Battered Bastards of Bastogne

by George Koskimaki

  After warming himself at the big stone house near the roadblock, S/Sgt. Robert Bowen returned to the company CP to draw rations and to inspect Tom Leamon’s squad on the windswept ridges. The cold wind was swirling the snow over the men’s foxholes. Without overcoats and overshoes, many of the men were suffering terribly. It was one helluva night for the men. Bowen would add more to his story the following day.

  Coping With Shortages

  Shortages were becoming a problem by the third day at Bastogne. From the Division “Narrative—December 1944”, this description is provided for the 22nd of December:

  By this time, food supplies as well as ammunition had become critical. It was necessary to requisition food from civilian sources. An abandoned U.S. Army bakery in Bastogne was also a source of considerable amounts of flour and lard. A Division hospital had been set up in Bastogne and was operated jointly by several of the unit medical detachments. Fortunately, an abandoned U.S. Army medical dump was found also in Bastogne and this was of great value to the hospital. During this period of encirclement, snow fell in the area and our troops were at a distinct disadvantage due to lack of snow capes. Only about one half of the Division had overshoes. All available white cloth was requisitioned; for camouflage purposes and burlap bags were found and used to keep the men’s feet warm.

  The 907th Glider Field Artillery Battalion commander’s office reported the following as a time when the “fortunes of war smiled upon the men of this battalion” in a narrative of its December activities:

  The selection of the above command post (a chateau one mile west of Bastogne) appeared to be one time in which the fortunes of war were in our favor. This chateau had been formerly used as a headquarters for the American Red Cross clubmobiles in this vicinity and there was a considerable amount of sugar, donut flour, butter and other edibles stored in the buildings adjacent thereto. This food supply was shared with other units in our area and it proved to be invaluable later inasmuch as it was flour to make hotcakes for breakfast, donuts for dinner and hotcakes for supper until other rations arrived.86

  The troops had been issued a basic load of K-rations and that supply was gone by the third day. However, the discovery of the large supply of flour in one of the warehouses provided for pancakes as a staple food. A bit of warm food does much for the morale of a front-line soldier. 1Lt. Robert P. O’Connell describes such an occasion:

  While on the MLR outside of Bizory, our food was K, C and D rations. This was adequate—we were making do. However, on two nights we got word that just before daybreak some hot food would be at a road junction but to be quiet and not stir up the Krauts. We were to go to this spot one at a time. At the site, there was a marmite container full of warm pancakes, king size. Weapon in one hand, we reached in and grabbed a couple (no syrup or butter) and back to the foxhole. Not a big thing, but a morale booster. It was not so much the hot food, it was that someone back there was thinking of us. The MLR can be a lonely place!

  When the Division pulled out of Mourmelon on the 18th, the basic issue of rations would take care of the first few days. It was assumed that once the men were positioned, the regular G-4 channels of the Division would provide additional supplies. However, for all intents and purposes, roads leading into Bastogne were cut on the night of December 20. Food supplies, or lack thereof, became a major problem. Captain Jim Hatch remembered how very concerned regimental commander Colonel Steve Chappuis was for the well-being of his men concerning food. Hatch recalled:

  Steve Chappuis gave an order that we in Regimental Headquarters Company would eat only two parts of a ration a day and send the extra one to the front line companies. That afternoon, after we pushed the extra rations to the front line units, I went forward to visit those groups. To my surprise, here were units eating steaks and French-fried potatoes. Our extra rations were still in the supply room. Division had passed down the order that units could give a hand receipt to owners of livestock and stored potatoes and proceeded to set up company kitchens in their buildings and were eating first class.

  Remembering an impulsive act he did in tossing away food that he did not particularly like, Pvt. E. B. Wallace recalled:

  On the first day, I threw away a can of K-ration cheese. When I became very hungry three days later, I crawled in the snow that covered the ground and found that cheese. The first cooked food we had was sprouted bean soup from dried beans someone found in a shack by the railroad.

  Recalling the days when food was in short supply, S/Sgt. Tom Alley may be remembering the same supply of dried beans briefly mentioned by Pvt. E. B. Wallace when he wrote:

  We had very little, if anything, to eat and I recall someone found a bag of beans in a farmhouse and they or the cook had made a large pot of bean soup. At night, they dragged the pot from foxhole to foxhole and gave each man some soup in his canteen cup. I never tasted anything better.

  For several days, fog was a major problem for the men. Snow began to fall on the night of the 21st. Men often became lost and confused when confronted by fog on patrol or on a scrounging mission in search of food. PFC. John E. Fitzgerald remembered such an incident:

  The morning of December 22nd brought dense fog. The problem of food was becoming acute. During the night, in an attempt to find something to eat, two men from ‘G’ Company decided to search a small village to our front. They went through one of our outposts and were gone for several hours. On their way back, they became lost in the fog and wandered too far to their left. As they approached our lines, they were cut down by one of our machine guns. Later that morning when the fog cleared, someone spotted their bodies. A detail was sent out to bring them back in. As we watched them being placed onto a jeep, we could see some potatoes rolling from their pockets onto the ground.

