American military authorities have formally opened a war crimes investigation into the December 19, 1944, attack on a clearly marked U. S. Army field hospital near Bastogne, Belgium, after a German Panzer reconnaissance unit opened sustained machine-gun fire on Red Cross tents for approximately fifteen minutes, killing one unarmed medic and capturing 130 American medical personnel, including eleven officers and 119 enlisted men.
The order to document the atrocity came directly from Lt. Gen. George S.
Patton Jr. , commander of the U. S.
Third Army, who directed his staff to compile a formal evidentiary record while witnesses were still alive and physical evidence remained intact, according to Army documents and survivor testimony reviewed this week.
The attack occurred at approximately 10:30 p. m. on December 19, when armored vehicles of the 116th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance battalion penetrated American lines northeast of the 326th Airborne Medical Company’s encampment, eight miles west of Bastogne.
The unit had arrived that morning after an overnight convoy from France and had established its field hospital in canvas tents with Red Cross panels on the roofs, Red Cross flags on exterior poles, and large red crosses painted on the hoods of every parked vehicle.
Survivors state the German vehicles were not lost. They had bypassed American positions hours earlier and were advancing west in search of routes to the Meuse River. What they encountered instead was a fully marked medical facility.
They opened fire with machine guns and continued firing for fifteen minutes.
Inside the tents, lanterns illuminated the interiors, turning the canvas walls into silhouettes. Shadows of nurses, medics, and wounded men on stretchers were visible from outside. The fabric walls offered no protection.
Pfc. Thomas Eigman, 22, of Nashville, Tennessee, was carrying a stretcher when the first rounds tore through the tent wall. The man on the stretcher beside him was hit.
Eigman dropped to the ground, crawled, and attempted to drag the stretcher behind him. The man on it was already dead. Eigman kept crawling because crawling was the only thing his body knew.
Pvt. Henry Sullivan, 19, of Rochester, New York, was outside when the firing began. He did not survive.
He was the only man killed in the initial assault, but the word “only” does not do the matter justice. He was a medic. He was unarmed.
He was nineteen years old, standing beside a vehicle with a red cross painted on its hood.
By midnight, the engagement was over. German forces had surrounded the site. The tents were riddled with bullets.
Equipment was destroyed. One hundred thirty Americans were taken prisoner, including all the doctors and surgeons upon whom the wounded paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division depended.
One officer escaped. Capt. Jacob Pearl, 28, of New York City, slipped out during the chaos and walked back to Bastogne through the snow.
At the aid station of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, he found the regimental surgeon and told him what had happened. The surgeon looked at him for a moment, then picked up the field telephone.
The message spread quickly. By 6:30 a. m.
the next morning, it had reached division headquarters. By midmorning, it was at command center. Within hours, it was on a desk at Third Army headquarters, on the desk of Gen.
George S. Patton.
Patton was already engaged in the most complex operation of his career. Three days earlier, at a conference in Verdun, he had promised Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower that he could disengage his entire army from its eastward advance, pivot ninety degrees north, and advance to relieve Bastogne within forty-eight hours. Everyone in the room thought he was joking. He was not.
His staff was moving 250,000 soldiers with all their equipment through frozen weather over roads never designed for such weight. Artillery was repositioned. Supply lines were redrawn.
The entire Third Army was turning like a massive wheel in the dark. Patton was at the center of it all, executing everything.
And now this. He read the report. Then he set it aside.
Then he read it again. Then he said something to his aide, Col. Charles Codman, which Codman later recorded almost verbatim.
A Red Cross hospital, marked, lit. They knew exactly what it was. He walked away from his desk.
Get me intelligence on the 116th Panzer.
What Patton already knew about the 116th Panzer Division was not reassuring. It was a veteran formation that had fought on the Eastern Front, was rebuilt after devastating losses, and was transferred west specifically for the Ardennes offensive. Its commander, Lt.
Gen. Siegfried von Waldenburg, was a professional soldier versed in the laws of war, meaning the men who attacked that hospital either acted without orders or received orders that should have stopped them and did not.
In either case, it was a clear war crime, documented, witnessed, with survivors and a commander who walked back through the snow to tell the story.
Patton’s intelligence officer, Col. Oscar Koch, was the man tracking the 116th Panzer’s movements in the Ardennes. Koch, 46, of St.
Louis, was widely considered the best intelligence officer in the U. S. Army.
He had been the one who warned, before anyone else, that the Germans were massing in the Ardennes for a major offensive. No one listened. But he was right anyway.
