Brothers In Arms

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Before rotating out to Metz with his 26th Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Willard Paul had forwarded a commendation to the 761st Battalion from XII Corps commander Manton S. Eddy. Major General Paul wrote: “It is with extreme gratification that the Corps Commander's commendation is forwarded to you. Your battalion has supported this division with great bravery under the most adverse weather and terrain conditions. You have my sincere wish that success may continue to follow your endeavors.”

  Major General Eddy's enclosed commendation read: “1. I consider the 761st Tank Battalion to have entered combat with such conspicuous courage and success as to warrant special commendation. 2. The speed with which they adapted themselves to the front line under the most adverse weather conditions, the gallantry with which they faced some of Germany's finest troops, and the confident spirit with which they emerged from their recent engagements in the vicinity of Dieuze, Morville les Vic, and Guebling entitle them surely to consider themselves the veteran 761st.”

  ON THE FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, after forty straight days of combat, George S. Patton's Saar Campaign had brought him, finally, to the point he had envisioned when he first assumed command of the Third Army almost a year before: His troops were poised to smash through the Siegfried Line and push northeast to the Rhine River. This sustained drive had cost more than Patton could possibly have imagined in the glory days of his August drive across France—certainly more than he acknowledged in his early, optimistic predictions for the campaign to higher headquarters. During the first three weeks in August, Patton's troops had advanced four hundred miles and liberated more than a third of France. By contrast, to capture the province of Lorraine, a stretch of territory with a width of only sixty miles, the Third Army had fought for more than three months, from September through mid-December, and suffered 50,000 casualties—which accounted for a third of the total number of casualties it would endure throughout all its operations in the European Theater (including the Battle of the Bulge). More than 25,000 of these casualties were sustained during the Saar Campaign.

  Postwar military studies have criticized Patton for spreading his forces too thin in Lorraine. Historian Christopher Gabel writes, “The German defenders were critical of, but grateful for, Patton's decision to [sic] a broad front of nine divisions spread out over sixty miles. . . . One rule of thumb for mechanized forces that emerged from World War II was to march dispersed but concentrate to fight. In Lorraine, Third Army fought dispersed.” Military historians have also criticized Patton for overoptimism about the strength of the obstacles in his army's path, an overoptimism that translated from the highest levels down the chain of command into the sorts of impossible missions the enlisted men of the 26th Division and the 761st were all too often given: “The corps commanders were trapped between Patton, who continually urged aggressive action, and the grim realities of terrain, weather, and a determined enemy.”

  The Saar Campaign was in the end a victory, gaining Patton the jumping-off point he had so urgently wanted. But it was a victory gained at an appalling price. As biographer Stanley Hirshson wrote of the siege of Metz, the Saar was not one of Patton's finest moments, and “he preferred to forget it.”

  WHILE THE MEN CONTINUED CHECKING and repairing their engines, tanks, and guns at Sarre-Union, Captain Williams was visited by Colonel Sears of the 87th Infantry Division. Sears informed him that the battalion's rest would be short-lived. The 761st Tank Battalion was to play a large role in a massive new assault planned by General Patton. Sears told Williams that the 4th and 6th Armored and the 80th and 87th Infantry Divisions were going to go through the Siegfried Line to the Rhine, with the 761st spearheading for the 87th.

  On December 10 and again on the thirteenth, Patton met with his staff to refine their plans for this attack, plans in which, according to biographer Robert Allen, “every defensive position and obstacle was meticulously pinpointed. Thousands of 1/25,000-scale multi-colored collated maps were compiled and distributed.” Patton's XII and XX Corps were to drive east simulaneously from the vicinities of Sarreguemines, Saarbrucken, and Saarlautern into Germany's Mainz– Frankfurt–Darmstadt corridor. This ground assault was to be preceded by a bombing campaign more intense than any in the war thus far, with sorties by five to six hundred medium bombers and twelve hundred to fifteen hundred heavy bombers, all supported in turn by hundreds of fighter-bombers. The distinguished RAF would follow this initial thrust by sending one thousand of its bombers farther ahead into Germany. The air assault would continue for three days before any American infantry involvement.

