Brothers In Arms Page 18

  Patton knew the sector was vulnerable, but he had no specific knowledge of the German plans. He would say of his decision to rush the 87th Infantry and 11th Armored to battle, “Some call it luck, some genius. I call it determination.” The 87th Infantry Division had stumbled off their trucks straight into the teeth of a massive German counterattack, a hail of mortar, artillery, and tank fire.

  JUST BEFORE DAWN ON DECEMBER 31, the 761st's Charlie Company rolled northwest from Offagne to join the 87th Division's 345th Infantry Regiment. What Leonard Smith glimpsed in the white-shrouded woods along the road gave him pause: the remains of a desperately contested battlefield, blasted trees, upended jeeps, and terribly shattered bodies. These bodies, partly covered with snow, were casualties from the fighting ten days earlier, when the German Seventh Army broke through thinly spread elements of the 28th U.S. Infantry Division. Scattered among the ruins, farther on, were fresh shell craters and overturned, still-burning American vehicles. The inexperienced Americans had been badly defeated the day before. The 87th Infantry had taken severe casualties against an elite German Panzer division; directly to its east, Combat Command A of the 11th Armored Division, rushed to the front from training in England, had been virtually slaughtered, suffering more than a hundred killed and wounded in its first twenty minutes of battle outside the village of Remagne. Despite such hellish losses, their presence had succeeded, as Patton had hoped, in turning the flank of the German forces approaching Bastogne.

  The 11th Armored's Combat Command A had withdrawn at midnight across the woods to the east; the 345th Infantry Regiment and Charlie Company of the 761st were ordered to take over its zone of advance. Their orders were to continue pushing the Germans back from Bastogne. Charlie's tanks were first to attack the German outposts at Nimbermont and Rondu. From there they intended to proceed north, supporting the 345th Regiment's assault on fortified Remagne itself.

  The geography of this region of Belgium, known as the “High Ardennes,” heavily favored the German defenders. Towns tended to be located in the low ground along the banks of countless streams, surrounded by thickly wooded hills where the Germans had clear views in every possible direction.

  The weather in itself posed problems of a kind the tankers had never before experienced. Dense, shifting ground fog was a frequent occurrence, giving the terrain an unreal and spooky aspect. This fog acted, at times, in the Americans' favor, neutralizing the superior range of the German guns. More often, it simply helped to conceal the waiting German troops. The overcast of the day before had turned to snow. The Germans, issued gray-and-white uniforms, snow capes, and whitewashed tanks, were hard to see until they opened fire. The American soldiers and tanks, lacking such camouflage, stood out plain as day.

  Rondu and Nimbermont proved to be lightly defended and were taken easily. The attack on Remagne, however, promised to be more difficult, involving a push across open ground heavily mined and covered by high-velocity guns. Charlie Company attempted to provide covering fire for the infantry before moving in to support their close-in fighting in the town. Warren Crecy, as had become his custom, stood on his turret directing a constant stream of .50-caliber ammunition against German ground positions. Smith and McBurney fired their 76mm cannons at suspected machine-gun nests and antitank posts.

  The tankers saw the exposed, ragged line of American infantrymen stumbling and taking enemy hits on all sides. Although the foot soldiers were young, many of them seventeen and eighteen, somehow they kept getting up and pressing forward. While the anguish of the men of the 761st on their first meeting with the 87th Division—the racial remarks and distrust on the part of some of the infantry—had left a bitterness on both sides that never fully disappeared, the two groups came to fight with a grudging respect. Whatever their underlying attitudes, they had no choice but to work together and support each other.

  The American team continued its advance. Charlie Company knocked out three machine-gun nests and killed fourteen German gunners. But the German resistance at Remagne, while heavy, was less intense than the men had expected. And though the tankers and infantry kept careful watch against a counterattack once they had cleared the town, no enemy troops emerged from the surrounding woods. The Germans seemed to have strategically fallen back. By evening, the infantry and Charlie had succeeded in capturing all three of their assigned towns.

