What the SS Said After Facing the 101st Airborne

America’s Glory

"We were not fighting men. We were fighting something that had decided not to die." — SS Panzergrenadier officer Werner Kortenhaus, field journal, Ardennes, December 1944. "Kortenhaus had survived Kursk. He had held lines against Soviet and British forces for three years. He was not a man who ran out of frame of reference easily. But somewhere in the frozen forests outside Bastogne, he encountered the 101st Airborne Division — and wrote those words. "This is the account of what happened when five SS divisions, armed with tanks, artillery, and numerical superiority in every category that is supposed to decide battles, attempted to break a surrounded American parachute force in the worst winter in decades. The 101st had no winter gear. Inadequate ammunition. Almost no artillery shells. A perimeter fifty kilometers around. Encirclement completed December 21, 1944. "On December 22, Generalleutnant Heinrich von Lüttwitz sent a formal surrender ultimatum. Acting commander Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe's written reply was one word: "Nuts." The SS assaults that followed were full-scale armored attacks. They broke against the American lines again and again. "What the German after-action reports describe is not American firepower or material advantage. SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Dinse of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich — veterans of France, Kursk, three years on the Eastern Front — filed a captured tactical assessment calling it "psychologische Immovabilität." Psychological immovability. Major Herbert Büchs wrote that the paratroopers "defended every position as though retreat had been struck from their vocabulary." SS Unterscharführer Klaus Rademacher wrote home from a field hospital: "There is something wrong with them." "Men like Sergeant Layton Black, a combat medic from Harlan County, Kentucky, who held the entrance to a field aid station against a direct SS assault with a pistol and a borrowed carbine. Or PFC Vernon Haught from Columbus, Ohio, who stayed at his machine gun when a Panzer IV came for his position, broke the assault's cohesion, and got back up after the second round threw him several meters. "This is not a story about slow-motion flags. It is a story about what it takes to make an entire division decide, each man individually, that leaving was not an option."