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Excitement ran high in Mourmelon. Now that Easy was in a more-or-less permanent camp, the men could expect more mail, and could hope that Christmas packages would catch up with them. There was the company furlough to Paris to anticipate; with a lot of luck, Easy might be in Paris for New Year’s Eve. And there was the Champagne Bowl coming on Christmas Day, with a turkey dinner to follow. Betting was already heavy on the football game, the practice sessions were getting longer and tougher.
The future after Christmas looked pretty good, from the perspective of a rifle company in the middle of the greatest war ever fought. There would be no fighting for Easy until at least mid-March. Then would come the jump into Germany, and after that the move to the Pacific for fighting in China or a jump into Japan. But all that was a long way off. Easy got ready to enjoy Christmas.
The sergeants had their own barracks at Mourmelon. On the night of December 16, Martin, Guarnere, and some others got hold of a case of champagne and brought it back to the sergeants’ barracks. They were unaccustomed to the bubbly wine. Martin popped a few corks; the other sergeants held out their canteen cups; he filled them to the brim.
“Well, hell, Johnny,” Christenson said, “that’s nothing but soda pop, for Christ’s sake!”
They drank some of the world’s finest champagne as if it were soda pop, with inevitable results. A fight broke out, “and I have to say I was in it,” Martin admitted, “and we tore every one of those bunks down, and nails sticking out, I ran nails into my foot, hell it was just a battle in there.”
First Sgt. Carwood Lipton came into the barracks, took one look, and started shouting: “You guys are supposed to be leaders. A bunch of sergeants doing all this crap.” He made them clean up the mess before allowing them to sleep it off.
That same night, Winters and Nixon were the only two battalion staff officers at HQ. The others had taken off for Paris. Pvt. Joe Lesniewski went to the movies at one of the Mourmelon theaters. He saw a film featuring Marlene Dietrich. Gordon Carson went to bed early, to be ready for football practice in the morning.
Winters and Nixon got word by radio that all passes were canceled. At the theater, the lights went on and an officer strode onto the stage to announce a German breakthrough in the Ardennes. In the barracks, Carson, Gordon, and others were awakened by the charge of quarters, who turned on the lights and reported the breakthrough. “Shut up!” men called back at him. “Get the hell out of here!” That was VIII Corps’s problem, First Army’s problem. They went back to sleep.
But in the morning, when the company fell in after reveille, Lieutenant Dike told them, “After chow, just stand fast.” He was not taking them out on a training exercise, as was customary. “Just stand by” were the orders. Dike told them to kill the time by cleaning the barracks. Evidently what was going on up in the Ardennes was going to be of concern to the 82d and 101st Airborne after all.
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Hitler launched his last offensive on December 16, in the Ardennes, on a scale much greater than his 1940 offensive in the same place against the French Army. He achieved complete surprise. American intelligence in the Ardennes estimated the German forces facing the VIII Corps at four divisions. In fact by December 15 the Wehrmacht had twenty-five divisions in the Eifel, across from the Ardennes. The Germans managed to achieve surprise on a scale comparable with Barbarossa in June 1941 or Pearl Harbor.
The surprise was achieved, like most surprises in war, because the offensive made no sense. For Hitler to use up his armor in an offensive that had no genuine strategic aim, and one that he could not sustain unless his tankers were lucky enough to capture major American fuel dumps intact, was foolish.
The surprise was achieved, like most surprises in war, because the defenders were guilty of gross overconfidence. Even after the failure of MARKET-GARDEN, the Allies believed the Germans were on their last legs. At Ike’s HQ, people thought about what the Allied armies could do to the Germans, not about what the Germans might do to them. The feeling was, If we can just get them from out behind the West Wall, we can finish the job. That attitude went right down to the enlisted-man level. Sgt. George Koskimaki of the 101st wrote in his diary on December 17: “It has been another quiet Sunday.… The radio announced a big German attack on the First Army front. This should break the back of the German armies.”
