| Interesting personal remembrance by a fellow who was General McAuliffe's aide. Registration required. |
| Text posted by request... |
Vincent Vicari remembers the Battle of the Bulge.
On Dec. 16, 1944, the field phone rang in the command post of the 101st Airborne Division's artillery regiment near Reims, in eastern France, and a voice told him to wake his boss, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, and have him report immediately to HQ. He recalls that as McAuliffe went out the door, he said, "Lieutenant, stay by that phone. Don't move." And he remembers the call an hour or so later, instructing him to alert all units to "get ready to move out, immediately." Those units would soon be spending Christmas fending off Adolf Hitler's last desperate attempt to turn the Allied tide that had been advancing since D-Day, six months earlier. The six-week battle to come would be the largest of the war in Western Europe.
| It was an Army made up of mostly draftees and National Guardsmen, quite a different Army from today. Instead of Humvees, they had Jeeps; instead of Bradleys, they had trucks, all of them unarmored. That was when the infantry wasn't going by shoeleather express. And they were fighting off the Brutal European Winter™. That was in the days before Global Warming, of course... |
Whatever was brewing, 1st Lt. Vicari and the rest of his unit didn't welcome it. They were recovering from three months of combat in Operation Market Garden, the failed British-led invasion of Germany via Holland. "We were exhausted and we'd had no time to refurbish," Vicari says. "We had no winter equipment. We were still in the same torn uniforms, short of food, ammo and everything else."
| Units weren't rotated to the States to rest and recuperate. When they were lucky, they were pulled off line and got reinforcements. I suppose there might have been somebody on the Home Front complaining — there were those who were on the other side, but the citizenry had the habit of beating them up. It didn't do any good to run off to Canada, because if you did you'd get drafted there, too. |
But orders were orders. By midnight, the troops had gathered their gear and boarded hastily organized convoys of trucks, jeeps and other vehicles for a bone-numbing dash to the front.
| I can't describe how cold those stinkin' jeeps were in winter. Most were open — without even the canvas covers. The damp cold would go through a field jacket and liner and fatigues and undershirt and woolies without pausing. My Dad tried to describe that to me. At the time, as a kid, I thought, "Yeah, that musta been tough." On winter exercises with 3rd Armored Division in the early 80s, I actually got the appreciate the actuality. I felt that cold right into my bones. |
"Nobody knew where we were going," recalls Vicari, now 84 and living in Easton, Pa. "We had never heard of a place called Bastogne." Bastogne, Belgium, a market town where several roads converged, was critical to blocking the German advance. The troops also didn't know Allied intelligence had been fooled into concluding that a German code name, "Wacht am Rhein"--Watch on the Rhine--referred to a defensive buildup, not a surprise counteroffensive into Belgium.
| There'd be congressional hearings about that today, with people sacked and all the politically wounded publicly shot... |
Aided by heavy overcast that grounded Allied aircraft, 200,000 German troops and 600 tanks were surging westward through the rugged Ardennes, driving a wedge into American lines that on battle maps would become famous as "the Bulge." "We gamble everything," Gen. Gerd von Runstedt, Germany's commander in the west, had told his forces in Daily Order No. 54 on Dec. 16, according to Alex Kershaw's "The Longest Winter," a new book. Stretched thinly across the forested terrain were five U.S. Army divisions--outmanned, outgunned and mostly untested in battle. By contrast, The 101st Airborne, the "Screaming Eagles" had jumped into the dark behind enemy lines on D-Day and fought across France and Holland. They were seasoned veterans, but even their biggest weapons were no match for the German army's fearsome 70-ton Tiger tanks.
| But they were at that time probably the best single division in the U.S. Army... |
As the Americans rumbled through a bitterly cold predawn, they met their defeated comrades stumbling to the rear. "Whenever the convoy slowed, we jumped off the trucks to get their ammo, hand grenades and guns," Vicari says.
| [Insert 2004-style comments about incompetence in the supply system here. Then ignore.] |
By getting to Bastogne first, the Americans were able to block German movements in southern Belgium. But after a week of fighting, the paratroopers and their supporting forces found themselves surrounded. German artillery shelled the town. Snow and fog allowed only a few supply drops, and many parachutes drifted into German lines, delivering much-needed ammunition, food and medical supplies to the wrong side. "Some of the townspeople gave us white sheets to cover our uniforms in the snow," remembers Vicari. "It was so cold that GIs had to keep their rifles under their coats to keep them from freezing."
