Just One Story--Friedrich August von der Heydt

It would be his last command. It's difficult to believe he didn't see it that way himself; after all, he and other high-ranking officers in the German army knew--or believed anyway--that Hitler's time and rule had come and gone. Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was no quitter; he'd won an Iron Cross for his heroics during the Wehrmacht's battle for the island of Crete.

It was his friends--and his cousin, Count von Stauffenberg --who had been at the center of Valkayre rebellion, the attempted and failed assassination of Der Fuhrer on July 20, 1944.

Six months later, when Hitler gambled big-time, midwinter, at the Battle of the Bulge, he sent von der Heydte out and his paratroopers out behind Allied lines to put a squeeze on the few American troops along what was called "the ghost front" because there were so few GIs. Von der Heydte was promised a crack unit, but what he was given was 150 recruits, many, if not most, of whom had never jumped from an airplane.

On December 16, 1944, his command in the surprise assault could not have gone worse. While troops from the Third Reich were advancing against scattered Allied forces all around, von der Heydte's paratroops who survived were scattered through the woods, many injured, more than a few dead from the jump itself. Von der Heydte himself had suffered a painful wrist injury.

Long before he jumped that night, he believed Hitler's dream for reversing the course of the war was hair-brained. But he fought anyway, led his men into agony--and for what?

"Pen and paper if you please?" he asked of a man and his son who answered his knock on their door one dark night in Belgium, war raging in the forest all around.

"I'm a Hitler youth," the little boy said, proudly.

Von der Heydte wrote a note out with his bad hand. "Take this to the Americans," he told the boy. "I'm surrendering."

Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was there when blitzkrieg roared into Poland, then France. His outfit landed on the island of Crete, then he was sent to Rome, where, a strong Catholic, he had an audience with the Pope. Eventually, he was returned to France, the western front. But that night, December 18, 1944, he was done. Finished. Tired. Sick. Wounded. Soul weary.

Even before the failed assassination the rebels called Valkayre, even in the thickest fog of war, he'd seen the end coming, knew the idiot gambit Hitler had dreamed up, in his madness, was just another deadly chapter in his idiot plan to rule the world. In Battle: The Story of the Bulge, John Toland says that night, right then, von der Heydte, war weary, sat down and "prayed it would soon be over for everyone."

Iron Cross, German Cross, Knights Cross and Oak Leaves--what on earth or in heaven did all of that mean right then? 

One million Allied troops were there at the Battle of the Bulge, exactly 75 years ago, half of those American. Six hundred thousand Germans, von der Heydte among them, opened up a bloody series of attacks nobody saw coming on an eighty-mile front.

Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was just one story at the Battle of the Bulge. Is it any wonder why men and women, no matter what side they on, found it so difficult to talk about what no one who hadn’t been there could describe? 

Picture him there, sitting on a chair, in a strange home in Belgium, his arm heavily bandaged, waiting for an end he'd known was coming for months, but now, when he was there, he couldn’t really imagine. Allied forces retreated, then regrouped, and finally retook the Bulge. Hitler was finished. 

Von der Heydt was one of a more than a million who were there, 75 years ago. His is just one story. 

[von der Heydt being lifted into an Allied ambulance]