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[Fishbreath]

December 16, 1944

It's several hours before sunrise in the Belgian Ardennes, on the eve of the Third Reich's last desperate offensive:

Split seconds before 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, December 16, an American soldier from Company K, 110th Infantry, manning an observation post atop a concrete water tower along the Skyline Drive in the village of Hosingen, telephoned his company commander. In the distance on the German side of the Our, he could see a strange phenomenon: countless flickering pinpricks of light. Moments later both he and his company commander had the explanation. At Hosingen, along the rest of the Skyline Drive, and at many another point along what had become the quiet front in the Ardennes, the morning darkness suddenly came alive with a maelstrom of bursting shells.

To start there, however, would be to tell the middle of the story before the beginning, and I don't truck with clever literary devices like that.

The genesis of Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein came in autumn of 1944, shortly after British forces liberated Antwerp and during Montgomery's ill-fated airborne attack on Arnhem. In keeping with plans that received Hitler's personal support, it was bold to the point of delusion. Some twenty-five divisions would be pulled from quiet sectors of the western front, the quieter sectors of the eastern front, and OKW's (that's Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, for the uninitiated) strategic reserve, and would drive from the Siegfried Line between the town of Diekirch along the Our River in the south and Malmédy and Monschau in the north. The Panzers were to penetrate deep into the Ardennes through the Losheim Gap at the west foot of the Schnee Eifel, wheeling northwest once they reached the Meuse and covering the remaining forty miles to Antwerp. In doing so, they would drive a wedge between the British sector northeast of Antwerp and the American sector to the southwest, and Hitler hoped that the isolation and elimination of several corps' worth of British troops and American disillusionment over a major defeat would lead to a separate peace.

His misunderstanding of politics on the Allied home fronts aside, the generals at OKW and those placed in charge of the operation uniformly thought that Antwerp was an unrealistic goal. In no small part, they formed this opinion on the basis that the Ardennes is not what one would refer to as good tank country.

All Hitler wants me to do is cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on and take Antwerp! And all this in the worst time of the year through the Ardennes where the snow is waist deep and there isn't room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armored divisions! Where it doesn't get light until eight and it's dark again at four and with re-formed divisions made up chiefly of kids and old men—and at Christmas!

The Ardennes had featured prominently in two previous 20th-century battles: a dustup between the French and the Germans in the First World War, during which the counterattacking French were badly beaten and ended up losing territory, and the 'battle' during the Fall of France in 1940. The latter wasn't so much a battle, though, as a drive through the Ardennes: the French and Belgian forces defending the region didn't expect to see so many tanks, and were quickly driven back by the German forces, who promptly got bogged down on the terrible roads characteristic of the Ardennes, and were only saved from destruction from the air by the overwhelming superiority of the Luftwaffe.

Speaking of things characteristic of the Ardennes, I think I should be more detailed. It's a labyrinth of deep valleys, through which run fast-moving, steep-banked rivers almost impossible for vehicles to ford, separated by forested hills, connected by generally poor roads. Nearly anywhere there was a bridge, there was also a town which could be fortified. There were really only three points that made the Ardennes suitable at all. The first was that the American forces in the vicinity had just taken part in a knock-down drag-out brawl in the Hürtgenwald on the way to capturing Aachen. The defending forces were overstretched all through the Ardennes, and generally either inexperienced or receiving replacements. The second was the weather. (The plan for the predawn assault on the 16th included searchlights bounced off the clouds to simulate moonlight. "How do you know you will have clouds?" asked Hitler. Responded von Manteuffel: "You have already decided there will be bad weather.") In December in the Ardennes, clouds, fog, and snow are the rule, and their presence certainly kept the offensive free from aerial attack for the first week. Third, but probably most responsible for the initial successes, was the utter failure of Allied intelligence services to realize what was coming.

It's simply amazing that no American officer had any inkling of an offensive of the scale that eventually came. Reconnaissance flights had noticed major activity in marshaling yards in Germany near the Ardennes. Decrypts from the Japanese diplomatic service revealed, in letters from the Japanese ambassador, that the Germans were planning a major attack. Ultra, the British codename for Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park, told the same story. Two Belgian civilians, in the last few days before the 16th, witnessed German preparations. Between the 14th and the morning of the 16th, American patrols across the Our River took prisoners who uniformly declared that a large attack was coming. One, an ethnic Pole understandably eager to share, said that the Germans would attack "between December 16 and Christmas, in a large-scale offensive, employing searchlights against the clouds to simulate moonlight." Even American soldiers had some evidence:

For several nights, outposts of the 106th Infantry Division had been reporting the noise of tracked vehicles, and on the 15th, Colonel [Robert P.] Stout [the division's chief intelligence officer] noted that the night before there had been the "sound of vehicles all along the front after dark—vehicles, barking dogs, motors."

Even so, it took until the evening of December 16th, more than twelve hours after the attack began, before the Allied high command decided they were facing a major attack. Ultra intercepts referred to the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies by name, and American troops recovered exhortations from the bodies of dead officers:

Forward, march, march! In remembrance of our dead comrades, and therefore on their order, and in remembrance of the tradition of our proud Wehrmacht!

We will not disappoint the Führer and the Fatherland, who created the sword of retribution. Forward in the spirit of Leuthen!

Soldiers of the West Front! Your great hour has arrived. Large attacking armies have been started against the Anglo-Americans. I do not have to tell you anything more than that. You feel it yourself. WE GAMBLE EVERYTHING! You carry with you the holy obligation to give everything to achieve things beyond human possibilities for our Fatherland and our Führer!

Noted the intelligence officer of the VIII Corps, "These documents indicate the scope of the German offensive, and its importance becomes apparent from the impressive list of high-ranking German generals whose signatures appear thereon." I should say so.

Those messages went out to the whole of the German force lined up opposite the Americans in the Ardennes: in the northern sector of the front, opposite Monschau, Elsenborn, and Malmédy, the Sixth Panzer Army, four SS Panzer divisions under Sepp Dietrich. Dietrich had long been associated with Hitler himself, having become his chauffeur and bodyguard in the late 1920s. In 1933, he commanded Hitler's household guard, the SS-Leibstandärte Adolf Hitler, and kept that post as it grew from regiment in France to brigade in Greece to division in Russia. He was not popular with the other German commanders. von Rundstedt called him "decent, but stupid." He wasn't much of a commander, but he had been loyal to Hitler since 1923, the troops adored him, and Hitler was convinced that he, more than any of the Reich's other commanders, could be trusted absolutely.

The Fifth Panzer Army, which stood ready to attack the center of the American lines, was under the command of Hasso Eccard von Manteuffel, a veteran of Barbarossa, the campaign in North Africa, and the long retreat on the Eastern Front, and his conduct over the course of his distinguished career had vaulted him past corps command entirely; on returning from the Eastern Front in 1944, he was placed in command of the Fifth Panzer Army, with three panzer divisions (including the Panzer Lehr Division) and two divisions of Volksgrenadiers. von Manteuffel's stature lent him the capacity to convince Hitler to make changes to the plan: at his urging, the artillery preparation turned from a three-hour barrage into a short, sharp bombardment, designed to throw the Americans into disarray and then exploit their confusion. He also had the time of the attack moved forward to the aforementioned 5:30, a move which lengthened the naturally-lit day for the Germans by several hours.

The Seventh Army, at the south end, was commanded by Erich Brandenberger, who may as well be named General Not-Featuring-In-This-Special. Walter Model commanded all three armies, while Generalfeldmarschall Karl Rudolph Gerd von Rundstedt held overall command (von Rundstedt remarked that, with Model in tactical command of the operation, Hitler had left him "the authority to change guards at my headquarters").



We concern ourselves primarily with the Fifth Panzer Army here; I want to save the exploits of the Sixth Panzer Army for next Christmas (I have the best title for it, let me tell you). Across from von Manteuffel was the 28th Infantry Division, positioned along the Skyline Drive: the highway that ran from Diekirch all the way north to St. Vith (hey, a familiar place name!). The 28th Division's sector was some twenty-five miles long, and tactical considerations dictated that two of its infantry regiments were to occupy only about five miles each (the 112th Regiment in the north, and the 109th in the south). That left the 110th Infantry Regiment with a fifteen-mile front to defend, and on top of that, the 110th was providing the divisional reserve, a battalion behind the Clerve river, five miles in the direction of Bastogne, leaving the regiment about sixteen hundred men in total. They could expect to defend neither the Our nor the Skyline Drive in anything approaching strength; during the day, they situated themselves in squad-sized outposts along the Our, and at night, they withdrew to positions astride major roads leading up to the Skyline Drive.

