34

Those Damned Engineers!

JUST TO THE south of the Elsenborn Ridge we left Obersturmbannführer Jochen Peiper camped just outside Stavelot on the night of 17–18 December. A town of about 5,000, Stavelot, like Malmedy and St Vith, had religious roots. Until the ravages of the French Revolution, the town had been linked with Malmedy as a tiny principality overseen by an abbot; the original monastic church had been built in 1090, but all was torn down in 1794.¹ An ancient, respectable town, it possessed many old stone buildings, some warehouses, a rebuilt abbey, and a network of cobbled streets.

However, the sight of American troops passing through from Malmedy, all heading west, on Sunday, 17 December, had triggered a general civilian exodus. There were dark memories of the former occupiers in Stavelot. During the German retreat of September, in nearby Werbomont, fanatical soldiers had executed twenty-two men and women in reprisal for resistance activity, and a further four, one a priest, outside the town itself.

Just to the north of the town was US Fuel Depot Number Three, containing up to three million gallons of gasoline, stacked in tens of thousands of jerrycans, piled under the trees along a five-mile stretch of road – exactly what Peiper needed – and guarded by sixty men of the 5th Belgian Fusiliers. They had been recruited from former soldiers and resistance members in Mons immediately after the liberation in late September. The 5th was the first unit of the Belgian army to be formed on national territory since 1940.

The commander of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment was Obersturmbannfuhrer Joachim ‘Jochen’ Peiper (1915–76), whom some historians have elevated to godlike status because of his reputation as a warrior. In fact, he missed several good opportunities to penetrate quicker and further behind the American lines. In his post-war interrogation, Peiper cited a series of battles with the American defenders of Stavelot which prevented him from seizing the town. No such combat took place and the truth was that this expert in night-time tank movement spent the night of 17–18 December asleep outside his objective. A fanatical Nazi, Peiper was arrogant, devious and manipulative. (NARA)

Although Peiper’s men had spent two long days on the road, he was under enormous pressure to reach the Meuse. The Herbstnebel plan called for his first panzers rolling up to the banks of the river at Huy on the evening of 17 December. However, by this hour, the Kampfgruppe had only reached the outskirts of Stavelot – barely one-third of the required distance. Peiper still had another forty miles to go along Rollbahn ‘D’. Perhaps this underlined the impossibility of the original plan – nevertheless, at this juncture, Peiper paused overnight before attacking Stavelot, despite knowing that every hour he delayed would see a more alert American defence. Looking down on to the town that night was one of his Panther commanders, Eugen Zimmermann, who remembered, ‘we could see the lights of many vehicles and hear them. I had the impression the Amis[Americans] were withdrawing.’² Peiper could have used the confusion of this night-time American retreat to cloak a swift seizure of Stavelot: tired though his Kampfgruppewere, there appears no excuse for Peiper halting in the dark.

The first major post-war historical interview with Peiper was conducted on 7 September 1945 by the US Army historian Major Ken Hechler. In it, Peiper offers a very specific reason why Stavelot was not taken on the 17th. What he says is most revealing about his character. The former Obersturmbannführer stated, ‘At 4.00 p.m. we reached the area of Stavelot, which was heavily defended … We shelled Stavelot with heavy infantry howitzers and mortars … At 6.00 p.m. a counter-attack circled round a high hill and hit my column from the south … After the counter-attack was repulsed, I committed more infantry to attack Stavelot again. We approached the outskirts of the village [sic] but bogged down because of stubborn American resistance at the edge of Stavelot. We … launched no additional organised counter-attacks until the dawn of 18 December 1944.’³

It is an instructive lesson in the use of source documents – for here, Peiper demonstrably lied to Major Hechler. There was no SS assault on Stavelot that evening, nor were there any recorded American counter-attacks. We know he arrived much later because of the roadblock his Spitzeencountered long after dark at about 7.30 p.m. Peiper invented a dramatic evening attack on Stavelot to conceal the fact that he was asleep. Veterans and historians also note that the Germans rarely attacked at night. Hechler’s 1945 interview notes also point out that it was only halfway through the session that Peiper revealed he spoke ‘perfect English’. As Hechler notes, ‘This so astounded both the interpreter and myself that we sat with our jaws hanging open for a full half-minute … In addition, on several subsequent occasions he turned heatedly on the interpreter and corrected his interpretation with perfect English.’⁴

