25
FOLLOWING PATTON’S CONFERENCE with Eisenhower and the other commanders at Verdun, he had phoned his code word back to his HQ in Nancy which alerted his staff that General Manton S. Eddy’s XII Corps was to disengage at once and move its and Third Army’s forward HQs into Luxembourg City. Major-General Willard S. Paul’s 26th Infantry Division had been resting in Metz when it was rushed to the southern fringes of the Bulge on 20 December. Known as the ‘Yankee Division’, it had been raised from the Massachusetts Army National Guard and was formerly based in Boston. They had a long journey from Metz, standing up in open trucks and trailers, via Longwy and Arlon, Staff Sergeant Bruce E. Egger of Company ‘G’, 328th Infantry, remembering some areas ‘seemed to be untouched by the war, with stores bedecked with decorations and Christmas trees’. His buddy, Lieutenant Lee Otts, of the same company, observed, ‘Whenever we slowed up in a small town we would barter with the civilians for bread and wine’.1
At the same moment, General Eddy (and thus Patton) took over Barton’s 4th Infantry Division, the 70th Tank Battalion, 10th Armored Division (including CCB which had gone to Bastogne), CCA of the 9th Armored Division (which included the much-battered 60th Armored Infantry Battalion), Rudder’s 109th Infantry Regiment, and other scattered units of the 28th Bloody Bucket Infantry Division. Meanwhile, the weather conditions deteriorated; a howling blizzard blew straight into the faces of tank commanders riding in the exposed turrets of their tall Shermans. They wrapped themselves in scarves and overcoats and downed mittens and goggles as they navigated their lumbering steeds over the icy cobbles of empty villages.
Ever alert for security laspses, German signals intelligence monitored a whole series of lazy messages emanating from American headquarters which indicated the movement of reinforcements in large numbers towards the Bulge. The first of these materialised on 21 December in the form of two fresh US infantry divisions, the 5th and the 80th, tasked to contain the southern edge of the German Bulge and prevent any further incursions to the west or south. In fact, the Germans were already spent, as we have seen and, forewarned of American reinforcements, Beyer’s LXXX Corps (with the 212th and 276th Volksgrenadier Divisions) had actually drawn back slightly into better defensive positions, like a boxer anticipating an attack from his opponent. The 276th tried a final counter-attack in the late afternoon of 21 December, preceded by three 75mm Sturmgeschütz (StuG) assault guns.
The three StuGs were put out of action, but American intelligence officers became very concerned when they found one StuG bore SS markings – for no units of the Waffen-SS were known to be in the southern sector of the Bulge; the reason for this may have been a last-minute substitution at a depot, or replacement in a workshop, but the instance remains a minor puzzle to this day. ‘Numerous Germans who surrendered after the 21 December attack had American jackets and equipment, many of them even wore the emblem of our division on their coats,’ observed Lieutenant-Colonel Ruhlen. ‘Those who were found with pieces of American uniforms had to remove them; this also applied to shoes. Thus they marched shivering toward the prison camp.’ Regarded possibly as prisoner abuse in modern times – a bootless prisoner could die in such sub-zero temperatures – December 1944 was a different era. ‘A certain ruthlessness came over us after we had found numerous dead American soldiers with head wounds or ripped-open bodies, with pieces of German equipment that had been stuck into them [whether ante-mortem torture or post-mortem abuse, Ruhlen didn’t state]. In this area the Germans were making short work of American prisoners who were caught with German materials,’ Ruhlen remembered of the tit-for-tat brutality that started to reign through the Ardennes.2
The opening salvoes of Patton’s counter-attack against the southern shoulder came on the morning of 24 December – Christmas Eve – which dawned clear and cold, at 20 degrees Fahrenheit below, a bane to the infantrymen but a boon to gunners and fighter pilots who used the opportunity to drop fragmentation and napalm bombs at bridging points along the rivers, with strafing and bombing runs on targets of opportunity. Able to put only 300 bombers into the air on 19 and 23 December, the US Eighth Air Force ordered a maximum effort on this clearest of days since the offensive began, to bomb logistics dumps and bridges in support of the US Army. Among the 2,046 bombers and 853 fighters which took to the skies in the largest single operation mounted by the Eighth were the four-engined B-24 Liberators of the USAAF’s 20th Bombardment Wing, flying out of Tibenham airbase, Norfolk, in eastern England.
