The Second Objective

19

VIII Corps HQ, Bastogne, Belgium

DECEMBER 18, 7:00 A.M.

Jesus Christ, take a look at this.”

The telex operator ripped off the printed cable and held it out to the radioman next to him before Bernie could read it.

“Holy shit.”

The corporal’s reaction drew Von Leinsdorf’s attention, and he stepped toward them, taking a look at it before Bernie did. He handed it back to the corporal, then smiled at Bernie.

“Read it, Corporal,” said Von Leinsdorf.

“Let me have your attention!” The corporal stood up on his chair and read it out loud. “First Army HQ, emergency override alert for all units in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. Be aware that squads of German commandos in American uniform, driving American vehicles, are operating in combat zone behind Allied lines-”

Bernie froze in place. The room quieted and soldiers gathered around them as the message continued.

“Be also warned brigade strength force disguised as same, equipped with Sherman tanks and mobile artillery, believed to be somewhere in the field, details to follow-”

Excitement radiated out around them. The corporal rushed the cable toward the CO’s desk. News of the bulletin ripped through the room, generating an uproar.

Bernie backed up against the wall, out of traffic, trying to make himself invisible. He caught Von Leinsdorf’s eye. Von Leinsdorf tilted his head toward the door and Bernie started toward the exit. A couple of HQ staff sergeants ahead of them looked like they were trying to stop people from leaving and to organize a stronger watch on the door. Von Leinsdorf grabbed one by the arm.

“Christ, can you fucking believe this?” asked Von Leinsdorf.

“I believe they’d do anything.”

“But how are we gonna know the difference? How can we tell these fuckers apart? Nazis wearing our uniforms, what if they’re standing right in front of us?”

“We’ll know, sir. They can’t pull something like this off.”

“Jesus, I hope you’re right. Station men here, check IDs coming in and out. We’ve got to secure our perimeter, get word to the MPs, let’s jump on it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The sergeant hurried off. Von Leinsdorf grabbed Bernie behind the elbow, guiding him through the door. “Keep walking. Don’t stop.”

The MPs outside were just hearing the news. Von Leinsdorf barked at them, “CO needs you men inside, double time, move, move, move.”

The news radiated out in front of them, jumping from man to man. Bernie kept waiting for someone to notice them, stop them, put an end to it, and some part of him half wished it would happen. As they reached the street, another artillery barrage began and lit up the morning sky, shells stepping progressively closer to the village.

“They caught one of us,” said Von Leinsdorf. “Probably one of the scout teams.”

“How much do you think they know?”

“Their alert didn’t mention the Second Objective. So we keep going.”

“To where?”

“Reims, France,” said Von Leinsdorf.

“What are we doing there?”

“In Reims? We’re going to the movies.”

They turned the corner and saw an MP in the parking area examining the unit numbers on their jeep. Bernie saw Von Leinsdorf’s hand move toward his belt as they approached.

“Corporal, what are you standing there for? Don’t you know what’s happening?” asked Von Leinsdorf.

“You from Twelfth Army, sir?” asked the MP.

“That’s right,” said Von Leinsdorf, climbing aboard and signaling Bernie to get in and drive, as he held up the document tube. “And we’re heading back there now, got to get these to the Old Man.”

The MP put a hand out and stopped Bernie from starting the jeep. “Where’d you come in from?”

“North,” said Bernie. “Both roads to Luxembourg are cut off, case you haven’t heard.”

“I was just gonna say,” said the MP. “Road north’s cut off, too, if you planned on going back that way.”

“How do we get out of here?” asked Bernie.

“You gotta head due west. I see your road pass, soldier?”

Bernie glanced at Von Leinsdorf and handed it to him. They waited while he shined his flashlight on it. Bernie saw Von Leinsdorf reach down into the seat for the hunting knife.

The MP took his time looking it over, then handed it back. “You better make tracks. Krauts just about got us buttoned up.”

“Good luck to you,” said Von Leinsdorf.

“You said something’s going on inside?” asked the MP.

“Nothing to worry about,” said Von Leinsdorf.

Bernie stepped on the gas and they drove due west out of Bastogne.

Liège

DECEMBER 18, NOON

They didn’t turn off the tape recorders until Earl Grannit had squeezed every last detail out of Karl Heinz Schmidt. Less than three hours later, stripped of his uniform and dressed as a prisoner of war, Schmidt was handed over to a squad of Army Intelligence officers. They began roving patrols of the main highways south and west of the front lines, using Schmidt as their watchdog, looking for elements of what Schmidt had called Operation Greif.

Ongoing Allied communications problems prevented First Army Interrogation from notifying Counter Intelligence in the city of Reims, France, about Schmidt’s final revelation: that the German assassination teams were planning to rendezvous at a cinema there on the evening of December 19. Earl Grannit and Ole Carlson drove out of Liège at noon and headed south to deliver that news in person.

Carlson held Karl Schmidt’s forged blue SHAEF pass in his hand, studying it as they drove, then suddenly slapped it against his leg. “Staring me right in the face. That’s what’s wrong with this thing.”

