Without warning Eisenhower, Bradley called his own press conference on 9 January. He wanted to justify the weakness of the American forces on the Ardennes front on 16 December and defend himself against accusations of being caught flat-footed; but also to emphasize that Montgomery’s command of US forces was purely temporary. This prompted the Daily Mail to bang Montgomery’s drum in the most provocative way, once more demanding that he be made land forces commander. The transatlantic press war began all over again with renewed ferocity.
Churchill was appalled. ‘I fear great offence has been given to the American generals,’ he wrote to his chief military assistant General Ismay on 10 January, ‘not so much by Montgomery’s speech as by the manner in which some of our papers seem to appropriate the whole credit for saving the battle to him. Personally I thought his speech most unfortunate. It had a patronising tone and completely overlooked the fact that the United States have lost perhaps 80,000 men and we but 2,000 or 3,000 … Eisenhower told me that the anger of his generals was such that he would hardly dare to order any of them to serve under Montgomery.’ Eisenhower later claimed that the whole episode caused him more distress and worry than any other during the war.
While Eisenhower’s emissaries, Air Chief Marshal Tedder and General Bull, were still struggling to get to Moscow, Churchill had been corresponding with Stalin about plans for the Red Army’s great winter offensive. On 6 January he had written to the Soviet leader, making clear that the German offensive in the Ardennes had been halted and the Allies were masters of the situation. This did not stop Stalin (and Russian historians subsequently) from trying to claim that Churchill had been begging for help. Roosevelt’s communication of 23 December, talking of an ‘emergency’, might have been seen in that light with rather more justification, but Stalin liked to take every opportunity to make the western Allies feel guilty or beholden to him. And he would play the same card again at the Yalta conference in February.
Stalin pretended that the major offensives westwards from the Vistula on 12 January and north into East Prussia the next day had been planned for 20 January, but that he had brought them forward to help the Allies in the Ardennes. The real reason was that meteorological reports had warned that a thaw would set in later in the month, and the Red Army needed the ground hard for its tanks. All of Guderian’s fears about the German ‘house of cards’ collapsing in Poland and Silesia were to be proved justified. Hitler’s Ardennes adventure had left the eastern front utterly vulnerable.
22
Counter-Attack
Patton’s impatience to start the advance from round Bastogne was soon frustrated. Remer proclaimed the efforts of the Führer Begleit ‘a defensive success on 31 December and estimated that they had destroyed thirty American tanks’. The Germans were left unmolested that night. This allowed them to form a new line of defence, which ‘astonished us eastern front warriors very greatly’. Yet Remer acknowledged that the inexperienced American 87th Infantry Division had fought well. ‘They were excellent fighters and had a number of commandos who spoke German and came behind our lines where they were able to knife many of our guards.’ There is, however, little confirmation of such irregular tactics from American sources. But since Remer’s tanks and assault guns were down to less than twenty kilometres’ worth of fuel, he ‘radioed Corps [headquarters] that we were fighting our last battle, and that they should send help’.
On the eastern flank, the 6th Armored Division passed through Bastogne on the morning of 1 January to attack Bizôry, Neffe and Mageret, where so many battles had been fought in the early days of the encirclement. The equally inexperienced 11th Armored Division, working with the 87th Infantry Division on the south-west side of Bastogne as part of Middleton’s VIII Corps, was to advance towards Mande-Saint-Etienne, but came off badly in a clash with the 3rd Panzergrenadiers and the Führer Begleit. ‘The 11th Armored is very green and took unnecessary casualties to no effect,’ Patton recorded. The division was shaken by the shock of battle. Even its commander was thought to be close to cracking up under the strain, and officers seemed unable to control their men. After bitter fighting to take the ruins of Chenogne on 1 January, about sixty German prisoners were shot. ‘There were some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners,’ Patton wrote in his diary. ‘I hope we can conceal this.’ It would indeed have been embarrassing after all the American fulminations over the Malmédy–Baugnez massacre.
