On 5 January, in house-to-house combat with grenades and bayonets, the paratroopers began to clear the large village systematically. Belgians, sheltering in cellars and afraid of grenades being thrown down the stairs, cried out that they were civilians. Many villagers had sought shelter in the religious college, the Alumnat, where conditions became horrific from dysentery and people driven mad by the shelling. During the day the Panzer Lehr made more counter-attacks supported this time by four Tigers, but soon after nightfall the last German positions were eliminated. The battalion was ordered into reserve, having lost seven officers and 182 men. The 5th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment took its place and the 23rd Hussars replaced the Fife and Forfar.
The inhabitants had been forced to remain in their dark cellars while the battle raged overhead. Yvonne Louviaux, then fourteen years old, remembered her mother telling her children to squeeze up close to each other so that if they were killed, they would all die together. After three days, with only apples to eat, they were finally able to climb back to the ground floor. They found their sofa covered in blood from one of the wounded soldiers. The village itself was 70 per cent destroyed or seriously damaged, and most of the livestock killed. Telephone poles were smashed and wires and electric cables dangled dangerously on the blackened snow. Severed limbs from bodies blown apart in the fighting lay around. With a slightly sinister symmetry, two babies were born during the battle while two villagers were killed. Others died later from stepping on mines left from the battle.
One family returned to their house and found what at first sight seemed like a naked human corpse strung from the ceiling of their living room. On closer inspection they saw it was the carcass of their pig, which the Germans had started to butcher, but then evidently they had been interrupted by the arrival of the Allies. They were luckier than the majority, who had lost all their livestock, hams and preserves to German hunger, as well as their draught horses and forage to the Wehrmacht. There was so little food available that a large bull, which had survived, was butchered to feed the village. Everyone, including small children, gathered to watch.
Impatient optimism still seemed to get the better of 12th Army Group headquarters, perhaps because General Bradley could not wait for the moment when First Army and Third Army met up. This would mark the moment when the First Army would be returned to his command. But Hodges’s diary keeper noted on 6 January that ‘this headquarters thought laughable the suggestion made by General Siebert, G-2 of the 12th Army Group, that we should be on the alert for any “imminent German collapse”’. Even ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins thought the suggestion ‘fairly ridiculous’. The very next day, Bradley called Patton to claim that the Germans were pulling all their armour and troops back from the Bastogne pocket. But according to Patton’s staff the intelligence officers of all divisions and corps ‘declare there’s no evidence of this and in fact 6th Armored Division was fighting the strongest counterattack launched against them during the present campaign’.*
The advance of the British gave the Germans the excuse to begin their fighting withdrawal from round Jemelle. Sergeant G. O. Sanford of the Parachute Regiment was captured at the village of On next to Jemelle. Two panzergrenadiers led him off into a wood and shot him dead. At Forrières, when surrendering Germans emerged from a wood with their hands on their head, two British armoured cars positioned by the station opened fire and mowed them down. As a local observed: ‘Undoubtedly the hard fighting in Bure had led these English to act in such a way.’ Belgians expected British soldiers to be better behaved than those of other nations, and were shocked to witness lapses. One woman, on seeing a British paratrooper take a watch from the wrist of a dead German, remarked: ‘they certainly did not seem to have that renowned English composure’.
In Jemelle on Monday 8 January, Sister Alexia Bruyère wrote in her diary: ‘At 09.30 we saw the Germans leave, keeping close to the walls, packs on their backs, heading towards the bridge at the railway station. The last ones were wearing white trousers (it is snowing), a bedsheet like a burnous and a cloth like a turban. One would have thought they were real Arabs.’
Refugees began to return with their remaining possessions piled on handcarts. One family entered their house in Rochefort and, on hearing little noises behind some heavy furniture, assumed that rats or mice had started a nest in their absence. But, on moving the furniture, they found a German soldier, hunched up in a ball and trembling with fear. He begged them not to give him up. He was an Austrian deserter. They reassured him that his unit had left, and he now could surrender to the Allies.
