Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Operation Swallow is the true story of how a small group of American soldiers, inspired by a charismatic but reluctant leader named Hans Kasten, worked to save hundreds of fellow servicemen from a Nazi plan to turn Jewish prisoners of war into concentration camp slaves. It begins in the snowy forests of the Ardennes during Christmas 1944 and ends at the charnel house of Buchenwald concentration camp in spring 1945. It is a remarkable battle of wills between a young GI thrust into a leadership position he didn't want and an SS officer who will stop at nothing to complete his orders. Written from personal testimonies and official documents, it is an escape story replete with courage, sacrifice, torture, despair and salvation. Even more remarkably, it is a story that has barely been told before, a chapter of US military history that the American government tried to suppress for decades - and an uplifting story that deserves to be widely known.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 417
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
To Fang Fang, with love
Contents
CHAPTER 1
Hold the Line!
Remember your orders are to hold at all costs. No retreat, nobody comes back.
Maj. Gen. Norman Cota
Take cover!” was the first order of the day on the morning of December 16, 1944. Hans Kasten had been asleep in his bivouac not far from the hamlet of Nachtmanderscheid, on the road to the strategically vital town of Clervaux in the northern tip of Luxembourg. The veteran Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division was guarding the border between Luxembourg and Germany in a heavily forested, hilly part of Europe called the Ardennes. Since landing in Normandy in June 1944, the Allied armies had pushed the Germans back to the very borders of the Reich, and were preparing to break into Germany itself in the coming spring. Roads through the Ardennes were few and the terrain considered unsuitable for offensive actions, so the Americans were satisfied to hold the region with the minimum of troops while concentrating their forces on more vulnerable sectors in France. Indeed, the area was considered so quiet that green units were sent there to acclimatize to conditions at the front, and battle-weary divisions rested.
Kasten’s unit, the 110th Infantry Regiment, was a part of the Twenty-Eight, one of these American divisions that had seen extensive action and had been sent to the Ardennes to rest and refit. Originally hailing from Pennsylvania, the men wore a red keystone patch on their shoulders to commemorate the Keystone State. The Germans had christened this symbol the “Bloody Bucket” for the punishment the Germans had dealt out to the American division in the Hürtgen Forest, and the death and mayhem that they had dealt out in kind.1 The Battle of the Hürtgen Forest had been an American attempt to break into Germany in late 1944 that had turned into a slaughter against a well-prepared enemy and ended in stalemate. After the breakout from Normandy in August 1944, it had looked as though the Germans were beaten, but now, in December, they had managed to stabilize their front line and could still give the Allies a bloody nose. What no one in the Allied high command expected was a full-scale offensive from the Germans so late in the war, and certainly not in the depths of winter in the unsuitable Ardennes.
To the north of the Twenty-Eighth Division’s position was the Belgian part of the Ardennes, garrisoned by more American divisions. With more than twenty inches of snow on the ground, Kasten, exhausted after coming off watch, had been huddled beneath sparse army blankets trying to catch some shut-eye when all hell had broken loose.
Kasten involuntarily reached up and touched a livid-looking scar that ran in a jagged line like a lightning bolt across his forehead. He had seen the sharp end of war long before the Ardennes, on the other side of the world. The scar was a memento of a white-hot shard of shrapnel that had struck him while he was aboard a troop transport in December 1941. Only instead of being German, this particular fragment of bomb casing had come courtesy of the Japanese. Kasten’s background and life journey had been complex and surprising.
He was born in Honolulu in August 1916 to well-to-do German parents who immigrated from Bremen. He had been raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, graduating with a degree in art history from the University of Wisconsin.2 But his freethinking and defiant attitude led him to take the unusual step of “retiring” straight out of college and go “off to the South Seas.”3 He’d joined the Merchant Marine and shipped out to the Philippines in the pay of a dredging company.
“The best thing I did was that I retired after college,” Kasten said. “Everybody talks about what they’re going to do after they retire but when they finally do retire, they’re too old to do anything and they’ve lost all their dreams.”4
At sea when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, his ship put in to Fiji and then headed to Brisbane, Australia, arriving on Christmas Eve.
America needed young men, and after listening to a rousing speech from the US ambassador, Kasten volunteered to return to the States to help the war effort. He and many other young Americans boarded a returning troop transport bound for San Diego. Shorthanded, the captain asked for volunteers to man the vessel’s antiaircraft guns. Kasten found himself operating the port aft gun.
It wasn’t long before Kasten, still a civilian, was in the thick of the action. A lone Japanese aircraft bombed his ship while they were steaming through the Tasman Sea. One minute Kasten was hammering away at the enemy aircraft, the next he was waking up in the ship’s sick bay with one hell of a headache and sixteen stitches holding together a nasty gash across his forehead.5
After arriving at Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago, Kasten had been assigned to the Transportation Corps. But due to his high intelligence and varied life experience, his superiors attempted to have him reassigned as a teacher at an Officer Candidate School. Kasten refused the transfer, stating clearly that he had joined the US Army to fight, not teach.6 Shipped over to England, Kasten found himself part of a unit that was tasked with unloading and distributing military supplies in the great port of Liverpool. Disgusted with the level of corruption and thieving that he witnessed, he volunteered for the infantry. Retrained at Tidworth Barracks, Kasten was the best marksman in his company.7
*
Now England was but a distant memory as Kasten’s company sector was subjected to an intense German mortar barrage in the Ardennes Forest. The GIs tumbled into dugouts and foxholes, trying to make themselves as small as possible as the bombs detonated all across the position, blowing down trees and throwing up clumps of frozen dirt and ice high into the overcast sky. White-hot shards of shrapnel scythed down on those too slow to reach cover. Kasten, a veteran of D-Day and the terrible Battle of the Hürtgen Forest—where tens of thousands of Americans and Germans had fought themselves to a stalemate through fifty square miles of dense, soggy woodland near the German city of Aachen—knew what was coming next. All the veterans in the unit knew. When the artillery fire slackened, an infantry attack would usually follow. The veterans in the Twenty-Eighth had witnessed this happen so many times, their reactions were almost automatic.
