by Mark Frost
Grannit took a long look at him. “Do I look troubled to you?”
Lieutenant Karl Heinz Schmidt would not see the other three men from his own jeep squad again until two days before Christmas. That night a group of captured German nurses were brought outside their cells and sang Christmas carols to them in their native language.
The four men were marched out at dawn the next day, Christmas Eve, tied to posts, and executed by an American firing squad. Schmidt’s protests about a secret arrangement with Counter Intelligence that was supposed to have spared his life fell on deaf ears.
By noon on December 18, First Army Headquarters at the Hotel Britannique in Spa had been abandoned, retreating northwest toward Liège. Supply dumps in the area were ordered to pull back fuel and ammunition stores and destroy whatever they couldn’t move to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. The German offensive had caught First Army so off guard and undermanned that every available able body was pressed into front-line action. Around Malmédy that included clerks and cooks with no combat experience, who called themselves “canteen commandos.” First Army’s commanding officer, General Courtney Hodges, issued one last order just before retreating toward Liège. All Allied military personnel currently in the brig for court-martial offenses were offered a one-time amnesty if they volunteered to join units fighting the increasingly desperate defense.
On the afternoon of December 18, Corporal Eddie Bennings and twenty-six other members of the 724th Railway Battalion accepted the offer. They were released from custody in Liège, re-armed, loaded onto a truck, and shipped toward Malmédy.
Fifteen minutes after being assigned to a front-line company, Eddie Bennings cut himself on the arm with his bayonet, spilling an impressive but inconsequential amount of blood. He feigned dizziness, and a medic walked him to a mobile field hospital. Bennings entered, slipped out the back of the tent as soon as he was alone, jogged half a mile down the road to the supply depot’s fuel shed, came out carrying two cans of gas, hot-wired a parked jeep, and headed south toward France.
As the day wore on, the warning about Skorzeny’s commandos paralyzed the American battle zone. Military police locked down every major intersection under Allied control. Effective immediately, no enlisted man or officer without the current password was allowed to pass through any checkpoint. Traffic piled up behind roadblocks, and movement of American troops, during critical hours of the offensive, came to a dead halt. Reinforcements were delayed, hundreds of soldiers ended up in custody, and important dispatches were held up for hours. Placards with information about the imposters appeared in every barracks. An army of men who had never felt any reason to distrust the American uniform now viewed one another through a lens of paranoia and suspicion. Like the rumors that had infected the Nazi camp at Grafenwöhr, wild speculation about the objectives of the 150th Panzer Brigade spread across the battlefield. Not even Otto Skorzeny would have dared to hope that the mere mention of his commando squads would create such chaos in the Allied ranks.
The bulletin that German spies were operating behind Allied lines was not the only news to hit hard on December 18. Late on the afternoon of December 17, three survivors of the massacre at Baugnez Crossroads were found by an American patrol and rushed to the field hospital in Malmédy. Two reporters from Time magazine encountered the survivors, heard their story, and rushed it to headquarters in Liège. By nightfall, First Army senior staff released the story that invading SS forces had murdered a large group of unarmed American prisoners of war. Newspapers in the United States, which hadn’t yet run a single story about the Ardennes offensive because of a blackout ordered by SHAEF, were encouraged to publish detailed accounts of the incident. Many compared the slaughter to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Anti-German sentiment spiked to a war time high; war bond purchases and volunteer enlistments soared.
Americans all across the country were reading about the “massacre at Malmédy” before the bodies of the eighty-six victims had even been recovered, lying under a thick blanket of snow in the meadow at the Baugnez Crossroads.
20
Supreme Allied Headquarters, Versailles
DECEMBER 18, 10:00 A.M.