  After the final strategy meeting on the thirteenth, Patton's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Hobart R. Gay, summarized his opinion of the significance of this operation: “It is my belief that if this air attack is carried out as planned, and if the ground attack is carried out as planned, it will breach the Siegfried Line, which means the advance of American troops to the Rhine and might well terminate the war.”

  Had events unfolded differently in mid-December, and had the sacrifices of Lorraine indeed proven to be a jumping-off point for the road to final victory in Europe, the Saar Campaign may have come to be viewed as equal in significance with the invasion of Normandy. This was undoubtedly George Patton's intent. Instead, today the Saar Campaign has largely been forgotten. Twenty-six members of the 761st Tank Battalion, along with thousands of other members of Patton's Third U.S. Army, were buried in the northeasternmost corner of France, in the province of Lorraine and in the Saar.

  The reason the Saar Campaign would fade in significance would soon become clear. On the night of December 15–16, as General Patton continued studying maps and planning his attack, he was disturbed by complete German radio silence in the area. He asked his intelligence liaison, Oscar Koch, what this might mean. Koch replied, “I don't know what it means when the Germans go on radio silence. But when we place one of our units in radio silence, it means they're going to move.”

  7

  THE BLOODY FOREST

  It just looked almost endless, like you were going

  to be there the rest of your life.

  —PRIVATE BART HAGERMAN, 17TH AIRBORNE DIVISION

  At 5:30 A.M. on December 16, a massive attack was launched by 250,000 German troops in the forested region of Belgium and Luxembourg known as the Ardennes. The offensive took the Allied high command utterly by surprise. American generals had viewed the harsh, rugged woodland of the Ardennes as the least likely location for a German attack, and had defended the eighty-mile front with only four thinly spread divisions of the First U.S. Army. These troops were overwhelmed by the staggering force of the enemy artillery and armored assault, many of them falling back in a confused, disorderly retreat, leaving behind those too badly wounded to walk. By December 19, the German armored spearhead of Joachim Peiper's 1st SS Panzer Regiment had advanced thirty miles west. Outside the Belgian city of Schonberg, 7,000 American soldiers of the 106th Infantry Division—surrounded on all sides, under constant bombardment, and entirely out of ammunition—surrendered, the largest surrender of American troops since Bataan. The Germans continued pressing rapidly west, forcing a showdown that would enter military history as the single bloodiest struggle ever engaged in by American forces: the Battle of the Bulge.

  On December 19, at Verdun, France, in what was to prove to be one of the most crucial meetings of the war, Eisenhower summoned George Patton, Omar Bradley, Lt. Gen. Jacob Devers, British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's chief of staff to discuss the Allied response to the German breakthrough. When Eisenhower entered the conference room at Verdun, in a cold, dimly lit French barracks, he found the faces of the Allied commanders around the table markedly grim. The notable exception was George Patton.

  Eisenhower asked Patton how soon he could have his Third Army on the attack in Belgium. Patton answered that he could attack the morning of December 21, with three divisions. Eisenhower told him to launch his attack on the twenty-second. The effect of this exchange on the a
ssembled officers was what one of them later described as “electric”: the act of pulling three full divisions off the front line, pivoting them ninety degrees from their planned axis of attack, and sending them more than a hundred miles north across icy roads to Belgium to attack in strength in less than three days was unprecedented.

  Patton expressed his concern, in strategizing the withdrawal of his troops, with guarding the hard-won Saar. The Germans could not be allowed any advances in the south. The 87th Division and the 761st were to hold the southernmost sector of the line while Patton's 4th Armored and 26th and 80th Infantry Divisions raced north, until elements of the Seventh Army could move up from Alsace to take their place. Then the 761st and the 87th Infantry would rush northwest to Reims, France. Their initial assignment—as the objectives of the German offensive were at this point unclear—was to guard against a repeat of Hitler's 1940 blitzkrieg through Sedan. But before the 761st had even arrived at Reims, Patton had changed their reserve status and committed them to battle near the Belgian town of Bastogne.

  ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 19, as the men of the 761st readied their tanks at Sarre-Union for the assault on the Siegfried Line, the battalion was informed of a sudden change of plans. They had no knowledge of the bitter fighting in the Ardennes. To Leonard Smith, the news they received seemed like an early Christmas present, a welcome break: The American offensive had been postponed. Now Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog Companies and the assault gun and mortar platoons were ordered to return to positions they had left five days before, to support the 87th Infantry Division in holding the front line.

