by Leo Barron
Wisely, Klampert’s and Love’s tank destroyer units that had been firing repeatedly since Maucke’s schwerpunkt had punctured Allen’s lines had backed off just short of the long hill west of Hemroulle. It would not be a good idea to follow in too closely, lest the Hellcats be mistaken by their own artillery as part of the German force.
Long-range artillery fire may have scored a direct hit or two on several of the German tanks as well. Regardless of the number of remaining German tanks in the southern column, obviously the threat to Bastogne was still very real. The best that can be figured is that as the gunners of the 463rd were moving their howitzers into the antitank positions, probably three to four German Mk IV panzers (some towing infantry sleds) and accompanying infantry were staring right down on them.5
The word had reached Cooper earlier that even with the valiant work of his artillery barrages, the 1/401st troopers, and the tank destroyers, enemy tanks and infantry were still heading his way. In fact, Cooper told his men to stack their barracks bags in a big pile and be prepared to burn them if the Germans broke into Hemroulle. Later, as the German tanks closed that gap and got even closer to his HQ, Cooper was nervous enough to order all classified documents and the M-209 cryptographic machine destroyed.6
That morning, on command from Major Victor Garrett, the fire operations officer, the artillery crews of Baker Battery manhandled their stubby guns into the special dug-out antitank positions they had prepared. The guns numbered one, three, and four were wheeled around 180 degrees from their position along the bank of the Rau de Petite Fontaine creek and pushed up a steep embankment. First Lieutenant Joseph Lyons, executive officer of Battery B, explained the need for repositioning the 463rd’s guns:
A little after dawn on Christmas morning, we got a call from the officer of number one gun in Baker battery. He reported that tanks were visible about six hundred yards from his position. Baker Battery was equipped with six guns; however, we had only three guns that could shoot in that sector. The guns were numbered one through six, and guns numbered one through three were pointed towards the enemy tanks. According to the orders from headquarters, we had to have the guns shoot 360 degrees; just in case the Germans did break through, we could have guns covering any field of fire.7
Through field glasses, Lyons and his commanding officer, Captain Ardelle E. Cole, kept a nervous eye on the dark shapes ahead as their men prepped the guns for antitank work.
One of the gun crews from Dog Battery—the battery to the right of B and aligned on the Hemroulle road—heaved one of their weapons into an antitank position near the other three guns. This was to fill in for B Battery’s fourth gun, which was still positioned for indirect fire. Instantly the mission of these four weapons had changed from the FO’s earlier demands for indirect artillery barrages to straight-up antitank defense.8
At 1,339 pounds and well balanced, the M1A1 75mm Pack howitzer was a wonderful—if, by comparison to its bigger brothers, small—gun. The Pack howitzer was easy enough to move—it could be physically pushed into place by its four-man crew or towed by a jeep; it was for this reason that it was specifically chosen by the airborne divisions. The gun was designed to be taken apart and loaded in a glider, or even para-dropped in pieces to be assembled on the ground. The mobility of the little guns was about to save the day.9 “The [M8] pack howitzer was well balanced and fairly easy to move with those big tires,” Hesler acknowledged. “Several men could do it—it had that ring in the front to help.”10
Private First Class Walter J. Peplowski, part of B Battery, gun number three’s crew, also remembered moving the guns that morning: “The number 3 pack howitzer with [Clifford] Wolfenberger, Silvas and Peplowski as a full gun crew was used. If it wasn’t for the powerful George Silvas of Corpus Christi, Texas, I don’t know if we could have made it up hill through the soft snow to the gun pit.”
The men threw open the wooden ammo chests containing the special M66 antitank rounds, (fortunately still in abundance, since the guns had been called on rarely in the antitank role since their arrival near Hemroulle) and loaded each gun for bear.
