Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble

Author:Antony Beevor [Beevor, Antony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141941271
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

14

Thursday 21 December

By the morning of 21 December, the Kampfgruppe Peiper was in a desperate situation, ‘pocketed without adequate supplies’, as its leader put it. He received a message from 1st SS Panzer-Division that it intended to advance through Trois-Ponts to relieve him. But Peiper’s reduced strength could not even hold Stoumont and Cheneux, and the relief force failed to get through. The enraged troops looted the Château de Detilleux south of the Amblève and destroyed whatever they did not take. Others in Wanne murdered five men and a woman, claiming that villagers must have been signalling to the American artillery. Another group of nine SS soldiers later seized food from a house in Refat and raped three women there after they had eaten.

In Stavelot on the morning of 21 December, another 100 German soldiers tried to swim the river to obtain a foothold on the north bank. Eighty of them were shot in the water by soldiers of the 117th Infantry who boasted of their ‘duck shooting’; and the rest turned back. Peiper’s position became even more critical when American combat engineers managed to block the road from Stoumont to La Gleize by blasting trees across it and mining the route. He had no alternative but to withdraw most of his remaining troops into La Gleize, where the 30th Division’s artillery began to bombard the village.

The battle against the Kampfgruppe had become savage. ‘After we saw those dead civilians in Stavelot, the men changed,’ one of the soldiers recorded. ‘They wanted to pulverize everything there was across the river. That wasn’t impersonal anger; that was hatred.’ Few SS soldiers were taken alive. Officers in the Waffen-SS apparently turned news of the Malmédy massacre to their own advantage, hoping to frighten their men into fighting to the bitter end. They told them that if captured, they would be tortured and then killed.

‘The prisoner bag is thus far small,’ an officer at First Army headquarters noted. ‘Our troops know of the atrocities committed by the enemy and know that now it is a matter of life or death, we or they.’ A number of senior officers made it clear that they approved of revenge killing. When General Bradley heard soon afterwards that prisoners from the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend had spoken of their heavy casualties, he raised his eyebrows sceptically. ‘Prisoners from the 12th SS?’

‘Oh, yes sir,’ the officer replied. ‘We needed a few samples. That’s all we’ve taken, sir.’

Bradley smiled. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he said.

Bradley was encouraged by the sight of Patton’s troops rolling north to attack Manteuffel’s southern flank. He and members of his staff stood outside the Hôtel Alfa in Luxembourg on 21 December to watch the columns of 5th Infantry Division vehicles, ‘caked in mud’, passing through the city all day. ‘The GIs looked cold,’ Hansen wrote in his diary, ‘bundled in brown against the winter wind that tore through their open vehicles, sitting stone-facedly on the piles of baggage in their trucks as they rode through town, staring back vacantly at the civilians who looked earnestly to them.

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