The double offensive from the north-west and the south-east was planned to break into Bastogne itself within five hours, but Kokott was dismayed to find that the 15th Panzergrenadier-Division was much weaker than he had expected. It had little more than a Kampfgruppe commanded by Oberstleutnant Wolfgang Maucke, with three battalions of panzergrenadiers, twenty tanks and assault guns, and two battalions of self-propelled artillery. A smaller force from the division had yet to catch up and would not be there until a day later.
The first assault was directed against the sector just in front of the village of Champs. At 05.00, Kokott’s 77th Grenadier-Regiment stole up on American foxholes without a preparatory bombardment. Only then did German artillery begin firing against American gun positions. The village of Champs was ‘taken, lost and re-taken’ in furious fighting, Kokott observed. A company of paratroopers and two tank destroyers inflicted heavy casualties on his men. Their intensive training to ‘strip and repair weapons under fire and in the dark’ had certainly paid off. Stoppages on a jammed machine gun were cleared in moments, and the firing recommenced. Corporal Willis Fowler manning a machine gun on the west side of Champs managed to destroy a whole company of grenadiers while four German panzers hung back on the ridgeline behind them. American artillery was also extremely effective in breaking up attacks, and at 09.00 the warning cry of ‘Jabos!’ was heard in German ranks as American fighter-bombers dived in.
Kampfgruppe Maucke, meanwhile, had steamrollered the positions of the 401st Glider Infantry south-west of Champs and reached the hamlet of Hemroulle, less than three kilometres beyond. A group split off north to attack Champs, and a savage battle took place around the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment’s command post and aid station. They were based in the Château de Rolley, an imposing eighteenth-century building next to a massive round tower which remained from the original medieval castle. A bridge leading to Rolley had been mined, but the extreme frost meant that the firing mechanism failed as the German panzers crossed. On that morning of plunging temperatures, when the wind whipped particles of snow off the frozen crust like sea-spray, paratroopers resorted to urinating on their machine guns to unfreeze the mechanism.
Every signaller, driver and cook in the chateau grabbed a rifle or bazooka to form a defence platoon. The doctor caring for the wounded on stretchers even had to hand a rifle to one of his patients, who became agitated at the thought of being caught unarmed. People shouted at the doctor to burn the book recording the dog-tag numbers of their dead, so that the enemy would not know how many paratroopers they had killed.
One member of the improvised defence group, Sergeant ‘Sky’ Jackson, managed to knock out several tanks. Another bazooka man was so carried away by excitement that he forgot to arm his round, so when it hit the tank there was just a loud clang. A Hellcat tank destroyer knocked out one more Panther. ‘The Germans piled out of the tanks and they were mowed down,’ another soldier recorded. ‘It was just red blood on the snow.’ Screams could be heard from inside one of the panzers.
A company of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment sighted around 150 German infantry and four Mark IV panzers, which opened fire. The paratroop lieutenant pulled his men back to the line of a wood. He ordered his machine-gunners to keep the infantry down and the tanks ‘buttoned up’ by constant fire, while he and another bazooka team stalked them from around their flanks. They knocked out three tanks with their bazookas, and the neighbouring company got the fourth. The paratroopers had little to eat that day. Most had no more than half a cup of soup with white ‘navy’, or haricot, beans to keep them going.
In this all-out effort, Kampfgruppe Kunkel attacked again in the south-west near Senonchamps up towards Hemroulle. And on the far side of the perimeter, ‘success seemed very close’ by 10.00 as the 901st Panzergrenadiers fought their way in from the south-east. An assault group reached the road-fork at the entrance to Bastogne, and a German breakthrough appeared almost inevitable. In McAuliffe’s makeshift headquarters staff officers prepared their weapons, and supply personnel collected any spare bazookas for a last-ditch defence.
‘The Germans attacked our positions with tanks,’ Corporal Jackson of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment recorded. ‘I was back at the C[ommand] P[ost] and we received word that more bazookas and bazooka ammunition were needed up front. I took a bazooka and all the ammunition I could carry. When I got to the front, I saw one tank retreating and one Mark IV, with nine men riding on it, out in a field. When the tank was about 40 yards away and broadside on, I jumped out and fired, hitting the tank in the side, just above the track. The rocket killed or stunned four of the men riding on the tank, and the tank immediately stopped and started to burn.’ The crew and the remaining infantry were shot down as they tried to escape.