Peplowski wrote a description years later. In an exciting present tense, he described the action on his own gun: “Now the howitzer is in the pit—all ammo is taken out of the cases. The bare shells lined up in perfect order: HE, WP, HE, WP, HE, WP, etc. The barrel is traversed to the tanks on the extreme left. We wait knowing to fire now would invite disaster, powder snow, smoke, a real give away.”11
As each loader slammed the breech on his weapon closed, the gunners spun the small elevating wheel, drastically lowering the muzzle. The men sat quietly behind each gun, waiting for the Germans to make their move. In the dim light of dawn, the four guns were now pointed at the shapes of the German tanks idling on the hill.
In a position forward of Baker Battery was an atypical young tech sergeant from Tennessee with an even more atypical nickname. He was ducked down in a hole behind a ridge of snow. The German Mk IVs had parked only about a hundred yards from Carson “Booger” Childress’s position. Childress and his security team, armed with rifles and a machine gun, had been quietly keeping an eye on the Germans for more than an hour. Childress was so close that he could hear the Germans talking, and could smell the coffee the cocky Panzertruppen were making as they sat and prepared—of all things—breakfast.12
Behind the forward positions, Claude D. Smith, B Battery’s first sergeant, had grown tired of Captain Cole waking him up early each morning, ordering him to rouse the men and prepare the guns in case of a tank attack. Smith was starting to feel his commander was like the boy who cried wolf a few times too often. This morning—Christmas—Smith decided to sleep in. Cole called Smith in his foxhole near Hemroulle and told him to get up immediately:
“Sergeant Smith, if you are going to get up, it had better be now!” Cole barked into the radio. Recognizing the urgency in Cole’s voice, Smith threw off his wool blanket and ran toward his lieutenant (Lyons) and the B Battery positions.13
Lyons crouched near his number one gun, which was to the left of Peplowski’s number three gun and the number two gun (4th Section) commanded by Sergeant William D. Wood. The D Battery howitzer that had joined them to their far right was commanded by Sergeant Russell Derflinger. Two A Battery guns were also brought in for support, several hundred yards to the north and just alongside the Hemroulle road.14
One of Lyons’s men, Private Merle W. McMorrow, shivered in the cold morning as he got the alert. McMorrow was a replacement who had served in the First Airborne Task Force in the invasion of southern France. When the panzers showed up along the ridgeline in front of the battery, he had been in the rear when a message came in over the phone, ordering them to head to the guns. McMorrow dashed over to one of the howitzers in B Battery. When he arrived he could hear the panzer engines in the darkness. As the sunlight finally crept over the horizon, the young paratrooper could make out several tanks along the ridgeline in front of him.
Later on, McMorrow recalled, “… there was more excitement than fear in the group. We usually never had an opportunity to see the enemy we were firing at.” Each weapon had to be bore-sighted, because the German tanks were so close. In other words, the gunners could not use the sights, but opted for looking straight down or through the bore, much like a pheasant hunter would do with an antique shotgun. McMorrow remembered the process. He wrote, “It involved direct fire and the gun had to be moved down the slope slightly to get the tube depressed sufficiently to get the tanks in the gun sight.”15
With everything in place now, the tension mounted. Everyone was waiting for Cooper’s order to open fire. Lyons shivered in the morning cold. “Joe,” he said to the gunner on one of his howitzers, “when you start firing, for God’s sakes don’t fire over.” Lyons explained his reasoning later: “If you fire short, at least you get a ricochet shot. I was really wasting my time telling him that because he was such a good gunner. I knew he would instinctively do it. We waited about three or four minutes.”
16
The gunners wondered why they were waiting. Lyons passed on the message from the 463rd switchboard: Cooper wanted to make dead sure the tanks were German and not friendly armor. It was rumored that Patton’s own tanks were nearby, trying their hardest this morning to bust into Bastogne. Cooper asked Lyons to see if he could tell whether the tanks had a muzzle brake (a knobby device on the end of German tank barrels to help eliminate the effects of gun flash. American tanks, at least in late 1944, typically did not have muzzle brakes).17
No sooner was Lyons peering through his field glasses to confirm this in the dim light than the Germans suddenly started to move. The panzer crews crawled back into their vehicles with the clanging of hatches slamming shut. Maybach engines roared to life. Some of the German soldiers started strolling forward cautiously, while others climbed back onto the tanks and sleds as the vehicles began a slow crawl down the hill.
