Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II

Status of the Division Prior to the German Attack

For the wheeled vehicles of the 3d Armored Division, the rest and maintenance period meant replacing tires and changing engines, particularly in many of the GMC trucks. Although the heavy-tread tires did not wear out, they had to be replaced primarily because they were either shot up or severely damaged by the mortar shell fragments on the roadways. When an HE shell explodes on a roadway, it generally breaks up into many small slivers with sharp points on both ends. Unlike a nail, which lies flat on the road, a sliver often has one point facing upward. The rolling action of a heavy-tread tire forces one of the points through the wall of the tire. Instead of causing a simple puncture, a fragment usually tears a large gap in the casing, so the tire has to be replaced.

In the 3d Armored Division, with all of its attached units, there were approximately 1,800 combat vehicles and 2,300 wheeled vehicles. To perform maintenance on all the diverse types of vehicles required a major commitment of personnel. In addition to the maintenance battalion, which had more than 1,000 men, there were another 1,000 men in the maintenance companies of the armored regiments plus the platoons and maintenance sections of other units, giving us a total of 2,000 men directly involved in maintenance. Add to this another 8,200 drivers and assistant drivers, who performed first echelon maintenance on their own vehicles, including tire changes, track changes, and minor repairs, and you can get some idea of the tremendous number of people required to keep a reinforced heavy armored division rolling.

Although this may aippear to be an unusually large commitment, the combat maintenance problems of an armored division in the field were staggering. There is no comparable commercial enterprise. For the wheeled vehicles, the maintenance problems were exacerbated by their being driven many miles in muddy and rough fields in four-wheel drive. When they came up on the highway for a short period, their drivers would often fail to disconnect the four-wheel drive. Because there was no slip mechanism in the final drive to accommodate the difference in front- and rear-tire wear, this put a severe overload on the entire engine and power train.

All the wheeled vehicles were heavily overloaded, particularly the GMC truck. Although it was rated at two and a half tons, it normally carried from four to ten tons, even in off-road conditions. Under these loads, truck engines had to be replaced every ten thousand miles, and it didn’t take long to put on that many miles. With 850 two-and-a-half-ton GMC trucks in the division, this in itself was a major maintenance problem.

For the combat vehicles, the overwhelming maintenance problem was by far the repair and replacement of battle-damaged vehicles. On the M4 tanks, with the Wright R975 radial engine, we had the persistent problem of spark-plug fouling, when the tanks idle their engines while standing still. Many of the older tanks had been knocked out by this time and had been replaced with the newer M4A1 tank with a Ford V8 water-cooled engine.

One problem we had thought might be major never materialized, the replacement of the tank tracks. One of the best features about our tank design was the track system. Back in the States, during garrison training and maneuvers, we were able to get approximately twenty-five hundred miles on a set of M4 tracks. The tracks were reversible and could be run on one side, then reversed and run on the other side. The tanks that we received in England, before going into Normandy, had heavy rubber grousers imbedded on one side of the track and they could no longer be reversed; however, the extra rubber still gave us good mileage. This was an excellent track design and far superior to anything that the Germans had. Their tracks used hardened steel blocks and hardened pins, which resulted in greater friction and wear. However, few of our tanks lasted in combat long enough to use up a set of tracks.

Each tank had a set of steel grousers that could be put on the track blocks over the holes in the track pins, which were spaced about every five or six blocks. These grousers did help somewhat in mud, however, on snow and ice, they would break through to the road and cause a large reverse bump between the track blocks.

This would strain the rubber doughnuts in the opposite direction and tend to cause the track to wear out prematurely at these bumps. It also created an extremely rough ride and was hard on the bogey wheels and suspension system. The tank crews had been instructed to use these grousers only in off-road conditions, but this was obviously impractical because tanks constantly went on and off the road. An alternate solution used one-half-inch square steel blocks, about two inches long, welded to the bottom of the wedge screw on the track connector. This welded pin extended down about one-quarter inch to three-eighths inch below the bottom of the track surface. It did appear to penetrate ice and hard-packed snow to a certain degree and seemed to help quite a bit as the snow and ice on the roads began to build up. It was not completely effective, but it was the best we had to offer at the time.

