The Angel of Bastogne
A Christmas Eve tragedy during the Battle of the Bulge
In 2005 I spent a semester teaching journalism at Syracuse University. While I was there, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Jack Prior, who was a battalion surgeon in the 10th Armored Division and operated a makeshift hospital during the siege of Bastogne. If you’ve seen Band of Brothers, you likely remember the nurse, Renee, who has a romance with Doc Roe. Her character was based on the real-life Renee Lemaire.
Today (December 16) begins the 80th anniversary remembrance of the Battle of the Bulge. I won’t pepper you with statistics, but rather will share some of the Bulge-related stories I’ve chronicled through interviews with veterans of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served, as well as veterans of the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions.
Dr. Jack Prior
Manlius, N.Y., Feb. 18, 2005
Battalion surgeon, 10th Armored Division
Aaron Elson: What was your first casualty like, that you had to treat?
Jack Prior: I don’t remember the first, but I remember the first action really that I got really involved in was in Noville, which is northeast of Bastogne, and we were overrun there. That was, It was like an oldtime Western. They were fighting in the streets there. And all of a sudden, I began to see head wounds, I saw belly wounds, and I saw chest wounds, lots of fractures. Overwhelmed with casualties. I began sending them back but then, all of a sudden, we had no transportation. My halftrack was hit, so I had no way to get people back to the hospital. I assumed there was a hospital in Bastogne. And the casualties kept increasing. They blew the second story off the building. We were crawling along on the floor to treat these patients.
The aid station was in a garage — no, in a bar — we used a bar usually for our aid station because there was a big room and you could put litters on the floor and take care of people. I had a dental officer with me who outranked me, and he and I were doing the first aid, and they sent a messenger over from across the street. Somehow he got across the street and said, “We’re leaving. We’re going back to Bastogne.” Here I was with probably 15 to 20 seriously injured, on the floor, no litters, and I said, “I won’t be going,” I said, “I’m gonna stay with these people. They’re my patients and I want to see that they get in good German hands for their medical care.” In the meantime I burned up all our records, all the paperwork in this unit, who was there, what they had, the time we gave them morphine, who had tourniquets. Everything was on fire. I burned it up in a corner of the room I can remember, because we were instructed to get rid of all records if you’re overwhelmed.
I went down to the basement to see, most of my detachment, I had 30 men, they were aid men, litter bearers and truck drivers, not skilled in taking care of people; I went down in the cellar and there was an old man and his wife down there. It was their bar and their restaurant. They’d been saying their beads all the time this was going on. And I said, “I need some volunteers.” The silence was deafening. We didn’t get any. So I went back up, and just at that time some of the tank crew were leaving the town. They ran in, “Doc, we’re leaving.”
I said, “I can’t go. I haven’t got any litters.”
They pulled the doors off all the rooms, made litters, put these doors onto their vehicles; they were on jeeps, they were on halftracks, they were on tanks, and they went down the road to go back to Bastogne which was probably 20 miles away.
We got down that road and it was dark. It was about 4 o’clock in the afternoon; it gets dark pretty early in the Ardennes. It doesn’t get daylight till 8 o’clock in the morning, but it was beginning darkness. The Germans had infiltrated both sides of the road. They moved into Noville and began dumping their artillery on us on this road. So we jumped into the ditches, and in the meantime these fellows on the tanks and on those doors are screaming, “Get us off!” But the Germans were sweeping the road with machine gun and small arms fire. The dentist and I were in the same ditch. He’d been in the unit a little longer than I had, I said to him, “Matt” — his name was Maitland; they called him Matt — and I said, “Matt, do you think we’re gonna get out of this?”
He said, “We would if you take off your helmet” — medical officers wore helmets, as did aid men, with a big red cross. He said, “They can see that.” In the meantime, they were chipping at a fencepost over my head, and I didn’t listen to him. I kept my helmet on.
About that time, the 101st Airborne arrived. They came in when we were in the ditches and when we were taking these people off the — we had to take them off the vehicles. And the 101st Airborne came in on foot; they didn’t jump. They’d had jumped into D-Day and the Netherlands, but they came in on foot. They had been on leave after the Holland episode, and they were poorly equipped. They had their dress uniforms on, some of them; they had low-cut shoes; they didn’t have overcoats. And many of them didn’t have weapons. They picked up weapons as they came in. They’d been on leave and they got the urgent message, “Get into Bastogne.” And that they did. They drove the trucks through the streets of Paris, these guys were on leave, and they hollered “101st Airborne!” And these fellows would run into the trucks. They trucked them right into Bastogne. And I’ve often said that had not the 101st Airborne arrived, on foot, I’d still be there. There wouldn’t be any way we were gonna get out of there.