That about finishes setting up the board. Let's get those pieces moving. The artillery preparation against the 110th Infantry Regiment came to a close, and units of the 26th Volksgrenadier Division and 2nd Panzer Division crossed the Our River and moved on the Skyline Drive.

The 110th Infantry held positions at Heinerscheid, Marnach, Hosingen, and three smaller crossroads further south. Unfortunately, Fishbach, a village whose name I appreciate, will not feature in this AAR beyond this mention. The German objectives for the 16th were Marnach and Hosingen. Roads led from Marnach to Clervaux and its bridges over the Clerve River, while both Marnach and Hosingen led via Munshausen and Bockholz, respectively, to Drauffelt and its bridge. After crossing the Clerve, they could run along good roads for the ten miles between the Clerve and Bastogne.

The 26th Volksgrenadiers and the 2nd Panzer Division had orders to bypass American strongpoints wherever possible in order to focus the whole of their effort on Marnach and Hosingen. The 26th Volksgrenadiers were largely successful, reaching Hosingen while the morning fog still lingered and overrunning one of Company K's platoons south of the town. Despite overwhelming superiority, the local commander failed to press the attack on Hosingen proper. Some of his units infiltrated past Hosingen, however, and came upon C Battery, 109th Field Artillery Battalion. They put in a desperate call to the commander of the 110th Infantry, Colonel Hurley Edward Fuller, who had just re-established communications with his division's command post in Wiltz, halfway between Bastogne and the front line along the Wiltz River. Fuller, a curmudgeonly Texan with a temper, wasn't the sort to let that sort of thing happen, so he called up divisional headquarters and demanded the release of his third battalion (the divisional reserve, remember). The divisional commander, Major General Norman Daniel 'Dutch' Cota, refused. The situation, in his opinion, was still developing, and he didn't want to commit his reserve before he had a better picture of it. Cota did release the remainder of 707th Tank Battalion, two companies of Shermans; the battalion's other two companies were already committed with the 112th Regiment to the north and the 109th Regiment to the south. Those two companies, still in the 707th's assembly area along the Clerve, were only two miles away from Hosingen, and so a platoon quickly got under way to bail out the artillery. They arrived shortly, and with their help the artillerymen resolved the day's first crisis.

While the Volksgrenadiers fought around Hosingen, elements of the 2nd Panzer Division crossed the Our opposite Marnach. They happened to run into an American minefield, which delayed them until the morning fog had lifted, and by the time they reached the town, Company B and a platoon of towed anti-tank guns had gone on full alert; the German attack failed, gaining only a foothold in the south end of the village. As was to become a pattern, though, the Germans simply bypassed the little island of American territory and continued down the road toward Clervaux and Battery B of the 109th Field Artillery. The commander of 1st Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel David Paul, attempted to send a platoon from Company A in Heinerscheid south to Marnach, but they were repulsed by Germans bypassing Marnach and only made it back to Heinerscheid just in time to aid in the defense against the German attack there.

Fuller, who had far too many crises on his hands to employ his two tank companies as a single unit, sent two platoons to Marnach to retake the south end of the village, while at the same time Paul dispatched his reserve, C Company, from Munshausen to carry out the same task. The two groups were supposed to meet, but C Company came under fire along the road and had to abandon it. The tanks made it to Marnach, though, and were able to clear the Germans from the town. Lt. Col. Paul sent one platoon to retrace its tracks, locate C Company, and defend Munshausen, while dispatching the other to drive south on Hosingen, which Paul thought had fallen. The first platoon did come across C Company and reach Munshausen, and the second swept the Skyline Drive between Marnach and Hosingen clear of Germans, and, to Paul's relief, found Hosingen still in American hands. Of course, his orders left the critical road junction at Marnach in the hands of an infantry company without tank support.

The Germans were also without tank support, because the Our was not an easy river to bridge:

Because the bridges had to be stout enough to support big Panther tanks, the girders were heavy, and the terrain around the bridge sites was so confined by the deep river gorge that no heavy equipment could get forward to help. All had to be done by hand; furthermore, the Our, normally a placid stream, was swollen from rains and melting snow. [...]

Shortly after 1 p.m., Major Loos's engineers finally completed the bridge for the 2nd Panzer Division at Dasburg, whence ran the road to Marnach and Clervaux. The Mark IV and Panther tanks were nevertheless slow to cross, for a narrow, precipitous approach road on the east bank had a succession of hairpin turns that was hard for the ponderous tanks to negotiate. Only ten had crossed the span when the next tank in column took the last turn too short, crashed into one side of the bridge, and plunged into the water. Except for the driver, the crew escaped; but repairing the bridge consumed another two hours, so that it was [4 p.m.] before tanks could begin crossing again. At about the same time [...] engineers of the Panzer Lehr Division completed a bridge downstream at Gemünd.

At around the same time, in Clervaux, Colonel Fuller was rounding up a platoon and a half or so of men on leave in the town's hotels and sending them east to Reuler, north from the Marnach road, where B Battery of the 109th Field Artillery and a detachment from the quad-machine gun halftracks of the divisional antiaircraft battalion were desperately fighting off a determined German assault. B Battery pulled back to Clervaux, out of immediate threat, while Colonel Fuller once again implored General Cota to release the divisional reserve. Cota refused, so Fuller devised a cunning stratagem: he asked for the two hundred-odd men from the division's other regiments and attached battalions who had also been on leave in Clervaux. This Cota agreed to, and Fuller dispatched his new provisional company to dig in on the road down into Clervaux, while organizing cooks, clerks, military policemen, and anybody else who could be spared from headquarters duties and hold a rifle to defend the old chateau in Clervaux. Orders all the way from the corps commander, General Middleton, required that Fuller hold the town.

Darkness was falling as the German tanks made it across the the Our, and although the Americans were hard-pressed at every point along the Skyline Drive, none of their outposts had fallen. That was soon to change; as the tanks arrived at Marnach and Hosingen, the Americans found themselves increasingly hard-pressed, and some outposts south of Hosingen were forced to retreat. As night fell, the defenders at Marnach radioed Fuller:

[They] reported by radio that the Germans were attacking again supported by half-tracks firing machine guns. That was the last word to come from the men who had so stoutly defended Marnach, but a continuing noise of firing from the village gave Colonel Fuller hope that some of them were still holding out.

Finally, at nine o'clock that night, General Cota released Fuller's 2nd Battalion back to him, and Fuller immediately planned to use the new battalion to relieve Marnach. The attack would come at dawn, supported by the 707th Tank Battalion's company of light tanks from the north.

General von Lüttwitz, in command of the 47th Panzer Corps that had been tasked with capturing Marnach and Hosingen, along with a crossing over the Clerve, found himself well short of his objectives: the Americans held in Hosingen and Clervaux, and the Germans had only succeeded in taking three defended positions over the whole day: Marnach and two of the villages south of Hosingen. MacDonald writes that the success of the American defense against such overwhelming odds (two battalions against four regiments; that is, no more than two thousand men against at least ten thousand) was the most remarkable achievement by the American soldier on the first day of the offensive.

Of course, the Pzkfw IVs of the 2nd Panzer Division were assembling just before midnight at Marnach, and with no serious opposition between them and Clervaux, Fuller was rapidly running out of time...

---

Well, we're about 3400 words in, and only now do I get to the administrative stuff:

I hope to update once a day from now until the end of December, giving a day-by-day account of the fight around Bastogne and, from the 22nd to the 26th, my defense and relief of Bastogne as fought in Command Ops.

Far and away the most helpful source for this opening post (note the map; that's a photograph from the book) and the daily updates to come was Charles B. MacDonald's A Time for Trumpets, which I give my highest recommendation. Pretty much every quotation and every fact comes from that history; it covers the crucial first few days of the battle in exhaustive detail, and it's still probably the among the most readable military histories I've ever read, owing in large part to the individual stories MacDonald weaves into the larger narrative. If you want a better feel for the Battle of the Bulge, this is your book. Trust me.

[Anvilfolk]

Posting to watch!

That was a fun read. How much of it already reflects your Command Ops play? Or is it mostly an introductory text?

[Fishbreath]

BftB has two Bastogne scenarios: Race for Bastogne and Battered Bastards. Race for Bastogne covers the 18th to the 22nd, and is probably actually the more interesting one, but I didn't pick that one this time. Battered Bastards covers the defense of surrounded Bastogne and the 4th Armored Division's attack in relief, and that's the one I'll be playing. From the 16th to the 22nd will be historical background.

