The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (15 page)

fleeing the town was no easy matter. The roads were under constant attack, and to the north, the forces of Kampfgruppe Peiper had closed off that escape route. Many refugees choked the road going west to Vielsalm and across the Salm river, adding to the tangled traf- fic jam of American units that were withdrawing. Mme. Elly Meurer of Saint Vith fled the town at the start of the battle, and wandered from farm to farm, sleep- ing among cattle in barns or basements amidst other despairing refugees. After walking in the bitter cold through heavy artillery and air bombardment, she and her sister took shelter in a disused railway tunnel a couple of miles outside Saint Vith. For over a month, they slept on the ground without blankets, drank melt- ed snow, and managed to hold out until the Americans returned to town on January 24. When the Americans asked the ladies to tell them their story, “we couldn’t,” Mme. Meurer recalled. “ We could not stop crying.” These women stayed in the railway tunnel until Feb- ruary 8, chiefly because their town was uninhabitable. Saint Vith had been utterly crushed during the fight- ing. When Belgian authorities arrived in early February to survey the scene, they found that “the commune of St. Vith is totally destroyed. There is not a single build- ing standing…. The area is completely empty of civil- ian inhabitants.” Ominously, American military au- thorities had no information on the whereabouts of the

population, and the Belgian High Commission for State Security urged that “an investigation should be under- taken immediately to determine the whereabouts of the residents of St. Vith.” A town of 2,800 people had vanished. The mayor estimated that there were 400 ci- vilian casualties (later studies suggest 250 townspeo- ple died); and he reported that 200 people were living in “deplorable” conditions in the basements of a few buildings and the town’s battered stone convent. They lacked everything: clothing, shoes, food, coal, or wood; medicine; even potable water. The U.S. Army opened a distribution point to give out dry rations to the few bedraggled civilians that turned up. Otherwise, Saint Vith had ceased to exist.
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Unlike Saint Vith, the town of Houffalize was given up without a fight. This small town on the Ourthe river had one main road through it, running north to Liège. Once the Germans punched through the weak U.S. line, Houffalize found itself right in the center of the bulge. With Liège to its north and Bastogne to its south, Houf- falize became an important road junction. The Ameri- cans had too few troops to hold the town and pulled out on December 19; they would concentrate instead on defending Bastogne. German troops rolled in be- fore dawn on December 20. Though the Germans were engaged in the greatest offensive in the western the-

ater of operations since 1940, they still found the time to arrest and interrogate civilians suspected of resis- tance activity. Immediately upon their return to town, the Germans ordered the mayor, Joseph Maréchal, to round up all the former resistance members; he re- fused and, fearing for his own life, fled. But the Ger- mans found documents naming many of the resistance members, who were then arrested, beaten, and mur- dered. On December 22–23, six suspected resistance members were arrested, interrogated, and shot. On December 24, the Germans killed two more, and on the 26th, three more.
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On Christmas day, the killing continued but now it came from the sky. American aircraft of the Ninth Air Force hit Houffalize, trying to destroy German armored units in the town and block road access through the town. But of course civilians paid a high price. The Christmas bombing took two civilian lives; the next day, in another raid, twenty-eight civilians died beneath U.S. bombs. On December 27, eight more civilians were killed. And this continued uninterrupted for almost thirty days. On the 28th, two more died; on the 29th, one; on the 30th, three; on the 31st, two. On each of the first five days of the new year, Allied bombs killed civilians in Houffal- ize. But it was the raid on January 6 that citizens of Houffalize recall as “atrocious, frightful, horrible, ter-

rible, terrifying.” On that day, 119 people were killed in a thirty-minute air raid by U.S. bombers, between 3:25 and 4:00 A.M. The civilian dead ranged in age from an eighty-five-year-old widow, Joséphine Martiny, to a three-year-old boy, Jacques Decker. This was not the last bombing run: on January 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, and 29, more Houffalois died under Allied bombs. But the bulk of the population was by then either dead or in flight. During this month of fighting four members of the Bol- let family were killed; five members of the Delme fami- ly died, and six of the Dubru family. The entire Hoffman family—father, mother, and four children—was wiped out. Joseph Maréchal, the mayor, returned to his vil- lage to find his own family dead beneath the ruins. In all, 192 people died in this small town during the Battle of the Bulge. Twenty-seven of the victims were under the age of fifteen. Of these 192 people, all but eight died at the hands of their liberators.
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When Belgian investigators arrived in late January to as- sess the damage to the town, only 130 people remained of a population of 1,325. Most of them were living, in glacial cold, in the vaulted basement of the rectory. They had nothing: no food, shelter, medicine, clothing. “One cannot say enough,” wrote one reporter, “about how these people have suffered.” There were not even any cattle or pigs left alive in the town; what livestock

the Germans had not pillaged or butchered, the bombs had killed. Hundreds of bodies were unburied, many of them beneath rubble; four shelters with dozens of townspeople in them had been hit on January 6, and those corpses had yet to be uncovered. Although the mayor called for immediate help to recover the dead, they lay unburied in the ruins for over a month. The aid crews lacked the heavy equipment to pull away the rubble and debris.
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General Omar Bradley, who had ordered the destruction of the town, wrote later with some regret about it: “Simple, poor, and unpretentious, the village had offended no one. Yet it was destroyed simply because it sat astride an undistinguished road junction.”
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A shockingly honest assessment.

