31

Roadblocks

‘THE SUCCESS OF the Fifth Panzer Army will rest on the early capture of St Vith,’ Manteuffel had predicted before Unternehmen Herbstnebel. His offensive, which had fully engulfed the 422nd and 423rd Regiments, immediately threatened the crossroads town and its population of around 2,000. Only the timely arrival of the US 7th Armored Division, along with the 81st and 168th Combat Engineers and elements of 9th Armored, 28th and 106th Divisions, stood in their way. The engineers straightaway dug in to defend Prummerberg Hill, which dominates the Schönberg–St Vith road. From the afternoon of the 17th, they slowed the 18th Volksgrenadiers, who were advancing with their assault guns and armoured half-tracks, using well-directed artillery fire. Meanwhile, US tanks and tank destroyers were hurried forward to block the route, alongside the 38th Armored Infantry and a troop of cavalry.

The Prummerberg was soon dotted with foxholes dug by the engineers and infantrymen, giving them overwatch of the sector. During 18 December, the Germans tried three times to swamp the defenders on the hill, but they stayed in position until ordered to withdraw by Brigadier-General Bruce C. Clarke, originally commanding CCB of the 7th Armored, who had by then taken over command of St Vith from General Jones. (A stone memorial to the 168th Engineer Combat Battalion now stands at the top of the Prummerberg, and near to it remain several of their foxholes.) Clarke was soon joined by a fellow brigadier-general, William M. Hoge, who commanded CCB of the 9th Armored and had been ordered to make contact with the 424th Regiment, to the south of St Vith. From then on, the two brigadiers, old friends, worked together to defend the town with their relatively meagre resources.

On 18 December the defenders’ fears were heightened when the Germans ambushed an American convoy at the little road junction of Poteau, the midpoint on the road between Vielsalm and St Vith, and six miles west of Clarke’s headquarters. General Hasbrouck, the 7th’s commander, ordered an immediate counter-attack using CCA: ‘Imperative you retake Poteau and hold it!’ They managed, but only after they found their opponents were not Volksgrenadiers, but the superbly trained Kampfgruppe Hansen of the 1st SS-Leibstandarte Division. The initial attack had been made on a column of US vehicles, comprising a troop of M-5 light tanks and M-8 armoured cars from the 18th Cavalry and towed guns of the 820th Tank Destroyer Battalion (of the 7th Armored’s CCA), commanded by Major J.L. Mayes, heading north out of Poteau. Taken by surprise, the GIs had little time to put up a defence and fled or were captured.

The best-known pictures from the Bulge – which appear in every book about the Ardennes (including an image on the jacket of this book) and show German troops rushing past blazing US vehicles – originate from this 18 December encounter. The Poteau location, with its burning half-tracks silhouetted against the snow-covered terrain, proved very photogenic, as at least one Waffen-SS ciné cameraman and a photographer discovered. They lingered to record much footage, and pose the attackers in a variety of staged assaults for the camera, which duly found their way back to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. Yet these are not the combat images they purport to be – there are no prisoners, dead or wounded, though the American column had clearly been ambushed only a short while earlier.

Heeding General Hasbrouck’s orders, after dusk, the 48th Armored Infantry and Shermans from the 40th Tank Battalion fought their way into Poteau. In a furious battle lit by the flames from burning tanks, the GIs flushed the SS from the village. The day-long battle for Poteau has been carefully researched by several modern historians, some of the participants in the propaganda images identified, and in 1998 the Ardennen-Poteau ’44 Museum was established in the old customs warehouse at the Poteau junction by Rob and Jacqueline de Ruyter. Their museum is packed with vehicles, military equipment, uniformed mannequins and well-presented dioramas about the battle. Recently they acquired a German armoured half-track, in which they drive visitors around the scene of the famous 18 December 1944 ambush.¹

A German soldier (identified as belonging to the Waffen-SS from his camouflaged jacket) urges his men past a burning American convoy. This picture was taken near the crossroads at Poteau, west of St Vith, on 18 December 1944, and is from the same sequence as the front cover image. A Kriegsberichter (war reporters) unit came across these flaming jeeps just after the fighting had finished. The cameramen marshalled passing SS troops to re-enact their assault on the US vehicles. After several takes, the soldiers, who belonged to Kampfgruppe Hansen of the 1st SS-Leibstandarte Division, moved on and the war reporters sent their iconic images, recorded both as newsreel and still photographs, back to Berlin. (NARA)

Back in St Vith, throughout the night of 18–19 December, the GI defenders could hear the movement of vehicles to their front and were twice attacked, as the Volksgrenadiers probed for a weak spot to attack on the 19th. The Germans tried through the entirety of the following day in the fog, but their assaults were driven back. The defenders now knew (from prisoners) they were facing at least a German corps, comprising the 18th and 62nd Volksgrenadiers, with the 1st SS-Leibstandarte Panzer Division identified to their north and 116th Panzer to the south.

