Two Belgians ran up to the Rangers. They may have been a father and son, and they gestured wildly. “New Germans” was apparently all the father could say in English. He whispered it over and over again, fiercely, making a huge circle with his arms.
Colonel Yates appeared out of darkness. He questioned the resistance fighters in halting French. Words poured from both father and son. Yates’ mouth turned down. He stabbed at his map, demanding information. The father stared at the colonel as if Yates were daft. The Belgian exhaled loudly, shook his head, then pointed east. The Rangers hastily began toward the low rise to the east, toward OKW’s advance headquarters at Viscount Henri Le Marten’s chateau, and toward disaster.
More so than day operations, night attacks require a limited objective and particularly accurate daylight reconnaissance. Certainly the destruction of the chateau was a modest goal, but the last successful recon flight had been two days before.
During the intervening time, the 44th Panzer Regiment had moved into the Zottegem area. The Rangers were expecting a Wehrmacht guard company at the chateau. They were not anticipating three tank battalions, each with two companies of Type III battle tanks and a company of short-gunned Type IVs, and assorted self-propelled antitank guns and PZ II flame-throwing tanks. The Rangers had tripped over a wasps’ nest of 120 armored vehicles.
An investigation by a U.S. Army commission after the war determined that the 44th Panzer was in transit and had just happened to bivouac that evening near the chateau. They settled in the cattle pastures east and north of the viscount’s residence not by plan, but only because Zottegem was as far as they had been able to move that day.
“The Rangers’ luck just plain ran out,” Private Lukowski concluded later.
The drop zone was five hundred yards west of the chateau, across several pastures and a barley field that straddled a hill. Yates knew the chateau was surrounded by formal gardens and that a forested area was to the south. The Rangers split up. Two platoons broke into squadrons and fanned out toward the hill. A third platoon, forty-eight men, including Betts and Lukowski, marched southeast, skirting the hill to come at the building from the south.
The Rangers knew they would not be able to land and move toward the chateau undetected. Too much noise overhead, too many Wehrmacht sentries on the ground. Speed was to compensate for lack of surprise during the approach to the headquarters. The soldiers loped along, some carrying almost a hundred pounds of equipment.
Just before the lead platoon crested the hill, small arms fire sounded from the north. Clumps of dirt jumped near them. Five Rangers branched off to deal with it, running at an angle to the sound.
Viscount Le Marten’s home was an eighteenth-century stone structure at the end of a long courtyard. Two other sides of the courtyard were framed by unadorned annexes, built at right angles to the main wing. At the end of the northerly annex was a chapel, with stained glass in the small windows. At the head of the courtyard was a drawbridge lodge that had a lantern turret atop a rounded roof. The moat had been filled in at the turn of the century. Several outbuildings—an apple press house, stables, tool sheds—were arranged to the west of the main compound.
Colonel Yates and his soldiers gained the hilltop for their first view of the chateau, now only a hundred yards in front of them. Despite the blackout, yellow light shone through several windows. In the darkness, they could see the dim outlines of three trucks and several Kübelwagens, the Wehrmacht’s equivalent of the jeep. In the courtyard were a number of black sedans, almost invisible in the darkness. Two of the automobiles were racing across the lowered drawbridge. Their headlights off, they turned south on the Gent road. Sounds of a firefight came from the north, several rifle shots followed by the stammer of a submachine gun. Hirschorn tripped over a rock and pitched forward. He rose quickly and wiped dirt off his Bren gun.
Lieutenant Betts and Private Lukowski’s platoon entered the southern woods without incident. The ash and oak trees had been planted there a hundred years before by a prior viscount to give his bedroom windows a view. Betts kept an arm in front of him to ward off low branches. He high-stepped over exposed roots. Someone cursed behind him. After a moment they could see several lights of the chateau through the trees.
That is when the sound began, the unmistakable clanking and growling of a tank. Then another, and finally a chorus of them, hidden somewhere in the darkness ahead. Betts called it a “cold-to-the-bone” sound.
One of the tank’s drawbacks is that it cannot do anything silently. Its engine roars, its gearbox grinds, and its treads rattle. Branches crack underneath, hatches slam, the turret whines. The machine blows smoke and kicks up dust. The massed tanks of the 44th Panzer began doing all this at that moment.
Lukowski had been assigned to set up a machine gun post at the edge of the woods to cover the Rangers’ retreat. He did not trust the American Johnsons, so was carrying a .303-inch Bren light machine gun, with its drum rear sight and angled grip beneath the butt, fitted with a bipod.
Lukowski was stocky, almost six feet, two inches, and weighed close to 220. “I’m a big Pole, and the army figured I must be dumb as an ox. So they made me a machine gunner. They didn’t think I knew that the average life expectancy of a machine gunner in the Great War after he first pulled the trigger was fourteen seconds. I’m lucky I could read and write, or they’d have given me a flame-thrower. Those’re the real dummies.”
Lukowski lowered himself to the ground a hundred yards south of the chateau. The Ranger behind him dropped several magazines and followed the others toward the building. “That was Timmy Bridges,” Lukowski told me. “Last I ever saw of him.”
The private had not been told of the topiary. When the moon broke through the clouds, a camel, two horses, an elephant, and an enormous goose took shape between Lukowski and the building. Even during the German occupation, the sculptured bushes had been carefully tended. Lukowski had never heard of such things. For a moment he wondered if that loud bray, which at first sounded like armored vehicles, might be these animals. He resisted an urge to loose a few shots into the camel. More Rangers ran past Lukowski.
Sergeant Hirschorn led his squad toward the chateau from the west, over a series of hedges. The throaty, ominous rumble of armored vehicles filled the night. He heard commands shouted in German. Several Wehrmacht sentries rounded the building’s northwest corner and raised their rifles. They were brought down quickly without the Rangers breaking step. The soldiers had been told to keep moving, that to drop and dig in would be to die.
A four-wheeled scout car next appeared at the corner. It fired both its 2cm cannon and MG 22, tearing up the manicured lawn in front of the commandoes. A Ranger bazookaman launched his rocket-propelled projectile, the back-blast lighting the garden like a flashbulb. The scout car erupted with flame and fragments.
The Germans were all coming from that corner. Two more bazookamen kneeled to wait. A heavy machine gun, a Maschinengewehr 34, opened up from the chateau’s flat roof. Fire was returned, but half a dozen Rangers fell before it was silenced with another bazooka round that entered the third-floor window and erupted skyward.