Vets prepare to salute Battle of the Bulge
On Dec. 16, 1944, Harold Kist was with two fellow soldiers hunkered down in a roadside ditch in Belgium searching for a German patrol that had accidentally stumbled into their camp.
The sky was pitch black and the snow-covered ground on the Allied side of the World War II battle line was as ”hard as a tabletop.”
”All of a sudden we hear all this commotion and this infantry of a couple of hundred German troops goes by half running and half walking,” Kist said.
On that bitterly cold morning, Kist was a witness to the start of the Battle of the Bulge, one of the war’s largest and bloodiest battles, and Hitler’s last-ditch effort to stop the Allied advance on Germany.
”We just couldn’t get over this,” Kist said. ”We didn’t know what was going on. Once we heard the small arms and heard the artillery fire, we knew there was an attack going on, but we had no idea of the scope of the attack.”
The Belgian government is flying 43 veterans to the ceremonies Wednesday. Other veterans, including Kist, Metz and Mariotti, are flying on their own. The events begin Friday.
”This is going to be a very moving experience for the men,” said Kist, who has not been back since the war in Europe ended in May 1945. ”This is probably going to be the last big celebration.”
Kist, Metz and Mariotti were new to the war when the Battle of the Bulge began. The Germans launched a surprise counter-attack across Belgium and Luxembourg to try to divide and destroy the allied forces in Europe. Their push into the Allied defense formed a ”bulge” into the southeast portion of Belgium and the northern half of Luxembourg.
”You have to remember that the Battle of the Bulge was just a confrontation where they had an objective and we had an objective to prevent them,” said Metz, president of the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge. ”The Battle of the Bulge concept came after the war was over.”
Hitler’s goal, according to historians, was to push allied forces back to the North Sea, capture the key port of Antwerp, Belgium, and ultimately force a negotiated peace treaty.
The surprise was strategically launched during bitter winter weather, which grounded Allied planes. German tiger tanks rumbled 50 miles into Allied territory.
More than 1 million American, British and German soldiers fought in the battle. When it ended Jan. 25, 1945, 19,000 American troops were dead and 62,000 were injured, captured or missing.
The Allies held their ground, recaptured Belgium and Luxembourg, and handed Hitler a defeat that began his slide, which ended on VE Day four months later.
For Metz, Mariotti and Kist, stationed on different parts of the vast battlefield, the 41 days seemed endless. There was little sleep and rarely a regular meal. Showers if they got them were almost always cold and taken in a metal bucket.
The days were a struggle to stay alive in brutally cold foxholes while slowly beating back the German onslaught of artillery shells and sniper fire.
Morris Metz
Metz, 79, graduated from Pen Argyl High School in June 1943 and, like most of his classmates, wanted to join the war.
Bad eyesight kept him from the Navy, but Metz memorized the eye chart and applied for the Army in September, reading the letters perfectly even though he could barely see the big ”E.”
He was selected for the Army Specialist Training Program, which would enroll soldiers in civil engineering courses in preparation for rebuilding war-torn regions of Europe when the war ended.
But with the war at its height and the country in need of healthy young men, the program was scrapped. By September 1944, Metz was in the 94th Infantry Division on the front lines, working in a 30-man platoon.
Metz’s unit entered the battle in January. It had been busy containing German forces at Lorient and St. Nazaire in France.
”We knew that there was something going on, because it trickled down, but not directly,” he said.
Metz’s unit was on the fringe of the battle, but the carnage was evident.
”As we moved around, we saw the impact,” Metz said. ”We saw jeeps carry the wounded back to headquarters. We saw a couple of people who were shot up, and burned-out German tanks.
”In one case when we were involved in a battle, they were pulling out wounded. One guy, I will never forget, was lying out on a stretcher with one leg blown off.”
Ennio Mariotti
Mariotti, 83, was working at Bethlehem Steel when the war started.The company had been able to get Mariotti two deferments from the Army, and for 31/2 years he was able to avoid the war.
”The third one, they couldn’t get anymore,” Mariotti said. ”They had to get rid of all the young people.”
Mariotti, then 23, was drafted into the Army in March 1944 and by October he was in Germany as a rifleman with the 9th Infantry Division, fighting in the Huertgen Forest.
In the days leading up to the start of the battle, Mariotti was already in combat with advancing troops in a ”little
Twenty-four hours after the start of the Battle of the Bulge, his unit was pulled back to help stop the German movement.
Mariotti was on a hilltop looking down on a valley where German soldiers were hiding less than 400 yards away.
Like other troops in his infantry, Mariotti and a partner dug a foxhole, taking turns sleeping while the other was patrolling for an attack.
