This was a secret so precious that those in command decreed that it should be used only over the sea. Some shells are duds, and when they hit the sea they sink out of an enemy’s sight and he will never know what missed him. But when a shell hits the ground it buries itself not too deeply, and the enemy might dig it up and get the benefit of all those years of research and hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. Now, however, this situation in the Bulge was so critical, the danger of Adolf Hitler’s dream coming true was so imminent, that orders had come to use the VT-fused shells. So here they were, and Germans crouching in trenches and foxholes in the good old way, thinking themselves safe from everything but a direct hit, suddenly discovered that howitzer shells were going off directly over their heads and pouring death and ruin among them. There was no longer any way to be safe; and dazed prisoners were brought in, who exclaimed to Lanny Budd, “We don’t know how you do it, but it must be contrary to The Hague Convention!”
X
At this time there were five German divisions attacking Bastogne; at full strength that would have been seventy-five thousand men. Pozit shells couldn’t kill them all, especially as Bastogne’s supply of them was limited. The battle was fought fiercely, day and night. The Americans would sally forth and seize a ridge; the Germans would attack and cut it off, and the Americans would fight their way back. Then it would be the Germans who got cut off and they would fight their way back.
The bombarding was incessant, and the town was gradually being reduced to rubble. A shell would come screaming and hit the house next to yours and shatter all the glass in your windows; if you were an American officer you were not supposed to bat an eye. You would make some supposed-to-be humorous remark—“Good eye, Jerry,” or “Wrong number!”—anything to show that you didn’t in the least mind being blown to flinders if it happened to be in the cards. The truth was, you were afraid you might lose your self-control, and you mustn’t show it; the other fellow might be on the verge of losing his, and you had to set an example.
Every rainy night the besieged men told one another, “Tomorrow we’ll have better weather, and the planes will come.” But day after day the weather stayed the same—they were marvelous meteorologists that Adi Schicklgruber had in his service. The men in the trenches lay in icy cold water, and at night it froze and maybe they froze with it.
They got used to the sight of huge tanks looming up in the mist, and when they got mixed up in the woods it was hard to tell which was theirs and which was ours. It was sure-enough Indian fighting, and many a time a man was on his own and had nobody to give him any orders or help. A man named Beaster went out in a newly arrived tank-killer, and he came up over a ridge and there were five enemy tanks which had turned to get away from him. He fired five quick shots and knocked them out like so many stupid partridges sitting on a limb; then two more came into sight and he hit them. Over his telephone he reported, “I have just killed seven tanks.” A moment later a shell from a German 88 hit his tank and knocked him out; but he lived to get more tanks.
Stories like that were all over the place. Men kept sneaking in through the enemy lines at night with the wildest tales of what had happened to them; enough adventure stories to keep the movies going for a hundred years. A young headquarters clerk from New York and two medics had sought refuge in a hayloft, exactly like Lanny and his Monuments. When they opened their eyes in the morning they discovered Germans cooking breakfast below; the barn had become a command post. Four days they had to stay there, without food or water, and one of the medics had to keep the wretched clerk from sleeping because he snored. By the time that Americans came the man was half out of his mind.
XI
In the headquarters was a maproom, and a Monuments colonel who had rendered special service was entitled to go there. The German units were marked with little red flags and the American with blue. By this time a lot of information had been accumulated, and you could see clearly what had happened. The Bulge was about sixty miles wide at its base and just about as deep; it was a triangle with irregular, curved sides. The Germans had got within fifteen miles of Namur, and within twenty of Liége; there they seemed to have been stopped.
The two exposed sides of that triangle, a front of a hundred and fifty miles, were one incessant battle. American units had been rushed up from every direction, with orders to stand and hold at all hazards; the Germans, probing here and there for soft spots, trying desperately to reach the goals which their Führer had set, found themselves encountering newly arrived columns, deploying quickly and not waiting to be attacked but attacking. So in the north there were battles at Malmédy and LaGleize and Werbomont and Marche, and in the nose of the Bulge at Rochefort, and behind that at Ciney and Celles and Beauraing; it was the same along the south side of the salient, only fighting was not so heavy, because the Führer had set the goals to the northwest.
Thursday, the 21st of December, the shortest day of the year, was the sixth day of the offensive; that longest night, instead of fair weather there was a high wind and heavy snow, what in America is called a blizzard. In the midst of it the Germans attacked Bastogne with renewed fury; evidently they had realized that unless they could have the use of those eight major roads they could no longer supply their troops that had plunged on to the west. They even recalled some of their armored forces to complete the encirclement of the town. By the next afternoon they had made such progress that they sent a major, accompanied by a captain and a couple of common soldiers, out into a field waving a flag made of a bedsheet. An American sergeant south of the town, getting ready a mortar barrage with some of those wonderful new proximity-fused shells, observed the flag and held up his fire. The Germans requested to be taken to an officer, so they were escorted to the nearest command post, and from there driven to town and into the presence of General McAuliffe.
