Citizen Soldiers [Condensed]

by Stephen Ambrose

  Peiper's advance ended. That afternoon he got an order via radio- withdraw. For the Germans the offensive phase of the Battle of the Bulge was over. One of Peiper's privates, Giinter Bruckner, asked a question to which the answer was obvious: "We were so well equipped, beautiful weapons, but what is the use of having a brand-new tank, but no gas? What is the use of having a machine gun when I have no more ammunition?"

  Or what is the use of having the world's best fighter aeroplane when there is no fuel to run it? By this stage the Germans had built hundreds of single-engine jets (Messerschmitt 163s) and twin-engine jets (ME-262s) and were going into production on a jet bomber. The Americans were not going to have jets until October. Some Allied airmen worried that if the war went on, the Germans might regain control of the sky. But the Luftwaffe was without fuel. The all-out bomber assault on German refineries and oil-related targets had a cumulative effect that was devastating.

  For the Wehrmacht almost everything had gone wrong, all of it predictable. It had been madness to attack in the Ardennes-an area with the most difficult terrain and least adequate road system in all of Western Europe-with insufficient fuel. Of course Eisenhower had tried to continue the Allied offensive in September and October when his troops had insufficient fuel. But by December the Allies had fuel dumps throughout Belgium and Luxembourg. Now it was the Germans' turn to retreat, abandoning their vehicles and weapons in disarray. Their week of glory was over.

  DURING CHRISTMAS season of 1944 there were some 4 million young soldiers on the Western Front, the great majority of them Protestants or Catholics. They said the same prayers when they were being shelled, directed to the same God. They joined in denouncing godless communism, which was one side's ally and the other side's enemy.

  In World War II no hatred matched that felt by Americans against Japanese, or Russians against Germans, and vice versa. But in Northwest Europe there was little racial hatred between the Americans and the Germans. How could there be when cousins were fighting cousins? About one third of the US Army in ETO was German American in origin.

  The season highlighted their closeness. Americans and Germans alike put up Christmas trees and used the debris of war-like chaff, the tinfoil dropped by bombers to fool radar-to decorate them. Men who would never do such a thing at any other time prepared gifts for other men. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day men on both sides of the line sang the same carols. The universal favourite was "Silent Night." Nearly every one of those 4 million men on the Western Front was homesick. Loneliness was their most shared emotion. Christmas meant family, and family and home meant life.

  They couldn't go home just yet, however, so the GIs did what they could to make where they were look like home. The 99th Division had taken its position in the Ardennes and gone to work building double-walled shelters. "We looked forward to spending Christmas secure in our log bunkers," one sergeant wrote, "with a decorated tree, singing carols and enjoying a hot meal."

  Most rear-echelon people lived and slept in houses. Sometimes frontline men, too, when the line ran down the middle of a village. If a village had been or was the scene of a battle, its civilian population was usually gone. The first men into the village got first crack at looting what the combat troops wanted most-food, a change in diet. Shelves of canned fruits, vegetables, and meats made for some memorable holiday feasts.

  Corporal Clair Galdonik of the 90th Division found himself on Christmas Eve in an undestroyed home just inside Germany. His company had occupied the town at dusk. The Germans thought civilians were still there. To keep them fooled, the CO told the men to build fires. The smoke rising from the homes worked: there was no shelling that night. But in Galdonik's house the chimney wasn't drawing. Smoke filled the room. Galdonik investigated. He found that the stovepipes were stuffed with smoked hams and sausages the German family had tried to hide. There was enough to provide his squad with two days of banqueting.

  There was no general cease-fire anywhere on Christmas Day. Apparently it never occurred to anyone to suggest it. But the urge to go to church was widely felt. Private George McAvoy of the 9th Armoured Division was in Fratin, Belgium, on Christmas Eve. He attended a midnight mass along with every man in his company not on duty and most of the town's inhabitants. As the church was jammed, the GIs took seats in the rear. They were in combat dress and armed, which caused considerable embarrassment. Rifles leaned against the hardwood pews would slip and crash to the floor. The men put their helmets under the pews in front of them; when people knelt they kicked the helmets and sent them spinning. "It was the noisiest service I ever attended," McAvoy wrote. "But the sense of comfort, well-being and safety was amazing."

