Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  “Sergeant, take your men and dig in,” he ordered. “Let the tanks pass and take care of the following infantry.”

  My men? Dig in the frozen ground? Take care of the infantry? Victor’s thoughts raced. They all could now hear the ominous rumble and clatter of enemy tanks. This was the last day of his life, he was sure. Victor thought of his parents getting the news at their apartment on West 72nd Street, and how stupid he had been to not take the cushy job with the colonel in Paris. Regular trips to London? Wonderful. Sign me up.

  “I’ll shoot any bastard who runs,” growled the general.

  Cota, as if reading Victor’s doubts, looked right at him.

  They rushed to take up positions on the icy ground just as a tank appeared at the edge of a tree line one hundred feet away. Victor saw it was a much-feared German heavy tank known as a Tiger. He recognized it from the long barrel of its main 88 mm gun even though it was painted in camouflage colors. He had never actually seen a real German tank—just the wooden mockups used for identification courses at Camp Ritchie.

  The tank pivoted its obscenely long barrel directly at them and fired a single shot. The ammunition truck parked on the road behind them exploded in a booming fireball that sent fragments flying.

  Victor lay dazed on the ground. When he looked up, he was alone. Even the crazy general was gone. At first, he could not find the jeep and thought someone had driven off with it. He staggered around until he found his team members waiting for him with the engine running. They skidded away on the dirt road with other soldiers hanging onto the back.

  When his head cleared, Victor checked the map. His teammates called him “a wizard” for his map-reading skill and his reliable sense of direction; time and again he had found the best escape route whenever they were in tight situations just as his father had done years earlier to save the family. Victor now decided to bypass their original destination, Bastogne, and veer northward on rural roads for Aywaille, which he thought would be secure because it was the headquarters of the XVIII Airborne Corps. Once again his instincts saved the day, as a column of tanks from the 2nd Panzer Division, which had crossed the Our River fifteen miles east of Wiltz over a portable bridge, was at that moment on the road to Bastogne, which was about to be encircled.

  As a Brombert, Victor had been making good on escapes all his life.

  The snow-covered Ardennes was deemed not only an ideal location for rest and reorganization of veteran combat units like the 28th Division after its mauling in the Hürtgen Forest, but was also a training site for new and untested infantry units, like the 106th Infantry Division, fresh off the Queen Mary from America.

  U.S. Army brass regarded the Ardennes as a comparatively safe section of the European front. Even though one of the opening battles of World War I had been fought here, it had yet to see combat in World War II, as its rugged hills and few east-west roads made it an unlikely setting for large-scale troop and armored movements. Furthermore, Allied Intelligence believed that the enemy units opposite the Belgian-German border consisted of only a couple of Volksgrenadier divisions filled out with jobless naval and aviation personnel from the ever-shrinking Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe, wounded soldiers returning to duty from hospitals, and others considered too young or old or unfit for frontline units. GIs referred to this backwater sector as the Kindergarten Front or the Old Men Front. Judged by intelligence estimates to be two-thirds the strength of regular Wehrmacht infantry divisions and to have received minimal training, the Volksgrenadier divisions were not regarded as a serious offensive threat. Allied planners did not believe the German army, reeling from losses across France and at Hürtgen Forest, had the strength to attack in force through the Ardennes or anywhere else.

  They were wrong. More than twenty-five German infantry and armored divisions—nearly a half million men and six hundred tanks—had massed in western Germany for Hitler’s last-ditch offensive. At a December 11 briefing at his new headquarters, a hundred miles away in Adlerhorst, Hitler had set the date for the attack for December 16 and ordered his commanders to break through the Ardennes and capture Antwerp in a week. As far back as August, Hitler had been planning a surprise, all-out offensive to isolate and destroy large numbers of American and British forces and weaken the resolve of the Allies. If his roll of the dice in the Ardennes worked, Hitler confidently predicted the Allies would never recover from the massive surprise attack and would seek a negotiated peace to end the war in Europe. “This battle is to decide whether we shall live or die,” lectured the Führer. “I want all my soldiers to fight hard and without pity. The battle must be fought with brutality and all resistance must be broken in a wave of terror.”

