Bastogne: The Story of the First Eight Days - US Army Center Of ...

THE ENEMY STORY 187
Bizory (by the 501st Parachute Infantry), and that the 78th
Regiment of the 26th Division had been stopped at Hill 540,
southeast of Foy (by Colonel Sink's forces). General Kokott,
too, had expressed the same gloomy views as Bayerlein. He realized
that the lOlst Airborne Division had beaten him to Bastogne.
And feeling that his own division might not be equal
to the task of dislodging them, he urged that the entire Corps
be committed to the task.
Liittwitz reported to Fifth Panzer Army that each of his division
commanders had gathered the impression that the enemy
was in extraordinary strength at Bastogne. He added his recommendation
that the original plan be changed and that the
XXXXVII Corps be solidly committed to the reduction of Bastogne.
Army refused the request, but it added a strange amendment
to the previous orders. The Corps as a whole was given
permission to renew the attack on a limited scale, since the
position of the Panzer Lehr Division had become seriously
compromised and so had that of the two northern regiments
of the 26th Volksgrenadier Division. This was how matters
stood on the highest level at 1600 on December 19.
But on the tactical plane, Corps and all three divisions had
been harassed mainly by thoughts of what might happen unless
they destroyed the Longvilly roadblock. They had gone to work
on that problem in early afternoon with such results that they
should have become convinced they had reduced it to a cipher.
The consequences to the American armor of the German attack
against the Longvilly position on the afternoon of December
19 have been described earlier in their bare detail. But
neither Captain Ryerson nor Lieutenant Hyduke had any idea
then what major forces had been arrayed against them. In the
course of the forenoon, out of Panzer Lehr, the 90lst Panzergrenadier
Regiment, one tank destroyer battalion with about
twenty TDs, and an artillery battalion, had collected in the area
of Benonchamps. Bayerlein, worrying about the Neffe-Mageret
forces and the probable involvement of his reconnaissance battalion-the
Panzer Lehr Division's reconnaissance training battalion-which
had been shaken out farther to the south, seized on