The 1st SS Panzer Division in the Battle of the Bulge
by Steve Kane
A Merriam Press Original Publication
Military Monograph MM2
An extremely readable account of the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” (LAH) throughout the Ardennes Offensive relating the actions of the LAH and a variety of German units who fought with them as well as considerable detail about the American units that fought against the 1st SS Panzer Division.
Specifications
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6th edition (December 2005)
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216
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– 6 x 9 inch pages
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Paperback ISBN 1-57638-027-0
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Hardcover
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PDF file on CD disc is a complete copy of the book including the cover images in a single PDF file
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35,000 words
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128 photos
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14 maps
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101 footnotes
Reviews and Testimonials
Have just purchased my second copy of The 1st SS Panzer Division in the Battle of the Bulge. A massive improvment on my copy bought in 1982.
Dennis Trowbridge (via email)
Book Excerpt
At 0530 on 16 December 1944, the artillery barrage of the Sixth Panzer Army began. Ninety minutes later, Peiper hoped to be on his way to the Meuse. It was expected that the 12th Volksgrenadier Division would take the town of Losheim by 0700, clear mines from the Losheim-Losheimergraben road, and repair the bridges in the area, including an important railway overpass south of Losheimergraben, crucial to Peiper’s route. If the latter were repaired by the engineers by 1200, Peiper promised that he would be on the Meuse twelve hours later, a journey of some seventy-five miles.
Generalleutnant Engel’s 12th Volksgrenadier Division had not, however, seized Losheim by 0700. The town fell soon afterward, but it was about as far as the 12th Volksgrenadiers were to get on 16 December. Engel had run into unexpectedly fierce resistance from the 394th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 99th Division. The key junctions of Losheimergraben and Bucholz Station remained in American hands. But further south, the German 3rd Parachute Division had met with some success. The division had, with the help of advance elements of Hansen’s 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment, infiltrated through the weakly held positions of Colonel Mark Devine’s 14th Cavalry Group in the Losheim Gap and had pushed Devine’s rapidly disintegrating force back several miles to the Manderfeld ridge. More importantly, a small but slowly increasing hole had been punched into the American lines, right along the boundary between the U.S. V and VIII Corps.
Peiper, enraged at the failure of the 12th Volksgrenadier Division and the subsequent delay, had remained at Engels’ headquarters, waiting for the word that would set his powerful kampfgruppe in motion. By 1400 no word had yet arrived, so Peiper went forward. To his utter horror and disgust, he saw that the roads to the front were completely clogged with traffic of every sort. To make matters worse, someone had ordered the 12th Volksgrenadier Division’s artillery regiment, a horse-drawn outfit, forward, and it added greatly to the chaotic situation.
For two hours, Peiper attempted to establish some kind of order, but the German road net leading to the front was by now so fouled up that little could be done. Impatient by nature, at 1600 Peiper stormed off to his kampfgruppe and told his commanders to begin moving forward anyway, with orders to run down anyone thick-headed enough to remain in the way. This was done, and by 1930 Peiper’s tanks had finally arrived in Losheim. At the same time his panzergrenadiers crossed the bridge leading northwest to Losheimergraben. To Peiper’s south and rear, the second group of the 1st SS Panzer Division also finally began moving west. This was Sturmbannführer Knittel’s reconnaissance battalion, and his force was to cover Peiper’s left flank. Knittel was to join Peiper only after the latter had reached good roads leading to the Meuse.
A few minutes later Peiper received word from Mohnke, his division commander, that for some reason the engineers of Engels’ division had to repair the railroad overpass near Losheimergraben. Peiper continued northward on the road to the overpass, however, for his kampfgruppe had just finished clearing the 12th Artillery Regiment from their path. To leave the road would mean having to plow through that regiment all over again. Once having reached the overpass and seeing that it was indeed still out, Peiper was ordered by I SS Panzer Corps to swing westward to Lanzerath, to get the 3rd Parachute Division moving again.
Peiper, in the lead armored car, immediately drove down the steep gorge near the overpass with his other vehicles right behind him. On the way to Lanzerath, five tanks and five other vehicles were knocked out by mines and fire from a couple of American anti-tank positions. Peiper, had he wanted to, could have proceeded with more caution by sending his engineers out to disarm these mines, but he had already wasted the entire day in the Losheim Gap and would tolerate no further delay. All mines were simply to be rolled over.
