Armor’s Stand at St. Vith

(Reprinted from November-December 1984) The German army, in a totally unforeseen move, launched a precipi tous offensive in the middle of their war with the Western allies. The Ardennes Battle of December 1944 (more familiarly known as the Battle of the Bulge) was the greatest battle fought by the American Army as it suf fered some 78,000 casualties. The simi larities between this last great German offensive and a Warsaw Pact conventional armor-heavy breakthrough attack, with little warning provided to NATO forces, are significant and very relevant to a study of a possible Central European conflict in the 1980s. If such an event should occur, the concept of operations and pattern of battle might just as well possess the same elements of this 1944 winter clash — surprise, cut-off units, bad weather, logistics problems, breakdown of communications, and the many other components of battle mechanics, which constitute the complexity of modern combat. Fortunately, the American soldier of 1944 was able to meet the situation at hand and his example is deserving of great praise. Between 16 December and 23 December 1944, the small Belgian town of St. Vith was defended by a heterogene ous force of lost units, stragglers, and the extremely resourceful armored bri gade of 7th Armored Division, commanded by General (then Colonel) Bruce C. Clarke. Because of a lack of understanding of this battle by the media, not much information was given to the American public at the time. What did seize the attention and imagination of the country was the drama being played out further to the south in Bastogne where the 101st Airborne Division was cut off and surrounded. The day-to-day sus pense connected with watching the progress of General Patton’s rescuing armored columns has made Bastogne the symbol of the obstinate, gallant, and ultimately successful American defense in the Battle of the Bulge. But there were other crucial actions which better deserve attention. The shoulders of the German penetration were held 12 — by tenacious infantry encounters at Monschau in Belgium and at Echternach in Luxembourg. However, the battle, above all others, that derailed the German timetable by six days was the action at St. Vith — the fiercest defensive battle ever fought by American forces on the Western Front.1 The allies had broken through the German western defenses and were advancing well ahead of their timetable in a mood of high optimism and cocky overconfidence. As they charged across France on the heels of the retreating, yet elusive, German army, the cost of the allied advance began to mount as the months of continuous battle took their toll on American men and equip ment. By October, the allies were also troubled by the fact that the warm and hazy days of the previous month gave way to early fall rains and cold temperatures that interfered with mo bile operations. With these changing circumstances, critical to the conduct of the war, the American high command was forced to take stock of their situation after the heady successes since the Normandy invasion in June. Casualties came to more than 2,300 since D-Day, and German resistance had been stiffening since mid-September. It was all but certain that the war could continue for at least another winter. Others argued with supreme confidence that the troops would be in Berlin by Christmas. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in the European theater of operations, had missed a great opportunity in early September to strike at the Ruhr, the northern industrial center of Germany, as was proposed in a plan by British Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. This was accompanied by a simultaneous failure to free the mouth of the Scheldt Estuary and the all-important seaport of Antwerp, Belgium. Up to this point, the allies were proceeding with an advance on abroad front and were now roughly on Germany’s pre-1940 boundary, but with a severely weakened force. One major handicap was logistics. Ninety percent of all allied war mater iel that landed in France was still on the Normandy beaches due to the reten tion of Antwerp by the Germans and the inadequacies of the English Channel and French Riviera coastal ports.2 Ammunition was so short that it had to be rationed and, owing to shipping shortages and miscalculations in Washington, even minimum requirements were not being met.3 Each month, American forces used up ten percent of their armored fighting vehicles and eight million rounds of mortar and artillery ammunition, as well as one hundred artillery tubes. During September alone, they were burning up twenty thousand tons of supplies, six million gallons of gasoline, and two thousand tons of artillery ammunition a day. Every bean and bul let came down along supply pipeline from Cherbourg on the French coast to the front. The famous Red Ball Express was one desperate means of keeping the supplies coming. But by September, the allied war machine was rapidly losing steam. The simple fact was that supplies could not keep up with the rapid advances. The 7th Armored Division, for example, was stalled for six days in front of the fortress town of Metz in southern France before it received enough gas to resume its attack. The situation was the same for Colonel Bruce C. Clarke’s “Combat Command A” of the 4th Armored Division. It was estimated that this division, on average, consumed seventy-four tons of petroleum products daily, or, as Clarke sized it up later, about a thousand gallons of fuel to move the division one mile.4 Logis tics, therefore, was the one element in all the allied planning that failed at the crucial moment. At the same time, Hitler laid his plans for a massive counteroffensive through the seemingly impassable Ardennes. It was here, had allied plan ners thought back, that the Germans broke the boundary between the British and French armies in 1940. They were about to try exactly the same maneuver in the winter of 1944. The Germans assembled 20 divisions under Generals Dietrich and Manteuffel for the counteroffensive of December

