At 17.30 hours on 19 December, the day before Eisenhower gave him command in the north, Montgomery had ordered Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps to secure the Meuse crossings. The 61st Reconnaissance Regiment in Bruges ‘bombed-up, tanked up, loaded up and drove into the night’. Reinforced with an anti-tank troop, one squadron also headed to the bridge at Dinant. As well as watching for ‘Germans masquerading as Yanks’, they were to guard against enemy frogmen. Any flotsam in the river was blasted with Bren-gun fire. The 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, also at Dinant, worked with American MPs checking traffic and ‘a small but steady trickle of American stragglers’, as the bridges were prepared for demolition.
SAS and Phantom reconnaissance teams were already in position. On de Gaulle’s orders, they were followed by the seven badly armed French battalions under Général de Division André Dody, and also by some scratch units from General Lee’s Com Z supply troops. General Bedell Smith was greatly relieved by the commitment of XXX Corps. He said later that ‘I felt that we were all right if [the Germans] went north because if they angled towards Liège–Namur we had Horrocks’s Corps of four veteran divisions. We knew Horrocks and knew he had good men.’
Because of their severe losses in tanks, the Americans also asked the British 21st Army Group for replacements. Altogether it would send about 350 Shermans, with the Guards Armoured Division bringing the first batch of eighty down itself with their radios removed, as the Americans used different sets.
While the line of the Meuse was secured, SHAEF’s insistence on controlling news of the Ardennes offensive drew heavy criticism. This was partly an ineffectual attempt to conceal the fact that it had been caught out by the surprise attack. Time magazine soon declared that SHAEF and 12th Army Group ‘clamped down a censorship thicker than the pea-soup fog that shrouded the great German counterattack’. And even when news was finally released, ‘communiqués were as much as 48 hours behind the event’, and deliberately vague. Some senior officers at SHAEF simply regarded journalists as an unnecessary evil. Bedell Smith told Third Army headquarters on the telephone: ‘Personally I would like to shoot the lot of them.’
Not only correspondents complained. Senior British officers at SHAEF felt that this policy was having ‘disastrous results on Belgian and French morale if not all western allies … It is undermining the credibility of our own news; it is encouraging people to listen to German broadcasts in order to find out the truth; and it is giving rise to a flood of rumours … The present SHAEF policy is merely leading the public to believe that serious disasters are being concealed.’
In Paris, many became convinced that the German attack was heading straight for the French capital. Wild rumours began to circulate. The Communists even tried to claim that the Americans had been so angry about the Franco-Soviet treaty signed in Moscow earlier that month by General de Gaulle that they were letting the Germans through simply to give the French a fright.
At the Adlerhorst Hitler was still elated, even though the advance was far behind schedule. News of the great counter-attack was released in Germany. ‘The wholly unexpected winter offensive in the Ardennes’, wrote a staff officer with Army Group Upper Rhine, ‘is the most wonderful Christmas present for our people. So we can still do it! … We had thought that this sixth Christmas of the war would hardly be festive and happy.’ Unfortunately for the Nazis, the desperation to believe in something positive raised expectations far too high. Many persuaded themselves that France would be reconquered and the war brought to an end.
Some women were encouraged in this delusion by letters from their menfolk taking part in the battle. ‘You cannot imagine what glorious hours and days we are experiencing now,’ a Leutnant wrote to his wife. ‘It looks as if the Americans cannot withstand our important push. Today we overtook a fleeing column and finished it … It was a glorious bloodbath, vengeance for our destroyed Homeland. Our soldiers still have the same old zip. Always advancing and smashing everything. The snow must turn red with American blood. Victory was never as close as it is now. The decision will soon be reached. We will throw them into the ocean, the arrogant big-mouthed apes from the New World. They will not get into our Germany. We will protect our wives and children from all enemy domination. If we are to preserve all tender and beautiful aspects of our lives, we cannot be too brutal in the deciding moments of this struggle.’
