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By Root 1166 0

at the hands of both sides. The Germans, during their brief reoccupation of liberated towns and villages, found time to execute scores of civilians either deemed guilty of resistance activity or, more often, murdered merely as examples to others. The savagery of some of Model’s men reflected a venom characteristic of 1944–45: if they themselves were doomed to lose the war and probably to die, they were bent upon depriving as many enemies as possible of the joys of survival and liberation. Allied bombing and shelling compounded civilians’ plight: in the small town of Houffalize, for instance, 192 people died, all but 8 of them from Allied bombing. Twenty-seven of the victims were younger than fifteen, and the survivors were left with ruins and destitution. Twenty inhabitants of the village of Sainlez near Bastogne were killed by bombardment that reduced every home to a shell; among them were eight members of one family named Didier: Joseph, forty-six; Marie-Angèle, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renée, thirteen; Lucille, eleven; Bernadette, nine; Lucien, eight; and Noël, six. Throughout the battle areas of Belgium and Luxembourg there was wholesale looting by Allied as well as German troops.

Model’s panzers were exultant in the wake of their early successes, while Allied commanders were stunned and appalled. German deployment of small numbers of English-speaking commandos in American uniforms, led by Otto Skorzeny, inspired an epidemic of “fifth-column fever” that prompted the Americans to execute every such disguised enemy soldier they captured. A New Year’s Day air assault on Allied airfields cost the Luftwaffe 300 aircraft to achieve the destruction of 156 American and British planes which were easily replaced. The raids further rattled Eisenhower’s commanders, but in truth the strategic predicament of the Anglo-American armies was never as bad as those in the eye of the storm at first convinced themselves. They had mass, while the Germans were desperately short of tanks, aircraft, fuel and quality manpower. Behind the formidable SS panzer divisions were infantry quite incapable of matching the driving aggression that had yielded so many Wehrmacht victories in 1940–41. The logistical difficulties of supplying the German spearheads through the defiles of the Ardennes were immense; within days, Model’s tanks were crippled by fuel shortages.

Sufficient American units offered stubborn resistance, especially at the vital shoulders of “the bulge,” to prevent the breakthrough from becoming a rout. American reserves, notably two airborne divisions, were rushed forward. One of Bradley’s soldiers watched survivors of the bitter fighting at Cheneux on 20–21 December pull back from the line. “The shattered remnants of the 1st Bn came straggling listlessly down the road, a terrible contrast to the happy battalion which had only two days before gone up the same road wisecracking and full of fight. They were bearded, red-eyed, covered with mud from head to foot, and staring blank-facedly straight to the front. No one spoke … They had written a page in history which few would ever know about … such was the confusion of places, units and deeds being churned around in the witch’s brew which was the present battle.”

For the Allies, powerful relief was at hand as reinforcements were fed into the line, while the German predicament worsened by the hour as American artillery delivered pulverising bombardments. “My sergeant and I jumped into a ditch,” wrote a SS senior NCO, Karl Leitner, about his own experience on 21 December. “After approximately ten minutes a shell hit to the right of us, probably in a tree. My sergeant must have been badly wounded in the lung—he just gasped, and after a short time died. I had taken a piece of shrapnel in my right hip. Then a shell exploded in a tree behind. A piece of shrapnel hit me in my left ankle, other fragments slashed my right foot and ankle. I pushed myself half under my dead comrade … Fragments from another shell hit me in the left upper arm.” It was several hours before Leitner was rescued and taken