by Leo Barron
Black still had a hundred yards to go before reaching the wood line. Lying on his back in the snow, he had disposed of his long overcoat so he could move faster. Hiding behind a pile of potatoes, Black watched as whitish green German tracer rounds zipped over his head. He picked an opportune moment and sprinted across the road to the woods, ducking for cover. Black also admitted later that the withdrawal of Charlie Company was more of a panicked run for cover than an organized retreat. On the positive side, Black noticed the men were keeping their wits and weapons about them, and that Captain Cody was quickly rallying them in the woods.
“Halfway up this long hillside, already in the open past the tree line, I looked up. There stood Captain Cody with his arms raised high. ‘Hold up there!’ he said. ‘This is as far as we’re going to run. Turn around! We are going back and fight the bastards!’” With Cody’s growth of beard, long overcoat, and dramatically raised arms exhorting his men, Black noted, “You know something? For a moment there, he looked a lot like Jesus Christ to me.”65
Black and his fellow NCOs began counting heads, organizing the men for a counterattack, and taking stock of what weapons they had. As they prepared themselves for the attack, other men from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd platoons began to arrive in driblets. Unfortunately, if they were going to counterattack, it would have to be with small arms. With all the commotion at the farmhouse, many heavy weapons had been left behind, and now there were hardly any machine guns, mortars, or bazookas. When Cody finally counted his men, he had most of 1st and 2nd platoons with him on the hill. Most of 3rd Platoon remained near the 401st Headquarters, either locked in combat for the courtyard or captured by the Germans.
In the end, the soldiers quickly noticed that two of 3rd Platoon’s squads had escaped. The last squad had not made it. Black admitted that this was an added incentive. He and the others knew the men left at the farmhouse were now prisoners of the Germans.66
“The thought of the other men—were they killed or captured?—spurred us on,” Black recalled.67
0715–0720 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
B/502nd Parachute Infantry tactical assembly area
Near Rolle
By now, any other Americans along the road to Champs had either heard the ground-shaking cracks as the tank destroyers exchanged fire with the Germans, or had seen the German tanks emerging from the fog, heading for the road. In fact, as the sun spread on the horizon and burned through the cloud cover, the rumbling Panzers and StuGs were hard to miss.
Earlier that morning, after checking with Chappuis at Rolle, Major John Hanlon had brought Baker Company of the 502nd almost a mile to the north, ready to move into Champs if needed. At Chappuis’s urging, Hanlon had already sent a platoon forward to help Sutliffe’s 2nd Battalion on the line between Champs and Longchamps, where the 77th Volksgrenadiers had attacked through the Les Bresses woods and clashed with Sutliffe’s men. The rest of B Company was digging in as reserve, to back up Swanson’s company in Champs if need be. The troops reached the bushes and trees along a low hill near the zigzag of woods west of Rolle. As they started to dig their foxhole positions, the paratroopers grumbled and complained, doubting they would see any action. From the tapering off of gunfire in Champs, and from Swanson’s radio reports, it looked like Able Company was getting things under control there. Now, as the sun rose in the east, Hanlon used one of Baker’s platoons to set up a roadblock on the Withimont road north of Rolle.68
About that time, D’Angelo’s and Vallitta’s M18 Hellcats sped by, treads crunching the soft snow on the road as they headed toward Rolle. Sergeant “Moe” Williams had ordered Sergeant D’Angelo to head in that direction and help out. Since Swanson had released his and Vallitta’s TDs from the close-quarters fighting in Champs, the two headed to their typical morning position near the Dreve de Mande, the “Lane of Trees.” The two Hellcats rumbled past, turned to the left, one after another, and vanished from sight beneath the slope of land to the east, taking a trail through the woods.69
The Baker Company troopers probably wondered where the two TDs were going in such a hurry. They had their answer shortly when several soldiers nearby shouted, “German tanks!” and pointed to the southwest. In the distance, spread out like the fingers of a great armored claw, the dark and prowling forms crawled across the snowy slope to the south. Several seemed to be heading up the road, toward B Company’s positions and straight toward Champs.