Kasten was his rifle squad’s Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) gunner. John Kopczinski, his best friend since basic training in Tidworth, volunteered to be Kasten’s assistant gunner—his job was to carry the weapon’s stack of magazines and help Kasten keep the gun in action.8
Running uphill in a crouch, Kasten, a tall, lean man with his distinctive Vandyke moustache and beard and piercing blue eyes, lugged the heavy BAR with him while Pfc. Kopczinski followed with the ammunition. Both men charged forward, almost oblivious to the occasional mortar bomb that still landed around them, before they flung themselves into a small bunker constructed out of a hole in the ground covered with tree trunks for rudimentary overhead protection.
All along the line other riflemen and machine gunners jumped into foxholes and dugouts, ready for anything the Germans could fling at them. Charging up the slope close to Kasten was nineteen-year-old Pfc. William Shapiro, a combat medic from the East Bronx in New York City. Like Kasten, Shapiro was the product of immigrant parents who had moved to the United States for a better life, in Shapiro’s case escaping anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia. Now, these same families had sent their sons back to Europe to fight Nazism. Drafted at eighteen, Shapiro had trained at Walter Reed General Hospital before landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy that summer.
Shapiro’s green steel helmet displayed red crosses inside white circles, marking him as a noncombatant; he also wore a Red Cross brassard. But artillery and mortars do not differentiate, and before he reached cover a shell exploded close by with a blinding flash. Shapiro was blown several feet by the blast and landed in the snow nearby, unconscious. Other medics and riflemen managed to drag his limp body to cover before he was evacuated back to the regimental aid station at the castle town of Clervaux.
Hans Kasten slammed a twenty-round magazine into the BAR and cocked the weapon, hastily setting up its bipod on the bunker’s lip. He glanced at Kopczinski, who propped his M1 carbine against the frozen side of the bunker. His friend smiled grimly before both men turned to stare out of the fire slit, awaiting the attack that they knew must come at any second.
Kasten was older than the average dogface, and so much more experienced in life, so many of the young GIs in the outfit looked to this fiercely independent, unorthodox man for guidance or advice. But perhaps his independent style and strong opinions were not to everyone’s taste, particularly those of his superiors, because Kasten hadn’t been promoted beyond private first class. There wasn’t much call for enlisted men with free-thinking, defiant attitudes. He even looked different from the average GI, with the ends of his moustache waxed and turned up “German-style.”9 He was, put simply, a man of the world, and older than his twenty-seven years suggested.
The Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division, a part of the US VIII Corps, had a simple task—conduct aggressive defense within the Corps zone. The Corps units consisted of, from north to south, the 106th Infantry Division, the Twenty-Eighth Division, the Ninth Armored Division (minus two-thirds of its strength), and the Fourth Infantry Division. The Twenty-Eighth was assigned a portion of the Schnee Eifel, a heavily wooded extension of the Ardennes running along the Belgian-German frontier that consisted of high, windswept plateaus, deep, snow-filled ravines, and ghostly, fog-shrouded forest valleys. The Twenty-Eighth Division’s three regiments, with Kasten’s 110th Infantry in the center, guarded a twenty-five-mile-long bow-shaped front covering the Our and Sauer Rivers. Maj. Gen. Norman “Dutch” Cota’s headquarters were located twelve miles back at the small town of Wiltz, with VIII Corps HQ a farther twelve miles west at the strategically vital crossroads town of Bastogne.10
Prior to the morning of December 16, 1944, the Ardennes had been a sector of the US lines where no serious fighting was expected. It was very thinly held. The assigned divisions were either “green” units, like the 106th Division, learning on the job by undertaking small patrol actions against the Germans, or shattered and exhausted units like the Twenty-Eighth that had been pulled out of the Hürtgen Forest meat grinder after suffering crippling casualties, their surviving veterans stiffened by the arrival of plenty of replacements. Either way, the Ardennes was a low priority for the Americans. The Allies were gearing up to break into Germany and cross the Rhine—and the last thing they expected was a massive German offensive. The Battle of the Hürtgen Forest had surprised the Allies—German resistance had been fierce and skillful, but surely overwhelming American and British pressure would be brought to bear somewhere else along the Siegfried Line and the hastily reassembled German defenses overcome.
