     Major Don Bower stood up in his jeep and shook his head at the mess. Before him stretched the biggest, hairiest traffic jam he had ever seen in his life. The little road between St. Vith and Vielsalm, a narrow country road, was packed with all manner of military vehicles: jeeps, tanks, trucks, artillery pieces, staff cars. For twenty miles the jam stretched. Half the vehicles were frantic and beaten troops, desperately trying to escape the German juggernaut just behind them. The other half were tanks of the 7th Armored Division, trying to fight their way forward through the chaos. They were desperately needed at the front, but couldn't make any forward progress in this wild anarchy.
     Who were all these people? Mostly rear-area troops: supply troops, engineers, medical services, administrative personnel. People who didn't think of themselves as combat troops. People who panicked at the thought of approaching Germans. And here they were on the one road out of St. Vith, fleeing for safety. There was no order, no control; it was a fear-driven rabble running for its life.
     Bower jumped up onto a tank and began clearing a path. He ordered the driver to run down anybody who got in his way. He waved oncoming traffic out of the way; he screamed orders; he waved his pistol threateningly; he urged the tank forward. Bit by bit, the armored column began to move forward.
     It took him four hours to get the column to move four miles. General Bruce Clark himself had to come out and help, directing traffic, unsnarling the mess. By late evening, the jam was cleared.
/Military Traffic
     This is one of those utterly mundane issues that you'll never find in a John Wayne or Sylvester Stallone movie; yet, traffic jams have lost more battles than cowardice.
     It takes thousands of vehicles to move an army. The Germans precisely calculated the amount of road space required for their units. An infantry division marching down a road formed a column 25 miles long; an armored division column would be 59 miles long. The allocation of road space was meticulously planned and precisely executed -- unless something went wrong. Then the snarls developed.
     Traffic jams were the rule, not the exception. All along the front, on both sides, traffic was hopelessly snarled as thousands upon thousands of vehicles scrambled down tiny ice-covered roads. In the chaos of combat and night fighting, units would become lost. Despite precisely defined road allocations, units would often steal other units' roads. On the German side, officers caught in the act of using somebody else's road were subject to arrest and court-martial. Despite these draconian measures, perhaps half of all German forces spent the first day of the offensive sitting in traffic on the German side of the startline.
     The quickest way to unsnarl a traffic jam was to install a general as traffic cop. General Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr did it on the 16th; General Clark did so on the 17th; Field Marshal Model did it on the 19th; indeed, almost every general involved in the battle did some traffic cop duty at some point during the battle./