100th Infantry Division soldiers manning a defensive position. (National Archives)

South of the Bulge the Third Army intensified its attacks northward to meet the First Army. Still counting on Middleton's VIII Corps to break through, Patton sent Millikin's III Corps northeastward, hoping to enter the roadnet and follow the terrain corridors to link up with Ridgway's XVIII Airborne Corps attacking St. Vith. Despite having less than fifty-five tanks operational, the I SS Panzer Corps counterattacked the III Corps' 6th Armored Division in ferocious tank fights unseen since the fall campaign in Lorraine. While the III Corps' 90th Division infantrymen broke through to the heights overlooking the Wiltz valley, the VIII Corps to the west struggled against a determined force fighting a textbook withdrawal. By 15 January Noville, the scene of the original northern point of the Bastogne perimeter, was retaken. Five miles from Houffalize, resistance disappeared. Ordered to escape, the remaining Germans withdrew, and on the sixteenth the Third Army's 11th Armored Division linked up with the First Army's 2d Armored Division at Houffalize. The next day, 17 January, control of the First Army reverted to Bradley's 12th Army Group. Almost immediately Bradley began what he had referred to in planning as a 'hurry-up' offensive, another full-blooded drive claiming the Rhine as its ultimate objective while erasing the Bulge en route. On the twenty-third Ridgway's XVIII Airborne Corps, now the First Army's main effort, and the 7th Armored Division took St. Vith. This action was the last act of the campaign for the First Army. Hodges' men, looking out across the Losheim Gap at the Schnee Eifel and hills beyond, now prepared for new battles.

In the Third Army sector Eddy's XII Corps leapt the Sure River on 18 January and pushed north, hoping to revive Patton's plan for a deep envelopment of the German escape routes back across the Belgian-Luxembourg-German borders. Intending to pinch the escape routes via the German tactical bridges on the Our River, the 5th Division crossed the Sauer at night, its main body pushing northward to clear the long Skyline Drive ridge, where the 28th Division had faced the first assaults. By the campaign's official end on the twenty-fifth the V, XVIII, VIII, III, and XII Corps had a total of nine divisions holding most of the old front, although the original line east of the Our River had yet to be restored.