The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (37 page)

Patton replied, “Two days.” The others chuckled at this typical Patton bravado;

Eisenhower advised him to take an extra day and make the attack stronger. He told Patton to cancel his offensive in the Saar, change directions, and organize a major counterblow to ward Bastogne by December 23. He was going to have Montgomery organize an attack in the north, against the German right flank. In short, by December 18, on the third day of the Bulge, well before the issue was settled at Bastogne or on the Meuse. Eisenhower had already put in motion a counterattack designed to destroy the German panzer armies in the Ardennes.  That Eisenhower was able to react so positively to news that had other generals shaking spoke well of him. But the real heroes of the day were the junior officers, the NCOs, and the enlisted men in the Ardennes. They were the ones who stood up to what should have been an overwhelming German attack. Hitler had managed to gather in the Eifel, across from the Ardennes, a force greater than the one that had attacked through the same area in May 1940. At the point of attack, the Germans had as much as a ten-to-one superiority. In such circumstances it was to be expected that the untried American troops in the Ardennes would cut and run, and some of them did, or surrender in mass, and some of them did. But at crossroads, on hilltops, in villages, individuals stood to their guns and did their duty, holding up the German onslaught, disrupting Hitler’s timetable, giving Eisenhower a chance to gather reinforcements and rush them to the battlefield. Not least of these was Lt. Lyle Bouck.  Lieutenant Bouck commanded the intelligence and reconnaissance (I&R) platoon of the 394th Regiment, 99th Division. He had enlisted before the war, lying about his age. He was commissioned a second lieutenant at age eighteen. Informal in manner, he was sharp, incisive, determined, a leader. The only man younger than he in the platoon was Pvt. William James. The platoon was near Lanzerath. Bouck kept his men up all night December 15-16, sensing that something was stirring somewhere.

Shortly before dawn, December 16, the sleepy-eyed men saw the sky lit up from the muzzle flashes of a hundred pieces of German artillery. In the light of those flashes, Bouck could see great numbers of tanks, self-propelled guns, and other vehicles on the German skyline. He and his men were in deep, covered foxholes, so they survived the hour-long shelling without casualties. Bouck sent a patrol forward to Lanzerath, with orders to climb to a second story and observe. The men came back to report a German infantry column coming toward the village.

Bouck tried to telephone battalion headquarters, but the lines had been cut by the shelling. He got through on the radio. When he reported, the officer at the other end was incredulous.

“Damn it,” Bouck hollered. “Don’t tell me what I don’t see! I have twenty-twenty vision. Bring down some artillery, all the artillery you can, on the road south of Lanzerath. There’s a Kraut column coming up from that direction!” No artillery came. A couple of tanks that had been supporting the I&R platoon had pulled out when the shelling began. The men told Bouck it was time for them to retreat; after all, they had gathered and reported the intelligence, which was their job.

Bouck said no. He started pushing men into their foxholes. Including Bouck, there were eighteen of them. They were on the edge of a wood, looking down on the road leading into Lanzerath. Bouck, Sgt. Bill Slape, and Private James had their foxhole in the edge of the village. They were in a perfect position to ambush the enemy, and they had plenty of firepower-a couple of .30-caliber machine guns, a .50-caliber on the jeep, a half-dozen BARs, and a number of submachine guns.

The German columns came marching on, one on each side of the road, in close order, weapons slung, no security on either flank. They were teenage paratroopers. The men of the I&R platoon were fingering the triggers of their weapons. Sergeant Slape took aim on the lead German. “Your mother’s going to get a telegram for Christmas,” he mumbled.

Bouck knocked the rifle aside. “Maybe they don’t send telegrams,” he said. Then he explained that he wanted to let the lead units pass so as to spring the ambush on the main body. He waited until about three hundred men had passed his position and gone into the village. Then he saw his target. Separated from the others, three officers came along, carrying maps and binoculars, with a radioman just behind-obviously the battalion CO and his staff. James rested his M-1 on the edge of his foxhole and took careful aim.

A little blond girl dashed out of the house just down the street. She made a vivid impression on James-later he recalled the red ribbons in her hair-and he held his fire. The girl pointed quickly at the I&R position and ran back inside.  James tightened his finger on the trigger. In that split second the German officer shouted an order and dove into the ditch. So did his men, on each side of the road.

