The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (77 page)

“One of our young lieutenants danced a rubber-legged jig as he twisted slowly, making the blue bullet hole between his eyes visible,” Roland later wrote. Artillerymen spiked their guns with thermite grenades, and drivers opened radiator petcocks before abandoning their trucks to flee on foot through the woods. Signalmen smashed switchboards, adjutants burned secrets, and skittish soldiers shot one another by mistake, including one clutch of GIs who accidentally killed their own major, then wounded a captain trying to calm them down. In the Bütgenbach villa where he kept his command post, the division commander, Major General Walter E. Lauer, played a piano in the living room with studied insouciance even as one frightful dispatch arrived after another; his casualties would climb to two thousand and keep climbing. Lieutenant Richard H. Byers, a lanky gunner from Cleveland, watched tracers flicker overhead in neon sheets and recalled lines written by the poet Alan Seeger before he was killed in France in 1916: “I’ve a rendezvous with death / At midnight in some flaming town.”

Two towns, actually: three miles from the German border, the twin Belgian villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath stood in the path of the 12th SS Panzer Division. The Murder Division, responsible for liquidating so many Canadian prisoners in Normandy, had been rebuilt with more Hitler Youth teenagers and 130 tanks and assault guns. Two panzer grenadier battalions probed the villages on Sunday only to butt against veterans from the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division who had been hustled into the line so quickly that some had Christmas packages from home dangling on their belts and rifle barrels; one witness thought they looked “more like postmen than soldiers.”

A full-throated German assault at first light on Monday failed to win through, and fighting swept from house to house, room to room, alley to muddy alley, with grenades, knives, tank destroyers, and artillery salvos called by American officers onto their own heads. Smoke spiraled in thick braids above the mêlée as men from both sides were captured, freed, and recaptured. Antitank guns and skulking bazooka teams, along with almost thirty thousand artillery rounds, knocked out so many Panthers and other tracks that a German officer called the villages “a perfect panzer graveyard.” An enemy gambit to outflank the American line by attacking through Höfen, ten miles north, ended with a battalion of Volksgrenadiers littering the snow like gray stepping-stones. Burial details counted 554 German bodies, for only a dozen U.S. casualties.

At dusk on Tuesday, with the last remnants of the 99th Division bundled to the rear except for stouthearts fighting with the 2nd Division, the Americans slipped from Krinkelt and Rocherath in thick fog, abandoning those flaming towns for better ground a thousand yards west—a boomerang crest two thousand feet high, running from southwest to northeast and unmarked on Belgian military maps. American commanders named this high ground after a nearby village: Elsenborn Ridge. Here Major General Gerow, the V Corps commander, believed the German attack could impale itself.

Corps gunners muscled hundreds of tubes into the lee of the ridge, along with 90mm antiaircraft guns to be used as artillery. Troops shoveled dirt into empty wooden ammunition boxes for field fortifications and burrowed down in the shale slope, roofing the hollows with pine logs and doors ripped from their hinges in a nearby Belgian barracks. Riflemen from the 2nd Division filled the ridgeline on the right and those from the 99th held the left, braced by the veteran 9th Infantry Division taking positions below Monschau in the north. An officer described a command post near Elsenborn as “a Gilbert and Sullivan opera … a big crowd of officers, all with map cases, binoculars, gas masks, etc., milling about. Nobody knew anything useful, even where the enemy was.” Loony rumors flitted about, including reports of Tiger tanks being dropped by parachute. “I want to throw back my head and give voice to that empty feeling with a long animal howl,” Lieutenant Byers wrote his wife. Then a colonel walked in and proclaimed, “You need worry no longer. The 1st Division is here.”

Just so. At a moment when artillery prowess was most in demand, no better gunner was to be found in the U.S. Army than the owlish, bespectacled pipe-smoker known as Mr. Chips: Major General Clift Andrus, who a week earlier had taken command of the 1st Division when General Clarence Huebner became Gerow’s deputy at V Corps. Andrus soon would orchestrate time-on-target fire missions from as many as thirty-five battalions—more than four hundred guns shooting at a single target simultaneously. Also welcome was the arrival of the division’s 26th Infantry Regiment to straddle the trunk road from Büllingen to Malmédy.