That small-sized man with one star on each shoulder was very busy and probably not very elegant in appearance just then; he hadn’t been expecting company. The German major handed him a letter, and he took time off to read it. It was in English and employed the very formal style which Wehrmacht officers considered protocol. It informed the American commander that: “The fortunes of war are changing, and this time United States Army forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German Army units.… There is only one possibility to save American troops from total annihilation, and that is honorable surrender.” The letter went on to say that the Americans would be granted a two-hour period “in order to think this over,” and it took the opportunity to offer a moral sentiment, pointing out that civilians might be killed in the bombardment, that the American Army would be to blame for this, and that it was not in line with “that well-known American humanity.”
Was this a touch of irony, or was it just hypocrisy? Did they really think the Americans hadn’t learned anything about German humanity, from Warsaw and Rotterdam on? The “Old Crock” may have felt a little bit sick at his stomach; anyhow, what he said was “Nuts!” He didn’t have any idea that he was making himself immortal by that word; millions of American boys had said it, and continued to say it when they had grown up and wished to express the ultimate of boredom and disgust. McAuliffe wrote on a scrap of paper: “To the German Commander: Nuts!”—and drew two lines under the word. The German major knew English, but not of that inelegant kind. On his way out he asked the staff officer who was escorting him, “What does ‘nuts’ mean?” The answer was, “It means about the same as ‘Go to hell.’” The German flushed and said no more. In his heart he would know that he was dealing with backwoodsmen, low-born men without breeding or manners; but unfortunately they could fight.
XII
The strange silence of the truce was broken, and the battle became still more fierce. The Germans attacked again and again, and shells poured into the town, making its lack of charm still more evident. Scores of fires were burning, many civilians were killed, and it was the Americans’ fault, but they bore up under the burden. And next m
orning came a miracle—a decent day. The storm had blown itself out, and, actually, there was a sun in the sky!
So there came the planes; all kinds and sizes, on their various errands; more than five thousand flew from the Continent and England that day. Thunderbolt fighter-bombers dropped their stuff on enemy tanks, truck concentrations, and supply dumps; Budd-Erlings sprayed road convoys with machine-gun bullets; and the pot-bellied cargo planes, the C-47S, came in swarms, flying low and dumping off stuff with parachutes. McAuliffe had called for all sorts of supplies and now he was getting them. Red parachutes meant one kind, blue another, yellow a third, and so on. The men below did not fail to make note of the spot and to collect.
That wonderful weather held for five days, and the Air Force made use of every hour. It was the end of German hopes, and the higher-ups could not have failed to realize it. Their supply lines far to the rear were being bombed out; ammunition depots and oil dumps, railroad yards, locomotives and trains, bridges and culverts—the Germans were back in the days when their trains and trucks dared to move only at night and had to be hidden off the roads by day. They sent out the best they had against the Air Force, and their planes were shot out of the sky by the mysterious new shells, whose accuracy appeared to be supernatural. They couldn’t, alas, make any appeal to The Hague Convention, for they had taken The Hague and everything in it; and anyhow, since when had the laws of war forbidden gunners to shoot too accurately?
The attack on Bastogne continued unabated. On Christmas Eve there was a fearful bombing, and it cost the young Monuments man from Wisconsin one of his arms. Fortunately a few surgeons had got into the town with Piper Cubs and gliders, and plenty of blood plasma had been dropped from the skies. Lanny’s conscience troubled him, and he wondered if he should not have tried to take his little company out to safety. But where was safety, going or coming, in the Bulge?
At three o’clock on Christmas morning the Germans made their fiercest attack, throwing four full divisions against the fourteen-mile perimeter of the town. They broke through on a front of about a quarter-mile. There was the wildest kind of melee in the snow, men using bayonets and knives, which were supposed to have got out of date in war. Ten Tiger tanks broke into the town, and kitchen and office men and the wounded fought them with anything they could pick up, including bottles of gasoline thrown from windows of houses. During those two days the Germans lost a couple of hundred tanks and before darkness fell on Christmas night had had to give up the ground gained. But they didn’t yield a foot without fierce fighting, and many chose to die in the trampled snow. Their Führer had ordered it, having told them that the loss of this battle would mean the loss of the war.
XIII
General McAuliffe might well have been worried, for his supplies were getting desperately low and he had to ration ten cartridges to each man in the trenches. But he knew that help was coming. It was another motion-picture finale, this time on an even bigger scale, and the hero of the event was that doughty warrior with the two pearl-handled revolvers, “Old Blood and Guts,” officially known as General George Patton. His Third Army was next in the line to the south, a couple of hundred miles away. It had been facing east, ready for a grand slam, when the Battle of the Bulge began, and it was ordered to make a left face and go to the rescue.