A large defensive arc, known in time as the ‘Fortified Goose Egg’ was established using three armoured combat commands and the remnants of the 106th Division. To the north was Colonel Dwight Rosebaum’s CCA of the 6th Armored; Clarke’s CCB protected the front of St Vith, and Hoge’s CCB was stationed to the south, contesting the Our crossing at Steinbrück – where Hoge’s men eventually blew up the all-important bridge on the 18th. With these were as many other units as could be found: spare armoured infantry, field artillery, tank, tank destroyer and combat engineer battalions were rounded up and sent to the ‘Goose Egg’, along with stragglers, enlisted men and officers, collected by MPs and formed into provisional units, no matter what their original trade – whether cook, quartermaster or signaller.

The remaining fighting units of the 106th, Colonel Reid’s 424th Regiment and the 591st Field Artillery Battalion, had fought on, slowly falling back towards St Vith. The 106th Division’s heavy artillery battalion, the 592nd (equipped with 155mm howitzers) had moved back during the night of the 17th and been firing non-stop since the 18th. Initially Clarke and Hoge had to battle against a flow of US Army traffic heading in the opposite direction, as reporter Jack Belden, covering the war for Time and Lifemagazines, described: ‘The road was jammed with every conceivable kind of vehicle. An enemy plane came down and strafed the column, knocking three trucks off the road, shattering trees and causing everyone to flee to ditches’. All recall that V-1 buzz bombs roaring overhead, and sometimes falling in their midst, added to the sense of terror.²

Clarke’s own CCB had to clear a path forwards for their armour, to move into the Goose Egg: ‘We started getting vehicles to move over to the sides. Slowly a path was beginning to open and the tanks began to roll along at a snail’s pace, with halts every fifty to one hundred feet. [Coming from the opposite direction] several times senior officers in command cars attempted to pull out into a space which I was opening up, and each time I told them to get back, that I didn’t care who they were, nothing was coming through except our tanks and anything else which was headed for the front.’³ Belden also observed a sense of shame among those witnessing the retreat, if not in those doing the retreating: ‘I noticed in myself a feeling that I had not had for some years. It was a feeling of guilt that seems to come over you whenever you retreat. You don’t like to look anyone in the eyes. It seems as if you have done something wrong. I perceived this feeling in others also.’⁴

As the weight of the German attack on St Vith increased during the 20th, Clarke and Hoge shifted some of the weak flanks back to protect their exposed rear, turning the arc into a horseshoe. Morale dipped twice during the night of 20–21 December as Germans managed to penetrate part of the defence but were repelled, and sank further when a platoon of three officers and thirty-five men from the 423rd Regiment turned up at St Vith, having evaded capture since the Schnee Eifel surrender of the 19th. This was the first the defenders knew of the loss of two entire regiments of the 106th, whom they assumed were still out there fighting somewhere. Clarke called a meeting of unit commanders and heard that, though they were not surrounded, supply convoys were having to battle their way into St Vith; immediately he ordered reduced rations and a sparing use of artillery, heightening a sense of siege.

The chief ration and fuel depot used by the defenders was at Samrée, which, as we have seen, was seized by Waldenburg’s 116th Panzer Division late on 20 December. So desperate were the 7th Armored, Golden Lions and Nelson’s 112th Infantry for supplies that items were still being issued from the north end of the Samrée dump while the south side was under attack by Waldenburg’s panzers. The last seven trucks to escape were loaded with fuel during the fighting, covered by tommy-gun toting guards recruited from General Clarke’s kitchen crews back in St Vith. The convoy took two days, with a night spent hiding in the woods, to return, running the gauntlet of four German ambushes in which one GI was killed and three wounded.⁵