General Eisenhower spent the morning with his staff in his Map Room, trying to piece together fifty disjointed dispatches into a coherent overview of the invasion. This much was clear: Twenty-four Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions had already been identified in the attack, striking toward Allied positions in three broad columns. While the northern and southern thrusts had met with makeshift but effective American resistance, the center through the heart of the Ardennes had not held. As Allied forces there crumbled and fell backward before the bludgeoning thrust of Kampfgruppe Peiper, tens of thousands of Wehrmacht and SS troops poured into the elastic middle behind them. The German attack flowed out to the south and west from there like water collecting in a basin, creating a distinct bulge on the map centering around the town of Bastogne.
During those early, uncertain hours, Dwight Eisenhower maintained a remarkable evenness of spirit. He had never led a battlefield unit but knew the first obligation of command was to set an example for the men around him. Despite the unsettling possibilities the attack presented, he never showed a moment’s panic, and his calm attitude flowed through SHAEF and down the chain of command. As a portrait of the battle began to emerge, Eisenhower’s tactical mind made an intuitive leap toward his enemy’s intent. He picked up a captured German sword, pointed to the center of the map, then slashed it west, all the way to Antwerp.
“They’re trying to split our army groups with this central thrust, and isolate the British to the north,” said Eisenhower. “These flanking columns are only there to screen the main push.”
General Strong asked him how he wanted to respond. Eisenhower stepped closer to the map, bringing the sword back to the middle of the Meuse River.
“If we keep them on this side of the river, pinch them in along both shoulders, and confine the central column along this corridor, there’s a chance we can choke them off here.”
The point of the sword came to rest on a nexus of interlocking roads south and east of the Meuse. Eisenhower immediately ordered his reserve divisions, the 82nd and 101st Airborne, to proceed with all haste toward Bastogne.
No longer able to reach Bastogne himself, General Omar Bradley summoned General George Patton to Twelfth Army headquarters in Luxembourg City. He told Patton that his Third Army’s offensive across the Saar River to the south, set to launch within days, had been officially called off. Bradley ordered Patton to have three of his divisions on the march toward the Ardennes within twenty-four hours.
During their meeting, Eisenhower sent word that he wanted to meet both his senior field commanders the following day in the French fortress city of Verdun, halfway between their headquarters, to finalize their response to the Ardennes offensive. Before they parted that evening, Bradley sympathized with Patton that his scheduled attack would not be going ahead.
“What the hell, Brad,” said Patton. “We’ll still be killing Krauts.”
To the east of the German border, at their battle headquarters in Ziegenberg, news of the invasion’s successes during the first two days heartened the Wehrmacht general staff. Hundreds of miles of forfeited Belgian territory had been regained, and thousands of American soldiers had surrendered. Oberstürmbannführer Peiper’s panzer column appeared to be relentlessly carving its way toward the Meuse.
The truth was more complicated. On the first morning after a crucial paratroop drop fell ten miles off course, the northernmost of their three panzer columns encountered stiff resistance and stalled in its tracks. Their inability to keep pace with the swift western progress of Peiper’s central column left his northern shoulder exposed and vulnerable to attack if the Allies were able to regroup. Peiper’s advance to the Meuse had turned into a race against time.
Since the offensive began, the main battle group of Otto Skorzeny’s 150th Panzer Brigade had been stuck behind
the massive traffic jam that backed up to the Western Wall. Despite the work of its advance commando teams, Operation Greif’s success depended on the main force making a clean break into open territory within the first few hours. Skorzeny’s American tanks would not even reach Belgian ground until the early hours of December 17. Shortly after they did, Skorzeny’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hardieck, attempted to avoid the traffic jam by driving around it on secondary roads. His Willys Jeep hit a land mine on a logging road that had not been cleared by scout teams. Hardieck, along with his driver and adjutant, was killed instantly.
Colonel Skorzeny decided to take personal command of the brigade, but the roads were so snarled with traffic that Skorzeny was forced to abandon his jeep and walk ten miles to reach their forward position. By which point, at dawn on December 17, realizing his tanks had no chance to reach the river that evening on schedule, Skorzeny nearly called off Operation Greif. Only the encouraging intelligence from his lead commando units that the bridges at the Meuse were still undefended kept Skorzeny from issuing that order.
