by Alex Kershaw
The jeep sped down a paved road. It had snowed the previous night, and two to three inches of fresh powder coated the ground. All of a sudden there was a loud explosion and Sparks was thrown into the air, several yards clear of the jeep. He was alive, though badly bruised and in shock. His left knee and right finger were cut. He lay sprawled in the snow, stunned, blood seeping from his wounds into the whiteness.
Mann was also in shock but otherwise unharmed. The sleeping bag he’d been sitting on had absorbed much of the blast. He climbed out of the jeep and saw that its back wheel was actually resting on top of a mine, an inch from the detonator. There were dozens of other mines laid out across the road in an extended W pattern, mostly hidden by the snow. One of the jeep’s front wheels had run over and detonated one of them.
No one but Sparks was hurt. While he was being tended to in an aid station, Captain John L. McGinnis, the Third Battalion’s executive officer, took over command of the Third Battalion as it began to push farther into the hills north of Reipertswiller. The German artillery fire was still so intense that Captain McGinnis himself was soon wounded and carried into the Third Battalion’s aid station, joining a fast-growing number of other men.
Sparks had little choice but to return to his post and resume command of his battalion. It had yet to reach its objectives, and his men would need him if they were to succeed. Back at the front line he gave orders to strike farther north into thickly wooded hills. By 3 P.M., his battalion’s three companies had managed to advance almost a mile despite the ferocious enemy fire.
As darkness approached, Sparks ordered a halt. It was 6:10 P.M. when he received an urgent message from regimental headquarters. Intelligence reports predicted an imminent SS counterattack involving at least three thousand troops. It was vital that Sparks’s battalion, numbering fewer than a thousand men, seize a ridge before the German offensive began. Early the following morning, Sparks ordered his battalion to attack once more. Around 9 A.M., it came under accurate fire from mortar and artillery and men were forced to take cover. By 1 P.M., K and L Companies had nonetheless reached the critical ridge, suffering fewer than a dozen casualties. Soon I Company also arrived and took up position between K and L Companies. Now the battalion ran in a line some eight hundred yards long, east to west, in the forested mountains north of Reipertswiller.
Sparks’s men had carried out his orders successfully. But the regiment’s other battalions had not managed to seize ridges on either side of Third Battalion’s, which meant that the Third Battalion was isolated, without support, its positions dangerously exposed. “We were the only God-damn battalion in the division who took our objective,” remembered Sparks. “We were sitting up there all on our own.”
That afternoon, Sparks walked up a trail through the dense forest, to the positions his men had taken. He found them well dug in. He told his company commanders they would need to be extra vigilant. He then returned to his forward command post near Reipertswiller, at the base of a supply trail, while it was still light. At 4:15 P.M., as darkness began to settle, he received an urgent radio report from Company K. Enemy troops were advancing and occupying a ridge to the left of the battalion. They then probed Sparks’s battalion’s positions but were pushed back by heavy machine-gun fire.
Later that evening, L Company detected another German probe and opened fire. The Germans quickly pulled back, leaving their dead behind. When several stiffening bodies were later examined, it was learned from pay-books that the Germans were from the 6th SS Nord Division. By now, the SS on the Western Front had a fearsome reputation for brutality and indiscriminate violence: A widely reported massacre of American POWs on December 17 at Malmédy, during the Ardennes offensive, had sent a chill through the entire U.S. Army in Europe and inflamed long-standing hatred for Hitler’s most fanatical warriors. Sparks’s men knew they could expect little mercy if they had to surrender.
Sparks ordered every able-bodied man who could wield an M1 onto the line to defend his battalion’s position, hoping reinforcements would arrive in time to repel another German strike.
REIPERTSWILLER, FRANCE, JANUARY 17, 1945
THE TROOPS FROM the 11th SS Mountain Infantry Regiment crept forward. They then set up positions in the woods overlooking a trail and opened fire with mortars and machine guns on Thunderbirds who were advancing along it, quickly pushing them back. The SS now controlled the main supply route that led to the Third Battalion’s positions. Meanwhile other German units moved through the thick forest and effectively surrounded Sparks’s men, seizing high ground on all sides of the ridge.