  In early December, the 106th Infantry Division arrived in the Ardennes, its soldiers drenched and miserable after the cold, rainy journey across France and Belgium in open trucks. The 106th was the newest Allied division on any front in the war. It was not only the greenest U.S. division in the Ardennes, it was the first to go into combat with a substantial number of eighteen-year-old draftees, which made it the youngest division in all of Europe. They arrived to relieve the 2nd Infantry Division, which had fought at Omaha Beach and the Saint-Lô breakthrough, then raced to Brest to capture that heavily defended fortress. After a period of rest and refitting in the Ardennes, the battle-wise soldiers of the 2nd were pulling out for a new assignment: to spearhead an attack to seize the Roer River dams in northern Germany.

  “Man by man and gun by gun,” as its orders read, the 106th took over the positions the 2nd had been holding for two months at the southern shoulder of VIII Corps. Assigned to an area three times greater than an infantry division would normally cover, the young soldiers of the 106th were dispersed along a twenty-seven-mile front. Customarily the 106th would have held one of its three infantry regiments in reserve several miles back, to be in position to counterattack an enemy thrust anywhere along its front. But they were left with no other option than to stretch thin all three regiments—about six thousand men in total—along the front.

  The men of the 423rd regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles Cavender, moved into their positions at the center of the 106th’s line on December 11, with sister regiments to the north (422nd) and the south (424th). Cavender’s regiment was responsible for an eight-mile-wide sector several miles inside Germany. Typically, an infantry regiment would be asked to hold only a front of perhaps two miles in such challenging territory.

  With Christmas only days away, the soldiers manned roadblocks, sentry outposts, and foxholes already dug into the snow-covered terrain, all while hoping that their mail and packages from home would find them. “It has been very quiet here and your men will learn the easy way,” Cavender, a forty-seven-year-old Texan, was assured by his 2nd Division counterpart upon that division’s departure.

  The next morning, Cavender inspected his regiment’s positions along the front. His southern flank started in the coal-mining town of Bleialf, situated at a key east-west access point, and extended northward around the southern nose of a two-thousand-foot ridge-line amid forested peaks known as the Schnee Eifel (Snowy Mountains). Just north of the Schnee Eifel lay a long, narrow valley that served as a natural corridor between Germany and Belgium. Called the Losheim Gap, it had been the gateway used by attacking Germans in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, and again in 1914 and 1940 when they invaded Belgium and France.

  Cavender, who began his army career as a private in 1917 before graduating from West Point in 1923, was aware of what a precarious situation his regiment was in. The next day, December 13, Major General Alan Jones, division commander of the 106th, met Cavender at his command post in Buchet, a farming village in the center of his regimental front. Cavender pointed out the corridor at his northern flank and asked, “Where is the help in case [we are] attacked up here? Where is the armor? Where is the help?”

  Jones told Cavender that he had asked the VIII Corps commander the same questions and was told: “‘There is no help. There is no armor in case of
an attack in force through Schnee Eifel. You will have to stay and slug it out.’”

  Like it or not, Jones told Cavender, that was the situation.

  With that, Jones was on his way back across the Belgian border to Saint Vith, fifteen miles away, to his division command post.

  The 423rd was one of two 106th regiments—along with the 422nd—positioned across the German border facing the enemy with their backs to the Our River. They were so far out in front that they represented the farthest eastward penetration of Allied forces into Germany. It was as if the two rookie regiments were being dangled enticingly in front of the enemy. But the quaint villages and towns scattered in valleys ringed by snowy, wooded hills were very quiet. For the troops, the only ominous note so far was a road sign their trucks had passed entering Germany:

  YOU ARE ENTERING

  GERMANY

  AN ENEMY COUNTRY

  KEEP ON THE ALERT

  The 106th Division had its own Ritchie Boys. An IPW team made up of six graduates of Camp Ritchie was assigned to the division in early December, with three men each sent to the 422nd and 423rd regiments.

