and twelve missing. Five M18s were destroyed as well.81
The men of C/609th KO’d fifteen enemy Mark V tanks and one Mark VI tank as well as three SP guns. Losses amounted to thirteen men and eight vehicles, including two M-18s destroyed by AT fire. The other losses were principally the result of nightly enemy bombing.82
Armored Crush
Anticipating orders from SHAEF, Patton on 18 December began to turn the weight of his Third Army more than 90 degrees so as to rip into the southern flank of the Bulge. Third Corps, including the 4th Armored and 80th and 26th Infantry divisions—each with an SP tank destroyer battalion attached—attacked on 22 December to relieve Bastogne, while Devers’s Sixth Army Group began to take over most of Third Army’s area of responsibility. Patton’s spearhead dashed one hundred twenty-five miles through a blizzard to accomplish this feat, and through 23 December, 133,178 motor vehicles traversed a total of 1,654,042 miles. German commanders who calculated that Patton would never be able to react so quickly were wrong.83 On the other hand, German intelligence easily detected the Third Army shift, and by the time Third Army’s spearhead arrived, the Germans had deployed strong blocking forces on all approaches.84
Captain Thomas Evans, now S-2 of the 704th Tank Destroyer Battalion, recalled, “We moved from around Sarreguemines, where we were engaged, and came back and got into Longwy, which was maybe twenty miles from Bastogne. It was about eighteen or twenty degrees below zero. There were maybe eight or ten inches of snow on the ground. And cold! It took us all night to move from Sarreguemines. They had MPs stopped every twenty miles. They had these big cans and logs burning so we could get out and warm our hands up. But we were only allowed to stay for two minutes.”85
The 4th Armored Division was battle weary. It was short on trained men and material, and most of its tanks were worn out.86 The 704th Tank Destroyer Battalion was just as tired after fighting along the Siegfried Line. Patton instructed the division—which would advance along and parallel to the road from Arlon—to attack with tanks, TDs, artillery, and armored engineers in the van, trailed by the armored infantry. The command was to use wide-envelopment tactics against any strongpoints.87
The division jumped of at 0600 hours on 22 December. It bridged the Sure River the next day after meeting light initial resistance, and commanders were optimistic that they would reach Bastogne in short order. Early in the afternoon on 24 December, a message from Patton relayed by VIII Corps arrived in Bastogne: “Xmas Eve present coming up. Hold on.” But the 4th Armored Division had run into a stiff German defense supported by antitank and assault guns around Chaumont, Warnach, and Bigonville.88
There would be no armored dash into Bastogne. Instead, the armor and infantry began the painful process of ejecting the Germans—mostly elite troopers from the 5th Parachute Division—from their path. Captain Thomas Evans spent Christmas day with his old Company C comrades, in the bitter cold, pinned down by German artillery fire.89
The official U.S. Army history declares the siege of Bastogne ended as of 1645 hours on 26 December, when the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion reportedly spotted three light tanks, thought to be friendly.90 They were actually Shermans from CCR’s 37th Tank Battalion. Eleven M18s from B/704th Tank Destroyer Battalion soon followed the tankers into Bastogne. Their first kill was a captured Sherman manned by German troops.91
North of the German salient, VII Corps readied itself to counterattack on orders from Field Marshall Montgomery, but it became embroiled in the defensive battle long before Monty was ready to move. The corps included the 2d and 3d Armored and two infantry divisions. Early on 21 December, “Hell on Wheels” began its march from the Roer front toward the German spearhead. The 2d Armored ran under radio silence, and its recon elements had orders to make sure that no one was captured.92
The 2d Panzer Division, low on fuel and badly strung out, had almost reached the Meuse River near Dinant. The 2d Armored Division’s reconnaissance patrols established contact on 23 December. After going round and round with higher command in order to get permission to attack, MajGen Ernest Harmon sent his CCA to bore into the German positions at 0630 on Christmas Eve. A roadblock supported by a Panther with a very skilled gunner barred the path of CCA’s Task Force A. One of the M36s recently acquired by the 702d Tank Destroyer Battalion crawled up the face of a defile and placed three rounds through the side of the Panther’s turret.93
Thus began a three-day engagement during which the 2d Armored Division annihilated its opposite number, and bits of Panzer Lehr Division to boot. At 0930 hours on Christmas day, CCB descended on the 2d Panzer Division’s main concentration at Celles. The Germans lacked enough fuel to maneuver, and the panzers often fought as strongpoints where they stood. The battle was a combined-arms extravaganza as American tanks, TDs, artillery, and fighter-bombers (including some British Typhoons) combined to destroy more than eighty German tanks and sixteen other armored vehicles. The crews of the 702d fought no large engagements, but its tank kills here and there added up to a tenth of the total.
On 26 December, Bradley—aware of the 2d Armored Division’s smashing victory—told SHAEF that he believed Hitler’s offensive had reached its high water mark.94 Indeed, the tide was already on its way back out.
The Smaller Bulge
The veterans of the North Africa desert in the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion were hunkered down near Strasbourg. The outfit’s informal history recorded, “Christmas week 1944 was cold, miserable, and anything but joyous. The destroyers were all over the division area, firing at the Kraut, blocking roads, and catching plenty of hell. The news from the north was terrible. There was constant talk of a coming Kraut push. Recon was up in the hills with the French Ghoums [North Africans]. Morale was ‘excellent’ in the morning reports, but nowhere else!”95
American and French troops in the now thinly stretched Sixth Army Group sector along the upper Rhine were glumly ushering in the new year amidst cold and snow when Hitler’s secondary offensive— Operation Nordwind—struck out of the midnight darkness. The German First Army executed the main attack, driving south through Bitche and the Wissembourg Gap. The Germans threw into the fight seven battle-worn divisions and one SS mountain division fresh from Finland. Their mission—straight from the Fuhrer’s mouth—was to destroy as many American formations as possible.96
Allied intelligence (including Ultra) provided forewarning of the attack, and Eisenhower ordered Sixth Army Group CG LtGen Jacob Devers to give ground in order to prevent a rip in his lines—but to fall back no further than the Vosges Mountains under any circumstances. Indeed, Ike was willing to abandon Strasbourg if need be, but threats of outright insubordination from the French persuaded him to abandon the idea. Seventh Army’s CG, LtGen Alexander Patch, in turn opted to shorten his lines by withdrawing to a new MLR before the mountains, although not until several of his divisions had been badly bloodied in the first week of fighting. The American line eventually stabilized on the Moder River, which flowed from west to east into the Rhine. The French, meanwhile, fought fiercely to contain the German Nineteenth Army, which still held a substantial area west of the Rhine around the city of Colmar and which launched a drive to capture Strasbourg from the south.
The weather was dreadful. Blizzards and fog often blinded the combatants, and roads iced into slick sheets that could send tracked vehicles sliding into ditches and snow banks. Sergeant Tom Sherman in the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion watched one M10 whip by down a hillside road at an impressive rate of speed. The captain standing beside him asked in surprise, “What’s their hurry?” Evidently only Sherman had noticed that the M10 had been sliding backwards.97
Between the conditions and the limited armor available to the Germans, the battle became primarily an infantry struggle.