Koch brought Patton everything he had on the 116th. Its axis of advance, its estimated strength, its current location. The reconnaissance battalion that attacked the hospital was part of a spearhead advancing west toward the Meuse.
They were moving fast, bypassing resistance, and the hospital was simply an obstacle in their path.
Koch paused after presenting the map. Sir, they fired for fifteen minutes on a clearly marked facility. They could not have been confused about what it was.
Patton looked at the map. He said: No, they could not. The international conventions are clear.
Medical facilities, medical personnel, and wounded receiving care are all protected. This is not a gray area. I know what the conventions say.
Patton put his finger on the map on the road the 116th had taken west from German lines. They came through here. Yes, sir.
And they are heading here. He moved his finger, placing them between my advancing columns and my Bastogne. Koch nodded.
He understood what Patton was doing. He was not merely absorbing the atrocity. He was calculating it.
Patton said: Bring me General Gaffey.
Maj. Gen. Hugh Gaffey, 51, of Connecticut, commanded the 4th Armored Division, the unit Patton had chosen to lead the relief drive toward Bastogne.
The 4th Armored was Patton’s best. He had built it from scratch and driven it across France faster than any armored formation in history. Its men were tired and its tanks were worn, but they moved.
Gaffey arrived at Patton’s command post within the hour. Patton did not begin with strategy. He began with the hospital report.
He read it aloud to Gaffey, in full. Pvt. Henry Sullivan, 19 years old, the fifteen minutes of firing, the 130 prisoners, including all the doctors the 101st Airborne had left.
And the tents with the red crosses that burned while the guns were still firing.
Gaffey listened without speaking. When Patton finished, he set the report aside. He said: Hugh, I want you to understand something before we talk about the road to Bastogne.
Sir. The men in Bastogne right now, the men we are going there to relieve, are doing it without medical support. Their hospital is destroyed.
Their doctors are prisoners. Their wounded are being treated in an abbey and a barracks and anywhere else they can find by two medical officers and 113 enlisted men instead of a full company.
He paused. That happened because the 116th Panzer Division decided that a red cross painted on a tent was not a reason to stop firing.
Gaffey did not say a word. His jaw was tight.
Patton said: I want the 4th Armored moving tomorrow, and I want you to understand that we are not just going to break the siege. We are going to account for what happened to that hospital. The solution is speed.
The solution is getting there before more men die for lack of surgeons.
He put his finger back on the map. The 116th Panzer is somewhere in this sector. Your road to Bastogne runs through the country they are working.
I am not asking you to chase them. I am asking you to move fast enough to make them irrelevant. I want to reach those men in that town before another night passes like last night.
Gaffey looked at the map. The route to Bastogne was sixty miles of frozen Belgian countryside, two rivers, and any German formation standing in the way. Gaffey asked: What is the weather forecast?
It was overcast, with no air support. Gaffey looked up. Sir, we are cutting sixty miles in this weather without air support through three German formations.
Patton said: I know. That is why I am sending you.
Gaffey’s 4th Armored Division moved the next morning, December 20. But Patton was not finished with the hospital report. He drafted a formal message to the Office of the Judge Advocate General and the Army’s War Crimes Investigation Section.
The message was two pages, single-spaced, named the 116th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance battalion by designation, described the attack in precise detail, cited the Geneva Convention articles violated, and demanded identification of responsible parties for prosecution.
He was not going to put it in a drawer. He was creating a paper trail that would outlast the battle.
His aide, Codman, asked him about it later. They were in the command car, moving between positions. Sir, with everything happening now, a mass breakout and a supply crisis, is this the time to file a war crimes complaint?
Patton looked out the window at the snow. That soldier who was killed, Sullivan, was a medic. He was unarmed.
He was nineteen years old and he was standing beside a vehicle with a red cross on the hood. He paused. If we do not document this now, it will be lost.
And if it is lost, the men who did it will go home and nothing will happen to them.
He turned from the window. He said: Document it. As long as the witnesses are alive, as long as the evidence exists.
Whatever happens in the next two weeks, we document it.
Codman wrote it down.
December 26, 1944. Midnight. The first tank of the 4th Armored Division broke through German lines south of Bastogne at 4:50 p.
m. Six days after Patton read the hospital report and ordered Gaffey to move sixty miles in six days through three German formations, two rivers, frozen roads, and no air support.
The corridor into Bastogne was one hundred yards wide, but it was open. The first vehicles through were not tanks. They were ambulances.
Patton had ordered that specifically before any supply trucks, before any reinforcements, before anything else. The men inside Bastogne had been treating the wounded for seven days with almost no medical support. The loss of the 326th had crippled their capability at the moment they needed it most.
