16

The Bloody Bucket

NORTH OF THE 60th Armored Infantry Battalion, in Lieutenant-General Middleton’s VIII Corps patch of the Ardennes, lay the highly experienced 28th Division. They were the pre-war Pennsylvania National Guard, who wore as their shoulder patch a red keystone badge, Pennsylvania being the ‘Keystone State’, but in the Hürtgen Forest the Germans had learned to call it the ‘Bloody Bucket’, on account of the casualties the Pennsylvanians inflicted and the punishment they took.

Major-General ‘Dutch’ Cota’s men, stretched along their wide front in the Ardennes, were best pictured as a very taut longbow. Though far from ideal, the front they had to defend dictated that all of Cota’s three regiments were in line, 112th to the north, 110th in the centre and his 109th Regiment in the south. Forward of their positions, following the line of the bow, was a twenty-five-mile stretch of river. The southerly flowing Our river to Cota’s front, after joining a smaller tributary called the Sûre, was the same stretch of water that flowed past Leonard’s 9th Armored and Barton’s 4th Infantry divisions, but there was called the Sauer river. Cota put his headquarters in Wiltz, about a dozen miles behind the front, where the archer might notch his arrow in the bowstring. The same distance again behind Cota was Bastogne, home to his corps commander, Middleton, and one of the key route centres in the whole Ardennes. A glance at any map would have told American and German officers alike that control of Bastogne was vital to all military movement through the Ardennes.

Cota’s Bloody Bucket boys were about to receive attacks from both the southern formations in Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer and northern units of Brandenberger’s Seventh Army. In Cota’s southern sector, his 109th Infantry Regiment would be hit by both divisions of Kneiss’s LXXXV Corps. Thus on the morning of 16 December the three battalions comprising the US 109th Infantry were faced with twelve battalions: 352nd Volksgrenadiers on their right, Heilmann’s 5th Fallschirmjäger Division against their left flank, plus the entire weight of the LXXXV Corps’ artillery.

The 109th was led by another capable soldier, who, like Cota, had been promoted for his outstanding leadership on D-Day – Lieutenant-Colonel James Earl Rudder. An ‘Aggie’ – as Texas A&M University graduates were known – and commissioned into the US Army Reserves in 1932, the thirty-four-year-old had commanded the Second Ranger Battalion which scaled the cliffs of the Pointe du Hoc on 6 June. Out of 230 who had made the assault, only seventy Rangers remained unwounded, Rudder himself being hit twice during the course of the fighting.¹ Awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, he then took his battalion to the Hürtgen Forest. On 7 December – nine days, as it turned out, before the German attack – Rudder was promoted to command the 109th Infantry Regiment, his predecessor, Colonel Jesse L. Gibney, being reassigned as Cota’s chief of staff.

Rudder may have been fit, highly capable and a born leader, and his new command close to full strength, but in mid-December Rudder’s rifle companies were ‘hollowed-out’. After sustaining horrendous losses in the Hürtgen Forest – like the whole Fourth Division – their ranks were full of green replacements possessing no combat experience. Rudder had a huge front to cover; with his headquarters in the Hôtel Lieffrig in Ettelbrück, he put two battalions forward, each nursing a frontage of about four miles watching the German fortifications on the eastern bank, and his third some distance back from the river in outposts.

Before Rudder took over the 109th it had experienced more than its fair share of problem soldiers. Not every draftee was cut out for combat and twenty-four-year-old Edward D. Slovik was one such. Since the age of twelve the Detroit native had been in and out of jail until drafted in January 1944. He was one of twelve reinforcements assigned to the 109th Infantry on 20 August, but deserted en route to his unit when he first came under shellfire. After further similar episodes, by November he had been court-martialled, found guilty and sentenced to death; but Slovik wasn’t worried as he knew that no US soldier had been executed for desertion since the civil war, eighty years before. In December Slovik wrote what he assumed would be a routine letter to Eisenhower, pleading for clemency. His timing was awful as desertion was increasing; after 16 December, with ‘lost’ GIs wandering the length and breadth of the Ardennes, Eisenhower felt he needed an example.

As any senior commander will testify, the action of a single soldier in being seen to desert the battlefield at a crucial moment, refuse to fight or neglect to protect his comrades, can undermine the cohesiveness of an entire unit, possibly encouraging others to do likewise. Slovik, with his history of run-ins with authority, was clearly set to continue in his ways, and, given the context of the Bulge, had his plea turned down and sentence confirmed. He was shot by firing squad on 31 January 1945 for the crime of desertion.²Given the circumstances, Eddie Slovik’s execution was perhaps understandable. What is surprising is that no other US deserters met a similar fate, although 140 GIs (seventy in the European theatre of war) were executed for murder and/or rape between 1942 and 1945.