  Operations sergeant Chester Brooks remembered a story his friend Cpl. Tom Maitland had related to him on a visit a dozen years after the war about being offered some fresh boiled chicken soup at a time when he was in need of sustenance. Brooks related:

  Food was scarce from the kitchen. Machine gun sections and squads were always attached and more often than not, attached units got less or felt they did. Anyway, it was a dark night and two men came carrying a marmite can and whispered to Maitland, ‘Get your men—this is not from the kitchen.’ They made a big point of saying it was chicken the company was providing. Evidently someone had raided a chicken coop and had boiled some chopped up chickens. Maitland got his men and they stood around the chicken pot and the ‘caterers’ said, ‘Help yourselves!’ Each man took off his jacket, rolled up his underwear or whatever and reached down into the deep can. Each man came up with a wing. Maitland said he had been gradually losing his appetite and knew after that pot had gone down the whole line there were only chicken wings left. The ‘caterer’ said, ‘Help yourself!’ but he said, ‘No thanks—I’m not that fond of chicken.’ They then looked around to make sure none of Maitland’s men would hear them and said, ‘Get your canteen cup and you can have some of the broth!’ Maitland said that he visualized a reinforce company of men who hadn’t washed in a week reaching down in that can sloshing their dirty hands around trying to find a drumstick or a breast and really had no appetite for the broth either.

  As a substitute supply sergeant in his company at Bastogne, PFC. Leonard Hicks remembered the scrounging that he did upon arrival to compensate for the lack of overshoes for his men:

  I was told to set up company supply at the small military post on the north side of town. Having no supplies, it didn’t take long. Then Edgar Bishop and I got busy. Before the day was very old, we had discovered a storage building packed with burlap (gunny) sacks—probably 2,000 to 3,000 of them. I told Bishop ‘these are more valuable than gold!’ We loaded all we could on the truck and headed for ‘F’ Company where they had dug in on a rise to the southeast of Foy. I explained and demonstrated to enough guys to wrap their feet with two or three bags per foot—great for keeping feet warm and dry, also to line their fox holes with bags. Anything lef
t over was passed along.

  One of the soldiers from a neighboring unit who received gunny sacks for footwear, Pvt. Anthony Garcia wrote: ‘Burlap sacks were issued to us in place of overshoes, which would keep the feet warm only while standing still but would be left behind like foot prints when you tried to walk even using the string supplied to tie the sacks on … a laughable situation.”

  Shelter From Tree Bursts

  The problem with artillery tree bursts was an extremely serious one—especially with the men dug in the relative concealment at the edges of the various tree plantations. PFC. Leonard Hicks describes how the men in his unit coped with the tree-burst problem:

  ‘F’ Company was set up in a patch of woods about a mile south of Foy. While some were trying to dig foxholes, others were felling and bucking six to eight-inch diameter logs to cover their foxholes. None of them could dig any deeper than a few inches—solid rock. They pulled out of there and left all those logs. I was sure they would need them at their next position. I discussed this with Edgar Bishop. He agreed that if we could get a truck driver to go, we would take a load of logs to ‘F’ Company. We really had a load when we finally arrived where the men were diggin in. The first person I met was Colonel Sink. He wanted to know what in hell I was doing with a truck up there. I said, ‘Sir, I have a load of logs for ‘F’ Company.’

  His answer was, ‘Dump them over here for ‘D’ or ‘E’.’ My answer was, ‘No sir—we gathered these for ‘F’ Company and they will need them!’

  His response surprised me a little. ‘Get you a detail from ‘F’ Company and get this truck out of here!’ We did. That night, we were hit hard by tanks, anti-tank guns, some got close enough to overrun some emplacements but when it was over the German Army had lost another battle. Several of the men thanked me for the logs saying, ‘Without them, most of us would not have survived.’

  Communications sergeant Hugh Pritchard describes the hole which became the sanctuary and command post for “Dog” Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the woods near Foy:

  For the company CP, we dug a hole approximately eight feet square by four and a half feet deep, cut pine logs to lay over it, covered the logs with a tarpaulin, then piled all the loose dirt on top. This became home for Captain Joe McMillan, our company commander, 1Lt. John Kelly, 1/Sgt. Robert Shurter, Sgt. Allen Westphal and myself. As communication sergeant, I ran telephone lines to 2nd Battalion, all of our platoons and outposts. We also had standby radios so our company CP was in touch with all necessary echelons at all times.

  With the shortage of fighting equipment available to the front line troops of the 101st Airborne Division, it wasn’t above them to appropriate equipment from those who didn’t seem to be using it against the enemy. T/Sgt. Frank A. Palys relates such an instance:

  We were in Luzery and there were times when we just sat around. About the main excitement we had was stealing a jeep from some major who was high-tailing it out of Bastogne. We helped steal a halftrack with quad-fifties on it, but someone from Division HQ took it away from us.

