Among visitors to the First Army headquarters in Spa on Friday, December 15, was a delegation of professional baseball players, including Mel Ott and Bucky Walters. They found few senior officers in the command post: most were on leave either in Paris, like Colonel Dickson, the G-2, or in London, like the G-3 operations officer, the G-4 logistician, and the top artillery, ordnance, and antiaircraft officers. General Hodges, the army commander, politely chatted up the guests for half an hour, then excused himself and returned to his billet, worn down by fatigue and a bad cold. Visiting the 106th Division at the same hour was a soldier named Theodore Geisel, known professionally as Dr. Seuss. Geisel, who was making a propaganda film with director Frank Capra, later composed a bit of doggerel to commemorate his experience of the next couple days: “The retreat we beat was accomplished with a speed that will never be beaten.”
Ten thousand Belgian civilians had been evacuated from the border areas north of the Losheim Gap, not least because many were ethnic Germans of whom Hitler claimed, “Inwardly they have always remained connected with Germany.” A few farmers were permitted to harvest late potatoes and tend the dairy herds, but the unmilked cows made such a racket with their lowing that butchers set up ten slaughter pens; Army trucks then hauled the beef to quartermaster depots in Brussels and Antwerp. Another roundup was scheduled for Saturday morning in Bütgenbach, command post for the 99th Division. Along the front, where conifers grew in such precise rows that they were described as a “cornfield forest,” company radios tuned into Axis Sally, the propagandist whose signature line GIs loved to mimic: “Go easy, boys. There’s danger ahead.”
Of the 341,000 soldiers in the U.S. First Army, 68,822 were in VIII Corps, anchoring the army’s right flank with three divisions in the line. They held an eighty-five-mile front—three times the length advised for a force of such strength under Army tactical doctrine—that snaked down the Belgian border through Luxembourg to Third Army’s sector. At two spots, the corps line extended across the border into Germany’s Schnee Eifel, a snowy hogback that was a topographical extension of the Belgian Ardennes. Intelligence officers calculated that 24,000 enemy soldiers currently faced VIII Corps, so few that First Army in recent days had ordered a deception program to feign an American buildup in the Ardennes; the intent was to lure more Germans, weakening Rundstedt’s lines to the north and south. Some VIII Corps troops wore phony shoulder flashes, drove trucks with bogus unit markings, broadcast counterfeit radio traffic, and played recordings of congregating tanks—all to suggest a preponderance that did not exist. In reality, some infantry regiments that typically should have held a 3,500-yard front in such broken country—two miles—now were required to hold frontages of six miles or more.
For much of the fall, four veteran U.S. divisions had occupied this region, mastering the terrain and rehearsing both withdrawal and counterattack plans. But in recent weeks they had been supplanted by two bloodied divisions from the Hürtgen—those weary troops seeking a quiet paradise—and the newly arrived 106th Infantry Division, which was not only the greenest Army unit in Europe but also the youngest. The first division into combat with substantial numbers of eighteen-year-old draftees, the 106th was plunked onto the Schnee Eifel and across the Losheim Gap, echeloned a mile or so west of the Siegfried Line like an ill-fitting stopper in a bottle.
As with so many newer divisions, the 106th had trained diligently for months at home only to be ripped apart by levies from other units shipping overseas first. By August 1944, more than seven thousand men had been transferred out of the division, including many aggressive infantrymen who were replaced by rear-echelon converts with suspect combat skills. After arriving at Le Havre on December 6, the 106th had been trucked across France to reach the Ardennes front at seven P.M. on December 11, “numb, soaked, and frozen,” as the military historian R. Ernest Dupuy later wrote. Man for man, foxhole for foxhole, across a twenty-eight-mile sector, they replaced troops of the 2nd Infantry Division, who bolted for showers and hot food in the rear.
Few soldiers of the 106th had ever heard a shot fired in anger, and some failed to zero their rifles to ensure accurate marksmanship. Radio silence precluded the testing and calibration of new sets. Battalions reported shortages of winter clothing, maps, machine-gun tripods, and mortar, antitank, and bazooka ammunition. Trench foot soon spiked when green troops neglected to dry their socks properly. Despite orders to mount an “aggressive defense,” few patrols ventured forward, and German war dogs terrorized those that did.