[Fishbreath]

December 17th, 1944

As the second morning of the Battle of the Bulge dawned, the 110th Infantry Regiment stood firm along the Skyline Drive. The 112th and 109th Regiments to the north and south had both faced determined attacks, the 112th from a full Panzer division, and the 109th from elements of General Branden-not-featuring-in-this-AAR-berger's Seventh Army, but neither had given much ground. All three of the 28th Infantry Division's regiments were likely to face heavy attacks in the upcoming day, and if the 109th and 112th were forced to retreat or even bent backward, the 110th would risk being encircled.

Overnight, the Seventh Army's 5th Fallschirmjäger Division attacked at Hoscheid, the boundary between the 110th Regiment's sector and the 109th's sector. General Cota saw reports that they were forming up, and quickly ordered the 109th to send infantry and tanks to bolster the defense. They never made it into the town; the Germans had already crossed the Skyline Drive before it reached Hoscheid. The 109th's Antitank Company, defending in town, was to hold for most of the 17th, but the 109th would no longer feature in the battle for the Clerve. In the north, the 112th, too, would be forced away to the north and northwest, but then, anyone looking at a map could have said that the burden on the Allied side in the race for Bastogne would weigh heaviest on Hurley Fuller and the 110th Infantry.

The action started well before dawn, as German artillery spotters sneaking into Clervaux under cover of darkness called artillery fire in on the town. German patrols got into town under cover of the shelling and brought the battalion headquarters company under fire. Battery B of the 109th Field Artillery, which had fallen back to positions near Clervaux the day before, had to fall back further, and that was to put them out of range to support Colonel Fuller's planned counterattack on Marnach with his 2nd Battalion. At the same time, Germans pushing past the Skyline Drive to the north overran Battery A, driving the artillerymen off and capturing all of the guns. Battery C and the regiment's Cannon Company were focused on providing support to Hosingen and points south, and were soon to come under attack anyway.

Without fire support, 2nd Battalion's attach on Marnach was unlikely to succeed. You'll want to refer to the map in the previous post for the geography here: 2nd Battalion marched northeast from Clervaux to the crossroads north of Reuler, which overlooked Marnach, but by the time they arrived, German tanks were already rolling west from Marnach and toward Reuler. Reinforcements from A Company, including support from light tanks, rolled out from Heinerscheid at about the same time, but German anti-tank guns in Fishbach (hey, it did feature again!) stopped those reinforcements cold. Further armored reinforcements, unexpected ones at that, arrived in Clervaux, but Fuller had little choice but to commit them in small portions. His orders were to hold every position at all costs, though, so he had little choice. The Germans pushed from Marnach, pressuring 2nd Battalion between Reuler and Urspelt, and eventually surrounding them. As night fell, 2nd Battalion's commander ordered his five attached tanks to fight a rearguard action, while the infantry split into small groups and tried to exfiltrate back to Clervaux. None of the tanks were to escape. Only sixty infantry out of more than four hundred escaped the pocket.

South of the fighting around Marnach, the Americans remained hard-pressed. Positions at Bockholz and Munshausen were shortly pushed back toward Drauffelt. By noon, Hosingen was surrounded, and given the way the rest of the sector was going, there was little hope for relief. The defenders held through the night of the 17th, driven in two by the overwhelming force of elements of the 2nd Panzer Division, the 26th Volksgrenadier Division, and the leading elements of the Panzer Lehr Division. Early in the morning of the 18th, they surrendered. Consthum, formerly 3rd Battalion's command post, was lost at around the same time; the tattered remains of 3rd Battalion fell back toward Wiltz.



Clervaux itself fared little better on the 17th. I have helpfully provided a map of the town:



The town nestles in a very phallic-looking curve of the Clerve River, and features four crossings over that watercourse: one north and one south of the chateau in the middle of the bend, and a rail bridge and road bridge to the northwest. The road that runs off the top left corner of the map goes to Reuler. The road to Marnach enters on the right edge of the map, then descends in a series of S curves in the bottom center of the map. At 9:30 a.m., German tanks and halftracks began to descend along those curves for the first time, trading losses with American tanks climbing to defend the town. Both sides fell back, the Germans to lick their wounds and the Americans to reload; Fuller had to recall forces he had in Munshausen to defend. They reached Clervaux along the south road just as more German tanks reached the top of the hairpin turns. The lead Sherman knocked out the lead Pzkpfw IV at the top of the hill, which effectively blocked the Germans from entering town that way.

Pressure on Clervaux increased steadily throughout the afternoon, as Panzergrenadiers infiltrated from various directions and brought the defenders under fire. At one point, Germans got within 200 yards of Fuller's command post, before a ragtag group of defenders and a single 57mm anti-tank gun managed to force them back. That was one victory in a long string of retreats, though; defenders from the Marnach-Clervaux highway trickled into town as the day wore on, and when the 2nd Battalion near Reuler collapsed at around 6:30 p.m., tanks made their way down the north road.

All day, Fuller had been trying to get General Cota or Cota's chief of staff, Colonel Gibney, to give him permission to fall back and establish new defensive positions where the road west from Clervaux joined the St. Vith-Bastogne highway, but each time he asked, he was rebuffed:

Newly come to the 28th Division, Fuller was not yet a trusted member of the family, and who was to say whether his dolorous assessment of the situation was accurate? [...] Again Fuller got Colonel Gibney on the phone, but again Gibney refused permission to withdraw. Even as the two were talking, a staff officer ran into the room to tell Fuller that six German tanks were approaching the hotel [where Fuller had placed his command post]. Fuller told that to Gibney. He would obey the order to hold, said Fuller, but as a Texan, he wanted Gibney to know that he was assigning him the same fate as befell the defenders of the Alamo.

At that moment three shells from German tanks exploded one after another inside the ground floor of the hotel beneath the room from which Fuller was talking. "What was that?" asked Gibney. Fuller told him. When Gibney began to say something more, Fuller interrupted; he had "no more time to talk," he said brusquely, and rang off.

Fuller and twelve men made a daring escape from the hotel, crossing a twelve-foot ladder balanced between one of the windows and a fire escape carved into the cliff to the west of the hotel, Fuller carrying a blinded soldier the whole way. He made his way westward to Esselborn, hoping to find a telephone or Company G, which had been released from its task defending the divisional headquarters, but neither was to be found.

By midnight on the 17th, the Germans had effectively gained the Clerve River. Pockets of resistance remained at Consthum, Hosingen, and at the chateau in Clervaux until the early part of the 18th, but the Fifth Panzer Army had its crossings. The race was on: the Second Panzer Division, driving westward from the Clerve, against CCB of the 10th Armored Division, already on the way, and the 101st Airborne Division, ninety miles away in Rheims.

---

MacDonald was an infantry officer in the Second World War, and it shows in his terminology: American tanks he refers to as 'Shermans', although there were at least two variants in service, one with a significantly better gun than the other. The M10, M18, and M36 tank destroyers were all in service at the time, but his habit of referring to all of them as 'self-propelled tank destroyers' makes it difficult to distinguish the first two (the latter had a 90mm gun, which is usually mentioned—it was one of the best AT guns of the war). By contrast, he also writes of 'towed tank destroyers', which is quaint to my ear. It's surprising to me how little the average infantryman knew of the hardware on his side, too: there are multiple accounts of troops with degrees of prior combat experience mistaking Panthers for Shermans, and even in the dark I don't think that's a mistake I could make.

[Fishbreath]

December 18, 1944

By dawn on the 18th, the Germans had eliminated the last pockets of American resistance east of the Clerve and captured the crossings at both Drauffelt and Clervaux. With the 110th Infantry Regiment almost completely destroyed, except for Company G (which had been en route to aid Fuller before the collapse of the defense in Clervaux) and the 3rd Battalion (which had managed to fall back across the Clerve from Consthum, south of Hosingen, with moderate losses). Nor was the 112th Infantry likely to be involved: they had been pushed back to the west, where they were rapidly becoming critical to the defense of St. Vith. The 109th Infantry remained steadfast in the face of infantry and Fallschirmjäger attacks on the southern shoulder of the penetration, and would eventually fall back on a defensive line ending at Wiltz.

That left the defense in the hands of the commander of VIII Corps, Troy Middleton, a former dean at LSU, who was running "distressingly low on troops with which to slow the German advance." At hand he had the remains of the 110th Infantry, three engineer battalions, an armored field artillery battalion, and the 9th Armored Division's CCR. (For much of the Second World War, American armored divisions were organized into three combat commands: A, B, and Reserve. I'm too old-fashioned and too newfangled by turns, so if I call them brigades [which are forces on the same organizational level as infantry regiments, for those less familiar with the terminology], as they were up to the middle of the war and again after it, you'll have to forgive me.) All told it was maybe two-thirds of a division, and it would have to delay three German divisions for at least 24 hours before the 101st Airborne and CCB of the 10th Armored Division could reach Bastogne and get into fighting positions.

