Why 500 German Soldiers Couldn’t Defeat 18 American at the Battle of the Bulge

By midnight on the 17th of December 1944, a 21-year-old American lieutenant was sitting on the floor of a Belgian cafe. He was wounded. He was exhausted. He was surrounded by German paratroopers who had spent the entire previous day trying to kill him. He looked down at his wristwatch.

The hands were aligning at the top of the dial. It was his birthday and he was the only man in that room on either side who understood what his 18 soldiers had just done to Adolf Hitler’s last great offensive of the Second World War. This is a story the United States Army buried for 37 years. The Germans who tried to take that hill never forgot it. This is what happened.

His name was Lyall Joseph Buke Jr. To understand how he came to be sitting on the floor of that cafe at midnight on his 21st birthday, you have to go back exactly 21 hours. You have to go back to a hilltop in eastern Belgium before dawn on the morning of the 16th of December, 1944. At 4:00 in the morning that day, the temperature on the hilltop had dropped well below freezing.

The trees did not move. Nothing moved. Snow had fallen in the night, thin and dry, and it lay on the pines like flower that no one had bothered to brush away. Lyall Book crouched at the lip of a foxhole he had been living in for 6 days. He had not slept more than 2 hours at a stretch since the 10th of December. He held a pair of binoculars against his eyes, but there was nothing yet to see, only the trees, only the road below, only the small dark cluster of a village called Lanzerath, silent, unlit 300 yd down the slope. He was listening and on the far

side of the treeine in the darkness behind the German border he could hear something that should not have been there. He could hear engines. He lowered the binoculars. He turned his head slowly the way a man does when he is not sure whether his own ears are lying to him. He listened again. Engines tracked vehicles.

And under the engines a low murmur that could almost mistaken for wind through the pines. But it was not wind. It was the sound of thousands of men moving toward him through the forest. To understand what those 18 Americans were about to do on the morning of December 16th, you have to understand where they were. And you have to understand that in the mind of every senior Allied commander from Eisenhower down this particular piece of ground was not a place where anything of importance would ever happen.

The Aden, a stretch of thickly wooded hills straddling the border between Belgium and Germany. 85 mi of dense forest, narrow roads, small farming villages, a landscape that in 1944 looked almost medieval. The Americans called this sector the ghost front. Nothing happened here. No counterattacks, occasional patrols, occasional artillery exchanges that both sides considered more ceremonial than serious.

The ghost front was where you sent divisions that were exhausted and needed rest, and where you sent divisions that were brand new and needed to be broken in gently before being committed to real combat further north. In November of 1944, one of those brand new divisions had arrived. 12,000 young men in unblooded uniforms, most of them under 22 years old, most of them fresh off the boat from the United States.

They were the 99th Infantry Division there. Nickname given to them by veterans who found their inexperienced touching and slightly comical was the Battle Babies. By the second week of December, the Battle Babies had settled into the routine of the Ghost Front. They dug foxholes. They ran patrols that encountered nothing.

They complained about the cold. They wrote letters home. They watched their breath fog in the December air and joked that this was the safest sector in the entire European theater. Some of them believed it. Most of them wanted to believe it. Their officers, older men who had served in North Africa and Italy, and who did not entirely trust silences of this kind, kept their opinions mostly to themselves.

Attached to the 99th Division was its 394th Infantry Regiment. And attached to that regiment was a very small unit with a very specific purpose. 18 men, the intelligence and reconnaissance platoon. In the abbreviated shortorthhand of the wartime army, they were the eye and our platoon. Their job was not to fight. Their job was to gather information.

to slip out at night into no man’s land and count things. To crawl close to enemy positions and come back with sketches and notes. To be in the language of doctrine the eyes and the ears of the regiment. Nothing in their training suggested that they would ever be asked to stop a battalion of paratroopers on an exposed hillside with only rifles and a heavy machine gun.

Their commander was the 20-year-old man crouching in the foxhole at 4 in the morning. Lyall Book was born in St. Louis, Missouri on the 17th of December 1923. He was the second child of a workingclass Catholic family. His father had been a private first class in the First World War. Money was tight in the Bou household throughout the 1930s.

Lyall was quiet and serious and physically small for his age. He understood early that if he wanted anything in life, if he was going to have to earn it himself. He wanted a lot of things. Most of all, he wanted to be a soldier. At 14 years of age in 1938, Lyall Book walked into a Missouri National Guard armory and lied about his birthday.

He was 5’9″, thin with an adult face if you did not look too closely. The recruiter did not look closely, Lyall enlisted. He drilled with the Missouri National Guard on weekends, wearing the uniform of a man 10 years older than himself, learning to fire a rifle, learning to march, learning the small courtesies and cruelties of army life.

when his mother found out she was furious. When his father found out he was quiet for a long time and then he shook his son’s hand. By the time the United States entered the Second World War in December of 1941, Bu had 4 years of guard service and he was 17 years old. Within weeks, he had transferred to the regular army.