The ambush ruined, the firefight began. Bouck’s men had the Germans pinned down.  Through the morning they fired their weapons, including the .50-caliber mounted on the jeep. Without armored support, the German infantry couldn’t get at the jeep, nor fire with much effect on the men in the foxholes. By noon, the I&R had taken some casualties but no fatalities.

Private James kept screaming at Bouck to bring in artillery with the new proximity fuse.* Bouck in turn was screaming over the radio. Battalion replied that there were no guns available.

A fuse that incorporated a tiny transceiver that emitted radio waves after firing, which exploded on the reflection back from the waves when the shell was near the target. Initially it was used only for anti-aircraft fire, but by late 1944 it was being used for bombardment by artillery against Germans caught in the open.

“What shall we do then?” Bouck demanded.

“Hold at all costs.”

A second later a bullet hit and destroyed the radio Bouck had been holding. He was unhurt and passed on the order to hold.

Private James was amazed at the German tactics. Their paratroopers kept coming straight down the road, easy targets. “Whoever’s ordering that attack,” James said, “must be frantic. Nobody in his right mind would send troops into something like this without more fire support.” He kept firing his BAR. The Germans kept coming. He felt a certain sickness as he cut down the tall, good-looking “kids.” The range was so close James could see their faces. He tried to imagine himself firing at movement, not at men.  As the Germans, despite their loses, threatened to overrun the position, James dashed on to the jeep and got behind the .50- caliber. Three Germans crawled up close enough to toss grenades at Pvt. Risto Milosevich, who was firing his .30-caliber at men in front of him. Unable to swing the .50-caliber fast enough, James brought up the submachine gun he had slung around his neck and cut the three Germans down. In a frenzy he ran to the bodies and emptied an entire magazine of nineteen rounds into the corpses.

By mid-afternoon there were four hundred to five hundred bodies in front of the I&R platoon. Only one American had been killed, although half the eighteen men of the platoon were wounded. There was a lull. Bouck said to James, “I want you to take the men who want to go and get out.”

“Are you coming?”

“No, I have orders to hold at all costs. I’m staying.”

“Then we’ll all stay.”

An hour later they were both wounded, the platoon out of ammunition. They surrendered and were taken into a cafe set up as a first-aid post. James thought he was dying. He thought of the mothers of the boys he had mowed down and of his own mother. He passed out, was treated by a German doctor. When he came to, a German officer tried to interrogate him but gave it up, leaned over James’s stretcher, and whispered in English, “Ami, you and your comrades are brave men.” At midnight, the cuckoo clock in the cafe struck. Lt. Lyle Bouck, on his stretcher on the floor, had turned twenty-one years old. “What a hell of a way to become a man,” he mumbled to himself.

On the third day of the attack, December 19, German armor began to acquire momentum; the greatest gains made by the armored spearhead columns were achieved that day. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, was in an apparent rout, reminiscent of First Bull Run eighty-three years earlier. As the Germans straightened out their traffic jams behind the front, the Americans in retreat were colliding with the reinforcements Eisenhower had sent to the battle, causing a monumental traffic jam of their own.

The U.S. Army in retreat was a sad spectacle. When the 101st Airborne got to Bastogne on December 19, the columns marched down both sides of the road, toward the front. Down the middle of the road came the defeated American troops, fleeing the front in disarray, moblike. Many had thrown away their rifles, their coats, all encumbrances. Some were in a panic, staggering, exhausted, shouting, “Run! Run! They’ll murder you! They’ll kill you! They’ve got everything, tanks, machine guns, air power, everything!”

“They were just babbling,” Maj. Richard Winters of the 506th PIR recalled. “It was pathetic. We felt ashamed.”

The 101st had packed and left Mourmelon in a hurry. The troopers were short of everything, including ammunition. “Where’s the ammo? We can’t fight without ammo,” the men were calling out as they marched through Bastogne to the sound of the guns. The retreating horde supplied some. “Got any ammo?” the paratroopers would ask those who were not victims of panic.

“Sure, buddy, glad to let you have it.”