Even the snub-barrelled howitzers of a parachute field artillery battalion took on the panzers over open sights. Most destructive of all were the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ or strafing with their .50 machine guns. Local farms and their inhabitants were not spared in what American commanders saw as a fight to the finish.
The fire of Shermans, Hellcat tank destroyers and bazookas in the fighting around Champs, Rolley and Hemroulle inflicted heavy losses. By the afternoon, the 15th Panzergrenadier-Division reported that it hardly had a battle-worthy tank left. Another desperate assault was launched after dark, supported by the remaining Jagdpanzer tank destroyers from the reconnaissance battalion. Bazooka teams from the 502nd Parachute Infantry stalked and knocked out half of them at close range, including the commander’s vehicle.
In the south-east, the assault group from the Panzer Lehr’s 901st Panzergrenadiers were ‘cut off and annihilated’. The regiment had no reserves left to reinforce or extricate them. Almost every man available had already been thrown into the battle. Kokott called off any further attacks. The 15th Panzergrenadier-Division was practically wiped out, and his own division had suffered more than 800 casualties. Most companies now mustered fewer than twenty men, and a whole battalion in the 78th Grenadier-Regiment was reduced to forty. The worst losses were among the experienced officers and Unteroffizieren. ‘We were 900 metres from the edge of Bastogne,’ an officer in the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division complained bitterly, ‘and couldn’t get into the town.’
Kokott reported to corps headquarters that his forces were so reduced that any further attacks on Bastogne would be ‘irresponsible and unfeasible’. Lüttwitz agreed that the encircling forces should simply hold their present positions until the arrival of Remer’s Führer Begleit Brigade in the next forty-eight hours. But Kokott also heard that the 5th Fallschirmjäger was failing to hold the increasing attacks by Patton’s forces coming from the south. All his volksgrenadiers could do was to lay minefields and prepare more anti-tank positions on the approach routes. The Ardennes offensive had failed, Kokott concluded. He wrote that the great operation had turned into a ‘bloody, dubious and costly struggle for what was, in the final analysis, an unimportant village’. Evidently Führer headquarters was not prepared to accept the facts of the situation.
While the battle raged north and south-east of Bastogne, the pilot of a light observation plane, braving the flak, flew in a surgeon with supplies of penicillin. A P-38 Lightning also dropped maps, which were still in short supply, and a set of photo-reconnaissance prints of the whole area. That was all the defenders received that day, for bad visibility in England had prevented another major airdrop. To make matters worse, Patton’s promised Christmas present of a breakthrough to Bastogne had not materialized. McAuliffe made his feelings clear by telephone to General Middleton, the VIII Corps commander. ‘We have been let down,’ he said.
Patton’s III Corps was close. Around Lutrebois, just six kilometres south of the centre of Bastogne, the 134th Infantry Regiment of the 35th Division was closely supported by artillery and tank destroyers. German tanks had been spotted in the woods ahead, so the field artillery opened fire. Some Shermans, attracted by the firing, came
up and joined in. Bazooka men had ‘to lie in wait or sneak up just like stalking a moose’. They had been told to aim for the tracks on a Panther, as rounds simply bounced off its armour. In the end, out of twenty-seven German tanks, only three escaped.
The 4th Armored Division was battering the 5th Fallschirmjäger units south of Bastogne between the roads to Arlon and Neufchâteau. As the village of Assenois shook from the relentless explosions of shells, civilians could do little but hope and pray. ‘We feel like we are in God’s hand,’ a woman wrote, ‘and we surrender ourselves to it.’ The Walloons were largely Catholic and deeply religious. Committing themselves to the hands of the Almighty was undoubtedly a comfort, when they had so little control over their own fate. Reciting the rosary together helped dull the pain of individual fear, and calm the nerves.