Go easy, boys. There’s danger ahead.
“The woods are of tall pines, dark and gloomy inside. After a snow it is all in black and white,” an artilleryman wrote his wife from an outpost near Losheim. “This was the Forest of Arden from Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” In the bard’s comedy, the forest is a pastoral refuge for characters who choose to devote themselves to love. Few soldiers trying to stay warm in an Ardennes copse in mid-December found such lyricism in the landscape. V-1 flying bombs launched from western Germany rattled overhead day and night, angling toward Antwerp. Forward strongpoints—a few dozen men consigned to the low ground of crossroads villages—were sardonically dubbed “sugar bowls” because of their topographic vulnerability.
A departing 2nd Division colonel told his 106th replacement, “It has been very quiet up here and your men will learn the easy way.”
* * *
Straw and rags muffled gun wheels and horses’ hooves as twenty German divisions lumbered into their final assembly areas on Friday night, December 15. Breakdown crews with tow trucks stood ready along roads that now carried only one-way traffic, and military policemen were authorized to shoot out the tires of any vehicle violating march discipline. For the last kilometer leading to the line of departure, soldiers portaged ammunition by hand or on their backs. Quartermasters issued ration packets of “special vitalizing and strengthening foods,” including fifty grams of genuine coffee, grape-sugar tablets, chocolate, fruit bars, and milk powder. “Some believe in living but life is not everything!” a soldier from the 12th SS Panzer Division wrote his sister. “It is enough to know that we attack and will throw the enemy from our homeland. It is a holy task.”
Two hundred thousand assault troops packed into an assembly area three miles deep. The initial blow by seven panzer divisions and thirteen of infantry, bolstered by almost two thousand artillery tubes and a thousand tanks and assault guns, would fall on a front sixty-one miles wide. Five more divisions and two heavy brigades waited in the second wave, giving the Germans roughly a five-to-one advantage over the opposing U.S. forces in artillery and a three-to-one edge in armor. The best of Rundstedt’s divisions had 80 percent of their full complement of equipment, others but half. Panzer columns carried enough fuel to travel one hundred miles under normal cruising conditions, which existed nowhere in the steep, icy Ardennes. Few spare parts or antitank guns were to be had, but for a holy task perhaps none were needed.
Hitler had indeed staked the future of his Reich on one card. The final OB West war diary entry on Friday night declared, “Tomorrow brings the beginning of a new chapter in the campaign in the West.”
* * *
In the red-roofed Belgian army barracks that served as the VIII Corps command post in Bastogne, champagne corks popped on Friday night to commemorate the anniversary of the corps’s arrival in Britain a year earlier. The commander, Major General Troy H. Middleton, had reason to be proud of his men’s combat record in Normandy and in the reduction of Brest. A Mississippian who had enlisted as a private in 1910, Middleton by November 1918 was the youngest American colonel in World War I and, in George Marshall’s judgment, “the outstanding infantry regimental commander on the battlefield in France.” Leaving the Army in 1937 to become dean and then vice president of Louisiana State University, Middleton returned to uniform in 1942, commanding the 45th Division through the Sicily and Salerno campaigns before taking corps command as an Eisenhower favorite. Now he drank a final toast to battles past and
future before retiring to his sleeping van.
A few miles to the east, the faint clop of horses and a growl of engines in low gear drifted to American pickets along the Our River, demarcating Luxembourg from Germany. Their report of disturbing noises in the night ascended the chain of command from one headquarters to the next, with no more heed paid than had been paid to earlier portents. Middleton’s command post in Bastogne issued a weather forecast for Saturday—“Cloudy, snow beginning around 1300. Visibility 2 miles”—and a three-word battle summary for the Ardennes: “Nothing to report.”
9. THE BULGE
A Rendezvous in Some Flaming Town
SHEETS of flame leaped from the German gun pits at precisely 5:30 A.M. on December 16. Drumfire fell in crimson splashes across the front with a stink of turned earth and burnt powder, and the green fireballs of 88mm shells bored through the darkness at half a mile per second as if hugging the nap of the Ardennes hillcrests. The Screaming Meemie shriek of Nebelwerfer rockets echoed in the hollows where wide-eyed GIs crouched in their sugar bowls. Then enemy machine guns added their sawmill racket to the din, and rounds with the heft of railroad spikes splintered fir boughs and soldiers’ bones alike. The thrum of panzer engines now carried from the east, along with a creak of bogey wheels, and as the artillery crashed and heaved, a rifleman in the 99th Division reflected, “You’d think the end of the world is coming.”
