In the winter of 1944, in a frozen forest in Belgium, 15,000 American men were told to hold a town that the German army said could not be held. They had no winter coats. They had no overcoats. Many of them had no rifles. Some of them had not eaten in 2 days. The Germans surrounding them had five divisions, hundreds of tanks, and a written ultimatum demanding immediate surrender.
The American commander read the ultimatum. He thought about it for less than 10 seconds. Then he wrote his answer on a single sheet of paper. The answer was one word. This is what happened next. And this is what the German general said about it years later under oath when there was no longer any reason to lie.
Two years after the battle, in a converted American military courtroom inside the former concentration camp at Dachau, a German general stood in the witness box. His name was Josef Dietrich. The Germans called him Sepp. The Allies called him a war criminal. Hitler once called him the most loyal soldier in the Reich. He had commanded the 6th SS Panzer Army during the Ardennes Offensive.
The American prosecutor asked him a question that no German general had yet answered truthfully in open court. General Dietrich, why did Operation Watch on the Rhine fail? The translators paused. The room waited. Dietrich did not look at the prosecutor. He looked down at his hands. He was 53 years old. He had been a soldier for 35 years.
He had been a butcher’s apprentice before the First World War. He had commanded Hitler’s personal bodyguard. He had led troops into Poland, France, Russia, and Belgium. He had won the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. And when he finally answered, his voice was flat. “We did not take Bastogne.” The room recorded the sentence.
That was the entire answer. No elaboration, no apology, just six words from a man who had once believed he served a thousand-year empire. This is the story of why. 18 months earlier, the Ardennes forest sat under a layer of snow so thick it muffled the sound of boots. The forest itself was old, the firs tall and dense, blocking out most of the daylight. It was December of 1944.
The war in Europe was supposed to be ending. The allies had liberated Paris, pushed across the Rhineland, broken into Belgium. Most American commanders believed the Wehrmacht no longer possessed the strength for a major offensive operation. They were wrong. In the bunkers of central Germany, Adolf Hitler had drawn a plan on a map.
It was extraordinary in its ambition. It called for a massive surprise attack through the Ardennes, the same forest Germany had used in 1940 to outflank France. The attack would cut through American lines, drive northwest to the port of Antwerp, and split the Allied armies in two.
If it worked, Hitler believed, the Western allies might be forced to negotiate. The plan was given a name, Wacht am Rhein, watch on the Rhine. Three armies were assembled in absolute secrecy. Radio silence was enforced. Troops moved only at night. Aircraft engines were used to mask the sound of tanks. By the morning of December 16th, more than 200,000 German soldiers had assembled in the snow-covered forest, undetected.
The northern arm of the attack belonged to Sepp Dietrich, the man who would later stand in the witness box at Dachau. >> [music] >> The southern arm, under General Erich Brandenberger, was tasked with protecting the flank. But the center, the crucial middle, belonged to a different kind of soldier. >> [music] >> His name was Hasso von Manteuffel.
He was 47 years old. He stood barely 5 and 1/2 ft tall, a slight wiry man with sharp features and a quiet voice. He came from old Prussian military aristocracy. He had been a cavalryman before there were tanks. He spoke French and English. He read philosophy, and he was, by the assessment of nearly every officer who served under him, one of the most intelligent armored commanders Germany had produced in the war.
Manteuffel commanded the Fifth Panzer Army. His mission was to break through the American line, race across Belgium, and seize a small road junction in the southeast. A town called Bastogne. Bastogne itself was not impressive. It was a modest market town, perhaps 4,000 inhabitants before the war, sitting in a shallow valley in the Belgian Ardennes.
There were stone buildings, a church spire, narrow streets that turned cold and gray in winter. But Bastogne sat at the intersection of seven roads. In the Ardennes, where the terrain was steep and the forests dense and the fields buried under snow, those seven roads were the only practical way to move armored vehicles westward at speed.
Whoever held Bastogne controlled the road network. Whoever controlled the roads controlled the offensive. Manteuffel understood this with absolute clarity. His plan was simple. Hit fast, take the town, continue west. He had four days, perhaps five, before the Americans would reinforce. He believed, as did Dietrich, as did Hitler, that the American units defending the sector would not hold.