Within a year, he had been identified as officer material and sent to officer candidate school. In February of 1942, at the age of 18, Lyall Book became one of the youngest commissioned officers in the entire United States Army. He was assigned to the 99th Division. He was given command of the 394th Regiments and our platoon. And in November of 1944, he crossed the Atlantic with his men, landed at La Hav, moved east through Belgium in freezing rain and mud, and took up positions on the Ghost Front.

The men who followed him were not on paper the kind of men who should have been reconnaissance soldiers. Reconnaissance work called for hardened non-commissioned officers and experienced infantrymen. But the American army in 1944 was running short of experienced infantrymen. It had recently made a decision that would change the destinies of thousands of young men whose lives had until that point been going in a very different direction.

The program was called the army specialized training program. Its logic was straightforward. The military needed engineers, linguists, doc technical specialists. So the army had identified tens of thousands of exceptionally intelligent young drafties, men who had scored in the highest brackets on the standard aptitude tests, and it had sent them not to combat training, but to universities.

They studied physics. They studied mechanical engineering. They studied German and Japanese. They wore uniforms and marched to class and considered themselves lucky. Then in the spring of 1944, with the invasion of Europe, imminent and infantry replacements running short, the army had made a different decision.

It had shut the program down. Overnight, tens of thousands of college educated soldiers were pulled out of classrooms, retrained as riflemen in a few compressed weeks and shipped to combat units that were bleeding faster than they could be resupplied. A significant number of them ended up in the 99th division. A number of them ended up specifically in the INR platoon of the 394th regiment.

Which is why on the morning of December 16th, the 18 men in foxholes on that hillside above Lanzerath included a former engineering student, a former language student, a former chemistry student, and a 19-year-old private named William James Takanikas, a former ASTP student of Greek heritage. Sakanikas was the youngest man on the hill.

He was quiet and precise. In 15 hours, a German bullet was going to enter the side of his head, pass through his cheekbone, take out one of his eyes, and exit the other. He was not going to die. He was not incredibly even going to stop firing. But at 4 in the morning, none of that had happened yet. The second in command of the platoon was technical sergeant William Slape, 27 years old, a career soldier, and the closest thing the platoon had to a father figure.

Slape was steady. Slape did not raise his voice. Slape could take apart a heavy machine gun in the dark and put it back together while carrying on a conversation about baseball. He was going to spend most of the coming day behind that machine gun. He was going to keep it firing when it should not by any mechanical standard have been able to fire anymore.

These were the men, 18 of them. Plus, as of a few days before, four attached forward artillery observers from battery sea of the 371st Field Artillery Battalion led by Lieutenant Warren Springer, who had come up to the ridge to help direct fire support if fire support was ever requested. 22 Americans in total, 19 of them under the age of 25.

All of them at 4 in the morning, sitting in freezing foxholes on a hill, they had been told, was in one of the quietest sectors of the entire Western Front. Behind the trees on the German side of the border, 60 mi of German military machinery was moving into position. Adolf Hitler had been planning this attack in absolute secrecy since September.

He had personally selected the code name. He called it Vah Amrine, watch on the Rine. The name was deliberately defensive, deliberately misleading, chosen to sound like a fortification effort rather than what it actually was, which was the largest concentrated of offensive that the German army would launch on the Western Front in the entire war.

200,000 men, nearly a thousand tanks and assault gun, almost 2,000 pieces of artillery, every reserve unit that could be scraped together from the crumbling perimeter of the Reich, concentrated in secret over a period of months, hidden from Allied intelligence by strict radio silence and by the cover of the same forested terrain that made the Arden seem like a sector where nothing important could ever happen.

Hitler’s goal was audacious to the point of delusion. He wanted to punch through the American lines in the Arden, race across Belgium, cross the Muse River, and capture the port of Antworp. If he succeeded, he would split the American and British armies in half, encircle a significant portion of the Allied strength and force a negotiated peace on the Western Front that would allow him to concentrate all his remaining strength against the Soviet Union.

His generals, when they were finally briefed, told him it was impossible. They pointed out that Germany did not have the fuel, the men, the aircraft, or the reserves to make it work. Hitler told them that willpower would compensate for what material could not. The spearhead of the entire operation, the tip of the German spear, the unit that had been given the most important mission of the entire offensive, was the first SS Panza division.

Libstande SS Adolf Hitler, the division that had begun the war as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and had ended it as one of the most experienced and most feared armored formations in the German army. Its assault detachment had been reinforced and reorganized into a mobile strike force and this strike force had been given the name of its commander Kgrup Peeper.

Yakim Peiper was 29 years old. He was tall, thin, arrogantly handsome, ideologically committed, tactically brilliant, and morally compromised in ways that would not become fully public until after the war. He had been Hinrich Himmler’s agitant before returning to combat duty. He had led armored assaults on the Eastern Front that had earned him the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves and swords.

His men would within days commit one of the most notorious atrocities of the Western Front, the massacre of American prisoners at Maldi. On the morning of December 16th, Peeper was waiting behind the German lines with his tanks and his halftracks and his self-propelled guns for the road ahead of him to be cleared. The road he needed ran through the village of Lanzerath.

Ahead of Piper’s tanks, tasked with clearing that road and pushing back the light American forces that were assumed to be there was the ninth regiment of the third Falsham Division. 500 German paratroopers. Their commander was Colonel Helmet Fonhofman, an officer of some experience, who had been given what he considered a simple assignment.