This Allied belief in an imminent German military collapse unexpectedly changed in December. American divisions found themselves assailed by Adolf Hitler’s last desperate gamble to wrest back the strategic initiative on the Western Front—the well-named Operation Herbstnebel (Autumn Fog). In an extraordinarily short period of time since the German Army had been defeated in Normandy, retreated through France, and crossed the Siegfried Line into Germany, Hitler had managed to assemble 250,000 men and more than one thousand tanks and assault guns. He was intent on slashing through the thinly held Ardennes, where he had surprised the French and British so memorably in the summer of 1940, and strike across the Meuse River to capture the strategically vital Allied supply port of Antwerp. In one stroke, Hitler believed that he would split the Americans from their British allies and cut off supplies to three Allied armies, with disastrous results. The entire plan depended upon surprise, speed, and bad weather. Two great tank armies would cross the rivers that bordered Belgium and Luxembourg in the Ardennes and surge forward to take the vitally important road junctions at St. Vith, blocked by the 106th Division, and Bastogne, the approaches via the towns of Marnach and Clervaux controlled by Cota’s Twenty-Eighth. From there, the roads to the Meuse would be wide open. The operation was timed for December, when the area would be deep under snow and bad weather would ground the Allied air forces, which had aerial superiority over the battlefield and made any offensive operations nearly impossible.
The Allies had also lost the advantage of Ultra, the top-secret decrypts of German signals traffic generated by the Enigma code that had been broken by British scientists at Bletchley Park in England. Though they were usually fully aware of Hitler’s plans before he launched them, because the Germans had been forced back behind their own border, they had stopped using radios and instead reverted to the telephone network, which the Allies could not penetrate. Therefore, Hitler achieved complete tactical surprise on the morning of December 16.
*
Hans Kasten let out a loud curse as he peered over the lip of his position downslope toward the Our River. It looked like half the German Army was surging across, gray-and-white-clad figures in the hundreds fanning out on the American side of the river, many firing as they ran or hurling stick grenades. The Germans had crossed using rubber boats under a smokescreen, while bridge-building units went to work trying to create crossings of the following heavy armor and supply vehicles.
Kasten quickly shouldered his BAR and zeroed in on the nearest running figures. He began working through magazines at a prodigious rate, his rounds peppering the ground all around the advancing Germans, knocking them down in clumps.11 Return fire thudded into the hillside, kicking up spurts of snow all around Kasten or cracking past his head as the Germans dashed from cover to cover, firing rifles and machine guns in an effort to suppress the deadly American return fire.
Every few seconds Kasten would release another empty magazine, the BAR’s muzzle steaming in the cold air, then turn and yell at Kopczinski for more ammo. Riflemen in foxholes to his left and right hammered away with their M1 Garands, the sounds of shooting constantly interspersed with metallic pings as empty ammo clips automatically ejected from their weapons. In this manner, the 110th Regiment would stand firm against all comers till the following day, severely disrupting the German timetable for reaching the Meuse.
*
At Company I, 422nd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Pfc. Joseph F. “Mish Kid” Littell and his comrades had been strangely left alone by the Germans since their great offensive had broken. Littell, a good-looking, clean-cut twenty-year-old with neat, side-parted dark brown hair, had acquired his unusual nickname because he had been born in Hankow, China, to American missionary parents in 1924.12 He shared something in common with Hans Kasten, though the two had yet to meet: Littell’s father was appointed bishop of Honolulu in 1930, fourteen years after Kasten was born there.
Joe Littell had had an unsettled early childhood, common in missionary families, changing schools and countries often. Then, at age twelve, he had been sent to boarding school in Delaware. Unlike many of the other grunts in the 422nd foxholes, Littell had already savored Europe before the war. In 1938, he had been selected by his headmaster as one of thirty young boys from thirty American schools who would be sent to Germany on an exchange program with the Nazi government. The idea was to foster greater understanding between Germany and the United States, and the visits were organized by American-German friendship societies. A reluctant Littell had attended an elite National Socialist Education Academy at Köslin, two hundred miles east of Berlin on the Baltic Sea between January and June 1939, shortly after Hitler had annexed Czechoslovakia and Austria and not long before he invaded Poland and started World War II. Littell, who was repulsed by the politics of Nazi Germany, reluctantly wore the Hitler Youth uniform, complete with swastika armband, and got plenty of practice “Heiling the Führer of the Third Reich.” Even more incredibly, his graduation diploma was personally signed by no less a dignitary than Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany.13
Now, more than five years later, he was facing his former school chums across the battlefield, his time in prewar Germany giving him an excellent grasp of the language and an abhorrence of Nazism. It was something that Littell would share with Hans Kasten, who had also studied in Germany before the war, and had memorably even met Hitler while staying at a youth hostel. Kasten had briefly spoken to Hitler, and formed the opinion that the Führer was already quite mad.
The 422nd Infantry’s frontage faced wide, snowy fields with tall stands of dense, gloomy fir trees beyond. Commanded by one of the youngest colonels in the US Army, George Descheneaux, the 422nd’s regimental headquarters was located in a gasthaus in the town of Schlausenbach just behind the lines. The 106th Division commander, Maj. Gen. Alan W. Jones, was forty minutes by jeep behind the front at the crossroads town of St. Vith, which, along with Bastogne, was to be held at all costs by the Americans in order to prevent German armored forces from exploiting the road network toward the Meuse River and beyond.
