The 101st Had No Armor at Bastogne. Kokott’s Panzers Found Out What They Did Have.

December 1944. The frozen woods northwest of Baston, an hour before first light. If you were the grenadier moving up through that treeine in a snowsuit, boots numb, breath freezing on your collar, you had been handed a simple picture of the men in front of you. Beaten, cut off. An airborne division with no tanks surrounded and waiting to be finished.

General Major Heines Cookot commanded the division sent to finish them. And Kokot was not a man who scared easily. He had seen the front in the east. He knew what a broken enemy looked like. 4 days later, he would sit down and write his assessment of what happened on that perimeter. The words he chose are still on paper in a United States Army archive, and they describe a division that had wrecked his armor.

This is the story of the 101st Airborne at Baston, and of the armor the Germans never knew was waiting for them. The same pages hold the verdict the German commander wrote in his own hand once his tanks had gone into those woods and did not come back. Hines Kott is the judge here and a verdict is only worth what the judge is worth.

He was 54 years old that winter, a professional soldier of longstanding. His 26th Vulks Grenadier Division was one of the formations Field Marshal Walter Model trusted to carry the southern shoulder of the Arden’s offensive. Above Kokot stood General Hinrich von Llutvitz who commanded the 47th Panza Corps. Above Von Lutwitz stood Hasso von Mantoyel with the fifth Panza army.

Mantiful handed von Lutwitz one job that mattered more than any other on that road. Take Baston. Seven paved roads met inside that little Belgian market town and no German column could reach the muse on schedule while the Americans held the crossroads. By the 21st of December the town was surrounded. Kokot’s grenaders had closed the ring from the south and west, and the airborne men inside were cut off from resupply, from reinforcement, from any friendly line.

The Germans held the initiative and the numbers, and they had armor on the field. The defenders had no armor of their own, and the Germans knew it. On the 22nd of December, Vonletwitz decided to make the obvious point in writing. He sent two officers under a white flag into the American lines carrying a typed ultimatum.

The document did not hedge. There was, it said, only one way to save the encircled American troops from total annihilation, and that was the honorable surrender of the town. 2 hours were granted for a reply. The reply came back from Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, the acting commander inside the pocket, and it was one word.

No. When Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Harper carried it back to the German delegation, they did not understand it. [music] So he translated in plain English. He told them it meant go to hell. The Germans saluted and withdrew and the shelling resumed. That exchange has become a piece of folklore told and retold until it sounds like a joke.

It was not a joke to Koko. A surrounded division that answers an ultimatum with one word is either bluffing or it knows something the man outside the wire does not. Kot assumed the former. He had every professional reason to. He was about to learn which it was. The whole verdict turns on the men inside the [music] ring and on who they actually were.

The 101st Airborne Division was raised as light infantry that arrives by parachute and glider and light infantry travels light. Its weapons were rifles, machine guns, and mortars with a handful of small artillery pieces. Tanks were left out on purpose because airborne divisions were built to seize a bridge or a crossroads and hold it for a day or two until heavier forces linked up.

When the Arden’s offensive broke on the 16th of December, the division was resting and refitting near reams far behind the line. was thrown north into Baston in a rush, riding in open trucks through freezing rain to plug a hole that was already collapsing. So, the picture Kott had been given was at the moment it was drawn correct.

The airborne men had no armor. What the picture missed was a decision made far up the chain days earlier by men reacting to the same emergency. On the 18th of December, with the situation map turning red, a tank destroyer battalion sitting in reserve roughly 60 mi to the north was ordered to turn around and drive for Baston.

The 75th Tank Destroyer Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Clifford Templeton, made that road march through the night and the following day and closed into the Basttorn area late on the 19th, hours ahead of the ring snapping shut behind it. It slipped in through a gap that would not exist much longer, and it reported to the 101st.

The battalion brought the M18 Hellcat. The Hellcat was a tank destroyer, a strange and specialized animal. Fast, faster than any tank on either side, it rode on a light chassis with an open topped turret and armor thin enough that a rifle caliber round could trouble the crew. It was never meant to trade blows with a tank head on.

The crews used it to reach a threatened spot fast and fire from cover. Then they pulled back before the enemy could range them. On its turret, it carried a 76 mm gun, a long high velocity weapon that could punch through the side and rear plate of a German tank at the ranges these fights were fought. The way the crews used the Hellcat mattered as much as the gun.