The 28th Infantry Division had been mauled in the Hurtgen Forest. The 99th and 106th were inexperienced. The line was thin, and the men behind it were unprepared for what was coming. In this assessment, the Germans were entirely correct. On the first morning of the offensive, December 16th, the German artillery opened with a barrage so intense that American soldiers in forward positions thought the world was ending.
The shells fell in the dark. The men in their foxholes had no warning. Communications collapsed within minutes. By midday, entire battalions of the 106th division were surrounded or routed. The 28th was breaking apart. The line was opening. Manteuffel’s panzers began rolling west. The road to Bastogne was opening in front of him.
And 120 miles to the southwest, in a French town called Mourmelon-le-Grand, 15,000 American soldiers were trying to sleep. They belonged to the 101st Airborne Division. They had returned from Holland barely 2 weeks earlier. They had fought for 72 consecutive days in Operation Market Garden, an attempt to drop airborne troops behind German lines and seize a series of bridges across the Rhine.
The operation had failed. The 101st had been left holding ground that should have been held by ground forces. They had bled in Eindhoven and Veghel and on what soldiers later called Hell’s Highway. They had returned to France understrength, undersupplied, and exhausted. Now, they were in Mourmelon. There were tents.
There were warm meals, sometimes. There were passes into Paris for the lucky few. The men needed everything: replacement uniforms, winter boots, ammunition, medical supplies. Above all, they needed rest. The division commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was not with them. He was in Washington, D.C. This is the first thing you should understand about what happened at Bastogne.
The man who was supposed to lead the 101st Airborne Division in combat was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean attending a conference on Airborne organization and doctrine. He had left his division in the rear in safe billets with no expectation that they would be needed before the new year. When the German offensive began, Taylor could not return in time.
Command fell to his deputy. His name was Anthony Clement McAuliffe. He was 46 years old. He was an artillery officer. He had attended West Point. He had served in the interwar army and helped develop American Airborne doctrine. But he had never commanded an infantry division in sustained combat. His specialty was guns, not foxholes.
He was tall and quiet and economical with his words. On the afternoon of December 17th, McAuliffe received the order that would define his life. The 101st Airborne division would deploy immediately to a town called Bastogne in Belgium to assist in halting a German offensive whose scale and direction were still unclear. They would move by truck.
They would leave that night. McAuliffe asked how long they had to prepare. He was told they had 18 hours. What followed was one of the strangest deployments of the entire war. The division had no winter clothing. Most men were still in their summer field uniforms. Many had no helmets. Some had no rifles.
The supply situation in more melon had been so degraded by the losses in Holland that entire companies were short of basic equipment. The trucks that were supposed to carry them west were standard cargo trucks open in the back without canvas covers. The temperature was already below freezing. The paratroopers climbed in anyway. They drove through the night.
The roads were ice. The headlights were taped down to comply with blackout orders. The men in the back of the truck sat shoulder-to-shoulder, knees [clears throat] drawn up, breathing into their hands. Some had not eaten in 18 hours. Some slept sitting upright, leaning against the man beside them. And as they drove east toward Belgium, they began to pass other vehicles going the other way.
These were Americans, soldiers from the 28th Infantry Division, from the 106th, from scattered combat engineer battalions and artillery units that had been overrun in the first two days of the German offensive. They were retreating. Some were wounded. Some had lost their weapons. Some had lost their boots. They walked alongside their vehicles because the vehicles were too full of casualties.
They moved in the dark in long columns with hollow faces and frostbitten fingers. They saw the paratroopers heading toward the fight and they shouted. They told them to turn around. They told them the Germans had tanks. They told them the SS was coming. They told them there were tigers in the woods. What mattered was what the paratroopers did next.
They began climbing out of their trucks during fuel stop. They walked over to the retreating men. They did not argue. They did not lecture. They simply asked quietly, almost politely, if they could borrow the rifles. The men of the 28th and the 106th handed them over. They handed over M1 Garand rifles, bandoliers of ammunition, light machine guns, grenades, bazookas, field dressings, helmets, whatever they had.
Some of them apologized. Some of them said nothing. The paratroopers took the equipment, nodded once, climbed back into their trucks, and kept driving east. There were entire companies of the 101st that arrived at Bastogne carrying weapons that had belonged 12 hours earlier to other men. This is not in most history books.
