Armageddon (46 page)

The 101st Airborne’s stand at Bastogne became one of the American legends of the Second World War. Just praise has been heaped upon the achievement of the “Screaming Eagles.” Less has been said about the medley of stragglers and survivors from all manner of units who found themselves participating in the town’s eight-day siege whether they liked it or not. Staff-Sergeant Charles Skelnar, a baker from Omaha, Nebraska, now serving as a cook with the 482nd Anti-Aircraft Regiment, first heard of Bastogne as he manned a .50 calibre machine-gun on the kitchen truck of his unit on the Longvilly road, feeling very frightened in the midst of “absolute chaos.” Until 16 December, he and his unit had scarcely heard a shot fired in anger. Now, they were suddenly ordered to abandon their half-tracks and pull back to Bastogne. About half his battery made it. The rest were lost on the road.

Dr. Henry Hills was a member of one of six field surgical teams which were landed by glider outside Bastogne on 26 December, to relieve the desperate shortage of medical aid. Three surgeons were killed by German fire before they landed, and every glider was hit in the air. As soon as they crashed, the medics dashed out of the wreckage and ran into the town perimeter. They were taken to a garage.

As soon as you lifted up that [garage] door to go in, you could smell gas gangrene. There were some women trying to help, giving them water and so forth. [Men] were dying like flies. They’d been there for ten days. The only light was on the far side, where mechanics did repairs. There was a field stove there with coffee brewing, and four tables set up—stretchers on saw horses. After a case, we dumped all the instruments into a great big vat filled with alcohol. We had no gowns or masks, of course. The bottom floor of the garage had 400 serious casualties. The top floor had 400 walking wounded. We didn’t bother with them.

The doctors had lost all but six pints of plasma in the glider crash. They had sulpha but no penicillin. As they worked, an infantry colonel came in and said he had received complaints that there were too many amputations: “Understand you’re taking them off right and left here.” Hills nodded: “Yep, those that need to come off.” The colonel said: “Well, I’m not sure they do.” Hills picked up a discarded limb and handed it to him. The colonel turned ashen, and left without another word.

Fifty hours after the medics arrived, they were relieved. Hills’s last case was a minor compound fracture of the forearm. The anaesthetists were busy, so the doctor instructed a cook on how to inject the man progressively with a syringe of pentothal. When they finished the operation, the cook said: “Now I’ve done everything in this army.”

The Germans bypassed Bastogne, leaving the town surrounded, and pushed on beyond St. Hubert, only twenty miles from the Meuse. But with the 101st in their rear it was immensely difficult for the panzers to exploit their advance. Von Manteuffel considered it one of the major German errors of the battle to leave Panzer Lehr to deal with Bastogne while pushing forward 2nd Panzer without support. Each division was independently too weak for its task.

Meanwhile on the northern flank, early on the morning of 21 December 12th SS Panzer launched the strongest attack thus far on the positions of the 2/26th Infantry north of Bullingen. German artillery and mortars began their bombardment long before dawn, and engineers had laid mines on the road approaching Colonel Daniel’s positions. The colonel called for an artillery “ring of steel” to support his infantrymen. Twelve American 105mm howitzer battalions, drawn from three divisions, were made available to give fire support. The Americans were amazed by the suicidal courage of the advancing German infantry. It was in vain. The artillery swept them away in a storm of explosives, smoke and heaving earth. Corporal Henry F. Warner became one of the American heroes of the battle, fighting a 57mm anti-tank gun until he was mortally wounded by machine-gun fire from a Mark IV he had knocked out. German armour achieved a brief breakthrough on the 2/26th’s right flank, and began crushing infantrymen in their foxholes. But an American tank destroyer entered the fray and hit seven German tanks in succession. Five others continued to advance, but two were wrecked by two Shermans before they, in turn, were knocked out.

The surviving Germans began to fire on the manor house which sheltered Daniel’s command post. Just when his position began to seem desperate, a platoon of American self-propelled 90mm guns arrived. Under cover of a smokescreen, they hit two of the German tanks. The last survivor retired. Several hundred Germans had died, and the enemy had lost some forty-seven tanks and self-propelled guns. The Americans suffered 250 casualties. Colonel Daniel’s force was now so weakened that he began to wonder if he should pull back. Yet the arrival of an additional company of reinforcements persuaded him that he could hold on. He was right. The Germans had exhausted themselves. The 2/26th had performed a memorable feat of arms, of the kind which decided the outcome of the battle. The regiment’s performance caused the commander of 12th SS Panzer to describe 21 December as “the darkest day of my life.” At Hitler’s insistence, Sepp Dietrich’s men continued to press forward against the Elsenborn Ridge for four more days. But the critical moment had passed. Model now recognized that, if a breakthrough was to to be achieved anywhere, it would have to be made by Fifth Panzer Army in the south, not Sixth SS Panzer Army in the north.