On 21 December huge attacks were launched around the perimeter, preceded by deadly artillery strikes. Manteuffel was now desperate to eliminate this obstacle to his plans. To the front, five major attacks, using the Schönberg road as an axis, were recorded at 11.00 a.m., 12.30 p.m., 2.00 p.m., 4.10 p.m. and 5.10 p.m. It was the same on the flanks. The front, facing east and manned by the 38th Armored Infantry, had sustained the worst and most concerted attacks. Major Boyer, S-3 of the 38th, recalled later:

We were under assault by two battalions of enemy infantry, each attacking in a narrow front, with two companies abreast. The Krauts kept boring in, no matter how fast we decimated their assaults. As fast as we would repel one, another would return. All machine-guns were employing swinging traverse and taking a deadly toll. One, which heretofore had been dishing out a deadly hail of fire all along the front, was hit by a Panzerfaust, which struck the barrel halfway between the breach and the muzzle. The gunner fell forward on the gun with half his face torn off; the loader had his left arm torn off at the shoulder and was practically decapitated, while the gun commander was tossed about fifteen feet away from the gun to lie quite still.⁶

The 38th withstood all, reinforced by the remnants of Colonel Gustin M. Nelson’s 112th Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard (the ‘Bloody Bucket’ Division), who were now scattered right across the front, with their commander holed up in Bastogne. Earlier, Nelson’s men had so effectively resisted the attack of LVIII Panzer Corps as to prevent 116th Panzer Division and 560th Volksgrenadiers from crossing the River Our at Lützkampen, and forced them to use 2nd Panzer Division’s bridge at Dasburg. After a magnificent four-day stand along the river line, forcing his opponents to outflank him, late on 19 December Nelson attached himself to the southern flank of the Golden Lions’ 424th Regiment, and hence became wrapped up in the defence of St Vith.

‘I established a mobile counter-attack force of part of a battalion of tanks, concealed near and behind St Vith,’ remembered Clarke. ‘It was used to counter-attack whenever the Germans established a dangerous situation, but only to sweep the enemy away, then I’d withdraw it for employment elsewhere. I was giving up maybe a mile a day, under enormous pressure. However, my German opponent needed to advance many miles, and quickly, to achieve his mission. The Seventh Armored prevented him from doing that.’⁷ By 8.00 p.m., the American front had been penetrated in multiple places and was in danger of collapse, so at 10.00 p.m., Clarke issued the order to withdraw to the high ground west of St Vith. By then, the Goose Egg contained Hoge’s CCB of the 9th Armored, the 112th and 424th Regiments, the 275th Armored Field Artillery and 965th Field Artillery Battalions; various engineer units, plus all the remaining elements of the 7th Armored Division – in all about 20,000 Americans. However, it rested on one very tenuous supply route, leading west from Vielsalm.

At noon on 20 December the much-debated plan for Field Marshal Montgomery to take charge of the northern half of the Bulge battlefield had come into effect. The mechanics of who commanded them initially did not matter much to Clarke and Hoge, still fighting for St Vith. In fact, they came under command of Matthew Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps, which controlled the rest of 7th Armored and 82nd Airborne Division who garrisoned the terrain just behind St Vith. (When the 101st Screaming Eagles under Tony McAuliffe had been sent to Bastogne, Jim Gavin’s 82nd All Americans had been deployed to the northern Ardennes at the same moment.)

On 22 December, Montgomery initially ordered that Clarke form a perimeter to be supplied from the air, as was being planned for Bastogne. Clarke demurred, and Hasbrouck argued on Clarke’s behalf that the St Vith defenders had been almost destroyed the previous night. The remaining homesteaders simply hadn’t the strength to circle the wagons: the Indians were too strong. After several radio conferences, the plan was amended. Accordingly, from his HQ in Vielsalm, Ridgway, commanding the XVIII Airborne Corps, ordered the withdrawal of the Goose Egg to positions behind Gavin’s 82nd Airborne. Those in the Goose Egg thus received a gracious message from Montgomery (their new commander, though none were aware of it): ‘You have accomplished your mission – a mission well done. It is time to withdraw, with all honour.’

General James Gavin, commanding the 82nd, visited the CP of the 106th at Renceveaux, west of Vielsalm, on 21 December. He felt sorry for General Jones, ‘the picture of dejection’, but was impressed and envious of the division’s new trucks and trailers parked outside. ‘There were two huge trailers containing doughnut-making machines and all kinds of vans and administrative vehicles’ – which seemed to sum up the American way of war in late 1944 – doughnut-making machines at the front.⁸ The following day Jones, who had just been appointed Ridgway’s Assistant Corps Commander, suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalised, having already been relieved of his division – the stress induced by the loss of his two regiments and his son becoming a prisoner of war can scarcely be imagined.