In short, Peiper was devious and manipulative, if on occasion charming. Hechler also notes, ‘Oberst Peiper is a very arrogant, typical SS man, thoroughly imbued with the Nazi philosophy. He is very proud of his regiment and division and is inclined to make derogatory remarks about other units. He is possibly frightened about his future disposition [the coming war crimes trial]. As soon as it became apparent that our conversation would be confined to military tactics and not his war crimes, he opened up.’⁵

In 1944, Peiper was not to know that almost every military unit in Stavelot was leaving town. The same had been true in Malmedy, where there were few troops able to defend the ancient town, apart from two companies, totalling 180 men, of Lieutenant-Colonel Pergrin’s 291st Engineers (some of whom had also been despatched to Stavelot). Peiper had missed two good opportunities on Sunday, 17 December. Not only was Malmedy his for the taking that afternoon, but he could then have driven down a good main road for no more than five miles to seize Stavelot as well, also relatively undefended, before nightfall. Taking advantage of the chaos of the American withdrawal, nightfall on 17 December might even have seen his Kampfgruppe in Trois-Ponts or Werbomont, and halfway to his objective of the Meuse.

Due to their assigned routes and with no knowledge of the American dispositions ahead, Kampfgruppe Peiper was feeling its way down minor roads, usually proceeding at barely a walking pace. Several of the Belgians executed by Peiper’s men were local people, plucked off the roadside, forced to act as guides and murdered when they were no longer considered useful. This was because the Spitze and Peiper had very few maps of the area. This was an omission suffered by most formations involved in Herbstnebel. Instead, captured American maps were prized, with their highly detailed scales of 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 (copied from the British), or US Army 1:200,000 route maps, copied from the French 1938 Michelin series. The standard German maps of Belgium, Luxembourg and France – as Generalmajor Friedrich Kittel, of the 62nd VolksgrenadierDivision, observed – were also Michelin 1:200,000 scale tourist maps.⁶ Throughout the war, the company was obliged to produce mapping for the occupiers in this standard scale, which had also been used for the earlier German invasion of May 1940. They are exactly the same as Michelin’s equivalent modern maps (apart from larger settlements and new roads), and, of course, fail to show the minor roads and tracks the panzers needed to use to outflank American positions, detailing only major routes.⁷

We have a sense of how poorly defended the Malmedy–Stavelot area was on the 17th, because between midnight and dawn on 18 December large numbers of reinforcements were rushed to the threatened sector. The Vikings – Lieutenant-Colonel Harold D. Hansen’s Norwegian American Battalion, whom we met earlier, and who found the routine of justifying their guttural accents at checkpoints particularly trying – were the first significant force to arrive in Malmedy, at about 03.00 a.m.⁸ Following them were elements of the 526th Armored Infantry, under Major Paul Solis, the 825th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and on the 18th, the 120th Regiment of the 30th Division, released from the Ninth Army. The 30th was led by Major-General Leland J. ‘Hollywood’ Hobbs, a skilled and flamboyant commander, who had graduated from West Point with Eisenhower and Bradley, and taken over the 30th from Simpson, now his Ninth Army boss. Hobbs had led his formation through Normandy and imbued its ranks with his aggressive fighting qualities. It had a superb combat reputation.

With the advance of both the Leibstandarte and Hitlerjugend obviously slowing, Otto Skorzeny realised there was less need for his trained commando teams. There was no point in them driving ahead in their GI uniforms and jeeps if there were no panzer spearheads with which to link up. The Americans were also now on the alert and looking out for them. With his mission compromised, Skorzeny lobbied Sepp Dietrich and Fritz Krämer at Sixth Army headquarters to be allowed to deploy the considerable resources of his Panzer Brigade 150 as a normal combat unit. Peiper had bypassed the defenceless Malmedy on 17 December, instead massacring the GIs of 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion at Baugnez, just out of town. Now Skorzeny was ordered to take Malmedy with his troops. Believing it to be only lightly defended, he attacked the town at 03.30 a.m. on 21 December.

