By David H. Lippman
Snow and biting cold covered American foxholes in the Vosges and the Alsace plain as GI wristwatches ticked down the last hours of December 31, 1944, awaiting the German attack. In their positions, American soldiers peered northward toward German West Wall fortified positions, into heavy woods, or tried to catch some sleep. Nobody felt like celebrating the opening of 1945 on the thin American lines.
There was no reason to—hundreds of miles to the north, two German panzer armies were slugging it out in the Ardennes with American and British forces in the Battle of the Bulge. Now Lt. Gen. Jacob Devers’ U.S. 6th Army Group had been forced to stretch its lines west to cover those of the U.S. Third Army, which had been pulled off its offensive into the Saar to drive north to relieve the siege of Bastogne.
The 6th Army Group, consisting of two armies, had to take over. The French 1st Army dug in around the Colmar Pocket in Lorraine and the U.S. 7th Army, under Lt. Gen. Alexander “Sandy” Patch, was tasked with holding the Rhine River from Strasbourg to the German border and westward. That length was 64 kilometers along the Rhine and nearly 140 facing the Saar. Worse, Patch’s army was thin, overstretched, short of 9,000 replacements, lacking reserves, and at the bottom of supply priorities because of demands from the Bulge. Some of Patch’s men were wearing castoff British, Canadian, and even captured German winter coats.
Still worse, few of its troops were veterans—the 100th “Century” Infantry Division, a new outfit, was all draftees. The 70th Infantry Division had completed training only two months ago. Three American divisions had been sent into the line without their artillery and supporting vehicles, simply to hold the ground on the near side of the Rhine.
Patch’s best infantry divisions were the 36th Texas Division and the 45th Thunderbirds, which had fought through Sicily and Italy before invading Southern France in August and through the Rhone Valley, up to Alsace.
It was not all bleak for Patch, who had advantages in air supremacy, good intelligence, and the fact that his troops occupied some of the abandoned earthworks and fortifications of the legendary Maginot Line. The Germans had stripped much of its equipment, even cookstoves, after their 1940 victory, but they couldn’t remove the tunnels, tank traps and other defenses—or the heavy guns, which all faced Germany and were soon put to good use.
As 1944 came to a close, the big question was what would the Germans do? Adolf Hitler’s answer came on December 22, when he told his top commando, SS Col. Otto Skorzeny, “We are going to launch a new attack in the Alsace!”
The German assault would involve two forces, Army Group Oberrhein, commanded by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, wearing one of his many hats. He was an unsuccessful general, believing that this task purely consisted of reviewing troops and presenting medals. His army group was deployed from the Swiss border to Scheibenhard, where the French border diverged from the Rhine and the West Wall’s fortifications turned west and included the 19th Army in the Colmar Pocket. From there, Germany’s defenses were manned by Army Group G, under Gen. Hermann Balck, who would be replaced by Gen. Johannes Blaskowitz just before the offensive.
Hitler’s plan, codenamed “North Wind” (Nordwind), called for a three-pincer assault on the exposed bulge of the 7th Army. The German 1st Army, under Gen. Hans von Obstfelder, would attack on the German right. This army was organized into three corps—the 13th SS, the 82nd, and the 90th, comprising nine divisions. The 13th SS Corps included two of the supposedly toughest divisions in the German inventory: the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Gotz von Berlichingen and the 6th SS Mountain Division, transferred from Finland when that nation left the war. The 6th Division’s men were young and fit, unlike the Wehrmacht units alongside them, but it had long been led by ill-trained party activists, with commanding officers reporting drunk. Even so, Keith Bonn, an American historian of the Vosges campaign, wrote that it was “undoubtedly the best German infantry formation on the entire western front in early January 1945.” Col. Felix Sparks, an officer in the 45th, said the 6th SS were “the best men we ever ran into, extremely aggressive, and impossible to capture. There was no driving them out, for they fought until they were killed.”
Named for a German robber baron from the Middle Ages, the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division was also a mess. It was formed in France and consisted of Germans, Romanians, and renegade Belgians. Most of them were killed at St. Lo, and replacements were marginal. The division’s chief abilities were torturing and murdering both French civilians and captured American military medical personnel. Flung into battle at Metz, it was mauled again. The division’s elitism and equipment were gone. The 29-year-old division commander, SS Col. Hans Lingner, was considered incompetent by his superiors.
But behind this questionable force were three tough divisions that had endured years of war: the 11th and 21st Panzer, and the 25th Panzergrenadier. The 21st had faced the British on D-Day, stopping them from reaching Caen. However, like every German division in the war by this point, they were short of ammunition, guns, fuel, and replacements.
The Germans considered three approach routes for Nordwind—through open country to the west of the Vosges Mountains; through the American salient at the Lauter River; and straight down through the lower Vosges. Obstfelder recommended that his troops attack straight down the lower Vosges Mountains, from Bitche to Saverne. Very few American forces held that area, and some of those Maginot positions were in German hands, reducing risks. It was a southern version of the Bulge offensive.
But Hitler wasn’t sold. For all his faults as a military leader, he had been an infantryman, and he did not believe his mechanized troops could drive down the backbone of a range of mountains and forests. He ordered a major effort west of the Vosges by the 13th SS Corps and the main attack east of the Vosges by the panzer forces.
