17
TO THE SHRILL Order of the Day penned by Rundstedt and Model, Freiherr von Manteuffel had attached his own carefully chosen words. They dwelt not on National Socialism, the Führer or Fatherland, but on the army, as befitted a representative of the old values: ‘Forward. March, march! In remembrance of our dead comrades, and therefore on their orders, and in remembrance of the tradition of our proud Wehrmacht!’1
Opposite Freiherr von Lüttwitz’s XLVII Panzer Corps the first signs of trouble pre-empted the mighty roar of the opening barrage early on 16 December by moments. As the seconds ticked towards 05.30 a.m., Company ‘K’ of Colonel Fuller’s 110th Infantry, based at Hosingen, reported that the entire German line was a series of ‘pinpoints of light’. Such words betrayed the inexperience of the observation post (OP), for veteran troops would have realised their ominous significance. The ‘pinpoints’ were shells and soon landing around the OP and every forward position, severing their field telephone links. These did less damage than the Germans hoped – the effect was more psychological than physical – and left the GIs able to call down artillery fire by radio. At the same time, the S-3 (Operations Officer) of the 14th Cavalry Group radioed 106th Division’s headquarters: ‘I am receiving heavy artillery fire on all, repeat, all my forward units, and my Command Post. No damage reports have come in yet and I will advise you as soon as info is available. What is going on? This is a hell of a lot of artillery for a Ghost Front.’ 2
Across the divide, Gefreiter Hans Hejny, an engineer in 2nd Panzer Pioneer Battalion, remembered the ‘sudden flash. Then followed ear-splitting explosions … As far as the eye could see there were flashes everywhere, heavy and heavier guns were fired. Everything was lit up as if by day … All of us jumped into our vehicles without averting our eyes from the horrible spectacle. Because of the fires the landscape seemed drenched in blood. We had to continue forward, fearful as we watched the awful bombardment over our heads that brought death and destruction. The road ended at a river, whereupon we left our trucks.’3
Even before the barrage, Oberst Heinz Kokott’s Volksgrenadiers in the very south of Manteuffel’s Fifth Army’s sector had started ferrying assault companies and heavy weapons across the Our from 03.00 am. As Manteuffel later observed, his men ‘infiltrated rapidly into the American front – like rain drops’.4 They knew any US outposts that might have spotted them were withdrawn – due to the manpower and terrain constraints – each day at last light. On 2 December Manteuffel had sought, and been granted, permission by Hitler personally to send in these companies. It aided him considerably and, in retrospect, there was no good reason why the Sixth and Seventh Armies should not have adopted the same tactics, except that in the pre-battle wrangles with Hitler and Jodl, Dietrich and Brandenberger were less vociferous than Manteuffel. Lüttwitz had left Kokott in no doubt as to the need for speed and momentum, and the commander of the 26th Volksgrenadiers was aware the clock was ticking if he was to secure the ridgeline as far as the River Clerf, and seize at least Clervaux by nightfall. This in turn meant the villages garrisoned by Fuller’s companies along the high ground would have to be bypassed or captured quickly.
Thick fog, the early start and searchlights aided Kokott, and it wasn’t until 09.00 a.m. that Fuller was able to warn Major-General ‘Dutch’ Cota that the Germans had crossed the river in force and were attacking the Skyline Drive. Despite Kokott’s orders to press on and avoid costly fights with the US-garrisoned villages, his Volksgrenadiers repeatedly blundered into the small settlements, and the day witnessed numerous German attempts to subdue the various American companies. All failed due to US field artillery firing 105mm shells with very short fuses, which meant they detonated almost immediately and decimated the attackers. Companies ‘I’, ‘K’ and ‘L’, in villages of Weiler, Holzthum and Hosingen respectively, atop the ridge, held out using mortars and machine guns to break up the seemingly endless waves of Volksgrenadiers.
