Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (19 page)

The American Defense

Back at SHAEF, it was obvious that the Germans had driven a wedge between the First and Third Armies. General Bradley’s 12th Army Group headquarters down south in Luxembourg could no longer maintain contact with First Army in the north. General Eisenhower reluctantly decided that Bradley would hold on to Third Army and get what assistance he could from General Devers’s 6th Army Group while the First and Ninth Armies would come under the control of General Montgomery’s 21st Army Group.

From the 7th Armored Division’s decimation at Saint-Vith, it was obvious that any attempt to directly block German armor was futile. SHAEF developed a simple and direct battle plan to counter the German offensive. First, the hinges on the flanks must be held at all costs. The 99th and 2d Divisions on the Elsenborn Ridge on the north would be reinforced as quickly as possible. At the same time the southern hinge and the 4th Infantry Division near Echternach were also reinforced. The First and Ninth Armies on the north would pull out all available divisions and swing them south into the line, one at a time, to seal off the northern flank of the German penetration. At the same time, the Third Army on the south would send all available divisions to seal off the southern flank. No major defense positions would be established directly in front of the westward movement of the main German elements.

Montgomery was ordered to bring British troops to the west side of the Meuse near Dinant and prepare to make a stand. The Germans would have to commit troops to protect their flanks as they penetrated, and the deeper they penetrated the weaker the main forces would become. As soon as the northern and southern flanks were stabilized and the Germans had overextended themselves sufficiently, the American counterattack would attempt to cut off the base of the German salient and surround and destroy the German remnants.

On December 18, the 3d Armored Division was ordered to move south to Eupen. A German paratrooper unit had dropped into some woods south of the town on the road extending toward Malmédy and the Elsenborn Ridge. The paratroopers threatened the 1st Infantry Division and the other units on the hinge, so CCA sent down a task force to engage them. The paratroopers were soon eliminated, and CCA dug further into its positions.

The 30th Infantry Division had previously been ordered to secure Stavelot, which lay directly on the main line of advance of the 6th SS Panzer Army. In the wooded area just north of Stavelot was a large First Army gasoline dump containing 3 million gallons of gasoline. This would have given the 6th SS Panzer Army sufficient gasoline to go into Antwerp. On the night of December 19, CCB was ordered southward to the Spa and Stavelot area to back up the 30th Infantry Division.

Combat Command B left the Mausbach area late in the afternoon of December 19 and headed sixty miles south to Verviers, Spa, and Stavelot. They moved all night. The scattered snow soon turned to freezing rain, making the roads sheets of ice. All the vehicles had small blackout lights both front and rear. These consisted of a small housing with a slot about an inch long and about an eighth of an inch wide. In the dark, the lights were supposed to be visible at a distance of sixty yards. With the fog, mist, and sleet, the lights were barely visible more than a few feet away. It was impossible to maintain a normal sixty-yard march order. To get twelve hundred vehicles on the road and moving, it was necessary to jam them bumper to bumper and move as rapidly as possible.

The movement was a pure nightmare. Despite the system of guides and sentries that the MPs had worked out on short notice, there was still lots of confusion and a constant stop-and-start situation all night long. The intervals were extremely erratic, and often after prolonged stops the vehicles would get stretched out. When this happened, the vehicle in the rear would drive rapidly to catch up, but in the mist and darkness it often came upon another stopped vehicle and banged into the rear of it. If a two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck happened to hit a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier, it would simply knock it off the road. If a tank skidded into a Jeep, it would have squashed it flatter than a pancake. I made sure I didn’t get in front of a tank that night.

The problem of unsnarling the wrecks, taking care of broken-down vehicles, and keeping everything moving in an orderly manner was the responsibility of the maintenance groups. The last vehicle in each section of each column was a maintenance vehicle. Following each column were ordnance wreckers and crews to take care of anything that the unit maintenance crews could not handle themselves. By dividing the maintenance into various levels and echelons, a particular problem could be taken care of at the lowest level as expeditiously as the facilities available would allow. This way the heavy ordnance maintenance crews and wreckers were required to take care of only the major problems.

In addition to this, we had our regular routine breakdown maintenance. A column of twelve hundred vehicles, approximately half of them tanks, half-tracks, and other combat vehicles, would normally experience 150 to 200 breakdowns during a night march of fifty to sixty miles. When this happened, the vehicles would be repaired on the shoulder of the road. If this could not be done quickly, crews were told to stay with the vehicles, and the ordnance maintenance heavy units from the rear of the column would get to them in due time.

