Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble Read Online Free PDF

Fifth Panzer Army had not imagined that General Patton would have been able to move any of his forces north so quickly.
    ‘Towards noon,’ Kokott wrote, ‘at first singly, but then in droves, men of the 5th Fallschirmjäger appeared near the divisional command post at Hompré. They were coming from the front lines and moving east. Barely an officer was in sight. When questioned, the men yelled: “The enemy has broken through! They’ve advanced north with tanks and have captured Chaumont!”’ Chaumont was no more than three kilometres to the south of Kokott’s headquarters.
    The stragglers were soon followed by vehicles and the horse-drawn carts of the Fallschirmjäger division. In no time at all, American fighter-bombers had sighted the congestion in Hompré and wheeled in to attack. Any German with a weapon began ‘firing wildly’ at the attacking planes. ‘Houses caught fire, vehicles were burning , wounded men were lying in the streets, horses that had been hit were kicking about.’
    This chaos coincided with a massive supply drop all around Bastogne. German soldiers, on seeing the quantity of white and coloured parachutes to their north, assumed in alarm that this was the start of a major airborne operation. They took up the cry: ‘Enemy paratroopers are landing to our rear!’ Even Kokott was shaken by an eventuality that he had never considered. But a sort of order was gradually established,with volksgrenadiers halting the young soldiers of the 5th Fallschirmjäger who were fleeing. An anti-aircraft battery near Hompré received the order ‘about face’. The gunners were to switch from aerial targets to prepare their guns for ground operations.
    Kokott then improvised combat groups, taking command of four tanks which happened to be near by, an artillery detachment and some engineers, and reorganized some of the fleeing paratroopers who had recovered from ‘their initial shock’. He ordered them to move south to take up position blocking the roads. The situation soon appeared to be restored. The American armoured force in Chaumont had only been a reconnaissance probe by forward elements from Patton’s Third Army and, lacking sufficient strength, it pulled back.
    The first warning the Germans received of the American airdrop to resupply the 101st Airborne and its attached units came soon after midday. The 26th Volksgrenadier-Division received the signal: ‘
Achtung!
Strong enemy formation flying in from west!’ The Germans sighted large aircraft flying at low level accompanied by fighters and fighter-bombers. They expected a massive carpet-bombing attack, and opened rapid fire with their 37mm anti-aircraft guns.
    They do not seem to have noticed the first pair of C-47 transports which dropped two sticks of pathfinders at 09.55 that morning. On landing, the pathfinders had reported to McAuliffe’s command post in Bastogne to establish the best sites for the drop zones. Their mission had been deemed essential by IX Troop Carrier Command, because of fears that Bastogne might have already been overrun. The pathfinders then set up their homing beacons just outside the town and waited until the drone of approaching aircraft engines gradually built to a roar.
    ‘The first thing you saw coming towards Bastogne’ , recorded a radio operator in the first wave of C-47 transports, ‘was a large flat plain completely covered with snow, the whiteness broken only by trees and some roads and, off in the distance, the town itself. Next, your eye caught the pattern of tank tracks across the snow. We came down lower and lower, finally to about 500 feet off the ground, our drop height.’ As the parachutes blossomed open, soldiers emerged from their foxholes and armoured vehicles, ‘cheering them wildly as if at a Super Bowl or World Series game’ , as one put it. Air crew suddenly saw the empty, snowboundlandscape come alive as soldiers rushed out to drag the ‘parapacks’ to safety. ‘Watching those bundles of