  Throughout the service McAvoy noted the boys up in the choir stall were giggling. It turned out that one of the squads had gone into the church shortly after dark, thrown their bedrolls down around the altar, and gone to sleep. When the priest arrived, he let them sleep. What set the boys to giggling was the sight of one of the GIs suddenly waking up, hearing the organ and seeing the priest, and crying out, "I've bought it!"

  GENERAL McAULIFFE was all pumped up. His boys had held, the skies had cleared, and help was coming. McAuliffe's men in the foxholes were not so upbeat. Their Christmas Eve dinner consisted of cold beans. In his company Captain Winters was last to go for chow. All he got was "five white beans and a cup of cold broth." At least his company didn't get attacked on Christmas Day. On the other side of Bastogne the Germans launched their heaviest attacks ever to try one last time to break through. They failed.

  That was but one of many attacks launched by both sides. They were there to kill, holy day or not. The dead and dying were all around. Sergeant Bruce Egger's company attacked a village late on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. German machine guns hit the advancing GIs. Two men were wounded, one killed. The platoon dug in. Egger recalled: "A wounded man kept crying, 'Mother, Mother! Help me!' as he struggled to rise. Another burst from the machine gun silenced him. That beseeching plea on that clear, cold Christmas night will remain with me for the rest of my life."

  Private Phillip Stark, a nineteen-year-old machine gunner in the 84th Division, arrived on Christmas Eve at a position outside the Belgian village of Verdenne on the northern shoulder of the Bulge. At twilight the German troops in Verdenne began to celebrate. Stark wrote later, "Sounds and songs carried well across the cold clear air." Too well for Stark's liking, however: officers at regimental level heard the songs and ordered Stark's platoon to attack and drive the Germans from the town. That meant going up a hill. In the dark the company got to the top, only to be shelled by American artillery. Stark and his buddy Wib tried to dig in, but below the frozen earth there was rock. Despite frantic efforts, when dawn came, "our hole was only about a foot deep and six feet long. Wib was 6'2" and I'm 6'6", but at least we were able to keep ourselves below the all important ground level. This is how we spent Christmas Eve in 1944."

  Christmas morning Stark got to talking about stories he had heard from the First World War, when on Christmas the front-line soldiers would declare a truce. "We longed for a day of peace and safety." Instead, they got a German barrage intended to cover the retreat of German vehicles. Stark began cutting down fleeing enemy infantry. "Only on this Christmas Day did I ever find combat to be as pictured in the movies. We blazed away ruthlessly," he wrote.

  At dawn the following day German infantry and tanks counterat-tacked. The remainder of the platoon retreated, but Stark stayed with his machine gun, even when Wib took a bullet in the middle of his forehead. "Now I was alone and for the first time I was sure that I too was going to die. But I kept on firing, hoping to keep them off. By now three enemy tanks were very close and firing their machine guns and cannon directly at my position." A German bullet ricocheted off his machine gun, broke into bits, and slammed into his cheek, blinding him in the left eye. He ran to the rear, over the hill, and back to where he had started three days ago on Christmas Eve. He had lost an eye and won a Silver Star.

  ON CHRIST
MAS Eve, Private Joe Tatman of the 9th Armoured found himself with his squad, hiding in a hayloft outside Bastogne, well within German lines. They had been trapped there five days and had run out of food, "but we talked about Christmas and home, never giving up our hopes."

  At 1600 the Germans found Tatman's group and forced it to surrender. A captain took charge. He had been a lawyer in New York. He explained that he had returned to his homeland to settle his father's estate and got caught up in the war. He took the prisoners into the kitchen of the farmhouse. His cooks were preparing for a Christmas party. He gave the GIs milk and doughnuts. He talked and joked about the war. He hoped it would end soon so that everyone could go home.

  After they ate, the captain gave the Americans hot water, towels, and shaving materials. He told them to wash up as he was inviting them to join the Christmas party. The elderly Belgian farm couple had set a large, beautiful table in a decorated dining room, covered with all kinds of food and drinks, including meats. There were plates holding "all brands of American cigarettes." After eating, the captain offered a toast of good luck to the prisoners. He explained he and his men wanted to have the party because they realized that in the morning, Christmas Day, the GIs "would begin their journey to Hell."

