The Second Objective

20

Supreme Allied Headquarters, Versailles

DECEMBER 18, 10:00 A.M.

General Eisenhower spent the morning with his staff in his Map Room, trying to piece together fifty disjointed dispatches into a coherent overview of the invasion. This much was clear: Twenty-four Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions had already been identified in the attack, striking toward Allied positions in three broad columns. While the northern and southern thrusts had met with makeshift but effective American resistance, the center through the heart of the Ardennes had not held. As Allied forces there crumbled and fell backward before the bludgeoning thrust of Kampfgruppe Peiper, tens of thousands of Wehrmacht and SS troops poured into the elastic middle behind them. The German attack flowed out to the south and west from there like water collecting in a basin, creating a distinct bulge on the map centering around the town of Bastogne.

During those early, uncertain hours, Dwight Eisenhower maintained a remarkable evenness of spirit. He had never led a battlefield unit but knew the first obligation of command was to set an example for the men around him. Despite the unsettling possibilities the attack presented, he never showed a moment’s panic, and his calm attitude flowed through SHAEF and down the chain of command. As a portrait of the battle began to emerge, Eisenhower’s tactical mind made an intuitive leap toward his enemy’s intent. He picked up a captured German sword, pointed to the center of the map, then slashed it west, all the way to Antwerp.

“They’re trying to split our army groups with this central thrust, and isolate the British to the north,” said Eisenhower. “These flanking columns are only there to screen the main push.”

General Strong asked him how he wanted to respond. Eisenhower stepped closer to the map, bringing the sword back to the middle of the Meuse River.

“If we keep them on this side of the river, pinch them in along both shoulders, and confine the central column along this corridor, there’s a chance we can choke them off here.”

The point of the sword came to rest on a nexus of interlocking roads south and east of the Meuse. Eisenhower immediately ordered his reserve divisions, the 82nd and 101st Airborne, to proceed with all haste toward Bastogne.

No longer able to reach Bastogne himself, General Omar Bradley summoned General George Patton to Twelfth Army headquarters in Luxembourg City. He told Patton that his Third Army’s offensive across the Saar River to the south, set to launch within days, had been officially called off. Bradley ordered Patton to have three of his divisions on the march toward the Ardennes within twenty-four hours.

During their meeting, Eisenhower sent word that he wanted to meet both his senior field commanders the following day in the French fortress city of Verdun, halfway between their headquarters, to finalize their response to the Ardennes offensive. Before they parted that evening, Bradley sympathized with Patton that his scheduled attack would not be going ahead.

“What the hell, Brad,” said Patton. “We’ll still be killing Krauts.”

To the east of the German border, at their battle headquarters in Ziegenberg, news of the invasion’s successes during the first two days heartened the Wehrmacht general staff. Hundreds of miles of forfeited Belgian territory had been regained, and thousands of American soldiers had surrendered. Oberstürmbannführer Peiper’s panzer column appeared to be relentlessly carving its way toward the Meuse.

The truth was more complicated. On the first morning after a crucial paratroop drop fell ten miles off course, the northernmost of their three panzer columns encountered stiff resistance and stalled in its tracks. Their inability to keep pace with the swift western progress of Peiper’s central column left his northern shoulder exposed and vulnerable to attack if the Allies were able to regroup. Peiper’s advance to the Meuse had turned into a race against time.

Since the offensive began, the main battle group of Otto Skorzeny’s 150th Panzer Brigade had been stuck behind the massive traffic jam that backed up to the Western Wall. Despite the work of its advance commando teams, Operation Greif’s success depended on the main force making a clean break into open territory within the first few hours. Skorzeny’s American tanks would not even reach Belgian ground until the early hours of December 17. Shortly after they did, Skorzeny’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hardieck, attempted to avoid the traffic jam by driving around it on secondary roads. His Willys Jeep hit a land mine on a logging road that had not been cleared by scout teams. Hardieck, along with his driver and adjutant, was killed instantly.

Colonel Skorzeny decided to take personal command of the brigade, but the roads were so snarled with traffic that Skorzeny was forced to abandon his jeep and walk ten miles to reach their forward position. By which point, at dawn on December 17, realizing his tanks had no chance to reach the river that evening on schedule, Skorzeny nearly called off Operation Greif. Only the encouraging intelligence from his lead commando units that the bridges at the Meuse were still undefended kept Skorzeny from issuing that order.

After consulting with his staff, he decided to try to keep their first objective alive for one more day.

At midnight on December 17, after speaking with Von Leinsdorf by radio, the two other commando teams he had recruited for the Second Objective cut off contact with Skorzeny’s corps command and made their way south toward France. By late afternoon on December 18, disguised as a squad of MPs, SS Unterstürmführer Gerhard Bremer’s team was less than forty miles north of the French border. After driving into the middle of a firefight, William Sharper’s squad had been forced to spend the night in the basement of an abandoned tavern. The delay put them two hours behind Bremer when they headed south again that morning.

Neither of them knew that the squad headed by Lieutenant Karl Schmidt had been arrested, that Schmidt had confessed, and that the alert was spreading behind American lines.