Surrounded at Weiler, a section of 81mm mortarmen and an anti-tank platoon equipped with 57mm guns repelled rows of attacking Germans, before picking up their rifles to continue the fight when their heavier ammunition was expended. There were no explicit orders to hold on, but Fuller had trained his regiment well enough in the short time available for them to understand the importance of holding their ground. Some of Fuller’s men had survived the Hürtgen fighting, which, as we’ve seen, had severely taxed the Bloody Bucket’s leaders. The fact that they hung on, rather than disintegrating during these opening moments of the 16 December attack, can be attributed to their earlier blooding in the Hürtgen and strong leadership. However, by 6.00 p.m. some of the 26th Volksgrenadier’s lighter vehicles were crossing a newly completed bridge at Gemünd, and shortly afterwards Company ‘I’ in Weiler reported being under attack by vehicles with multiple 20mm guns and asked for American artillery fire on their own positions; the vehicles were from Kokott’s 26th VolksFlak Battalion, which finally persuaded the defenders to abandon Weiler, divide into two groups and head west, trickling cross-country. They had done the best they could.
Kokott later admitted to US Army historians that he had not expected the manner in which ‘the remnants of the beaten units of the 28th did not give up the battle. They stayed put and continued to block the road. Fighting a delaying battle … individual groups time and time again confronted our assault detachments from dominating heights, defiles, on both sides of gullies, on forest paths.’ The whole Herbstnebel plan, Kokott realised, had been predicated on a swift advance. There was no alternative plan if the Americans resisted as strongly as they in fact did. ‘It became evident,’ he went on, ‘already during the morning hours [of 16 December] that the enemy, after the initial shock and surprise, was beginning to get hold of himself and was making efforts to delay and stop the German assault with all available means.’ 5 What Kokott could not have known was that this resistance was spontaneous, for there was no way of coordinating this kind of response across the front immediately.
At about 4.00 p.m., just before dark, as a pair of sixty-ton bridges capable of bearing the armour of Panzer Lehr had been completed by his engineers at Gemünd, Manteuffel urged his tanks and assault guns across to give the coup de grâce to those determined GIs still holding out in the villages against Kokott’s grenadiers. They were aided again by more artificial moonlight created by the Flak’s searchlights.6 The bridging had taken far longer than planned because the site chosen was just before the confluence of two rivers, the Irsen and the Our, and two successive structures were needed, something good reconnaissance (forbidden by Hitler) should have revealed. With some vehicles of the Lehr’s 130th Panzer Regiment crossing in the late evening, much of the later fighting swirled around Company ‘K’ in Hosingen, whose continued defence caused traffic jams at the exit from the Gemünd bridges. Yet to defeat the villages, especially at Hosingen, whose successful defence was delaying the panzers, the Volksgrenadiers needed armoured support. It was a classic catch-22 situation. By the end of the day, the 26th Volksgrenadier Division had crossed the Our by ferry and boat, were working their way through the ridgeline, but had yet to descend the high ground and reach or control the Clerf river crossings. Very few of the Lehr’s vehicles were across before dark – only part of the Reconnaissance Battalion, known as Kampfgruppe von Fallois.
Back in Wiltz, to where the Bloody Bucket Division’s headquarters had first moved on 19 November, all wire communications forwards and to the rear had been severed. Wholly reliant on radio networks, ‘Dutch’ Cota was beginning to understand this was no local attack and that Troy Middleton, beset with troubles everywhere, had no reserves to offer him. Consequently, Cota dispersed the 707th Tank Battalion, permanently attached to him, sending two tank companies to Hurley Fuller, one to James Rudder and the last to Gustin Nelson’s 112th Infantry covering the north.