Cpl. Walter Gordon noted sardonically that by giving away their ammo, the retreating men relieved themselves of any further obligation to stand and fight.  They had long since left behind partly damaged or perfectly good artillery pieces, tanks, half-tracks, trucks, jeeps, food, rations, and more.  Abandonment of equipment was sometimes unavoidable, but often it was inexcusable. Panic was the cause. Guns that should have been towed out of danger were not. When a convoy stalled, drivers and passengers jumped out of their vehicles and headed west on foot.

Panic was costly in every way. Pvt. Ralph Hill of the 99th Division remembered a platoon of infantry who were occupying a deep dugout with a heavy wooden cover.  An antitank gun was set up at the nearest crossroads. At 0530, December 16, heavy artillery shells began falling around the position. The gun crew, with no cover, dashed for the dugout. “When they tore off the cover, the 99th Division infantry opened fire from the dugout, thinking they were German. All of the gun crew was killed so the gun was abandoned.”

Major Winters was not alone in feeling ashamed. Pvt. Kurt Vonnegut was a recently arrived replacement in the 106th Division. He was caught up in the retreat before he could be assigned. To his eyes, it was just rout, pure and simple.

His unit surrendered. Vonnegut decided he would take his chances and bolted into the woods, without a rifle or rations, or proper winter clothing. He hooked up with three others who wouldn’t surrender and set off hoping to find American lines.

Every man for himself. It was reminiscent of the German retreat through the Falaise Gap. But there were two critical differences. All along the front, scattered groups of men stuck to their guns at crossroads and in villages. They cut the German infantry columns down as a scythe cuts through a wheat field.  German losses were catastrophic. The GIs were appalled at how the enemy infantry came on, marching down the middle of the road, their weapons slung, without outposts or reconnaissance of any sort, without armor support, with no idea of where the American strong points were located. The German soldiers scarcely knew how to march or fire their weapons, and knew nothing of infantry tactics.  In launching an offensive, the German army in the first year of the Great War had been better than the German army in the last year of the Second World War.  What was happening at the front was exactly what Eisenhower had predicted-the Volkssturm divisions were not capable of effective action outside their bunkers.  In far too many cases, however, they were attacking eighteen- and nineteen-year-old barely trained Americans. Both sides had been forced to turn to their children to fight the war to a conclusion. In this last winter of World War II, neither army could be said to be a veteran army.  Another difference between the German retreat in August and the American retreat in December was that as the beaten, terrified GIs fled west down the middle of the roads, there were combat troops on each side headed east, reinforcements marching to the sound of the guns.

In this crisis the men of the U.S. Army in Northwest Europe shook themselves and made this a defining moment in their own lives and in the history of the army.  They didn’t like retreating, they didn’t like getting kicked around, and as individuals, squads, and companies as well as at SHAEF, they decided they were going to make the enemy pay.

That they had the time to adjust and prepare to pound the Germans was thanks to a relatively small number of front-line GIs. The first days of the Battle of the Bulge were a triumph of the soldiers of democracy, marked by innumerable examples of men seizing the initiative, making decisions, leading. Captain Roland of the 99th put it best: “Our accomplishments in this action were largely the result of small, virtually independent and isolated units fighting desperately for survival. They present an almost-unprecedented example of courage, resourcefulness, and tenacity on the part of the enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and junior-grade commissioned officers of the line companies.”

By midday, December 20, Charlie Company, 395th Infantry Regiment, 99th Division, had been retreating for three and a half days, mostly without sleep and water and not enough food, through daytime mud “that was knee deep, so deep that men carrying heavy weapons frequently mired in mud so others had to take their weapons and pull them out. In one area it took 1 ½ hours to cover a hundred meters.” Sgt. Vernon Swanson said that when word came down at 1700 hours that the regiment was withdrawing to Elsenborn Ridge, where it would dig in beside the 2nd Division and where more reinforcements were headed, “It was certainly good news. We felt it was the equivalent of saying we were returning to the United States.”

The journey to Elsenborn, however, Swanson remembered “as the worst march of that week” because of the combination of mud, ice, frozen ground, and snow, seemingly all at once and all along the route. A high-pressure system had moved in from the Atlantic on December 18, temporarily opening the skies so the Allied air forces could fly a few support missions and starting a daytime thaw that slowed German tanks as much as American infantry. After darkness fell on the twentieth the ground began to freeze again; on the twenty-first there was a hodgepodge of snow, blizzards, fog, and sleet. Through this miserable weather Charlie Company marched.