Deployed against this were two American corps: Maj. Gen. Wade Haislip’s 15th west of the Vosges, with the 44th, 100th Infantry, Task Force Harris, and 12th Armored Divisions, the latter in reserve, as well as a combat command—the equivalent of a brigade group—of the French 2nd Armored Division, the strongest outfit in the Free French Army. Well-equipped, motivated, and trained, the 2nd Armored enjoyed the dynamic leadership of Gen. Philippe Leclerc, one of the earliest officers to join Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces in 1940. He and his men preferred operating with the Americans rather than their countrymen, as the French 1st Army was largely made up of French forces that had supported Vichy from 1940 to 1942 and then the Allies. In French army barracks and officers’ messes, there was a great deal of tension between Gaullists and former Pétainists.
Though the 44th and 100th lacked combat experience—75 and 47 days, respectively—they were far better trained and equipped than their German opposition.
On the right, Maj. Gen. Albert Brooks’ 6th Corps covered the vast tract of land from the high Vosges to the Rhine River. The 36th and 45th Infantry Divisions were dug in on the Franco-German border, with a motley group of tanks and armored cars called Task Force Hudelson, after its CO, Colonel D.H. Hudelson, assigned to cover the high Vosges forests, hills, and mountains.
The German plan was solid, but their troops were short on supplies, worn out, and could not train for or rehearse the attack—or even reconnoiter the American positions, for fear that Allied air supremacy would spot their deployments.
It didn’t matter. The Americans knew the Germans were coming. After the crushing intelligence failure that opened the Battle of the Bulge, American reconnaissance planes, British radio-intercept teams, and Bletchley Park codebreakers were reading German Enigma messages to determine Hitler’s intentions. It was clear that the Germans were going to attack in the first hours of the New Year. Patch summoned his commanders on New Year’s Eve to inform them and forbid any celebrations for the 7th Army. He did not want the Germans attacking hung-over troops.
On December 26, Allied supreme commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower summoned Devers to his Paris headquarters to discuss how the 6th Army Group would face the impending attack. Eisenhower was more concerned about losing casualties and wasting valuable supplies than holding ground. The Alsace salient was a burden on his overstretched lines. He told Devers to be prepared to withdraw. Back at his headquarters, Devers ordered Patch to be ready to fall back as far as the Moder River, and, if necessary, yield Strasbourg.
Devers was not happy with the decisions, particularly the last one—he had strong faith in his men. Furthermore, holding Strasbourg was a major humanitarian and political issue. The city was sacred to France for being taken by Prussia in 1870. The lost Alsace-Lorraine had dominated French military and political thinking since then and through the Great War. One of France’s great children’s stories, taught in every classroom, was “The Last Lesson,” in which a teacher in Strasbourg delivers his final class in French before having to yield his post and the school to the Prussians in the morning.
Now 150,000 Frenchmen—many Alsatians of wavering views—lived in Strasbourg. Ceding the city could lead to bloodshed on a massive scale as Nazis and their sympathizers attacked de Gaulle followers.
He was a major problem, too. As head of the new French state, de Gaulle was concerned about the fate of his citizens. In addition, if Strasbourg were yielded to the Nazis without a fight, it would be a major loss of prestige for his government. He might lose power to his communist rivals, who made up the backbone of the French resistance, despite his efforts to rein it in.
Both Devers and de Gaulle appealed to Eisenhower to keep troops in Alsace and Strasbourg ahead of New Year’s Eve, but got no answer before 11 p.m. on December 31—when German artillery in the West Wall opened fire on American positions as Nordwind began under a bright moon. German Nebelwerfer (“Fog Throwers”)—“Screaming Meemies” to the Americans—rocket launchers lit up the sky with their short-range missiles. German infantry stormed American positions, yelling “Heil Hitler! Down with Roosevelt!” A GI on the receiving end of this verbal assault said, “It sounded like a Republican Convention.”
First hit was Task Force Hudelson, the “seam” between the 15th and 6th Corps. The Americans often had difficulty assembling ad hoc task forces during the war, and this was just such an example—it consisted mostly of armored cars and light tanks from 12th Armored Division and was unable to maneuver off-road. Still, they were dug in with machine guns, trip-flares, and minefields.
Four German Volksgrenadier divisions started the action by probing and finding holes in the thin American line. In their white snowsuits, the German attackers poured through the holes, yelling “Hold your fire!” in English. The Americans did, thinking the snowsuit-covered apparitions were fellow dogfaces or surrendering Germans, until the Volksgrenadiers opened fire. The Americans fought back—even cooks and clerks grabbed rifles and went into the line—but couldn’t hold. The Americans started running out of ammunition and fled in small groups, leaving their vehicles behind in varying states of effectiveness. By dawn, Task Force Hudelson had ceased to exist as a fighting force.
As they retreated, they also discovered that numbers of the Alsatian population, being German, were hostile. A French woman who had been friendly to the Americans up to this point opened fire on the fleeing GIs with a rifle. The Americans cut her to pieces with a .50-caliber machine gun.