But they got us back to Bastogne, and the 101st Airborne was at one end of the town and the 10th Armored was at the other end. I have great respect for those guys. An outstanding unit and they still are. It’s one of the best units in the Army today.
Aaron Elson: Now your aid station, was it combined in Bastogne with the 101st?
Jack Prior: No. That was very interesting. I maintained my own. I had a garage for a few days and I couldn’t heat it. I kept getting casualties, so I went to a three-story building, and I’ll talk about that. I was probably holding somewhere around, it would be under 100, maybe 80 patients. I took two buildings. In one building I had the worst cases, the most severely injured, and in the other one I had the walking wounded, the fractures, and the psycho cases, which we called combat fatigue in those days. I had a lot of that.
And at this time, I’ve told the story many times, two Belgian nurses appeared. They were in their twenties, and they asked if they could help. And I want to tell you, help we needed. They were welcomed. One was Renee Lemaire, and the other was Augusta Chiwy. I still hear from Augusta, and Renee was in the building on Christmas Eve, December 24. I was in the building next door where the walking wounded were, preparing to go into the building where the serious people were which was next door, when one of my men said “Do you know what day today is?” and I said “No.”
He said, “This is Christmas Eve.”
He said, “I’ve got a bottle of champagne here, would you like some?” So we got out our canteen cups and we each had a couple swigs of champagne.
Then, just as I walked out the door to go where I was going, I heard the whistle of a bomb, which was the first bomb I’d ever heard. We hadn’t been bombed before. And it hit the building where all the most seriously injured were, and it became a pile of flaming rubble, just collapsed.
We ran to the building, or what was left of it, and threw off timbers. We still could hear some noise in there, but the bomber that was up there, and it must have been a smaller plane, came back and machine-gunned us as we stood out against the snow. It was cold. There was probably two feet of snow in Bastogne all the time we were there. But he could see us moving around. He threw flares out so that the night was just like daylight, very bright. So he saw us and he would strafe us. And we’d slide under vehicles, he’d lace the area with machine gun fire, then he’d go back, and then he’d come down again. Well, the result was, of course, we didn’t salvage anybody, and Renee Lemaire was in the basement I think. Most people think that’s where she was. We recovered her body when the road opened and we began dissecting this building and we found and identified I think everyone that was in there. A terrible task, but we did it.
There’s a story about Renee. About the 22nd or 23rd, they began parachuting supplies into Bastogne, and they sent in, ohhh, 500 tons of equipment was parachuted into Bastogne, with different colored parachutes. White might be ammunition. Blue might be food. Medical supplies were another color, and these parachutes came in. There were 1,500 packages that came into Bastogne. Some of the equipment went to the Germans, because they were all around us. But those that came were not centralized; nobody said we’re gonna distribute this equally. The 101st got more because they had more men in there. And we got what we could. But Renee, when she would be working with me, taking care of these people, would leave me when the parachutes came down because she wanted a parachute. She was engaged to be married, and she was going to take this parachute for her wedding dress.
When we uncovered her body I wrapped it in a white parachute, and brought it, her family was still there, they had elected to stay in Bastogne, and I met her mother and father there. They have a big, sizable monument to Renee, and when we went back for the 50th anniversary we dedicated a plaque which I had made, a bronze plaque at the site of the building that was bombed, and Renee’s name is there along with the 30-odd that I think were in that building at the time.
Now, there are other stories that, I thought of a lot after I gave the talk the other day that I didn’t talk about, but there are other stories about things going on in Bastogne, and people say “Were you discouraged?” No. There was not discouragement there. Everybody felt we’re gonna get out of this. In fact, the attitude was, They’ve got us surrounded, those bastards, now we can attack them on all sides. We did get an offer to surrender, and I kept a copy of the surrender offer from the Germans. Four Germans came in, two officers and two enlisted men with a white flag, and they said in essence, this: The fortune of war is changing; this is a copy of what they said, and it it was in English. “At this time the United States forces in and around Bastogne are encircled by strong German armored units. German armored units have crossed” – and they listed the rivers they’ve crossed, the towns they have taken, and then they said there is only one possibility to save the encircled United States troops from annihilation – “That is an honorable surrender of the encircled town. In order to think this over, a term of two hours will be granted, beginning with the presentation of this note. If this proposal should be rejected, one German artillery corps, six heavy antiaircraft battalions are ready to annihilate U.S. troops in and near Bastogne. The order for firing will be given immediately after this two-hour term. All the serious civilian losses caused by artillery fire would not correspond with the well-known American humanity.” Signed, the German commander.
Now, they tell me, I wasn’t there when it happened, but McAuliffe had been dozing. [Anthony] McAuliffe was a one-star general. He was not the commanding general of the 101st; he was the artillery commander with one star, and he had been dozing when they woke him up to show him this thing. He read it, and he threw it down and said, “Nuts.” Then he looked at his staff and said, “How will we answer this?”
