Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble - Plot & Excerpts
He received a message from 1st SS Panzer-Division that it intended to advance through Trois-Ponts to relieve him. But Peiper’s reduced strength could not even hold Stoumont and Cheneux, and the relief force failed to get through. The enraged troops looted the Château de Detilleux south of the Amblève and destroyed whatever they did not take. Others in Wanne murdered five men and a woman, claiming that villagers must have been signalling to the American artillery. Another group of nine SS soldiers later seized food from a house in Refat and raped three women there after they had eaten. In Stavelot on the morning of 21 December, another 100 German soldiers tried to swim the river to obtain a foothold on the north bank. Eighty of them were shot in the water by soldiers of the 117th Infantry who boasted of their ‘duck shooting’; and the rest turned back. Peiper’s position became even more critical when American combat engineers managed to block the road from Stoumont to La Gleize by blasting trees across it and mining the route.
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