Behind Hitler's Lines (38 page)

During the week between Christmas and New Year's Cur-rahees astride the Bastogne-Houffalize road attacked and defended on alternate days. Attacking was more difficult. The temperature was zero, the snow waist deep. They had to clear the wooded hills the Wehrmacht had occupied for weeks and fortified expertly, better than any other army in Europe could. There were log bunkers and slit-firing machine-gun nests, with overlapping fields of fire, registered on approaches by which the Germans knew the Americans would come— through dense stands of pine, with branches so low and the
snow so high, a trooper couldn't help but rustle foliage as he wallowed forward; when he did the enemy saw him coming. The first action they took was to call for artillery, which they had in abundance and larger than any guns in the 101st. About thirty feet high, the forests were ideal for “tree bursts,” explosions that added splinters to shrapnel blasted down on attackers who had to close within hand-grenade range before they could detect German infantry positions. The thin-trunked trees were no protection from their fire.

American tanks, and there were plenty after New Year's, were of scant help in the battle for forests. Because of thick ice, often blanketed in snow, tanks were roadbound, ducks in a shooting gallery for well-sited 88s. In Russia the Wehr-macht had developed antitank mines that worked in snow, so fields of mines awaited American armored forces that dared venture off the narrow roads. Only on the Siegfried Line were the Germans in better defensive positions. For the attack to cut off the base of the Bulge, the 101st were like Marines assaulting Japs in palm-tree bunkers on Tarawa—with deep fog, cold, and snow giving the defenders more advantage.

Model himself visited Houffalize to ensure that no matter how hard and heavily Patton attacked from Bastogne, he would not prevent extraction of the bulk of German forces from the shrinking Bulge. Model had accomplished similar feats, even more difficult ones, in Russia, and this time he had a shorter front manned by better and better-equipped divisions. He was said to have assured Hitler that as Bastogne had been for the Americans, so too would Houffalize be a vital hub held for as long as necessary by the Wehrmacht.

Spearheading Patton's drive, it was for the 101st to prove Model wrong, but with plenty of help. Their attacking zone was narrow, about five miles wide, pinched by the 17th Airborne and 11th Armored Divisions (though both were without combat experience) on the left, the 6th Armored on the right. It was the first time in the war that the Screaming Eagles' flanks were protected. Heavy-caliber artillery salvos of an entire corps supporting them made them flinch at first,
much as the ground flinched as volley after outgoing volley seemed a redux of Bastogne in reverse.

On the Bastogne-Houffalize road, the 506th and 501st attacked in combination like left and right fists. The Currahees' first objective was to recover Foy and Noville, the hamlet and town from which they'd been ordered to retreat in the first days of Bastogne. Some of their dead were still there, frozen, it seemed, like the Snow Princess waiting for love to restore them. Foy was in a hollow; whoever controlled the hills could have it, and it changed hands innumerable times. To take those hills Blues set forth into the woods.

Albers recalls: “We hated to leave our foxholes. We'd been in 'em for a while, and it had been some job digging 'em deep in the frozen ground. Then we'd put down a layer of boughs, pine mattresses we called them. They'd get wet and we'd pile on another layer. Well, the layers got so high they were almost to ground level, so I guess it was time to leave.

“It was the most snafued attack I've ever been in. As soon as we started climbing through those woods we lost sight of each other. We couldn't make any noise or the krauts would hear us. All of I Company was following a compass azimuth. That's all we had to guide by, but no one except a couple of guys beside the compass man could see where he was going.

“We heard a Mauser. One round. The krauts are damn good snipers. One of'em hit Harry Watson in the throat. He'd had his head shaved by a bullet in Normandy. He was still lucky, still alive, so two men dragged him back through the snow. It was ass deep. Captain Anderson chose the two strongest men because lugging anything extra, like a case of machine-gun ammo, made you stop and pant like somebody climbing Mount Everest. So the krauts got Harry but put three men out of action.”

Sometimes shooting, sometimes being shot at, I Company was floundering, exhausted, and most of all lost. The worst of a bad situation was the cold, not so much now but what it would be later. During the wait to find direction and objectives they could squat down, their helmets dimples on the disturbed snow, wiggle their toes, and cup a cigarette, for it was
still light, not much past noon. In three, definitely no more than four hours, I Company would have to find shelter before darkness, or else the cold would disable them more than a regiment of krauts.

