Band of Brothers

11 'THEY GOT US SURROUNDED-THE POOR BASTARDS"

*

BASTOGNE

December 19-31,1944

On December 19 Easy went into the line south of Foy as one part of the ring defense of Bastogne. It was, in effect, one of the wagons in the circle. Inside were the 101st Airborne, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored, plus the 463rd Field Artillery Battalion. Against this force the Germans launched as many as fifteen divisions, four of them armored, supported by heavy artillery.

The fighting was furious and costly. During the nineteenth and twentieth, the 1st Battalion of the 506th, supported by Team Desobry of the 10th Armored, engaged the 2nd Panzer Division at Neville, northeast of Foy. When the battalion pulled back beyond Foy on the twentieth, it had lost thirteen officers and 199 enlisted men (out of about 600). Together with Team Desobry, it had destroyed at least thirty enemy tanks and inflicted casualties of between 500 and 1,000. Most important, it had held for forty-eight hours while the defense was being set up around Bastogne.

Easy and the other companies badly needed the time, as the situation in the defensive perimeter was fluid and confused. Easy's left was on the Bastogne-Noville road, linked to 3rd Battalion on the other side. Dog Company, on the right flank of 2nd Battalion, extended to the railroad station at Halt, but it was not linked to the 501st PIR. Winters worried that the battalion was not in the right position; he sent Nixon back to regimental HQ to check; Nixon returned to say the battalion was where it was supposed to be.

Easy's position was in a wood looking out on a grazing field that sloped down to the village of Foy, about a kilometer away. The trees were pines, 8 to 10 inches in diameter, planted in rows. The men dug foxholes to form a Main Line of Resistance a few meters inside the woods, with outposts on the edge. Winters set up battalion HQ just behind the company at the south edge of the woods. The first night on the MLR was quiet, even peaceful; the fighting was to the north, in Noville, 4 kilometers away.

At dawn on December 20, a heavy mist hung over the woods and fields. Winters rose and looked around. To his left he saw a German soldier in his long winter overcoat emerge from the woods. He had no rifle, no pack. He walked to the middle of a clearing. Two men with Winters instinctively brought their rifles to their shoulders, but he gave them a hand signal to hold their fire. The Americans watched as the German took off his overcoat, pulled down his pants, squatted, and relieved himself. When he was finished, Winters hollered in his best German, "Kommen sie hier!" The soldier put up his hands and walked over to surrender. Winters went through his pockets; all he had were a few pictures and the end of a loaf of hard black bread.

"Think of this," Winters commented. "Here is a German soldier, in the light of early dawn, who went to take a crap, got turned around in the woods, walked through our lines, past the company CP and ended up behind the Battalion CP! That sure was some line of defense we had that first night!"

German soldiers were not the only ones who got lost that day. Medic Ralph Spina and Pvt. Ed "Babe" Heffron went back into Bastogne to scrounge up some medical supplies. At the aid station Spina got some of what he needed (the 101st was already running low on medical supplies, a major problem). The two E Company men grabbed a hot meal, and although they hated to leave the stove, with darkness coming on, they set out for the line.

Heffron suggested a shortcut across a wooded area. Spina agreed. Heffron led the way. Suddenly he fell into a hole. There was a shout of surprise. Then a voice called out from under Heffron, "Hinkle, Hinkle, ist das dui"

Heffron came barreling out of the foxhole and took off in the opposite direction, yelling "Hinkle Your Ass, Kraut!" He and Spina got reoriented and finally found the E Company CP.

(Spina, who recalled the incident, concluded: "To this day every time I see Babe, I ask him how Hinkle is feeling or if he has seen Hinkle lately.")