1944. The halt in the advance of the American Army enabled them to do this with little interruption or even allied knowledge of the preparations. American intelligence had a poor opinion of the state of German equip ment and availability. That same source also failed to discern any signs of the massive German buildup:

• “The German army is in a poor condition — we will finish it in the early spring.

• The German tanks have been greatly reduced in numbers and are in a poor state of maintenance.

• We know immediately if the Germans move a division, and are able to report it to General Bradley at the next morning’s briefing.” Before pursuing the battle further, let us consider some questions that may have In the public mind, the encirclement of the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne became synonymous with the drama of the Battle of the Bulge. But the skillful mobile defense mounted at St. Vith upset the German timetable and snubbed Hitler’s last great offensive. Above, a street scene at Bastogne after the battle. — 13 been raised at the time, but certainly came to light following the battle:

• Why did the allied army run out of gasoline in September 1944?

• Was General Eisenhower aware of the problem on 15 September when he wanted Field Marshal Montgomery to push forward and take Berlin?

• Why did the allied G2, 12th Ar my Group, not detect the preparations for the counteroffensive of 16 December 1944?

• Why was the 106th Infantry Division placed where it was (to the east of St. Vith) without any armor support attached?

• What was to account for the condition of the 106th Infantry Division’straining?

• Why did the 101st Airborne Division move into Bastogne and make no plans to break out?

• How effective was the handling of the First Army (where the Bulge was) by General Hodges?

• Why did General Eisenhower relieve General Bradley of command of the First and Ninth Armies on the evening of 19 December 1944?

• Why did he give these armies to Montgomery — a Briton?

• Why did Ike’s chief of staff (General Smith), on the evening of 19 December, tell Bradley that his relief from command was only for the length of the Bulge but, in fact, General Hodges would be under General Montgomery for a month, and General Simpson’s Ninth Army until after the allies crossed the Rhine?

• Could the Battle of the Bulge, encompassing a great area of maneuver, be adequately directed from Ike’s headquarters, which was as far away as Versailles, France?

• Did the false report, that Clarke’s command had been destroyed at St. Vith, pervading Eisenhower’s headquarters on 18 December lead to the replacement of Bradley (an infantryman) by Montgomery (a tanker)? Their opponent, General Manteuffel, was the top German Panzer general with a distinguished reputation.

• To what degree did Patton’s Third Army affect German operations after it relieved Bastogne on 26 December 1944?

• Had the allied army not been delayed in the fall of 1944, and then subsequently surprised in the Battle of the Bulge, would the allies have overrun a greater part of Germany before the Russians got there?

• Would Germany have necessarily been split in two and would we have needed to keep some 200,000 Army and Air Force per sonnel in Germany for the past 38 years at great expense? There are other questions, which may be consid ered in another article or book due to extensive research. This is difficult since Eisenhower would now be 93 if still alive, and his senior com manders were generally the same age. There are few who have experienced high command in battle that can discern the correct answers to these questions. The greatest defensive battle fought by American forces in Europe had some unique moments:

• It was commanded by a British general after the third day.