The 3d Armored Division’s unusually large maintenance organization had other, unanticipated benefits. When the combat commands went forward to exploit a breakthrough, each had its own ordnance maintenance company, in addition to the maintenance company of the armored regiment and the maintenance sections of each separate battalion and company. A large percentage of the officers and men in this maintenance group knew one another and had worked together as a team in maneuvers and training for three years back in the States and in England.

Major Dick Johnson, commanding officer of the maintenance company in the 33d Armored Regiment, was the ranking maintenance officer in Combat Command B. It was my responsibility to coordinate the maintenance effort between Major Johnson’s group, the ordnance maintenance company attached to the combat command, and the ordnance battalion in the division trains to the rear.

As the combat command moved forward, it often had motorized infantry battalions from the infantry divisions and separate artillery battalions and other corps-level combat units attached to it. The combat command often moved thirty to forty miles a day, and it might take the main elements of the infantry divisions several days to come forward. The infantry division’s maintenance sections followed behind the main body, which left the elements attached to the combat command without adequate heavy maintenance support. We soon learned from experience that it was necessary for the combat command maintenance group to assist the attached units in addition to doing the work for the combat command’s organic units.

During the campaign from Paris to the Siegfried line, the 3d Armored Division’s maintenance group supplied the major maintenance for the entire forward elements of the corps. This commitment was a major contributing factor in the continued success of the corps during such extended operations. Without this, the corps’ progress would have soon ground to a halt.

The German Attack

On the morning of December 16, I walked from the maintenance battalion headquarters, located in the main office building of the Engleburt Rubber factory in Aachen, to our shop area across the street. I was careful to give a wide berth to two 500-pound American unexploded bombs (UXBs) lying about a hundred feet apart in the parking lot. These bombs were considered extremely dangerous and were avoided until the ordnance bomb disposal crews could get rid of them. As I approached the shop building, I saw my buddy Lt. Ernie Nibbelink, liaison officer for CCA, coming toward me. He appeared excited about something.

“Cooper, have you heard the news? The Krauts have broken through south of us near Malmédy and are going like hell. Arlington just got word; it came down from division.”

My initial reaction was that this couldn’t be more than a local operation. We had the Germans pinned down on the Roer River and had been beating their butts off. But I was soon proven wrong. In a short time, the rumors were going like wildfire. The Germans had dropped paratroopers in isolated groups behind our lines.

Groups of German SS troops, wearing American uniforms and riding in American Jeeps, had infiltrated our lines.

The reaction at CCB headquarters was confused, and the situation map was sketchy. Apparently, the Germans had launched a massive assault along a broad front ranging from the Losheim gap in the north, near Malmédy, as far south as Luxembourg, just north of Echternach. This distance of some sixty miles was covered by only three divisions. An average of twenty miles of front per division was far too much to be covered. Because this sector had been considered relatively quiet, it had been used to give new troops combat experience before they were exposed to heavy fighting.

The 106th Division, which had just been committed to combat for the first time, entered the line on December 14, the day before, to replace the 2d Infantry Division. The battle-hardened 2d Infantry Division had pulled out of the line to move north to attack the dams on the Roer River at Schmidt, long been considered a prime target. The 106th Division moved into the positions previously occupied by the 2d Division on the Schnee Eifel, a series of heavily wooded hills just inside the German border. The 2d Division had prepared elaborate bunkers, foxholes, and trenches, and the 106th Division occupied these same positions.

The 14th Cavalry Squadron screened the area just north of the Schnee Eifel. This was a relatively wide area, and in some cases the outposts were as much as a mile apart. SHAEF had sixty-four divisions covering six hundred miles from the English Channel to the Swiss border. With some divisions in reserve, the average division had ten miles or more of front to cover. When forces concentrated for an offensive, certain areas would be even more lightly protected.