Meanwhile, on 16 December, one of the indirect causes of Slovik’s demise, Heilmann, had ordered his Fallschirmjäger to avoid pitched battles for defended positions, push inland and reach Wiltz, the divisional objective (and Cota’s HQ), twelve miles inland, by that first evening. The mission would eventually take three days, due to the resistance of the US Bloody Bucket Division and the woeful inexperience of Heilmann’s impressive sounding formation. Major Goswin Wahl had been a Luftwaffe airman in the Mediterranean, eventually retreating from southern France in the autumn of 1944. Purely on account of his rank, he was made one of Heilmann’s battalion commanders: ‘I became a paratrooper without parachute training,’ he wrote later, observing that he had no intermediate commander, only his divisional chief. Around 10 December he was warned to conduct combat drills for his battalion and on the 13th reported to Heilmann, ‘Herr Oberst, I am of the opinion that it is probably time for Fallschirmjäger Regiment 13 to be assigned a commander’. Heilmann responded, ‘You lead the regiment. I cannot wait until they have dug someone out of the drawer at the Reich Air Ministry.’ One of his three infantry regiments (which the British would call a brigade), was thus going into battle led by an airman who had never before led ground troops in combat.³

Major Goswin Wahl had been an airman in the Mediterranean, but on account of his rank was given a battalion of Fallschirmjäger Regiment 13 to train in preparation for battle. Three days before the offensive began, he was appointed the regimental commander, with no prior ground combat experience whatsoever. Wahl was brutally criticised by one of his battalion commanders, Hans Frank (front seat, in car) for his wasteful and costly attacks against Fouhren on 16 December. ‘Our liaison was a complete failure’, Frank later complained. (Author’s collection)

As Heilmann himself warned Brandenberger and Model, he assessed his command as only Kampfwert IV (fit for static defence). Himmler may have found his recruits, in this case from Luftwaffe ground crews, but he didn’t have to lead them in battle. When a dispirited Heilmann asked Model how his division could possibly achieve victory, the field marshal responded in his usual cold fashion, ‘with audacity’. To Heilmann this must have seemed a personal insult to his otherwise gilt-edged combat career – but the state of his formation was merely a symptom of the chaos in which the Third Reich found itself by late 1944.⁴

The 5th Fallschirmjäger’s first task was a quick and unopposed crossing of the Our; like the German divisions further south, their commanders saw river crossings in terms of unwelcome choke points, where pre-registered American artillery could cause havoc. In fact the Our was less than fifty feet wide at the points chosen for the initial assaults, and between 05.30 and 06.00 a.m. Heilmann’s assault companies made their way over by rubber craft quickly, bypassing or overwhelming American outposts under cover of the bombardment. As he rightly anticipated, the best results came from the only seasoned units in his division – Oberstleutnant Kurt Gröschke’s 15th Fallschirmjäger Regiment and the 5th Parachute Engineer Battalion of Major Gerhard Mertins, already a Knight’s Cross holder, and Normandy veterans all.

The 15th Fallschirmjäger pushed over the Our near Vianden, though during the Engineer Battalion’s assault upriver some of their little rubber boats overturned in the fast-flowing winter torrent; the engineers, weighed down with weapons and ammunition, perished immediately. The Parachute Engineers repaired a stone bridge for use in Vianden itself, and another damaged railway bridge, and eventually assembled a pontoon bridge, for wheeled, but not tracked, vehicles, inevitably called die Brücke Gröschke (the Gröschke Bridge), after their commander. The paratroops crossed so quickly and quietly in the first few minutes that the US 2nd Battalion’s outpost in Vianden castle simply disappeared. Leutnant Hans Prigge led his 4th Parachute Company into the town, overwhelming the I&R (Intelligence and Reconnaissance) Platoon who had first encountered Elise Delé two days earlier. After the successful Our crossing, the paratroopers moved on to Hoscheid, almost halfway to Wiltz, eventually basing their heavy mortars there. In the absence of warnings, it was only at 09.00 a.m. that Lieutenant-Colonel Rudder began to receive reports of German incursions, but by this time his forward lines had been breached and Gröschke’s advance was gathering strength and momentum.