Skorzeny’s intelligence was incorrect: as we have seen, the Viking Battalion and the 120th Regiment (three battalions) were in occupation, alongside Pergrin’s 291st Engineers. As no German artillery support was available, Skorzeny planned a two-pronged surprise attack from Baugnez (scene of the massacre on the 17th) in the east, and the south-west. The Baugnez attack was soon shredded by the defenders and rapidly abandoned. Moving from Ligneuville, through Bellevaux, and attacking along the Route de Falize, Skorzeny preceded his other attack with five Panthers disguised as American M-10 tank destroyers. However, they triggered trip flares, alerting the defenders who brought down such a weight of defensive artillery fire that this attack, too, was eventually abandoned with heavy casualties.

It was during this engagement that PFC Francis S. Currey of Company ‘K’, 120th Infantry, used a bazooka to destroy a tank with one round, suppressed a German-held house with other shots, drove off three panzers threatening his buddies with more anti-tank rounds and manned a machine gun to cover the withdrawal of colleagues. Such actions, and more besides, would win him the Medal of Honor. Skorzeny’s attack had been defeated, and it had been a ridiculous waste of highly trained specialist troops – the commando leader’s fighting instinct had overcome his common sense in sending such a valuable asset into battle. This underlined, too, the poor state of German tactical intelligence in December 1944: Skorzeny had no clue as to the strength of the defenders. After his abortive assault, the remnants of the Panzer Brigade were transported back to their training base at Grafenwöhr, their usefulness at an end.

Two days after Skorzeny’s attack, on 23 December, the good weather brought out the Allied air forces, as we’ve seen. Six B-26 Marauders from the 322nd Bomber Group hit Malmedy in error, thinking it was the German town of Zülpich, further east. The tragedy was compounded with a much heavier raid by B-24s on Christmas Eve, and – incredibly – again on Christmas Day, when the centre was bombed by four B-26s, who had mistaken the town for St Vith, which had just fallen to the Germans. The appalling death toll from three days of ‘friendly’ fire was 225 civilians and 37 GIs killed and over 1,000 wounded, in addition to 1,160 houses rendered uninhabitable.⁹ Worse was the scepticism that US Army personnel attached to any projected operations of the ‘American Luftwaffe’. Some of the bombing may have been provoked by US anti-aircraft fire, for American aircraft recognition skills were notoriously bad. Sergeant Otie Cook from the 745th Tank Battalion was reprimanded for shooting down an aircraft with a .50-inch Browning machine gun. ‘The trouble was it was a British one. The pilot was mad at me. “Bloody Yanks. You shoot at anything!” he said, right after I had shot him out of the air. Then he told me: “By the way, jolly good shooting!”’¹⁰

We now return to Peiper’s attack on Stavelot of 18 December. The River Amblève flows through the small town, which then had a population of about 5,000, and was surrounded by densely wooded, high ground to the north and south. Those GIs in Stavelot who were not withdrawing overnight had begun to prepare defensive positions on the south-east side of the town, unaware of the actual threat facing them. All they knew was that a roadblock had been attacked the night before, though the offending Germans had not been identified. A company of engineers overlooked the southward-facing, multi-arched stone bridge over the river, built in 1576, and had laid mines to its front, but – possibly misunderstanding their orders – had not readied it for demolition.¹¹

Most of Stavelot lay to the north of the crossing, but some of the town was on the southern side. Peiper was attacking from the south, and his route took him downhill, over that bridge and into town. At about 06.00 a.m. on the 18th US engineers removed the mines, allowing a patrol from Major Solis’s 526th Armored Infantry to cross and climb the steep slope opposite in their half-tracks. They ran into fire from Peiper’s Spitze which was descending the hill. The American vehicles were destroyed, their crews killed or wounded, though some managed to recross the bridge.

Peiper’s troops, meanwhile, could see the structure was not prepared for demolition and waited for their panzers to support an attack over the river and into town. At 08.00 a.m. on the 18th, his artillery opened fire on Stavelot. In the leading Panther, Eugen Zimmermann had been briefed to race for the bridge, taking care of an American 57mm anti-tank gun in front of it. He remembered, ‘Slowly it got light. We ran our engines to warm them. “Driver, march!” We met no resistance. The anti-tank gun was there. We rammed it out of the way. Onto the bridge. I saw another anti-tank gun behind the corner of a house. “Gunner, Open fire!” The 7.5 cm missed. “Driver accelerate!” We drove over the trail of the anti-tank gun. It broke and ended up on the driver’s hatch. Heavy firing from all sides. Gradually it decreased, and we were through.’¹²