  The interrogators who arrived at the 423rd command post in Buchet were Second Lieutenant John Seale, twenty-eight, an American who had learned passable German in school; Sergeant Kurt Jacobs, stocky, and at thirty-four considered the team’s old man; and its youngest member, Technician Fifth Grade Murray Zappler, twenty, who with his dark hair and swarthy good looks could have passed for a Spaniard. Jacobs and Zappler were German Jews who had become naturalized U.S. citizens prior to shipping overseas.

  Jacobs had received a law degree in Berlin in 1932, and he had fled Germany after Hitler came to power—first for Paris, then to Buffalo, New York. He spoke English with a robust German accent. Zappler, whose family had left Germany when he was six years old, had gone to a German grammar school in Belgium before emigrating to the United States, where he graduated high school in New York City. Zappler spoke German fluently—he had also studied the language for a year at the University of Pennsylvania in the ASTP program—and his English bore not a hint of his ancestry but rather carried the accent of his adopted home: the Bronx. Zappler and Seale both graduated from Camp Ritchie’s Nineteenth Class in July 1944, and Jacobs from the next class a month later. While they had all done well in their course work, Jacobs, the Berlin lawyer, had received the highest grades. But when the three Ritchie Boys arrived in Buchet, none of them had ever interrogated an actual German prisoner.

  When the surprise German attack commenced at 5:30 A.M. on December 16, with artillery and mortar fire along the entire Ardennes front, Cavender alerted his units to prepare for an all-out enemy ground assault. German artillery quickly zeroed in on the regimental supply yard, destroying a number of vehicles and much of the 423rd’s extra ammunition.

  As the enemy barrage began to lift shortly after 6 A.M., German infantrymen attacked Bleialf from three directions. Located in the Alf River valley, Bleialf was a village of about a hundred houses clustered around an eleventh-century church. By now, most residents had evacuated. At the southern end of town was a railway station and tunnel that the Germans had used as an underground factory facility. About a mile away, atop a hill to the southeast, was the town of Brandscheid, from which Germans observed U.S. positions.

  The attackers seemed to emerge from nowhere, clad in snow-white camouflage and ghostlike in the reflective glow of searchlights bouncing off the clouds. Before the 423rd knew what was happening, the Germans were upon them, firing their weapons at point-blank range and exploding grenades in yards and alleyways. Soldiers on both sides died in the streets and in houses, some shot, some blown up, and others stabbed with bayonets or clubbed to death with rifle butts. The Americans fought hard, but the numbers favored the Germans, and by 8 A.M. the enemy held most of the town, with GIs resisting in isolated groups.

  From his command post two miles away, Cavender ordered reinforcements to Bleialf. He sent a company of combat engineers and another of service personnel such as clerks and cooks, for a total of about 170 men. Although few of them had handled a rifle since basic training, this motley force counterattacked with the support of an effective barrage by the regiment’s artillery unit, fired from the heights northeast of town. In bitter house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting, the Americans rallied and cleared the enemy out by 3 P.M. The Germans were left holding only a few houses down the road toward the train station.

  During the fighting, thirty Germans were taken prisoner. Jacobs and Zappler hurried into Bleialf to conduct interrogations, and spent the rest of that day and night questioning the prisoners in a requisitioned house. They learned that the units that had attacked Bleialf and the southern flank of the regiment were from the 18th Volksgrenadier Division, which had been formed in Denmark three months earlier by redesignating an older Volksgrenadier unit and absorbing elements of a Luftwaffe field division. They had moved into the area days earlier to take part in what the Germans called the Rundstedt Offensive, named for their commander in chief in the west, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.