Hanlon was nowhere near a radio at this time. Hanlon’s S2, First Lieutenant Samuel B. Nickels Jr.—who had been at Champs with A Company and had seen the German attack that morning—went scurrying to warn the regimental HQ.70
Automatically, several of the troopers guarding the roadblock turned the other way to face this new danger to their rear. Armed with rifles, two bazookas, and a machine gun, this small force of men, a platoon in size, now believed they were all that stood between this German assault and their brothers in arms at Champs. With no time to dig in, the soldiers found a ditch in the snowy ground edging the woodlot. As each man picked out a fighting position, the Screaming Eagles of Baker Company checked their weapons and prepared to deal out death and destruction.71
After “No Love, No Nothing” had passed the bend in the road, a burst of German machine gun fire over D’Angelo’s head alerted him to the approaching German menace. Following the elevated Champs–Hemroulle road would just make his tank destroyer a perfect target, outlined against the rising sun to the east. Popping up in the open turret, D’Angelo raised his arms over his head to signal Vallitta. “I told him to follow me. We had fire coming in, so I went to follow the contour of the land,” D’Angelo related. “We went to the left, where we were behind the ridge, and I saw all of these paratroopers up on this hill there, digging in and getting ready to fight.” The two tank destroyer commanders knew this position. Lieutenant Long had assigned their section to the Champs sector for the last few days, and D’Angelo had already staked out the position near the tree line as a good ambush spot.
A paratrooper, happy to see the arrival of the “big guns,” ran up to “No Love, No Nothing” and told D’Angelo that German tanks were attacking up ahead. “I got off my tank destroyer so doggone fast that I left my field glasses on board.” He did not need to see the enemy—D’Angelo would hear from them soon enough.
At that moment, one of the German tanks let loose with a 75mm shell. The shell passed over D’Angelo and his crew as the paratroopers hit the earth. It crashed into the bushes and tree lot behind the vehicles, sending up geysers of snow. Having been shot at twice by tanks in the past twenty-four hours, D’Angelo felt very lucky as he picked himself up. “It was probably my closest call of the war,” he admitted. The fire had come from one of the German tanks that had parked near the woods and Allen’s recently abandoned HQ. D’Angelo’s first sergeant, “Moe” Williams, shouted from his nearby Jeep to get the TDs around behind the Panzer and take it out from the rear. Williams put his Jeep in gear and drove ahead to scout the way.
Just then a 101st lieutenant ran up to his M18, ordering D’Angelo and Vallitta to go up the hill and attack the oncoming tanks. D’Angelo recalled the conversation:
“I told him, ‘We can’t fight like that. We ain’t got no doggone armor!’ He started swearing, calling me every name in the book.”72 Corporal Paul “the Greek” Stoling, the driver of Vallitta’s tank, overheard the argument. “I remember the lieutenant who threatened to court-martial us. I said [if he had sent us straight at the German tanks], ‘There, five men killed! You happy?’”73
It was a common problem during the Bastogne defense, as so few of the paratroopers had ever worked with tank destroyers before. D’Angelo realized there was no time to educate the young officer on tank destroyer tactics. Instead, he decided to appeal to the lieutenant’s common sense. Even without his field glasses, D’Angelo could see the German tanks making for the Champs–Hemroulle road. He quickly noticed the woods south of Rolle, across the field in front of him, where Williams had indicated
he should attack. He also noticed the tree line was adjacent to where the panzers would proceed on their present course. To the veteran tank destroyer commander, the site looked like the perfect firing position—concealed and offering an almost point-blank solution on the passing German armor. A perfect flank attack! D’Angelo knew that all he had to do was use the wooded trail to zip over to the woods in time, and with the speedy M18s that would be no problem.