A tank destroyer battalion did not sit in a line and slug it out. It parked its guns in cover behind hedge at farm walls in the mouths of village lanes and sunken roads. Each one sighted on the ground a tank would have to cross. And it waited. When German armor moved, the Hellcats fired into the flank and the rear, the thin plate, and then used their speed to shift before the enemy could bring a gun to bear.

On a broken perimeter of small villages and open snowfields, cut by sunken roads and stone farms. That method fit the ground almost perfectly. Every approach the German tanks could take ran through a killing lane. Somebody had already picked. Roughly three dozen of those guns rolled into the perimeter with Templeton’s men.

That was the armor Koko did not know was there. When his tanks went forward, expecting a division that could not shoot back at armor, they met crews who had trained for exactly one thing, killing tanks, and who had picked their firing positions in the dark and waited. The first proof came before the ring even closed on the northern approach at a village called Novel.

Novel sat on high ground north of Baston, a stride one of the roads the Germans needed. Holding it was a scratch force built around Major William Desabri of the 10th Armored Division, a combat command sent down from the north to buy time. Team Desabri had a few Sherman tanks and some infantry.

And on the night of the 18th, it was reinforced by paratroopers of the first battalion, 56th parachute infantry regiment and by 4 M18 Hellcats sent up from Templeton’s battalion. Against them came the lead elements of the second Panza division under Colonel Minrad von Laoser, a full armored division driving hard for the muse. At about 4 in the morning on the 19th, Von Lasher’s tanks came on.

What saved the defenders for the first hours was the fog. A thick freezing mist lay over the ground, and it hid the handful of American vehicles as thoroughly as it hid the German attack. Then, for a few minutes late that morning, the fog lifted. When it did, the men at Novel found German tanks stopped in the open on the low ground and the far ridge, engines idling, waiting for the mist to clear so they could pick their target.

In those few minutes, the Shermans and the four Hellcats fired into a stationary enemy, and German tanks began to burn on the slope before the fog rolled back and hid everyone again. This is the point where the folklore has to be corrected because the correction makes the fight larger. The second Panza division at novel was a fast armored division built around Panther tanks and Panzer 4s.

Television retellings like to place a heavy Tiger on that ridge and none was ever there. The gun the Americans faced was serious enough without one, and inventing a heavier enemy only cheapens what the crews actually did against the armor that was in front of them. The fight for Novel lasted two days, and it was expensive on both sides.

Major Desbury was gravely wounded and captured. The team lost roughly half its strength along with a number of its Shermans and tank destroyers and the paratroopers of the first of the 506 lost heavily too. When the survivors pulled back toward Baston on the 20th, the defenders had been credited with knocking out on the order of 30 German tanks.

For the second Panza division, the machines could be replaced. The days could not. The division had been meant to sweep through and drive on for the river, and instead [music] it had spent two days it did not have on one village. Delay ran down the whole German timetable in the north. Novel was one action against one enemy division.

The action that produced Kokot’s verdict came 5 days later [music] on a different piece of ground against a different German unit. And it was Kokot’s own attack. Between those two attacks came the hardest days the defenders spent inside the ring and those days nearly emptied the pocket. By the 22nd of December, the pocket was running dry.

The defenders had gone into Baston short of everything, and a week of steady fighting had drawn down what little they carried. The artillery was the first crisis. Some batteries were down to a handful of shells per gun, and the gunners were ordered to fire only at targets a forward observer could actually see, so that not one round was wasted on a hope.

Rations were nearly gone. The wounded were piling up in cellars and aid stations with the surgical teams overwhelmed because a field hospital had been overrun early in the siege and captured whole. Cold did the rest. Men without overshoes or winter coats lost feet to frostbite in the foxholes, and the ground was frozen too hard to dig without picks.

Then about midday on the 23rd of December, the sky cleared. The overcast that had grounded Allied aircraft for a week broke open, and out of it came the transport. More than 200 cargo aircraft flew over the town in waves and dropped tons of ammunition and medical supplies by parachute into the perimeter along with rations for men who had run out.

while fighter bombers worked the German positions in the fields beyond. The airdrops did not break the siege, but they refilled the gunpits and the aid stations at the moment they had almost emptied, and they meant that when Kokot made his main effort, the defenders would have shells to answer it. By Christmas Eve, Hitler had put a date on the town.

Bastorm was to be taken on the 25th. Kokot no longer had the second Panza division which had been pulled off toward the Muse. What he had was his own 26th Vulks Grenadier Division worn down by a week of fighting and a fresh regiment that had just come up. the 115th Panza Grenadier Regiment of the 15th Panza Grenadier Division with a battalion of tanks attached.