The German Ardennes offensive had brilliant planning and extremely tight security. On the morning of December 16, the Germans launched a massive assault with three armies abreast. Although the weather was extremely overcast and bad for flying, the Germans committed a thousand Luftwaffe planes, the largest force we had seen since the early days of Normandy. They used this air force for reconnaissance, for dropping groups of paratroopers, and, as the weather cleared, for attacking the highways, particularly at night. They also committed fighters to oppose high-level American bombing.

The initial assault against our frontline troops was overwhelming. With widely dispersed units, the Germans infiltrated, cut off, and surrounded many of our forward elements. In spite of this, many units formed small groups that put up a courageous rear guard. Stubborn resistance by these American units disrupted the tight German timetable during the critical phases of the attack and enabled SHAEF to bring reserves into play.

Back at maintenance battalion headquarters in Aachen, everything was in a mad scramble. All available men made an all-out effort to get every tank, half-track, and armored vehicle back on the line. The division was put on full alert and prepared to move immediately. We were told that the 7th Armored Division, our sister division at Camp Polk, from XLX Corps had already moved toward Saint-Vith. We had many buddies in the 7th Armored Division and were shocked the next day to hear that the first combat command to arrive in Saint-Vith to team up with remnants of the 106th Division had been completely overrun and shattered by superior German armor.

Although the Germans had been delayed, it was soon obvious that they had made a broad and deep breakthrough. Combat veterans in American armored divisions had long known that it was futile to try to stand directly in front of a major German panzer attack; this understanding had finally seeped up the chain of command.

Because of this German armor superiority, our task forces had to develop special tactics. As a combat command moved forward, the task forces would contact the German column and attempt to set up a roadblock reinforced with tanks, infantry, and self-propelled artillery. At the roadblock, the tanks could sometimes take a defiladed position for added protection against German firepower. Other tanks and infantry from the task force would attempt to move out on the flanks and, once the German column was stopped, subject it to heavy flanking fire, where our tank guns were most effective against the lighter German side armor.

Our task forces also used the M36 tank destroyer, when it was available. It had a 90mm gun with a muzzle velocity of 2,850 feet per second. This was still less powerful than the German PzKw VIb King Tiger’s 88mm gun and was not effective against the Tiger’s six-inch glacis faceplate. Sometimes, it would ricochet off the faceplate of a Panther. The M36 had only an inch and a half of armor on its front glacis plate and one inch on its sides. It also had an open-topped turret, which made it vulnerable to overhead airbursts from artillery.

The large gasoline dump at Stavelot was a prime objective of the German 6th SS Panzer Army. From there, they and the 5th SS Panzer Army would proceed northward past Liège, secure bridges across the Meuse River, and drive northward to Antwerp, cutting off the American First and Ninth Armies and the entire British 21st Army Group. Had this been successful, it would have been a military disaster for the Allies. The Germans were so short of gas at the beginning of this attack that the first parachute landing had to be delayed twenty-four hours because the paratroopers’ trucks ran out of gas trying to get to the airfield on time. The capture of the gasoline dump at Stavelot was absolutely essential to the Germans.

The Germans had trained a special brigade of English-speaking soldiers, scrounged from the entire German army on both fronts. They were equipped with American Jeeps and American uniforms and weapons even down to dog tags and GI long underwear. They also carried identification taken from dead American soldiers and prisoners. Their mission was to infiltrate rapidly through the American lines and, in conjunction with paratroopers, attempt to secure bridges across the Meuse River.

We used an identification method known as “password and parole.” When our sentries challenged an individual, they asked for the password. If he knew this, he was challenged a second time to give the parole.

If he knew this, he would be allowed to pass. A new password and parole was issued every twenty-four hours.

Somehow these infiltrated Germans secured the correct password and parole, many of which began with the letter W. Because most Germans had difficulty pronouncing W, pronouncing V instead, we thought this might give them away. The Germans had apparently been cautioned about this and had overcome the problem. So we also asked simple questions that only an average American would know, such as who is L’il Abner? name five American candy bars, and who is Babe Ruth? Any German soldier who could name these was pretty sharp.