German artillery fire had erupted quite suddenly at 0530 hours on December 16. Several dozen men from various 106th Division companies were caught out of cover. Pfc. Peter Iosso had been making his way wearily back to his position when the barrage went up. An Italian American from Newark, New Jersey, Iosso had turned nineteen just two months before. He was serving in the 422nd Infantry, assigned to the Company E weapons platoon, where he manned a .30-caliber medium machine gun. Normally he would have been with his weapon, nicely ensconced inside a log bunker covering the ridge, but he had been detailed to a combat patrol ordered to insert itself into the ground in front of the American position the night before. Iosso, a little guy, was wading through deep snow back toward his position, thoroughly worn out and soaking wet, his boots sodden, a pair of spare socks drying in his armpits, when a shell from the German’s opening barrage exploded close by, knocking him unconscious.
For an hour Joe Littell and his comrades had pressed themselves into their holes beside their bivouac positions behind the ridge; the ridgeline was only thinly held when there was no alert on. German artillery rounds had whined overhead, sounding like freight trains ripping through the heavens before landing somewhere behind them with booming explosions. The ground had shaken continuously like an earthquake; the American soldiers covered their heads with their arms or gritted their teeth and huddled lower in their holes. More than one man prayed out loud as the firestorm of metal and explosives grew in intensity. Occasionally, a shell dropped short, throwing up a geyser of snow, mud, and rock close by. In the distance, the reports of the German guns rumbled like summer thunder, and soon a new and far more frightening sound had joined the cacophony—a high-pitched screaming that was enough to curdle blood. German Nebelwerfer rocket batteries added their peculiar projectiles to the opening barrage of the great German offensive. The GIs soon had a name for them—“screaming meemies.”14
Close behind Littell’s position, the Company I commander, Capt. David Ormiston, slammed down the field telephone receiver he had been holding to his ear while trying to hear the voice on the other end over the whine and crash of incoming shells. The line had suddenly gone dead while he had been talking to battalion headquarters. The artillery fire had probably severed the line. But a few minutes later a runner arrived from headquarters. The messenger quickly dismounted from a snow-and-mud-splattered jeep and rushed into Ormiston’s command post, a stone farmhouse hidden among the trees. The messenger ducked through the house’s doorway, flinching when another shell landed close by, and quickly handed the note to one of the sergeants who was crouched near Ormiston.
“Message from Regiment, sir,” the NCO yelled after glancing at the paper in his hand. Ormiston glanced up from a tactical map that he had been examining.
“Read it, Sergeant,” he yelled back, ducking when a shell landed close enough to spray the roof of the house with falling debris.
“Go on combat alert for a German ground attack and await further orders,” the sergeant called.15 His eyes locked with Ormiston’s. The news was electrifying, but also ominous. Ormiston knew that his regiment, the 422nd Infantry, like every other American unit, was spread mightily thin along this section of the line.
The 422nd was one of three regiments that constituted the 106th Infantry Division, a fresh unit that had arrived from England and been sent to the “quiet” Ardennes sector to gain some experience. Arriving at St. Vith, six miles behind the front on December 10 after an exhausting 470-mile journey in unheated trucks, the division’s three regiments had settled into prepared positions vacated by other units.
They were deployed abreast with the 422nd Infantry covering the northern sector, two thousand yards west of the Siegfried Line on the western slopes of the Schnee Eifel. The regiment’s left flank touched the village of Schlausenbach, the right meeting the 423rd Infantry at Oberlascheid. The 423rd’s lines extended southwest to the town of Bleialf. Meanwhile, the 424th Infantry covered the south, from Bleialf to around Winterspelt, tying in with Hans Kasten’s veteran 28th “Bloody Bucket” Division.
Division HQ was at St. Vith, where Major General Jones had his 106th headquarters inside a large convent school. The town was a vital crossroads that the Germans were determined to capture and exploit quickly.16
In the five days that the 422nd was in the line before the German assault, cases of trench foot had skyrocketed. The special snow overboots issued to the troops had been mistakenly left behind in England, so the GIs endured wet feet in the deep snow as their ordinary combat boots struggled to cope. Sick men taken off the line were not replaced, as no fresh troops were available, further thinning the already threadbare American positions. The GIs shivered in the frigid air, as no proper winter uniforms had been issued, either—the men simply wore every item of clothing they possessed beneath their long green greatcoats or combat jackets and further wrapped themselves up in green blankets like Victorian old ladies. But the cold was bone-chilling and constant, with the men rotating from their bivouacs in warmer farmhouses and barns up to the ridgeline bunkers and foxholes for guard duty. Morale was low. Even more ominously, the units were short of mortar ammunition, and they possessed no tank support, which would later prove critical.
Captain Ormiston glanced back at the tactical map with its colored transparent overlays indicating the positions occupied by his platoons and the other companies and battalions in the regiment. Like elsewhere along the Ardennes front, the units were holding three or four times as much territory with the normal complement of men. A German push could roll right over them.
“Have the platoon commanders report to me at once,” Ormiston shouted, ducking involuntarily as another German shell landed close to the house, rocking it to its foundations and bringing down plaster from the ceiling like falling snow. Atop the ridgeline outside, the men of the 422nd gritted their teeth and braced themselves for a German assault.