Goebbels noted that, following the announcement of the offensive, the entire Christmas ration of schnapps was consumed in Berlin. But sceptical Berliners, on the other hand, were less impressed. With characteristic gallows humour, they joked about the approach of a very unfestive Christmas: ‘Be practical, give a coffin.’ Their thoughts focused more on the threat from the east, and many privately prayed that the Americans would break through and reach the capital before the Red Army.
News of the offensive produced very different reactions among the German generals held prisoner in Britain. A secretly recorded conversation showed that Generalleutnant Ferdinand Heim, captured at Boulogne, Generaloberst Ramcke, the veteran paratrooper who had led the defence of Brest, and Standartenführer Kurt Meyer, the former commander of the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend, were all excited. Heim called it ‘The Battle of the Long Nights’. ‘Just rumble forward at night,’ he cried out, ‘just keep rumbling on!’
‘Panzermeyer’ agreed. ‘The old principle of tank warfare: “forward, forward, forward!” … This is where the superiority of German leadership and especially of German junior commanders comes into play.’ As a panzer leader, he was however concerned that the replacement tank gunners did not have enough experience. He was also in two minds whether the offensive might be over-ambitious and thus counterproductive, but Ramcke was having none of that. ‘This offensive is terrific!’ he insisted. ‘The German people cannot be got down. You’ll see that we shall chase the Allies right across France and hurl them into the Bay of Biscay!’
Others, on the other hand, were scathing. General der Panzertruppe Heinrich Eberbach said of Hitler: ‘That man will never stop having illusions. When he is standing under the gallows he will still be under the illusion that he’s not going to be hanged.’ And Generalleutnant Otto Elfeldt, who had been captured in the Falaise Gap, reminded his listeners: ‘It’s Wednesday today, and if they have advanced only 40 kilometres in five days, I can only say that that is no offensive. A slow-moving offensive is no good at all because it allows the enemy to bring up reserves far too quickly.’
14
Thursday 21 December
By the morning of 21 December, the Kampfgruppe Peiper was in a desperate situation, ‘pocketed without adequate supplies’, as its leader put it. He received a message from 1st SS Panzer-Division that it intended to advance through Trois-Ponts to relieve him. But Peiper’s reduced strength could not even hold Stoumont and Cheneux, and the relief force failed to get through. The enraged troops looted the Château de Detilleux south of the Amblève and destroyed whatever they did not take. Others in Wanne murdered five men and a woman, claiming that villagers must have been signalling to the American artillery. Another group of nine SS soldiers later seized food from a house in Refat and raped three women there after they had eaten.
In Stavelot on the morning of 21 December, another 100 German soldiers tried to swim the river to obtain a foothold on the north bank. Eighty of them were shot in the water by soldiers of the 117th Infantry who boasted of their ‘duck shooting’; and the rest turned back. Peiper’s position became even more critical when American combat engineers managed to block the road from Stoumont to La Gleize by blasting trees across it and mining the route. He had no alternative but to withdraw most of his remaining troops into La Gleize, where the 30th Division’s artillery began to bombard the village.
The battle against the Kampfgruppe had become savage. ‘After we saw those dead civilians in Stavelot, the men changed,’ one of the soldiers recorded. ‘They wanted to pulverize everything there was across the river. That wasn’t impersonal anger; that wa
s hatred.’ Few SS soldiers were taken alive. Officers in the Waffen-SS apparently turned news of the Malmédy massacre to their own advantage, hoping to frighten their men into fighting to the bitter end. They told them that if captured, they would be tortured and then killed.
‘The prisoner bag is thus far small,’ an officer at First Army headquarters noted. ‘Our troops know of the atrocities committed by the enemy and know that now it is a matter of life or death, we or they.’ A number of senior officers made it clear that they approved of revenge killing. When General Bradley heard soon afterwards that prisoners from the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend had spoken of their heavy casualties, he raised his eyebrows sceptically. ‘Prisoners from the 12th SS?’
‘Oh, yes sir,’ the officer replied. ‘We needed a few samples. That’s all we’ve taken, sir.’
Bradley smiled. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he said.