For a week, two medical officers and what remained of their enlisted staff had worked in an abbey by candlelight in temperatures that froze plasma before it could be administered.
When the ambulances entered that corridor, the men in the abbey heard the sound first. It was the sound of engines coming from the south, the direction they had been watching for six days. The 4th Armored Medical Company brought plasma, penicillin, surgical instruments, and three surgical teams.
They had anticipated the need. The wounded inside Bastogne had been accumulating faster than they could be treated, and they could not be evacuated because there was nowhere to send them. By midnight on the twenty-sixth, surgeries that had been waiting for six days began.
Patton visited Bastogne on December 30. He went to the temporary hospital in the abbey on Rue de Viville. He walked through wards that had been classrooms and chapels, now filled with beds.
He stopped at every bed. He did not speak much. He looked at the men, nodded, and moved on.
One medic present, T/Sgt. Raymond Gebhardt, 27, of Pennsylvania, later described the scene. He said Patton moved slowly, which was unusual.
Most generals in that period moved quickly. Things developed fast. A brief appearance, a few words, and it was over.
Patton stopped at every bed.
At one point, he stopped at the bed of an unconscious man, critically wounded, kept alive by a plasma transfer device. He stood there for a long moment, then said quietly to the doctor standing beside him: Who is this man? The answer: Pvt.
David Carr, sir, of the 327th Glider Infantry. He arrived three days ago.
He asked: What are his chances? The doctor paused. His condition is better today than yesterday, sir.
Patton nodded. Then he moved on.
Before leaving, he stopped the officer in charge of the temporary hospital, one of the two medical officers who had held on for seven days without a full company, a captain named Gerald Brauer, 34, of Massachusetts. Brauer was as exhausted as men get when they work beyond their bodies’ limits. There were dark circles under his eyes like bruises.
Patton looked at him for a moment, then said: Do you know what happened to the hospital staff? Brauer answered: Yes, sir, I know.
Patton said: They are prisoners. The Germans are holding them. When this is over, we will get them back.
A short silence. What you did here for seven days, with what you had, will be in the records.
Brauer said something that Gebhardt, standing nearby, later recorded. He said: Sir, we just did the job.
Patton looked at him. Most men can do any job under normal conditions. What you did was not just a job.
It was something else. He did not explain what that something else was, and he did not need to.
The war crimes documentation Patton ordered began in January. Investigators interviewed survivors of the hospital attack as soon as they were located. Capt.
Jacob Pearl, who had escaped through the snow, gave his official statement. Pfc. Eigman gave his statement.
The after-action report of the 326th Airborne Medical Company became part of the evidence file. The commander of the 116th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance battalion was identified. Postwar proceedings began.
The trail Patton started on December 20, “document everything as long as the witnesses are alive,” became part of the official war crimes investigation record.
The 130 members of the 326th Airborne Medical Company who were taken prisoner were liberated at the end of the war. Most returned home. The unit was rebuilt and returned to service.
Pvt. Henry Sullivan, 19, of Rochester, New York, was the one who did not return. He was buried in the Henry Chapelle American Cemetery in Belgium, Section B, Row 4.
His mother received a telegram in January 1945. She did not learn for a long time the circumstances of his death beside a vehicle bearing a red cross at a field hospital marked on all four sides at midnight. When she learned the full story, she gave an interview to a Rochester newspaper in 1946.
Asked what she felt when she heard what had happened, she said: I thought about what Henry told me before he left. He said medics do not carry weapons. He said their job is to be clearly unarmed, to carry clear markings, and to trust that the other side will respect that.
He believed that.
She paused, then said: He was right to believe that. What happened to him was wrong. He was right and they were wrong, and that will not change.
Asked whether she knew that Gen. Patton had ordered a war crimes investigation, she said she had been told. Asked what she thought of that, she said: I think it means someone was paying attention.
When the worst things happen, the question arises whether anyone is listening, and whether anyone is writing down what occurred. Gen. Patton wrote down what happened.
That matters a great deal.
The Ardennes offensive, or Battle of the Bulge, continued until January 25, 1945. When it ended, the German Army had lost 100,000 men, 800 tanks, and any realistic hope of changing the course of the war. The 4th Armored Division, which cut sixty miles through frozen Belgium to relieve Bastogne, was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation.
Patton was the architect of that drive.
But what he did on December 20, which did not make front pages, that two-page memorandum to war crimes investigators, the order to document what happened while witnesses were alive, was an answer in itself. It was not the loudest answer, nor the most dramatic, but it was the one that endured.