O
N
20
D
ECEMBER,
despite Bradley’s bitter protests, Eisenhower gave Montgomery command of the entire northern flank of the Bulge, placing most of Hodges’s First Army and Simpson’s Ninth under his orders. This was a stroke of wisdom of the kind which justified all the Supreme Commander’s claims to his authority. Montgomery, as has been observed, was the object of intense dislike among his American peers. It would have been understandable if Eisenhower had thus felt unable to give the British field-marshal authority over U.S. troops. Yet in this crisis he showed his statesmanship and was rewarded by a highly competent performance from Montgomery. Now that the Germans had broken wireless silence, Bletchley Park was decoding a flood of signals about their deployments and intentions. Montgomery therefore possessed advantages denied to his American counterparts in the first days. Yet other generals, possessing the same access to intelligence, remained unnerved by the German lunge. At a time when there was disarray, if not panic, at First Army headquarters, the foxy little field-marshal kept his balance. Coolly and calmly, he redeployed British and American forces to create a solid northern front against the German advance.

The British XXX Corps at Dinant was shifted to block the last miles to the Meuse. It was scarcely called upon to fight, for the Bulge was an American battle. But Montgomery displayed the quality most vital to a commander in a crisis—grip. Many even among those Americans who detested him applauded his contribution to the defence against Germany’s winter offensive. When Brigadier William Harrison of the 30th Division met 21st Army Group’s commander, he thought: “Here is a guy who really knows what he is doing.” Von Manteuffel asserted afterwards that the Allied response to the Ardennes offensive was very much better co-ordinated than the original German attack.

Yet even in this crisis Montgomery could not bring himself to behave gracefully. At a meeting with Hodges of First Army and Simpson of Ninth, instead of inviting the Americans to brief him on the battle situation as they huddled over maps on the bonnet of his Humber staff car, the British commander turned to his young British liaison officer, Major Carol Mather. “What’s the form?” demanded Monty, inviting Mather to explain the battle situation. The British officer wrote: “Our American friends . . . looked severely discomfited. It was a slight uncalled for.” Montgomery’s official biographer, Nigel Hamilton, said of his treatment of Hodges: “He humiliated the shyest . . . of American generals in his hour of shame.” Bill Simpson, fortunately, seemed impervious to Montgomery’s discourtesies. The gaunt, lanky, unassuming Ninth Army commander was a West Point classmate of Patton, and passed out of the Academy second from bottom. A rancher’s son from Texas, much decorated in the First World War, Simpson proved himself one of the most sympathetic as well as most competent American officers in Europe. Not least among his virtues was a patience and good nature towards the British in general and Montgomery in particular, which deserved a more generous response than it received.

From the beginning of the battle, it became evident that Montgomery intended to exploit the crisis to pursue his familiar demand that an overall Allied ground commander should be appointed. On the very day Eisenhower gave the field-marshal command of the northern flank of the Bulge, Brooke felt obliged to send Montgomery a weary, strongly worded letter urging him to abandon his delusions about taking over the Anglo-American armies: “I think you should be careful about what you say to Eisenhower himself on the subject . . . especially as he is now probably very worried over the whole situation.” The next day, Brooke reinforced his message: “I would like to give you a word of warning. Events and enemy action have forced on Eisenhower the setting-up of a more satisfactory system of command . . . It is important that you should not even in the slightest degree appear to rub this unfortunate fact into anyone at SHAEF. Any remarks you make are bound to come to Eisenhower’s ears sooner or later.”