CCR/9th was the most combat-effective formation at Middleton's disposal: one battalion each of armored infantry, medium tanks, and armored field artillery, and a company each of tank destroyers, armored engineers, and anti-aircraft artillery, somewhat reduced by various commitments to reinforce the 110th Infantry Regiment. (The American AA vehicles were the well-known Half-Track, M16 Gun Motor Carriage, Anti-Aircraft, mounting four Browning M2 .50-caliber machine guns. While A Time for Trumpets is full of accounts of ground-based anti-aircraft vehicles being used in a direct-fire anti-infantry role, I can't recall a single point at which MacDonald writes of them being fired at aircraft.) Middleton ordered them to establish roadblocks at a two important points in front of Bastogne: the junction between the Clervaux road and the N12 highway between St. Vith and Bastogne at Antoniushof, and at Fe'itsch where the road from Wiltz met the N12 highway. Neither position was good defensive terrain; they bucked the trend in the Ardennes by being largely un-forested and un-crisscrossed by ravines and streams and draws and suchlike. Nor were there many buildings at Antoniushof or Fe'itsch for tanks to hide behind. Nevertheless, they were critical points at which to fight delaying actions.



At Antoniushof, Task Force Rose (named for its commander, Captain Lawrence Rose, as were most American task forces), comprising a company of tanks and armored infantry, plus a company of engineers and a battery of artillery near enough to provide fire support. A company of American foot infantry was nearby at Donnange, dug in behind the village. Task Force Harper (under Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Harper) at Fe'itsch had a company of tanks, a company of armored infantry, and fire support from the two batteries of the 73rd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. Already there were a hundred men and ten officers of the reorganizing 110th Infantry Regiment, organized under Colonel Theodore Seely, a former commander of the regiment who had been injured in the Hürtgenwald (at the corps headquarters, Middleton had told him, "Go find your regiment and take command of it").

The fighting was to start at daybreak, and men of the 110th Infantry would see the first of it once again. A forward observer team attached to Company G climbed the steeple in Donnange, spotting German tanks where they had been spending the night. Sergeant Charles Johnson, the spotter, sent his radio operator back to Company G to let them know of the nearby German force. Company G moved toward Donnange, but the Germans spotted the movement and took them under fire. Sergeant Johnson and his radio operator, who had brought the jeep back into town, followed Company G in making a narrow escape back to Lullange, where they weathered two attacks that day before being forced back to Task Force Harper's positions at Fe'itsch. Task Force Rose saw attacks starting in midmorning, the first one of which drove the inexperienced armored infantry (this was CCR/9th's first taste of combat) away in a disorganized rout toward Fe'itsch. Captain Rose requested permission to withdraw, but Middleton refused it. By dark, Rose had been forced out of the road junction, and decided to fall back on his own authority. The direct road to Bastogne was blocked, so Task Force Rose aimed northwest at Houffalize, along the Ourthe River, where they ran into reconnaissance elements of the 116th Panzer Division. Only a few men escaped back to Bastogne.

Nor did Task Force Harper do much better: at twilight, Panzergrenadiers attacked Fe'itsch in force. MacDonald writes that they were supported after dark by Pzkpfw IVs and Panthers equipped with active-infrared night-sighting devices. Such equipment was tested starting in summer 1944, but I can't find sources corroborating their presence in this particular engagement, or indeed in any combat. Either way, Task Force Harper was quickly forced to vacate Fe'itsch, falling back on CCR/9th's headquarters at Longvilly. Company G and Seely's remnants from the 110th Infantry held a little longer, but soon fell back themselves. At Longvilly, the combat command headquarters waited for the attack to fall, but it never did: half a mile northeast of Longvilly, the German force turned off the N12 highway to bypass Bastogne. Their objective was the Meuse. That turn saved the headquarters and the stragglers, but it did cut off the screening force Colonel Gilbreth (CCR's commander) had established between Fe'itsch and Longvilly. Of a company of infantry and two platoons of tanks and tank destroyers, a surprising 225 men made it back to Bastogne, some as many as six days later.

Fritz Bayerlein, the commander of the Panzer Lehr Division, passed south of Fe'itsch with the advance guard of his division while the German attacks on that strongpoint continued, reaching Mageret, only about three miles from Bastogne. Bayerlein was very close to victory in the race for the crucial junction at Bastogne, but a Belgian farmer, questioned by Bayerlein's men, reported that forty American tanks had just passed Mageret going toward Longvilly. Worried about such a strong American force behind his own (of some Panzergrenadiers and fifteen tanks), he waited in Mageret for the situation to develop.

American tanks had passed through Mageret not long ago, but they numbered far fewer than forty. At about 4:00 p.m., Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division began to arrive in Bastogne. Middleton ordered that it be split into three teams, a decision which didn't sit well with CCB's commander:

Like most experienced armored commanders, Colonel Roberts, who had taught armored doctrine at the Command and General Staff College, was always wary of the way doughboy generals might employ armor. They had a tendency to use it in the fashion that helped bring the downfall of the French Army in 1940, not as a powerful massed force but in increments, often as infantry support. And Middleton—Roberts was aware—was a doughboy general.

Team Cherry, under Lt. Colonel Henry T. Cherry, rolled through Mageret shortly before Bayerlein arrived. It had not forty tanks, but in actual fact only seventeen Shermans and ten light tanks. It reached Longvilly, where it had been ordered to hold, at 7:00 p.m. Around the same time, the 101st Airborne arrived at their assembly area near Bastogne. Nothing substantive was to come of the German presence in Mageret, beyond a failed American attempt to evict them. By a scant few hours, the Americans had won the race for Bastogne.

[Fishbreath]

December 19, 1944

On the night of the 18th and into the morning of the 19th, Colonel Gilbreth's headquarters at Longvilly drew the remains of Task Force Harper, Company G, and what remained of Seely's men from Fe'itsch. With the Germans not more than half a mile away, Gilbreth decided to pull his headquarters back to Bastogne proper, while leaving the line units in Longvilly to provide a screen. This was not the greatest of ideas:

Word for the headquarters troops to withdraw went out in a grim setting. Pitch darkness, a clinging fog, German searchlights in the distance, fiery arcs of tracer bullets, eerie flickers of flares. There was shelling, the occasional chatter of burp guns from German patrols, and everywhere untold confusion. To many a man it looked like Armageddon, and somewhere just over a hill or two, or maybe three, there was a place where he could escape it: Bastogne.

There was no way to confine word of the withdrawal to the few who were supposed to execute it, and for men who had just experienced the enemy's deadly power at the Fe'itsch road junction, it was easy to convince themselves that the order to fall back applied to them, too. At the appointed hour for men of the headquarters to depart, seemingly every man, every vehicle, every gun in Longvilly converged on the western exit from the village. Soon there was panic, an ugly panic.

Somehow Colonel Gilbreth and his staff managed to stop it. Gilbreth "cut the column in the middle" and ordered that not another vehicle, not another man, including the headquarters troops, was to leave Longvilly until daylight.

Still, though, the flow of vehicles on the road from Longvilly to Mageret hit Team Cherry's vehicles going the other direction, and the road wasn't nearly big enough for both of them. The traffic jam lasted well into the morning. This would have been a problem if the Wehrmacht had been able to make its attack at dawn on the 19th as von Lüttwitz had ordered. That timetable proved unrealistic, though: disorganization and fatigue had taken their toll during the long advance through the night, and it wasn't until late morning before two Volksgrenadier regiments and the Panzer Lehr Division managed an attack. Nebelwerfers and artillery pounded the American positions along the Longvilly-Mageret road, which was soon crowded with burning vehicles. The Panzer Lehr Division might have been able to completely eliminate the American forces along that clogged highway with a serious attack, but General Bayerlein was not giving the battle his full attention:

In a wood outside Mageret, his troops had found a platoon from an American field hospital, and among the staff, a "young, blonde, and beautiful" American nurse attracted Bayerlein's attention. Through much of December 19, he "dallied" with the nurse, who "held him spellbound."

The Wehrmacht was unable to organize a sufficient attack to defeat the handful of defenders Team Cherry had protecting their column on the road through the whole day. As darkness fell, the Americans were able to clear the highway, and most of the force escaped via Arloncourt back to Bastogne. That brought to a close the fighting in front of Bastogne, but there was still some drama to play out just north of town.

