Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (38 page)

They stayed apart from the panzergrenadiers, and took over some wooden buildings near the main road. Christmas Eve happened to be a Sunday, so almost the whole village was at mass. As the doors opened afterwards and the congregation came out, every man of military age was seized, supposedly for an examination of identity papers. Altogether some seventy men were rounded up. Just under half – those aged between seventeen and thirty-one – were taken under guard down to a sawmill near the main road where they were locked up. Many of them were refugees from elsewhere, but they too were interrogated brutally about the attacks in the area on retreating German forces three and a half months before. One by one, they were taken out and shot.

There was just a single survivor, Léon Praile, a powerful and athletic twenty-one-year-old. He had tried to persuade others to join him in rushing their guards, but could find no volunteers. When his turn came – by then night was falling fast – he suddenly punched his escort hard in the face and took off, leaping a low stone wall and sprinting towards the stream. Shots were fired in his direction, but he escaped.

When the village was eventually liberated in January by British paratroopers from the 6th Airborne Division, the Abbé Musty and Léon Praile took them to where the thirty-four bodies, by now frozen stiff, had been concealed.
‘After the deed was done,’
stated the British report, ‘the Germans half covered the bodies with earth and planks. Finally they wrote on a wall of the house “Revenging the honour of our German heroes, killed by the Belgians” … [the victims] show signs of having been beaten before being shot through the back of the head.’

The massacre seemed inexplicable to the villagers, and the shock produced a false rumour that Praile could have escaped death only by betraying his comrades. Over the years this idea became a fixation. Praile decided never to return to the region.

Generaloberst Guderian, the army chief of staff responsible for the eastern front, drove from Zossen, south of Berlin, to see Hitler at the Adlerhorst. It was quite clear to him that the Ardennes offensive had failed to achieve its goals and was not worth continuing. The point of
maximum danger lay to the east, where the Red Army was preparing its great winter offensive. In his briefcase he had a rather more accurate assessment than usual from Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen, the head of Fremde Heere Ost, the army intelligence department dealing with the eastern front. Gehlen had been wrong many times in the past, which did not help his arguments, but Guderian was convinced that his warnings were correct. Gehlen’s department estimated that the Red Army had a superiority of eleven to one in infantry, seven to one in tanks and twenty to one in artillery. Soviet aviation also enjoyed almost total air supremacy, which prevented the Germans from carrying out photo-reconnaissance.

In the conference room, Guderian found himself facing Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, Generalfeldmarschall Keitel and Generaloberst Jodl. As he presented the intelligence estimates, Hitler stopped him. He declared that such estimates of Soviet strength were preposterous. Red Army tank corps had hardly any tanks and their rifle divisions were reduced to little more than 7,000 men each.
‘It’s the greatest imposture since Genghis Khan,’
he shouted. ‘Who is responsible for producing all this rubbish?’

Guderian’s attempts to defend Gehlen’s figures were treated with contempt, and Jodl, to his horror, argued that attacks in the west should continue. At dinner Himmler, a military ignoramus who had just been made commander-in-chief Army Group Upper Rhine, confidently told Guderian that the Soviet build-up was an enormous bluff. Guderian had no option but to return in despair to Zossen.

On the extreme right of Patton’s two army corps, the 5th Infantry Division had begun to advance north-west from behind the 4th Infantry Division. Hemingway, recovered from flu and drinking his own urine, watched and joked on a hilltop with friends from his adopted division as the soldiers below proceeded in extended order wearing their bedsheet camouflage and firing aimlessly in front of them. There did not seem to be any Germans shooting back. On Christmas Eve he went to the 22nd Infantry’s headquarters at Rodenbourg not knowing that the new commander, Colonel Ruggles, had also invited Hemingway’s estranged wife. Ruggles had sent a Jeep to Luxembourg to fetch Martha Gellhorn, hoping it would be a pleasant surprise for both of them. The disengaged couple found themselves having to share a room.

