Four Hours of Fury Read online

  On December 16, Hitler had launched a massive surprise assault to recapture Antwerp, Belgium, and divide British and American forces. The desperate gamble, what would later be referred to as the Battle of the Bulge, caught senior Allied commanders flat-footed, and they scrambled to repulse the enemy’s advance as Wehrmacht troops streamed out of the dense Ardennes Forest, decimating green American troops all along the front. Chased by panzer tanks, entire battalions fled from their positions while Allied commanders desperately tried to stem the retreat. Chaos reigned for several days, and accurate information was in high demand but short supply; defenses appeared to be crumbling all along the front.

  It was into this maelstrom that the 17th Airborne was sent to bolster the lines. The initial plan of dropping them into Belgium had to be scrapped due to high winds and thick cloud cover. Thus the men of the 17th, who had trained for two years to descend into battle by parachutes and gliders, entered combat for the first time by jumping from the tailgates of cargo trucks.

  Joining the war in Europe after the venerable 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had each been involved in significant fighting and earned distinguished records, the troopers of the 17th knew they had a reputation to live up to and were keen to prove themselves.

  They got their chance when they were assigned to protect the flank of General George Patton’s counterattack out of Bastogne. They moved into the line for their first attack on the morning of January 3, 1945. Patton’s Third Army intelligence officers assured General William Miley, the 17th’s commander, that the enemy was fleeing before them; they would encounter only the delaying actions of small rearguard elements. Even so, Miley was concerned. His units were still assembling at their line of departure, his supporting artillery and anti-tank guns had yet to arrive, and timing prohibited even a cursory terrain study. Making matters worse, fog and snow significantly reduced visibility all along the front.

  Miley’s troopers, naïvely trusting Third Army’s intelligence reports, left the line of departure in piecemeal fashion. It was their first mistake. Just as the forward elements began their advance, Oberst Otto-Ernst Remer’s Führer Begleit Brigade launched an unexpected counterattack. The brunt of the German force, led by Panther tanks and half-tracks filled with two battalions of crack panzer grenadier infantry, hit the unprepared Americans like a brick in the face, stunning them to a halt.

  Confronted by the heavily armed and battle-hardened enemy formations, Miley struggled to keep his units moving in concert with Patton’s. In a fit of temper, Patton threatened to relieve Miley if he failed to keep his division on the move. Patton didn’t realize until later that Miley’s men had decisively engaged the enemy’s main attack. Despite the retreat of an attached tank-destroyer unit, for which its commander was later court-martialed, the men of the 17th fought the German vanguard to a standstill, preventing a breakthrough into Patton’s unprotected echelons from the rear.

  On their second morning of combat, at 08:15, a battalion of Miley’s paratroopers left the shelter of the Bois de Fragette woods near Flamierge. They were well into an open field when the Germans unleashed waves of artillery, mortar, and small arms fire. Casualties mounted quickly as the men loped forward through blankets of snow, seeking shelter in a depression on the south side of a small highway.

  At the attack’s height, two German tanks emerged through the dense fog like armored apparitions, clanking down the highway and firing into the exposed paratroopers. Corporal Isadore Jachman, known as Izzy to his friends, recognized the peril of the situation and sprinted from cover to salvage a dead comrade’s bazooka.

  Recovering the weapon and a canvas satchel of rockets, Izzy loaded the crew-served weapon himself and headed toward the German armor. He hoisted the bazooka to his shoulder, squinted against the blowing snow, and aimed. The high-explosive warhead slammed into the lead panzer, but with little effect. The tank’s thick armor prevented serious damage, but the jarring detonation gave the crew pause and stalled their advance.

  To get a better angle on the second tank, Izzy weaved forward through enemy fire, reloading on the move as he changed positions. The German commander of the trailing tank, witnessing the hesitation of the panzer in front of him, threw his machine into reverse and the two tanks crawled back to the protection of their lines. As Jachman pursued them, a burst of machine gun fire cut him down. The twenty-two-year-old corporal died moments after his comrades reached him.