After consulting with his staff, he decided to try to keep their first objective alive for one more day.
At midnight on December 17, after speaking with Von Leinsdorf by radio, the two other commando teams he had recruited for the Second Objective cut off contact with Skorzeny’s corps command and made their way south toward France. By late afternoon on December 18, disguised as a squad of MPs, SS Unterstürmführer Gerhard Bremer’s team was less than forty miles north of the French border. After driving into the middle of a firefight, William Sharper’s squad had been forced to spend the night in the basement of an abandoned tavern. The delay put them two hours behind Bremer when they headed south again that morning.
Neither of them knew that the squad headed by Lieutenant Karl Schmidt had been arrested, that Schmidt had confessed, and that the alert was spreading behind American lines.
21
The Lomme River, Belgium
DECEMBER 18, 11:00 A.M.
Twenty miles west of Bastogne, Bernie slowed the jeep as they neared an American battalion’s encampment. Forward security posts were unmanned, exterior gates had been left open and the camp abandoned, leaving behind the battalion’s bivouac and heavy gun emplacements. The German vanguard had not moved through yet, but artillery fire from the southeast suggested they were closing fast. In an eerie silence, the two men searched the tents to scrounge for rations and supplies.
The Americans had left in a hurry. Scores of uneaten breakfasts still sat on mess hall tables. Canisters of hot coffee and oatmeal bubbled over on field stoves. Von Leinsdorf helped himself to coffee and a slice of toast off a plate, then filled a knapsack with K rations and medical supplies. Outside they squeezed the last few gallons of gas from the camp’s depot and strapped four extra cans to the rear of the jeep, enough fuel to get them deep into France. By the time they finished, they could hear German tanks advancing behind them, less than a mile away.
A short drive beyond the camp, they neared a river and spotted a platoon of American engineers working on the far side of an old stone bridge. Bernie drove toward the eastern approach, then slammed on the brakes when four armed GIs jumped out of the bushes, blocked the road, and pointed their rifles at them.
“What’s the password?” shouted the lead corporal.
“Jesus,” said Bernie. “You almost gave me a fucking heart attack.”
“The password is ‘stamp,’” said Von Leinsdorf. “What’s the countersign?”
“Powder,” said the man.
“That’s incorrect,” said Von Leinsdorf.
That response seemed to confuse them, and they conferred noisily for a moment.
“Hurry up, for Christ’s sake. We’re carrying important dispatches,” said Von Leinsdorf.
“The Krauts are right on our ass,” said Bernie.
“Hold your horses.” They finished talking among themselves. “Is it ‘smoke’?”
“That’s right,” said Von Leinsdorf. “Now get the fuck out of the way.”
Another one of the soldiers stepped forward to ask: “What’s the capital of Illinois?”
“Springfield,” said Bernie.
“That’s the wrong answer, search ’em.”
The other soldiers moved toward the jeep. Von Leinsdorf stood up and pulled his pistol.
“It’s Springfield, for Christ’s sake, what the fuck’s the matter with you?” shouted Bernie.
“The capital of Illinois is Chicago.”
“Who says it is?” asked Bernie.
The corporal pointed to one of his other men. “He does.”
“Is he from Illinois?”
They asked the man. He shook his head.
“He’s a fucking moron, it’s not Chicago, it’s Springfield.”
The soldiers discussed it heatedly among themselves, and couldn’t reach a decision, but didn’t move out of the road.
“God damn it, we don’t have time for this shit,” said Von Leinsdorf, pulling his pistol. “You’re grilling us? You didn’t even know the countersign. What are you fuckups doing here? Is that your bivouac we just passed?”
“Yes, sir, we’re the last company out. We got orders to blow this bridge. The Krauts are supposed to break through any minute.”
“No shit, Einstein, I just told you they’re on our ass,” said Bernie.
“We can help,” said Von Leinsdorf. “We’re engineers.”