The night before Christmas carried a special significance for soldiers on both sides. In Bastogne, the less seriously wounded received rations of brandy and listened to the endlessly repeated song ‘White Christmas’ on a salvaged civilian radio. North-east of the town in Foy, German soldiers packed into houses and farms to get warm. A young German soldier quietly told the Belgian family in whose house he was billeted that he intended to go home alive: three of his brothers had already been killed. On other parts of the perimeter American soldiers listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’. They could only talk about Christmas at home, imagining their families in front of warm fires. Some of their luckier comrades to the rear attended a midnight mass, such as the one in the chapel of the Château de Rolley, packed with refugees and the family of the owners. In most cases, they also sang ‘Silent Night’, thinking of home. In Bastogne, about a hundred soldiers assembled for mass in front of an improvised altar lit by candles set in empty ration tins. The chaplain in his address to them offered simple advice.
‘Do not plan, for God’s plan will prevail.’

At Boisseilles, between Celles and Foy-Notre-Dame, German soldiers also joined the civilians sheltering in the chateau there. One panzergrenadier from the 2nd Panzer, perhaps inflamed by alcohol, declared that
‘Tomorrow we will cross the Meuse!’
Another, in a more realistic frame of mind, sighed, ‘Poor Christmas.’

The advanced units of the 2nd Panzer were famished, if not starving. In Celles an Alsatian soldier knocked at a door and, when the family opened it cautiously, went down on his knees to beg for a little food. The condition of many of them was so pitiable that locals felt compelled to give their occupiers something to eat out of Christian charity. There were impressively few cases of 2nd Panzer soldiers seizing food at gunpoint, although some might order a farmer’s wife to make them soup, or a pie from her store of preserved fruits in jars, as a Christmas gesture. Others forced local women to wash their socks or underclothes.

German soldiers, despite their intense hunger, were even more desperate to find drink to drown their sorrows on Christmas Eve. In Rochefort, a fourteen-year-old girl, Liliane Delhomme, saw a
Landser
smash the glass door of the Café Grégoire with his fist, cutting himself badly in the process, to get himself a bottle. Homesickness is worse at Christmas. Many soldiers gazed at photographs of their family and wept silently.

Infantrymen on both sides spent the night in their foxholes. The Americans had only frozen C-Rations to celebrate with, which was at any rate more than most Germans. One paratrooper described how he cut out chunks of frozen hash one by one to thaw them out in his mouth before being able to eat them. On the most northerly shoulder at Höfen, a soldier in the 99th Infantry Division wrote in his diary:
‘The fellows are calling up and down the line wishing each
other a Merry Christmas. It is a very pretty night with the ground covered with snow.’ The fortunate ones were visited by an officer passing round a bottle.

Command posts and higher headquarters had Christmas trees, usually decorated with the strips of aluminium foil for radar-jamming. The higher the headquarters, the greater the opportunity for a proper celebration. The city of Luxembourg, still untouched by the war, now felt secure. And as snowflakes fell gently on the night of Christmas Eve, US Army chaplain Frederick A. McDonald was about to conduct the service in a candle-lit church. He had been warned that General Patton would be attending communion that night. The church was packed, but McDonald had no trouble recognizing
‘this General of stern expression’
standing alone and erect at the back. He went to welcome him and mentioned that, in the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm II had come to services in this church. McDonald, no doubt aware of this general’s desire to commune with history, asked: ‘Would you, sir, like to sit in the Kaiser’s pew?’ Patton smiled. ‘Lead me to it,’ he said.

The short-lived silence of Christmas night in Bastogne was broken by a Luftwaffe bomber flying over the town dropping magnesium flares, followed by waves of Junkers 88. The Americans had come to regard the Luftwaffe as a spent force, and the effect was far more devastating than even the most intense artillery bombardment. The shock was still worse for the refugees and Bastognards packed into the cellars, when buildings collapsed above them.

McAuliffe’s headquarters were hit. Walls vibrated as in an earthquake, and everyone was terrified they would be crushed by falling masonry. In the packed cellars of the Institut de Notre-Dame, people prayed or screamed in panic as clouds of dust descended. Several became completely crazed.

