As soon as dark fell and the Thunderbolt and Lightning fighter-bombers had departed, the tanks and half-tracks of the SS Das Reich emerged from the woods and drove north towards Manhay. The Germans employed their usual trick of placing a captured Sherman at the head of the column. The Americans held their fire, in case it was a task force from the 3rd Armored Division. But then the SS fired flares to blind the American tank gunners. Two panzergrenadier regiments attacked abreast at 21.00. By midnight, they had taken Manhay. The combat command of the 7th Armored lost nineteen tanks in the night battle, and its exhausted tank crews had to escape on foot. The Das Reich panzer regiment lost none.
Waldenburg’s 116th Panzer-Division, having been sent round to the west of the River Ourthe, received orders to break through between Marche-en-Famenne and Hotton, then to swing west towards Ciney to protect the right flank of the 2nd Panzer-Division. But Bolling’s 84th Infantry Division held a strong line south of the main Marche–Hotton road. The 116th managed to break through around the village of Verdenne, but the success did not last. This was just the start of what Waldenburg called ‘bitter and ever-changing’ battles. Houses and positions changed hands many times.
Marche itself was threatened. The twenty-one-year-old Henry Kissinger with the 84th’s intelligence branch volunteered to stay behind under cover despite the added risk of being Jewish. But Bolling’s men held firm and his artillery eventually inflicted terrible losses on Waldenburg’s men. Field artillery battalions used the new Pozit fuse at high elevation, if necessary by digging down the trails, so as to achieve air bursts over the German positions. The American infantry watched the effect with savage glee, and reported back ‘beaucoup dead’.
Allied fighter-bombers also wheeled back and forth, dropping bombs and strafing. ‘Of the German Luftwaffe nothing was to be seen or heard,’ Waldenburg commented angrily. The closest his panzergrenadiers came to Marche was the treeline north-west of Champlon-Famenne overlooking the town, where they were constantly bombarded by American artillery. To this day the local landowner cannot sell timber from the forest because of the shards of metal buried deep in the massive conifers.
At the furthest tip of the German salient, the 2nd Panzer-Division had now lost three tanks in its clashes with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment. Lieutenant Colonel Brown, concerned that the Germans were now so close to the bridge at Dinant, reinforced the approaches in case panzergrenadiers tried to slip through on foot. He had learned that the German fuel situation had become desperate. British artillery began to bombard 2nd Panzer positions around Celles, and plans were made to attack from Sorinnes the next day to crush Böhm’s reconnaissance battalion in Foy-Notre-Dame. Brown did not yet know that the British 53rd Division was starting to cross the Meuse, so he would have strong support.
Major General Harmon, instantly recognizable from his barrel-chest, military moustache and gravelly voice, could scarcely control his impatience to be at the enemy. He had received orders from General Collins to hold back until the moment was ripe for a counter-attack, but Collins could not be reached as he was preoccupied with the dangerous situation on his east flank. Montgomery had even issued an instruction that, because of the threat from the 2nd Panzer and Panzer Lehr in the west, Collins’s corps could, ‘if forced’, swing back to a line between Hotton and Andenne, some thirty kilometres north of Marche as the crow flies. This would have constituted a major retreat and, unlike the withdrawal of Gavin’s 82nd Airborne, a huge mistake. But fortunately Montgomery had left Collins with the authority to take his own decisions.
Harmon suspected that there was a large panzer force around Celles, but had no confirmation until two P-51 Mustangs reported flak firing from near by. (No contact had yet been established with the British at Sorinnes.) Amid considerable confusion between First Army headquarters and VII Corps during Collins’s absence, Harmon refused to wait any longer. He ordered his Combat Command B to join Combat Command A at Ciney, and sent forward two battalions of self-propelled artillery. When finally Collins spoke to Harmon by telephone that evening and gave him leave to attack next morning, Harmon apparently roared: ‘The bastards are in the bag!’ Montgomery backed Collins’s decision to deploy the 2nd Armored Division, even though it now meant that his plan to hold back the VII Corps for a counter-attack had unravelled.