The medics were the most popular, respected, and appreciated men in the company. Their weapons were first-aid kits,- their place on the line was wherever a man called out that he was wounded. Lieutenant Foley had special praise for Pvt. Eugene Roe. "He was there when he was needed, and how he got 'there' you often wondered. He never received recognition for his bravery, his heroic servicing of the wounded. I recommended him for a Silver Star after a devastating firefight when his exploits were typically outstanding. Maybe I didn't use the proper words and phrases, perhaps Lieutenant Dike didn't approve, or somewhere along the line it was cast aside. I don't know. I never knew except that if any man who struggled in the snow and the cold, in the many attacks through the open and through the woods, ever deserved such a medal, it was our medic, Gene Roe."

On December 20 what was left of the 1st Battalion of the 506th and Team Desobry pulled back from Noville and went into reserve. Easy awaited an attack that did not come; the damage inflicted by 1st Battalion was so great that the Germans made their assaults on other sectors of the defensive perimeter. Easy underwent artillery and mortar bombardments, but no infantry attack.

On December 21, it snowed, a soft, dry snow. It kept coming, 6 inches, 12 inches. The temperature fell to well below freezing, the wind came up, even in the woods. The men were colder than they had ever been in their lives. They had only their jump boots and battle dress with trench coats. No wool socks, no long underwear. Runners went into Bastogne and returned with flour sacks and bed sheets, which provided some warmth and camouflage. In the foxholes and on the outposts, men wrapped their bodies in blankets and their boots in burlap. The burlap soaked up the snow, boots became soggy, socks got wet, the cold penetrated right into the bones. Shivering was as normal as breathing. The men looked like George Washington's army at Valley Forge, except that they were getting fired upon, had no huts, and warming fires were out of the question.

Col. Ralph Ingersoll, an intelligence officer with First Army, described the penetrating cold: "Riding through the Ardennes, I wore woolen underwear, a woolen uniform, armored force combat overalls, a sweater, an armored force field jacket with elastic cuffs, a muffler, a heavy lined trenchcoat, two pairs of heavy woolen socks, and combat boots with galoshes over them—and I cannot remember ever being warm."1

1. Ralph Ingersoll, Top Secret (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946).

For the men of Easy, without decent socks and no galoshes, feet always cold and always wet, trench foot quickly became a problem. Corporal Carson remembered being taught that the way to prevent trench foot was to massage the feet. So he took off his boots and massaged his feet. A German shell came in and hit a tree over his foxhole. Splinters tore up his foot and penetrated his thigh. He was evacuated back to Bastogne.

At the hospital set up in the town, "I looked around and never saw so many wounded men. I called a medic over and said, 'Hey, how come you got so many wounded people around here? Aren't we evacuating anybody?' "

"Haven't you heard?" the medic replied. "I haven't heard a damn thing." "They've got us surrounded—the poor bastards." General McAuliffe saw to it the wounded had booze for comfort. A medic gave Carson a bottle of creme de menthe. "I didn't even know what it was, but to this day I have liked creme de menthe." The Luftwaffe bombed the town that night. Carson remembered to get on his hands and knees for the concussion. He got sick. "Thank God for that helmet. I had already had about half that creme de menthe. It was all green in my helmet."

For the most part, all the men of Easy had to eat was K rations, and not enough of those had been distributed back at Mourmelon. The company cooks tried to bring a hot meal up after darkness, but by the time they reached the men in the foxholes, the food was cold. Mainly it consisted of white navy beans which, according to Sergeant Rader, "caused gastronomical outbursts that were something to behold." Cook Joe Domingus found some shortening and cornmeal, which he turned into corn fritters, also stone cold by the time they arrived. The men mixed the lemonade packet in their K rations with snow to make a dessert.

On the line, the days were miserable, the nights worse. The shelling was not continuous, the machine-gun fire directed at the Americans was sporadic, but snipers were active through the day. At night, the ominous silence would be broken by the nerve-racking hammering of enemy mortars, followed by cries from the wounded and calls to man the positions in preparation for an attack. Then another ominous silence.