1
The surprise was achieved, like most surprises in war, because the attackers did a good job of concealment and deception. They gathered two armies in the Eifel without Allied intelligence ever seeing them. By a judicious use of radio traffic, they got Ike’s G-2 looking to the north of the Ardennes for any German counterattack (no one in the Allied world thought for one minute that a German counter
offensive
was conceivable). Six months earlier, on the eve of D-Day, Ike and his officers had an almost perfect read on the German order of battle in Normandy. In December, on the eve of the German attack, Ike and his officers had a grossly inaccurate read on the German order of battle.
The Allies were also badly deceived about the German will to fight, the German matériel situation, Hitler’s boldness, and the skill of German officers in offensive maneuvers (the American generals in the Allied camp had no experience of defending against a German offensive).
The result of all this was the biggest single battle on the Western front in World War II and the largest engagement ever fought by the U.S. Army. The human losses were staggering: of the 600,000 American soldiers involved, almost 20,000 were killed, another 20,000 captured, and 40,000 wounded. Two infantry divisions were annihilated; in one of them, the 106th, 7,500 men surrendered, the largest mass surrender in the war against Germany. Nearly 800 American Sherman tanks and other armored vehicles were destroyed.
The battle began on a cold, foggy dawn of December 16. The Germans achieved a breakthrough at many points in the thinly held VIII Corps lines. Hitler had counted on bad weather to negate the Allies’ biggest single advantage, air power (on the ground, in both men and armor, the Germans outnumbered the Americans). Hitler had also counted on surprise, which was achieved, and on a slow American response. He figured that it would take Ike two or three days to recognize the magnitude of the effort the Germans were making, another two or three days to persuade his superiors to call off the Allied offensives north and south of the Ardennes, and then another two or three days to start moving significant reinforcements into the battle. By then, the German armor would be in Antwerp, he hoped.
It was his last assumptions that were wrong. On the morning of December 17, Eisenhower made the critical decisions of the entire battle, and did so without consulting anyone outside his own staff. He declared the crossroads city of Bastogne as the place that had to be held no matter what. (Bastogne is in a relatively flat area in the otherwise rugged hills of the Ardennes, which is why the roads of the area converge there.) Because of his offensives north and south of the Ardennes, Ike had no strategic reserve available, but he did have the 82d and 101st resting and refitting and thus available. He decided to use the paratroopers to plug the holes in his lines and to hold Bastogne.
Finally, Eisenhower blasted Hitler’s assumptions by bringing into play his secret weapon. At a time when much of the German Army was still horse-drawn, the Americans had thousands and thousands of trucks and trailers in France. They were being used to haul men, matériel, and gasoline from the beaches of Normandy to the front. Ike ordered them to drop whatever they were doing and start hauling his reinforcements to the Ardennes.
The response can only be called incredible. On December 17 alone, 11,000 trucks and trailers carried 60,000 men, plus ammunition, gasoline, medical supplies, and other matériel, into the Ardennes. In the first week of the battle, Eisenhower was able to move 250,000 men and 50,000 vehicles into the fray. This was mobility with a vengeance. It was an achievement unprecedented in the history of war. Not even in Vietnam, not even in the 1991 Gulf War, was the U.S. Army capable of moving so many men and so much equipment so quickly.
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Easy Company played its part in this vast drama, thanks to the Transportation Corps and the drivers, mostly black soldiers of the famous Red Ball express. At 2030, December 17, Ike’s orders to the 82d and 101st to proceed north toward Bastogne arrived at the divisions’ HQ. The word went out to regiments, battalions, down to companies — get ready for combat, trucks arriving in the morning, we’re moving out.
“Not me,” Gordon Carson said. “I’m getting ready to play football on Christmas Day.”