The 707th were old friends, having trained in England and landed in Normandy on 1 September, then accompanied the division into the Hürtgen campaign, taking their share of casualties. Commanding one of their Sherman tanks was Staff Sergeant Paul F. Jenkins of Platteville, Wisconsin, whom we met in Luxembourg. In the Hürtgen his tank had a hole a foot wide punched in the turret by an anti-tank round, fortunately without casualties, which destroyed his turret-mounted 0.50-inch calibre machine gun, but they’d carried on. Jenkins had learned to carry ‘maybe twenty-five cases of C-rations on the back of our tank. We carried them because you’d always run into some infantry men that hadn’t eaten for a couple days, and we could feed them. We’d go through the rations and pick out the hash. If they got meat in it then we could trade to the civilians for fresh potatoes, tomatoes, anything.’7
When they arrived in the sector in October, key personnel from the 707th had been sent over to the veteran 70th Tank Battalion, attached to the 4th Ivy Division, to benefit from the latter’s collective experience, for the 70th had been in Europe since 6 June. Like their colleagues, the 707th were rebuilding when the German attack came in. Jenkins’ most hair-raising day was 16 December, when he was summoned to defend one of Fuller’s villages. ‘They wanted two tanks. They said there’s a patrol of eighty men coming, and they want two tanks to go down and check it out. I went with my platoon leader; we went up the hill [from the Clerf river] and could hear the gunfire to our right. The number soon grew from eighty Germans to eight hundred, and I think before the day was over, it was over eight thousand. So we went back down and got near the company, and bivouacked with them for the night. The next morning, we found out we had slept amongst some Germans.’ 8
We have seen how German ‘friendly fire’ had killed a divisional commander further south; something similar occurred in this sector on the 16th. Just like Jenkins’ mission, in the early afternoon a platoon of the 707th’s Shermans had been sent to remove some of Kokott’s Volksgrenadiersknown to be occupying the route between Holzthum and Consthum, in the area of Fuller’s Companies ‘I’ and ‘L’. On being reassured that there were no friendly troops in the vicinity, the tankers immediately engaged and destroyed one of Company ‘I’s anti-tank guns. There was then a delay while both sides identified themselves to the other’s satisfaction before the tanks rolled on. Wilfrid R. Riley of the 188th Combat Engineer Battalion had a similar encounter, wearing his greatcoat. Deploying with his platoon one night, a voice in the dark suddenly commanded ‘the soldier wearing the long coat to move forward’. Riley did as he was instructed, then ordered to halt again. Passwords, questions and answers about American culture flew back and forth, before he was motioned forward and told by a tank crewman ‘Soldier, if I was in your shoes I would get rid of that long coat … because in it you sure as hell look like a German.’9 Such is the currency of war, and the majority of such encounters often go unrecorded, but in the confusion of the first week of the Bulge it is estimated that between 5 and 15 per cent of casualties on both sides may have been due to such instances.10
To Fuller’s exasperation, though correctly, Cota refused to commit his final reserve, the infantry battalion he had withdrawn from Fuller’s 110th Regiment earlier. Throughout the day the 707th Tank Battalion managed to fend off the Germans for light losses, dispersed into companies and platoons, as most of their opponents were infantry regiments of Panzer- or Volksgrenadiers, the feared German armour still waiting to cross the Our once the engineers had performed their magic at the bridging sites.11
On Fuller’s left flank in the north, Lauchert’s 2nd Panzer Division had enormous problems at Dasburg, a frontier hamlet with a customs post and integrated into the Siegfried Line. In September, retreating German engineers had sensibly demolished the bridge over the Our at this point, the east bank being protected by a series of obstacles, like gates, constructed in 1939–40. They had been left in place, for the Germans possessed an unlocking device which enabled the obstacles simply to be moved out of the way. The 2nd Panzer Division’s plans were predicated on being able to swing these impediments aside, but at the last moment an embarrassed officer admitted the unlocking key could not be found. The alternative was to spend precious hours waiting for Major Georg Loo’s 600th Bridging Battalion to blow the obstacles, which – for reasons of surprise – couldn’t happen until after the preliminary bombardment. This is what eventually transpired, after which the 600th Engineers laboured hard to construct a sixty-ton timber trestle bridge capable of bearing the armour of 2nd Panzer (including their forty-five-ton Panthers).