During the battle for Hemroulle, Model and Manteuffel had visited Lüttwitz’s corps headquarters at the Château de Roumont near the highway to Marche. Lüttwitz was even more concerned about his old division stranded round Celles, and again urged that the 2nd Panzer must be saved by permitting its rapid withdrawal. Model and Manteuffel ‘showed understanding’, but they ‘obviously were not authorized to decide the withdrawal of the 2nd Panzer-Division’. That order could come only from Hitler, and he was certainly not prepared to admit defeat.
Lüttwitz’s worst fears for the Böhm and Cochenhausen Kampfgruppen were being realized as they spoke. The Allied counter-attack had begun before dawn. The artillery with the 29th Armoured Brigade began to bombard Böhm’s reconnaissance battalion in Foy-Notre-Dame, and fulfilled their promise of avoiding the seventeenth-century church. American artillery batteries took up position in the fields around the villages of Haid and Chevetogne. When they had reached Haid the evening before they celebrated with the locals, who made galettes and hot chocolate: with milk from their own cows and melted Hershey bars. Afterwards, the American soldiers accompanied their new friends to midnight mass in the church. Only a couple of days before a sixteen-year-old Alsatian, who had been dragooned into the Wehrmacht, had broken down in tears, telling a farmer’s wife about the horrors they had been through.
In Chevetogne, an officer went round the houses warning people to leave their windows open, or the blast from the guns would shatter them. Villagers watched an artillery spotter plane, which they called ‘Petit Jules’, circle over German positions. A little later, twin-tailed P-38 Lightning fighter-bombers appeared in force.
Combat Command A of Harmon’s 2nd Armored Division advanced south to Buissonville a dozen kilometres to the east of the Cochenhausen Kampfgruppe, and clashed with a force from the Panzer Lehr which had advanced from Rochefort. They tracked one of the German columns to the farm of La Happe where fighting began. Most civilians in the area immediately took to their cellars, but a few climbed up to attics to watch the deadly firework display of a tank battle. Some twenty-nine Germans were killed and many more seriously wounded. The latter were carried to a barn and laid on the straw.
Combat Command B, meanwhile, coming from Ciney, split into two, with one task force heading for Conjoux and the other for Celles to surround the main Cochenhausen Kampfgruppe spread between the two villages. The Germans round Celles were sitting targets: they did not even have enough fuel for the Feldlazarett’s ambulance. In Celles itself, most of the inhabitants sheltered in the crypt of the church with the nuns and the priest. The straw laid during the September fighting was still there. Some farmworkers brought down a pail of milk for the children when there was a lull in the firing, and cooked a chicken which had been killed by an explosion. The rest crouched in cellars as the shells flew overhead. The Americans were using phosphorus shells, and naturally the locals feared for their farms.
The Shermans of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, supported by the American 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion and with P-38 Lightning fighters overhead, advanced from Sorinnes on Foy-Notre-Dame. It was retaken that afternoon, along with Major von Böhm and 148 of his men. Only a few managed to escape through the deep snow. Some families stayed hidden after the village had been liberated because they still heard firing, but this was due to a blazing half-track in a farmyard on which the ammunition continued to explode for a long time. For most, the first thing to do was to cut squares of cardboard as an emergency repair to their smashed windows. It was a great relief that this battle of the ‘Tommies’ and ‘Sammies’ against ‘les gris’ – the ‘greys’, or Germans – had finally come to an end.
A small girl among those being evacuated to Sorinnes had lost her shoes, so an American soldier from the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion forced a German prisoner at gunpoint to take off his boots and give them to her. They were much too large, but she was just able to walk, while the German soldier faced frostbitten feet.
After American and British artillery had hammered the German positions round the farm of Mahenne between Foy-Notre-Dame and Celles, a local story grew up that SS officers had set fire to the place; but no SS were in the area and the destruction was entirely caused by shelling. Once again the black overalls and death’s-head badge of the panzer arm appear to have been mistaken for the Waffen-SS.