For some, yes, soon enough. A pearly dawn leaked down the slopes, hurried by hissing German flares that glazed the snow with metallic tints of red and silver. Through the trees the infantry emerged as bent shadows, some in snow suits or white capes, others in greatcoats of Feldgrau with flanged helmets or duck-bill caps, shouting and singing above the whip-crack of rifle fire. One GI, hiding in a barn among cows now excused from the Saturday-morning slaughter, whispered, “The whole German army’s here.” Along the thin American line, men dug in deeper, scratching furrows with helmets and mess tins. Others scuttled to the rear, past the first dead men, who wore the usual deadpan expressions. Only the living were surprised.
The battle was joined, this last great grapple of the Western Front, although hours would elapse before American commanders realized that the opening barrage was more than a feint, and days would pass before some generals acknowledged the truth of what Rundstedt had told his legions in an order captured early Saturday: Es geht um das Ganze. Everything is at stake. The struggle would last for a month, embroiling more than a million men drawn from across half a continent to this haunted upland. The first act of the drama, perhaps the most decisive, played out simultaneously across three sanguinary fields scattered over sixty miles—on the American left, on the American right, and in the calamitous center. “Your great hour has struck,” Rundstedt had also declared. “You bear in yourselves a divine duty to give everything and to achieve the superhuman for our Fatherland and our Führer.”
* * *
No man embraced the field marshal’s sentiments with greater fervor than the slender young SS lieutenant colonel barking at the jammed traffic northwest of Losheim on Saturday morning. Joachim Peiper’s great hour had indeed struck, yet he was already late. A highway bridge across a rail cut had been demolished in September by retreating German troops, but engineers assigned to repair the span could not get past the mule wagons, horse-drawn artillery carriages, and Tiger tanks clogging the narrow approach road. A stalled column of tanks and personnel carriers snaked for miles back into Germany.
As commander of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, proudly wearing the death’s-head insignia above the visor of his peaked cap, Peiper had been given the specific divine duty of streaking across Belgium with a task force of almost six thousand men and seventy-two tanks to seize the Meuse crossings at Huy, between Liège and Namur. Although only twenty-nine, he was an obvious choice as the Spitze—the point—of Sixth Panzer Army’s attack and indeed all of HERBSTNEBEL. A Berliner born into a military family, fluent in English and French, and handsome in the approved Aryan mode, Peiper in 1938 had served as Heinrich Himmler’s personal adjutant, even marrying one of his secretaries shortly before the invasion of Poland. Much of his war had been spent in the east, burning villages and slaughtering civilians with such abandon that his unit was nicknamed the Blow Torch Battalion. Two brothers, also SS men, were now dead, but Peiper’s devotion to the Reich was undimmed. With Allied bombers terrorizing German cities, he did not question Hitler’s orders to wield fear and terror as weapons.
In early December, after a test run in a Panther near Bonn, Peiper reported that a tank regiment could cover eighty kilometers in a single night, “if I had a free road to myself.” But when assigned his route to the Meuse in December he had complained that “these roads were not for tanks but for bicycles.” The Saturday chaos proved his point, and although he urged his young troopers to “run down anything in the road ruthlessly,” most of Null Tag had slipped past before the column finally found a detour through Losheim at 7:30 P.M.
More troubles awaited. Both German and American mines cost Peiper five tanks before the task force reached Lanzerath at midnight; an hour later, he ordered two Panthers to take the point, guided through the tenebrous woods by troops waving white handkerchiefs. Shortly before 6 A.M. on Sunday the Spitze clattered into Honsfeld to find American vehicles parked in doorways and exhausted GIs slumbering inside. Here the atrocities commenced. Eight soldiers rousted outside in their underwear and bare feet, shouting “Kamerad”—comrade, I surrender—were lined up in the street and murdered with a machine gun. Five others emerged from a house with a white flag; four were shot, and the fifth, pleading for mercy, was crushed beneath a tank. Four more Americans, also carrying a large white banner, were shot, too. Peiper’s men stripped boots from the dead and pressed on to Büllingen, two miles northwest.