Hans Hennecke followed, and eventually the whole Kampfgruppe rolled down the long hill over the bridge at the bottom and into Stavelot. The first few German vehicles charged through the town, without any infantry strength to mop up their American opponents, but as more of the Kampfgruppe arrived the balance of forces tilted and the GIs started to withdraw. A few German tanks were hit, yet Peiper’s men did not waste time subduing the town, and the Spitze turned left out of Stavelot toward Trois-Ponts at about 10.00 a.m. It was in Stavelot that Hennecke – commanding the charge downhill – had his Panther put out of action, but he transferred to another and continued on. Sheer momentum had carried Peiper’s men into town. The arrival of some of his King Tigers further dispirited the defenders, as Lieutenant John V. Pehovic of the 526th Armored Infantry recalled: ‘The Germans brought up a monstrously huge King Tiger tank … [against which] the anti-tank guns proved ineffective … By this time it was obvious that the Germans had overwhelming force and we had nothing that could stop the Tigers.’¹³ Peiper was also lucky that the defenders, many of whom had not seen action before, had arrived at night, with no sense of the geography of the town they were to defend (though neither, admittedly, had Peiper).

The Americans in Stavelot were not well organised; had they destroyed the bridge, with the numbers and weapons at their disposal, they should have been able to hold off Peiper for the rest of the day, at least until more reinforcements arrived. The Amblève river would not have stopped Peiper’s infantry from wading over, but as he had no combat bridging a sabotaged crossing would have amounted to a major impediment. With the bridge intact, however, the remainder of the Leibstandarte column (more than 800 vehicles) continued to pour into Stavelot throughout the day. Some convinced themselves that the townsfolk had taken up arms with the Americans against them and an orgy of destruction began. Belgians on the street were executed at random. An SS soldier in a moving half-track was observed laughing hysterically as he idly machine-gunned houses, killing and wounding families in their own homes.

Almost immediately squads of the US 117th Infantry, supported by M-10s from the 843rd Tank Destroyer Battalion, began to counter-attack Stavelot behind Peiper, and by the evening of the 18th had retaken a fair proportion of the town. The fighting spilled into the 19th, when other Kampfgruppen of the 1st SS-Leibstandarte launched attacks from the south to keep open supply routes to Peiper. On the night of the 19th, the old stone bridge was blown by GIs, something that should have been done on Peiper’s first appearance. Captain Leland E. Cofer of Company ‘A’, 105th Engineer Battalion with the Old Hickory Division, remembered receiving orders about noon on 19 December to destroy the structure. Under cover of darkness, he and his men placed twenty 50lb boxes of TNT in one stack directly over the first span. As Cofer recalled, ‘We pulled the fuse igniters and took off running, disregarding any noise we might make. Then a couple of short blocks away, we heard KA-BOOM!!! It was a terrific explosion. Stone masonry houses close to the ends of the bridge collapsed and any remaining windows near the bridge were blown out. The first span had disappeared, it was a good gap. As our company commander, Captain James Rice, told Hal Boyle, the Associated Press reporter, “No German tank can jump that.”’¹⁴

The Germans were furious. Hand grenades were thrown into cellars; a group of twenty-two women and children were mown down along a hedgerow along the route to Trois-Ponts. The SS gave up trying to retake the northern part of Stavelot on 20 December, but would retain control of that part which lay to the south until 13 January. By the end of the Ardennes campaign, 920 out of Stavelot’s 1,250 houses would be destroyed or damaged; memorials around the town record the names of 138 civilians murdered by the SS. It was noted that the majority of the perpetrators were between sixteen and nineteen years old, and had embarked on their orgy of mayhem with a sense of anarchy: they could do anything they wanted – and did.¹⁵ Many of Stavelot’s victims lie in a common grave in front of the abbey. (Last time I drove through the town, I noticed that the walls of some houses, such as Number 19, rue de Haut Rivage, still bore the bullet holes from December 1944.) Overlooking the replacement stone bridge on the Amblève is a 1944-era US half-track, commemorating those of the 30th Division who fought here, including the engineers who demolished the 368-year-old bridge.