Every two hours, the platoon sergeants would wake two men in a foxhole and lead them to the outpost (OP) position, to relieve the men on duty. "The trip out to the OP was always eerie," Christenson remembered. "You eyed all silhouettes suspiciously, skeptical of any sound. Reluctantly, you approach the OP. The silhouettes of the men in their positions are not clear... . Are they Germans? The suspense is always the same... then finally you recognize an American helmet. Feeling a little ridiculous, yet also relieved, you turn around and return to the main line, only to repeat the entire process in another two hours."

In the foxholes, the men tried to get some sleep, difficult to impossible given the cramped conditions (usually 6 feet by 2 feet by 3 or 4 feet deep, for two men). At least lying together allowed the men to exchange body heat. Heffron and Pvt. Al Vittore did manage to get to sleep the second night out. Heffron woke when Vittore threw his heavy leg over his body. When Vittore started to rub Heffron's chest, Heffron gave him a shot with his elbow in his belly. Vittore woke and demanded to know what the hell was going on. Heffron started to give him hell in return; Vittore grinned and said he had been dreaming about his wife.

"Al," Heffron said, "I can't help you, as I got combat boots, jump pants, and my trench coat on, and they are not coming off." In other foxholes, men talked to relieve the tension. Sergeant Rader and Pvt. Don Hoobler came from the same town on the banks of the Ohio River. "Don and I would talk all night about home, our families, people and places, and what the hell were we doing in a predicament like this?" Spina recalled discussing with his foxhole mate "politics, the world's problems, plus our own. Wishing we had a drink or a hot meal, preferably in that order. We talked about what we were going to do when we got home, about a trip to Paris in a couple of weeks, go to the Follies. Mainly we talked about going home."

Sergeant Toye, back from hospital, didn't like the silence at night between mortar attacks. To break it, he would sing. "I'll Be Seeing You" was his favorite. Heffron told him to cut it, that the Krauts would surely hear him. Toye sang anyway. According to Heffron, "Joe was a hellu'va better soldier than singer."

Sitting in front-line foxholes was bad, being on OP was worse, going on combat patrol looking for a fight was the worst. But it had to be done. It was the inability of VIII Corps to patrol aggressively, due to insufficient manpower, that had led to the December 16 surprise when the Germans attacked in far greater force than anyone anticipated.

On December 21 Lieutenant Peacock sent Sergeant Martin to the various foxholes of 1st Platoon. At each one holding a sergeant or a corporal, Martin announced, "I want all N.C.O.s back at the platoon CP—now."

The men gathered. Lieutenant Peacock, the platoon leader, as tense as ever, stopped the grumbling: "At ease. Battalion wants a platoon to go on a combat patrol, and we have been elected to be that platoon." He paused. No one spoke. Peacock went on, "We know the Krauts are in the woods in front of our MLR, but we don't know how many, or where their MLR or OPs are located. It's our job to acquire that information, and to capture some prisoners, if possible."

Questions came in a torrent. "What's the plan of attack?" Sergeant Christenson, leader of 1st squad, wanted to know.

"How will the squads be positioned?" asked Sergeant Muck of the mortar squad.

"What happens when we lose contact in those woods?" wondered 2nd squad leader Sergeant Randleman.

Peacock did not have any ready answers. "You'll know more of what you're going to do when we reach the woods," was all he could think to say. Son of a bitch, Christenson thought to himself. This is going to be another SNAFU operation, with not enough information to fill a peapod.

"We move out at 1300 hours," Peacock concluded.

Damn, was Christenson's thought. We are being led by Mister Indecision himself; to infiltrate into the German lines without a good plan is a tremendous, bungling, tactical error. But when he met with his squad, he kept his thoughts to himself. He told the men to draw ammunition and be ready to jump off at 1300.

At 1200, 1st platoon fell back a few meters from the MLR and gathered around Father Maloney, who had his Communion set out. He announced that he was giving a general absolution. After the men who wanted one received their Communion wafer, he wished them "Good luck."

Just before 1300, the platoon assembled in the woods behind the MLR. Peacock looked to Christenson "like a frightened rabbit." He had no special orders to give, offered no clarification about a plan. He just announced, "All right, men, let's move out."

