Part III: The Battle Begins

The following is excerpted  from Into The Valley, Chapter 13, Historical Notes.

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 101^st 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.^†

See next, Bastogne Under Siege.

Copyright © 2001-10 Charles D. Young. All rights reserved. 
Last modified: 20 Nov 2011