On the extreme American left, the 36th Volksgrenadiers and the 17th SS Division attacked the New York and New Jersey National Guardsmen of the 44th Infantry. SS troops—some of them drunk or high on Benzedrine—yelled “Die Yankee bastards!” and “Come and fight, Yankee gangsters!” as they attacked. The 44th held its ground as night turned to day. The American 749th Tank Battalion joined in counter attacks, scything through the Volksgrenadiers. The Germans hit back with some troops from the 17th SS Panzergrenadiers, but they proved as incompetent as ever. German dead piled up below American positions on the high ground. GIs called the area beneath them “Morgue Valley.”
Amid the night fighting, Sergeant Charles A. MacGillivary, a Canadian-born guardsman who lived in Boston, led a squad of infantry of the 71st Regiment of the 44th to meet the German attack and displayed extraordinary courage against the enemy. He received the Medal of Honor from President Harry Truman on August 23, 1945, at the White House, returned to Massachusetts, died in 2000, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Other defenders proved equally ferocious. Private Leon Outlaw cut down more than 100 attackers with his .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun.
On the right flank, the 6th Corps faced a German advance over the Alsace plain with fewer troops, holding a long line. Brooks reacted to the Nazi attacks swiftly. He had two task forces, Linden and Herren, keeping watch on the Rhine. These two task forces were the infantry components of the 42nd and 70th Infantry Divisions, respectively, which meant they lacked their divisions’ supporting artillery, armor, and engineers. Their infantry had not seen battle, either. But they were trained, equipped, and available. Brooks appreciated from intelligence and weather conditions that the Germans on the east side of the Rhine were in no shape to mount any kind of major crossing, so he pulled the two task forces out of their mission and sent them north to reinforce the battered divisions 45th and 79th.
In the 45th Division, Brooks had one of the best in the Army; the “Thunderbirds” of Texas and New Mexico had fought with valor in Sicily and Italy. The 45th Division’s CO, Maj. Gen. Robert T. Frederick, one of the Army’s youngest, had previously commanded the legendary “Black Devils,” the U.S.-Canadian 1st Special Service Force, leading it from the front. Maneuvering his men dexterously, Frederick and the understrength 45th held off German attacks. The Germans facing them were poorly briefed and not well trained—a bad combination for an offensive.
Frederick moved with his usual alacrity as he shifted the 179th Infantry Regiment from his far right to his left flank and put the 36th Combat Engineers in on the right, along with two battalions from the 79th. German troops from the 90th Corps’ 257th Volksgrenadier Division attacked into the many villages and towns on the Alsace plain, and house-to-house fighting raged all day along a 12-mile curving line. German pressure was heavy—Frederick ordered two regiments to pull back to a new line of resistance in the Maginot fortifications.
Word of this fresh German attack landed on Eisenhower’s desk in Paris along with a great deal of other bad news that morning. The Battle of the Bulge was continuing, supplies were short, and the Luftwaffe had launched a massive dawn aerial assault on Allied air bases in Belgium and Holland, destroying 134 Allied aircraft for a loss of 220. Eisenhower’s offer of a pardon to GIs convicted of murder and rape if they emerged from stockades to fill manpower gaps in rifle companies had gone mostly ignored.
Now Devers’ troops were ignoring his plan to withdraw. Eisenhower sent Devers a hard message, insisting that Patch pull back as far as possible. Sixth Corps was not to be caught on the Alsatian plain and destroyed—if necessary, they were to pull back as far as the Moder River. But Eisenhower did release the 12th and 14th Armored and the 36th Infantry divisions from his reserves.
To make matters worse, de Gaulle demanded that Eisenhower personally guarantee the defense of Strasbourg. De Gaulle sent Marshal Alphonse Juin, head of the Forces Francaise Interieur, which commanded the Resistance, to meet with Eisenhower ’s chief of staff, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. They met on January 2 and the discussion did not go well. As tempers rose, Juin threatened to take the French 1st Army out of the Allied command and order it to hold Strasbourg on its own.
Smith roared back at this insubordination, shouting, “The French 1st Army will not get a single further round of ammunition or a gallon of gasoline!”
“In that case, General de Gaulle will forbid American forces the use of French railways and communications,” Juin retorted.
Smith backed down, but the battle between allies was not over.
Nor was the battle on the Alsatian front. The gap created by the collapse of Task Force Hudelson allowed German troops to pour through it on January 1 and 2, threatening to cut off the 100th Infantry on their right and the 45th Division on their left. The 44th rallied, counterattacked, and then retreated again.
Determined to hold his ground, Haislip sent in his reserve, the French 2nd Armored Combat Command L, whose Sherman tanks and mechanized infantry stemmed the German attack. The Nazis tried to split the seam between the 44th and 100th Divisions, using captured Sherman tanks to fool the Americans. But as weather improved west of the Vosges, American air power made its presence felt, blasting open German positions, troop concentrations, and supply columns.
The German 1st Army’s assistant chief operations officer, Colonel Albert Emmerich, reported on the 13th SS Corps’ attack harshly, saying that it had “under incompetent leadership, in the meantime been completely dispersed … Probably because of the insufficient training of the volks artillery corps, the coordination between the attacking infantry and the supporting artillery was only rarely achieved, so that the artillery support, which was actually strong, did not show its effectiveness either.”
The assault west of the Vosges was called off on January 4, but harsh fighting continued there. On the night of January 8, Tech. Sgt. Charles Carey, an Oklahoma native in the 397th Infantry Regiment, 100th Infantry Division, gave his life defending against 200 German infantrymen and a dozen tanks. He received a posthumous Medal of Honor and is buried in the American cemetery in Neuville-en-Condroz, Belgium.