They said, “Why don’t you say what you just said?”
He said, “What did I say?”
They said, “You said, ‘Nuts.’”
He said, “Well that’s good enough. Send it back.”
Now I made the point that “Nuts” was kind of confusing, because that term we used when I was growing up when you were frustrated, when you hit your finger with a hammer, or when you got back a C minus on your French test. But it didn’t really fit, I don’t think. But anyway, they went back to the Germans and said “Nuts.”
So they said, “Is this affirmative or negative?” And they were assured it was negative. And they wanted more amplification, so one of the Americans said, “It means ‘Go to hell.”
Now, I never knew this until years later, and there was a magazine named Colliers, and they had an interview with Field Marshal Von Runstedt, who was the overall German commander. He was a fine soldier in the tradition of Frederick the Great; he was the best the Germans had, and he was not a member of the Nazi party and he had no use for Hitler. He always referred to Hitler as corporal; that was Hitler’s rank in the First World War. But they tell me he very seldom gave interviews, and he did give an interview, and the upshot was when he read this, he said, “I wish those guys were on our side,” which I think is quite interesting.
The other thing the Germans did, they parachuted in, or sent in by artillery, leaflets like these, which are kind of humorous, telling us to surrender, and these were collected like baseball cards. Everybody wanted a different one, to see how many they could get. They didn’t frighten anybody.
The other thing that frightened us, and I made a point of this when I talked to the group that day, was the fact that Hitler created a special unit under the command of a guy named Skorzeny. Skorzeny was a favorite of Hitler’s. He was no more than a colonel, but he had rescued Mussolini from northern Italy in 1943. Mussolini was in the mountains and the partisans were about to kill him, and Skorzeny came in and rescued him and he became a favorite of Hitler’s. And Hitler, when he devised, I didn’t tell you this, but Hitler planned this whole operation, and the operation was to go through the Ardennes on the way to Antwerp where all American supplies and British supplies were coming in, and Hitler wanted ammunition, he wanted weapons, he wanted gasoline. And that was where they were going.
Skorzeny apparently spoke fine English, and he was ordered to put together a unit that spoke English. So he had, probably no more, they ended up with probably 100 or 150 people who were dressed in American uniforms. As they overran us; they took the uniforms off our people, put them on, took our vehicles, drove into our lines, and these were English-speaking Germans. So that you had concern, if you bumped into somebody you didn’t know and there were plenty of them in Bastogne that you didn’t know, you had concern, was this one of us or one of them? And what they did, usually you had a password but there was no way to get a password out; the 101st was in one end of the town and we were in the other, and it was impossible. The shelling was continual. You didn’t go out and move around much. But since you didn’t know the password, the only way you could identify them, they would ask, “Who was Harry James married to?” That was Betty Grable. “What’s the name of Mickey Mouse’s wife?” Minnie. Or the questions they’d say, “Are the Cubs in the American or the National League?” And they tell the story, and I don’t know whether this is true, but General Bradley was stopped by one of the sentries, the sentry asked him what the capital of Illinois was, and Bradley promptly answered “It is Springfield.” The sentry was convinced it was Chicago. I don’t know if it’s true, but it is a good story.
So anyway, Skorzeny was there, and Hitler also had some paratroopers in there. He was not a fan of paratroopers, he had bad luck with them in Crete, somehow or other he had very little use for them, but he put paratroopers in there, and the Germans of course were all garbed in white, which was great camouflage, and he parachuted in these German paratroopers. He brought them in at night, and they came in, the Ardennes is a very thick forest, and they came into this thick forest which isn’t good for jumping, and they were to disrupt communications, they were to blow up bridges, turn around road signs, cut all our lines, our cables. They never amounted to much other than psychological. The psychologic effect of Skorzeny’s men and these paratroopers was quite impressive, because you were always concerned that they were in the town with us, and we had to know that.
The Ardennes is a very thick forest. It looks mostly like our Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley down there. It’s beautiful country. The roads are narrow. There are peat bogs. There are gorges. There are streams and some of the best trout fishing in the world I guess is in the Ardennes. It is continual fog from the North Sea that comes in. As I said, it doesn’t get daylight until 8 o’clock. It gets dark early. So it was a failure of the American intelligence to appreciate that even though this was not desirable country to fight in, it had been done before. The Kaiser went through there in 1914, and Rommel took some troops through it in 1941 when he took over the low countries and got into France. So it was possible to get in there, but the American intelligence said nobody will come through there; the Germans don’t have any troops in that area, there are a few, someone characterized them as dwindling firefighters and young boys. That’s all that’s in there, you don’t need to worry about the Ardennes.
In the movie, I think if you’ve seen the movie “Battle of the Bulge,” Henry Fonda rides a Piper Cub over there and sees the Germans massing this tremendous force, 600,000 troops, 28 divisions were in there. Can you imagine? And we had four divisions to stop them. Twenty-eight divisions they brought in, and these were skilled troops. They had been fighting, they knew their officers, they knew how to handle battle. They had superior equipment. And they moved this mass of troops in there without our knowing it, and they did it somehow by having low-flying planes in the area making noise so you wouldn’t hear the tracks of the vehicles. They put pine boughs on the road and straw to stop the noise of the vehicles going over. So they amassed this great force and apparently at Army headquarters of the Third Army at least, there was a General Strong, he was the chief of intelligence, he was convinced there was nobody there. There was one man on his staff by the name of Monk Dixon, I can’t remember his first name, they called him Monk, and he had talked with civilians, Belgian civilians who were coming through the area, and they told him, “There’s something going on there, the Germans are massing a tremendous force,” but nobody paid attention to Monk. They laughed at him. They used to say he sees a Nazi in back of every bush.
Aaron Elson: Going back to the aid station, you had said that there were some psycho cases, the combat fatigue. Could you describe how some of those manifested themselves, what they did or what they looked like?Jack Prior: Yeah. Mostly I remember them sitting in a corner, crying, or with their head down, trying to sleep. No communication. You couldn’t talk to them. Of course this is where Patton got in trouble, slapping one of those fellows. But there was a lot of it. And it’s understandable, because so many of these, we had four divisions opposing 28 divisions. Two of the divisions had had no combat whatsoever. They didn’t even know their fellow soldiers, to say nothing of their leaders, and the best thing they could do when they were hit, was run. And some of these troops, some of these two divisions ran, left their vehicles with the tank motor running, the lights on, just get the hell out of here, and a whole division.
The 106th Division was the worst. They ran first and fastest. And their commanding general was relieved on the spot. He was relieved by General Ridgway, one of the paratroop divisions. Right on the spot he developed a coronary as he was relieved. Allen Jones his name was, Allen Jones. A two-star general. He was evacuated immediately to England with his coronary and the end of his career.
Aaron Elson: So were you there when the 4th Armored Division broke through?
Jack Prior: I was there when they came in.
Aaron Elson: What was that like?
Jack Prior: Well, that’s a story that I haven’t told too much. They came in to Bastogne, and what troops do sometimes when they took towns, they would kick in the window of a store, and if there was some clothing in there they might put a top hat on, or they might find a woman’s dress for sale, they’d dress up once in a while. And when the 4th Armored came in, we were still dissecting, trying to get the bodies, along with the 4th Armored came General Taylor, Maxwell Taylor, who was the two-star general who should have been in Bastogne but who had gone home during that leave allegedly for a conference but more probably to have a nice Christmas with the family. Anyway, he missed the boat.
So there we were working, and all of a sudden I turned around and here was a tall guy, he was taller than I was, with a helmet with two stars on it. So I went over, saluted him and told him who I was. He said, “What are you doing?”
So I explained to him. In the meantime, all these enlisted men, these GIs, were walking by, looking him up and down, not saluting – you know, they’d never seen a general, I’m sure, and some of them had a top hat on, some of them were walking with a cane they found, and they weren’t paying a bit of attention to Taylor. And one of them, he grabbed on the shoulder and turned him around, and he said, “Soldier, do you salute officers?”
And this guy said, “Yeah.”
He said, “Salute me.”
You know, there hadn’t been any saluting in Bastogne I might say. So the guy saluted him. And then he turned to me, and Taylor said, “Who is that? Is this one of your men?”
And I said, “No, Sir. They are not my men. I have nothing to do with them.”
He said, “I want you to find their commanding officer and I want him back here and I’m coming back in ten minutes!”
So I did what I think was probably a good plan. My first sergeant saw all this.
“Sergeant, you heard that. Find him.” I didn’t expect that he would turn him up. A few minutes later, the sergeant came back and said, “I know where he is.”
I said, “Where is he?”
He said, “He’s in a cellar down this road.”
So I walk down the road. And here was a brand new second lieutenant. He’d just arrived. He had some maps he was looking at. And I said, “Have you ever heard of a guy named General Taylor?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know anything about General Taylor.”
I said, “He wants to meet you.” So I told him what had happened.
He said, “Well, you aren’t going back there, are you?”
I said, “Yeah, I’m going back. But what I’ll do is tell him I can’t find you. I don’t know what’s gonna happen then.”
So, he thanked me very much. I left and I went back and continued the job. Never saw Taylor again. I had forgotten that story.
That’s about half the interview. The full interview is included in my book “The D-Day Dozen,” available at Amazon.
Listen to the full interview with Dr. Jack Prior in Episode 101 of my podcast War As My Father’s Tank Battalion Knew It, at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
(Dr. Jack Prior passed away in 2007 at the age of 90.)