Heilmann’s other two regiments, comprising the airmen-turned-infantrymen, did much less well, and the construction of a wooden bridge at Roth was held up by mortar fire from Foühren, a mile south of Vianden, which should have been taken straightaway by Major Wahl’s men. Throughout the 16th, Rudder gradually committed whatever reserves were available to him, but it was his field artillery support that most slowed the Germans; by nightfall Rudder’s lines had held – just. His situation was similar to that of Chance’s 12th Regiment and the 60th Armored Infantry; they still controlled their ground, but the Germans had managed to infiltrate beyond and behind. As Heilmann had anticipated, bridge construction was slow in the first few hours because of American artillery fire, which in turn meant less fire support from his own guns and rocket-firing Nebelwerfer than he would have liked, stranded as they were on the wrong side of the Our. Much later, when American armour appeared on the scene, Major Wahl would report, ‘In this combat it was shown again that troops lacking combat experience are very sensitive on their flanks and act scared and witless when faced with enemy tanks.’ ⁵

Luftwaffe Major Hans Frank, who commanded the III Battalion in Wahl’s Fallschirmjäger Regiment, remembered trying to storm Foühren, held by Rudder’s Company ‘E’, on 16 December. Within twenty-five yards of his objective the attack stalled as his company commanders were killed; he crawled forward on his stomach and took personal control. Each runner he sent back with requests for heavy weapons support was shot. ‘Then, for two and a half hours, I worked my way back, [moving] by inches on my stomach. What a show for the young boys, making their way over a plain without support of heavy weapons!’ Frank explained the situation to Wahl, his regimental commander, and wanted to wait for a forward observation officer before re-attacking. Wahl ordered, ‘Get going, take that village; there are only a few troops holding it’. The battalion commander demurred calling another attack ‘madness’. ‘No, it’s an order. Get going, we must capture the village before evening,’ Wahl insisted. As Major Frank observed, ‘We took the village without any support and scarcely were we in it when our heavy guns began firing into it. I brought out 181 prisoners altogether. I rounded up the last 60 and a salvo of mortar shells fell on them. After 22 hours our own artillery was still firing into the village.’⁶

Meanwhile, holed up in Foühren was Bill Alexander, serving in the 109th with the Intelligence Section of Rudder’s Second Battalion. He had fond memories of the kindness of the Luxembourger, who had cooked a roast goose for him and his unit on Thanksgiving Day. Later, he had manned an observation post in Vianden castle, watching the German OP in a sanatorium on the far bank watching him. The afternoon of the sixteenth found him besieged in Foühren with Company ‘E’, when he noticed the Volksgrenadiers collecting for an attack. ‘One of the ways the Germans were using to move troops across the open area was by means of stretcher bearers wearing Red Cross armbands. They would move across the road further south with four men carrying the stretcher, and they came back with only two. They were doing this for some time before we brought down artillery fire.’⁷

Also hurrying towards Foühren late that afternoon was one of Rudder’s officers, Lieutenant James V. Christy of Company ‘B’. He was having difficulty coaxing his platoon of new arrivals to move into battle, even though they were mounted on two Shermans of the 707th Tank Battalion. His men were tired, hungry and had already taken losses. Fearful of Germans lurking with Panzerfausts, the tank crews eventually refused to go any further in the dark without the infantry clearing ahead. When Christy ordered his platoon sergeant, Stanislaus Wieszcyk, to get a squad forward, Wieszcyk reflected their reluctance. ‘The guys have had more than enough today. They won’t go.’ There was nothing for it but for Christy himself to set out alone and guide the tanks. He had barely begun to stretch out when the officer made out a figure on his left. It was Wieszcyk. ‘OK lieutenant, you made your point.’ With him was the platoon’s first squad.⁸

Major Frank lamented the Fallschirmjäger’s lack of experience and training, ‘Our liaison was a complete failure. Later we had tanks [assault guns] but they were never used in conjunction with the infantry, and were recklessly thrown away. But if there had been a little co-operation, if one or two hours had been allowed for preparation, then it would have been wonderful.’⁹ Hans Frank’s comments were sharply critical of his superior, Major Wahl, but were made from the safety of a British Prisoner of War camp. His remarks, made to a fellow inmate on his arrival, were picked up by covert surveillance microphones and transcribed by intelligence service operatives. The Files containing these transcripts have only recently been discovered in the UK National Archives.¹⁰

Once the Germans had moved beyond and pushed US artillery out of range, Foühren fell to the Fallschirmjäger and sixty to seventy men of Company ‘E’ were captured along with some of Rudder’s Second Battalion headquarters staff. They had held their opponents at bay for twenty-four hours and surrendered only when their building, home of the Betzen family, was in flames. PFC Kahn, the only Jewish member of Company ‘E’, was determined not to fall into German hands. He stood silhouetted against the flames, was cut down and killed. Amazingly he was the only one who died. Bill Alexander of the Intelligence Section remembered his captors ‘were of a paratroop unit. They treated us well. Most of them very young, they may have been seventeen or eighteen.’¹¹