“Look, Lieutenant,” D’Angelo told him. “We’ll fight our way, the way we were trained. We’ll go around behind, back in the woods, and come out on them.” The young officer gave his reluctant consent. D’Angelo hopped aboard his Hellcat and signaled the two tank destroyers to head out.74
0715–0720 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment command post
Rolle Château, Belgium
Colonel Chappuis sensed the German attack had stalled in Champs. He ordered Hanlon to prepare for a counterattack once the sun was up. Now “Silent Steve” was growing convinced that the German attack in Champs was only an attempt to contain U.S. forces and that the main German effort was coming somewhere else, nearby. Chappuis’ staff officers, James J. Hatch, and Captain Ivan G. Phillips, the regimental communications officer, were able to send a message via radio to McAuliffe’s headquarters at 0715 to inform them of the 502nd’s plans to retake Champs.
As Hatch departed for Champs to plan the operation, a bright flash and shock wave blasted through the command center. Another explosion quickly followed and everything went dark. The switchboard operator, though stunned, was unharmed, but the switchboard itself was a different story. The blast had destroyed it, and with that, all communication with division headquarters had ceased. Phillips dispatched several parties to repair the lines.
At about this time, a very winded and flushed Lieutenant Nickels burst into the regimental HQ at Rolle just as the 502nd commander was picking up the radio. Chappuis had been expecting another call from Swanson at Champs, filling him in on the latest developments there. Instead, Nickels, standing in the doorway and catching his breath, blurted out more pressing news:
“There are seven enemy tanks and lots of infantry coming over the hill to your left,” he said in a gasp.75
Chappuis now knew that the Germans had broken through Allen’s positions and were literally in his front yard. The German tanks were approaching down the road, the first two StuGs about five hundred yards from the château front. He turned to Cassidy and the other officers present. In his calm drawl, “Silent Steve” ordered them to get everyone out who could carry a gun and fight.
Immediately, Captain Stone started gathering up men—radio operators, cooks, clerks, drivers, chaplains, engineers, and so forth—and headed out the château gate to do battle with the Germans. Stone decided the best place to establish his hasty defense was along the Dreve and the slight incline that overlooked the Rolle crossroads. It was a motley crew, but they were all that remained on the château grounds.76
Divisional surgeon Major Douglas T. Davidson told First Lieutenant Henry Barnes, a medical evacuation officer, to watch over the wounded men in the stable opposite the château. In this primitive, candlelit building, Barnes had been taking care of the more severely wounded. Davidson then took all of the wounded who were able to hold a rifle and, arming the men, left to follow Stone up the road.
Barnes, meanwhile, attempted to make the more severely wounded more comfortable. At one point, as soldiers darted past his aid station, he heard that “seven tanks were practically in the courtyard” of the ancient château.
“The noise of firing, explosions and shriek of incoming shells increased with daylight,” Barnes recalled years later. “A medical officer ran over to me and told me to get ready to burn all the medical books of tags so the enemy couldn’t know how many men we had lost.” Barnes did everything within his power to keep the wounded calm. When he heard more gunfire outside, he started a small fire to burn the tags.77
Chappuis and Cassidy kept the one radio operator with them to maintain contact with their men. It was now only the three of them occupying the château, as Stone had scraped together every able body, including Davidson’s twenty or more “walking wounded.”
Chappuis knew that if he could coordinate the movements and actions of his 1st Battalion, which Hanlon had stretched out along the front from Hemroulle to Champs (luckily, in exactly the place the Germans were attacking), he would have a fighting chance of blocking the German advance. In addition, if the officers could get the men to hold their ground—dig in and fight where they were—Chappuis could close the break in the line before any of the Germans reached Bastogne or the valuable artillery park to the south. To make this happen, Chappuis told Cassidy to radio B Company to stand firm, and to get C Company turned around to face the attack from the west.
The radios were still the only way to communicate. Cassidy was not having trouble reaching the three companies, but getting hold of their commanders was a different story. Swanson, for instance, had his hands busy in Champs. Chappuis could guess that. What “Silent Steve” did not know was that Baker and Charlie companies were in the same boat. Cassidy had already sent a runner to alert the two tank destroyers nearby and then go on to C Company with the message, but by the time the runner reached Cody, his men had already figured out on their own what to do. Cassidy was able to reach Hanlon by handy-talky and told him to face both companies around immediately to meet the German advance on the road. Unfortunately, neither he nor Chappuis realized that the two company commanders, frantically trying to save the line, never got the word.
