Confirmation of the tough fighting on the southern side of the perimeter came from a signals intercept. The 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division was clamouring for more Panzerfausts and anti-tank guns to help in its battle against the 4th Armored Division. The Third Army commander appeared to have no doubts about the outcome. ‘General Patton was in several times today,’ Hansen noted. ‘He is boisterous and noisy, feeling good in the middle of a fight.’ But in fact Patton was concealing his embarrassment that the 4th Armored’s advance was not going nearly as rapidly as he had predicted and was meeting tough opposition. The division had also found that VIII Corps engineers in the retreat to Bastogne ‘blew everything in sight’, so their progress ‘was impeded not by the enemy but by demolitions and blown bridges caused by friendly engineers’.
The Luxembourgers were more confident. They were reassured by the endless convoys of Third Army troops streaming through the city, and believed that the Germans would not be coming back. Strangely, 12th Army Group intelligence suddenly increased their estimate of German tank and assault-gun strength from 345 to 905, which was rather more than the earlier estimated panzer total for the whole of the western front.
Despite the terrible cold which made men shiver uncontrollably in their foxholes, morale was high within the Bastogne perimeter. Although the paratroopers and 10th Armored looked forward to relief by Patton’s forces, they rejected any idea that they needed to be saved. With another brilliant day of flying weather, they watched the sky fill with Allied planes of every description. They listened to bombs exploding and the clatter of machine guns, as fighters strafed the German columns. Dogfights against the few Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts provoked ferocious cheers and roars as if it were a deadly boxing match, and bitter cries broke out if an Allied transport dropping supplies was hit by ground fire.
Allied fighter-bombers during this period proved very effective in breaking up German attacks as they were assembling. They were directed on to targets by air controllers in Bastogne. A warning of the threat, with co-ordinates coming from a regimental command post or an artillery liaison plane, meant that ‘it was usually only a matter of minutes until planes were striking the enemy forces’.
With priority on artillery ammunition in the airdrops, the food situation for troops barely improved. Many depended on the generosity of Belgian families sharing what they had. Both in Bastogne and on the northern shoulder, ‘rations were frequently supplemented with beef, venison and rabbit when these animals set off the mines by running into the trip-wires’. Snipers shot hare and even boar, but the longing for wild pork was greatly reduced after hogs had been sighted eating the intestines of battle casualties.
The intense cold and deep snow caused more than discomfort. They greatly affected fighting performance. Those who did not keep a spare set of dry socks in their helmet-liner and change them frequently were the first to suffer from trench foot or frostbite. The newly arrived 11th Armored Division on the Meuse followed, perhaps unknowingly, the old practice of Russian armies for avoiding frostbite, by providing blanket strips to make foot bandages. Tank crewmen standing on metal in such conditions for hours on end, not moving their feet sufficiently, were particularly vulnerable. But at least those in armoured vehicles and truck drivers could dry out their footwear on engine exhausts.
Condoms were fitted over the sights of anti-tank guns, and also on radio and telephone mouthpieces, because breath condensation soon froze them up. The traverse mechanism on tanks and tank destroyers needed to be thawed out. Snow would get into weapons and ammunition clips and freeze solid. Machine guns were the most likely to jam. The heavy .50 machine gun was essential for shooting enemy marksmen out of trees and other hiding places. American soldiers soon discovered that German snipers waited for artillery or anti-aircraft fire before they pulled the trigger, so that their shot would not be heard.
Lessons learned in one sector were rapidly passed to other formations through ‘combat observer’ reports. German patrols would cut cables at night and run one of the severed ends into an ambush position, so that they could seize any linesman sent out to repair it. German soldiers sometimes fired a bullet through their own helmet in advance, so that if they were overrun they could play dead and then shoot one of their attackers in the back. They often mined or booby-trapped their own trenches just before withdrawing.