Walk through Lanzerath, push back whatever token forces the Americans had placed there. Open the road for the SS armor coming up behind him. He expected the entire operation to be over by midm morning. Neither Peiper nor Hoffman knew that at the top of the ridge above Lanzerth in foxholes, concealed by the treeine, 18 young Americans were waiting for them.

The men on the ridge did not entirely know it either, but they had begun to suspect. On the 10th of December, 6 days earlier, the INR platoon had received orders to move to Lanzerath. The word was that there was a gap in the American line. A 5mm hole between the 99th Division and the 14th Cavalry Group to the south. Nothing to worry about, just a stretch of ground that needed eyes on it.

Send the reconnaissance platoon. Have them establish an observation post. have them report anything unusual. Book had walked the position with his men. He had chosen the tree line on top of the ridge 300 yd northwest of the village where he could see the road that ran up from the German border.

He had them dig foxholes with overhead cover. He had them lay in fields of fire. He had them sight the heavy machine gun and the light machine guns in mutually supporting positions. He had done, in short, exactly what a reconnaissance officer with combat instinct should have done, which is to say he had prepared a defensive position that was significantly stronger than anything a reconnaissance platoon should have needed.

On the night of the 15th of December, just before midnight, one of his men on watch had crawled back to his foxhole and told him that there were sounds in the German woods. Vehicle sounds, voices, movement booked into the radio and called the regiment. He had reported what his man had heard. He had asked for permission to send out a patrol.

The response from regimental headquarters was polite and dismissive. Vehicle sounds in the Arden were normal. Vehicle sounds at night in the Ardens had been reported dozens of times in the past 3 weeks. Every report had turned out to be nothing. Get some sleep, Lieutenant. Continue observation. Report anything definite.

Book went back to his foxhole. He did not sleep. He listened. At around 3:00 in the morning on the 16th of December, one of the men on the ridge saw movement on the road below. Headlights. American headlights. A small column of American tank destroyers that had been positioned in support of the Lanzerath sector along with their supporting infantry was pulling out.

Nobody had told the Iron Andra platoon they were leaving. Nobody had explained where they were going. They simply started their engines, moved out onto the road, and drove north, away from the German border, away from Lanzeroth, away from the 18 men on the ridge. Within 20 minutes they were gone.

Book got on the radio again. This time the answer was different because this time somebody at higher headquarters actually seemed to be paying attention. The armored support had been repositioned. There had been an order. The INR platoon was to remain in position and continue its observation mission.

There was nothing to be concerned about. Higher headquarters would evaluate the situation at first light. At first light, further instructions would follow. U lowered the radio handset. He looked at the sergeant next to him. Neither of them said anything. They did not need to. They had both understood the same thing at the same moment, which was that the men who had been protecting their flank had just left, and that the higher headquarters that were supposed to be evaluating the situation was very likely not evaluating anything, and that whatever was coming

across the border in the next few hours was hit them, and hit them alone. Book went back to the lip of his foxhole. He raised the binoculars again. He listened. At 5:29 on the morning of the 16th of December, along an 85 mile front stretching from Moncho in the north to Echanak in the south, nearly 2,000 German artillery pieces stood loaded and ready. The gun crews were in place.

The commanders had their watches synchronized. The forward observers were at their instruments. The entire Western Front was for the moment silent. At 5:30 exactly, the guns fired on the ridge above Lanzerath. Lybuk heard the sound before he saw the flashes. It came from behind him and from in front of him and from the north and from the south a rolling continuous thunder that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

He saw the treetops behind him light up orange. He saw the sky flicker. He felt the ground move under his knees in his foxhole. Then the first shells began to arrive on his position. He pressed his face into the frozen earth. He heard his men shouting. He heard the whistle of incoming rounds.

He heard in the small, still corner of his mind that was still capable of noticing anything, the fact that the barrage was heavy and sustained an evidently very well planned, and that this was therefore not a raid, not a probe, not the routine harassment fire that the ghost front had grown accustomed to. This was something else. He did not yet know what.

He did not yet know that behind those guns were 200,000 German soldiers. He did not yet know that one of the most decorated armored formations in the German army was waiting to come up the road below his position. He did not yet know that in the coming hours he was going to be asked alongside 17 other very young men and four attached artillery observers to hold a hillside against odds that no textbook, no training manual, no reasonable officer would ever have expected a unit of his size to hold.

He knew only that the ground was shaking, that the sky was on fire, that his men were alone. The barrage continued for 90 minutes. At 7:00 in the morning, it stopped. The silence that followed was almost worse than the noise had been. B lifted his head from the frozen soil. His ears were ringing.

He looked down slope toward the road toward the little dark cluster of houses that was the village of Lanzerath. Nothing moved. He looked at his watch. Then he looked at the sky, which was beginning to lighten in the east. He did not know it yet, but he had 3 hours to wait before the first Germans came up out of the trees.

By midm morning, hours after the barrage had ended, they came. At first they came as shapes, dark figures separating from the treeine at the far side of the valley. One, and then two, and then a dozen, and then more than a man could count. They moved into the open field below the ridge, and they kept coming. They did not run. They did not crouch.