  Izzy’s actions disrupted the enemy attack and provided his unit with a vital respite to consolidate their scattered positions and reorganize their defense. Izzy’s parents, both German-born Jewish immigrants, would later receive their son’s posthumous Medal of Honor.

  In the next twenty-four hours, bitter skirmishes erupted over every yard of contested ground, with the adversaries trading possession of the same villages or hilltops multiple times.

  German grenadiers attacked and pushed the paratroopers out of Flamisoulle at noon only to cede it back to them a few hours later. The frozen ground made digging protective foxholes almost impossible. The next morning, a German counterattack led by fifteen Mark IV and Mark V panzers overran the American positions, forcing them to withdraw with heavy casualties. All along their lines the evicted troopers regrouped and launched their own counterattacks. Bayonet-wielding paratroopers retook the village of Monty near Mande-Saint-Étienne at the sharp end of cold steel—screaming and whooping as they charged into the German defenders, who retreated in terror.

  While the main line of resistance fluctuated, the troopers absorbed the German advance and stubbornly defended their assigned sectors. Patton, learning of the attack’s ferocity, later acknowledged his best decision of the war might have been ordering the 17th to protect his flank. He was convinced that if they’d failed to hold their line, the German panzers would have wreaked havoc on his forces from the rear.

  The division’s vigorous defense earned praise from one of Patton’s generals, Troy Middleton, who agreed, “The 17th saved the day.” However, he also criticized their aggressive spirit, which he believed bordered on “recklessness.” Another staff officer noted, “The 17th has suffered a bloody nose and in its first action lacks the élan of its airborne companions.”

  The troopers disagreed—when confronted with enemy armor, the choice was simple: bold violence or retreat. “God, how green we are, but we are learning fast,” observed Colonel James R. Pierce, one of the division’s regimental commanders.

  Green they were. The lessons of launching poorly coordinated and piecemeal attacks came at a staggering cost—519 men killed in action and almost 3,500 wounded. At least one battalion commander was replaced, and several others probably should have been.

  In the middle of February, after forty-six days of combat, the 17th rotated out of the front in Luxembourg, ending what Miley later referred to as their “long nightmare.” The warming weather melted the snow, revealing a landscape dotted with rotting corpses, and an unbearable stench of decay followed the troops as they marched out of the splintered Ardennes Forest. Quartermaster troops piled the dead into the backs of trucks for transport and burial. The bodies, made stiff by freezing temperatures and rigor mortis, were difficult to stack and formed a macabre heap of twisted limbs with arms and legs jutting out at grotesque angles.

  • • •

  The weary men boarded a troop train for their journey out of Luxembourg and were soon rattling steadily toward France, watching as fields of patchy snow gave way to those of wildflowers. Heading west, their route took them through the Argonne Forest and Verdun, where long-abandoned trenches from World War I could still be seen.

  They rode in wooden, four-wheeled French boxcars known as “forty-and-eights,” named for the stenciled emblem on the exterior indicating capacity for forty men or eight horses. Originally used as freight cars, the French pressed them into service during the First World War to transport men, horses, and equipment back and forth to the front. The men sat on the wooden floor or on their packs. Some chose t
o sit in the open door; others opted to scrounge enough straw from the floor for a makeshift pillow. They were used to fending for their own comfort, and the inevitable cattle jokes or mooing sounds had long since lost an amused audience.

  The cadence of the train rocked some men to sleep, but many others fidgeted in discomfort. Having agonized through one of the coldest winters in Belgian history, enduring privation, snow, ice, frostbite, and the flu—not to mention German artillery and tanks—almost all of the troopers suffered from chronic diarrhea. As the forty-and-eights chugged away from the sights and sounds of the front lines, the men now struggled against attacks from within.

  It didn’t take long for the GIs to note the lack of sanitary facilities on what they christened the Diarrhea Express. In some boxcars men used their bayonets to pry up floorboards to fashion a privy hole. But the shifting of the train frustrated accuracy and they abandoned that option. A riskier, but more effective, technique was put to the test: the men took turns standing backwards in the open door of the swaying boxcar, dropping their trousers and leaning back into a squatting position. To prevent their buddy from toppling overboard, two comrades held firmly onto his arms and shoulders.