Sixty percent of the combat command had arrived in the assembly area by daybreak on December 20. The remaining vehicles were scattered along the highway, and it was late in the afternoon before the majority of them arrived. It took an entire day before the worst wrecks were cleared up. In a few isolated instances, drivers got lost, and the entire crews used this as an excuse to shack up in some remote Belgian farmhouse. One oddball GI from the maintenance battalion got lost and wound up at Liège. When the MPs apprehended him six weeks later, he was wearing an Eisenhower jacket with captain’s bars and both air force and ordnance lapel insignias. The MPs became suspicious because he was obviously out of uniform. He was returned to maintenance battalion custody and could have been charged with desertion in the face of the enemy, which was a capital offense. The charges were later reduced to extended AWOL and impersonating an officer. He was given a section 8 (incompetent for military service) and a dishonorable discharge.

The army, like any other cross section of the American population, had its share of misfits. Almost all soldiers, even lieutenants (if you can believe it), were prone to goof off from time to time. This acted as a stress relief valve to offset some of the fear and terror that gnawed at the guts of the soldier in combat. All the average American soldier wanted was for the war to end so he could go home. In spite of this, the great majority of American soldiers did their duty with great courage and valor, as proven by the terrible sacrifices they made.

In spite of all the planning, the night of December 19 was one of violent contrasts for the maintenance people. There were long periods when the crews, working under blackout conditions, would have to crawl under a tank or other wrecked vehicle to hook up a towing cable. In some instances a tank or truck would be on its side, and the men would have to crawl in rain-soaked ditches to hook up the cables. The first priority was to get the combat vehicles on the road, then the wheeled vehicles still able to run, and finally those that had to be repaired in place or towed to the next VCP. My job was to stay behind the tank column, find out where it was going, and offer ordnance contact as soon as the firefight began. In spite of all the breakdowns and wrecks, the road march soon settled down into a typical start-and-stop situation.

During one of the long waiting periods on the road, I reflected on the situation. This was the first time we had actually seen the enemy achieve a major breakthrough in our lines. Rumors were flying. The Germans had broken through on a broad front with twenty to thirty divisions and were still going strong. They were killing prisoners. German paratroopers had dropped behind our lines and German soldiers in American Jeeps and uniforms were infiltrating our lines.

The situation was highly fluid, and we never knew exactly where the enemy was. A definite change in the mood of the men was evident. Although morale was still good, there was a great deal of anxiety because this was our first experience in a major retreat. I began to understand how the German soldier must have felt during the greater part of the fighting from Normandy up to the Siegfried line. Although a retreat is difficult for everyone, it must have been much harder on the infantry than on the armored troops. After all, we spent most of our time behind enemy lines when we were advancing. The main difference here was that instead of advancing most of the time, we were going backward. That’s one hell of a difference.

Stavelot–Trois Ponts–Stoumont–La Gleize

After arriving in Spa on December 20, CCB immediately went into action. It was attached to the XVIII Airborne Corps, and Maj. Gen. James Gavin ordered us to support the 30th Infantry Division in its attack to retake Stavelot and prevent the Germans from getting to the gasoline dump. At the same time, CCB was to attempt to establish a line south of Stavelot to further extend our northern flank.

Combat Command B advanced southward in three columns. Task Force Lovelady, the eastern column, advanced from Spa down the middle of the gasoline dump to the intersection of the road between La Gleize and Stavelot and from there to the western side of Stavelot to support the 30th Division’s attack. Part of the column went southward to extend the defense line. Task Force McGeorge in the middle secured La Gleize. Task Force Jordan on the west advanced through the rugged woods to secure Stoumont and extend the line farther.

When I arrived in Spa, I immediately drove through the main part of town to the top of the hill, where CCB had turned off to head down through the gas dump to Stavelot. The dump, which spread over several square miles and was well camouflaged from the air, consisted of five-gallon cans in thousand-can stacks about fifty yards apart along both sides of small firebreak roads that spread in a geometric pattern throughout the forest. A reinforced quartermaster truck group had been ordered forward to move the gas out of there as quickly as possible and take it to another dump across the Meuse River in France, where it would be safe from the German advance.

A GMC truck could handle only two hundred five-gallon cans, so this would have taken three thousand truckloads. The quartermaster group had brought up a number of ten-ton tractor-trailer trucks and parked them along both sides of the main road in Spa. The plan called for the GMC trucks to load the gas in the dump, unload it onto the ten-ton trucks, then return for another load. As soon as the tractor-trailer was filled up, it was supposed to take off as rapidly as possible, unload the gas, and make a return trip.

The quartermaster troops had worked out a system for loading the GMC trucks. They worked in four-man teams. Each truck had a small portable manual roller conveyor about twenty feet long. The truck was backed up as close as possible to the gasoline stack. Two men got on top of the stack and two men were in the truck with the conveyor stretched between them. The men on the stack would load the cans onto the conveyor, which angled slightly downward, and the other two men would pick the cans off the rolling conveyor and stack them in the truck.