Captain Prior, the doctor with the 10th Armored aid station, had been sharing a Christmas bottle of champagne with several of his colleagues, including Augusta Chiwy, the Congolese nurse. They were all thrown to the ground by the force of a blast, and Prior suddenly feared that the aid post itself had been hit. Coated in dust, they struggled out into the street. The three-storey building had collapsed on top of their wounded patients and the ruins were on fire. Chiwy’s fellow nurse Renée Lemaire was killed along with some twenty-five of the seriously wounded, burned to death in their beds. Soldiers rushed up to pull away debris to create an exit, but attempts to put out the fire with buckets of water were fruitless and soon abandoned. Some of the wounded, surrounded by flames, begged to be shot. The low-flying bombers machine-gunned the streets,
prompting paratroopers to fire back with rifles. Bastogne had no anti-aircraft defences because the quadruple .50 half-tracks were all deployed to bolster the perimeter defences.

This attack, which was renewed several hours later, was clearly the opening salvo of the Germans’ Christmas Day onslaught. The
Arko
, or senior artillery commander of the Fifth Panzer Army, had come on Manteuffel’s instructions to supervise fire control. Kokott had moved his command post to Givry opposite the north-west flank. This sector had fewer woods and villages, which the Americans had used so effectively as strongpoints, and the open terrain presented obstacles no greater than small gullies covered with snow. Even so, most of his volksgrenadiers dreaded the battle to come, and were not convinced by the exhortations and promises of their officers that this time they had overwhelming strength.

The double offensive from the north-west and the south-east was planned to break into Bastogne itself within five hours, but Kokott was dismayed to find that the 15th Panzergrenadier-Division was much weaker than he had expected. It had little more than a Kampfgruppe
commanded by Oberstleutnant Wolfgang Maucke, with three battalions of panzergrenadiers, twenty tanks and assault guns, and two battalions of self-propelled artillery. A smaller force from the division had yet to catch up and would not be there until a day later.

The first assault was directed against the sector just in front of the village of Champs. At 05.00, Kokott’s 77th Grenadier-Regiment stole up on American foxholes without a preparatory bombardment. Only then did German artillery begin firing against American gun positions. The village of Champs was
‘taken, lost and re-taken’
in furious fighting, Kokott observed. A company of paratroopers and two tank destroyers inflicted heavy casualties on his men. Their intensive training to
‘strip and repair weapons under fire and in the dark’
had certainly paid off. Stoppages on a jammed machine gun were cleared in moments, and the firing recommenced. Corporal Willis Fowler manning a machine gun on the west side of Champs managed to destroy a whole company of grenadiers while four German panzers hung back on the ridgeline behind them. American artillery was also extremely effective in breaking up attacks, and at 09.00 the warning cry of ‘
Jabos
!’
was heard in German ranks as American fighter-bombers dived in.

Kampfgruppe
Maucke, meanwhile, had steamrollered the positions of the 401st Glider Infantry south-west of Champs and reached the hamlet of Hemroulle, less than three kilometres beyond. A group split off north to attack Champs, and a savage battle took place around the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment’s command post and aid station. They were based in the Château de Rolley, an imposing eighteenth-century building next to a massive round tower which remained from the original medieval castle. A bridge leading to Rolley had been mined, but the extreme frost meant that the firing mechanism failed as the German panzers crossed. On that morning of plunging temperatures, when the wind whipped particles of snow off the frozen crust like sea-spray, paratroopers resorted to urinating on their machine guns to unfreeze the mechanism.

Every signaller, driver and cook in the chateau grabbed a rifle or bazooka to form a defence platoon. The doctor caring for the wounded on stretchers even had to hand a rifle to one of his patients, who became agitated at the thought of being caught unarmed. People shouted at the doctor to burn the book recording the dog-tag numbers of their dead, so that the enemy would not know how many paratroopers they had killed.

One member of the improvised defence group, Sergeant ‘Sky’ Jackson, managed to knock out several tanks. Another bazooka man was so carried away by excitement that he forgot to arm his round, so when it hit the tank there was just a loud clang. A Hellcat tank destroyer knocked out one more Panther.
‘The Germans piled out of the tanks and they were mowed down,’
another soldier recorded. ‘It was just red blood on the snow.’ Screams could be heard from inside one of the panzers.