  Those who managed to scrounge a scrap of paper or handful of hay found wiping while dangling out the door required the dexterity of an acrobat. However, solid teamwork prevailed over the active motion of the train and the poor condition of the tracks. The troopers of the 17th didn’t lose a single man during the journey.

  Laughing at the sight of bare bottoms continually appearing and disappearing along the line of boxcars, a company commander joked that the French farmers should thank his men for the free fertilizer.

  Châlons-sur-Marne, France. Tuesday, February 13, 1945.

  Disembarking at a small train station in the middle of the night, the men stretched their legs, grabbed their gear, and milled about until trucks arrived to complete the final leg of their journey. They’d arrived at Châlons-sur-Marne, a quiet town sixty-three miles northeast of Paris and home to the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Châlons, an imposing Roman Catholic monument consecrated in the twelfth century.

  The division established its headquarters in the former barracks of a French cavalry unit, an impressive example of Second Empire architecture with mansard roofs and a high-walled parade ground. The Germans, during their recent occupation, had also used it as a temporary holding compound for American POWs. Now some of the 17th troopers were lucky to be billeted in the town itself, but most would reside in camps set up three or four miles out in the surrounding countryside.

  One such tent city resident was Sergeant John Chester, whose camp was ten miles southwest of Châlons in the village of Soudron. After a long journey, he hopped from the back of the truck and plopped into a field of thick mud at a camp clearly still under construction. He squinted at the scene for a few seconds, deciding the quagmire and the camp’s condition didn’t matter—it was unquestionably superior to a foxhole in the snow.

  Chester had first attempted to join the Army in 1938, on his eighteenth birthday, but his father refused to sign the enlistment papers. He had been raised on a Missouri farm during the Depression, and his parents had encouraged him to embrace a strong work ethic. Through this blending of circumstance and influence, Chester learned to accept the unavoidable in order to accomplish the necessary. As a teenager, he routinely rose at three o’clock in the morning to feed the animals and help his father bale hay, before starting his homework. With more chores in a day than there were hours, he often tackled tasks in a single-minded, pragmatic way.

  For example, when picking up coal during the winter months, he found it more efficient to spend the night in the family truck parked outside the quarry gate so that he’d be first in line, rather than waste time waiting behind other customers in the morning. The bottle of milk he brought with him for breakfast often froze, so he treated it like a snow cone and ate his breakfast without complaint. By making his personal comfort a low priority he was often able to be in “the right place, at the right time.” He just thought it common sense—a quality that would serve him well in combat.

  The ranks of Chester’s artillery battalion, originally filled by over 500 men of such varied civilian occupations as professional boxer, rumrunner, fisherman, feed store operator, and university instructor, had been whittled down to fewer than 300. He watched as his fellow survivors, whose uniforms were slick with two months of dirt and grime, took their issued cots and shuffled off to assigned tents.

  Despite the camp’s Spartan conditions, the men had reason to be happy; they were out of combat and among friends. Many dropped their gear and crawled onto their cots for some shut-eye. Some wandered from tent to tent, seeking buddies not seen since leaving England. Others spent time comparing or trading their spoils of war: German helmets, daggers, flags, badges, firearms, watches, and belt buckles emblazoned with swastikas. To navigate through the muck created by the spring thaw and rain, they wore their rubber overshoes, designed for coping with snow but equally effective when clomping through mud.

  Private George Holdren and his squad, members of the division’s anti-tank battalion, experienced a few hiccups while settling into life off the line. While adding wood to the tent’s M1941 stove, one of the men accidently dropped the heavy steel lid, creating a sudden clanging noise that, because it sounded like incoming artillery, sent all of those nearby diving into the muck.

  Recovering, the muddy troopers stripped off their uniforms in anticipation of a shower. But one of Holdren’s buddies tossed his filthy boxer shorts into the stove and the resulting stench chased the men out of the tent, coughing and gagging for fresh air. They threw the rest of their soiled uniforms into a trench for burial.