Here for three days and nights German paratroopers and the 12th SS Panzer smashed against the defensive bulkhead again and again. One message to Andrus’s headquarters advised, “Attack repulsed. Send litters.” Then: “Much happening out there. We are killing lots of Germans.”

The heaviest blows fell on the 26th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion, commanded since the battle of El Guettar in Tunisia by Lieutenant Colonel Derrill M. Daniel, a Ph.D. entomologist wise in the ways of insect pests. A night attack from Büllingen by twenty truckloads of whooping, dismounted German infantry supported by panzers churning through deck-deep mud was repulsed with white phosphorus and antitank guns firing high-velocity British sabot ammunition at exhaust flames and engine noises. Hours later eight Panthers punched through the battalion line in a rampage of machine-gun and 75mm fire until bazooka teams and scorching antitank volleys threw them back. Thursday brought worse yet, with a three-hour cannonade before dawn by German howitzers and Nebelwerfers; then two battalions of paratroopers and SS panzer grenadiers spilled from a piney wood in the west, trailed by thirty panzers. The 2nd Battalion’s right flank crumbled, and SS tanks wheeled up and down the line, crushing GIs in their foxholes.

“Get me all the damned artillery you can get,” Daniel radioed. Ten thousand rounds in eight hours—among the fiercest concentrations in the European war—kept enemy infantry at bay, but panzers closed to within a hundred yards of the battalion command post in a farm compound called Dom Bütgenbach. For much of the day Daniel and his staff crouched in a cellar with the wounded, burning classified papers and massing fires as tank and machine-gun rounds blistered the four-foot stone walls. Sleeting counterfire from Shermans and new 90mm tank destroyers finally winkled out the last attackers from behind a barn by shooting right through it; only one panzer escaped. An eerie silence descended with the night.

Army patrols reported enemy dead “as common as grass,” and grave diggers would count nearly 800 bodies, along with the wrecked hulks of forty-seven panzers and self-propelled guns. Daniel took 250 casualties—this just three weeks after ruinous losses in the Hürtgen—and during the protracted fight at Elsenborn Ridge 5,000 others were killed or wounded or went missing in the 2nd and 99th Divisions alone.

But the American line held. Here Sixth Panzer Army reached its high-water mark, on what would become known as the north shoulder of the Bulge. Dietrich needed an eight- to twelve-mile cushion on his right flank to keep German assault columns unmolested by American artillery as they lumbered toward the Meuse. Instead, the juggernaut was forced to shear away from the main road through Bütgenbach to seek secondary avenues farther south; three routes allocated to the I SS Panzer Corps remained blocked, with others under fire. An attack farther north near Monschau failed abjectly when one German division arrived late to the battle and the other was knocked back. Only Peiper’s foray showed clear promise in this sector. The 12th SS Panzer Division had been mauled, again, and other SS units seemed muscle-bound and clumsy.

The Americans by contrast demonstrated agility and a knack for concentrating firepower. Sixty thousand fresh troops had been shuttled into the Ardennes on Sunday, December 17, among the quarter-million reinforcements who would arrive within a week. Four U.S. infantry divisions clotted the north shoulder so effectively that OB West’s war diary acknowledged “the Elsenborn attack is gaining only quite insignificant ground,” while Army Group B lamented “slower progress than anticipated.” The tactical fortunes of Dietrich and his lieutenants seemed increasingly doubtful, to the point that Rundstedt and Model, watching the offensive come unstitched, agreed to abruptly shift the German main effort from Sixth Panzer Army to Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army in the south. With northern routes denied or constricted, a new urgency obtained on the German left, and the roads leading through Luxembourg toward Bastogne and thence to the Meuse were now more vital than ever.

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Two armored corps abreast had come down like wolves on the fold in Manteuffel’s Saturday-morning attack, each corps falling on little more than an American regiment at an unnerving ratio of ten wolves for each sheep. Cota’s 28th Division, still recuperating from six thousand Hürtgen casualties, held an impossibly wide twenty-five-mile front along the Our River, with all three infantry regiments on line. Instead of facing two German divisions across the river, as Army intelligence had surmised, Cota’s men found themselves fighting five, plus heavy enemy reinforcements.