Elsewhere, other American units fought stubbornly to stop the German advance and prevent capture of fuel supplies, a prime German objective. Thousands of GIs were taken prisoner, however, and at Malmedy, Belgium, more than 80 were machine-gunned by Waffen SS soldiers in one of World War II's most notorious battlefield atrocities.
| That's the same sort of thing we expect from our present enemy... |
| My godfather was one of those taken prisoner by the SS, he managed to get away somehow. Never talked about it, but till the day he died he would have nothing to do with anything German. |
Meanwhile, English-speaking Germans in American uniforms had slipped through U.S. lines, hoping to create chaos. Some were caught and at least 18 were executed as spies.
| We don't seem to do that anymore. Too bad... |
At Bastogne, the 101st's paratroopers repulsed repeated attacks and were desperately low on ammunition. In the wintry darkness, American soldiers sang "Silent Night" and heard Germans singing "Stille Nacht," the same carol. On Dec. 22, four German couriers approached U.S. lines under a flag of truce, carrying a message "from the German commander to the American commander." Asserting that Bastogne was "encircled," the note gave McAuliffe, who was acting commander of the 101st in the absence of Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, two hours to surrender or face "total annihilation."
What came next would be one of World War II's seminal moments. As Vicari, McAuliffe's personal aide, recalls it 60 years later, "General Mac read the note and said, `Aw, nuts.' Then he asked, `What should I tell them?"'
Lt. Col. Harry W.O. Kinnard, the division operations officer, said, "Why not tell them what you just said?"
"What did I just say?"
"You said, `nuts,"' Kinnard replied.
McAuliffe scribbled a reply: "To the German commander. Nuts! From the American commander." He handed the message to Lt. Col. Joseph Harper, who had escorted the couriers. To the Germans who didn't understand the Yankee colloquialism, Harper explained: "It means the same thing as `go to hell."'
Some have speculated that "nuts" might have been a sanitized version of what the tough paratroop general actually said. Not so, Vicari says. "General Mac was the only general I ever knew who did not use profane language," he says. "`Nuts' was part of his normal vocabulary."
The next day the weather cleared, enabling American P-47 Thunderbolts to attack enemy positions while cargo planes dropped supplies to Bastogne's defenders, who by then knew that Lt. Gen. George Patton's 4th Armored Division was fighting through German-held territory to relieve them. Asked how quickly he could get to Bastogne, Patton had assured skeptical superiors he could turn his tanks north toward Bastogne in 48 hours. He didn't tell them they were already on the way.
On the day after Christmas, Lt. Col. Creighton Abrams, commanding the 37th Tank Battalion and under orders to attack German positions in a nearby village, realized that the road to Bastogne was open. His first four Shermans roared into the battered town about 4 p.m. Vicari recalls Patton arriving soon after, war correspondents in tow. He pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on "General Mac." Bitter fighting continued across the front, but the Bulge was shrinking. The Germans began retreating, and by Jan. 28, the battle was over. The Allied toll included 8,600 Americans and 200 British killed. The Germans suffered 17,000 dead.
| That would be almost nine years of operations with casualties at the current levels in Iraq. |
War historians offer a mixed verdict: the Battle of the Bulge delayed the Allied timetable for victory in Europe by at least six weeks, but by depleting the best of Hitler's forces, it made the final push to Berlin less costly in the long run. Bastogne today is a tourist favorite that annually celebrates its famous survival. It has a Place McAuliffe and even a Rue Nuts. |