Silently they removed snow from boughs and pushed it into canteens. After the melt from body heat, fifteen handfuls of snow would fill a canteen. There was time for that as they awaited a decision from the CO. In the thick forest Anderson had garbled radio contact with Third Battalion, but he knew that by heading east I Company would run into the Foy-Noville road. Better there than here, for sure. He asked for volunteers for a patrol, a few good men to go ahead and see what krauts might be on the road. Inspired by the grit of Sheeran, who had turned urine yellow and staggered from jaundice, Albers volunteered. If Sheeran could stay the course, everyone could.

“Yesterday we'd been watching 'em,” Albers says. “Krauts were thick covering the road. I said, ‘Sir, I'll go down that road whistling “The Star-Spangled Banner” if you want me to, but we know damn well they're there. They're there.’ “ Anderson was as spent as his men, more so for having their lives depend on his decisions. His decision this time was for I Company to swing over to the road. Fortuitously it arrived just in time to take part in a momentous push beyond Foy That's what attacks had come to be called, pushes. The Americans would push for a while, then the Germans would push back and vice versa, back and forth in a Siberian landscape.

“We heard tanks coming from the right [south]. The sound scared us. Tanks moving always meant enemy. We parted the branches and looked at them. Shermans! Hell, says, Engel-brecht, let's get in on this.”

His platoon wallowed through snow to parallel the tankers' flank. Turrets swiveled toward them, and luckily the tank commanders recognized the tatterdemalion, improvised white camouflage of the now famous “battered bastards of Bastogne.” Artillery from both sides had destroyed Foy and cratered all the ground around it.

“We used the craters for cover. We yelled from one crater
to another: ‘You shoot, I'll move.’ ‘Okay’ We'd do that like leap-frogging. That's the way we advanced. Somewhere between Foy and Noville was this big barn. We wanted it real bad because it could be our shelter for the night.”

The alternative was “tripods,” a cluster of men putting arms around one another and leaning toward the center for mutual support. As profoundly exhausted as they were, they could sleep that way for minutes till their feet told them they had to move, which they would, regaining circulation, then re-forming tripods throughout the night.

“Tankers shot up the barn till we told them to stop. We didn't want it to catch fire and burn down. There were krauts in there, they said. Yeah, we know it, but we'll get 'em out. Engelbrecht had us shoot at the windows. Scare the hell out of 'em so they'll come out without a fight. Didn't know who was in there. If it was SS, they'd go down fighting. Under our covering fire a squad went up to the barn yelling and screaming. A kraut lieutenant dumps a sheet out. We're happy as hell, but Engelbrecht thinks it's a trick if they're SS. ‘Who're we fighting?’ he asks Anderson. Latest intelligence is
Volksgrenadiers
— sort of the German national guard. They give up easy. Sure enough the lieutenant surrenders what's left of his platoon, three walking wounded and two ‘mortals.’ ”

Now Engelbrecht's platoon, down to fifteen men, had the barn and ground around it, but he knew the Wehrmacht's S.O.P. was to counterattack as soon as they'd lost a position. So Dziepak set up his machine gun in the hayloft for a great field of fire. It was like the upstairs of the farmhouse in Holland but without thick stone walls. If an 88 hit at the level of the loft, it would fall and with it the squad's main weapon. Better put it at ground level. No, Albers argues, all he'll see is snow before he sees a potato masher. He prevails, and the machine gun stays in the loft.

As if by script the Germans came back in a counterattack, panzers supporting like artillery. The barn roof came off as if in a tornado. Damn, it's going to be colder without that roof, but no kraut is going to sleep here tonight. Tracers were added to Albers's machine-gun belts as a statement of strength:
I Company owns this barn, and trespassers will be shot. The
VolL. grenadiers
backed off.

“The next morning we were feeling pretty good,” Albers recalls. “Anderson had some pancakes sent up. They were frozen, felt like hubcaps. There wasn't any syrup, but some Belgian had soaked them with cognac. I've heard that's called crepes suzette. What happened next is confused in my mind.”

Albers was acting squad leader when G Company pulled out without notice on his flank. After leaving the barn, his squad was left hanging in no-man's-land, so short of men that single foxholes were more than twenty-five yards apart, within shouting distance but invisible from one another. German attack time was again twilight. There was much sudden shouting, grenades muffled by snow, a flurry of two-way fire, then silence except for the moaning wind.