But in the 6th Corps sector, a bitter struggle and retreat was the order of the day. Patch and Brooks struggled to disentangle the 45th, 79th, and 70th Infantry Divisions (Task Force Herren) on narrow Alsatian roads jammed with fleeing refugees. Brooks moved Herren to plug up the eastern exits from the Vosges, with Frederick in overall command. In the center, two regiments of the 45th and one of the 79th dug in to face the German second wave.
Patch made another important move—he pulled the 103rd Infantry Division out from his left flank and to the right flank of Haislip’s command to relieve Task Force Herren, which was running out of men. The 103rd was a fairly new division, but it had superb leadership in Brig. Gen. Anthony McCauliffe, who had led the 101st Airborne Division in its stand at Bastogne. Command of the 103rd was the quiet paratrooper’s reward. The 103rd dug in and held the line.
Fierce fighting raged at Phillipsbourg, where the 12th “Hellcats” Armored Division had been released from SHAEF’s reserve to face the German onslaught. Among them was a Los Angelino Pfc. named George B. Turner of the 499th Armored Field Artillery, who survived a harrowing overnight ordeal after covering the retreat of several soldiers forced to abandon damaged armored vehicles and suffering a serious wound. Turner received the Medal of Honor on August 23, 1945. He died in 1963, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
On January 3, General de Vigier, the French military governor of Strasbourg, sent an impassioned plea to Patch’s headquarters at Lunéville imploring 7th Army not to abandon the city. While Patch digested this message, Devers turned up and ordered Strasbourg evacuated regardless of any political pressure to hold the city.
Meanwhile, de Gaulle himself took his protests to Eisenhower, admitting that the military plan made sense, but the loss of Strasbourg would be a political disaster for France. With Winston Churchill present as both witness and potential mediator, de Gaulle presented Eisenhower with a letter threatening to use the French Army to independently defend the city if necessary.
A great military politician, Eisenhower told de Gaulle that he would modify his orders to ensure that Strasbourg would be defended. But he would not tolerate French insubordination to the Allied command. If de Gaulle removed his troops from Eisenhower ’s command, the French would not get a single bullet or gallon of gas from his depots. De Gaulle agreed. Studying his maps, de Gaulle ordered the French 1st Army to send the 3rd Algerian Division, a veteran but understrength outfit—like most of the units fighting in Alsace-Lorraine—to Strasbourg with orders to hold the city. Meanwhile, Eisenhower ordered Devers to limit Brooks’ withdrawal to a point north of Strasbourg. Then Churchill and the two generals had dinner.
Meanwhile, Frederick fought grim battles in small towns with names that his Thunderbirds would never forget, as they and their buddies would take heavy casualties struggling to knock out German assault guns and defeat Volksgrenadier and 6th SS attacks. Frederick moved more troops to his left to face both the SS men and the 361st Volksgrenadier Division, whose 951st Volksgrenadier Regiment was facing his troops. The two forces collided head-on, and the Germans were repulsed at every point, leaving the 12th SS Mountain Regiment at Wingen-sur-Moder surrounded. With a fanaticism born of both desperation and being SS, a number of the trapped German troops were able to fight their way out.
On January 4, the 275th Regiment’s 1st Battalion (70th Infantry Division) attacked Phillipsbourg, backed by heavy artillery fire. The regiment’s executive officer, Lt. Col. John T. Malloy found 75 men and some tanks clinging to the edge of town, ready to withdraw, but rallied them.
The struggle for Philipsburg continued on the 5th, with American artillery and armor making its presence felt. The SS defenders were forced to withdraw.
Yet German hopes remained high. With reports from Himmler that American defenders were thinning out at Strasbourg, the Nazi high command committed the 21st Panzer and 25th Panzergrenadier on the night of the January 5 to cross the Rhine and be ready to attack across the Alsatian plain, under the command of the 39th Panzer Corps. Eisenhower considered this the most dangerous move the Germans could make in Alsace.
The same day, Himmler hurled his Army Group Oberrhein into the attack from the Colmar Pocket, with SS Gen. Otto von dem Bach-Zelewski’s 14th SS Corps leading the way in by crossing the Rhine River against light American opposition. Bach-Zelewski was Hitler’s “model anti-partisan fighter,” having crushed the Warsaw Uprising in August. Two days later, Operation Sonnenwende (“Winter Solstice”) got underway with the German 64th Corps attacking north to Strasbourg. The attacks meant that Patch could not gain any relief from his French troops in the south.
Devers now faced attacks on his right and left, with only his stretched-out 7th Army. Fortunately, he had Ultra intelligence reports providing him with up-to-date information on German strength and movements, enabling him to spot his forces. To the 79th Infantry Division, under Maj.-Gen. Ira Wyche, he assigned Task Force Linden and moved them to the road from Weyersheim to Gambsheim. The 79th was named the “Cross of Lorraine” Division from its previous incarnation in World War I, having won battles there.
Brooks told Wyche, “Get in there and get it cleaned up, it’s got to be cleaned up pronto! We can’t let them get in there!” Wyche attacked at 3:45 p.m. straight into the Germans and became bogged down in darkness and machine-gun fire. Soon Wyche’s attack was completely stalled.
