New Year's Eve, the Germans Attack
My Father's War in Real Time
Apologies for so many posts, but I realized that this was way too tied to the actual date to wait as I ordinarily do and the men like Maurice Lloyd need to be remembered.
At midnight, New Year’s Eve, 1944, the Germans divisions attacked, targeting Rimling on the left flank of the 100th Division and Lemberg on the right flank. Hitler firmly believed that the thinly dispersed American troops would be drunkenly carousing, suspecting nothing. It would be simple for overwhelming numbers of troops to hit the lines in a shock wave and reach the road that led to the Saverne Gap.1 Once on the Alsatian Plain, the attack units would join the troops in the Colmar Pocket along the Rhine. To keep the element of surprise, they had not been probing the American lines or the local commanders might have realized that the Americans were grimly dug in and waiting for them.
At one time the Germans had a 7 to 1 numerical advantage around Lemberg. The memoirs and histories written by the men who were there recount the same thing—at midnight, the Germans attacked in terrifying human shock waves, shrieking, cursing the Americans, and clearly “doped up.” Machine gun squads mowed the Germans down and yet the madmen kept charging: “Shadows stormed out of the moonlight.”2
I took that phrase “doped up” with a grain of salt until I discovered that "doped up” was literally true. Methamphetamine had been invented before the war by a German chemist as an alertness aid. Under the brand name Pervitin it was issued to German troops at times during the war. It took away fear and misery and even some sensitivity to pain. It also brought addiction, depression, hallucinations, and heart failure.
It makes sense that they issued Pervitin before Operation Nordwind because the generals had decided their strategy was just surprise and overwhelming numbers. Given the chaos created during the Battle of the Bulge, the belief that Americans would be drunk on New Year’s Eve, and their memory that these were the bloated Americans who had not bothered to cross the Rhine at Strasbourg, they were sure the Americans would break and run when the shock waves struck. The American troops talked of themselves as amateurs fighting professionals—and the critiques by SS men of American troops agreed. As one SS officer said, “The Americans seemed to us very green.”3 But as the shock wave tactic shows, the Volksgrenadiers were themselves not capable of much. It was a sign of how different the German army of January 1945 was that they could only charge straight ahead. T.C. told me that he was very glad that they didn’t have to fight the “real” German army.
At midnight, a German artillery barrage “roared and rocked the American lines.”4 As with any artillery barrage, the explosions created pressure changes so intense that the men would squeeze their eyes shut to stop them from popping out of their sockets. “Then there’s silence and the air crackles with sparks and sizzling chunks of metal.”5 Barrage after barrage of nebelwerfers went off—the screaming meemies. The rockets lit up the sky with trails of red, howling through the air before crashing down.
Some units in the 7th Army cracked and moved back to the prepared lines of resistance, some units were simply over-run by sheer numbers, and some men got cut off. One squad of men from the 399th B Company were cut off near Bitche itself. Hiding, working through the German lines, it took them two days, but they made it to the American lines again, only to find out that they didn't know the password because they'd been cut off. Luckily, they could answer whatever American factoid the guard threw at them, and they didn't get shot as saboteurs. As the 399th history said, their heroism should have been recognized, but they didn’t get any kind of medal. “Joes who do their stuff too far out in front often times don’t get noticed on decoration day.”6
There were a lot of men that day who did their stuff too far out in front. But then there were units, like the cobbled-together untried Task Force Huddleson on the 100th Division right flank, that simply collapsed. The task force phoned the 399th headquarters to say that they were “falling back a little” and didn’t stop running until they were ten miles in the rear. The 399th then had an open flank and the 100th Division had a “front” on three sides.
At Rimling, the fighting was savage, house to house, hillock to hillock. The company that took the brunt of the initial attack was ripped to shreds and the survivors were shell shocked. The men who relieved them said they just sat with the 1000-yard stare of men who had cracked. But the men of the 100th Division held. By January 4, the Germans called off the attack on Rimling. As the German general later said, the Sarre assault showed only that the German soldier still knew “how to die, but little else.”7
As for Dad, his platoon and the 399th waited along the railroad track that stretched through the forest from Bitche to Lemberg.
Dad told me that Bagley had wanted to put him up for a Bronze Star a number of times, but Dad told him not to. He thought it wasn’t right when he was only doing what he had been ordered to do. But he did let Bagley put him in for a Bronze Star for Operation Nordwind because Dad disobeyed direct orders, risking court martial to do the right thing.
Dad said that he’d been told by the battalion headquarters and that “damn guy” in charge, that they needed the bridges for their future forward motion. Reading the morning reports, I realize that he’d been allowed to wire things up but not to blow them except by direct order from headquarters. In particular he was to preserve the stone bridge that carried the road over the Bitche to Lemberg railroad. They wanted the bridge because they thought American tanks would be quickly moving forward again.
