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Bastogne, 1944 |
| Written by JS Brown | |
| Tuesday, 15 April 2008 | |
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Share it:      There had once been a time when I would have felt the need to uncover the faces and find out, and maybe even wonder how many of the Germans that were there fell to mine and Gertrude’s bullets, but that day was long since past. My unit, the 101st Airborne, had dropped all over the French coast the night before D-day in an attempt to raise havoc behind the lines and disrupt German communications and supply routes, but the deep thinkers back at Ops had screwed the pooch on the deployment and we’d been scattered all to hell and gone throughout the French countryside. It had taken some men weeks to find their way back to our unit, and some guys, some good guys, had simply vanished into the fog of war. The curiosity of a hill boy from Gatlinburg, Tennessee hadn’t survived the first day. You might say that the curiosity was the first casualty of war, but you damn well couldn’t say that it was the last. So here I sat, two days before Christmas, bogged down at the strategic crossroads in the town of Bastogne, Holland. What SHAEF (Strategic Headquarters, Allied European Forces) headquarters in Paris was calling this little party was the Battle of the Bulge, and we, the 101st Airborne Pathfinders, were calling it hell on earth. We’d marched in on December 18th to hold the town against Nazi armor, and almost immediately had been socked in by the weather, preventing any form of effective resupply by the Allied air forces. Ammo was running short—just ask Gertrude, right?—and we’d been low on supplies from the fighting we’d done in Holland. But God was watching out for us, as he almost always did, and we’d found a warehouse full of flour, so instead of the normal Army crap they fed us, they were feeding us hot flapjacks morning, noon, and night. That was okay the first couple of days, but after that you kinda got fed up with flapjacks, at least until you got hungry again. Damned shame we didn’t have an orchard of Maple trees in the town square, or what was left of it after the Kraut artillery got done, to make syrup with. All the same, I’d rather have had some air support, and some ammo. You may wonder why I could sit here in all these adverse conditions and think that God loves the 101st. We’re surrounded by several Panzer divisions, no one really knows how many, and some days the artillery coming in on our position is almost constant. We’ve got a handful of tanks and a little artillery support that can cover the whole of our front lines, 360 degrees of fire support that generally fires at the largest group we can locate wherever it happens to be without regard for who needs cover fire. When SHEAF asked Gen McAuliffe what our situation was, he radioed back “Do you know what the hole in a doughnut looks like?” When they radioed affirmative, he said “Well, that’s us.” Speaking of the general, word went through town yesterday that the German commander sent a really nice letter to him yesterday via a negotiating party waving a white flag asking for our forces immediate surrender, promises of good treatment, all that jazz. Do you know what McAuliffe’s reply to him was? “Nuts. Signed, The American Commander” He placed the German officers under protective custody and sent Col. Harper with the written reply to their surrender request to them, where a colorful little banter ensued as the haughty Germans, sure of the response, waited to negotiate our surrender. They demanded to know what the reply was, and Col Harper informed them that we would fight. He also informed them that “If you continue your foolish attack your losses will be tremendous.” The officers were placed in a jeep and rejoined their guard of German enlistees, where Harper took it upon himself to further enlighten the Germans. “If you Germans don’t know what ‘Nuts’ means, it’s the same thing as ‘Go to Hell’. And I’ll tell you something else. If you continue to attack, we’ll kill every goddamn German that tries to break into this city.” The Germans, very taken aback by the refusal to surrender, informed him “We will kill many Americans. This is war.” Harper, nonplussed, told him “On your way, bud. And good luck.” Hot damn. That’s why I think God loves the 101st. He gives us men like that, and plenty of Krauts to shoot. Every German you shoot is a day sooner that you get to go home, I say. But I’m not so callous as to keep count of my kills, like Bennet does. Nor do I pray and thank God for every Kraut that stumbles in front of my rifle like Shatner. I’m just glad to be fighting the good fight. I am, as the Germans would say, a Juden. A Jew. And the rumors of death camps turned out not to be rumors at all. So me and Gertrude are happy to be in the war, even if we don’t celebrate the killing. Also, God loves us because he keeps the snow coming. So long as the Germans are blind, they don’t know where to shoot. From our point of view, we can shoot anywhere. That’s the only benefit to being completely surrounded. I tugged the white sheet, a gift from a matronly lady in town when she saw our forces bedraggled condition as we arrived, around me tighter to hide my Army greens. None of us had winter uniforms. Hell, quite a few of us had walked right out of our boots, making do with rags around our feet instead. Some of us were wearing civilian coats given to us by the town’s residents, and more than a few of us were using captured German weapons. But I scrounged ammo like a madman, refusing to lay Gertrude aside. She’d been very good to me since D-Day. And I knew one thing for sure. We were going to hold this city, by the grace of God and by force of will. ***Author’s note: The siege of Bastogne lasted from the 18th of December until the 26th, at which point the skies cleared enough for resupply of the entrenched 101st, and General George S. Patton himself rolled into the area with a column of armor he had stripped from his own units after he heard Gen. McAuliffe’s reply to the German command. Patton, who had performed a miracle of logistics in rerouting his armor through more than a hundred miles of war-torn fighting and adverse conditions, claimed to have arrived “…just in time to save the 101st.” But none of the 101st ever agreed that they had needed to be saved. They had only wanted more ammunition. Copyright 2008 JS Brown |
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