The Cochenhausen Kampfgruppe had taken up all-round defence in two pockets between Celles and Conneux, while awaiting promised reinforcements from the 9th Panzer-Division. But the 9th Panzer was in turn delayed, waiting to refuel. The 2nd Panzer’s forward elements were also clamouring for ammunition and fuel, but the extended supply line was far from secure. This was made worse by renewed American attacks on the high ground south-west of Marche and the increasing numbers of Allied fighter-bombers overhead. Staff in the 2nd Panzer-Division headquarters south of Marche burned with frustration that this should happen when they were so close to their objective. An instruction from Generalfeldmarschall Model went out to Foy-Notre-Dame: ‘If necessary, elements of the reconnaissance battalion were to capture the Dinant bridge on foot, in a coup de main,’ just as Colonel Brown had imagined. But Böhm’s Kampfgruppe was the hardest pressed of all, as British artillery ranged in on it.
Frustration soon turned to alarm in the 2nd Panzer-Division headquarters ‘since both pockets reported that their supply of ammunition and fuel would not allow them to continue the battle much longer’, Oberstleutnant Rüdiger Weiz recorded. ‘And since the fuel available at the front was not sufficient for the withdrawal of the forces, the nearly unsolvable question arose how to bring help to the elements fighting in the front line.’
Lauchert decided to pull out the Kampfgruppe commanded by Major Friedrich Holtmeyer screening Marche. He ordered it to move west via Rochefort, and thrust towards Conneux to relieve the encircled forces there. This operation could be carried out only at night because of American air supremacy. Lüttwitz agreed with the plan, but permission first had to be obtained from Fifth Panzer Army headquarters. Lauchert received authorization that afternoon, but the reconnaissance battalion was no longer responding on the radio. Holtmeyer’s force set out that evening, but this difficult manoeuvre in the dark was further hindered by American groups attacking as they withdrew.
Ten kilometres south-east of Marche, the village of Bande stands on a hill above the N4 highway from Marche to Bastogne. As mentioned earlier, German SS troops had burned thirty-five houses along the N4 highway near the village during their retreat from the region in September as a reprisal for attacks by the Belgian Resistance. On 22 December, leading elements of the 2nd Panzer-Division had passed by, and on the following day some of their troops were billeted in the village. They behaved well. On Christmas Eve, a very different group, some thirty strong, appeared wearing grey SS uniforms. They had the badge of the Sicherheitsdienst – an SD in a lozenge – on the left sleeve. The majority of this Sondereinheitkommando 8 were not German, but French, Belgian and Dutch fascists led by a Swiss and attached to the Gestapo.
They stayed apart from the panzergrenadiers, and took over some wooden buildings near the main road. Christmas Eve happened to be a Sunday, so almost the whole village was at mass. As the doors opened afterwards and the congregation came out, every man of military age was seized, supposedly for an examination of identity papers. Altogether some seventy men were rounded up. Just under half – those aged between seventeen and thirty-one – were taken under guard down to a sawmill near the main road where they were locked up. Many of them were refugees from elsewhere, but they too were interrogated brutally about the attacks in the area on retreating German forces three and a half months before. One by one, they were taken out and shot.
There was just a single survivor, Léon Praile, a powerful and athletic twenty-one-year-old. He had tried to persuade others to join him in rushing their guards, but could find no volunteers. When his turn came – by then night was falling fast – he suddenly punched his escort hard in the face and took off, leaping a low stone wall and sprintin
g towards the stream. Shots were fired in his direction, but he escaped.
When the village was eventually liberated in January by British paratroopers from the 6th Airborne Division, the Abbé Musty and Léon Praile took them to where the thirty-four bodies, by now frozen stiff, had been concealed. ‘After the deed was done,’ stated the British report, ‘the Germans half covered the bodies with earth and planks. Finally they wrote on a wall of the house “Revenging the honour of our German heroes, killed by the Belgians” … [the victims] show signs of having been beaten before being shot through the back of the head.’