Bradley was encouraged by the sight of Patton’s troops rolling north to attack Manteuffel’s southern flank. He and members of his staff stood outside the Hôtel Alfa in Luxembourg on 21 December to watch the columns of 5th Infantry Division vehicles, ‘caked in mud’, passing through the city all day. ‘The GIs looked cold,’ Hansen wrote in his diary, ‘bundled in brown against the winter wind that tore through their open vehicles, sitting stone-facedly on the piles of baggage in their trucks as they rode through town, staring back vacantly at the civilians who looked earnestly to them.’
Montgomery, all too conscious of the Germans’ determination to cross the Meuse with their panzer divisions, recognized that First Army had to extend its line westward, well beyond the 30th Division’s block on the Peiper Kampfgruppe. Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, a tall and formidable paratrooper who never appeared without grenades hooked on both shoulder straps of his webbing harness, had arrived to take command of the XVIII Airborne Corps west of the River Salm. Beyond, stretching towards the Meuse, Montgomery insisted on having the young Major General J. Lawton Collins in command of VII Corps. Montgomery regarded him as one of the very best American corps commanders, and Hodges also rated him highly. The First Army chronicler noted that ‘General Collins is full of his usual fighting Irish vigour.’ Collins was to have the 3rd Armored Division, the 84th Infantry Division and the 2nd Armored Division, Patton’s old outfit known as ‘Hell on Wheels’.
Ridgway, supported by Kean, the chief of staff First Army, and now Collins, argued that they should drive on St Vith while the defenders continued to hold out. ‘Monty would come down about every other day to my command post,’ Collins recorded. ‘He would call Ridgway over to meet me at the same time, and would discuss the situation with us … I had gotten to know Monty well enough, and somehow or another we hit it off well. I could talk to him and disagree with him and he didn’t get mad.’ Montgomery opposed the idea of a corps attack towards St Vith partly on the grounds that a single road was insufficient to support a whole corps. ‘Joe, you can’t support a corps over a single road,’ he said, no doubt remembering the route to Arnhem.
‘Well, Monty, maybe you can’t, but we can,’ Collins retorted.
But both Hasbrouck, the commander of the 7th Armored Division, and Bruce Clarke of Combat Command B strongly disagreed with the plan to relieve St Vith. They felt afterwards that Montgomery had been right when he wanted to withdraw its defenders. They also thought that Ridgway was unnecessarily gung-ho and, as a paratrooper, did not understand the use of armoured formations.
Having heard the noise of tanks during the night of 20–21 December, the defenders of St Vith had expected an attack at dawn, but it did not come until towards the end of the morning. German volksgrenadiers began knocking out American machine-gun positions with grenades and the ‘dread Panzerfaust’. They were so close that the American machine-gunners used ‘swinging traverse’, spraying fire in all directions. Hasbrouck’s artillery battalions, although short of shells, responded to calls for fire missions within two to four minutes, ‘bringing down fire within fifty yards of our own men’.
At 15.15 hours the battle died down, but Major Boyer suspected that it ‘would prove to be only the lull before the storm’. They had no reserves left. Half an hour later, the German Nebelwerfer batteries suddenly opened fire again. Trees were lacerated. ‘Huge gashes were cut in the logs over our holes, and all around us we could hear the crash and ripping of tree tops and even of trees as the merciless hail of steel swept and lashed through the forest. Again and again we heard the anguished scream of some man somewhere who had been hit, and yet all we could do was cower in our foxholes with our backs against the forward walls, hoping that we would not receive a direct hit. It seemed as if our very nerves were being torn out by the roots as the screaming steel crashed around us.’
The Germans attacked through the woods under the cover of the barrage. Boyer shouted out ‘Heads up!’ as the bombardment lifted. His infantrymen opened fire as the Germans tried to rush across the logging road. An American with a bazooka managed to knock out a self-propelled assault gun. And ‘a Panther was destroyed when one soldier with a bazooka climbed out of his hole, ran forward and pressing his tube against the fender line, pulled the trigger. As he fired, he slumped to the ground dead.’