The platoon moved to the extreme right flank of the battalion, along the railroad tracks. It moved through D Company's position and began advancing toward the Germans, the tracks to the right, the woods to the left. It proceeded slowly, moving in column, stopping frequently. Some 200 meters beyond the MLR, Peacock called the N.C.O.s forward. He gave his orders: each squad would form a column of twos, abreast of one another, send out two scouts on point, and proceed into the woods until contact was made.

The platoon plunged into the woods. Immediately, the columns lost touch with each other, the squads lost touch with their scouts. The snow was soft, not crunchy, and the silence complete. It was broken by a short burst from a German machine-gun. Pvt. John Julian, a scout for 2nd squad, was hit in the neck and Pvt. James Welling, scouting for 3rd squad, was also hit.

The machine-gunners from Easy set up their weapons and prepared to return fire. Pvt. Robert Burr Smith of 1st squad opened up with a long burst in the direction of the German fire base. When he paused, the Germans let loose another burst of their own. Christenson shouted for Martin. No answer. For Randle-man. No answer. For Peacock. No answer. Only more German fire.

The 1st platoon's being decimated! Christenson thought. He shouted again. Bull Randleman came through the woods to answer. "Have you seen Martin or Peacock?" Randleman had not. Another burst of machine-gun fire cut through the trees.

"We have got to make a move," Randleman said. He joined Chris in calling for Martin. No answer. "Let's get the hell out of here," Chris suggested. Bull agreed. They called out the orders to their men and fell back to the railroad. There they met Martin, Peacock, and the remainder of the platoon.

The patrol had not been a great success. 1st platoon had uncovered the German MLR and discovered that the German OPs were thinly manned and stretched out, but it had lost one man killed (Julian) and one wounded and failed to bring in a prisoner. It spent the night shivering in the foxholes, eating cold beans and fritters, wondering if the weather would ever clear so that the 101st could be resupplied by air.

The next couple of days were about the same. Easy sent out patrols, the Germans sent out patrols. Occasional mortar attacks. Sporadic machine-gun fire. Bitter cold. Inadequate medical supplies. No hot food. Not enough food. Constant shivering was burning off energy that was not being replaced. For the privates, not enough sleep. For the N.C.O.s, almost no sleep. This was survival time, and reactions were slow due to the near-frozen limbs. Shell bursts in the trees sent splinters, limbs, trunks, and metal showering down on the foxholes. To protect themselves, the men tried to cover their holes with logs, but not having axes made it a difficult task. One man solved the problem by putting two or three German "stiffs" over the top.

Most maddening was the inability of the American artillery to respond to German shelling or to disrupt German activity. Easy's OP men would watch with envy as German trucks and tanks moved back and forth behind the German line, bringing in the shells and food that the Americans so badly missed. Back in Bastogne, the Americans had plenty of guns, including 105 and 155 mm howitzers. They had been active the first few days of the siege, firing in a complete circle at all German attempts to break through the MLR. But by the twenty-third they were almost out of ammunition. Winters recalled being told that the single artillery piece covering the Foy-Bastogne road—his left flank— was down to three rounds. They were being saved for antitank purposes in the event of a German panzer attack down that road. In other words, no artillery support for Easy or 2nd Battalion. This at a time when the men of the company were down to six rounds per mortar, one bandolier for each rifleman, and one box of machine-gun ammo per gun.

That day, however, the snow stopped, and the sky cleared. C-47s dropped supplies, medicine, food, ammunition. American artillery got back into action, curtailing German daytime activity, boosting morale on the MLR. K rations were distributed, along with ammo. But the 30-caliber for the light machine-guns and M-1s was insufficient to the need, and the 24,406 K rations were enough for only a day or so. Not enough blankets had been dropped to insure that every man had one.

The afternoon of December 23, 2nd Lt. Edward Shames prepared to lead 3rd platoon on a patrol. "OK, Shifty, let's go," he said to Cpl. Darrell Powers, a dependable man who was the best shot in the company.

