The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (78 page)

The castle too was burning. Flames danced from the tower roof and black smoke stained the whitewashed inner walls. A final radio call went out Monday morning, December 18, before a panzer battered down the heavy wooden gates. At one
P.M.
the little garrison hoisted a white flag in surrender. Silence settled over Clervaux but for crackling fires and the shatter of glass from German looting. In a small inn that once housed the Red Cross club, a sign in the front window still proclaimed, “Of course we’re open.”

Not far from Clervaux, frightened civilians in another Luxembourg town wielded hammers and axes to demolish a huge sign erected in the fall to welcome the Americans. On the heels of the retreating 109th Infantry, three thousand men, women, and children fled Diekirch in bitter cold at midnight on Tuesday, abandoning four hundred others too old, infirm, or stubborn to leave. On Cota’s order, undelivered Christmas packages and letters were piled in a Wiltz courtyard, doused with gasoline, and burned; the division command post pulled out Tuesday, first to Bastogne, then to Sibret, and eventually to Neufchâteau. A gaggle of Army bandsmen, engineers, paymasters, and sawmill operators fought as a rear guard until overrun by whistle-blowing German paratroopers, who reduced Wiltz with machine pistols and forty panzers.

“This was the end,” the official Army history recorded. “Shots, blazing vehicles, and screaming wounded.” Some GIs escaped by night in groups of ten with map scraps and radium-dial compasses. Several hundred others were captured, including one young officer who described being propped on a German staff car as a hood ornament, legs dangling over the grille, and driven east through march columns of Wehrmacht reinforcements who were “laughing at me as the trophy.”

The 110th Infantry had been annihilated, with 2,500 battle casualties. Sixty American tanks were reduced to smoking wreckage. Yet once again space had been traded for time, a few miles for forty-eight hours, and once again that bargain favored the defenders. The southern shoulder was jammed almost as effectively as the northern. Fifth Panzer Army now marched on Bastogne, true enough, but the stumbling, tardy advance by three bloodied divisions hardly resembled the blitzkrieg of Hitler’s fever dream.

*   *   *

Only in the center of the German onslaught did
HERBSTNEBEL
find unalloyed success. Here many of the fourteen thousand green soldiers in the 106th Division sheltered in captured Siegfried Line pillboxes, as enemy spearheads to the left and right tried on Saturday to envelop them in a pincer movement around the Schnee Eifel hogback. General Manteuffel hoped to capture St.-Vith within a day; the five main roads and three rail lines converging on that Belgian market hub, sixteen miles to the west, were vital given the hazards of moving cross-country through the Ardennes. On no segment of the Western Front were GIs more outnumbered, yet sharp firefights that morning imperiled the German timetable here as elsewhere. After one enemy column was slapped around, a German soldier shouted, in English, “Take a ten-minute break. We’ll be back.” A GI answered, “Fuck you, we’ll still be here.”

Not for long, at least on the left flank. Here about half of the sixteen hundred troopers in the 14th Cavalry Group plugged the Losheim Gap with flimsy armored cars and a few tank destroyers in eight sugar-bowl strongpoints under the group commander, Colonel Mark A. Devine, Jr., a beetle-browed disciplinarian with a penchant for telling Belgian mayors, “Your damn town is dirty. Clean it up.” Facing paratroopers from the southern edge of Sixth Panzer Army and Volksgrenadiers from the northern edge of Fifth Panzer Army, the cavalry buckled. “Front lines still intact. Things well in hand,” Devine reported from Manderfeld, but German shock troops gobbled up the sugar bowls one by one: Krewinkel, Afst, Kobscheid. A final radio message from Roth—“Tanks seventy-five yards from command post. Firing direct fire. Out”—was followed by silence. At four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, after an enemy shell wounded a staff officer and knocked Devine to the floor of his command post, he received permission from the 106th Division headquarters in St.-Vith to pull back two miles. Troopers put Manderfeld to the torch and retreated to the next ridgeline, blowing up eight of a dozen tank destroyers to forestall capture.

Devine’s behavior now grew odd; perhaps he was suffering effects from the concussive blast. As his troopers dug in, he drove to St.-Vith, where for hours he loitered around the hectic 106th Division offices, eating bread, cheese, and then a breakfast of hot cakes and coffee. One officer thought his demeanor unremarkable, but the assistant division commander found him “almost incoherent.… He was nervous, could barely control his actions.” The chief of staff described him as “excited and anxious.” The division commander, Major General Alan W. Jones, anxious himself, offered scant advice other than to hold tight.