Gavin wrote later of his admiration ‘for the way in which Montgomery congratulated all those who fought at St Vith for the fine job they did’. He was full of praise, too, for ‘the ubiquitous British field officer and a “Phantom Regiment” Jeep and radio [which] stayed in close touch with us. Monty had a policy of stationing a young field officer at every division headquarters [whose] mission was to keep Montgomery’s headquarters informed at once of everything that was taking place. I thought the system was excellent, since all too frequently information does not get to an army headquarters or higher for hours, until it is too late.’⁹ Gavin did not go on to explore the difference one of Monty’s liaison officers would have made at General Jones’s HQ in St Vith on 16 December. Given one, the misunderstanding with Middleton, his superior in Bastogne, might never have happened.

It was on the 22nd that Eisenhower issued one of his very rare Orders of the Day (only two had preceded it, on 6 June and 14 August 1944, and six would follow it in 1945). The occurrence indicated the gravity of the moment. However, its tone was upbeat, not desperate, and a masterpiece of public relations:

The enemy is making his supreme effort to break out of the desperate plight into which you forced him by your brilliant victories of the summer and fall. He is fighting savagely to take back all that you have won and is using every treacherous trick to deceive and kill you. He is gambling everything, but already, in this battle, your gallantry has done much to foil his plans. In the face of your proven bravery and fortitude, he will completely fail.

But we cannot be content with his mere repulse.

By rushing out from his fixed defenses the enemy may give us the chance to turn his great gamble into his worst defeat. So I call upon every man, of all the Allies, to rise now to new heights of courage, of resolution and of effort. Let everyone hold before him a single thought – to destroy the enemy on the ground, in the air, everywhere – destroy him! United in this determination and with unshakable faith in the cause for which we fight, we will, with God’s help, go forward to our greatest victory.¹⁰

Ridgway had not approved of Monty’s plan to withdraw the troops now in his XVIII Airborne Corps out of the Goose Egg. It went against his gut instinct. Though he understood the reason for pulling the armoured troops out from St Vith, he was also aware that the 101st Airborne in Bastogne were surrounded and about to be supplied from the air. It seemed as though one rule had been applied to St Vith and a second to Bastogne. Neither was he keen on pulling back Gavin’s 82nd Airborne (his old command), as Monty later ordered on 24 December, adhering to the very British notion of a ‘tidy battlefield’. If the 82nd had won terrain by spilling blood, they should not then have to relinquish it, Ridgway felt, especially on the command of a foreign general.

Gavin admitted the new orders ‘shortened the sector allocated to the 82nd by about fifty percent, thus enabling us to do much better on the defensive’, that it was ‘far superior in terms of fields of fire and cover for the defenders’ and he would be ‘in a much better position to launch a counter-attack’ from it, but it still went against his division’s motto of ‘No ground gained is ever relinquished’. Nevertheless they obeyed; some discipline was called for.¹¹ For all the much-vaunted efficiency of Gavin’s division, the combat historian, Master Sergeant Forrest Pogue, remembered visiting a farmhouse where a detachment of the 82nd had set up a CP. ‘We entered through the kitchen, where two GIs were sitting at a stove. They glanced at us as we went through a door into the next room. The room was empty of officers or men, but the wall had a map showing the division’s dispositions and at one side were all the passwords and alternate challenges for the week. We made note of locations, noted some of the challenges, went back out, got into our Jeep, and drove away without ever being asked who we were or what we wanted.’¹²

In fact there was almost no withdrawal from St Vith, as Hoge and Clarke found their wheels and tracks were mired in thick Ardennes mud and any movement seemed a remote possibility. There was discussion of having to stay put in St Vith and fight it out. Clarke spent a restless night. By the morning of 23 December ‘a miracle had happened’, as he later put it. Even lower temperatures had frozen the mud solid, enabling his vehicles to be chopped out of the ice. At 06.00 a.m. they started rolling, with Clarke directing the traffic flow (much as he had done on first entering the beleaguered town). The day dawned clear and the arrival of the massed Allied air fleets did much to restore morale and protect the move of first Hoge’s CCB and then Clarke’s troops, bringing up the rear at 10.00 a.m., and following the armoured traffic along the road via Poteau to Vielsalm. As fighters patrolled overhead and C-47s in the distance headed towards Bastogne, for the first time in days Clarke allowed himself to fall asleep, roped to his seat, while his faithful driver, Sergeant Jendrewski, drove on. His column leap-frogged back, with Remer’s Führer-Begleit-Brigade snapping at their heels; all had crossed the bridge at Vielsalm when it was blown at midday.

