“Damned Engineers” and the Battle of the Bulge
My Father's War in Real Time
First, two items of bookkeeping.
Part 2 of the history of the Rosalie Villas is now published in the Herald. This is not the same as material in this newsletter
A question came up about the presence of ASTP men—the so-called Whiz Kids—in the 100th Division. That’s from earlier chapters in my WWII book, so I posted that.
One of my goals in writing has been spelling out the role combat engineers played since there aren’t too many books about them. So this is a side trip to the Battle of the Bulge—but since the 100th Division got slammed in the second phase of the Battle of the Bulge, it’s worth taking a look at what was happening—and also to see how well the unsung 7th Army did.
The 100th Division stopped after taking the Maginot Line because the Battle of the Bulge had started. It wasn’t called that until later. It dawned on me while reading about it that it is actually an odd name for a battle. It was only after reading about Eisenhower’s obsession with a straight front that it dawned on me that battles are named for the location, or the operational code word—Antietam, Verdun, Kursk, D-Day, Market Garden. This one was named for the way it made a mess of Eisenhower’s front line strategy. After reading quite a lot about it, I think it was best summed up this way: “mistakes were made and many men died.”
One of the worst of Eisenhower's subordinates proved to be General Hodges, the commander of the 1st Army. Hodges had in fact flunked out of West Point. His strategy was just to smash ahead, which of course suited Eisenhower’s broad front strategy but didn’t match the terrain. The area in November where Hodges tried to smash ahead was a thick woods that had been fortified as part of the Siegfried Line with interlocking fields of fire and thousands of mines that went on for miles. There was no thought of outflanking it or dealing with it strategically. The men went in with short supplies and no real plan, no artillery or air support. It was a slaughterhouse known as the Huertgen Forest, where 120,000 soldiers sustained 33,000 casualties in the battle called “the most ineptly fought series of battles in the war in the West.” Stephen Ambrose said, that it was "a plan that was grossly, even criminally, stupid."
One of the units in the Huertgen Forest was the 8th Infantry Division and its 28th Infantry Regiment. Dad had served in the 28th from 1941 to 1943, rising to a machine gun sergeant before getting ordered to volunteer for officer training in the combat engineers because he had three years of engineering school. If he had stayed in the 28th Infantry Regiment I wouldn’t be here.
The unit had been reconstituted from the horrendous losses in the Normandy hedgerows before it was sent into the Huertgen Forest. In the Huertgen Forest, the carnage was so great for the 8th Division that three company commanders and two battalion commanders were relieved of duty for refusing to order the men forward. One platoon commander was arrested for refusing to advance. The life expectancy of a platoon leader was twelve days.5 As one writer has summed it up, the bodies were piled like cordwood in order to gain a few trees.
Two of the divisions destroyed in the Huertgen Forest were not removed to reserve status but were rather moved to the Ardennes Forest and left on the line as replacements were sent forward. Many of the men were new to combat and there was little unit cohesion. In addition two brand new undertrained divisions were also sent to the Ardennes to get themselves settled in what SHAEF assumed was a quiet zone. They officers paid no attention to defense.7 They made rookie mistakes. They didn’t lay mines. They didn’t even dig proper foxholes because of the frozen ground. They ignored the reports of German troop activity from the local residents.
Hitler had seen an opportunity. Britain was running out of men for replacements. There simply weren’t more men to draft to make up for their losses. In the United States, Chief of Staff General Marshall was being pressured to cut Army manpower so that there’d be workers to make consumer goods. There was already a shortage of workers in the defense industries and of course there was a dire shortage of agricultural workers. They were already trying to fight the war in the West on the cheap. Eisenhower had 69 divisions across Europe in December 1944. That sounds like a lot but in contrast, at the beginning of 1944, the Germans had 193 divisions in Russia, 28 in Italy, 18 in Norway and Denmark, and 59 in France, Belgium, and Holland.9 Stalin was gathering 190 divisions on the Eastern Front for an offensive in January. Marshall had originally planned on building 200 U.S. divisions but the political will in the United States just wasn’t there.