Frederick assigned Colonel Malloy to set matters straight. He found tank commanders refusing to advance. Malloy whipped out his .45 and ordered them to do so at gunpoint. Then Malloy personally took charge of the attack, with one of his lieutenants firing a light machine gun from the hip, like a pistol. “Who is that crazy guy?” Malloy yelled. “Let’s get him a medal!”
Malloy’s ferocity worked, although he took a wound in the shoulder, then in the leg. Medics took Malloy out of the battle, but he had won the point and the day.
Meanwhile, the Germans had cut holes in the snowy American lines and brought their armored units into play. First up was the 21st Panzer Division, one of Germany’s most unusual such outfits. The original 21st Panzer Division had fought in North Africa and been destroyed there. Its number was given to a new panzer division formed in France to face the Allied invasion in 1944. Many of its vehicles were war booty. On D-Day the division’s CO, Lt. Gen. Edgar Feuchtinger, was in Paris with his mistress, a French actress. Lacking leadership, the division responded sluggishly and was unable to break through to the British beaches. Feuchtinger’s superiors demanded to know why the top panzer commander had failed his most important job. Feuchtinger admitted to being an opportunist Nazi who had planned major Party rallies before the war, not generalship. He claimed his only maps of France were from the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.
Feuchtinger’s superiors didn’t believe that one, and on January 5, 1945, they arrested the general for deserting his post on D-Day, which—along with misappropriation of Wehrmacht funds and giving secrets to his new South American mistress—resulted in 21st Panzer being unable to attack. Feuchtinger was sentenced to death at court-martial and stripped of all his medals, but Hitler intervened, busting the general to artillery private and sending him to the 20th Panzergrenadier Division on the Eastern Front. Feuchtinger deserted instead and survived the war.
The effect of this high-level court-martial was also to delay 21st Panzer’s assault until January 7, when it attacked Task Force Linden, which was reinforced by the 12th Armored Division. The Americans also held Maginot Line strongpoints. Facing fixed defenses, mobile Sherman tanks, well-placed mines, as well as a heavy mist, the German attack stalled.
By January 8, the 553rd Volksgrenadier Division, the cutting edge of the otherwise weak 14th SS Corps, had fought its way across the Rhine to the town of Herrlisheim, cutting the north-south road. It was now reinforced by one of the tougher SS outfits, the 10th SS “Hohenstaufen” Panzer Division, which had fought in Normandy and Holland, but not the Bulge. The Americans mustered two task forces from the 12th and 14th Armored Divisions to tear apart the bridgehead. In what became known as “Purple Heart Lane,” a wild battle ensued, as the Americans did not expect to find SS men. The Americans fought their way into Herrlisheim, and on the following day the 12th Armored’s Combat Command B (CCB) stormed in, using tanks to provide fire support for infantry. They didn’t find SS troops, but the 553rd Volksgrenadiers proved tough enough.
American radio communications then broke down and several of the Sherman tanks milling about outside the town were eviscerated by German 88mm guns. When dusk fell, the GIs withdrew, though harsh fighting continued in the town for four days.
The German assault in the Alsace Plain continued on January 7, with 21st Panzer and 25th Panzergrenadier trying again. Blaskowitz was unhappy with two elite panzer divisions failing to break through slapped-together American task forces and made his displeasure known by personally visiting the 21st Panzer’s tactical HQ, where he warned the 39th Panzer Corps’ CO, Gen. Karl Decker, and the 21st’s acting CO, Lt. Col. Hans von Luck, that Feuchtinger’s cell at Torgau prison had two empty cots.
The two German senior officers in turn pointed out that the American opponents, a portion of the famed 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division (still Task Force Linden), were holding a portion of the Maginot Line with heavy artillery and tank support. Just to make things worse, von Luck had no up-to-date maps of the battle area. Neither Blaskowitz nor Decker could help von Luck—they didn’t have good maps, either.
But Decker and von Luck attacked with ample determination on the 9th, driving on the 242nd Infantry Regiment’s 1st Battalion at Hatten. The 25th Panzergrenadier led the way with its tough infantrymen infiltrating around pillboxes. The Americans stabilized the situation with mortar fire, but the Germans hit back with flamethrower tanks. That forced one American bunker to surrender, and most of Company B was overrun. The 1st Battalion’s CO told his company commanders to let the tanks pass but kill the German infantrymen.
Three German tanks approached 1st Battalion’s command post, but the leading Panther was stopped by mines. The other two, unable to advance, hurled shells at the CP.
Captain Herr of the 21st led an assault group of engineers and 12 Panther tanks against an American bunker and forced its surrender, blasting three Sherman tanks and taking many prisoners. The Americans treated the Germans to a heavy artillery barrage that forced them to withdraw.
With the support of 20 fresh assault guns from Germany, Herr tried again, on a cold snowy night. Neither he nor his men could see the GIs in the moonless dark. German soldiers aged 16 and 17 struggled toward a silent bunker. There was no incoming fire, so a German NCO simply banged on the door. It opened slowly, enabling the Germans to take the GIs prisoner. But the noise alerted the other bunker crews, who opened fire on the attackers, joined by heavy artillery, stalling further German advance. The Nazis kept trying, with the 25th Panzergrenadiers joining in, to little avail.