The artillery officer, Leutnant Behrman of the 18th Volksgrenadiers, whose diary we have already sampled, recorded the abrupt change of circumstances with the arrival of good flying weather:

24 December: Dive-bombers [most likely P-47s] attack and hit a house in front of me. Two metres more and it would have been me. We take our car and race towards St Vith. Here dive-bombers attack again and strafe all roads. During the night more bombs fall.

25 December: On the road to Hinderhausen [midway between Poteau and St Vith] a dive-bomber starts for us. We are able to stop the lorry in time to get off the road as the bullets start flying about us. Nothing is to be seen of our air force. Where is it? Our anti-aircraft guns knock down two bombers. The pilots parachute down but the dogs are lucky and the wind drives them toward the west.

26 December: During the afternoon we undergo the second large-scale air attack on St Vith. The house shakes and the windows break. The terrorised family seeks refuge in the cellar. Babies cry but the bombers keep coming. There’s nothing left of St Vith.¹³

The defence of St Vith had bought the Americans seven working days and stopped cold one of the two main thrusts of Herbstnebel. However, it came at the cost of 3,400 casualties, eighty-eight tanks and twenty-five armoured cars from 7th Armored and the 14th Cavalry. In 1964 Clarke and Manteuffel met when the former had just stepped down as commander of the US Army in Europe (USAEUR). ‘Why didn’t you just overwhelm us with a powerful frontal assault on 17 December?’ asked Clarke of the baron. ‘We assessed that we were up against at least a division, if not a corps,’ answered the Fifth Panzer Army’s former commander. ‘Every time we probed your defences we found tanks, but in our preliminary briefings we were led to believe there were no armoured formations in our way.’¹⁴

Clarke hadn’t slept properly in days and, after Vielsalm, his surgeon ordered him to take a strong sleeping tablet, which knocked him out immediately. Sometime after midnight a staff officer tried to wake him with the news that he was to report immediately to General Ridgway, his corps commander. ‘The hell with it,’ the exhausted brigadier managed to say before he lapsed back into well-earned slumber. A mild rocket from Ridgway followed in the morning, upbraiding him for not reporting, but Clarke was past caring. He knew he’d done an outstanding job. ‘In that case, I’d like your permission to leave and return to Third Army, where I know General Patton will be glad to see me,’ he retorted. At that, Ridgway relented: ‘Well, just don’t let it happen again.’

On Christmas Eve, Manteuffel phoned Jodl at the Ziegenberg Adlerhorst to tell him the offensive had definitely failed. His tanks had run out of fuel near the Meuse, the Seventh Army had stalled in the south; the Sixth had made no progress on the Elsenborn Ridge and St Vith had only just fallen. Antwerp was, as he had always suspected, an impossible dream. However, he suggested he still might be able to envelop the US forces east of the Meuse. ‘Give me reserves, and I will take Bastogne, reach the Meuse, swing north and help the Sixth Panzer Army to advance,’ he countered. ‘But I must have sufficient petrol and air support – and I need a reply tonight.’ Despite the baron’s urgings, Hitler refused to make a decision until 26 December, when he offered him the requested reserves – which by then could not move through lack of fuel. Herbstnebel was doomed to continue. After the war, Manteuffel told Basil Liddell Hart that, even on 24 December, ‘I think a limited success would still have been possible – up to the Meuse. Afterwards, however, Hitler condemned us to a corporal’s war. There were no big plans, only a multitude of piecemeal fights.’ Rundstedt was even more forthright: ‘I wanted to stop the offensive on 22 December, when it was plain we could not achieve the aim, but Hitler furiously insisted that it must go on. It was Stalingrad No. 2.’¹⁵

