“Short, sweet and scary,” Bowen characterized the order. He wished the regiment had an officer to put in charge, but it didn’t. He discussed the situation with his men and agreed there had to be a better way than just charging the houses at the roadblock. At that moment a tank appeared.
“Suppose I take care of those houses with my cannon?” the tanker asked. “My fifty-cal can rake those foxholes dug in around them. OK?”
“OK?” Bowen replied. “Man, you’ve just come from heaven.”
They went at it. The tank began to fire, cannon and machine gun. Bowen’s squads moved down the road, shooting as they walked. Within a half-hour some of the Germans were fleeing, while others threw up their hands. “It was a textbook attack,” Bowen said, “working better than anything we had ever done in practice.”
The threat met and defeated, Bowen went back to his original position. That night the thermometer plunged again. “The night passed like a horrible dream,” Bowen remembered. “Nothing I could do could keep me warm. I begged for dawn to come.”
When it did, a heavy ground fog reduced visibility to near zero. Germans used the cover to move in on the American positions; their white camouflage clothing helped hide them. As Bowen put it, they were “opaque figures in snow suits emerging from nowhere.” A fierce firefight ensued. Bowen looked for the tank that had been so helpful the previous day. He found it, badly damaged. The tanker had been firing the .50-calibre when an antitank shell hit the turret just under him. His face was horribly cut by shrapnel. Bowen got him to an aid station, then returned to position.
Things couldn’t have been much worse. Germans were scattered in a semicircle around him, firing at his men in their holes. There were eleven German tanks supporting the infantry. Bowen could do nothing about them because the 57-mm antitank gun assigned to his team was useless- its wheels were frozen solid in the ground, and it could not be moved.
A half-track pulled up, bringing a squad of fighting men forward. Bowen checked his line. His casualties were mounting. He picked up a bazooka and three shells from the half-track, took careful aim at a Tiger 200 metres distant, fired-and grazed the turret. A mortar shell found Bowen’s position. He was badly wounded and, shortly thereafter, captured. German doctors treated him, then sent him east to a POW camp. So it went for the armoured troopers and airborne infantry in Bastogne.
LIEUTENANT Helmuth Henke was an aide to General Fritz Bayerlein, CO of the Panzer Lehr Division, which had been reconstituted after its pounding in France. On December 22 Bayerlein handed him a letter from the “German Commander to the USA Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne.” It demanded an “honorable surrender to save the encircled USA troops from total annihilation.” Bayerlein told Henke, who spoke good English, to join a colonel from the staff, get a couple of enlisted men and two white flags, approach the American lines, and deliver the letter.
All went well. The GIs stopped firing when the German party waved its white flags. The Germans came into American lines, where Henke told a lieutenant that he had a message for the CO. The lieutenant blindfolded the Germans and drove them to General Anthony McAuliffe’s headquarters. Henke, still blindfolded, handed over Bayerlein’s demand.
McAuliffe read it, and a short while later said, “Take them back,” as a staff officer placed McAuliffe’s reply into Henke’s hand. The Germans were driven back to the front, where their blindfolds were removed. Henke finally had a chance to read McAuliffe’s response. It said, “Nuts.” He looked at his American escort, Colonel Joseph Harper. “Nuts?” he asked, in disbelief.
“It means, ‘Go to hell,'” Harper replied.
Henke knew what that meant. Before departing for his own lines, “I told the American officer what I told every soldier whom I took prisoner, ‘May you make it back to your homeland safe and sound.'”
“Go to hell,” was Harper’s reply.
ON DECEMBER 23 the skies cleared. The Allied air force, grounded for a week, went into action. Medium bombers hit German bridges and rail yards around and behind the Eifel. Jabos shot up German vehicles and columns. Captain Gerd von Fallois, commanding a German tank unit outside Bastogne, called it “psychologically fantastic. Aeroplanes everywhere. Thousands.” He added, “I didn’t see a single Luftwaffe plane.”