The Bulge battle began at a time when American enthusiasm for the British was at a low ebb. James Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization and sometimes known as Roosevelt’s “assistant president,” noted that even before the events of mid-December U.S. generals in France had been complaining about the “passivity” of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. There was ferocious U.S. criticism of British military intervention against the communists in Greece, which was considered to reflect not only Churchillian imperialism but a willingness to enforce this by diverting British troops from the west European battlefield, thus increasing the burden upon the Americans. Roosevelt told Stimson that he was frankly “fed up” with the British. “Something very like a crisis exists beneath the surface in the relations between the Allies who are fighting this war,” the columnist Marquis Childs wrote in the
Washington Post
on 8 December 1944. “. . . I believe that most Americans who think about these things are deeply troubled about the turn of events in Occupied Europe.” Representative Barry of New York said in Congress: “We Americans haven’t suffered more than half a million casualties to divide Europe between Great Britain and Russia.” The
Manchester Guardian
observed in a considerable understatement: “Anglo-American relations seem rather unhappy just now.” With the trauma of the German assault in the Ardennes overlaid upon existing tensions, this was no time for a British commander to provoke the Americans.

Yet on 22 December the field-marshal wrote to Brooke in terms which reflected the conceit and self-delusion which he would soon afterwards expose in public: “I think I see daylight now on the northern front, and we have tidied up the mess and got two American armies properly organised. But I can see rocks ahead and no grounds for the optimism Ike seems to feel. Rundstedt is fighting a good battle.” The following day, Montgomery reported: “I do not think Third U.S. Army will be strong enough to do what is needed. If my forecast proves true, then I shall have to deal unaided with both Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies. I think I can manage them, but it will be a bit of a party.”

Patton had been deputed to restore the southern front of the German penetration. He responded with a feat of command and staff work which won the admiration of history, by wheeling three divisions of Third Army through ninety degrees in seventy-two hours, to launch a drive north to Bastogne and beyond. Montgomery did not have to “deal unaided” with Fifth and Sixth SS Panzer Armies, nor was it ever likely that he would. By 22 December, the crisis of the Ardennes battle was over, though plenty of hard fighting still lay ahead. The field-marshal displayed admirable professionalism in reorganizing the northern front. But he did nothing then or later in the battle which suggested brilliance.

Moreover, his rhetoric deprived him of gratitude even from those who might otherwise have been willing to offer it. On 28 December, he reported smugly to Brooke about a meeting with Eisenhower:

I said he would probably find it somewhat difficult to explain away the true reasons for the “bloody nose” we had just received from the Germans, but this would be as nothing compared to the difficulty we would have in explaining away another failure to reach the Rhine . . . [Eisenhower] was definitely in a somewhat humble frame of mind, and clearly realised that present trouble would not have occurred if he had accepted British advice and not that of American generals.

Even after the initial crisis of the battle had passed, some American units continued to suffer pain from the Germans’ furious, frustrated thrashings. “Our outfit broke,” Private John Capano of the 30th Division’s 120th Infantry said frankly. His unit’s first inkling that the Germans were moving came from Belgian civilian women, who trickled into their positions around the Lingueville–Malmédy road early on 21 December and volubly proclaimed that the enemy was close. “When the trouble started, we had no foxholes dug. Suddenly, there was the Luftwaffe bombing us. We’d been told the Luftwaffe was washed up. When we heard tanks, we all started to run for cover. We didn’t know which way to go. We were firing into the trees. We figured that we just ought to make as much noise as we could. We thought: ‘Somebody’s fouled up.’ The armored guys were our saviors. We rode out on top of their tanks.” In reality, it should be said, although the 120th was badly mauled by the 150th Panzer Brigade—led by some of Otto Skorzeny’s men in American vehicles and uniforms—the regiment later rallied.

Lieutenant William Devitt of the 330th Infantry was hit one night by mortar fragments which also brought down his platoon sergeant. “My first reaction was fear. I was afraid I was going to die. Concurrent with the fear came a prayer, something like ‘God help me!’ But simultaneously, I started to talk to myself: ‘Don’t panic. Seek help.’ ” He called quietly for a medic. The corpsman who responded explained apologetically that he had lost his torch. But within ten minutes stretcher-bearers took Devitt to the rear, with shrapnel wounds in his hand and abdomen. A few days later, he found himself sharing a room in a Welsh hospital with a young officer who had lost his leg. “I really don’t give a Goddam any more,” said his roommate. “How’ll I play tennis? I had a football scholarship from Texas Christian waiting for me. I just don’t want to live this way.” The boy got his wish, for he died of septicaemia. Devitt, who had been so eager a month earlier to experience combat, was profoundly grateful now to be through with it.