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By Root 1137 0

baseplate, striking sparks. For hours, they lay inert while German machine-gun fire hosed monotonously up and down the line, wounding a few men. Lindstrom felt the snow melting under him as he lay. Darkness came. At last their platoon leader, a thirty-five-year-old named Lavern Ivens, shouted: “Men, we can’t lay here all night and wait to get hit. Start crawling up the hill towards that clump of trees.” They were thrilled to receive orders and gingerly started moving. Then they heard an engine start, a German voice, and laughter. They lay still again. Rollie Combs called to Roy Mitchell: “Mitch, Mitch, which way should I lay? Facing or away from them?” Then somebody cried: “Let’s get the hell out of here before they start shelling us.” They trickled miserably back down the hill. A wounded man begged Lindstrom for his overcoat, but he felt so cold that he refused. Somebody else obliged and made Lindstrom feel guilty: “I am sure I would have given him mine. I just had to get used to the idea. I suppose I came across kind of poorly.” They reached a field kitchen and sat gratefully eating their chow. That night, their battalion CO was relieved of his command.

Next morning, they were told to be ready to attack again. “That made me feel kind of desperate . . . I had never been so frightened as I was the night before, and now we were back at it again. I asked God to help me.” F Company scouting officer asked for volunteers for a patrol. No one moved. At last, a few came forward. As they began to advance, American shells fell close. The line broke and ran towards the rear. Lindstrom looked in horror at a man with one eye hanging out; another with his legs blown off, smoking a cigarette under a tree; a stray boot with a foot in it; a sergeant being carried screaming to the rear by stretcher-bearers. He noticed that the NCO’s body was a bloody mess below the waist, and wondered if he had lost his penis and testicles.

For four days after that, they lay in foxholes under shellfire. They had no idea where they were, nor that they were taking part in “the Battle of the Bulge.” Lindstrom wrote: “Most of the time, I responded to simple dog-like commands such as ‘move out,’ ‘hold up,’ ‘set up firing positions,’ ‘keep your head down.’ I was always thinking about how cold I was.” When he saw his first dead Germans, he envied them their peace: “The war was over for them. They weren’t cold any more.” Everybody was familiar with a U.S. government propaganda film about how the war was being fought for a typical all-American family and their dog Fido. Now, men would say to each other: “Remember, we’re doing this for Fido.”

Lindstrom’s portrait of the experience of combat, in all its discomfort, bewilderment and fear, possessed a far greater resonance for most men who took part in the Second World War than the reminiscences of those who won medals. If anyone had told the Minnesotan and his comrades in their foxholes that merely by hanging on in there, by the fact of their survival, they had helped to win a great battle, they would have been bemused. Yet such was the reality. With such top-class American divisions as the 1st, 2nd Armored and two airborne formations reinforcing the line, the Germans were now simply beating themselves to death against the Allied positions, or struggling to win a breathing space for retreat. Bridges across the Ourthe had been blown in advance of 116th Panzer, and indeed at every turn American demolitions denied river crossings to the enemy. Joachim Peiper fumed about “the damned engineers.” Only very late in the battle, as units began to capture large numbers of German pan-zers abandoned with empty tanks, did Allied commanders begin to grasp the scope of the Germans’ fuel difficulties. When the U.S. 743rd Tank Battalion got into La Glieze, its men were excited to find thirty Tigers and Panthers standing intact, with empty tanks. The Americans enthused briefly about taking over the panzers, but the maintenance problems seemed insuperable.

At 1650 on 26 December, elements of Patton’s 4th Armored Division broke through