  The front to which they returned, just beyond the German border, was oddly quiet. There were no sounds of shelling or machine-gun fire. Over the next three days, the men maintained their posts against only scattered pockets of enemy activity. Stretches of territory that had been hotly contested now appeared, as Preston McNeil looked east through his field glasses, inexplicably to have been transformed into ghost towns. On December 23, the 87th Infantry Division was pulled off the line—an unusual order, as the unit had been in combat for less than two weeks. The tanks of the 761st covered their withdrawal as elements of a new unit, the 44th Infantry Division of the Seventh U.S. Army, took over their positions. The following day, the 761st itself was pulled out.

  They drove to the south ten miles, spending Christmas Eve bivouacked in the small town of Weidesheim. On Christmas Day, they rolled southwest, past Honskirch, Bourgaltroff, and Guebling, to Wuisse, where the company cooks had gone ahead to prepare Christmas dinner. Their mood was relaxed, even playful. William McBurney, Preston McNeil, and Leonard Smith were only too relieved to be moving out of the Saar. It had been the stuff of nightmare. Smith's unthinking zeal for combat had been tempered by the devastation he'd witnessed at Munster and Honskirch, difficult to reconcile with any of his comic book notions of war. But he still maintained on some fundamental level a belief in his own boundless hero's luck. Wherever it was they were off to, Smith was game for the new adventure.

  He sought out Willie Devore, joking around and stamping his feet against the cold as they waited for their holiday dinner. Christmas was to be their first full hot meal in weeks.

  But before the food was ready, the battalion was ordered to move out. Chunks of steaming, half-done turkey were ripped off the baking birds and tossed to the tankers as they mounted their Shermans.

  THE 761ST'S ULTIMATE DESTINATION, Bastogne, was in many ways an unremarkable town. A sleepy market village with a population before the war of fewer than 4,000, it lay in a picturesque resort area that reminded most American visitors of nothing so much as upstate Vermont. But Bastogne was also a crossroads for seven hard-surfaced roads, crucial to the rapid movement and deployment of armored vehicles, infantry trucks, and supply vehicles. It was the hub of a transportation wheel that could greatly aid or hinder the German advance to the west. Realizing the scope of the German breakthrough on December 17, Eisenhower had dispatched his only available reserves, the 7th and 10th Armored and 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, to the Ardennes, with the 101st Airborne and Combat Command B of the 10th Armored moving directly to Bastogne. These units had begun arriving there on December 18—only to witness the sight of hundreds of civilians and American soldiers retreating on the remaining roads out to the west. Combat Command B, the 101st Airborne, Combat Command R of the 9th Armored Division, the 705th Tank Destroyer battalion, and remnants of other miscellaneous units, such as the 969th Field Artillery—an African American battalion—were ordered to hold Bastogne at all costs.

  In the face of intense enemy shelling and relentless infantry attacks, American forces at Bastogne held out amid dwindling food, ammunition, and medical supplies. By December 22, they were completely surrounded. German general Heinrich von Luttwitz delivered a surrender ultimatum that afternoon to the 101st Airborne's Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, to which McAuliffe answered dryly, “Nuts!”

  Patton's three divisions were fast closing on the city. Between the nineteenth and the twenty-second, Patton had rushed back and forth between his divisions on the road, exhorting them to “drive like hell!” At 6 A.M. on December 22, as he had promised the high command—in a logistical feat never before accomplished in the history of war—Patton's 4th Armored and 80th and 26th Infantry Divisions began attacking south and southeast of Bastogne.

  Elsewhere throughout the Ardennes, the German advance had been slowed as small numbers of valiant troops held firm as long as humanly possible against much larger German forces, from Elsenborn in the north to Echternach in the south. The Germans had hoped to press forward on a wide, eighty-mile front, but the northern and southern shoulders of the attack had been narrowed and stabilized by this defiant resistance. By December 23, at the center and farthest point of the “bulge” in the American lines, Joachim Peiper's SS spearhead had advanced to Dinant, less than six miles from their initial goal of the Meuse River. But on the twenty-third, the U.S. 2nd Armored Division and British 29th Brigade mounted a furious counterattack against them. Everywhere on the twenty-third, with the first clearing of the skies since the German offensive began, Allied troops received supplies and relief from the Ninth U.S. Air Force. Patton's 4th Armored and 80th and 26th Infantry Divisions waged a continued, close-in ground battle south of Bastogne against entrenched elements of the German Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies.