  Hell was a German POW camp. By late December they were growing rapidly, as the GIs captured in the first days of the Bulge began to come in. The trip from Belgium to the camps in eastern Germany was purgatory. Private Kurt Vonnegut of the 106th had a typical experience. After his group was forced to surrender, the Germans marched the POWs 60 miles to Limburg. There was no water, food, or sleep. In Limburg they were loaded into railway cars designed to hold forty men or eight horses. Private Vonnegut's car held sixty men. The cars were unventilated and unheated. There were no sanitary accommodations. Half the men had to stand so the other half could lie down to sleep. In every car there were any number of men with severe dysentery. There they stayed for four days.

  Shortly after dark on Christmas Eve, in one of those cars, a man began singing. "He obviously had a trained voice; he was a superb tenor," Private George Zak recalled. He sang "Silent Night." Soon the others in the car took it up. It spread to the cars up and down the line. The German guards joined in the singing.

  Suddenly the air-raid sirens went off. Soon bombs from the RAF were dropping all around the railroad yard. "Let us out!" the POWs screamed as they pounded at the locked sliding doors. "For Christ's sake, give us a chance!" But the guards had run off. The thinnest man in the car managed to squeeze through one of the vent windows and remove the wire locking the sliding door. The POWs poured out and ran up and down the track, opening the wire on the other cars. They saw a cavelike gully and ran to it. Some made it, but about 150 got killed or wounded.

  When the all-clear sounded, the guards returned, rounded up the prisoners, and put them back in the cars. Slowly the excited talk died down as the adrenaline drained. Soon it was a silent night. "Hey," someone called out. "Hey, tenor, give us some more."

  A voice from the other end of the car responded, "He ain't here. He got killed."

  So it went on the Western Front during the Christmas season, 1944.

  OUT IN THE English Channel the transport Leopoldville, a converted luxury liner, was headed towards Le Havre, bringing 2,223 replacements for the Battle of the Bulge. The officers were from the Royal Navy, the crew was Belgian, the passengers were Americans-a fine show of Allied unity. Sergeant Franklin Anderson and 150 others went up to the deck just before midnight to sing Christmas carols. There was a boom. A torpedo from a U-boat had hit amidships.

  The ship shivered, then began to sink. The officers and crew jumped into the lifeboats-there were only fourteen of them-and took off, leaving the US soldiers to fend for themselves. Anderson managed to jump from Leopoldville to the deck of a destroyer that came alongside. Others who tried the same missed and were crushed as big waves pushed the two ships into each other. Still others drowned or succumbed to hypothermia. Altogether 802 GIs died in the incident, but not one British officer or Belgian seaman died. Bad show for Allied unity. The incident therefore was covered up. There was no investigation, no court-martial.

  Built to carry 360 passengers, the Leopoldville held well over 2,000 troops when it sank in early winter, a time when the Channel is always rough and often stormy. The Allies were sending every available man across the Channel to the front on every available boat. To speed the process, ordinary precautions were neglected. There were insufficient life jackets, and no instructions on their use. With men packed into the very bowels of the ship, there were no lifeboat or abandon-ship drills. There were many other oversights, most caused by haste.

  As a result, what should have been a minor loss was the equivalent of losing a full-strength rifle regiment, as the 1,400 or so survivors of the Leopoldville had to be sent to the hospital rather than the front line when they finally got to Cherbourg.

  PATTON WOKE on Christmas morning, looked at the sky, and said to himself, "Lovely weather for killing Germans." But to his disappointment the spearhead for his thrust north to relieve Bastogne failed to break the siege that day.

  The next morning the 4th Armoured moved out, with the 37th Tank Battalion (twenty Shermans strong), commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, in the lead. Jabos preceded them, laying bombs into the German lines only a couple of hundred metres ahead of the advancing tanks. Keep moving, Abrams ordered. They did, and at 1650, December 26, Lieutenant Charles Boggess drove the first vehicle from 4th Armoured into the lines of the 101st Airborne. He was followed by Captain William Dwight. "How are you, General?" Dwight asked General McAuliffe, who had driven out to the perimeter to greet him.