Noville was a small village four miles north of Bastogne, along the highway between Bastogne and Houffalize. It stood on windswept, treeless ground, with little cover and little concealment. It was also to be the site of some of the heaviest fighting in the days before the encirclement of Bastogne was complete. Major William Robertson Desobry arrived in Bastogne in the late hours of December 18, and immediately met with his commander, Colonel Roberts of CCB, 10th Armored Division.

Roberts pointed on a map to the village of Noville, and told Desobry to go there. He had no way of knowing, said Roberts, who was there: Americans, Germans, or nobody. General Middleton had nevertheless designated the village as an oupost for Bastogne at the limit of artillery support positioned closed to the town.

"You are young," said Roberts, "and by tomorrow morning you will probably be nervous. By midmorning the idea will probably come to you that it would be better to withdraw from Noville. When you begin thinking that, remember that I told you it would be best not to withdraw until I order you to do so."

To hold Noville, Major Desobry had about four hundred men: a company of seventeen Shermans, a company of armored infantry, and a handful of engineers, medics, and reconnaissance troops. Desobry established positions in an arc from the east to the northwest, and ordered his men to send any stragglers who looked willing to fight into Noville proper to be organized into provisional fighting units. They had only a few hours to dig in before the first German forces arrived:

It was close to four o'clock in the morning when the men on the road to Noville from the east and the village of Bourcy heard half-tracks approaching. Not certain whether they were American or German, a sentry yelled: "Halt!" As the leading half-track braked abruptly, someone shouted somethingin German. From an embankment above the road, the men in the outpost hurled hand grenades into the half-track, and a duel with more hand-grenades ensued.

The Americans withdrew a short distance toward Noville, while the half-track turned and left. Through the morning, the sound of tracked vehicles could be heard moving around the town. Two Shermans traded for two panzers in the fog at daybreak, but it wasn't until 10:30 a.m. that the true nature of the situation became clear. Noville was situated on low ground, overlooked by ridges to the north and northeast (nobody in Bastogne had a detailed map). On the high ground were fourteen German tanks, and thirty to forty more were situated in various positions around Noville. The German infantry were unwilling to accompany the tanks over such a broad expanse of open ground, and the fight quickly turned into a duel between armored vehicles. The Americans were aided by the timely arrival of a platoon of tank destroyers (my other sources suggest that these were M18 Hellcats; MacDonald is, of course, silent on that issue), and knocked out nine of the fourteen panzers on the high ground in short order. An armored car mounting a mere 37mm gun scored a lucky hit on a Panther, knocking it out; the gunner himself found it "hard to believe". All told, the Americans knocked out seventeen tanks, plus two more earlier, against losses of a single tank destroyer, four light vehicles, and thirteen men wounded. The position would not be defendable for very long, however: the Germans, in dug-in positions on the high ground, could pour fire into Noville with near-impunity.

Desobry was thinking, just as Colonel Roberts had predicted, that it would be better to withdraw from Noville. He also remembered that Roberts had said he was not to withdraw without permission. Radioing Roberts, he requested that permission.

Roberts' hands were tied. Desobry's position was not tenable in the long term, but there was nowhere behind Noville to fall back on before Bastogne, and that was not acceptable to General Middleton. Roberts compromised: he sent a battalion of parachute infantry from the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment under James LaPrade, and when they arrived, Desobry planned a counterattack to take the high ground. It gained no more than five hundred yards, coinciding as it did with another German attack on the town. The Germans lost yet more tanks. Though they failed to gain the town, Desobry was injured and LaPrade was killed by fire from German tanks, which was aimed at a vehicle in the center of Noville, but hit Desobry's command post instead. Desobry was sent to a collecting station west of Bastogne for evacuation, but as the Wehrmacht began to flow around the town, Desobry and all the Americans at the collecting station were captured. Noville's position had not improved, but the commander on the scene in Bastogne, General Anthony McAuliffe, had orders from General Middleton that Noville was not to be lost. It would hold through the night.

East and southeast of Bastogne, the Americans and the Germans fought small actions throughout the day. Parachute infantry from the 101st Airbone made attempts to retake Mageret, but were repulsed, and rather prudently requested permission to form a defensive line between Bizory and Neffe, two villages on roads into Bastogne from the east (they'll feature on the map in tomorrow's update).

So did the first phase of the battle for Bastogne end: the Americans had narrowly won the race, but faced several divisions of experienced German troops with an airborne division (much smaller than a standard infantry division) and a single combat command of armored troops, plus disorganized stragglers from the previous days' fighting. The outcome could well have been different: the 110th Infantry, nearly obliterated as a fighting force, had stalled the Germans until the morning of December 18th. If they had folded twelve hours before, Bayerlein's Panzer Lehr Division would have reached Bastogne ahead of the 10th Armored Division's CCB. The 9th Armored Division's CCR was also reduced to a shadow of its original strength, taking heavy losses on the road from Antoniushof to Longvilly, but delaying the German arrival further. The German losses from the Our to Bastogne had been heavy, too, but the losses in time were to be felt far more dearly. Now von Manteuffel had a choice: Bastogne, the Meuse, or both?

---

Writing this so far has been a very interesting experience: MacDonald laid out his book in sections. The relevant ones so far have been the introduction (obviously), a full section on the first day of fighting in each locale, a section that covers (roughly) the 17th and the 18th, and a section that covers the parts of the battle where the German advance is contained (about the 19th through the 25th or 26th). This is handy to get a sense for the flow of the overall battle, but poor for a deep understanding of an individual part of it. Compiling this narrative so far has had me jumping from the first page of the book to the 480th, but in doing so I've gained a much better feel for the course of battle for Bastogne. I guess I owe you, the reader, a thank you for that—I doubt I would have learned as much if I had just read the book through once and put it away.

[Fishbreath]

December 20th, 1944



The night of December 20th was not an easy one for Team Desobry and the battalion from the 506th Parachute Infantry. Panzergrenadiers and tanks in small groups probed the perimeter around Noville all night, and morning brought no respite as shellfire hit harder and German tanks moved in.

As tanks drew up alongside the first building in Noville, the crews failed to note that they were within ten yards of an American bazooka team. The first rocket [...] set one of the tanks on fire.

A short distance up the highway, Staff Sgt. Michael Lesniak dismounted from his tank, had a look, returned to his tank, and moved into the center of the road. Before the Germans knew what was happening, Lesniak's gunner fired and with his first round knocked out the other German tank. Yet a third tank that had stayed some distance behind the others threw a few shells into the village before falling back. One of those hit Lesniak's tank, damaging the traversing mechanism on the turret.

Attacks came through midmorning, when the fog lifted as it had done the day before. Once again, increased visibility revealed a skirmish line of German tanks on the ridges overlooking the village, and the first American volley knocked out four. The rest fled behind the crest of the hill. At around the same time, Majors Harwick and Hustead, who had replaced Desobry and LaPrade, verified something that boded poorly: the road from Noville to Bastogne had been cut by German forces.

In Bastogne, General McAuliffe was not insensitive to the plight of his men in Noville, though owing to cut communications, Harwick and Hustead didn't know that. McAuliffe sent another battalion of parachute infantry to push through to Noville from Longchamps, but they reached the highway and met Germans in sufficient force to stymie their attack. That and the deteriorating situation in Noville convinced McAuliffe that it would now be more prudent to pull the defenders out rather than reinforce them. A battalion of parachute infantry near Foy would retake that town, and when the men in Noville heard the noise, they were to make a fighting retreat to Bastogne.

To Majors Harwick and Hustead, the chances of a successful retreat looked bleak. The road from Noville to Foy ran straight as a ruler, open fields on either side, not a single tree, the only cover or concealment a lone farmhouse on the left of the road some five hundred yards short of Foy. [...]

As if acting as a signal for the withdrawal to begin, the curtain of fog descended again. The foot troops in the lead made the march with few problems, and all might have gone well for everybody except for a freak incident. As the first half-track preceding the vehicles carrying the wounded came abreast of the farmhouse outside Foy, the armored shutter over the slit through which the driver looked out to drive fell shut. When the driver raised his arm to lift the shutter, an officer thought the man had been wounded and pulled the hand brake. As the vehicle came to an abrupt stop, the half-track behind it rammed into the rear. In accordion fashion, every vehicle along the entire column came to a halt. At that moment, small-arms fire struck the head of the column, some coming from the ditches on either side of the road, some from the farmhouse.