American patrols were advised that when encountering the enemy at night, ‘fire at random, throw yourself into cover, then yell like mad as if you were going into the attack, and they will start firing’, which would reveal their position. In defence, they should place dummies well to the front of their foxholes to prompt Germans to open fire prematurely. They should provide cover for the enemy in front, but bury mines under it; construct fake defences between strongpoints. Just before going into the attack, it helped to make digging noises to mislead the enemy. And when inside a house, they should never fire from the window, but keep it open and shoot from well back in the room.
The most respected and vital members of a company were the aid men. They were trusted with grain alcohol to prevent the water freezing in their canteens which they would offer to the wounded. ‘The stimulating effect of the alcohol does no harm either,’ the report added. Chaplains were also sent to the aid stations with alcohol to make a hot toddy for wounded men coming in. Countless men later acknowledged that they owed their lives to the dedication, courage and sometimes inventiveness of aid men. PFC Floyd Maquart, with the 101st, saved one soldier severely wounded in the face and neck by cutting open his throat with a parachute knife and inserting the hollow part of a fountain pen into his windpipe.
Conditions for more than 700 patients in the riding school and the chapel of the seminary in Bastogne continued to deteriorate, since the German capture of the field hospital meant that there was only one surgeon. The doctor from the 10th Armored was assisted by two trained Belgian nurses: Augusta Chiwy, a fearless young woman from the Congo, and Renée Lemaire, the fiancée of a Jew arrested in Brussels by the Gestapo earlier in the year. Those with serious head and stomach wounds were least likely to survive, and the piles of frozen corpses grew, stacked like cordwood under tarpaulins outside. A number of patients suffered from gas gangrene which gave off an appalling stench, and the stock of hydrogen peroxide to clean such wounds was almost all gone. The dwindling supply of plasma froze solid, and bags had to be thawed by being placed in somebody’s armpit. For some operations, a slug of cognac had to replace anaesthetics. Sedatives were also in very short supply to deal with the increasing number of combat-fatigue casualties, who would sit up and suddenly start screaming. Men who had demonstrated great bravery in Normandy and in Holland had finally succumbed to stress and exhaustion. Cold and lack of proper food had accelerated the process.
As well as the setpiece assaults, which Generalmajor Kokott had been forced to launch, there were many more German attacks at night, often with four tanks and a hundred infantry. Their soldiers in snow suits were well camouflaged out in the snowfields, but when they were against a dark background of trees or buildings they stood out. Realizing this they took off the jacket, but the white legs still gave them away.
‘Knocking out tanks is a matter of team-work, mutual confidence and guts,’ an VIII Corps report stated. ‘The infantry stay in their foxholes and take care of the hostile infantry and the tank destroyers take care of the tanks.’ Providing both elements did their job, the Germans were usually repulsed. Some paratroopers, however, clearly got a thrill out of stalking panzers with bazookas. The 101st claimed that altogether between 19 and 30 December it knocked out 151 tanks and assault guns and 25 half-tracks. These figures were almost certainly exaggerated, rather like the victories claimed by fighter pilots. Many targets were shared with the Sherman tanks of the 10th Armored and the Hellcats of Colonel Templeton’s 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion.
The continuing fight against the 901st Panzergrenadiers around Marvie had become increasingly confused in the early hours of the morning. An Ame
rican machine-gunner shot two glider infantrymen who appeared over a crest. The Americans were forced back from the village, but managed to hold the hill to the west. McAuliffe’s headquarters in Bastogne re-examined their defences. The push into the town from Marvie had only just been stopped, but they were also vulnerable on the western side of the perimeter. It was decided to pull back from the Flamierge and Mande-Saint-Etienne salient, and withdraw from Senonchamps. Reducing the overall frontage would strengthen their lines, but they also reorganized their forces by attaching tanks and tank destroyers permanently to each regiment.
Generalmajor Kokott, meanwhile, was left in no doubt from both his corps commander Lüttwitz and Manteuffel that Bastogne must be crushed next day, before the 4th Armored Division broke through from the south. Kokott, while waiting for the 15th Panzergrenadier-Division to deploy on the north-western sector, became increasingly concerned about the 5th Fallschirmjäger’s defence line to the south. He thought it prudent to set up a southern security screen of ‘emergency platoons’ from his own supply personnel with a few anti-tank guns. The anti-aircraft battalion near Hompré was also told to be ready to switch to a ground role to take on American tanks. It was a comfort to know that at least the main road south to Arlon was covered by the 901st Panzergrenadier-Regiment from the Panzer Lehr.