Despite these infantry successes, to best exploit their gains Heilmann needed artillery forward, but his cannon remained out of touch, short on ammunition, and were queuing to cross the river. Like Major Ernst Schrotberger’s guns further south, they were horse-drawn but were expected to motorise and advance with captured American vehicles and fuel. Failure to provide heavy bridges quickly removed the possibility of help from the twenty or so 75mm StuGs from the 11th Assault Gun Brigade, which had been attached to his division. As Major Frank observed, they would have made a significant difference early on. Heilmann hoped for extra enthusiasm from the armoured support, for both the assault gun crews and his division wore the emblem of the Luftwaffe. Later that night, the StuGs in fact found an undefended weir by which they crossed the Our, reached the Skyline Drive – the north–south route running along the American front – and turned south along it in the small hours. This would unhinge the American defences around Ettelbrück on the 17th. Ultimately, the first day saw Heilmann’s Fallschirmjäger firmly lodged on the west bank of the Our, to a depth of two or three miles. Their objective of Wiltz, however, was well beyond reach.

Against Rudder’s southern flank, Oberst Erich Schmidt’s 352nd Volksgrenadiers flung themselves over the Our, via two sets of temporary bridges, towards the route centres of Diekirch and Ettelbrück, small towns five and seven miles from the river respectively. In the pre-campaign report on his new division, which would reflect that of all the Volksgrenadiers deploying into the Bulge, Schmidt has observed that while his men’s ages averaged between twenty-two and thirty, they were limited in other ways: ‘too briefly trained, no experience with terrain or combat, not yet been in action. NCOs: Vary in front experience and level of training. Strength is only 75 percent of what it should be. Officers: vary very much in combat experience and training.’¹²

Schmidt had assessed his two infantry regiments as possessing ‘good fighting spirit’, amongst whom was Friedrich Schmäschke, a teenager of seventeen when transferred from a naval support unit in Wilhelmshaven to the Volksgrenadiers. Receiving three months’ condensed infantry training, Schmäschke was luckier than Günter Münnich, a year older, who received no further combat tuition, though was given specialist courses on air defence and on operating a telephone switchboard.¹³ The division’s artillery reportedly had ‘too brief training time; tactically and [was] technically not dependable in directing and adjusting fire and observation’. Of his equipment, Schmidt was concerned that 35 per cent of radios for fire direction were missing, as were 25 per cent of the MP-44s he was authorised.¹⁴ Oberst von Gersdorff, Seventh Army’s chief of staff, concluded of the unit: ‘Small cadre of veteran lower officers and men. Commanders generally good, lower officers and NCOs only partially suited. A useful division, but suffering from shortages.’¹⁵

The advance of Schmidt’s men was to be coordinated with Heilmann’s 5th Fallschirmjäger Division, and in turn the pair were to remain on an axis parallel to Manteuffel’s Fifth Army. Schmidt’s soldiers were luckier than many in that they had been issued with the Wehrmacht’s brand-new reversible winter uniform, white on one side, camouflaged on the other. However, as the first waves of Volksgrenadiers crested the ridge beyond the river on the American side, they were mown down in the open primarily by fire from Captain Embert A. Fossum’s Heavy Weapons outfit (Company ‘L’), equipped with eight Browning .30-inch water-cooled machine-guns and six 81mm mortars. Each gun, with its solid tripod and 250-round belts of ammunition, weighed in at a hefty 103 lbs, albeit broken down into a minimum of three man-portable loads. This meant their gun emplacements had to be good, for moving the Brownings in a hurry wasn’t an option. Yet on the grenadiers charged, for many their first – and last – time in battle. After three unsuccessful assaults during the first day, incurring almost 400 casualties, the Volksgrenadiers abandoned their attempts to take the plateau.

The GIs responsible for the carnage on the plateau above Hoesdorf were amongst three companies from the US 109th Infantry, dug in with their machine-guns and mortars looking east to the river and south-east towards Reisdorf. Accompanying their rude awakening at 05:30 am, Rudder’s men had witnessed searchlights bouncing their beams off the low clouds and fog to provide artificial daylight for their foes. At Ammeldingen, directly opposite the American lines, assault companies of 916th VolksgrenadierRegiment negotiated the swollen and fast-flowing Our via ingenious footbridges made from lines of farm carts dragged into the river and walkways constructed from house doors nailed to the carts. Some battalion staff were about to follow the assault troops across when a rubber-boat ferry also in use was destroyed by a direct hit from an American shell.