To avoid the poor roads that Kampfgruppe Peiper had encountered, other vehicles from the 1st SS Leibstandarte Division detoured south to the crossroads at Recht, then and today still known as the Kaiserbaracke, (the ‘Kaiser’s junction’, from the days when this was part of Imperial Germany). A sequence of cleverly composed images, recording King Tiger tanks and half-tracks racing past, and SS troopers pausing at the signpost pointing to Malmedy and St Vith, have become some of the iconic images of the Ardennes campaign. (NARA)

Not all the German vehicles supporting Kampfgruppe Peiper continued along his Rollbahn. When word filtered back as to its atrocious state and slow going, especially between Büllingen and Ligneuville, other Leibstandarte vehicles took a much longer detour, south from Büllingen, via Amel (the German name for the town of Amblève), to a crossroads at Recht, where they turned north to rejoin Peiper at Stavelot. At the crossroads, then and today still known as the Kaiserbaracke (the ‘Kaiser’s junction’, from the days when this was part of Imperial Germany), several Waffen-SS Kriegsberichter (war photographers) had gathered to record the might of the Third Reich as it trundled into battle. Taken on 18 December, their pictures – of cigar-smoking young SS troopers in their Schwimmwagen (amphibious jeep) pausing at a signpost pointing to Malmedy and St Vith, a King Tiger tank and half-tracks, loaded with German soldiers – like the others we have noted, have become some of the iconic images of the Ardennes campaign.

A mile north of Stavelot, on the road to Francorchamps, was the huge US gasoline dump, along a five-mile stretch of road. Ironically, Peiper – again desperately short of fuel – was unaware of this depot, and would certainly have deviated from his advance to capture fresh supplies. During the morning, Major Paul Solis, acting CO of the 526th Armoured Infantry Battalion, had stationed himself near a squad manning a 57mm anti-tank gun at the foot of the N622, the minor road leading north to Francorchamps. As the panzers moved through Stavelot, Major Solis retreated back up the Francorchamps road, convinced the Germans would follow him to the fuel. On reaching the dump, he immediately ordered the GI and Belgian guards to pour as much fuel as possible into a dip in the road and burn it. To Solis’s thinking, this had the double effect of producing the perfect anti-tank barrier and denying Peiper his gasoline.¹⁶

The fuel started to burn, though Solis’s orders were later countermanded when reinforcements arrived in the form of the US 117th Infantry Regiment, and it became apparent that Peiper was heading elsewhere – by which time 124,000 gallons had gone up in flames. Jerrycans shot up into the air, propelled by the force of combustion. (At the site in the 1980s, I found one of them, expanded and burst open by the heat, discarded and forgotten in the undergrowth.) Peiper never knew how close he had been to the precious gasoline, the presence of which, fortuitously, had not been marked on any map captured by his Kampfgruppe. None of his men even ventured up the Francorchamps road (though the screenplay for the 1965 movie Battle of the Bulge, discussed later, climaxes with the character of a German panzer commander, modelled on Peiper, arriving at a US supply depot, based on this fuel dump, trying to seize its precious gasoline, and perishing in the attempt). In fact, the opposite was the case – the 117th Infantry ordered the flames put out so they could get past and into action against the SS in Stavelot.

In the September 1945 interview, Ken Hechler asked Peiper where he expected to capture gasoline. Peiper replied, ‘Our divisional intelligence officer had a situation map purporting to show your supply installations. We believed from that map that we could capture gasoline at Büllingen and Stavelot.’ Hechler went on, ‘Did you realise that you came within 300 yards of a three-million gallon gasoline dump at Spa? [Hechler actually meant the big depot at Stavelot, not Spa.]’ Hechler’s interview notes then record, ‘With a typical gesture Oberst Peiper shrugged his shoulders, smiled rather arrogantly, and said in English “I am sorry”. He didn’t know of the existence of the gasoline dump.’¹⁷ Peiper had expected to find fuel in Stavelot piled in jerrycans in the town square, as he had done in Büllingen. Its absence, he assumed, was because the Americans had moved it – not because it still lay there, under his very nose, a mile north of Stavelot.