Demonstrating his much-admired leadership qualities, the Wing’s executive officer, with over twenty combat missions under his belt, would fly occasional uncredited sorties to keep his hand in. Airmen and GIs alike were surprised to find the modest, mild-mannered lieutenant-colonel was none other than James Stewart, whom they remembered starring with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, released in 1940, for which he had received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Stewart’s flying was no cakewalk; the commander of the 4th Bombardment Wing on 24 December, Brigadier-General Frederick W. Castle, was shot down in his B-17 and killed.3 Stewart had traded his Hollywood career to fight in the forces and would retire eventually as a major-general. He would pick up his film career after the war, and another Best Actor nomination, with perhaps his best-known performance (ironically of a small-town banker unable to serve in the war) in It’s a Wonderful Life, in 1946.
Tank driver Robert McEvoy, who had witnessed the fight in Consdorf days earlier, remembered ‘Wall-to-wall American bombers and cargo planes. They dropped us supplies by parachute – red ones, green, yellow, white. Man, they were a welcome sight.’4 The Allies colour-coded their silk canopies so ground troops could tell what was in a parachute container before it even hit the ground. Red meant weapons and ammunition; yellow was for medical supplies; blue signified containers of rations; white indicated miscellaneous equipment, and green (khaki) was reserved for personnel, such as medics, signallers and other specialists who jumped in to supplement beleaguered garrisons where necessary.
Among the new arrivals was Major-General S. Leroy Irwin’s US 5th Division, whose badge was a red diamond. No strangers to combat, they had landed on Utah Beach during 9 July, and liberated Verdun with three tanks of the 7th Armored Division on 31 August. They had also been rushed up from Metz, which they had taken on 22 November. In support of their 24 December counter-attack, 5th Division’s own artillery fired 5,813 rounds, adding to the corps artillery’s effort amounting to 21,173 shells. Out of the line, Ruhlen reported that his own battalion had used over 26,000 rounds by Christmas Day: ‘from 16 to 23 December, we had theoretically fired an average of one round every forty seconds. The highest shot cadence was achieved on 21 and 22 December. On each of these days we fired approximately 7,100 rounds. Day and night the ammunition vehicles of our Service Battery supplied the guns with urgently needed shells. The loaders and drivers ate while they drove; we ourselves, according to army orders, had absolute priority for ammunition since we were known to be the only artillery unit in this threatened sector for days.’5
At this stage, the 26th Division had decided to issue gas masks, solely, remembered Staff Sergeant Bruce Egger, ‘because the Germans dressed in American uniforms who had infiltrated our lines had not captured any’. With the clear skies, the weather was depressingly cold too. Egger remembered a buddy who had left his boots outside his foxhole one night found them so frozen solid the next morning as to be unwearable.6 Christmas Eve saw limited American gains, with the six attacking US battalions losing about two hundred casualties, thanks to the well-dug-in Volksgrenadiers and their effective counter-battery fire. The main achievement was that Barton’s 4th Ivy Infantry Division had been relieved; some of them – including Colonel Chance’s 12th Infantry – had been in combat for eight continuous days, fighting in sub-zero temperatures. Among those relieved on Christmas Eve was tanker Ed Gossler in Dickweiler, who had survived on K-ration crackers, honey from a beehive and a couple of pigs, caught, butchered and fried. The arrival of Irwin’s 5th Infantry Division gave him ‘the best Christmas I ever had’.7