The massacre seemed inexplicable to the villagers, and the shock produced a false rumour that Praile could have escaped death only by betraying his comrades. Over the years this idea became a fixation. Praile decided never to return to the region.
Generaloberst Guderian, the army chief of staff responsible for the eastern front, drove from Zossen, south of Berlin, to see Hitler at the Adlerhorst. It was quite clear to him that the Ardennes offensive had failed to achieve its goals and was not worth continuing. The point of maximum danger lay to the east, where the Red Army was preparing its great winter offensive. In his briefcase he had a rather more accurate assessment than usual from Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen, the head of Fremde Heere Ost, the army intelligence department dealing with the eastern front. Gehlen had been wrong many times in the past, which did not help his arguments, but Guderian was convinced that his warnings were correct. Gehlen’s department estimated that the Red Army had a superiority of eleven to one in infantry, seven to one in tanks and twenty to one in artillery. Soviet aviation also enjoyed almost total air supremacy, which prevented the Germans from carrying out photo-reconnaissance.
In the conference room, Guderian found himself facing Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, Generalfeldmarschall Keitel and Generaloberst Jodl. As he presented the intelligence estimates, Hitler stopped him. He declared that such estimates of Soviet strength were preposterous. Red Army tank corps had hardly any tanks and their rifle divisions were reduced to little more than 7,000 men each. ‘It’s the greatest imposture since Genghis Khan,’ he shouted. ‘Who is responsible for producing all this rubbish?’
Guderian’s attempts to defend Gehlen’s figures were treated with contempt, and Jodl, to his horror, argued that attacks in the west should continue. At dinner Himmler, a military ignoramus who had just been made commander-in-chief Army Group Upper Rhine, confidently told Guderian that the Soviet build-up was an enormous bluff. Guderian had no option but to return in despair to Zossen.
On the extreme right of Patton’s two army corps, the 5th Infantry Division had begun to advance north-west from behind the 4th Infantry Division. Hemingway, recovered from flu and drinking his own urine, watched and joked on a hilltop with friends from his adopted division as the soldiers below proceeded in extended order wearing their bedsheet camouflage and firing aimlessly in front of them. There did not seem to be any Germans shooting back. On Christmas Eve he went to the 22nd Infantry’s headquarters at Rodenbourg not knowing that the new commander, Colonel Ruggles, had also invited Hemingway’s estranged wife. Ruggles had sent a Jeep to Luxembourg to fetch Martha Gellhorn, hoping it would be a pleasant surprise for both of them. The disengaged couple found themselves having to share a room.
The night before Christmas carried a special significance for soldiers on both sides. In Bastogne, the less seriously wounded received rations of brandy and listened to the endlessly repeated song ‘White Christmas’ on a salvaged civilian radio. North-east of the town in Foy, German soldiers packed into houses and farms to get warm. A young German soldier quietly told the Belgian family in whose house he was billeted that he intended to go home alive: three of his brothers had already been killed. On other parts of the perimeter American soldiers listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’. They could only talk about Christmas at home, imagining their families in front of warm fires. Some of their luckier comrades to the rear attended a midnight mass, such as the one in the chapel of the Château de Rolley, packed with refugees and the family of the owners. In most cases, they also sang ‘Silent Night’, thinking of home. In Bastogne, about a hundred soldiers assembled for mass in front of an improvised altar lit by candles set in empty ration tins. The chaplain in his address to them offered simple advice. ‘Do not plan, for God’s plan will prevail.’
At Boisseilles, between Celles and Foy-Notre-Dame, German soldiers also joined the civilians sheltering in the chateau there. One panzergrenadier from the 2nd Panzer, perhaps inflamed by alcohol, declared that ‘Tomorrow we will cross the Meuse!’ Another, in a more realistic frame of mind, sighed, ‘Poor Christmas.’
The advanced units of the 2nd Panzer were famished, if not starving. In Celles an Alsatian soldier knocked at a door and, when the family opened it cautiously, went down on his knees to beg for a little food. The condition of many of them was so pitiable that locals felt compelled to give their occupiers something to eat out of Christian charity. There were impressively few cases of 2nd Panzer soldiers seizing food at gunpoint, although some might order a farmer’s wife to make them soup, or a pie from her store of preserved fruits in jars, as a Christmas gesture. Others forced local women to wash their socks or underclothes.