Here again, Peiper had been let down by faulty intelligence. Had he continued his advance through the night of 17–18 December, he would have had more time to discover and correct his error in overlooking the fuel, in undreamt-of quantities – as the Belgian fusiliers and Major Solis’s small group of GIs would not have been able to prevent a determined German assault from overwhelming the gasoline dump. Now, without waiting for the rest of his Kampfgruppe, or the 3rd Fallschirmjägers, whom he hoped were following closely in his wake, he pressed on.

Peiper could sense the American defences stiffening and was aware that the next town, Trois-Ponts, was a crucial bottleneck. As its name suggested, the town contained three river bridges of tactical importance. It was at the confluence of the Amblève and Salm rivers. Through it, the main north-east–south-west road from Malmedy and Stavelot ran to Manhay, Hotton and Marche. In Trois-Ponts, it intersected with the north–south road from Liège to Vielsalm, Clervaux and Luxembourg. Here, too, was the junction of the Spa to Luxembourg line with the Amblève valley railway. Arriving from the east, in order to pursue his Rollbahn ‘D’, Peiper needed to pass through a pair of railway tunnels, turn left immediately and drive over the Amblève river bridge. Five hundred yards later, his Kampfgruppe would then need to execute a right turn over the Salm river. This would be a complicated series of manoeuvres for 800 armoured vehicles in peacetime, but under fire presented all manner of hazards and a perfect ambush spot. Peiper was convinced the sector would be defended, and feared the bridges were prepared for demolition: he would be right on both counts.

To be sure of seizing Trois-Ponts and its valuable bridges to continue his advance westwards, Peiper split his force in two. The main body approached the town from the north bank of the Amblève from Stavelot, but a smaller column moved along the south bank towards the high ground at Wanne, which led to another bridge over the Salm, south of Trois-Ponts. Shortly after 11.00 a.m., the slowly moving Spitze with the northern main body encountered a solitary American 57mm anti-tank gun, stationed forward of the railway tunnels, belonging to Major Solis’s 526th Armored Infantry. It fired several rounds before it was destroyed and its crew of four killed.

The fighting slowed the Kampfgruppe’s progress right down, and during this exchange, at about 11.45 a.m. on 18 December, the river bridge over the Amblève was blown by Captain Sam Scheuber’s Company ‘C’ of the 51st Engineer Combat Battalion, very audibly. This was a major blow to Kampfgruppe Peiper, who were for the moment unable to move any further along their assigned Rollbahn, which should have seen them progress beyond Trois-Ponts, out of the twisting Amblève valley and on to the fast highway that led, via Werbomont and Hamoir, to the Meuse at Huy. Although nearly forty miles away, travelling on the much better road might have seen them reach the Meuse that very night. With Peiper thus frustrated, Americans on the far bank, watching through binoculars, counted nineteen tanks of his Spitze exit the railway tunnels and turn right, for Coo and Stoumont. Engineers of the 51st and 291st Engineer Battalions defended Trois-Ponts until the arrival of the 505th Parachute Infantry, but could do little to prevent Kampfgruppe Peiper from venting their frustration on nearby civilians. One Engineer GI watched helplessly as SS troopers pursued and executed a teenage boy on the far side of the river. Memorials in town commemorate the 82nd Airborne and nineteen civilians, ranging in age from thirteen to seventy-one, murdered by the SS.

Peiper hoped for better news from his southern attack group, but the Lower Salm bridge was also blown on the 18th, at 1.00 p.m., virtually in their faces. This indicated that the defenders were now fully alert, which was likely to be the case all along Peiper’s projected route. He possessed no bridging equipment: his superiors had gambled that his speed and audacity would win him intact bridges, and so far they had been right. Thereafter, Peiper would need combat bridging to cross the damaged spans, which he did not possess. This also underlined a logistics issue; for Peiper’s southern attacking force reported their fuel tanks were dry. Although they had filled up with captured gasoline at Büllingen the day before, slow going in the appalling weather and the road network – Peiper’s route was very hilly – had doubled his fuel consumption.