“That wouldn’t be up to us, sir. Ask over there,” said the corporal, pointing to the far side of the bridge.
“Then get out of the fucking way,” said Von Leinsdorf.
The soldiers finally stood aside.
“It’s Springfield, I’m telling you, anybody else comes through and you’re gonna ask ’em that,” said Bernie, as they drove past them.
When Bernie reached the far side of the bridge, Von Leinsdorf pointed to three other Allied vehicles and ordered him to pull over.
“What the hell for?” asked Bernie.
“Because I told you to,” said Von Leinsdorf. “Come with me and keep your mouth shut.”
Bernie followed Von Leinsdorf down a steep path that ran along the base of the bridge to the edge of the river below. Half a dozen American engineers worked underneath, planting M85 satchel charges, stringing fuses to the western shore beneath the single span.
“How can we help?” Von Leinsdorf shouted.
“You guys techs?” asked the sergeant in charge.
“That’s right.”
“You can rig those last two charges,” he said, pointing them toward a pile of demolition supplies stacked against the stone.
Von Leinsdorf opened one of the boxes and handed Bernie two twenty-pound satchels, packed tight with block charges. They hammered two spikes in between the stones in the base of the rampart and suspended the satchels on them. Looking across the river, Bernie could see six other satchels strung under the bridge, connected by fuses leading back toward the western approach.
“What are we doing here?” whispered Bernie.
“Give me the priming assembly,” said Von Leinsdorf.
Bernie watched as he appeared to attach the detonating cord clip to the booster charge running from the satchel, but at the last moment folded the connector underneath the clip with a pair of pliers, concealing it inside a fold of canvas. He then ran the fuse out to the main line running toward the shore.
“Here they come!” shouted one of the GIs on the far side of the bridge.
Moments later they heard the last patrol retreating over the bridge overhead. Bernie stepped out from under the span and looked east, but he was too far below the bank to see anything.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.
“Hold your horses,” said Von Leinsdorf, working calmly.
He repeated the procedure on the second satchel. The other engineers had finished their work, running lines behind them as they backed toward the eastern shore. Von Leinsdorf tossed their f
use line to the sergeant who was making fast all the connections. Bernie turned to follow the engineers up to the road, looked back across the river, and saw a line of gray German scout cars advancing down the road, less than a mile away.
Instead of hooking their line to the main fuse, the sergeant stopped to check the connections on their satchels. Von Leinsdorf, who had started after Bernie, hesitated when he saw the man stop. He waved at Bernie to keep going. Bernie could see that the sergeant was about to come across their unconnected detonating cord. Von Leinsdorf pulled his knife, held it along his leg, and advanced toward the sergeant’s back.
“Sarge, come on, they’re closing in on the bridge,” called Bernie.
The sergeant looked up and saw Von Leinsdorf ten feet away with the knife in his hand. Von Leinsdorf kept walking, trying not to appear threatening.
“I double-checked everything, Sarge,” said Von Leinsdorf.
“Stop right where you are,” said the sergeant.
The sergeant pulled a handgun on Von Leinsdorf. Von Leinsdorf turned to glance at Bernie, expecting him to react. Bernie slowly raised his rifle, unsure where to point it.
“Sarge, the Krauts are coming, what’s the problem?” asked Bernie.
“Drop that knife, Lieutenant,” said the sergeant. “Right now.”
“Come on, Brooklyn,” said Von Leinsdorf, glancing back at him. “What are you waiting for?”
“I’m counting to three, then I shoot,” said the sergeant. “One, two—”
Von Leinsdorf dropped the knife and raised his hands. “Jesus, what are you so jumpy for, Sarge? Did I fuck up the connections? I didn’t mean to—”
“Turn around and start walking.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Drop the rifle, kid, or I’ll fire. I’m not fucking around.”
Bernie lowered the rifle, holding it to the side as he stepped toward them. “We lied, okay? So we’re not engineers, we were driving past and saw the situation. He didn’t mean to fuck up the fuse. We’re just trying to give you a hand.”