Christmas Day saw Lieutenant Otts’ platoon of the 75th Division pinned down by machine-gun fire attacking Eschdorf, ‘stretched out prone in a frozen ditch, where we remained for 6½ hours. Every few minutes the bullets came zinging down the road and across the flat, snow-covered fields on both sides of us, so we were afraid to stand up. I made several trips up and down the length of my platoon on my stomach, trying to keep the men awake. As long as we kicked our feet and flexed our hands and fingers, I knew we wouldn’t freeze.’ Later, his men found comfort in the warmth of an old barn. Sitting on a log, ‘I turned on my flashlight and discovered it was a dead German, frozen stiff with his mouth open and his eyes rolled back.’8 Staff Sergeant Eggers would write home on 27 December, ‘There was no Christmas for me this year; it will have to be postponed for another year or two. I just couldn’t get that Christmas spirit, and who could when there is anything but peace and goodwill toward fellow men over here.’ Perhaps his friend in the same company, Lieutenant Otts, was practising self-censorship when he wrote two days later, ‘If it hadn’t been for the fighting, it would have been one of the most beautiful Christmases I had ever spent. I had never seen such a white Christmas nor such beautiful country. The rolling hills, the snow-covered fields and mountains, and the tall, majestic pines and firs really made it a Christmas I’ll never forget in spite of the fighting.’ In his ‘V’-mail letters home, there was no way that a GI could really convey the real mood and horrors of the front, and most never attempted to.9
In the immediate aftermath of battle, it is traditional for commanders to write and thank their colleagues – especially subordinates – for the military support they received which contributed to success. Such letters are designed to be read out to soldiers of the recipient unit, or repeated in their daily Orders. Copies are also held by the receiving Commanding Officer and influence his prospects of promotion. Thus, with appropriate hyperbole, on 26 December, Colonel Chance wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Davidson of the 70th Tank Battalion that ‘the highest praise is deserved by you and other officers and enlisted men of the 70th Tank Battalion for the most outstanding tank support that this infantry regiment has ever witnessed’.10
The US counter-offensive was sustained over three days, by which time the west bank of the Sûre had been reached at several points, and Beyer’s corps were hastening to back-track eastwards across the river and regain the protection of the Siegfried Line. By the end of their December Ardennes counter-attack, Irwin’s 5th Division ‘Red Diamonds’, whom the Germans came to know as die Roten Teufel (the ‘Red Devils’), had recaptured great quantities of abandoned American equipment, acquired 830 prisoners and wiped out the enemy threat to the southern flank of the salient. However, they had also sustained 945 combat losses and 620 non-battle casualties – a ratio repeated throughout the Bulge, where the low temperatures, endless snowdrifts and countless icy streams contributed to all manner of sicknesses, from respiratory problems, to frostbite and trench foot.11
However, US commanders among Patton’s counter-attacking divisions began to note the poor training that newly arrived reinforcements had received. When, on Christmas Day, a P-47 Thunderbolt flew low over American lines, some of the 75th Division’s new men stood up and fired at it with their rifles. Another was killed, recalled Lieutenant Otts, ‘standing up firing when he should have been lying flat in the snow. I yelled at him to get down, but he couldn’t hear me above the noise, and before anyone could pull him down, a bullet hit him right in the forehead.’12Nevertheless, the Germans were suffering from exactly the same inexperience.
Exactly ten days after their initial assault, the 212th Volksgrenadiers had withdrawn, among them the Eastern Front veteran Grenadier Peter Kelch in the division’s Fusilier Battalion; the 276th would follow them the following day, the 27th. Any pursuit was made more difficult by German artillery well hidden on the east bank and able to rain down defensive fire on US units that ventured too close. Those grenadiers trapped on the west bank fought stubbornly wherever they were attacked, the last formal resistance ending on 28 December. Of Beyer’s two infantry divisions, Dempwolff’s 276th Volksgrenadiers, whose first commander, Möhring, had died on 18 December, lost well over 2,000, with some of its companies reduced to ten men. The 988th Grenadier Regiment lost 1,162 killed, wounded and missing from the 1,868 on their rosters for 15 December, a loss rate of 62 per cent sustained over twelve days of fighting. Casualties among his 986th and 987th Regiments were not dissimilar.