The 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division certainly appeared ill equipped for its task of defending the southern flank of the Fifth Panzer Army. Its much disliked commander Generalmajor Ludwig Heilmann despised his Luftwaffe staff, claiming to have discovered ‘corruption and profiteering’ when he took over command. ‘So far these people had been employed only in France and Holland,’ he said later, ‘and had vegetated on plundered loot and were all accomplices together.’ He claimed that the older Unteroffizieren said quite openly that they ‘would not dream of risking their life now at the end of the war’. The young soldiers, on the other hand, almost all of them under twenty and some just sixteen, ‘made a better impression’, even though they had received little training. Heilmann was being constantly questioned by his superiors on the exact positions of his regiments, but the reports he had received were so few and imprecise that he decided to go forward himself, if only to escape the ‘harassing demands’ from corps headquarters.
Yet despite the 5th Fallschirmjäger’s apparent deficiencies, its mostly teenage soldiers were fighting with formidable resilience, as the 4th Armored Division was finding to its cost. That morning at dawn, the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion and the 37th Tank Battalion attacked the village of Bigonville, more than twenty kilometres south of Kokott’s command post. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton W. Abrams (later the commander of US forces in Vietnam), and took the place and the high ground behind in less than three hours. But then ‘the enemy managed to infiltrate back into the town and more fighting was required to clear it’. To make matters worse, the American force was then bombed and strafed by P-47 Thunderbolts, which turned away only after coloured smoke grenades had been set off and snow brushed off identification panels. Securing Bigonville a second time took another three hours, and this village came at a heavy cost. Tank commanders, with their heads out of the turret, attracted the fire of German snipers, who ‘accounted for nine in the 37th Tank Battalion, including the C Company commander’.
The 4th Armored Division was also suffering from the extreme weather. ‘Our company commander was evacuated with pneumonia,’ wrote a soldier with the 51st Armored Infantry Battalion, ‘and we lost our platoon sergeant because his feet froze.’ By the next day there was only one officer left in the company. Patton’s hope of relieving Bastogne by Christmas was fading fast.
Kokott’s forces like most German formations in the Ardennes were running short of ammunition, especially mortar rounds. Allied airstrikes on marshalling yards and forward supply lines were already having an effect. That afternoon, the Americans noticed that the German guns had fallen silent. The defenders guessed that they were conserving their ammunition for a major attack on Christmas morning.
Some fifty kilometres to the north, the remnants of Kampfgruppe Peiper in La Gleize had prepared the destruction of their vehicles, prior to a breakout on foot across the River Amblève. At 03.00 on 24 December, the main group of some 800 men crossed the river and trudged up through the thick woods on the south side towards the ridge line. Peiper, just behind the point detachment, took Major McCown with him. Two hours later they heard explosions behind them and, down in the valley, the ruined village was lit by the flames from burning vehicles.
Peiper, unsure where the German lines lay, led them south parallel with the River Salm. McCown recounted later that they had nothing to eat but four dried biscuits and two gulps of cognac. An hour after dark they bumped into an American outpost, where a sentry opened fire. The panzergrenadiers were exhausted, especially the two dozen walking wounded. They blundered about in the dark, wading streams to avoid roads and villages. In the early hours of Christmas morning they ran into another American position north of Bergeval, triggering a formidable response with mortars and machine guns firing tracer. McCown escaped during the confusion, and rejoined the American lines where he identified himself to paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne. He was taken to General Jim Gavin’s command post.