Among the enemy troops was twenty-year-old Johann Voss. He was fighting the “Amis,” as the Germans called the Americans, for the first time and learning that they were just as tough and persistent as the Russians and Finns he had encountered in the North, and far better supported by artillery fire. Voss and his comrades were grimly determined experts in mountain fighting, having long since adapted their weapons and tactics to the terrain. Armed with Panzerfausts, they were crucially far more mobile than the Thunderbirds, having fitted machine guns and even Nebelwerfer rocket launchers to sleds. Voss and his fellow SS also had excellent artillery support; their morale was far higher than that of Sparks’s men; and they were determined to fight to the end to defend their homeland. The odds were in fact very much against the Americans.
At his forward command post, an increasingly concerned Sparks learned that the key supply trail to his men had been cut off. It had to be reopened or his entire battalion could be overrun. Swift and intense use of force was essential. Above all, Sparks was determined to avoid another tragedy like that at Anzio, when his men had been surrounded and then gradually wiped out over several days. The lesson of the Battle of the Caves had been to hold at all costs, but only if the stakes warranted the resulting sacrifice in young men’s lives. The current situation, as Sparks saw it, did not necessitate a prolonged, stubborn resistance. As soon as possible, his men should be pulled off the ridge, using the critical supply trail as an escape route.
Sparks consulted with regimental commander Colonel O’Brien, who shared his views. O’Brien contacted the Division G-3, in charge of operations, and asked permission to pull the Third Battalion from the ridge. The G-3 then conferred with the 45th’s commander, General Frederick, who saw the situation differently. Sparks’s men must remain in their positions. More lives would be lost and the Allied front would be under greater threat if the SS seized the ridge. Frederick’s orders were to “hold the line as long as possible to keep from creating weakness in the front.” Frederick wasn’t about to risk his reputation for steely aggression by giving up ground this late in the war.
The response to O’Brien’s request to pull the Third Battalion back was emphatic: “Permission denied.”
When Sparks learned of Frederick’s order, he was furious. It was sheer stupidity. Frederick was clearly way out of his depth, incapable of reading the battle correctly. Sparks was as incensed as he was alarmed by Frederick’s belligerence. From crackling radio messages, he knew his men were weak and getting weaker by the minute, running low on ammunition, their positions being methodically picked off by superb SS troops. This was no time to stand and hold as Americans had at Bastogne that Christmas when the outcome of a much greater battle was in the balance. If the SS wanted Reipertswiller so badly, let them have it.
REIPERTSWILLER, FRANCE, JANUARY 18, 1945
IT WAS JUST after midnight when General Frederick’s second in command, Colonel Paul Adams, contacted Colonel O’Brien’s regimental headquarters. He wanted to know if any men had managed to open the vital supply trail and get through to Sparks’s stranded companies.
Major Carroll, the regimental S-3, did not know.
Adams was far from pleased.
What the hell was going on? What was the holdup?
“Will you find out why Third Battalion hasn’t tried to use light tanks to contact the companies before this?” Adams asked Carroll.
“They h
ave tried to contact them before,” replied Carroll. “They were not successful. They ran into automatic fire and rifle grenades.”
The thirty-eight-year-old Alabama-born Adams, who had previously served as General Frederick’s executive officer, had been with the division for only a fortnight. Like so many senior officers in the American Army that January, he had been rapidly promoted and lacked critical combat experience.
Adams angrily demanded to know why Sparks had been “fooling around all evening.” Why hadn’t he been able to reach his men?
Carroll handed the telephone receiver to Colonel O’Brien. Adams vented his frustration at O’Brien, then added: “Tell Colonel Sparks to get the lead out of his ass and get up to the companies!”
It was a gross, inexcusable insult to one of his regiment’s finest officers. Clearly, Adams didn’t have a clue about Sparks or the severity of the fast-deteriorating situation on the ground. All he could see was lines on a map.