During Christmas week, Jim Gavin of the 82nd was invited to dinner with General Hodges at the First Army’s HQ, when the conversation turned to Field Marshal Montgomery. Hodges’ staff spoke of him with ‘amusement and respect. Obviously they liked him, and they respected his thorough professionalism.’ One officer thought Monty ‘optimistic, meticulous, precise and cautious’. This goes some way to challenging the post-war view, led by General Omar Bradley and sustained in recent years by historian Stephen E. Ambrose, that all Americans detested Montgomery: many admired his military skills, if not his public utterances. By contrast, the First Army staff were less than amused by Patton and his Third Army, who seemed to be out to grab the headlines, especially in the army’s daily, Stars and Stripes. What had particularly irked them was Patton’s prayer. On 8 December, the exuberant general had phoned the Head Chaplain of his Third Army, Father James H. O’Neill, demanding, ‘Do you have a good prayer for weather? We must do something about those rains if we are to win the war.’ O’Neill composed one and sent it round within the hour. Patton read it, approved and directed him to have 250,000 copies printed for distribution to every man in the Third Army:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.

That was all very well, but when Stars and Stripes printed the prayer in a special box on the front page, Hodges felt the Patton publicity machine had gone too far. First Army demanded, and got, a separate edition of Stars and Stripes that printed their stories.¹⁶

Some of the 589th Field Artillery Battalion, mostly from Battery ‘A’ and Battalion HQ, with three 105mm howitzers, had managed to fight their way through Schönberg, and headed towards St Vith. The force of about one hundred, led by Major Arthur C. Parker III, represented all that was left of the twelve-gun battalion which supported the 422nd Infantry Regiment of the Golden Lions. On 19 December, Parker was directed to hold a crossroads north-east of St Vith, known as the Baraque de Fraiture. It consisted then, as it does today, of a few buildings on one of the highest summits in the Ardennes (over 2,000 feet), and a key intersection of the north–south road from Bastogne to Liège with a good east–west route running between Vielsalm and La Roche.

When Parker’s men reached the crossroads, everyone was exhausted and numb from the bitter cold.¹⁷ In addition to his own force, Parker enlisted the help of four passing half-tracks with quad .50 calibre machine guns, odd tanks and some towed anti-tank guns, a cavalry troop and, later, Company ‘F’ from the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment (of Gavin’s 82nd Airborne): in all, fewer than 300 soldiers. On the same evening, seventeen-year-old Kanonier Josef Reusch, with the 560th Volksgrenadiers had arrived in the village of Montleban, between Houffalize and Parker’s position. ‘I spent the evening in a hayloft. Our guns stood in the courtyard of the farm when suddenly, in the middle of the night, an American convoy rolled through the village with tanks and trucks. The alarm was not sounded, simply because there was no point to it, since everything happened so fast!’¹⁸ He went back to sleep.

The 20th was quiet for both sides at the Baraque de Fraiture, although a dozen Volksgrenadier cycle troops on a scouting mission were engaged and some killed. Over the following days, two company-sized probing attacks from the 560th Volksgrenadiers were repulsed. Among them was Josef Reusch, whose guns had just been destroyed and he had become a rifleman. His memories are of dense fog on 21–22 December and such thick snow that his tent, in the woods surrounding the Baraque de Fraiture, collapsed on top of him. Under mortar fire, in the pre-dawn darkness of 22 December, an officer patrol from the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division was captured and identified. Low on fuel, the SS unit were scouting a move from Houffalize to turn right at the crossroads and attack Vielsalm. That evening, Parker was wounded by mortar shell fragments, lost consciousness and was evacuated. Major Elliot Goldstein, also of the 589th, stepped in to continue the defence. However, their defensive positions were clearly outlined against the newly fallen snow to the Germans, who thus worked out all their positions.

The following morning, the 23rd, Obersturmbannführer Otto Weidinger, commander of the SS-Der Führer Regiment, initially sent his II Battalion of Panzergrenadiers to take the crossroads. They succeeded in knocking out the towed anti-tank guns and advanced slightly before being forced back by a counter-attack from the glider infantry company and five Shermans from the 3rd Armored Division, recently arrived. Ingeniously, the SS then took radios from captured US vehicles and began to jam the frequencies used by the American forward observers when calling for fire support. Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne had gone up to the Baraque de Fraiture as the afternoon of the 23rd waned, increasingly concerned for its safety. ‘I went to the town of Fraiture and proceeded from there toward the crossroads. I encountered such a tremendous volume of fire that it was suicide to go any further. Small-arms fire was ricocheting in all directions. Interspersed with this was artillery, mortar and tank fire.’¹⁹

