Eisenhower agreed to the proposal, partly because Bradley had taken no steps to reinforce the line of the Meuse as he had ordered. He began to consult the map to decide where the boundary line should be drawn. He decided it would go from Givet on the Meuse, and run north of Bastogne to Prüm behind German lines. Montgomery would command all Allied forces to the north, thus leaving Bradley with just Patton’s Third Army and Middleton’s VIII Corps, which would be attached to it.
Bedell Smith rang Bradley in Luxembourg to warn him that Eisenhower thought of giving Montgomery command over the Ninth and First Armies. According to Bedell Smith, Bradley admitted that he had been out of touch with Hodges and the First Army for two or three days. ‘Certainly if Monty’s were an American command,’ Bradley acknowledged revealingly, ‘I would agree with you entirely. It would be the logical thing to do.’
Next morning, Eisenhower rang Bradley to confirm his decision. Bradley had by now worked himself into a frenzy of outrage. ‘By God, Ike, I cannot be responsible to the American people if you do this. I resign.’
‘Brad, I – not you – am responsible to the American people,’ Eisenhower replied. ‘Your resignation therefore means absolutely nothing.’ He then dealt with further complaints, and terminated the conversation by saying: ‘Well Brad, those are my orders.’
A senior RAF officer present at 12th Army Group headquarters described how, after the call, an ‘absolutely livid’ Bradley ‘walked up and down and cursed Monty’. Bedell Smith later found it ironic that ‘Montgomery for a long time thought Bradley was very fond of him; he didn’t know he couldn’t stand him.’ The dislike in fact went much deeper. Bradley saw Montgomery ‘as the personal inspiration of all his troubles’, an American staff officer remarked. ‘He had long since acquired a distaste for the little man with the beret and the bark.’ In his increasingly paranoid mood, a humiliated Bradley saw Eisenhower’s decision ‘as a slam to me’.
13
Wednesday 20 December
Captain Carol Mather left Montgomery’s headquarters again at midnight, uneasy at his ‘extremely delicate’ mission to General Hodges. The journey, slowed by ice and roadblock guards checking for Skorzeny groups, took some two hours. From time to time V-1 missiles flew overhead through the night sky towards Liège. On arrival at First Army headquarters at Chaudfontaine, an MP took him straight to the bedroom of Hodges’s authoritarian chief of staff, Major General Bill Kean. Many thought that Kean was the real army commander. Kean was in his pyjamas with a blanket round his shoulders telephoning.
Mather presented the handwritten letter from Montgomery. During a pause, Kean put his hand over the receiver and asked after Montgomery’s chief of staff Major General Freddie de Guingand. They then went next door to wake Hodges. Mather described how the First Army commander sat up in bed also with a blanket round his shoulders to read Montgomery’s letter. He felt that Hodges was ‘completely out of touch’ with events. He passed every question to Kean. ‘On the important question of the Meuse crossings,’ Mather recorded, ‘General Hodges had nothing to say. He implied that it was of no great consequence and had been or would be looked after’.
Mather, suffering from loss of sleep, was back with Montgomery well before dawn. The field marshal sat up in bed sipping a cup of tea as he listened to Mather’s report. He intended to meet Hodges later that day, but first he wanted an accurate picture of the German breakthrough. Five liaison officers, including two Americans attached to his headquarters, set off in Jeeps immediately. They wore the newly issued tank suits in pale-brown canvas to ward off the cold, but these increased the suspicions of nervous American soldiers manning roadblocks.
On that morning of 20 December, Montgomery took a call from Eisenhower. According to General Miles Dempsey, the commander of the Second British Army, who was with Montgomery when Eisenhower rang, the extraordinarily brief conversation went as follows:
‘Monty, we are in a bit of a spot.’
‘So I gathered,’ the field marshal replied.
‘How about taking over in the north?’
‘Right.’
Montgomery drove to Chaudfontaine intending to sort out the situation. Mather’s report had convinced him that Hodges was in a state of near collapse. In the memorable description of one of his own staff officers, the field marshal arrived at First Army headquarters ‘like Christ come to clean the temple’, even if Our Lord would not have appeared in a dark-green Rolls-Royce with pennants flying and motorcycle outriders.