While this was taking place, Gefreiter Hejny of 2nd Panzer’s own divisional engineer battalion recalled, ‘We engineers had to build a ferry very quickly so the most important vehicles could cross the Our, whilst the blown-up bridge was being replaced. We made this using flotation bags and also constructed a stone pier on the bank for the first ambulances.’ Hejny’s ferry conveyed wheeled vehicles from 2nd Panzer’s Reconnaissance Battalion first, with troops from 304th Panzergrenadier Regiment. Next door, the main bridge was completed by 4.00 p.m., just before last light; however, after the first few panzers had rolled across, the eleventh tank misjudged his approach and slipped through a span, crashing into the river below and drowning the driver: repairs to the bridge entailed a further three-hour delay.12 Nevertheless, the first assault troops had much earlier crossed by rubber boats, and reached Company ‘B’s position in Marnach as early as 08.00 a.m., halfway to Clervaux. Dasburg, apart from a new bridge built on the site of the old, has hardly changed from 1944 and, given the narrowness of the twisting approach road, it is easy to see why the engineers had such a hard job and how a nervous young panzer driver lost his life and cost his division three hours, when every minute counted.
Some German troops heeded Manteuffel’s demand for speed, and rushed beyond Marnach towards Clervaux, though others set to, in an attempt to destroy Marnach’s hard-pressed garrison, who fought on. After years of black news, in the initial moments of Herbstnebel the attackers were jubilant, as Gefreiter Friedrich Bertenrath, a signaller with the 2nd Panzer Division, recalled. ‘We had begun to act like a beaten army. Now, moving forward, the men were extremely happy and filled with enthusiasm. Everywhere there were signs of renewed hope.’13 Hitler also thought with the brain of the Gefreiter he had once been. He understood that what his Wehrmacht needed was a taste of victory again – and he was right; the value to Germany’s fighting prowess by the lifting of spirits was incalculable. All armies prefer to be on the offensive, where they retain the initiative and dictate the course of events, than the defensive, where they do not.
Yet even the Wehrmacht’s corporals could see the writing on the wall, for Bertenrath perversely concluded, ‘I never thought this attack would change the tide of the war. But it was a moment to enjoy.’14
After dark, once their bridge at Dasburg was finished, tanks from 2nd Panzer entered the fight at Marnach, but could not overcome the little town that night. To say that this left Lüttwitz and Manteuffel annoyed is an understatement. A series of delays – the missing key to the obstacle, then the accident at Dasburg, the slow process of bridging, determined resistance of the American defenders and tendency of their Volksgrenadiers to get sucked into fire-fights – all contributed to shaving a day off their aspirations to reach at least the Clerf river and Clervaux, if not Bastogne.
Billeted in the luxury Villa Prüm on Clervaux’s rue Brooch was Sergeant Frank A. LoVuolo, with Battery ‘B’ of the 107th Field Artillery, who would later play professional football with the New York Giants. He remembered being on guard duty when the German artillery barrage began. ‘I could hear shell fragments strike the pavement and nearby buildings and was forced to race for the protection of the villa,’ he recalled. ‘Crawling and running, I finally reached the front door.’ He slammed it shut behind him. ‘No one knew at that time what all the German activity really meant. We were completely out of communication with everyone, and stayed put until late morning. At that point in time we heard the clanging and creaking sound of armor coming down the Wiltz road and thought the worst.’ The tanks were friendly Shermans and their commander entered LoVuolo’s villa and told his group that the Germans had broken through their lines in several places. ‘He advised us to get out of Clervaux as quickly and as best we could and to avoid encirclement. Those were the last semblance of orders I was to receive until I rejoined my unit at Christmas. Without hesitation and without packing any of our belongings everyone escaped onto the hillside behind, becoming part of an ever-growing stream of Americans moving west. There was mass confusion and I was a part of it,’ admitted LoVuolo.15
Meanwhile, in Bastogne General Middleton had recognised the magnitude of the attack he was facing with virtually no reserves, the result of Bradley’s gamble. He had no option but to order VIII Corps to ‘stand fast’ until their positions were ‘completely untenable’, then withdraw back to a further specified line. Colonel Fuller at his CP, in Clervaux’s Hôtel Claravallis, had much better awareness of the situation. Radio reports were flooding in of the German attacks, and he knew Clervaux was not yet in danger. Like Middleton, his main worry was a lack of fresh troops to stem the German tide, and GIs, like LoVuolo and his friends, who had been prematurely ordered to withdraw. However, by the end of the first day Fuller was surprised to discover most of his companies of the 110th Infantry were still in position.
