There were some unusual junior officers on the front. One was Lieutenant Ed Gesner of the 4th Infantry Division. He was a 40-year-old who had been transferred out of OSS (Office of Strategic Services) because he was too old to jump behind enemy lines. He knew survival tricks that he taught his platoon, such as how to create a foxhole in a hurry in frozen ground: he shot eight rounds into the same spot, quickly dug out the loose dirt with his trench knife, placed a half stick of TNT in the hole, lit the fuse, ran back 30 metres, hit the dirt, got up and ran back before the dust settled, and dug with his trench shovel. Within minutes a habitable foxhole.
The junior officers coming over from the States were another matter. Pink cheeked youth, they were bewildered by everything around them. Major Winters, himself a private back in 1942, commented that during the Bulge, “I looked at the junior officers and my company commanders and I ground my teeth. Basically we had weak lieutenants. I didn’t have faith in them.” Winters did what he could to get his most experienced NCOs with the weakest officers and scattered the veterans among the new lieutenants.
In the hundreds of companies stretched along the front, when the order to attack got down to the line, the men were outraged. Major Winters said, “It pissed me off. I could not believe that after what we had gone through and done, after all the casualties we had suffered, they were putting us into an attack.”
It wasn’t just that they figured it was some other guy’s turn; it was that they were exhausted, completely drained, men. Practically every one had a bad cold to add to the misery (pneumonia sent many back to hospitals), and they were jumping off into conditions that would have taxed them at their peak physical condition.
In the woods in the Ardennes the snow was a foot and more deep, frozen on top, slippery, noisy. To advance, a man had to flounder through the snow, bending and squirming to avoid knocking the snow off the branches and revealing his position. Visibility was limited to a few metres. An attacker could not see a machine-gun position or a foxhole until he was almost on top of it. There were no landmarks. Squads had to move on compass bearings until they bumped into somebody-friend or enemy. But attacking through the cleared grazing fields was equally daunting. There was no concealment, and many GIs had no camouflage.
On January 9 an officer from the Criminal Investigation Corps asked Colonel Ken Reimers of the 90th Division if he had a Lieutenant Barry in his outfit. Reimers did. The CIC officer wanted to arrest Barry; it seemed he had stolen some sheets from a civilian house in the 90th’s area. The CIC claimed a lot of looting had been going on, and he was going to put a stop to it. But Reimers discovered that Barry had hit on the idea of sheets for camouflage in the snow, and had cut holes in the centre of them and distributed one to every man in his platoon. When Reimers explained this to the division commander. General Earnest Bixby, Bixby said, “Promote him.” Reimers explained that Barry was already a first lieutenant. “Well, give him a Bronze Star then, for his initiative.”
Under the sheet, if he was lucky enough to have one, the average infantryman had the pockets of his combat jacket crammed with rations, shaving articles, pictures, cigarettes, candy, dry socks, writing paper and pens, and mess kit. He had his raincoat folded over the back of his belt or wore it to help keep warm. He carried two to four army-issue thin wool blankets. Whenever the GIs had to make a forced march of more than a few miles, the roadside would be strewn with blankets, overcoats, overshoes, and gas masks. A truck would follow along behind, collect the equipment, bring it forward, and reissue it-hopefully, before dark.
PRIVATE KURT Gabel of the 17th Airborne Division was in the attack on January 3 near Mande St.-Etienne, some ten kilometres north of Bastogne. His platoon moved through a wood, then spread out to cross an open snow-covered field. “Suddenly the air directly above us was alive with sounds I had not heard before,” Gabel wrote. It was the screeching sound of the “screaming meemies,” the German nebelwerfer, or multiple rocket. “The first salvo crashed into our formation as the next rounds already howled above us. The platoon leader yelled, ‘Hit it!’ I hit the snow, face first, and felt multiple concussions as the rockets pounded down. They howled and burst, and I clawed the ground and whimpered.”