Instead, at daybreak on Sunday Devine returned to his men and, though there was little enemy pressure, ordered them to fall back farther, this time without authorization. He again drove to St.-Vith early in the afternoon, bursting into Jones’s office. “The Germans are right behind us!” he warned, his face flushed. “They’ve broken through in the north. My group is practically destroyed.” Sent back to his cavalrymen, the colonel ordered yet another retreat contrary to orders, now to Poteau,
west
of St.-Vith and seventeen miles from the original front.

At dusk on Sunday, Devine set out once more for St.-Vith, this time driving southeast with his executive officer and entire senior staff in a convoy of three jeeps and an armored car, each burning blackout lights. Thwarted by torrents of traffic crawling west, the little procession turned around in the dark only to hear a sharp command of
“Halt!”
a mile east of Recht. As an approaching German picket did a double take at the white star insignia on the armored car, an officer in the lead jeep pulled a pistol and shot the enemy soldier in the face. A sergeant then unleashed a cackling burst from a .50-caliber machine gun, and in the ensuing gunfight the Americans scattered through the woods. At midnight a disheveled, incoherent Devine appeared in the Poteau tavern serving as his command post, where he told a subordinate, “I want you to take over”; at four
A.M.
Monday, he was evacuated to Vielsalm by the unit dentist. A battalion surgeon later found Devine in La Roche with “a wild gleam in his eye,” directing traffic and urging passersby to counterattack immediately. Six grams of sodium amytal put him into a deep sleep and removed him from the front.

The damage had been done, but even a stalwart stand by the 14th Cavalry likely would not have long postponed the catastrophe that followed. With the American left flank abruptly unhinged, German paratroopers on Sunday had cantered through Manderfeld to Lanzerath, brushing sleeves with Colonel Peiper’s SS column and further pressuring the 99th Division to the north as well as imperiling the 106th Division in the south.

In St.-Vith, General Jones, a stocky native of Washington State with brilliantine hair and a Clark Gable mustache, sought counsel from the VIII Corps commander, General Middleton. Except for an engineer battalion, virtually all division reserves had been hustled into the fight. Should the 106th’s infantry regiments, entrenched along a twenty-eight-mile front, pull back?

“You know how things are up there better than I do,” Middleton said in a phone call from Bastogne. “But I agree it would be wise to withdraw them.” In one of those mischances so common in war, a brief disruption on the line apparently kept Jones from hearing the second sentence. He hung up, telling his staff in St.-Vith, “Middleton says we should leave them in,” even as Middleton told subordinates in Bastogne, “I just talked to Jones. I told him to pull his regiments off the Schnee Eifel.” The 106th would stand pat, despite howling barbarians on both flanks. “He felt that he could hold,” Middleton later observed. “He made a mistake.… He had a fighting heart.”

Jones also believed that help was on the way. VIII Corps promised that combat commands from both the 7th and 9th Armored Divisions would soon arrive, perhaps within hours. That optimism failed to account for the “indescribable confusion” of double- and triple-banked traffic “hurtling to the rear,” in one major’s description. “It was a case of every dog for himself … the most perfect traffic jam I have ever seen.” Another officer conceded, “It wasn’t orderly, it wasn’t military, it wasn’t a pretty sight.” A tanker plowing against the exodus at one mile per hour reported that “the fear-crazed occupants of the vehicles fleeing to the rear had lost all reason.”

By midday on Sunday, only the advance guard from Combat Command B of the 7th Armored Division had arrived in St. Vith. The commander, a newly promoted brigadier general named Bruce C. Clarke, had been preparing to leave for Paris to undergo gallstone surgery when word came that “Alan Jones is having some trouble at St. Vith.” Clarke, a craggy engineer from upstate New York, found that General Jones’s trouble included Germans on three sides, a disintegrating cavalry group, and fretful anxiety over his son, a lieutenant somewhere on the Schnee Eifel. Division staff officers stomped about, burning maps and flinging equipment into truck beds for evacuation. At one
P.M.
, Jones phoned Middleton again, telling the corps commander, “Things are looking up.… We are going to be all right.” After ringing off he told an astonished Clarke that Middleton had “enough troubles already” without worrying about the 106th Division.

The crackle of small-arms fire sent both generals hurrying to the third floor of the division command post in steep-roofed St. Josef’s Kloster, where the devout had long cared for the sick, schooled the young, and bathed the bodies of the dead. Muzzle flashes twinkled along a bluff just east of town. “I’ve thrown in my last chips,” Jones said, turning to Clarke. “I’ve got nothing left. You take it now.” And with that General Jones soon joined the frantic exodus to the west.