• While all U. S. commanders from corps level and above were infantrymen, the officers of the 7th Armored Division and its attached units (“CC B,” 9th Armored Division) included afield artillery division commander “... A major lesson of armored warfare was demonstrated at St. Vith...” 14 —

Above left, tanks and infantry rush to relieve Bastogne late in December, 1944. At right, U. S. troops and tanks moving over snow, which complicated the battle. Below left, a wound ed German prisoner getting helped to an aid station by his comrades and, below right, a knocked-out Panther tank. — 15 The German offensive was predicated on three conditions. The attack had to be a surprise; the weather had to preclude allied air strikes on the German columns; and progress of the main effort through and beyond St. Vith had to be rapid. Two conditions were met — surprise and weather. The third was not met and the German offensive failed. Careful planning went into the offensive preparations. The Germans established the sequence and range of American patrols on the attack front. They located boundaries between regiments and battalions and they called off a planned 1½-hour artillery preparation because they did not want to “wake up” the Americans. The attack was launched with platoon columns down the boundaries between regiments and battalions because they were the weakest points in the defense line. After penetrating 3-4 kilometers, the attacking columns closed behind the Americans and took 8,500 prisoners. Here we have the classic penetrate and surround maneuver, an early version of the deep strike attack of AirLand Battle doctrine [Army doctrine]. Pre-attack intelligence established the American patrol’s ranges and frequencies and the location of boundaries was essential to the initial success of the offensive. The amazing factor in the St. Vith battle was that the defenders were not a homogeneous force. Rather, they were a hodgepodge of battered, in-place units, and relieving units. The leadership of brand-new Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke (he had been promoted only 10 days before) not only welded the disorganized units into a cohesive fighting force, it held St. Vith and destroyed the German’s timetable and hopes for success. Years later, when questioned as to the principal duty of a general in such a battle, General Clarke replied, “It is to prevent the confusion from becoming disorganized.” Clarke established a fire base in the St. Vith sector with a tank destroyer company dug in. He set up a mobile counterattack force to be used when the Germans had created a serious situation. The force could counterattack the Germans then retire to its original positions and prepare for its next foray. Criticized by General Ridgway for his “hit and retire” tactics, General Clarke replied in effect that he was not holding ground, per se, he was delaying the enemy advance at its most critical point for as long as possible with the least expenditure of American lives. “We are winning; he is losing,” he told General Ridgway. After 7 days of futile attempts to break through the St. Vith sector, General von Manteuffel recommended to Hitler’s adjutant “that the German Army give up the attack and return to the West Wall.” Early in the battle, General Eisenhower placed British Field Marshal Montgomery in command of the U. S. First and Ninth Armies, temporarily replacing General Bradley. The ramifications of this act are beyond the scope of this article, nevertheless, General How History Assessed Clarke’s Stand at St. Vith Montgomery had nothing but praise for the American soldiers he commanded in the battle. In the New York Times of 8 January 1945, Montgomery said of the Americans who had fought in the Bulge: “The American troops, isolated and cut off, were fighting and holding on to centers of road communication, making it extremely difficult for the Germans to move any flow through the gaps they had created…” “…The American soldiers of the U. S. Seventh Armored Division and the 106th Infantry Division stuck it out [at St. Vith] and put up a very fine performance. By Jove, they stuck it out, those chaps.” Clarke’s “hit and retire” tactics were not only successful in delaying the German offensive, they also won him the postwar plaudits of his opponent, General von Manteuffel, who wrote to Clarke on 9 November 1975, “…possession of the ground or capture of ground does not garanty (sic) victory! Loss of ground does not mean defeat — withdrawal is not disgrace, but a method of fighting! Your fighting around St. Vith ist (sic) one of the best model[s] of this method of fighting! ” (italics von Mantueffel’s, Ed.) The Battle of the Bulge remains the hardest fought battle the Americans knew in Europe in World War II. It epitomizes the bravery of the fighting troops, but more than that, it holds many valuable lessons to the commander of today’s fighting troops.