Combat Command B of the 2nd Armored Division also entered Celles that afternoon. The famished and exhausted panzer troops, short of ammunition and out of fuel, could not resist for long. Mopping up continued for another two days. Some 2,500 Germans were killed or wounded and another 1,200 captured. In addition, eighty-two armoured fighting vehicles and eighty-two artillery pieces were taken or destroyed, as well as countless vehicles, many of which had been booty taken from American forces earlier. Most were out of fuel and ammunition.
Major von Cochenhausen, with some 600 of his men, managed to escape on foot across country after splitting up. Many were only too willing to give up. Around Celles, hidden Germans begged locals to find the Americans and tell them that they were ready to surrender. They were worried that if they appeared suddenly, even with their hands up, they might be shot. Some were afraid that, because they wore so many items of American uniform, they might be mistaken for members of the Skorzeny Kampfgruppe. In a few cases as a sign of goodwill they handed over their pistol to a Belgian civilian, who would then hand it over to the American soldiers. The locals did not realize until it was too late that they could have made a lot of money selling them instead. ‘The Americans were mad to get their hands on one,’ a farmer said. Many civilians were also afraid of holding on to items of German equipment in case the enemy returned yet again and found them in their houses.
Apart from the 2nd SS Das Reich, which still caused great concern to First Army in the fighting round Manhay and Grandménil, the other panzer divisions fared little better on the north-western flank of the Bulge. The 116th Panzer was still ordered to break through east of Marche, but as Generalmajor von Waldenburg recorded, the ‘divisional units which fought in this battle were nearly completely wiped out’, and Kampfgruppe Beyer of the 60th Panzergrenadiers was cut off. Only a few men and vehicles managed to escape.
That night Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt informed Hitler that the offensive had failed. He recommended a withdrawal from the salient before the bulk of Army Group B was trapped. Hitler rejected his advice angrily and insisted on more attacks against Bastogne, unaware that even more Allied reinforcements were arriving. The 17th Airborne Division was moving into position, although an VIII Corps staff officer thought that its paratroopers had ‘a lot to learn’. The newly arrived 11th Armored Division also lacked experience, especially the drivers of their Shermans. ‘Their tanks left a trail of uprooted trees and torn wire lines,’ a report commented.
‘A clear cold Christmas,’ Patton wrote in his diary that day, ‘lovely weather for killing Germans, which seems a bit queer, seeing Whose birthday it is.’ Patton had moved his headquarters into the Industrial School in Luxembourg. He proudly showed off his lights, with the bulbs hanging in captured German helmets acting as lampshades.
But the festival brought little joy to the Belgian popu
lation of the Ardennes. In a village close to Elsenborn, where the fighting had died down, the Gronsfeld family decided to come out of their cellar to celebrate Christmas Day. The light was blinding with the sun reflecting off the snow as they sat at the kitchen table, father, mother and their young daughter, Elfriede. Suddenly, a German shell exploded near by, sending a sliver of shrapnel through the window. ‘It cut deep into Elfriede Gronsfeld’s neck. American medics came to her aid, but there was nothing they could do. The girl was buried on December 29. She was five years old. “What can one say to the mother?” one of the village’s women mourned in her diary. “She cries and cannot understand.”’
An American soldier on the Elsenborn ridge wrote to his wife that day: ‘The bombers have fine, feathery white streams of vapor streaked across the sky and the fighters scrawl wavy designs as they try to murder each other.’ They would keep their eye on Piper Cub artillery spotters, often half dozen or more in the sky at once. When the aircraft suddenly kicked their tails straight up and dived towards the ground, ‘we knew it was time to look for cover’. In another letter he wrote, ‘We’re getting strafed once or twice a day by our own planes.’
Profiting from clear skies again, American fighter-bombers ‘like a swarm of wasps’ roamed over St Vith as well. ‘We prefer to walk instead of using a car on the main highway,’ a German officer wrote in his diary. ‘The American Jabos keep on attacking everything which moves on the roads … We walk across the fields from hedgerow to hedgerow.’ But soon a much heavier droning sound of aircraft engines could be heard. Formations with seventy-six B-26 bombers had arrived and proceeded to flatten the remains of St Vith. The tactic was cynically known as ‘putting the city in the street’, that is to say filling the roads with rubble so that German supply convoys could not get through this key crossroads.