Mather, although the most loyal of aides, felt that Montgomery put American backs up unnecessarily on his arrival by ignoring the American generals and summoning his liaison officers who had arrived with their reports of the fighting. ‘What’s the form?’ he demanded, and they crowded round the bonnet of a Jeep with their maps. General Hodges and General Simpson, the commander of the Ninth Army, could only look on in embarrassment. ‘It was a slight uncalled for on that day,’ Mather wrote.
Montgomery had now taken command of all Allied armies north of that line from Givet on the Meuse to Prüm. He was also deeply concerned about Hodges. On his return, he telephoned Bedell Smith to say that as a British officer he was unwilling to relieve an American general, but that Eisenhower should consider it.* Bedell Smith asked for a twenty-four-hour delay. Montgomery sent a message the next day that things could stay as they were, even though Hodges was hardly the man he would have picked. This was a view shared by Bedell Smith, who considered Hodges ‘the weakest commander we had’.
Bradley later claimed that Montgomery and SHAEF had grossly exaggerated the danger for their own ends, to deprive him of the First Army. But the situation appeared desperate. Hodges was close to breaking down, and Kean had taken over. Even Kean said the following day that they would not know until Friday ‘whether we can hold or will have to withdraw to a defense line such as the Meuse’.
Bradley clearly regretted having chosen the city of Luxembourg for his Eagle Tac headquarters and now felt trapped. It was not just a question of prestige, as he had said to Hansen. If he pulled out, the Luxembourgers would believe they were being abandoned to German vengeance. And even though Bradley tried to downplay the threat of the enemy offensive, his own staff officers took it very seriously. ‘We sandwiched the thermite grenades in amongst the most secret of our papers,’ one them wrote, ‘to be ready to destroy them if we saw any grey uniforms across the hills.’ But unbeknown to all of them, Generaloberst Jodl had persuaded Hitler not to include the city of Luxembourg as an objective in Operation Herbstnebel.
The capital of Luxembourg had in any case been ably defended by the 4th Infantry Division, holding the southern shoulder of the breakthrough. Its commander Major General Barton declared stoutly, if not very originally, during the battle: ‘The best way to handle these Heinies is to fight ’em.’ Barton had refused to allow his artillery battalions to move back. Their task was to maintain fire on the bridges over the Sauer, and he made sure that they were well defended by infantry. This prevented the Germans from bringing forward their heavy weapons, especially anti-tank guns. They were therefore unable to fight back effectively against the 10th Armored Division, which was arriving to support the 4th Division.
Like General Cota of the 28th Division, Barton used reinforced companies to hold key villages and thus block crossroads. Along with the 9th Armored Division on his immediate left, Colonel Luckett’s task force was pushed back up the Schwarz Erntz gorge, but held fast at the village of Müllerthal to thwart the Germans as they attempted to break into the rear areas of the division.
In Berdorf, halfway down the east side of the gorge, a small mixed force of 250 men from the 10th Armored and two companies of the 4th Infantry had held on for three days. A heavy attack left them with little ammunition and many wounded in need of evacuation. Three assaults, supported by Nebelwerfer rockets and artillery, were beaten off. But just as the small force feared that they would not be able to hold back another attack, a group of two Shermans and three half-tracks bro
ke through to the town with ammunition and supplies, and then left with the severely wounded. Later, the tank commander in Berdorf, Captain Steve Lang of the 11th Tank Battalion, received orders to withdraw. Each tank carried fifteen infantrymen, ‘four inside and eleven clinging for life on the outside’. An artillery barrage was laid on to cover the noise of the tanks moving, and the small force managed to escape before the Germans discovered what was happening.
German attacks along that sector of the front began to weaken on 20 December, and the arrival of more units from General Patton’s III Corps meant that the 212th and 276th Volksgrenadier-Divisions made no further advance to the south. Only thick fog prevented the Americans from counter-attacking. The stalwart defence of the southern shoulder meant that the Germans lacked room for manoeuvre, and that the Third Army could concentrate its forces against the encirclement of Bastogne.