The morning reports state that at 0530 hours “Lt. Morse calls to report the Germans are counter attacking.” What they don’t say is that he had already blown all of the defenses he had prepared in the week before, including the stone bridge, which carried the road over the railroad. Dad was always inordinately proud of that explosion. He loved to tell me that he’d gotten the charges placed just right. When the Germans got close, he let it go, orders or not. It was a thing of beauty. The stones rose up, the arches collapsed, the whole thing dropped just where he wanted it. He had completely blocked the railroad and eliminated the road above in one fell swoop, literally stopping the German tanks in their tracks.
Dad always said he got the Bronze Star for that bridge. According to the official award from the 100th Infantry Division, however, he got it for all his efforts to analyze the line of attack and construct all the obstacles he could in the days before. As the award said:
When the enemy seriously threatened our right flank positions in the vicinity of Lemberg, Lieutenant Morse, a platoon leader, with outstanding forethought, planned and supervised the creation of an impregnable block system between Lemberg and Bitche that rendered all avenues of approach to our positions useless to enemy armored vehicles. His use of abatis, craters, mine fields, and the destruction of bridges forced the enemy to alter his tactics, which, without the support of armored vehicles, were subsequently proved ineffective. As a result of his intelligent planning, sound judgments, and thorough knowledge of his mission, Lieutenant Morse materially contributed to the elimination of a major enemy threat.
I’m partial of course, but I was interested to read that, in the estimation of the official Army historians, when they finally got around to writing the history of the 7th Army, one of the great differences in the outcome of Nordwind was that American combat engineers were superior to German engineers. In Nordwind, “combat engineers often found themselves at the forefront of the battle, building or destroying bridges, constructing obstacles, and minefields or serving as infantry.”8
One of the men in a rifle company along the Lemberg railroad tracks, John M. Khoury, recalled that night in a memoir. They were stretched too thin. The foxholes were 100 feet apart. Though they had an open field of fire on the railroad tracks, they knew “If just one foxhole was penetrated, there was enough room to send an enemy company through.”9 The forward outposts for his company were 50 yards in front of where he lay. The left outpost was PFC Paul “Abe” Lincoln. The right outpost was PFC Maurice Lloyd, who had already been seriously wounded during the fighting for Tete a Reclos. He’d just returned to their squad on December 11.10 They knew an attack was coming but didn’t know how big it would be. “Strangely no one seemed to be nervous or panicky. There was just a tense calm along our line as we waited in the icy cold, exhaling clouds of vaporized breath and moving hands and feet to keep warm. The moon was bright and the snow reflected the light that gave an eerie grayness across the land.”11
When the wave came, the two men in the outposts, who each had a BAR, began firing as fast as they could until they ran out of ammunition. Moving to pull back for more ammunition, Maurice Lloyd was shot through the head. Khoury saw Lloyd’s blood and brains spilling out, steaming in the cold. There was no doubt that he was dead.
The Germans were yelling and screaming up the railroad tracks into their line. “Immediately, without any order to open fire, they were met with a tremendous fusillade of machine gun and rifle fire.” After a few hours it became quiet. The Germans pulled back. Love Company of the 399th had held its ground. Late in the evening of January 2, one of the reserve companies from the 63rd Division took over their positions along the railroad and the company withdrew.
The gap that Task Force Huddleson left was big enough to allow the 6th Mountain SS Nord Division to make the deepest penetration of Operation Nordwind. They reached the already battered town of Wingen-sur-Moder along the road southeast of Lemberg that led to the Saverne Gap. The SS Nord had spent the war fighting in Finland, but according to their commander, the fighting in Wingen against elements of the 45th and 70th Infantry Divisions was as difficult as any they had encountered. Though the 6th Mountain SS Nord were ruthless professionals, they couldn’t overcome the fact that the Germans had no supplies and no reserves to take advantage of their position. Even their technical advantages were liabilities. Their brand new, fast-firing machine guns ran through 250 rounds per minute, but it just meant they ran out of bullets faster. As their commander, Colonel Zoepf said, the German strategy of surprise had meant bad preparation and little recon.12
When Eisenhower learned of the German penetration to Wingen he raged at General Devers for failing to order the entire 7th Army to fall back far to the south. To Eisenhower, it was a catastrophe. But the 6th Mountain SS Nord was already beaten. By January 6, the survivors slipped back in small groups through American lines back to Bitche through the dense woods. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately for Col. Zoepf since he did survive the war--the SS commander literally slipped into the American lines. He fell through the top of a log-covered foxhole covered in snow. When he landed, he pulled his gun on the startled occupants. When he heard their sergeant coming up to yell at them for lazing around, Zoepf hid under a blanket. But the sergeant thought it was a dogface hiding from his wrath and snatched the blanket off, finding himself face to face with an armed SS colonel. At that point, Zoepf, with a shrug, surrendered.13
By January 6, the day Zoepf surrendered, another prong pushed forward on the east side of the Vosges into the Hagenau Forest, where a new firefight erupted.14 The military experts who finally got around to writing up the 7th Army history fifty years later concluded that the battle in the Hagenau Forest was one of the best fought defensive battles of the war.15
No one knew about any of it back then. The newspapers, the so-called first draft of history, spent their time reporting on Patton and Hodges, the 3rd and 1st Armies, because those generals had press officers that made the job of reporting easy. Mom, who was desperate for news in between Dad’s rare letters, kept a scrapbook of any reference to the 7th Army that she could find in the newspapers. Many were newswire releases of Drew Middleton’s reporting in the New York Times. The articles provided many paragraphs about the other armies and at most provided a sentence about the 7th Army.