Sometimes, civilians died because Allied air forces were criminally sloppy. Just a few miles to the east of Stavelot, in Malmédy, American aircraft mistakenly bombed both their own soldiers and civilians by ac- cident not just once but three times. On December 23, Malmédy was hit by B-26 Marauder bombers; on the 24th, it was hit by the ill-named B-24 “Liberator” bombers; and on the 25th, another flight of B-26s pounded the town—all mistakenly. In addition to kill- ing 37 American soldiers who were among the heavy presence defending the town, Allied bombers killed 202 civilians: 129 from Malmédy and 73 refugees from other towns. The city was set on fire; the water pumps were either broken by the shelling or frozen and thus useless in containing the blaze. Among the dead civil- ians were five members of the Anselme family, includ- ing two-year-old Jean; five members of the Delhasse family; six members of the Gohimont family; and seven members of the Melchior family. Maria Renier lost her twelve-year-old daughter, Anny, when, on Christmas Eve, a 250-pound bomb from a “Liberator” landed on her house. The girl’s body was laid out on a stretcher in the freezing cold, spattered with mud, clothed in a col- orful woolen jacket she had made. Her mother recalled “that she loved to knit; she had put it on for Christmas.” The town of Malmédy put out a small brochure to com- memorate the mistaken Christmas bombing. It con-

cluded, with some restraint: “It was a Christmas unlike any other; in truth, it was a Christmas in hell.”
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Despite the calamity at Malmédy, civilians were usually safe when their towns were held by American troops. Thus Bastogne, the famous redoubt where the Ameri- cans held out against German encirclement, was not heavily bombed by air, making it survivable for civil- ians who were well sheltered in the caves of the town’s stone buildings. To be sure, the city was shelled relent- lessly by the German divisions that desperately wanted to take this stubbornly defended town, and residents spent anxious nights in darkness and cold. But accord- ing to one report on liberated Bastogne in late Janu- ary, the health of the 1,200 remaining residents (out of a preinvasion population of 5,000) was good, and only twenty people had been killed in the fighting for the town.
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The real damage done in the Ardennes came when American troops and aircraft were turned upon towns that had to be retaken from the Germans—a reminder that death always precedes liberation. Just three miles south of Bastogne, the town of Sainlez was seized by the Germans on December 20. It lay directly on the road between Bastogne and Arlon, along which the 4th Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army would stage its famous thrust north in relief of Bastogne. On Christmas Eve the town, then in German hands, was

leveled by American air bombardment, using phos- phorous bombs that set the town ablaze. By the time the Americans retook this village, on December 27, it was a mere smoking pile of rubble. “Only” twenty or so inhabitants were killed. But among these twenty were eight members of the Didier family, whose house took a direct hit: Joseph Didier, forty-six years old; Marie- Angéla, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renée, thirteen; Lucile, eleven; Bernadette, nine; Lucien, eight; and Noël, six years old. For a small village like Sainlez, such a loss had an apocalyptic quality to it, a moment of confron- tation with the eternal and the unknown. At a memo- rial service for the victims, a local religious instructor,

M. Albert Boeur, spoke with heartrending tenderness about the events of Christmas 1944 in Sainlez. “At the very moment when so many Christians were singing before the crèche in their churches, Joseph Didier, a fervent Christian, departed for eternity with his seven cherubs…How difficult it is to penetrate the designs of the Lord! But ladies and gentlemen,” he continued, in words that could have been uttered in thousands of villages across Europe, let us honor the memory of our dead, victims of the bombing; let us not cry for them in vain but let us pray for them and invoke their names; they are martyrs who will aid us to bear in a Christian manner the hardships we have suffered. They will not have the happiness to celebrate with us the victory that

is now at hand; but they will celebrate it in Heaven, more pure and more beautiful. As for us, families cru- elly tested—husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters of our victims, let your tears flow; they are justified. Then recover your courage and recall that your dead ones are still at your side, their eyes— full of glory—gaze into your eyes, full of tears…. Dear departed, victims of this catastrophe of December, rest in peace, in eternal peace in close union with the all- powerful God that you served throughout your lives. Goodbye!
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D

URING THE CATASTROPHIC fighting in the winter of 1944–45, Belgians rarely rebuked the American military forces for the damage and de- struction they caused. Civilians knew that the Germans were the cause of their afflictions and that the Ameri- cans, however clumsily, had come to free the country from the rapacious invaders. To this day, dozens of memorials and tributes to fallen American soldiers dot the Belgian countryside, and are tended reverentially by local groups. This has something to do with the work that the Americans undertook once they returned to these small rural towns in the Ardennes. Consider one small case. In La Roche, a town about ten miles west of Houffalize that was overrun by the Germans in mid- December, repeatedly bombed by the Americans, and

finally liberated on January 19, the returning U.S. forces found a town in a state of total collapse. Yet Americans went to work to tackle the health and sanitation prob- lems of the civilians still in the village. Major Edward O’Donnell of Detachment E1G2, Company G, 2nd ECA Regiment, of the First Army’s G-5 section, traveled to La Roche to evaluate the recovery work. He found that 50 percent of the buildings had been destroyed; about 200 civilian and 100 German bodies still lay trapped beneath the rubble of the town, unburied and rotting; there was no municipal water or sewage; water was obtained from a stream running through town; and of 1,200 civilians there, 400 had chronic diarrhea. Yet the 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron was feeding 190 people three meals a day, working with the Belgian Red Cross to assure steady supplies. The Belgian gov- ernment had also sent a detachment of nurses, trained rescue personnel, an ambulance, and quantities of medical supplies into the town. Two nurses had made house-to-house calls with a DDT sprayer, delousing the inhabitants. About 100 children under ten still in the town were eligible for extra rations of canned milk and bread. American soldiers from the 298th Combat Engineers were busily setting up a water purification and pumping station. And La Roche was no anomaly: this sort of work was going on in dozens of other vil- lages and towns, both during and after the Battle of

the Bulge. Having done so much to destroy, Americans proved more than willing to begin the work of repair and recovery.
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