  For the weary enlisted men, however, these small gains hardly felt like victory. The territory in almost every direction around them was still held by entrenched enemy forces, and the dense woods and rugged terrain tended to compartmentalize combat to the extent that capturing one hill or town meant very little in terms of scouting and capturing the next. The ground troops often felt as though they were fighting in circles. The Battle of the Bulge was everywhere becoming a desperate yard-by-yard struggle with no clear lines of advance. It was occuring, moreover, in the midst of the worst European winter in thirty-five years.

  On New Year's Eve, the tank crews of Charlie Company shivered in their tenuous forward positions in the interior compartments and beside their vehicles in the snow. Their eyes were red from lack of sleep, their combat fatigues and gloves threadbare, stained with motor oil and gunpowder. Leonard Smith and Hollis Clark had managed to add a few more blankets to their secret stash, but they felt so cold they might as well have had none. William McBurney, huddled against Willie Devore, wore two pairs of pants, two shirts, and every single piece of clothing he could find, but this did little to keep him warm.

  The few tankers who did manage to fall asleep were awakened on the stroke of midnight by a tremendous series of explosions. At 12:00 A.M. on January 1, Patton ordered every piece of artillery under his command to fire “on a likely target as a New Year's salute from Third Army to the Wehrmacht.” American forward artillery observers reported for hours afterward the sound of wounded German soldiers screaming in the woods.

  AT DAWN, BAKER AND DOG COMPANIES of the 761st rolled forward from Offagne to join Charlie. The battered 345th Infantry Regiment marched along the road in the opposite direction. The unit, which had fought against veteran troops with considerable courage, had suffered so many killed and wounded in its first two days that it had been ordered back from the front, to be replaced by the 347th. The ill-fated 345th took further casualties during its withdrawal, triggering a series of antipersonnel mines and Tellermines concealed beneath the ice and snow.

  The 761st's Charlie Company continued to press forward. Charlie, along with Baker Company, was ordered to spearhead a push by the 347th Infantry Regiment from Moircy and Remagne toward Jenneville, Pironpre, and Tillet. Although not so much towns as tiny hamlets, they were nonetheless of critical strategic importance, clustered around a major highway system running southwest from St. Vith through Houffalize, Bastogne, and St. Hubert to the Meuse River. In his December 22 surrender demand to Anthony McAuliffe, German General von Luttwitz had boasted of his capture of the “Hompre-Sibret-Tillet” section of this highway. The significance of such roads in the Ardennes fighting cannot be overstated: Control of the roads in the Ardennes, quite simply, equaled control of the war.

  Success for the German offensive depended on the rapid movement of large armored forces over a region of dense second-growth woods and jagged terrain that, as the 761st quickly discovered, was just plain hell for tanks. Moreover, in order to neutralize American air superiority, Hitler had deliberately scheduled his attack for one of the worst weather periods of the year. Armored vehicles needed the hard-surfaced roads to move forward. Supply trucks needed these roads to reach them.

  With the First U.S. Army blocking off the Germans in the north, and with elements of Patton's Third Army (including the 26th “Yankee” Infantry Division) fighting steadily forward across the extensive road system south and east of Bastogne, the Bastogne–St. Hubert highway assumed even greater importance. By December 27, it had in fact become one of only a handful of remaining supply routes for German forces west of Bastogne. By recapturing the towns and territory
that overlooked it, the 87th and the 761st would help deprive the forward German units at the tip of the Bulge of supplies of gasoline and ammunition, as well as of a path back to the east.

  The Germans, equally aware of the importance of this highway, had been ordered to hold it at all costs. The 87th Division's 347th Infantry Regiment had developed a two-pronged plan of attack in its sector, to advance on either side of the dense Haies de Tillet Forest. The 761st's Baker Company was situated on the left (west) wing, supporting the 347th's 3rd Battalion in attacking north from Moircy to cut the highway at Pironpre and Bonnerue. Charlie Company was on the right (east) wing, supporting the 1st Battalion in pushing north from Remagne, with the goal of cutting the highway at Amberloup. Each branch of the 347th's planned advance held aspects of a suicide mission: Pironpre was situated across an open field where any movement was certain to be seen and met with fire; Amberloup was located across a valley overlooked by heavy artillery in German-held hills. Two Sherman tanks of the 761st were to attack in advance of each infantry company.