“What?” asked Grannit.

“This is U.S. government issue watermarked paper, and everything else is so well crafted you’da thought the Krauts’d catch this, it’s just so danged obvious once you notice-”

“Notice what, Ole?”

“They transposed the e and a in ‘headquarters.’ They misspelled the doggone word.”

Carlson showed it to him.

“Get on the radio,” said Grannit. “Make sure they know that at the border. With luck we’ll get there before they cross over.”

Carlson cranked up the radio, trying to find a signal. “They’re gonna execute him, aren’t they?” he asked. “Schmidt?”

“That’s right, Ole.” Grannit glanced over as he drove. “What’s the problem?”

“You promised him he wouldn’t die for it.”

“We don’t even know he’s telling the truth. Maybe he made the whole thing up to save his ass.”

“Sounded pretty straight to me. How many more teams you think they sent over?”

“He said eighty men.”

“They’re desperate enough to try something like this. He had too many details. I think it’s real and he got caught up without knowing what it was about-”

“Every bad guy’s got a sob story, Ole.”

“I’m just saying that if he’s shot for it after helping us and us telling him different so he’d talk, it’s a raw deal-”

“Guy comes over the line, war time, in our uniform, confesses he’s got orders to kill our commanding general, and you feel sorry for him.”

“We lied to him, Earl.”

Grannit said nothing.

“Well, how do you feel about it?”

Grannit took a long look at him. “Do I look troubled to you?”

Lieutenant Karl Heinz Schmidt would not see the other three men from his own jeep squad again until two days before Christmas. That night a group of captured German nurses were brought outside their cells and sang Christmas carols to them in their native language.

The four men were marched out at dawn the next day, Christmas Eve, tied to posts, and executed by an American firing squad. Schmidt’s protests about a secret arrangement with Counter Intelligence that was supposed to have spared his life fell on deaf ears.

By noon on December 18, First Army Headquarters at the Hotel Britannique in Spa had been abandoned, retreating northwest toward Liège. Supply dumps in the area were ordered to pull back fuel and ammunition stores and destroy whatever they couldn’t move to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. The German offensive had caught First Army so off guard and undermanned that every available able body was pressed into front-line action. Around Malmédy that included clerks and cooks with no combat experience, who called themselves “canteen commandos.” First Army’s commanding officer, General Courtney Hodges, issued one last order just before retreating toward Liège. All Allied military personnel currently in the brig for court-martial offenses were offered a one-time amnesty if they volunteered to join units fighting the increasingly desperate defense.

On the afternoon of December 18, Corporal Eddie Bennings and twenty-six other members of the 724th Railway Battalion accepted the offer. They were released from custody in Liège, re-armed, loaded onto a truck, and shipped toward Malmédy.

Fifteen minutes after being assigned to a front-line company, Eddie Bennings cut himself on the arm with his bayonet, spilling an impressive but inconsequential amount of blood. He feigned dizziness, and a medic walked him to a mobile field hospital. Bennings entered, slipped out the back of the tent as soon as he was alone, jogged half a mile down the road to the supply depot’s fuel shed, came out carrying two cans of gas, hot-wired a parked jeep, and headed south toward France.

As the day wore on, the warning about Skorzeny’s commandos paralyzed the American battle zone. Military police locked down every major intersection under Allied control. Effective immediately, no enlisted man or officer without the current password was allowed to pass through any checkpoint. Traffic piled up behind roadblocks, and movement of American troops, during critical hours of the offensive, came to a dead halt. Reinforcements were delayed, hundreds of soldiers ended up in custody, and important dispatches were held up for hours. Placards with information about the imposters appeared in every barracks. An army of men who had never felt any reason to distrust the American uniform now viewed one another through a lens of paranoia and suspicion. Like the rumors that had infected the Nazi camp at Grafenwöhr, wild speculation about the objectives of the 150th Panzer Brigade spread across the battlefield. Not even Otto Skorzeny would have dared to hope that the mere mention of his commando squads would create such chaos in the Allied ranks.

The bulletin that German spies were operating behind Allied lines was not the only news to hit hard on December 18. Late on the afternoon of December 17, three survivors of the massacre at Baugnez Crossroads were found by an American patrol and rushed to the field hospital in Malmédy. Two reporters from Time magazine encountered the survivors, heard their story, and rushed it to headquarters in Liège. By nightfall, First Army senior staff released the story that invading SS forces had murdered a large group of unarmed American prisoners of war. Newspapers in the United States, which hadn’t yet run a single story about the Ardennes offensive because of a blackout ordered by SHAEF, were encouraged to publish detailed accounts of the incident. Many compared the slaughter to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Anti-German sentiment spiked to a war time high; war bond purchases and volunteer enlistments soared.

Americans all across the country were reading about the “massacre at Malmédy” before the bodies of the eighty-six victims had even been recovered, lying under a thick blanket of snow in the meadow at the Baugnez Crossroads.