The alternative, as recalled by Günter Münnich of 914th Regiment, evoked images of an African safari, though in a more unpleasant setting: ‘we and the battalion staff now had to cross the Our on foot at a shallower place, in ice-cold water up to our chests. Holding all our baggage above our heads, we reached the far shore thoroughly soaked.’¹⁶ Later, Münnich’s squad came to the small village of Longsdorf, a mile west of the river: ‘the Americans must have been taken completely by surprise; anyway there was an abandoned gun nearby … its ammunition had been unpacked and spread out on a tarpaulin, and there were two Jeeps there too’.¹⁷

At Gentingen, the 915th Volksgrenadiers used rubber boats pulled across on cables, and footbridges made from felled trees; in most cases the civilian engineers of Albert Speer’s 1st Todt Brigade were doing the work. Schmidt’s army pioneers were too short-handed and ill-prepared, since most of their resources had been diverted to Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies. The regiment included at least one Frenchman; as with all young males from Alsace-Lorraine (which had been forcibly reincorporated into the Reich), Celestin Lejeune was conscripted, in his case into the Kriegsmarine in 1944, not speaking a word of German. When training at Kiel, his job – with fellow conscript Frenchmen – was to collect by hand any unexploded incendiary bombs dropped by British aircraft the previous night. In mid-December his group was suddenly posted to the front, issued ammunition, stick grenades and Panzerfaust ‘the use of which I did not know. My immediate superior was a Feldwebel; I didn’t even know the name of the company commander, nor the precise name of the company, but I did know that I belonged to Volksgrenadier Regiment 915.’ Crossing the Our at Roth, south of Vianden, his first job was picking up dead soldiers and loading them into a truck.¹⁸

Unteroffizier (Sergeant) Wilhelm Stetter of the 915th was only alerted to the offensive less than forty-eight hours beforehand; of his regiment he recalled that ‘most NCOs and officers came from the infantry, but everybody else was Kriegsmarine; there were even volunteers from seventeen to twenty years old’. He remembered being read Rundstedt’s Order of the Day (which begins Chapter 15) by his company commander Oberleutnant Schubert, who ‘closed with an exhortation [of his own] to fight in the spirit of Frederick the Great, and I had to think of the fact that in the days of “Old Fritz” they had no tanks. Nor did we have any, but the Americans had plenty of them.’¹⁹

Stetter led his platoon forward all day until that evening when ‘A messenger appeared and led us into a patch of woods where almost the whole battalion was waiting. “Dig in” was ordered, but with our short infantry spades we scarcely made a dent on the frozen, root-filled soil … Sentries were posted, men checked. There must have been US batteries all around us, for shots were heard constantly from not far away. It was a cold December night, and we stiffened in our holes. Complete silence was ordered. No fires were allowed.’²⁰ (A few years ago I came across one of the Wehrmacht’s tiny entrenching spades, cast aside in an Ardennes pine copse. Somehow its wooden handle had remained intact after fifty years, but the rusting blade had been bent back when its first owner had tried to dig a foxhole in 1944, and lost his battle with a tree root.)

Stetter’s experience was mirrored exactly when Oklahoma-born PFC Hubert ‘Bill’ Cavins of Company ‘E’ in the 109th told me of the exact same night, in a similar setting. Then twenty years old, he recollected, ‘I had no winter clothing, just long underwear, a woollen shirt and pants, my field jacket and a thin woollen overcoat. Overcoats were a thing of the past for most of my buddies, who had thrown theirs away when they had gotten covered with mud, as they were really heavy to wear when wet. We was freezing cold. After running around all day, we kinda got separated and a bunch of us holed up in this forest. It was dark, we could hear gunfire all around, but we was too tired to mount guard and just collapsed on the ground, somehow I fell asleep, my head on a log. It froze overnight. A gun cracked and I jerked awake so quickly I left a whole patch of my hair frozen to the wood. I was too scared to care.’²¹

Major Günther Stottmeister of the Volksgrenadier engineer battalion recalled his men were 95 per cent young former naval personnel, who had received three weeks’ engineering training; they managed after two days to construct a bridge made of tree trunks, but not before ‘a central pier made of lumber failed. The swift current at this point tore the construction apart even before it could be fastened. Since time was short the central pier was dispensed with.’²² American defensive fire halted construction for two hours and Stottmeister remember the ‘wounded were taken by the dozens to Dr Krause at the battalion commander’s bunker. Arms and legs were amputated before my eyes.’²³ Some forty-eight hours after the first assaults, trucks, half-tracks and the first Hetzer crossed to support the Volksgrenadiers who had been pinned down on the American side all the while under intense automatic and mortar fire.

