War Stories III (37 page)

On 17 September, the 82nd and the 101st Airborne landed and quickly seized most of their objectives—the bridges over the River Meuse at Nijmegen and the Wilhelmina and Zuid Willems Canals near Eindhoven—both in Holland. The British 1st Parachute Division, however, was dropped a full six miles from the Rhine crossings at Arnhem—and was quickly surrounded by the veteran 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions. The advancing Sherman tanks of the Guards Armored Division—restricted to a single narrow road for their approach—never made it to Arnhem. On 24 September, the 9,000 valiant, lightly armed paratroopers, outnumbered, outgunned, and fighting house-to-house, were finally overwhelmed. Only 2,000 of them made it back across the river. All the rest were killed or captured by the Germans.

Hitler was emboldened by the bloody “victory” at Arnhem and the overall Allied offensive slow-down precipitated by lengthy supply lines. Despite the looming advances by the Red Army in the east, Hitler ordered his generals to “harden” their defenses and prepare for a counter-attack. The effect of his order was almost immediate. By early October, Wehrmacht “personnel officers” had culled through every command and rear-echelon unit to find any able-bodied man able to fight.

On the river approaches to Antwerp, 65,000 troops under General Gustav von Zangen fought desperately to hold off Montgomery's Canadians from 6 October until 8 November as the Brits fought in terrible weather to open the port. Fortifications on the Siegfried Line—the “west wall” along the Saar River—were improved by the Germans and manned against the U.S. 1st and 9th Armies. In the Hürtgen Forest—a fifty-square-mile swath of densely wooded steep terrain along the Belgian-German border—Hitler Youth, Home Guardsmen, and
Volksgrenadiers
inflicted more than 25,000 casualties on the Americans, fighting them to a bloody standstill, in their futile effort to capture the Ruhr River dams.

As autumn turned cold, even Patton, strapped for lack of adequate fuel for his tanks, found it difficult to maneuver in Lorraine against the remnants of German Army Group G that had escaped the Allied landings in southern France. At the fortress city of Metz, the U.S. 95th Infantry Division, in which my father served, was decimated in a month-long battle that started on 18 November. Meanwhile, in the deep draws of the Eifel Mountains, on the German side of the Ardennes forest frontier with Belgium, Hitler was gathering eight Panzer Divisions, two Parachute Divisions, and a Panzergrenadier Division in preparation for a counter-attack called Autumn Mist.

It was the gamble of a desperate man. Hitler ordered his reconstituted Panzers and SS troops—under the overall command of von Rundstedt and led by his devoted follower, Waffen-SS General Sepp Deitrich, at the head of the 6th SS Panzer Army—to capture Brussels and then break through to Antwerp. The Führer's fantasy was that his SS units could somehow push 100 miles from the Ardennes to the Channel coast, divide the Americans from the British, and permanently deny the Allies a new logistics base. His hope was that an armor attack out of the Ardennes in weather too foul for Allied airpower to fly would come as a complete surprise—and that they could capture enough American and British fuel to keep his tanks in the fight all the way to the Channel. His first hope would be realized. His second would not.

At 0535 on the morning of 16 December, a barrage of German artillery, rocket and mortar rounds came crashing down on the U.S. 4th, 28th, and 106th Infantry Divisions as the 9th Armored Division deployed along an eighty-five-mile swath of the Belgian frontier. It was damp, foggy, and bitterly cold and the American units were totally unprepared. Few of the U.S. soldiers were equipped with winter-weather gear for what turned out to be the coldest Western European winter in fifty years.

Both the 4th and 28th Divisions had already been badly battered in the Hürtgen Forest and their cantonments on the edge of the Ardennes were supposed to be “rest and recovery” camps. Because the Germans had strictly
enforced radio silence, Ultra intercept operators had no inkling that von Rundstedt had massed hundreds of thousands of troops, hundreds of tanks, and more than 1,000 artillery pieces less than five miles away in the thick forest to their east.

Nearly all of the 28th Division was overrun almost immediately, and to their north, the inexperienced 106th Division was surrounded in a matter of hours. Farther south, the 4th Infantry Division, supported by the 9th Armored Division, managed to hold up the advancing SS columns for much of the day, but when ammunition supplies dwindled, they were forced to retreat—leaving other supplies, vehicles, and many of their wounded behind.

Bradley's 12th Army Group—whose area of operations included the Ardennes—was slow to react. Lacking Ultra intercepts or any aerial reconnaissance because of the low-hanging clouds, Bradley believed the German assault was merely a localized attack. Eisenhower, summoned from an aide's wedding in Paris, thought otherwise—and ordered the 7th Armored Division to cut into the German thrust from the north and Patton's 10th Armored Division to move north in an effort to interdict the “tail” of the attack.

The following morning the 7th Armored Division ran headlong into the 1st SS Panzer Division at St. Vith—a key road junction on the way to Antwerp—and the American fuel stores. By then it was clear that a major offensive was under way and Bradley finally moved to contain it. He issued a warning order to the 101st Airborne Division to move as fast as possible from their rest-training camp at Reims to the town of Bastogne—a crucial crossroads on the way to Antwerp.

The 101st raced the 100-mile distance by truck and arrived during the night of 18–19 December and started digging into the frozen ground. At dawn the following morning the Panzer Lehr Division with 100 tanks arrived on the outskirts of Bastogne—only to find their way blocked by the lightly armed but determined paratroopers. Michigan native Sergeant Donald Burgett was one of them.

Brigadier General Anthony McAullife was acting commander of the 101st Airborne when they were ordered to Bastogne. For three days after arriving at the small Belgian city, the paratroopers and a handful of tanks fended off the German Panzers. Then, on 22 December, four Germans carrying a white flag approached the American positions at the edge of the besieged city.

The leader of the group, a Panzer officer, told the U.S. soldiers who stopped the group of envoys that he had a message for the commanding officer of the U.S. unit. The Germans were blindfolded and taken to the 101st Division HQ, where they delivered their message to the Division G-3, a tall Texan and West Point graduate, Colonel Harry Kinnard.