A company of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment sighted around 150 German infantry and four Mark IV panzers, which opened fire. The paratroop lieutenant pulled his men back to the line of a wood. He ordered his machine-gunners to keep the infantry down and the tanks
‘buttoned up’
by constant fire, while he and another bazooka team stalked them from around their flanks. They knocked out three tanks with their bazookas, and the neighbouring company got the fourth. The paratroopers had little to eat that day. Most had no more than half a cup of soup with white ‘navy’, or haricot, beans to keep them going.

In this all-out effort, Kampfgruppe
Kunkel attacked again in the south-west near Senonchamps up towards Hemroulle. And on the far
side of the perimeter,
‘success seemed very close’
by 10.00 as the 901st Panzergrenadiers fought their way in from the south-east. An assault group reached the road-fork at the entrance to Bastogne, and a German breakthrough appeared almost inevitable. In McAuliffe’s makeshift headquarters staff officers prepared their weapons, and supply personnel collected any spare bazookas for a last-ditch defence.

‘The Germans attacked our positions with tanks,’
Corporal Jackson of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment recorded. ‘I was back at the C[ommand] P[ost] and we received word that more bazookas and bazooka ammunition were needed up front. I took a bazooka and all the ammunition I could carry. When I got to the front, I saw one tank retreating and one Mark IV, with nine men riding on it, out in a field. When the tank was about 40 yards away and broadside on, I jumped out and fired, hitting the tank in the side, just above the track. The rocket killed or stunned four of the men riding on the tank, and the tank immediately stopped and started to burn.’ The crew and the remaining infantry were shot down as they tried to escape.

Even the snub-barrelled howitzers of a parachute field artillery battalion took on the panzers over open sights. Most destructive of all were the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ or strafing with their .50 machine guns. Local farms and their inhabitants were not spared in what American commanders saw as a fight to the finish.

The fire of Shermans, Hellcat tank destroyers and bazookas in the fighting around Champs, Rolley and Hemroulle inflicted heavy losses. By the afternoon, the 15th Panzergrenadier-Division reported that it hardly had a battle-worthy tank left. Another desperate assault was launched after dark, supported by the remaining Jagdpanzer tank destroyers from the reconnaissance battalion. Bazooka teams from the 502nd Parachute Infantry stalked and knocked out half of them at close range, including the commander’s vehicle.

In the south-east, the assault group from the Panzer Lehr’s 901st Panzergrenadiers were
‘cut off and annihilated’
. The regiment had no reserves left to reinforce or extricate them. Almost every man available had already been thrown into the battle. Kokott called off any further attacks. The 15th Panzergrenadier-Division was practically wiped out, and his own division had suffered more than 800 casualties. Most
companies now mustered fewer than twenty men, and a whole battalion in the 78th Grenadier-Regiment was reduced to forty. The worst losses were among the experienced officers and Unteroffizieren.
‘We were 900 metres from the edge of Bastogne,’
an officer in the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division complained bitterly, ‘and couldn’t get into the town.’

Kokott reported to corps headquarters that his forces were so reduced that any further attacks on Bastogne would be
‘irresponsible and unfeasible’
. Lüttwitz agreed that the encircling forces should simply hold their present positions until the arrival of Remer’s
Führer Begleit
Brigade in the next forty-eight hours. But Kokott also heard that the 5th Fallschirmjäger was failing to hold the increasing attacks by Patton’s forces coming from the south. All his volksgrenadiers could do was to lay minefields and prepare more anti-tank positions on the approach routes. The Ardennes offensive had failed, Kokott concluded. He wrote that the great operation had turned into a
‘bloody, dubious and costly
struggle for what was, in the final analysis, an unimportant village’. Evidently Führer headquarters was not prepared to accept the facts of the situation.

While the battle raged north and south-east of Bastogne, the pilot of a light observation plane, braving the flak, flew in a surgeon with supplies of penicillin. A P-38 Lightning also dropped maps, which were still in short supply, and a set of photo-reconnaissance prints of the whole area. That was all the defenders received that day, for bad visibility in England had prevented another major airdrop. To make matters worse, Patton’s promised Christmas present of a breakthrough to Bastogne had not materialized. McAuliffe made his feelings clear by telephone to General Middleton, the VIII Corps commander.
‘We have been let down,’
he said.

