Armageddon (47 page)
Major Hal McCown, commanding the 2/119th Infantry of 30th Division, was captured on 21 December while visiting forward positions, along with his wireless-operator and orderly. He was taken before Joachim Peiper, and conversed with the SS officer through a German interpreter who had spent sixteen years in Chicago. McCown said later: “The Germans’ morale was high, despite the extremely trying conditions.” He talked to Peiper for most of the night: “I have met few men who impressed me so much in so short a space of time as did this German officer. He was completely confident of Germany’s ability to whip the Allies.” Peiper waxed lyrical before the American about V2s, new submarines, fresh divisions. In the two days that followed, heavy American artillery fire fell around Peiper’s headquarters, killing one American prisoner and a guard. On the afternoon of 23 December, McCown was summoned once more to Peiper. His panzers had run out of fuel. He was withdrawing on foot, leaving behind the wounded prisoners, but taking the American major with him. In the early hours of the next morning, 800 Germans slipped silently into the woods. Two hours later, the fugitives heard the first explosions as charges on their abandoned tanks began to detonate. All next day, the Germans probed for an escape route, once being challenged by an American sentry. Peiper and his staff disappeared. The other Germans pressed on, carrying their own wounded, until that night the column collided with American positions. In the ensuing firefight, Major McCown was able to escape into friendly hands, and tell his story to men of the 82nd Airborne.
The weather had cleared on 23 December. “There was an other-worldly beauty in the battlefield for those who had the comfort and leisure to observe,” wrote the Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead.
When you drove past the frozen canals and the tobogganing children up to the heights of the Ardennes, the sun broke through and it was like a spot-lighted stage, mile upon mile of untrodden snowfields under the clear and frosty lamp of the winter sun. If you turned your back to the ruined villages and forgot the war for a moment, then very easily you could fancy yourself to be alone in this radiant world where everything was reduced to primary whites and blues; a strident, sparkling white among the frosted trees, the deep blue shadows in the valley, and then the flawless ice-blue of the sky.
For Allied defenders gazing up at the sunshine, lyrical beauty was to be found in the fact that their aircraft could fly. Supply drops rained down on Bastogne. At last, fighter-bombers descended in full force upon the battlefield. In St. Vith, Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder watched the impact of the first strikes on his depleted unit of the 18th Volksgrenadiers and thought bleakly: “This is not going to be easy.” A veteran of the Eastern Front, Schröder had never before experienced heavy air attack. His commanding officer was wounded. They began to retreat under the command of a colonel newly arrived from Norway who, Schröder noticed with dismay, wore a tunic bare of battle decorations. His fears were confirmed during an American counter-attack. The colonel excused himself, saying: “Schröder, I’m afraid my foot is playing up.” It should never be supposed that the Wehrmacht was led only by brave men.
American control of the battlefield reasserted itself slowly but surely. German tanks reached the furthest point of their advance, sixty miles from their start line and a few miles short of the Meuse, on 24 December. The panzers’ clockwork had run down. Most enemy armoured units were starved of fuel. They were battered by aircraft and concentrated artillery fire. The American genius for mobility had enabled the defenders already to double their infantry numbers and treble their armoured strength in the embattled sector. The Bulge looked alarming on the map, yet no longer presented a strategic threat. “The fact that the Hun has stuck his neck out,” wrote Tedder at SHAEF as early as 22 December, “is, from the point of view of shortening the whole business, the best thing that could happen. It may make months of difference.” Time was always the friend of the Allies, the enemy of the Germans. Hitler’s armies had lost their race.
Matthew Ridgway, commanding XVII Airborne Corps, was absent in England when the German offensive began. Gavin of the 82nd filled his place superbly through the first days, returning to his own division when the corps commander arrived. The force of Ridgway’s personality is stamped upon every line of his correspondence, every record of his conversations. After days in which some senior officers who should have known better panicked, it is striking to contrast Ridgway’s remarks to his formation commanders on Christmas Eve: “The situation is normal and completely satisfactory. The enemy has thrown in all his mobile reserves, and this is his last major offensive effort in this war. This Corps will halt that effort; then attack and smash him . . . I want you to reflect that confidence to the subordinate commanders and staffs in all that you say and do.” Ridgway told Gavin: “Now, I know your men are tired, they’ve done a magnificent job out there, and they need you to go and pep them up a little bit. I don’t know of anyone who can do that better than you. Will you get that across?”