Other troops, however, had managed to thrust two miles beyond the river to the villages of Longsdorf and Bastendorf, in spite of vigorous opposition from the 109th Infantry’s rear battalion, badly stretched along their own four-mile front. Stationed in Bastendorf was Dr M. Bedford Davis, one of Rudder’s combat surgeons, who had (illegally for a medic) acquired a P-38 pistol from a dead German soldier. ‘During the seesawing of the front lines over 16–17 December, I hid it in the coal bin in the cellar of our store three separate times. I guessed if the Germans caught me with one of their pistols they would think I had killed its rightful owner and deserved the same treatment,’ Davis recalled. He remembered Bastendorf ‘was so small and the battlefield so limited that no one could escape a front line position. It was like watching a football game from the fifty-yard line. The Germans attacked our town time after time, in massed formation … We piled them like cord wood in front of our position. Yet, they kept on coming … by noon they were piled up several high, just a few yards in front of us.’²⁴

Rudder’s report of that first day communicates his own sangfroid: ‘Everyone was holding and I saw no cause for alarm. We were in a good position and had a distinct advantage of terrain. As the attack progressed it became apparent that it was in great strength. We did not consider giving up any ground, and the division order was to hold as long as tenable.’²⁵ The more than creditable performance of Rudder’s men was sometimes matched by Schmidt’s unit, full of ex-Kriegsmarine sailors with only a month’s training in infantry tactics. However, that night, in trying to spear their way through American lines, Rudder’s Third Battalion witnessed some of Schmidt’s Volksgrenadiers, whether high on alcohol or ideology, charge ‘wildly, screaming and firing their weapons until killed or wounded’.²⁶

Many of the 916th Volksgrenadier’s casualties were caused by one of Company ‘L’s machine-guns, mounted on its heavy tripod and dug in along a wood-line overlooking the Hoesdorf plateau. Some 81mm mortars, of which Company ‘L’ had six, added to the carnage. These fired fifteen-pound shells up to three thousand yards. Heavy fighting and hand-to-hand combat would continue on this high ground for two days when the exhausted Americans were ordered to withdraw. Today, shallow dips in the ground betray the signatures of shell craters from the opening barrage, and Company ‘L’s foxholes still dot the landscape, now home to the foxes of Luxembourg. Local children showed me some of the empty cartridges they had dug out of the earth where the machine gun had been. Incredibly, nearby trees still bear GI graffiti, where Elmer Hiott carved his name in 1944 and Paul Zuhlki left his address (51, 11th Av, Chicago).²⁷ In 2004 a memorial stone was erected on the machine-gun position commemorating those who fought here, both GI and grenadier.

By the evening of 16 December, Rudder’s front had been penetrated, and he had German troops behind him, but appeared unworried by the fact and stayed put. At the end of the month, he reported succinctly, ‘We learned that if you stay in position and hold your ground, enemy infiltrations behind your front lines can be repelled by small well-organised counter-attacking forces. The men must be taught not to become panicky at the sound of a few burp guns to the rear. When Field Artillery positions are threatened to be over-run by enemy infiltrations, we learned from experience that artillery gun crews can be very effective fighting forces if they do not abandon their guns and attempt to escape … One of the Regiment’s biggest assets during this operation was having infantry officers trained as forward artillery observers.’ After the fighting was over, a GI painted a vivid description of the area in a letter home: ‘Everywhere there is the tangle of shell-shot tree trunks, the litter of prolonged fighting at close quarters: bits of broken rifles, bayonets, shattered helmets, unexploded hand grenades, fragments of shell, displaced sandbags, broken stretchers, boots and gloves not quite empty and shreds of uniform and equipment.’²⁸ December 1944 would turn out to be an expensive month for Rudder’s new command, and his report enunciated almost half his pre-battle strength missing – 1,174 casualties killed, wounded, missing or captured, losses of fifty-six vehicles and trailers, ninety-seven mortars and machine guns, with sixty tons of ammunition expended, though fifteen truckloads of Christmas mail had been distributed before 16 December.²⁹

Apart from the combat and casualties, most Landser had only one thing on their minds – Futter (fodder, i.e. food). German military rations at this time were both appalling and in short supply. They included canned meat, which generations of German soldiers referred to as Alter Mann(‘older man’), as it was reputedly made from the bodies of old men found in Berlin’s workhouses. Former grenadiers Ulrich Jonath and Horst Hennig of the 352nd Volksgrenadiers remembered part of their incentive to reach the American lines was simply to eat: ‘food supplies were unsatisfactory; other than captured American chocolate and some preserves taken from civilian houses, there was nothing. Cooking could be done only in rare cases because of the ever-watchful American Artillery observers.’ Not that there was much to cook, although in the same battle Unteroffizier Stetter remembered the cooks in his 3rd Company of the 915th Volksgrenadier Regiment issuing him with ‘our first warm food in ten days, pea soup on which the fat was swimming, for there was plenty of pork fat in the deserted houses. So we ate, no, we gobbled as much of the fatty broth as we could hold.’ Inevitably rich food on empty bellies led to stomach cramps and diarrhoea shortly afterwards.³⁰