Patton’s III Corps was close. Around Lutrebois, just six kilometres south of the centre of Bastogne, the 134th Infantry Regiment of the 35th Division was closely supported by artillery and tank destroyers. German tanks had been spotted in the woods ahead, so the field artillery opened fire. Some Shermans, attracted by the firing, came up and joined in. Bazooka men had
‘to lie in wait or sneak up just like stalking a moose’
. They had been told to aim for the tracks on a Panther, as rounds simply bounced off its armour. In the end, out of twenty-seven German tanks, only three escaped.

The 4th Armored Division was battering the 5th Fallschirmjäger units south of Bastogne between the roads to Arlon and Neufchâteau. As the village of Assenois shook from the relentless explosions of shells, civilians could do little but hope and pray.
‘We feel like we are in God’s hand,’
a woman wrote, ‘and we surrender ourselves to it.’ The Walloons were largely Catholic and deeply religious. Committing themselves to the hands of the Almighty was undoubtedly a comfort, when they had so little control over their own fate. Reciting the rosary together helped dull the pain of individual fear, and calm the nerves.

During the battle for Hemroulle, Model and Manteuffel had visited Lüttwitz’s corps headquarters at the Château de Roumont near the highway to Marche. Lüttwitz was even more concerned about his old division stranded round Celles, and again urged that the 2nd Panzer must be saved by permitting its rapid withdrawal. Model and Manteuffel
‘showed understanding’
, but they ‘obviously were not authorized to decide the withdrawal of the 2nd Panzer-Division’. That order could come only from Hitler, and he was certainly not prepared to admit defeat.

Lüttwitz’s worst fears for the Böhm and Cochenhausen Kampfgruppen
were being realized as they spoke. The Allied counter-attack had begun before dawn. The artillery with the 29th Armoured Brigade began to bombard Böhm’s reconnaissance battalion in Foy-Notre-Dame, and fulfilled their promise of avoiding the seventeenth-century church. American artillery batteries took up position in the fields around the villages of Haid and Chevetogne. When they had reached Haid the evening before they celebrated with the locals, who made galettes and hot chocolate: with milk from their own cows and melted Hershey bars. Afterwards, the American soldiers accompanied their new friends to midnight mass in the church. Only a couple of days before a sixteen-year-old Alsatian, who had been dragooned into the Wehrmacht, had broken down in tears, telling a farmer’s wife about the horrors they had been through.

In Chevetogne, an officer went round the houses warning people to leave their windows open, or the blast from the guns would shatter them. Villagers watched an artillery spotter plane, which they called ‘Petit Jules’, circle over German positions. A little later, twin-tailed P-38 Lightning fighter-bombers appeared in force.

Combat Command A of Harmon’s 2nd Armored Division advanced
south to Buissonville a dozen kilometres to the east of the Cochenhausen Kampfgruppe, and clashed with a force from the Panzer Lehr which had advanced from Rochefort. They
tracked one of the German columns to the farm of La Happe where fighting began. Most civilians in the area immediately took to their cellars, but a few climbed up to attics to watch the deadly firework display of a tank battle. Some twenty-nine Germans were killed and many more seriously wounded. The latter were carried to a barn and laid on the straw.

Combat Command B, meanwhile, coming from Ciney, split into two, with one task force heading for Conjoux and the other for Celles to surround the main Cochenhausen Kampfgruppe
spread between the two villages. The Germans round Celles were sitting targets: they did not even have enough fuel for the
Feldlazarett
’s ambulance. In Celles itself, most of the inhabitants sheltered in the crypt of the church with the nuns and the priest. The straw laid during the September fighting was still there. Some farmworkers brought down a pail of milk for the children when there was a lull in the firing, and cooked a chicken which had been killed by an explosion. The rest crouched in cellars as the shells flew overhead. The Americans were using phosphorus shells, and naturally the locals feared for their farms.