*   *   *

Jones’s stand-fast decision had left two infantry regiments, the 422nd and 423rd, and five artillery battalions exposed to entrapment on the Schnee Eifel. On Sunday the trap snapped shut when German columns from north and south converged in Schönberg, just across the Belgian border east of St.-Vith. South of town a third regiment, the 424th Infantry, had earlier that day managed to beat back the enemy envelopment and thus escape entrapment, but by dusk nine thousand other GIs were surrounded on a bleak, snowy German moor. An icy west wind soughed through the fir stands, carrying the fateful whine of panzer engines from the American rear. GIs huddling for warmth in foxholes along the West Wall listened impassively, displaying, one officer recorded, “absolutely no expression.”

At 2:15 on Monday morning, a radio message from General Jones at last ordered the two regiments to retreat toward Schönberg, where an armored spearhead from St.-Vith would help them break out. Ammunition, food, and water were to be dropped by parachute. Colonel George L. Descheneaux, commander of the 422nd Infantry, bowed his head. “My poor men,” he said. “They’ll be cut to pieces.”

Cooks made towering stacks of pancakes, then destroyed their kitchens. In dense fog at dawn the anabasis began, a serpentine column of battalions trudging through the snow, vaguely following a compass azimuth of 270 degrees, while a parallel procession of trucks, jeeps, and towed artillery bumped along cow paths and game trails. Men listened for V-weapons overhead and sought to follow the sound westward. Even Descheneaux muttered, “Where the hell are we?” Huge orange panels were readied to mark a drop zone, but no drop came. Bad weather and “command incoordination,” as the AAF later termed the confusion, kept some planes grounded in England, while two dozen others shuttled emergency supplies between airfields in Belgium and France, futilely seeking information about the besieged regiments.

By midday the Germans had found them though Allied pilots could not. Artillery and mortar salvos fractured the columns, killing or wounding hundreds and scattering regiments, battalions, and companies across the tableland. Unsure where to shoot, given enemy fire falling from at least three directions, gunners began to spike their guns. With mortar ammunition gone and many riflemen reduced to just a few rounds, wet, cold, hungry troops crawled down ravines or sheltered among the firs and waited for dark. Another radio message from General Jones, now in Vielsalm, advised that no armored relief column was likely to appear. He added:

Attack Schönberg. Do maximum damage to enemy there. Then attack toward St. Vith. This mission is of greatest importance to the nation. Good luck.

At daybreak on Tuesday, three battalions from the 422nd Infantry, quite lost but still game, moved out abreast only to be lacerated by German tank and machine-gun fire. Mortars walked through the ranks with a heavy footfall. GIs again went to ground, although not before unleashing a five-minute fusillade against shadowy figures in a nearby stream bed who proved to be comrades from the 423rd Infantry. Their commander, Colonel Charles C. Cavender, leaned against a tree, a study in dejection. “Well, Colonel,” the regimental chaplain said, “this isn’t exactly as we planned, is it?” Cavender shook his head. “No, Chaplain, it isn’t.”

By one
P.M.
, at least one battalion had been pared to just fifty men. Relentless cannonading flayed the pastures between Radscheid and Auw. An icy breeze stirred the hair of helmetless boys sprawled on their backs, pupils fixed and sightless, “their skin that yellow-white of the newly dead,” one lieutenant noted. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw records blared from German loudspeakers, interspersed with promises of “showers, warm beds, and hotcakes.” A GI sobbing in a ditch shouted, “Go blow it out your ass, you German son of a bitch!” Spirits soared for a moment when a clanking Sherman appeared on the Schönberg road; then enemy crewmen inside the captured tank opened fire, and all hope perished.

At 2:30
P.M.
, with two thousand of his men now packed into a last-stand perimeter four hundred yards across, Colonel Descheneaux summoned his subordinates. “We’re still sitting like fish in a pond,” he told them. “I’m going to save as many men as I can, and I don’t give a damn if I’m court-martialed.” The order filtered through the ranks: “Destroy all weapons and equipment. We are about to surrender.” As soldiers smashed their rifles against tree trunks and tossed the last ammunition clips into a creek, a major knotted together two white handkerchiefs and set off in search of parley. Descheneaux sat on the lip of a slit trench, weeping. Half a mile away, Colonel Cavender had reached the same conclusion, giving his regiment thirty minutes to destroy all weapons and fling away any German souvenirs. An artillery officer stood on an ambulance waving a snow cape, bellowing, “We surrender.”