Only a military man could conceive what that meant; an army has things that belong at the front and others that belong at the rear, and if any of them get mixed up there is confusion beyond imagining. When you have several hundred thousand men performing such a maneuver there are several hundred thousand things that may go wrong, and a headquarters staff has to work all day and all night and its members are lucky if they don’t go mad. After it was all over, some of them figured up that in six days 133,178 motor vehicles had traveled 1,654,042 miles; 61,935 tons of supplies had been moved; and enough telephone lines laid, what is called “field wire,” to reach six times across the United States. Some had to prepare and others had to distribute hundreds of thousands of maps, terrain analyses of the new battle area, estimates of the enemy situation, and detailed orders of battle.
The 4th Armored Division, deep in the Sarreguemines salient, was ordered to move at once to the Ardennes. The order came at midnight, and in black darkness the division withdrew, and by nine o’clock next morning was at Nancy, fifty miles behind its former position; this in the midst of the blizzard just before Christmas. The division sped northward, and by the next morning it was fighting enemy tanks at a town called Arlon, some thirty miles below Bastogne. The Germans knew all about the 4th Armored, for it had chased them all the way through Normandy, across France, and across the Moselle River. Apparently they didn’t like what they had learned, for they called the men “Roosevelt’s Butchers,” which didn’t annoy the men a bit.
And then came the 80th Infantry Division, who called themselves the “Blue Ridge Mountain Boys.” They too had fought all the way across France. They had been resting at St. Avoid, and had traveled forty miles on their way back into the line when the Ardennes battle started. The division was loaded into open trucks at one o’clock in the morning and traveled in bitter cold for fourteen hours. Then it got out and fought, and destroyed two-thirds of a German division which blocked its path. That helped to explain why the Germans did not succeed in their efforts to widen the shoulders of the southern salient and take the city of Luxembourg.
XIV
The fighting here was as tough as that before Bastogne, and it lasted as long. “Old Blood and Guts” was a fighting man, and so were all his officers; he had told them that they must like to fight. “If you don’t like to fight, go back to Washington; you don’t belong with the Third.” The battle was going on all through the period of rotten weather, the blizzard followed by fog and rain, and the General, a devout Episcopalian, wrote a prayer and had it printed and distributed to all the troops:
“Almighty and merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee, that armed with Thy power we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.”
And when this prayer was answered and five thousand planes shot up into the sky, the man with the pearl-handled revolvers danced with delight and exclaimed, “Hot dog! I guess I’ll have another hundred thousand of those prayers printed. The Lord is on our side, and we’ve got to keep Him informed of what we need!”
Villages changed hands three times in the course of the 4th Armored’s advance toward Bastogne. The enemy mined the roads and posted their Panzerfausts behind rocks and trees. American planes swooped down upon German tanks, thus revealing their position; the American “arty” would get them with the new pozit ammunition. The fighting advance went on for five days, and on the day after Christmas the commander of one tank battalion announced, “We are going into Bastogne today.”
The tank men stepped on the gas, and they came to a little village only a mile and a half south of Bastogne. American artillery was firing into the town and knocked out several of the American halftracks. But the road was cleared and the Sherman tanks sped on. The Germans literally threw their Teller mines into the road, and the Americans lifted them off by hand. Then they came to a pillbox that had been knocked out and was still smoking; they didn’t know whether it was American or German. They halted, afraid to fire, and both sides stared at each other. It was almost evening and the light was bad. Finally an American officer came forward, and when he had made sure who it was he said, “I am glad to see you.”
XV
And that’s all the drama there was to the second deliverance of Bastogne. Oddly enough, when the “Old Crock” got word that the tanks had come and rode out to meet them, he said the very same words, “I am glad to see you.” Americans are a practical-minded people and as a rule lack a sense of drama. It probably
never occurred to “Tony” McAuliffe that he was making history; he was just giving the Germans a licking, because they had declared war on his country and it was a job that had to be done. Anything beyond that would have been playacting, and rather silly to him.
Such was the ending of the Siege of Bastogne. But right away another struggle began, no less fierce, which was properly to be called the Battle of Bastogne. The enemy couldn’t give up and retire because Bastogne and the new corridor constituted a bulge driven into his bulge, and it imperiled all the forces he had sent far to the west. He had hoped to fight at Namur and Liége, but instead he was forced to fight at this dingy little town which was now a mass of rubble. He had to bring in troops from both east and west to meet those Patton was driving in from the south. It took two days to widen the corridor so that American supplies could be safely brought into the town, and after that there were ten days of ceaseless fighting.
Another blizzard descended, in spite of all Georgie’s printed prayers, and three Monuments officers decided that this battle was one out of many still to be fought, and it was no point of honor to stay and risk any more portions of themselves. Convoys were coming in loaded and going out empty, and it was easy for assimilated officers to bum a ride. Morrison, the wounded man, was carried in an ambulance, and his two friends rode with him to see that he was kept warm and cheerful.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 9