“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.
“There is no feeling like being alone, being unarmed, and not knowing what to do,” Foehringer recalled. Instinct told him to get back to where he came from, the farmhouse on the edge of Biillingen. He took off cross-country and made it. He found a guy who had fired at one of the German tanks and missed. As the tank began to swing its cannon at their position, Foehringer and his buddy ran for the farmhouse. They found two carbines and went up to the second floor, where they broke the windows and began firing at German troops spread across the field.