  "Gee, I am mighty glad to see you," McAuliffe replied. With the siege of Bastogne broken, with Peiper and the others in retreat, the week after Christmas was relatively quiet on the front. But to the rear American trucks were rushing reinforcements and supplies forward. The US Army in ETO had been pounded badly in the second half of December, but it had recovered, held, and now was preparing the final offensive.

  Chapter Nine

  Winter War: January 1945

  ON NEW YEAR'S Eve, 1944, Lieutenant John Cobb (USMA, 1943) was in a convoy crossing the English Channel. A replacement officer for the 82nd Airborne, he was on his way to Elsenborn Ridge. "Notwithstanding blackout and security conditions," he wrote later, "every ship in the Channel sounded whistles or sirens or shot off flares at midnight on New

  Year's Eve."

  That same night Corporal Paul-Arthur Zeihe of the llth Panzer Division was on the front line near Trier. "Just before midnight the shooting stopped almost entirely," he remembered. "As the clock struck twelve, the Americans began with their fireworks, sending illuminated rockets into the air. Suddenly, by the light of their rockets, we saw the Americans getting out of their holes, clutching their rifles and pistols, jumping, skipping around, shooting their weapons and lighting up the whole valley. I can still see them before me today, caught against the light of their rockets, prancing around on a background of fresh snow. It did not take long before we were doing the same thing, firing off illuminated rockets, shooting our weapons. It lasted about five, maybe six minutes. It slowed, then stopped. We disappeared back into our holes, and so did they. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I had during my service. We had allowed our humanity to rise that once."

  The feeling was universal. The new year had begun. Surely this had to be the last year of the war. The Allies had driven the Germans back. The troops had liberated France and Belgium. Supply lines from the United States and Great Britain were secure and stuffed with men and materiel being sent to the front.

  A panoramic snapshot of ETO taken on January 1, 1945, would have shown tankers and freighters and transports unloading at Le Havre, Antwerp, Cherbourg; long lines of trucks carrying men and supplies forward; tent-city hospitals and army headquarters; supply dumps that held many square miles of food, ammunition, clothing, fuel, vehicles; some villages and
cities destroyed, some intact; airfields scattered across France and Belgium, swarming with activity; a constant movement of tanks, cannon, jeeps, trucks; close to the German border the big cannon lined up;

  and at the front itself American troops dug in-cold, hungry, exhausted but victorious.

  A panoramic snapshot of Germany would have shown city after city in ruin, on fire; in rural areas little evidence of war; abandoned vehicles, some disabled by Jabos, some by mechanical problems; no artillery in sight because of camouflage; and at the front itself German troops dug in-cold, hungry, exhausted and just defeated in their great offensive gamble.

  As to the cold, all suffered equally. How cold was it? So cold that if a man didn't do his business in a hurry, he risked a frostbitten penis. Private Don Schoo, an AA (antiaircraft) gunner attached to the 4th Armoured Division, recalled, "I went out to my half-track to relieve the man on guard. He couldn't get out of the gun turret. His overcoat was wet when he got in and it froze so he couldn't get out." It was so cold the oil in the engines froze. Weapons froze.

  Nights ranged from zero Fahrenheit to minus ten and lower. Men without shelter other than a foxhole-or heat stayed awake, stomping their feet through the fourteen-hour night. Major Harrison had as one of his most vivid memories the sight of GIs pressed against the hot stones of the walls of burning houses, as flames came out of the roof and windows. They were not hiding from Germans: they were trying to get warm for a minute or two.

  The conditions in Northwest Europe in January 1945 were as brutal as any in history, including Napoleon's and the German retreats from Moscow in midwinter 1812 and 1941. But in this battle the Germans were not retreating. They fought back against the American advance, which could barely move forward anyway in the ice and snow, forcing the Americans to pay the highest price for taking back the territory lost in the Bulge. Eisenhower had under his command seventy-three divisions. Of the total, forty-nine were American, twelve British, three Canadian, one Polish and eight French. He had forty-nine infantry, twenty armoured and four airborne divisions. As against this, the Germans had seventy six divisions.