They walked in a loose column for a breast straight up the road toward the village. Lyall Book put the binoculars to his eyes. He could see their faces. He could see the shape of the helmets. He could see the smoks the German paratroopers wore mottled in green and brown against the snow. He could see the shoulder patches.

He could see, most astonishing of all, that they had no scouts out in front of them. No flankers, no advanced guard. They were coming up the road in a formation that a peacetime drill sergeant might have used for a parade. B lowered the binoculars. He turned to the man in the foxhole next to him. He did not shout. He did not raise his voice.

He said only what needed to be said. Hold your fire. The word passed down the ridge from foxhole to foxhole. Hold your fire. Hold your fire. 18 young Americans lay in the frozen earth and watched 500 German paratroopers walk toward them across an open field and not one American finger moved on a trigger.

There is a moment in combat if you talk to men who have been there that they will describe to you in almost identical words. It is the moment before the first shot. It is a stillness that has nothing to do with peace. It is the stillness of a decision that has already been made but has not yet been executed.

The men on the ridge understood without anyone having to explain it to them that if they fired too early, they would give away their position and their strength, and that the Germans in the field below would immediately reorganize and come at them properly with fire and maneuver and mortars, and would overrun them within an hour.

They understood that they had exactly one advantage, which was surprise, and that surprise was a thing you spent only once, and that they had to spend it at the moment of maximum damage. So they waited. The Germans kept coming 200 yd, 150 y, 100 yd from the base of the ridge. Book moved his eyes along the line from one foxhole to the next, and he saw the young faces looking back at him, waiting for his signal.

He saw Takanikas at the heavy machine gun. He saw Slape crouched behind the sights of a light machine gun. He saw Warren Springer, the young artillery officer who was supposed to be here in a purely advisory capacity. holding a rifle that was not part of his ordinary equipment and looking down the sights of it with the concentration of a man who has decided to stop being an adviser. Book brought his own rifle up.

He settled his cheek against the stock. He put the front sight on the chest of a German officer walking near the head of the column. He gave the order. The ridge erupted every weapon that 18 men could bring to bear opened fire at the same instant. The heavy machine gun tore a slot through the middle of the German column, cutting men down in groups.

The light machine gun swept the flanks. Every rifleman on the line had a target, and every rifleman had rehearsed the range and the angle for that target for six full days. The first burst lasted maybe 12 seconds. When it stopped, more than a third of the men who had been standing in the road were no longer standing. The rest went to ground.

They did not run. They did not break. They dropped where they were into whatever shallow depression in the field they could find, and they began to return fire. But the fire they returned was scattered wild, aimed at the tree line generally, rather than at any specific target. They could not see the American positions.

The first assault lasted perhaps 15 minutes. When it broke, when the surviving paratroopers began to crawl backward through the snow toward the tree line they had come from, B lowered his rifle and looked down at the field. He counted quickly the dark shapes lying motionless in the open. He stopped counting at 40. Then he did something that most young officers in his position would not have done.

He picked up the field telephone he got through to regimental headquarters. He reported in a voice that his men later remembered as being remarkably steady, that he was in contact with what appeared to be a battalion of German paratroopers, that he had repulsed one assault, and that he was requesting artillery support and reinforcement.

The voice on the other end of the line asked him if he was sure it was a battalion. Book said yes. The voice on the other end of the line told him that artillery was committed elsewhere, that reinforcements were not available, that his mission was to hold his position and continue to observe.

Then the voice said one more thing. It said, “Hold at all costs.” Hook put the phone down. He did not tell his men what he had been told. He did not need to. They had heard his side of the conversation. They understood. They were on their own. Down in the field below, Colonel Helmouth Fon Hoffman was trying to understand what had just happened to his lead company.

He was a professional soldier, a veteran of the Eastern Front, a man who had seen a great deal of combat, and had come to believe he could read a battlefield the way another man might read a familiar road. What he was reading now did not make sense. His paratroopers had walked into fire that had been controlled and coordinated and accurate to a degree that suggested a defensive position of at least company strength.

But intelligence had told him that this sector was thinly held. Intelligence had told him he would encounter no more than a platoon. He looked at the field, he counted as dead. He counted his wounded crawling back toward the treeine. He looked at the ridge above the village, which was silent again, and which betrayed no movement, and which gave no clue to the strength of what was up there.

He reorganized, he called forward his mortars. He gave orders for a second assault. “This one,” he told his officers, would be different. “This one would use fire and movement. This one would not walk up the road in a parade formation.” At the top of the ridge, Bu watched the Germans reforming below. He knew what was coming next. He moved along his line from foxhole to foxhole, checking on his men.

He told them what to expect. He told them where to focus their fire. He told them to conserve ammunition because there was not going to be any more of it. Not today, not ever. Then he went back to his own foxhole. He sat down against the frozen wall of it. He closed his eyes for a moment. He was 20 years old. The second assault came near midday.

It came as Bu had known it would, with mortifier first. The rounds fell along the tree line, sending up geysers of frozen soil and snow. Some of them landed close to the American positions. One of them detonated inside a foxhole and killed one of the four attached artillery observers, a young forward observer whose name would appear on a casualty list within the week and whose family would receive a telegram before Christmas.