O’Brien managed to control his temper, but only just.
“You’d better watch your language and what you’re saying!” he told Adams. “Colonel Sparks is more courageous and eager to get the job done than anyone I know of!”
The conversation ended abruptly.
THIRD BATTALION’S POSITIONS, two hills with a saddle between them, were utterly devastated, dotted with hundreds of shell holes. German and American corpses littered the churned and bloodstained ground. The trees that had previously provided cover looked like so many snapped matchsticks. The surrounding ridges controlled by the SS were just as apocalyptic due to the unprecedented heavy fire of the 158th Artillery, which had landed an astonishing five thousand shells on the Germans the previous day.
Sparks was in constant communication with his battalion through a radio in his forward command post. Every urgent message compounded his frustration and concern. Casualties had mounted through the long night, bringing the total over three days to 118, a quarter of his battalion. The SS had dug in behind and to the front of them and had them completely pinned down. Whenever a Thunderbird showed his head aboveground, he was seemingly greeted by machine-gun fire, followed soon after by the hiss and scream of a Nebelwerfer rocket launcher. Observers lurked behind rocks and trees on the high ground around the battalion’s positions. The crosshairs of SS sniper rifles had settled on American foxholes all across the ridge.
To his relief, around 6 A.M. on January 18, a sleepless and ever more anguished Sparks got what he needed to attempt a breakthrough: Three M8 reconnaissance vehicles arrived at his command post. It was dark as he greeted the young officers of the armored vehicles. At first light, they would set out to reopen the supply trail to his stranded battalion.
Time was running out. The SS were, remembered one Thunderbird, “close to the kill and they knew it.” In the hills surrounding the battalion, they strapped on the twin fuel tanks of flamethrowers, shouldered MG42 machine guns, ammunition belts hanging around their necks, and picked up their recoilless grenade launchers called Panzerfausts. They then began to move through the forest from several directions toward the ridge held by Sparks’s men. Their primary target was Lieutenant Osterholt’s G Company, closest to the supply trail, now down to just sixty-eight men, many of them wounded.
Dawn was breaking as the two hundred SS troops, in winter camouflage, crept closer toward G Company, trailing small sleds on which MG42 machine guns had been mounted, ready to be fired. Then the SS crouched down and checked their machine pistols, flamethrowers, and “potato-masher” grenades, waiting for the order to attack. A few minutes later, there was a shrill blast of a whistle: the signal to attack. Soon the white-helmeted SS were on top of Lieutenant Osterholt’s G Company, tossing stick grenades into foxholes and dugouts and letting rip with machine pistols, which made a b-r-r-r-r-r-r-p sound due to their high rate of fire.
The sled-mounted MG42s raked G Company’s positions, firing fifteen hundred rounds a minute, green and white tracers ripping through the murky forest, ricocheting off rocks and shattering already smashed tree limbs. Snow, fragments of bark, and lethal splinters from tree bursts filled the air. Flares soared and cruelly lit the killing field below as the SS moved in on Sparks’s men, squirting jets of roaring yellow flame at the most stubborn defenders.
It was not just G Company that came under attack. The SS probed all across the Third Battalion’s positions. From every one of Sparks’s five stranded companies came radio calls of distress. Fewer than thirty men from G Company escaped the German infiltration. The other forty in the unit were either killed or captured. Those who somehow got clear of the jets of burning gasoline and hails of bullets staggered to K Company’s positions, fifty yards to the north on the benighted ridge.
In G Company’s seized positions, the SS searched for food and weapons. Among the abandoned equipment they found an SCR-300 radio. It was still working, much to the delight of the SS men’s commanding officer, Standartenführer Helmut Raithel, who had it brought to him in his command post. The quick-thinking Raithel sent for an English-speaking rifleman in another SS battalion. The soldier was in fact fluent, having lived in Chicago before the war. It wasn’t long before he was translating the curt messages he heard over the radio.
The SS now knew the Americans’ every move.