Generalleutnant Franz Sensfuss’s 212th Volksgrenadier Division had taken an even heavier pounding, suffering casualties of about 4,000 officers and men; among the survivors was Major Ernst Schrotberger of the 212th VolksArtillerie Regiment, who returned without his guns. This was his second retreat in such a landscape: he had already endured a Russian winter during which his horses died in the extreme cold. Due to traffic congestion and Allied air power, some of his gunner colleagues had never even managed to cross the Sauer, which ensured their ultimate safety. As Generalmajor Sensfuss reported, ‘The enemy air raids were particularly efficient … The constant supremacy of fighter bombers on the road Trier–Bitburg was very disagreeable. The roads were not useable during the day.’13
After tracking the left-hand pair of Brandenburg’s four divisions that were assaulting the Americans in Luxembourg, we need to turn our attention to the northern two formations of General Kniess’s LXXXV Corps. These comprised Oberst Erich Schmidt’s 352nd Volksgrenadiers and, adjacent to the Fifth Panzer Army, Generalmajor Ludwig Heilmann’s 5th Fallschirmjäger Division, which was charged with protecting the left flank of Manteuffel’s panzer thrust to Bastogne, the region’s key route centre. Both formations were to cross the Our river, and the 352nd ordered to push west up the Sûre valley, capturing Diekirch and Ettelbrück. On the receiving end of both was the lone 109th Infantry Regiment, led by the legend of D-Day, who had scaled the heights of the Pointe du Hoc with his Rangers, Lieutenant-Colonel James Earl Rudder. As the American historian Trevor N. Dupuy has noted, the two German divisions possessed a combined combat strength of 32,730, as against Rudder’s 4,985 including attached units, or a ratio of 6.5 to one. In terms of opposing infantry, the figures may have been as high as fifteen to one.14
German intelligence had compiled a detailed list of US units across the Ardennes, with names of commanders and strength gained from prisoner interrogations and wireless intercepts. They knew that Cota’s Twenty-Eighth ‘Bloody Bucket’ Division had been decimated in the Hürtgen and convinced themselves that Rudder’s 109th would therefore fold within the first couple of days. Initially their assessments seemed correct: on 16–17 December one regiment of Fallschirmjägers had surrounded and forced the surrender of the US battalion defending Weiler, and a second achieved the same, assisting the 352nd Volksgrenadiers at Foühren as well. Although Rudder lost his forward outposts and squad positions, they had turned the Hoesdorf plateau into a killing zone for their Volksgrenadier opponents.
Early on the 17th, Rudder found the Germans had penetrated the northern boundary between his 109th Regiment and the 110th Infantry at Hosheid, cutting him off from his parent 28th Division. Later that day, as the last of his anti-tank guns was destroyed, he discovered that German engineers had completed their first major bridge across the Our, enabling those StuGs of 11th Assault Gun Brigade not yet in action to slither across the river. Due to the low cloud and poor light, for the first time since landing in Normandy on D-Day, Rudder had no air support – a luxury he and his fellow Allied commanders had automatically counted on, whenever needed. By the end of 17 December, Rudder found he was isolated and about to be surrounded – Heilmann’s 5th Fallschirmjäger Division had outflanked him to the north and the 60th Armored Infantry Battalion had pulled back, exposing his southern flank.
By the 18th Rudder was being attacked by 75mm StuG and Hetzer armoured assault guns, aiming for Diekirch. At the same moment Volksgrenadier reinforcements rushed over a second wooden bridge. Of note was that neither German crossing in Rudder’s sector was a metal combat engineer bridge, but, instead, a roughly constructed wooden affair which was surely an indication of the paucity of raw materials available, as well as an admission that the Panzer armies had first call on the best equipment. After midday on 18 December, Rudder withdrew westwards with Cota’s reluctant permission, falling back towards the Herrenberg hill (or the Härebierg, today a military training ground where I have exercised), shadowing Diekirch to the north. His men dug into the ‘dead’ ground just behind the crest, which offered them cover from view and hostile fire, and thus invisibility from the advancing Germans.