At 4.00 that afternoon, preceded by effective German artillery, another attack was launched by Weidinger, this time with two panzer companies. Three of the Shermans were knocked out, the rest retreated, and the II and III Battalions of Weidinger’s Der FührerRegiment then stormed the crossroads. Two US tanks and a few officers and men slipped through to friendly lines, but the rest were overwhelmed; of the 116-man glider rifle company, only forty-four rejoined their parent unit. Weidinger had wisely attacked at last light, when the Allied air support had turned for home and, earlier in the day, Josef Reusch remembered the ‘fighter aircraft attacking with rockets. Additionally they dropped bombs and fired cannon. Every half hour they returned and started again. First they destroyed an anti-aircraft battery and then they turned on us!’²⁰

One escapee was T/4 Randolph C. Pierson, who worked in the 589th’s Fire Direction Center and had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday on 19 December, the day they arrived. He managed to escape but was wounded and captured the same evening. Interrogated by an SS officer on the 24th, at the end Pierson was asked, ‘Why did you fight so hard at Baraque de Fraiture? Do you hate the Germans so much?’ ‘My answer was very calculated, “I don’t hate the Germans, but your men were trying to kill me”. He smiled, and then replied in perfect English, “I hope you survive this ugly war. If you do, I advise you to finish your college education”.’

Later, Pierson, in company with an 82nd paratrooper, was being taken to a POW collection centre by a wounded German corporal. ‘To my surprise, the paratrooper suddenly bent over as if in pain, the guard approached him, and was dropped by a vicious right hand upper-cut. I caught the German’s rifle as it flew into the air, out of his hands, and pinned him to the frozen ground with a vicious bayonet thrust through his chest. The paratrooper and I instantly broke into a fast run for the snowy Ardennes forest. He in one direction, and I in another. Later I was rescued.’²¹

Though the Baraque de Fraiture had been lost, its surviving defenders had withdrawn with ‘high morale. They claimed that they had inflicted tremendous casualties on the Germans before withdrawing,’ recorded Jim Gavin.²² The battle then moved four miles north-west to another crossroads at Manhay, where the main north–south highway intersects with another, running from Stavelot via Trois-Ponts west to Grandmenil, Erezée and Hotton. As recently as 22 December, Manhay had been the CP of Major-General Maurice Rose, commanding the US 3rd Armored Division. A US tank company was hurried to Manhay, where an attack by the 2nd SS Division, flanked by the 560th Volksgrenadiers, developed on Christmas Eve.

During the German advance on Manhay from the Baraque de Fraiture via Odeigne on 24 December, an SS panzer column, preceded by a captured Sherman, tripped several US 7th Armored Division roadblocks, then raced ahead and overwhelmed the crossroads, engaging several American vehicles passing through at the time. In the lead by then was Panther 401, commanded by Oberscharführer Ernst Barkmann, a six-foot blond tank ace who had already chalked up twenty-eight victories in Normandy. His tank came to a halt opposite the Sherman of Frank Ostaszewski, which had stalled with engine failure. Barkmann acted quicker than the Sherman crew: ‘In seconds the tank turret turned to the right and the long barrel slammed against the turret of the Sherman. Gunner to commander, “I cannot fire – the turret traverse is jammed!” The driver, Rottenführer Grundmeyer, moved back a few paces. Then Unterscharführer Poggendorff, the gunner, fired a shell into the middle of the enemy tank at a distance of a few yards. The explosion that followed wrecked the Sherman, but miraculously all of the crew, including Ostaszewski, survived.’²³

Josef Reusch was still in the mêlée and recalled the confusion of intermingled forces: ‘On one occasion, American first aid trucks with wounded drove through our position. Immediately we decided to change our position and followed the trucks to the next road intersection.’²⁴ Over Christmas Day, US counter-attacks by the 3rd Armored Division were frustrated when strafed in error by their own air force, which killed thirty-nine GIs, and Manhay remained in German hands.²⁵ On 26 December, panzer attacks to the north of Manhay and as far west as Grandmenil were countered by the density of US forces now flooding into the area – in addition to elements of the 3rd Armored and 82nd Airborne Divisions, the US 75th Division had also arrived. They possessed two luxuries the Germans did not: unlimited fuel and massive amounts of artillery on call, and these factors ensured that, by the evening of 26 December, Grandmenil had been retaken.