”We made it about chest high with enough space so both of us could lay down curled up like a pretzel,” he said.
Mariotti’s feet froze from below-zero temperatures combined with sleet and snow. The weather has been called the worst in Belgium in the past 100 years.
”I couldn’t walk,” he said. ”I took my shoes off. My feet were so frozen I couldn’t put them back on because I couldn’t lace them.”
Before Christmas, Mariotti was sent back to headquarters, where he was given a bottle of rubbing alcohol to massage his feet until circulation returned and he could lace his shoes.
”I was lucky,” he admits. ”There were people who lost their toes or got gangrene.
”I can still feel it now. When I am walking and I got shoes on, I think that my socks are wrinkled up at the bottom of my feet.”
Before the New Year, Mariotti returned to his old foxhole at the northern front of the battlefield.
”We were very fortunate,” he said. ”We had a lot of artillery behind us and only one time did [German soldiers] try to penetrate.”
Mariotti regularly saw German soldiers moving in the woods below. According to the reports, the German army was ready to attack the area.
”We were told, ‘Don’t do any shooting.’ Don’t give away your position if you can,’ ” he said. ”They had spotters and they could see us. Every once in awhile if you moved around, during the course of the day especially, you would get mortar shells.
”[The Germans] conceded that area because they didn’t have enough gasoline for their tanks and were getting heavy artillery.”
Mariotti and his infantry moved forward into Germany, which borders Belgium, toward the Rhine River.
Harold Kist
Kist, 81, was 20 and studying at a flight school in Toms River, N.J., when he was drafted into the Army.
He was initially assigned to the 8th Armored Division. After basic training, he was to study engineering. But in March 1944, Kist and the rest of his class were moved to combat training in the 99th Infantry Division and trained as riflemen.
By early November, Kist, too, was on the front lines, joined with troops who had made the push east to liberate France. Waiting for the supply lines to catch up, Kist and his division stopped near the German border overlooking the Ardennes Forest.
”This was supposed to be a nice, quiet, peaceful winter because it was all heavy forested land,” Kist said. ”It was the first few days of November.”
The troops would go on patrols to ”penetrate and harass the Germans and they would do the same to us.”
”The forest was beautiful,” he said. ”There were great big pine and spruce trees 40-, 50-, 60-feet high. The trees were so thick, very little light filtered down to floor of the forest.
”This also made it very difficult for us, because when the Germans sent artillery fire over, the artillery shells would hit the top of the tree and explode, and all the shrapnel would come down to the ground,” Kist said. ”Even if you were in a foxhole you could still be hit by shrapnel.”
For Kist, a firefight with German soldiers started a day early. A German patrol had been operating behind the allied lines for a long time.
”This patrol was for sabotage,” he said. ”They were cutting communications lines, disabling vehicles, burning supplies, disrupting communications.
”They were making their way back to their own lines and didn’t know the Germans were going to attack the next morning.”
During the night, the patrol stumbled into the 99th Infantry’s camp and a battle ensued.
By dawn, Kist’s unit split into small groups scattered over the Ardennes looking to capture the German patrol.
”In my unit we always worked in threes so that when we are in a foxhole, there are three in a foxhole. One man sleeps and two men are awake. One man awake is no good. He falls asleep, there is no guard.”
They were in the ditch looking for German soldiers hiding in a nearby forest when the German army rumbled past, beginning the Battle of the Bulge.
Kist rejoined his military company, which was soon sent to defend the northern front of Elsenborn Ridge, where the division held off the German onslaught while suffering mass casualties.
”We were told we had to hold that ridge,” he said. ”There was no more retreating, no more withdrawing.
”From about the 20th until when I left at the end of January, we dug in on that hill.”
Sometimes the snow was about 3 feet deep.
”During the day you couldn’t move because the Germans were in the woods,” Kist said. ”We couldn’t see them, but they could see us.”
”You had to stay in your foxhole. You couldn’t go out even to relieve yourself, because there was snipers in those trees. You didn’t eat. If there was food brought, it was brought at night in the cover of darkness.Water would be brought up in the cover of darkness.”
At night they would go out on patrols.
The Germans made several attempts to break through Kist’s line, ”but we held our own,” he said.
After the battle ended, Kist was evacuated, ”because we couldn’t walk anymore.”
”Everybody was sick. Everybody had bad colds. Everybody was coughing and hacking. Sometimes it was so cold that you couldn’t get your finger to pull the trigger.”
Of the 210 men in Kist’s company when he left the United States, there were 21 by the time he returned.
”We don’t know what happened to the rest of them,” he said.
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