The US Army used two different kinds of pre-packed meals. C-rations were the mainstay; they came in six combinations of menu arrangements to provide variety: two each for breakfast, lunch and supper. They included – as with modern military rations – packets of crackers, chocolate bars and caramels, with sachets of soluble coffee, lemon or orange-juice powder. This was the origin of modern freeze-dried coffee powder. GIs became quite imaginative in their use of C-rations: Lieutenant Otts of the US 75th Infantry Division recalled a merry evening on 27 December, giving toasts of officer-issue gin mixed with lemonade powder.³¹ A particularly vicious GI version, popular among medics, was ‘razor swipe’, made with orange or lemon powder and surgical spirit or aftershave.³² A C-ration accessories packet included nine cigarettes; water-purification tablets; a book of matches; toilet paper; chewing gum and an opener for the meat cans.

K-rations were designed for just a few days’ use under assault conditions. Adopted for use in 1942, the demands of war meant that GIs often ate them for weeks on end. They were colour-coded, brown for breakfast, green for supper, and blue for lunch, and the packaging dipped in wax to keep the contents waterproof and provide fuel for fire-lighting. PFC Richard D. Courtney of the Twenty-Sixth ‘Yankee’ Division preferred the chocolate bars, caramels and Milky Ways they contained. He was ‘glad to get the little packs of toilet paper (tan coloured)’ in his K-rations, but one of his post-war ambitions was to ‘find that committee of nutrition specialists that chose the dry, hard crackers for K-rations and force them to eat that stuff for a week’.³³

In the Ardennes, GIs subsisted on pre-packaged ‘C’ and ‘K’ ration packs. However, the most prized items for both sides were chocolate bars. By 1945 Hershey estimated they had produced and distributed over three billion ration bars like these. The Germans often relied on captured US rations and one prisoner claimed in his interrogation that 80 per cent of his unit’s food came from liberated American stocks. (NARA)

For the Germans, captured C-rations more than lived up to their expectations, although many GIs quickly tired of the canned meat and beans, meat and vegetable stew, spaghetti, ham, egg and potato varieties. The most prized item for Germans and GIs was the ‘D-bar’. In 1939, Hershey Chocolate responded to a US Army contract to produce a high-energy, heat-resistant, four-ounce chocolate bar intended to provide a soldier with 600 calories, a third of the minimum recommended daily requirement. Initially, the company produced 100,000 units per day but output soon reached twenty-four million Hershey ‘D-bars’ per week. By 1945 the company estimated they had produced and distributed over three billion Hershey ration bars.

Even today, rusting cans and traces of silver foil from old ration items decorate many an old foxhole; sometimes one can still read the labels: ‘Instant Coffee Powder: Empty Contents into ½ Canteen Cup’. At least this was real coffee: the Wehrmacht had long had to make do with an ersatz alternative made from acorns or barley. Volksgrenadiers more than happily exchanged their issued Krebstangen (cancer sticks) for captured Lucky Strikes. Grenadier Friedrich Schmäschke, the seventeen-year-old former sailor introduced earlier, always recalled his first encounter with the ‘olive green packs, similar to naval packs, and I searched them curiously. Out came small brown cartons that I had a hard time opening for they were coated with wax. They contained peanut butter, cookies, chocolate, tea, coffee in powdered form, chewing gum, soft drink powder, fruit bars, cigarettes, and other such things.’³⁴ These were unheard-of delights in the austerity-ridden Fatherland. Feldwebel Hans Griesbach, of the 14th FallschirmjägerRegiment, captured on 2 January 1945, claimed in his interrogation that 80 per cent of his unit’s food (and much of their clothing to keep warm) came from captured America stocks.³⁵

Capturing an American food and clothing store in a convent located at Bettendorf, Grenadier Herbert Brach, of the 352nd Volksgrenadiers, had no complaints: ‘Now, for a pleasant change we had enough to eat. Everybody feasted on the tasty US field rations, and nobody asked where our field kitchen was. The grenadiers stuffed their pockets, food bags and assault packs again. In fact, some of them had even rounded up old baby carriages and milk carts and filled them with food … That evening, after several days, the field kitchen finally came to supply us with hot food, but nobody was hungry, thanks to the tasty delicacies from much sought-after American rations. The supply chief himself came on the scene and was annoyed to have to take the watery stew away again.’ ³⁶