Ridgway sent a biting letter to the officer commanding the 75th Division in his corps, asserting that its performance had been sorely inadequate: “I want every man imbued with the idea how lucky he is to be here, where the decision of this war will be reached, and where he can contribute his utmost to putting the 75th up alongside of the best divisions in our army. That upclimb starts today.”
At least one man of the 75th Division which Ridgway was addressing, Harold Lindstrom, a twenty-two-year-old farmboy from Alexandria, Minnesota, felt nothing like “lucky to be here.” A bespectacled rifleman in F Company of the 2/289th Infantry, Lindstrom arrived in France on 15 December and had been growing steadily more unhappy ever since. First, the tough, respected staff-sergeant who had been with his company through training succumbed to combat fatigue on their sixth day in the war zone, without hearing a shot fired. Lindstrom himself was nursing a feverish cold. The unit chaplain, a man he had never cared for, came by. To his own surprise, the soldier found himself grateful to see the priest: “things were different. I was ready to listen. I was afraid of the future and was looking for all the help I could get.”
His company trudged forward, cold, weary, hungry and thirsty. They passed jeeps loaded with wounded, wrecked vehicles crushed into twisted steel and broken glass, trucks with their tyres still burning. Abandoned kit lay everywhere: “It was scary to see equipment just like that I was using. They had to have been guys just like me . . . After seeing that mess I was deathly afraid of German tanks, and I think most other guys were, too.” Their neighbours in K Company were strafed by American P-38s. On Christmas morning, the 289th deployed for an attack, three battalions in line, towards the blazing Belgian village of Grandmenil. Tracer streaked towards them. As Lindstrom’s platoon mortarman set up his tube, a German round ricocheted off the baseplate, striking sparks. For hours, they lay inert while German machine-gun fire hosed monotonously up and down the line, wounding a few men. Lindstrom felt the snow melting under him as he lay. Darkness came. At last their platoon leader, a thirty-five-year-old named Lavern Ivens, shouted: “Men, we can’t lay here all night and wait to get hit. Start crawling up the hill towards that clump of trees.” They were thrilled to receive orders and gingerly started moving. Then they heard an engine start, a German voice, and laughter. They lay still again. Rollie Combs called to Roy Mitchell: “Mitch, Mitch, which way should I lay? Facing or away from them?” Then somebody cried: “Let’s get the hell out of here before they start shelling us.” They trickled miserably back down the hill. A wounded man begged Lindstrom for his overcoat, but he felt so cold that he refused. Somebody else obliged and made Lindstrom feel guilty: “I am sure I would have given him mine. I just had to get used to the idea. I suppose I came across kind of poorly.” They reached a field kitchen and sat gratefully eating their chow. That night, their battalion CO was relieved of his command.
Next morning, they were told to be ready to attack again. “That made me feel kind of desperate . . . I had never been so frightened as I was the night before, and now we were back at it again. I asked God to help me.” F Company scouting officer asked for volunteers for a patrol. No one moved. At last, a few came forward. As they began to advance, American shells fell close. The line broke and ran towards the rear. Lindstrom looked in horror at a man with one eye hanging out; another with his legs blown off, smoking a cigarette under a tree; a stray boot with a foot in it; a sergeant being carried screaming to the rear by stretcher-bearers. He noticed that the NCO’s body was a bloody mess below the waist, and wondered if he had lost his penis and testicles.
For four days after that, they lay in foxholes under shellfire. They had no idea where they were, nor that they were taking part in “the Battle of the Bulge.” Lindstrom wrote: “Most of the time, I responded to simple dog-like commands such as ‘move out,’ ‘hold up,’ ‘set up firing positions,’ ‘keep your head down.’ I was always thinking about how cold I was.” When he saw his first dead Germans, he envied them their peace: “The war was over for them. They weren’t cold any more.” Everybody was familiar with a U.S. government propaganda film about how the war was being fought for a typical all-American family and their dog Fido. Now, men would say to each other: “Remember, we’re doing this for Fido.”