When left to their own devices, the American GI could always come up with an innovative solution. Pretty soon, the GIs started loading the trucks to a boogie cadence. They were spurred on not only by competition among the various trucks but also because the 991st Field Artillery had started firing 155mm shells over their heads onto a road junction south of the dump.

I had gone about a hundred yards down the road into the dump when one of these GMC trucks loaded with gas came screaming around the curve heading straight toward me. My driver, White, pulled onto the shoulder of the road; the truck missed us by inches. The expression on the truckdriver’s face was frozen as he came wheeling by, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop for any Jeep. We pulled back on the road and drove another fifty yards or so when another truck came screaming out of the dump.

After repeating this five or six times, I finally contacted the quartermaster lieutenant in charge of the group. I told him I was the 3d Armored Division maintenance liaison officer and was trying to contact some elements of CCB near Stavelot. I asked him if he could hold a couple of these trucks for a few seconds until I could get by them.

He looked at me with a sheepish grin. “Lieutenant, I had to sweat my damn guts out to get these guys to come in here in the first place and unload this gas, and I sure as hell can’t stop them now. If I can just keep these guys coming fast enough and unloading this gas to keep it away from the Krauts, I’ll have done the best I can.”

I surmised by his bearing that he was a brand-new second lieutenant right out of officer candidate school and was probably greener than I was. I could have pulled rank on him and chewed his butt a little bit, but I knew that it probably wouldn’t do much good. And I couldn’t blame the quartermaster troops for being nervous about those 155s being lobbed over their heads. After all, if one of them fell short in the dump, it could have been a disaster. I realized that any further attempt to get through the dump by that route was futile. I turned around, went back to Spa, and found another route.

One of the startling things about the Battle of the Bulge was how rapidly the rear-echelon service troops responded to the situation. By December 20, four days after the initial assault, the German breakthrough was fifty miles wide and thirty to thirty-five miles deep. SHAEF’s defensive tactic of sealing off the flanks was forcing the Germans to penetrate deeper and in turn commit their own troops on the flanks, while at the same time seeking out a weak point where they could swing north and cross the Meuse River. Thus, when Kampfgruppe Peiper of the 6th SS Panzer Army took Stavelot, elements of the 30th Division came to retake Stavelot, seal off the gas dump, and establish a line on the northern flank. Because this flank was still highly fluid, the 30th Division was able to block off only the main road from the north through Stavelot. It was not possible for the 30th Division to block off all the firebreaks. As a result, the 6th SS Panzer Army constantly sent patrols to try to get through one of these lanes and bypass the 30th Division’s positions. Until the 30th Division arrived north of Stavelot, the only thing standing between the Germans and the road to the gas dump were several small detachments of COMZ troops.

These consisted of engineers, signal, ordnance, quartermaster, and antiaircraft troops ranging in size from five to twenty-five men. The men carried .30-caliber M1 carbines, which had about half the range of the Garand but were still good weapons at close range. Every available man, including cooks, bakers, clerks, runners, mechanics, and drivers, was pressed into service.

One such group on the road from Spa to Stavelot consisted of a young engineer construction lieutenant with some engineer and antiaircraft troops together with a 90mm antiaircraft gun and one machine gun. They were the only roadblock north of Stavelot on this particular highway to the gas dump. They put the 90mm antiaircraft gun in a defiladed position off the left shoulder of the road and depressed the gun barrel to where it was just barely above the pavement. They placed the machine gun on the other side of the road, then set up small groups of riflemen in foxholes on both sides of the road. The total group consisted of no more than ten to twelve men, but they had a well dug in fortified position.

The 90mm, like the German 88, could be operated as an antitank as well as an antiaircraft weapon. The group had both armor-piercing and HE ammunition. There were numerous roadblocks of this type around the area, so whenever the advance guard of one of the German task groups approached they would immediately draw fire. Not realizing the size or nature of the roadblock, the German units would try to bypass and infiltrate around the roadblock. In so doing, they would encounter another roadblock from another small group of Americans dug in along one of the small fire lanes or bypass roads. Because the Germans had no way of knowing whether these were outposts of a major defensive position or just merely individual roadblocks, they were slowed considerably—enough to allow the 30th Infantry Division and CCB of the 3d Armored Division to secure the gas dump and establish a strong position along the northern flank.