German soldiers, despite their intense hunger, were even more desperate to find drink to drown their sorrows on Christmas Eve. In Rochefort, a fourteen-year-old girl, Liliane Delhomme, saw a Landser smash the glass door of the Café Grégoire with his fist, cutting himself badly in the process, to get himself a bottle. Homesickness is worse at Christmas. Many soldiers gazed at photographs of their family and wept silently.
Infantrymen on both sides spent the night in their foxholes. The Americans had only frozen C-Rations to celebrate with, which was at any rate more than most Germans. One paratrooper described how he cut out chunks of frozen hash one by one to thaw them out in his mouth before being able to eat them. On the most northerly shoulder at Höfen, a soldier in the 99th Infantry Division wrote in his diary: ‘The fellows are calling up and down the line wishing each other a Merry Christmas. It is a very pretty night with the ground covered with snow.’ The fortunate ones were visited by an officer passing round a bottle.
Command posts and higher headquarters had Christmas trees, usually decorated with the strips of aluminium foil for radar-jamming. The higher the headquarters, the greater the opportunity for a proper celebration. The city of Luxembourg, still untouched by the war, now felt secure. And as snowflakes fell gently on the night of Christmas Eve, US Army chaplain Frederick A. McDonald was about to conduct the service in a candle-lit church. He had been warned that General Patton would be attending communion that night. The church was packed, but McDonald had no trouble recognizing ‘this General of stern expression’ standing alone and erect at the back. He went to welcome him and mentioned that, in the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm II had come to services in this church. McDonald, no doubt aware of this general’s desire to commune with history, asked: ‘Would you, sir, like to sit in the Kaiser’s pew?’ Patton smiled. ‘Lead me to it,’ he said.
18
Christmas Day
The short-lived silence of Christmas night in Bastogne was broken by a Luftwaffe bomber flying over the town dropping magnesium flares, followed by waves of Junkers 88. The Americans had come to regard the Luftwaffe as a spent force, and the effect was far more devastating than even the most intense artillery bombardment. The shock was still worse for the refugees and Bastognards packed into the cellars, when buildings collapsed above them.
McAuliffe’s headquarters were hit. Walls vibrated as in an earthquake, and everyone was terrified they would be crushed by falling masonry. In the packed cellars of the Institut de Notre-Dame, people prayed or screamed in panic as clouds of dust descended. Several became completely crazed.
Captain Prior, the doctor with the 10th Armored aid station, had been sharing a Christmas bottle of champagne with several of his colleagues, inc
luding Augusta Chiwy, the Congolese nurse. They were all thrown to the ground by the force of a blast, and Prior suddenly feared that the aid post itself had been hit. Coated in dust, they struggled out into the street. The three-storey building had collapsed on top of their wounded patients and the ruins were on fire. Chiwy’s fellow nurse Renée Lemaire was killed along with some twenty-five of the seriously wounded, burned to death in their beds. Soldiers rushed up to pull away debris to create an exit, but attempts to put out the fire with buckets of water were fruitless and soon abandoned. Some of the wounded, surrounded by flames, begged to be shot. The low-flying bombers machine-gunned the streets, prompting paratroopers to fire back with rifles. Bastogne had no anti-aircraft defences because the quadruple .50 half-tracks were all deployed to bolster the perimeter defences.
This attack, which was renewed several hours later, was clearly the opening salvo of the Germans’ Christmas Day onslaught. The Arko, or senior artillery commander of the Fifth Panzer Army, had come on Manteuffel’s instructions to supervise fire control. Kokott had moved his command post to Givry opposite the north-west flank. This sector had fewer woods and villages, which the Americans had used so effectively as strongpoints, and the open terrain presented obstacles no greater than small gullies covered with snow. Even so, most of his volksgrenadiers dreaded the battle to come, and were not convinced by the exhortations and promises of their officers that this time they had overwhelming strength.