Kokot studied his map and chose the western face of the perimeter, the sector around two small farming villages called Champs and Hemrile. He would strike there and break through the thin airborne line. If it worked, he would be in the town before the morning was out. Timing was everything, and he knew it. He wanted his men inside Baston by 9 in the morning.

Any later, and the winter sky cleared at last, would fill with American fighter bombers that caught his columns in the open on the snow. opened on Christmas Eve. That night, the German bombers came back over Baston in two heavy raids, lighting the town and dropping bombs across the American rear. Around 3:00 in the morning, aircraft droned over the roll shadow itself and put bombs down near the 52n command post.

The blast broke up a midnight church service in the stables where the wounded and the cold had gathered to stay warm. Behind the bombing, Kokot sent in a preliminary attack against Champs, the northwestern village held by Lieutenant Colonel Steve Chapui and his 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment. Grenaders in white snowsuits crept forward with a few tanks in support and the weight of it fell on a company of the first battalion.

The paratroopers held through the dark and the probe told Kokot where the American line was and told him it would not simply give way. His main blow was set for a few hours later at first light. Before dawn on Christmas morning, his assault group formed up. The grenaders pulled on white snowsuits and climbed onto the decks of the tanks, and the tanks themselves had been hastily whitewashed to blend into the fields.

Around 18 Panza 4s, painted white and loaded with infantry, rolled out of the treeine toward Champs and Hemrru in the gray light. For a few minutes at the armor broke clean through the forward airborne foxhole line between the two villages, and got in among the American positions, and to the paratroopers in the snow, it looked as if the Western Wall had just been Greek.

Then the ground the tanks had broken into closed around them. The western sector was held by the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment with its command post back at a stone farmhouse, the Roll Chatau. As the white tanks pushed past the forward positions, they drove straight into ground.

The defenders had prepared in depth. Templeton’s Hellcats were cited to cover exactly this approach. Shermans of the 10th Armored were in support. The howitzers of the 463rd Parachute Field Artillery sat behind the line, firing over open sights at armor they could see. Bazooka teams were dug in among the farm buildings and the hedges. The German tank column split as it came on.

Some vehicles turned toward Champs and others toward Hemrul and each group drove into fire from more than one direction at once. The 76 mm guns of the Hellcats took them in the flank as they passed. In the farm buildings a few dozen yards off, bazooka teams waited for a tank to show its side. A white painted tank that survived one gun drove into the ark of the next.

The close fighting threw up the kind of moment the afteraction reports remember by name. Two of the German tanks broke north from Hemoule and tried to slip past the Royal Chateau, the regimental command post itself. A paratrooper of the 502nd, trooper Sky Jackson, went after them alone with a bazooka and knocked one of them out single-handed, an act that brought him the Silver Star.

The second tank got past him only to be destroyed a short distance on at Shamp by another man of the same regiment, John Ballard of a company, who would himself be killed in action little more than a week later. The guns of the 463rd Parachute Field Artillery commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Cooper added their own contribution in a way field artillery was not meant to.

As the white tanks came on across open ground, the howitzer crews depressed their barrels and fired over open sights, aiming down the tube at armor they could see the way an anti-tank gun does. A 75 mm pack howitzer around at that range did not need to find a weak plate. The refilled ammunition stocks from the airrops 2 days earlier were what let those crews keep firing instead of hoarding a last few shells.

And on the western wall that morning, the gunners spent them on tanks in the open. The Panza Grenaders, who had ridden forward on the decks, were now on foot in a snow field swept from more than one direction with their armor burning around them. By the time the fire slackened, the assault group that had rolled out white against the snow had come apart in the fields between the two villages.

The German armor that had broken into the perimeter had been destroyed inside it. The grenaders who had ridden in on the decks were taken as casualties or as prisoners. The attack that was supposed to be inside Baston by 9 in the morning never reached the town at all. The number everyone quotes needs an honest look.

The 705th’s own afteraction report claimed 27 German tanks destroyed on Christmas Day against six Hellcats lost. That figure is a friendly tally, the count the American crews turned in. The German records do not confirm it as a reconciled loss. The assault force itself was on the order of 18 tanks and those were accounted for on the field.

The exact score belongs to the men who filed it. What is not in dispute is on which side of the line the wreckage sat when the shooting stopped and it sat on Kokot. Cockott tried once more. On the morning of the 26th of December, he scraped together another assault group from what was left of his division with about 10 tank destroyers and sent it toward Hemule from a new direction.

