He slid to the bottom of his foxhole. "The canteen cup followed me and the hot liquid spilled in my lap. I can see the steam rising upward to this very day."
Taylor and Earl McClung went looking for the sniper who had shot Gordon. They found and killed him. Shifty Powers was in the next foxhole. As Shames had hoped would happen, he had recovered completely. Shifty was from Virginia, a mountain man, part Indian. He had spent countless hours as a youth hunting squirrels. He could sense the least little movement in a woods. He spotted a German in a tree, raised his M-l, and killed the man.
Paul Rogers, Gordon's best friend, Jim Alley and another member of the 3rd platoon rushed over to Gordon. They hauled him out of the hole and dragged him back into the woods, in Gordon's words "as a gladiator was dragged from the arena." In a sheltered area, they stretched him out to examine him. Medic Roe came up, took a quick look, and declared that it was serious. Roe gave Gordon morphine and prepared to give plasma.
Sergeant Lipton came over to see what he could do. "Walter's face was ashen and his eyes closed," Lipton recalled. "He looked more dead than alive." In the extreme cold, it seemed to Lipton that the plasma was flowing too slowly, so he took the bottle from Roe and put it under his arm inside his clothes to warm it up.
"As I looked down at Walter's face he suddenly opened his eyes. 'Walter, how do you feel?' I asked. 'Lipton,' he said in a surprisingly strong voice, 'you're standing on my hand.' I jumped back, looking down, and he was right. I had been standing on his hand." A jeep, summoned by radio, came up and evacuated Gordon to the aid station.
The German attack continued, intensified, was finally thrown back with heavy losses, thanks to a combination of Easy's rifle and machine-gun fire, mortars, and grenades, ably assisted by artillery. Lipton later counted thirty-eight dead German bodies in front of the woods. Lieutenant Welsh was hit and evacuated.
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the men received General McAuliffe's Christmas greetings. "What's merry about all this, you ask?" was the opening line. "Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South and West. We have identifications from four German Panzer Divisions, two German Infantry Divisions and one German Parachute Division... . The Germans surround us, their radios blare our doom. Their Commander demanded our surrender in the following impudent arrogance." (There followed the four paragraph message "to the U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne" from "the German Commander," demanding an "honorable surrender to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation," dated December 22.)
McAuliffe's message continued: "The German Commander received the following reply: '22 December 1944. To the German Commander: NUTS! The American Commander.'
"We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas. A. C. McAuliffe, Commanding."2
2. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 545.
The men at the front were not as upbeat as General McAuliffe. They had cold white beans for their Christmas Eve dinner, while the division staff had a turkey dinner, served on a table with a tablecloth, a small Christmas tree, knives and forks and plates.3
3. There is a photograph on p. 549 of Rendezvous with Destiny of that dinner. The officers are looking appropriately glum, but what the men of Easy bring to my attention is the luxurious (everything is relative, they admit) surroundings. One of those staff officers was Lt. Col. (later Lt. Gen.) Harry W. O. Kinnard. Twenty years later, in an interview about the Battle of the Bulge, Kinnard said, "We never felt we would be overrun. We were beating back everything they threw at us. We had the houses, and were warm. They were outside the town, in the snow and cold." Every surviving member of E Company has sent me a copy of that newspaper story, with caustic comments, the mildest of which was, "What battle was he in?"
Winters' dinner that night consisted of "five white beans and a cup of cold broth."
Out on the MLR, Sergeant Rader was feeling terrible about having to put men out on OP duty on Christmas Eve. His childhood buddy, Cpl. Don Hoobler, suggested, "Why don't we take that post tonight and just allow the men to sleep. We can lay it off as a kind of Christmas present to the men." Rader agreed.
When darkness fell, they moved out to the OP. It was miserably cold, a biting wind taking the wind-chill factor well below zero. "As the night wore on, we talked of our homes," Rader remembered, "our families, and how they were spending their Christmas Eve. Don felt sure all of them were in church praying for us."
On Christmas Day, the Germans attacked again, but fortunately for E Company on the other side of Bastogne. The following day, Patton's Third Army, spearheaded by Lt. Col. Creighton Abrams of the 37th Tank Battalion, broke through the German lines. The 101st was no longer surrounded; it now had ground communications with the American supply dumps. Soon trucks were bringing in adequate supplies of food, medicine, and ammunition. The wounded were evacuated to the rear.
General Taylor returned. He inspected the front lines, according to Winters, "very briskly. His instructions before leaving us were, 'Watch those woods in front of you!' What the hell did he think we had been doing while he was in Washington?"
(Winters has a thing about Taylor. In one interview he remarked, "and now you have General Taylor coming back from his Christmas vacation in Washington. ..." I interrupted to say, "That's not quite fair." "Isn't it?" "Well, he was ordered back to testify. ..." Winters cut me off: "I don't want to be fair.")
The breaking of the siege brought the first newspapers from the outside world. The men of the 101st learned that they had become a legend even as the battle continued. As the division history put it, the legend "was aided by the universality of the press and radio, of ten thousand daily maps showing one spot holding out inside the rolling tide of the worst American military debacle of modern times. It was aided by a worried nation's grasping for encouragement and hope; for days it was the one encouraging sight that met their eyes each morning. And the War Department, earlier than was its practice, identified the division inside the town, so even before their bloody month in the town was up, to the world the 101st became the Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne. The elements of drama were there— courage in the midst of surrounding panic and defeat; courage and grim humor in the midst of physical suffering, cold, and near-fatal shortages; a surrender demand and a four-letter-word rebuttal; and a real comradeship... . Courage and comradeship combined to develop a team that the Germans couldn't whip."4
4. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 586.
Of course, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division was also in Bastogne, but it was not identified in the press.
And of course the 82nd Airborne fought as costly and desperate a fight on the northern shoulder of the Bulge, a fight that was at least as significant as the one at Bastogne. But it was not surrounded and never got the publicity the 101st received.
The 101st still had a complaint. As the story of the Battle of the Bulge is told today, it is one of George Fatten and his Third Army coming to the rescue of the encircled 101st, like the cavalry come to save the settlers in their wagon circle. No member of the 101st has ever agreed that the division needed to be rescued!
With the encirclement broken, the men of the 101st expected to return to Mourmelon to bask in the Allied world's adulation and perhaps to celebrate the New Year in Paris. But the heroic stand at Bastogne had been a defensive action; to win the war the Allies were going to have to resume their offensive; the Germans had come out of their fixed positions in the West Wall and made themselves vulnerable; Eisenhower wanted to seize the opportunity. But his problem at the end of December was the same as it had been in the middle of the month, a manpower shortage. The stark truth was that the Germans outnumbered the Allies on the Western Front. The United States had not raised enough infantry divisions to fight a two-front war. This was a consequence of the prewar decision by the Government to be lavish with deferments for industrial and farm labor, and to refrain from drafting fathers. There was also a shortage of artillery shells, brought on by a decision in September—when it seemed the war in Europe would be over in a matter of weeks—to lower production of shells on the industrial priority list. To go over to a general offensive, as he had decided to do, Ike needed the 101st and 82nd in the line.