"Sir, I can't go. I cannot go," Powers replied. "What the hell do you mean? That's a court-martial offense." "Do what you want with me," Powers answered, indicating that he was not moving.

Powers had done everything asked of him up to this moment, and more. Shames thought, It would be asinine of me to say, "OK, buddy, I'm going to get you on a court-martial." Instead he said, "Corporal, rest up. I'll see you when we get back."

Shames (who stayed in the Army Reserves and made colonel) felt forty-seven years later that it was one of the best decisions he ever made. He knew Powers had broken, but thought he would recover. He knew that every man had his breaking point, that "there but for the grace of God go I. We all knew we were one firefight, one patrol, one tree burst, one 88 mm from the same end." He believed that "if I had not had a command of these people, I would have broken too, but the fact that I had something to hang onto, to know that these people depended on me, carried me through more than anything else."

In an interview in 1990, Powers described his feelings: "I never, never really got discouraged the whole time I was in service until that day. And one place, one time up there, the Germans were shooting and shelling, and Lieutenant Shames wanted a patrol, and this one particular time I really didn't care whether to get in a foxhole to get out of the way or not, or go on a patrol, or anything. You see, you have nothing to look forward to. The next day is going to be the same or worse."

Officers watched for signs of breaking. When Winters sensed that Private Liebgott was on the edge, he brought him back to battalion CP to be his runner. This gave Liebgott a chance to rest up and get away from the tension of the MLR. "Just being back 50 yards off the front line made a tremendous difference in the tension," Winters wrote.

The temptation to stay put when a patrol went out was very strong; even stronger was the temptation to report back at the aid station with trench foot or frozen feet and hands or an extreme case of diarrhea. "If all the men who had a legitimate reason to leave the MLR and go back to the aid station in Bastogne had taken advantage of their situation," Winters wrote, "there just would not have been a front line. It would have been a line of outposts."

The temptation to get out altogether via a self-inflicted wound was also strong. It did not get light until 0800. It got dark at 1600. During the sixteen hours of night, out in those frozen foxholes (which actually shrank as the night went on and the ground froze and expanded), it was impossible to keep out of the mind the thought of how easy it would be to shoot a round into a foot. A little pain—not much in a foot so cold it could not be felt anyway—and then transport back to Bastogne, a warm aid station, a hot meal, a bed, escape.

No man from Easy gave in to that temptation that every one of them felt. One man did take off his boots and socks to get frostbite and thus a ticket out of there. But for the others, they would take a legitimate way out or none. Winters recalled, "When a man was hit hard enough for evacuation, he was usually very happy, and we were happy for him—he had a ticket out to the hospital, or even a ticket home—alive.

"When a man was killed—he looked 'so peaceful.' His suffering was over."

At first light on Christmas Eve morning, Winters inspected his MLR. He walked past Corporal Gordon, "his head wrapped up in a big towel, with his helmet sitting on top. Walter sat on the edge of his foxhole behind his light machine-gun. He looked like he was frozen stiff, staring blankly straight ahead at the woods. I stopped and looked back at him, and it suddenly struck me, 'Damn! Gordon's matured! He's a man!' "

A half hour later, at 0830, Gordon brewed himself a cup of coffee. He kept coffee grounds in his hand grenade canister, "and I'd melted the snow with my little gas stove, and I'd brewed up this lovely cup of coffee." As he started to sip it, the outposts came in with word that a German force was attempting to infiltrate Easy's lines. His squad leader, Sgt. Buck Taylor, told him to "get on that machine-gun."

Gordon brushed snow from his weapon and the ammo box adjacent to the gun, telling his assistant, Pvt. Stephen Grodzki, to look sharp, pay attention to detail. A shot from a German rifleman rang out. The bullet hit Gordon in the left shoulder and exited from the right shoulder. It had brushed his spinal column; he was paralyzed from the neck down.