In an incident near Spa, a sentry in an ordnance heavy maintenance company stopped an American 99th Division Jeep carrying four well-dressed GIs. They knew the password and parole and seemed to pass all the other preliminary tests, so the sentry was getting ready to let them pass. About this time, a lieutenant came out and saw the four men in the Jeep. He asked where they were going. They said they had just come out of the line and were going for rest and recreation in Liège. The lieutenant figured that no GI came out of the line with clean clothes and a clean-shaven face. He also knew that all leaves had been canceled and that the 99th Division was fighting for its life.

He called the corporal of the guard, and the men were taken in, questioned, and strip-searched down to their bare skin. One of the young Germans apparently was an officer and had kept his German identification with him to get back inside the German lines. The unit commander immediately convened a general court-martial, and the German soldiers were tried in accordance with the Geneva Convention, which stated that any soldier caught behind enemy lines in enemy uniforms could be shot as a spy. The men were all convicted and, with First Army notification, were taken out and shot that night. Justice was swift and final in wartime.

At least these Germans had been given a fair trial, which was more than our soldiers received just east of Malmédy. A number of American soldiers were captured by a German SS armored column, marched out in a field, and shot in cold blood with machine guns. This became known as the Malmédy Massacre. After the word got out, American GIs had little sympathy for German POWs.

The American Defense

Back at SHAEF, it was obvious that the Germans had driven a wedge between the First and Third Armies.

General Bradley’s 12th Army Group headquarters down south in Luxembourg could no longer maintain contact with First Army in the north. General Eisenhower reluctantly decided that Bradley would hold on to Third Army and get what assistance he could from General Devers’s 6th Army Group while the First and Ninth Armies would come under the control of General Montgomery’s 21st Army Group.

From the 7th Armored Division’s decimation at Saint-Vith, it was obvious that any attempt to directly block German armor was futile. SHAEF developed a simple and direct battle plan to counter the German offensive.

First, the hinges on the flanks must be held at all costs. The 99th and 2d Divisions on the Elsenborn Ridge on the north would be reinforced as quickly as possible. At the same time the southern hinge and the 4th Infantry Division near Echternach were also reinforced. The First and Ninth Armies on the north would pull out all available divisions and swing them south into the line, one at a time, to seal off the northern flank of the German penetration. At the same time, the Third Army on the south would send all available divisions to seal off the southern flank. No major defense positions would be established directly in front of the westward movement of the main German elements.

Montgomery was ordered to bring British troops to the west side of the Meuse near Dinant and prepare to make a stand. The Germans would have to commit troops to protect their flanks as they penetrated, and the deeper they penetrated the weaker the main forces would become. As soon as the northern and southern flanks were stabilized and the Germans had overextended themselves sufficiently, the American counterattack would attempt to cut off the base of the German salient and surround and destroy the German remnants.

On December 18, the 3d Armored Division was ordered to move south to Eupen. A German paratrooper unit had dropped into some woods south of the town on the road extending toward Malmédy and the Elsenborn Ridge. The paratroopers threatened the 1st Infantry Division and the other units on the hinge, so CCA sent down a task force to engage them. The paratroopers were soon eliminated, and CCA dug further into its positions.

The 30th Infantry Division had previously been ordered to secure Stavelot, which lay directly on the main line of advance of the 6th SS Panzer Army. In the wooded area just north of Stavelot was a large First Army gasoline dump containing 3 million gallons of gasoline. This would have given the 6th SS Panzer Army sufficient gasoline to go into Antwerp. On the night of December 19, CCB was ordered southward to the Spa and Stavelot area to back up the 30th Infantry Division.

Combat Command B left the Mausbach area late in the afternoon of December 19 and headed sixty miles south to Verviers, Spa, and Stavelot. They moved all night. The scattered snow soon turned to freezing rain, making the roads sheets of ice. All the vehicles had small blackout lights both front and rear. These consisted of a small housing with a slot about an inch long and about an eighth of an inch wide. In the dark, the lights were supposed to be visible at a distance of sixty yards. With the fog, mist, and sleet, the lights were barely visible more than a few feet away. It was impossible to maintain a normal sixty-yard march order. To get twelve hundred vehicles on the road and moving, it was necessary to jam them bumper to bumper and move as rapidly as possible.