It is in the unit diaries and the after action reports. It is in the memories of men who survived. It is one of the small details that tells you what was actually happening in those days. The American Army in the Ardennes was not a uniform machine. It was a thing breaking apart and being reassembled in real time, in the dark on icy roads.
By men who had decided that whatever was happening at Bastogne, they would not arrive empty-handed. They reached the town on the morning of December 19th. And here is the second thing you should understand. The thing that almost no one outside professional military history remembers.
The 101st Airborne Division was not the first American unit to reach Bastogne. >> [music] >> The previous evening, another column had already entered the town. It was not infantry. It was armor. It was Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division under the command of Colonel William L. Roberts. They had been pulled out of reserve and ordered north to plug whatever gap they could find.
They had reached Bastogne in the late afternoon of December 18th. They had positioned tank destroyers and Sherman tanks along the eastern approaches. They had established roadblocks at the village of Noville, and the village of Longvilly, and the village of Wardin. When the 101st arrived, Roberts was already fighting.
His tanks had already engaged the lead elements of the 2nd Panzer Division. His infantry support had already taken casualties. His command post had already been operating for half a day. The truth, which Hollywood would later quietly omit, is that the defense of Bastogne began as an armored operation. The paratroopers reinforced it.
They did not begin it. But what they brought, beyond rifles and replacements, was something that Roberts and his tankers did not have on their own, a psychology. The 101st Airborne Division had been trained, as a matter of doctrine, to fight [music] when surrounded. Their entire concept of airborne operations assumed they would land behind enemy lines, that they would be cut off from supply, that they would have to hold ground without flanks, without reinforcement, without retreat.
The founder of American airborne forces, Major General William Lee, had given them a single principle that defined their identity. He had told them that the word surrounded simply meant the enemy was now in range in all directions. It was the kind of line that sounded like a joke when you first heard it. It was not a joke.
It was an operational philosophy, and the men of the 101st had internalized it the way other soldiers internalized the manual of arms. When they arrived at Bastogne and looked at the map and saw that German forces were converging on the town from three directions, they did not see a crisis. They saw a normal Tuesday.
Roberts, for his part, understood immediately what had just been added to his command. He did not know McAuliffe well. He had never served with the 1st, but he was a professional soldier and he could read what was in front of him. He saw paratroopers in summer uniforms climbing out of cargo trucks at 20° below freezing. He saw them carrying borrowed weapons.
He saw them taking up positions in the snow without complaint. He saw them moving toward the sound of guns instead of away from it. By the morning of December 19th, the perimeter around Bastogne was beginning to form. It would eventually stretch 16 miles in circumference. Inside it, by the end of the day, were approximately 18,000 American soldiers.
The 1st Airborne, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored, Combat Command R of the 9th Armored, stragglers from the 28th, engineers, medics, cooks who had been handed rifles, truck drivers who had become infantry. Outside it, closing in by the hour, were five German divisions, Panzer Lehr, the 26th Volksgrenadier, the 2nd Panzer, elements of additional formations moving up from the rear.
The fog rolled in on the night of the 19th and did not lift for days. Air support was impossible. >> [music] >> Resupply was impossible. Evacuation of the wounded was impossible. The men in the perimeter did not know it yet, but the only general who could break through to relieve them, George S. Patton, was still hundreds of miles away in the middle of a conference in Luxembourg, where he was about to be asked by Eisenhower to do something that no general in the modern era had ever successfully done, turn an entire army
90° in the middle of winter and attack north. That, however, was a story for later. For now, on the morning of December 19th, the men at Bastogne began to dig. The ground was frozen so hard that entrenching tools bounced off it. They dug anyway, and 100 miles to the east, in a command bunker overlooking his attack, a small, wiry Prussian general named Hasso von Manteuffel, was watching reports come in from his lead units, and he was beginning, for the first time in the operation, to feel something he had not felt since June of
- He was beginning to feel that his timetable had slipped. He did not yet know what that would mean. He would learn. The men dug through the night of December 19th and into the morning of the 20th. They used entrenching tools first. When the tools bounced off the frozen earth, they used bayonets.
