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t 0530, 16 December, in the darkness before the dawn,
German forces totaling approximately 250,000 men and nearly 1,000 tanks
launched the final German offensive of the war and the largest pitched
battle on the Western Front. For the Allies, the first two days were
nearly complete chaos. Some troops panicked and ran; some
surrendered. Some stayed and fought. Communication broke down. Two
divisions of V Corps, pushing eastward in the Allied offensive against the
Roer dams, tangled with five divisions of infantry covering Dietrich’s
right flank. The American divisions fought gallantly, but were not allowed
to take defensive positions until two days had gone by and the situation
was better understood by Allied commanders. It was probably “just a
local diversion,” said one of VIII Corps intelligence officers of the
first day. Generals Hodges and Bradley both believed the Allies should
stay in an offensive posture. Patton’s initial reaction was, “Fine, we
should open up and let them get all the way to Paris. Then we’ll bite
off the rear of their attack” (Merriam, 88).
During the morning of the 16th, Montgomery, unaware
of the attack, proclaimed: “The enemy is at present fighting a defensive
campaign on all fronts, his situation is such that he cannot stage major
offensive operations.” And Eisenhower, who had ordered a mobile
transmitter to be available by 15 December in time for the fall of Berlin,
continued plans to attend a wedding on the evening of 16 December (Bauer,
1969).
Once the offensive was underway, however, German
communications got back to normal and it was not long before Enigma
and teletype messages began to be processed by the Ultra unit in
England. By dawn of 17 December Allied commanders had confirmation that
they were facing an all-out offensive (Bradley & Blair, 356).
Eisenhower, who had no emergency reserve force at SHAEF (Supreme HQ,
Allied Expeditionary Force), looked to where
he had become accustomed to looking for help: Airborne. The 17th Airborne
Division, now in England, was to be moved to forward bases in France. Both
the 82d and the 101st Airborne Divisions were recuperating and refitting,
just weeks from their return from the Holland campaign. These two veteran
units were ordered to leave immediately for Bastogne, chosen for its good
road net as an assembly area. Patton’s Third Army was told to send six
divisions north, though Bastogne was not mentioned in his early orders.
Eisenhower decided to hold the Meuse at all costs,
but he also decided, very quickly, to contest the Ardennes vigorously.
Troops from the Allies’ Aachen salient began to pour south, and units
were brought up and put in position in numbers the Germans thought
impossible. On the day of 17 December, the U.S. First Army alone brought
60,000 men into the area of penetration, and another 188,000 men in the
next six days.
SHAEF listed four areas which had to be held at all
cost: 1) the port of Antwerp; 2) British advance bases in Antwerp and
Brussels; 3) the city of Liège, major road and rail center on the Meuse,
stocked full of supplies; 4) the line of communications between Antwerp
and Liège (Merriam, 92). See map.
Hitler, shortly before the battle began, issued an
exhortation to his commanders: “This battle is to decide whether we
shall live or die. I want all my soldiers to fight hard and without pity.
The battle must be fought with brutality and all resistance must be broken
in a wave of terror. . .” (Breuer, a, 377). Though it was a
hackneyed call, the German attack nevertheless began with such sudden
ferocity that there is no doubt the Americans and the British, already
victims of their own optimism in Holland, were caught offguard. American
troops of the VIII Corps bore the brunt of the assault. Robert E. Merriam,
Chief of the Ardennes section of the Historical Division, European Theater
of Operations, stated
that after the first two days, as “the terror and dismal uncertainty of
those first hours diminished, a perceptible change swept through American
ranks. Rudely shocked out of their complacency, the grim truth suddenly
dawned on our dazed troops and leaders—the war was far from over”
(Merriam, 103).
There were numerous examples of the brutality which
Hitler called for, including the massacre at Malmédy when on 17 December,
72 unarmed American prisoners were machine-gunned by Peiper’s
fanatical SS troops, most of whom were products of the “Hitler Youth”
indoctrination program (Gilbert, 620).
Dietrich, butcher by trade and former
brownshirt,
mishandled the advance of his 6th Panzer Army, which “became one vast
traffic jam” (Galvin, 207). Now in defensive positions, units of the 2d
and 99th Divisions of the U.S. V Corps stubbornly held the critical
Elsenborn Ridge, frustrating Dietrich’s timetable. The southern branch
of 6th Panzer was led by Peiper’s 1 SS Panzer Division, which made a
breakthrough between the Elsenborn Ridge and the Schnee Eifel (a portion
of the German West Wall on the First Army front, defended mostly by units
from the green 106th Division), and rapidly headed west along the north
bank of the Amblève River.
To the
south, von Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army was doing better than
Dietrich’s 6th Panzer. His northern Panzer corps moved rapidly toward
the Ourthe River, his northern infantry divisions moved in toward St. Vith,
and his southern Panzer corps raced for Bastogne.
When the call came to send the 82d and the 101st
Airborne Divisions toward Bastogne, these outfits were told they would receive their orders
there, or on the way. Before it could get to Bastogne, however, the 82d
was ordered north to Werbomont by General Hodges of the U.S. First Army,
who used the division to plug a large gap in the American lines. Just
minutes after the 82d turned north from Houffalize toward Werbomont, von
Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army came rolling through, some elements of
which surrounded Bastogne while others proceeded toward the Meuse,
providing the primary bulge that gave the battle its name.
The 101st proceeded up the road to
Bastogne. Gen. Heinrich von Lüttwitz, commanding the southern panzer
corps of von Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army, was handed a transcript of
the intercepted radio transmission on 18 December, alerting traffic posts
of the convoys bringing in the 82d and 101st. At the time, his Panzer Lehr
Division was only 10 miles outside of Bastogne. He immediately asked for
permission to seal the town off prior to the arrival of American airborne
forces. His request was denied directly by Hitler. His orders stood:
bypass any pockets of resistance; waste no time getting to the Meuse.
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