Inferno - Max Hastings [373]
Two days later, on 18 December, Operation Autumn Mist was launched against the weakest sector of Hodges’s First U.S. Army. It achieved absolute tactical and strategic surprise, a breakthrough on a forty-mile-wide front as panic-stricken American troops broke and fled in disarray in the path of the SS panzers; because of thick fog, the Allied air forces were impotent to intervene. Within two days, German troops were pouring through a gaping hole—“the bulge”—in the American line. Eisenhower’s British chief of intelligence, Maj. Gen. Kenneth Strong, bore a substantial share of responsibility for failing to recognise the significance of the German buildup in the Ardennes, which had been flagged by Ultra. Strong told the supreme commander that German formations identified in the area were merely resting and refitting. The fundamental failure, in which many senior American and British officers were complicit, was that they were convinced of their own mastery of the campaign and, thus, discounted the possibility of a major German thrust.
Lt. Tony Moody was one of a host of young Americans who found themselves overwhelmed by the experience of retreat. “I wasn’t scared at the beginning—I got more scared: it was the uncertainty; we had no mission, we didn’t know where the Germans were. We were so tired, out of rations, low on ammo. There was panic, there was chaos. If you feel you’re surrounded by overwhelming forces, you get the hell out of it. I was demoralized, sick as a dog. I had frostbite. I felt pretty bad about it. I kept thinking ‘oh my God, what I have got into? How much of this can I take?’ I suddenly found myself quite alone, and wandered off. I stumbled into a battalion aid station and I just collapsed … slept twenty-four hours. The mind washes out a lot of images, but you remember the feeling of hopelessness, despair. You just want to die. We felt the Germans were much better trained, better equipped, a better fighting machine than us.”
“Fear reigned,” wrote Donald Burgett. His formation, the 101st Airborne, played a critical part in stabilising the front, while watching soldiers of some other units flee for their lives. “Once fear strikes, it spreads like an epidemic, faster than wildfire. Once the first man runs, others soon follow. Then, it’s all over; soon there are hordes of men running, all of them wild-eyed and driven by fear.” Pfc. Harold Lindstrom, from Alexandria, Minnesota, became so desperate in his misery that he found himself gazing with envy at German corpses. “They looked peaceful. The war was over for them. They weren’t cold any more.” He even felt pangs of envy towards comrades desperate enough to maim themselves: “No one would ever know how many accidents were genuine and how many self-made.” An infantry company commander wrote of an action at Stoumont on the twenty-first: “It was so foggy that one of our men found himself ten yards from a German machine-gun before he knew it … Everyone had been pushed about as far as he could be. Nerves were being broken on men whom one would have thought would never weaken.”
A young infantryman described his predicament one late December day when his foxhole buddy was hit: “Gordon got ripped by a machine-gun from roughly the left thigh through the right waist. He … told me he was hit through the stomach as well … We were cut off … We were in foxholes by ourselves, so we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine. We couldn’t ease [the pain] so I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked it as hard as I could, because he wanted to be put out. That didn’t work, so I hit him up by the head with a helmet and that didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly froze to death, he bled to death.”
Belgian civilians suffered terribly