He was the only American who would die on that hillside that day. Behind the mortar fire, the Germans came again. This time in dispersed groups. This time using cover. This time doing everything that competent infantry are supposed to do when they are attacking a prepared position. They came up the slope in bounds. One group covering while another advanced, working their way steadily upward toward the tree line. The men on the ridge waited again.

They waited longer this time because the range was closing and because Bu knew that the closer he let them come, the more men they would lose when the American fire opened up. At 60 yards he gave the order. The ridge erupted a second time. The heavy machine gun which Slape had been feeding all morning opened up again with its enormous drumming thunderheavy rhythm, and it swept the slope in front of the American positions, and every man it hit went down and did not get up again.

The light machine guns worked the flanks. The riflemen, most of whom were now firing single aimed shots because they were already thinking about the ammunition problem, picked off targets with a discipline that would later be remarked upon by every German officer who wrote a report about the engagement. The second assault broke inside 20 minutes.

The Germans withdrew again, dragging their wounded with them where they could, leaving the dead behind on the slope. When it was over, the field between the tree line and the base of the ridge was littered with bodies. Book picked up the field telephone a second time. He reported the second assault.

He reported that he had repulsed it. He requested again artillery support and reinforcement. The answer was the same. Hold your position. Hold at all costs. By early afternoon, three things had happened on the ridge that no one at higher headquarters was yet aware of. The first was that Sakanikas, the 19-year-old former ASP student behind the heavy machine gun, had begun to grasp what his weapon was doing to the men on the slope.

He was firing a heavy machine gun capable of tearing through vehicle armor, and he was firing it at human beings, and the effect of that weapon on a human body is not something a 19-year-old is ever quite prepared for. He did not stop firing. He did not falter, but something happened behind his eyes that would not entirely leave him for the rest of his life.

The second was that the platoon was running out of ammunition. Not immediately, not critically, but they had come to this position with what a reconnaissance platoon normally carries, which is enough for a firefight, not enough for a battle. They had already fired more than half of it. If the Germans came a third time and a fourth time, the arithmetic was going to become a problem.

The third was that a boy had come out of the village. His name was Adolf Shu. He was a teenage boy from Lanzareth, no older than 15 or 16. He had grown up in one of the 23 houses in the little cluster below the ridge, and he knew the terrain around the village the way any boy who has grown up in a small place knows the ground he has run and played on all his life.

He knew the paths through the woods. He knew where the streams were. He knew most importantly where a man on foot could get from the German-h held forest to the American-held ridge without being seen from the ridge itself. Adolf Shure was not a soldier. He was not in any meaningful sense an enemy combatant. He was a village boy in the wrong place at the wrong time in history.

When the Germans arrived in the outskirts of Lanzerath that morning, one of Hoffman’s officers had noticed him watching and had made a calculation and had asked the boy where the Americans were. Adolf Shur told him he pointed at the ridge. He described the tree line. He described from memory the shape of the ground behind the American positions.

He drew in the snow with a stick a small map showing where the Germans could work around to the northern flank without being observed from the ridge itself. He was a teenager. He did not fully understand what he was doing. He would live long enough after the war to think about what he had done and to speak about it and to be interviewed about it and to try to explain what it had felt like to be a boy in a village that was suddenly full of soldiers and to be asked a question by a man in a uniform and to answer it. The information he

provided did not affect the second assault, but it was going to affect the third assault and it was going to affect most decisively everything that came after. As the afternoon wore on, back at the German staging area behind the border, Yoakima was growing furious. Radio reports kept coming back to him from the front.

The road that ran through Lanzerath was still not clear. His tanks had not moved. His entire schedule had begun to sliper’s tanks were supposed to be racing up that road. His tanks were supposed to be miles into Belgium by now. His tanks were sitting in staging areas, engines idling, waiting because a road that was supposed to have been cleared by 9:00 in the morning was in the afternoon still blocked.

Peeper is reported by more than one German source to have used language on the radio that was not printable in the afteraction report. He was furious not at any one man but at the situation. The entire schedule of the entire offensive had been built around his armored column moving fast, moving without pause, breaking through the American line, and racing for the Muse River before the Americans could react.

Every hour that his column sat idle was an hour the Americans had to figure out what was happening and to move reserves. His whole mission depended on speed, and his mission had been stalled by something no one had planned for. a hill, a single hill above a village of 23 houses. He gave orders to reinforce Hoffman’s assault with an additional battalion.

Colonel Hoffman understood without needing to be told directly that if he did not take that hill by nightfall, his own career was going to be a very short one. The third assault came in the middle of the afternoon. It came with more men. It came with heavier mortar fire. It came, most importantly, with a flanking element that was working around to the north, following the paths that a teenage boy had described in the snow that morning.

The men on the ridge did not know about the flanking element. Not yet. What they knew was that the frontal attack was heavier this time. The mortar rounds were falling closer. The Germans were using smoke to conceal their movement. The advance was faster than either of the first two. Book moved along his line again.