Accompanying Rudder was Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Rosborough’s 107th Field Artillery with towed 105mm guns, who had trained for six months at Porthcawl in South Wales before deploying to France with the rest of the 28th Division. They had slowly withdrawn alongside the rest of Rudder’s regiment and dug in on the Herrenberg. When late in the afternoon of 18 December the order came to head into Diekirch and redeploy westwards, one of their gunners, Bob Davies with Battery ‘C’, remembered leaving behind ‘numerous rounds of ammunition and fuses which there had been no time to destroy and heading for Diekirch followed by two other trucks towing the guns’. He noticed that the familiar road sign for Diekirch ‘was not pointing in the right direction. Without giving much thought to the matter, we went on. Somewhat later we met twelve to fifteen military policemen in new-looking uniforms and armbands. They looked like soldiers ready for a parade, since their uniform trousers were neatly pressed.’
‘The MPs all carried Thompson submachine-guns and were remarkably clean-shaven,’ thought Davies. ‘They stopped the convoy and a lieutenant stepped up to us. From inside the truck I heard how, in perfect English, he persuaded the driver to take a different route to Diekirch. The other MPs did not say a word during this conversation. Only now did I remember the road sign pointing the wrong way and I whispered to Staff Sergeant Phil Marino, who sat next to me, “I think these MPs are Krauts”. Since the driver hesitated, the MP lieutenant drew his pistol and three of his men cocked their weapons and pointed them at me as I tried to load my M-1 carbine. Sergeant Marino growled at me: “Do you know what you’re saying?” and ordered the driver to take the prescribed route.’15 Although he never did get to Diekirch, Davies and his truck managed to reach safety.
Knowing he could trade space for time, in order for reinforcements to arrive, Cota had suggested Rudder fall back on Bastogne, the key town to his north-west, but the 109th’s commander had enough situational awareness to realise he would be simply retreating into the path of Manteuffel’s Panzer Army if he headed in that direction. Instead he argued wisely that he could guard the otherwise uncovered Diekirch–Ettelbrück road running east–west. By the end of 18 December, Rudder’s third day of defence, his regiment had been whittled down to about 50 per cent, but had expended 280,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, called down 10,000 artillery rounds and 5,000 mortar bombs, thrown 3,000 hand grenades and loosed off 300 bazooka rounds. This had slowed the advance of his opponents significantly, who by 19–20 December were still only completing their schedule for Day One in Rudder’s sector.16
That evening he conferred with his immediate superiors, Cota of the Bloody Bucket Division, Leonard of the 9th Armored (to his south) and Middleton, commanding VIII Corps. By then, Rudder had three options: to fight and be annihilated in situ; to withdraw south and link up with CCA of the 9th Armored Division, whose battles we have just followed; or to continue to retire westwards, slowing his opponents and inflicting damage where he could. Middleton gave him complete freedom to ‘use your own judgement as you are on the ground’ – a refreshing contrast to his opposite numbers in the Wehrmacht who were firmly under Hitler’s inexpert thumb at every level.17
Meanwhile, Captain Harry S. Kemp, executive officer of Rudder’s 3rd Battalion, had found himself obliged to order the civilian evacuation of Diekirch by midnight, but they had to keep off the main road to Ettelbrück. Kemp knew this to be a hugely controversial and unpopular move, which was ill-received by the townsfolk who had welcomed the GIs with open arms weeks earlier.18 (His observations would later find their way into a military study of controlling civilian refugees, written by Kemp in anticipation of ordering German townsfolk to flee a Soviet invasion of Cold War Europe.) By 19 December, Rudder had withdrawn his regiment from the Herrenberg and had the satisfaction of watching the Germans expend huge quantities of ammunition on a feature he no longer occupied. In the Dupuy study noted earlier, it was estimated that over the first four days of combat Rudder inflicted average daily losses on the Germans of 436, while suffering a similar average of 259 each day to his own command – an indication of the intensity of the fighting as well as Rudder’s professionalism.19
At this stage, Rudder, at 50 per cent strength, realised he could not hope to compete with the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division, his principal antagonists, who would soon annihilate his command completely. He knew from captured maps that the Germans intended to continue westwards along the Diekirch–Ettelbrück–Arlon road, and accordingly divided his force into combat teams. Each all-arms force, comprising an infantry company with an array of anti-tank weapons, 105mm guns, engineers and the few remaining Shermans of the 707th Tank Battalion, permanently attached to Rudder’s formation, which also towed his artillery pieces, was to ambush the Volksgrenadiers from a successive series of defensive positions along the route, in Feulen, Mertzig and Grosbous, then retire to avoid a head-on confrontation.