The column came under tank fire, as well, and three of the tanks escorting it were disabled. One TD saw some of its crew wounded, so paratroopers filled in, and in another instance the men of the 101st drove a tank all the way back to Bastogne:

When [Pfc. Thomas E.] Gallagher [the driver] said he was short of crew and had no gunner, two paratroopers climbed aboard. With a paratrooper doing the firing at a range of two hundred yards, Gallagher's tank destroyer knocked out one of the tanks, and the other turned away. [...]

The vehicles [that escaped] included the fifth tank, manned and driven by paratroopers, who climbed aboard swearing that they would learn how to drive "the son of a bitch."

By dark, the defenders of Noville had gained Bastogne. Casualties ran to eleven tanks, five tank destroyers, and 400 men. Losses to the 2nd Panzer Division were north of 30 tanks and 600 men—and 48 hours plus fuel for the same, time the 2nd Panzer Division was supposed to be driving over lightly-defended territory to the west and northwest toward the Meuse. The two days Team Desobry bought were critical (though that's a story for another AAR).

The 20th also saw an attack on Bastogne proper from the east: two regiments of the 26th Volksgrenadiers and two regiments from the Panzer Lehr Division made no progress against the northeast and southeast approaches to Bastogne. The 47th Panzer Corps and von Lüttwitz could point to only two successes for the whole of the 20th: they had driven the Americans from Noville, and more importantly, at the town of Sibret they had cut the highway northwest from Neufchâteau to Bastogne, along which ran the supplies to Bastogne. The last reinforcements to reach Bastogne before its relief had arrived, and now I feel more able to give an accounting of the American forces:

The 101st Airborne numbered about 10,000 men, and including an engineer battalion, and four battalions of artillery. It was largely free from casualties. The 10th Armored Division's CCB had taken serious losses: Team Desobry and Team Cherry had both lost while fighting delaying actions, but Team O'Hara still had a full complement, and Roberts managed to find eight replacement Shermans in Bastogne, en route to the front. The front had come to them. The 9th Armored Division's CCR had nearly evaporated. 23 tanks remained, supported by eight howitzers and sixty armored infantrymen; they were to become Team Pyle for the duration of the battle. Team SNAFU comprised remaining elements of CCR (tankers without tanks, armored infantrymen without halftracks), plus stragglers from the 110th Infantry. In total, they numbered about 600. 36 M18 Hellcats of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion rounded out the defenders. The 101st plus the ragtag attachments were a reasonably formidable force, especially in artillery: they had 130 guns, a total of eleven battalions, when the average division had four.

There was one last story that came to an end on the 20th: the 4th Armored Division, Patton's favorite, was expected to join the defense. Near midnight on the 19th, CCB arrived on the Neufchâteau-Bastogne Highway, and someone on Middleton's staff ordered to Bastogne. McAuliffe ordered it to a reserve position—a position near Sibret, where the Germans (with a significantly smaller force) were soon to cut the highway. Hugh Gaffey, the commander of the 4th Armored Division, was formerly Patton's chief of staff, and he resented having a third of his command stolen. He bent Patton's ear, and with Patton's authority, recalled his CCB back to the rest of his division. So did the Germans meet minimal opposition at Sibret, and so was the supply route to Bastogne was cut.

---

The patch to Command Ops I was waiting for is finished; now it just needs to be released.

Reading these accounts of combat (and playing Command Ops, for that matter) has changed my understanding of how war is fought at low levels: fronts are never as contiguous as they look on maps (i.e. the 110th Infantry behind the Our, or the various task forces around Bastogne who covered pretty much only the roads). High-intensity battlefields generally still come down to small units battling it out; there's only so much that force can be concentrated (the 110th Infantry again). Tanks are not very useful in difficult terrain (there are at least a dozen accounts of German and American advances being held up because the road was blocked by a single damaged vehicle).

I was also talking with a friend about the battle, and came up with the General's Triangle (by analogy to the Engineer's Triangle): an attack (or a defense, with simple modifications) can be fast, bloodless, or deep-penetrating. Pick two. It seems particularly apt in this story: the Germans lost heavily in attacking quickly and deeply, while the Americans paid in blood for defenses that gave ground neither quickly nor in large quantities.

Obviously, it can't be applied to all situations, and I can think of a lot of examples where 'bloodless' is the one generals didn't pick, while I can't think of many for the other two, so it may not even be that good a rule to begin with.

[FritzPL]

This is better than a history lesson; I always love things that, while being entertaining let you learn a lot of stuff - for instance, I would've never known that the Art of War could be so complex until I've read your St. Vith AAR, and I would've never spoken English so fluently(or at all) if I hadn't played internet games. I am very much looking forward to this.

[Fishbreath]

December 21, 1944

Around Bastogne, the 21st was neither a calm nor a quiet day, but it was a largely uneventful one. The action played out mainly to the south and west of the town, as kampfgruppen from the 26th Volksgrenadier Division and the Panzer Lehr Division, en route to the Meuse, bypassed the town to the south. Only on the 21st was Bastogne fully surrounded; at the end of the 20th, there remained ways out of the city to the west (although there wasn't much there that would have justified a retreat). The only real fighting was at Senonchamps, where Kampfgruppe Kunkel drove away an artillery battalion before Team Pyle and some quad-50 half-tracks from the 796th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion stopped them cold. Other skirmishes west of Bastogne resulted in the loss of a handful more artillery pieces.

The supply situation was to be the largest problems facing the defenders of Bastogne:

The arrival of many of the paratroopers without their personal gear foretold that there would long be supply shortages in Bastogne. Nor did an airborne division travel with the big supply trains to be found with infantry and armored divisions. Yet Colonel Roberts had arrived with his trains full and would be able to share, and most of the artillery units (other than those of the airborne division) had fairly ample supplies of rations and ammunition.

Scrounging supply officers soon found that any of the units attached to the VIII Corps had left behind large stocks of supplies, including a Red Cross depot with great amounts of flour for doughnuts, so that pancakes appeared on everybody's breakfast menu. So, too, the town of Bastogne had some reserves of food, and the poultry, pig, and cattle population in the surrounding villages was a resource not to be ignored.

Nevertheless, should the town be surrounded and subjected to siege, there was bound to be hardship and concern, in particular, for ammunition and gasoline. A further problem quickly developed when the 101st Airborne Division lost its collecting station, along with most of the surgeons and other medics, creating a severe shortage of surgeons and medical supplies.

---

So, as of now, 7:00pm on the 21st, the patch for Command Ops still isn't out. If it isn't out by the time I'm back from Christmas tree hunting tomorrow, I'll just have to start without it. Alas. At least the six days of preparatory gabble are done, and when next I update this, there will be an actual game involved.

[Heron TSG]

Holy crap, I just read all of this and it was fantastic. Ye of the piscine breath, thy writing is better than most history books I've ever read. It's downright lively. This kind of writing is the reason I love studying history so much. I'll be following this one for sure.

[Fishbreath]

Holy crap, I just read all of this and it was fantastic. Ye of the piscine breath, thy writing is better than most history books I've ever read. It's downright lively. This kind of writing is the reason I love studying history so much. I'll be following this one for sure.

Charles B. MacDonald is more responsible for that than I am. Once again, I have to recommend his book on the Battle of the Bulge, which is full of the sort of personal accounts these posts are only peppered with. He's an engaging writer with a seemingly-innate sense for readability, and although he dedicates the lion's share of his book to the battle until the 26th, that's the most interesting part.

This is better than a history lesson; I always love things that, while being entertaining let you learn a lot of stuff - for instance, I would've never known that the Art of War could be so complex until I've read your St. Vith AAR, and I would've never spoken English so fluently(or at all) if I hadn't played internet games. I am very much looking forward to this.

I'm glad you're enjoying it. I'm also excited to get to playing, although the unacceptable failure on the part of Matrix Games to produce a patch installer given a week to do it has me a bit steamed.

[Fishbreath]

December 22, 1944

George Patton requires little introduction. I'll let MacDonald do so anyway:

By late 1944, George Smith Patton, Jr., at fifty-nine years of age, was already something of a legend in the United States army and a darling of the American press. It had not always been so. After word had leaked out that in Sicily Patton had slapped two American soldiers whom he suspected of malingering, newsmen had gone for his jugular. An impolitic remark before a ladies' club in England before the invasion had set the jackals to howling again, but General Eisenhower had stuck by Patton, confident of his ability on the battlefield.

His dash across France from the Normandy beachhead in late summer appeared to justify Eisenhower's loyalty; and a fickle press, suddenly adoring his posturing, his profanity, his flashy uniforms, glistening helmet, pistols on each hip, nicknamed him "Old Blood and Guts" and turned him into an idol of the American public. [...] Nobody loved the profession of arms more than George Patton.