Peplowski continued to narrate his anxious wait in the present tense: “The snow is melting as we kneel this Christmas morning. My knees are wet. We talk about the range and decided that a lead of 2 ¼ to 2 ½ tank lengths would be just right; also to drop rounds, aim lower so there would be no overs. The leading tank swerves, others follow just like in the book. We joke a little—the tension is broken. We know soon firing will commence and will move like hell. Wolfenberger is gunner, a cool, calm, efficient and accurate one.”18
The German tanks and infantry seemed to be heading to the south and east of the 463rd’s positions, rumbling across the field, trying to drive wide around Hemroulle and head into Bastogne. Cooper’s men realized the Germans had to be stopped. The machine guns and bazooka men on security were the first to open up.
Corporal Nicholas Bellezza, Private First Class Aloysius Fredericks, and an unnamed green recruit were manning a .50-caliber machine gun near the Baker Battery gun line. They opened fire at the German soldiers as they advanced:
“On Christmas Day, at daybreak, I noticed through the haze, approximately 350 yards, the outlines of tanks which were located directly in front of my position,” Bellezza recounted in a letter years later. “I immediately called the switchboard for verification to find out if they were our tanks. The response was negative.”
As the Germans around the tanks began to move, Bellezza pushed the butterfly trigger on the M2 and started firing. “German fire was returned (white tracers) at my position. The recruit had said ‘Don’t fire, they may see us!’ He was so scared that he left the gun position leaving Fredericks and me to keep firing. The barrel got so hot we had to stop and change it. Fredericks in his haste grabbed the barrel instead of using asbestos gloves. His burns were minor.”19
By this time, First Sergeant Smith had reached Lyons’s position, but not without difficulty. “I came out of my foxhole on the run and all I could see was a bunch of tracer bullets flying from all directions… there was a lot of lead flying around. I made a mad dash for the command post and found Captain Cole and Lieutenant Lyons already there. From the information I was able to obtain, the Germans had us in a circle and had launched their major attack.”
Smith was just in time to witness that, “One of our machine gun crews noticed a bush that appeared to have grown larger overnight: Just to limber up their guns, they fired at the bush and it began to move and out came three German tanks. I was able to locate and identify them through my field glasses and requested Capt. Cole order our guns to open fire. He said no, they may be our tanks. I knew from the muzzle break [sic] they were German tanks, because our tanks don’t have them. A few seconds later, the tanks fired on the three of us.” Cole quickly changed his mind at that point, and ordered his men to open fire.20
Cooper finally had his confirmation. Lyons and the other battery commanders could see the muzzle brakes and low silhouettes easily now. There was no mistaking it—these were not Patton’s Shermans—but German Mk IVs. Cooper had set up a previous code for the batteries. From his command post in a stone farmhouse across from the Hemroulle chapel, Cooper told Major Garrett to relay the radio order: “Let the shit hit the fan!”21 With that blunt and earthy command, the battery commanders for Baker and Dog batteries whispered the order to their gun crews, spurring the gunners to pull the lanyards almost simultaneously on four gun breeches.
There were multiple shots. Some of the rounds tracked over; some of the lower rounds hit the snow and sent up jets of ice as they skipped like a massive stone on a pond. Several, though, struck home, slamming into the panzers with audible cracks that echoed across the great field. From his position on the hill overlooking the Hemroulle road, Hesler knew the fight was on:
“I couldn’t see the action from where we were; because of some trees near us, our view was limited.” But he could definitely hear the action, and he knew the difference between the 463rd’s guns and the German guns. “The 75mm is a barker, not a boomer, so I could make out our guns firing,” Hesler remembered.22
The machine gunners and bazooka men continued to add their destructive fire to the scene. Riflemen joined in, knocking any remaining German soldiers to the ground like bowling pins. The Germans, for their part, reacted poorly. Several of the vehicles began moving forward, apparently still trying to make for Bastogne or spot the gun positions and lay their own weapons on them. Unfortunately for the Germans, this just moved them closer to the gunners and further into the “kill box” the 463rd had established. It was a trap that none of the tanks would escape.