  New Year's morning brought sleet, snow, and plummeting temperatures. The 761st and infantry struggled across high snowdrifts. Willie Devore found that the intense cold had one blessing to it, in that the ground was frozen rock solid, providing him with some room and traction to maneuver off the main roads. But the Germans, with ten days to fortify the area, had considered every axis of attack. Though they did not know it, the 761st's tanks were heading straight into waiting elements of the most prestigious German armored unit, the Panzer Lehr Division, created around a group of top instructors from the army's tank-training schools. The majority of these soldiers were decorated veterans of the Russian front who had a thorough (and hard-earned) understanding of winter warfare.

  The attack on January 1 began with deceptive ease. Baker Company and the 3rd Battalion advanced north from Moircy successfully to claim the hamlet of Jenneville—the site of a previous failed attack by the 345th Regiment—by noon. They had, however, little time or cause for celebration: The 902nd Regiment of the Panzer Lehr had simply fallen back eight hundred yards to the village of Pironpre. Pironpre was the crossroads for two major spokes of the St. Hubert highway system and had been prepared by the German defenders as a “hornet's nest.” As Baker's tanks rolled north from Jenneville, they were met with a hail of enemy machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire. To this was added another, more ominous sound—the distinctive bark of German tank guns.

  Six Panzer tanks had been carefully positioned at Pironpre to maximize their fields of fire. They were concealed behind the high wood piles of a local sawmill—impossible to spot from the road. The 3rd Battalion and Baker Company attempted repeatedly to cross the open terrain below Pironpre. Scores of infantry were killed, and armor-piercing rounds devastated the exposed Shermans. These attempts, coming at great cost, gained nothing. Unable to locate the source of this relentless fire, the Americans were forced to pull back for the night.

  To their east, across the Haies de Tillet Forest, Charlie Company and the 1st Battalion advanced steadily throughout the early part of the day against only small-arms fire and scattered artillery. To Leonard Smith, taking out target after target, they seemed to have it made. Their objective seemed well within reach; in fact, forward patrols successfully crossed a stretch of highway north of Remagne. But the Panzer Lehr, with orders to defend the road at all costs, had been waiting for nightfall to provide its troops with cover from roving American fighter-bombers. Enemy tanks attacked at dusk and drove Charlie and the 1st Battalion back toward Remagne. They, too, bivouacked having made no appreciable gains.

  The following morning, Baker Company and the 3rd Battalion regrouped and altered their plan of attack to circle around Pironpre. Their flanking maneuver successfully captured Pironpre and Bonnerue, temporarily cutting the highway there. But they were forced out in a furious series of counterattacks at the crossroads and in the surrounding forest. The undetected Panzers continued to inflict heavy damage. The 3rd Battalion of the 347th Infantry Regiment reported that by the afternoon of January 2, “three of the [761st] tanks were burning and one was damaged beyond use.”

  Charlie's tanks, spearheading for the 1st Battalion, fought their way over a mile north to claim the village of Gerimont. They peered through their periscopes and blasted out all the upper-level windows, taking no chances.

  The intense cold and lack of sleep tended to reduce to the barest, most immediate essentials the goals of American GIs. Their first thought wasn't about winning the war, but rather about getting warm. The Bulge was becoming for Leonard Smith and William McBurney what GIs everywhere in the Ardennes termed “the bitter battle for the billets.” They fought viciously to take the next town for the simple purpose of gaining access to whatever shelter and food it might afford. But Charlie's commanding officer, Pop Gates—who felt very acutely his responsibility for the deployment and well-being of his company—had larger concerns and was facing a grave decision.

  Gerimont consisted of a small cluster of buildings atop a hill; down this hill, to the north, across a ridge-studded valley and atop the hill beyond, lay the 347th's objective of Amberloup. More than a dozen Sherman tanks of the 11th Armored Division were visible in that valley—wrecked and overturned, mute testimony to the presence of German antitank artillery in the surrounding woods and hills. At the center of the valley, at the center of the road Charlie Company would have to follow to reach Amberloup, lay the village of Tillet. Pop Gates had been ordered to make a frontal attack on Tillet.

