Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Fourteen

December 19, 1944. The Ardennes. Tuesday, 1500 Hours.

On the fourth day of the German offensive, intelligence officers at First Army and VIII Corps prepared the following reconstructions and summaries for Supreme Allied Headquarters at Versailles.

Operation Christrose had been launched on a ninety-mile front from Monschau in the north to Echternach in the south, a striking force of more than twenty-seven full-strength Panzer and infantry divisions with a reserve estimated at seven divisions.

On the northern shoulder of the German line. General Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army had smashed through the Losheim Gap into the forward positions of the Americans’ 14th Armored Division. In the center. General Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army had broken the same division’s left flank and bypassed it to open approaches into the deep valley of the Our River.

On the southern flank. General Brandenberger’s Seventh Army was driving a wedge below at the rail center at Bastogne, its objective the Meuse River and its tributary, the Semois.

These spearheads were savaging the American 4th Infantry Division and positioning their armor to provide a shield against the expected counterattacks from the south by General Patton’s Third Army.

At dawn on December 19th, the io6th Infantry Division (the Golden Lions) had been surrounded on the Schnee Eiffel by a pincer movement of the Fifth and Sixth German Panzer armies; nine thousand troops of the division were captured with their supplies intact, gasoline, medical stores and ammunition.

Fragmentary reports reaching Intelligence from the broken American lines indicated that elements of the American V Corps were barely holding their position on the Elsenborn Ridge.

The 9th Armored and the 28th Infantry Division had been badly mauled in the first stages of Christrose. Kampfgruppe Peiper had broken cleanly through the American front, its columns driving toward the Salm River and Trois-Ponts.

Strategically important towns captured or invested by the enemy as of this date were Malmédy, Stavelot, Vielsalm, St. Vith, Houffalize, Longvilly and Wiltz.

Bastogne was known to be surrounded, the 101st Airborne Division trapped inside a ring of German armor.

Intelligence summaries created this picture: American forces were retreating by the thousands to an illusion of safety in rear-echelon areas, discarding weapons and even overcoats and food supplies in a flight through streets clogged with the wreckage of tanks and trucks and rotting with decomposed bodies.

To contain the great breach in the Allied eastern lines. General Eisenhower had placed certain units of General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group under the command of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

Patton’s famous Third, the Lucky Forward, was marching north to relieve Bastogne. Various other divisions — the ist, the 30th, the 7th Armored and the 82nd Airborne — were given new orders and committed to the Battle of the Bulge.

First intelligence reports also included brief sketches and descriptions of two German officers and their operations, as well as information suggesting that these missions were crucial to the success of Christrose.

Colonel Friedrich August Heydte: the commander of a brigade of paratroopers who were being dropped into Belgium and France from heavy transports (JU-52S) as far as the outskirts of Paris. The numerical strength of the brigade was estimated at two thousand officers and men.

Colonel Heydte was in his middle forties, five feet nine, narrow features, high cheekbones, dark hair and eyes, scars on left side of forehead. Fluent in English, a member of the German nobility (a baron), Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves with Swords, one of his country’s most feared and audacious commanders. (To this someone added a notation: Heydte once received a Carnegie Fellowship in International Law to teach at an Ivy League university in the United States. Start of hostilities precluded this.)

Colonel Otto Skorzeny: born June 12, 1908, Vienna. A physical giant, six feet six, weighing 275 pounds. Dueling scars at left temple, left cheek, left side of jaw. His unit’s mission: to infiltrate American lines in the Ardennes in United States army uniforms. Mission is code-named: Greif (the Griffon).

Skorzeny’s troops were fluent in English, briefed on American politics, sports, movie stars, popular music, and so forth. “It is imperative,” the report continued, “that American troops regard with suspicion all soldiers in American uniform not known to them personally. ID and dog tags to be inspected. Suspects, regardless of rank, to be interrogated. Intelligence officers will provide suitable questions for such encounters and distribute to all units. Senior American commanders will travel with armed escorts. The number of German soldiers assigned to Colonel Skorzeny’s Operation Greif unit is unknown at this time.”

Above the valley of the Ourthe and Amblève rivers, two American military trucks traveled west toward the town of La Roche-en-Ardennes. The trucks were loaded with soldiers, several with arms in splints, some with bandages stark white against grimy faces. A half-dozen soldiers were clinging to the hoods and fenders of each truck, and more were packed on the lowered tailgates. As the trucks turned off a winding road toward a bridge spanning the Ourthe, both were waved on urgently by Americans wearing MP brassards on the sleeves of their overcoats. A U.S. command car was parked off the road, VIII Corps insignia on its hood and door panels.