On the night of 5–6 January, ninety RAF Lancasters of Bomber Command flattened the town of Houffalize to block the key crossroads for German supply columns and the escape route for German forces. The place was impassable for three days.*
Partly due to the bombing of Houffalize, the 116th Panzer-Division found that the roads became more and more congested during the gradual retreat, which at first averaged less than two kilometres a day. Most movements had to take place in daylight, but with the weather generally overcast until 10 January, there were few fighter-bomber attacks.
‘Resistance never let up,’ wrote an officer with the 83rd Infantry Division east of Manhay, ‘and the brutality for which SS troops were notorious was brought home to us. A platoon of infantrymen from the 331st’s 2nd Battalion became pinned down in an open field in drifting, waist-deep snow. With a hail of intense fire directed at them, they could only burrow deeper into the snow. Some were killed, and others were wounded. When the firing finally stopped, the platoon sergeant raised his head and saw two Germans approaching. They kicked each of the prostrate infantrymen, and if one groaned, he was shot in the head. After rifling the pockets of their victims, the Germans left. When darkness fell, the sergeant staggered back to safety, half frozen and half shocked out of his mind. Of 27 men in the platoon, he was the only one to come out alive. When kicked, he had played dead.’
German soldiers fought on even though many longed to be taken prisoner. ‘Everyone thinks: “If only the time would come”,’ a German soldier called Friedl remarked, ‘and then comes the officer, and you just carry out orders. That’s what’s tragic about the situation.’ As American interrogators found from prisoners, German morale was suffering badly as the half-starved soldiers struggled to push vehicles and guns in freezing conditions, with the knowledge that the great offensive had failed. Nazi attempts to bludgeon their men into further efforts were based on orders which had been standard in Waffen-SS divisions since Normandy. ‘Anyone taken prisoner without being wounded loses his honour and his dependants get no support.’
Waffen-SS prisoners were conspicuous by their rarity, either because of their determination to go down fighting, or from being shot on sight by their captors. One SS officer, however, attempted to justify his presence with unconvincing logic. He told his interrogator in a First Army cage: ‘Do not get the impression that I am a coward because I have let myself become a prisoner of war. I would gladly have died a hero’s death, but I thought it only fair and just to share the misfortune of my men.’
American divisions in the Third Army felt that prisoners should be treated differently according to circumstances. ‘When the Germans are having success along a front,’ the 6th Armored Division observed, ‘prisoners taken are apt to be cocky and feel that though they were taken prisoner they just had an unlucky break. In the treatment of such PWs, they should not be fed, allowed to smoke, or given anything bordering on soft treatment until they have been questioned. On the other hand, prisoners taken when the Germans are suffering general reverses along the line are generally discouraged and disgusted with conditions in their lines and with their superiors. Many of these prisoners have voluntarily surrendered and are willing and eager to talk if well treated. If they are put at ease, allowed to sit down and smoke during questioning these men will unburden themselves, often volunteering information that has not been asked for.’ This was true of both officers and ordinary soldier
s.
In the case of captured SS, all depended on whether they saw themselves as Aryan supermen or whether they had been forced into the SS against their will, as was often the case with Poles and Alsatians. The latter could be treated as ordinary prisoners. ‘The true “superman” requires stern treatment; it is all he has given anyone else and is what he expects. He has been in the habit of threatening physical violence and then carrying out his threat. For this reason he seems to be particularly susceptible to the threat of physical violence. It is not necessary to beat him up, but if he thinks he had better talk or else – he talks! To put it bluntly, we have found the best system is: for the humble and whipped prisoner, “A full stomach and an empty bladder”; for the arrogant and cocky, “A full bladder and an empty stomach”.’ The 35th Infantry Division, on the other hand, reported that the prisoners it had captured from the 1st SS Panzer-Division ‘were more meek [than the volksgrenadiers], probably in anticipation of retribution’, and they complained that their ‘officers had withdrawn in time of danger, leaving them to hold their positions’.