Thereafter his panzers could operate whenever gasoline (only his eight-wheeled Puma armoured cars worked on diesel) was brought forward, all the way down the line of march, from the Fatherland – but not otherwise. The millions of gallons sitting in American jerrycans five miles away would have made all the difference to his tactical mobility. Without realising it at the time, any chance of success that Kampfgruppe Peiper had disappeared with the destruction of the Trois-Ponts crossings. They had run out of time. Their situation was now that of a cornered animal, which would grow more vicious and unpredictable with every day. Peiper’s main force of panzers, therefore, had no option but to turn right after the railway tunnels and follow the north bank of the Amblève, towards Coo and Stoumont, where they hoped to secure another bridge over the river at Cheneux, which would lead to a second crossing over the River Lienne – a tributary that flowed into the Amblève – at Hâbièmont. That could return the Kampfgruppe to their correct Rollbahn, still take them out of the Amblève valley, and would leave them with only one other bridge (over the Ourthe at Hamoir) between them and the Meuse. If they achieved this, the detour would constitute merely an extra loop in their march. But the real cost would be time.

Peiper’s mood improved on hearing from his Spitze that the Cheneux bridge had been taken. It had been readied for demolition, but no orders to blow it were received by the American engineers guarding it. At around 1.30 p.m. on 18 December, as the column was crossing, the Kampfgruppe came under concerted air attack and lost a dozen vehicles, including two Panthers. ‘Jabos [Allied fighter-bombers] hung in the air like wasps,’ reminisced one trooper. During the attack, Peiper and Gustav Knittel, one of his sub-unit commanders, had to take shelter in the old bunker which still overlooks the bridge, to the left of the road. They lost two precious hours until 4.00 p.m., when fog and bad light drove off the aircraft. Their final objective was the 180-foot timber trestle Neufmoulin bridge, over the Lienne at Hâbièmont, which his leading Panthers approached at 4.45 p.m. As daylight was fading, soldiers of Company ‘A’, with Lieutenant-Colonel Pergrin’s 291st Combat Engineer Battalion, led by Lieutenant Alvin Edelstein, blew the Lienne bridge as the panzers rattled up to it. A commemorative plaque marks this spot, where the panzers ran out of steam – and bridges. Peiper apparently sat with a leaden heart, pounded his knees and swore bitterly, over and over, ‘diese verdammten Ingenieure!’ (‘Those damned engineers!’)¹⁸

In the meantime, Major-General James Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division (alerted with the 101st which had gone to Bastogne with McAuliffe) had arrived in Werbomont, ten miles west of Trois-Ponts, transported standing up from Reims at high speed, in the usual mix of open-topped 6 × 6 trucks and semi-trailers. With them the 82nd brought a ‘truck-load of Panzerfausts captured from the Germans in Holland’, which were greatly preferred to their own bazookas.¹⁹ At Werbomont they created a defensive perimeter, and immediately Colonel Reuben H. Tucker’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment advanced on foot to Rahier, midway between the Lienne and Cheneux bridges. Tucker’s 1st Battalion threw out a protective screen towards Cheneux, where they encountered Peiper’s men.

With the Lienne bridge out, Peiper was forced to withdraw, leaving a rearguard and most of his anti-aircraft units at Cheneux, and concentrated around La Gleize. Some German half-tracks managed to find a way over the Lienne at Chauveheid, but the bridge could not support tanks. They crossed during the night of the 18th, and were ambushed by Gavin’s men just short of Werbomont. The following morning Gavin recorded driving out by jeep to inspect his division’s overnight handiwork. ‘I came on five knocked-out German armored vehicles and self-propelled guns, with several dead Germans lying along the road.’²⁰ This would be the furthest western point reached by any of Peiper’s men. The arrival of the 82nd Airborne was again an indication of Peiper’s wasted time the previous night outside Stavelot. The intervening hours had enabled an entire airborne division to block his route westwards.

Although some reinforcements managed to get through to him, Peiper was now desperately short of fuel and in danger of being cut off. The following morning, 19 December, his Kampfgruppe attacked Stoumont, which was strongly held by the 30th Division’s 119th Regiment, and soon joined by Tucker’s paratroopers. The battle carried on through the day, but the Americans were stubborn and held out, the US 740th Tank Battalion accounting for several Panthers. Meanwhile, Tucker’s 504th Parachute Infantry took the fight to the Kampfgruppe. They attacked Cheneux during the night of 20–21 December, capturing fourteen German half-tracks which they henceforth used as their own, but his First Battalion lost 225 dead and wounded in the extremely bloody close combat.