He was horsearo now. His voice had been giving orders and reassurances for more than 6 hours. He was cold in a way that no amount of moving around could warm. He passed by the heavy machine gun and sortas still there, still firing, still working the weapon with a discipline that the machine gun itself was starting to strain against. The barrel was glowing.

It should have been changed hours ago. Slape had been feeding ammunition, and the barrel had never been off the mount. Book reached the northern end of the line. He looked out into the trees north of the ridge. He saw movement. He saw shapes among the pines that should not have been there.

He understood in a single terrible second that the Germans had gotten around him. He turned. He shouted a warning. He fired at a figure in the trees and saw the figure go down. Then a burst of automatic fire came back at him from the woods and something struck him in the leg and he went down. He crawled behind a tree.

He looked at his leg. It was bleeding. He could still move it. He got up onto his knees and kept firing. In the machine gun pit, Sakanikas heard the shooting from the north and turned his head to look. In the moment he turned his head, a German rifle round from the frontal assault, came in over the parapit of his position, and entered the side of his face just below the ear.

He did not remember later the pain of it. He remembered only a sound, an enormous sound, and a feeling like his head had come apart, and a sudden warm wetness pouring down his neck and into his uniform. He remembered thinking in a distant, clear way that he was probably dying. He was not dying. The bullet had entered his face just below the right ear and traveled forward and outward.

It had shattered the right side of his jaw. It had passed behind his right eye and destroyed it. It had exited through his upper lip. He was incredibly still conscious. He was more incredibly still, still on the trigger of the heavy machine gun. He never took his hand off it.

He did not know in that moment that he was still firing. He knew only that his hand was there and that the weapon was working and that the men coming up the slope were still coming. Slape reached him a few seconds later. Slape looked at his face and understood immediately that he had lost the eye. Slape wrapped a field dressing around the boy’s head as best he could.

The dressing was soaked through with blood within seconds. Slape kept feeding the belt. The heavy machine gun kept firing. The third assault in the end broke against the ridge the same way the first two had. The frontal attack could not close the last 30 yards. The flanking attack, which had come closer than either of the frontal assaults to actually overrunning the American position, faltered in the trees when Bu and two of his men, all of them by that point wounded, poured fire into it from behind the northern edge of the ridge.

By late afternoon, the Germans had pulled back a third time. The ridge held. Book lay behind his tree, bleeding into the snow, and looked at his watch and saw that it was after 4:00 in the afternoon. His men were almost out of ammunition. Half of them were wounded. Sakanas was still alive, was still somehow still firing intermittently, but was not going to be alive by morning if he did not receive medical attention.

The radio was no longer receiving a signal from regimental headquarters. Bu had lost contact with the world above him. He looked out into the field one more time. He saw the Germans moving. He saw new formations moving up. He understood that the Germans knew now exactly what was on the ridge above them and that the next assault was going to be the last one and that this time they were going to bring enough men and fire to end it.

He looked at the sergeant next to him. Neither of them spoke. Both of them understood. The light was beginning to fade in the western sky. The fourth assault was coming. The light in the western sky was the color of old brass. In the Arden in December, at that latitude, at that time of year, the sun sets a little after 4:00 in the afternoon.

By 4:30, the shadows are long. By 5 it is nearly dark, and it was somewhere in that thin margin between the day and the night that the fourth German assault came up the slope of Lanzerath Ridge, and this time it did not stop. Book was still behind his tree at the northern end of the line. His leg had gone numb from the cold and from the loss of blood, but he could still move it, and he had propped himself against the trunk with his rifle across his knees.

He had a magazine and a half of ammunition left. He had watched in the last of the light the Germans forming up strength at the base of the ridge. He had counted roughly, and he had understood that this was not going to be another probe. This was the end of it. Down the line, Slape was still at the heavy machine gun. The barrel had overheated past its limits.

Its accuracy was gone. The rounds were spraying in a pattern that no one who had trained on the weapon would have recognized as accurate fire. Slate kept feeding it anyway because a heavy machine gun, even one that has lost its accuracy, is still a heavy machine gun, and the sound of it working was doing something to the German advance that Bu could not have accomplished with any other weapon he had. Sakarnas was next to sleep.

He had not spoken in some time. His head was wrapped in a field dressing that was black with blood in the failing light. He was on his knees. His right hand was on the trigger of the machine gun alongside slapes. His good eye was fixed on the slope below, and it did not blink, and it did not waver, and it did not close. The Germans came up in waves.

They came in fire and movement, this time by companies rather than by platoon. This time with heavy support from mortars that had been repositioned to bring fire directly down onto the American line. Rounds began to land inside the perimeter. A foxhole on the southern end took a direct hit and the two men in it were wounded and stopped firing.

Then another foxhole, then another. Book lifted his rifle. He picked a target. He fired. He picked another. He fired again. He had, by his own late account, perhaps 12 rounds left in the magazine. He fired them one at a time. He made each shot count. When the magazine was empty, he loaded the last one and continued firing.