He slid to the bottom of his foxhole. "The canteen cup followed me and the hot liquid spilled in my lap. I can see the steam rising upward to this very day."

Taylor and Earl McClung went looking for the sniper who had shot Gordon. They found and killed him. Shifty Powers was in the next foxhole. As Shames had hoped would happen, he had recovered completely. Shifty was from Virginia, a mountain man, part Indian. He had spent countless hours as a youth hunting squirrels. He could sense the least little movement in a woods. He spotted a German in a tree, raised his M-l, and killed the man.

Paul Rogers, Gordon's best friend, Jim Alley and another member of the 3rd platoon rushed over to Gordon. They hauled him out of the hole and dragged him back into the woods, in Gordon's words "as a gladiator was dragged from the arena." In a sheltered area, they stretched him out to examine him. Medic Roe came up, took a quick look, and declared that it was serious. Roe gave Gordon morphine and prepared to give plasma.

Sergeant Lipton came over to see what he could do. "Walter's face was ashen and his eyes closed," Lipton recalled. "He looked more dead than alive." In the extreme cold, it seemed to Lipton that the plasma was flowing too slowly, so he took the bottle from Roe and put it under his arm inside his clothes to warm it up.

"As I looked down at Walter's face he suddenly opened his eyes. 'Walter, how do you feel?' I asked. 'Lipton,' he said in a surprisingly strong voice, 'you're standing on my hand.' I jumped back, looking down, and he was right. I had been standing on his hand." A jeep, summoned by radio, came up and evacuated Gordon to the aid station.

The German attack continued, intensified, was finally thrown back with heavy losses, thanks to a combination of Easy's rifle and machine-gun fire, mortars, and grenades, ably assisted by artillery. Lipton later counted thirty-eight dead German bodies in front of the woods. Lieutenant Welsh was hit and evacuated.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the men received General McAuliffe's Christmas greetings. "What's merry about all this, you ask?" was the opening line. "Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South and West. We have identifications from four German Panzer Divisions, two German Infantry Divisions and one German Parachute Division... . The Germans surround us, their radios blare our doom. Their Commander demanded our surrender in the following impudent arrogance." (There followed the four paragraph message "to the U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne" from "the German Commander," demanding an "honorable surrender to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation," dated December 22.)

McAuliffe's message continued: "The German Commander received the following reply: '22 December 1944. To the German Commander: NUTS! The American Commander.'

"We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas. A. C. McAuliffe, Commanding."2

2. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 545.

The men at the front were not as upbeat as General McAuliffe. They had cold white beans for their Christmas Eve dinner, while the division staff had a turkey dinner, served on a table with a tablecloth, a small Christmas tree, knives and forks and plates.3

3. There is a photograph on p. 549 of Rendezvous with Destiny of that dinner. The officers are looking appropriately glum, but what the men of Easy bring to my attention is the luxurious (everything is relative, they admit) surroundings. One of those staff officers was Lt. Col. (later Lt. Gen.) Harry W. O. Kinnard. Twenty years later, in an interview about the Battle of the Bulge, Kinnard said, "We never felt we would be overrun. We were beating back everything they threw at us. We had the houses, and were warm. They were outside the town, in the snow and cold." Every surviving member of E Company has sent me a copy of that newspaper story, with caustic comments, the mildest of which was, "What battle was he in?"

Winters' dinner that night consisted of "five white beans and a cup of cold broth."

Out on the MLR, Sergeant Rader was feeling terrible about having to put men out on OP duty on Christmas Eve. His childhood buddy, Cpl. Don Hoobler, suggested, "Why don't we take that post tonight and just allow the men to sleep. We can lay it off as a kind of Christmas present to the men." Rader agreed.

When darkness fell, they moved out to the OP. It was miserably cold, a biting wind taking the wind-chill factor well below zero. "As the night wore on, we talked of our homes," Rader remembered, "our families, and how they were spending their Christmas Eve. Don felt sure all of them were in church praying for us."