*
Pfc. Peter Iosso came around to find that it was now fully light and his chin was bleeding. His feet were frozen and painful. Pulling himself up, he made his way to his company positions, where he reported for sick call. Iosso was sent immediately to the battalion aid station, where a medic patched up his lacerated chin.17 But things were starting to look grim when Iosso was told that he would not be evacuated back to the regimental hospital—it was too dangerous, because the Germans had started to press around behind the 106th Division’s position. Iosso and his comrades all along the snowy ridgeline and the occupied villages behind began to realize that they were in a very hazardous situation. The Germans—who, Iosso and his friends had been told repeatedly, were a spent, defeated force—were apparently advancing in huge numbers right through the American lines, and no one appeared to be able to stop them.
This thought had already occurred to Pfc. Joseph Markowitz, who was manning a field telephone switchboard at the Third Battalion, 122nd Infantry’s headquarters, established inside a captured German pillbox right on the much-vaunted Siegfried Line. The pillbox, one of many the Americans had taken near the Schnee Eifel, actually faced the wrong way, but they made excellent and well-protected command bunkers. The son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Markowitz, twenty-four, was from the South Bronx in New York City. A college graduate, he had been almost overwhelmed by a stream of fire missions being routed through his switchboard from forward artillery observers up on the ridge, sending coordinates back to the artillery batteries to fire on German positions. Markowitz thought the situation so bad that he decided to put on every single item of clothing that he possessed—he had a dreadful feeling that soon he was going to find himself outside in the snow and ice. His premonition was completely correct.
Notes
1 Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow & Steel: The Battle of the Bulge 1944–45 (London: Arrow Books, 2014), 284.
2 Roger Cohen, Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 75.
3 Francesca L. Ortigas, “People You Should Know in Manila: A Profile in Courage,” indianamilitary.org. http://www.indianamilitary.org%2FGerman%2520PW% 2520Camps%2FPrisoner%2520of%2520War%2FPW% 2520Camps%2FStalag%2520IX-B%2520Bad%2520Orb% 2FUnused%2FHans%2520Kasten.rtf.
4 Ibid.
5 Conrad F. Goeringer, “Hans Kasten IV: Foxhole Atheist, American Hero,” American Atheist, Vol. 44, No. 7, October 2006.
6 Cohen, Soldiers and Slaves, 76.
7 Ibid.
8 Goeringer, “Hans Kasten IV.”
9 Ibid.
10 Caddick-Adams, Snow & Steel, 284.
11 Goeringer, “Hans Kasten IV.”
12 Joseph F. Littell, A Lifetime in Every Moment (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 19.
13 Ibid., 76.
14 Ibid., 117.
15 Ibid.
16 John S. D. Eisenhower, The Bitter Woods: The Battle of the Bulge (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 159.
17 Flint Whitlock, Given Up for Dead: American GI’s in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2005), 44.
CHAPTER 2
Surrounded!
Death was an every hour occurrence in those days. Life was cheap.
Pfc. Hans Kasten
The German artillery and mortar fire stopped abruptly after ninety punishing minutes. There was an eerie, pregnant silence broken only by snow falling from trees. Then, away to the north and south, Joe Littell and his comrades started hearing the sounds of heavy fighting. German panzer and Volksgrenadier divisions were attempting to smash their way through the American lines and capture vital river crossings and, most important, the road junctions farther west at St. Vith and Bastogne.
Littell and his platoon, along with most of Company I, had joined the regiment’s other companies up on the exposed ridge, leaving their warmer bivouacs on the reverse slope, following another order from Regiment: “Enemy action reported on our northern flank and south of us, on the 423rd’s southern flank. Dig in along the ridge and, in the event of an attack, hold the ridge at all costs.”1
The 422nd’s job, like the other units holding the line, was to absorb the initial German assault and try and hold them up long enough for proper reinforcements to arrive.
For the rest of the day their sector remained quiet as the German force opposing them attempted to encircle the 106th Division. The German commander had deployed two of his three regiments at either end of the high ground, intending to move forward and take St. Vith with his third once the 106th’s flanks had been pushed in and infiltrated.2 Littell’s regiment was the one blocking the middle route to St. Vith, hence the delay in the German assault.
Based in an old schoolhouse in St. Vith, the 106th Division’s commander, Maj. Gen. Alan W. Jones, knew his regiments were vulnerable, but felt he had no choice but to put them into the line owing to the length of front he was being asked to garrison. The real danger was a three-mile gap between the two regiments up on the Schnee Eifel ridge and Jones’s third regiment, the 424th, that tied in with Hans Kasten’s neighboring Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division. This massive gap was virtually undefended, save for the town of Bleialf, which was garrisoned by a hodgepodge of antiaircraft, tank destroyer, and cavalry reconnaissance units. If the Germans took Bleialf they could drive west to Schönberg and cut the 422nd and 423rd Regiments off. And this was exactly what the Germans intended to do—hence no direct assault on Littell’s or the neighboring regiments’ positions.
Littell and his twelve-man squad had been detached down into the valley below the ridgeline to patrol, sweeping the area for enemy combatants, but nary a German had been heard, let alone seen. But in the meantime, the Germans were hammering the neighboring American units, including the adjoining Twenty-Eighth Division, mercilessly.