At 2400 Peiper finally arrived in Lanzerath. He found the front to be much too quiet for his liking and asked the commander of the 3rd Parachute Division’s 9th Regiment what had caused the delay. This man, a former official in the Luftwaffe ministry who had never been in combat before, told Peiper that his men had attacked Honsfeld three times but had failed on each occasion. He said that the woods south of Honsfeld were bristling with mines, pillboxes, machine gun positions, and hundreds of fanatical Americans. Peiper then asked the officer, who was a full colonel and thus outranked Peiper by one grade, if he had actually seen all of this. No, was the reply; it had been reported to him by one of his battalion commanders. Peiper quickly questioned this second man and he, too, had personally seen nothing. One of his company commanders had told him.
At this, Peiper exploded. He despised incompetents of any kind, and here in Lanzerath he had apparently run into an entire regiment of them. At this very moment Peiper was supposed to be in Huy, astride the Meuse, but instead he sat in some insignificant village in the Losheim Gap, about seventy miles east of the river. He ordered the commander of the 9th Parachute Regiment to give him one battalion. Peiper himself would take Honsfeld.
Shortly after 0100 on 17 December, Peiper held a conference with his commanders. Two Panthers would lead the advance, followed by several platoons of infantry, from Diefenthal’s battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment, in half-tracks. The rest of Peiper’s tanks and other vehicles would follow, including some of the Tigers of the 501st SS Battalion, which were just arriving. The bulk of the parachute battalion would “ride shotgun” on Peiper’s tanks, while one company of them would offer flank protection to the panzers, which were rather vulnerable to anti-tank fire at night. Peiper’s men were quickly organized into the attack column, but further delays came about when the officers of the parachute battalion had to go round up their men, who were billeted in and around Lanzerath. While the sleeping parachutists were awakened, Peiper fumed. Finally, at 0400, the column began moving forward.
Much to the young Obersturmbannführer’s surprise and disgust, no resistance was encountered. Not one American soldier was to be found. And, except for a sporadic round of American artillery fire, nothing hindered the advance of the kampfgruppe. Not one mine was discovered. The column had to proceed slowly, however, to enable the walking parachute infantry to keep up with the tanks. Soon afterward the SS had seized Bucholz Station and overrun its defenders, two platoons of Company K of the 394th Infantry Regiment. One American, however, remained unnoticed: a radio operator holed up in a cellar who sent hourly reports to his division commander, Major General Walter Lauer of the 99th Division, of the strength of the German column passing through that tiny hamlet.
During the dark pre-dawn hours on the 17th, Peiper’s advanced mechanized elements, including tanks and panzergrenadiers transported in half-tracks, managed to mingle into a long line of American vehicles retreating from the Losheim Gap. The mixed German-American column had already entered Honsfeld before any firing broke out. Fighting finally erupted at several points throughout the town, but so complete was Peiper’s coup that American resistance collapsed in a matter of minutes. By dawn, Honsfeld was completely in German hands. Nearly fifty American troops had managed to escape, but most of the garrison had been captured. Some fifty U.S. vehicles had also been seized intact, along with several anti-tank guns. Nineteen American prisoners were supposedly killed here.
Peiper was in a good mood for the first time since the offensive began. He had not expected such an easy victory. Now he hoped to roll forward to the Meuse against little or no opposition. The breakthrough was complete. All was not roses, however: Peiper’s tanks were beginning to run low on fuel, for the traffic snarl in the Losheim Gap and the subsequent cross-country meandering of his kampfgruppe had started to drain his vehicles of their lifeblood. A small reconnaissance detachment was sent west toward Schoppen and they reported that Route D in this area was indeed the “bicycle track” that Peiper had labeled it.
According to Peiper’s orders, he must now move west with the utmost speed. If he did so, however, he would quickly run out of “Otto” (gasoline). A glance at the map showed that an American fuel depot existed at Büllingen, about two miles to the north. Büllingen was part of Route C, that of the 12th SS Panzer Division, but Peiper’s battle-trained ears told him that heavy gunfire was still in evidence several thousand yards to the northeast. This meant that the Hitler Jügend Division had been held up, enabling Peiper to grab the fuel at Büllingen without encountering any red tape. He may have had a tinge of sympathy for the 12th SS, which had gone into battle with the 277th Volksgrenadier Division, a low-grade unit. Supposedly the two divisions on the left flank of the I SS Panzer Corps, the 3rd Parachute and 12th Volksgrenadier Divisions, were the best infantry units in the Sixth Panzer Army. Peiper had seen first-hand just how good these divisions actually were.