  The task of cleaning and clothing troops who had just come off the line fell to the Army’s Quartermaster Corps. Its units could bathe, examine, and clothe 2,500 men in ten hours. Of chief concern was delousing: expelling lice and other infectious parasites helped maintain basic hygiene and prevented an epidemic.

  Shower installations, established outside of the camps, pumped water out of ponds, through a large heater, and into an olive-drab semi-trailer, the interior of which was fitted with a row of showerheads.

  In assembly-line fashion the men entered the shower six at a time; they were allowed ten minutes to bathe. The file of naked men extending down the trailer’s wooden steps urged them on with shouts of “Hurry up!” and “Keep it moving!” After his first shower in two months, each man underwent a quick medical examination and then moved to the dressing station, where he donned a clean uniform. Rather than wait in line, in some cases up to two hours, many took advantage of nearby ponds or creeks to soap up and bathe themselves.

  It was at one of the improvised bathing points that the troops announced their presence to the locals. Napping on a small dock after a swim in the Marne River, John Chester jolted awake as three loud detonations shook his resting place and rained water down on him like a monsoon. Some of the men had wagered that C-2 composition explosives would make excellent fish bait. Their hunch proved correct.

  Within seconds, dozens of dead fish dotted the water’s surface. Troops splashed into the river or rowed out in borrowed boats to claim their prizes. Seized by a vision of fresh fish for dinner, Chester joined in the melee, diving in and scooping up as many of the creatures as he could. He enjoyed seeing the men having fun and laughing again.

  The blasts attracted the attention of the town’s population, and soon parents, chasing their excited children, came running to discover the source of the commotion. The soldiers shared their haul with the locals, whose nervous smiles seemed to indicate all was forgiven, but it wouldn’t be the last time the GIs startled their new neighbors.

  The men of the division had four days to get their camps “squared away.” They pitched additional tents and improved paths and roads, including hardstanding motor parks, latrines, and mess facilities.

  “So this is a rest camp?” grumbled more
than one trooper. “We got more rest at the front.”

  Laid out according to Army regulations, which recommended 8.3 acres for a thousand men, the camps were bracketed by latrines and vehicle parks on one side, and mess facilities on the other. In between were ranks of evenly spaced squad-sized, twelve-man tents. The open rows separating them were wide enough to facilitate company reveille formations and the movement of marching troops. The tents—made of non-breathing, fire-resistant, olive-drab canvas—had no floors. Each occupant had just enough room for his cot and duffel bag, and the savviest had scrounged wooden pallets for makeshift flooring to keep their equipment out of the mud.

  After two months of poor diets and bad hygiene, many men had loose teeth or cavities. The division’s dentists set up in a large tent to offer their services as needed. Waiting in line, patients watched uneasily as an Army private pedaled furiously on a bicycle contraption to power the dental drill.

  The dentist looking into George Holdren’s mouth surprised him by saying, “I see you are from Iowa.” Apparently the quality of Midwestern dental work was well known in the profession.

  Subsisting for weeks on cold rations stirs an obsession with hot food, preferably good hot food, and the local Frenchmen hired to assist the cooks rose to the occasion. Taking it as a matter of national pride, they worked hard to surpass the quality of anything the troops had eaten in England. The GIs appreciated English hospitality but had grown tired of meat boiled to the point that even spirited debate could never, with certainty, settle the identity of its origin.

  Many took advantage of the downtime to write home, informing their loved ones they were still alive and safe, but official restrictions limited the details they could share. Every correspondence bore a “Passed by US Army Examiner” stamp and the signature of the officer who read, and, if necessary, censored the contents before it left camp. The smallest possibility of the mail falling into enemy hands forbade troopers from mentioning upcoming missions or revealing their location; instead they had to use generalities such as “somewhere in Europe” or “somewhere in France.” Censors blotted out sensitive details with India ink or excised them with a razor blade before sealing and sending the letters on.