Peiper and his men withdrew down into the Salm valley and swam across the freezing river. The I SS Panzer Corps reported his arrival, apparently wounded, later on Christmas morning. This was at about the same time as the 30th Infantry Division crushed the other pocket of his men, trapped near Stavelot. Their resistance was fanatical, probably out of a belief that their opponents would not be taking prisoners. ‘Attacking waves literally waded knee-deep through their own dead in their desperate assaults,’the after-action report stated. The divisional artillery commander estimated that there were more than a thousand German dead piled at one point, and the woods around Stavelot and La Gleize were strewn with corpses. The Americans estimated that 2,500 members of the Kampfgruppe had been killed and ninety-two tanks and assault guns destroyed.
Now that the only breakthrough by the Sixth Panzer Army had been thoroughly destroyed, the eyes of Hitler and the OKW were firmly on Manteuffel’s panzer divisions to the west. The build-up against the northern shoulder line appeared overwhelming. After the 2nd SS Panzer-Division Das Reich had crushed the force at Baraque-de-Fraiture, it was reinforced by the advance guard of the 9th Panzer-Division. The Führer Begleit Brigade was on its way to attack Hotton, and the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions, supported by the 9th SS Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen, were attacking the 82nd Airborne on the Vielsalm sector, where General Ridgway insisted on holding a right-angled wedge.
General Bradley was outraged to hear that Montgomery had deployed Collins’s VII Corps along the shoulder line rather than hold it back for a major counter-attack. (In fact it was Collins himself who had committed his divisions because there was no choice.) Once again it demonstrated how completely Bradley failed to understand what was really happening. With four panzer divisions attacking north and north-west, a defence line had to be secured before a counter-attack took place. First Army headquarters, which was considering a major withdrawal on the VII Corps front, even recorded that evening: ‘Despite the air’s magnificent performance today things tonight look, if anything, worse than before.’ Concern about a breakthrough by the panzer divisions to the west even prompted First Army to consider pulling back all the heavy equipment of V Corps in case of a sudden retreat.
Ridgway was livid when Montgomery overruled him once more, on this occasion by ordering Gavin’s 82nd Airborne to withdraw from Vielsalm to the base of the triangle from Trois-Ponts to Manhay. The 82nd was coming under heavy pressure from the 9th SS Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen, the rest of the 1st SS Panzer-Division and the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadier-Divisions. Yet Ridgway felt insulted by the idea that the United States Army should be ordered to give ground in this way. He attributed the move to Montgomery’s obsession with ‘tidying-up the battlefield’, and pr
otested vehemently to General Hodges, ‘but apparently received little sympathy there’, as Hansen later acknowledged. Bradley became obsessed with Montgomery’s decision and harped on about it for some time to come.
Gavin, however, saw the point of the redeployment, and Montgomery was almost certainly right. The 82nd was already overstretched even before the next wave of German formations was due to arrive. Reducing their front from twenty-seven kilometres to sixteen meant a much stronger defence line. The withdrawal began that night, and ‘morale in the 82nd was not materially affected’. Gavin’s paratroopers soon had plenty of frozen German corpses to use as sandbags in their new positions, and they refused to allow Graves Registration personnel to take them away.
Task Force Kane and a regiment of the newly arrived 17th Airborne were positioned to defend the Manhay crossroads, against what First Army headquarters still believed to be an attempt to capture American supply bases in Liège. The untried 75th Infantry Division was on its way to support Rose’s 3rd Armored Division as it attempted to extricate Task Force Hogan, surrounded at Marcouray.
The defenders at Manhay expected a fearsome attack by the Das Reich, but it advanced cautiously through the forests either side of the highway and occupied Odeigne. This was partly due to continuing fuel-supply problems, but mainly to avoid moving in the open on another day of brilliant sunshine. An armoured column in daylight would become easy prey for the fighter-bombers overhead, scouring the snowbound landscape for targets.
Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, the commander of the Das Reich responsible for the massacres of Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane on their advance north to Normandy in June, was tall and arrogant with a pitted face. He was famous for his ruthlessness, like most of his officers. They even thought it funny that the Das Reich had murdered the inhabitants of the wrong Oradour. ‘An SS-Führer told me with a laugh’, Heydte was secretly recorded later as saying, ‘that it had been the wrong village. “It was just too bad for them,” [he said]. It turned out afterwards that there weren’t any partisans in that village.’