Bastogne surrounded

Bastogne, a small town of a few thousand inhabitants on a plateau in the Belgian Ardennes, became in December 1944 one of the best-known places of the Second World War. War chronologies record under 18 December that the important road junction of Bastogne was surrounded. That shorthand, however, runs two or three days ahead of events. On 18 December the town was not yet encircled. A race was under way: from one side the divisions of the German XLVII Panzer Corps were hurrying towards it, from the other American reserves rushed up from France. On the evening of 18 December Combat Command B of the American 10th Armored Division reached Bastogne, and during the night of 18/19 December the first lorries carrying men of the 101st Airborne Division arrived. The Germans cut the roads around the town only on 20 and 21 December, and it was then that both sides regarded the defenders as surrounded.

Seven roads

Bastogne’s importance stemmed from geography. The Ardennes are an upland covered with forests and cut by deep river valleys, where large motorised units could move only along a few paved roads. Seven such roads met at Bastogne, including the highways from Luxembourg and from Liège and the road leading west towards the Meuse around Namur and Dinant. Anyone who wanted to move tanks, fuel and artillery quickly westwards from the valley of the Our had to pass through Bastogne or go round it on sodden local roads.

The plan for Operation Wacht am Rhein, launched on 16 December, envisaged three German armies breaking through the front in the Ardennes, crossing the Meuse and reaching Antwerp. The central sector was entrusted to the Fifth Panzer Army of General Hasso von Manteuffel. Taking Bastogne was the task of General Heinrich von Lüttwitz’s XLVII Panzer Corps. He had at his disposal the 2nd Panzer Division, General Fritz Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr Division and the 26th Volksgrenadier Division. Lüttwitz knew that without Bastogne his corps could not safely advance further west, but the main prize remained the bridges over the Meuse. This dual objective – to take the junction, or to bypass it and race on – weighed on the whole course of the fighting for the town.

Delay on the Our

The sector struck by XLVII Panzer Corps was defended by the 110th Infantry Regiment of Major General Norman Cota’s 28th Infantry Division. The division had been through bloody fighting in the Hürtgen Forest and had been sent to the Ardennes as a quiet sector where it could make good its losses. Here a single regiment had to watch a dozen or more kilometres of front along the border river Our. The companies held Luxembourg villages on the main roads, and the outposts along the river were manned only by day.

Despite the attackers’ overwhelming superiority, the defence of the 110th Regiment and neighbouring units cost the Germans time. The plan assumed that they would cross the River Clerve on the very first day. In reality the fighting for the crossings and villages lasted two, and in places three, days. During the night of 17/18 December tanks of the 2nd Panzer Division broke into Clervaux, where the regiment’s headquarters was located. Some of the soldiers held out in the local castle until 18 December, and the regimental commander, Colonel Hurley Fuller, was taken prisoner. The 28th Division fought its last action on 19 December at Wiltz, where its headquarters had been until then.

Middleton’s decision

Bastogne housed the headquarters of the American VIII Corps under Major General Troy Middleton, who was responsible for the whole of the surprised Ardennes sector. His corps had three infantry divisions stretched along a front more than 100 km long and one incomplete armoured division. By the evening of 17 December it was clear that the 28th Division was falling apart and that two regiments of the 106th Infantry Division had been cut off on the Schnee Eifel. Middleton had nothing left with which to block the roads leading to the town. He nevertheless decided to defend Bastogne and its roads for as long as possible, and pressed his superiors for reinforcements.

The first help came from Lieutenant General George Patton’s Third Army. On the orders of the commander of the 12th Army Group, General Omar Bradley, Patton had to give up Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division, which he had been preparing for his own attack on the Saar. Colonel William L. Roberts’s unit set out from Lorraine on 17 December and reached Bastogne late in the afternoon of 18 December. Middleton immediately split it into three teams and sent them out along the three roads by which the Germans were approaching. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Cherry’s team went east, towards Longvilly (PL). Lieutenant Colonel James O’Hara’s team took up positions to the south-east, near Wardin (PL). Major William Desobry’s team drove north to Noville. According to accounts cited in American studies, Roberts protested against splitting up his armour, but Middleton decided there was no alternative. Each team was to hold up the enemy for even a few hours to give the approaching infantry time.

Ahead of them, on the road from Clervaux to Bastogne, the reserve combat command of the 9th Armored Division was already fighting. Its two roadblocks could not withstand the pressure. Captain Lyle Rose’s team was overrun on the morning of 18 December at a crossroads near Lullange, and Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Harper’s team in the evening and night near Allerborn (PL). Harper was killed, and the survivors of both teams fell back towards Longvilly. There was now almost nobody between the leading German units and Bastogne.

The lorries from Mourmelon

The main Allied reserves in Europe at that time consisted of two airborne divisions, the 82nd and the 101st. Both were resting in camps near Reims in France after weeks of fighting in the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden. On the evening of 17 December General Dwight Eisenhower agreed to place them at the disposal of the 12th Army Group. The divisions had no transport of their own, so hundreds of lorries were gathered overnight from supply units. The 101st Division was, moreover, weakened by shortages of men and equipment, and its commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was in the United States. Command was taken over by the division’s artillery commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe.