During Nordwind, Middleton said the 7th Army fell back miles from the front. Finally, days into the battle, Middleton admitted that the source of his information was German radio, that is, German propaganda, colored by SHAEF’s contempt toward the 6th Army Group commander, General Devers. On January 4, Drew Middleton exclaimed:
The truth is that this press headquarters is so poorly informed by the Sixth Army Group that no one knows whether to expect a German breakthrough in force or a defensive victory in this sector. It is, however, significant, this correspondent feels, that the chances of the enemy’s knifing through and cutting the supply route through the Saverne Pass to Strasbourg and Wissenbourg Gap were freely discussed today as well as the evacuation of this area.
He was of course quoting Eisenhower’s point of view and he was of course completely wrong. And so for fifty years, the histories of World War II, if they said anything at all about the war in the Vosges Mountains, gave Nordwind a footnote as “a half-hearted German offensive”16 met by an inept resistance.
It is true that most of the 7th Division was knocked back to the prepared lines of defense. Only the 100th Division lost no ground. As a result, the division formed a reverse bulge. As the shock wave receded, the division was ordered to adjust their lines to better protect their exposed flanks. Company C of the 325th Engineers pulled back toward Goetzenbruck again. They were able once more to get some hot food and more Christmas mail from home. Dad finally found the time to write Mom. He was proud enough to let slip more than usual of what he’d been doing:
11 January 45, Dearest
Thanks very much for the packages. I enjoyed them very much.
Snow has been intermittent and at present we have only four inches. Have been sanding a few roads to maintain traffic. I am back in the mountains with an underground shelter. As usual, have all the comforts to good living. Radio is coming in clear tonite. BBC is spouting off, announcer sounds very sniffy.
Bagley is still hale and hearty, sitting beside me now. He has a cute little mustache. He feels pretty proud, had a little French girl give him a massage and shampoo. Willie has his usual stomach trouble and has been evacuated.
Watched the New Year in but wasn’t expecting midnite exactly.
Unit has more than held its own, due in many ways to Company C. Blew bridges, roads, railroads. My sector made out good, although had some fun. We were ready and waiting, preparations in depth. Don’t worry about the outcome.
[Battalion Headquarters] still balling works up.
Feel sorry for poor civilians.
All Love Gordon
The railroad from Bitche to Lemberg turned into a no man’s land. Maurice Lloyd, the outpost with his BAR who had held out until the very end on New Year’s Eve, was listed as missing in action. His mess mates like Khoury knew exactly what had happened to him, but he was officially missing in action because his body hadn’t been recovered. The army carved his name on the wall of missing at the Epinal cemetery.
Thirty years after the war, a man from Lemberg, his son, and their dog were walking through the dense forest along the tracks, when the dog found a log-covered foxhole. Inside, was a skeleton, still holding his BAR still pointed up the railroad, still guarding Lemberg. The man picked up the skeleton’s dog tags and shivered when he read the name Maurice. St. Maurice, a martyr-soldier who died defending his country in 303 AD, is one of the patron saints of Lemberg. The people of Lemberg embraced Maurice Lloyd as one of their own and erected a monument at his foxhole, deep in the woods. It is, perhaps, the only monument at a foxhole.17
On the 2004 Battlefield tour, on a bitterly cold, rainy day, my sister and I walked through those woods to reach the place where Maurice Lloyd died, trying to imagine that snowy New Year’s Eve. There was the railroad cut. There was a new bridge, high overhead, possibly near the one that Dad had blown up. The vets laughed at me when I said I was trying to get the feeling of that day. One of them pointed out that there were no 88s crashing in tree bursts, no machine guns, no burp guns. Walking down the road, we didn’t have to stare at the red clay mud looking for signs of mines. And most of all, we had a warm dry hotel to go back to that night. I laughed, but the dark dripping woods still felt haunted. When we got to the monument, the heavens opened up in a driving rain. We laid a wreath and said a prayer in honor of all the men who had made a stand outside Lemberg.
Longacre p. 8
399th p. 76
Hastings p. 81
399th p. 76
Gimlette p.132
399th p. 86
Riviera to the Rhine p. 509
Riviera to the Rhine p. 531
Khoury p. 71
Khoury p. 71
Khoury p. 71
Zoepf, Wolf T. Seven Days in January, 2001
Zoepf, Wolf T. Seven Days in January, 2001
Riviera to the Rhine p. 520
Riviera to the Rhine p. 520
Hastings p. 235
Khoury p. 74
Your dad was a pretty shrewd dude. Another excellent story. I will certainly remember Maurice Lloyd.
So vivid, cinematic, tense, moving. Good for your father! Next time I'm hiking in the Vosges I'll be remembering this, I hope!