As artillery and mortar barrages shredded field-phone wires and truck tires, German infiltrators forded the Our in swirling fog to creep up stream beds behind the American pickets. Forward outposts fell back, or perished, or surrendered. “While I was being searched they came across my teeth wrapped in a handkerchief in my pocket,” a captured engineer recorded. “These they kept.” German shock troops soon rushed American gun lines illuminated by flares and by searchlights ricocheting off the low clouds; howitzer crews fired over open sights before spiking their tubes. An American armored column rushing down a ridgetop road known as Skyline Drive blundered into a German ambush: eleven light tanks were destroyed in as many minutes, “like clay pipes in a shooting gallery.” From his command post in Wiltz, a brewing and tanning town ten miles west of the Our, Cota repeated orders from General Middleton at the VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne, another ten miles farther west: “Hold at all costs.” A soldier scribbled in his diary, “This place is not healthy anymore.”

Yet as in the north, frictions and vexations soon bedeviled the German attack. A bridge for the 2nd Panzer Division collapsed into the Our after only ten tanks had crossed. Engineers eventually built two spans stout enough to hold a Panther, at Gemünd and Dasburg, but steep, hairpin approach roads, pocked by American artillery, reduced traffic to a crawl. Although Cota’s flank regiments yielded ground in the face of flamethrowers and panzer fire, they imposed a severe penalty on the German timetable.

Along the American right, where four infantry divisions from the enemy’s Seventh Army formed
HERBSTNEBEL
’s southern lip, the 109th Infantry over three days would fall back slowly for four miles to Diekirch before joining forces with part of the 9th Armored Division. Another Hürtgen convalescent, the 4th Infantry Division, helped parry an enemy sweep into the American rear. On Cota’s left, two battalion kitchens in the 112th Infantry were quickly overrun, but cooks fought with rifles and Manteuffel’s LVIII Panzer Corps bled badly in getting a foothold across the Our. By Sunday night, the weight of metal and numbers won through for the Germans, but the 112th withdrew in good order to the northwest, largely intact although now splintered away from the rest of the 28th Division. With Cota’s permission, the regiment continued sidling north to help defend the Belgian town of St.-Vith.

That left Cota a single regiment, the 110th Infantry, holding an eleven-mile front in the division center. Here Manteuffel swung his heaviest blow, with three divisions in XLVII Panzer Corps instructed to rip through to Bastogne, specifically targeted for quick capture under a Führer order. By midday Sunday the 110th was disintegrating, though not without a scrap. In the medieval town of Clervaux, various nobles for nine centuries—notably, John the Blind and the House of Burgundy—had occupied a feudal castle on a rocky spur overlooking the road to Bastogne. Now one hundred GIs, including clerks and bakers, barricaded themselves inside, firing from arrow slits in the Tower of the Witches at Germans in long leather coats scampering below. Wailing pleas for salvation rose from the dungeon, where dozens of women and children had taken refuge.

A mile up the road, in the three-story Hotel Claravallis, the flinty regimental commander, Colonel Hurley E. Fuller, advised Cota by radio of his peril: at least a dozen panzers on the high ground firing into Clervaux; the castle besieged; ammunition short; artillery overrun or retreating. “Hold at all costs,” Cota repeated. “No retreat. Nobody comes back.”

At 7:30 on Sunday evening, Fuller was again on the radio to division headquarters, likening his predicament to the Alamo, when a staff officer rushed in to report enemy tanks on the street outside. “No more time to talk,” Fuller told one of Cota’s lieutenants, and then slammed down the handset just before three shells demolished the hotel façade. He bounded to the third floor to grab his carbine and coat, only to find ten terrified soldiers crouched in Room 10. As the sound of German voices carried up the stairway, an explosion blew in the window. Glass, plaster, and steel sprayed the room, killing a lieutenant and wounding five other men. Hurriedly bandaging the eyes of a blinded soldier, Fuller led him by the hand to Room 12, where an iron ladder extended from the window across a fifteen-foot gap to crude steps cut into a shale cliff behind the hotel. Out and up they climbed, one by one, the blind man clutching Fuller’s belt from behind. Reaching the bluff above the ruby glow of burning Clervaux, Fuller set a course west for Bastogne, but to no avail: chaos and gunfire soon scattered the absconders. Within hours Fuller had been captured in a thicket near Wiltz, to be bundled off by boxcar to a prison camp near Leipzig.