Battle of the Bulge vets honored: 101st Airborne

--“How would you like to die for Christmas?” — German propaganda blasted over a loudspeaker in the Ardennes.

On Dec. 16, 1944, Gerald Paulk of the 101st Airborne Division thought the war was won, and he had seen much of the winning firsthand.

Paulk, from the tiny burg of Ocilla, Ga., had parachuted into Normandy in June on D-Day, which later led to the liberation of Paris and most of France. He jumped into Holland that September during Operation Market Garden, which freed the southern half of the Netherlands.

Hitler’s armies had been pushed to their last defensive positions before the Rhine River – the German border – and the “Screaming Eagles,” as the 101st was known, were taking a little break.

“Everybody had a pass,” said Paulk, 86, now of Barnwell. “Everybody was having fun. We thought it was all over.”

Then, almost without warning, the Germans desperately lashed out in a vast forest called the Ardennes, setting off the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought by the U.S. Army, involving an estimated 1 million German and American soldiers.

They call it the Battle of the Bulge – for the “bulge” in the American lines caused by the German advance – and Paulk and the 101st would win renown for holding a little crossroads town called Bastogne.

This week, Paulk and more than 80 other veterans of the World War II battle will gather in Columbia for their national conference.

Americans prevailed in the monthlong battle but at a staggering price. Figures vary, but estimates of U.S. losses are that 38,500 to 47,500 men were wounded, 23,000 or so were captured and about 19,000 were killed. The Germans lost up to 100,000 men.

The battle was the last gasp for Hitler’s Third Reich.

The gamble didn’t pay off. The losses in men and equipment weakened the German Army to the point that it could not defend itself as the Americans and their Allies stormed into the Fatherland.

The war in Europe would be over in five months.

In Columbia, veterans from 29 states and four foreign countries are to be honored at 4 p.m. Thursday with a parade down Assembly Street to Williams-Brice Stadium, where they will be recognized before the nationally televised USC-Southern Mississippi football game.

There will also be luncheons and a dance, receptions and an autograph session, noted speakers and honored guests – among them syndicated columnist George Will and George Patton’s grandson, Mount Pleasant’s Pat Waters. Will is scheduled to speak during the conference because his father-in-law, Leif Masseng of Columbia, is a Battle of the Bulge veteran and president of the South Carolina chapter.

It will all be high style for men who spent Christmas 1944 huddled in foxholes in the coldest winter on record, shelled nearly senseless by German artillery, with nothing to eat but frozen K-rations.

The conference is the result of two years of planning by the South Carolina chapter of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge and co-chairs Everett C. Davis and Barbara J. Mooneyhan, who are associate members.

“We just want to do our part to recognize these gentlemen and ladies who have done so much for us,” said Davis, who produces the “Road to Victory” musical and along with Mooneyhan has conducted more than 300 oral histories of World War II veterans. “And we also wanted to bring some national recognition to Columbia and South Carolina.”

This week’s events will have strong South Carolina ties.

• About 30 of the veterans, like Paulk, live in South Carolina.

• The Third Army, which rode to the rescue of Bastogne under Gen. George S. Patton, is in the process of transferring its headquarters to Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter from Atlanta.

• And one of the divisions that bore the initial brunt of the German attack – the 106th Infantry Division – formed at Columbia’s Fort Jackson. It found itself at the front, overstretched, ill-equipped and with insufficient ammunition.

“We really weren’t prepared at all for what happened,” said Chris Carawan of Columbia, a fresh-faced 18-year-old radioman in the 106th when he found himself in the middle of the fighting.

The Battle of the Bulge began with eerie quiet in the Ardennes, which stretch through Belgium and Luxembourg. As Paulk said, everyone thought the Germans were whipped.

So quiet was this part of the front lines that the U.S. Army put the 106th “Golden Lions” – one of its newest and greenest divisions – there just to get settled in.

Then, On Dec. 16, the shelling began.

“For two hours, it was constant,” Carawan said. Rockets. Artillery. “The whole works. Then they hit us with three divisions. There were more tanks than you could believe.”

The 106th and other divisions along the front held for a couple of days, then crumbled. American and Allied forces from throughout northern Europe rushed to stop the German surge.

They tried to contain the Germans in a wide arc, hunkering down on key ridges and strong points that defined the edges of “the bulge.”

At Bastogne, the 101st joined 10th Armored Division tanks and artillery, as well as the specialized 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and dug in. They were quickly surrounded, and endured some of the most vicious German attacks of the war, mostly by massed German artillery, the dreaded and versatile 88mm anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, called simply “88s.”

When the Germans sent the 101st’s commander, Gen. Anthony Clement McAuliffe, a surrender ultimatum, he responded with one word: “Nuts!”

After about two weeks of fighting, the bulge was stemmed. In another two weeks, the American’s drove the Germans back.

‘We won the war’

The Battle of the Bulge was the last major German offensive of the war.

In the five months after the bulge was closed, American and Allied troops would cross the Rhine into Germany, take most of its major cities, and liberate concentrations camps in which Jews and other civilian victims of the Holocaust had been confined and executed.

The war in Europe would end on May 8, 1945.

Paulk looks back with pride on his service in World War II. The jacket he wore when he jumped on D-Day is framed on his living room wall.

“I had a 26-inch waist, weighed 180 pounds and could have whipped a bear,” he said. And even at a fragile 86 years old, he retains the cockiness that is the hallmark of American paratroopers.

“There were a lot of infantry guys who did a terrific job closing up the bulge,” he said, then grinned. “But me and Eisenhower, we won the war.”