*
By nightfall on December 16, the regiments in Hans Kasten’s Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division were just managing to hold on to their positions. The 424th Regiment was exhausted but had not given up its foxholes and bunkers. In the 423rd’s sector, violent hand-to-hand fights had erupted in hastily defended villages behind the ridgeline. The regiment held, but its seam with the 424th was now under direct threat. How much longer these thinly manned positions could hold against such a massive enemy thrust was unknown, but it would certainly not be for long if they were not quickly reinforced and resupplied.
*
Littell’s outfit, the 422nd Infantry, had so far been spared a direct German assault, with US artillery fire managing to hold off the attack on the regiment’s northern shoulder. But German infantry had managed to penetrate on the left flank and move into some of the rear areas, including assaulting the village of Schlausenbach, the location of Colonel Descheneaux’s regimental headquarters. A strong German spearhead had also penetrated the three-mile gap, assaulting the town of Bleialf, which was holding but under intense pressure. Many officers in the 106th’s three regiments were casting nervous glances rearward. They were wondering how long VIII Corps HQ would wait before ordering a general withdrawal west. If they left it too long, the regiments would soon become surrounded.
*
For Hans Kasten and the men of the 110th Infantry Regiment, the battle had been deadly serious all day and night of the sixteenth and into the morning of the seventeenth. Stubbornly, the American lines held. The GIs inflicted massive casualties on the white-clad Volksgrenadiers who were trying to secure the ridgeline so that German tanks could cross the Our in safety. The tanks’ target was the vital crossroads town of Bastogne, and the Germans needed to capture it quickly.
Eventually, German numbers and firepower began to overwhelm the thin line of defenders on the ridge. Kasten had kept his BAR in action for hours, his bunker almost ankle deep in spent brass cartridges, with Pfc. Kopczinski passing him fresh magazines or running back down the hill to fetch more supplies when the ammunition began to run short. But soon there were no more crates of ammunition to distribute, and as American casualties mounted and German units began to penetrate the line, the end was rapidly approaching.3
For what seemed like the thousandth time, a grim Kasten rammed another magazine into his BAR, cocked it, and then ran a hand over his dirty face. He was exhausted and existing purely on adrenaline. There had been hardly a moment to eat or drink anything for hours. Suddenly, a German rifle round ricocheted off a log close by his head and he was instantly back in action, the deafening hammering of the BAR filling the little bunker where he crouched with his friend, adding to the roar of battle all along the snowy ridge. With the coming dawn, the Germans were making a renewed and frenzied assault on the stubborn American positions, their leaders acutely aware that the offensive was already badly behind schedule.
Behind Kasten’s regimental position, German forces had started to move into the rear areas, not only with infantry but also tracked assault guns. At the ancient Luxembourg town of Clervaux, which dominated the Clerve River crossings and the road to Bastogne, US troops who had been on rest and relaxation leave were hastily gathered together for a defense of the vital settlement, overlooked by a medieval white castle, its towers topped by pointed black witch’s hat–style roofs. But many chose to flee instead of fight, joined by stragglers from smashed units retreating from the front in considerable disorder.
German artillery was already falling on Clervaux, adding to the confusion as reluctant rear area personnel were suddenly finding themselves being issued weapons and ammunition and told to take up defensive positions.4 A concerned Col. Hurley Fuller, commanding the 110th Regiment, was monitoring the deteriorating position from his headquarters in the Hotel Claravallis in Clervaux. He pushed up what reserves he still possessed to try and reinforce his companies defending the ridgeline and the villages behind, his face a mask of anguish as he issued a stream of orders to his harried junior officers.5
*
“Jesus!” exclaimed Joe Littell, his eyes narrowing beneath the brim of his helmet, his gloved hands tightening automatically around the butt of his M1 Garand rifle.
His stomach contracted, butterflies whirling through his guts as a dozen German soldiers suddenly emerged from a stand of tall fir trees some five hundred yards down a snowy slope from Littell’s platoon position atop the ridge.6 It was the morning of December 17, and the 422nd sector, in contrast to everywhere else, was still eerily quiet. A low mist hung in the canopy of trees like smoke against the gray overcast sky that was heavily pregnant with snow. Littell glanced to his right, licking his lips in excitement and astonishment. He could see American helmets spaced out at regular intervals, their owners hunkered down in shallow foxholes, rifles balanced on the lips of their earthen scrapings. Many of the helmets had been given a rough coating of whitewash or had ripped-up bed-sheets turned into ersatz snow covers to help the GIs blend in to the winter landscape.
“Here they come!” Littell exclaimed in a loud hiss to the GI in the next foxhole a few yards to his left.
Pvt. Art Kranz turned his unshaven, grimy face toward Littell, his eyes wide like saucers, his face unhealthily pale and drawn. “I see ’em, Mish,” Kranz muttered, before his head whipped back toward the approaching Germans.7
To Littell’s right, Pvt. Ben Kruger swore quietly, pressing his rifle into his shoulder. The Germans kept coming. Some wore long gray greatcoats under their equipment that had already turned white to the waist as they plunged through the thick snow, loping along like wolves, while others had white covers on their helmets or snowsuits over their uniforms. They carried rifles and machine pistols held across their chests, and some had stick grenades tucked into their belts. They moved forward confidently, widely spread out but seemingly oblivious to the presence of Littell and his buddies hundreds of yards away atop the ridge. All along the line, M1 helmets bobbed as the GIs took a bead on individual German soldiers.