Tuesday 2 January was ‘a bitter cold morning’, with bright clear skies, but meteorologists warned that bad weather was on the way. Manteuffel appealed to Model to accept that Bastogne could no longer be taken. They had to withdraw, but Model knew that Hitler would never agree. Lüttwitz also wanted to pull back east of the River Ourthe, as he recognized that the remnants of the 2nd Panzer-Division and the Panzer Lehr were dangerously exposed at Saint-Hubert and east of Rochefort. In the Führer Begleit, battalions were down to less than 150 men and their commanders were all casualties. Remer claimed that there was not even enough fuel to tow away the damaged tanks. The answer from the Adlerhorst was predictable. Hitler insisted on another attempt on 4 January, promising the 12th SS Hitler Jugend and a fresh Volksgrenadier division. He now justified his obstinacy on the grounds that, although his armies had failed to reach the Meuse, they had stopped Eisenhower from launching an offensive against the Ruhr.
The First Army and the British XXX Corps began the counter-offensive on 3 January as planned. Collins’s VII Corps, led by the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions, attacked between Hotton and Manhay, with Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps on its eastern flank. But the advance was very slow. The weather conditions had worsened with snow, ice and now fog again. Shermans kept sliding off roads. No fighter-bombers could support the advance in the bad visibility. And the German divisions, although greatly reduced, fought back fiercely.
Although the 116th Panzer-Division was forced back from Hotton, German artillery, even while withdrawing, ‘continued to pour destruction’ on the town. The theatre, the school, the church, the sawmill, the Fanfare Royale café, the small shops on the main street, the houses and finally the Hôtel de la Paix were smashed. The only structure undamaged in Hotton was the bandstand on an island in the Ourthe river, and its roof was riddled by shell fragments.
On 4 January, Manteuffel launched a renewed assault on Bastogne as ordered, but this time his troops came in from the north and north-east led by the 9th SS Hohenstaufen and the SS Hitler Jugend supported by two Volksgrenadier divisions. In the north near Longchamps the 502nd Parachute Infantry, which had just fought a protracted battle, received a lucky break. A German panzergrenadier from the SS Hohenstaufen became lost in the snow-bound landscape. Seeing a soldier standing in a foxhole with his back to him, he assumed he was German, went up and tapped him on the shoulder to find out where he was. The paratrooper, although taken by surprise, managed to knock him down and overpower him. During interrogation, it transpired that the German prisoner was a company runner, carrying all the details of the attack planned for the following morning. He even volunteered the exact position of the assembly areas for 04.00 hours. Since the information seemed too good to be true, the regimental interrogator suspected that he must be planting disinformation, but then began to realize that it might well be genuine. The 101st Airborne headquarters was informed, and every available field artillery battalion and mortar platoon stood ready.
The attack of the SS Hohenstaufen against the 502nd Parachute Infantry was severely disrupted in the north. But the offensive against the Bastogne pocket, as it was now termed, hit the 327th Glider Infantry round Champs, the scene of the battle on Christmas Day, and was especially ferocious in the south-west. The 6th Armored Division, attacked by the Hitler Jugend, was close to breaking point; and after one battalion collapsed, a general withdrawal took place, losing Mageret and Wardin. A complete collapse was prevented by massive artillery concentrations.
Even the experienced 6th Armored had lessons to learn. A lot of the fog of war on the Am
erican side came from the simple failure of commanders at all levels to report their position accurately. ‘Units frequently make errors of several thousand yards in reporting the location of their troops,’ a staff officer at the division’s headquarters observed. And on a more general perspective he wrote that American divisions were ‘too sensitive to their flanks … they often do not move unless someone else is protecting their flanks when they are quite capable of furnishing the necessary protection themselves’. ‘If you enter a village and you see no civilians,’ another 6th Armored officer advised, ‘be very very cautious. It means that they have gone to ground in their cellars expecting a battle, because they know German soldiers are around.’