The soldiers of the 28th Division did not believe in a dual approach. They objected to seeing rear-area troops giving German prisoners candy and cigarettes. Their own prisoners were all made to march back rather than ride in a truck, and they received only water until after they had been interrogated. ‘Too good treatment of prisoners has a bad effect on our men. The way we handle them, our men distinctly have the idea that being a prisoner of war is not so good.’ Another division was even tougher in its views. ‘We have never been benefited by treating prisoners well … We are here to Kill Germans, not to baby them.’ Some soldiers in the 30th Division exacted their own revenge when they captured Germans wearing American combat boots taken from the dead. They forced them at gunpoint to remove them and walk barefoot along the icy roads.
The US First Army noted that ‘prisoners were beginning to complain of the lack of food and many told stories of long marches with heavy equipment owing to the lack of transportation’. On both the north and south sides of the salient, prisoner-of-war interrogations confirmed that German troops dreaded the air bursts from the new Pozit fuses on American artillery shells. ‘The results of these new shells on German bodies and minds are very effective,’ a First Army report on prisoner-of-war interrogations stated.
Around the Bastogne pocket, the fighting slackened a little after the battles of 3 and 4 January. The 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division now came under General der Panzertruppe Krüger’s LVIII Panzer Corps. But when the paratroopers’ commander Generalmajor Heilmann argued that it was futile to waste more lives in doomed attacks, Krüger retorted: ‘If we want to win the war the 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division has to take part in it too!’
On 6 January, Heilmann had received a secret order from Himmler which read: ‘If there is any suspicion that a soldier has absented himself from his unit with a view to deserting and thus impairing the fighting strength of his unit one member of the soldier’s family (wife) will be shot.’ Presumably this had been prompted by a report from Brigadeführer Mohnke of the Leibstandarte to the SS-Reichsführer. Heilmann was sacked a few days later. Even in the more reliable 26th Volksgrenadier-Division men began to desert. ‘Ten or twelve of the remnants of our company dressed in civilian clothes and hid,’ a Feldwebel acknowledged in captivity.
As in all armies, it was not so much the fear of death as the fear of mutilation which preyed on minds. A German field hospital, or Feldlazarett, was little more than an amputation line. American doctors were horrified by the German army’s tendency to cut off limbs without a moment’s thought. A wounded American prisoner from the 401st Glider Infantry was appalled when taken into the operating room. ‘I nearly gagged,’ he wrote. ‘There were half a dozen tables surrounded by doctors in white rubber aprons splattered with blood. All the tables were occupied with German wounded or men with frozen limbs. Buckets on the floor held toes, fingers and other appendages. The men on the tables had been given a local anesthetic, but were still screaming and groaning as the doctors worked.’ When the buckets were left or emptied outside, local dogs soon helped themselves, as Belgians noted. The corpses of those who died under the knife were stacked outside, frozen solid, some with a coating of ice over their faces as if in a glass sarcophagus. Even those lucky enough to be evacuated to Germany had no idea of their destination or fate. ‘The wounded are sent to wherever the hospital train happens to go,’ a German doctor said. ‘Nobody at the front knows the destination.’
American field hospitals could also be a grisly spectacle. A senior nurse with the Third Army described a ward known as the ‘Chamber of Horrors’, which stank of ‘gore and sweat and human excretions’. She recounted a night shift, tending two soldiers who ‘had been dying all day yesterday, and they were dying all night now … One, a private in the infantry, had lost both legs and one hand: he had a deep chest wound and his bowels were perforated by a shell fragment … The other patient was a corporal in a tank outfit. His spinal cord was severed and he was paralyzed from the waist down. His belly was open, and so was his chest.’ Both boys were in a coma, breathing noisily. ‘It’s a good thing their mothers can’t see them when they die,’ she said.
Non-battle casualties were also mounting. In November and December losses to cold amounted to 23,000 men. Almost all were combat infantrymen, and since a division usually had 4,000 of them, this amounted to the equivalent of at least five and a half divisions. Neuro-psychiatric cases, termed combat exhaustion, rose to nearly a quarter of all hospital admissions. The German army, which refused to recognize the condition, apparently suffered far fewer cases.