The hauling of the gas continued at a feverish pace, spurred on by accelerated artillery fire. As Task Force Lovelady approached the junction on the road between La Gleize and Stavelot, it ran into increasing German opposition. A firefight in this area destroyed a small German convoy of three ammunition trucks and three antitank guns. The American column split into two groups, one heading eastward toward Stavelot and the other southward toward Trois Ponts. Just north of Trois Ponts, the group ran into a heavy armored column consisting of Panther and King Tiger tanks from the 1st SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Panzer Division, considered the toughest panzer unit in the entire German army. Our lightly armored M4 Shermans didn’t stand a chance against these German behemoths, and we immediately lost our four lead Sherman tanks. Task Force Lovelady withdrew slightly, established roadblocks, and called for heavy artillery fire.

In one incident, an M12 gun carriage with its 155mm GPF rifle loaded came around a bend in the road and suddenly found itself face to face with a King Tiger. Fortunately, the 155 was pointed directly at the base of the King Tiger’s turret. The gun commander gave the order to fire. The 155 struck the King Tiger at the base of the gun mantlet where the turret joins the deck. The explosion ruptured the thin top deck armor and blew the turret off the tank, instantly killing the entire crew. Had the shell struck a few inches lower on the front glacis plate, it would have exploded harmlessly, and the King Tiger would have been able to drill the M12 from end to end with its high-velocity 88. Such were the fortunes of war.

Back north in the gasoline dump, the boogie cadence picked up a terrific rate of speed and the quartermaster crews started loading those damn trucks like crazy. No sooner was a truck loaded than off it went. I found out later that as the artillery fire increased some of the drivers panicked and kept going when they got to Spa, not stopping to load the gasoline in the large 10-ton semi-trailers. Like a race horse grabbing the bit in his mouth, they went off in every direction except toward the Germans. Some of these gas trucks wound up at Liège, Antwerp, Brussels, and various points in northern Paris.
¹
At least the damn Germans didn’t get it. This was still a remarkable undertaking, when one considers that it took First Army over two months to accumulate this much gas and it took the quartermaster troops some 24 hours to get it safely away from the Germans.

In the meantime, the other two task forces of CCB proceeded southward in two columns. Task Force Lovelady withdrew north from Trois Ponts and Petit-Coo and proceeded down a secondary road to Parfondroy preparatory to a joint attack on Stavelot with the 30th Infantry Division. It was here that they discovered the massacre of innocent civilians by the brutal SS troops of Kampfgruppe Peiper. Numerous bodies of old men, women, and children were scattered around the village; they had been shot by the SS. The 30th Division troops in Stavelot told us that they had encountered similar massacres there. Word of these massacres undoubtedly contributed to the shortage of live SS prisoners taken by American GIs.

The battle of Stavelot raged back and forth for several days. Before CCB got there on December 20, the 117th Regimental Combat Team of the 30th Infantry Division engaged German
panzergrenadier
s with heavy King Tiger tanks, without any forward support of their own. Because the 117th Regiment was spread over a large area, their flanks were constantly threatened.

Company A of the 117th Infantry, commanded by Capt. John Kent, found a number of fifty-five-gallon drums loaded with gasoline. Kent told me later that his men removed incendiary rounds from .30-caliber machine-gun ammunition and loaded them in their Garand rifles. When a German tank column emerged from the narrow streets of Stavelot and started up the hill, the GIs rolled several drums of gasoline down the hill, then fired incendiary bullets into the gas drums, which immediately erupted into a blazing explosion. As the crew attempted to bail out of the lead tank, they were met by a fusillade of small-arms fire.

When the GIs found the roads frozen too hard to plant mines, they would take a mine and tie a light rope to the cage. They would place the mine in a ditch on one side of the road with a GI on the other side holding the rope. When a tank approached, they would pull the mine across the road in front of the tracks. The tank would strike the mine, breaking the tracks. When the crews bailed out, the GIs would cut loose with small-arms fire and kill the crew members before they could get off the tank.

In the meantime, a major battle had developed on the northern flank, and CCB and the 30th Division were joined by the 82d Airborne. The entire force came under the XVIII Airborne Corps, which brought up additional artillery and other supporting troops.

Both Task Force Jordan and Task Force McGregor were stopped by heavy German tank and antitank fire. Task Force Jordan withdrew slightly, regrouped, and overcame resistance in Stoumont. Jordan then proceeded toward La Gleize to join up with Task Force McGregor coming down from the north. After an extremely heavy firefight, the German resistance was overcome and the entire German column was put out of action.

This operation along the Stavelot–La Gleize–Stoumont line appears to be the first time that the main armored thrust of the 6th SS Panzer Army was engaged head-on by a major combination of American armor and infantry. They were stopped dead. They not only failed to capture the gasoline dump, which could have been the most valuable prize of the entire campaign, they were forced to extend their efforts farther westward and expose their ever-lengthening flanks on the north. This, in turn, weakened their forward thrust as they constantly committed troops to hold this flank against American pressure.