomed Avranches counter-attack in August, recommended to Manteuffel that they should start to withdraw the division from the tip of the whole German salient. But he knew that Hitler would never contemplate such a move.

On the left flank of the 2nd Panzer, Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr had advanced from Saint-Hubert north to Rochefort, with General von Manteuffel accompanying them. Their artillery shelled the town in the afternoon. A patrol entered the edge of Rochefort and reported back that it was empty, but they had not looked carefully enough. A battalion from the 84th Infantry Division and a platoon of tank destroyers were concealed and waiting. The road into Rochefort ran along the L’Homme river in a rocky gorge, which made the German attack a risky enterprise. As night fell, Bayerlein gave a characteristic order:
‘Right, let’s go! Shut your eyes and in you go.’

Led by the 902nd Panzergrenadiers, commanded by Oberstleutnant Joachim Ritter von Poschinger, the charge was brought to a sudden halt under a massive fusillade at a major barricade in Rochefort. The fighting was ferocious and lasted through the night. The panzergrenadiers lost many men and a heavy Jagdpanzer was knocked out near the central square. The American defenders, heavily outnumbered, were eventually
forced back. The survivors escaped north next day, to join up with the 2nd Armored Division.

Most of the townsfolk sought shelter in caves at the base of the cliffs surrounding Rochefort. They were to stay there for some time, since Rochefort now became a target for American artillery. During the worst of the shelling, Jeanne Ory and her younger sister asked their mother: ‘Mummy, are we going to die?’ She replied: ‘Say your prayers, my children.’ And everyone around would recite the rosary together. One man found a friend dead in the frozen street face down with a cat sitting serenely on his back, profiting from the last of the body’s heat. The Trappist monks from the Abbaye de Saint-Remy took on the task of removing bodies.

That evening, President Roosevelt in Washington wrote to Josef Stalin.
‘I wish to direct General Eisenhower
to send to Moscow a fully qualified officer of his staff to discuss with you Eisenhower’s situation on the Western Front and its relation to the Eastern Front, in order that all of us may have information essential to our coordination of effort … The situation in Belgium is not bad but it is time to talk of the next plan. In view of the emergency an early reply to this proposal is requested.’ Stalin replied two days later to agree. The very mention of ‘emergency’ in the last sentence must have suggested to him that the Allies had their backs against the wall. Air Chief Marshal Tedder and General Bull were designated to confer with Stalin. They prepared to fly from France to Cairo and then on to Moscow, but because of long delays they would not see Stalin until 15 January, well after the crisis was over.

Sunday 24 December again produced bright sun and blue skies. Captain Mudgett, the 12th Army Group meteorologist in Luxembourg, was
‘almost hysterical with
his continued success in the weather. He looks proudly out over the blue sky that stretches way into Germany over the stone ramparts and the three spires of the cathedral.’

Bradley’s Eagle Tac headquarters now had few fears about the defence of Bastogne, with the men of the 101st Airborne
‘clinging stubbornly
to their position like a wagon train in the pioneer days of the west’. But staff officers were well aware of the plight of the wounded in the town. McAuliffe had asked for four surgical teams to be dropped by parachute. Plans went ahead for them to be brought in by glider instead.

While Patton’s III Corps with the 4th Armored Division was struggling to break through to Bastogne from the south against much heavier resistance than expected, Hansen was amused by a bizarre report.
‘Today a quartermaster soldier
asked for the road to Luxembourg while passing through Arlon. He got on the wrong road, [and] drove up the road to Bastogne. When someone fired on him, he only got more frightened, pressed his accelerator and finally drove into the area of the 101st – the first person to make contact with them, and in a purely accidental manner.’

Confirmation of the tough fighting on the southern side of the perimeter came from a signals intercept. The 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division was clamouring for more Panzerfausts and anti-tank guns to help in its battle against the 4th Armored Division. The Third Army commander appeared
to have no doubts about the outcome.
‘General Patton was in several times today,’
Hansen noted. ‘He is boisterous and noisy, feeling good in the middle of a fight.’ But in fact Patton was concealing his embarrassment that the 4th Armored’s advance was not going nearly as rapidly as he had predicted and was meeting tough opposition. The division had also found that VIII Corps engineers in the retreat to Bastogne
‘blew everything in sight’
, so their progress ‘was impeded not by the enemy but by demolitions and blown bridges caused by friendly engineers’.

The Luxembourgers were more confident. They were reassured by the endless convoys of Third Army troops streaming through the city, and believed that the Germans would not be coming back. Strangely, 12th Army Group intelligence suddenly increased their estimate of German tank and assault-gun strength from 345 to 905, which was rather more than the earlier estimated panzer total for the whole of the western front.

