Britain’s Battle of the Bulge:
Scenario Preview, Part Three
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2021

Lately, we’ve put a lot of effort into telling the full story of the events behind our games. To not shy away from the ugliness that some would like to forget (like the sordid history of racism and segregation that underlies Black Panthers). But that also means remembering the heroism of those who stood up against irredeemable evil.

In early 1945, the British Army faced the German offensive that became known as the Battle of the bulge. The British contribution is a story little told, dwarfed as it was by the massive U.S. involvement in the area. Weary of the war, the British troops – many of which had been rousted out of rest camps where they had assumed that their war was over – picked up their weapons and stopped the Nazi offensive cold.

That’s the story of Elsenborn Ridge: Britain’s Battle of the Bulge. Let’s have a look at a few more scenarios.

Scenario Five
Win or Die
Bure and Wavreille, Belgium
3 January 1945
Montgomery’s counteroffensive in the Ardennes began with 29th Armoured Brigade moving east of the Meuse to support the 6th Airborne Division’s attack against the German salient. The fighting concentrated in the area of Wavreille and Bure, small farming villages just to the south of Rochefort. The attack involved two parachute battalions of 5 Para Brigade. Their objectives were the villages of Bure and Wavreille and then eastwards to Grupont and Forrières to cross the river Lomme. The weather had become positively savage: spasmodic blizzards reduced visibility often to a matter of yards, deepening snow made ground conditions nearly impossible, and the cold was biting.

The attack on Bure by the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion started at 1300. Supported by the tanks of C Squadron/2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry Regiment, A Company was to secure the village, while B Company secured the high ground and C Company was in reserve. The paratroopers were also supported by men of the 1st Belgian SAS Squadron. At 1430, the 7th (Light Infantry) Parachute Battalion supported by another squadron of Shermans advanced on Wavreille, four kilometers north of Bure. The battle motto of 13th Para Battalion was “Win or Die,” a shortened version of: “They win or die who wear the rose of Lancashire.”

Conclusion
Despite the massive array of heavy guns available to 6th Airborne Division, the British attack on Bure went in without any artillery support. The attacking force came down the hills to the north and northwest of the village. When the paratroopers of the 13th Battalion reached the valley between the hills in the north and the village itself, the Germans opened fire with machine guns and mortars. The unfortunate Paras sat in the woods under heavy shelling.

“The Germans knew we were there,” recalled A Company’s commander, Major Jack Watson. “They were waiting for us and as soon as we started to break cover, I looked up and I could see about a foot above my head the branches of trees being shattered by intense machine gun fire and mortaring. They obviously had the guns on fixed lines and they pinned us down before we even got off the start line. This was the first time I’d led a company attack and within minutes I’d lost about one-third of them. I could hear the men of my left-hand platoon shouting for our medics.”

The attack immediately met sustained heavy mortar and machine gun fire, supported by German armor, and casualties mounted in both companies. The supporting tanks from C Squadron made an adventurous approach to the village, slithering from side to side on the glassy road. Two hundred yards short of the village the leading tank struck a mine and the remainder of the troop paused before entering the village from another quarter, where an armor-piercing shell took out another of the tanks.

Repelled, the paratroopers regrouped and attacked again. This time A Company managed to gain a foothold in the village while B Company reached the high ground through which it entered Bure. There, panzerfaust rockets knocked out two of the leading tanks and 13th Parachute Battalion took many casualties. The Paras fought their way from house to house, eventually establishing themselves at the crossroads in the center of the village. The Germans counter-attacked from the south-east, led by four self-propelled guns. British tanks put three of them out of action and the fourth withdrew. At 1800 the Paras along with a troop of Shermans from 2nd Fire & Forfar Yeomanry held half of Bure.

Notes
Now we get to the main event: the British Paras with their screamingly high morale try to take a key village and surrounding woods from a German Panzer division that’s been kicked around but still has plenty of fight left in it. While everyone has tank support, it’s the infantry who are going to carry this day. Win or Die.

Scenario Six
The Nastiest Little Battle
Bure, Belgium
4 January 1945
During the cold night of 3/4 January, the paratroopers of 13th Parachute Battalion succeeded, with great difficulty, in holding on to half of the village of Bure. Reinforced by the battalion’s C Company, the depleted British turned all of the buildings they occupied into strongpoints. At dawn on the following day, the village of Bure and Chapel Hill were subjected to a continuous artillery barrage before the 2nd Panzer Division counter-attacked with Panther tanks (which the British mistook for Tiger tanks). It was snowing hard and visibility was reduced to nothing.

Conclusion
Well-directed enemy fire knocked out all three Sherman tanks which had been left in Bure to support the Paras. When C Squadron, now in position to the south-west of the village along with a troop of Achilles tank destroyers from 198th Anti-Tank Battery, pushed forward to outflank the village, they lost another tank. In Bure, as the terrible weather continued, the Paras fought off five German counterattacks, knocking out tanks and self-propelled guns with their PIAT spring-loaded anti-tank grenade launchers.

At one point the Paras drove off a German assault only by calling down artillery fire on their own positions. In the closeness of the fighting, the paratroopers used their fighting knives to avoid giving away their locations and casualties could not be evacuated nor could supplies be brought forward. There, for hours, the situation remained deadlocked.

Each side resorted to heavy shelling and the village was simply plastered. At nightfall C Squadron was down to nine tanks out of an original nineteen so it withdrew to Tellin. By 2030 the paratroopers reported that they had cleared Bure but during the night German infantry and at least one self-propelled gun infiltrated again into the village adding more confusion to the battle. “Bure was, in fact, one of the nastiest spots the Squadron had ever been in,” A Squadron’s report reads. “The Germans clung to the houses and ruins, hid in cellars and catacombs, fighting and sniping grimly to the end. It wasn’t a place for a depleted battalion and half a troop of tanks.”