Like the 21st, the 22nd was not a quiet day, but not an eventful one as it relates to Bastogne. Patton had three divisions for his relief effort: the 26th and the 80th Infantry Divisions, which were to attack northward in the vicinity of Wiltz to secure that flank, and the 4th Armored Division. The 4th Armored had a long history with Patton, and as I recently wrote, was commanded by Hugh Gaffey, formerly Patton's chief of staff. The relief of Bastogne was to be his first battle with a division-sized command.

Patton had two choices for the line of advance for the 4th Armored: along the highway from Arlon or along the highway from Neufchâteau. The latter option was three miles shorter (nine miles against twelve), and the known German opposition along that route was lesser in strength. Arlon had the advantage that it would squeeze the Germans south of Bastogne around to the west, cutting them off from supply and leaving the 4th Armored well-placed for a drive eastward toward St. Vith. Patton settled on Arlon, a choice that was to prove less-than-ideal over the next few days.

The 26th and 80th Infantry Divisions did well on the 22nd, meeting German march columns and inflicting heavy losses. The 4th Armored's CCA was delayed until the 23rd by blown bridges; CCB reached Burnon, seven miles from Bastogne, before nightfall, but it wasn't until the next day that they were able to replace the bridge there and continue toward Bastogne.

---

Now the fun part begins. It's D1 (December 22nd), 2300 hours, and Combat Command B of the 4th Armored Division is assembled at the bridge just south of Burnon. Obviously, an hour isn't much time to see anything done, but I can at least speak to my plans for the scenario.



Maybe I should have turned off the objective markers. The highways to Arlon and Neufchâteau are marked in red. CCB has arrayed itself from Fauvillers, under the secured objective marker in the far south, to Burnon, the next directly above it. CCB will attack north through Burnon toward Chaumont (the next two objective markers), and will set up blocking positions along the river and railway. CCA and two battalions of the 318th Infantry Regiment will arrive at the south end of the Arlon highway during the afternoon of the 23rd. The two battalions of the 318th Infantry will take up CCB's blocking positions, while CCB and CCA will press on to Clochimont (along the road north out of Chaumont). If the situation looks good when I've gained Clochimont, I'll leave CCB and one battalion to block between Clochimont and Chaumont, while a reinforced CCA tries to reach Sibret. I shouldn't be at all surprised if that takes me until the 25th, when CCR arrives. The Neufchâteau road should hopefully be clear by then (I'll have to send some light tanks to be sure on the 24th, to leave me time enough to clear it if it isn't), and CCR can join CCA for a final push into Bastogne (perhaps aided by forces in Bastogne proper).

There's not much to say about my plans for Bastogne, beyond don't yield the town. I don't believe that the Germans have sufficient force to break through the perimeter, and I was able to create a small mobile reserve in the town center from the remains of Team Cherry and a few platoons of armored engineers. At midnight on the 22nd/23rd, the 4th Armored's CCB has pushed into Burnon, and will hopefully evict the company of German defenders by morning.

[Fishbreath]

Also December 22, 1944

I nearly forgot the most iconic story to come from the siege of Bastogne: at around noon on the 22nd, two German officers under a flag of truce approached the line around Bastogne near the Arlon highway. They brought an ultimatum from the German commander, threatening an artillery bombardment that would destroy the town, the American troops defending it, and the civilians still in the city. The tale played out at McAuliffe's command post, as Ned Moore, McAuliffe's chief of staff, read the ultimatum:

"What does it say, Ned?" asked McAuliffe.
"They want you to surrender," said Moore.
"Aw, nuts!" said McAuliffe.

When McAuliffe got around to composing a reply to the ultimatum, he was at a loss as to what to say.

"That first crack you made," said his G-3, Harry Kinnard, "would be hard to beat."
"What was that?" asked McAuliffe.
"You said, 'Nuts!'"

With a pen, McAuliffe wrote: "To the German commander: Nuts! From the American commander."

When it came to cleanness of language, McAuliffe was Patton's opposite. Indeed, "Nuts!" was sufficiently idiomatic that it confused the Germans, one of whom spoke excellent English. They asked for clarification from Colonel Harper, commander of the 327th Glider Infantry.

"The reply," answered Harper, "is decidedly not affirmative, and if you continue this foolish attack, your losses will be tremendous. If you don't understand what 'Nuts!' means, in plain English it is the same as 'Go to hell!' And I will tell you something else; if you continue to attack, we will kill every goddamn German that tries to break into this city."

Not quite as clean-speaking as McAuliffe, nor quite as succinct, but definitely clearer.

[Fishbreath]

December 23rd, 1944

The 4th Armored Division continued its charge toward Bastogne on the 23rd. CCA didn't make it into the fight until late in the evening, and CCB bore the brunt of the fighting that day. They passed through Burnon without meeting the enemy, and only once they reached Chaumont did they encounter a company from the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division. They made their attack in mid-afternoon, but the slopes above the town had turned soft in the sun, and the tanks bogged down. The 10th Armored Infantry Battalion evicted the paratroopers from the town.

Early that morning, important news had come to both the American Ninth Air Force headquarters in Luxembourg City and the headquarters of the 26th Volksgrenadier Division east of Bastogne. To the Germans came a platoon of Ferdinand tank destroyers (Tiger chassis with long-barreled 88mm cannons in fixed turrets), seemingly by accident. The Ferdinands hailed from a battalion recently pulled from Italy; headed for Alsace, five of them had ended up in the Ardennes by accident. (The mental image of a German tanker scratching his head with his hat and saying, "Wir haben 200 Kilometern zu weit gefahren!" makes me chuckle.) Colonel Kokott, in command of the 26th Volksgrenadiers, didn't really care where they had come from. With their support, paratroopers from the 15th Fallschirmjäger Regiment were able to retake Chaumont.

The news for the Americans was to have a much greater impact: the weather had finally broken. P-47s and P-38s in vast numbers hit the Germans around the Bastogne perimeter, flying about 250 sorties that day. The total number of sorties flown on the 23rd was north of 1,300 when counting bomber missions, escort flights, and supply drops to Bastogne:

Shortly before noon came the unmistakable hum of vast numbers of motors, then the big C-47 transport planes lumbered into view, looking for all the world like pregnant geese against the sky, and the hum became a thunder. As the big planes slowly plowed through the air at little more than a thousand feet above the ground, out of their bellies plunged para-packs with parachutes of red, yellow, orange, blue, and white.

Men watched in awe from their foxholes, others from windows and the streets of the town, and crowds of civilians emerged from their catacombs for what seemed to be a miracle, "resupply coming from the sky."

95% of the supplies had dropped inside the American lines, and General McAuliffe's G-3, Colonel Kinnard, allowed as to how that was "close enough for government work." The drop on the 23rd didn't meet all the defenders' needs (in particular, ammunition for the 75mm howitzers was still in short supply, and medical supplies were urgently required), but it was a start.

Kokott ordered attacks on Bastogne on the 22nd, hitting the town from the northwest with a fresh regiment of the 26th Volksgrenadiers, and a regiment of Panzergrenadiers attacked from the southeast. Neither attack made significant progress, and Kokott, von Lüttwitz, and von Manteuffel all did not expect to make that sort of progress without major reinforcement. Supplies would continue to be problematic for the defenders of Bastogne, and the 4th Armored Division's drive remained critical to the survival of the 101st Airborne Division.

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Alas, I am forced to play without the patch to fix an irritating bug in the Command Ops engine, wherein units are often caught in a loop of halting and reassessing whenever enemy troops are nearby; attacks that should be over relatively quickly can take two or three times as long as they should. Given that one of the major advantages of mechanized troops is alacrity of action, this has the potential to be troublesome.

Oddly, though, it hasn't actually been that yet. The battle through the 23rd has progressed relatively well. Unlike the real CCB, I ran into moderate-to-heavy opposition in Burnon: first a single company of the 15th Fallschirmjäger Regiment, then reinforced by a good deal of the rest of that regiment. Fortunately, heavy fighting between the Our River and Bastogne had worn the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division down; the units I've had to deal with so far are generally at about half strength.



Bastogne was under heavy attack the whole day, in regiment-plus force from Neffe, just easy of the perimeter. Air strikes, bombardment from the defending artillery units, and the stalwart paratroopers prevented the Germans from penetrating the defensive line, although the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment took 20-30% losses. Attacks in the south came from the Villeroux area and Remoifosse; the 1st Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry, less a company which helped plug the gap between the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 501st Parachute Infantry, had been held in reserve, but I committed it to meet those attacks. Team Cherry was committed to the Rouette area in the northwest to meet a light attack there.



