Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (45 page)

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 advanced 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.

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’.
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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 soldiers.

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.