On Christmas Day, the Germans attacked again, but fortunately for E Company on the other side of Bastogne. The following day, Patton's Third Army, spearheaded by Lt. Col. Creighton Abrams of the 37th Tank Battalion, broke through the German lines. The 101st was no longer surrounded; it now had ground communications with the American supply dumps. Soon trucks were bringing in adequate supplies of food, medicine, and ammunition. The wounded were evacuated to the rear.

General Taylor returned. He inspected the front lines, according to Winters, "very briskly. His instructions before leaving us were, 'Watch those woods in front of you!' What the hell did he think we had been doing while he was in Washington?"

(Winters has a thing about Taylor. In one interview he remarked, "and now you have General Taylor coming back from his Christmas vacation in Washington. ..." I interrupted to say, "That's not quite fair." "Isn't it?" "Well, he was ordered back to testify. ..." Winters cut me off: "I don't want to be fair.")

The breaking of the siege brought the first newspapers from the outside world. The men of the 101st learned that they had become a legend even as the battle continued. As the division history put it, the legend "was aided by the universality of the press and radio, of ten thousand daily maps showing one spot holding out inside the rolling tide of the worst American military debacle of modern times. It was aided by a worried nation's grasping for encouragement and hope; for days it was the one encouraging sight that met their eyes each morning. And the War Department, earlier than was its practice, identified the division inside the town, so even before their bloody month in the town was up, to the world the 101st became the Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne. The elements of drama were there— courage in the midst of surrounding panic and defeat; courage and grim humor in the midst of physical suffering, cold, and near-fatal shortages; a surrender demand and a four-letter-word rebuttal; and a real comradeship... . Courage and comradeship combined to develop a team that the Germans couldn't whip."4

4. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 586.

Of course, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division was also in Bastogne, but it was not identified in the press.

And of course the 82nd Airborne fought as costly and desperate a fight on the northern shoulder of the Bulge, a fight that was at least as significant as the one at Bastogne. But it was not surrounded and never got the publicity the 101st received.

The 101st still had a complaint. As the story of the Battle of the Bulge is told today, it is one of George Fatten and his Third Army coming to the rescue of the encircled 101st, like the cavalry come to save the settlers in their wagon circle. No member of the 101st has ever agreed that the division needed to be rescued!

With the encirclement broken, the men of the 101st expected to return to Mourmelon to bask in the Allied world's adulation and perhaps to celebrate the New Year in Paris. But the heroic stand at Bastogne had been a defensive action; to win the war the Allies were going to have to resume their offensive; the Germans had come out of their fixed positions in the West Wall and made themselves vulnerable; Eisenhower wanted to seize the opportunity. But his problem at the end of December was the same as it had been in the middle of the month, a manpower shortage. The stark truth was that the Germans outnumbered the Allies on the Western Front. The United States had not raised enough infantry divisions to fight a two-front war. This was a consequence of the prewar decision by the Government to be lavish with deferments for industrial and farm labor, and to refrain from drafting fathers. There was also a shortage of artillery shells, brought on by a decision in September—when it seemed the war in Europe would be over in a matter of weeks—to lower production of shells on the industrial priority list. To go over to a general offensive, as he had decided to do, Ike needed the 101st and 82nd in the line.

It was a question of timing. Eisenhower wanted to attack even before New Year's Eve, but Monty, commanding the forces (all American) on the northern shoulder of the Bulge, stalled and shivered and made excuses, so it did not happen.

For Easy, that meant staying in the line. Conditions improved, somewhat—the men got overshoes and long underwear and sometimes hot food. But the cold continued, the snow did not go away, the Germans hit the company with mortar and artillery fire daily, patrols had to be mounted, German patrols had to be turned back.

On December 29, Easy was in the same woods it had occupied for nine days. With the clear weather, the men on OP duty could see Foy below them and Noville across open fields and along the road about 2 kilometers to the north.