CCA trickled in from about 2:00 p.m. to 3:30. The cavalry reconnaissance squadron encountered a company of paratroopers in Warnach. The whole of CCA fell on top of them, driving them off to the east, and the cavalry reconnaissance squadron forced them to surrender in the early evening. My orders to CCA were to move up the highway to the base of the arrow, then to attack toward CCB.



It took them four hours or so to organize . My pathing orders (I asked them to take the quickest path) made them take the highway up all the way to Chaumont, but to my surprise, it turned out alright: CCA encountered only light opposition on the road, and reached Chaumont by midnight. At about 10:00pm, I ordered the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion to attack Chaumont, and with the 10th Armored Infantry in Chaumont and CCA freed to attack to Clochimont, I may end up somewhat ahead of schedule. Tomorrow, two battalions of the 318th Infantry Regiment will arrive, which I can use to shore up the line at Burnon and Chaumont, freeing more of CCA and CCB for clearing a path for CCR.

West of CCB's headquarters, B Troop of the 25th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron and B Company of the 24th Armored Engineer Battalion are placed to at least warn against attacks from the northwest, which looked possible earlier in the day.



At Bastogne, the defense is stable. The attack from Neffe, which tailed off early in the night, is now back and being pounded by artillery once again. I'm going to swap D/506th PIR with C/501st PIR, and I might try to find two more companies to take the places of A/501st and A/506th, both of which took fairly heavy losses while blocking the Neffe highway.

As the arrow with the giant question mark suggests, I'm worried about that regiment of German infantry off to the west. It's only opposed by a battalion, and I'm probably going to scavenge a few more troops to shore up that line, possibly a platoon of engineers from Team Cherry, E Battery of the 81st Airborne AA Battalion (it's a roughly company-sized unit with six Browning .50-caliber machine guns), and the assault gun and mortar platoons from the 54th Armored Infantry Battalion. I may also pull B Company of the 54th Armored Infantry Battalion off of the front line at Rau de Harzy and use it as a reserve along the road from Neffe; the Rau de Harzy region is not well-suted to attacks.

[Fishbreath]

December 24, 1944

On the 24th, Patton sent McAuliffe a radio message: "Xmas Eve present coming up. Hold on."

This was an example of Patton's grandstanding more than his success as a commander: it took CCA until midday on the 24th to get past Warnach, and CCB was still bogged down between Chaumont and Clochimont. Christmas Eve passed without relief for the defenders of Bastogne.

Early in the evening, as McAuliffe was walking past the police station, he heard German prisoners inside singing carols. He paused to listen: "Stille nacht," "O Tannenbaum." On an impulse, McAuliffe went inside. "We'll be in Antwerp in a few weeks," shouted one of the prisoners in English. "We'll seen be freed," shouted another, "and it is you who will be the prisoner." And still another: "You'll like it there, General; it is most comfortable and cozy."

McAuliffe waited for them to quiet down. He had come by, he said at last, to wish them all a Merry Christmas.

The defenders of Bastogne matched the stubbornness displayed by the German paratroopers in stalling the 4th Armored Division's advance, and at the end of the day the lines had not changed significantly. Most critically, General Gaffey ordered the 4th Armored's CCR to attack along the Neufchâteau highway.

That night, in preparation for a major attack on Christmas Day, the Germans launched a bombing raid against Bastogne:

Inside Bastogne, around eighty thirty on Christmas Eve, men heard the approaching drone of a swarm of big planes, their motors throbbing in a manner uncharacteristic of American planes. For almost all the Americans in the tow, the bombing was a new and terrifying experience. First came magnesium flares that made the night seem brighter than day and anybody caught in the open feel naked; then the bombs.

In two runs over Bastogne, German bombers, most of them Junkers 88s, dropped approximately 2 tons of bombs, low in terms of what American bombers usually delivered (seldom less than 20 tons), but enough to do heavy damage to a town the size of Bastogne. [...] A town that had hardly been touched earlier in the war at that point "wore that ghastly air of desolation" that had come to so many other places in Europe.

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My alternate-history 24th was not nearly so uneventful. By daylight, the bulk of the 4th Armored Division's CCA took Chaumont, though the headquarters elements were delayed on the Arlon highway east of Burnon. I redirected the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion to attack to give CCA's headquarters a safe route up to Chaumont, where it could direct an attack on Clochimont.



Overnight, I'd had an inkling that some German units had managed to infiltrate through the leakier line to Bastogne's north and at two under-defended points in the southwest and southeast. Only when daylight came did I realize how bad it was: a company of infantry and an attached mortar platoon had snuck past the lines in the north, and threatened the 321st and 463rd Parachute Artillery Battalions between Luzery and Savy, a mile north of Bastogne. Two assault gun companies were spotted in Bastogne itself, and a third had broken through the lines of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment's 1st Battalion, and sat in Iles-les-Prés directing accurate and deadly fire at any tanks that came near.



Fortunately, overnight I'd formed a new task force from reserve elements of Team O'Hara: B Company of the 54th Armored Infantry Battalion, along with the 54th Armored Infantry's mortar and assault gun platoons. I'd also recalled Team Cherry from its defensive post on the northwest of the perimeter, and pulled D Battery of the 81st Airborne AA Battalion and C Company of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion off of the northeast perimeter. I held all of those in reserve in or around the town center, so when daylight hit, they were well-placed to start on the process of evicting the Germans inside the perimeter. Task Force B/54 moved to eliminate the infantry and mortar company, while Team Cherry plus a platoon of tank destroyers cleared out an assault gun platoon from Bastogne by afternoon. The other had retreated south, and spent most of the day lobbing fire to the west.

By noon, elements of the 4th Armored's CCA had reached Clochimont, only three miles from the Bastogne perimeter, along with the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion and the 8th Tank Battalion. Headquarters units of the 4th Armored and of CCA and CCB held Chaumont and Burnon.



Team Pyle's tank company, which you can see in the screenshot above behind the German assault gun company in the vicinity of Iles-les-Prés, spent most of the day getting hammered by crossfire from the other assault gun company, and was eliminated by nightfall. The German assault gun platoon south of Bastogne proper attempted to retreat toward Remoifosse, but was forced to surrender by engineers there, and Task Force B/54, plus C Company, 705th TD Battalion and A Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment had cleared out the German infantry, leaving only the assault gun platoon that had penetrated from Villeroux inside the perimeter. Team Cherry attacked to close that gap. By twilight, the leading elements of the 35th Tank Battalion had reached Assenois, less than a mile from the Bastogne perimeter, and prepared for an attack to the west to relieve the pressure on the 1st Battalion, 327th Glider Infantry Regiment.

I had originally intended the 318th Infantry Regiment to hold critical road junctions to the south to keep supply lines open, but the situation in Bastogne has been sufficiently critical all day that I decided to send the 2nd Battalion along the road into Bastogne from Assenois to reinforce the defense. The 1st Battalion would go on to guard the flank at Clochimont.



As evening settled in over Bastogne, the town had taken heavy attacks through the whole day, from Villeroux, Remoifosse, and Neffe. In an effort to find more reserves to commit against the incursions from Neffe and Villeroux, I bent the line in the north down into a straighter line, which let me pull two companies from the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment.

Midnight arrived with the situation vastly improved. The northwest perimeter featured a large gap between the 1st Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Battalion, 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, but attached to the 3/327 were an armored car company and C Company, 705th TD Battalion, either or both of which I could detach to use as a mobile reserve. Team Cherry had reached the perimeter and was effectively plugging the gap, while CCA's attack on Villeroux gained the edge of the town. The 51st Armored Infantry Battalion, operating detached, was marching on Sibret but had not yet seen any opposition. Just south of this picture, the 2nd Battalion, 318th Armored Infantry, was on the way from Clochimont to Bastogne via Assenois.



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In my version of events, the Germans employed a vastly different strategy to the plan they employed in reality. My Bastogne has experienced heavy attacks almost non-stop at three points, and the infiltration overnight forced me to stretch the troops in Bastogne far more than I was comfortable doing so. I reached Bastogne on the night of the 24th rather than the early morning of the 26th, making good on Patton's ill-advised promise, but the road to Bastogne was practically undefended. Nearly every unit the Germans could spare was attacking Bastogne.

Last night, Matrix released the Command Ops patch, an effort for which I retract most of my earlier steamedness. Unfortunately, I doubt it's save-game compatible, so I'll have to finish this with the halting bug.