The Germans reached the tree line. They came in through gaps that Bu’s platoon had not been able to cover. They came around the flanks. They came from the north along the paths that a teenage boy had described in the snow. They were suddenly very close. Close enough to see individual faces in the last blue gay light.

close enough to hear their voices shouting to one another in a language that most of the Americans on the ridge did not speak, but that all of them at that moment understood. Slape stood up behind the heavy machine gun. He fired one long burst directly into the closest German. Then the belt ran out. There was no more ammunition for the weapon.

He looked at the empty belt. He said nothing. There was nothing left to say. Book fired his last round. He worked the bolt on his rifle. The bolt closed on an empty chamber. He looked at the rifle for a moment as though he was surprised to find it empty. Then he set it against the tree beside him. He raised his hands. Along the line, one by one, in the failing light, the other men of the INR platoon set their weapons down.

The fight had lasted more than 11 hours. The Germans came into the American positions carefully. They were not at that moment in a mood for further heroics from anyone. they had lost over the course of the day close to a 100 casualties to a defensive position that they had been told at the start of the morning was going to be overrun in half an hour.

They were exhausted. They were angry. Some of them were quite literally in a state of grief for the friends they had watched die on the slope below. But they were also disciplined soldiers. They did not shoot the prisoners. They collected weapons. They gathered the Americans together at the crest of the ridge and they began to count them.

There was a long pause after the count. One of the German officers, a captain, walked back to Colonel Hoffman’s position and reported the number. Hoffman asked him to repeat it. The captain repeated it. Hoffman looked at him for a long moment and then he laughed. It was not, according to the captain, who later wrote about it, a happy laugh. 18.

The count was 18 plus the four attached artillery observers. 22 Americans, one of whom had already died in the second mortar barrage that morning. 21 prisoners. That was what had held up the entire spearhead of the entire German offensive for the entire day. That was what had cost the 9th Falamy Jagger regiment close to 100 casualties.

21 men. Colonel Hoffman is reported by more than one German source to have stood on the ridge in the last of the light and stared at the American prisoners in something like disbelief. He did not speak to them. He did not apparently know what to say. He gave the order to move the prisoners down into the village.

They walked down the ridge in the darkness, 21 Americans with their hands on their heads, moving among their capttors past the bodies of the men who had died trying to take the position. Book limped on his wounded leg. Slape helped Port Sakanikas, who could barely walk, whose head wound had begun to bleed again, whose good eye was starting to lose focus.

They came into Lanzerath from the north. They walked down the single street of the village. They were taken into a small building known as the Cafe Schulzen. The building was warm. There was a fire going. The furniture had been pushed against the walls to make room for the German command staff. And now the Americans were pushed against a different wall to await disposition.

A German medic tended to Takanikas as best he could through the night. The boy would survive. He would carry the wound on his face for the rest of his life. Book sat against the wall of the cafe. His leg had been bandaged. He was exhausted in a way that went past exhaustion into something colder and stiller.

He watched his men, the ones who could still sit up, sitting quietly along the wall. He watched the German officers moving in and out of the cafe, speaking to one another in a language he did not follow. He did not think in that moment about the significance of what had happened on the ridge. He did not think about the offensive or about Peeper or about the strategic consequences of a delay on the northern shoulder of the largest German attack of the Western War.

He was too tired to think about any of that. He looked at his wristwatch instead. It was a small thing, a cheap watch, a gift from his family before he shipped out. It had a luminous dial. In the dim light of the cafe, he could just make out the position of the hands. It was almost midnight. He watched the second hand sweep around the face of the watch.

He watched the minute hand move up toward the 12. He watched, and he did not say anything, and no one around him noticed that he was watching. And at the moment that the hands aligned at the top of the dial, he realized that it was no longer the 16th of December. It was the 17th, the 17th of December, 1944. His 21st birthday. He lowered his wrist.

He looked at the ceiling of the cafe. He did not cry. He did not smile. He did not speak. He wondered briefly whether anyone at home knew he was still alive. Then he closed his eyes. He slept sitting up against the wall of the cafe for a few hours. He did not know in any of that what he and his men had actually accomplished.

He would not know for years. He would not in fact know the full picture of it for decades. Here is what had happened on the larger scale. Campgroup Peeper, the armored spearhead of the entire German offensive, was supposed to have been in the town of Lineville by the evening of December 16th. It was supposed to have been across the Muse River by December 17th.

It was supposed to have been in Antworp inside a week. Because of what had happened on Lanzerath Ridge, Peeper’s column did not reach Lineville until the afternoon of December 17th, more than a full day behind schedule. Because of the delay, the American units to the west had time, precious time, to move reserves, to blow bridges, to fortify positions that would otherwise have been overrun in the first hours of the offensive.

Campf Group Peiper would never reach the Muse River. It would run out of fuel deep inside the Belgian countryside at a place called Lagl. It would be surrounded there. It would abandon its vehicles, blow up its equipment, and its men would try to walk out on foot through the freezing forest back to the German lines. Peeper himself would escape.