Despite the terrible cold which made men shiver uncontrollably in their foxholes, morale was high within the Bastogne perimeter. Although the paratroopers and 10th Armored looked forward to relief by Patton’s forces, they rejected any idea that they needed to be saved. With another brilliant day of flying weather, they watched the sky fill with Allied planes of every description. They listened to bombs exploding and the clatter of machine guns, as fighters strafed the German columns. Dogfights against the few Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts provoked ferocious cheers and roars as if it were a deadly boxing match, and bitter cries broke out if an Allied transport dropping supplies was hit by ground fire.

Allied fighter-bombers during this period proved very effective in breaking up German attacks as they were assembling. They were directed on to targets by air controllers in Bastogne. A warning of the threat, with co-ordinates coming from a regimental command post or an artillery liaison plane, meant that
‘it was usually
only a matter of minutes until planes were striking the enemy forces’.

With priority on artillery ammunition in the airdrops, the food situation for troops barely improved. Many depended on the generosity of Belgian families sharing what they had. Both in Bastogne and on the northern shoulder,
‘rations were frequently
supplemented with beef, venison and rabbit when these animals set off the mines by running into the trip-wires’. Snipers shot hare and even boar, but the longing for
wild pork was greatly reduced after hogs had been sighted eating the intestines of battle casualties.

The intense cold and deep snow caused more than discomfort. They greatly affected fighting performance. Those who did not keep a spare set of dry socks in their helmet-liner and change them frequently were the first to suffer from trench foot or frostbite. The newly arrived 11th Armored Division on the Meuse followed, perhaps unknowingly, the old practice of Russian armies for avoiding frostbite, by providing blanket strips to make foot bandages. Tank crewmen standing on metal in such conditions for hours on end, not moving their feet sufficiently, were particularly vulnerable. But at least those in armoured vehicles and truck drivers could dry out their footwear on engine exhausts.

Condoms were fitted over the sights of anti-tank guns, and also on radio and telephone mouthpieces, because breath condensation soon froze them up. The traverse mechanism on tanks and tank destroyers needed to be thawed out. Snow would get into weapons and ammunition clips and freeze solid. Machine guns were the most likely to jam. The heavy .50 machine gun was essential for shooting enemy marksmen out of trees and other hiding places. American soldiers soon discovered that German snipers waited for artillery or anti-aircraft fire before they pulled the trigger, so that their shot would not be heard.

Lessons learned in one sector were rapidly passed to other formations through ‘combat observer’ reports. German patrols would cut cables at night and run one of the severed ends into an ambush position, so that they could seize any linesman sent out to repair it. German soldiers sometimes fired a bullet through their own helmet in advance, so that if they were overrun they could play dead and then shoot one of their attackers in the back. They often mined or booby-trapped their own trenches just before withdrawing.

American patrols were advised that when encountering the enemy at night, ‘fire at random, throw yourself into cover, then yell like mad as if you were going into the attack, and they will start firing’, which would reveal their position. In defence, they should place dummies well to the front of their foxholes to prompt Germans to open fire prematurely. They should provide cover for the enemy in front, but bury mines under it; construct fake defences between strongpoints. Just before going into the attack, it helped to make digging noises to mislead the enemy. And
when inside a house, they should never fire from the window, but keep it open and shoot from well back in the room.

The most respected and vital members of a company were the aid men. They were trusted with grain alcohol to prevent the water freezing in their canteens which they would offer to the wounded. ‘The stimulating effect of the alcohol does no harm either,’ the report added. Chaplains were also sent to the aid stations with alcohol to make a hot toddy for wounded men coming in. Countless men later acknowledged that they owed their lives to the dedication, courage and sometimes inventiveness of aid men. PFC Floyd Maquart, with the 101st, saved one soldier severely wounded in the face and neck by cutting open his throat with a parachute knife and inserting the hollow part of a fountain pen into his windpipe.

Conditions for more than 700 patients in the riding school and the chapel of the seminary in Bastogne continued to deteriorate, since the German capture of the field hospital meant that there was only one surgeon. The doctor from the 10th Armored was assisted by two trained Belgian nurses: Augusta Chiwy, a fearless young woman from the Congo, and Renée Lemaire, the fiancée of a Jew arrested in Brussels by the Gestapo earlier in the year. Those with serious head and stomach wounds were least likely to survive, and the piles of frozen corpses grew, stacked like cordwood under tarpaulins outside. A number of patients suffered from gas gangrene which gave off an appalling stench, and the stock of hydrogen peroxide to clean such wounds was almost all gone. The dwindling supply of plasma froze solid, and bags had to be thawed by being placed in somebody’s armpit. For some operations, a slug of cognac had to replace anaesthetics. Sedatives were also in very short supply to deal with the increasing number of combat-fatigue casualties, who would sit up and suddenly start screaming. Men who had demonstrated great bravery in Normandy and in Holland had finally succumbed to stress and exhaustion. Cold and lack of proper food had accelerated the process.