Hemingway, eager not to miss the big battle even though he was suffering from influenza, managed to reach Colonel Buck Lanham’s command post near Rodenbourg. The house had belonged to a priest suspected of being a German sympathizer. Hemingway took great delight in drinking a stock of communion wine and then refilling the bottles with his own urine. He claimed to have relabelled them ‘Schloss Hemingstein 1944’ and later drank from one by mistake.
The Germans had already found that their salient was too narrow and that Bastogne controlled the road network. Both Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr and Kokott of the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division argued that since a swift attempt to take Bastogne had failed, then its defenders must be crushed by the whole corps. But General von Lüttwitz, the commander of XLVII Panzer Corps, was under strict instructions to send his two panzer divisions past Bastogne and straight on to the Meuse.
The German drive to the Meuse was also not helped when the 116th Panzer-Division was ordered to change direction to the north-west. This ‘caused a considerable waste of time’, wrote its commander Generalmajor Siegfried von Waldenburg, and led to chaos on the overcrowded roads. This decision, he maintained, ‘became fatal for the Division’.
The mixed force of paratroopers and 10th Armored in Noville, north of Bastogne, were attacked again and again in rushes by panzers and panzergrenadiers emerging out of the fog. They knew that the road behind them had been cut by another German unit, but not that the battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment had been pushed back south of Foy. This would make their escape far more difficult. In the middle of the morning, the fog lifted, and the tanks of the 2nd Panzer-Division opened fire from the high ground. When radio contact was finally re-established with the beleaguered force in Noville, General McAuliffe told them to prepare to break out. He had decided that despite his orders from General Middleton not to pull them back, he must either rescue or lose them. He told Colonel Sink to launch a renewed assault on Foy to open the road, with his paratroopers of the 506th. German tanks were firing tree bursts in the woods just south of Foy to keep the paratroopers’ heads down. Easy Company of the 506th had no anti-tank weapons, but fortunately the Germans never put in a proper armoured attack against them.
By a stroke of luck the fog rolled in again, just as the defenders of Noville were about to withdraw. The infantry left on foot, the wounded and the body of Lieutenant Colonel LaPrade were loaded on half-tracks, the Shermans carried as many men as possible, and the Hellcat tank destroyers acted as rearguard. Demolitions set in the church made the tower collapse across the road as planned. But, as they reached Foy, the armoured visor on the lead half-track came down, obscuring the driver’s vision. He brought it to an abrupt halt, and all the following half-tracks rammed into one another: this gave three German panzers, out to the flank, stationary targets to fire at. The leading vehicles caught fire. A soldier further back in the column noted that ‘the fog up front turned bright orange’. Crews baled out, and the same soldier watched from the ditch as German fire poured into the column. ‘Dead were lying all around on the road and in the ditches. Some were hanging out of their vehicles; killed before they could get out and seek cover. Our trucks and half-tracks were either burning or had been torn to shreds.’
Chaos was finally averted when a Sherman, with paratroopers manning the gun, managed to knock out one of the tanks, and the other two pulled back rapidly. The force with which Desobry and LaPrade had held Noville had lost 212 men and eleven out of fifteen Shermans in less than two days.
General Troy Middleton’s determination to maintain an extended perimeter had proved costly, but the sudden withdrawal from Noville seemed to encourage Lüttwitz in the belief that the capture of Bastogne would be straightforward. Generalmajor Kokott claimed that when Lüttwitz visited the headquarters of the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division at Wardin that morning, he said: ‘The 2nd Panzer-Division has taken Noville. The enemy is in flight-like retreat to the south. 2nd Panzer-Division is in steady pursuit. The fall of Foy – if it has not already taken place – is to be expected at any moment. After taking Foy, the 2nd Panzer-Division will, according to its orders, turn west and drive into open country.’ Lüttwitz, a large, smoothly shaved panzer general with a well-fed face and a monocle, also convinced himself that the Panzer Lehr Division had taken Marvie on the south-eastern edge of Bastogne. Lüttwitz strenuously asserted later that he had urged Fifth Panzer Army to capture Bastogne first, and Bayerlein believed his version.*
Kokott argued that the decision to send on the 2nd Panzer was the major mistake in the failure to take Bastogne. He blamed a lack of clear thinking at Fifth Panzer Army and XLVII Corps level. ‘Is Bastogne to be captured? Or is Bastogne to be merely encircled and the Maas River reached?’ Only with 2nd Panzer attacking from the north and west, and Panzer Lehr and the bulk of the 26th attacking from the south-west, could they sort out this ‘Eiterbeule’ or pus-filled boil. But in fact even Manteuffel himself had little say in the matter. Führer headquarters would brook no alteration to the plan.