  A vital piece of information was revealed by one prisoner during his interrogation: another attack on Bleialf was planned for the next morning by the 293rd Regiment of the 18th Volksgrenadier. He said the assault would be preceded by an artillery barrage and rockets fired from launchers in the surrounding hills. Cavender considered the intelligence so important, he ordered the interrogators to send their report directly to division headquarters, while he also urgently requested reinforcements.

  Patrols reported German armor, followed by infantry, moving into position outside of Bleialf by 3 A.M. At the same time, the enemy began firing artillery and rockets from nearby hills, and they were landing in and around the town. This prelude to a large attack corroborated the new intelligence, and as if right on cue, the second leg of the assault began at 6 A.M. on December 17. Waves of enemy troops and tanks pushed down the deserted streets, overrunning pockets of U.S. defenders and driving them back. With the key crossroads back in their control, the enemy rolled infantry and tank columns through Bleialf, pushing up the Schönberg road toward Saint Vith, sealing off any escape to the west. As they did, German troops poured through the Losheim Gap and dropped down from the Schnee Eifel ridge directly into the northern flank of the 423rd.

  With both his flanks smashed and having lost contact with his artillery battalion, Cavender now found his center under attack. His own regimental defense platoon of thirty men, along with clerks and staff, was desperately defending his command post in Buchet. At 10:51 A.M., Cavender radioed division: “Will hold our perimeter. [Air] Drop ammunition, food and medical supplies until route open. We have no artillery.”

  Cavender had no choice but to await the airdrop and armored column that division said was on the way to reinforce his regiment, but neither ever arrived. Adverse weather prevented the planes from flying, and the relief column got caught in its own fight en route. Meanwhile the situation for his men turned dire. Blocked on all sides, without sleep or food, low on ammunition, and running out of medical supplies to treat the wounded, they fought on until the Germans, satisfied with having achieved the encirclement, diminished the fury of their attack.

  On the third night, Cavender, along with 422nd regimental commander Colonel George Descheneaux, received orders to attack along the Schönberg road and drive toward division headquarters at Saint Vith. To carry out the order, the 423rd would have to break out of the enemy encirclement. When Descheneaux read the orders, he bowed his head and mumbled, “My poor men. They’ll be cut to pieces.”

  When night fell, Cavender took his beleaguered regiment northwest through the Alf Valley toward the Schönberg road and the Our River. The woods were thick, and it was very dark and muddy. The weapons carriers and command jeeps became bogged down, and his three battalions had difficulty staying in contact. German patrols weaved in and out of the area, preventing contact between the 423rd and 422nd, which was to be following but at what distance
Cavender did not know. Due to enemy jamming and the weather, radio communication was erratic. He had lost contact with division after their last message.

  As Cavender’s lead elements emerged from the valley into a ravine, they were hit by a barrage of artillery and mortar fire. A patrol reported back that thirty German tanks and self-propelled guns were massed on their right flank and another column of armor was to their front, between their position and the Our River. They could go neither forward nor back.

  Cavender set up a command post on a wooded hill and summoned his unit commanders; he asked them for their assessments. In the four days of fighting since the German offensive began, the 1st Battalion had suffered so many casualties it had ceased to exist as a fighting unit; the 2nd Battalion, apparently lost in the dark, had disappeared during the night; and the 3rd Battalion had been reduced to half strength. His infantrymen had no ammo remaining except for the few rounds each man carried. They had no artillery support or air cover. Food and medical supplies had run out, and some of the wounded were on the verge of dying unless they got proper attention soon.

  Sensing the decision the colonel was weighing, one officer said, “I know it’s no use fighting, but I still don’t want to surrender.”

  “I was a GI in the First World War,” Cavender said, “and I want to see things from a soldier’s standpoint.” He had seen too much bloodshed in the trenches of that war to sacrifice his men for a lost cause in this war.