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

76 BASTOGNE
twenty minutes. 1o Prisoners-of-war letters captured from the
76th Regiment said that their losses had been terrible. t1
There followed a day-long wait along Colonel Ewell's 501st
Parachute Infantry front. About 1900 the Germans put a heavy
shelling from tanks and self-propelling guns on sensitive points
over the ground held by the 50Ist-Bizory, Mont and the road
junctions. The bombardment severed all the telephone wires
connecting the battalions with the rear.12
As the German artillery slacked off, the 1st Battalion of the
50lst radioed to Ewell that the enemy was charging straight
down the road from Neffe (Map 10, page 75). Major Raymond
V. Bottomly's 1st Battalion could hear the tanks coming on but it
was so dark that they could tell little else. 18 All the guns from
the eleven artillery battalions in Bastogne dropped a dam of fire
across the road one or two hundred yards west of Neffe-the
heaviest and most effective American defensive fire during the
siege. Three German tanks, two of them Panthers and one a
Tiger Royal, were hit and destroyed just as they drew past the
last houses in the village. 14 Some German infantry, which had
moved down the Bastogne road before the barrage dropped, met
their fate from machine guns Company B had posted in a house
by the side of the road. That company took the shock without
having to yield one yard of ground. Their strongpoint controlled
the terrain so well that not one German drew near enough to
close on the infantry line. 15 They were killed to the last man,
and for weeks later, their grotesque forms along the roadside,
heaped over by the Ardennes snows, showed where the German
death march ended. The most forward of these bodies was 300
yards ahead of the shattered tanks. 16
The German thrust from Neffe coincided with an assault on
the 3d Battalion's position at Mont, though here the battle took
a quite different form because of Major Templeton's tank destroyers.
l1 The 1st Platoon of Company B, 705th Tank Destroyer
Battalion, under command of First Lieutenant Robert Andrews,
had arrived to reinforce Colonel Griswold's 3d Battalion position
on the evening of December 19. One tank destroyer was posted
at the bend in the road. From here it could cover both the dirt