Two Panthers began methodically knocking out the foxholes one after another with direct fire. One of Boyer’s officers called over the radio ‘with tears in his voice’ asking where the tank destroyers were to deal with the Panthers. ‘Goddamn it, they’ve two heavy tanks here on the crest, and they’re blasting my men out of their holes one at a time.’ But no Shermans or tank destroyers were in their sector. Soon after nightfall, Boyer reported that he thought they could hold through the night, but just after seven the German onslaught began again, with Nebelwerfers and panzers eliminating foxholes one by one.
The German attacks came from three directions astride the main roads into the town from the north, east and south-east. The defenders were soon overwhelmed. Every machine gun in Boyer’s battalion had been manned by several crews. ‘As soon as one team was destroyed, it was replaced by other men.’ By 22.00 ‘German tanks had blasted their way through the center of the line and were entering Saint-Vith.’ This cut off the 38th Armored Infantry on the south-east side of the town after five days of battle with no sleep, little food and many suffering from frostbite. Boyer’s battalion of 670 men was reduced to 185 men still on their feet. All the rest were dead or severely wounded. Snow began to fall heavily.
Brigadier General Clarke of Combat Command B issued the order: ‘Reform. Save what vehicles you can; attack to the west through Saint-Vith. We are forming a new line west of the town.’ Finding the order impossible to carry out, Boyer told his men to break out in groups of four or five, taking only personal weapons. He sent a runner to the mortar platoon with the instruction to destroy vehicles, but salvage their mortars and bipods. A medic volunteered to be left behind with the wounded. The exhausted men trudged through the falling snow into the forest. A point man led them by compass, and each soldier was told to hold on to the equipment of the one in front of him.
St Vith’s streets were littered with rubble and broken glass, the slaughterhouse was on fire, and terrorized cattle rampaged in the streets. During the heavy shelling the day before, many civilians in the town had packed some belongings and sought refuge in the St Josef Kloster, which had solid vaulted cellars. As the bombardment intensified, Father Goffart decided to join the refugees below. ‘He took a chalice and wafers with him and built a small altar in one of the subterranean storage rooms.’ By the time of the all-out German attack that day, the place was so packed that nobody else could fit in. Many of them were wounded American soldiers who had dragged themselves there and forced the civilians to make room.
Soldiers retreating through the town included the intelligence and reconnaissance platoon of the 423rd Infantry, from the ill-fated 106th Division. ‘Nothing much could be seen in the darkness but outlines in the snow,’ one of them wrote, ‘except when the blinding lights of the flares a
nd muzzle blasts made it seem brighter than day.’ The last three Shermans left in St Vith, with the intelligence and reconnaissance platoon alongside, ‘proceeded cautiously down another street, the Rodterstrasse, that led to the northwest. At the edge of the town, some climbed aboard the tanks, lying as flat as they could, clinging to anything they could get hold of while the rest of the group flanked the tanks on foot. The tanks took off in the midst of a murderous crossfire coming from either side of the road – a crossfire marked by machineguns firing red tracers, scaring the living hell out us. Luckily, the Germans were firing too high and the tracers criss-crossed safely a few feet above our heads. At the top of a small hill about a mile to the west of town, we pulled off the road. The tanks took up position at the edge of a small patch of woods. The I&R moved down the forward slope of the hill a few yards, spread out and dug in as best we could.’ The temperature had dropped significantly in the snowstorm.
The cold and famished Germans of the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions charged into the town, desperate to seek shelter and loot what food they could find from houses and abandoned American stores. Hasbrouck’s forces had pulled back to a new line west of St Vith, and now it was the turn of American field artillery battalions to bombard the doomed town.
To the north-west, Generalmajor Siegfried von Waldenburg’s 116th Panzer-Division had orders to push on east of the River Ourthe to Hotton. The day before, Waldenburg’s panzer group had attacked Samrée and Dochamps, while the 560th Volksgrenadier on their right had a harder fight. The Panthers managed to disable about a dozen American tanks in the battle, but they were so short of fuel that 156th Panzergrenadier-Regiment, the artillery and the reconnaissance battalion had to be halted. Relief came after capturing Samrée, where they discovered a fuel dump of 25,000 gallons, which Waldenburg described as ‘a God-sent gift’. American prisoners told them that it had been sabotaged with sugar, but he claimed that it ‘suited the German engines very well’.