Mass American artillery caught it in the open before it closed and it was broken up before it could do anything. That same day from the south, the lead tanks of the fourth armored division of Patton’s third army broke through the ring near the village of Asaninoa and reached the defenders. A tank commander named Charles Bogus drove the first Sherman into the perimeter and shook hands with the airborne men who came up out of their holes to meet him.

The corridor was thin and would be fought over for days more, but the encirclement was broken and the siege as a German operation to take the town was over. Kokot had spent his last armor trying to be inside Baston by 9 on Christmas morning and the town was relieved from the outside instead. which brings the story to the paper Kirk left behind because the verdict on the 101st is his in his own words written for the record.

After the war, Kokot was among the German commanders. The United States Army asked to reconstruct their operations for the historical record in the series of manuscripts known as the foreign military studies. He wrote at length about the fight for Baston and about his Christmas attack in particular. He was writing for a professional audience in defeat with nothing left to win.

The account he gave is careful and unsentimental. He was honest about his own reasoning going in. He had chosen the western sector because his reconnaissance told him it was the thinnest and least expected place to strike, a seam between strong points where a fast armored punch might reach the town center before the defenders could seal it.

He had believed the airborne line there was brittle and that armor driving through it in the dark would find open road behind. The plan was sound on the map. What his account records is that the plan met something the map did not show. The airborne defense was organized in depth with guns sighted to cover exactly the ground his tanks had to cross.

His armor was engaged from several directions the moment it broke through before it could exploit anything at all. He called the Christmas assault what it was, a desperate attempt to force a decision. He recorded that at the end of the 25th, the 15th Panza Grenadier Division was, in his words, practically wiped out and that his own 26th division had lost more than 800 men that day.

The attached tank battalion, he noted, had barely a single combat fit tank left at its disposal. And on the fate of the armor he had sent into the sector around Hemorrh, the tanks he had counted on to break the airborne line and win the town, he chose two words. in the area around Hemoule. He wrote, “The tank battalion had been wiped out and annihilated.

” That is the verdict, and it is worth weighing what it cost the man who wrote it. Kokot had begun the week certain [music] he faced a beaten division with no armor, an enemy already surrounded, and only waiting to be told it had lost. He had the surrounded part right and he had it right that the paratroopers owned no tanks of their own.

What he misread was what that meant. The division with no armor had quietly in the dark on the 19th of December been handed a battalion of tank destroyers and about three dozen high velocity guns. And it had put them exactly where his tanks would come. teeth were there the whole time. Kokot simply could not see them until his own armor drove onto them and did not come back.

What the armor destroyed at Baston cost the Germans reached far past Kott’s own division. The Arden’s offensive was a race against the clock and against a fuel supply that was never enough. Mantiful’s fifth Panza army had to be across the muse before the American and British armies could concentrate and the road net at Baston was one of the keys to getting there.

While von Litvitz’s core was still spending divisions on the crossroads, the spearheads to the north ran low on fuel and ground to a halt short of the river. The second Panza division had burned two days at Novel. Kokut’s own division spent a week battering a town it could not take. On Christmas morning, its armored battalion was consumed in the fields around Hemula.

All of that came out of a timetable that had no slack in it at all. The high command had counted on the crossroad. The crossroads stayed in American hands. The perimeter held. Baston never fell. The seven roads stayed shut to the Germans through the worst of the winter, and the timetable that ran on those roads never recovered.

The 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion and the 101st Airborne both wore the presidential unit citation for those days, the Armorless Division, and the armor that arrived just in time to belong to it. The men who held that western wall were most of them ordinary. They were paratroopers who had ridden north in open trucks in the freezing rain and tank destroyer crews who had driven all night to reach a town they had never heard of.

One of them went after two German tanks alone with a bazooka at the edge of a farmyard. They left no document as famous as the German commanders. But it was the German commander who wrote the verdict on them, and he wrote it plainly, and he meant every word. He had seen a great deal of war on more than one front, and he set down for the permanent record that the armor he sent against the 101st had been wiped out and annihilated in the snow west of the town.

Maybe someone in your family served at Baston in the 101st Airborne or the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion or in one of the other units that held that perimeter through Christmas of 1944. Leave the name and the unit in the comments. And if you have ever crewed or fired an M18 Hellcat or know someone who did, tell us.

These stories stay alive because the people who carry them say them out loud.