  On December 26, a combat command of the 4th Armored finally broke through the German lines. But the lifeline they established into the city was so tenuous that, in the words of one 4th Armored tanker, “you could spit across it.” Historian John S. D. Eisenhower describes it as a string attached to a balloon. The section of the American lifeline to the southwest of Bastogne was particularly soft and lightly defended. Patton was aware of its vulnerability; as it turned out, so too were the Germans. This was the 761st's assigned sector.

  THE 761ST ROLLED WEST throughout Christmas day and night, stopping for maintenance checks in the city of Bar-le-Duc, France, the following afternoon. The enlisted men had learned by this point that the Germans had mounted an enormous offensive, and that that was where they were headed. But in typical military fashion, they were told nothing more. Leonard Smith pestered Pop Gates with questions. Gates simply responded that he should try to get some sleep. Something about Gates's grave, intent expression made sleep a practical impossibility. William McBurney had noticed it, too.

  On the twenty-seventh, they pivoted and began moving north, driving for two days. They stopped north of Reims, at Rethel, where they camped in the ruins of a World War I battlefield. The weather had turned bitter cold, with temperatures hovering around zero. Before dawn on the twenty-ninth, as the crews warmed up their engines, the men took turns standing behind them, grabbing a bit of heat from the exhaust fumes.

  They took off again, advancing in a column through the following night. Drivers strained to keep sight of the taillights of the tank before them. William McBurney talked by headset to Willie Devore to help keep him focused. In the rush
across the steep, narrow Ardennes roads made treacherous by snow and thick ice, ten of the battalion's tanks were lost to accidents and mechanical breakdowns. The tank commanded by Sgt. Robert Johnson slid off the road, and Johnson—who had fired the white phosphorus barrage that saved tankers and infantrymen in the ditch at Honskirch—died from injuries he sustained in the crash.

  THE 761ST PRESSED ON to the northeast, arriving on the afternoon of December 30 at the village of Offagne, Belgium, located in the 87th Infantry Division's assembly area between Bertrix and Libramont. MPs directed the battalion's tanks to a wooded area two miles north of Offagne. It was so cold that the snow around their Shermans burned the men's hands if they were not wearing gloves. Leonard Smith tried to catch some sleep in his tank as they waited, but found he'd wake himself shivering, regardless of how tired he was. Captain Williams, Captain Gates, and the other company commanders could not find anyone to give them clear orders for their deployment. Unbeknownst to them, the headquarters of the 87th Division was in a turmoil: The faint guns the men of the 761st heard to their north were the sounds of a confused melee.

  On Patton's orders, the untested 87th Infantry Division and 11th Armored Division had engaged the German forces in the southwest quadrant straight off the road at 7:30 A.M. with no time for reconnaissance or planning. Maj. Gen. Frank Culin of the 87th and Maj. Gen. Charles Kilburn of the 11th Armored had protested that their forces should wait a day; Patton insisted they attack immediately. He was to count this among the more fortunate decisions of his career.

  Bastogne, though useful and important, was not an absolutely essential military objective for Hitler, whose initial plans had called for the town simply to be bypassed if resistance there was too stiff. Hitler wanted nothing to interfere with his lightning push west to reach the Meuse River within two days, and the Belgian port of Antwerp within four days. But the strict timetable of the German offensive had been thrown off already by fierce resistance from American forces. Enraged at the disruption of his plans, Hitler came to view Bastogne as a symbol of American defiance. He developed what can only be described as a personal vendetta against the troops holding the town. On December 26, he gave the order for his SS Panzer divisions and crack Fuhrer Begleit Brigade to turn back from their push to the Meuse to “lance this boil.” The assault from the southwest to cut the Bastogne lifeline was set to begin on the thirtieth.