McAuliffe’s “Nuts!”

At about 11.30 a.m. on 22 December 1944, four German soldiers carrying a white flag approached the American lines along the Arlon road, near the Kessler farm south of Bastogne. Two officers – Major Wagner of the XLVII Panzer Corps staff and Lieutenant Hellmuth Henke of the Panzer Lehr Division – carried a letter addressed to the “U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne”. In it the corps commander, General der Panzertruppe Heinrich von Lüttwitz, called on the Americans to surrender and gave them two hours to consider. The reply he received, less than three hours later, consisted of a single word: “Nuts!”

The soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division and units of the 10th Armored Division, who had been holding Bastogne for four days, had been completely surrounded since the previous day. They were short of artillery ammunition, food, winter clothing and medical supplies, and the low, dense cloud cover ruled out supply from the air. Even so, the commander of the defence, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, had no intention of giving in – and his laconic reply became one of the most famous utterances of the war.

Bastogne in the ring

Bastogne lay at the junction of seven roads in the central Ardennes and was of key importance to the German Fifth Panzer Army of General der Panzertruppe Hasso von Manteuffel: the best roads westwards, towards the Meuse, ran through the town. When the Ardennes offensive began on 16 December, the front of Major General Troy Middleton’s American VIII Corps collapsed within two days. In the race that led to the encirclement of Bastogne, Colonel William L. Roberts’s Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division reached the town on 18 December, and during the night of 18/19 December the 101st Airborne Division arrived in lorries from Mourmelon in France. Its commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was in the United States at the time, so the division was commanded by its artillery commander, McAuliffe.

The delaying actions at Noville, Longvilly and Wardin cost the defenders much blood but gave them time to organise a perimeter around the town. During the night of 19/20 December a German reconnaissance unit overran the division’s clearing station west of Bastogne: almost the entire 326th Medical Company was captured, with its doctors and equipment. From then on the wounded were treated at improvised aid stations in the town – in the riding hall of the barracks, in garages and cellars – and the battalion surgeons were helped by local volunteers, including the nurses Renée Lemaire and Augusta Chiwy. By noon on 21 December the Germans had cut all the roads leading into the town.

Lüttwitz, however, did not intend to tie down his whole corps at Bastogne. In accordance with his orders, the 2nd Panzer Division and most of Panzer Lehr bypassed the town and pressed on westwards towards the Meuse, while the task of taking Bastogne was left to Generalmajor Heinz Kokott’s 26th Volksgrenadier Division, reinforced with one regiment of Panzer Lehr. These forces attacked one sector of the perimeter after another but were too weak to break a defence backed by several artillery battalions and a mobile reserve of tanks from the 10th Armored Division.

An ultimatum under a white flag

The German envoys were first spotted by soldiers of F Company, 2nd Battalion, 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, which was defending the southern sector of the perimeter. Under the customs of war, as codified in the Hague Conventions, parlementaires under a white flag were inviolable. According to accounts collected by the historians of the 101st Division, the two officers were blindfolded and led to the company command post; a German-speaking medic, Private Ernest Premetz, interpreted. The two German privates waited at the front line. The two-page letter – in German and English – was passed through channels to regimental headquarters, and from there Major Alvin Jones drove it to division headquarters in the Heintz Barracks in Bastogne.

The ultimatum, signed “The German Commander”, declared that “the fortune of war is changing”. It claimed that strong German armoured units had encircled the American forces in and around Bastogne, and that others had crossed the Ourthe near Ortheuville, taken Marche and reached Saint-Hubert, and that Libramont was in German hands. The only way to save the encircled troops from “total annihilation” was said to be an “honorable surrender”. If the proposal were rejected, “one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A. A. Battalions” would open fire. The letter ended with a jibe: the heavy civilian losses the shelling would cause “would not correspond with the well known American humanity”.

Some of these claims were true – the German spearheads really were heading west past Bastogne – but the artillery threat was largely a bluff. The corps did not have firepower on that scale, and its panzer divisions were just then moving away from the town. According to post-war accounts, Manteuffel, the commander of the Fifth Panzer Army, was angry when he learned of the ultimatum, because Lüttwitz had issued it without his knowledge and without the means to carry out the threat. A rejected call to surrender, not followed by the promised bombardment, undermined the credibility of the commander who had sent it.

“Aw, nuts!”

McAuliffe, who was resting after a night spent on his feet, learned of the letter from his acting chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Ned Moore. According to witnesses’ accounts, collected among others by the US Army, he muttered “Nuts!” while still half awake, and when he had read the letter exclaimed: “Us surrender? Aw, nuts!” He dropped the paper and left headquarters to visit one of the units. On his return he pondered with his officers how to word a formal reply. It was then that the division’s operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Kinnard, remarked that it would be hard to beat what the general had said in the first place. The staff took up the idea with enthusiasm.