Captain Embert A. Fossum, whose Company ‘L’ had caused so much carnage at Hoesdorf, led the largest team to Grosbous, totalling about 180, although he had already lost more than that number in combat and through weather-related casualties. Fossum later wrote of his men’s hunger and tiredness:
[They] were so worn with loss of sleep and fatigue that orders did not arouse interest. They were almost too tired, cold and hungry to care. Incessant attacks by the enemy and the digging of three successive positions during the withdrawal had fatigued them almost beyond endurance … When they left their original position shortly after noon on the eighteenth, each man had carried one-third of a K-ration in his pocket. Another one-third had been issued as they left Diekirch on the night of the nineteenth … So it was a pretty badly beaten unit that headed for Grosbous. Morale was certainly at a low ebb.20
Cota encouraged Rudder to harry the Germans as much as possible, due to his knowledge that Bastogne, now completely encircled, was about to be counter-attacked by two fresh US infantry divisions assembling in his vicinity, the Massachusetts Guardsmen of the 26th and the ‘Blue Ridge’ 80th (so-named as they comprised draftees from Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland). Rudder’s mission now became one of preventing the Volksgrenadiers from interfering with the concurrent attempts to relieve Bastogne. Guided through Ettelbrück and Grosbous by armband-wearing local resistance fighters, Rudder had Fossum’s task force dig in on high ground near Grosbous, overlooking the Ettelbrück to Arlon road from where on 22 December they were able to ambush ‘a column of men and vehicles, one-and-a-half miles long with towed artillery pieces and two tanks at its tail and no patrols for security on its flanks’.
The result was a massacre – a hackneyed phrase, but in this case accurate: with his artillery hitting the Germans’ rear first to prevent escape, Fossum’s men caused an estimated 2,000 casualties, ‘the fire was kept up for twenty minutes on everything that moved, with not one shot received in return,’ wrote Fossum, and Rudder laconically recorded, ‘We stacked them [the dead Germans] in piles along that road from Ettelbrück’.21 Fossum’s performance, which brought him a Bronze Star and Croix de Guerre, had been outstanding.22 Rudder knew his regiment’s hard training and combat experience had been rewarded, for the ambush could have been spoiled easily by a single trigger-happy GI, but their fire discipline, despite extreme exhaustion, was superb. His 109th Regiment linked up with units of the US 10th Armored (the Tigers) on 24 December, when they continued to clear the villages of Gilsdorf and Moestroff of Volksgrenadiers, but their well-being was never again so perilous.
Thus ended nine astonishing days of combat, which saw Rudder’s men, in the words of a Third Army G-2 Report, ‘destroying the entire 915th Volksgrenadier Regiment, Major von Criegeren’s 916th, and a major part of the 914th Regiment of the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division’. Much of the debris of these encounters has since found its way into Monsieur Roland Gaul’s excellent and well-stocked National Museum of Military History in the heart of Diekirch. A stone’s throw to the south-west lies the little town where in ad 451 Attila the Hun built a river bridge, in time giving his name to the settlement which developed subsequently – Ettelbrück, meaning ‘Attila’s Bridge’. Today, another important military commander, George Patton, guards the town in the form of a magnificent statue, complete with his binoculars and twin Colt revolvers, cast in bronze. A memorial museum to the general forms one of the town’s main tourist attractions.
However, the battle had cost Rudder’s 109th Regiment 875 combat and non-battle casualties, including missing and prisoners, which equated to a loss rate of 29 per cent.23 Rudder’s performance elevated his already considerable achievements far above the norm, bringing him a Silver Star in addition to the Distinguished Service Cross he had received on D-Day. He demonstrated that in modern war – and in the Ardennes in particular – the actions of the individual could still make a difference.