The movement was a pure nightmare. Despite the system of guides and sentries that the MPs had worked out on short notice, there was still lots of confusion and a constant stop-and-start situation all night long. The intervals were extremely erratic, and often after prolonged stops the vehicles would get stretched out. When this happened, the vehicle in the rear would drive rapidly to catch up, but in the mist and darkness it often came upon another stopped vehicle and banged into the rear of it. If a two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck happened to hit a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier, it would simply knock it off the road. If a tank skidded into a Jeep, it would have squashed it flatter than a pancake. I made sure I didn’t get in front of a tank that night.

The problem of unsnarling the wrecks, taking care of broken-down vehicles, and keeping everything moving in an orderly manner was the responsibility of the maintenance groups. The last vehicle in each section of each column was a maintenance vehicle. Following each column were ordnance wreckers and crews to take care of anything that the unit maintenance crews could not handle themselves. By dividing the maintenance into various levels and echelons, a particular problem could be taken care of at the lowest level as expeditiously as the facilities available would allow. This way the heavy ordnance maintenance crews and wreckers were required to take care of only the major problems.

In addition to this, we had our regular routine breakdown maintenance. A column of twelve hundred vehicles, approximately half of them tanks, half-tracks, and other combat vehicles, would normally experience 150 to 200 breakdowns during a night march of fifty to sixty miles. When this happened, the vehicles would be repaired on the shoulder of the road. If this could not be done quickly, crews were told to stay with the vehicles, and the ordnance maintenance heavy units from the rear of the column would get to them in due time.

Sixty percent of the combat command had arrived in the assembly area by daybreak on December 20. The remaining vehicles were scattered along the highway, and it was late in the afternoon before the majority of them arrived. It took an entire day before the worst wrecks were cleared up. In a few isolated instances, drivers got lost, and the entire crews used this as an excuse to shack up in some remote Belgian farmhouse.

One oddball GI from the maintenance battalion got lost and wound up at Liège. When the MPs apprehended him six weeks later, he was wearing an Eisenhower jacket with captain’s bars and both air force and ordnance lapel insignias. The MPs became suspicious because he was obviously out of uniform. He was returned to maintenance battalion custody and could have been charged with desertion in the face of the enemy, which was a capital offense. The charges were later reduced to extended AWOL and impersonating an officer. He was given a section 8 (incompetent for military service) and a dishonorable discharge.

The army, like any other cross section of the American population, had its share of misfits. Almost all soldiers, even lieutenants (if you can believe it), were prone to goof off from time to time. This acted as a stress relief valve to offset some of the fear and terror that gnawed at the guts of the soldier in combat. All the average American soldier wanted was for the war to end so he could go home. In spite of this, the great majority of American soldiers did their duty with great courage and valor, as proven by the terrible sacrifices they made.

In spite of all the planning, the night of December 19 was one of violent contrasts for the maintenance people.

There were long periods when the crews, working under blackout conditions, would have to crawl under a tank or other wrecked vehicle to hook up a towing cable. In some instances a tank or truck would be on its side, and the men would have to crawl in rain-soaked ditches to hook up the cables. The first priority was to get the combat vehicles on the road, then the wheeled vehicles still able to run, and finally those that had to be repaired in place or towed to the next VCR My job was to stay behind the tank column, find out where it was going, and offer ordnance contact as soon as the firefight began. In spite of all the breakdowns and wrecks, the road march soon settled down into a typical start-and-stop situation.

During one of the long waiting periods on the road, I reflected on the situation. This was the first time we had actually seen the enemy achieve a major breakthrough in our lines. Rumors were flying. The Germans had broken through on a broad front with twenty to thirty divisions and were still going strong. They were killing prisoners. German paratroopers had dropped behind our lines and German soldiers in American Jeeps and uniforms were infiltrating our lines.