Another German attack, led by more than 25 tanks, enveloped the town and reached the area south of Rittershoffen. The Americans sent in the 14th Armored Division’s 48th Tank Battalion to stop the German assault.
The American fire was effective—in five minutes all the panzers were smoking hulks.
Inside Hatten, German “Landsers” and GIs shot it out in bitter house-to-house fighting. Master Sergeant Vito Bertoldo, of A Company of the 242nd Infantry Regiment, and Macon, Illinois, proved exceptionally courageous.
“He fought with extreme gallantry while guarding two command posts against the assault of powerful infantry and armored forces which had overrun the battalion’s main line of resistance,” his Medal of Honor citation read. He received his Medal of Honor on December 18, 1945, died in California in 1966, and is buried in Golden Gate Cemetery in San Bruno, California.
The 242nd Infantry and the 48th Tank Battalions broke the German momentum, and the Americans counterattacked in the dark—not a standard GI practice—using the burning wreckage of German vehicles to light their way. The American assault was joined by a new outfit, the 827th Tank Destroyer Battalion, consisting of speedy M18 Hellcats. The 827th was an all-black outfit with white officers and African American enlisted men. Unlike the sharper 761st Tank Battalion, this unit performed with overall mixed results due to poor communication, training, and leadership. But at Rittershoffen, they had good moments. Attacked by 16 German tanks, the 827th destroyed 11 of the enemy, with the remainder withdrawing. Lt. Robert Jones personally spotted for his gunners under heavy fire, which helped another one, Sgt. Harry Johnson, get the first draw on an approaching Tiger tank, forcing the Germans to withdraw.
Back at Herrlisheim, the 56th Armored Infantry Battalion and the 714th Tank Battalion attacked the village, suffering 50 percent casualties to German mortars and concealed tanks. The battle turned into another house-to-house action, with German troops in white capes marking their targets with tracer fire and then blasting the building with antitank guns or hand-held Panzerfaust rocket launchers. In some buildings, the Germans would hold the first and second floors while attacking Americans would slip into the cellar and charge the Germans from behind, wielding flamethrowers.
As January 9 closed, Blaskowitz messaged Hitler that his shortage of infantry, American air superiority, and their ability to withstand the attack was grinding Nordwind to a halt. All that was left was continuing the attack in the Alsace Plain purely to tie up American troops. Hitler dismissed the reports as “pessimistic.”
On January 10, the Hatten battle intensified, when the 2nd/315th moved into town, and soon came under crossfire from both friendly and enemy tanks. The American infantry faced a dozen German panzers and had to man a crippled M-10 tank destroyer, using it as a “scarecrow” to fend off German attacks. The 827th Tank Destroyers moved in to reinforce the 2nd/315th.
The Germans maintained their determination. Major Spreu led a team of combat engineers to attack American bunkers, snapping barbed wire and hurling hand grenades into the ports. The assault succeeded as five officers and 117 enlisted men emerged under a white flag. Spreu made that bunker his HQ, but was wounded the next day and sent back to Germany. He was awarded a Knight’s Cross.
The American counter attacks continued on the 10th. At Herrlisheim, GI engineers built a Bailey Bridge over the Zorn River, enabling the 714th Tank Battalion to drive into the town in the predawn darkness. Captain Leehman didn’t know where he was, so he drove through empty streets, closed in on a panzer, and blasted it open at point-blank range. After that, he met a GI who pointed out where the main American command post was. Leehman reported that his men couldn’t hold. His superiors disagreed, but the Germans forced them back.
January 11 saw German artillery blasting into Hatten and panzergrenadiers attacking into Rittershoffen through snow and mist in a pincer attack. Fifteen panzers headed to the southwest corner of town. The seemingly ubiquitous 827th Tank Destroyer Battalion sent four M-18s to address this menace, and Sergeant Spencer Irving saw some GIs dug in, awaiting the armored assault.
“How do you want them,” Irving yelled, “one-two-three, or three-two-one? I think I’ll take them one-two-three!” Irving’s gunner did so, and the infantrymen shot down the escaping German crews.
The 14th Armored’s Combat Command A (CCA) attacked to relieve the defenders of Hatten and was stopped 400 yards from their objective. Their mechanized infantry got into town, enabling the survivors of 1st/242nd to withdraw. The battalion had gone into battle with 781 officers and men. Some 264 GIs emerged. One 14th Armored man, a veteran of Italy captured by the Germans, told his interrogators, “This is the bloodiest battle we’ve ever fought, worse than the legendary battle of Anzio.”
CCA tried again on January 12 and reached northern Rittershoffen to find the Germans defending a cemetery in the southeast corner of town. CCA organized teams of eight infantry and one tank to operate in the town, with GIs hurling hand grenades and tanks blasting open buildings. “The tanks inched ponderously a few yards down the street, heavy cannon searching out machine-gun nests (and) enemy strong-points,” a divisional history read. “The infantrymen moved along with them, running, dodging from building to building, throwing grenades in the cellar windows, going through each small (house) room by room, rifles at the ready, hand grenades ready; the artillery and mortar fire screamed into the street and exploded the roofs, and the German machine-gun fire swept the street in quick, nasty blasts.”
Combat Command B moved in at 11:15 a.m and lost two tanks immediately. Unable to advance further, CCB remained in place for a week.