  The antitank guns in the woods to the north were not Gates's only problem. By the evening of the second, the German-controlled Haies de Tillet Forest stood as what the official U.S. historian terms a “dangerous gap” between the 347th's two battalions. The left (west) flank of Gates's company was fully exposed to this forest; Gates and his tanks had taken antitank fire from their left every time they tried to move north from the protection of the buildings at Gerimont. With numerous mechanical breakdowns from its rush to Belgium, Charlie was at a shadow of its full strength. Gates was on his own: The infantry officers seemed to have had no training with tanks, and he could not find a company commander when he needed to talk to one to address his concerns.

  Gates stationed his tanks just beyond the monastery at Gerimont for the night, holding their positions against the cold and blowing snow. He posted a forward watch until daybreak, as the infantry, against standard procedure, had been ordered back by an inexperienced lieutenant, leaving the tanks exposed to potential infiltration by Panzerfaust teams. Enemy mortars and shells continued to fall at random intervals into the houses on the edge of town. Determined to avoid a repeat of the disaster at Honskirch, Gates had made a decision. He refused to send his tanks and accompanying infantry straight down the road into the valley, ordering them instead to keep their defensive positions in Gerimont. Over the next several days at Tillet, his decision would prove to be a wise one.

  JANUARY 3 MARKED A TURNING POINT in the Ardennes fighting: the start of a coordinated counterattack by the Allied forces. Patton's Third Army continued its northern push around Bastogne; the First Army began a concomitant push toward the south. The two American armies, separated since December 16 by the “Bulge” created by the attacking Germans, intended to link up at the town of Houffalize. From there they would force the Germans back to the east. Patton objected bitterly to the strategy, arguing instead for the more aggressive approach of driving north and south along the initial start line of Hitler's attack (the eighty-mile line along the Belgium– Luxembourg border with Germany), which would have trapped the main body of Hitler's troops west of the Siegfried Line, within the Bulge. By doing so, Patton claimed that he “could win this war now.” But Eisenhower, following the advice of Field Marshal Montgomery (whom the irascible Patton called “a tired little fart”), had opted on December 28 for the more cautious strategy of attacking farther west on the broad axis around Houffalize. The 87th Division and the 761st had been released from strategic re
serve to Patton on the date of Eisenhower's decision, the twenty-eighth, for the specific purpose of carrying out the westernmost edge of this attack.

  The problem with Eisenhower's attack plan was that while it forestalled any further westward movement by the Germans, for the American troops involved it virtually guaranteed a bloodbath. Rather than moving north as he had hoped along the “narrow front” of the Germans' original line of attack, Patton, writes historian Peter Elstob, “had to try to push a twenty-five-mile-wide front some twenty miles through country which seemed to consist of natural defensive features.” Patton's chief of staff, Hobart Gay, was troubled in particular by the problems this plan would pose for the 87th Infantry and 11th Armored Divisions, reflecting in his journal on December 30 that their assigned angle of attack evidenced “a complete misunderstanding of the problem involved.” It “would drive the enemy back on this high ground rather than take it away from him.” By January 3, both divisions had already suffered greatly from this fundamental flaw; in the coming weeks, it would cost the 87th Division and the 761st grievously.

  The 11th Armored Division, directly to the east of the 87th, had taken casualties so severe in its attack against the Fuhrer Begleit Brigade that on the morning of the third, Patton, remarking that the unit was “badly disorganized,” ordered it pulled off the line. In just four days of battle, the division had lost fifty-four tanks—almost a third of its armor—and 661 men wounded, missing, or killed in action. The 11th Armored was replaced by the 17th Airborne, which had also been rushed to the Ardennes with no combat experience. It was similarly savaged by the entrenched German troops, leading even the generally sanguine Patton to reflect that “we can still lose this war.” At Tillet, the 761st Tank Battalion was soon to encounter this same brigade.