The situation was highly fluid, and we never knew exactly where the enemy was. A definite change in the mood of the men was evident. Although morale was still good, there was a great deal of anxiety because this was our first experience in a major retreat. I began to understand how the German soldier must have felt during the greater part of the fighting from Normandy up to the Siegfried line. Although a retreat is difficult for everyone, it must have been much harder on the infantry than on the armored troops. After all, we spent most of our time behind enemy lines when we were advancing. The main difference here was that instead of advancing most of the time, we were going backward. That’s one hell of a difference.

Stavelot-Trois Ponts-Stoumont-La Gleize

After arriving in Spa on December 20, CCB immediately went into action. It was attached to the XVIII Airborne Corps, and Maj. Gen. James Gavin ordered us to support the 30th Infantry Division in its attack to retake Stavelot and prevent the Germans from getting to the gasoline dump. At the same time, CCB was to attempt to establish a line south of Stavelot to further extend our northern flank. Combat Command B advanced southward in three columns.

Task Force Lovelady, the eastern column, advanced from Spa down the middle of the gasoline dump to the intersection of the road between La Gleize and Stavelot and from there to the western side of Stavelot to support the 30th Division’s attack. Part of the column went southward to extend the defense line. Task Force McGeorge in the middle secured La Gleize. Task Force Jordan on the west advanced through the rugged woods to secure Stoumont and extend the line farther.

When I arrived in Spa, I immediately drove through the main part of town to the top of the hill, where CCB had turned off to head down through the gas dump to Stavelot. The dump, which spread over several square miles and was well camouflaged from the air, consisted of five-gallon cans in thousand-can stacks about fifty yards apart along both sides of small firebreak roads that spread in a geometric pattern throughout the forest.

A reinforced quartermaster truck group had been ordered forward to move the gas out of there as quickly as possible and take it to another dump across the Meuse River in France, where it would be safe from the German advance.

A GMC truck could handle only two hundred five-gallon cans, so this would have taken three thousand truckloads. The quartermaster group had brought up a number of ten-ton tractor-trailer trucks and parked them along both sides of the main road in Spa. The plan called for the GMC trucks to load the gas in the dump, unload it onto the ten-ton trucks, then return for another load. As soon as the tractor-trailer was filled up, it was supposed to take off as rapidly as possible, unload the gas, and make a return trip.

The quartermaster troops had worked out a system for loading the GMC trucks. They worked in four-man teams. Each truck had a small portable manual roller conveyor about twenty feet long. The truck was backed up as close as possible to the gasoline stack. Two men got on top of the stack and two men were in the truck with the conveyor stretched between them. The men on the stack would load the cans onto the conveyor, which angled slightly downward, and the other two men would pick the cans off the rolling conveyor and stack them in the truck.

When left to their own devices, the American GI could always come up with an innovative solution. Pretty soon, the GIs started loading the trucks to a boogie cadence. They were spurred on not only by competition among the various trucks but also because the 991st Field Artillery had started firing 155mm shells over their heads onto a road junction south of the dump.

I had gone about a hundred yards down the road into the dump when one of these GMC trucks loaded with gas came screaming around the curve heading straight toward me. My driver, White, pulled onto the shoulder of the road; the truck missed us by inches. The expression on the truckdriver’s face was frozen as he came wheeling by, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop for any Jeep. We pulled back on the road and drove another fifty yards or so when another truck came screaming out of the dump.

After repeating this five or six times, I finally contacted the quartermaster lieutenant in charge of the group. I told him I was the 3d Armored Division maintenance liaison officer and was trying to contact some elements of CCB near Stavelot. I asked him if he could hold a couple of these trucks for a few seconds until I could get by them.

He looked at me with a sheepish grin. “Lieutenant, I had to sweat my damn guts out to get these guys to come in here in the first place and unload this gas, and I sure as hell can’t stop them now. If I can just keep these guys coming fast enough and unloading this gas to keep it away from the Krauts, I’ll have done the best I can.”