Orders for the next day were categoric. The 2nd Panzer and Panzer Lehr were to push on westwards with the bulk of their force, leaving the 26th Volksgrenadier plus a panzergrenadier regiment from Panzer Lehr to encircle and capture Bastogne all on their own. ‘The Division dutifully expressed its doubts,’ wrote Kokott, but Lüttwitz dismissed them, apparently on the grounds that American forces in Bastogne could not be very strong, with ‘parts of an Airborne division’ and ‘the remnants of those enemy divisions which had been badly battered at the Our River and which had taken refuge in Bastogne’. Corps headquarters apparently also believed that ‘on the basis of prisoner of war interviews, the fighting quality of the forces inside Bastogne was not very high’.
The 26th Volksgrenadier, having expressed its need for artillery support in the attack ordered on Bastogne, was at least given time to deploy its 39th Regiment which had been guarding the southern flank, while most of the 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division was delayed in the Wiltz valley. Kokott was bemused by Lüttwitz’s optimism. His two regiments confronting the Americans in the Foy–Bizôry sector had not detected any weakness. The rest of his division was then sent round to the south of Bastogne towards Lutrebois and Assenois, to attack the town from the south. But through gaps in the mist he spotted American vehicles rushing south from Neffe to Marvie. To the north, ‘the deep rumble of artillery could be heard – in the wooded areas west of Wardin, in addition to the crashing impact of the mortars, the fire of rapid German and slower American machineguns was audible’. Roads and forest tracks had been blocked by craters, so the soldiers had to take their heavy weapons off the vehicles and manhandle them.
At about 13.00 hours, American artillery observers sighted the concentration of vehicles round the divisional headquarters of the 26th Volksgrenadiers in Wardin. Battalion salvoes crashed into the village ‘with devastating effects on this assembly of men and machines’, Kokott reported. That afternoon he heard that his reconnaissance battalion, when crossing the southern road to Arlon, had come into contact with the enemy. Matters were not helped by the chaos on roads and tracks south of Bastogn
e, with vehicles from the Panzer Lehr, the 26th Volksgrenadier and now an advance unit of the 5th Fallschirmjäger all trying to push on to the west but getting hopelessly entangled. Youngsters of the 5th Fallschirmjäger had to pull their own few vehicles when they broke down.
One of Kokott’s Volksgrenadier battalions managed to break in from the north-east along a railway track, which was guarded by little more than a strong patrol because it was on the boundary between the 506th and the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiments. The patrol’s resistance slowed the Volksgrenadier advance. Both Colonel Sink south of Foy and Colonel Ewell reacted quickly, sending a company each to block the penetration. Soon they found that the enemy force was larger than they had realized, and more units had to be hurried in, including, to their own disbelief, those who had escaped that day from Noville. The battle carried on well into the next day.
Another attack on the Neffe sector that evening by the Panzer Lehr was hit by a rapid response of concentrated artillery fire. McAuliffe could now count on eleven artillery battalions, several from the 101st, but also others from divisions which had withdrawn via Bastogne, including two battalions of African-American gunners. This gave him a total of around 130 pieces, but ammunition shortages would soon become a problem. Hellcats from the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion firing tracer from their machine guns, as well as every automatic weapon in Ewell’s 1st Battalion, caught the two battalions of panzergrenadiers in the open, exposed in the dark by the deathly glow of illuminating flares. They had been slowed down in this night attack by barbed-wire cattle fences. The carnage was sickening. Daylight next morning revealed a hideous sight of corpses caught on the wire like scarecrows battered by a freak storm.