As well as the setpiece assaults, which Generalmajor Kokott had been forced to launch, there were many more German attacks at night, often with four tanks and a hundred infantry. Their soldiers in snow suits were well camouflaged out in the snowfields, but when they were against
a dark background of trees or buildings they stood out. Realizing this they took off the jacket, but the white legs still gave them away.

‘Knocking out tanks is a matter of team-work, mutual confidence and guts,’
an VIII Corps report stated. ‘The infantry stay in their foxholes and take care of the hostile infantry and the tank destroyers take care of the tanks.’ Providing both elements did their job, the Germans were usually repulsed. Some paratroopers, however, clearly got a thrill out of stalking panzers with bazookas. The 101st claimed that altogether between 19 and 30 December it knocked out 151 tanks and assault guns and 25 half-tracks. These figures were almost certainly exaggerated, rather like the victories claimed by fighter pilots. Many targets were shared with the Sherman tanks of the 10th Armored and the Hellcats of Colonel Templeton’s 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion.

The continuing fight against the 901st Panzergrenadiers around Marvie had become increasingly confused in the early hours of the morning. An American machine-gunner shot two glider infantrymen who appeared over a crest. The Americans were forced back from the village, but managed to hold the hill to the west. McAuliffe’s headquarters in Bastogne re-examined their defences. The push into the town from Marvie had only just been stopped, but they were also vulnerable on the western side of the perimeter. It was decided to pull back from the Flamierge and Mande-Saint-Etienne salient, and withdraw from Senonchamps. Reducing the overall frontage would strengthen their lines, but they also reorganized their forces by attaching tanks and tank destroyers permanently to each regiment.

Generalmajor Kokott, meanwhile, was left in no doubt from both his corps commander Lüttwitz and Manteuffel that Bastogne must be crushed next day, before the 4th Armored Division broke through from the south. Kokott, while waiting for the 15th Panzergrenadier-Division to deploy on the north-western sector, became increasingly concerned about the 5th Fallschirmjäger’s defence line to the south. He thought it prudent to set up a southern security screen of ‘emergency platoons’ from his own supply personnel with a few anti-tank guns. The anti-aircraft battalion near Hompré was also told to be ready to switch to a ground role to take on American tanks. It was a comfort to know that at least the main road south to Arlon was covered by the 901st Panzergrenadier-Regiment from the Panzer Lehr.

The 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division certainly appeared ill equipped for its task of defending the southern flank of the Fifth Panzer Army. Its much disliked commander Generalmajor Ludwig Heilmann despised his Luftwaffe staff, claiming to have discovered
‘corruption and profiteering’
when he took over command.
‘So far these people had been employed only in France and Holland,’
he said later, ‘and had vegetated on plundered loot and were all accomplices together.’ He claimed that the older Unteroffizieren said quite openly that they ‘would not dream of risking their life now at the end of the war’. The young soldiers, on the other hand, almost all of them under twenty and some just sixteen, ‘made a better impression’, even though they had received little training. Heilmann was being constantly questioned by his superiors on the exact positions of his regiments, but the reports he had received were so few and imprecise that he decided to go forward himself, if only to escape the ‘harassing demands’ from corps headquarters.

Yet despite the 5th Fallschirmjäger’s apparent deficiencies, its mostly teenage soldiers were fighting with formidable resilience, as the 4th Armored Division was finding to its cost. That morning at dawn, the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion and the 37th Tank Battalion attacked the village of Bigonville, more than twenty kilometres south of Kokott’s command post. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton W. Abrams (later the commander of US forces in Vietnam), and took the place and the high ground behind in less than three hours. But then
‘the enemy managed to infiltrate back into
the town and more fighting was required to clear it’. To make matters worse, the American force was then bombed and strafed by P-47 Thunderbolts, which turned away only after coloured smoke grenades had been set off and snow brushed off identification panels. Securing Bigonville a second time took another three hours, and this village came at a heavy cost. Tank commanders, with their heads out of the turret, attracted the fire of German snipers, who ‘accounted for nine in the 37th Tank Battalion, including the C Company commander’.