Casualties in Europe were running way over the original estimates. Many of the divisions needed replacements--535,000 replacements in all, almost all for riflemen. A division of 14,000 soldiers only had 5,200 riflemen on the line, but the riflemen were taking almost all the casualties. Some rifle companies had over 200% turnover. The men being fed in as replacements in 1944 were the new draftees—teenagers, not well educated, shorter, with weaker teeth and weaker eyesight, plus older men and men with criminal records. They were thrown into a unit of strangers with very little training. The Germans dealt with decimated units by pulling them off the line, introducing new men, training the unit together to get unit cohesion, and then reinserting them on the line. At least, in the early years of the war, that was the German plan. They knew that men fought harder when they fought with and for their buddies. But the United States instead drafted men, put them through a fast round of basic boot camp, and then shipped them to replacement depots in Europe. They were dumped randomly into units on the front line. The new men were dangerous to be around because they had no idea how to survive combat. Too many accounts mention that some of the replacements didn’t even know how to maintain or even reload their weapons. Too many were killed before the paperwork caught up to their units. They died before anyone knew their names.
It never occurred to SHAEF that this situation was a problem: Divisions that were too beat up or too new and poorly trained to fight were stretched thinly across the main route that the Germans had taken twice before to invade France. It was known that the Germans' basic mode of operation was to seize opportunities, “to exploit weakness before the enemy could reinforce a threatened spot.” And yet Eisenhower was sure that the Germans wouldn’t launch a penetrating attack, perhaps because he would never do it. They had come to rely on the information from breaking the Ultra code used in radio communications. It didn't apparently occur to anyone that with the German army now fighting close to Germany, they were relying much more on telephone communications. SHAEF knew that it didn’t know where 14 German divisions were located. Most of the divisions they couldn’t locate were armored divisions, the kind that spearhead counteroffensives. By the time the attack launched on December 16 at 5:30 a.m., the German advantage in the Ardennes had built up to 10 to 1.
The Bulge wasn’t just a random punch into the American line. The goal was to split the seam between British and American units and get to the Meuse River and Antwerp. Though Montgomery had captured this essential supply port, he hadn’t bothered to capture the estuary leading up to the port and Eisenhower hadn’t bothered to mention to him that it wasn’t Antwerp but a functional port that was the point. The rationale was that, if the Germans seized Antwerp, the Allies might be demoralized enough to give up. But to make the plan work they needed the speed of blitzkrieg and they needed to capture fuel supply dumps along the way. They needed to smash through before opposition could be effectively organized against them.
Surprise and confusion was essential and they got it. The untried poorly trained units broke and ran or got surrounded and captured en masse, which happened to almost all of the brand new 106th Division, including a raw recruit named Kurt Vonnegut. The experienced but beat up units retreated as they could into pockets of resistance. The fighting was intense, and information was scarce. General Hodges froze for a day then panicked and ran, leaving behind food on the table and essential plans and maps scattered all over the 1st Army headquarters. As a result, there was no information or direction coming from the 1st Army headquarters to the smaller units. It was up to the small unit commanders--the captains and lieutenants--to find a way to make a stand in the confusion. There are thousands of stories.
Germans who could speak English dressed in American uniforms to spread even more confusion, though the numbers don’t seem to be large. Just large enough for the rumor that that was happening raced across the front, so, as with all disinformation, panicky men stopped trusting anyone. Guards challenged everyone with improvised trick questions, like who won the World Series of 1940. When actor David Niven, serving in the British Army, was asked that, he said that he didn’t know, but that he could tell them what movie he made with Ginger Rogers in 1940.
One of the prongs of attack was led by Col. Joachim Peiper, fresh from the savagry of the Eastern Front. The group launched with 4000 men and 75 tanks, but did not have a unit of combat engineers incorporated into the attack. I’m biased of course, but the lack of mine-clearing and bridge-building capacity clearly took a toll. Their way was slowed because their heavy tanks had to stay on the roads but the roads were muddy sloughs and mined to boot. With no engineers, the tank crews had to deal with the roads and mines on their own, even stealing farmers’ harrows. That wasn’t conducive to lightning speed.
I also found it quite odd, given the need for speed, that Peiper’s lead SS unit took the time to murder nearly everyone they found on their way, including civilians. Their most infamous action was the massacre at Malmedy. Peiper’s unit had come across a hapless U.S. field artillery unit that was fleeing to the rear. The GIs surrendered, were marched into a field, and then gunned down with a machine gun. Then, in spite of the imperative to reach the Meuse River, the SS unit stayed there for two hours firing into the mounded bodies to make sure everyone was dead, leaving 86 bodies frozen to the earth. Twelve men lived to tell the story, stumbling into the nearby town. Word of the incident spread like wildfire along the Western Front. After that, Americans did not take SS men prisoner.