When the bayonets bent, they used their hands, scraping at the iron hard ground cold fingers until the fingers bled and the blood froze in the cuts. They took turns. One man dug, another stood watch. A third tried to sleep curled against the side of the hole, knees drawn to chest, helmet over his face.
The temperature on the morning of December 20th was 22° below freezing. This was the United States Army in the Ardennes. >> [music] >> This was what was about to face the German military machine. On the morning of the 20th, the village of Noville fell. It had been held by Team Desobry, a battalion-sized element of Combat Command B under Major William Desobry of the 10th Armored Division reinforced by the 1st Battalion of the 6th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st.
They had been ordered to hold a forward position northeast of Bastogne to slow the German advance. They held it for 36 hours against the 2nd Panzer Division. Desobry had been gravely wounded during the fighting, struck in the head by shell fragments. He had been evacuated by ambulance to the rear. The ambulance never reached Bastogne.
It was intercepted by a German patrol on the road and captured. Desobry, unconscious and bleeding, became a prisoner of war. He would survive the rest of the war in a German hospital and a series of prison camps, and he would not learn until April of 1945 what had happened to the men he left behind.
The survivors of Team Desobry fell back into the main perimeter. They brought their wounded. They brought what equipment they could carry. They brought, for those who could still speak, an understanding of what was coming. The Germans had tanks. The tanks were not only Panzer Mark IVs. The tanks included Panthers, 45 tons of steel with sloped frontal armor that American bazookas could not reliably penetrate.
The infantry coming behind the tanks were not exhausted Volksgrenadiers being driven forward at gunpoint. They were trained, equipped, motivated men of the Wehrmacht executing a plan they believed could still win the war. On December 21st, the encirclement closed. The last open road into Bastogne, the road running south to Neufchâteau, was cut by lead elements of the German 5th Parachute Division.
The 101st Airborne and everyone trapped with them were now alone. They could not be reached by ground. They could not be resupplied by air because the fog had not lifted and the C-47 transport aircraft of the IX Troop Carrier Command could not navigate to drop zones they could not see. The wounded inside the perimeter were beginning to die in significant numbers.
The 326th Airborne Medical Company had been overrun on the night of December 19th. The Germans had captured 11 physicians, including the division surgeon, along with most of the division’s surgical supplies and approximately 100 wounded men who could not be moved. The hospital had been set up in a roadside clearing west of Bastogne.
The Germans appeared 3:00 in the morning. >> [music] >> There was a brief firefight. The medical staff surrendered. The wounded were left behind to die or to be taken prisoner, depending on whether they could walk. The senior medical officer remaining inside the perimeter was a major named Jack Prior. He was 33 years old. He had been a country doctor in Vermont before the war.
He set up a new aid station in a warehouse in the center of Bastogne. He had almost no morphine. He had almost no plasma. He had no surgical instruments other than what had been in his personal kit. He operated by candlelight on a table made of stacked crates, assisted by a Belgian civilian nurse named Renee Lemaire, 29 years old, who had volunteered when she saw the wounded being carried into the warehouse.
She would die 3 days later when a German bomb destroyed the aid station on Christmas Eve. But that was still ahead. On the afternoon of December 22nd, the day after the encirclement closed, two German officers walked toward the American lines under a white flag. The first was Major Leo Wagner of the Panzer Lehr Division. He was a senior staff officer, professional and businesslike.
The second was a younger man, Lieutenant Hellmuth Henke, also of Panzer Lehr, who spoke fluent English. They came from the south, walking carefully along a road that had been mined and unmined and remined. They carried a leather case. They were met at the forward outpost of the 2nd Battalion, 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, by an American sergeant who pointed his carbine at them and asked them in English what they wanted.
Henke answered, “We are parliamentaires. We bring a message for your commander.” They were blindfolded and led back through the American lines. The leather case was opened in the presence of Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe. Inside was a typed document, two pages, written in formal German and informal English. The English translation read as follows: “To the USA Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne, the fortune of war is changing.
This time the USA forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German armored units. There is only one possibility to save the encircled U. SA troops from total annihilation. That is the honorable surrender of the encircled town. In order to think it over, a term of 2 hours will be granted, beginning with the presentation of this note.
If this proposal should be rejected, one German artillery corps and six heavy anti-aircraft battalions are ready to annihilate the U. SA troops in and near Bastogne. The order for firing will be given immediately after this 2-hour term. All the serious civilian losses caused by this artillery fire would not correspond with the well-known American humanity. The German commander.
