Overall, the Northwind offensive was a failure. The Germans never got near Strasbourg, nor could they cut US supply lines. Seventh Army’s losses in January were 11,609 battle casualties plus 2,836 cases of trench foot. German losses were around 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing.
IN THE Ardennes, K Company, 333rd Regiment, 84th Division, was the spearhead for First Army’s drive on Houffalize. One member of the company. Private Fred “Junior” Olson, had come in as a replacement on, New Year’s Eve. He remembered that no one gave him any advice or information: “It was as if there was no way to explain it, that I would find out for myself in due time.”
Over the next week Olson had enough experience to make him a hardened veteran. In his first firefight, on January 7, a German got behind his foxhole. Olson was eating “one of those damn chocolate bars out of the K ration” and never noticed. His buddy. Sergeant Paul Zerbel, saw the German when he was ten feet away. Zerbel beat the German to the draw. After killing the German, Zerbel said it was time to haul ass. “We were going single-file down through the trees,” Olson recalled, “and I tripped.” As he did, a machine-gun burst cut the branches off right above his head. His life flashed past him. “It didn’t last long, just a matter of seconds. I still know in my own mind that if I hadn’t tripped I’d have been killed.”
When Zerbel and Olson reached the company lines, Olson was greatly relieved. “It was past midnight and January 7th had been my birthday. For some strange reason I had persuaded myself that if I could live through my nineteenth birthday, I could make it all the rest of the way;
that somehow everything was going to be all right. Here it was, January 8th, and I’d made it.”
The company continued to attack. On January 13 Lieutenant Franklin Brewer protested to the company commander, “There is not one man in the company fit to walk another mile, much less fight.” But division headquarters said that as the company had just spent a day in a village, where it had “rested and reorganized,” it was fit for duty. That meant the men had found the ruins of a house to break the wind, huddled down in frozen overcoats, and fallen into an exhausted sleep. At 0330 it was up for tepid coffee and Spam and cheese sandwiches, then a march towards Houffalize.
That morning the lead squad came under fire from log-covered emplacements. The GIs did what came naturally to them by this stage- they called in the artillery. Within minutes more than a hundred rounds of 105 shells exploded against the German position. “As the barrage lifted,” the company history records, “we moved forward quickly and built up a firing line within forty yards of the Germans. The small-arms exchange lasted only a few minutes before a white rag on the end of a rifle was waved frantically from a hole. The Germans-eight or ten of them crawled out of their holes, stretching their arms as high as possible as they trudged apprehensively towards us through the snow.”
Moving forward. Captain Leinbaugh came across a German major propped against a tree. His right leg had been cut off at midthigh. The German said to Leinbaugh, quietly and in good English, “Please shoot me.” Leinbaugh kept on walking. Further on, one of the sergeants caught up to Leinbaugh and asked if he had seen the guy with his leg cut off.
“Yeah. He asked me to shoot him.”
“Yeah. He asked me, too.”
“Did you?” “Hell, you know I couldn’t walk off and leave the poor son of a bitch to die like that.”
That same day Major Roy Creek of the 507th PIR, one of the heroes of D-Day, met two men carrying a severely wounded paratrooper back to the aid station. Creek took his hand to give him encouragement. The trooper asked, “Major, did I do OK?”
“You did fine, son.” But as they carried him away, Creek noticed that one of his legs was missing. “I dropped the first tear for him as they disappeared in the trees. Through the fifty years since, I still continue to fight the tears when I’ve thought of him and so many others like him. Those are the true heroes of the war.”