I surmised by his bearing that he was a brand-new second lieutenant right out of officer candidate school and was probably greener than I was. I could have pulled rank on him and chewed his butt a little bit, but I knew that it probably wouldn’t do much good. And I couldn’t blame the quartermaster troops for being nervous about those 155s being lobbed over their heads. After all, if one of them fell short in the dump, it could have been a disaster. I realized that any further attempt to get through the dump by that route was futile. I turned around, went back to Spa, and found another route.

One of the startling things about the Battle of the Bulge was how rapidly the rear-echelon service troops responded to the situation. By December 20, four days after the initial assault, the German breakthrough was fifty miles wide and thirtj’ to thirty-five miles deep. SHAEF’s defensive tactic of sealing off the flanks was forcing the Germans to penetrate deeper and in turn commit their own troops on the flanks, while at the same time seeking out a weak point where they could swing north and cross the Meuse River. Thus, when Kampfgruppe Peiper of the 6th SS Panzer Army took Stavelot, elements of the 30th Division came to retake Stave-lot, seal off the gas dump, and establish a line on the northern flank. Because this flank was still highly fluid, the 30th Division was able to block off only the main road from the north through Stavelot. It was not possible for the 30th Division to block off all the firebreaks. As a result, the 6th SS Panzer Army constantly sent patrols to try to get through one of these lanes and bypass the 30th Division’s positions. Until the 30th Division arrived north of Stavelot, the only thing standing between the Germans and the road to the gas dump were several small detachments of COMZ troops.

These consisted of engineers, signal, ordnance, quartermaster, and antiaircraft troops ranging in size from five to twenty-five men. The men carried .30-caliber M1 carbines, which had about half the range of the Garand but were still good weapons at close range. Every available man, including cooks, bakers, clerks, runners, mechanics, and drivers, was pressed into service.

One such group on the road from Spa to Stavelot consisted of a young engineer construction lieutenant with some engineer and antiaircraft troops together with a 90mm antiaircraft gun and one machine gun. They were the only roadblock north of Stavelot on this particular highway to the gas dump. They put the 90mm antiaircraft gun in a defiladed position off the left shoulder of the road and depressed the gun barrel to where it was just barely above the pavement. They placed the machine gun on the other side of the road, then set up small groups of riflemen in foxholes on both sides of the road. The total group consisted of no more than ten to twelve men, but they had a well dug in fortified position.

The 90mm, like the German 88, could be operated as an antitank as well as an antiaircraft weapon. The group had both armor-piercing and HE ammunition. There were numerous roadblocks of this type around the area, so whenever the advance guard of one of the German task groups approached they would immediately draw fire. Not realizing the size or nature of the roadblock, the German units would try to bypass and infiltrate around the roadblock. In so doing, they would encounter another roadblock from another small group of Americans dug in along one of the small fire lanes or bypass roads. Because the Germans had no way of knowing whether these were outposts of a major defensive position or just merely individual roadblocks, they were slowed considerably—enough to allow the 30th Infantry Division and CCB of the 3d Armored Division to secure the gas dump and establish a strong position along the northern flank.

The hauling of the gas continued at a feverish pace, spurred on by accelerated artillery fire. As Task Force Love-lady approached the junction on the road between La Gleize and Stavelot, it ran into increasing German opposition. A firefight in this area destroyed a small German convoy of three ammunition trucks and three antitank guns. The American column split into two groups, one heading eastward toward Stavelot and the other southward toward Trois Ponts. Just north of Trois Ponts, the group ran into a heavy armored column consisting of Panther and King Tiger tanks from the 1st SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Panzer Division, considered the toughest panzer unit in the entire German army. Our lightly armored M4 Shermans didn’t stand a chance against these German behemoths, and we immediately lost our four lead Sherman tanks. Task Force Lovelady withdrew slightly, established roadblocks, and called for heavy artillery fire.