“No, you’re not,” Lieutenant Dike said. Frantic preparations began. Mourmelon did not have an ammunition dump, the men had only the ammunition they had taken out of Holland, there was none to be found. Easy did not have its full complement of men yet or of equipment. Some men did not have helmets (they did have football helmets, but not steel ones). The company was missing a couple of machine-guns and crews. The men had not received a winter issue of clothes. Their boots were not lined or weatherproof. They had no long winter underwear or long wool socks. They scrounged what they could, but it was not much. Even K rations were short. When Easy set out to meet the Wehrmacht on the last, greatest German offensive, the company was under strength, inadequately clothed, and insufficiently armed.
It was also going out blind. As not even General McAuliffe knew the destination of the 101st as yet, obviously Colonel Sink could not brief Captain Winters who thus could not brief Lieutenant Dike. All anyone knew was that the Germans had blasted a big hole in the line, that American forces were in full retreat, that someone had to plug the gap, and that the someone was the Airborne Corps.
Weather precluded an airdrop, and in any case it was doubtful if enough C-47s could have been gathered quickly enough to meet the need. Instead, Transportation Corps, acting with utmost dispatch, gathered in its trucks from throughout France but especially in the area between Le Havre and Paris. M.P.s stopped the trucks, Services of Supply forces unloaded them, and the drivers — many of whom had already been long on the road and badly needed some rest — were told to get to Camp Mourmelon without pausing for anything.
The process began as darkness fell on December 17. By 0900 on December 18, the first trucks and trailers began arriving in Mourmelon. The last of the 380 trucks needed for the movement of the 11,000 men of the 101st arrived at the camp at 1720. By 2000 the last man was outloaded.
Just before Easy moved out, Malarkey went into a panic. He remembered he had $3,600 in his money belt. He asked Lieutenant Compton for help; Compton put him in touch with a division fiscal officer, who said he would deposit the money, but if he did, Malarkey could not get at it until he was discharged. That was fine with Malarkey; he handed over the money and took the receipt. He climbed into his trailer with the happy thought that after the war he could return to the University of Oregon and not have to wash dishes to pay his way.
· · ·
“We were packed in like sardines,” Private Freeman remembered. Captain Winters used a different image: “You were just like an animal in there, you were just packed into that trailer like a cattle car.” As the trucks pulled out, Carson thought about the football practice he had been anticipating with relish, contrasted it with his actual situation, and began singing “What a Difference a Day Makes.”
The trucks had no benches, and damn little in the way of springs. Every curve sent men crashing around, every bump bounced them up into the air. It was hard on the kidneys — relief came only when the trucks stopped to close up the convoy — and on the legs. The trucks drove with lights blazing until they reached the Belgium border, a calculated risk taken for the sake of speed.
As the truckborne troopers were on the road, VIII Corps command decided where to use them. The 82d would go to the north shoulder of the penetration, near St. Vith. The 101st would go to Bastogne.
The trucks carrying Easy stopped a few kilometers outside Bastogne. The men jumped out — a tailgate jump, they called it — relieved themselves, stretched, grumbled, and formed up into columns for the march into Bastogne. They could hear a firefight going on. “Here we go again,” said Private Freeman.
The columns marched on both sides of the road, toward the front; down the middle of the road came the defeated American troops, fleeing the front in disarray, moblike. Many had thrown away their rifles, their coats, all encumbrances. Some were in a panic, staggering, exhausted, shouting, “Run! Run! They’ll murder you! They’ll kill you! They’ve got everything, tanks, machine-guns, air power, everything!”
“They were just babbling,” Winters recalled. “It was pathetic. We felt ashamed.”
As Easy and the other companies in 2d Battalion marched into Bastogne and out again (residents had hot coffee for them, but not much else), uppermost in every man’s mind was ammunition. “Where’s the ammo? We can’t fight without ammo.” The retreating horde supplied some. “Got any ammo?” the paratroopers would ask those who were not victims of total panic. “Sure, buddy, glad to let you have it.” (Gordon noted sardonically that by giving away their ammo, the retreating men relieved themselves of any further obligation to stand and fight.) Still, Easy marched toward the sound of battle without sufficient ammunition.