Fuller’s main concern was Marnach, through which ran the only good, hard-surface road in the region westwards, via Clervaux, straight into Bastogne. Clearly the Germans wanted to make for Bastogne and this would become their main effort on 17 December. General Cota recognised this too. Somewhat buoyed by Colonel Rudder’s positive assessments from the 109th Infantry’s sector, at 9.00 p.m. Cota returned Fuller’s third rifle battalion back to the 110th Infantry, minus a company to defend Wiltz. With this unit, and as many tanks in the area as he could muster, Fuller hoped to counter-attack Marnach on the morrow. He had no way of knowing he would run slap-bang into Lauchert’s 2nd Panzer Division intent on doing the same.
Typical of many GIs cast adrift in those first few days, Sergeant Frank LoVuolo had now begun to make his way cross-country in search of his unit. As he recalled, ‘This began an eternity of foraging for food, sleeping in barns, sprinting across open fields, and hiding in deep woods. I decided that as long as I was on my own and under no direct orders, I would strive for three objectives: (1), stay alive; (2), avoid capture and (3), find my artillery unit – in that order. I succeeded in all three.’16
North of Fuller and his troubles lay Cota’s third regiment, forty-five- year-old Colonel Gustin M. Nelson’s 112th Infantry; like the others it was at full strength, though many of the men were post-Hürtgen replacements. Nelson, who described himself as a ‘regular army man with no home town’, was a West Pointer who graduated in 1921. His father was a senior journalist with the New York Sun, which ensured his son, who at one stage led his men in combat waving a malacca cane, always had a good write-up in its pages.17 His sector, a six-mile stretch of the Our, was also where the Belgian, Luxembourg and German frontiers met. Then, as now, there were few houses or settlements in the area to use for shelter and pine forests made observation difficult. The ground was altogether more challenging and undulating than that which Rudder or Fuller were defending, with fewer creature comforts. It was dominated by heights on the German side, with numerous small draws. It contained no major roads, and most routes were effectively unpaved, muddy logging trails.
Nelson’s men had merely a series of squad and platoon posts, incorporating where possible captured Siegfried Line pillboxes on the eastern bank of the Our, though these were mainly built for shelter, not to fight from. As the structures faced the wrong way, companies had to rely on foxholes and barbed wire for protection and defence, as Richard S. Shoemaker remembered. He had grown up in rural Michigan and was drafted in 1942; by 1944 he was a veteran of Company ‘E’ who had fought through Normandy and the Hürtgen. Though still a PFC, the twenty-four-year-old was acting as squad sergeant, leading patrols. As the weather deteriorated in the Ardennes he remembered the hunt for food in particular: ‘One day we found a barn to get out of the weather. We used the wax boxes from our K-rations to start a fire and I supplied the food. Outside I saw a chicken and wanted to get it for dinner. I picked up a frozen apple and hurled it at the chicken breaking its legs. I was lucky to hit it and ran over and picked it up and we had a great dinner. I cleaned it and we put it in an old pot we found in the barn. I put some bouillon cubes in the water and boiled the chicken. That was a good meal.’18
He and the rest the 112th were, of course, unaware of the impending attack by the entire muscle of Krüger’s LVIII Panzer Corps, comprising Siegfried von Waldenburg’s 116th Panzer Division (the Greyhounds), and the 560th Volksgrenadiers, under temporary command of Oberst Rudolf Langhäuser, deputising for his hospitalised boss. Both the German formations were for different reasons grossly under-strength. Nevertheless, elements of two Wehrmacht divisions were about to attack three American battalions under conditions of total surprise. Krüger had realised astutely that substantial numbers of Nelson’s regiment, including an entire field artillery battalion, occupied the Our’s east bank and therefore used intact bridges to negotiate the river and resupply the forward units. Rather than build his own structures, Krüger intended to capture at least four of his opponents’. To the north 116th Panzer would try and seize US bridges at Lützkampen, while barely a mile away the 560th Volksgrenadiers were assigned two bridges either side of the tiny village of Ouren.
