Today, he is a Civil Affairs officer in Manderfeld, Belgium, where the HQ of the 14 Cavalry Group is located. They hold the northern flank of the 106th Inv. Div. and in particular guard the Losheim Gap, a pass through the Schnee Eifel. Like the 106th, the 14th's front is too wide for a contiguous line, so they hold a series of strongpoints, for which lightly armored cavalry is ill suited.
Today, the CO and XO are in Luxembourg and Grandpa is in charge of the detachment.
Today, Grandpa is awakened by gunfire and hurries to 14th Group HQ. Yesterday, he was ordered to tidy up the town's woodpiles. Today, all that is forgotten and there are looks of worry and concern. Communications are being cut and Grandpa is ordered to go up to Krewinkel and deliver an order to hold at all costs. He finds a hotly engaged gun crew and delivers the order. They are low on ammo. He returns to Manderfeld and loads ammo. On the return trip he finds the crew fleeing, having destroyed their gun. Grandpa goes further and finds another gun crew. Going back to Manderfeld he detours down to Andler to find troops from the 106th streaming to the rear, toward St. Vith, Division HQ. They return to Manderfeld to find the 14th is preparing to fall back on a new defense line. Grandpa's troops have packed up and his officers have returned. They fall back to St. Vith to look for orders.
Grandpa is worried. Manderfeld is in a small, German speaking part of Belgium, given to them in the treaty of Versailles. Since 1940 it has been reattached to Germany. Grandpa is worried that people who cooperated with the Americans may be subject to retaliation. He tells the local man who has been acting as his assistant in town administration to go home, stay indoors and law low for a few days.
The 14th Group will retreat, occupying a series of defensive positions. At the end of the day it ceases to exist as an effective combat unit and its remnants are attached to another outfit. Col. Devine, who took command on December 11, will be evacuated as a noncombat casualty.
Good stuff. Will this be a day-by-day firsthand, eyewitness account of what Grandpa saw and experienced in the Battle of the Bulge?
A harrowing experience for Grandpa, who was not expecting or expected to be a combat soldier. But expecting the 14th Cavalry Group to “defend” the Losheim Gap was foolish. Cavalry Groups were lightly armed recon units without much in the way of infantry or heavy weapons. In other words, they had no business trying to “hold” any sector of front. Certainly not the relatively open terrain of the Losheim Gap.
The 14th will cease to exist, and the Losheim Gap is wide open around the northern flank of 106th ID and St. Vith. The way to the Meuse appears to be open. For now.
From The Guns at Last Light...
‘Sheets of flame leaped from the German gun pits at precisely 5:30 a.m. on December 16. Drumfire fell in crimson splashes across the front with a stink of turned earth and burnt powder, and the green fireballs ot 88mm shells bore through the darkness at half a mile per second as if hugging the nap of the Ardennes hillcrests. The Screaming Meemie shriek of Nebelwerfer rockets echoed in the hallows where wide-eyed GIs crouched in their sugar bowls.
...
The battle was joined, this last great grapple of the Western Front, although hours would elapse before American commanders would realize that the opening barrage was more than a feint, and days would pass before some generals acknowledged the truth of what Rundstedt had told his legions in an order captured early Saturday, Es geht um das Ganze. Everything is at stake. The struggle would last for a month, embroiling more than a million men drawn from across half a continent to this haunted upland. The first act of the drama, perhaps the most decisive, played out simultaneously across three sanguinary fields scattered overt sixty miles—on the American left, on the America right, and on the calamitous center. “Your great hour has struck,” Runstedt had also declared. “You bear in yourselves a divine duty to give everything and to achieve the supehuman for our Father-land and our Frhrer.”