AT SPARKS’S FORWARD command post, the two-hundred-pound, dark green SCR-694 radio set delivered more bad news.
“G Company is captured! Something has to be done quick!”
The SS began to shell the battalion’s positions mercilessly. More shells landed in rapid succession on the Thunderbirds than anywhere else in the previous four hundred days of war, even at Anzio. Shards of white-hot steel seeded almost every yard of the Americans’ positions. “No aid could be given to the wounded,” recalled one Thunderbird. “When hit, men sank in their holes and tended their wounds as best they could.” An astonishing three out of four men were injured by the flying shrapnel.
When the barrage finally ended later that morning, the armored vehicles at Sparks’s command post set out, accompanied by three squads of infantrymen. It was miserable weather, even for January in northern Europe. There was a steady lashing rain that considerably reduced visibility as the rescue party moved toward the vital supply trail.
Twenty-two-year-old Sergeant Bernard Fleming and his rifle squad of twelve men moved cautiously through woods beside the trail. He heard intense small-arms fire close by. The other rifle squads in the rescue party were knocking out German machine guns overlooking the trail. Then silence. Fleming continued up the trail, believing his fellow Thunderbirds had successfully broken through the German cordon around the battalion.
He was mistaken. Waiting in ambush up ahead were more SS machine gunners, well dug in and concealed, their new MG42 guns fully loaded and positioned to lay down deadly fire on the supply trail as it crossed a small bridge. A few minutes later, as Fleming and his squad approached the bridge, the SS opened up with the machine guns. Several men fell in agony, badly wounded in their legs—the only parts of their bodies that had been visible to the SS from their holes below the tightly bunched firs.
Sergeant Bernard Fleming looked around for cover. He was close to a large hole in the ground caused by a fallen tree.
“Come on,” he shouted at his men. “Get over here.”
Fleming and his men jumped into the hole.
Not long after, two men from another squad appeared and jumped into the hole with Fleming and his men.
“We got orders to withdraw,” one of them said. “But I couldn’t get out. I heard you guys firing down here, so I came down.”
The SS opened fire again. Fleming and the others were pinned down. Indeed, the rescuers now needed saving. Their only hope was to get word back to Sparks’s command post.
A young radio operator, Private Emmett L. Neff volunteered: “I’ll go.”
Neff took off running through the woods, dodging trunks and branches, skirting the trail, headed for the American lines, but after twenty-five yards he
fell in agony, shot through the ankles.
Neff shouted that he’d been hit.
“I’m going out there to get him,” said Fleming. “Give me a lot of fire.”
The men in the hole all did so. Fleming ran over to Neff, dragged him back to the hole, and began to pull off Neff’s bloodied boots so he could examine his wounds.
“I’m gonna go,” said Private Lawrence S. Mathiason.
“Wait a minute now,” said Fleming. “They already got one guy. They’re going to watch us.”
Mathiason ran off anyway. He hadn’t made it ten yards when the Germans “drilled” him with machine-gun and rifle fire.
Fleming took off his heavy ammunition belt and handed his tommy gun to one of his men. He didn’t need the extra weight.
“You guys stay here,” he said. “I’m going to get help.”
Fleming sprinted from the hole then dropped down beside Mathiason. He was dead. Fleming continued running. The SS had him in their sights. Bullets cracked overhead. One passed through his trousers but he wasn’t hit. He made it to the bottom of the trail, where he found Sparks in the Third Battalion’s forward command post.
Fleming told Sparks of the failed rescue mission. Now there were more men, stranded near the supply trail, who needed help.
Sparks could not stand to stay in his command post, listening to his men being killed, for a minute longer. He decided he would lead the next attempt to break through. He owed his men no less. But he wasn’t about to get himself killed in some crazy suicide mission. Armored cars clearly weren’t capable of punching through the German positions on the trail. Real firepower would be needed.
He picked up his field telephone and called regimental headquarters.
Major Carroll answered.
“[We] have to clear the hill,” said Sparks. “If you send tanks I will take [one] and fire at the positions myself.”