McAuliffe read the document. His staff watched him in silence. He was sitting in a small room in the basement of the Heintz barracks, which the 101st had requisitioned as its command post. The room was lit by a single bulb running off a portable generator. There was a map on the wall.
There was a small stove burning wood. The temperature inside was perhaps 40°. McAuliffe finished reading. He let the paper fall to the desk in front of him. He said one word. He said, “Nuts.” His staff thought he had not understood the question. His operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Kinnard, 29 years old, broke the silence first.
He said, “Sir, what do you want to put in the reply? Huh?” McAuliffe looked up. He said, “I don’t know what to tell them.” There was a pause. Then Kinnard quietly said, “That first remark of yours would be hard to beat.” McAuliffe looked at him for a long moment. He looked at the staff officers in the room. He looked at the typed German ultimatum on his desk.
Then he nodded. The formal American reply was typed on a single sheet. It was dictated by McAuliffe, witnessed by his staff, and carried by Colonel Joseph Harper, 43 years old, commander of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, back to the German parliamentaires, who were waiting under blindfold at the perimeter.
The reply read as follows, “To the German commander, NUTS.” The American commander, Harper handed the reply to Lieutenant Henke. Henke [music] read it. He read it a second time. He looked up at the American colonel with something approaching genuine confusion. He asked what the word meant. Harper considered his answer carefully.
He said, “It means the same as go to hell.” He removed the blindfolds. He walked the two German officers back to the edge of the American perimeter. >> [music] >> At the line, he turned and looked at them. He said, “On your way, bud, and good luck to you.” It was perhaps the strangest courtesy of the entire war.
A senior American officer wishing two enemy emissaries good luck as they returned to the army that was about to attack him. The Germans walked back into the trees. The reply was eventually delivered to General Heinrich von Lüttwitz, commander of the German XLVII Panzer Corps, the officer who had drafted the ultimatum.
Lüttwitz did not understand the word, either. It had to be explained to him by Henke. When it was, his reaction was not recorded for history. But the German artillery did not begin to fire at the end of the 2-hour deadline as threatened. The ultimatum had been in part a bluff. But the men inside Bastogne did not know that.
What they knew was that their commander had told the German army to go to hell in writing, in the presence of witnesses, with the perimeter shrinking and the wounded dying and the temperature dropping. The reply spread through the division in hours. It spread by word of mouth, the way important things spread among soldiers. A runner told a sergeant, a sergeant told a squad, a squad told the next squad in the next foxhole.
By nightfall on December 22nd, every man in the 101st Airborne Division knew that General McAuliffe had said “Nuts!” to the Germans. What it did to the men inside that perimeter is difficult to describe in modern language. It was not bravado. It was not propaganda. It was the moment they understood with absolute clarity that they were not going to be surrendered.
Their commander had made the decision for them. The decision was no. They went back to their foxholes. They kept digging. And here is the thing that almost no Hollywood film about Bastogne has been willing to tell you. The thing that runs against the popular memory of the battle. The army surrounding Bastogne in those first critical days was not the SS.
There were no Waffen SS divisions in the encirclement on December 22nd when the ultimatum was delivered. The forces investing the town were the Panzer Lehr Division under General Fritz Bayerlein, the 26th Volksgrenadier Division under General Heinz Kokott, and elements of the 2nd Panzer Division.
These were Wehrmacht units, regular German army. The SS was 60 miles to the north fighting a different battle entirely on the northern shoulder of the offensive >> [music] >> battering itself to pieces against the American 2nd and 99th Infantry Divisions at a place called Elsenborn Ridge. The Wehrmacht was at Bastogne, not the SS.
This matters because the popular memory of the battle has compressed two stories into one. History, looking for a clean narrative, put them in the same forest. The truth is that the regular German army, which had spent five years convinced of its tactical superiority over every other military force in Europe, was the one that hit the wall at Bastogne, and it hit hard.
On the night of December 22nd, Heinz Kokott of the 26th Volksgrenadier Division wrote in his command log that the Americans inside the perimeter were fighting with a determination he had not expected. Kokott was 44 years old. He had commanded troops in Russia. He had seen what desperate men were capable of.