The most dangerous approach in war, whether toward a friendly or enemy position, is at night. It was quiet over there, so either Albers's troopers, four of them, had held their own or krauts owned their foxholes. Albers investigated the next morning. The first thing he noticed was a bulge among the trees, a kraut silhouette. Easy to drill it, but it was so stationary, no condensed breath coming out of it. A frozen corpse from an earlier fight, Albers decided, and crept on. There was another snow-laden statue, this one American; it seemed his rifle pointed at him. No visible exhalations, so Albers continued silently.

One by one he found recently occupied foxholes, M-l clips, expended shells in the snow, some blood around the foxholes and within grenade-range depressions in the snow, depressions containing krauts. Albers tore away white camouflage smocks; yes, there was the double lightning bolt of the SS on the collar. Forensically he looked for more evidence of what happened. The krauts hadn't removed their own corpses, so they certainly wouldn't have done so for American dead. Therefore Albers's four troopers, three of them rookies, must be prisoners. Indeed, there was an oval of tramped-down snow; easy to imagine it to be where the four had been herded
together by the krauts and led away. A narrow trail through the snow led back toward German lines.

“I felt like a mother who'd lost my kids when the house burned down. A long time ago I could have been promoted to squad leader, but I liked being a machine gunner and didn't want to be responsible for other guys. Now I'd lost four … Jankoviac, Clever.

“I'd rather defend anytime, but I was glad when we started attacking again. The platoon was down to squad size. We were like the survivors of a shipwreck, sad and glad both. Sort of celebrating being alive because no one had a right to be, and because everything was moving forward. We could hear big outgoing shells headed for Houffalize. That was the divison objective, where we could stand down.”

Where the artillery hit, lights went on like a pinball machine. Sink pressed his battalions to follow the glow. All the Currahees had to do was get up there and the game was over.

“The weather was clear, and P-47s were swarming like bees. They must have gotten new high-powered rockets. We'd see panzers flip into the air like toys. In Holland and up till then the 101st had been pretty much by itself. Now we felt the whole army and air corps with us. We had tanks alongside. We learned to work with 'em like a good basketball team. Troopers could see in all directions and pointed out targets. There was this 88 a tank commander couldn't pick out. We kept pointing, faster and faster because the 88 was turning toward his tank. We dove in the snow just as the tank gunner saw it and got off a round. He beat the kraut to the draw like in a Western movie.
Bang,
our shell goes out,
boom
on target. The 88's muzzle went down like a flat tire. We cheered and beat the side of the tank. But that was too close. One of our officers banged on the hatch and told the tank commander to get his head out so he could see what we were spotting.

“The tankers liked the way we went out ahead of 'em with bazookas. They said no one else they'd worked with did that. Killing panzers was the tankers' main job, but with the end in
sight we were going to get on to Houffalize with or without 'em. We were like rabid dogs. A tank battalion commander asked a 501st officer, ‘Where do you get these men?’ From a dog pound!

“Cyr, Sheeran, and I were leading, huffm' and puffin', heads down with 50-calibers outgoing overhead. Engelbrecht had just pulled some krauts out of their holes. He spoke German and was a great surrender maker. Germans are conditioned to take orders, and he'd yell orders at 'em as he charged.
'Raus! Raus!'
['Out! Out!'], and up would come some krauts. Then he 'd whack 'em in the ass with the stock of his tommy gun.
'Schnell! Schnell!'
['Fast! Fast!'], and they run off to the rear with their hands up. Engelbrecht knew their ranks. If one of them knew something, he was on his back in the snow with a trooper knife at his throat.
Ja,
his battalion CP was over there! The three of us started that way. Cyr's knocked backwards. Sniper. The bullet hit his metal cigarette case. He's stunned but okay

“The krauts were protecting that CP. We heard a big rumble. This Tiger Royal rolls out like a tyrannosaur. Our supporting tanks stop and take cover, but we took him on. I get a bazooka and hit him. Trouble is the Tiger Royal had chain-link fencing draped all over his hull. Someone else hits him with the same result. We peel off and wave our tanks up. Hell, their 90-millimeter don't do much more. The Tiger rules. Anderson must have been watching because in comes the air corps. That wasn't always good. With everything so mixed up it seemed we got plastered as often by air strikes as the krauts. This time a P-47 identifies the target and nicks it with rockets. The Tiger had enough. That whole action was like a video game. He pulled back and we moved into this CP bunker as big as my living room in Muskegon. It was hard to get us to attack anymore after the warmth of that bunker.”