The 75mm rounds thumped into the frontal armor of several of the Mk IVs, and the tanks began to brew up—flames spewing from open hatches as the munitions cooked off in the intense heat. The American gunners could hear the detonations. Machine gunners and riflemen in their pits opened up on the infantry, targeting the German soldiers running about in confusion. By now, in the light of dawn, they made easy targets, and in contrast to the fight they had put up around Rolle, these men chose to run or surrender. For many, there was no longer a choice, as they lay still and bleeding in the snow next to the burning tanks.
One of the rounds from Lyons’s and Cole’s section of guns hit the nearest panzer, stopping it cold. The crew bailed from the burning wreck and ran for the woods. Another gun launched a white phosphorus round at the next tank, scattering the infantry riding on its back and turning the tank into a torch, lighting up the field. Hesler, though, still believes today that the WP round, usually used for gun registration (finding where to center your barrages), was intentional, mentioning that gunners were also taught to aim and light up the back section of a German tank.
“Well, we were taught that the back of the German tanks were greasy,” he explained years later. “The German tanks had their gas tanks there.”23
John Mockabee, a machine gunner from D Battery, also had a vivid recollection of the action. He was manning one of the .50-caliber machine guns that morning when the attack began:
During the battle word came that tanks were coming up from the rear. A howitzer was then moved to the left and west of the 50 cal. machine gun and put into position to fire south. Also the 50 cal. that was covering the left flank of the battery was moved up and to the left side of the howitzer to fire south. As I remember there were three tanks and I think they were pulling sleds with troops. As I remember a lieutenant (probably Lieutenant Lyon) was directing the firing of the howitzer upon the tanks. After a few rounds the first tank was knocked out. At that time the 50 caliber started firing and then the howitzer directed their fire on the second and third tanks. There were other tanks but they stopped and turned and went back in the direction from which they had come.24
Mockabee then swept the field south of him with the M2 machine gun, chugging away at the hapless German dismounted troops.
It was the third panzer that would be most memorable to the men of the 463rd. The 75mm round cracked into the front left side of the turret, right as the crew was posting in their vehicle and attempting to back away from the firing. The crewman who was scrambling to enter the hatch at that unfortunate moment
was killed instantly. The Americans watched as the tank commander, wounded, dropped from the tank into the snow, crawling to the nearby trees for cover. The driver of the vehicle threw it into reverse, down a ravine, and accidentally backed the tank into a clump of trees out of sight, effectively trapping the tank. With no place to go, several of the surviving members of the crew burst open through the hatches and, like the others, attempted to make it to the woods.
This vehicle was so close to “Booger” Childress’s foxhole that he and his men leaped up, sprinted a mere fifty yards or so, and fired point-blank with their rifles into the crew compartment of the smoldering wreck. Straddling the front portion of the tank, pointing his rifle over the driver’s and machine gunner’s hatches, Childress found two of the crewmen dead. Childress then leaped back down, pouncing on the tank commander, who was nearby, leaning against a tree and obviously in great pain.
Childress and the men accompanying him—Private August F. Hazzard, Private William L. Justice, Private John T. Faria, Private Stanley M. Levendosky, Private Gordon L. Ballenger, and First Lieutenant Ross W. Scott—found the other members of the crew, and, shouting, “Hände hoch!” took them prisoner. Scanning the nearby woods with their rifles pointed and ready, the men captured another two officers and twelve enlisted men. Another group of five security men from Baker Battery sprinted from their positions and took on a German machine gun crew that was attempting to fight back from the same trees. Overwhelming the German MG with small-arms fire, the Americans killed one and captured eight enlisted men.25
Best yet, the tank that Childress had “captured” was still running. As he hauled the bodies out of the tank, he convinced the others around him that the panzer would make a fine trophy to show off at division. With a grin, Childress dropped inside the driving compartment and started trying to move it up and away from the trees.