Among these Volksgrenadiers was the young Kanonier named Josef Reusch, who had grown up in this frontier neighbourhood. He recalled that his Panzerjäger (anti-tank) battery ‘consisted of 108 men and had six 75mm PAK-42 guns that were pulled by the Raupenschlepper Ost (RSO) which had an Opel engine’. This was essentially a truck on caterpillar trucks designed for Russia, and an indication of the division’s original destination, but enormously handy in the muddy conditions of the wintry Eifel. However, and illustrative of the transport variation within 560th’s sub-units, he went on, ‘Each gun had a crew of six men and the remaining material and supplies were pulled by horse-drawn wagons’. Pausing in the villages Reusch, then merely seventeen, remembered resting while ‘the Pferdeführer (horse wagon drivers) gathered food in the first few houses. An old lady recognised me because of my dialect and then cursed at me. I felt guilty because I belonged to the robber bands, but what were the wagon drivers to do? The animals would not go further if they did not eat!’19
With Nelson and Headquarters Company of the 112th Regiment, spread through a few buildings in Ouren, was PFC Earl T. Chamness, already a veteran of the Hürtgen by the time he moved to the Ardennes. He couldn’t help contrasting the quiet of the area with the activity he had known in the ‘Green Hell’ of the Hürtgen a few weeks before. ‘It was quiet now, only occasional artillery and mortar fire disturbed the prevailing peace. Line upon line of (previously humming) pill boxes now seemed lifeless,’ he recalled. At 05.30 a.m. on 16 December the German attack found him ‘lying on a kitchen floor by my telephone switchboard. Traffic had slowed so we were trying to get some shut-eye. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. Mortars coming in, shells going over head, and many guns firing all over the place. The switchboard rang, I answered, but recognised it was not an American speaking. Heinie had captured one of my phones!’20
Clarence Blakeslee, with Company ‘M’ of the 112th, remembered hearing German voices in the pre-dawn darkness. One was calling out for his leader, Karl. ‘I found our sentry and used his phone to call the CP … The lieutenant said there would be “hell to pay” if I was wrong and he alerted the company. I said it would be much worse if I am right and you don’t. He alerted everybody. Someone from Company “K” heard them and emptied his carbine at them. Suddenly they came running toward me.’ 21 The barrage had fixed many of Nelson’s men and daylight showed the attacking 1130th Volksgrenadier Regiment already beyond and behind many of the forward platoons, using the wooded areas to maximum advantage. At Sevenig, they overran a platoon of Nelson’s Company ‘L’ at breakfast, reaching one of their objectives, a stone bridge south of Ouren. US artillery fire managed to blunt much of this assault, so the German troops at the bridge really amounted to the tip of a damaged arrow; by evening a battalion counter-attack had pushed the grenadiers – according to one prisoner, all ex-Luftwaffe personnel with the 560th VolksgrenadierDivision – back and restored the situation.
Krüger’s main effort was Waldenburg’s attack; the latter threw his two Panzergrenadier regiments forward as the bombardment started and by 06.30 a.m. Nelson was receiving reports of his forward battalions in this sector under assault from Germans who had filtered between his companies on the line. At this stage a captured map revealed how the Panzergrenadiers had managed to plot all the American machine-gun positions through careful observation.