S.Sgt. J. B. Parish ran over at a half crouch to Littell’s squad and knelt on one knee, cradling his Thompson submachine gun in his arms. He adjusted his helmet with one gloved hand and grimaced as he stared at the Germans.
“Hold your fire,” Parish hissed curtly, his breath pluming in the thirty-degree air. The platoon sergeant, who was only in his early twenties, sounded out of breath, whether from rushing between positions or from nerves, Littell and the others didn’t know. Parish glanced at Littell.
“Wait till they get closer. I’ll tell you when to fire.”8
Some of the other GIs looked up at their platoon sergeant, hardly seeming to comprehend the order, their faces blank or their expressions anxious. Everyone on the gun line was as green as fresh grass, including the officers and NCOs. As soon as he spoke, Parish was off to the next squad, running in that crouched way all soldiers soon developed on the front line, his tommy gun at the ready.
Littell pressed his right cheek against the cold wooden butt of his rifle and peered along the sights, trying to line up on the moving Germans. It seemed unreal. Time seemed to slow down.
How could they not see us?
He flicked off the safety catch with a reassuring snap, his finger wrapping around the weapon’s trigger, taking first pressure. The only noise was the loud crashing and thuds of German and American artillery and mortars away to the north and south. Someone somewhere was catching hell from the Krauts.
Littell and the other Company I GIs settled their rifles on the Germans, every man faithfully following Staff Sergeant Parish’s order to not fire until he gave the signal. It was unreal, seeing German soldiers so close. For most of the men in this inexperienced regiment, this was their first view of a real live German soldier. They had known that the Germans were close since the regiment took up its position a week earlier, though they hadn’t seen any. The Germans sometimes tried to spook them, knowing that they had replaced experienced troops. They occasionally drew swastikas on trees.
Now, out in the open, the German patrol that Littell and his comrades stared at looked capable and determined as they pushed on up the hill toward the position. Probably a reconnaissance squad sent to locate or probe the American positions. There were undoubtedly many more waiting out of sight in the tree line.
Littell and the others focused on the advancing Germans, eyes squinting along rifle sights, breath pluming in the chill air, totally concentrated on what must inevitably happen next. Throats and mouths were dry with excitement and fear and expectation. But then when it seemed that firing must erupt at any second, suddenly most of the Germans stopped in their tracks, abruptly about-faced, and started loping back toward the tree line. One or two of the GIs exclaimed in confusion or glanced furtively at their pals in the next foxholes. The Germans must have realized they were running straight into the arms of their enemies. But two of the Germans didn’t hear the order to retire, probably lost in the noise of artillery fire and swishing snow and ice. These two still came on, now just three hundred feet from the American gun line.
Littell sensed movement behind him and saw Staff Sergeant Parish return and crouch down close to his foxhole. Littell shifted his gaze back to the pair of Germans, taking a fresh bead on the leading man. He was close enough now to make out his features clearly beneath his coalscuttle helmet. Littell was only twenty, but this German appeared even younger.
“Fire!” Parish shouted close by, and Private Kruger, on Littell’s left, pulled his trigger, followed a split second later by Littell. The bullets punched into the leading German, throwing up brief sprays of red. The enemy soldier suddenly straightened up and crashed face-first into the snow, his Mauser rifle bouncing off his steel helmet as he fell. Private Kranz fired a split second later, along with others in the squad, and the second German went down soundlessly, a round striking him in the face and turning his head into jellied pulp.9 Both enemy soldiers lay still in the snow, apart from a few twitches.
Littell let out a long breath.
I’ve killed a man! was Littell’s first shocked thought. I’ve shot and killed a man! I’ve snuffed out the life of another human being!10
Littell’s body went limp and he started to shake. He groggily clambered out of his foxhole, feeling light-headed, and moved behind the ridge. He had to move; he couldn’t stay looking at the corpses of the men that he and his friends had just killed. No one noticed—they were all having similar thoughts, trying to process the couple of seconds of extreme violence that they had just perpetrated. It had been unlike anything in their short lives before—it was unreal. Many, like Littell, raised in a religious household, felt a terrible guilt at having killed for the first time. One second those two Germans had been powering through the snow toward them, rifles held purposefully across their chests, the next they were just bleeding lumps in the virgin snow. And Littell had done this. He tried to pull himself together. Hands shaking, he shouldered his rifle and took out a cracker and an army chocolate bar from his pocket and quickly ate them. But seconds later he was leaning against a tree trunk, quietly heaving out his guts into the snow.11 When he finished he felt a little better. He returned to his foxhole, avoiding eye contact with his buddies, who said nothing as they, too, mulled over their first taste of action.
“Littell,” a voice said close by.
He turned. It was Staff Sergeant Parish.
“Heads up. Combat patrol, ten minutes.”12
Littell sighed and nodded. The platoon was sending out a small patrol into the valley to see if any Germans remained in the vicinity. It wasn’t the first time Littell had performed this task, but since his first clash with the enemy, the war had suddenly become fearfully real—and deadly.