As much as Chappuis was trying to organize the defense, the well-trained veterans of the 101st and 705th were typically one step ahead of their commanders. The average soldiers, NCOs, and junior officers reacted instinctively to the attack, and reacted well. Those vaunted airborne and armor traits, and a little bit of luck, might just save Bastogne.78
CHAPTER TEN
“A Small Lesson in Tank Warfare”
“We have not so merry a Christmas.”1
—Henry Dearborn, a private at Valley Forge
0710–0720 hours, Monday, 25 December 1944
1/401st battle positions
East of Mande Saint-Etienne
The men of Able and Baker companies of the 1/401st may have felt a little like they had been run over and left for dead, but they still had plenty of fight left in them.
Just minutes after the German tanks had passed through their positions, the angry glider-fighters of Bowles’s 2nd Platoon slid back to their holes, turned their weapons around, cocked the charging handles on their machine guns, and prepared to deal with the German infantry that was trailing the panzers. These men did not need orders. They knew what they had to do.2
Back at Harper’s command post, word had arrived that Allen had been forced out of his CP and sent running to Hemroulle. Communications, with the severing of the telephone lines throughout the sector, had almost completely broken down. Harper knew he had to get back in touch with Allen and find out what was happening, quick. Harper sent his S3, Major Alvin Jones, with a radio to the 463rd’s command post in Hemroulle to help relay information about the breaking situation.
Both Bowles and Towns, of course, were out of contact with the battalion—not that it mattered, because the battalion HQ was now swarming with Germans. Towns had a gut feeling the German armor that sped past his position had overrun the battalion command post.
Over the radio net, they heard Captain MacDonald. The voice of the more experienced commander on his flank helped set Bowles at ease.
“Here’s the situation. The battalion commander has had to get out,” MacDonald said. “I can see you from where I am. Your best bet is to stay where you are. Hold tight to your positions and fight back at them.”3
MacDonald then radioed Towns. “Speck, this is the time for a counterattack. You come out at them over the route we followed yesterday, and we’ll move in on this side. We can take
them right where they are.”4
Far behind the panzers was the infantry of Maucke’s 3rd Battalion, under the command of Major Adam Dyroff. Dyroff’s mission was to mop up the pockets of resistance the tanks had left behind. The soldiers trudged through the fields of thick, heavy snow, still yelling and firing into the air. Some of the grenadiers were in formation, and bunched up as they began to climb up the ridge toward Able and Baker companies’ battle positions. To some of the men of the 1/401st, the German infantry looked like ghosts in their pale winter camouflage. Leveling their weapons and squinting down the sights, the determined glidermen prepared to fire.5
Suddenly the Panzergrenadiers heard a loud thump. Several of the older veterans of Italy knew that sound. It was the sound of a mortar round leaving its tube.
With keen foresight, Bowles had brought his lone 81mm mortar to bear on the clumps of German foot soldiers, who had made the fatal mistake of presenting the enemy with large, slow-moving targets. Before the Panzergrenadiers could react to the incoming rounds, Able Company’s machine guns opened up. From their occupied trenches and foxholes, the glider-fighters poured .50-caliber and .30-caliber rounds into the soldiers. Red tracers ripped through the fog as if from nowhere, and the Germans dropped in droves, pools of crimson appearing in the snowdrifts. Caught out in the open with no cover, and in a deadly cross fire, the soldiers could do nothing but fall, screaming, as belt after belt of ammo lanced into their lines.6
The slaughter had only just begun.
Rifle fire rent the air. Now men from MacDonald’s Baker Company joined in the cacophony of gunfire. Gisi and others emptied clip after clip of ammo from their M1 rifles as the Germans approached to their left, crunching through the snow on foot. Cut off from the armor, the Germans were shot down left and right. B Company’s machine guns added to the awful chatter as bullets sliced through air and flesh. Caught out in the field between the two tree clumps, more grenadiers fell in heaps.