Lieutenant Dettor expected to be shot. Instead he was kicked, relieved of his watch and $48 cash, then put to work carrying wounded German soldiers on stretchers. He got to see the German army on the move from the inside and described it vividly: "Many SS troops in vicinity. Pushed around by SS officer. Beautiful observation from enemy position. Firing still going on. Men being ushered into attack. Roads filled with vehicles, ammunition, staff cars, horse and wagons. Staff cars carrying German officer and ammunition trucks draped with large red crosses to disguise them as ambulances. Snow on ground-windy."
The Germans took Dettor's coat, gloves, and shoes, leaving him his overshoes, and put him in a column of POWs marching east. "Roads filled with heavy equipment coming to the front," Dettor noted. "Felt extremely depressed after seeing size of the attack." Then he began to cheer up as he observed, "German motor vehicles very poor. Many vehicles broken down."
LIEUTENANT Lyle Bouck commanded the Intelligence and Reconnaissance (I&R) platoon of the 394th Regiment, 99th Division. He had enlisted before the war, lying about his age. He was commissioned a second lieutenant at age eighteen. Informal in manner, he was sharp, incisive, determined-a leader. The only man younger than he in the platoon was Private William James. The platoon was near Lanzerath. Bouck kept his men up all night, sensing that something was stirring somewhere.
Shortly before dawn on December 16, the sky was lit up from the muzzle flashes of one hundred pieces of German artillery. In the light of those flashes Bouck could see great numbers of tanks and other vehicles on the German skyline. He and his men were in deep, covered foxholes, so they survived the hour-long shelling without casualties. Bouck sent a patrol forward to Lanzerath. The men came back to report a German infantry column coming towards the village.
Bouck got through to battalion headquarters on the radio. When he reported, the officer at the other end was incredulous.
"Damn it," Bouck hollered. "Don't tell me what I don't see! I have twenty-twenty vision. Bring down some artillery, all the artillery you can, on the road south of Lanzerath. There's a Kraut column coming up from that direction!"
No artillery came. Bouck started pushing men into their foxholes. Including Bouck, there were eighteen of them. They were on the edge of a wood, looking down on the road into Lanzerath. Bouck, Sergeant Bill Slape, and Private James had their foxhole on the edge of the village, in a perfect position to ambush the enemy, and they had plenty of fire-power-a couple of .30-calibre machine guns, a .50-calibre on the jeep, a half-dozen BARs, and a number of submachine guns.
The German columns came marching on in close order, weapons slung. They were teenage paratroopers. The men of the I&R platoon were fingering the triggers of their weapons. Sergeant Slape took aim on the lead German. "Your mother's going to get a telegram for Christmas," he mumbled.
Bouck knocked the rifle aside. "Maybe they don't send telegrams," he said. He explained that he wanted to let the lead units pass so as to ambush the main body. He waited until about 300 men had passed his position and gone into the village. Then he saw his target. Separated from the others, three officers came along, carrying maps and binoculars, with a radioman behind-obviously the battalion CO and his staff. Private James rested his M-l on the edge of his foxhole and took careful aim.
A little blonde girl dashed out of a house down the street. Later James recalled the red ribbons in her hair. He held his fire. The girl pointed quickly at the I&R position and ran back inside. James tightened his finger on the trigger. In that split second the German officer shouted an order and dove into the ditch. So did his men, on each side of the road.
The ambush ruined, the firefight began. Through the morning, Bouck's men had the Germans pinned down. Without armoured support the German infantry couldn't fire with much effect on the men in the foxholes. By noon the I&R had taken casualties, but no fatalities. Private James kept screaming at Bouck to bring in artillery. Bouck in turn was screaming over the radio. Battalion replied that there were no guns available.
"What shall we do then?" Bouck demanded.
"Hold at all costs."
A second later a bullet hit and destroyed the radio Bouck had been holding. He was unhurt and passed on the order to hold.
Private James was amazed at the German tactics. Their paratroopers kept coming straight down the road, easy targets. "Whoever's ordering that attack," James said, "must be frantic. Nobody in his right mind would send troops into something like this without more fire support." He kept firing his BAR. Germans kept coming. He felt a certain sickness as he cut down the tall, good-looking "kids." The range was so close James could see their faces. He tried to imagine himself firing at movement, not at men.
As the Germans, despite their losses, threatened to overrun the position, James dashed to the jeep and got behind the .50-calibre. Three Germans crawled up close enough to toss grenades at Private Risto Milo-sevich. Unable to swing the .50-calibre fast enough, James brought up the submachine gun slung around his neck and cut the three Germans down.
By midafternoon there were 400 to 500 bodies in front of the I&R platoon. Only one American had been killed, although half of the eighteen men were wounded. There was a lull. Bouck said to James, "I want you to take the men who want to go and get out."
"Are you coming?"
"No. I have orders to hold at all costs. I'm staying."
"Then we'll all stay."
An hour later they were both wounded, the platoon out of ammunition. They surrendered and were taken into a cafe set up as a first-aid post. James thought he was dying. He thought of the mothers of the boys he had mowed down and of his own mother. He passed out, was treated by a German doctor. When he came to, a German officer tried to interrogate him but gave it up, leaned over James's stretcher, and whispered in English, "Ami, you and your comrades are brave men."
At midnight the cuckoo clock in the cafe struck. Lieutenant Lyie Bouck, on his stretcher on the floor, turned twenty-one years old. "What a hell of a way to become a man," he mumbled to himself.
BOUCK AND his men had successfully blocked the Lanzerath road against a full strength German battalion for a day, inflicting catastrophic casualties of more than l50 per cent. Such heroism and combat effectiveness could hardly be equalled. But in many ways the I&R platoon's experience was typical.
In the 99th Division alone there were any number of junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted men who, although new to combat, stood to their guns, to the dismay of the Germans. At Losheimergraben railroad station Captain Neil Brown's Company L, 394th Infantry, held through the day. At one point, when a Tiger tank appeared. Lieutenant Dewey Flankers ran up to it and launched an antitank grenade up the bore of the cannon before it could fire. Scores of unrecorded actions were taken independently, as communication between platoons was poor, between companies and regimental headquarters nonexistent.
All along the front, from Monschau to the north down to Echternach in the south, German attacks passed through gaps in the line and surrounded the American positions. But the Americans in many cases fought back with every weapon available to them-usually just small arms. They stacked up German bodies and held the crossroads, preventing German tanks from bursting through.
With the few German units in which tanks accompanied the infantry, the Americans had less success. Private Roger Foehringer of the artillery was attached to the 99th, billeted on the outskirts of Bullingen, Belgium. At 0700 on December 16 he was put to work with two others carrying a case of grenades up a hill to a machine-gun pit. "We were not to the point where we could see over the hill, when down on us came a German Tiger." Foehringer jumped into a row of bushes along the road. He lost his rifle and helmet but was untouched by the tank's machine-gun bursts. It moved on, to be followed by another, then a half-track with infantry in the back.