Despite his concerns over a lack of armoured support, by the end of 16 December Brandenberger could take heart that Sensfuss, Möhring, Schmidt and Heilmann had all made some progress, though nowhere near that required by their ambitious timetable. The 212th had lived up to Brandenberger’s high expectations of it, fixing a fair proportion of the US 4th Infantry Division, as ordered, and made shallow penetrations of the American front, even if behind schedule. Among the German casualties of those first few days of vicious fighting was the shoemaker from Grösskotz, Grenadier Georg Jedelhauser. On 21 December, he was caught, ironically, by enemy mortar fire while serving in his own mortar squad of 4th Company, part of the 423rd Volksgrenadier Regiment. Severely wounded at Consdorf, near Echternach in Luxembourg, he died later the same day, aged nineteen. Later, his divisional commander, Generalleutnant Sensfuss, took the trouble to write a personal letter to his mother, offering his condolences and telling her that Georg’s unit was sending her a gift of 300 Reichsmarks. Perhaps he knew of the family’s poverty. Not every grenadier of his rank received such a send-off; a nice touch from a decent man in an inhumane war.³⁷

Möhring’s 276th Division had the misfortune to come up against the US 60th Armored Infantry Battalion, which could – and did – call on the considerable resources of the rest of Combat Command ‘A’ of 9th Armored Division. Schmidt’s 352nd likewise were evenly matched against half of Rudder’s 109th Regiment, but the latter could call on excellent fire and tank support. Heilmann desperately needed his armour across the Our and indeed that evening some of his StuGs made it across an old weir, but he would also start to benefit from the effect of Fifth Panzer Army operating on his right flank, to the north.

Seventh Army’s main problem, as Brandenberger and Gersdorff feared, was the time taken to assemble vehicle bridges, meaning all their Volksgrenadier attacks had taken place without armour and with minimal artillery support. The infantry had managed to cross via rubber boats or used ferries made from pontoons, but if Seventh could get their artillery and the StuGs from the 11th Assault Gun Brigade forward, then they could still make progress. Barton, Leonard and Cota, on the other hand, had been totally surprised and had desperate fights on their hands. They had held their ground but were being slowly eroded and needed reinforcement. At this stage, not all American reserves could head to the front, for a concern remained that the Germans might break through to Luxembourg City and GIs were held back in readiness to block any such attempt.

Nowhere was there panic among the forward troops, although plenty of eyewitnesses remember the service personnel further back who, never having seen a German except behind the barbed wire of a stockade, had begun to take fright and move westwards, their convoys frequently claiming road space from reinforcements heading the other way. Combat troops and service personnel have always maintained tense relationships: in the Wehrmacht they referred to each other as Etappenhengste (‘rear echelon stallions’) or Frontschweine – the ‘front swine’.

In considering Rudder’s dispositions and the reserves available to him, it is quite apparent that both the attacking divisions of Baptist Kneiss’s LXXXV Corps had the advantage of surprise, numbers and – initially – firepower. In depriving Seventh Army of suitable bridging units, adequate artillery or armour, Hitler and Jodl, as the planners of Herbstnebel, had thrown away their best opportunity to push through the weakest sector of the American lines.

The Battle of the Bulge is replete with tactical ‘what ifs’, which are invariably a distraction in considering the campaign, but it is worth observing at this stage that the Germans had a good chance of reaching the Meuse through the Ardennes, though not by following Hitler’s plan. The original scheme as enacted saw the main German effort, with all the panzers and majority of bridging units and artillery, weighted to the north. Given the slenderness of ‘Dutch’ Cota’s defences due to the front he had to cover, and the sparsity of Rudder’s positions in the south for the same reason, it is not unreasonable to surmise that, suitably reinforced, Brandenberger’s Seventh Army could have done much better against Cota’s Bloody Bucket Division than it managed.

With far more combat power shifted to Kneiss’s Corps, including an allocation of panzers and superior bridging and artillery units, the evening of 16 December might well have seen elements of the resourceful 5th Fallschirmjäger Division cascade out of Vianden and reach Wiltz, halfway to Bastogne, as planned. Driving the route today, along the beckoning network of good roads westwards, it is apparent that Heilmann, using captured transport, could then have easily reached Middleton’s almost undefended headquarters beyond by the following morning; for Bastogne lies only twelve miles west of Wiltz – as the Messerschmitt flies.