Many soldiers closed their minds to the suffering of the Belgians as they focused on the priority of killing the enemy. Those who did care were marked for life by the horrors that they witnessed. Villages, the principal targets for artillery, were totally destroyed. Farms and barns blazed. Women and children, forced out into the snow by the Germans, were in many cases maimed or killed by mines or artillery from both sides, or simply gunned down by fighter-bombers because dark figures against the snow were frequently mistaken for the enemy. GIs found wounded livestock bellowing in pain, and starving dogs chewing at the flesh of lacerated cows and horses even before they were dead. Water sources were poisoned by white phosphorus. The Americans did what they could to evacuate civilians to safety, but all too often it was impossible in the middle of a battle.
West of Bastogne, the 17th Airborne Division took over from the 11th Armored Division on 3 January. The 11th Armored had advanced just ten kilometres in four days, at the cost of 661 battle casualties and fifty-four tanks. The newly arrived paratroopers appeared to fare little better in their first action. ‘The 17th Airborne, which attacked this morning,’ Patton wrote in his diary on 4 January, ‘got a very bloody nose and reported the loss of 40% in some of its battalions. This is, of course, hysterical.’
The 17th Airborne, fighting towards Flamierge and Flamizoulle on the western edge of the Bastogne perimeter, was up against the far more experienced Führer Begleit and the 3rd Panzergrenadier-Division. ‘We have had replacements who would flop down with the first burst of enemy fire and would not shoot even to protect others advancing,’ an officer complained.
American advice came thick and fast. ‘The German follows a fixed form. He sends over a barrage followed by tanks, followed by infantry. Never run, if you do you will surely get killed. Stick in your hole and let the barrage go over. Stick in your hole and let the tanks go by, then cut loose and mow the German infantry down.’ ‘Don’t go to a white flag. Make the Germans come to you. Keep the Krauts covered.’ Officers also found that their men must be trained what to do when shot in different parts of the body, so that they could look after themselves until a medic arrived. ‘Each man takes care of himself until the medical men arrive. No one stops the fight to help another.’ Yet badly wounded men left in the snow without help were unlikely to survive more than half an hour.
The 17th Airborne Division had a tank battalion manned entirely by African-American soldiers attached to it. ‘Our men had great confidence in them,’ a colonel reported. ‘We used the tanks to protect our infantry moving forward. The tanks would come first with the doughboys riding on them and following in squad columns [behind them]. Selected men were in the last wave, tail end of the company, to knock off Jerries in snow capes. The Jerries in snow capes would let the tanks and bulk of the infantry pass, then rise up to shoot our infantry in the back, but our “tail enders” ended that.’
When they captured a position, they usually found that the ground was frozen so hard that it was impossible to dig in. The division decided that they needed to use their 155mm guns to blast shellholes on an objective or piece of ground to be occupied, so that foxholes could be prepared rapidly. With so much to learn against such hardened opponents, it was hardly surprising that the 17th Airborne had such a baptism of fire. ‘The 17th has suffered a bloody nose,’ 12th Army Group noted, ‘and in its first action lacks the élan of its airborne companions.’ But there were also examples of outstanding heroism. Sergeant Isidore Jachman, from a Berlin Jewish family who had emigrated to the United States, seized a bazooka from another soldier who had been killed, and saved his company by fighting off two tanks. He was killed in the process and was awarded a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor.
The 87th Infantry Division to the west was not making any better progress, having come up against a Kampfgruppe from the Panzer Lehr. There were constant complaints about soldiers being far too trigger-happy and wasting ammunition. A sergeant in the 87th Division described how he ‘saw a rifleman shoot a German and then empty his gun and another clip into him although it was obvious that the first shot had done the job. A 57mm gun fired about forty rounds into a house suspected of having some Germans in it. Practically all were A[rmor] P[iercing] shells and fired into the upper floors. The Germans were in the basement and lower floor and stayed there until we attacked.’
