Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble

Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble by Antony Beevor

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Authors: Antony Beevor
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matter of team-work, mutual confidence and guts,’ an VIII Corps report stated. ‘The infantry stay in their foxholes and take care of the hostile infantry and the tank destroyers take care of the tanks.’ Providing both elements did their job, the Germans were usually repulsed. Some paratroopers, however, clearly got a thrill out of stalking panzers with bazookas. The 101st claimed that altogether between 19 and 30 December it knocked out 151 tanks and assault guns and 25 half-tracks. These figures were almost certainly exaggerated, rather like the victories claimed by fighter pilots. Many targets were shared with the Sherman tanks of the 10th Armored and the Hellcats of Colonel Templeton’s 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion.
    The continuing fight against the 901st Panzergrenadiers around Marvie had become increasingly confused in the early hours of the morning. An American machine-gunner shot two glider infantrymen who appeared over a crest. The Americans were forced back from the village, but managed to hold the hill to the west. McAuliffe’s headquarters in Bastogne re-examined their defences. The push into the town from Marvie had only just been stopped, but they were also vulnerable on the western side of the perimeter. It was decided to pull back from the Flamierge and Mande-Saint-Etienne salient, and withdraw from Senonchamps. Reducing the overall frontage would strengthen their lines, but they also reorganized their forces by attaching tanks and tank destroyers permanently to each regiment.
    Generalmajor Kokott, meanwhile, was left in no doubt from both his corps commander Lüttwitz and Manteuffel that Bastogne must be crushed next day, before the 4th Armored Division broke through from the south. Kokott, while waiting for the 15th Panzergrenadier-Division to deploy on the north-western sector, became increasingly concerned about the 5th Fallschirmjäger’s defence line to the south. He thought it prudent to set up a southern security screen of ‘emergency platoons’ from his own supply personnel with a few anti-tank guns. The anti-aircraft battalion near Hompré was also told to be ready to switch to a ground role to take on American tanks. It was a comfort to know that at least the main road south to Arlon was covered by the 901st Panzergrenadier-Regiment from the Panzer Lehr.

     
    The 5th Fallschirmjäger-Division certainly appeared ill equipped for its task of defending the southern flank of the Fifth Panzer Army. Its much disliked commander Generalmajor Ludwig Heilmann despised his Luftwaffe staff, claiming to have discovered ‘corruption and profiteering’ when he took over command. ‘So far these people had been employed only in France and Holland,’ he said later, ‘and had vegetated on plundered loot and were all accomplices together.’ He claimed that the older Unteroffizieren said quite openly that they ‘would not dream of risking their life now at the end of the war’. The young soldiers, on the other hand, almost all of them under twenty and some just sixteen, ‘made a better impression’, even though they had received little training. Heilmann was being constantly questioned by his superiors on the exact positions of his regiments, but the reports he had received were so few and imprecise that he decided to go forward himself, if only to escape the ‘harassing demands’ from corps headquarters.
    Yet despite the 5th Fallschirmjäger’s apparent deficiencies, its mostly teenage soldiers were fighting with formidable resilience, as the 4th Armored Division was finding to its cost. That morning at dawn, the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion and the 37th Tank Battalion attacked the village of Bigonville, more than twenty kilometres south of Kokott’s command post. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton W. Abrams (later the commander of US forces in Vietnam), and took the place and the high ground behind in less than three hours. But then ‘the enemy managed to infiltrate back into

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