Dirt: Battle of the Bulge

16

...the overall operational effectiveness of the infantry arm is determined most fundamentally by the performance of its smallest units and their leaders.

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1974

When the three old men gathered in the mess hall at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in 1974 it was the first time that they had ever discussed with each other their fight in the Ardennes. Back then, thirty years earlier, they had been too busy to talk about it. They had more battles to fight. Although each had been interviewed by Army historians during the war and had told their stories at various other times, they had never had the opportunity to remember together.

Now they were in a company mess hall of their old regiment, the 327^th Infantry. They were the wartime regimental commander, one of his battalion commanders, and a company commander of the battalion. The current brigade commander was there and the audience was his serving officers. Maps of the Ardennes were mounted on easels and each man was going to tell a new generation of officers, the Vietnam and post-Vietnam generation, what their unit had done in the Battle of the Bulge.

I noticed how close in age the three men seemed to be. It could not have seemed so thirty years earlier. Then, as now, rank and age seemed to go together. A colonel is supposed to be much older than a captain. But even if the colonel had been forty and the captain twenty-five that winter morning in 1944 (and the battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, somewhere in-between), there was an even greater distance in authority. Now at seventy and fifty-five they looked much closer in age. Nevertheless, between them, the men who had been a colonel, a lieutenant colonel and a captain, there was still a distance.

The first to step to the maps was the Colonel. He was very clear and concise as he described his assessment of the situation. He told what he knew about the German attack, when he knew it, what locations he thought were critical, how he disposed his battalions, and how he plotted his artillery fires. As he described it, the information was carefully drawn in military symbols on sheets of clear acetate covering the maps.

Then the man who had been a lieutenant colonel and one of the battalion commanders stepped up to the map. He studied it for a while and turned to his old boss. 

“I got your orders, sir, but I didn’t think you really understood what was happening here.” He pointed to a spot on the map.

He went on to explain the orders he had given to his company commanders. These were drawn on more sheets of acetate and placed over the maps. They were not quite the same as what the colonel had told him to do.

Then the man who had been one of the lieutenant colonel’s company commanders came up to the map. He smiled.

“I got your orders, sir, but I didn’t think you really understood what needed to be done at the road junction right here.” He pointed to a spot on the map as the rest of the men in the room chuckled.

The Lieutenant Colonel turned to the Colonel. “Told you that sonofabitch never followed orders. He’s the hard-headedest infantryman I ever saw.”

The Colonel shot back, “He had a good example. I didn’t notice you following my orders all that well.”

The Captain turned back the map and went on to describe how a small hill controlled the intersection and where he’d put his machine guns and anti-tank weapons, and where he’d plotted artillery fires.

They all then went on to tell the stories of the confusion of the days that followed, the back and forth in the cold and mud, and how they stayed and fought and won until they were at last relieved.

This is a delicate, delicate balance, this web of relationships that spreads across the infantryman’s earth. One foxhole relates to another foxhole. One platoon’s set of foxholes and machine guns relates to another platoon’s. Company to company, battalion to battalion, brigade to brigade, the web spreads beyond any one person’s capacity to control. But if that one foxhole is right, and in the right place, and the web is built on the competence of each person in it, then everything can hold together.

Dirt: Maps

Main Street, Bastogne, Belgium, Olin Daws, 1945

15 

If we reflect upon the commencement of War philosophically the conception of War does not originate properly with the offensive, as the form has for its absolute object, not so much fighting as the taking possession of something....

Karl von Clausewitz, On War

My map was on the ground beside me and was wrapped in plastic to protect it from rain and sweat. The plastic covering also allowed me to draw on it with a grease pencil. The scale of the map was 1:50,000, which meant that one map sheet covered a very small piece of the earth. The map was a masterpiece of the cartographer’s art and yet so common in my experience that I had long since quit admiring it. I wanted it to tell me even more than it did.

Brown contour lines provided a sense of the three-dimensional shape of the land — how high the hills were, how steep their sides. Small blue lines showed me the streams and rivers. Black symbols and lines told me the man-made objects that were on the land such as roads, houses, bridges, churches, and graveyards. Other tints and symbols told me about farmland and orchards and swamps and rice paddies.

Overprinted on the map was a grid that sectioned off the land into little squares one kilometer on a side. If the map was accurate, if my hand steady, if my eye clear, and if I could relate this piece of paper to the ground in which I dug, I could tell within 10 meters exactly where I was. I could create a number that would tell any listener to my radio or reader of my messages exactly the same thing.

On the plastic covering were drawn other symbols. They told me where to go and what to do when I got there. They told me who was supposed to be on my left and my right. Essentially, the symbols gave me ownership of a specific piece of the earth. I possessed this land with my men and my skill and my weapons. Also, when I converted my numbers into code and sent them up through the chain of command I told them, “Here I am! Don’t shoot me!”

But why was I here? This day? This time? That was not easy to answer.

An appraiser determines the value of civilian real estate. In general, that value is determined by the most recent sales of “comparable” pieces of property. It is self-evidently a fool’s game and a tautology, but it is in most places a shared delusion so that a market is made and deeds are exchanged. However, ownership established by anything other than force of arms is a rather modern idea.

The infantryman is from an older tradition. The infantryman establishes a much more primal claim to the land. His claim is very simple. “This is mine because I am here and I will kill you if you try to take it away from me. I have dug my hole and it’s either your blood or mine.”

That’s one soldier’s view. But the perception shifts the moment two foxholes are considered. Perception shifts again and again and again as the circumstances become more complex. Simple possession is not enough. Just being there only matters if being there has some advantage that favors the owner in relation to his enemy.

All other things being equal, the value of land to an infantryman derives primarily from its prominence, its shape and its location.

Consider a road junction in the Ardennes forest in late 1944. If an infantryman and his colleagues are at that junction, standing in the middle of the road, then a group of Germans who want to go through that junction will have to get them out of the way. If the infantrymen just stand there in the open, the Germans will shoot them, drop some artillery on them, or maybe just drive over them in their tanks, crushing their bodies into the mud and the snow. The location has some value, but defending is a bit difficult.

So what happens if they dig their holes beside the junction? That is a little bit better, at least now they are more difficult to kill. Their ability to control who can go through the junction is pretty much determined by who has the most people and the amount and types of weapons they have or can call on.

Suppose that the road junction is next to a small hill. If the infantrymen are up on the side of the hill where they can cover the intersection, then they can shoot anything that tries to get through and they are even more protected. To use the intersection, the Germans have to send some people up the hill to force the infantrymen away.

Of course, it doesn’t mean a damn thing if the infantrymen are in a place no one else wants. Of course, it doesn’t mean a damn thing if they occupy a hill that confers no advantage over their enemy. That was one of the many frustrations of being an infantryman in Vietnam. All too often the only point of attacking a location was to kill the people at that location. The dirt had no value relative to the enemy and once they were there it often meant nothing to the enemy or friendly forces. But the history of war is full of examples of mis-appreciation of the value of a particular piece of dirt. The infantryman just knows that it is his job to claim ownership today. Tomorrow will have to take care of itself.