The Germans reinforced Rittershoffen with mobile antiaircraft guns, flamethrowers, and more panzers. The 14th Armored sent in its third and last outfit, Combat Command R, which finally regained the wrecked town by the 15th. More than 100 civilians were killed in the fighting.
Now 14th Armored faced the full weight of 39th Panzer Corps’ two tracked divisions and new reinforcements, the 7th Parachute Division. While not jump-trained, the German paratroopers were still a formidable force, highly skilled on offense as well as defense. They were among the first combat units equipped with assault rifles, giving them extra punch. They wore dark uniforms that made them look like demonic shadows.
CCB’s 19th Armored Infantry Battalion counterattacked along with two tanks from 47th Tank Battalion. The GIs moved through the main street’s rubble amid supporting fire, which added noise and smoke to the mist. A German tank appeared, and the Americans slammed two 75mm rounds into its engine compartment and turret, knocking it out of action. Unfortunately, the second American tank saw the first one silhouetted against a burning building, and its crew drew the wrong conclusion, blasting it in a case of “friendly fire.”
The Americans committed four more tanks to the attack and treated the Germans to 75mm and machine-gun fire. The Germans fired back with Panzerfausts. After five hours, the Americans held half of Rittershoffen.
The Germans got the point. They pulled out the panzers and replaced them with the 47th Volksgrenadiers on January 16, trying to find another area where their tanks could punch through. Two months after the Alsace battle was over, American battlefield surveyors found the hulks of 31 M-4 Sherman tanks and nine M-5 light tanks strewn across the ground along with 16 panzers and 8 self-propelled guns.
On the salient’s eastern shoulder, the 45th Division had fought the Germans to a standstill, and Frederick attacked on the 11th, seeking to clear a valley between Baerenthal and Monterhouse. The 3rd/157th drove a salient into the German lines, but the 6th SS Mountain Division, used to snow and difficult terrain, enveloped the battalion, trapping it and destroying it piecemeal. Only two GIs were able to escape the pocket.
It was increasingly clear to Devers, Patch, and Brooks that with shortages of everything from replacements to ammunition, combined with troops becoming exhausted from fighting and snow, 7th Army had to give some ground. The best thing to do was pull back to the Moder River, as originally planned, which would shorten up the American lines but not yield Strasbourg.
But the Americans still had to clean up the west bank of the Rhine, and the 12th Armored attacked on January 16 across the Zorn River amid snow and bitter cold. CCB was ordered to head southeastward to link up with CCA in Herrlisheim, defended by the 553rd Volksgrenadiers. German anti-tank guns cut down a dozen tanks of CCA’s 43rd Tank Battalion, slowing the American assault.
Meanwhile, the German 39th Panzer Corps continued its big drive down the west bank of the Rhine, pursuing the Americans and seeking to hook up with the 553rd before it was annihilated.
Before the attack, a junior officer from Blaskowitz’s HQ briefed von Luck on the latest big plan, finishing with, “It will interest you to know that Himmler has been entrusted with the high command of Rhine-sector south. Hitler himself, moreover, has ordered the new attack south of the Haguenau forest. Nothing more can now go wrong, Lieutenant Colonel.”
Von Luck responded to the lieutenant’s fatuous statement in the only manner that seemed appropriate to him and his unshaven, weary, freezing staff—even though what he said was a death-penalty offense: “Very well, then, let us rely on Himmler and his ‘war experience.’”
The panzer troops slammed into Task Force Linden’s 232nd Infantry Regiment, defending a line from Sessenheim to the river, on the 17th. The SS 10th Panzer Division captured three towns, and Brooks attached two battalions and some light tanks to the defense.
Back at Herrlisheim, the Americans beefed up the 43rd Tank Battalion with the 17th Armored Infantry Battalion, battling past anti-tank guns. Lt. Col. Nicholas Novosel led his tanks over a railroad track near the town’s station and found a 10th SS Panzer assault gun, several anti-tank guns, and a number of infantrymen defending the area. The Germans counterattacked immediately, and a wild battle ensued. German infantrymen with Panzerfausts stalked American Shermans through the town’s railyard. “Things are very hot,” Novosel reported in his last message. He was hit shortly afterward and recalled nothing until he woke up in a German military hospital.
Under heavy fire, the 43rd withdrew. American air reconnaissance found 14 wrecked tanks lying on the battlefield. A March survey counted 27 blasted tanks from the 43rd scattered in the area. Meanwhile, another prong drove on Herrlisheim. At dusk, American tanks pulled back to the south edge of town. The SS attacked the 17th Armored Infantry Battalion and crushed it, even capturing 15 intact Sherman tanks.
Early on the 18th, the Germans finally connected their main advance with the Gambsheim pocket. SS troops seized the bridge over the Landgraben Canal on the Weyersheim-Gambsheim road and crossed the Zorn River. The Americans hit back with their favorite weapon—massive artillery fire—and knocked out eight advancing tanks to stop the drive.
The 12th Armored had lost 1,200 men and 70 vehicles and needed a break. Patch sent in the 36th Infantry Division to relieve them. The 12th Armored ultimately moved south to recuperate and assist the French 1st Army. Devers saw that Task Forces Linden and Herren also needed a break. He moved the 103rd Infantry Division to the Herrlisheim area to face the three Nazi armored divisions.