Most of his tanks would not. The northern shoulder of the German offensive, the sector where the spearhead had been designed to move fastest and cut deepest, would fail more completely than any other part of the entire operation. And the reason it failed, the specific mechanical reason it failed was that its schedule collapsed on the first day in the first hours on a hillside above a Belgian village of 23 houses, 18 men and four attached artillery observers and a lieutenant who had turned 21 at midnight while sitting in a cafe among his

capttors. That was the entire cost of it. Lybuk spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. He was moved east into Germany. He was held in a series of camps. He was liberated in the spring of 1945 when American forces reached the camp where he had ended up. He came home. Sakanikas was moved to a German field hospital and then to a prisoner camp for the wounded.

He was liberated by American troops in the spring of 1945. He came home. Slape came home. Springer, the artillery officer who was not supposed to have been fighting alongside the platoon in the first place, came home. Almost all of them came home and then for the next 37 years almost nothing happened. The Battle of the Bulge became one of the most famous engagements of the American War in Europe. Books were written about it.

Films were made about it. Baston became a household word. The stand of the 101st Airborne at Baston became a defining piece of American military mythology. The kind of story that gets taught in high school history classes and referenced in political speeches. The stand at Lanzareth Ridge was not in any of those books.

It was not in any of those films. It was not taught in any of those history classes. The men of the I and our platoon came home back to their old lives or built new ones and mostly did not talk about what had happened on the 16th of December 1944. They had been briefly questioned after their liberation. They had filled out debriefing forms.

Their forms had been filed away in an archive. And then because the entire American army was busy with the enormous administrative task of winding down a war and demobilizing millions of men, the question of what exactly had happened on a hillside in eastern Belgium was for all practical purposes forgotten. Book became a chiropractor in Missouri he raised a family.

He did not for many years tell his children about the war. Slape went back to civilian life. Sakanikas, who eventually changed his name legally to James because it was easier for Americans to pronounce, moved to Virginia. He became successful in business. He would live a long life. He would rarely speak in detail about what had happened on the ridge.

The others scattered across the country into small towns and large cities into the ordinary lives that American veterans of the Second World War returned to and rebuilt. The German officers, meanwhile, had not forgotten. In their memoirs, in the debriefings the Allies took from senior German prisoners after the war, in the letters they wrote to one another, in the years that followed, they returned again and again to what had happened at Lanzerath.

They described the fire from the ridge. They described the discipline of it. They described the fact that they had believed all day, that they were facing a full company, and that the discovery at the end of the day that they had been held up by fewer than two dozen men had been. In the words of one German officer, a moment of something that felt like shame.

It was a German officer’s testimony buried in a German memoir published years after the war that eventually caught the attention of an American historian. The historian was named John S. D. Eisenhower. He was the son of the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. He was writing a book about the Battle of the Bulge.

He was reading everything he could find from every source on every side. He came across the German references to Lanzerath. He was at first skeptical. He looked into it. He tracked down the surviving members of the INR platoon one by one. He interviewed them. He compared their accounts to the German ones.

He wrote up what he had found in his book, which was published in 1969, and which was called The Bitter Woods. That was how it began. Slowly, in the years that followed, other historians began to look into the story. Old comrades began to talk to one another. A campaign to have the platoon officially recognized began quietly among veterans of the 99th Division and among a handful of people who had come to believe that a genuine injustice had been done.

The campaign took years. It took in the end a special act of the United States Congress. On the 26th of October 1981, 37 years after the fight on the ridge above Lanzareth, the members of the intelligence and reconnaissance platoon of the 394th Infantry Regiment were formally recognized by the United States Army.

Every surviving member of the platoon received a decoration. Four of them, including Book, received the Distinguished Service Cross, which is the second highest decoration for valor that the United States Army awards. Five received the silver star. Nine received the bronze star with V device for valor. The platoon as a whole was awarded the presidential unit citation.

They became by count the most decorated platoon of the second world war. In any theater, the ceremony was held. Book was there. He was 57 years old. He accepted the medal quietly. He gave interviews after the ceremony. In one of them given to a reporter from the New York Times, he was asked what it had been like on that hillside on the 16th of December 1944.

He thought about the question for a moment. Then he answered it. He said we were frightened and we were tired and it was like like a hellish nightmare. He said it seemed it would never end. He said we couldn’t get any help. It seemed like it was all hopeless. Those were his words. Those are the words he chose.

They are not the words of a man in a movie. They are the words of a man who was there and who had been asked and who did not want to lie about it. Lyall Book died on the 2nd of December 2016 in Sunset Hills, Missouri. He was 92 years old. He had lived a long, quiet, decent American life. He had raised his children. He had run his practice.

He had watched his country go through wars in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. He had spoken in his later years at occasional veterans gatherings, and he had always been careful to say that he had done nothing on that hillside that any of the other 17 men had not also done. There is a small memorial today at Lanzerath.

It stands near the treeine where the American positions were. It is not large. It is not visited by many people. If you go there, you can walk the ground where those 18 men lay in their foxholes, and you can look down at the road where the German paratroopers came up out of the treeine, and you can see the distance between the two.

You can stand there on the ridge in the wind that still comes down out of those pines, and you can think about young Americans, most of them under 25, most of them scared, most of them almost certainly convinced that they were going to die on that piece of ground. And you can think about the fact that they did not run.

That is in the end the whole of it they did not run. They held and a German colonel who saw them do it stood in the last of the December light and did not know when the count came back what to