Büllingen was defended by elements of the 254th Engineer Battalion. Peiper’s kampfgruppe roared north, destroying several American artillery spotter planes on the ground. The American garrison at Büllingen was effortlessly overwhelmed. Fifty thousand gallons of gasoline were seized and the fifty Americans captured there were forced at gun-point to fill the fuel tanks of the German vehicles. Post-war legend has it that shortly afterward the guns opened fire on the fifty unfortunates, killing them all. At 0930 Peiper came under American artillery fire as well as a brief air attack. No serious losses were incurred, however. He pulled out of Büllingen and headed west.
The scratch force of Americans holding north of Büllingen were greatly surprised to see this, and so was Major General Lauer of the 99th Division. It was thought that Peiper would continue to move north toward Butgenbach and Elsenborn. Had he done so, he could have easily pushed aside the rag-tag assortment of engineers, anti-aircraft gunners, and a handful of worn-out tank destroyers defending the area and thus turned the entire southern flank of the U.S. V Corps. Peiper, however, had absolutely no interest in doing this. He had only one objective in mind: Huy, on the Meuse River. He headed west, not north.
After leaving Büllingen, Peiper swung back onto his original route. A small detachment had been left behind in the town with orders to mop up and then advance eastward to Huenningen. This group would later rejoin the main body of the kampfgruppe. Peiper’s spearhead overran both Schoppen and Moderscheid by late morning on the 17th, encountering no resistance to speak of.
Sometime between 1200 and 1300 on 17 December, Peiper’s advance guard had reached a crossroads at Baugnez, a tiny village located a few miles south of the town of Malmédy. One road, running north–south, led from Malmédy to St. Vith. The other ran west toward Stavelot.
Just prior to Peiper’s arrival at the crossroads, Combat Command R of the U.S. 7th Armored Division had roared through Baugnez toward St. Vith. The two armored columns had missed each other by minutes. At least one straggling jeep didn’t make it, though; it was fired upon by Peiper’s men. The jeep contained the chief-of-staff of the 7th Armored Division, who was killed.
About the same time Peiper reached the crossroads, another convoy of jeeps and trucks carrying Battery B of the U.S. 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion arrived in Baugnez on the way south. The SS shot up the convoy, quickly rounding up about 125 prisoners. To this was added about twenty-five other Americans captured earlier in the day by the kampfgruppe. They were all herded into a field along the side of the road and remained there under light guard. Peiper continued westward toward Ligneuville.
Approximately one hour later, another SS mechanized column approached Baugnez. This group was the advance element of the main body of Kampfgruppe Peiper, apparently commanded by Sturmbannführer Werner Pötschke, one of Peiper’s senior tank commanders who was later killed in Hungary in 1945. Driving up the road, the SS force erroneously presumed the large body of American prisoners to be an armed group and began firing. Dozens of prisoners were killed in the resulting confusion, as well as several of the guards Peiper had left behind. The wild firing continued as the SS seemed possessed by the “blutrausch,” best translated as a kind of frenzy or intoxication of the blood. The Americans, having already surrendered once, did not attempt to do so again but instead either threw themselves to the ground in the hopes of avoiding being hit by gunfire or else tried to make a run for the more broken terrain beyond the field. Eventually the firing subsided and finally died out altogether. Although the exact number of dead will probably never be known, at least eighty-six Americans had been killed.
In the meantime, Peiper had questioned a captured lieutenant colonel who told him that an American command post existed in Ligneuville. Lured on by this news, the German spearhead moved southwest to that town and reached it shortly before 1300. The Americans, who were preparing dinner at the time, fled when the totally unexpected news of Peiper’s arrival came. The SS men wolfed down the still-hot food and continued on their way. Several prisoners were rounded up and eight were shot. A brutal sergeant wanted to execute fourteen others but their lives were saved by the intervention of Peter Rupp, an elderly Belgian hotel owner, and an SS lieutenant with a conscience. Although most of the SS men in Ligneuville were in high spirits, a few sullen individuals continued to threaten Rupp and the fourteen Americans in his care until their ugly mood was soothed by freely-flowing cognac.