The stories of these three crossroads encounters – at Poteau, Baraque de Fraiture and Manhay (along with Hotton, where we began) – typify much of the winter fighting in the Ardennes. The weather and required speed of advance dictated there could be little off-road movement. An offensive in the summer months would have produced a very different result for the attackers, when they could have freely manoeuvred around the intersections. The Alamo-style defence at these locations required great bravery, as they were often encounters to the last man, the last bullet, but needed initiative also. They also represent many other defences where the heroes – a few GIs clustered around a machine gun – went unrecognised because all perished in their valour. Parker’s actions at the Baraque de Fraiture are studied by soldiers for his resourcefulness in holding up much of a German division for several days. For this reason, the location had become known as ‘Parker’s Crossroads’, even by the locals, though no doubt inspired by the 1862 encounter in Tennessee, between Confederate and Union forces, of the same name.

At Parker’s Crossroads, a memorial plaque to the 106th Division and a wartime 105mm howitzer – facing east – now stand by the side of what is today a very busy intersection. In June 1945, the battered 106th Division was reconstituted, and Parker, recovered from his wounds, returned to command a new 589th. Another reminder of the Bulge is at Grandmenil, where the 2nd SS-Das Reich Panzer Division left behind one of their tanks on Christmas Day in 1944. The crew of Panther 407 had to leave their mount because of fuel shortage and abandoned it in a field. It survived the post-war scrapmen and today sits by the town’s roundabout.

The Das Reich panzer attacks of 26 December constituted another high tide of the German push west, which had likewise culminated for the 2nd Panzer Division on 25–26 December at Foy-Notre-Dame and Celles, near the Meuse. The Waffen-SS did, however, make one last attempt to exploit a thousand-yard gap in the American defences, between the villages of Sadzot (a small settlement of about twenty houses, known as ‘Sad-Sack’ to the GIs, after a Stars and Stripes cartoon character) and Briscol, four miles west of Grandmenil. Really a local attack rather than a major attempt to break out to the west, it was launched by two battalions of the 25th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment of the Hitlerjugend Division. They had been withdrawn from the Elsenborn Ridge and sent to reinforce the Das Reich Division. The defenders of Sadzot included Company ‘C’ of the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion, whose two platoons and company CP were all billeted inside the houses because of the extreme cold. (Every US infantry division had a chemical mortar battalion attached to it, which operated 4.2inch (107mm) mortars, capable of firing high-explosive and white phosphorus shells. The latter could shroud targets with smoke and cause casualties through burns.)

At 01.00 a.m., the SS storm troopers slipped into the village, slit the throats of the few sentries and began lobbing stick grenades through windows and raking each building with automatic fire. The mortarmen were completely surprised but recovered rapidly. Lieutenant Gordon Byers found an M-5 light tank and ordered its commander to come and help, but the tank crew refused. Byers was in no mood to listen. ‘He issued the order to the crewman one more time and when the sergeant refused again the lieutenant calmly drew his .45 and pointed it at the soldier’s head. That finally convinced him, with Byers manning the machine-gun on top of the vehicle, blazing away at every German he saw.’ Somehow they survived, and caused such confusion in the German ranks that a number of his men were able to escape.

About thirty mortarmen escaped down a trail and were challenged for a password. They gave the correct one, but were attacked, several being killed. The shooters were part of a parachute infantry battalion of the 509th PIR (part of Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division) in the area who worked to different passwords and ‘had been tricked before in Italy by Germans dressed as GIs’. The extremely confused series of fire-fights, fought with small arms, knives and fists, began in the early morning darkness of 28 December, continued through the day and into the 29th, before being finally repulsed.

Major-General Fay B. Prickett’s 75th Infantry Division, in VII Corps reserve, were also in the vicinity, working with the battle-tested Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored to gain experience. Mortar Sergeant William E. Breuer was sent to rouse some help from a regiment of the 75th whose CP was known to be in the vicinity. ‘Despite the sounds of battle that could be clearly heard from inside the house, the regimental commander and other officers were lounging around drinking coffee. There wasn’t even a guard posted outside. Breuer explained to the colonel that the men of the 87th were under heavy attack in Sadzot just 800 yards away and needed immediate help.’ None was forthcoming. ‘It took just a moment for the incredulous mortar sergeant to realise that the regimental commander had no idea where his troops were.’²⁶

It cost the mortarmen fifty-three killed, but 189 German dead were afterwards counted in and around the village. The battle of Sadzot represented the Germans’ last major offensive activity in the Ardennes, for on 29 December Generalfeldmarschall Model ordered the Sixth Panzer Army over to the defensive and began stripping it of its armour.²⁷