Battle of the Bulge profiles: 106th endures 'Glorious Collapse'

On Dec. 15, 1944, Chris Carawan, an 18-year-old radio operator from Washington, N.C., could hear ominous rumblings from the German lines on the other side of the valley, and he dutifully reported the strange sounds to headquarters.

“Sounded like tanks to me,” he said. “They said not to worry. There might be a slight counterattack, but nothing major.”

No one in Carawan’s 106th Infantry Division, formed at Columbia’s Fort Jackson the year before, questioned the reply. They had just entered the front lines four days before and were the greenest of replacements, one of the first divisions in the U.S. Army to be assigned 18-year-old draftees.

They were deployed in an area along the Belgium-German border, just east of a couple of anonymous little hamlets called Bastogne and St. Vith. The sector that had been quiet for 10 weeks, making it a place where the 106th could work its way into the war slowly, they were told.

Then, about 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 16, “all hell broke loose,” said Carawan, now living in Columbia. “They shelled us and shelled us with everything they had. We didn’t have many automatic weapons. We didn’t have much ammunition. They came up with Tiger tanks and just overran us.”

The shelling marked the opening salvo of the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought by the U.S. Army — the Battle of the Bulge.

More than 80 veterans of the battle, named for the bulge in the American lines that the German thrust caused, will arrive in Columbia on Wednesday for their national conference.

One of the highlights of the five-day event will occur on Thursday with a 4 p.m. parade down from downtown to Williams-Brice Stadium, where they will be honored before the nationally televised USC-Southern Mississippi football game. There also will be a full slate of receptions and dinners, a dance, tours and an autograph session, many of which will be open to the public.

Interaction with the public will have added poignancy because the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II is Thursday – the date of the signing of the armistice on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, Sept. 2, 1945.

“As we approach the 65th anniversary of the end of the war, it’s important for the people of the city of Columbia to have an opportunity to say thank you to these heroes in person,” said Barbara J. Mooneyhan, the co-chairman of the event along with Everett C. Davis, both associate members of the South Carolina chapter of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, which is hosting the national conference.

The 106th Division was activated on March 15, 1943, at Fort Jackson. But according to the regimental history, the division repeatedly had been tapped for replacement troops, sent to fill out other combat units, before its deployment to Europe, eroding the 106th’s cohesiveness and esprit de corps.

This drain came at a time when the Army was rounding up supply troops and mechanics, even air ground crews and turning them into riflemen in preparation for the final push into Germany following the D-Day invasion.

In the month before it was shipped overseas in March 1944, the 106th “Golden Lions,” as they were called, had lost 95 percent of its original members and received new recruits, the history says.

“Its training in the states had been routine, and its equipment was merely adequate,” the history reads.

Carawan was one of the late comers.

The offspring of a seafaring family, he signed up for the Army when he was just 17 years old, with the permission of his parents.

“At that time, the Germans were sinking ships off the coast of North Carolina like gangbusters, so everyone expected me to join the Navy,” Carawan said. “But I joined the Army. My uncles, who were in the Navy, gave me a real hard time. But that’s what I wanted to do.”

After basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, Carawan was shipped to Indianapolis, Ind., where the division was training and awaiting transfer overseas.

“They had pulled in a lot of really young people like me,” Carawan said.

After being shipped to Scotland -- “where we trained night and day,” Carawan said -- the division crossed to France and was trucked to the front.

There they relieved the veteran 2nd Infantry “Indianhead” Division in heavily forested and hilly area called the Schnee Eifel. The veterans wished the new soldiers well, and told them to enjoy the stay. All was quiet.

“They brought in kitchens and hot food,” Carawan said. “Told us to get some rest.”

In addition to being inexperienced, the division was strung out for 27 miles along the Schnee Eifel, while Army regulations — “the book,” as the regimental history calls it — dictated a division cover five miles.

Because of Allied successes after D-Day the front lines of the war in December of 1944 stretched from the Netherlands to Austria, and the American and British armies were struggling to cover all of the territory.

When the German attack came, the division’s 422nd and 423rd Infantry Regiments were quickly surrounded. But shortly after midnight on the 17th, the 106th received word from its corps commander, Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton, to “hold at all costs.”

The division commander, Maj. Gen. Alan W. Jones, said laconically to his regimental commanders: “In plain military language, that means, ‘Stay until you’re dead.’ ”

Although by many accounts the 422nd and the 423rd fought valiantly for two days, they surrendered on Dec. 18 in the face of overwhelming odds.

Carawan, whose 424th Regiment was better positioned near Bastogne, better supplied and was able to withdraw to fight again, said: “There’s been a lot of speculation why the 106th lost those regiments. If you would have been there, you would have known what the situation was. You are outnumbered 10-to-1 and you run out of ammunition. What else are you going to do?”

Carawan remembers with pain the loss of two buddies, the retreat and counterattacks, unbelievable cold, even the Christmas dinner they had. “Shot a dozen chickens,” he said. “Popped their heads off with M-1s (carbine rifles).”

At the end of the battle, reports show 416 men of the 106th had been killed, 1,246 were wounded, 1,023 were missing and 5,978 captured, including a scout named Kurt Vonnegut, who later wrote a novel based on his prisoner-of-war experiences in then-German city of Dresden. Despite the defeat, the 106th and other overrun divisions delayed the German advance just long enough for reinforcements to arrive and stem the bulge, their commanders said.

First Army commander Gen. Courtney Hodges would write, “No troops in the world, disposed as (the) division had to be, would have withstood the impact of the German attack. … Please tell these men for me what a grand job they did. The delay they affected, upset the (German) timetable.”

A regimental historian, Stanley Frank, was more philosophical.

“War … is a dirty, despicable, degrading business, sometimes attended by bitter, unredeemed defeat in a man’s first action, leaving him to wonder for the rest of his days whether he was betrayed by circumstances or his courage,” he wrote. “That was the side of the war the 106th Infantry Division knew.”