In one incident, an M12 gun carriage with its 155mm GPF rifle loaded came around a bend in the road and suddenly found itself face to face with a King Tiger. Fortunately, the 155 was pointed directly at the base of the King Tiger’s turret. The gun commander gave the order to fire. The 155 struck the King Tiger at the base of the gun mantlet where the turret joins the deck. The explosion ruptured the thin top deck armor and blew the turret off the tank, instantly killing the entire crew. Had the shell struck a few inches lower on the front glacis plate, it would have exploded harmlessly, and the King Tiger would have been able to drill the M12 from end to end with its high-velocity 88. Such were the fortunes of war.

Back north in the gasoline dump, the boogie cadence picked up a terrific rate of speed and the quartermaster crews started loading those damn trucks like crazy. No sooner was a truck loaded than off it went. I found out later that as the artillery fire increased some of the drivers panicked and kept going when they got to Spa, not stopping to load the gasoline in the large 10-ton semi-trailers. Like a race horse grabbing the bit in his mouth, they went off in every direction except toward the Germans. Some of these gas trucks wound up at Liège, Antwerp, Brussels, and various points in northern Paris. [A lot of the gas wound up on the French black market in Paris.]

At least the damn Germans didn’t get it. This was still a remarkable undertaking, when one considers that it took First Army over two months to accumulate this much gas and it took the quartermaster troops some 24 hours to get it safely away from the Germans.

In the meantime, the other two task forces of CCB proceeded southward in two columns. Task Force Lovelady withdrew north from Trois Ponts and Petit-Coo and proceeded down a secondary road to Parfondroy preparatory to a joint attack on Stavelot with the 30th Infantry Division. It was here that they discovered the massacre of innocent civilians by the brutal SS troops of Kampfgruppe Peiper. Numerous bodies of old men, women, and children were scattered around the village; they had been shot by the SS. The 30th Division troops in Stavelot told us that they had encountered similar massacres there. Word of these massacres undoubtedly contributed to the shortage of live SS prisoners taken by American GIs.

The battle of Stavelot raged back and forth for several days. Before CCB got there on December 20, the 117th Regimental Combat Team of the 30th Infantry Division engaged German Panzergrenadiers with heavy King Tiger tanks, without any forward support of their own. Because the 117th Regiment was spread over a large area, their flanks were constantly threatened.

Company A of the 117th Infantry, commanded by Capt. John Kent, found a number of fifty-five-gallon drums loaded with gasoline. Kent told me later that his men removed incendiary rounds from .30-caliber machine-gun ammunition and loaded them in their Garand rifles. When a German tank column emerged from the narrow streets of Stavelot and started up the hill, the GIs rolled several drums of gasoline down the hill, then fired incendiary bullets into the gas drums, which immediately erupted into a blazing explosion. As the crew attempted to bail out of the lead tank, they were met by a fusillade of small-arms fire.

When the GIs found the roads frozen too hard to plant mines, they would take a mine and tie a light rope to the cage. They would place the mine in a ditch on one side of the road with a GI on the other side holding the rope. When a tank approached, they would pull the mine across the road in front of the tracks. The tank would strike the mine, breaking the tracks. When the crews bailed out, the GIs would cut loose with small-arms fire and kill the crew members before they could get off the tank.

In the meantime, a major battle had developed on the northern flank, and CCB and the 30th Division were joined by the 82d Airborne. The entire force came under the XVIII Airborne Corps, which brought up additional artillery and other supporting troops.

Both Task Force Jordan and Task Force McGregor were stopped by heavy German tank and antitank fire.

Task Force Jordan withdrew slightly, regrouped, and overcame resistance in Stoumont. Jordan then proceeded toward La Gleize to join up with Task Force McGregor coming down from the north. After an extremely heavy firefight, the German resistance was overcome and the entire German column was put out of action.

This operation along the Stavelot-La Gleize-Stoumont line appears to be the first time that the main armored thrust of the 6th SS Panzer Army was engaged head-on by a major combination of American armor and infantry. They were stopped dead. They not only failed to capture the gasoline dump, which could have been the most valuable prize of the entire campaign, they were forced to extend their efforts farther westward and expose their ever-lengthening flanks on the north. This, in turn, weakened their forward thrust as they constantly committed troops to hold this flank against American pressure.