Originally the 101st Division was to go to Werbomont, on the northern edge of the breach. But since the 82nd Division, which had been resting longer and was better replenished, was ready sooner, it was sent north instead, against the battle group of SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, which the day before had carried out the massacre of prisoners near Malmedy. The 101st Division was ordered to Bastogne. The column left Mourmelon-le-Grand on the afternoon of 18 December and drove through the night in sleet, often with headlights on to save time. At one point it stretched all the way from Reims to Bouillon in Belgium. McAuliffe went on ahead and met Middleton in Bastogne on the afternoon of 18 December. The first battalions of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment reached the assembly area west of the town just after midnight, and by the morning of 19 December the whole division was there. The same day the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion also arrived in Bastogne, sent from the north to give the paratroopers anti-tank weapons.

The night of 18/19 December

The race was decided within a few hours. The Panzer Lehr Division, which was to attack Bastogne from the east, was already at Niederwampach, about ten kilometres from the town, by the evening of 18 December. Bayerlein chose a shorter but very poor side road through Mageret, on which his column got bogged down in mud. He reached Mageret only during the night. After the war he related that a local inhabitant had warned him of a supposedly strong American armoured force, which led him to halt for several hours. Historians treat this account with caution, but agree that Panzer Lehr lost time that night which it never made up. On the morning of 19 December, when its leading units moved on Neffe, the 1st Battalion of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment already stood in their path, and Cherry’s team was fighting near Longvilly.

In the north Desobry’s team occupied Noville during the night of 18/19 December. The next day the 2nd Panzer Division attacked it. Supported by paratroopers of the 1st Battalion, 506th Regiment and a few M18 Hellcat tank destroyers, the team held out until 20 December, inflicting heavy losses on the Germans, and only then withdrew through Foy to Bastogne. Those two days of fighting allowed the 101st Division to organise an all-round defence around the town.

The rest of the front on 18 December

Bastogne was only one of several points being fought over on 18 December. On the northern wing the Sixth SS Panzer Army failed to break the defence of the American 2nd and 99th Infantry Divisions at Krinkelt and Rocherath, which in the following days fell back to the Elsenborn (PL) ridge. Peiper’s group, the only one to have broken through deeply, came up on 18 December against bridges blown by American engineers at Trois-Ponts and turned towards La Gleize and Stoumont, while behind it the Americans began fighting to retake Stavelot, through which ran its only supply route. In the centre St. Vith, the other key road junction besides Bastogne, held out thanks to Brigadier General Robert Hasbrouck’s 7th Armored Division and the remnants of the 106th Division. The latter’s two encircled regiments surrendered on 19 December, and the defenders abandoned the town itself on the evening of 21 December, then withdrew behind the River Salm by 23 December.

On the Allied side, 18 December was still a day of switching command from thinking about attack to thinking about defence. The following day Eisenhower called a conference at Verdun, at which Patton undertook to turn part of his army north towards Bastogne within a few days.

Encirclement

Faced with stubborn defence from the north and east, Lüttwitz decided to go round the town from the south and west. During the night of 20/21 December German reconnaissance units cut the last roads, including the highway to Neufchâteau, where VIII Corps headquarters had moved. By noon on 21 December all the roads leading to Bastogne were in German hands, and from then on both sides spoke of an encirclement. Inside the pocket were well over ten thousand American soldiers (estimates in the literature range from about 11,000 to about 18,000): the 101st Division, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division, tank destroyers, several artillery battalions and several hundred stragglers from other units, gathered by Roberts into an improvised team. With them several thousand inhabitants and refugees from the surrounding villages took shelter in the town’s cellars.

At the same time both of Lüttwitz’s panzer divisions were ordered to continue their march towards the Meuse. Left outside Bastogne was mainly the 26th Volksgrenadier Division with one regiment of Panzer Lehr. Forces divided in this way were unable to take the town, while the defenders, using shorter interior lines, shifted their artillery and few tanks to wherever an attack was coming in. Meanwhile Bastogne, even surrounded, blocked the roads along which supplies were to flow to the German spearheads on the Meuse.

Significance

The events of 18 December ensured that Bastogne did not fall to the Germans at the first rush. Several factors combined to decide this: the stubbornness of the shattered 110th Regiment on the Our, Middleton’s decision to defend the town, the sacrifice of the teams of the 9th and 10th Armored Divisions on the eastern roads, and finally the night march of the 101st Division from Mourmelon. Each gave the defenders a few hours, and together they allowed the town to be occupied before the Germans could take it.

The siege lasted until 26 December. On 22 December the Germans called on the defenders to surrender and received McAuliffe’s famous one-word reply. From 23 December, when the skies cleared over the Ardennes, Allied aircraft dropped ammunition and supplies to the encircled troops. On 26 December tanks of the 4th Armored Division from Patton’s Third Army broke through to the town from the south. The fighting around Bastogne nevertheless went on for several more weeks, into January 1945, and was among the heaviest of the whole battle. The defence of the town became the symbol of the Ardennes offensive in the United States, and the 101st Division received for it the Distinguished Unit Citation (later renamed the Presidential Unit Citation) for the division as a whole – according to its historians, the first entire division in the history of the US Army to be so honoured. The people of Bastogne who survived the shelling and bombing kept the memory of those days alive for decades, and in 1950 a memorial to the American dead was unveiled on Mardasson Hill.