Shifty Powers came in from an OP to report to 1st Sergeant Lipton. "Sergeant," he said, "there's a tree up there toward Noville that wasn't there yesterday." Powers had no binoculars, but Lipton did. Looking through them, Lipton could not see anything unusual, even after Powers pinpointed the spot for him.

One reason Lipton had trouble was that the object was not an isolated tree,- there were a number of trees along the road in that area. Lipton expressed some doubts, but Powers insisted it had not been there the previous day. Lipton studied the spot with his binoculars. He saw some movement near the tree and then more movement under other trees around it. Then he saw gun barrels—88s by their appearance, as they were elevated and 88s were the basic German antiaircraft weapon as well as ground artillery piece. Lipton realized that the Germans were putting an antiaircraft battery in among the trees, and had put up the tree Powers spotted as part of their camouflage.

Lipton put in a call for a forward artillery observer. When he arrived, he saw what Powers and Lipton had seen. He got on the radio, talking to a battery of 105 mm back in Bastogne. When he described the target he had no trouble getting approval for full battery fire, despite the short supply of artillery ammunition.

To zero in on the target, the observer called for a round on a position he could locate on his map, about 300 meters to the right of the trees. One gun fired and hit the target. Then he shifted the aim 300 meters to the left and called for all the battery's guns to lay in on the same azimuth and range. When he got a report that all was ready, he had his guns fire for effect, several rounds from each gun.

Shells started exploding all around the German position. Lip-ton watched through his binoculars as the Germans scrambled to get out of there, salvaging what they could of their guns, helping wounded to the rear. Within an hour the place was deserted.

"It all happened," Lipton summed up, "because Shifty saw a tree almost a mile away that hadn't been there the day before."

The German 88 battery had been going into place as a part of renewed pressure the Germans were putting on Bastogne. Having failed in their original plan to get across the Meuse River, the Germans needed Bastogne and its road net to hold their position in the Bulge and to be prepared for withdrawal. They launched furious attacks against the narrow corridor leading into the town from the south, and increased the pressure all around. By the end of the year eight German divisions, including three SS Panzer Divisions, were fighting in the Bastogne area. Patton's Third Army was attacking north, toward Bastogne; U.S. First Army, under Gen. Courtney Hodges (who was under Monty at this time) was scheduled to begin an attack south "sometime soon." If they linked up in time, they would cut off the Germans in the Bulge salient. If the Germans could stop Patton's thrust, and take Bastogne, they would have the road net that would enable them to escape.

That was the situation on New Year's Eve. At midnight, to celebrate the coming of the year of victory and to demonstrate how much things had changed in Bastogne in the past few days, every gun in Bastogne and every mortar piece on the MLR joined in a serenade of high explosives hurled at the Germans.

Corporal Gordon, along with more than a dozen other wounded Easy men, was evacuated to the rear. Another seven men from the company lay buried in shallow graves in the woods. Easy had put 121 officers and men on the trucks back in Mourmelon twelve days earlier. Its fighting strength was down to less than 100.

Gordon was taken by ambulance to Sedan, then flown to England and on to a hospital in Wales. He was heavily sedated, paralyzed, hallucinating. He was placed in a plaster cast from waist to the top of his head; only his face was left unplastered. But the cast that kept him immobile also prevented treatment of the wounds made by the bullet entering and exiting his back, so it was removed and replaced by the device known as the Crutchfield tongs. The apparatus was applied by boring two holes in the crown of his head, then inserting steel tongs into the holes and clamping them into place. A line attached through pulleys provided traction while preventing any movement without the need for a cast. He stayed in that position, flat on his back gazing up at the ceiling, for six weeks. Slowly he began to have some feeling in his extremities.

The doctor, Maj. M. L. Stadium, told him that had the bullet varied '/z inch in one direction, it would have missed him; had it varied that much in the other direction, the wound would have been fatal. Gordon considered himself to be "fortunate, very fortunate. A million dollar wound." Only a man who had been in the front line at Bastogne could describe such a wound in such words.