He was not given to romantic descriptions of his enemies. But what he was watching unfold in front of his division was, in his own assessment, something he had not been trained to defeat. He had assumed, like Lüttwitz, like Manteuffel, like Hitler himself, that American troops in a closed pocket would degrade quickly.
The cold would weaken them. The hunger would weaken them. The isolation would weaken them. They would surrender within a week. By the morning of December 23rd, 6 days into the battle, they had not weakened. They had not surrendered. The perimeter had not shrunk. If anything, the American positions had become more organized, more interlocking, more difficult to assault.
>> [music] >> The German artillery was firing on grid coordinates that had become irrelevant because the Americans had moved their positions overnight, slowly, methodically, in the dark, while the German staff officers slept. This was not improvisation. This was not luck. This was professional infantry doctrine being executed under conditions so extreme that even the men executing it did not always realize how well they were performing.
They had been trained to dig in, hold ground, and fight from positions of cover. They were doing exactly that. On the morning of December 23rd, the fog lifted, the sky cleared, and the United States Army Air Forces arrived overhead. The first to come were the C-47 transports of the IX troop carrier command. They had taken off from airfields in England before dawn, formed up over the channel, and crossed Belgium at low altitude in clear winter light.
Pathfinders had jumped over the perimeter at first light to mark the drop zones with colored panels and homing beacons. The transports came in waves. They dropped 144 tons of supplies, ammunition for rifles, machine guns, and mortars, medical supplies, rations, batteries for radios, fuel for tanks.
The men inside the perimeter watched the sky open with what some of them later described as religious feeling. The parachutes were colored, white for medical supplies, red for ammunition, blue for food, orange for radio equipment. They drifted down through clear air onto frozen fields, and the men of the 101st ran out of their foxholes to gather them in.
That afternoon, P-47 Thunderbolts came over. They were close air support fighters, armed with eight machine guns each, capable of carrying 500-lb bombs. They strafed German artillery positions. They bombed German armor. They flew so low over the American lines that the men in the foxholes could see the pilots in the canopies.
They came again and again, sortie after sortie, for the rest of the day. The German attacks slowed, but they did not stop. The German command knew what the clear weather meant. It meant that the window for taking Bastogne by direct assault was closing. The Americans were being resupplied. The American Third Army was now moving. Patton, in Luxembourg, had wheeled his entire force 90° in less than 72 hours, an operation that military historians have since called one of the most logistically remarkable maneuvers of the 20th century. He was driving north with
three divisions. He was coming for Bastogne. If Bastogne was going to fall, it had to fall soon. The German command made the decision to commit to a final all-out assault. It would happen on Christmas Day. It would be led by the 26th Volksgrenadier Division, reinforced by elements of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division, which had been moved up from reserve specifically for this attack.
The objective was to crack the western face of the American perimeter, drive directly into the town, and seize the road junction by force. The attack began at 3:00 in the morning on December 25th. It came at a village called Champs, defended by the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Steve Chappuis.
The Germans came across open snow in white-painted assault suits. They came with tanks behind them, 18 Mark IVs and assault guns, the last of the armor the Germans could spare for the western face. The fighting at Champs was hand-to-hand within an hour. Paratroopers fought in the streets of the village with rifles, with grenades, with bayonets, with whatever they had.
The fighting was so close that artillery support was impossible. The men of the 502nd held the village house by house through the dark while the temperature continued to fall. And then, in the moment that would later become the strange, almost accidental climax of the battle, something happened that the Germans had not planned for.
A column of their tanks, perhaps 18 vehicles in all, broke through the American line west of Champs and continued moving east in the dark. The tank commanders believed they were heading toward the center of Bastogne. They were not. The disorientation of fighting in the snow, in the dark, against an enemy whose positions did not match the German maps had caused the column to veer south of its intended axis of advance.
The tanks rolled through woods that were not where they were supposed to be. They emerged into open ground. They continued east expecting to find the rear of the American infantry positions. What they found instead was the divisional artillery park of the 101st Airborne Division. They had driven directly into the gun line of the 463rd Parachute Field Artillery Battalion.