After the barrage, Charlie Haug of Company ‘B’ at Lützkampen remembered there was complete silence from 07.00 to 07.30 a.m. and a few minutes later he and his friends acting as company messengers ‘experienced what was perhaps the biggest hair-raising scare of our entire army career. Out of the darkness came the awfullest screaming and yelling you would ever want to hear. The Germans were coming! They were screaming like a bunch of wild Indians. They were less than a hundred yards in front of us. How they ever got so close without us hearing them, we’ll never know.’22 PFC Richard S. Shoemaker in Company ‘E’ had earned himself a furlough in Paris; he had just returned when the attack came in. ‘I did not even have my rifle yet. We were overwhelmed and we had to run. Some men just gave up and sat there. I said “come on guys get moving”. I don’t know what the Germans did to them.’ 23
Sergeant Lamoine ‘Frank’ Olsen, commanding a platoon in the 112th that morning, was likewise overtaken by the initial confusion. The Union City, New Jersey, inhabitant had joined the Pennsylvania National Guard in 1941 and three and a half years later found himself forward of most of the Keystone Division, on the east side of the Our. He was checking his unit’s positions when the German attack erupted, and was swiftly surrounded as shooting broke out. ‘The Germans couldn’t distinguish me from their own in the dark so I removed my helmet and tucked it under my arm like a football and ran through them as fast as I could.’ Olsen barged into several Germans who fell to the ground as he ran at them in the dark, ‘being a prudent man, I kept my mouth shut, got up and continued on my way’. He recalled, as he arrived at the stone farmhouse which housed his platoon command post, that ‘all hell was breaking loose’ with his men and the Germans were trading shots all around the vicinity. Soon he received a radio message from his company commander to delay their opponents as long as they could. ‘We had more men than windows and doors to shoot out, so some crawled up to the attic and poked holes in the straw roof to fire out of.’ They held out throughout the day.24
Many of Waldenburg’s Panzergrenadiers were young and new to war. Company ‘B’ around Lützkampen claimed around 135 killed. ‘The remaining thirty or forty Germans decided to call it quits,’ remembered Charlie Haug with Company ‘B’. ‘The oldest was perhaps about eighteen, and they went down to about fourteen years old. This was part of what we had been fighting all morning … As soon as we had finished searching the Krauts, they started to ask us questions. The main one seemed to be, “Will we be sent to New York?’’’25
Just before the daylight began to fade, Waldenburg’s panzers had appeared on a knoll overlooking Lützkampen, but could not shift the GIs in the vicinity, who replied with accurate defensive artillery fire. Haug watched through his field glasses, seeing ‘hundreds of German tanks, trucks and half-tracks coming down the winding roads’, one of which had a flame-thrower. ‘It stopped about fifty feet from a foxhole, and as the two kids sat there helplessly, a gigantic stream of roaring fire shot in on them. Their worries were over. They had been burned to a crisp,’ Haug recalled. Many men around him ‘jumped up from their holes and ran back over the hill’, seeking safety in the dense woods behind his position; others, like Haug, wanted to run, but couldn’t. Many stood their ground, shaking uncontrollably, crying or praying for deliverance. It came unexpectedly as US anti-tank guns opened up on the fire-breathing dragons. ‘From a hillside about a quarter-mile to our left, we heard a series of sharp cracks … and we could see the streaks of fire coming from the hillside towards the tanks. The first few shells missed, but the third made a direct hit on the first tank, and it burst into flames. The streaks of fire kept coming from the hillside, and soon the second and third tanks were also in flames. Did we ever have fireworks. Shells exploding in every direction. It was only a matter of seconds and the fourth and fifth tanks were also hit. Their tracks were knocked off and they couldn’t move.’ 26