In colloquial English of the time the word “nuts” meant roughly “nonsense”, “madness” or “rubbish” – an expression of contempt, but not an obscenity. McAuliffe’s aide, Captain Vincent Vicari, later recalled that the general did not swear and that “nuts” was part of his everyday vocabulary. A clerk typed in the middle of a sheet: “To the German Commander. N U T S! The American Commander.”

The reply was delivered to the waiting envoys in person by the commander of the 327th Regiment, Colonel Joseph “Bud” Harper. When Lieutenant Henke asked whether the reply was affirmative, Harper answered that it was “decidedly not affirmative”. The Germans did not understand the American colloquialism, so Harper explained it in his own way – in the accounts handed down by the US Army, he told them that in plain English it meant the same as “Go to hell”. He added that if the Germans continued to attack, they would suffer enormous losses. At about 2 p.m. the blindfolded envoys were escorted back to their own lines.

Short of ammunition, burdened with wounded

McAuliffe’s reply was not the bravado of a man unaware of his situation. The general knew perfectly well what state his division was in. The 101st had come to the Ardennes straight from a rest after hard fighting in the Netherlands, where it had been dropped during Operation Market Garden, and before that it had jumped into Normandy. Many units had left Mourmelon without full equipment, without winter boots and overcoats, and with small stocks of ammunition. On 22 December snow fell in the Ardennes, and night-time temperatures dropped well below freezing.

Most serious of all was the shortage of shells for the howitzers on which the whole defence rested. The artillery had to ration its fire strictly – according to the division’s officers, individual batteries received only a few rounds per gun per day, and fire was permitted only at clearly identified targets. Several hundred wounded lay in the aid stations, some on sawdust and straw on the floor of the riding hall; there was a shortage of doctors, plasma, dressings and painkillers. The wounded could not be evacuated. Several thousand inhabitants of Bastogne and refugees from the surrounding villages were also sitting out the fighting in the town’s cellars.

On top of all this came rumours about the fate of prisoners. News of the Malmedy massacre, where SS men of Peiper’s battle group had shot disarmed American soldiers, spread rapidly along the front and – as historians agree – confirmed many soldiers in the belief that surrender offered no guarantee of safety.

What the refusal brought

The threatened massive bombardment did not materialise. The Germans continued to attack individual sectors of the perimeter, and the Luftwaffe bombed the town on the following nights, especially on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. On the evening of 24 December a bomb hit one of the aid stations; at least twenty wounded men were killed (sources give varying figures), as was the nurse Renée Lemaire. On Christmas Eve McAuliffe sent his troops a Christmas message in which he quoted the German ultimatum and his reply, and wrote that by holding Bastogne the division was giving its country and loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present. The strongest German attack, supported by tanks, came on Christmas Day from the west, at Champs and Hemroulle – and was beaten off.

Meanwhile, as early as 22 December, the day of the ultimatum, III Corps of Lieutenant General George Patton’s Third Army began its attack northwards from the Arlon area towards Bastogne. The weather improved on 23 December, and C-47 transport aircraft appeared over the town dropping ammunition, food and medical supplies. At about 4.50 p.m. on 26 December, tanks of Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’s 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th Armored Division broke through to the perimeter from the south. The fighting for the town, however, went on for several more weeks.

Morale and legend

News of McAuliffe’s reply spread among the defenders that same day, and after the siege was broken it reached the American and British press through war correspondents. At a time when the German offensive had caused shock and alarm in the Allied countries, the one-word refusal became a symbol of American determination. The soldiers of the 101st Division proudly called themselves the “Battered Bastards of Bastogne”. For the defence of the town McAuliffe received the Distinguished Service Cross, and in March 1945 General Dwight Eisenhower presented the entire 101st Division with the Presidential Unit Citation – according to the US Army, the first such award to a whole division.

Place in the war

The word “Nuts!” did not change Bastogne’s military situation – the outcome of the defence was decided by the tenacity of the infantry, the artillery, the tanks of the 10th Armored Division, the supply drops and Patton’s attack. The refusal nevertheless had a significance that reached beyond the town. It showed that the encircled troops had no intention of capitulating, and turned the defence of a road junction into a symbol of resistance to the last great German offensive in the west. Bastogne, which the Germans never took, tied down considerable forces until the end of the offensive and blocked the roads the Fifth Panzer Army needed to supply its spearheads near the Meuse.

After the war McAuliffe, who rose to the rank of general and to command of the US Army in Europe, was remembered above all as the “Nuts general”. In Bastogne the main square bears his name, and every December the town commemorates the anniversary of the defence. The scene of the delivery of the ultimatum has been re-enacted in films and television series, and the word itself has gone down in history as one of the shortest and most eloquent replies in the annals of war.