Peiper’s next stop was the town of Stavelot, where a combat engineer on the edge of town went out with a bazooka and crippled the tread of the lead tank, which blocked the whole column since they were unable to go cross country. Peiper, whose men had had no sleep for three nights, decided to pause until dawn so his men could get some rest and they could gather more information. Peiper, having rested up, easily took Stavelot, where his men again took the time to massacre civilians. This delay gave GIs enough time to get to the enormous fuel depot near Stavelot and prepare a barrier. When Peiper's tanks happened to head up the road in the direction of the fuel depot, 100,000 gallons of gasoline were poured into a steep road cut and ignited. Peiper, who seems not to have realized that there was a major fuel depot in that direction, backed up from the wall of fire and headed toward the town of Trois Ponts on the Salm River. If he got across there, it was a straight shot to the Meuse River.
Luckily, his hesitation at Stavelot was long enough for a company of combat engineers, who had been working at a sawmill far behind the lines, to get to the town of Trois Ponts ahead of Peiper. It was very important that it was combat engineers who got to a town called “three bridges” because they had the expertise to blow them up. It isn’t that easy to take down a bridge. It takes structural expertise. The problem for the Germans was that their tanks were exceptionally large and heavy so they needed large stone bridges. Small wooden bridges built for local traffic wouldn’t do. Their blitzkrieg strategy was to seize existing bridges before the enemy could react. The Germans didn’t develop tactical bridge building capabilities, so, unlike the Americans, when a bridge was blown, they were stuck. With the engineers holding in town, stragglers who had lost their units in the confusion wandered in and were enlisted.14 The American engineers managed to hold Peiper at bay around Trois Ponts for four days, in part by using deception. They put chains on a 4-ton truck to make it sound like a tank and drove it around at night. They would take the truck and drive it out of town with the lights off then drive it in with the lights on, over and over, mimicking troops arriving. By the time Peiper over ran the company of engineers, the bridges were blown and the 82nd Airborne Division had moved into the region. By December 24, Peiper had to abandon his tanks and head back toward Germany on foot with 770 men, all that was left of his Kampfgruppe of 4000. Peiper himself blamed “the damned engineers” for his failure when interrogated after the war. Dad would have liked that.
The most famous story of the Battle of the Bulge is of course Bastogne, where the main prong of the German blitzkrieg was traveling. It’s the story in Band of Brothers. But there too I was glad to see that unsung engineers played a role. American combat engineers blew up culverts and bridges, created abatis from felled trees, and forced delays as the Germans headed up various alternative routes, looking for a way through. The delay allowed just enough time for the 101st Airborne to rush into Bastogne for their rightfully famous stand—1800 GIs surrounded by 45,000 Germans.
On December 19, Eisenhower, realizing the scope of what was happening, called the famous meeting at Verdun where Patton startled the other generals by declaring he could move three divisions to Bastogne in six days—and did. There was, however, another piece to the meeting at Verdun. Because Patton’s 3rd Army was moving to the northwest, Eisenhower ordered Devers to spread the section of the 7th Army that was west of the Vosges Mountains to cover the territory originally covered by both the 7th Army and 3rd Army, and, according to Eisenhower, he ordered Devers to pull back all the way to the High Vosges, toward Baccarat, abandoning the Maginot Line and Strasbourg. Devers didn’t hear it that way. He interpreted it as instructions to prepare to fall back if needed. In any case the French refused to abandon Strasbourg. When Eisenhower insisted, there was an explosive confrontation with DeGaulle, who issued an ultimatum. The French would refuse access to all French railroads if Strasbourg was abandoned. It was a matter of French pride to keep the second largest city and it was a matter of protecting the citizens from the reprisals of the Germans. Eisenhower had to back down.
Thus, the 100th Division did indeed withdraw a bit after December 19, but not nearly as far as Eisenhower thought they should. Their lines were stretched across a wide front. One foxhole could barely see to the next one. The 399th on the right flank of the division pulled back into the high ground north of Lemberg where the deep railroad gorge led to Bitche, and the thick woods and steep ravines offered a defense. And they waited.
Wait! Don't leave us hanging!!