Armageddon - Max Hastings [168]
American control of the battlefield reasserted itself slowly but surely. German tanks reached the furthest point of their advance, sixty miles from their start line and a few miles short of the Meuse, on 24 December. The panzers’ clockwork had run down. Most enemy armoured units were starved of fuel. They were battered by aircraft and concentrated artillery fire. The American genius for mobility had enabled the defenders already to double their infantry numbers and treble their armoured strength in the embattled sector. The Bulge looked alarming on the map, yet no longer presented a strategic threat. “The fact that the Hun has stuck his neck out,” wrote Tedder at SHAEF as early as 22 December, “is, from the point of view of shortening the whole business, the best thing that could happen. It may make months of difference.” Time was always the friend of the Allies, the enemy of the Germans. Hitler’s armies had lost their race.
Matthew Ridgway, commanding XVII Airborne Corps, was absent in England when the German offensive began. Gavin of the 82nd filled his place superbly through the first days, returning to his own division when the corps commander arrived. The force of Ridgway’s personality is stamped upon every line of his correspondence, every record of his conversations. After days in which some senior officers who should have known better panicked, it is striking to contrast Ridgway’s remarks to his formation commanders on Christmas Eve: “The situation is normal and completely satisfactory. The enemy has thrown in all his mobile reserves, and this is his last major offensive effort in this war. This Corps will halt that effort; then attack and smash him . . . I want you to reflect that confidence to the subordinate commanders and staffs in all that you say and do.” Ridgway told Gavin: “Now, I know your men are tired, they’ve done a magnificent job out there, and they need you to go and pep them up a little bit. I don’t know of anyone who can do that better than you. Will you get that across?”
Ridgway sent a biting letter to the officer commanding the 75th Division in his corps, asserting that its performance had been sorely inadequate: “I want every man imbued with the idea how lucky he is to be here, where the decision of this war will be reached, and where he can contribute his utmost to putting the 75th up alongside of the best divisions in our army. That upclimb starts today.”
At least one man of the 75th Division which Ridgway was addressing, Harold Lindstrom, a twenty-two-year-old farmboy from Alexandria, Minnesota, felt nothing like “lucky to be here.” A bespectacled rifleman in F Company of the 2/289th Infantry, Lindstrom arrived in France on 15 December and had been growing steadily more unhappy ever since. First, the tough, respected staff-sergeant who had been with his company through training succumbed to combat fatigue on their sixth day in the war zone, without hearing a shot fired. Lindstrom himself was nursing a feverish cold. The unit chaplain, a man he had never cared for, came by. To his own surprise, the soldier found himself grateful to see the priest: “things were different. I was ready to listen. I was afraid of the future and was looking for all the help I could get.”
His company trudged forward, cold, weary, hungry and thirsty. They passed jeeps loaded with wounded, wrecked vehicles crushed into twisted steel and broken glass, trucks with their tyres still burning. Abandoned kit lay everywhere: “It was scary to see equipment just like that I was using. They had to have been guys just like me . . . After seeing that mess I was deathly afraid of German tanks, and I think most other guys were, too.” Their neighbours in K Company were strafed by American P-38s. On Christmas morning, the 289th deployed for an attack, three battalions in line, towards the blazing Belgian village of Grandmenil. Tracer streaked towards them. As Lindstrom’s platoon mortarman set up his tube, a German round ricocheted off the