The men of the 463rd were artillerymen. They were trained to fire indirect fire missions at coordinates given to them by forward observers. They were not infantry. They were not trained to fight tanks at close range. But they were paratroopers and they had spent the previous five days being told that there was nowhere to retreat to.
And when the German tanks came rolling out of the woods in the gray light of Christmas morning, the gun crews did the only thing left to do. >> [music] >> They dropped the muzzles of their 75-mm pack howitzers to point horizontally. They loaded high explosive shells. They fired directly into the German tanks at point-blank range.
The first volley destroyed three Mark IVs. The second volley destroyed two more. Within 20 minutes, seven German tanks were burning in the field east of Champs. The surviving vehicles tried to turn around. But they could not maneuver in the soft ground. They were destroyed where they stood. The infantry that had been following the tanks was cut down by machine gun fire from the gun crews and from a hastily assembled defense line of cooks, drivers, and signalmen who had been pulled out of the rear and given rifles. The Christmas Day assault on
Bastogne collapsed before noon. When the smoke cleared and the snow began falling again over the bodies of the men and the burning hulks of the tanks, the Germans had lost their best opportunity to take the town. In a farmhouse a few miles to the east, Heinz Kokott sat at a kitchen table and wrote a report to General von Luttichau.
The report acknowledged that the attack had failed. It acknowledged that the 26th Volksgrenadier Division had taken catastrophic losses. It acknowledged that further operations against the western perimeter were no longer practical. He sat down his pen. He sat in the cold kitchen and looked at the small window where the snow had begun again.
He did not write what he was thinking. What he was thinking he would not write down until many years later in a room far from any battlefield after the war had ended and the empire had fallen and the only thing left to do was tell the truth. On the afternoon of December 26th, a Sherman tank rolled into the southern outskirts of Bastogne.
It belonged to Company C of the 37th Tank Battalion, Fourth Armored Division, United States Third Army. The tank commander was a lieutenant named Charles Boggs. He was 23 years old from Illinois and he had been awake for most of the previous 48 hours. The tank battalion he served in was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, 30 years old, a stocky cigar-chewing officer who would one day become Army Chief of Staff and have a tank named after him.
Boggs’ tank crossed a small rise outside the village of Assenois. He saw a line of figures in the snow ahead of him. He could not tell in the gray light whether they were Germans or Americans. He picked up his radio and ordered his gunner to hold fire. He stood up in the turret. He waved. A figure on the ground waved back.
It was an engineer of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division. The siege of Bastogne was over. Eight days of combat, six days fully encircled. What happened in the hours that followed has been described many times. >> [music] >> There were no celebrations. There was no Hollywood embrace.
The men of the 101st who came out of their foxholes to greet the tankers were too tired and too cold to do much more than nod. Some of them shook hands. Some of them just stared. A few asked for cigarettes. The tankers handed them over. The paratroopers lit them with hands that shook. Major General Maxwell Taylor, the division commander, flew back from Washington and reached the perimeter that evening.
He resumed command from McAuliffe. McAuliffe, who had spent eight days as the acting commander of a surrounded division under attack from five German divisions in the worst winter in living memory, did not complain about being replaced. He went back to his pack howitzers. This is where most accounts of Bastogne end. The siege is broken.
The 101st is relieved. Patton has come north. The battle is won. But the men inside the perimeter did not go home. They stayed. And the worst was still ahead. In a bunker hundreds of miles to the east, Adolf Hitler received the news of the breakthrough at Bastogne, and he did not accept it. He believed the Ardennes offensive could still be saved.
He gave orders that startled even his own commanders. He ordered the first SS Panzer division to be pulled out of the wreckage on the northern shoulder of the offensive and moved south. The division was the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the bodyguard, the original SS formation. The unit whose officers wore Hitler’s personal monogram on their shoulder boards.
It had been ground down at Stoumont and La Gleize and the long roads of the northern sector. It was a wounded animal, but it was still the Leibstandarte. It was commanded by Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke, 33 years old, a hard, dark-faced man who had risen through the ranks of the SS from its earliest days. He had been investigated, but never prosecuted, for the murder of British prisoners at Wormhoudt in 1940.
He was, by any reasonable definition, the kind of officer the Allies hoped to capture alive at the end of the war. He received his new orders in the last days of December. His division was to move south, link up with elements of the 167th Volksgrenadier Division, and attack the eastern flank of the Bastogne Corridor.