German intelligence had correctly identified Büllingen as a likely fuel dump, and SS crews, after raking a dozen parked spotter planes with gunfire on an airstrip outside town, seized fifty thousand gallons of gasoline by ten A.M. Several American soldiers hiding in a cellar strangled their pet dog to keep her from barking, but two hundred other men were rounded up. Before being marched to prison cages in the rear, GIs were forced to fuel the panzers with jerricans in the treeless square that in happier days had served as the town cattle market. Already many hours behind schedule and still sixty miles from Huy, with orders to ignore his exposed flanks and all diversions, Peiper now pivoted southwest—unwittingly giving the Americans a priceless tactical reprieve. Had he swung northwest a few miles to Bütgenbach and then Elsenborn, where the 12th SS Panzer Division was attacking from the east, he likely would have encircled as many as thirty thousand GIs in the beset 2nd and 99th Divisions, who were struggling to fall back to defensible ground.
This serendipity proved catastrophic for Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, which early that morning had hurriedly decamped from Germany with orders to move to Luxembourg. At 11:45 A.M., 140 men in thirty-three vehicles stopped for a Sunday lunch of hash, peas, and pineapple outside the Walloon town of Malmédy, ten miles west of Büllingen. An hour later the march south resumed, past Army engineers taping TNT to ash trees to be blown down as roadblocks if necessary. As the convoy sped through Malmédy on Highway N-23, Belgian civilians gestured ahead, yelling, “Boches! Boches!”
Boches there were, and in a particularly foul mood after clumping down a muddy farm trace barely passable even by tracked vehicles. Three miles below Malmédy, at the crossroads hamlet of Baugnez, Peiper’s SS column collided with Battery B shortly before one P.M. For two minutes German machine-gun and tank fire peppered the American convoy until Peiper, furious at the destruction of fifteen fine Detroit trucks, managed to call a cease-fire. A few GIs had been killed, a few others escaped through the woods or hid in a ditch, but more than one hundred surrendered, some with white rags tied to their rifle barrels. As Panthers shoved the burning chassis off the road, prisoners were herded with hands high into eight rows on a snowy field, wh
ere their captors stripped them of rings, cigarettes, watches, and gloves. Peiper watched for a few minutes from his personnel carrier, then pushed on down the N-23 toward Ligneuville behind his vanguard.
No one would ever be certain which German soldier fired the first shot, but at 2:15 P.M. an abrupt fusillade from two panzer machine guns chewed into the ranks of prisoners still standing with their hands raised. “At the first outburst of fire everyone fell to the ground, including myself,” recalled Private First Class Homer D. Ford, an MP who had been captured while directing traffic at the crossroads. For two minutes gunfire tore into the writhing, bleating ranks. Then SS men stalked through the bloody pile, kicking groins and—with the fatal verdict “Da kriegt noch einer Luft,” This one’s still breathing—firing pistol shots into the skulls or hearts of those yet alive. Ford lived to bear witness:
I was wounded in the left arm while the group was being sprayed on the ground.… I was laying in the snow … and I was afraid they would see me shivering but they didn’t.… I could hear them pull the trigger back and then the click.
For twenty minutes executioners prowled the field, bellowing in English, “You sons of bitches!” An American medic permitted to attend a wounded soldier was then shot along with his patient. A dozen GIs who had fled into a scruffy café at the crossroads were flushed when the building was set ablaze, and shot down as they scattered. For the next two hours, passing SS convoys fired into the mounded bodies until even the SS tired of the sport. The faces of the dead quickly assumed a deep claret color as the blood in their capillaries froze.
Unaware for the moment that his minions had just committed one of the most infamous battlefield crimes of the war, Peiper arrived at Ligneuville in midafternoon. He was disappointed to find that American officers had just fled, but he spent thirty minutes wolfing down the lunch they left behind in the dining room of the Hôtel du Moulin, a three-story hostel with a wrought-iron balcony. Here a German sergeant led eight U.S. prisoners out back to dig graves for three dead Germans; he then shot the Americans in the head, killing seven. The eighth fled bleeding through the forest only to be later captured again and sent to a camp.
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