Lindstrom’s portrait of the experience of combat, in all its discomfort, bewilderment and fear, possessed a far greater resonance for most men who took part in the Second World War than the reminiscences of those who won medals. If anyone had told the Minnesotan and his comrades in their foxholes that merely by hanging on in there, by the fact of their survival, they had helped to win a great battle, they would have been bemused. Yet such was the reality. With such top-class American divisions as the 1st, 2nd Armored and two airborne formations reinforcing the line, the Germans were now simply beating themselves to death against the Allied positions, or struggling to win a breathing space for retreat. Bridges across the Ourthe had been blown in advance of 116th Panzer, and indeed at every turn American demolitions denied river crossings to the enemy. Joachim Peiper fumed about “the damned engineers.” Only very late in the battle, as units began to capture large numbers of German pan-zers abandoned with empty tanks, did Allied commanders begin to grasp the scope of the Germans’ fuel difficulties. When the U.S. 743rd Tank Battalion got into La Glieze, its men were excited to find thirty Tigers and Panthers standing intact, with empty tanks. The Americans enthused briefly about taking over the panzers, but the maintenance problems seemed insuperable.
At 1650 on 26 December, elements of Patton’s 4th Armored Division broke through to the 101st Airborne. Brigadier Anthony McAuliffe hastened out to the perimeter to meet the tank men. Captain William A. Dwight saluted and asked: “How are you, General?” McAuliffe said: “Gee, I’m mighty glad to see you.” The 101st Airborne had suffered 1,641 casualties, 10th Armored 503, while 4th Armored Division lost 1,400, and other units in proportion. The fighting around Bastogne was not over, and the link between the town and the main American front remained precarious. But it was no longer in doubt that the positions could be held.
The Bulge crisis provoked a hasty combing of rear areas for service corps personnel who might replace the heavy infantry casualties. Private Charles Felix, an artilleryman, was stricken by despair when told in late December that he was being transferred to infantry. An unwilling draftee, Felix had been relieved to see his papers stamped “Limited Service” because of poor eyesight. He was correspondingly crestfallen to be sent overseas at all. On arrival at his battalion, he seized the opportunity to claim non-existent radio experience and to his overwhelming relief was posted to battalion CP rather than to a rifle company. Omar Bradley liked to tell a story of a man who kept telephoning the
Stars & Stripes
Paris office for news of the battle. After repeated calls, he was asked which commander he was calling for. “I don’t represent any general,” the man responded gloomily. “I’m one of the Com-Z people slated for transfer to infantry.” At one moment during the frantic search for reinforcements, Eisenhower asked Washington to make available 100,000 Marines, an extraordinary admission of desperation. His request was rejected.
I
N THE NORTH
in the last days of December, 2nd Armored Division from Hodges’s First Army met its German counterpart 2nd Panzer Division just west of Dinant, and destroyed almost every one of von Manteuffel’s tanks that had not already run out of fuel. 2nd Panzer started the battle with 116 tanks and assault guns and ended it with virtually none. Far southwards, in front of Patch’s Seventh Army, the German Army Group G launched a second offensive in the Saarland, designed to increase pressure on the Allies, and make it harder for Eisenhower to reinforce the Ardennes. The initial assault gained a little ground and inspired a resurrection of Hitler’s hopes. But this German assault, too, faltered and died in the first days of 1945.
On 27 December, SHAEF Intelligence recorded: “The tempo of the enemy’s efforts has slowed almost to nothing.” Corporal Iolo Lewis, a Welsh wireless-operator in one of Montgomery’s Shermans, waiting for the Germans with XXX Corps above the Meuse, watched the enemy’s tanks advancing in extended line, infantry among the panzers. The British felt relaxed and confident, their own tanks deployed hull down in overwhelming strength, as backstop for the American front. “As the sun came out, we knew the Germans were finished,” said Lewis. “When the Typhoons came down on them, you could see crews jumping out of the panzers even before they were hit.” On New Year’s Day 1945, the Luftwaffe made its last big effort on the Western Front. Its fighters destroyed on the ground 140 Allied aircraft, including Montgomery’s personal transport, in a series of surprise strafing attacks on airfields. But the German pilots suffered punishing casualties they could not afford, while Allied losses were quickly made good.