The objective was to cut the road that Patton had opened. The attack began on the morning of January 1st, 1945. It struck at a village called Lutrebois, 3 miles southeast of Bastogne, and it fell primarily on the 35th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division. But the eastern positions of the 101st Airborne, held by elements of the 501st and 506th Parachute Infantry Regiments, came under heavy pressure from the northern axis of the attack.
For the first time in the entire battle, men of the 101st Airborne were directly engaging soldiers of the Waffen SS. The fighting at Lutrebois lasted four days. The 1st SS Panzer Division was broken at Lutrebois. It lost more than 30 tanks and assault guns in four days. It lost officers it could not replace. It lost the cohesion that had defined it through five years of war.
The Leibstandarte, the unit Hitler had built personally, fought its last serious offensive action in the snow outside a Belgian village whose name most Americans cannot pronounce. And then it stopped. Around the same time in a command bunker far to the east, the small Prussian General Hasso von Manteuffel composed a report and sent it directly to Hitler.
The report recommended the immediate withdrawal of all armored forces from the Ardennes Salient. It argued that the offensive had failed. It argued that continued attacks would only feed equipment and men into a meat grinder that could not produce strategic results. Hitler read the report. He rejected it. The attacks continued, smaller now, more desperate, costing what Germany no longer had.
Manteuffel, in his memoirs many years later, would describe that period as the moment he understood with absolute clarity that the war was lost. Not lost in the sense of declining, lost in the sense of decided. He continued to issue orders to his men because he was a soldier, and soldiers issue orders, and the men in the foxholes deserved leadership even when their leaders no longer believed in the cause they served.
It was a kind of grief that no military manual prepares an officer for. The 101st Airborne Division remained at Bastogne through the rest of December and into the middle of January. They continued to take casualties. They continued to lose men to frostbite and trench foot and the small ordinary violences of a battle that no one else was watching anymore.
On January 17th, they were withdrawn from the line. The division had suffered approximately 1,641 casualties during the Bastogne operation. The number was smaller than the legend. It was large enough. The men who walked out of Bastogne walked out as a different division than the one that had arrived. Not because they had become better soldiers.
They had been excellent soldiers when they arrived. They walked out as men who had been tested at the absolute limit of what their training had prepared them for, and they had not failed. The German officers who had faced them in the years that followed wrote about it. Sepp Dietrich at the Dachau tribunal said it in six words, “We did not take Bastogne.
” Hasso von Manteuffel, interviewed after the war by the British historian B.H. Liddell Hart, gave a longer answer. He compared Bastogne to a fish bone lodged in the throat of the German advance. He said his army could not swallow it. >> [music] >> He said his army could not cough it out. He said the bone was still there when he was given the order to withdraw.
Heinz Kokott, in his post-war manuscript for the United States Army Historical Division, finally wrote what he had not been able to write in the kitchen in Belgium on Christmas Day. He wrote that he had assumed before the battle that American soldiers in a closed pocket would degrade quickly. He wrote that the assumption had been incorrect.
He wrote that the 101st Airborne Division had fought with a cohesion and a discipline that he had not been trained to defeat. He did not call them heroes. He did not call them supermen. He called them what they were. He called them paratroopers. 80 years have passed since the siege of Bastogne. The men who held it are nearly all gone now.
The last veterans of the 101st who fought there are in their late 90s. Most have already laid down their rifles for the last time and gone to rest beside the men who did not come home. In the cemetery at Luxembourg City beneath rows of white marble crosses, more than 5,000 Americans are buried. Among them is General George S.
Patton, who asked before he died to be buried with his men. The grass over those graves has been kept green for 80 winters by a small staff of Belgian and Luxembourgish caretakers, the children and grandchildren of the people the Americans came to liberate, who tend the stones in all weather, and who do not need to be told why.
What happened at Bastogne was not a miracle. It was the result of a decision. The decision was made by 15,000 individual American men alone in their foxholes, in the cold, with the wounded dying around them and the enemy closing in, that they were not going to leave. They were not going to surrender.
They were not going to step back. The Germans had a doctrine for soldiers who broke. They did not have a doctrine for soldiers who would not. By the time they understood the difference, they had already lost.
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