An MP corporal shouted at the driver of the lead truck, “Move your ass, Mac. Snap shit.”

“Where the hell’s the fire?”

“You heard me — move it. On the double!”

When the trucks rolled onto the bridge, tires making a sucking sound, lumbering black shapes almost lost in the freezing mists, the corporal waved to a sergeant standing near the command car.

The sergeant raised a gloved hand, then walked behind the car and leaned his weight on the plunger of a concealed detonating device.

The charges under the bridge exploded in a series of heavy, linked blasts. Smoke and flames rushed toward the swollen sky. The bridge broke into jagged sections, beams and girders splintering as if struck by giant hammers. The trucks were rent into nightmarish shapes by the upward surge of the explosion, jackknifing and falling in fragments into the icy currents below them.

The screams of the dying soldiers were faint but clear in the rolling echoes created by the detonations.

The soldiers in American uniforms climbed rapidly into the command car marked with the numeral viii on a blue field surrounded by blue and white hexagons. The vehicle was lost in the haze of the Amblève valley even before the sounds of the explosions were carried away by scattering winds.

On the same afternoon, Lieutenant Donald Longworth and his driver. Private Lenny Rado, were waved down by an American officer standing beside a recon car on the road above the Amblève, several kilometers east of the Belgian town of Stoumont. Lenny Rado waited for a nod from Longworth before braking their jeep and pulling off the road.

The American officer, a captain, walked toward them, his body bent against the freezing winds.

Longworth stepped from the jeep, a hand close to the open holster of his .45 automatic. The captain wore an VIII Corps shoulder patch and an overcoat buttoned to his throat. Twin silver bars were pinned to his epaulets. Two white stripes shone on his helmet.

“The name’s Madden.” The captain’s face was lined with fatigue but there was a look of energy and vitality in his sharp, blue eyes. “Where the hell you guys lost, strayed or stolen from?”

“Lieutenant Longworth, sir. Two Sixty-ninth Automatic Weapons Battalion.”

“And you, soldier?”

“Private Lenny Rado, same outfit, sir.”

At the wheel of Madden’s recon car a sergeant watched Longworth and Rado.

“Lieutenant, you’re a damned fool to volunteer information,” the captain said. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but there’s a brigade of Germans in the Ardennes wearing our uniforms. So let’s see your dog tags. You, too, soldier.”

Longworth and Lenny Rado opened their overcoats and flipped out their ID tags.

Madden checked them. “Where you from in the States, lieutenant?”

“San Diego.”

“You, soldier?”

“Wisconsin, sir.”

“What kind of fishing you got there?”

“Pike, bass, muskies if you’re lucky, sir.”

“I could use a mess of ’em right now,” the captain said. “Lieutenant, what’s that big hotel on the island off San Diego?”

“The Del Coronado, sir.”

“You guys go to the head of the class. Let’s get back to this goddamn war. I been looking for some sign of the Eighty-second Airborne. We heard it’s heading toward Werbomont. You meet any of their units?”

“Captain, let’s take a look at your dog tags,” Longworth said.

“I was wondering what the fuck you were using for brains,” the captain said, and pulled out his dog tags.

Longworth checked them, then said, “Where you from in the States, sir?”

“Chicago, the Windy City.”

His sergeant stepped casually from the recon car, a hand near his gun.

“Tell me about Chicago,” Longworth said.

“Sure. The Palmer House, the Drake, the Cubs and White Sox, Chicago University, and more polacks than you’ll find in Warsaw.” He grinned at them. “I’ll tell you something else. There’s a great little tattoo parlor on South State Street. Take a look.”

The captain pushed back the sleeve of his overcoat and tunic, revealing a blue-and-gold tattoo on his wrist, the slender figure of a nude woman holding two feathered fans. Underneath the tiny posturing dancer were the words: “Chicago World’s Fair. Miss Sally Rand.”

“She’s a comfort on a cold night.” The captain tensed the muscles in his forearm, causing a ripple to tremble up and down the dancer’s body.

Longworth smiled. “Looks like we’re on the same side, sir, including Miss Rand. No, we haven’t seen anything of the Eighty-second. But according to German transmitters, the Hundred-and-first is in trouble at Bastogne.”

“Well, you can’t believe those fucking kraut-heads.” His sergeant laughed and the captain said, “What’d you say your battalion was?”