Colonel William E. Ekman’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, meanwhile, sealed the front from Trois-Ponts south to Vielsalm, to prevent any further incursions westwards and Colonel Roy E. Lindquist’s 508th PIR did the same, occupying Chevron and the high ground south-east of Werbomont, around Bra, where the Germans had earlier executed seven young men. (This was just to the north of the crossroads battlesites of the Baraque de Fraiture and Manhay that we studied earlier.) Peiper could now make no further progress until resupplied, and conducted a gradual fighting withdrawal towards La Gleize. Further German reinforcements arrived during 20 December, for Mohnke – the divisional commander – had realised that his best chance of progress lay with Peiper. On 21 December, Mohnke concentrated the bulk of his division on the heights between Trois-Ponts and Wanne in an attempt to relieve Peiper. On the high ground, across the Salm river from Mohnke, Gavin placed his airborne artillery, covering Trois-Ponts from the south-west. From there he was able to give the Leibstandarte a severe mauling.

With the bridge over the Amblève in Stavelot destroyed, a Jagdpanzer IV was ordered to cross north, over the weak bridge over the Amblève at Petit-Spai, just east of Trois-Ponts. Reluctant to risk the flimsy structure, Hauptsturmführer Otto Hoist nevertheless drove his twenty-six-ton tank destroyer onto the bridge, both of which promptly ended up in the Amblève. The replacement bridge still spans the river just before the first Trois-Ponts railway tunnel. High water, a strong current and US artillery fire prevented any further bridging, and by 22 December Peiper’s situation had deteriorated, with air drops of supplies – including gasoline, rations and ammunition – ending up in the hands of Tucker’s 504th Parachute Infantry.

Nearby lay the old stone-built Château de Petit-Spai (today in ruins), a home for war-orphaned children, which was taken over by the Leibstandarte. When one toddler waddled up to an SS trooper, grabbed his hand and innocently welcomed him, ‘Bonjour, Monsieur l’Américain’, the reaction was predictable – the resident priest was immediately sought out and shot in cold blood, and the young children and their guardians herded into the cellars, without food, water or any sanitary arrangements. Peiper’s men stayed for two days, deliberately terrorising the children. When their place was taken by a Volksgrenadier unit, the atmosphere changed immediately. Food and water was arranged for the half-crazed waifs and their fearful attendants.²¹ This incident, better than many others, illustrated the brutality that Dietrich (its first commander), Mohnke and Peiper – among others – had fostered in the 1st SS-Leibstandarte Division. Every German unit may have had its thugs, but the SS deliberately encouraged them.

Under intense artillery fire (the 30th Infantry Division recorded firing more than 57,000 shells into the area), on 23 December Peiper received orders to break out from his contracting perimeter at La Gleize. The 82nd Airborne and 30th Infantry Divisions, meanwhile, were doing their best to contain any movement of Peiper’s and block other Leibstandarte support from reaching him. On the 23rd, between Trois-Ponts and Stoumont, at Petit-Coo, Company ‘I’ of the 120th Infantry (30th Division) was pinned down by extremely heavy automatic fire coming from a house. With a colleague, Staff Sergeant Paul L. Bolden crawled forward and hurled fragmentation, then phosphorous grenades into the building, opened the door and despatched twenty SS troopers, but was severely wounded by the remainder. In extreme pain he attacked again, killing the rest and survived to be decorated with the Medal of Honor. Meanwhile, up the road, Peiper began disabling his remaining 135 armoured vehicles; their fuel tanks were, in any case, empty. They sabotaged those they could, then about 800 men of the Kampfgruppe trekked on foot back to the divisional HQ at Wanne, overlooking Trois-Ponts. They arrived just before dawn on Christmas Eve; with them was Hans Hennecke. The airborne troops and 30th Division GIs thought at first of re-employing Peiper’s remaining armour as their own, but ‘the maintenance issues were insuperable’, so they were sabotaged by American engineers – just in case the Germans were to return.

Among the many tanks left behind in La Gleize was King Tiger, No. 213, once commanded by Obersturmführer Wilhelm Dollinger. It is there still. Escaping the scrapman, and restored by the local community, the Tiger II is parked outside the town’s ‘December 44 Historical Museum’, which contains an astonishing amount of memorabilia connected with Peiper (including his map case, left in the village), and his American opponents. A visit makes a fitting conclusion to any tour of the Ardennes battlefields.²² The bloody march of Kampfgruppe Peiper had ended.²³