"Short, sweet and scary," Bowen characterized the order. He wished the regiment had an officer to put in charge, but it didn't. He discussed the situation with his men and agreed there had to be a better way than just charging the houses at the roadblock. At that moment a tank appeared.
"Suppose I take care of those houses with my cannon?" the tanker asked. "My fifty-cal can rake those foxholes dug in around them. OK?"
"OK?" Bowen replied. "Man, you've just come from heaven."
They went at it. The tank began to fire, cannon and machine gun. Bowen's squads moved down the road, shooting as they walked. Within a half-hour some of the Germans were fleeing, while others threw up their hands. "It was a textbook attack," Bowen said, "working better than anything we had ever done in practice."
The threat met and defeated, Bowen went back to his original position. That night the thermometer plunged again. "The night passed like a horrible dream," Bowen remembered. "Nothing I could do could keep me warm. I begged for dawn to come."
When it did, a heavy ground fog reduced visibility to near zero. Germans used the cover to move in on the American positions; their white camouflage clothing helped hide them. As Bowen put it, they were "opaque figures in snow suits emerging from nowhere." A fierce firefight ensued. Bowen looked for the tank that had been so helpful the previous day. He found it, badly damaged. The tanker had been firing the .50-calibre when an antitank shell hit the turret just under him. His face was horribly cut by shrapnel. Bowen got him to an aid station, then returned to position.
Things couldn't have been much worse. Germans were scattered in a semicircle around him, firing at his men in their holes. There were eleven German tanks supporting the infantry. Bowen could do nothing about them because the 57-mm antitank gun assigned to his team was useless- its wheels were frozen solid in the ground, and it could not be moved.
A half-track pulled up, bringing a squad of fighting men forward. Bowen checked his line. His casualties were mounting. He picked up a bazooka and three shells from the half-track, took careful aim at a Tiger 200 metres distant, fired-and grazed the turret. A mortar shell found Bowen's position. He was badly wounded and, shortly thereafter, captured. German doctors treated him, then sent him east to a POW camp. So it went for the armoured troopers and airborne infantry in Bastogne.
LIEUTENANT Helmuth Henke was an aide to General Fritz Bayerlein, CO of the Panzer Lehr Division, which had been reconstituted after its pounding in France. On December 22 Bayerlein handed him a letter from the "German Commander to the USA Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne." It demanded an "honorable surrender to save the encircled USA troops from total annihilation." Bayerlein told Henke, who spoke good English, to join a colonel from the staff, get a couple of enlisted men and two white flags, approach the American lines, and deliver the letter.
All went well. The GIs stopped firing when the German party waved its white flags. The Germans came into American lines, where Henke told a lieutenant that he had a message for the CO. The lieutenant blindfolded the Germans and drove them to General Anthony McAuliffe's headquarters. Henke, still blindfolded, handed over Bayerlein's demand.
McAuliffe read it, and a short while later said, "Take them back," as a staff officer placed McAuliffe's reply into Henke's hand. The Germans were driven back to the front, where their blindfolds were removed. Henke finally had a chance to read McAuliffe's response. It said, "Nuts." He looked at his American escort, Colonel Joseph Harper. "Nuts?" he asked, in disbelief.
"It means, 'Go to hell,'" Harper replied.
Henke knew what that meant. Before departing for his own lines, "I told the American officer what I told every soldier whom I took prisoner, 'May you make it back to your homeland safe and sound.'"
"Go to hell," was Harper's reply.
ON DECEMBER 23 the skies cleared. The Allied air force, grounded for a week, went into action. Medium bombers hit German bridges and rail yards around and behind the Eifel. Jabos shot up German vehicles and columns. Captain Gerd von Fallois, commanding a German tank unit outside Bastogne, called it "psychologically fantastic. Aeroplanes everywhere. Thousands." He added, "I didn't see a single Luftwaffe plane."
American transport C-47s dropped tons of supplies into Bastogne- medicine, food, blankets, ammunition-with an over 90 per cent success rate. The Germans continued to attack-they launched one of their heaviest assaults on Christmas Day-but they made no gains against the resupplied men of the 10th Armoured and the 101st Airborne.
From the Battle of Trois-Ponts on, events had turned rapidly. As Major Guderian of the 116th Panzer Division put it, "We started with fuel enough for only fifty kilometres." Captured American fuel gave them enough for another twenty kilometres. Meanwhile, behind the German lines the traffic jams had been straightened out, so more fuel and ammunition could be brought forward. But as Guderian remarked, "We had no defence against air attacks."
Peiper's advance ended. That afternoon he got an order via radio- withdraw. For the Germans the offensive phase of the Battle of the Bulge was over. One of Peiper's privates, Giinter Bruckner, asked a question to which the answer was obvious: "We were so well equipped, beautiful weapons, but what is the use of having a brand-new tank, but no gas? What is the use of having a machine gun when I have no more ammunition?"
Or what is the use of having the world's best fighter aeroplane when there is no fuel to run it? By this stage the Germans had built hundreds of single-engine jets (Messerschmitt 163s) and twin-engine jets (ME-262s) and were going into production on a jet bomber. The Americans were not going to have jets until October. Some Allied airmen worried that if the war went on, the Germans might regain control of the sky. But the Luftwaffe was without fuel. The all-out bomber assault on German refineries and oil-related targets had a cumulative effect that was devastating.
For the Wehrmacht almost everything had gone wrong, all of it predictable. It had been madness to attack in the Ardennes-an area with the most difficult terrain and least adequate road system in all of Western Europe-with insufficient fuel. Of course Eisenhower had tried to continue the Allied offensive in September and October when his troops had insufficient fuel. But by December the Allies had fuel dumps throughout Belgium and Luxembourg. Now it was the Germans' turn to retreat, abandoning their vehicles and weapons in disarray. Their week of glory was over.
DURING CHRISTMAS season of 1944 there were some 4 million young soldiers on the Western Front, the great majority of them Protestants or Catholics. They said the same prayers when they were being shelled, directed to the same God. They joined in denouncing godless communism, which was one side's ally and the other side's enemy.
In World War II no hatred matched that felt by Americans against Japanese, or Russians against Germans, and vice versa. But in Northwest Europe there was little racial hatred between the Americans and the Germans. How could there be when cousins were fighting cousins? About one third of the US Army in ETO was German American in origin.
The season highlighted their closeness. Americans and Germans alike put up Christmas trees and used the debris of war-like chaff, the tinfoil dropped by bombers to fool radar-to decorate them. Men who would never do such a thing at any other time prepared gifts for other men. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day men on both sides of the line sang the same carols. The universal favourite was "Silent Night." Nearly every one of those 4 million men on the Western Front was homesick. Loneliness was their most shared emotion. Christmas meant family, and family and home meant life.