It was a question of timing. Eisenhower wanted to attack even before New Year's Eve, but Monty, commanding the forces (all American) on the northern shoulder of the Bulge, stalled and shivered and made excuses, so it did not happen.
For Easy, that meant staying in the line. Conditions improved, somewhat—the men got overshoes and long underwear and sometimes hot food. But the cold continued, the snow did not go away, the Germans hit the company with mortar and artillery fire daily, patrols had to be mounted, German patrols had to be turned back.
On December 29, Easy was in the same woods it had occupied for nine days. With the clear weather, the men on OP duty could see Foy below them and Noville across open fields and along the road about 2 kilometers to the north.
Shifty Powers came in from an OP to report to 1st Sergeant Lipton. "Sergeant," he said, "there's a tree up there toward Noville that wasn't there yesterday." Powers had no binoculars, but Lipton did. Looking through them, Lipton could not see anything unusual, even after Powers pinpointed the spot for him.
One reason Lipton had trouble was that the object was not an isolated tree,- there were a number of trees along the road in that area. Lipton expressed some doubts, but Powers insisted it had not been there the previous day. Lipton studied the spot with his binoculars. He saw some movement near the tree and then more movement under other trees around it. Then he saw gun barrels—88s by their appearance, as they were elevated and 88s were the basic German antiaircraft weapon as well as ground artillery piece. Lipton realized that the Germans were putting an antiaircraft battery in among the trees, and had put up the tree Powers spotted as part of their camouflage.
Lipton put in a call for a forward artillery observer. When he arrived, he saw what Powers and Lipton had seen. He got on the radio, talking to a battery of 105 mm back in Bastogne. When he described the target he had no trouble getting approval for full battery fire, despite the short supply of artillery ammunition.
To zero in on the target, the observer called for a round on a position he could locate on his map, about 300 meters to the right of the trees. One gun fired and hit the target. Then he shifted the aim 300 meters to the left and called for all the battery's guns to lay in on the same azimuth and range. When he got a report that all was ready, he had his guns fire for effect, several rounds from each gun.
Shells started exploding all around the German position. Lip-ton watched through his binoculars as the Germans scrambled to get out of there, salvaging what they could of their guns, helping wounded to the rear. Within an hour the place was deserted.
"It all happened," Lipton summed up, "because Shifty saw a tree almost a mile away that hadn't been there the day before."
The German 88 battery had been going into place as a part of renewed pressure the Germans were putting on Bastogne. Having failed in their original plan to get across the Meuse River, the Germans needed Bastogne and its road net to hold their position in the Bulge and to be prepared for withdrawal. They launched furious attacks against the narrow corridor leading into the town from the south, and increased the pressure all around. By the end of the year eight German divisions, including three SS Panzer Divisions, were fighting in the Bastogne area. Patton's Third Army was attacking north, toward Bastogne; U.S. First Army, under Gen. Courtney Hodges (who was under Monty at this time) was scheduled to begin an attack south "sometime soon." If they linked up in time, they would cut off the Germans in the Bulge salient. If the Germans could stop Patton's thrust, and take Bastogne, they would have the road net that would enable them to escape.
That was the situation on New Year's Eve. At midnight, to celebrate the coming of the year of victory and to demonstrate how much things had changed in Bastogne in the past few days, every gun in Bastogne and every mortar piece on the MLR joined in a serenade of high explosives hurled at the Germans.
Corporal Gordon, along with more than a dozen other wounded Easy men, was evacuated to the rear. Another seven men from the company lay buried in shallow graves in the woods. Easy had put 121 officers and men on the trucks back in Mourmelon twelve days earlier. Its fighting strength was down to less than 100.
Gordon was taken by ambulance to Sedan, then flown to England and on to a hospital in Wales. He was heavily sedated, paralyzed, hallucinating. He was placed in a plaster cast from waist to the top of his head; only his face was left unplastered. But the cast that kept him immobile also prevented treatment of the wounds made by the bullet entering and exiting his back, so it was removed and replaced by the device known as the Crutchfield tongs. The apparatus was applied by boring two holes in the crown of his head, then inserting steel tongs into the holes and clamping them into place. A line attached through pulleys provided traction while preventing any movement without the need for a cast. He stayed in that position, flat on his back gazing up at the ceiling, for six weeks. Slowly he began to have some feeling in his extremities.
The doctor, Maj. M. L. Stadium, told him that had the bullet varied '/z inch in one direction, it would have missed him; had it varied that much in the other direction, the wound would have been fatal. Gordon considered himself to be "fortunate, very fortunate. A million dollar wound." Only a man who had been in the front line at Bastogne could describe such a wound in such words.
12 THE BREAKING POINT *
BASTOGNE
January 1-13,1945
During the siege Easy had been on the defensive, taking it. The greatest disadvantage to being on the defensive in the woods was that the pines gave an optimum tree burst to artillery shells. But in other ways being on the defensive had some decided advantages. By New Year's Day, the snow was a foot deep in some places, frozen on top, slippery. Even the shortest infantry movements were made under the most trying conditions. To advance, a man had to flounder through the snow, bending and squirming to avoid knocking the snow off the branches and revealing his position. Visibility on the ground was limited to a few meters. An attacker had little contact with the men on his left and right, and he could not see a machine-gun position or a foxhole until he was almost on top of it. There were no roads, houses, or landmarks in the woods, so an advancing force would report its position by radio only by approximation. Squads on the attack had to move on compass bearings until they bumped into somebody, friend or enemy. Ammunition boxes for resupply were hand-carried to the foxholes, as always, but in this case by men who had no clear idea of direction.
Attacking in the cleared grazing fields was equally daunting. There was only one road, Noville-Foy-Bastogne, and it was ice-coated on top, with black ice under the snow. German 88s were zeroed in on the road, which was also mined. But the alternative to attacking down the road was to come cross-country over the fields, which offered no concealment.