Combat exhaustion produced recognizable symptoms: ‘nausea, crying, extreme nervousness and gastric conditions’. Some commanders felt that officer patients were returned to their unit too rapidly, because they often broke down again. The effect could also be infectious. ‘When one man cracks, others will soon follow.’ Yet isolation was the main problem. It was vital to get men out of their foxholes and mix with the others when not under shellfire. ‘Tank fatigue’ was due more to ‘prolonged periods of continuous combat action’. It differed from the infantry version, even though symptoms were similar with ‘upset stomach, nausea, dysentery, limpness and men crying in some cases in almost a state of hysteria’. The 2nd Armored Division blamed unhealthy eating, ‘long hours of exposure’ in extreme cold, as well as physical exhaustion. ‘Cold C and K rations do not materially increase vitality and resistance, and in some cases cause upset stomachs.’ Attempts to use captured German blowtorches to heat cans of food failed to resolve the problem. American doctors did not of course know then what the Germans had discovered after the battle of Stalingrad. The combination of stress, exhaustion, cold and malnourishment upsets the metabolism, and gravely reduces the body’s capacity to absorb calories and vitamins.
‘Even with hard and experienced troops, a soldier is only good for so long,’ an officer with the 5th Infantry Division on Patton’s right flank observed. ‘I have seen some marvellous things done by some of my men and I have seen some of these men crack finally … Tired troops cannot do a job well. They’ll go, but they lack smack. When you lack smack you start losing battles.’
On 8 January, the remnants of the 2nd and 9th Panzer-Divisions received the order to withdraw the next day. ‘It is the coldest weather I’ve ever experienced,’ a British civil affairs officer noted in his diary. ‘The wind was just like a knife to the face … The roads are full of ditched vehicles with freezing drivers alongside them, waiting for whatever help can come.’ Some people, however, thought it slightly ironic that the atrocious driving conditions greatly reduced the number of traffic accidents and deaths because the drivers were forced to proceed so carefully.
On 10 January, Generalfeldmarschall Model passed on an instruction from Hitler at the Adlerhorst. ‘The Führer has ordered that I and II Panzer Corps, with the 1st, 2nd, 9th and 12th SS Panzer-Divisions, with immediate effect, are to assemble for rapid refitti
ng behind Army Group B and placed at the disposal of Commander-in-Chief West in such a way that they no longer become involved in combat.’ Army formations would once again feel angry that they would be expected to hold the line while Waffen-SS divisions were withdrawn to be rested and re-equipped.
The bitterness of defeat in the Ardennes was reflected among some German generals held prisoner in England. Having exulted in their material superiority earlier in the war, they now seemed to regard such advantages as unfair. Generalmajor Hans Bruhn, a divisional commander captured by the French in Alsace, was secretly recorded saying to his companions: ‘It’s the greatest mockery in the history of the world and at the same time the saddest part of it, that the flower of our manhood is being mowed down by the aircraft and the massed tanks of an army which has no real soldiers and which doesn’t really want to fight.’
On Thursday 11 January, there were unmistakable signs that the Germans were pulling back. In the Houffalize–Bastogne area, their corridor was only thirteen kilometres wide and under heavy American artillery fire. The 30th Infantry Division told Ninth Army headquarters that bad visibility was allowing the Germans to escape. ‘The Germans are pulling all their armor and heavy stuff entirely out of the Bulge in an orderly and leisurely withdrawal.’ Also that day, the BBC announced that the broadcast on Montgomery’s comments had been the product of German propaganda. The news did little to soften Bradley’s feelings about his bête noire.
The next morning 12th Army Group received authorization to stockpile gas munitions in case the Germans resorted to chemical weapons in desperation, or on Hitler’s orders. This had been prompted by a report from SHAEF to General Marshall’s intelligence chief in Washington five days earlier. Major General Strong and his staff had been perturbed by five references to ‘gas’ found in Ultra decrypts.*