*
In Pfc. Kasten’s 110th Infantry position, the Germans were not running away—they were attacking uphill relentlessly in huge numbers despite their massive casualties, and they were starting to win. Unlike Littell and the 106th, Kasten and his comrades had long ago lost their fear and fascination with the taking of human life—the Hürtgen battle had seen to that. And now they were knee-deep in German corpses, but enough of the enemy was still alive to decide the issue. The Germans had successfully penetrated the boundary between the 110th and its neighboring regiment, the 109th, at the village of Hoscheid. German engineers had also managed to throw makeshift bridges across the Our River, and panzers and assault guns were starting to rumble across and join in the fight—the American infantry had little with which to stop them, just a handful of supporting Sherman tanks and their own bazookas, for which there was a shortage of rockets. The 110th’s positions were becoming increasingly untenable in the face of the massive German attack, and the regiment was being progressively surrounded.13
Kasten fought on without hesitation or relief. Suddenly, Pfc. Kopczinski, Kasten’s assistant gunner, cried out and Kasten turned. His friend lay still, unconscious and bleeding in the bottom of the bunker. He’d been struck twice by bullets and was completely paralyzed.14
“John!” Kasten yelled above the din of firing, exploding hand grenades, and shouting American and German soldiers. He reached out and shook his friend, but there was no response.
“Medic!” Kasten yelled, looking up and down the ridgeline. “Medic, we got a man down here, medic!” He quickly turned back to the BAR and loosed off a long burst at the nearest Germans before turning back to his friend, who still appeared to be breathing.
“Hang in there, John,” shouted Kasten. “Hang on, buddy, help’s coming.”
A few seconds later one of the company medics, his helmet marked on four sides with a red cross inside a white circle, flopped down beside Kopczinski and started to go to work on him.
“Doc, is he alive?” Kasten asked breathlessly in between firing the BAR.
“He’s alive,” replied the grim-faced medic, adding, “watch yer front” as he administered a shot of morphine to Kopczinski.
A few minutes later, his wounds wrapped in field dressings, Kopczinski was evacuated by stretcher off of the line. He was the last one who was taken out to the battalion aid station behind the position before the final surrender.15
The fighting continued for a few more minutes after Kopczinski had been taken to the rear, but Germans were now all around them. With casualties mounting and with communications back to divisional headquarters cut, the surviving American officers gave the order to cease fire and surrender. Word was quickly passed from position to position. Kasten was incredulous when he first heard. At no point during the war had he ever thought that he might be taken prisoner—killed, yes, but not forced to surrender.
Within a few minutes, a strange silence settled over the battlefield, which was littered with dead Germans lying in the snow like bloody bundles of dirty laundry. Tree trunks were chipped and riddled with bullets. In and around American positions lay dead or wounded GIs, the white earth here and there scorched black by grenade explosions. The wounded groaned or screamed, while the medics moved resolutely among them, ministering with what little equipment and drugs they had remaining. Here and there shell-shocked men sat cradling their heads in their hands or laughing hysterically. Then Kasten heard the guttural calls of German soldiers moving along the line. “Raus, raus,” they yelled, ordering the GIs who could still stand to climb out of their foxholes and dugouts at gunpoint, while others violently wrenched rifles and machine guns out of their hands and stacked them in piles on the frozen ground.
One man shouted, “Hands up, Chicago gangsters!” over and over in heavily accented English.16 It was a ridiculous refrain, borne of watching too many prewar Hollywood movies, and it would have been funny under other circumstances, but not now.
Soon hundreds of German soldiers swarmed over the ridgeline, pushing and shoving the disarmed and confused GIs into rough groups. Many men took the opportunity to dispose of weapons or personal possessions before the Germans got to them. One man deliberately removed his wristwatch and smashed it against a rock, declaring loudly, “Those bastards don’t get this!”17 Others whacked their rifles against tree trunks to break off the wooden butts, or tossed vital mechanical parts from machine guns deep into the woods.
Kasten and one group of about two dozen dazed and exhausted survivors were herded into a rough line beside a snowy track, and stood silently with their hands up while several German soldiers started working their way down the column. Germans wrenched back GIs’ greatcoat sleeves and ordered them to take off their watches. They were told to remove their combat webbing, which was placed in a pile near their confiscated weapons. This meant not only the loss of their ammunition pouches, bayonets, and gas masks but, vitally for prisoners of war, their water bottles and medical packs.18 Other Germans roughly frisked each GI, taking any items that they fancied, including gold rings, any medical supplies or rations, cigarettes, and their useful little combination eating tools.
When they had finished, the Germans left Kasten and his comrades with only the uniforms they stood in and their M1 steel helmets. Everything else was shared out among the Germans, whose supply situation was precarious at best. With nothing to eat, drink, or smoke—and in some cases minus mittens after Germans had snatched them off frozen hands—the GIs were ordered to fall in and start walking east.
“Raus, raus!” yelled their German guards. “Amerikanische Schweinehunden!” With the occasional encouragement of a rifle butt, fist, or boot, the survivors of Kasten’s decimated company trudged wearily through the snow along tracks and roads whose surfaces had been churned up by passing German vehicles.
Kasten soon realized that the column of prisoners was only lightly guarded; the Germans needed every man they could get up at the front, fighting the remaining Americans. And each time a German vehicle came slipping and sliding along the muddy, snowy road, the guards yelled at the prisoners to scatter onto the high banks, then reform in the roadway once it was clear. Kasten was determined to escape, and escape quickly before he had been marched miles into the German rear areas.19
