Gabel was more than impressed: "The rockets seemed to lose their terror next to that captain. I did not know who he was and did not care. I jumped up and stumbled forward." Others did the same. The platoon got to the far side of the open field. The men threw themselves down in a drainage ditch, exhausted.
"Fix bayonets!" Gabel felt the shock of the order jerk his body. "Fix bayonets? That is World War I stuff. Bayonets were for opening C-ration cans." Not this day. All around Gabel, "there was the blood-freezing sound of fourteen bayonets drawn from scabbards and clicking home on their studs under the rifle barrels."
"Let's go," the platoon leader called out. All fourteen men jumped out of the ditch, formed into a line of skirmishers, and moved towards the German position. They began shouting, "Geronimo!" Gabel screamed with the others. They got into the German lines. Enemy soldiers tried to lift their hands. Still yelling, the troopers thrust their bayonets into the Germans. They took the village. Their reward was that they got to spend the night in town,
One thing that kept many of those thrown into these early January attacks going was the thought of where they would spend the night, usually the next small village to the east. "It was something to live for," Private Jack Ammons of the 90th Division remembered. If the GIs could drive the Germans from the houses before dark, it would be the GIs occupying the cellars, out of the wind. If Germans held the town, the GIs would spend the first hours of darkness digging foxholes in the wood nearest the village and the remainder of the night stomping in the foxhole to keep from freezing-and then move out on another attack in the morning.
It sometimes happened that the Germans occupied one set of cellars, the GIs the other. Occasionally they shared the same cellar. Private Schoo found three German soldiers sleeping on a cellar floor. Schoo got a couple of buddies, and they woke the Germans up. One could speak English. "We had them get wood for a fire, we heated food and coffee- we sat up all night talking, in the morning we took them back to HQ (they were nice guys)."
Another characteristic of the January fighting was the horror created by a high incidence of bodies crushed by tanks. Men slipped, tanks skid-ded. Wounded couldn't get out of the way. Twenty-year-old Sergeant Dwayne Burns of the 82nd Airborne saw a fellow paratrooper who had been run over by a tank. "If it hadn't been for the pair of legs and boots sticking out of all the gore, it would have been hard to tell what it was. I looked away and thought for sure that I was going to vomit. I just wanted to throw my weapon away and tell them I quit. No more, I just can't take no more."
But he had to, because the pressure from above was irresistible. The generals wanted results, so the colonels wanted results, so the men kept moving, no matter what.
Not all company commanders were willing to follow orders unques-tioningly. On one occasion two simply refused to carry out a direct order to attack. They were Captain Jay Prophet and Captain Harold Lein-baugh, commanding companies A and K of the 333rd Infantry Regiment, 84th Division. The morning after a night spent in a wood, under regular shelling, the battalion commander, a colonel, came to the front and ordered A and K companies to advance another half mile. Prophet refused. So did Leinbaugh. Prophet protested that all the weapons were frozen; the companies were at half strength; the men exhausted. The colonel threatened a court-martial. "Colonel," Prophet replied, "there's nothing I'd like more right now than a nice warm court-martial."
The colonel refused to believe the weapons were frozen. Prophet ordered a test. None of the weapons could be fired. The colonel began to chew out the captains for their own and their men's appearance. He said it looked like no one had shaved for a week. Leinbaugh said there was no hot water. The colonel, who prided himself on being a product of the old National Guard, gave a tip: "Now if you men would save some of your morning coffee it could be used for shaving." Leinbaugh stepped over to a snowbank, picked up the five-gallon GI coffee can brought up that morning, and shook it in the colonel's face. The frozen coffee produced a thunk. Leinbaugh shook it again.
"That's enough," said the colonel. "Goddammit, I can hear."
WHEN THE offensive began on January 3, First Army and Third Army were separated by 25 miles of rugged hills and gorges, frozen rivers, icy roads, snow-laden forests, and tens of thousands of battle-hardened German troops. From the south the lead units of Third Army-the 26th and 90th divisions-moved out towards Houffalize. To the north First Army lurched forward.
The 82nd Airborne was one of First Army's divisions, attacking southward from Trois-Ponts. Colonel Vandervoort's battalion of the 505th PIR was in the van. H hour was 0830, and initially all went well. Then an open field stretched between them and the village of Fosse, the first objective. Small-arms fire came on in such volume that it was impossible to advance. Nevertheless, company and platoon commanders tried to get the men to follow-only to be shot down themselves before taking a half-dozen floundering steps in the two-foot-deep snow. Colonel Vandervoort got artillery on the German position, and the barrage forced the Germans to pull out. The paratroopers moved into Fosse, then out to a wood, where they dug in for the night.
As the temperature dropped and the snow continued to fall, the 505th learned that trucks couldn't get through to bring on their gear, so there would be no overcoats, packs, or sleeping bags. Canteens froze solid. The cold and exposure caused old wounds to flare up and, remarkably, triggered many relapses of malaria that had been contracted in the Mediterranean. The regimental history comments, "Despite the heroic efforts of the Medics (many of whom became casualties themselves) who laboured unceasingly all night long, some of the more seriously wounded died."
In the morning, January 4, the sleepless men resumed their attack- really, slogging through the snow, one man breaking trail for two followers, with two tanks in support. They came to a strongly defended hill. The tanks rolled forward and began raking the hillside with bullets and shells. "Everyone opened fire, shooting as fast as they could pull triggers and load clips. In a very short time (probably less than a minute), German soldiers started popping out of holes with their hands in the air," the regimental history notes. "Then an incredible spectacle occurred. From every position on that hill, Germans began climbing out of holes while troopers stood there with their mouths wide open at the sight of approximately 200 Germans milling around." In this encounter the 505th, which had suffered grievously the previous day, had nary a scratch.
January 5 and 6 were more of the same-a kilometre or so advance each day. The good news on January 6 was that the engineers had bulldozed a road through to the front, so trucks could bring the GIs their gear.
On January 7, at 0800 hours, Colonel Vandervoort was hit by mortar fire. "This stunned the battalion," the regimental history continues, "which had come to believe that its long-time commander was invincible." The wounds eventually ended his army career prematurely. As army historian S.L.A. Marshall put it, "The US Army lost a file that was destined for higher command."
THE GERMAN retreat out of the Bulge was slow, stubborn, and costly to the Americans-but to the Germans also. Hitler, always insistent on holding captured ground, refused to consider pulling out and returning to the Siegfried Line. To hold in the Bulge and retain the threat of an offensive thrust westward, Hitler attacked in Alsace with the idea of preventing further American reinforcements moving north to the Ardennes.