Due to the particularly rugged terrain Peiper was being forced to operate in (and it would get worse as he went further west), radio contact with the LAH headquarters was no longer possible. Once having taken Ligneuville, Peiper would have liked to have swung back north to Malmédy. The road from that town to Liege, on the Meuse, was only forty miles long and it was hard-surfaced. Peiper’s original route was, until it passed Werbomont, a poor secondary road. Further, Huy was fifty miles from Ligneuville. Peiper, however, could not contact Mohnke. It was by this time mid-afternoon on 17 December, and Peiper had to assume that the 12th SS Panzer Division finally must have broken through and could not be far behind him. Even if they were not, the road from Malmédy to Liege was off limits to Peiper. He had risked severe reprimand by seizing the fuel dump at Büllingen and perhaps had no wish to push his luck any further with another flagrant violation of his orders. He continued west.
Negotiating the narrow, winding streets of Ligneuville with some difficulty, the armored spearhead of Kampfgruppe Peiper soon reached the western edge of town. There the Germans ran into part of the U.S. 9th Armored Division’s Combat Command B (CCB). The Americans there were a part of CCB’s supply trains and they, under Captain Seymour Green, offered Peiper the most spirited opposition he had yet encountered. Two Sherman tanks and an M10 tank destroyer engaged the SS on the edge of town. Peiper’s lead Panther was blown up, and he also lost two half-tracks and an armored scout car. All three American vehicles were soon turned into blazing wrecks and a convoy of supply trucks belonging to the 9th Armored Division was shot up. But nearly an entire hour had been wasted during this encounter. Perturbed, Peiper ordered his spearhead forward toward Stavelot, eight miles away.
About three miles west of Ligneuville, shortly after 1600, two service companies defending the bridge over the Amblève River were brushed aside. The bridge was captured and Peiper’s men continued to move west. They reached the outskirts of Stavelot just as the sun was setting.
Stavelot was a sleepy little town of three thousand inhabitants in December 1944. Almost all of the town was located on the northern bank of the Amblève. Only a few buildings existed south of the river, and an old stone bridge connected the two. A huge rock, some 1,500 feet high, overlooked the approach to the southern end of the town, funneling any armored advance. Just before the bridge the ruins of a medieval castle jutted out. To the left of the road leading to the ancient bridge, a steep gully existed. To the right a high cliff rose, with a good view of the entire area. From their vantage point the Germans could see many trucks scurrying back and forth through Stavelot. It gave the impression that the town was heavily defended, but, unknown to the SS, the vehicles in the area were merely evacuating a fuel depot located just to the northeast of town. Stavelot itself was defended by a handful of men from the U.S. 291st Engineer Battalion.
The bridge at Stavelot was essential to Peiper. His infantry could wade across the Amblève with little difficulty, but the icy, swollen river presented a major anti-tank barrier to Peiper’s armor, the first real difficulty he had run across since achieving the initial breakthrough at Honsfeld. Three tanks attempted to rush the bridge at dusk. The lead vehicle hit a hastily laid mine and blew up, forcing the other two back. An SS officer then assembled about sixty grenadiers, all the infantry that Peiper’s spearhead had available at the time. They ran forward to seize the bridge, but were driven back by a hail of vigorous small arms and anti-tank fire.
For the rest of the night, except for sporadic German shelling of the American supply trucks milling about, the front at Stavelot was quiet. Why Peiper stopped is still somewhat of a mystery. The town, or so he was led to believe, was heavily defended. All Peiper had available at the time was a handful of tanks and infantry. The rest of his column was still strung out about fifteen miles to the rear. Further, the men were exhausted. Many had been without proper sleep for three days. They were cold, hungry, and in need of (to Peiper’s way of thinking) a well deserved break. Morale was rather low, and so was the supply of gasoline. In a little over twelve hours, Peiper and his spearhead had advanced some thirty miles. It was time to wait for a while to allow the rest of the 1st SS Panzer Division, or at least his own kampfgruppe, to catch up with him.
Around 2400, further bad news arrived. A former naval lieutenant, now a member of Skorzeny’s Einheit Steilau commando teams, arrived near Stavelot. He told Peiper that the German rear was in complete, utter chaos due to a gigantic traffic jam that had immobilized entire battalions. In addition to this, the few units who had been trying to follow Peiper’s route were completely bogged down in a quagmire between Moderscheid and Ligneuville. They had, it seems, not enough gasoline with which to jockey through the mud, as Peiper had had that morning. On top of everything else, Peiper sensed that American reinforcements were on the way to stop him. Although he had no way of knowing this, he was right. The 82nd Airborne Division and the 30th Infantry Division were at that very moment preparing for the move to the Ardennes.