“The Two sixty-ninth, sir.”

“We ran into some of your headquarters people about half an hour ago. Straight down this hill, first fork on the left.”

Rado put in, “First left on this road, sir?”

“That’s right. The turn is about twelve or fourteen hundred meters from here.” The captain smiled at them, his eyes amused and cheerful. “Here’s a tip if you run into anybody else you’re not sure about. Ask ’em what’s on the flip side of Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas.’ ”

“They could bluff me out of the pot,” Longworth said. “I haven’t a clue.”

The captain thought about it, frowning and rubbing his jaw, then laughed. “It beats the shit out of me, too, lieutenant. We better check it with Der Bingle next time we see him.”

Longworth gave a casual salute at the captain, who returned it smartly, the blue-and-gold tattoo twinkling softly through the gathering sleet-flecked darkness.

Climbing into the jeep, they drove slowly down the hill, Rado staying as close as possible to the side of the mountain. Longworth looked across at the fog drifting above the drop into the valley.

“What’s bothering you, sir?” Rado said.

“I can’t put my finger on it.”

“How far he say that turn was?”

“That’s one of the things.”

“Twelve hundred meters. That struck me kind of funny too,” Rado said. “Should of been yards.”

“Everything about Chicago checked out,” Longworth said. “So why that last stupid question about the record?”

Rado saw the left fork in the road through the fog and eased the jeep into it, the vehicle picking up speed rapidly as it started down the slick grade into the valley.

“We’d better have another talk with the captain,” Longworth said. “Turn around the first chance you get, Lenny. Maybe I’m just—”

The lieutenant never completed the sentence, for neither he nor Lenny Rado had seen the taut steel wire stretched across the road four feet above its frozen surface. And had they seen it, there was nothing they could have done because there was no time to stop, no way to check their swift acceleration... The quarter-inch cable tore away the metal posts of the windshield, shattering the glass into sparkling fragments, cutting off the screams rising in the throats of Rado and Lieutenant Longworth.

The jeep itself swung about in a wild lashing circle, then went over the side of the road, taking the bodies of the lieutenant and his driver into the depths of a gorge studded with jagged rocks and the stumps of spruce and pine trees...

A half mile away, Waffen SS Captain Walter Brecht stood beside his recon car and studied the road below him through U.S. Army binoculars, watching smoke and flames curling up from the wreckage of the American jeep, spreading through the trees and underbrush, creating dull yellow reflections against the cover of haze and mists, and the sight reminded him of Guernica, and standing braced against the wind on foreign soil once again, Brecht thought suddenly and resentfully of Karl Jaeger, knowing that it was not possible to apply Jaeger’s fine distinctions on how one killed his country’s enemies. The soldiers in the burning jeep below him were as dead as if he had eliminated them in a punctilious duel, or as if they had fought each other to the death with lances on the backs of chargers. It was an indulgence close to outright treason to prefer to destroy your enemy by honorable means — the word stood out in his mind in brackets — in “honorable” cavalry charges or behind an “honorable” flash of bayonets. This wasn’t a chivalric war; the very phrase was an absurdity.

Jaeger’s division. Das Reich, was on schedule, Brecht knew, spearheading elements of General Dietrich’s Sixth SS Army across the Salm Valley. His tanks were smashing through all resistance, “honorably” destroying bridges and villages and farms, spreading “honorable” terror over hundreds of square miles in the Ardennes, and these bloody pursuits were considered “honorable” simply because Jaeger and his men wore field-gray uniforms with silver SS runes on their tunics. With their Knight’s, Crosses and polished boots they had convenient memories. No one boasted of Das Reich at Oradour-sur-Glane, with the locked church jammed with women and children and put to the torch... No, that name would never be celebrated in drinking songs or emblazoned on Das Reich’s battle standards.

Brecht was proud to be known as “Der Henker” and needed no excuse for his role in Operation Christrose. Whenever you killed your country’s enemies was the right time for it. However you did it was a good way to do it. It didn’t matter that it might earn one only a crude tarpaulin, the wooden arrow pointing to the sky above a grave, to the mournful strains of “Ich halt’ einen Kameraden.”

Brecht recalled then — memory was a strange and illusive comrade itself, he decided — the name of the song on the opposite side of the Bing Crosby recording of “White Christmas.” It had been an awkward moment when he’d forgotten, but the Americans had been too careless to notice. “Stille Nacht,” yes, “Silent Night,” and it seemed an appropriate and fortuitous thought with Christmas and the memories of silver bells so close at hand.