Notes
The struggle for Bure continues, and the Germans have called up some friends including Panther tanks. But the Paras, they’re the Paras.

Scenario Seven
Drunken Elephants
Bure, Belgium
5 January 1945
The town of Bure had been converted into a heap of rubble, but the Germans still clung to the houses and ruins, hidden in cellars and catacombs, fighting and sniping to the end. Their tanks still operated in the village which made mopping up by the British extremely difficult. On the previous evening, C Company of 2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, part of the 6th Airlanding Brigade, reinforced the 13th Parachute Battalion. On the morning of 5 January, the British assault was renewed.

Conclusion
By 1015 a troop of 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry had managed to work its way forward from Chapel Hill into a position where it could shoot at anything moving into or out of Bure’s eastern side. In the village, the British attack succeeded in pushing the bulk of the Germans out of the town although one tank remained despite repeated PIAT attacks against it. West of Bure, the 23rd Hussars’ tanks were due to relieve the Fifes during the day and join the fight. At 1000, A Squadron moved out from Tellin. “The roads were getting into an appalling state,” Lt. Edward Harte wrote later, “and our awkward, top-heavy Shermans skated about on the icy roads like a stampede of drunken elephants.”

Bure lies at the foot of a high hill to the south of it, steep, wooded, covered in snow and half shrouded in mist. Most of A Squadron’s tanks set out to reconnoiter this high ground in order to cover the right flank of the infantry in the village. Slowly climbing out of Tellin up a steep and narrow track covered with ice, the tanks attempted to reach the crest. Visibility was barely thirty yards and the progress murderously slow. Behind them, the Germans had laid an ambush. Taking advantage of the mist and snow and woods, the Germans had concealed a party and a minefield across the track. One tank went up on a mine and another one was destroyed by panzerfausts.

Tanks were not made to fight blindly in fog, up icy mountain tracks, and it soon became obvious that the whole enterprise was doomed, if not to disaster, at least to failure. By early afternoon the tanks withdrew and abandoned that part of the attack. Meanwhile, 1st Tank Troop fought its way through Bure where the Fifes and the infantry had already cleared the larger part of the village at great cost to themselves. But German outposts still clung to the eastern edge of the village and some of the remaining ruins.

By 2100 the last German outpost had been eliminated by A Company and German resistance ceased. The British also made good progress towards the river at Grupont, where the two leading tanks were hit and destroyed. That evening, as 53rd Welsh Division on the left had met some success, XXX Corps ordered 6th Airborne Division to withdraw from Bure and extend its frontage in a defensive rather than an offensive role. The withdrawal was carried out during the night, without incident. In the fight to capture Bure and the surrounding villages, 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion lost about a third its strength: seven officers and 182 enlisted (68 killed in action). The 2nd Battalion, Ox and Bucks, lost one officer and 20 enlisted (seven KIA). The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry and 23rd Hussars also suffered heavy casualties including the loss of sixteen Sherman tanks. The Belgian SAS lost three men while supporting the attack on Bure.

Notes
This time the Brits get some reinforcements, Sherman tanks including a Firefly, which means they have the means to exterminate that nasty Panther. It’s not going to be easy, and even after the tanks arrive, you’ll still need the Paras to finish things. Win or Die.

Conclusion
On 27 December, XXX Corps ordered Captain Blondeel’s Belgian Special Air Service (SAS) unit to the village of Froidfontaine south of Beauraing, there to join the 61st Reconnaissance Regiment. That outfit, equipped with light tanks, belonged to the British 6th Airborne Division soon to arrive from England. On 31 December the Belgian paratroopers set out to reconnoiter the village of Bure. Blondeel formed two teams of four jeeps, each equipped with twin Vickers machine guns, one under Lieutenant Van der Heyden, the other under Lieutenant Renkin.

Van der Heyden headed for Wavreille, to find access blocked by mines. The men quickly removed those obstacles, but on the outskirts of the village large felled trees blocked the jeeps’ path. Despite these difficulties, the patrol managed to penetrate Wavreille, which it found occupied by the Germans. Van der Heyden withdrew, but before returning to his base he sent Oultremont's jeep to reconnoiter the chapel at Bure where, on the way, they took a prisoner and captured five more Germans in the chapel.

For his part, at around 1215 Renkin passed through Resteigne and Tellin, which the Germans had left the night before, then moved towards Bure by gaining the heights to the south of the village. At the top of the hill known to the British as Nipple 360, his jeep came to a stop, its occupants noticing suspicious movements on the edge of the woods. Private Lorphèvre, the rear gunner, jumped from the jeep and strode about 30 meters through the thick snow before the sharp clap of a detonation broke the silence. Covered by his machine guns, Renkin stepped forward but retreated rapidly when an 88mm shell exploded a few meters from the jeep. While descending the hill, a second shell hit the vehicle head-on at about 1500. Paul Renkin, Émile Lorphèvre and Claude Comte de Villermont were killed instantly. Having heard the cannon fire, Lieutenant Van der Heyden headed for the hill, but enemy fire stopped him from reaching it.

On 3 January at around 1500 Captain Blondeel and Lieutenant Van der Heyden managed to reach the ridge where Lieutenant Renkin's jeep was hit. They were immediately harassed by mortar shells and machine gun fire which prevented them from retrieving the bodies of their comrades.

Notes
This is an odd little scenario, with British recon troops (manned by Belgians) racing around the map to spot the Germans and have a look at their defenses. Most of our games/books have something unusual in them, and this is the entry for Britain’s Battle.

And those are the remaining scenarios of Chapter Two. Next time, it’s on to Chapter Three.

You can order Britain's Battle of the Bulge right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a staggering number of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.