Milton J. Schober, serving with Company ‘F’ of the 424th Regiment, part of the Golden Lions Division, to the north of the inter-unit boundary, also witnessed this exchange and could remember looking south to ‘see the action of German troops moving against Company ‘B’, 112th Regiment, at the outskirts of Lützkampen and we noticed German artillery landing in the farm fields in front of us, but nothing was landing on us at the time. In the late afternoon of the sixteenth, our company jeep came bouncing down a logging road to bring hot chow to first platoon men. While waiting to be served, there was a loud explosion that I took to be incoming artillery but then realized that 25–35 feet away was a three-inch anti-tank gun of Company ‘B’, 820th Tank Destroyer Battalion, which was firing toward Lützkampen – a column of German tanks was the target, and what excitement there was in watching those fiery orange balls streaking to and exploding the tanks. Some say there were six tanks, others say five tanks and a truck, but whatever, they all burned furiously. While all of this was going on, one of the cooks dishing out the food said, “Hurry up, you guys – we’ve got to get out of here”. He got no sympathy from us!’27
General Krüger was acutely aware of the lack of momentum and time ticking away, and ordered the panzers to sideslip down the river line, using a handy track on the German bank. Despite the 560th Volksgrenadiers seizing a destroyed bridge south of Ouren at midday which they reckoned repairable, Krüger’s corps engineers could not guarantee a tank-bearing structure constructed on that site for at least twenty-four hours. At least one panzer tried to cross, for Kanonier Reusch remembered, ‘The first situation we encountered was a tank that was too heavy for a bridge and it lay in the Our.’28 The hunt for a crossing site resumed while the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 116th Panzer Division was despatched to cross over 2nd Panzer’s bridge at Dasburg, searching for a suitable bridge as they moved down along the east bank of the Our.
Meanwhile, for PFC Chamness and Colonel Nelson’s Headquarters Company, the situation soon degenerated into confusion as he remembered, ‘Our head sergeant shouted, “Close up board, let’s get out of here!” So we put everything in a jeep and trailer and took off across the snow covered fields. I was in a jeep and we came upon a captured American ammunition convoy. Jerry had just stopped the convoy, so our driver took us across some more snow covered fields till we got out. Later we found our lines, were put in covered trucks and passed through Spa, a resort town. We finally came to Bastogne, and since it was getting late, we were told to bed down in a barn. We were so tired we went right to sleep in the hay.’29
The day ended with the 112th Infantry still in its positions east of the Our, less damaged than its southern neighbours but defending a sector alive with German tanks, and possessing none of their own. Haug’s Company ‘B’ had started the day with about 190 men, and by 9.00 p.m. was down to ‘one lieutenant and seventeen enlisted men’, though the majority of these were lost rather than killed or wounded, a story that echoed throughout 112th Infantry. Krüger, on the other hand, was livid. Hardly any vehicles, let alone a formation of panzers, had crossed the Our. The various German attacks against the front of the US 28th Division nevertheless succeeded in splitting the 112th Infantry apart from the rest of Cota’s division. As communications gradually broke down over the next few days between the 112th and Cota, his northern regimental commander, Nelson, had to act very much on his own, and would be eventually pushed back north-westwards to St Vith, where he found himself swept up in the array of units defending this crucial route centre. His defence on 16 December exposed the Volksgrenadiers’ inexperience and lack of training, and the fault lay entirely at Hitler’s feet for committing such an inadequate unit to a major task. In their first day of battle the half-strength 560th Volksgrenadiers had suffered nearly 1,000 casualties.
This need not have been so, for many of Nelson’s troops were inexperienced replacements too; but they had been better trained and integrated with veterans in the short time available. Several historians and military analysts have argued that all three of Cota’s regiments ‘collapsed’ to varying degrees in the Hürtgen fighting, which is why each regimental commander in the Bulge – Rudder, Fuller and Nelson – was relatively new in post.30 It was a wise move, for with good training and fresh leadership, despite the intense shelling and psychological shock of panzers grinding about, none of Nelson’s men folded. Middleton helped by designating a clear defensive line to hold (the Skyline Drive), which helped orientate the small groups of defenders. But this was just the beginning.