The 87th Division, despite Remer’s compliments on their fighting prowess, suffered all the usual faults of green troops. Men froze under mortar attack instead of running forward to escape it. And when soldiers were wounded, several would rush over to help them instead of leaving them to the aid men following on behind. Unused to winter warfare, the 87th and the 17th Airborne suffered many casualties from frostbite. Men were told to obtain footwear which was two sizes too big and then put on at least two pairs of socks, but it was a bit late for that once they were already in action.
Middleton was utterly dejected by the performance of the inexperienced divisions. Patton was furious: his reputation was at stake. He was even more convinced that the counter-attack should have been aimed at the eighty-kilometre base of the salient along the German frontier. He blamed Montgomery, but also Bradley who was ‘all for putting new divisions in the Bastogne fight’. He was so disheartened that he wrote: ‘We can still lose this war … the Germans are colder and hungrier than we are, but they fight better. I can never get over the stupidity of our green troops.’ Patton refused to recognize that the lack of a good road network at the base of the salient, together with the terrain and the atrocious winter weather which frustrated Allied airpower, meant that his preferred option would probably have stood even less chance of rapid success.
The advance of the counter-offensive in the north fared only slightly better, even with the bulk of the German divisions switched to the Bastogne sector. There was nearly a metre of snow in the region and temperatures had dropped to minus 20 Centigrade. ‘Roads were icy and tanks, despite the fact that gravel was laid, slipped off into the sides, destroying communication set-ups and slowing traffic.’ The metal studs welded to the tracks for grip wore off in a very short time. In the freezing fog, artillery-spotting Cub planes could operate for only part of the day, and the fighter-bombers were grounded. The 2nd Armored Division found itself in an ‘extremely heavy fight’ with the remnants of the 2nd Panzer-Division. ‘A lucky tree burst from an 88-mm shell knocked out between fifty and sixty of our armored infantry, the largest known number of casualties’ from a single shell. But ‘Trois Ponts was cleared as was Reharmont and by nightfall the line Hierlot–Amcomont–Dairmont–Bergeval was reached,’ First Army noted. The 82nd Airborne Division took 500 prisoners.
Field Marshal Montgomery, who visited Hodges at 14.00, was ‘greatly pleased with the progress made and kept remarking “Good show. Good show”’. He informed Hodges that two brigades of the British 53rd Division would attack at first light the next morning in the extreme west, to maintain contact with the flanks of the 2nd Armored Division. Yet the counter-attack was not proving nearly as easy as Bradley had assumed. Even ‘the 2nd Armored Division of Bulldog Ernie Harmon is running into the same kind of resistance’, wrote Hansen, ‘finding it difficult to get an impetus in this difficult country with stern opposition’.
South of Rochefort, part of the British 6th Airborne Division adv
anced on Bure, which the Belgian SAS had reconnoitred four days before. The 13th (Lancashire) Battalion of the Parachute Regiment went into the attack at 13.00 hours. Heavy mortar fire from the Lehr’s panzergrenadiers caused a number of casualties, but A Company made it into the village despite fire from six assault guns and automatic weapons. Panzergrenadiers supported by a Mark VI Tiger launched a counter-attack. Shermans from the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry arrived to help, but these tanks also had no control on the icy roads. The Germans were beaten off after dark, but during the night they attacked again and again, while tracer bullets set barns and farmhouses on fire.
The following day the paratroopers, under intense shellfire, managed to hold the village against another five attacks. The lone Tiger tank remained in the centre of the village, impervious to the anti-tank rounds fired by PIATs, the much less effective British counterpart to the American bazooka. Along with the German artillery, the Tiger accounted for sixteen Shermans from the Fife and Forfar. Houses shook and windows shattered every time the monster fired its 88mm main armament. Because the Tiger could control the main street with its machine guns, the wounded could not be evacuated. The firing was so intense that the only way the medical aid post was able to send more field dressings to paratroopers on the other side of the street was to tape them to rifle magazines and throw them across the road from one house to another through smashed windows. A company from the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry arrived to reinforce the paratroopers after so many losses. But late that evening another attack supported by two Tiger tanks forced the Ox and Bucks back from their section of the village.