  The 502nd Front

  From their first defensive position at Monaville, “A” Company made its first move to Champs. PFC. Ted Goldmann describes the move and the way they were positioned in a perimeter defense:

  At 2 a.m., the 22nd of December, the first snow fell and it came down off and on from then until nightfall. At 0700 we got up, finished the food we had obtained the night before and moved out with all our load. We had picked up the packs and overcoats when we went into the woods. The first village we had been in was Monaville, now we moved from the woods to Champs, a slightly larger village. We dug in on the northern outskirts and then started hunting for food which the civilians of Champs had very little of but shared willingly—again, bread, butter and chicory (coffee substitute).

  Patrols went out from the front line companies and from the various S-2 sections within the regiment. Some were successful and others were not.

  As a member of the S-2 intelligence section, Cpl. Newman L. Tuttle was involved in a lot of patrolling. It was a little different in Bastogne with the snow, cold and constant threat of enemy soldiers appearing in American uniforms and with the fog playing tricks, rising and then sinking quickly. Tuttle recalled:

  On a night patrol in the cold and snow, I remember watching German tanks coming up a road and stopping at a road junction about one hundred yards down the hill from us. We sat quietly in the snow in our white camouflage and listened to the Germans. We counted the tanks and vehicles to report back to Regiment to the S-2 officer. We did not open fire on them. Our orders were to only gather information. This was several days before Christmas. When we approached our lines, we had to give the sign for the evening and wait for the countersign. Also, we had to have our left hand on our hip. I had a nervous feeling and hoped none of the new replacements in the company would have ‘itchy trigger fingers.’

  Another patrol that went out from “A” Company was not as fortunate as the S-2 patrol from Regimental Headquarters. PFC. Ted Goldmann describes what happened to some of their men on the night of December 22nd:

  That night, a six-man patrol from our platoon went out with Givry as its mission and we never saw them again. In March, one of the men, Cpl. Jim Goodyear, escaped and said they had become lost on the return trip and veered too far west (of Champs) and on Christmas Day had been captured when they fell asleep from exhaustion in a house.

  The Need for Sheets

  In an article he wrote for Readers Digest, John Hanlon, former commander of 1st Battalion of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, described the sudden need for camouflage material to counter the new snow which had fallen at Bastogne:87

  The paratroop battalion I commanded, some 600 strong, was ordered into Hemroulle, a little village in the Ardennes about two miles northwest of Bastogne. It didn’t look like much of a place; two dozen farmhouses and as many cow barns, about 100 inhabitants in all; a small church with a perky spire; one dirt road and a couple of byways—all of it sitting rather bleakly in a dip in the terrain. We were short of food, low on ammunition and outnumbered. Six inches of snow had just fallen and we were without camouflage—our soldiers in their olive-green paratroop uniforms were sitting ducks against the white background.

  At my headquarters in house billet No. 13, I called a meeting of my staff. Someone suggested bed sheets. But how on earth could we get hold of that many sheets in a hurry?

  I sent my executive officer, Capt. Edward Fitzgerald to ask the burgomaster if there was any chance of our borrowing some sheets. ‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘we’ll return them when we can.’

  The burgomaster was Victor Gaspar, a man in his seventies with a round red face and a large mustache. Twice in Monsieur Gaspar’s lifetime, in 1914 and again in 1940, the Germans had invaded his village. When Fitzgerald told him of our needs, he did not hesitate. ‘Come,’ he said and led the way across the road to the village church. There he unwound the belfry rope and began tolling the bell. ‘The people will know,’ he said. ‘The ringing is a signal for them to come.’

  As the first sound of the bell floated over the village, a surprised woman poked her head out of her cottage door and listened. She wiped her hands on her apron, threw a coat over her shoulders and started for the church. Others followed. Singly or in small groups, some accompanied by their children, most of the villagers were soon scurrying along the road to the church.

  As they arrived, Monsieur Gaspar gave them instructions. ‘Bring your sheets,’ he said. ‘The Americans need them for camouflage. And be quick!’

  A few could not come. Mme. Eudoxie Collard, for one, was too busy cooking a meal for 60 people who had taken refuge in her cellar and she couldn’t leave her stove. But the burgomaster called personally on those who did not answer the bell’s summons. At the church, meanwhile, the villagers were beginning to return with their precious bundles. In half an hour, 200 sheets were stacked in the church vestibule. There was never a word about my prom
ise to return them.

  Quickly I had the sheets distributed to the men—and a few minutes later I realized the folly of that promise. The soldiers were making proper military use of their camouflage; they tore out square pieces of the sheeting and made them into coverings for their helmets; they cut strips and laid them across the machine gun barrels. For their own covering, the men slit openings in the sheets and slipped them over their heads, pancho-fashion. When the job was done, they were a weird and ghostly lot but they were well concealed.

  Apparently the requisitioned sheets that were available for camouflage purposes to conceal troops on the MLR were often given to members of S-2 patrols on a priority basis. They were not always a welcome addition to their gear as is related by T/Sgt. Frank Palys of the S-2 Section of the 506th Parachute Regiment He wrote:

  On those patrols that the S-2 made, we had some white sheets that were given to us to wear while on patrol. I sure as hell didn’t want to wear them because when they got slightly damp, they would rustle as they froze and the sound would carry for some distance.

  Snow and Shells

  In a diary he kept while serving with Signal Company in both Holland and Bastogne, T/4 Gerald Zimmerman made the following notation: