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The MP put a hand out and stopped Bernie from starting the jeep. “Where’d you come in from?”
“North,” said Bernie. “Both roads to Luxembourg are cut off, case you haven’t heard.”
“I was just go
“How do we get out of here?” asked Bernie.
“You gotta head due west. I see your road pass, soldier?”
Bernie glanced at Von Leinsdorf and handed it to him. They waited while he shined his flashlight on it. Bernie saw Von Leinsdorf reach down into the seat for the hunting knife.
The MP took his time looking it over, then handed it back. “You better make tracks. Krauts just about got us buttoned up.”
“Good luck to you,” said Von Leinsdorf.
“You said something’s going on inside?” asked the MP.
“Nothing to worry about,” said Von Leinsdorf.
Bernie stepped on the gas and they drove due west out of Bastogne.
Liège
DECEMBER 18, NOON
They didn’t turn off the tape recorders until Earl Gra
Ongoing Allied communications problems prevented First Army Interrogation from notifying Counter Intelligence in the city of Reims, France, about Schmidt’s final revelation: that the German assassination teams were pla
Carlson held Karl Schmidt’s forged blue SHAEF pass in his hand, studying it as they drove, then suddenly slapped it against his leg. “Staring me right in the face. That’s what’s wrong with this thing.”
“What?” asked Gra
“This is U.S. government issue watermarked paper, and everything else is so well crafted you’da thought the Krauts’d catch this, it’s just so danged obvious once you notice-”
“Notice what, Ole?”
“They transposed the e and a in ‘headquarters.’ They misspelled the doggone word.”
Carlson showed it to him.
“Get on the radio,” said Gra
Carlson cranked up the radio, trying to find a signal. “They’re go
“That’s right, Ole.” Gra
“You promised him he wouldn’t die for it.”
“We don’t even know he’s telling the truth. Maybe he made the whole thing up to save his ass.”
“Sounded pretty straight to me. How many more teams you think they sent over?”
“He said eighty men.”
“They’re desperate enough to try something like this. He had too many details. I think it’s real and he got caught up without knowing what it was about-”
“Every bad guy’s got a sob story, Ole.”
“I’m just saying that if he’s shot for it after helping us and us telling him different so he’d talk, it’s a raw deal-”
“Guy comes over the line, war time, in our uniform, confesses he’s got orders to kill our commanding general, and you feel sorry for him.”
“We lied to him, Earl.”
Gra
“Well, how do you feel about it?”
Gra
Lieutenant Karl Heinz Schmidt would not see the other three men from his own jeep squad again until two days before Christmas. That night a group of captured German nurses were brought outside their cells and sang Christmas carols to them in their native language.
The four men were marched out at dawn the next day, Christmas Eve, tied to posts, and executed by an American firing squad. Schmidt’s protests about a secret arrangement with Counter Intelligence that was supposed to have spared his life fell on deaf ears.
By noon on December 18, First Army Headquarters at the Hotel Brita
On the afternoon of December 18, Corporal Eddie Be
Fifteen minutes after being assigned to a front-line company, Eddie Be
As the day wore on, the warning about Skorzeny’s commandos paralyzed the American battle zone. Military police locked down every major intersection under Allied control. Effective immediately, no enlisted man or officer without the current password was allowed to pass through any checkpoint. Traffic piled up behind roadblocks, and movement of American troops, during critical hours of the offensive, came to a dead halt. Reinforcements were delayed, hundreds of soldiers ended up in custody, and important dispatches were held up for hours. Placards with information about the imposters appeared in every barracks. An army of men who had never felt any reason to distrust the American uniform now viewed one another through a lens of paranoia and suspicion. Like the rumors that had infected the Nazi camp at Grafenwöhr, wild speculation about the objectives of the 150th Panzer Brigade spread across the battlefield. Not even Otto Skorzeny would have dared to hope that the mere mention of his commando squads would create such chaos in the Allied ranks.
The bulletin that German spies were operating behind Allied lines was not the only news to hit hard on December 18. Late on the afternoon of December 17, three survivors of the massacre at Baugnez Crossroads were found by an American patrol and rushed to the field hospital in Malmédy. Two reporters from Time magazine encountered the survivors, heard their story, and rushed it to headquarters in Liège. By nightfall, First Army senior staff released the story that invading SS forces had murdered a large group of unarmed American prisoners of war. Newspapers in the United States, which hadn’t yet run a single story about the Arde
Americans all across the country were reading about the “massacre at Malmédy” before the bodies of the eighty-six victims had even been recovered, lying under a thick blanket of snow in the meadow at the Baugnez Crossroads.