Sixth Corps withdrew on the night of January 20-21. On the morning of the 21st, von Luck arose to find the Americans gone, his casualties heavy, his men filthy and exhausted, and the battlefield filled with the ugly detritus of war. Rittershoffen villagers emerged from hiding, seeking permission to bury their dead. “We are so very sorry about your lovely village,” von Luck replied. “This damn war! For you it is now at an end.”
With that, von Luck led his men to the portion of the village church that was still undamaged, finding a ruined altar and an intact organ. Von Luck asked one of his men to man the bellows, and the colonel started playing an old German hymn, “Now Thank We All Our God.” The sound of the organ echoed through the quiet village, and German troops and villagers entered the battered church, faced the organ, sang the hymn, and prayed.
The 14th Armored Division screened the 79th Infantry Division’s move while smaller infantry units blew bridges behind them. The new line, going east to west, ran north along the Zorn from just west of Gambsheim to its confluence with the Moder at Rohrwiller, west along the Moder to Pfaffenhoffen, then northwest, along the Rothbach River.
The French 3rd Algerian Division took over the defense of the Rhine and the Zorn south of Gambsheim. Everything else was held by the 6th Corps.
The Germans attacked the 6th Corps on the night of January 24-25 with six divisions, driving on the open ground southwest of the Haguenau Forest. Nazi tanks and infantry aggressively probed 103rd Infantry defenses and established a small bridgehead at Rothbach. That enabled the 6th SS Mountain Division to attack there and break through positions of the 410th Infantry Regiment. The Americans counterattacked on the 26th and cut the SS force’s supply line. Lacking bullets, gasoline, and hot chow, the SS couldn’t put up much of a fight. The 103rd cleared them out by January 27.
Between Neuborg and Schweighausen, the 47th Volksgrenadier, the 25th Panzergrenadier, and the 7th Parachute Division hit Task Force Linden’s 222nd Infantry Regiment, driving the GI outpost line south of the river on January 23, plastering the main American line with heavy artillery the next day.
At 8 p.m. on the 24th, German infantry attacked out of the gathering darkness from the woods west of Schweighausen, a town on the Moder’s south bank. The Germans surrounded 2nd/222nd’s Company F, which fought until they ran out of ammunition. Two officers and 30 GIs escaped the slaughter.
Early on the 25th, 1st/222nd’s B Company counterattacked the Germans in the woods. They failed to eject the Germans, but they contained the German bridgehead.
Wyche reestablished Task Force Linden and brought in 14th Armored’s CCB to hit the Germans at 7:30 a.m. on January 26. The GIs advanced to find that the Germans had withdrawn across the Moder River during the night.
The Nazis created another bridgehead over the Moder on the 25th, rowing across in small rubber rafts at 1 a.m. They moved forward 500 yards in the dark before meeting determined American resistance from the 242nd Infantry Regiment. The attack stalled, and two battalions of the 242nd counterattacked early in the afternoon and eliminated the bridgehead by 5 p.m.
The German attack across the Moder River had completely failed, and even Hitler had to recognize that Nordwind had become a disaster, doing so on the 25th, ordering the offensive halted after the last attacks. The offensive had failed to gain Strasbourg, failed to cut off the 6th Army Group, and failed to draw in American reserves from the equally failing Ardennes offensive. All that could be shown for it were 25,000 German casualties; the Americans had suffered about 15,000.
Just to make the offensive even more pointless, while four German armored divisions, a mountain division, and a parachute division were expending themselves fruitlessly in Alsace, and as the Anglo-Americans were grinding down the Germans in the Ardennes, the Soviet Union unleashed a massive offensive on January 12, its greatest of the war. In a week, the Red Army was within 100 miles of Berlin.
Hitler had no choice. He began withdrawing his panzer troops to face the Eastern hegira, leaving behind Volksgrenadiers and their Panzerfausts to prevent an American 7th Army drive into the recaptured area. Having dismissed Blaskowitz’s earlier messages as “pessimistic,” he dismissed Blaskowitz on January 27, in a shuffle of generals that sent him to command the defense of the Netherlands.
The 7th Army needed to shorten its line and recover. As the Bulge was erased, Patton’s 3rd Army resumed its old positions and prepared its long-planned drive into the Saar. Patch received the 10th Armored Division to strengthen his line. Task Force Linden became the 42nd Infantry Division, Task Force Harris became the 63rd, and Task Force Herren the 70th, as their proper backing arrived.
Finally, the American 101st Airborne Division, fresh from its epic stand at Bastogne, was brought down to defend the Moder River, relieving the 42nd and the 79th Infantry Divisions. The American paratroopers outclassed the German Volksgrenadiers they faced in every way.
The battle was a great triumph for the 7th Army. It was the first time they had faced real engagements with attacking German forces equal or superior to their own, as the U.S. Army’s official history Riviera to the Rhine noted. American leadership from Devers down to regimental commanders had been deft and kept pace with the German moves. The average GI fought well.
The Nordwind offensive was poorly planned, badly fought, and completely failed. It only proved two things: that American soldiers from generals to privates were courageous, adaptable, and skillful; and that, as 13th Corps commander SS Gen. Max Simon tartly observed when his attack was stopped, German troops knew how to fight and how to die and little else.
The American theory won wars. The
German theory did not.
Author David Lippman resides in New Jersey and writes frequently on a variety of topics for WWII History magazine.
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