Assistant Editor, ARMOR (1984) (Has brouck) and two engineer combat commanders (Hoge and Clarke). It was no small achievement in mili tary history that a small force of 8,020 American soldiers warded off over 87,000 enemy troops and prevent ed them from controlling St. Vith and the vital area east of the Salm River for a period of six days.5 Throughout this ordeal, the 7th Armored Division, with the 14th Cavalry Group and “CC B” of the 9th Armored Division attached, sacrificed nearly 3,400 officers and men who were killed, wounded, or missing. Colonel Clarke’s plan of action during this engagement was to cause maximum delay of the German advance, and at the same time, prevent the destruction of his combat command. A major lesson of armored warfare was demonstrated at St. Vith: an armored unit can stage an awesome mobile defensive action if required to do so by force of circumstances. By the aggressive employment of small-unit counterattacks, an armored task force can harass an enemy and confuse him as to its actual size and composition. This example was witnessed in more recent times during the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. To stand and defend every inch of ground does not apply in all situations. By the time the last of Clarke’s troops pulled out of the St. Vith salient, the German offensive was eight days old, and General Patton’s Third Army was counterattacking along the entire southern flank of the German “Bulge.” From the German point of view, St. Vith was far more important than Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.6 The main German effort was to bypass Bastogne and turn north. What, in effect, was accomplished by the Ardennes Offensive of 1944 was to delay allied offensive operations by only about six weeks, but with a loss to the Germans of nearly 250,000 men, 600 tanks and assault guns, and about 1,600 Luftwaffe planes. Furthermore, the offensive had caused a serious reduction in war materiel stocks, and the depleted state of German supply reserves precluded any further large-scale offensive. Allied victory, therefore, was guaranteed. The Ardennes, in a very real way, had been the birthplace of German 1940 lightning tactics. Now, four years later, the town of St. Vith became the burial place where the once potent German blitzkrieg came home to die. Notes 1William Donohue Ellis and Colonel Thomas J. Cunningham, Jr., (Retired), Clarke of St. Vith: The Sergeant’s General, Dellon, Liderbach, Inc., Cleveland, 1974, p. xi, Introduction. 2Peter Elstob, Hitler’s Last Offensive, Macmillan Co., New York, 1971, p. 39. 3Arthur Bryant, Triumph in the West, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1959, p. 239. (In fact, in the middle of November, General Eisenhower was forced to broadcast an appeal to the American peo ple for more ammunition.) 4Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke and Lieutenant Colonel Creighton W. Abrams, The Principles of the Employment of Armor, U. S. Army Armor School, Fort Knox, KY, p. 5. Written while General Clarke was assistant commandant of the Armor School and Colonel Abrams was working under him as the command and staff director, U. S. Army Armor School, 1948- 49. 5History of the Seventh Armored Division and the Seventh Armored Division Association, Taylor Publishing Co., Dallas, TX, 1982, p. 103. 6NORTHAG videotapes, reel no. 8, the meeting of General Hasso von Manteuffel, German Army, retired, and General Bruce C. Clarke, U. S. Army, retired, was conducted as part of a Department of the Army project entitled the “NORTHAG Terrain Study” on 12-15 June 1976. The discussions on the battle of St. Vith, Belgium, 16-23 December 1944, were recorded on videotape, which is in the possession of the author. Captain Stephen D. Borows is a 1976 graduate of Virginia Military Institute and was a candidate for an M. A. at the University of Louisville in 1983. He is a graduate of the Airborne and Ranger Schools and the French Command School No. 4. He served as a tank and cavalry platoon leader; a brigade headquarters company XO; an armor battalion assistant S1 and assistant S4; an instructor and military historian at Command, Staff, and Doctrine Department, U. S. Army Armor School; and as an AIT company commander at Fort Knox. With the pressure easing, U. S. infantrymen trudge through snow-covered Belgian fields in the wake of the Bulge fighting. The German attempt to sweep through the Ardennes to the Channel was stym ied. 16 —